Between Summer's Longing and Winter's End: The Story of a Crime

by Leif G. W. Persson

  The details are starting to fall into place, thought Johansson. He put the address book back and tried to make eye contact with a waiter.

  “Can we each get a grappa?” said Johansson just as Wendell came back, and then they continued talking about everything else but Krassner.

  It had been really nice. Johansson insisted on paying, and afterward he indicated that it was on his own account by leaving the check behind on the table. Then he’d excused himself to go to the restroom before they left, and Wendell had of course palmed it the way he always did. The newspaper could easily take this, and to his credit it should be said that he never wrote the names of his various informants on the back. Wendell was just looking out for number one; besides, it was almost Christmas and in this case it didn’t hurt any poor people.

  When they separated, Wendell returned to the newspaper office while Johansson took a taxi and went home. Regardless of the fact that it was almost Christmas he had no intention of returning to his workplace to exhale strong beer, wine, and grappa on his coworkers. Others besides him could do that, in other places with other rules than the ones that applied to him.

  Finally he unpacked his suitcases. He sorted the dirty laundry, dividing it between the two laundry baskets in the bathroom, hung up what didn’t need to be washed in the closet, and set the Christmas presents he’d bought on the desk in his study. Remaining were Krassner’s papers; the unease he’d felt earlier had not lessened after the meeting with Wendell. When he’d packed his suitcase at the hotel in New York he had put them into the plastic bag that he’d gotten when he bought his new shoes, and they were still there.

  What do I do now? thought Johansson, weighing the bag in his hand, a few pounds at the most. He still had the same unpleasant premonition of what he would find when he finally made up his mind to read through them. He didn’t want to take them to work, for they had no business being there, and besides, they were his. He’d gotten them from the person who had inherited all of Krassner’s earthly belongings, and that if anything made them a legal acquisition.

  Problems, thought Johansson, and since they didn’t concern him they might just as well wait. I’ll take them with me up to my big brother’s, he decided. Then I can read them in peace and quiet. If he was going to do it anyway it was just as well to do it thoroughly. That’s how it will be, he decided. Folded up the bag and laid it on the bookshelf in his study alongside the books that he’d also thought about taking with him to read during the Christmas holiday. He’d found what he was looking for, he’d had the good fortune to do so, and now it wasn’t going to run away from him, so the work that remained could just as well wait until he felt ready for it.

  Having the luck to find what you’re looking for: among archival researchers—a profession that is best practiced as a calling—this is something so great and unusual that there is a special word for it: Finderglück. A German expression that can’t readily be translated but whose original meaning is that you have the luck that is also required for your efforts to be crowned with success. On the other hand it doesn’t mean that you’re going to be happy once you do, for that’s far from always the case.

  For a professional archival researcher, Johansson’s reaction was not especially noteworthy. Researchers are well aware of the feelings that usually surface when this uncommon grace befalls you: the ambivalence, the doubt, the spiritual hangover or, in severe cases, even anxiety and remorse that can appear when you’re sitting there with the find in your meager hands. And obviously the possibility that what you’ve found will unfortunately show that you’ve had it all wrong with your theories or hypotheses.

  Johansson was no archival researcher, but during his years as a detective he had devoted hundreds of hours to what in police talk is called internal surveillance: seeking the truth or traces of the truth in various police and other registers, and he was well acquainted with the feelings that went along with both the uncommon successes and the constant failures. One time he had even found a murderer that way, and because the victim was an especially big son of a bitch while the perpetrator was an ordinary and pleasant person, afterward—and to himself—he’d cursed the union of intuition and judicious precision that had led him correctly where all his other colleagues had gone astray. Without even needing to leave his office and while his colleagues were as usual running around out in the field.

  Those papers aren’t running away from you, Johansson repeated to himself, nodding in confirmation in his solitude. Besides, he needed to take a little nap, after the time change and the heavy Italian lunch, which he’d paid for with his own money to boot. He’d already done the necessary shopping for his survival on his way home to Wollmar Yxkullsgatan.

