Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö met in the summer of 1962. Wahlöö was a well-known writer and journalist, thirty-six years old, married, and with a daughter. Sjöwall was twenty-seven, a journalist and magazine art director, twice divorced, and with a six-year-old daughter. The attraction was instant but the situation was difficult. They met in bars, worked together, wrote together. Within a year, Wahlöö had moved in with Sjöwall. Their first son was born nine months later. They never married, but in Sweden their romance, one that had started out as virtually a public scandal, became envied and almost legendary: they were inseparable. A year after they met, they began planning a series of crime novels in which they would apply their common, radically leftist perspective. The series title, The Story of a Crime, in fact was meant to refer to the political agenda of the novels: the crime referred to was society’s abandonment of the working classes.
They wrote their novels in longhand, alternating chapters. They would then switch, editing the other’s work as they typed the final copy.
Apart from their ten novels, Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö had time to do very little collaborative writing. For most of their time together, for economic reasons, they had to keep their day jobs. But they did work on movie scripts and occasional shorter nonfiction and fiction. All told, they published only three short stories. These stories follow a similar pattern: the authors are themselves present as observers and relate to their readers what they have heard and seen. “The Multi-Millionaire” is the only short work by Sjöwall and Wahlöö to reflect both the psychological and, by implication, political concerns that drive their ten famous crime novels. It is the story of an unusually successful con artist.
A FEW YEARS AGO, WE MADE THE ACQUAINTANCE OF A DOLLAR MULTI-MILLIONAIRE. You don’t meet multi-millionaires every day. Particularly not in dollars. When all’s said and done, there is something special about dollars.
If you consider the place where we met, perhaps the occurrence wasn’t all that strange. It happened on board the Queen Elizabeth —the real Queen Elizabeth, the one nowadays moping around as a hotel somewhere in Florida—and not only that, but in first class, where they probably had more than one millionaire. There were also a lot of blue-haired American ladies and tottering English lords. But we particularly remember our man because he told us a story. A story complete with a moral.
From the poop deck we watched as we sailed out to sea under the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, and when Ambrose Lighthouse had disappeared in the sun haze we went to the bar and that’s where we first saw him.
He sat alone at a table, his back bent in its light-blue cashmere pullover as he brooded over a double whiskey. It was fairly early in the morning. He gave us a cursory glance as we each climbed on one of the bar stools. The three of us and the man behind the bar were the only ones in the room and it was still more than an hour to lunch.
The man looked close to sixty; later we learned that he was forty-two.
At the same moment we were ordering drinks the man dropped his pack of cigarettes on the wall-to-wall carpet. Then he fixed the bartender with his violet-blue stare and said: “Please hand me my cigarettes.”
The barman went on mixing our drinks.
“My cigarette pack fell to the floor. Please hand it to me,” the man on the couch said.
The bartender vigorously stirred our drinks and pretended not to hear.
“Shall I blow my top?” the man asked.
Unconcerned, the bartender rattled the ice while the man on the couch sat immobile, staring hard at him with his truly conspicuous violet eyes.
We started to get interested and awaited further developments.
The man in the light-blue pullover slammed his glass down on the table and said, “Okay, I’ll blow my top.”
So he did. Which meant that he got furious. He stood up, heaped abuse on the bartender, behaved like a hysterical five-year-old and left the bar with quick, mincing steps, leaving his pack of cigarettes on the carpet. The bartender didn’t bat an eyelid. After a while a bar assistant arrived and put the cigarettes back on the table.
“A loathsome man,” we said.
The bartender’s face was sphinxlike.
For this trip we had been seated at the table headed by the purser and the ship’s doctor. At the table we met the man from the bar again. Not at lunch, when his chair was empty, but at dinner. He was in a bad mood, since he had been expecting to sit at the captain’s table. After all, he was a multi-millionaire.
The crossing took four days, fifteen hours and twenty-five minutes.
This isn’t a very long time, historically speaking, but aboard a large ship it can feel rather long.
Since there were relatively few first-class passengers on the trip and meals tend to be many and long and we also sat at the same table, we came to talk a lot to the man who was a multi-millionaire.
