The Steel Spring

by Per Wahlöö

  ‘Here’s a list of forty-three individuals who live or are active in the district. They are to be apprehended immediately, searched and put into preventive custody. The regional prosecutor’s office will send officers over to fetch them later today.’

  ‘Er, Inspector?’

  ‘Yes, what is it?’

  ‘What have these people done?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Jensen glanced at the clock. ‘And anyway, you’re the inspector now. The car’s in the usual space. The keys are in the pen tray.’

  He stood up and put on his hat and overcoat. The man at the desk studied the arrest list and said:

  ‘But they’re all …’

  He broke off.

  ‘That’s right,’ said Jensen. ‘They’re all doctors. Goodbye.’

  He picked up his suitcase and went.

  CHAPTER 3

  The airport lay to the south, a long way from the city. Getting there by car from the Sixteenth District police station took an hour and a half if you were lucky. The journey had been considerably longer in the past, but in recent years the inner city had turned increasingly into one huge traffic-flow system, an apparent jumble of flyovers and criss-crossing motorways. Virtually all the older buildings had been pulled down to make more living space for automobiles, a planning solution that had resulted in a city centre apparently consisting of soaring columns of glass, steel and concrete. Divided up into squares and corralled by the multi-lane highways were groups of multi-storey car parks, office buildings and department stores with small shops, cinemas, petrol stations and gleaming chrome snack bars on the ground floors. Many years earlier, when this city plan was being implemented, critical voices had been raised to say that the system would make the city inhuman and uninhabitable. The experts had brushed off the criticism. They argued that a modern city should be built not for pedestrians and horse-drawn carriages but for cars. As on so many other issues, both sides had subsequently been proved right. This was entirely in the spirit of the Accord.

  The taxi moved swiftly through the inner city, plunged into the road tunnel by the Ministry of the Interior and surfaced in an industrial area eight kilometres further south. It continued over a bridge and approached the suburban belt.

  The air was chilly and the skies were cloudless on this early autumn day. Hoar frost veiled the concrete surface of the motorway, and the greyish air, poisoned with exhaust fumes, lay like an enormous bell over people, cars, roads and built-up areas. The experts at the Ministry for Public Health calculated that the polluted air now extended fifty or sixty metres into the air. Just a few years before, the bell of air had been estimated to be just fifteen metres high, with a diameter of twelve kilometres. The latest measurements at ground level showed the area had more than doubled. The investigation had been carried out as part of a routine programme, and had not caused any measures to be taken. The report had been declared confidential, since it was feared that the findings could cause anxiety to certain parts of the population, but before that it had been circulated among senior police officers. Jensen had read it and passed on the papers without comment.

  The traffic was dense but fast moving. The sides of the road were lined with coloured posters reminding people of the forthcoming democratic elections. Posters bearing the image of a lantern-jawed man with thinning hair and vivid blue eyes alternated with others that were just a letter of the alphabet, a big pink ‘A’. The man was the future head of the government, an individual considered to represent the totally interdependent concepts of welfare, security and accord better than anyone else. Married into the royal family, he had previously been the head of the National Confederation. He was currently the Minister for the Interior. Before the grand coalition he had been a social democrat.

  The taxi driver put on the brakes as a policeman signalled to him to stop. They were on their way up on to a long bridge, and ahead of them, constables in green uniforms were busy with a traffic jam. The driver wound down the side window, took a white handkerchief out of his breast pocket and blew his nose. He looked impassively at the grey-black marks on the handkerchief, cleared his throat and spat out of the window.

  ‘Another demonstration,’ he said. ‘We’ll be through in no time.’

  Thirty seconds later, the police constable waved the traffic ahead, and the driver engaged gear and eased the car forward.

  ‘Morons,’ he said. ‘Taking up a whole lane.’

  They met the march up on the bridge. It was not a particularly large one. Jensen made a practised assessment of its size and composition. Between two thousand, five hundred and three thousand people, divided roughly equally between the sexes, and a surprising number of children for a country with a birth rate in permanent decline. Some of the children were so small that they were in pushchairs or sitting on their parents’ shoulders. The demonstrators were carrying placards and banners, and Jensen read the slogans as the march went past. Some were easy to understand. They complained about issues like poor air quality and non-recyclable packaging, but also about the current government. ‘Accorded to Death’ was a recurring slogan. But most of the texts were incomprehensible. They were about solidarity with other races and foreign peoples, countries he’d never heard of and combinations of letters he didn’t understand, but assumed to be acronyms. Some of the marchers were carrying pictures of foreigners with strange names, presumably heads of state or political leaders. The intention appeared to be to sing the praises of some of these and denounce others. There were also placards with a variety of old-fashioned and obsolete slogans and sentiments like class struggle, proletariat, capitalism, imperialism, the working masses, and world revolution. At the front and back of the march there were massed red flags.

  The people in the cars and along the sides of the road seemed wholly unaffected, doing no more than glance distractedly at the flags and placards. The onlookers seemed simply indifferent. Admittedly they all appeared dissatisfied and nervous, with nowhere to go, but their reaction had nothing to do with the demonstration. Jensen knew this from experience.

