“What do you think?” said Sarah, smiling with delight. “It sure is cozy.”
“I think you should sell it,” said Johansson. “Otherwise those poor kids will take an overdose.”
On the lower floor was a large hall that opened onto an even larger living room. Dark men’s-club furniture from the era before the war, and rows of framed photographs crowded together on the sooty mantelpiece above the fireplace. On the brown-spotted wallpaper were light rectangular and square areas, evidence of paintings that had previously hung there. On the facing long wall was a pair of half-open double doors into a neighboring dining room, where merely sticking his head in caused Johansson to lose his appetite. It was untidy with a vengeance. Ashtrays overflowing with cigarette butts, crumpled cigarette packs, and dried-up apple cores, newspapers tossed on the floor, piles of books that had been taken off a bookshelf that was still leaning precariously. In the middle of the floor was a motley pile of outdoor rattan furniture barely covered up by a worn-out Oriental rug.
“Elegant, isn’t it?” said Sarah.
The only thing Johansson looked at closely were the photographs on the mantelpiece. Twenty-some photos of one or several persons with frames of silver, pewter, and wood, and judging by the motifs they had been taken over a period of about fifty years. A man was pictured in all the photos except one, a portrait of a woman in early middle age. She was high-busted, had her hair set in a bun, wore a dress with a collar, and was staring sternly at the photographer.
“John’s mother,” said Sarah. “The reason she’s staring like that is that as usual she’s dead drunk. All the others are of his uncle, the colonel, visiting fine people that he’s met.”
“You say colonel,” said Johansson. “I thought you said he was a professor.”
“We’ll discuss that later,” said Sarah. “After you’ve looked at all his photos where he’s visiting fine people that he’d met.”
Not a bad summary, thought Johansson. In the photo where he was the youngest, the uncle was dressed in full academic regalia with a flat hat, black robe, and chain, courteously bowing toward a white-haired skeleton in the same getup. In the others as a rule he was dressed in uniform or double-breasted suit with broad lapels, and depending on the outfit he was either saluting or shaking hands with other men, without exception older than himself and, judging by their appearance, higher class as well. Two of them Johansson even recognized. The first from his school history textbook, for it was President Harry S. Truman, who, politely leaning forward, was shaking hands with Uncle Colonel-Professor, who, despite the broad-striped suit, was standing at stiff attention with his chin thrust forward and a steely glance. Who the hell is it that he resembles? thought Johansson.
In the other photo he was standing in dress uniform, saluting a small bulldog-like man who seemed to be looking at something else, unclear what but in any case outside the picture, and who quite recently, in a historical sense, had been host to Johansson and his colleagues: the legendary head of the FBI, founder of the FBI Academy in Quantico, J. Edgar Hoover. He resembles someone, thought Johansson with increasing irritation, and it wasn’t Hoover, for he only resembled himself.
One of the photos was more informal. The colonel in his forties with a somewhat older man, both in double-breasted striped suits, smiling broadly toward the photographer with their arms around each other’s shoulders. There was also summer and sun glistening on the waves of Strömmen in Stockholm with the palace in the background. It must have been taken outside the Grand Hotel, thought Johansson with surprise, and from force of habit he turned the photograph over. A brief handwritten text: “Comrades in the field, Stockholm, June 1945.”
“My hometown,” said Johansson delightedly, despite the fact that he had been born in the sticks north of Näsåker, and handed the photo over to Sarah. “This is Stockholm. You can see the Royal Palace in the background.”
“Very nice,” said Sarah politely. “Do you know who he’s hugging?” she asked, giving the photo back.
No one I know, thought Johansson, shaking his head. “Not a clue.”
“But Hoover you recognized,” she said and smiled teasingly. “The fact is, here at home this man is almost as big a legend as Hoover. His name was Bill Donovan, known as Wild Bill. He was the first head of what in time became the CIA, although during the war it was called OSS, Office of Strategic Services. I believe it was in 1947 that they changed the name to CIA.”
So that’s how it was, thought Johansson and nodded. Who is it that he resembles? he thought. It wasn’t Wild Bill Donovan, even if he and Uncle Colonel were rather like one another.
He thought of it on the stairway to the upper story. Of course, it’s that human disaster Backstroem, thought Johansson with delight. Apart from the difference in age they could be identical twins, he thought.
“Special Agent Backstroem,” said Johansson out loud to himself.
“Pardon?” said Sarah.
“It was nothing,” said Johansson. “I was just thinking out loud.”
It’s strange how often you think of things when you’re on a staircase, he thought.
On the upper story there was a hallway, and past that a narrow corridor with rows of doors to a half dozen bedrooms of varying size, besides one larger and one smaller bathroom.
“I was thinking about starting by showing you the colonel’s room,” said Sarah.
The colonel? The professor? A man with at least two strings on his lyre, thought Johansson.
Colonel John C. Buchanan had obviously had the use of the largest bedroom in the house, with his own bathroom. The furniture also provided a picture of the man who had lived there, even if a very curtailed one. Against the one short wall stood a tall, narrow bed with a mahogany headboard and frame that still held a mattress, although the linens were gone. On each side of the bed stood a nightstand of the same type of wood and on the one to the right of the pillow was an old-fashioned iron bed lamp with a parchment shade.
