For obvious reasons, Tore P.-V. Hansson had never been required to do military service. He hadn’t even been utilised as a desk-job recruit anywhere, and he had no complaints about the matter. But if he had done his military service and become familiar with firearms, he wouldn’t have had to ponder for long about what the lathe operators were actually working on. As it was, it took him some time to figure things out, and that didn’t happen until he saw some sort of chief inspector standing in the middle of the workshop. The man examined each product by sticking a cylinder into a sub-machine gun and making several jerking movements with the weapon before removing the cylinder and placing the approved item in a box filled with wood shavings.
They were manufacturing bolts for sub-machine guns, and it was with this realisation that Tore P.-V. Hansson wrote his own death warrant – or put the first nail in his coffin, to make use of a thriller-like phrase.
Tore P.-V. Hansson sat up there for many hours in the workshop of the Zeverin Precision Tool Company AB, his eyes burning as he spied on the workmen operating their lathes and milling the bolts, which were then inspected and approved and packed up. Late at night the efficient, blacked-out work was completed and the workshop was emptied out as the workers left, murmuring to each other. The lamps were turned off, and the blackout curtains were once again hoisted up on their ropes, filling the entire building with their hissing sound.
The crippled, stammering spy must have been filled with a sense of triumph. He had been thoroughly vindicated. He had proved to himself that night work actually was being done in the workshop and that the disarray of his tools really had been caused by something other than a practical joke.
But to go into all the developments that now followed would require far too much space, and the original text which Leo Morgan had furnished filled a good fifty pages. He had added long expositions on the time period in general, as well as on the industry, the Third Reich, and so on. In other words: he had tried to imitate Edvard Hogarth.
Tore P.-V. Hansson was, of course, both pleased and confused by everything he had witnessed that night from his perch high up on the post. He had no idea to whom he could turn, whether this was some clandestine matter for Sweden or whether there were highly criminal interests behind the activity. It was, after all, a secret business that under no circumstances should be exposed – that much he had understood. The important thing, at any rate, was for him to convey the matter further, first to his wife. She probably thought that he’d been out on a binge with Berka or some other carousers that night, and she had met him with allegorical rolling pins when he later, finally, fell into bed. At first she demanded a better story than that, but her doubts were quickly laid to rest, and she realised that Tore had actually discovered something quite awful. Those were terrible times in the world. Europe, Africa and Asia were all in flames, and people were capable of just about anything. For understandable reasons she wanted Tore to keep quiet, to let it go, to forget what he had seen. Let other men wage war, but not him. Tore was crippled and not suited for battle – although she knew full well that he would never comply with her wishes. Tore was much too scrupulous to forget about such a night. Not even the announcement that Tore was going to be a father could make him change his mind. On the contrary, it made the matter even worse. If Tore P.-V. Hansson was going to be a father, then he could not be a coward.
So it was shortly after that night at the Zeverin Precision Tool Company AB that Tore Hansson contacted a major newspaper. Edvard Hogarth wrote that one day in the spring of 1944 he had a very strange phone conversation as he sat in the editorial offices. A stammering and very agitated young man told him about what he had seen one night at the workshop where he was employed in the daytime. And Hogarth added: ‘If he hadn’t stuttered, I would have taken him for a perfectly ordinary madman.’
________
But Edvard Hogarth was no fool, and he asked the young worker to come up to the newspaper office the following day. The meeting never took place. Ever since 4 May 1944, the stammering, limping lathe operator Tore P.-V. Hansson has been missing without a trace. He left behind a wife on Brännkyrkagatan, and in November of that same year she gave birth to a son named Verner. The pregnancy had been a nightmare, filled with police interviews and investigations that led nowhere. It had turned Mrs Hansson into a hard and disappointed woman, and when her son Verner was born, she decided to forget all about her missing husband. She was never going to see justice done.
