Master, Liar, Traitor, Friend: a Leo Junker case

by Christoffer Carlsson (Translated by Michael Gallagher)

  ‘Go in and get them. Put them in the bag.’

  ‘But …’

  ‘I know what you’re doing,’ he interrupted, ‘and I understand why. But if I’m going to be able to help you, you’re going to have to stop now.’

  ‘I can’t,’ he whispered. ‘Not yet.’ He turned towards the house. ‘I’ve still got the children left.’

  OCTOBER 1984

  I know what you’re up to. Ring 08 180614 at 1.30pm.

  That’s what it says on the little note that arrived at The Bureau today, inside an envelope that was addressed to a telephone number rather than a name.

  Charles’ telephone number.

  Paul is sitting opposite him, examining the envelope. Charles is smoking. The drags are greedy, the way nervous people smoke, but he can’t even manage an attempt at hiding it.

  ‘What should we make of this?’ Paul asks.

  ‘A threat?’

  ‘I mean the fact that it’s addressed to your telephone number, not your name.’

  ‘That she doesn’t know my name, at a guess.’

  ‘How do you know that it’s a woman?’

  ‘I’m just assuming that it’s the same person who called me a few weeks back. The one I told you about, the journalist.’

  Charles chews on his bottom lip, taps the cigarette so forcefully that the glowing tip falls off.

  ‘I’ve got a really fucking bad feeling about this.’

  ‘It will pass,’ says Paul. ‘We’re basically finished now. We just need to talk to the Resident, so that everything is in order at his end too. Just focus on the money. Don’t think about the risks.’

  ‘She had a high voice, the journalist,’ says Charles. ‘Sounded young.’

  Paul puts the envelope down and examines the handwritten note.

  ‘Scrawled handwriting, like a child’s. And the number goes to a phone box?’

  ‘Central Station, on the ground level.’

  ‘So … practical,’ he says, smiling weakly.

  Charles lights the remains of the cigarette and blows out smoke, watches it rising towards the ceiling.

  He leans forward, placing his forearms on the desk.

  ‘What do we do if she does actually know?’

  Paul folds the note and puts it in his inside pocket.

  ‘We don’t even know if it is her. We’ll start by calling the number.’

  The door behind Paul is wrenched open and the noise from the corridor — clattering typewriters, hurried steps from one place to another, a voice asking if anyone knows the best place to buy cigarettes in East Berlin — rushes in. In the doorway, the Director, who looks like he’s just been asleep and has his sleeves rolled up, with several buttons undone under his chin.

  ‘Levin and Goffman. My office, now.’

  ‘I’ve got word that the VAX computers have been moved again, from one of the storage units out near the Royal Institute of Technology down to a garage in Skärmarbrink.’

  He slumps into his chair, leans back, and puts his feet on the desk. There’s a cigarette butt stuck to the sole of one of his shoes. Neither of them mention it.

  ‘Okay?’ says Paul. ‘That’s good, isn’t it?’

  ‘It’s making me nervous. I want this sorted as soon as possible. It’s been going on for over six months now.’ He feels for cigarettes in the chest pocket of his shirt. When he doesn’t find them, he looks around, confused, until Paul gets to his feet and offers him one from his own packet. ‘Thanks.’ He lights it. ‘So, sort this out.’

  ‘We’ve got them under round-the-clock surveillance,’ says Charles. ‘But we still haven’t seen any sign of anyone other than Öberg and Savolainen. We are trying to identify their whole network.’

  ‘It’s not worth it.’ The Director slams the tabletop with his hand. A pen falls to the floor. He’s red in the face. ‘This has got to stop,’ he barks, the saliva flying from his mouth. ‘Now.’

  ‘It’s not that simple,’ says Paul.

  ‘Don’t use that tone with me.’

  ‘Of course. I apologise. But given the nature of the goods in question, we have put significant resources into this. It would be unfortunate, against that background, if we were not able to present any results. And we will soon be in a position to do so. We just need a little more time.’

