‘The Russians?’ said Per-Gunnar Gerdin.
‘Yes, the Russians. Your deceased colleague Bucket talks of “the Russians” in your bugged telephone conversation. You complained that Bucket hadn’t called your pay-as-you-go phone, and Bucket answered that he thought that only applied when you did business with the Russians.’
‘That isn’t something I want to talk about,’ said Per-Gunnar Gerdin, mainly because he didn’t know what to say.
‘But I do,’ said Prosecutor Ranelid.
There was silence around the table. The papers hadn’t mentioned the bit about the Russians in Gerdin’s telephone conversation, and Gerdin himself hadn’t remembered it. But then Benny said:
‘Yesli chelovek kurit, on plocho igraet v futbol.’
They all stared at him.
‘“The Russians” refers to me and my brother,’ Benny explained. ‘Our father – may he rest in peace – and our Uncle Frasse – may he also rest in peace – were a bit red. So they made me and my brother learn Russian as children and friends and acquaintances nicknamed us “the Russians”. That was what I just said, but in Russian of course.’
Like so much else this particular morning, what Benny had said had very little to do with the truth. He had simply tried to get Pike Gerdin out of a tight spot. Benny had almost completed a BA in Russian (he never handed in his final essay) but that was some time ago and all Benny could remember in a hurry was:
‘If you smoke, you won’t be much good at soccer.’
But it worked. Allan was the only one there who understood what Benny had said.
It was all too much for Prosecutor Ranelid: First, all these idiotic references to historic figures, and then people speaking Russian…
‘Can you explain, Mr Gerdin, how you were first rammed and killed by your friends, and then rose up from the dead and are now sitting here and… eating watermelon? And can I taste that melon, after all?’
‘But of course,’ said Bosse. ‘The recipe is secret though! Or as the saying goes: “If the food is going to be really tasty then you don’t want the Food Inspector watching you when you make it.”’
That was not a saying that either Chief Inspector Aronsson or Prosecutor Ranelid had ever heard before. But Aronsson had once and for all decided to keep as quiet as possible, and Ranelid now wished for nothing more than to bring it all to a conclusion… whatever that was… and leave. So he didn’t ask for an explanation. Instead, he noted that the watermelon in question was the tastiest he had ever bitten into.
Per-Gunnar Gerdin explained how he had come to Lake Farm just as the bus was driving away, how he had gone to look around before he realised that the bus had probably carried off his friends, and how he had then chased it, overtaken it, and lost control of his car in a skid – and, well, the photos of the wrecked car were not unfamiliar to the prosecutor, he supposed.
‘No surprise that he caught up with us,’ Allan added, after having been quiet for a while. ‘He had more than three hundred horsepower under the hood. Not like the Volvo PV444 that took me to visit Prime Minister Erlander. Forty-four horsepower! That was a lot in those days. And I wonder how many horsepower Gustavsson had when he turned into my yard by mistake —’
‘Shut it… please Mr Karlsson, before you finish me off,’ said Prosecutor Ranelid.
The chairman of Never Again continued his story. He had, of course, lost a little blood in the wrecked car, or actually quite a lot, but he was soon bandaged and he hadn’t thought it necessary to go to hospital for as little as a light wound, a broken arm, concussion and a few broken ribs.
‘Besides, Benny did study Literature,’ said Allan.
‘Literature?’ repeated Prosecutor Ranelid.
‘Did I say Literature? I meant Medicine.’
‘I have studied Literature too,’ said Benny. ‘My absolute favourite is probably Camilo José Cela, not least his first novel from the 1940s, La familia de —’
‘Get back to the story.’
The prosecutor, in his appeal, had happened to look at Allan, so Allan said:
‘If you’ll excuse us, Mr Prosecutor, we’ve told you everything. But if you absolutely want to hear us talk some more then I can probably remember one or two adventures from my time as a CIA agent – or even better from my trip across the Himalayas. And do you want the recipe for making vodka from goats’ milk? All you need is a beet and a bit of sunshine. And some goats’ milk of course.’
