The Terrorists

by Maj Sjowall

  All the proposed activities of the distinguished visitor had already been reported in the newspapers, which had managed to dig out the minutest details. There was a certain amount of criticism in the press, but so far no one had actually attacked the police.

  At ten past eleven, Martin Beck switched out the lights in all the rooms and locked the doors to the corridor, with an unpleasant sense of having neglected something, though quite what he did not know.

  He didn’t want to spend the night alone, so he went back to Rhea’s. She usually had a kind of open house for her tenants and others on Wednesday evenings, and he felt a great need to talk to people whose thoughts were not forever circling around police cordons, specially trained sharpshooters, helicopters and highly improbable bombs. Since his own driver was off duty that day, he begged a lift in a patrol car and asked the driver to stop in Frejgatan, around the corner from Rhea’s block.

  Four minutes after Martin Beck left headquarters, Gunvald Larsson rode up in the elevator. He unlocked the doors and switched on his desk light, noticing the bulb was still warm.

  Beck, he thought. Who else?

  He was wet and his hair was mussed. Outside the windows, gangs, thieves, robbers, drunks and junkies reigned over the darkness, the cold and the rain.

  Gunvald Larsson was tired. He had not slept the previous night but had lain awake thinking about ULAG, flying presidential heads and such. Then he had missed both lunch and dinner, and for hours, mostly out of doors, had been working with Einar Rönn, who was very much in need of a helping hand. Gunvald Larsson had a formidable constitution, physically and mentally, but it could not stand up to absolutely anything.

  They had an electric percolator in the offices and he kept sugar and a few teabags in one of his desk drawers. He poured water into the coffee pot, plugged it in and waited. Since childhood he had known that the use of teabags was about as tasteful as putting condoms in the teapot, but here he had no choice in the matter.

  When the tea was more or less as brewed as it could be, he took his private cup out of his desk—the others used plastic cups—then sat down at his desk and at once took several large hot gulps to warm himself up. Then he took all his papers out of his briefcase and began to read. He was in a bad mood, frowning heavily, a wedge of flesh forming above his nose. After a while even his blond eyebrows were furrowed, too.

  Something was bound to go wrong, he was sure.

  But what?

  He fetched Säpo’s close-range-security plans from Melander’s desk. They were almost illegible because of the myriads of abbreviations in the text, but all the same he worked his way through it page by page, studying the appended tables and sketches thoroughly.

  Like the others in the group, he had to admit that the plan seemed unassailable. Eric Möller was a specialist and his assessments correct. Close-range security was an easier game anyhow.

  The surveillance of what Möller called “sensitive areas” was to begin at midnight. Gunvald Larsson looked at the clock on the wall. Nine minutes to twelve, so some of the four hundred security police mentioned in the text would now be on their way out to get wet.

  He put the papers aside and went on to think about long-range protection. Logården was a suitable spot not only for Möller; the King and this damned American would both be standing there as if on a platform, exposed to expert longdistance snipers from both Blasieholmen and Skeppsholmen, not to mention the boats on Strömmen and along the quays.

  But was there really any cause for alarm? The five thinkers—that was to say, himself, Beck, Melander, Rönn and Skacke—had recognized all these dangers long ago. The bridge over to Skeppsholmen had been blocked some hours ago, and the buildings along Blasieholm quay had been rigorously checked, especially the Grand Hotel, which had a great many windows.

  Gunvald Larsson sighed and leafed aimlessly through the papers. The sewers and other tunnels under Logården were few and easy to check, provided people either had good rubber coveralls or else did not mind their clothes being ruined.

  The clock on the wall clicked. Twelve exactly.

  He looked at his own chronograph. The wall clock was wrong as usual, one minute twenty-three seconds slow, to be precise. He got up to put it right.

  At that moment, there was a knock on the door.

  The members of the group never knocked, so it had to be someone else.

  “Come in,” said Gunvald Larsson.