  The Director grunts, breathless from the exertion that his sudden outburst seems to have entailed. He isn’t far off a heart attack.

  ‘A week,’ says the Director. ‘You have one week.’ He opens his mouth again but pauses, looks at the elegantly framed calendar on the wall, before eventually adding, ‘You’ve got until the eleventh of October.’

  ‘I think it’ll be over before then,’ says Paul.

  ‘I want shot of them. They annoy me.’

  ‘They annoy us, too.’

  ‘Good. Now get out of here.’

  Charles wraps his coat around him and goes in via the entrance from Klarabergsviadukten to avoid being down on street level. As he approaches the main hall, the hubbub gets louder. One voice lists departure times, another announces delays. He keeps his hands in his pockets and avoids all eye contact.

  There’s a row of three telephone booths down there. Up here, there’s just one. Charles goes in, pretends to dial a number, but keeps his eyes on the ground level. He has a good view, which calms him down, temporarily.

  He exits the telephone booth and checks the time on his watch, squints at the board showing arrivals and departures hanging on the wall, and then studies the long rows of seating.

  13:27.

  Marika. Since reading that text in her book, Charles has wanted to go through the other pages too, but each time he approaches it a force field goes up between him and the little dark red book. It’s the key to another time, another life that will never return.

  13:28.

  She never brings friends home, almost never goes to anyone else’s place after school. He thinks. He needs to ask Pauline; he might have asked her before, but he can’t remember right now.

  13:29.

  Charles takes the coins from his trouser pocket, and rubs his fingers across them. They’re cold and slippery. Women and men walk past the small cabins down there, but none of them look to be stopping or hanging around.

  13:30.

  Charles inserts the coins, dials the number. The ringtone sounds in the receiver, and far away, through the noise of the main hall, one of the phones down there starts ringing. Out of the corner of his eye: Paul, aimlessly wandering around the hall, plastic coffee cup in hand.

  Charles adjusts his glasses and sees a woman walking hurriedly between the benches. She has a little round nose, an angular profile, and light brown hair, parted in the middle. It falls around her shoulders but not much beyond that. She’s wearing jeans and trainers, a dark-green jacket that reaches her thighs and looks a bit like a rain coat.

  She goes into the middle kiosk and lifts the receiver. Paul watches her from a distance.

  In Charles’ ear, the ringtone stops.

  ‘Hello?’ he says.

  ‘I know what you’re up to, and I want to talk.’

  ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Don’t even bother.’

  ‘If we’re going to talk, I need to know what your name is.’

  ‘Likewise.’

  ‘My name is Frank Möller,’ says Charles.

  ‘Is that your real name?’

  ‘What about you?’

  ‘I have a number of details that I would like you to comment on.’

  ‘You are a journalist.’

  ‘And you work at SEPO.’

  She speaks without hesitation, and has prepared what she was going to say in advance. Paul passes the phone booth and glances at her back. When Charles blinks, he’s gone.

  ‘Is that correct?�
�� she asks.

  He hesitates. The name Frank Möller belongs to an operative of theirs, a registered employee with correct personal details and genuine documents, even a little biography, but he doesn’t exist. He is mere data and bureaucratic paperwork, nothing more. They create and use decoys for missions like this.

  ‘Yes,’ says Charles. ‘That’s correct.’

  ‘Is it right that you currently have a consignment of VAX computers destined for East Germany under surveillance?’

  ‘If we arrange a time when we can meet face to face instead …’

  ‘It is true, then?’

  ‘No. But I would like to meet you and discuss the origins of those details.’

  ‘Well, that can wait.’

  She is not handling this well at all. Charles squints down at the phone booth. She moves and holds herself like a young person, can’t be particularly experienced.

  A departure time is announced. Charles can hear it on the concourse around him, straight from the loudspeakers, and through the telephone receiver. In the booth below, she is suddenly stiff.

  She knows that I am in the vicinity.