We even learned his name: McGrant. That he was an American there was no reason to doubt for even a second.
When we asked him where he lived, he raised his eyebrows in great surprise and said, “In McGrant, of course.”
And so it was. He came from a town called McGrant somewhere in Mississippi or Kentucky or whatever state it was in. His great-grandfather was a Scot and had come there and founded the town and then it had been passed on to his heirs. Quite simply he owned the town that bore his name: the bank and the department stores and most of the buildings and, indirectly, also almost all of the land. It was a fine town, he said, of around ten thousand inhabitants, and they all lived in their own houses and were white, even the servants, and of course he also had control of the local party organization.
He liked his Bentley, he said, but he liked his Rolls-Royce better, even if both of his Cadillacs were more American, and he regarded us as friends of his since we shared our bread and our salt and Cunard’s peculiar desserts, which looked like swans made from jelly pudding, and sat at the same table.
He threw indignant glances at the elderly, stodgy peers at the captain’s table and said that of course he couldn’t have known we would end up at the same mess table that first time in the bar when he delivered his first fit of rage and let his pack of cigarettes fall to the long-suffering deck in the old Queen’s barroom.
We listened to him in badly hidden amazement and watched his antics in sadness mixed with terror.
He never opened or closed any door, never sat down in a chair unless someone pushed it under him and never retrieved any of the objects that with regular and usually very short intervals he let fall from his hands. And however fast the servants were he would tell them off. That was part of the system, an integrated component of his method.
If any of us, or any other passenger, in some way tried to help him along, he was put off.
Somehow that was inappropriate.
We wondered: How can any person become like him?
And he must have read that question in our eyes, for that was when he told us his strange story.
The beginning wasn’t so strange. The story of the single son of an inhumanly demanding father. And the son, who within a year would take it all over but who first had to prove himself capable of making his own way. What was strange was the rather particular method.
Suddenly one day his father had said: Here’s a ticket to San Francisco. Go there and stay for a year and fend for yourself and come back and take over the town of McGrant. (He ought to have added that he himself would probably die from heart failure within that year, and so indeed he did, that is, die.)
McGrant junior had no other choice than to do as his father demanded. With a couple of dollars in his pocket and a bag with the bare necessities of clothing he took the train to San Francisco. It was a very long way and he had never before been on the West Coast and he knew nobody in the city.
“But I made do,” McGrant said. “Of course I made do. And more than that, I lived well that whole year in San Francisco.”
“So you got yourself a job there,” we suggested.
“A job?” said McGrant, flabbergasted, and looked unsympathetically at us with his round, violet-blue eyes.
It was the third day, a stormy day, and in the afternoon through our binoculars we had sighted Fastnet Rock far away in the northeast quadrant. The swell of the Atlantic was heavy and green and pitiless and manropes had been stretched all around the ship.
We three had been the only diners in the mess—rumor had it that even the ship’s doctor was seasick in his bathtub, where he observed the swell of the sea by watching the water in his bath rise and fall—and now we were having coffee and brandy in the very thinly populated salon.
“No,” McGrant said. “No, I certainly didn’t get a job, but I did learn how to live in San Francisco. And since you are friends of mine I will tell you how I did it. Perhaps knowing it will come in handy at some point.”
And we listened.
“So I arrived in San Francisco without a cent in my pocket,” McGrant said.
“Without a cent?”
He raised his eyebrows in a very surprised manner above his violet-blue eyes and said: “Don’t you really know how to do it?”
No, we said. We truly really didn’t know.
And so he told us:
“I came to San Francisco without a cent in my pocket and I had only one chance.”
“San Francisco,” he said, “is one of the toughest towns in the States, and that makes it one of the toughest towns in all the world.”
“Really?” we said. “And how do you get ahead there,” we said.
Questioningly.
And then he told us his story.
It went like this:
“So as I said, my dear father sent me to San Francisco without a cent in my pocket.”
“And then what happened,” we said.
