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

by Leif G. W. Persson

  There must have been a great deal worth writing about, thought Johansson, for he’d also read that in Reader’s Digest. The scoundrels from the East used to have pens that were actually pistols, umbrellas with poisoned ferrules, and innocent-looking walking sticks that with a quick tap on the handle could be transformed into shining rapiers with razor-sharp blades. But what had Pilgrim actually had, aside from his noble intentions and a good cause?

  He would have needed someone like my big brother, thought Johansson. A slightly simpler companion like big brother with his shrewd head and his huge fists and his completely unsentimental ability to punch anyone and everyone on the jaw as soon as things didn’t suit him. Or like Jarnebring, perhaps? True, he wasn’t as shrewd as his brother, far from it, but when it came to genuine hand-to-hand fighting he was unbeatable. Not even James Bond could have managed him even by escaping, for then Jarnebring would have caught up with him and chopped him on the neck and given him a going-over until he was no more than an empty suit coat and a pair of limp trousers from some tailor on Old Bond Street and. … About then he fell asleep, and when he woke up in the morning it was with the same smile on his lips.

  Sweet Jesus, thought Johansson, laughing a little to himself. Pilgrim and Jarnie, what a radar unit.

  High time to tie up my sack, and the sooner the better, thought Johansson, because it was Sunday, Epiphany Eve, and the day before his journey home. It had been a quick shower and an even quicker breakfast, and at six-thirty he was already at his place at the large desk in the farm office.

  The piles before him had thinned out and most of it he’d been able to sort out. Of the documentation only a letter with its envelope and a condolence card with a black frame and a three-line poem remained. But these were original documents, not copies, they were handwritten, and according to Krassner it was the prime minister, Pilgrim, who had written them, after he’d become prime minister, and according to Krassner he had written them in May 1974. They were postmarked Stockholm and sent by express mail to Buchanan’s post office box at home in Albany.

  Almost twenty years after he’d written his farewell letter, thought Johansson. An entire lifetime, considering all that had happened and all that he’d experienced. Peculiar, very peculiar, thought Johansson.

  We ought to be able to check on these, he thought from force of habit while by turns he held the letter, the condolence card, and the envelope between the nails of his thumb and index finger, twisting and turning them. Perhaps there are prints too, he thought. American technicians had succeeded in securing fingerprints that were decades old—he’d read that in the FBI’s monthly journal—and it was almost always a matter of prints left on paper. Where would I get his fingerprints from? thought Johansson with a wry smile.

  . . .

  The letter first: It was short, written by hand with Pilgrim’s characteristic, expressively forward-leaning penmanship—like a cavalry charge on paper, thought Johansson, smiling again. The stationery was thick and certainly expensive. When he held it up against the light he saw the Lessebo watermark.

  Fionn,

  Heard about Raven’s tragic death yesterday. I truly hope that you put away the bastards who did it. Because I’m guessing that you intend to go to his funeral, I would be grateful if you could deliver the enclosed final greeting from me. Don’t ask me why, but Raven was a true lover of Icelandic sagas. Take care!

  Pilgrim

  Then the condolence card, which he had sent in the same envelope.

  If this is Snorre then I’m Japanese, thought Johansson while he read the three lines on the card, written in Swedish:

  Death is black like a raven’s wing,

  Sorrow is cold like a midwinter night

  Just as long and no way out

  Must be something that Pilgrim wrote himself, thought Johansson. Perhaps something that only he and Raven understood the meaning of and which now served as a final greeting. What was it she’d said, that extraordinarily talented woman he’d met a month before? A man with a poetic disposition, or rather a poetic ambition?

  Johansson leaned back in the desk chair while he stretched his back with his fingers laced together behind his neck in order to think better. But this time it didn’t help. Instead he took Krassner’s manuscript and continued to read. Now only a third of it remained, a thin bundle that already felt limp in his hand and whose written contents seemed to promise little more. According to Krassner, during his active period Buchanan recruited almost a hundred agents in the struggle for Europe’s young, developing elite. He’d had two favorites, and according to his nephew they were the only ones who really meant anything to him. One was Pilgrim and the other was Raven. The first had betrayed him; the other had been faithful to him unto death.

  Raven was Salomon “Sal” Tannenbaum, same age as Pilgrim. Born and raised in New York in a prosperous intellectual Jewish family, and according to the “Irishman” Krassner, that was just about the best background you could have in the international intelligence world, regardless of whether you “opened your brown eyes” in Moscow, Warsaw, London, or New York.

  Must be your German father, thought Johansson grimly while he hurried through the sparse text.

  He’d gotten his agent name, Raven, from Buchanan, an obvious and simple choice, as he looked like a raven and was as wise as two. After studying law at Harvard and an early involvement in the American student movement, he’d met Buchanan, been recruited as an agent for the CIA, and gone over to Europe in order to make a few introductory brushes with the communist student organizations.

  In Frankfurt, in November 1948, Raven met Pilgrim. Not unexpectedly, they took a liking to each other.