By now it had grown quite late, and Leo had downed one drink after another. He was celebrating a great triumph up there in Stene Forman’s office. The editor-in-chief was sitting on the other side of the desk, smoking non-stop as he read through the fifty pages of Leo’s document with the greatest attentiveness. Forman muttered, sighed, and groaned, but he seemed pleased. He looked immensely tired and worn out in the sharp light of the desk lamp. Now and then his weariness would be replaced by an expression of surprise as he jotted down some comments in the margin. It was utterly quiet and dead in the editorial offices. Once in a while Leo took a stroll among all the desks in the office landscape, going over to the panoramic windows to look out at the city and the park. The two of them were all alone in the whole building, except for the guard at the entrance. The Hogarth Affair was completely off the record.
With an audible snort – which actually sounded much like the laugh that had made him famous among the Provies of the sixties – Forman closed the folder and took his feet down from the desk. He was finished. He squeezed the bridge of his nose between his thumb and index finger and sat motionless and silent for a long time.
Filled with anticipation, Leo sat there with another drink, fingering his neat dossier like some errant job applicant. Finally Stene Forman broke the silence with yet another audible snort and asked Leo if he was tired. Leo was a bit surprised by the question but replied in the affirmative. He was tired, dead-tired and rundown. All the excitement of discovery had kept him awake for several nights in a row, but he had never really allowed himself to notice whether he was tired or not. The fatigue was mostly like a cloud of feverish heat, an up-until-now controlled pain in his forehead. But he was still too wound up to think about sleep or rest. Right now it was the battle that counted, and Leo wanted most of all to think about headlines – glaring, screaming headlines that would convey this scandal out to the entire populace in the name of truth and information. Never before had he been involved in anything to such a degree, becoming engulfed in a mission so completely that everything else seemed unimportant, mere trifles. Not even when he was in the midst of his most intense periods of creativity had he experienced anything like this. He hadn’t even touched the black workbook in which his poetry collection Autopsy was awaiting completion. In this context it seemed to him mere therapy, introverted nonsense. The Hogarth Affair had, in some special way, allowed Leo to reconquer the world that had been lost to him so long ago.
But Stene Forman was not thinking along those lines at all. He suddenly didn’t look as eager or joyfully excited as Leo had hoped he would after getting his hands on this nitro-glycerine. Instead Forman looked quite dejected and depressed, as if he were trying to control something that demanded the greatest gravity, a threat of catastrophe.
Leo sipped his drink, and now the alcohol started loosening up the warm, oppressive cloud of fatigue inside his forehead, releasing a kind of anaesthetising precipitation over his brain. He slumped in the easy chair opposite the editor-in-chief’s desk, lit a fresh cigarette and took a couple of deep drags.
Stene Forman began talking about the business in general, about how difficult everything was, how hopeless it could be at times to wrestle with truth and lies, relaying information and keeping secrets, and so on. Most often it was pure hell. Leo didn’t understand where he was going with this. Forman talked, by turns, a bit incoherently about himself, his enormous alimony payments and his weariness, then about Blixt, his wretched financial advisors, the ruthless creditors and the still-imminent bankr
uptcy.
It was nothing but an incoherent song and dance; Leo still didn’t understand what it was all about. He wanted Forman to speak plainly. Surely everyone realised what economic conditions were like – that was nothing to be spouting off about tonight. Instead they should be celebrating their great triumph, saluting the fact that Verner Hansson was going to see justice done, that Blixt would start selling like hot cakes, and that the Hogarth Affair would finally become public knowledge.
