He skimmed haphazardly back and forth through the pages, becoming more and more confused. The only thing he understood was that it had to do with the weapons industry and deliveries to the Third Reich. He didn’t manage to find out more before he heard the phone being slammed down in the next room. He instantly put the pages back in their place on the desk.
Hogarth looked distressed and low-spirited when he returned. He didn’t sit down but instead leaned his arms on the back of the chair, looking out the window, as if to slowly bring his attention back to his guest.
He said that Leo would have to leave. For a change, Hogarth had to go out to an urgent meeting. But it was with his sister. She was ill, dying. Unfortunate, in every way. Leo’s visit had been most pleasant, and he would like to talk to him again. His guest was welcome to come back.
They hastily said goodbye, and the old man, shaking his head and muttering morosely, went back upstairs. Quite bewildered, Leo took the no. 12 tram back into town. It had stopped snowing, and the weather was merely an all-encompassing grey.
________
Then it was Easter. Leo shocked those who knew him by accompanying his mother out to Storm Island in the archipelago. He hadn’t been out there in Lord knows how many years, and he generally hated to travel. He had not yet been out of the country, not even across to the Åland Strait in Finland. He had even gone so far as to claim, both to himself and to everyone else, that it was his thing never to leave Sweden. Undoubtedly it was not so much a fear of missing out on something here at home as it was the fear of regaining his sense of curiosity.
Greta had not been this happy in a very long time; that was evident just by looking at her. She looked ten years younger. She praised Leo’s good health. She was immensely proud of going out to see her relatives on Storm Island with a son who was radiant with well-being. He too was happy to be there. The old child prodigy again walked around the houses, asking how everyone was. The islanders presumably remembered the skinny little boy with the vasculum and herbarium, and they were surprised to see this tall, stately man who looked old, sombre and authoritative, like a public prosecutor on a tour of inspection.
The population of Storm Island had now shrunk to the deplorable present-day total of seventeen people. Some of the oldtimers had breathed their last, a number of them having outright refused to move across the bay to the retirement home on Kolholma. And Leo’s maternal grandmother and grandfather persisted in their belief that times would change, that people would come back and they themselves would be vindicated. That’s how things had always been. Justice would be done. The land on Storm Island had been good enough for several hundred residents in the past, and it was no worse now than it had ever been.
As for Leo Morgan, something happened to him during that Easter on Storm Island. Utterly sober and well-groomed, he walked around his childhood island without shivering. His feelings of anxiety and the spasms of feverish hallucinations at the place where the red accordion had been placed on a rock near the shore had been deflated and silenced, dead forever. He visited the rocky caves where he had scratched stone-age runes on the walls with sharp sticks; he sought out the marshy meadows where the Storm bluebell still shot up in the summer in all of its majestic height; he peeked at the Ark in the boathouse, lying there with its naked ribs and the cobwebs spreading upward from the keel, looking just the same as it had fifteen years before – everything had stagnated; all human activity had come to a standstill. But flowers still bloomed, and the sea kept on raging as if nothing had happened, as if it had all been an annihilatingly beautiful dream, a nocturnal parenthesis that would soon be forgotten.
Leo continued to work on his notes for Autopsy, which he was assembling in his black workbook. One fragment is particularly interesting because it signifies a return which is quite obviously a rewriting of Leo’s own return to his childhood. The fragment says: ‘The fisherman comes back, dazzled by the immense sea, / as always the first time / – a new species crawls up onto the rock / clinging fast, constantly starting over again …’ The frogfish, the origin of life, the fishermen, etcetera – perhaps all these marine-based metaphors evolved during this visit to Storm Island. It sounds highly plausible, since so much of the draft was written with the very same pen, with the same composed and pleasing handwriting, as if in one long breath.
In any case, it was a rested, inspired and, in most senses of the word, well-balanced Leo Morgan who came back to Hornsgatan just after Easter in 1975. He had regained the desires of his body: the desire to write, the desire to reproduce, exactly as if he had been to a very good health spa.
On his own initiative he saw Eva Eld a number of times; she is the ingénue of this drama. Over time she had developed into a robust and sensible schoolmistress with stringently scheduled activities in which even eroticism had a limited scope. Yet it was not so limited that her old lover Leo could not be given space, and according to later reports, she testified that Leo had seldom looked as healthy as he did at that time.
But it didn’t last long. Cruel fate was about to call on him, seek him out in the middle of the night to lead him astray and make him mute.
________
The doorbell rang in the middle of the night – Leo didn’t know how long it had been ringing before he awoke. Everything was very unclear. Feeling quite muddled he went out to the hall towards the furious ringing. He was alone in his two-room quarters. Henry was away, in the midst of a film that was being shot in Skåne.
At the glass door – through which he could see the hazy silhouette of a man wearing a coat and hat – he asked what this was all about. Edvard Hogarth muttered his name with annoyance, and Leo opened the door. The old man stepped inside. He looked haggard and worn out. He placed his briefcase on a chair in the hallway and said that he was not planning to apologise – this was important and he would make it brief.