Sometimes your mouth seems to go its own way while your brain stands still, and that was probably what happened to Prosecutor Ranelid when – contrary to what he had just decided – he happened to comment on Allan’s latest nonsense:
‘You crossed the Himalayas? At a hundred?’
‘No, don’t be silly,’ said Allan. ‘You see, Mr Prosecutor, I haven’t always been a hundred years old. No, that’s recent.’
‘Can we move on…?’
‘We all grow up and get older,’ Allan continued. ‘You might not think so when you are a child. Take young Mr Kim Jong Il, for example. That unfortunate child sat crying on my lap, but now he is head of state, with all that entails…’
‘Never mind, Karlsson.’
‘I’m sorry. You wanted to hear the story of when I crossed the Himalayas, Mr Prosecutor. Well, for several months my only company was a camel, and say what you will about camels, they aren’t much fun…’
‘No!’ exclaimed Prosecutor Ranelid. ‘I don’t want to hear that at all. I just… I don’t know…’
And then Prosecutor Ranelid was silent for a few moments, before saying in a quiet voice that he didn’t have any more questions… except possibly that he couldn’t understand why the friends had stayed in hiding for several weeks when there was nothing to hide from.
‘You were innocent, weren’t you?’
‘But innocence can mean different things depending on whose perspective you adopt,’ said Benny.
‘I was thinking along the same lines,’ said Allan. ‘President Johnson and de Gaulle for example. Who was guilty and who was innocent when it came to their bad relationship? Mind you, I didn’t bring that up when we met, we had other things to talk about, but —’
‘Please, Mr Karlsson,’ said Prosecutor Ranelid. ‘I beg you, please be quiet.’
‘You don’t have to go down on your knees, Mr Prosecutor. I shall be quiet as a mouse from now on, I promise you. During my hundred years, my tongue has slipped only twice. First when I told the West how you build an atom bomb, and then when I did the same for the East.’
Prosecutor Ranelid slowly got up, and with a nod quietly thanked them for the melon, for the coffee and the cake, for… the conversation… and for the fact that the friends at Bellringer Farm had been so cooperative.
After which he got into his car and drove away.
‘That went well,’ said Julius.
‘Indeed it did,’ said Allan. ‘I think I covered most of it.’
In his car, Prosecutor Ranelid’s mental paralysis gradually lost its hold. He went over the story he’d been told, adding something here, deleting something there (mainly deleting), and patching and polishing until he felt he had a nicely tidied-up story that would actually work. The only thing that really worried the prosecutor was that the journalists just wouldn’t believe that the hundred-year-old Allan Karlsson already carried the scent of death.
Then Prosecutor Ranelid had an idea. That damned police dog… Could they blame it all on the dog?
If Ranelid could make it sound as if the dog was crazy, unimagined possibilities appeared for the prosecutor to save his own skin. The story would then be that there never was a corpse on the inspection trolley in the Södermanland forest, and that’s why it hadn’t been found. But the prosecutor had been fooled into believing the opposite, and that in turn led to a number of logical conclusions and decisions – which had turned out to be completely wrong. But you couldn’t blame the prosecutor for that. It was the dog’s fault.
This could be brilliant, Pros
ecutor Ranelid thought. The story of the dog that had lost its touch just needed to be confirmed by another source and then Kicki – was that her name? — had to end her days fast. It wouldn’t do for her to prove her skills after the prosecutor had explained what happened.
Prosecutor Ranelid had a hold on Kicki’s handler since the time, some years ago, when he had managed quietly to spirit away a case of a police officer suspected of shoplifting at 7-Eleven. A police career shouldn’t end because of one muffin that somebody had forgotten to pay for, thought Ranelid. But now it was high time for the dog-handler to repay the favour.
‘Bye-bye Kicki,’ said Prosecutor Ranelid and smiled for the first time in ages.
Shortly afterwards, his telephone rang. It was the county police chief. The autopsy and identity report from Riga had just landed on his desk.
