The Troubled Man (2011) kw-10

by Henning Mankell

  ‘We can discuss that later,’ said Wallander. ‘But as I’m sure you understand, old men also have jobs to do.’

  Talboth accepted that response, showed Wallander the bathroom, kitchen and extensive balcony, then left. Wallander watched through a window as Talboth once again clambered into the black Mercedes. He took a bottle of beer from the fridge and swigged it back while standing on the balcony. As far as he was concerned, that was a way of saying goodbye to the woman from the previous evening. She no longer existed, except perhaps as a persistent memory in his dreams. That was the way it usually was. He never dreamed about the women he had really been in love with. But the ones with whom he had engaged in more or less unpleasant experiences frequently turned up.

  He thought about remembering what he would prefer to forget, and forgetting what he should remember. There was something fundamentally wrong with his way of life. He didn’t know if it was the same for everyone. What did Linda dream about? What did Martinsson dream about? What did his interfering boss, Lennart Mattson, dream about?

  He drank another beer, started to feel tipsy, and ran a bath. After a good soak, he felt much better.

  George Talboth came back a couple of hours later. They sat out on the balcony and started talking.

  That was when Wallander noticed a little stone on the balcony table. A stone he was certain he recognised.

  36

  There was a question nagging at Wallander during the time he spent with George Talboth. Did he realise that Wallander had noticed the stone? Or didn’t he? Wallander still wasn’t sure when he left for home the following day. But he had no doubt that Talboth was a sharp-eyed man. Things happen at top speed behind those eyes of his, Wallander thought. He has a brain that doesn’t leak, or decline. He may seem uninterested or even apathetic at times, but he is always wide awake.

  The only thing Wallander could be sure about was the fact that the stone that had disappeared from Hakan von Enke’s desk was now on a table on the balcony of George Talboth’s apartment. Either that, or an exact copy of it.

  The idea of a copy also applied to the man himself. Even at the motel, Wallander had been struck by the feeling that Talboth was very much like somebody else, that he had a doppelganger. Not necessarily somebody Wallander knew personally, rather somebody he had seen before, but he couldn’t remember who.

  It wasn’t until the evening that the penny dropped. Talboth looked exactly like the film actor Humphrey Bogart. He was taller, and didn’t have the cigarette constantly glued to his lips; but it wasn’t only his appearance, there was something about his voice that Wallander seemed to recognise from films like The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and The African Queen. He wondered if Talboth was aware of the similarity, and assumed that he was.

  Before they sat down that afternoon Talboth also demonstrated that he had surprises up his sleeve. He opened one of the doors in his apartment that had been kept closed and revealed an enormous aquarium with a whole shoal of red and blue fish swimming silently behind the thick glass. The room was filled with glass tanks and plastic piping, but what astounded Wallander most was that the bottom of the aquarium was criss-crossed by cleverly constructed tunnels through which miniature electric trains were racing round and round. The tunnels were completely transparent, apparently made of glass, and not a drop of water seeped through into them. The fish seemed to be unaware of this railway line at the bottom of their artificially made seabed.

  ‘The tunnels are almost an exact copy of the one between Dover and Calais,’ said Talboth. ‘I used the original plans and certain constructional details when I made this model.’

  Wallander thought of Hakan von Enke sitting in the remote hunting lodge with his ship in a bottle. There’s some kind of affinity between them, in addition to their friendship, he thought. But what that implies, I can’t say.

  ‘I enjoy working with my hands,’ Talboth went on. ‘Using only your brain isn’t good for you. Do you find that too?’

  ‘Hardly. My father was pretty handy, but I inherited none of that.’

  ‘What did your father do?’

  ‘He produced paintings.’

  ‘You mean he was an artist? Why did you use the word “produced”?’

  ‘My father really only painted one motif throughout his life,’ Wallander said. ‘It’s not much to talk about.’