“It was morning, early morning, when I arrived in San Francisco,” McGrant told us. “I was broke and hungry and since I wasn’t used to either I didn’t know what to do. I walked out of the railway station and saw the line of cabs and it felt strange not to be able to get into one of them and go to the best hotel in town. I stood there with my little bag and I thought: You’re all alone now, and you have to manage this.
“But I didn’t know how.”
“That’s when I caught sight of him. A short, shabby man stumbling along on sore feet along the opposite sidewalk. He was carrying a sign saying: EAT AT FRIENDLY—THE FRIENDLY RESTAURANT!, and below that, in smaller letters, it said: TRY OUR GREAT HOMELY FARE—IF YOU’RE NOT SATISFIED, YOU DON’T PAY!
“As I already told you, I was hungry, and the little money my father had given me for travel expenses I had already out of old habit spent on drinks in the dining car. I decided to do as the sign suggested and I decided that I would certainly not be satisfied. “As it turned out, the friendly restaurant happened to be just halfway down the first block on the next crossing street. The dining room was huge and full of breakfast eaters. I sat down at the back of the room and ordered a square meal of ham and eggs, toast, butter, cheese, jelly, juice, coffee, well, basically all I could think of. Now I should mention that I really don’t eat much, as you may have noticed already, being my friends at the purser’s table. I eat like a bird, always have.”
We nodded. He certainly hadn’t indulged much in the way of solid food during these few days.
“At any rate, all the things I had ordered were brought to my table and when I’d just tasted a small sampling of each I was absolutely full. So I called to the waitress, pointed to my seemingly untouched breakfast and declared that it was the worst meal I had ever been served. She got hold of the head waiter. He was sorry that I wasn’t satisfied, assured me that of course Friendly would stand by its promise and asked me to sign my name to the check. I wrote the first name that popped into my head: G. Formby. I’ve always liked the banjo. When I walked to the door, full of food and happy, I noticed that many of the guests had left their tips on the table, you know, coins half hidden under a plate, the we do back in the States. It was an easy thing to snatch those coins on my way out.”
“Well, it wasn’t a bad start. The money I found under the plates was enough to rent a room. And can you imagine how surprised I was when I glanced out the window and the first person I saw was an old man carrying exactly the same sign as the one I’d see outside the railway station: EAT AT FRIENDLY—THE FRIENDLY RESTAURANT! TRY OUR GREAT HOMELY FARE—IF YOU’RE NOT SATISFIED, YOU DON’T PAY!
“Naturally I went to a phone booth and to my considerable delight I found that Friendly was a huge chain of restaurants with at least a hundred outlets in the San Francisco Bay area. I immediately realized the enormous possibilities hidden within this fact. Obviously I became a faithful patron of these eateries, and the coins I found under most plates meant that I never needed to be penniless. On the contrary, my capital began growing, slowly but surely.
“One day a man at the table next to mine spoke to me. He was a shabby creature whom I of course hardly could start talking to. What he said was:
“‘This is a great trick. Too bad you can only pull it a couple of times a year. The checks you sign are collected in some office somewhere, and they keep track of the names. If you sign too often they put you on their blacklist, and they just won’t serve you any longer.’ “I stared at him. Most probably he was an imbecile. After watching me sign the check with a dignified and dismissive expression, he sadly wiped his mouth and said:
“‘I know another good trick, but you can only do it once a year. At Parsley’s. They give you a free cake on your birthday. And then you can sell it. But you have to be able to document that it’s really your birthday.’
“Without dignifying him with a glance I rose to leave, increasing my capital with a further five quarters on the way out.”
“I was now faced with a problem, but solved it immediately. I could hardly get in touch with my father, but instead I could write the authorities in McGrant and tell them to send me a hundred identity cards with my birth date left blank. In McGrant, that kind of thing was handled by the sheriff, and since he was up for reelection only half a year later, I had the cards in three days. He had mailed them special delivery.
“After that, everything became much easier. I picked my cakes up at Parsley’s, which was also a major trade chain, and sold them to those Friendly restaurants I had already used up.
