Cop Killer

by Maj Sjowall

  “Taking a coffee break,” said Kristiansson dismally. “We weren’t in the car, so we couldn’t hear the radio.”

  “I see,” said Gunvald Larsson woefully. “And so then you chase him into the hospital and try to prevent him from entering the operating room. And what’s more, you’ve got the gall to report him for assaulting an officer of the law. Personally, in that situation, I would probably have killed you.”

  “I didn’t report anybody,” Kristiansson mumbled.

  “The National Commissioner himself said that …”

  Began Kvastmo grandly, but was immediately interrupted by Gunvald Larsson.

  “You leave him out of this, or I’ll throw you bodily through that window,” he bellowed.

  “That’s not a very loyal attitude,” said Kvastmo.

  Gunvald Larsson rose to his full and considerable height and extended his arm like Charles XII, although he was pointing at the door and not at Russia.

  “Out!” he thundered. “And see to it you withdraw that report pretty damn quick.”

  An hour later he received a telephone call that made his clear blue eyes stiffen in anger.

  “Malm here. The Chief tells me you haven’t been showing proper loyalty to the patrol units. He doesn’t like it. As long as you’re under my command, you’re going to have to control yourself. Because I have to suffer the consequences.”

  “What?” said Gunvald Larsson.

  That was all he could get out.

  “By the way, we’ve got that cop-killer surrounded out at Midsommarkransen,” said Malm blithely. “Along with some gangster named Lindberg. You and Kollberg might drive on out, if you’ve got the time. We’re going to move in any moment now. I’m personally in command, from down here at Södra police station.”

  Gunvald Larsson banged down the receiver and rushed into the office next door, where Kollberg and Einar Rönn were playing tic-tac-toe.

  Rönn was another detective, notable for his red nose and his Lapland dialect. He had long experience in the Violence Division and had therefore been detailed to Malm’s special command.

  “Quick,” said Gunvald Larsson. “The desperado himself just called and told me they’ve got Ronnie Casparsson and The Breadman surrounded out at Midsommarkransen.”

  “The desperado?” said Rönn.

  “Yes, Malm, of course. Come on, let’s get out there. We’ll take my car.”

  “Poor kid,” Kollberg said. “But I’ve got a score to settle with The Breadman.”

  Ronnie Casparsson stepped right into a trap when he went with Maggie to Midsommarkransen, but there was no way he could have known.

  For Maggie’s new boyfriend was Lindberg in person, better known as The Breadman, and the apartment was under surveillance night and day.

  Admittedly, this stakeout was being handled by a group of unusually listless and uninspired plainclothesmen, who, for fear of The Breadman’s well-known impudence and audacity, stayed too far from the building and who, moreover, lacked the necessary experience.

  But The Breadman sensed that they were there, and when he saw Ronnie Casparsson he shook his head.

  “This is not a good spot for you, Caspar,” he said.

  But Ronnie Casparsson had nowhere else to go, and even if The Breadman was a crook, he was a good-tempered crook, which he immediately demonstrated.

  “But stick around, Caspar. I’ve got a really terrific place to hide out if they try to take us here. Anyway, no one’s going to recognize you with that haircut.”

  “You don’t think they will?”

  Ronnie Casparsson was discouraged and frightened, and his sense of alienation was now complete. He had only been disturbed before, according to the social welfare psychologist.

  “Come on,” said The Breadman. “Don’t be downhearted. So you shot a cop. I shot an old woman, who popped up out of nowhere. It can happen to the best of us.”

  “The only thing is, I never shot anybody.”

  “That doesn’t make any difference to them, so it’s nothing to worry about. Anyway, like I said, no one’s going to recognize you.”

  Lindberg himself had been sought by the police any number of times, and he didn’t think it was at all unlikely that they were watching him now, but he accepted the situation with studied calm and an almost exaggerated sense of humor.

  “They’ve already been here to search the place,” he said. “Twice. So they probably won’t be back for a while. The only trouble is that now Maggie has to support you too, and she’s already got me to carry.”

  “Don’t be silly,” Maggie said. “You’re getting unemployment and welfare—we’ll make do. Of course, it’s going to be mostly blood pudding and spaghetti and like that.”

  “As soon as it’s safe for me to get out to the cabin in Södertörn, it’s going to be pâté and champagne,” The Breadman said. “You can count on that. And it won’t be long now. And then, Caspar, my boy …”

  He put his arm around Caspar and squeezed his shoulders to cheer him up. He was more than twenty years older, and it wasn’t long before Caspar began to look up to him as a sort of father, or at least as an adult who understood. There had not been many such adults in Ronnie Casparsson’s life. His parents were straight out of the Stone Age. The very most a person could do was feel sorry for them, sitting there in their splendid suburban house with their installment-plan car in their garage, bored to death, their eyes glued to their color TV. They never thought about anything but how they were going to make ends meet and how badly their son had turned out.

  After all they’d done for him.

  That was a constantly recurring theme.

  Ronnie Casparsson had always had a hard time sitting still. It had never been easy for him to wait patiently for things to happen, and now, afterward, it seemed to him that it was exactly the passive atmosphere in his parents’ home that had driven him away.