  A girl came into the room. Well, a woman. She looked to be somewhere between twenty-three and thirty.

  After a hesitant look at Gunvald Larsson, she said, “Hi.”

  “Good evening,” said Gunvald Larsson with great reserve. He was standing with his back to his desk, his arms folded. “What can I do for you?”

  “I recognize you, of course,” she said. “You’re Gunvald Larsson from the Violence Division.”

  He said nothing.

  “But you probably don’t recognize me.”

  Gunvald Larsson looked at her. She had ash-blond hair, blue eyes and regular features. Quite tall, five ten or so, quite good-looking, simply and carefully dressed in a gray polo shirt, well-pressed blue slacks and low-heeled shoes. She looked too calm to have anything up her sleeve, but he was almost certain he had never seen her before. He frowned and stared at her with his china-blue eyes.

  “My name’s Ruth Salomonsson,” she informed him. “I work here. In the Investigation Bureau.”

  “As what?”

  “Police assistant,” she said. “I’m on duty now. That is, I’m just having a break.”

  Gunvald Larsson remembered his tea, half turned and swallowed it down in one gulp.

  “Do you want to see my card?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  She took her identity card out of the right-hand back pocket of her slacks and handed it to him. Gunvald Larsson studied it carefully. Twenty-five. That might well be right. He handed it back to her.

  “What is it you want?”

  “I know you’re working on this special job under Chief Inspector Beck, the Stockholm chief and the National Commissioner.”

  “Beck will do. Where did you hear that?”

  “Oh, you know what a lot of talk there is around here. And …”

  “And what?”

  “Well, they say that you’re looking for a certain person, whose name I’m not sure about. But I’ve heard the description.”

  “Where?”

  “In the Identification Department. I’ve a friend working there.”

  “If you’ve got anything to say, then let’s have it,” said Gunvald Larsson.

  “Won’t you ask me to sit down?”

  “No, I hadn’t thought I would. What’s it about?”

  “Well, a few weeks ago—”

  “When?” interrupted Gunvald Larsson. “I’m only interested in facts.”

  She looked resignedly at him. “It was in actual fact Monday, the fourth of November.”

  Gunvald Larsson nodded encouragingly. “What happened on Monday the fourth?”

  “Well, a friend of mine and I had agreed to go out dancing. We went to the Amarante—”

  Gunvald Larsson interrupted her at once. “The Amarante? Can you dance there?”

  She did not reply.

  “Do they have dancing at the Amarante?” he repeated.

  She suddenly seemed timid and shook her head.

  “What did you and your friend do then?”

  “We … we went into the bar.”

  “Together?”

  “No.”

  “What happened then?”

  “I met a Danish businessman, who said his name was Jörgensen.”

  “Uh-huh. And then?”

  “Then we went back to my place.”

  “Uh-huh. And what happened there?”

  “What do you think?”

  “I never have preconceived ideas,” said Gunvald Larsson. “Especially about other people’s private lives.”

  She bit her lip. “We were t
ogether,” she said defiantly. “Slept with each other, to put it nicely. Then he left and I’ve never seen him again.”

  A vein in Gunvald Larsson’s right temple swelled. He walked around the desk and sat down. Then he thumped his right fist on the top of the desk so hard that the electric wall clock stopped, at the wrong time what’s more—one minute, thirty-three seconds slow.

  “What kind of goddamn joke is this?” he said angrily. “What do you want me to do? Put up notices about the police providing free broads, who can be found in the bar at the Amarante? What are your hours? Mondays from five to eleven, say?”

  “I must say I didn’t expect such a rigid and old-fashioned attitude,” she said. “I’m twenty-five, unmarried and childless, and at the moment wish to remain so.”

  “Twenty-five?”

  “And unmarried and childless,” she said. “Are you trying to tell me I have no right to a sex life of my own?”

  “No,” said Gunvald Larsson. “Of course you do. As long as I’m not mixed up in it.”