After throwing on some clothes and noting that it was just after four in the morning, Leo returned to his guest and asked the man to sit down, but he declined. Hogarth wandered through the flat, through all the rooms and corridors, and peered into the billiard room, which had once been occupied by Leo’s paternal grandmother. For a time Hogarth seemed to have forgotten the purpose of his visit. With his hair standing on end, Leo followed the man around, no doubt completely uncomprehending. Hogarth murmured and chuckled at old memories, and Leo began to suspect that the man was suffering from dementia.
It was cold in the flat, and Leo was freezing. He still had the lovely warmth of the bed in his body, but he had to admit to himself that he felt a newly awakened curiosity tingling inside, which was making him shiver. Old Edvard Hogarth finally returned to the hallway where he had left his black briefcase.
He said that a taxi was waiting for him downstairs, so he had to make it quick. He then opened the briefcase and rummaged through the confusion of documents and dossiers – the whole time complaining that ‘it was all such a mess’ – until he found a sheaf held together with an elastic band. This was for Leo to keep; the old man wanted to leave these papers with Leo for the time being. Leo was to read the papers, which contained important information. Perhaps they would help set Leo on the right track. Something might happen. Although what that might be, he couldn’t say. Perhaps it was all just illusion and a figment of his imagination. Old people often grew alarmed for no reason.
Hogarth laughed – there was a hint of insanity in that laugh – and all Leo could do was to accept the papers with a nod, unable to think of anything to say. He merely nodded and listened, and then they shook hands. There was also something strange about that handshake. It was fraught with solemnity, and it may have lasted just a second too long, a negligible little second that was still too long, as if the old man were bidding farewell to someone who was about to go away.
Finally the old man said that he trusted Leo. That was the first time in a very, very long while that Leo had heard anyone say that they trusted him. Then Edvard Hogarth disappeared out the door, back to his taxi, wh
ich was waiting down on Hornsgatan.
________
The same maître d’ as before showed Leo Morgan to the same secluded table in the Restaurant Salzers. This time Stene Forman had managed to fill up almost the entire ashtray as he waited impatiently. He had a very hard time hiding his excitement. He kicked out a chair, reached out his cloying hand and leaned conspiratorially over the table. Leo had done a great job. It was a real pleasure to invite him to lunch again.
Over a heavy lunch with wine and then coffee with cognac, Leo calmly gave his report. With an almost exaggerated composure he matter-of-factly recounted what had happened. He repeated certain phrases, added things he had forgotten, calmed down again and at last came to the strange night just after Easter when he had received a sheaf of papers from Edvard Hogarth, almost as if it were a top-secret dossier in some clichéd thriller.
Stene said that was so typical of Hogarth. The old man was not just some nobody; he had a reputation for being a bit odd, so to speak. Whether it was a matter of an ordinary persecution complex, an over-active imagination, or something else, no one could say. Edvard Hogarth did his thing, which could make a person feel a little confused, but there was nothing to be done about that.
It could be that at this point we should at least give some hint as to what this whole affair actually concerned. The dossier, handwritten on typing paper, which Leo Morgan received that night contained excerpts, selected in the greatest haste by Hogarth himself, and they could do little more than provide a hint of the themes of his magnum opus.
The Hogarth Affair, as the matter came to be called, had its roots far back in time. Zeverin & Co. – a firm that plays a central role in this drama – became the Zeverin Precision Tool Company AB in the twenties. The company moved to a new plant, considered impressively modern at the time, in Hammarby, not far from the Sickla docks. Hogarth spent a lot of time describing the CEO Hermann Zeverin, his previous career and the status of the Swedish precision tool industry at the time. It would be much too long-winded to insert that reverential account here; the work had taken Hogarth many years and it was brimming with details and statistics.
At any rate, during the thirties the Zeverin Precision Tool Company AB seemed to be an unusually lucrative and successful business for its day. While many factories around the world had folded as ruined and obliterated wrecks, the Zeverin Precision Tool Company AB was hiring new employees and continued to grow at a calm and steady pace. The nature of the labour market was such that companies could pick and choose among hordes of skilled workers who possessed tremendous expertise. One thing that might seem curious but was based on ice-cold calculation was the fact that even back then the Zeverin Precision Tool Company AB utilised a special variant of the employment interview, a questionnaire for those seeking jobs. It was a cleverly worded form that evoked answers revealing everything from the applicant’s shoe size and marital status to membership in trade unions and opinions on the political situation in the world, if the applicant had any such opinions.
In the late thirties, the Zeverin Precision Tool Company AB at Hammarby Harbour near the Sickla docks employed about a hundred workers as well as a score of office clerks reporting directly to management. Over the previous decade production had become more extensive and diversified. They were producing everything from machine parts – in addition to entire machines for specific purposes – to little stainless-steel parts for kitchenware. The firm had customers all over Scandinavia, mostly large workshops where the Zeverin Precision Tool Company AB could supply the time-consuming precision work.
Business was booming for this small company when the Second World War began. It was significant that the workers at the Zeverin Precision Tool Company AB received considerably higher wages than workers at, for instance, the newly built huge plants of the Hedlund Brothers or General Motors.