  ‘How do you know Sunitron’s managing director, Sven-Olof Håkansson?’ she says, attempting, but failing, to sound composed.

  A cold wave rushes over him. She knows.

  He slams the receiver back on the hook and stares at the telephone, then at the woman down in the booth. She looks surprised, then carefully replaces the receiver and opens the door, looking around before she sets off.

  13:32.

  In the blink of an eye, Paul has appeared a few paces behind her, still carrying the plastic cup, and he follows the woman out of Central Station.

  SEPTEMBER 1971–AUGUST 1972

  I love her, he thought to himself. I really do.

  He knew that, but it wasn’t until after he’d moved that he understood the implications of what he’d done. Sivertsson, his boss in Stockholm, muttered something inaudible when Charles told him about it.

  ‘It’s always the smart ones that leave my unit,’ he said. ‘But this has to be the first time someone’s left to go to some village in the back of beyond. You haven’t gone and become a bloody hippy have you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, it’s still a crying shame — I hope you know that.’

  ‘I am sorry.’

  Sivertsson responded with a harsh, barking laugh.

  ‘Course you’re fucking not. Good luck anyway.’

  Charles was glad to see the back of most of his colleagues, but the Fox from Högdalen was one he was going to miss.

  His parents were clearly shocked at the news, but tried to give the appearance of being merely surprised. He did his best to calm them down, even introducing them to Eva, who had travelled up to Stockholm that summer to spend a very peculiar evening with them. Mark just smiled at them, or perhaps at the situation, and sat there slowly shaking his head.

  ‘I like Mark,’ Eva said when it was all over. ‘But I really don’t know what to make of your parents.’

  During dinner, they seemed to be straining to understand what she was saying; the Bruket accent seemed almost to be like a different language to them. Whatever they did understand, they took no notice of.

  ‘You are not even married,’ Charles’ mother mumbled. ‘It’s unfathomable.’

  ‘We haven’t got married yet,’ Charles said. ‘We are planning to.’

  ‘That would …’ his father began. ‘Moving in together before getting married, it’s …’ He laughed. ‘It was a bit … It is drastic.’

  ‘Drastic,’ Charles repeated.

  ‘Yes? Drastic.’

  Mark laughed at them. Charles sighed. Eva seemed to be unsure what to do with her hands.

  ‘You haven’t thought about …’ Charles’ father said, hesitantly. ‘You have a good life here, Charles. Good job, nice flat. You work in, what was it, a shop?’

  ‘In a supermarket,’ Charles said, and noticed how bitterly he pronounced the words. ‘Like she just said.’

  ‘I can speak for myself, darling.’ Eva put her hand on Charles’ shoulder, and made eye contact before looking over at his father. ‘That’s right. I work at the supermarket.’

  ‘Nothing wrong with that — it’s a good job,’ said his father. ‘But you could … you could live here.’ He cleared his throat, peered across at the woman who had been his wife for twenty-nine years. ‘Isn’t that right?’

  ‘Yes,’ she replied, and took a deep breath.

  Then it came. A long explanation of just how easy everything would be if Eva were to move here instead. How they wouldn’t need a car, how Eva could move in with Charles to begin with and his parents could help them find a bigger flat, and how there were plenty of job opportunities for Eva here — how there were two supermarkets in the very neighbourhood they were about to spend the night in and …

  ‘But Mum,’ Charles said. ‘We don’t want to. I don’t want to. I’m twenty-four years old, not a child.’

  ‘Yes, so you keep saying,’ she said as she stood up, quickly collecting the coffee cups, several of which were still half-full of coffee, and went out to the kitchen. ‘But this idea is silly enough to have come from a child.’

  Mark rolled his eyes. Eva squeezed Charles’ hand. Charles sighed. This is where we lose each other, he thought, my parents and I.

  He dragged Eva into the bathroom, next to the kitchen where his mother was clattering the dishes, and pushed her against the wall. Eva was wearing a long navy-blue skirt, and when she lifted the hem above her hips there were no knickers to be seen, just the thick triangle of dark hair and her pale, smooth thighs.