  When he woke up it was only seven o’clock in the evening but he was both alert and clear in the head and didn’t give a thought to Krassner and his papers. Then Jarnebring called as he stood in the shower, and because it was almost Christmas he continued the entertainment program already under way and invited him to dinner at his very good neighborhood restaurant. Jarnebring didn’t have any particular objections but rather contented himself with suggesting the same menu as the last time so as not to take any unnecessary risks, and a good hour later they were sitting across from each other, raising Aunt Jenny’s crystal glasses over a very good baked toast with anchovies, tomatoes, basil, and mozzarella.

  “Brilliant,” said Jarnebring, aahing audibly after the shot. “These spaghetti guys aren’t your usual gooks.”

  No, thought Johansson. They’d probably never dream of serving boiled sausage with white bread and shrimp salad.

  “Tell me,” said Jarnebring while bolting yet another anchovy toast and nodding knowingly toward his empty glass. “Spare me no details, like Bogart used to say.”

  So Johansson told about his visit to the FBI and the meeting with the police in New York, but as to the rest he didn’t say a word about meeting Krassner’s old girlfriend Sarah Weissman or about Krassner’s posthumous papers that he’d brought home with him.

  “You gave up on that crazy American?” asked Jarnebring.

  “Sure,” said Johansson. “I’ve given up on that, although yesterday I figured out how he got hold of my home address, and you were just about right there. He got it from one of our Swedish talents. I talked with him today. Krassner clearly wanted to make contact with the Swedish police. Not that I understand why, but he clearly did.”

  “They always do, damn guys,” snorted Jarnebring, who hated journalists. “You should have made glue out of that bastard who gave out your home address.”

  “I let mercy precede justice,” said Johansson, smiling wanly, “so he was allowed to live. How’s it been going for you, by the way?”

  The sun was shining on Jarnebring’s home front. The colleague with the Achilles heel had shown promising signs of recovery and should be coming back half-time after the holidays. Someone other than Jarnebring could take care of the other fifty percent, so he would get back to the bureau and a little real work. And his live-in—for that was no doubt the way he had to view her, since he mostly lived at home with her, despite the fact that hers was the only name on the apartment lease—had been unusually kind and good recently.

  Hultman had also offered a happy surprise. It wasn’t enough that he’d shown up with the promised mixed case. He’d also had the good taste to supplement all the liqueurs and other shit that women were so fond of with a whole carton of Jarnebring’s favorite bourbon. But naturally he hadn’t mentioned that to Johansson. True, Johansson was his best friend, but in the thin air where his friend was living nowadays there were a few things that he would feel better about not knowing. Instead Jarnebring chose a different solution and invited him home for a small pre-Christmas dinner.

  “What do you think about next Thursday? Me and my old lady are both off then. I’ve bought two kinds of aquavit,” Jarnebring assured Johansson, for that was another way of looking at the matter.

  “Suits me fine,” said Johansson, for it
did.

  “She has a damn pretty girlfriend too.” Jarnebring for some reason lowered his voice and leaned across the table. “A colleague, working temporarily at Norrmalm. What do you think about that?”

  “Well,” said Johansson. “It sounds nice. Is it anyone I know?” What should I say? he thought.

  “Don’t think so,” said Jarnebring. “She’s been put on duty for a few months. Works in Skövde with the uniformed police, fresh gal, no kids, nothing steady.”

  “How old is she?” asked Johansson.

  “Well,” said Jarnebring, shrugging his shoulders. “Like mine, in her prime.”

  So that’s how it is, thought Johansson, and for unclear reasons he suddenly became a little depressed. Perhaps it was his tightening pants lining and his still only half-eaten and in and of itself extraordinarily good-tasting roast pork with marsala sauce and polenta. It must have been something.

  “That’ll be nice,” Johansson repeated.

