“Which unfortunately was not that difficult, I guess,” Sarah said and sighed. “However it happened, John succeeded in getting the newspaper to start publishing a series of articles that we had a Vietnamese mafia on our hands. After two articles, publication was interrupted and to make a long story short, the newspaper had to pay a lot of money and John was fired.”
“Was there anything that he wrote that was true, then?” Johansson asked, occupationally injured as he was.
“I can’t imagine what,” said Sarah. “It was certainly a typical John disclosure.”
. . .
Then they had fruit for dessert, but when Sarah ordered green tea Johansson felt more than a slight hesitation.
“Do you think they have coffee at a place like this?” he asked, lowering his voice.
“Of course they do. Vietnamese aren’t numbskulls. If I were you I would order a double espresso.”
She’s actually really pretty, thought Johansson. Although a little sharp perhaps.
It was Johansson who drove the black Volvo home to Sarah’s. It’s true that he had had two beers, but because they’d been sitting in the restaurant for almost three hours, and because he would never dream of doing it at home, it wasn’t such a big deal. When they came back they had sat down in the living room and talked awhile. Sarah had asked him if he wanted to have wine, whiskey, or something else, but he had declined. Why—he didn’t really know himself; he had just said no thanks, and therefore things had turned the way they had. After a rather short time the conversation had run out. She had shown him to his room, said good night, stood on her tiptoes, and given him a light kiss on the cheek as she smiled and nodded, and that’s how it was.
Johansson brushed his teeth, put on his clean new American underwear, and crept down into her dad’s bed, which was both large enough and hard enough for Johansson’s requirements. Five minutes later he was sleeping, on his right side and with his arm under the pillow as he always did when he was at home, but without having followed his older brother’s advice. How would that look, in her papa’s bed? thought Johansson just before he fell asleep.
CHAPTER X
Free falling, as in a dream
Stockholm in November
In spite of everything Berg felt a certain confidence, even a certain increased confidence. True, this Krassner affair was not good, but up till now nothing had come out that was directly alarming. The signals he got from Waltin seemed to indicate the opposite. The fellow clearly abused narcotics, and considering the quantity he’d purchased it appeared not entirely impossible—if required, if it appeared that he was sitting on some essential secrets and the matter was going to become public anyway—that the police and the prosecutor would be able to sell him to the media as a cynical narcotics dealer and not just some ordinary drug-abusing academic. In such contexts it wasn’t really a matter of whether what was said was true or false but rather of who was saying it.
According to Waltin and his officers there were also many other things indicating that Krassner was not in his right mind. High-strung, suspicious, almost paranoid: These were hardly qualities that furthered his objectivity and clarity, if things were so bad that his uncle had let the cat out of the bag about something that might have consequences for Berg and the interests he was employed to protect. Whatever that might be, thought Berg. With all due respect to Swedish security policy, regardless of whether you were talking about the official or the factual accounts, Krassner’s uncle had ended his active service almost thirty years ago. He was dead, besides, so in that respect Krassner couldn’t count on any active support from that quarter. You should take care not to see ghosts in the daytime, Berg decided, and at that point he had also started to view the situation more positively.
In the best case, perhaps this story could be turned to the advantage of Berg and the operation. It had already contributed to normalizing his relations with the prime minister’s special adviser, and that was good enough. That this depended on the fact that, at least for the time being, he needed Berg more than Berg needed him was nothing to sulk about. Instead it gave him an opportunity to take the initiative, go on the offensive, and, he hoped, be able to win back some lost territory. At the first weekly meeting with his superiors in November, therefore, Berg had decided that he would only bring up two matters, and both were chosen with care. By himself of course.
However, he had not been able to avoid the brief introductory description of the situation. First he mentioned the ongoing survey of antidemocratic elements within the police and the military. “It’s not going quickly, I’ll be the first to admit that, but it’s moving forward,” said Berg, nodding confidently. None of his superiors had any questions or raised any objections.
After that something about the Yugoslavs—“it appears the situation is calm just now”—and finally the usual mantra about the Kurds, and it was then that the minister had come to life and everything started to go completely wrong, despite all of Berg’s exertions.
“This Kudo,” said the minister. “How’s it going for him? It’s been a while since we heard anything from that front.”
Thank the good Lord for that, thought Berg without changing his expression.
“It’s rolling along according to plan,” said Berg. “I’ve told them to try to penetrate a little deeper into the special ethnic aspects of … yes, their communication, if I may say so. How they exchange secret messages and those kinds of things. We’re often up against difficult questions of interpretation.”
“Yes, it would be interesting to get to meet them some time,” said the minister. “Yes, this Kudo here and his closest associate … what was it he …”
“Bülling,” Berg interjected quickly, because he wanted to put an end to the misery.
“Exactly,” said the minister and brightened noticeably. “Bülling, that sounds almost German.”