  “I think I can guarantee that you won’t be.”

  Gunvald Larsson caught the sarcasm and again struck the desk with his fist, this time so hard that it hurt all the way to his elbow. He grimaced.

  “Female cops who sit in hotel bars and pick up men,” he said. “And then come around to bullshit about Danes.”

  He looked at the stopped clock and then at his watch. “Coffee break must be over now,” he said. “Out!”

  “I came here to try to be useful,” she said. “But that’s obviously a waste of time.”

  “Obviously.”

  “So I won’t tell you the rest.”

  “I’m not interested in pornography.”

  “Neither am I,” she said.

  “What’s the rest then?”

  “I liked this guy,” she said. “He was educated and pleasant, and good in other ways.” She looked coldly at Gunvald Larsson. “Remarkably good, even.”

  Gunvald Larsson said nothing.

  “Then ten days later I telephoned the hotel where he said he was staying.”

  “Oh?” said Gunvald Larsson.

  “Yes, and the receptionist said there was no guest by that name staying in the hotel and there never had been.”

  “Extremely interesting. He probably goes around testing out police girls in different countries for some kind of sexual report. It’ll probably be a best-seller. Have you made sure you’ll get a cut?”

  “You’re absolutely impossible,” she said.

  “You think so?” said Gunvald Larsson politely.

  “Anyhow, I met my friend yesterday. She spoke to him for a while, you see, before we went back to my place.

  “And where do you live?”

  “Twenty-seven Karlavägen.”

  “Thank you. If I get an address book for Christmas, I’ll write it in.”

  She began to look angry then, and obstinate.

  “But I won’t get one,” said Gunvald Larsson conversationally. “I buy all my Christmas presents myself.”

  “My friend worked in Denmark for several years and she said that if he was Danish, then he was from a very strange part of the country. She said his Danish was the kind that was spoken at the turn of the century.”

  “And how old is your friend?”

  “Twenty-eight.”

  “And what does she do?”

  “She’s studying Scandinavian languages at the university.”

  Gunvald Larsson mistrusted many things in this world, and one of them was a university education. But now he was beginning to look slightly thoughtful.

  “Go on,” he said.

  “Today I looked into the aliens register and checked. The name isn’t there either.”

  “What did you say his name was?”

  “Reinhard Jörgensen.”

  Gunvald Larsson rose and went over to Melander’s desk. “And what did he look like?”

  “Much like you, though twenty years younger. And he had sideburns.”

  “Was he as tall as I am, for instance?”

  “Almost, anyhow. But he certainly weighed less.”

  “Not many people are as tall as I am.”

  “He may have been a few inches shorter.”

  “And he said his name was Reinhard?”

  “Yes.”

  “Had he any special identifying marks?”

  “No. That is, he was very sunburnt, except …”

  “Except?”

  “Except in places where men aren’t usually sunburnt.”

  “And he spoke Danish?”

  “Yes. I thought it sounded pretty authentic. Until my friend brought it up.”

  Gunvald Larsson had taken a brown envelope out of one of Melander’s letter trays. He weighed it in his hand for a moment and then took out a seven-by-ten photograph. He handed it to Ruth Salomonsson.

  “Did he look like this?”

  “Yes, that’s him, but that’s about two years old, I’d say. At least.”

  She peered more closely at the photograph. “Bad quality,” she said.

  “It’s an enlargement extracted from a group photograph on a small negative.”

  “Anyhow, that’s him all right. I’m certain of it. What’s his real name?”

  “Reinhard Heydt. He seems to be South African. What did he say he was doing here?”

  “Business. Buying and selling some complicated machinery of some kind.”

  “And you met him on the fourth in the evening?”

  “Yes.”

  “Was he alone?”

  “Yes.”

  “When did you last see him?”

  “The next morning, at about six o’clock.”

  “Did he have a car?”

  “Not with him, anyhow.”

  “Where did he say he was staying?”

  “The Grand.”