  The demonstrators were marching four abreast. The police calmly and systematically made way for them and kept the traffic moving. There was no commotion; the whole thing seemed harmless.

  The procession had passed by, and the taxi driver accelerated and asked without much interest:

  ‘Who are that lot? Some kind of socialists?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  The driver looked at his watch.

  ‘Well they’re holding up the traffic. We lost at least three or four minutes back there on the bridge. Why don’t the police clear them off the streets?’

  Jensen said nothing. He knew the answer to the question, nevertheless.

  Demonstrations of that kind had been going on for the previous four years. They were still relatively insignificant in scale, but were being staged increasingly often, with participant numbers seeming to swell each time. The marches always followed roughly the same pattern. They began somewhere in the suburbs and headed for the city centre, either to some foreign embassy or to the coalition parties’ central offices, where the march would break up of its own volition once the participants had chanted slogans for half an hour or so. There was no legislation outlawing demonstrations. In theory it was for the police themselves to decide on an appropriate response. In practice, things worked rather differently. The Ministry of the Interior initially gave orders that the demonstrations were to be halted and dispersed, that placards and banners were to be examined, and confiscated if any of the slogans were considered indecent, distressing or offensive. The clearly stated aim was to protect the general public from experiences that might put people on edge or spread a sense of insecurity. But police intervention had exactly the opposite effect. Despite the fact that these were not mass demonstrations but generally just groups of a few hundred people, attempts to break up the demonstrations led to skirmishes, disorder and serious disruption of the traffic. After a time, the police were ordered to use other meth
ods, but there were no specific instructions on the measures to be taken. The forces of law and order did their best. They stopped some marches, for example, while they subjected all those taking part to breath tests. The constant rise in drunkenness had led the government some years previously to pass a law making the abuse of alcohol illegal, not only in public places but also in the home. Being under the influence of alcohol in any setting at all had therefore become a criminal offence, a fact that had increased the burden of police work almost to breaking point. The new legislation had had no impact on drinking to excess, and it soon proved ineffective in clamping down on the demonstrations as well, since the marchers were never under the influence of alcohol. This strange circumstance was to Jensen’s mind the only essential feature that distinguished the demonstrators from the population as a whole. Two years before, the alcohol policy had changed, with the new focus on price rises and chemical substances. In the meantime, the police had been ordered to leave the demonstrators in peace. It was decided by the government that the police should confine themselves to keeping certain foreign embassies under surveillance and directing the traffic along the march routes. Since then, the demonstrations had passed off calmly, but they were happening increasingly often, and more and more people were joining in, even though there was never a word about them in the papers, on radio or on television. There were rumours, however, of some anxiety at government level. In the most recent elections, voter turnout had slumped in a very disquieting way. No one understood why. Only vague figures had been released for publication, and these were commented on only in the most general terms. And the collaborating parties were engaging this year in propaganda more concentrated than they had ever employed before. The campaign had been launched back in the late spring, and was now accelerating to its peak.

  Jensen had no clear conception of what the real aim of the demonstrations might be, but he thought he had some idea of how and when they had started.

  The pain was intense and caught him off guard; it seared through the right side of his diaphragm, wild and merciless. Everything went black, he hunched over and clenched his teeth so as not to whimper like a dog about to be whipped.

  The driver squinted at him suspiciously but said nothing.

  It seemed a very long time until the spasm ebbed away and the pain reverted to the usual dull ache. In actual fact it was only a matter of minutes. He was panting for breath; he gasped for air and managed to suppress a fit of coughing.

  When he looked up again, they were just passing the suburb where his own apartment lay. The taxi was keeping up a decent speed on the motorway.

  ‘We’ll be there in half an hour,’ said the driver.

  The suburb where Inspector Jensen lived consisted of thirty-six eight-storey blocks of flats, set out in four parallel lines. Between the rows of blocks there were car parks, grassy areas, and play pavilions of transparent plastic for what few children there were. It was all very neatly laid out.

  Further south, the tower blocks grew more spectral and decayed. It was some years since the authorities had solved the housing shortage with a building programme that produced endless blocks of flats like the one where he lived himself. So-called uniform estates, with standard apartments, all identical. But even back then, the older of the tower blocks, paradoxically often located long distances from the inner city, began to lose their occupants. They were abandoned by shopkeepers, property owners, the authorities and the tenants, in that order. Falling birth rates and the shrinking population naturally played their part, too. Deprived of communications and any way of supporting themselves – in the end they also had their water and electricity supplies turned off – the suburbs in question very quickly degenerated into slums. Most of the blocks of flats had only come into existence because private developers hoped to make a quick profit from the housing shortage. They were poorly built, and many of them had already collapsed, sinking like sinister grave mounds into the scrubby undergrowth. The experts at the Ministry of Social Affairs had promoted the concept of letting these residential areas gradually empty themselves and ultimately collapse. Such suburbs were called ‘self-clearance areas’ and were to be viewed as naturally occurring rubbish dumps. The experts’ projections had proved valid except on one point. About five per cent of the flats in the blocks that were still standing continued to be occupied by people that the society of the Accord had somehow failed to take care of. People were sometimes even killed when the old blocks of flats collapsed, as they often did, but neither the property owners nor the authorities were held legally responsible in such cases. A blanket warning not to live in abandoned apartment blocks had been issued, and that was sufficient.