  It’ll have to be the swimming pool early tomorrow, he decided, pushing his plate to the side.

  “If you’re not having any more I can take that,” said Jarnebring greedily.

  They remained sitting, talking, and drinking until the restaurant closed, and then Johansson called off the traditional follow-up, pleading a combination of jet lag and early business matters. Jarnebring’s protests were surprisingly mild.

  “You work too much, Lars,” he said. “And exercise too little. Come along and work out sometime, why don’t you?”

  Then he did something highly unusual. He leaned over and put his burly arms around Johansson’s shoulders and gave him a hug.

  “Take care of yourself, Lars. We’ll see you in a week.”

  It must be the Italian food, thought Johansson with surprise.

  When he came home and went to bed he had a hard time falling asleep for once. A feeling of depression that didn’t want to go away. Women, thought Johansson. Must get myself a woman. Then he dropped off as usual.

  [THURSDAY, DECEMBER 12]

  Johansson had started his day at work with an hour in the swimming pool, but when he emerged from the sauna after an additional half hour his waist measurement unfortunately appeared to be the same as before. On the other hand he’d acquired a ferocious appetite that he felt obligated to alleviate at once. He had two cups of coffee and a substantial slice of rye bread with meatballs and red-beet mayonnaise down in the cafeteria in order to put a stop to the worst of it before he sat down behind his desk.

  Muscle-building, thought Johansson; he would certainly be able to solve the woman problem during the course of the day. First he thought about the post office manager he’d met when he was poking around on the fringes of the Krassner case. A really splendid woman, who seemed wise as well, whom he’d already made use of in his fantasies on a few occasions when he followed big brother’s advice, but the practical problems were considerable.

  You can’t just call her up and ask if she wants to go to bed, thought Johansson. However much you’d like to. Besides, that was inappropriate for other reasons as well. Consider, for example, if the Krassner case were to take an unfortunate turn and get new life and she were to be called in as a witness in a new investigation, and he himself were to be … something he’d rather not imagine. You’ve chosen the wrong profession, thought Johansson, feeling the despondency coming back with renewed force, and what was that wretched Wiklander up to anyway? Almost two full days since he’d told him to check on whether the pieces in Jarnebring’s investigation really were in place, and since then he hadn’t heard a peep from him.

  Six weeks without naked skin, thought Johansson. And the fact that he was crawling in his own hide wasn’t so strange. In a week he would be meeting the female friend from Skövde that Jarnebring had announced, but quite apart from the fact that that was an eternity away, his feelings about this encounter were, to say the least, mixed. Say what you will about his best friend, his view of women was different from Johansson’s.

  After lunch he sneaked away from the office to shop for Christmas presents, and when he came home it was already evening and he was dead tired. First he had a simple dinner alone and idly watched TV for an hour. Then he went to bed and fell asleep without any fuss, and during the night his post-office manager visited him in his dreams and it was quite obvious that she didn’t work for the police.

  [FRIDAY, DECEMBER 13]

  When Johansson woke up he was in an excellent mood despite the fact that no candle-adorned Lucia appeared to sing for him; in the shower he followed big brother’s advice. Seeing that it was Friday the thirteenth, when no one ought to stick his neck, or any other body part, out unnecessarily, this was, moreover, a risk-free and attractive form of erotic practice. While he made coffee he hummed an old Sven-Ingvars song, great fan of dance-band music and real policeman that he was, in contrast to those fictional opera lovers who seemed to populate every single made-up police station from Ystad to Haparanda. Despite the ominous combination of date and weekday, he felt instinctively that this was going to be a really good day.

  . . .

  When he got to work his faithful coworker Wiklander was already sitting in the corridor outside his office waiting for him, but before he let him in he sent him to fetch coffee for both of them. There had to be some system; he himself had fetched numerous cups of coffee for older colleagues when he was Wiklander’s age.