  Talboth noted Wallander’s unwillingness to elaborate, and he asked no more questions. They watched the fish swimming slowly to and fro, and the trains rushing through their tunnels. Wallander noticed that they didn’t pass at exactly the same point every time; there was a delay that was hardly noticeable at first. He also noted that at one part of the circuit they used the same stretch of line. He hesitated but eventually asked about what he had observed. Talboth nodded.

  ‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘I’ve built a short delay into the system.’

  He reached up to a shelf and took down an hourglass that Wallander hadn’t registered when he entered the room.

  ‘This contains sand from West Africa,’ said Talboth. ‘To be more precise, from the beaches of the islands in the little archipelago called Buback. It’s just off the coast of Guinea-Bissau, a country most people have never heard of. It was an old English admiral who decided that this was the perfect sand for the English navy in the days when hourglasses were used for telling the time. If I’d turned the glass at the same moment as I switched on the trains, you’d have discovered that one of the trains catches up with the other one after exactly fifty-nine minutes. I make that happen now and then, to check that the sand in the hourglass isn’t running more slowly, or that the transformer doesn’t need adjusting.’

  As a child Wallander had always dreamed of owning a model train set, but his father was never able to afford it. Trains like the ones in front of him now still seemed an unattainable luxury.

  They sat down on the balcony. It was a hot summer’s day. Talboth had brought out a jug of iced water and two glasses. Wallander decided that there was no reason to beat around the bush. His first question formulated itself.

  ‘What did you think when you heard that Louise had disappeared?’

  Talboth’s bright eyes were firmly fixed on Wallander.

  ‘I suppose I wasn’t all that surprised,’ he said.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I don’t need to tell you what you already know. Hakan’s increasingly intolerable suspicions - I suppose we can call it a certainty now - that he was married to a traitor. Is that what you say? My Swedish isn’t always perfect.’

  ‘That’s correct,’ said Wallander. ‘If you’re a spy, you are usually a traitor. Unless you deal in more specific things, such as industrial espionage.’

  ‘Hakan ran away because he couldn’t put up with it any more,’ Talboth said. ‘He needed time to think. Before Louise disappeared he had more or less made a decision. He was going to hand over the proof he had to the military intelligence services. Everything would be done according to the rule book. He didn’t intend to spare himself or his own reputation. He realised that Hans would also be affected, but that couldn’t be helped. It boiled down to a question of honour. When she disappeared, he was dumbfounded. He became increasingly scared. I began to worry after some of the phone conversations I had with him. He almost seemed to be suffering from paranoia. The only explanation he could think of for Louise’s disappearance was that she had managed to read his thoughts. He was afraid she would find out where he was. If not her, one of her employers in the Russian intelligence service. Hakan was convinced that Louise had been and still was so important that they wouldn’t hesitate to kill her in order to prevent any revelations. Even if she was too old now to be an active spy, it was important that she not be unmasked. Naturally, the Russians didn’t want to reveal what they knew. Or didn’t know.’

  ‘What did you think when you heard that she had committed suicide?’

  ‘I never believed that. I thought it was obvious she had been murdered.’

  ‘
Why?’

  ‘Let me answer by asking a question. Why would she commit suicide?’

  ‘Perhaps she was overwhelmed by guilt. Perhaps she realised the torture she had inflicted on her husband. There are lots of possible reasons. In my police work I’ve come across a lot of people who committed suicide for much less serious reasons.’

  Talboth considered what Wallander had said.

  ‘You may be right. But I haven’t told you my overall impression of Louise. I knew her well. Even though she concealed large parts of her identity, I got to know her intimately. She wasn’t the kind of person who commits suicide.’

  ‘Why do you think that?’

  ‘Certain people simply don’t commit suicide. It’s as straightforward as that.’

  Wallander shook his head.

  ‘That’s not my experience,’ he said. ‘My feeling is that, under unfortunate circumstances, anybody at all can take their own life.’