All right, said Stene Forman, he would speak plainly. First, he acknowledged that he appreciated Leo’s efforts and the fact the everything had been done with such proficiency. The overall picture was clear, although there were details that were unknown to Leo, but not to Forman. Editor-in-chief Forman – who suddenly looked as if he had been the editor-in-chief of the Washington Post for the past fifty years – recapitulated the whole story of the Hogarth Affair. Point by point he went through Tore P.-V. Hansson’s discovery that during the Second World War the Zeverin Precision Tool Company AB at the Sickla docks in Stockholm had manufactured weapons parts during secret, night-time shifts. The crippled, stammering lathe operator had vanished quite suddenly – and the police investigations came to an abrupt halt upon orders ‘from on high’ – but the mystery remained. The thread was then taken up by Edvard Hogarth, at the time still an active journalist, who at regular intervals over a period of thirty years had poked around in the case until he discovered that the Zeverin Precision Tool Company AB had carried on a brisk business with the Third Reich, which was in violation of Sweden’s policy of neutrality. The fact that the entire operation was also kept secret from the tax authorities made the matter even more incendiary. From Edvard Hogarth and the Zeverin Precision Tool Company AB – as previously mentioned – the red thread ran to the mighty Griffel Corporation and its headquarters on Birger Jarlsgatan in the middle of Stockholm. In reality that was where the actual core of the whole matter was centred. The Griffel Corporation was today, meaning almost thirty years later, one of the most profitable trusts we had. The company continued to export spare parts for weapons that, taken individually, were of no interest, parts that armies in Africa, for example, could assemble into fully functioning firearms. Yesterday’s market in Nazi Germany had today become dictatorships such as the one in Uganda. That was exactly how the Griffel Corporation functioned, although from the outside, CEO Wilhelm Sterner looked as blameless as Gyllenhammer, Wallenberg and others. No one would be able to find anything untoward about the Griffel Corporation; any discrepancies had to be stifled, at all costs. The truth required its hecatombs.
Stene Forman talked for a long time, and Leo suddenly became sober and wide awake. What had earlier looked like a great triumph had now acquired serious blemishes, although he didn’t yet comprehend what Forman was saying. OK, Leo interjected, he may have left some gaps in his presentation; he wasn’t a professional, after all. But that shouldn’t make any difference. The important thing was the main theme, and that was utterly clear. This Wilhelm Sterner was a different story.
The editor-in-chief sighed deeply and again looked tremendously old. Speaking plainly apparently wasn’t enough. He would have to resort to stronger stuff to get Leo to understand the full dimensions of the matter.
He got up from the desk and, shoulders slumped, moved over to a big safe that was built into the wall. This was the inner sanctum of Blixt magazine. Everything that was in any way confidential was kept inside it: lists, sources that could not be revealed, and ready cash. Very slowly Forman spun the combination on the lock and finally opened the door with a firm yank. He leafed through a couple of stacks of paper on the bottom shelf, behind other, less important piles and then took out a couple of unmarked, sealed envelopes.
Stene Forman handed one of the envelopes to Leo, told him to open it, and then went back to his chair. Leo slit open the envelope and took out a couple of photos that made him feel sick. They were pictures from an autopsy, and only one of them, a close-up, enabled him to identify the deceased. It was Edvard Hogarth. The pictures showed a pale and surprisingly fit body which, with a few cuts that were equally elegant and nonchalant, had been deformed into a shapeless mass of flesh. In one of them, the face was pulled away from the skull into a rolled up mask around the neck, organs and entrails were looped around as if in some bloody pasta dish, and the hairy skin was splotched with dried blood. The remaining photos showed a series of close-ups of the right calf, which revealed two extremely small dots about an inch apart. The marks had been circled in pen, with comments in Latin.
Accompanying the photographs was a copy of the autopsy report, in which it was apparently established that Edvard Hogarth had died of cardiac arrest brought on by an electric shock, most likely caused when a cord connected to the power grid was pressed against his calf. In other words, it was murder.
After the first wave of nausea had subsided and Leo had wiped the sweat from the palms of his hands, he started to understand what this was all about. Forman didn’t have to acknowledge or comment on very much. Leo had been his errand boy. This whole thing had nothing to do with uncovering the Truth, winning justice for Verner Hansson or any other noble causes. The editor-in-chief – Leo’s former friend – had been operating on his own and had in principle come up with the same material, the same explosive formula. He had the right contacts and had only drawn from Leo’s account when necessary. The material would never be published, nor had that ever been the intention.
The intention was perfectly clear, and presumably Leo was much too tired to feel enraged, surprised or depressed. He calmly took in the facts, and when the next envelope was tossed towards him from the other side of the desk and turned out to contain 25,000 kronor in crisp banknotes, he didn’t even have to ask why.
