Between Summer's Longing and Winter's End

by Leif Gw Persson

  Krassner appeared extremely suspicious, hardly surprising considering whose “faithful squire” he had been, and one of the first days when Jeanette had visited the South African and contrived an errand to the kitchen, she had observed how he “taped a strand of hair” on the door when he went out.

  In this case it was a little paper flag he had placed on the door’s overhang, which of course would not still be there if anyone opened the door while he was away. A simple, standard measure among policemen, criminals, and those who were simply generally suspicious.

  That suspiciousness also argued against emptying the corridor where Krassner and the others were living by creating some emergency situation, for example a false fire alarm. Such a solution also went against the principle of discretion, which Waltin placed uppermost in his professional practice. Involve as few as possible, do as little as possible, and be seen as little as possible. Microsurgery, quite simply, he thought.

  Friday evening was the right time for a home visit to Krassner. The students would as a rule be out partying if they didn’t have an exam or had decided to have a party in their own corridor. Friday evening, the twenty-second of November, thought Waltin after having looked at his calendar and consulted with little Jeanette. Then at least two of them would be going home to their parents, one would be at a party outside the building, and another two would receive free tickets to a pop concert that they themselves hadn’t been able to acquire. Jeanette would take care of the South African. Krassner himself was his problem. Forselius, thought Waltin. It really was high time for the surly old bastard to pull his weight. One thing remained—finding a sufficiently capable operative to carry out such an operation. It was then that he happened to think of Hedberg. Quite naturally, because Hedberg was the only person he really trusted.

  CHAPTER IX

  Between Summer’s Longing and Winter’s End

  Albany, New York, in December

  [SUNDAY, DECEMBER 8]

  The room they were sitting in was large and light, with a fireplace and generously proportioned bay window, walls covered with books, a giant-sized sofa in front of the fireplace, large easy chairs with footrests. Quite obvious that it had been furnished by someone considerably older than Johansson’s hostess, and judging by her clothes by someone with considerably more conventional taste. Her parental home, thought Johansson. Educated, intellectual people with good finances.

  She had offered him a cup of tea, and because Johansson didn’t want to unnecessarily complicate things that were inherently simple he had accepted, despite the fact that he would have preferred coffee.

  “Although perhaps you’d rather have coffee,” she suggested as she served his tea in a large ceramic cup.

  “Tea is just fine,” said Johansson politely.

  The cups were hers, in any case, he thought. Although otherwise there wasn’t much that added up. If Krassner really was the scatterbrain that he had imagined, it agreed very poorly with the woman sitting in front of him: smiling, leaning slightly forward, palpably present and with curiosity shining from her big brown eyes. Hardly a deeply mourning ex-girlfriend for example, thought Johansson.

  “Tell me,” she said. “Before I die of curiosity.”

  Wonder if I can trust her? thought Johansson.

  “Well,” he said hesitantly. “I don’t really know where I should begin.”

  “Begin at the beginning,” she said, smiling even more broadly. “That’s always the easiest.”

  Okay, thought Johansson and nodded. What do I really have to lose?

  “It all begins with a shoe with a heel with a hole in it.”

  “A shoe with a heel with a hole in it? You mean a shoe with a hollow heel?”

  So that’s what it’s called, of course, thought Johansson.

  “Hollow heel, yes,” said Johansson.

  “Oh, Jesus,” she said with delight. “And I’ll bet it was on John’s foot.”

  “Yes,” said Johansson and nodded. “It was, but that’s not the reason I’m here.”

  Naturally that’s the pattern, thought Johansson a half hour later. You should always start at the beginning. He had told about the annoying little scrap of paper with his name, title, and home address that they had found in the hollow heel, about Krassner’s suicide, about Krassner’s letter that had gone astray and that he hadn’t yet been able to read, about the actual reason for his visit to the United States, about his own private reasons for now sitting on her couch. On the other hand, he hadn’t said a word about the worry that he had also felt.

  She hadn’t said anything. Just listened and nodded while she let her tea stand, untouched. When he told about Krassner’s suicide she stopped smiling and contented herself with nodding now and then. Serious, attentive eyes.

  “Well, I guess that’s all,” said Johansson, making an explanatory gesture with his hands.

  “Good that you came here,” she said. “I’ve actually been trying to get hold of you.”

  Heavens, things are moving fast here.

  “You’ll be able to read his letter soon,” she said. “I’m afraid that it’s not especially enlightening, even if it does say quite a lot about John,” she added, smiling again.

  “But first you were thinking of saying a little about yourself,” said Johansson.

  “Exactly,” she said. “And all policemen aren’t stupid, are they?”

  “Not all,” said Johansson, shaking his head.

  Then she told about herself and about her ex-boyfriend John P. Krassner, and if she had done so in the same way during an ordinary police interrogation, she would have bestowed eternal and everlasting credit on her interrogator.

