The Assignment

by Per Wahlöö

  When he returned to the bar for another glass of beer, he was detained by a middle-aged man wearing a tweed hat and a wind-breaker. The man turned back his jacket and gave him a glimpse of a press card which was fastened to the breast pocket of his blazer with a paper clip.

  “You’re Manuel Ortega, aren’t you? The new Provincial Resident?”

  “Yes.”

  “The man with the suicidal assignment?”

  “Well, there’s no reason to overdramatize it.”

  “It didn’t go all that well last time. Are you used to assignments of this kind?”

  “No. And besides, the situation is a very special one. But is the general public here really interested in our little problems?”

  “Not very. But in you personally. Anyway, it might become more interesting. Would you mind answering a few questions?”

  “As well as I can.”

  Most of the questions were foolish and irrelevant. Such as: “What did your wife say when you left?” and “How many children do you have?”

  He answered in monosyllables or by shrugging his shoulders.

  “Are you yourself from this province?”

  “No. I was brought up in the capital, in the north of the country.”

  “Is your father alive?”

  “No.”

  “What was his profession?”

  “Executive in an export business.”

  “What kind of an education did you have?”

  “A commercial education. I studied economics and law at the university as well. I worked for a while with the Ministry of Finance.”

  “What are your political views?”

  “None.”

  A photographer appeared and took a few shots.

  Manuel Ortega smiled with an effort and said: “May I ask you a question? Aren’t you afraid of losing your press card?”

  The man looked dumfounded. Then he turned back his wind-breaker and said:

  “No, not at all. Look at this. I’ve got a safety pin which goes through the case and is fastened on the inside of the pocket. My wife fixed it for me.”

  He returned his notebook to his pocket and added: “One more question—a little more fundamental than the others. Are you afraid?”

  “No,” said Manuel Ortega.

  He turned toward the bar and tapped on the glass counter with a coin to show that the conversation was at an end. Out of the corner of his eye he watched the two men walk across the floor of the hall, and he saw that the photographer said something to which the other shrugged his shoulders.

  He had been unpleasantly disturbed and felt ill at ease. When he tried to analyze the sheer physical sensation he found that it could be best described as pressure on his chest.

  His flight was called after half an hour’s delay. It was raining, although the sky had been quite cloudless during the flight in. The concrete apron shone with pools of water, and as he had left his raincoat on board, he put his head down and half ran to the plane. He was very conscious of his limp and thought that he must look rather foolish.

  Manuel Ortega sat by the window with his black briefcase lying on his knees. Everyone seemed to be in place, but the seat beside him was still empty. He peered out into the rain and busied himself with the seat belt and did not notice her until she was standing about a yard away from him. She took off her dark-green leather coat, folded it up, and put it up on the luggage rack. Then she sat down, fastened her belt, and placed a worn canvas bag on her knee. She took a pack of cigarettes and a lighter out of the bag and put them into her jacket pocket. Then she turned her head and looked at him.

  “Miss Rodríguez?”

  “Yes. Danica Rodríguez.”

  “Manuel Ortega.”

  She thrust her hand into her bag again and passed him an identity card in a plastic case.

  While the plane was rolling toward the takeoff runway and the engines were being revved up, he studied the identity card. It was the same type as his own, issued by the department but signed by the Foreign Minister of the previous government. Everything was there, from thumbprint and details of height, age, marital status, and color of hair, to her service codes. Surname: Rodríguez Fric. First name: Danica Antonia. Born: 1931. Place of Birth: Bematanango. Marital status: Married. Height: 5 ft. 8 in. Hair: Black. Eyes: Gray.

  The first part of the code he solved with ease: stenographer, correspondent, interpreter, but after that there followed a series of numbers which he did not recognize and which for a moment at least he could not figure out.

  The plane had air beneath its wings when he returned the card. She took it without looking at him and it vanished into her bag. As soon as the warning lights went off, she took a cigarette out of her jacket pocket and lit it.

  “Where is Bematanango?” said Manuel Ortega.

  “Down there, where we’re going. Right down in the south. It hardly exists. Twenty-five or thirty mud huts at the bottom of a valley, one street, a little Catholic chapel. There was a little hospital there once, but it’s fallen down now.”

  He nodded.

  She let the subject drop.

  “I have a few things with me for you to deal with. Do you want to look at them now?”

  “It can wait. We’ve plenty of time.”

  Manuel Ortega lets the back of his seat down and closes his eyes. A formula has once again begun to grind away in his brain: The sentence will be carried out within two weeks at the most. Then he shrugs his shoulders and thinks, without knowing it, in exactly the same words as his predecessor: Barking dogs don’t bite. Then he remembers the news item about Orestes de Larrinaga, his name misspelled. He thinks about the journalist with the neat safety pin and the abrupt question: Are you afraid? It is easier to spell Ortega, he thinks. A few seconds later he is asleep.