  She smiled. Which made him feel like he was mad. Then she turned serious.

  ‘They are very strange. But I think they just want to still have you around.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘That’s not unusual. You’re their child after all.’

  ‘I know.’

  She stroked his cheek. Then she turned her back to him.

  ‘Hard,’ she said, as if she knew exactly what he needed. ‘As hard as you can.’

  So he threw himself into a new life, just as he threw himself into most things that would, in the end, turn out to matter. But he was young when he made that decision, he felt young, and he had nothing valuable to leave behind when he went.

  If this wasn’t actually the beginning of real life, then at least it was a nice way to spend the time waiting for real life to start.

  In an aerial photograph, the glass factory resembled a small town in its own right, with car parks and little roads skirting around the heavy buildings. In the mornings, on the journey away from Bruket as he headed for his new job with Halland’s police force, Charles drove past the large car parks and saw the men climb out of their cars and walk, almost in a column, towards the main building. Their backs were straight and their hands held lunchboxes or rucksacks. Sometimes, if he finished early, he could see them streaming out again, only now more stooped, as if each step was weighed down with something heavier than the day’s work they’d just put in.

  Charles arrived in Bruket as an outsider and he always remained one. He did make the odd acquaintance, and one of the foremen at the glass factory, Lars-Erik Sunesson, had even had him round for coffee on a few occasions, after Charles had helped reunite him with his stolen car. He was friendly, yet there was something slightly uncomfortable about their relationship. Sunesson behaved like a man who was forever indebted. Charles got to know another Bruket resident, Petter Aspgren, in the queue at the supermarket one afternoon. Aspgren was in charge of Bruket’s considerable volume of internal mail and was a bloke you could trust, slightly built but robust in character.

  For the first few years, Charles tried to get a job at Bruket’s police station, but it had only a small workforce, and whenever a vacancy did come up,
they would fill it with one of their friends or acquaintances. That was just the way it was. He contemplated leaving the force, even getting a job at the glass factory, but Eva managed to persuade him not to.

  ‘You’d never be able to be anything other than a policeman,’ she said, and Charles knew she was right.

  The house he moved into soon became a part of him. For Charles, the house was like his shell. Eva Alderin became Eva Levin. The ceremony was a short one, with few guests besides the couple themselves.

  ‘Perfect,’ Eva whispered to him that night. ‘This has been an absolutely perfect day.’

  Eva liked changing her name, she said. It felt like shedding a skin. Her belly started growing, and when Charles put his hand on it he could feel a slight but definite flutter, just under the surface.

  And then, as if in the blink of an eye, Charles was driving the long miles to the hospital and Eva sat in the front alongside him, squeezing his hand with each contraction. When their daughter saw the light of day a few hours later, the world did a somersault and everything was perfectly quiet. A very beautiful little girl. She had her mother’s eyes and her father’s dark hair …

  … so when he realised what was happening, they had already bonded with each other. The next morning, Eva was sleeping and Marika was lying at her breast when Charles left; and when he returned, nine hours later, they were still there.

  ‘Have you been lying here all day?’

  ‘Uh-huh.’ Eva’s voice sounded mechanical, vacant. ‘She needs changing.’

  The little girl wasn’t crying, wasn’t screaming, wasn’t doing anything in particular, besides discovering her own hands and gurgling.

  ‘Haven’t you changed her?’

  ‘Once,’ Eva said, blinking. ‘I didn’t have the energy after that.’

  ‘Is everything okay?’ Charles sat on the edge of the bed and picked Marika up. ‘Are you ill?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’ Eva looked down at her hands. ‘I’m just … I just feel so tired.’

  He’d heard about post-natal depression, and he was worried that the woman he loved might have fallen victim. But the next day, weirdly, she was smiling and laughing, had got her energy back, and when Charles gave her a kiss she reciprocated hungrily.