  “Do you know anything else?”

  “No, nothing whatsoever.”

  “Okay. Thanks for coming,” said Larsson, more kindly now.

  “Don’t mention it.”

  “I said one or two ill-considered things before.”

  “All that about free broads and so on?” she said, smiling.

  “No,” said Gunvald Larsson. “About women police. We need a lot more.”

  “My coffee break is definitely over now,” she said, turning to go.

  “Just a moment,” said Gunvald Larsson. He tapped the photograph with his knuckles. “This guy’s dangerous.”

  “To whom?”

  “Everyone. Anyone. You should let us know if you ever catch sight of him again.”

  “Has he killed anyone?”

  “Many people,” said Gunvald Larsson. “Far too many.”

  In the end, Martin Beck had quite a pleasant evening. There were already seven or eight people around the kitchen table when he arrived, and he had met some of them before.

  Among them was a young man named Kent, who a few years ago had said that he was thinking of joining the police. Martin Beck had not seen him since and asked him how he’d made out.

  “At the Police College?”

  “Yes.”

  “I got in, but halfway through the term I had to leave. It was an absolute madhouse.”

  “What are you doing now?”

  “Sanitation Department. A garbage man. It’s a hell of an improvement.”

  As was usual around Rhea’s kitchen table, the conversation was lively and fluent, moving from one subject to another. Martin Beck sat relaxing in silence, now and again sipping at his wine. He had decided to have no more than one glass. Only once was the notorious Senator mentioned. Some were thinking of demonstrating, others satisfied with grumbling at the government. Then Rhea began talking about Gascony fish soup and lobsters and Brittany, thus putting an end to political arguments.

  She was to go away on Sunday, to a sister who was constantly in need of help of one kind or another.

  At one o’clock she shooed out all her guests, except Martin Beck, of
course, who hardly counted as a guest any longer.

  “You’ll be absolutely pooped tomorrow if you don’t go to bed at once,” she said.

  She also went to bed at once, but half an hour later she had to get up again and go out to the kitchen. Martin Beck heard her clattering about at the stove, but was too tired to be able to think about au gratin ham sandwiches with parmesan, so he stayed where he was.

  She came back a little later, thumped about in the bed for a while and then snuggled up close to him. She was warm, her skin soft and covered with almost invisible short fair hairs.

  “Martin?” she said softly, testing to see if he was awake.

  “Mmm.”

  “I have to tell you something.”

  “Mmm.”

  “When you were here last Thursday, you were very tired and went to bed before me. I read for an hour or two. But you know how damned inquisitive I am, so I opened your briefcase and looked through your papers.”

  “Mmm.”

  “There was a file with a photograph in it of someone named Reinhard Heydt.”

  “Mmm.”

  “I thought of something that might be important.”

  “Mmm.”

  “I saw that guy about three weeks ago. A large, blond man about thirty. We bumped into each other by chance when I was up at your place in Köpmangatan. Then we walked through Bollhus Alley. He was only two steps behind me, so I let him pass. He was a Nordic-European type and I thought he was a tourist, because he had a map of Stockholm in one hand. He had sideburns. Blond ones.”

  Martin Beck was immediately wide awake. “Did he say anything?”

  “No, nothing. He just walked past. But a few minutes later I saw him again. He was getting into a green car with Swedish plates. I’m bad on cars and don’t know what make it was. I must have looked rather specially at the letters though, on the plates because I remember they were GOZ, but I forgot the numbers. I’m not sure I even saw them. I’ve got a bad memory for figures, anyhow.”

  Martin Beck was at the phone dialing Larsson’s number in Bollmora before Rhea even got her legs out of bed.

  “New world speed record out of beloved’s bed,” she said.

  Martin Beck waited impatiently while the number rang twelve times. No one answered.

  He hung up and called up the central exchange.

  “Do you know if Gunvald Larsson’s in the building?”

  “He was here ten minutes ago.”