  An hour later they are over another part of Europe. The plane is a Convair Coronado 990 jet of Swissair. It is flying at twenty-six thousand feet and the air in the cabin is dry and smells of cloth and leather. The man by the window has awakened. His mouth tastes of lead and he is sitting forward with his black briefcase on his knees and he has put his right arm across it so that no one can see the chain between his wrist and the handle.

  He turns his head to the right and looks at the woman in the seat beside him for the first time. Her hair is short and black and she is wearing a red dress with blue revers. She is sitting slightly crouched with her right elbow on the foam-rubber armrest and her head resting against her hand. On her knees there is an open notebook and a page of stenciled tables. She is smoking as she reads. When she picks a flake of tobacco from her lip with her little finger, he sees that her nails are cut short and the cuticle is bitten down. She is wearing no makeup and has a thin downy shadow on her upper lip, and he thinks that most young women would have this removed. There is nothing conspicuous about her. She would vanish into anonymity on any European or American street, and if she had been sitting a few yards farther away he would quite likely never have noticed her. Presumably she had been in the waiting room at Kastrup all the time while he had been looking for her.

  He thinks: Be careful, Manuel. They mean it.

  Then she turns her head and looks at him with her strange dark-gray eyes. She says nothing, but smiles slightly and calmly.

  He looks at the clock and turns away, leaning his forehead against the windowpane and staring into the darkness.

  He notices that she rises and goes to the washroom and when she comes back down the aisle he follows her with his eyes. She walks like an animal, softly and rhythmically, with gliding steps.

  It was ten past nine when they touched down in Zürich. During the long wait there Manuel Ortega drank coffee and brandy in the waiting room. She sat opposite him and read an American paperback.

  At one point he said: “You have an unusual name.”

  “My mother was a Croat.”

  “Not your father?”

  “No.”

  Another time he asked: “Have you a clear picture of the job
we’ve got ahead of us?”

  “Only in principle.”

  “I must admit I’ve not really had time to look into the matter. I didn’t get my instructions until eight o’clock this morning.”

  “Mine came even later.”

  “As soon as possible we must get the negotiations going again from where they … were broken off.”

  “I don’t think there was time for much negotiating before Larrinaga was shot.”

  When she said this she looked straight into his eyes.

  “Your knowledge of the province will be extremely useful.”

  “I wasn’t there for very long.”

  At that point the conversation ceased.

  As the plane bounced in the air pockets over the Alps, Manuel Ortega sat with his legs crossed and wrote. He had put his notebook with its black oilcloth cover on top of his briefcase and he was trying to write down his thoughts. This was a habit he had acquired long ago; he had often found it useful.

  The woman had fallen asleep, and when he looked at her he realized how tense and nervous her face had been when she was awake. Now it was open and relaxed, and he noticed that her features were finely-drawn and pure like those of a little girl. She was breathing through her nose and her breath played in the soft hair on her upper lip.

  He wrote: Am I afraid? Yes, but not rationally. I have never concerned myself with politics in their active and more extreme forms, but on the other band I have come across many other and similar situations, for example in the commercial world, and have handled difficult negotiations between obviously incompatible parties. In these cases it has always been possible to come to some agreement in a rational way. A small group of people working on the same problem sooner or later always come around to what is possible and what is absolutely out of the question. Politics prove this: in situations in which it is a question of saving everyone’s skin, compromise solutions always appear to be quite honorable. One assumption is that the parties are represented by people who are neither mentally ill nor entirely without talent. The work that lies ahead in this unhappy province should then, on my part, be accomplished with reasonable expectations of progress. The first step must be to create a state of peace and guarantees of public safety. Then it should be possible to find practical solutions which would to some extent satisfy and benefit the backward masses without the occupying (and, one supposes, the more able) class suffering any real damage. There should, of course, be found within this “upper” class technically and administratively trained people who must not be pushed out, but who must be won over to a sensible project of cooperation. I cannot believe that either side would gain anything by doing violence to me personally. They must realize this themselves. The murder of Larrinaga was surely a tragic mistake, committed by some lone fanatic. (What has, for that matter, become of the assassin? No one has said anything about that. Presumably he was caught. In which case his trial should prove productive.) Moreover, it was a provocation to give the post of Resident to an army man, even if he was retired and a national hero. A stupidity on the part of a Liberal government. What I am now embarked on is a matter of the well-being of three hundred thousand people. It is a great task. No, I am not afraid. But I shall naturally take all reasonable precautions. The best thing would be to rely entirely on the Federal Police. Without physical security one cannot work efficiently.

  Manuel had filled several pages of his notebook. He closed it and put it into the outside pocket of his briefcase. Then he leaned back and was lulled to sleep in the air pockets.

  At midnight they touched down at Lisbon. They still had the cold, raw chill of northern Europe in their bones, and they were taken by surprise by the night air which billowed up to meet them, heavy, hot, and suffocating.

  Like a small taste of the day to come.