  ‘I’m not going to start arguing with you. You can interpret my view however you like. I’m convinced that your experience as a police officer is important. But you shouldn’t just shrug off the experience I have from working for many years in the American security services.’

  ‘We know now that she was in fact murdered. And we also know that there was incriminating evidence in her handbag.’

  Talboth had raised his glass of water. He frowned and put it down again without having drunk. Wallander thought he detected a different kind of alertness in him.

  ‘I didn’t know that. I had no idea they’d confiscated secret material.’

  ‘You’re not supposed to know. I shouldn’t have told you. But I did so for Hakan’s sake. I trust it will go no further.’

  ‘I won’t say anything to anybody. You learn how to do that when you work in the intelligence service. The day you resign, nothing is left in your head. You clear out your memory just as other employees clear out their lockers or desks.’

  ‘What would you say if I were to tell you that Louise was probably poisoned using methods patented by the East Germans in the good old days? In order to conceal executions and make them look like suicides?’

  Talboth nodded slowly. Once again he raised his glass of iced water to his mouth; this time he drank some.

  ‘That also happens in the CIA,’ he said. ‘Needless to say, we have often found ourselves in a position that made it necessary to liquidate somebody. In such a way that convinced everybody it was suicide.’

  Wallander wasn’t surprised by Talboth’s unwillingness to talk about things not directly connected to Hakan or Louise von Enke; but he’d made up his mind to take this as far as possible.

  ‘Anyway, we can assume that Louise was murdered,’ Wallander said.

  ‘Could it be the Swedish secret service that liquidated her?’

  ‘That’s not the way things work in Sweden. Besides, there’s no reason to assume she’d been unmasked. In other words, we don’t have a potential perpetrator with a plausible motive.’

  Talboth moved his wicker chair into the shade. He said nothing for a while, chewing his bottom lip.

  ‘It’s tempting to think that it’s a sort of crime of passion,’ he said eventually.

  He sat upright on his chair.

  ‘Working in Sweden was naturally never the same as being behind the Iron Curtain, for as long as it existed,’ he said. ‘Anybody who was caught there was almost always executed. Assuming you weren’t so important that you could be used in exchange deals. One traitor swapped for another. Spies can get careless when they’ve been out in the field, always in danger of being exposed. The pressure can become too much. That’s why spies sometimes turn against one another. The violence turns in on itself. Somebody’s success can give rise to jealousy, and the competitive urge replaces cooperation and loyalty. That is a distinct possibility in Louise’s case. For a very special reason.’

  Now it was Wallander’s turn to move his chair into the shade. He leaned forward to pick up his glass of water. The ice had melted.