  He saw himself in the mirror and realized that he looked like thousands of other young people.

  Maggie and The Breadman were probably right. No one would recognize him.

  And so on Friday he went out. Took the subway downtown and strolled around for a while in the usual places. Nevertheless, he avoided spots like Humlegården, where he knew the police made regular raids, mostly just for the fun of it. He wasn’t about to give the cops a chance of getting him by accident, by coincidence, simply because he happened to sit down on a park bench or talk to someone who was about to be arrested.

  He left the house for a few hours on Saturday and Sunday too. He knew that all the papers had carried his picture and that the police had been to his parents’ house and that they had raided a lot of clubs and apartments where he used to hang out. He also knew he was being pictured as some sort of public enemy number one. A cop-killer, pure and simple. A person who had to be put out of action by any and all means.

  The Breadman was a somewhat calmer soul than Caspar, but he’d been forced to lie low for a long time now, and he too was beginning to long for some sort of activity.

  As the three of them sat watching television Sunday night, The Breadman made Caspar an offer.

  “If the cops track you down and try to take you,” he said, “let’s get out of here together. The two of us. I’ve got a good plan that I made for myself, but it’ll be easier for two.”

  “The cabin in the woods, you mean?”

  “Right.”

  Maggie said nothing. But she thought, Well, boys, they’ll catch you pretty soon, and that’s the end of the fun this time around.

  On Monday, Caspar was finally identified.

  The man who spotted him was an older Chief Inspector in plain clothes who had really come out only to see that the men on the stakeout weren’t sloughing off completely.

  The man’s name was Fredrik Melander. He was an old, trusted confederate of Martin Beck’s, but had been in the Robbery Division for several years. It was one of the dreariest jobs a man could have on the Stockholm police. Theft, burglary, and robbery were b
eing committed at a furious and steadily accelerating rate, and the police had not the slightest chance of keeping up, but Melander was a stoic man with no inclination to neurosis or depression. He also had the best memory on the force and was worth a great deal more than any computer.

  He parked his car near the building at Midsommarkransen and immediately caught sight of Ronnie Casparsson, who was on his way home after a brisk, aimless afternoon walk. Melander followed him in and made certain that the boy entered the apartment where The Breadman and his girlfriend lived.

  But it took him some time to find the policeman presently in charge of surveillance. This was an individual named Bo Zachrisson, notorious for his incompetence, and he found him asleep in his car two blocks away.

  Zachrisson was just the type of man who would probably not have noticed either Caspar or The Breadman had they come parading out of the building at the head of a herd of elephants. To the best of Melander’s knowledge, he had never done anything right. But his peculiar ability to misjudge every possible kind of situation had caused great difficulties from time to time.

  Melander now found himself in a somewhat delicate predicament. His long experience and sound judgment told him there was only one sensible course to follow. That would be to take Zachrisson with him—preferably in handcuffs—and go up in the building and arrest Caspar and The Breadman before they had time to take any counter-measures. In order to do this, he would need a ballpoint pen and a pad of paper, utensils which he always carried with him.

  On the other hand, Melander knew that strict orders had been issued regarding what was to be done if and when an individual policeman spotted Ronnie Casparsson. The matter was to be reported instantly to Division Commander Malm, who would then take over and effect an arrest.

  And so Melander used the radio in Zachrisson’s car to report what he had seen and let it go at that. Then he walked tranquilly back to his own car and drove home for a lunch of mutton stew.

  And thus the apparatus was set in motion.

  Malm’s tactical command had planned carefully for just such an eventuality as this. The necessary force had been assessed at fifty men, half of whom would be equipped with helmets, face masks, automatic weapons, and bulletproof vests. They were to be transported in seven police vans and would have at their disposal two specially trained dogs, four tear gas experts, and a frogman, in the event the criminals attempted some counter-move. In addition, there was a helicopter ready for immediate takeoff. What its mission might be, Malm would not reveal. Perhaps it was his secret weapon.

  Stig Malm had a weakness for helicopters, and now that the police had been equipped with no fewer than twelve of these machines, they were an unavoidable feature of any action organized by the upper echelons.

  The tactical command also had four observation and surveillance specialists, who would be dispatched to the scene at once and hold the position until the main force could be brought into play.

  Caspar and The Breadman were sitting in the kitchen eating corn flakes with lingonberry jam and milk when Maggie came hurrying in.

  “Something’s happening,” she said. “There are two trucks outside. I think it’s the cops in disguise.”

  The Breadman walked quickly over to the window and looked out.

  “Right,” he said. “It’s them all right.”

  One of the policemen was dressed up as a telephone repairman and was sitting behind the wheel of a bright yellow telephone van. The other was wearing a white coat and driving a worn-out ambulance. They both sat stock still at their posts.

  “Let’s get out of here,” The Breadman said. “You’ll cover for us, Maggie?”

  She nodded, but at the same time she made an objection.

  “Breadman, you really don’t have to go,” she said. “It’s Caspar they’re after, not you.”

  “Could be,” The Breadman said. “But I’m starting to get sick of them running after me day in and day out. Come on, Caspar.”

  He hugged Maggie and gave her a kiss on the nose.