  Jensen looked out of the side window. A self-clearance area stretched away to the right of the motorway. Roughly a third of the blocks were still standing. They were silhouetted like sooty pillars against the ice-blue autumn sky. In the distance he could see a few children playing amongst stacks of wrecked cars and piles of non-reusable glass bottles and indestructible plastic packaging.

  His gaze was calm and expressionless.

  Fifteen minutes later, the taxi stopped outside the airport terminal building. Inspector Jensen paid and climbed out.

  He was still in a lot of pain.

  CHAPTER 4

  The room had two windows with thin, pale blue curtains. The walls were dark blue and the ceiling was white. The bed was also white. It was made of wood and ingeniously constructed.

  Jensen lay perfectly still on his back, arms at his sides. If he moved his right hand five centimetres he could reach the button and ring the bell. If he did that, it would take no longer than fifteen seconds for the door to open and the nurse to come in. He didn’t touch the button. The only thing he could think about was not being sure what the date was. It might be the first of November, but it could also be the second or even the third. He knew he had been in this room for about two months, but he didn’t know exactly how long, and that irritated him.

  He also knew he was alive. This did not surprise him beyond a vague sense of surprise at not being surprised.

  By the far window stood a basket chair. For the past two weeks he had been allowed to sit in that chair twice a day, half an hour in the morning and half an hour in the afternoon. It was afternoon now. He was aware of something that might be a desire to sit in the chair by the window. It was many years since he had felt anything like that.

  The door opened. The man who came in had on a pale grey suit and was of slim build and very tanned. He had dark brown eyes, black curly hair slicked back from his face, and a thin black moustache. He nodded to Jensen and stood at the foot of the bed. As he was flicking through the sheaf of notes hanging from the bedpost, he took out a yellowish cigarette with a long cardboard holder, put it between his lips and rolled it distractedly from one side of his mouth to the other before fishing out a box of matches and lighting up. Then he dropped the dead match on the floor and came gliding to the head of the bed, where he bent over Jensen and looked him in the eye.

  Jensen felt he had had that face in front of him on countless occasions, at brief intervals, for as long as he could remember. The expression in the brown eyes had shifted; it had been worried, soothing, curious, resigned, enquiring or sad. The smell, on the other hand, had always remained the same: hair oil and tobacco smoke. Jensen had a vision of having once seen this man in a mask, with an orange rubber cap pulled well down over his black curls. That time, their surroundings had been drenched in a caustic, blue-white light and the man had been wearing something that looked like a butcher’s apron. He knew with absolute certainty that the man had once, a very long time ago, shaken him by the hand and said something guttural and completely incomprehensible that presumably meant hello or welcome. Or perhaps he had simply been saying his name.

  Today, the man looked cheerful. He smiled and nodded encouragingly, tapped his cigarette ash nonchalantly on to the floor, turned and left the room with rapid steps.

  Soon after, the
nurse appeared. She, too, was tanned and had dark, curly hair, but her eyes were grey. She was wearing blue canvas shoes and a short-sleeved white overall buttoned down the back. Her legs and arms were muscular and shapely. Like the doctor’s, her movements were quick and supple and her touch was light. Jensen knew she was amazingly strong. She had a permanent smile now, even when dealing with bedpans and urine bottles, but he had very often seen her grave and thoughtful, with compressed lips and her black eyebrows knitted in a frown.

  She did not smoke or use any cosmetics, but she sometimes smelt of soap. Today he sensed only a vaguely astringent smell, which was presumably her own. It reminded him of something. When she had drawn back the bedclothes and tucked up his nightshirt, she washed him with a sponge. As she was bending over his legs, he observed the shape of her back and hips beneath the fabric. He wondered what she was wearing under the white overall. He could not remember ever having thought anything like that before.

  The nurse had full lips and short black hairs on her shins. When she smiled you could see that her teeth were rather uneven but very white.

  These two, the doctor and the nurse, had comprised his only direct contact with the world for a long time. He understood nothing of what they said, and by now they had stopped saying things, anyway. Once the doctor had had a newspaper with him, but it had no pictures and the letters of the alphabet were symbols he had never seen before.

  The nurse had very suntanned hands and no rings on her fingers. Once when she thought he was asleep she had scratched herself between the legs.

  When Jensen was sitting in the basket chair by the window, he could see out over a lawn with paved paths and little trees with pink or white flowers.

  Men and women in blue gowns like the one he had on himself were strolling along the paths or sitting at small stone tables playing something, presumably chess. The grounds were not large, and beyond them ran a road where yellow trolleybuses rattled by. Once he had seen a camel out there.