“Perhaps I haven’t told you that I genuinely dislike walking, while at the same time disdain on principle so-called public transportation, possibly, and I really mean just possibly, with the exception of this kind.”
McGrant fell silent and made a sweeping gesture encompassing the Queen Elizabeth’s lounge, where the fifth Earl of Something, strongly marked by age, senile decay and general stupidity, was just giving a lecture on Lord Nelson and the Battle of Aboukir to a sparse audience of commandeered ship’s officers twisting uneasily in their seats. The old man seemed totally oblivious of the swell.
“Well,” McGrant continued, in passing letting his coffee spoon fall to the floor, “in brief, this is what I did. I phoned all the major car retailers in town and told them that my aunt had asked me to buy her a car. A luxury car, but that she wanted it thoroughly tested. Then I set up meetings with the salesmen in the lobby of one of the largest hotels. After that I let myself be chauffeured around for a week or so, taking in the nearby sights. When the salesman began to seem nervous and started hinting that I ought to make my mind up, I would of course have come to realize that his particular car just wouldn’t do for my discriminating aunt. After that, I turned to the next outlet. At one point, I believe when I was riding a Daimler, I had already been driven around for ten days and had to let my poor aunt pass away from a heart attack on the eleventh.”
“Yes, my friends, that’s how I lived during my year in San Francisco, most brutal of all great cities. And if you should ever happen to find yourselves there, at least you know how to cope. When the year ended I took a train home, and you can trust me when I tell you that this time I had plen
ty of dollars in my pocket. Unfortunately my father never got to see my proud return, since he had died a week before.”
McGrant was a careful man. At an intimate moment he showed us his medicines—around a hundred—and his cash. In spite of his checkbooks and bank accounts and credit cards and the fact of his trip being prepaid, he always carried a wallet full of bills in large denominations and from every Western European country.
“You never know what may happen,” he said.
And of course that’s true.
He disembarked at Cherbourg and on the quay a black, chauffeured limousine waited for him.
The last piece of advice he gave us was:
“Don’t tip the bootblack when you get to Southampton.”
We last glimpsed him as he minced out from the dining room, on his way palming a few dollar bills left under a plate by some gullible American.
Otherwise, the trip was as such trips usually are. Schools of flying fish and porpoises and a whale blowing. By the way, the captain was named Law.
And we won a prize in designing the funniest hat in a competition. Everyone who entered did. McGrant didn’t enter. He was up on deck, telling off the cabin steward for allowing his suitcases to be wrongly packed. Incidentally, it wasn’t his cabin steward.
Per Wahlöö was born in 1926, began working as a journalist in 1947, and continued writing—though gradually emphasizing theater and movie reviews and features—for newspapers and magazines until 1964. He published his first novel in 1959 and a further seven until 1968; they express his strong political convictions as well as his concerns about social justice and abuse of power. These themes are also central to the ten crime novels he wrote in collaboration with Maj Sjöwall, born in 1935 and a journalist, editor, writer, and translator. Wahlöö and Sjöwall met and began living together in 1963; in 1965, they published their first cowritten novel, Roseanna, which began their ten-novel series The Story of a Crime, starring the detectives working under Chief Inspector Martin Beck at the homicide commission of the Swedish national police. The fourth novel in the series, Den strattande polisen (The Laughing Policeman, 1968), in translation won the 1971 Edgar Allan Poe Award for best crime novel published in the United States. Sjöwall and Wahlöö also wrote movie scripts, short stories, and essays. The last novel in their series, Terroristerna (The Terrorists), was not yet published when Wahlöö died in 1975, at the age of forty-eight. The Sjöwall-Wahlöö novels were published around the world and have never been out of print. All of them have been made into feature films or adapted for TV, and more than twenty-five additional movies have been based on characters from the novels; in Great Britain, the BBC has produced a radio dramatization of the ten books. As Maj Sjöwall has noted, she and Per Wahlöö failed in changing the face of Swedish society, which was the task they set out to accomplish. But they did, most emphatically, change the themes and directions of Swedish crime fiction.
A Darker Shade of Sweden Page 27