  “Now don’t take any chances,” he said. “I don’t want you getting hurt. Don’t put up any resistance.”

  Aside from the breadknife, there was nothing in the apartment that even resembled a weapon.

  The Breadman and Caspar went up to the attic, opened a trapdoor, climbed out onto the rear slope of the roof, and then crawled across to the next building. They moved across five buildings before descending through another trapdoor and leaving through a kitchen entrance. From there, they had to climb over a couple of fences before they finally reached the street where The Breadman had parked his getaway car.

  It was an old black taxi with false license plates, and The Breadman even had the cap and jacket to a uniform so he could pass as a cabbie without attracting attention.

  As they turned onto another street and headed south, they heard the wail of a great many sirens in the distance behind them.

  The big police action went wrong right from the start.

  The neighborhood wasn’t cordoned off until fifteen minutes after Caspar and The Breadman had left that entire section of the city.

  When Malm drove up in his command car, he managed to run over one of the special dogs.

  The dog’s hind legs appeared to be seriously injured, and it lay on the ground whimpering. Malm climbed out and began the day’s operations by bending over and patting his wounded colleague on the head. He had probably seen some American police chief do something similar in the movies or on TV. It would doubtless be a popular gesture, and he looked around to see if any press photographers had reached the scene. But they had not, which was probably just as well, for an instant later the dog bit his hand. It couldn’t seem to distinguish between criminals and Division Commanders from the National Police Administration.

  “Good for you, Grim, by God,” said his handler.

  He was obviously very attached to the animal.

  “Good dog,” he added, for good measure.

  Malm threw him an astonished glance and then wound a handkerchief around his bleeding right hand.

  “Get me a dressing,” he said to the men standing nearby. “And carry on with the operation as planned.”

  The plan was rather complex. First, policemen with automatic weapons were to enter the building and try to evacuate people from the neighboring apartments down to the basement. Then sharpshooters were to break the windows to the apartment, whereupon tear gas bombs would be hurled in through the shattered glass.

  If the criminals did not surrender instantly, the apartment would be stormed by five policemen in gas masks, supported by the two dogs and their handlers. Or, as now seemed to be the case, one dog and its handler. When all of this was completed, a policeman would give the all-clear sign from the window and Malm himself would enter the house along with a couple of higher police officials. Meanwhile, the helicopter people would keep watch over the entire block for the possibility of some attempt by the two criminals to leave the building.

  The plan proceeded beautifully. Terrified neighbors were herded into the cellar, and the windows were shot to pieces. The only real error committed was that the tear gas personnel managed to lob only one of their grenades into the apartment, and that one turned out to be a dud.

  Maggie was standing in the kitchen washing dishes when the windows were shot to bits. At this point, she grew really frightened and decided to escape through the front door and try to give herself up.

  Before she got that far, they stormed the apartment.

  This was easily done, as it happened, because in her desire that nothing be damaged she had left the door unlocked.

  Maggie was just on her way out to the hall when five heavily armed men and a dog burst in upon her.

  The dog was obviously in a vile mood after the calamity that had befallen its associate.

  It threw itself directly at the woman and knocked her to the floor on her back. Then it bit her on the left thigh, in the groin.

  “By God, that dog sure
knows where to bite a whore,” said one of the policemen, laughing.

  Since they could see right away that Caspar and The Breadman were gone, they let the dog bite her again in roughly the same spot.

  “Well, at least we’ll have some use for the ambulance,” said the policeman with the sense of humor.

  Gunvald Larsson and Kollberg arrived just as the operation was beginning and were thus too late to be of any help or hindrance.

  And so they remained sitting in the car and observed what took place.

  They saw the accident with the dog and Malm being wounded and eventually bandaged. And they watched as one of the ambulances was backed up to the building and Maggie was carried out.

  Neither one of them said a word, but Kollberg shook his head sadly.

  When everything seemed to be over, they climbed out of their car and walked over to Stig Malm.

  “No one home, I see,” said Gunvald Larsson.

  “Only that girl.”

  “How was she hurt?” Kollberg asked.

  Malm glanced down at his own bandaged hand.

  “Apparently the dog bit her,” he said.

  Malm was an unusually well-dressed, vigorous man, even though he was approaching fifty. He had a ready, winning smile, and anyone who did not know he was a policeman—which, in fact, he was not—might easily have taken him for a film director or a successful businessman. He ran his good hand through his curly hair.

  “Ronnie Casparsson and Lindberg,” he said. “Now we’ve got two desperadoes to hunt. And both of them are apparently prepared to use a gun.”

  “Are you sure of that?” Kollberg said.

  Malm ignored the question.

  “I’ll have to have more personnel next time,” he said. “Twice as many men and quicker concentration. Otherwise, the plan worked beautifully. Just as I had imagined.”

  “Ha!” said Gunvald Larsson. “I’ve read through that damn plan. In my opinion, it borders on pure idiocy. Are you really so stupid you think an experienced man like The Breadman wouldn’t recognize two policemen in disguise, lurking there in a telephone van and an old discarded ambulance?”

  “I’ve never liked your choice of words,” said Stig Malm resentfully.