  Raven’s contribution on the European front, however, had not lasted long. Instead he’d returned to the United States and started working as an attorney for just about every worthy, politically correct purpose whatsoever that could be found in the great land to the west. Sal Tannenbaum had represented the civil-rights movement, the Black Panthers, Mexican farmworkers, Native Americans, and even Eskimos. He had “stood up” for racial integration, union rights, peace in Vietnam, and of course for world peace. He had thundered against organized crime and capitalist exploitation of the black underclass. He had almost always done it pro bono—and according to Krassner he’d been one of the CIA’s most effective infiltrators of the “radical, socialist, and communist movements” on the American home front for more than twenty years.

  Sweet Jesus, sighed Johansson. If this is true he can’t have had it too easy.

  In May of 1974 a man, probably in early middle age, probably white, probably dressed in a suit, with an everyday appearance, had come into Tannenbaum’s office. Calm, quiet, and unobserved he walked past the receptionist, who was on the phone as usual, opened the door to Tannenbaum’s office, and shot a bullet right through his head. Then he’d left the place, and considering who the victim was and how little the witnesses had seen, the whole thing was a police nightmare.

  Must have been crawling with motives and possible perpetrators, thought Johansson. And if it really was as Krassner alleged, and someone else must have come to the same conclusion, you probably have to multiply them by two, he thought.

  According to Krassner it was much simpler than that. The murder of Raven was a contract killing. The person who had ordered it was Pilgrim, and those who’d helped him with the practical aspects were the new masters he was serving, the Soviet Union and its military intelligence services. (Hence the title of Krassner’s book, “The Spy Who Went East.”) Krassner’s explanation was long, complicated, and thin. Firm evidence was completely lacking and instead Krassnerian logic held unrestricted sway. During his twenty years with the police, Johansson had heard a number of Swedish variations on the same theme discussed ad nauseam in police break rooms and among friends, although he’d never heard anything even remotely similar to this.

  Fair is fair, thought Johansson while reviewing in his mind’s eye several of the most rabid characters among th
e colleagues he’d had, all of whom had in common that they never ought to have been allowed to become policemen. Russian spy? Yes, because “everyone knew” that. Murderer? No, and there wasn’t anyone who suggested that, either. And personally he’d always thought—regardless of how he’d voted, for that of course had varied over the years—that the whole thing was pure nonsense. That the prime minister would spy for the Soviet Union was just as improbable as he now found it probable that for several years in his youth he’d been an agent for the CIA. I’ll buy that from you, thought Johansson, and the “you” he was thinking of was that wretched Krassner and his thirsty uncle. But the rest you can just forget.

  Having come that far in his musings, he was interrupted by the phone ringing, even though it was only eight o’clock on a Sunday morning. It was Wiklander, and as a real policeman should he’d found something out. Namely that the mysterious Professor Forselius not only knew highly placed persons in the secret police but also was a close friend of the prime minister’s special adviser, the same man responsible for security issues that affected the prime minister and the government.

  “Interesting,” said Johansson mendaciously. “How’d you find that out?”

  “Our colleague Söderhjelm,” said Wiklander. “Didn’t I mention that we were going to have dinner together yesterday evening?”

  Evidently one thing had led to another, and without going into details Wiklander had ended up somewhat later in front of Söderhjelm’s well-stocked bookshelf, inherited from an uncle with literary interests, where by pure chance a book about great Swedes in mathematics had caught his eye, and with Forselius freshly in mind one thing had led to another.

  “Pure chance,” said Wiklander modestly.

  “So how was dinner?” said Johansson as a diversion.

  Nice, according to Wiklander. So nice, in fact, that he was now considering forgetting about the Canary Islands and going instead with Söderhjelm to Thailand on a three-week-long diving expedition.

  “Sounds nice,” said Johansson neutrally. “Say hello from me, by the way, and thanks a lot for the help.”

  I am her boss, after all, he thought as he set down the receiver and returned to Krassner and the concluding and messiest part of his manuscript, which had been messy from the get-go. And because he’d instinctively mistrusted everything in it when he’d done the first run-through, he decided to read it extra carefully now.

  Concurrently with his growing political success, Pilgrim had also acquired international ambitions, and by the end of the 1960s he had already actively expressed his support for just about every movement or conflict hostile to the United States that could be found on the political map. First he’d turned against the U.S. struggle for peace and freedom in Vietnam, then he’d started to give support to Castro in Cuba and various South and Central American rebels, and as the cherry on the cake he’d stood up for Arafat and his Palestinian terrorists.

  According to Krassner he’d done so because he was now, and had been for a long time, an agent of influence for the Soviet Union—he hadn’t mentioned even a word about his possible political convictions—and whatever the case he’d driven his old comrades-in-arms Buchanan and Raven crazy. Raven was the more furious of the two because he wasn’t the person everyone believed him to be but was rather merely an ordinary, hardworking, true American CIA agent. And he was also a Jew, so it was the support of Arafat and the Palestinians that vexed him the most.

  Raven wanted to strike back and reveal Pilgrim’s past. Buchanan was hesitant. Accustomed as one easily became in his line of work to doubters, defectors, normal traitors, and double agents, regardless of the factual background it was “bad for business” to expose old agents. As things were, with Raven exerting pressure and wanting to retaliate by messing with Pilgrim, and Buchanan trying to hold him back while other solutions were being considered, the whole thing had solved itself at the beginning of May 1974, by way of the “probably white,” “probably dressed in a suit,” “probably early middle aged,” and quite certainly “everyday” man who walked into Raven’s office and shot his head off.