This was a dangerous business, according to Forman. This was nitro-glycerine and, if used properly, it could be profitable, but one misstep could spell death, which was what had happened to Edvard Hogarth. There was no use in pretending to be proud. The game had its own rules. Forman followed the rules, and Leo should too. Leo should simply forget about the whole thing; he had done a good job, and he should be pleased. He should get some sleep and spend his money on a long trip or whatever the hell he liked, as long as he relaxed and forgot about the whole affair. That was the only proper thing to do. Forman claimed that ‘they’ would leave him in peace. ‘They’ had been in contact with Forman for a long time. Wilhelm Sterner himself had promised peace as long as the lid stayed on; he knew how to handle the situation. Forman actually admired Sterner in a way; there was such an unflinching logic to that coldness. How much Forman himself had been involved in the affair he never said. There was so much that Leo didn’t know. Blixt was going into bankruptcy the following week, the last issue had already been put to bed. Forman would soon be moving abroad with his new wife. Perhaps even in a couple of weeks. The Hogarth Affair would be forevermore off the record.
________
It was well past midnight on that April night in 1975 when two men exited the offices of the soon-to-be-defunct Blixt magazine on Norr Mälarstrand. They got into editor-in-chief Stene Forman’s new car, a fancy vehicle that had cost a sizable sum. It was no ordinary company car.
Stene Forman drove Leo Morgan home to his flat on Hornsgatan. They sat for a while in silence, each smoking a cigarette and watching the steady movement of the windscreen wipers. Several times Forman tried to hand over the small brown envelope containing 25,000 kronor in unused banknotes, but Leo made no move to take it. The editor-in-chief then started speaking. He spoke for a long time. What he said is known only to those two individuals. Perhaps he offered promises and reassurances regarding Leo’s personal safety, saying that no one would touch a hair on his head as long as he kept quiet and all the documents remained locked in the magazine’s safe. They would soon fall into the hands of those who were paying. Nothing was free. Even truth had a price.
Finally Leo Morgan snatched the brown envelope, jumped out of the car, and slammed
the door. The black-out was complete. For the time being.
That same night, terrorist bombs exploded at the German embassy. All of Sweden was shaken.
________
Several days later Henry Morgan arrived home from the film shoot in Skåne. As soon as he stepped inside the tall glass doors of the hallway he noticed a disgusting stench of excrement. Annoyed, he made a round of the flat and then went into Leo’s private quarters.
Leo was lying on the bed as if paralysed, staring at the ceiling. The whole room was filled with banknotes that had been used exclusively as toilet paper. The floor was completely covered with 25,000 kronor – an entire fortune smeared with faeces. The stink was horrendous, and Henry opened a window as he tried to avoid stepping on the money. But he was not successful, and several sticky thousand-krona bills stuck to his shoes. He started yelling, furious and in tears. He shouted at Leo that he should at least answer his questions civilly, because he knew exactly what he was up to. He had heard about it from Wilhelm Sterner himself and had been forced to cut short his filming in order to come back and look after his fucking little brother, who was always getting himself in trouble.
But Leo did not react. Leo didn’t move a muscle. Henry shook him, slapped him hard on both cheeks, but without result. Leo didn’t even blink. His breathing was steady and his pulse was low. In spite of this relative calm, a tremendous process of combustion seemed to be taking place within him, because he was already quite emaciated. Perhaps inestimable psychological forces were raging within Leo and demanding great quantities of energy.
Henry rang the family physician, Dr Helmers, who arrived huffing and puffing a couple of hours later. He knew how serious this could be. But Dr Helmers couldn’t make contact with Leo either. He had seen all the various illnesses that the boy had suffered over almost thirty years, and he thought he knew the routine. But this time the task was too much for him. He said that he had witnessed exactly the same phenomenon in the boys’ paternal grandmother. To all intents and purposes, she had fretted herself to death in the early sixties, and she had looked just like this. It seemed as if all her desire to live had suddenly poured out of her rear end, and then there was no going back. Dr Helmers realised that he was powerless to do anything; this was far beyond his area of expertise. This required professionals. Leo needed care. He promised to arrange for him to be admitted to Långbro Hospital.
Gentlemen (Klas Ostergren) (FO8) Page 40