‘The compressed corpse at the scrapyard was Henrik Hultén,’ said the police chief.
‘Nice to hear that,’ said Prosecutor Ranelid. ‘And a good thing you phoned! Can you connect me to reception? I need to get hold of Ronny Bäckman, the dog-handler…’
The friends at Bellringer Farm had waved goodbye to Prosecutor Ranelid and at Allan’s suggestion had returned to the kitchen table. There was, he said, a question that needed to be resolved.
Allan started the meeting by asking Chief Inspector Aronsson if he had anything to say about what Prosecutor Ranelid had just been told. Perhaps the chief inspector would prefer to go for a walk while the friends had their meeting?
Aronsson answered that he thought the account had been clear and sound in every way possible. As far as the chief inspector was concerned, the case was closed, and if they would let him remain seated at the table he would be happy to do so. He himself was not free from sin, said Aronsson, and he was not about to throw the first or even the second stone in this matter.
‘But do me the favour of not telling me things that I don’t really need to know. I mean, if there should be alternative answers to those you just gave to Ranelid…’
Allan promised, and added that his friend Aronsson was welcome to stay.
Friend Aronsson, thought Aronsson. In his work over the years, Aronsson had made many enemies among the country’s most unscrupulous villains, but not a single friend. He thought it was about time! And so he said that if Allan and the others would like to include him in their friendship, he would be both proud and happy.
Allan answered that during his long life he had been on comradely footing with both presidents and priests, but not until now with a policeman. And since their friend Aronsson absolutely didn’t want to know too much, Allan promised not to say anything about where the group’s pile of money had come from. For the sake of friendship, that is.
‘Pile of money?’ asked Chief Inspector Aronsson.
‘Yes, you know that suitcase? Before it contained super slim bibles in genuine leather, it was filled to the brim with five-hundred-crown banknotes. About fifty million crowns.’
‘What the devil…’ said Chief Inspector Aronsson.
‘Swear if you like,’ said The Beauty.
‘Fifty million?’ asked Chief Inspector Aronsson.
‘Minus some expenses in the course of our journey,’ said Allan. ‘And now the group has to sort out who owns it. And with that I shall ask Pike to speak.’
Per-Gunnar ‘Pike’ Gerdin scratched his ear. Then he said that he would like the friends and the millions to stick together. Perhaps they could go on holiday together, because there was nothing Pike longed for more just now than to be served a parasol drink under a parasol somewhere far, far away. Besides, Pike happened to know that Allan had leanings of a similar nature.
‘But without the parasol,’ said Allan.
Julius said that he agreed with Allan that protection from rain over the vodka was not one of the necessities of life, especially if you were already lying under a parasol and the sun was shining from a clear blue sky. But he also thought that the friends didn’t need to argue about that. A shared holiday sounded great!
Chief Inspector Aronsson smiled shyly at the idea, not daring to assume he belonged to the group. Benny noted this, so he put an arm around the chief inspector’s shoulder and asked how the representative of the police force preferred to have his holiday drinks served. The chief inspector smiled and was just about to answer when The Beauty put the damper on everything:
‘I’m not taking a single step without Sonya and Buster!’
And then she was silent for a second before she added:
‘Not a snowball’s chance in hell!’
Since Benny for his part couldn’t contemplate taking a step without The Beauty, his enthusiasm rapidly evaporated.
‘Besides, I don’t suppose half of us even have a valid passport,’ he sighed.
But Allan calmly thanked Pike for his generosity with regard to how the suitcase money could best be shared. He thought a holiday was a good idea, and preferably as many thousands of miles from Director Alice as possible. If only the other members of the group could agree, they could surely sort out the transport issues and find a destination where they weren’t so fussy about visas for man and beast.
‘And how do you intend to take along a five-ton elephant on the plane?’ said Benny in despair.
‘I don’t know,’ said Allan. ‘But as long as we think positively, I’m sure a solution will appear.’
‘And the valid passports?’
‘As long as we think positively, as I said.’