  “Let’s hear it,” said Johansson, leaning back in his desk chair and sipping the day’s second cup of coffee. Freshly brewed, thought Johansson contentedly, biting into a saffron bun with raisins. Good, he thought, despite the fact that he didn’t really like saffron buns with raisins.

  “It’s a suicide,” said Wiklander. “On that point I’m in complete agreement with our colleagues.”

  “I’m listening,” said Johansson and nodded.

  True, the initial measures that the police in Stockholm had carried out left a great deal to be desired—everything, actually, if you wanted to be that way—but then their colleague Jarnebring, acting head of the local detective unit at Östermalm, had gone in and brought order into the case. Wiklander’s line of reasoning and conclusions sounded in other respects quite like that which Johansson had heard from his best friend fourteen days earlier.

  “Jarnebring is really good, so you don’t get past him too readily,” Wiklander observed. “Though for that matter, chief, you know that better than I do.”

  “Was there anything at all strange?”

  “Well,” said Wiklander, smiling wanly. “The gumshoes in the building next to us have also gone in and checked.”

  SePo, thought Johansson.

  “You’re quite sure of that?”

  “Yes,” said Wiklander. “Do you remember Persson, chief? The one who worked on aggravated thefts down in Stockholm a bunch of years ago? He’s working at SePo now. Big, fat guy, surly type, though good, really good policeman. I know one of the gals in the archive and she told me that Persson had been down last week and copied the file and told her to keep her mouth shut because otherwise there’d be hell to pay.”

  “But she didn’t do that,” said Johansson.

  “No,” said Wiklander, grinning. “She doesn’t like Persson. Thinks he’s an uncommonly surly old geezer.”

  But she clearly likes you, thought Johansson.

  “Was it Krassner they wanted to check on?”

  “I thought so at first,” said Wiklander. “But I’m not so sure anymore. Where I’m leaning is that it was someone else they were interested in. A foreign student from South Africa, a black guy who’d gotten a scholarship from the union federation. Belongs to some radical group of civil-rights activists down in South Africa. That’s no doubt why they brought him here. The union, that is.”

  “What does he have to do with Krassner?” asked Johansson.

  “Nothing,” said Wiklander. “They were just living in the same corridor. Don’t seem to have known each other.”

  “And why do you think that i
t was him they were interested in? The colleagues at SePo, that is?”

  “They seem to have put an overcoat on him,” said Wiklander.

  “Huh?” said Johansson.

  Wiklander had among many other things made a few discreet inquiries among the students who lived on the same corridor as Krassner. That was how he’d found out that one of them had a girlfriend who came by often. Louise Eriksson, nice-looking girl, around twenty, who’d said that she was studying criminology or some similar easily digested trendy subject, when she wasn’t together with Daniel M’Boye.

  She and M’Boye had clearly run into each other more or less by chance in the middle of October. After that they’d started getting together regularly, and they’d kept on that way at least through November. Although then the whole thing seemed to have run into the sand and lately he’d only spoken with her on the phone. Young Miss Eriksson herself had disappeared out to the fringes, according to her own information to go home to her parents and take care of her sick mother.

  “Have you spoken with this M’Boye?” asked Johansson.

  “Yes,” said Wiklander. “Although he’s actually rather difficult to talk to. Especially as it concerns that girl Eriksson. Unrequited love, perhaps,” said Wiklander, smiling wryly.

  “Is there any reason for us to bring him in?” said Johansson. Whatever that would be, he thought.

  “That would be rather difficult, I’m afraid,” said Wiklander. “He went home to South Africa yesterday morning.”

  Sigh, thought Johansson. “The girlfriend,” he said. “Louise Eriksson, is she a police officer, does she work at SePo, or does she just freelance?”

  “Jeanette Louise Eriksson, twenty-seven years old,” said Wiklander. “Left school six years ago and disappeared almost immediately to SePo. I’m guessing she’s in their detective unit. Really good type, actually, looks like she just left preschool. First name Jeanette, except when she’s studying criminology at half speed at the university, for there she calls herself Louise.”