“Or assumed,” declared the special adviser with a light sigh.
“You mean as in byling, slang for ‘cop,’ ” said the minister delightedly, for he was not stupid in that respect. “Rather inventive, it might even be said, almost a little bold.”
“Bülling is actually a very bold person,” said the special adviser, looking at the minister with almost closed eyes and a heavily corroborative nod. “Without exaggeration I would maintain that Bülling is probably the absolute boldest and bravest police officer in the corps.”
“You don’t say,” said the minister, leaning forward in order to hear better. “Is there anything you can tell us about this?”
“It will have to stay in this room, then,” said the special adviser, with a certain apparent hesitation. “Yes, he was the one who saved all those kids from that burning day-care center out in Solna a few years ago.”
“Now that you mention it,” said the minister with his forehead deeply creased. “I have some vague recollection.”
“The whole day-care center was burning like a beacon, but Bülling rushed straight into the sea of fire and carried out every single kid. Fourteen times, a kid under each arm, in total about thirty kids if I’ve calculated correctly, but if he hadn’t been able to borrow the Phantom’s fireproof undies probably not even Bülling would have managed it.”
“You’re pulling my leg,” said the offended minister.
“Why would you think that?” said the special adviser, looking at the minister as though he were an interesting object and not a person of flesh and blood. And at last Berg had been able to get to the point.
Berg had prepared himself carefully. First he had an up-to-date list made of persons who in various ways might be thought to constitute a threat against the prime minister and those closest to him. He had also been very selective in his choice and only included those who, according to his coworkers, “deserved to be taken seriously.” All those who’d only been drinking at their neighbor’s and seen the prime minister on TV and sworn that “I’m going to personally shoot that bastard’s head off” had thus not been taken seriously. N
ot even if they were in the national guard and had an AK-4 in the closet, or devoted their time to hunting or competitive shooting, which by the way evidently many of them seemed to do. So many that there were even grounds for suspicion that such activities formed an essential part of their personal profiles.
Their neighbors and other close associates also appeared to form an interesting group, because daily more or less anonymous tips came in to the police authorities, and even directly to the secret police, about normal, honorable Swedish citizens who “in an informal social context promised to take the life of the prime minister.” But “all of these drunkards, nut jobs, and big talkers”—at any given point in time there were hundreds of such pending cases piled one on top of another in Berg’s surveillance register—Berg had chosen to leave out. Remaining were twenty-two persons who at the moment could be imagined going from words to action, and those whom Berg himself looked at most seriously were of course those who hadn’t talked very much about their wishes or intentions.
Viewed as sociological material they formed an interesting group; among other things, they were distributed across the entire social spectrum. There was a count with his own castle, large forests, and landholdings who, it was true, said little for the most part but who at the same time possessed considerable personal and material resources. In addition he had an ominous history. He was demonstrably prone to violence and risk-taking, and capable in practical matters. In the B-annex on Polhemsgatan where Berg spent most of his time he was long referred to as “Anckarström”—the notorious assassin of King Gustav III in 1792—and on one occasion Berg had personally intervened in a rather delicate matter. When he’d found out that the prime minister had accepted an invitation to an exclusive dinner to which “Anckarström” had also been invited, he had contacted the government office building. At the last moment the prime minister had had a conflict and Berg had avoided both a personal headache and an unnecessary assignment for the bodyguard unit of the secret police.
In this material there was also a Swedish billionaire who resided in London. He had left a tax suit behind at home in Sweden in which the government was demanding several hundred million dollars from him, and with London as a base he had spent large sums over the past several years to support various campaigns directed against the Social Democratic Party, the government, and not least the prime minister personally. At a private dinner at the West India Club in London he had also expressed more far-reaching ambitions than that and promised ten million to the person, or persons, “who can see to it that the Gustav III of our time meets a logical end.” According to Berg’s informant, who had been a guest at the same dinner and had a long history within the industry’s own security organization, the presumptive ringleader had been stone sober, serious, and low-voiced when he laid out his offer. “He seemed almost slightly amused as he said it,” the informant summarized.
In Berg’s organization the billionaire had been given the cover name Pechlin, after one of the conspirators against Gustav III; it was Berg himself who’d chosen it for him. Berg was interested in history, and most of what he read outside his work were books dealing with Swedish history. There was something soothing about the subject, thought Berg. Regardless of how depressing it had been and how badly things may have gone, it was already history and nothing that he could be expected to do anything about. However, these two, and a few others besides, were still exceptions, and the center of gravity was of course where it always was in such matters. Exactly half of the twenty-two were dangerous criminals, and two of them were serving life sentences for murder.