  Sarah J. Weissman, J. for Judith, was born in 1955. She was an only child; her parents had been divorced for the past ten years. Her mother had remarried and lived in New York, where she was working as an editor. Her father was a professor of economics, and the house they were sitting in was his. Five years earlier he was granted a professorship at Princeton and his daughter had moved in temporarily until he decided whether to sell his house. And because he was still thinking, she had stayed.

  “A typical Jewish family,” Sarah summarized, smiling broadly. “Not in that correct, tiresome way but rather more practically Jewish. You noticed the Christmas tree,” she said, and giggled. “Here it’s important to have a Christmas tree.”

  “Yes,” said Johansson.

  “And snow-shoveling,” she said. “My neighbor usually shovels for me, despite the fact that his wife yells at him, but now they’ve gone to Florida.”

  “I can take care of that if you’d like,” said Johansson, for he had learned to do that even as a little boy. Both what he should say and how he should do it.

  “I can certainly believe that,” she said, nodding, “but it will get warmer after the weekend so I think I’ll take a chance and wait.”

  “What kind of work do you do yourself?” asked Johansson.

  A little bit of everything, it appeared. Since she completed her degree in English and history at the university she had started working freelance for several book publishers in New York; it was her mother who had opened the door to that line of business, and her main activity the last few years had been collecting information and fact-checking.

  “Both nonfiction and novels. Just now I’m working on a novel about the Civil War, by one of the publisher’s best-selling authors. The author is quite pleased with me. Refuses to work with anyone else.”

  I can imagine that, thought Johansson.

  “She’s even proposed,” said Sarah, giggling with delight. “So just now we’re having a little crisis.”

  Then she suddenly became serious again.

  “John,” she continued. “I’m going to tell about John, I promise to pull myself together.”

  Then she told about John. It took only a quarter of an hour and when she was through, Johansson had put all the pieces in place. I wasn’t far off, he thought.

  “Now you’ve pieced it together
, right?” she asked, looking at him contentedly.

  “Yes,” said Johansson and smiled reluctantly. “Now it makes more sense.”

  “I saw that on your face at the start,” she said. “That you hadn’t really pieced it together.”

  Sarah and John had met at the university. She was eighteen, young and inexperienced. He was two years older and, if one were to believe everything he said, which she did at that time, he was a very experienced and exciting young man besides. In addition he looked good, so when her parents separated, she responded by moving into a student apartment at the university with John.

  “Dad really hated John,” she said delightedly, “and because I always loved my dad more than anyone else it was actually rather logical. That John and I moved in together, I mean. My dad is a very wise man,” she added, serious again. “He’s so wise that he’s actually never accomplished anything practical, and where John was concerned he was completely right.”

  She sat silent a moment before she continued.

  “John’s dad disappeared with another woman when John was very small, so he grew up with his mom and her brother. Uncle John. John was christened after his uncle; he was the one who became his father figure when he was growing up.”

  “Yes,” said Johansson. What should I say? he thought.

  “Two of those kind of shrewd, dishonest, really thirsty, and naturally prejudiced Irishmen. You can become a Jew for less,” summarized Sarah without the least hint of a smile. “His mom died from cirrhosis of the liver a few years after we’d met and her brother no doubt simply drank himself to death, if I may say so. He died last spring. He was a really horrid sort. He was a professor here at our own university, SUNY Albany, but they were forced to fire him in spite of the fact that he had a really special background and in spite of the fact that it was no doubt our own government that paid his salary.”

  “Why is that?” said Johansson. What does she mean? he thought.

  “I’m getting to that,” said Sarah calmly.

  The apple hadn’t fallen far from the tree, and if that was due to inheritance or environment or a little of each was actually uninteresting because either way she was the one who had to suffer. Young John had a great amount of knowledge, to a small degree factual but in everything essential fictional. He’d been involved in one thing after another and borrowed almost everything from other people, and mostly from his uncle.

  She figured that out quite soon after they moved in together, and then it had only gotten worse. Already that first year, although he was still so young, he had started drinking heavily like the Irishman he was and smoking even more, and finally he hit her, for that’s what a real man did when she talked back.

  “That was why I broke up with him,” she said, looking seriously at Johansson. “He hit me good and hard and afterward I thanked God for every punch. Then I broke up with him. Although it took more than two years.”

  “I see,” said Johansson.

  “So then he tried to take his own life,” said Sarah. “It wasn’t a bad performance, I can assure you. We were living on the third floor. It was, maximum, fifteen feet from the balcony to the lawn below, so it was completely impossible to kill yourself and it was certainly my fault, that too. As a suicide attempt it was exactly like everything else he dreamed up.”

  “And yet you became his heir,” said Johansson. When he did it for real, he thought.