Here Hogarth interjected a comprehensive cost estimate which showed that the move to the large plant in Hammarby was made possible by generous bank loans taken out against various securities. At the same time, and perhaps for that very reason, another transaction was undertaken, which would require an entire academic dissertation to explain properly. In any case, the gist of it was that, in a brilliant manoeuvre, the Zeverin Precision Tool Company AB became linked to the already vast Griffel Corporation. This association – which still exists today – was by no means official, and it took Hogarth at least four months of dogged persistence, as he mentions in a personal passage, to find proof to support this claim. The verification lay buried under pounds of archival dust, historical ‘obfuscation’, and the reluctance of civil servants. This was not the least bit surprising – rather, it was entirely expected – because this fact reveals that the activities of the Zeverin Precision Tool Company AB during the Second World War were not an unfortunate coincidence, an unpredictable consequence of the avarice of some unscrupulous capitalist. It was cold-hearted business, completely in keeping with the directives of the large corporation, and that was why the affair had consequences, even today, when the Griffel Corporation has acquired the dimensions of an empire that every governmental administration must take into consideration.
The move from the small workshop near Norrtull to the large plant near the Sickla docks in Hammarby Harbour took place with much pomp and circumstance. The plant was opened by the Finance Minister of the future coalition government, and CEO Hermann Zeverin himself gave a long speech in which he thanked and praised the company’s capable rank and file. The nearly 120 employees applauded and were then invited to partake of coffee and rolls.
The gigantic factories of the Hedlund Brothers, General Motors, Luma and Osram cast their shadows over the facilities which, seen in context, were actually quite modest. But everything is relative. The German boot, in turn, cast its menacing shadow over them all, though the danger was mentioned only in passing by all the speakers.
‘These are uneasy times,’ said the future minister, even daring to mention the deep wounds left by the Kreuger crash, but, ‘we have to be grateful that things are the way they are for us.’
CEO Zeverin spoke in benevolent terms of the AK-jobs and their favourable effect on Swedish business. Not without a certain satisfaction he noted his own company’s unique position, which drew a small round of applause from the fawning office clerks.
A certain spirit of agreement, mutual trust and loyalty hovered over these inaugural festivities in the best 1930s style. The manufacturer also disclosed that production would be altered to a certain extent, and that training courses would be arranged for this purpose. Some employees would soon be singled out, that much he could promise. It was easy to read between the lines: some specially chosen, co-operative, and subservient workers would be selected.
This was where Tore Hansson came into the picture. Tore Hansson, who was Verner’s father, could be mentioned in Hogarth’s summary only in passing, which made it all the more irritating. Tore Hansson had to disappear.
In the copy given to Leo, Hogarth had underlined the name Tore Hansson each time it appeared. But because of time constraints he had been forced to cut his account short. The intent – if there was any sensible intent behind this – may have been to point Leo in the right direction. But instead the effect was mostly annoying.
Stene Forman couldn’t hide his agitation. During this second lunch at Salzers he had managed to fill the ashtray to the brim, and sweat was dripping from his forehead. Leo had done a good job, even though he had merely received a pile of papers that were largely incomplete.
But this was just the beginning, according to Forman, as he got more and more worked up. He started firing off ideas about how they were going to dig into the whole affair. The Zeverin Precision Tool Company AB still existed at the site near the Sickla docks, and the Griffel Corporation was one of the largest companies in Sweden. There was plenty to dig into – ownership relationships, customers, international transactions and so on, ad infinitum. Somewhere in the mix they would find Tore Hansson, there was no d
oubt about that. The job had to be done with great thoroughness, nothing could be left to chance, as Forman said, laughing in almost the same way as before. The maître d’ looked worried and tallied up the bill.
Leo couldn’t understand Stene Forman’s excessive enthusiasm. He had merely recounted a fragmented story that ended with one big question mark.
________
A totally normal person would presumably have been well on his way to exploding with curiosity after having come this far in the intrigue – exactly the way Stene Forman was about to burst with something that at least appeared to be curiosity but would later turn out to be greed. But not Leo Morgan. He might have been able to admit to an uneasy tingling in his body, but that probably wasn’t enough to be called curiosity. As previously mentioned, he had once written a treatise on the subject. It was called Curiosity, Inquisitiveness and Knowledge. Anyone who is not put off by this academically shabby and unimaginative title – how far he had come from his beautiful and sublime titles of the sixties: Herbarium, Sanctimonious Cows and Façade Climbing and Other Hobbies! – can actually read a truly exciting, instructive and entertaining put-down of curiosity which, in the author’s take on the subject, is one of humanity’s lowest vices.
Of course the discussion ends up in an epistemological argument that goes right over my head, but as far as I can tell, Leo rejected the type of deduction in which truth becomes the intuited manifesto of the thesis. The human being cannot guess at anything but can only examine one thing at a time, inventing categories and concepts, constantly trying to test them over and over again.
Gentlemen (Klas Ostergren) (FO8) Page 36