  . . .

  “On the usual inscrutable roads where the intelligence agents of the world travel,” wrote Krassner, Pilgrim’s Russian comrades had evidently intercepted what was going on, and Pilgrim’s friend and agent contact, the Russian KGB general Gennadi Renko, member of the Politburo and the Central Committee, had quickly seen to cleaning up Pilgrim’s history. This was the situation in which Buchanan made his decision. Regardless of the fact that he was now risking his life, his temporal support, and his posthumous reputation, he didn’t intend to take this lying down, and what made him the most furious was that Pilgrim had had the nerve to send a condolence card to a man he’d had killed. Therefore he told his story to “his nephew, young friend, and faithful squire,” and “demanded of him a sacred oath” to see to it that “justice was served and that perhaps the greatest traitor in European postwar history got his just punishment.”

  “And this was the only, the simple, and the obvious reason that I’ve written this book,” Krassner concluded his manuscript. The end of the very last sentence he’d evidently decided to cross out, possibly from false modesty or because he’d gotten cocky, but as it was carelessly done with the aid of a ballpoint pen and the last page, like the page before it, was an original and not a photocopy, Johansson could still read the original typewritten text from the back side of the paper: “despite the fact that I am obviously well aware that I am thereby running a considerable risk of being murdered myself.”

  On Epiphany Johansson drove home to Stockholm in a car that he’d borrowed from his brother and that he was to deliver to a car dealer on Surbrunnsgatan of whom he had a vague police memory that he would rather not think about. Instead he thought about other things, mostly about Krassner and the papers he’d gotten from him. He was in an unusually good mood the whole time, mostly pondering a small detail in Pilgrim’s farewell letter to which Krassner hadn’t given him an answer. Not even the hint of an answer.

  That time when he’d fallen free, like in a dream?

  . . .

  What was it that had really happened back then? thought Johansson. And before him, in the twilight land of his imagination, he saw a rebuilt Lancaster bomber with sound-muffled motors that in the middle of the black night was searching under Polish radar. The jumping hatch was already pushed open and there stood Pilgrim in black overalls and a tight-fitting leather hood with only his hawk-nosed profile sticking out. Every muscle tensed while he held tightly to the cable on the roof. Now, now he got the high sign, and after a decisive nod he jumped straight out just as he released his hold on the cable and fell freely, like in a dream, through all the blackness, toward all the unknown down there.

  Think if a real writer got to sink his teeth into Krassner’s material, sighed Johansson. What a story it could have been. It wouldn’t even have to be true, he thought.

  CHAPTER XVI

  And all that remained was the cold of winter

  Stockholm in January and February

  Waltin never tried to get hold of Hedberg. Instead he was seized by boredom while the days simply slipped away without his being able to get anything reasonable accomplished. He even broke off the training of little Jeanette, despite the fact that now was when he ought to have had the time to seriously attend to it. Instead he just sat there brooding about all the idiots who surrounded him fixated on only one thing—how to get at him and hurt him. Berg, for example, who quite obviously was trying to put the blame on him for the fact that that crazy junkie Krassner happened to tumble out his window. And he would rather not think about what that lunatic Forselius was up to along with his bosom buddies in the government building. Then that red-haired sow and her miserable husband—that is what they were called, regardless of whether or not they were fulfilling their marital duties—who had more or less accosted him on Christmas Eve. What she was in the process of cooking up he would rather not think about either
.

  Of course he stayed away from work—a benefit of the external operation—because he’d heard through the grapevine that Berg’s fat stable boy, Chief Inspector Persson, was sneaking around, asking strange questions. If there was anyone he didn’t want to encounter it was Persson. Primitive and brutal and completely unscrupulous, fully capable of coming up with just about anything as soon as the master snapped his fingers. Not Persson, anyone but Persson, thought Waltin.

  For a few days he tried to get some temporary relief by fussing with his collections. He had hundreds of Polaroids, and quite a few regular pictures as well, which to be on the safe side he’d had processed abroad, and almost as many hours of videotapes and tape recordings, so as a private collection it ought to be the finest in the country, but there were also irritating imperfections and blemishes.

  Take, for example, the pictures of that red-haired sow he’d seriously considered sending as a “reader’s contribution”—where did they get them all, those jerk-offs, for you know they couldn’t read?—to one of the working class’s many pornographic publications, but on closer consideration he’d refrained, because you actually couldn’t tell from the pictures that she was the subject. A fat red-haired sow lying tied up to the bedposts, before and after the removal of a portion of red bush; true, you could see that, and for many people perhaps that was good enough, but you actually didn’t see that she was the one it depicted, and that was of course the whole point of publishing the pictures.

  Because she had wriggled so infernally his meticulously applied muzzle had slid up so it covered half her face, and unfortunately he’d missed correcting that little detail during the photography, overworked and stressed as he was due to Berg and his incessant paranoid fantasies.