On the opposite wall stood an English desk and a desk chair in the same style with a high back and broad arms, upholstered in green leather. On the wall above the desk were ten or so lighter areas where paintings or photographs of various sizes had clearly been hanging, and the desktop was also completely empty of objects with the exception of an electroplated penholder.
The room had two high windows out toward the street, where Johansson could see Sarah’s black Volvo. A cornice hung over heavy dark curtains, running on tracks, that could be pulled closed. On the opposite long wall toward the corridor stood a large green safe of 1970s vintage with a combination lock and the solid door standing ajar. Inside it was empty.
Empty, thought Johansson and looked at Sarah.
“You call him the colonel,” he said, “but first you told me that he was a professor at the university in this city.”
“Yes,” said Sarah. “He was, in the formal sense—professor, that is. He wrote a dissertation in political science right before the war. I’ve never read it but Dad did when I started seeing John, and Dad was completely crazy for a whole month. He was as crazy as he usually gets when you award the year’s Nobel Prize in economics.”
Now she’s smiling again, thought Johansson.
“Although he really was a colonel, I guess,” said Sarah. “He became an officer when we entered the war and I believe he retired sometime in the early sixties. It was then he got that position at the university. It was an open secret that it was in gratitude for his time in the military. It’s true they created a new professorship for him, in contemporary European history or something like that, and the lectures he gave attracted a certain amount of attention, to put it nicely, and he was always just called the colonel.”
“What did he do in the military?”
“Intelligence officer,” said Sarah, nodding decisively. “To put it simply, he worked for the CIA, or its precursor, the OSS. I said that already, didn’t I? He did his service in Europe, among other places in your home country. He was at the
embassy in Stockholm for several years. You saw the photo yourself down in the living room.”
“You’re quite certain that he worked for the CIA?” said Johansson.
“Quite certain,” said Sarah, shrugging her shoulders. “That’s what everyone said. John harped on it constantly and what other reason would there be to stand and hug someone like Wild Bill Donovan?”
And why did they take a photo when they did it? thought Johansson. I would think it must almost have been considered official misconduct in those circles.
“Did you ever meet him?” asked Johansson.
“I met him a few times when John and I were together. He was just as unhappy that John was seeing me as Dad was that I was seeing John, so on that point they were in agreement.” Sarah smiled and shook her head. “He didn’t like me,” she continued.
“Why is that?” said Johansson. “Was he as crazy as his nephew?”
“Because I’m Jewish,” said Sarah.
“I understand,” said Johansson. How the hell do you respond to that, he thought.
Then they were in John’s room. Considerably smaller and without a bathroom, but for the most part furnished along the same fundamental principles minus the safe and the heavy curtains but plus a TV, VCR, and radio cassette player. Clearly someone had lived in the room until quite recently, a person who wasn’t especially orderly, at that.
“Housecleaning was never John’s strong suit,” declared Sarah.
That’s not the problem, thought Johansson. Where are the traces of the person who’s been living here?
On the wall above the desk hung an old oil painting depicting some horses grazing in a meadow, quite certainly something inherited from his uncle and of highly questionable value as a work of art. In addition a few framed posters, the most memorable of which was a photograph, grainily shot against the light, of a young, vulnerable Marilyn Monroe leaning over a balcony railing.
On the nightstand beside the bed was a clock radio. On the desk were some of the things usually found on a normal desk. An unwashed coffee cup, paper clips, brads, coins, and a number of pens, a cheap watch with a worn-out band, typing paper, and envelopes. A tall, adjustable table lamp screwed tightly onto a strong iron plate. A few paperback books, all of them mysteries or thrillers. But no bookcase, no calendar, no notebooks, no neatly organized albums with photographs, no private videotapes or cassette tapes. Nothing at all.
It looked the same inside the large brown armoire on the short wall across from the bed: jackets, jeans, and shoes, shirts, undershirts, underwear, and socks, stored all over the place, clean clothes mixed with dirty. On the floor was a golf bag with a half dozen clubs and stuck down among the clubs a Remington short-barreled semiautomatic 12-gauge shotgun. Loaded with a full magazine and to be on the safe side with a shell fed into the bore.
“What did he have this for?” Johansson asked as he drew the shell out and locked the safety catch.
“I don’t know,” said Sarah, shaking her head without the least hint of a smile. “He was just like that. Take it away, please.”
Finally they walked around the house. They were even up in the attic and down in the cellar, and the first impression was also the only lasting impression that Johansson had. Most memorable was the enormous pile of empty bottles that they found in the cellar. A mountain of glass: bourbon, Scotch, and Irish whiskey bottles plus a few hundred extra that had contained American vodka, and when Sarah saw the mountain she didn’t lose her cheer.
“Did I mention that the old man drank a bit?” Another giggle.
Then they locked up and went to a Vietnamese restaurant only a few hundred yards farther down the street, lit up with paper lanterns and with its own Christmas tree before the entry.