  “Yes, he was like that. If there was something that didn’t fit, he just thought it away. He never got over my breaking up with him. He’s kept in contact the whole time, even though it’s been ten years. He’d call me in the middle of the night, often just to tell me that he had met a new girlfriend.” Sarah sighed, with a certain feeling, as it appeared. “And to anyone who could bear to listen, he always said that we were still together.”

  “I see,” said Johansson.

  What do you say about such things? he thought.

  “He seems to have been a little strange,” said Johansson, smiling tentatively.

  “He was completely nuts,” said Sarah. “But that wasn’t the biggest problem.”

  “So what was it?” asked Johansson.

  “In four words,” she said, “he was no good.” She put emphasis on each syllable.

  “That letter he wrote,” said Johansson divertingly. “Might one be able to take a look at that?”

  “Certainly,” said Sarah. “I’ll get it right away, but there’s one thing I don’t really understand.”

  “Shoot,” said Johansson, smiling.

  “You say that he took his own life. How sure are you of that?”

  Murder, suicide, accident, thought Johansson. Then he recounted Jarnebring’s and his own conclusions, with special emphasis on the note that Krassner had left behind.

  “The paper was sitting in his own typewriter, it’s typed on the same machine, we’ve compared the text with the impressions on the color ribbon that was in the typewriter. In addition, his own fingerprints are on the letter. In just those places where they should be.”

  “A suicide note,” said Sarah. “So John is supposed to have left a letter where he said he was going to take his own life?”

  “Yes,” said Johansson. “A suicide note, that’s how we interpret it.”

  “May I take a look at that letter?” said Sarah.

  “Of course,” said Johansson. “I brought a copy with me—a photocopy of the original,” he clarified. “The original is still in Stockholm. It’s in the investigation file.”

  Johansson took out the copy from the inner pocket of his sport coat and handed it over to Sarah.

  “Here it is,” he said.

  “I have lived my life caught between the longing of summer and the cold of winter. As a young man I used to think that when summer comes I would fall in love with someone, someone I would love a lot, and then, that’s when I would start living my life for real. But by the time I had accomplished all those things I had to do before, summer was already gone and all that remained was the winter cold. And that, that was not the life that I had hoped for.”

  Sarah set aside the letter and looked seriously at Johansson.

  “And this is the letter that you believe John would have written?”

  “Yes,” said Johansson.

  “He didn’t,” said Sarah, shaking her head decisively.

  “Why do you think that?”

  “I don’t think,” said Sarah. “I know, and I can give you a million reasons.”

  “I’m listening,” said Johansson.

  “It isn’t that I’m jealous,” she said and smiled wryly. “It isn’t that he harped on for ten years that I was the only woman in his life, for he did that even when he’d hit me. It’s not that.”

  What is it then? thought Johansson and contented himself with nodding. I’m not the one who was together with that bastard, he thought, suddenly feeling a slight irritation.

  “I’m not a police officer but I’m good at English,” said Sarah. “American English, British English, pidgin English, slang English, go-fuck-yourself English, you-name-it English. I’m even good at Her Majesty the Queen’s English.”

  She smiled as she looked at Johansson with her large brown eyes.

  “How shall I put it?” she said. “John was no better at English than most Americans, and he definitely didn’t write this.”

  “He didn’t?”

  “No way,” said Sarah, “and because you’re still wondering if you can ask, I’m telling you that the person who wrote this is neither an American nor an Englishman. If I were to guess, I’d say someone who does not speak English as their native language, but who still writes and speaks it more or less fluently. A man, definitely a man, who in addition seems to have a poetic disposition or, more correctly, a poetic ambition.”

  Like those poems I wrote when I was a boy, thought Johansson, nodding as he tried hard to appear sharp. She’s a little too clever, he thought. It’s crucial to be on your guard here.

  “It’s no
thing you recognize,” said Johansson. “A quotation, I mean.”

  “No,” said Sarah, shaking her head. “It’s not that good.”

  “Hm,” said Johansson, looking as though he were thinking deeply. “I still think it was your old boyfriend who wrote it. Purely technically, I mean,” he added quickly when he saw that she was preparing to object.

  “What I mean is the following,” Johansson clarified. “I believe that he’s the one who sat and wrote this on his own typewriter. He’s the one who put the paper in the typewriter and wrote out the text. He even made a few corrections that you do when you’re copying off of something and discover that you’ve made a typo. And I don’t believe that anyone forced him to do it.”

  Sarah nodded. Didn’t appear completely dismissive of the idea.

  “Could it be that he copied something written by someone else?”

  Sarah suddenly looked rather pleased.

  “I could certainly imagine that. That sounds just like John.”

  “So why did he do it?” asked Johansson.

  “Don’t know,” said Sarah, shrugging her shoulders. “But that’s not the big problem.”

  “What is it then? The big problem?”

  “John would never take his own life,” said Sarah and nodded with emphasis.

  “How do you know that?”

  “He was far too pleased with himself,” said Sarah. “He would rather die than take his own life,” she said, smiling.