  ‘As Hakan has already told you, rumours about a Swedish spy had been circulating for a while,’ said Talboth. ‘The CIA had known about it for ages. When I worked at the Stockholm embassy, we put a lot of resources into trying to solve this problem. The fact that somebody was selling Swedish military secrets to the Russians was a problem for us and for NATO. Sweden’s arms industry was at the cutting edge when it came to technical innovations. We used to have regular meetings with our Swedish colleagues about this worrying situation. And with colleagues from England, France and Norway, among others. We were faced with an incredibly skilful agent. We also realised that there must be an intermediary, an “informer”, in Sweden. Somebody passing on information to the agent, who in turn sent it on to Russia. We were surprised that we - or rather, our Swedish colleagues - could never find any clues as to who it was. The Swedes had a shortlist of twenty names, all of them officers in one service or another. But the Swedish investigators got nowhere. And we didn’t manage to help them either. It was as if we were hunting a phantom. Some genius hit on the idea of calling the person we were looking for “Diana”. Like the Phantom’s girlfriend. I thought it was idiotic. Mainly because there was nothing to suggest that a woman was involved. But it would eventually transpire that the nitwit responsible had unknowingly but devastatingly stumbled onto something very relevant. In any case, that was the situation until late March 1987. The eighteenth, to be precise. Something happened on that day that changed the whole situation, sent several Swedish intelligence officers out into the cold, and forced us all to start thinking differently. Has Hakan told you about this?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘It began outside Amsterdam at Schiphol, the big airport, early in the morning. A man appeared outside the airport police’s office. He was wearing a baggy suit, a white shirt and a tie. He was carrying a small suitcase in one hand and had an overcoat over his arm and a hat in his other hand. He must have given the impression of coming from another age, as if he had climbed out of a black-and-white film with sombre background music. He spoke to a police officer who was really far too young for the job, but there was a flu epidemic and he was filling in. The man spoke bad English and announced that he was seeking political asylum in the Netherlands. He produced a Russian passport in the name of Oleg Linde. An unusual surname for a Russian, you might think, but it was correct. He was in his forties, with thinning hair and a scar along one side of his nose. The young police officer, who had never set eyes on a defector from the East before, called in an older colleague who took over. I think his name was Geert, but before he had a chance to ask his first question, Linde began talking. I’ve listened to the interrogation so many times that I know the most important parts almost by heart. He was a colonel in the KGB, the division dealing with espionage in the West, and was seeking political asylum because he no longer wanted to do work that was propping up the crumbling Soviet empire. Those were his first words. Then he came out with the bait he had prepared in advance. He knew about many of the Soviet spies working in the West, especially a number of very competent agents based in the Netherlands. After that he was handed over to the security services. They took him to an apartment in The Hague, ironically enough not far from the International Court of Justice, where he was interrogated. It didn’t take long for Sapo to realise that Oleg Linde was completely genuine. They kept his identity secret, but they immediately began informing colleagues all over the world that they had come across a marvellious “antique”, which was now standing on a table in front of them. Would they like to come and take a look? To examine it? Reports came in from Moscow to the effect that the KGB was in an uproar; everybody was scuttling around like ants in an anthill poked with a walking stick. Oleg Linde was one of those people who simply couldn’t be allowed to go missing. But missing he was. He’d disappeared without a trace, and they feared the worst. Moscow figured out that he must be in the Netherlands when their spy network there collapsed. He had begun his big “clearance sale�
�, as we called it. And he was cheap. All he wanted was a new name and a new identity. According to what I’ve heard, he moved to Mauritius and settled in a town with the wonderful name of Pamplemousse, where he earned a living as a cabinetmaker. Evidently Linde had a background as a joiner before he joined the KGB, but I’m not sure about that part of the story.’

  ‘What’s he doing now?’

  ‘He’s sleeping the eternal sleep. He died in 2006. Cancer. He met a young lady in Mauritius and married her, and they had several children. But I don’t know anything about their lives. His story is reminiscent of that of another defector, an agent known as “Boris”.’

  ‘I’ve heard of him,’ said Wallander. ‘There must have been a constant procession of Russian defectors at that time.’

  Talboth stood up and went indoors. Down in the street below, several fire engines raced past, sirens wailing. Talboth came back with the jug full to the brim with iced water.

  ‘He was the one who informed us that the spy we’d been looking for in Sweden was a woman,’ he said when he had sat down again. ‘He didn’t know her name; she was overseen by a group within the KGB that worked independently of the other officers - that was normal practice with especially valuable agents. But he was certain that it was a woman. She didn’t work in the military or in the arms industry, which meant that she had at least one, possibly several, informers who provided her with information that she sold. It was never clear whether she was a spy for ideological reasons or if she did it purely as a business venture. The intelligence services always prefer spies who operate as a business. If there is too much idealism involved, the operation can easily go off the rails. We always think that agents with great faith in the cause are never entirely reliable. We are a cynical bunch, and we have to be in order to do our job properly. We repeat the mantra that we might not make the world any better, but at least we don’t make it any worse. We justify our existence by claiming that we maintain a sort of balance of terror, which we probably do.’