  The plane went down from twenty-six thousand feet to six hundred and drew a shining aluminum spiral over the capital of the Federal Republic. Manuel Ortega sat on the inside of the curve and through the window saw the city gradually become larger and nearer. It was white and beautiful with parks and wide tree-lined avenues, the sunlight winking on the cathedral’s copper roof and reflections glittering in hundreds of thousands of windowpanes. At this time of the day most of the shutters were not yet closed. The pilot flattened the plane out just above the rooftops; the circular bullring and an oval soccer stadium slipped by beneath the wing, then blocks of apartments and a suburb of dirty small houses and sooty black factories, but even they seemed neat and tidy. It was obvious that this was a great city in an orderly country, a country to be proud of. Then came a chicken farm with thousands of shapeless white blobs fleeing in all directions below the great shadow, then grass and the windsleeve and the first bounce on the concrete runway.

  As the plane was still rolling and long before the warning notices were switched off, a uniformed official, presumably the radio officer, came aft down the aisle and said quietly: “Would you and the lady kindly mind waiting in your seats until the other passengers have disembarked?”

  So they stayed seated and waited. When the plane was finally empty, a police officer in a white uniform stepped in through the doorway. He saluted and said: “Welcome home, sir.”

  His tone of voice was gruff and his face serious, as if he were on a difficult and important mission.

  At the foot of the steps stood a white American police car with a radio aerial and spotlights on the roof. The white paint was marred by the word Policía painted in (black) block letters across the doors. Ten yards away stood a white jeep. The engine was running, a policeman sat behind the wheel and another was standing upright in the back. Otherwise there was not a soul in sight. The plane had stopped unusually far away from the airport buildings.

  The officer opened the car door for them, made a commanding gesture to the guards on the steps, and then got into the back of the car himself. He was fat and it was quite a squeeze. The jeep drove past with its siren wailing and took the lead. Then the little convoy drove three hundred yards over to an annex of the airport buildings which was seldom used for anything but ceremonial welcomes for prominent visitors. Manuel Ortega threw a confused glance at the woman at his side. Her face was completely expressionless.

  The car had stopped, and although the distance to the entrance was no more than three yards, the arrangement with the guards was repeated before the Resident and his secretary were allowed to enter the foyer. This room was ostentatiously equipped with luxurious furniture and colorful wall decorations. A policeman opened a door in the far wall and at the same time made a sign to the woman to stay where she was.

  Manuel Ortega went into a small room containing low tables and leather armchairs. Two men were already in there, one whom he had only heard of and seen in pictures and one whom he knew of old. The former was Jacinto Zaforteza, Minister of the Interior in the federal government, the other Miguel Uribarri, Chief Inspector of the C.I.D.

  Manuel shook hands with Zaforteza and embraced his brother-in-law.

  The Minister of the Interior was a large, coarse man with a bull neck and short gray hair. Several heads of government had considered him invaluable, but no one really knew why. He was a skilled orator and his powerful blustering voice had over the years become almost physically penetrating.

  He began to speak at once.

  “The only thing I can do for you at the moment is to welcome you most warmly and give you a word or two on your way. Your task is an extremely delicate one and perhaps it will land you in some awkward situations. Don’t expect swift or grandiose results—the situation is much too complicated for that. We expect nothing of that sort from you anyhow. What we do expect, on the other hand, is uncompromising loyalty and complete cooperation. Two things must be avoided at all costs: open military activity and incidents of a kind that arouse international attention. Otherwise you have a free hand. It is important that you get to your destination as quickly as possible. So an air force helicopter is coming to pick you up in twenty minutes. You sho
uld be able to get down there in less than five hours.”

  Zaforteza glanced at his watch, embraced him, heavily and powerfully, and then dashed out of the room.

  Manuel Ortega stared in astonishment at the closed door. He had in fact not had the chance to say a single word.

  “Yes, you can see how much help you can expect from that quarter,” said Uribarri.

  He was a small, neat man with a thin face and a narrow black mustache. Although he was wearing civilian clothes, his bearing bore traces of many and long years in various uniforms. He strode impatiently up and down the room.

  “Manuel, what in the hell have you done?”

  He said it suddenly and with unexpected violence.

  “You’ve made a terrible mistake. The situation down there is horrible. They’re all mad.”

  “I’m certain the problem can be solved.”

  “To hell with the problem. It’s possible that you might get them to agree, but I don’t care about that. What I’m thinking of is your personal safety.”

  “But the Federal Police …”

  “The Federal Police are a collection of idiots—at their best. You saw the circus out there for yourself? Huge escorts with sirens to move one man three hundred yards on an empty airfield. The most logical thing would have been to let you come in as unobtrusively as possible.”

  “Well, anyhow, it’s too late now.”

  “Yes—it’s too late to withdraw—but not to save your life. Listen now. I’ve sent four men down there. They’ll meet your helicopter. They’re my men, the best I can find. Their only job is to look after you, and I promise you they know their job. Remember one thing: of all the people you’ll meet, these four are the only ones you know you can trust. Don’t trust anyone else, not the army, nor the police, nor anyone else.”

  Uribarri walked over to the window and peered out between the slats of the blind.

  “Who’s that woman?”

  “My secretary.”

  “Where’s she from?”

  “The embassy in Copenhagen.”

  “Name?”