Phenomenal food, although hardly something you would dare offer Jarnebring, thought Johansson a little more than an hour later. They had started with a soup made of something that looked like seaweed and that according to Sarah was seaweed, a very special and good-tasting seaweed. After that they ordered some kind of Vietnamese ravioli filled with thin strips of smoked duck breast. Johansson drank beer while Sarah drank white California wine and talked and smiled for the most part the entire time.
First he asked her about the house they had just visited. Where were all the paintings, books, art objects, and other personal belongings that ought naturally to have been found in a house of that size? Sold, according to Sarah, over a period of years and apparently for the same reason that had brought about the death of their owner.
“I don’t know what kind of pensions the CIA has,” said Sarah. “I guess you’ll have to call their office in Langley and ask.”
It had been ten years since Sarah had been a guest in the house; according to her recollection it hadn’t been so remarkably furnished even during the time when the colonel had also drawn a salary as a professor.
“It was mostly junk. Not that many books, and the art was roughly like that painting of the horses you saw in John’s room. What I recall the best is that he had a lot of scrap metal with a military connection that he collected, a lot of helmets and swords and medals and that kind of thing. He himself was terribly proud of his collections. I doubt that he got millions for them, but it’s clear they weren’t completely worthless, I guess. This country is full of crazy people who collect such things.”
Then Johansson had led the conversation on to John, and he’d done so using John’s room as a starting point. What had bothered him, “as a cop,” was not that the person who was living there seemed to be a real pig, for Johansson had seen considerably worse, but rather a pig who seemed to lack personal qualities and interests. You didn’t like things like that if you were a policeman, which Johansson was.
Sarah had nodded in agreement. John was a slob who at the same time was conspicuously uninterested in generally accepted human means of enjoyment; a bed was something you slept in, clothes something you put on yourself because it was warm or cold or rained or snowed, and eating was something you did when you were hungry.
“Drinking beer, on the other hand, was something you could do all the time.”
“He must have had some interests, don’t you think?” Johansson persisted.
Few, according to Sarah. What he read were mostly just mysteries, spy novels, and other similar junk, and when he watched TV he seemed to change channels the whole time.
“He wasn’t even interested in sports. That golf bag in his closet must be something he got from the colonel. I know that he was a member of a golf club for awhile, but that he resigned his membership when they started to accept black people.”
Nice guy, thought Johansson, but he didn’t say that.
“John didn’t even like walking; he thought it was a waste of time. When we went out during the time we were together he used to station himself in the darkest corner of the bar and drink beer while he checked out girls and looked mysterious. He thought that was really exciting.”
“But he must have done something,” persevered Johansson, who was starting to get seriously interested.
“John was only interested in John. I don’t think he was even interested in women, in spite of all the conquests that he bragged about. I believe it ran in the family. His uncle was completely uninterested in women. Everything he said and did only concerned other men. Women weren’t part of the equation for him.”
So that’s how it was, thought Johansson, who had worked for more than twenty years as a policeman.
“A true member of the homoerotic society,” Sarah summarized. “Of course he hated gays too.”
“Did John have any friends?” asked Johansson.
“Lots,” said Sarah and giggled. “What do you think?”
John had lived in his own little world. “The John World,” in which there was no place for friends. There were only scoundrels great and small, spies and terrorists, and because he himself was one of the few remaining white knights, his life was in reality a mission.
“To unmask them and s
ee to it that they ended up in jail. That was what life was all about for someone like John. Although he liked men like you. Big, strong cops, and if you’d met him I’m convinced that you would have kicked him in the butt within five minutes.”
I see, one of those, thought Johansson, who had been a policeman for all of his adult life but had still never kicked anyone in the butt, for he used to let his best friend, Bo Jarnebring, take care of that detail for them both in those days.
“I’m quite certain that’s why he became a journalist,” Sarah concluded.
John had worked as a journalist for several years, and for a while he had even been employed as a reporter of some fame at the local TV station.
“He looked so good that no one heard what he said,” Sarah explained. “But then he got ambitions and started at our largest local paper as an investigative journalist, and it was then that the shit hit the fan.”
According to Sarah, that the shit hit the fan was ultimately due to the restaurant where they were eating, and the one who had seen to it that it hit where it did was actually not John but his uncle the colonel. The restaurant was owned by a Vietnamese family who had come over as boat people at the end of the seventies. They had quickly found economic success in their new homeland and today they owned and ran more than ten businesses in Albany and the surrounding area: restaurants, laundromats, and convenience stores as well as a building supply store and a large motel.
In the early eighties they had opened the restaurant where Johansson and Sarah were sitting, only a couple of stones’ throws from the house where the colonel lived, and it was then too that the colonel had gone seriously crazy. Vietnamese were the Enemy, and as the Enemy they were riffraff, according to the colonel. “Not real warriors, just common gangsters,” and as for the almost two hundred thousand of them who had fled to the United States, they were either communist infiltrators or common deserters who ought to have been shot on the spot. First he’d risen up from his drinking bench and gone around the neighborhood with a petition, but the interest among his neighbors had been tepid and instead it was getting more and more crowded at the newly opened restaurant. It was high alert and red alert and the colonel had succeeded in converting his nephew to the cause.
Between Summer's Longing and Winter's End: The Story of a Crime Page 25