‘I don’t think Sonya actually weighs much more than four tons, perhaps four and a half at the most,’ said The Beauty.
‘You see, Benny,’ said Allan. ‘That’s what I mean by thinking positively. The problem immediately became a whole ton less.’
‘I might have an idea,’ The Beauty said.
‘Me too,’ said Allan. ‘Can I use your phone?’
Chapter 26
1968–82
Yury Borisovich Popov lived and worked in the city of Sarov in Nizhny Novgorod, about 350 kilometres east of Moscow.
Sarov was a secret city, almost more secret than Secret Agent Hutton. It wasn’t even allowed to be called Sarov any longer, but had been given the not particularly romantic name Arzamas-16. Besides, the entire city had been rubbed out on all maps. Sarov did and didn’t exist at one and the same time, depending on whether you referred to reality or to something else – kind of like Vladivostok for a few years from 1953 on, except the opposite.
The city was fenced in with barbed wire, and not a soul was let in or out without a vigorous security check. If you had an American passport and were stationed at the American Embassy in Moscow, it was not advisable to come anywhere near.
CIA agent Ryan Hutton and his new pupil Allan Karlsson had practised the A to Z of spying for several weeks before Allan was installed at the embassy in Moscow under the name Allen Carson and with the vague title ‘administrator’.
Embarrassingly for Secret Agent Hutton, he had completely ignored the fact that the target that Allan Karlsson was intended to approach was unapproachable, shut in behind barbed wire in a city that was so well protected that it wasn’t even allowed to be called what it was called, or to be where it was.
Secret Agent Hutton told Allan he was sorry about the mistake, but added that Mr Karlsson would surely think up something. Popov must visit Moscow now and then.
‘But now you’ll have to excuse me, Mr Karlsson,’ said Secret Agent Hutton on the phone from the French capital. ‘I have some other business on my desk. Good luck!’
Secret Agent Hutton replaced the receiver, sighed deeply, and returned to the mess of the aftermath of the military coup in Greece the previous year – supported by the CIA. Like so much else in recent times, it had not exactly turned out as intended.
Allan, for his part, had no better idea than to take a refreshing walk to the city library in Moscow every day and sit there for hours reading the daily papers and magazines. He was hoping that he would come across an article abo
ut Popov making a public appearance outside the barbed wire that fenced in Arzamas-16.
The months went by and no such news items cropped up. But Allan could read about how the presidential candidate Robert Kennedy met with the same fate as his brother and how Czechoslovakia had asked the Soviet Union for help getting its socialism in order.
Furthermore, Allan noted one day that Lyndon B. Johnson had been succeeded by a man called Richard M. Nixon. But since he was still getting his expenses from the embassy in an envelope every month, Allan thought that he had better keep on looking for Popov. If anything changed, then Secret Agent Hutton would no doubt get in touch.
1968 turned into 1969 and spring was approaching when Allan in his everlasting thumbing through newspapers at the library came across something interesting. The Vienna Opera was going to give a guest performance at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow, with Franco Corelli as tenor and the international Swedish star Birgit Nilsson in the role of Turandot.
Allan scratched his (now again) beardless chin and remembered the first and only entire evening that he and Yury had spent together. Late in the night, Yury had started to sing an aria. ‘Nessun dorma’ is what he had sung – nobody is allowed to sleep! Not long afterwards, he had for reasons connected with alcohol fallen asleep anyway, but that was another matter.
To Allan’s way of thinking, a person who at one time could manage a more or less good rendering of Puccini and Turandot at a depth of 200 metres, would hardly miss a guest performance from Vienna with the same opera at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow, would he? Especially if the man in question lived only a few hours away and had received so many medals that he would have no problem getting a seat.
Or perhaps he might. And, in that case, Allan would have to continue his daily walks to and from the library. That was the worst that could happen, and that wasn’t so bad.
For the time being, Allan worked on the assumption that Yury might turn up outside the Opera, and then all he had to do was to stand there and remind him of their last drinking bout. And that would be that.
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