One of the two was a Yugoslav terrorist, and because he was where he was, it was not he but rather his associates who constituted the practical concern. He had ongoing contacts with at least three of his countrymen, all of them known criminals who seemed to have a lot of hair on their chests and had complete freedom of movement. They were also difficult to keep an eye on, extremely taciturn in a hard-to-understand language, almost Mafia-like in their behavior and choice of associates.
The other murderer was a dogmatic Swede who harbored a deep, implacable hatred for the Swedish authorities in general and the judicial authorities in particular. He was no ordinary dogmatist, either. Among other things he was technically knowledgeable and had during his active period pieced together a number of bombs that functioned well enough to earn him his life sentences. Among those who were like-minded he was a model and a leadership figure, and because almost all of his supporters were still running loose he ached like a thorn in Berg’s awareness. Most recently he had also shown an ominous interest in the prime minister and at least two of his governing colleagues.
What the remainder had in common was that they were all men without a previous criminal record, but who otherwise constituted a delightful mixture. Two of them were, in context, more interesting than the others. Pure nightmares from a secret police perspective, Berg used to think in gloomy moments. One was a former paratrooper and junior officer at the paratrooper school in Karlsborg. Ten years earlier he had been discharged from the military and simply disappeared, it was unclear to where. A girlfriend of his had reported the disappearance to the police, but the investigation had been discontinued when she received a postcard from Turkey on which he briefly reported that he didn’t intend to see her again, thanked her for “at least one memorable lay,” and asked her not to bother the police on his behalf as he was “doing great” and didn’t intend to “return home any time soon.” The girlfriend had shown the postcard to the police, who had asked the usual questions, compared the handwriting on the postcard with previous messages, and closed the case. Of what the “memorable lay” consisted had never been discovered, but according to local gossip the ex-girlfriend was said to have parachuted on at least one occasion in her life.
A little more than a year later he had shown up in Sweden again and been observed, purely physically, in connection with a large-scale surveillance effort against a Swedish political organization on the extreme left wing. It was also by pure chance that he had been noticed—the SePo spy who did so had had him as a commander when he did his military service as a paratrooper, and the spy described him as the person who would end up lowest on his list if he had to choose an enemy. The object’s background, the context in which he was observed, and the opinion of the person who had done so had quickly increased interest in his person at the secret police’s surveillance squad.
“For Christ’s sake, we’re talking about a guy who can kill half this squad with his bare hands,” the somewhat bad-tempered chief inspector summarized the surveillance matter that had landed on his desk.
Because neither he nor his colleagues in the military intelligence service had sent him there as an infiltrator—the very thought had been absurd—it was definitely the right man in the completely wrong place. Left-wing activists should have eyeglasses with lenses thick as bottle bottoms. They could happily go around in workman’s shirts and carpenter’s pants, for that made both surveillance and identification easier, and as long as they had office-workers’ hands with arms that weren’t any thicker than those of the squad’s female office assistants, they could squawk as much as they wanted that the working class that they nowadays represented would violently overthrow society.
As long as they couldn’t jump-start a car, much less screw together a functioning bomb, or even bloody one of his colleagues’ noses. To that extent they left him cold. The ex-paratrooper did not.
Regardless of this they’d drawn a blank. The ex-paratrooper had disappeared without a trace, and because he could also shoot a hole in a five-crown piece at a distance of five hundred yards, the bad-tempered chief inspector decided that it was high time to go outside the building.
“This is truly not a person you invite home for a cup of tea, so I believe it’s best that we talk with the Germans,” decided the boss, who was both an educated man and mild-mannered, despite the fact that he was a police superintendent.
The Germans had made c
ontact six months later when they sent a surveillance picture that, according to their own image analyst “with a certainty bordering on likelihood,” depicted the former paratrooper. The picture had been taken by a rather craftily placed surveillance camera that covered the parking lot outside the agricultural bank in a small town by the name of Bad Segeberg thirty-five miles outside Hamburg. Just that day an amount corresponding to a little more than a million U.S. dollars had been in the till, and right before closing time three masked men had come in and taken it all with the help of their automatic pistol, probably of the Uzi brand and of Israeli manufacture. A robbery “with clear terrorist connections,” declared the head of Constitutional Protection’s division in Schleswig-Holstein. The three robbers were obviously putz weg, and it would be highly desirable if the Swedes could help out with their own countryman.
The following day the former paratrooper had been the object of an operational effort by the Swedish secret police: Operation Olga. The reason this name had been chosen was not that they wanted to mislead the enemy, which they would gladly do, but rather that the object of surveillance had gone by the nickname Olga during his time as a paratrooper.
True, it wasn’t something you called him when he was listening, for then you were dead, but the reason he’d acquired this particular nickname was flattering enough, for there was only one person in the entire paratrooper school in Karlsborg who was even tougher than the object in question—namely Olga, who was the manager of the paratroopers’ cafeteria.
Between Summer's Longing and Winter's End: The Story of a Crime Page 26