Free Falling, As If in a Dream

by Free Falling, As If in a Dream (retail) (epub)

  “Let bygones be bygones,” he summarized.

  According to Johansson a person should be very careful about believing everything that appeared in the newspaper. What he’d done was simply assign a few co-workers to look over the indexing of the material. That was all, and it was high time, by the way, that it was done.

  “You don’t think it was Christer Pettersson who did it?” his host interrupted.

  “Because it’s you who’s asking,” said Johansson, “no. I never have.”

  “But why in the name of God then,” objected his host. “Lisbeth actually singles him out.”

  “Even the best can make a mistake,” said Johansson.

  “You’ll have to excuse me but the logic of what you’re saying—”

  “He doesn’t feel right,” interrupted Johansson, indicating by rubbing his right index finger against his right thumb. “If you want details I can ask one of my co-workers to give you a presentation.”

  “To me he feels quite right,” said the special adviser. “Unfortunately,” he added.

  According to Johansson’s host, Christer Pettersson was a step in a logical progression. A woeful progression to be sure, but nonetheless a logical one. First there was an eccentric aristocrat, with certain radical ideas for the time, who murdered Gustav III at an opera masquerade for the upper classes. Then a middle-class child who had gone wrong in life and grew up to be a drug-addled hooligan who shot his own prime minister on the street. In the midst of all the ordinary citizens. Now most recently a crazy Serb had cut down the country’s foreign minister in the most bestial way when she was shopping for clothes at the city’s largest department store among all the other prosperous middle-class female shoppers.

  “What should we expect next time, Johansson?” asked his guest with a sorrowful expression. “The old orangutan from the Rue de Morgue? Or perhaps the swamp adder in Conan Doyle’s story about the speckled band?”

  “More of the opera masquerade, if you ask me,” said Johansson. “There’s no time for monkeys or adders. They’re too unpredictable.”

  “Yet another solitary madman, if you ask me,” said the special adviser. “Even solitary madmen can change the world, unfortunately. They do it all the time, actually.”

  Because they were still on the subject Johansson had a question of his own. More precisely, one of his many co-workers had a question for his host, and he had actually promised to ask him.

  “She knows we know each other,” Johansson explained. “She worked with me at SePo.”

  “Of course,” said the special adviser. Johansson was free to ask him about everything. In contrast to all his colleagues, who he was now much too old and tired to bear talking with.

  The prime minister’s plans to go to the movies that evening more than twenty years ago. Just how known were they at his office in Rosenbad?

  “I’ve already been asked that question,” said the special adviser, smiling.

  “I know,” said Johansson. “I’ve read the interview. I also know that you spoke with Berg about the matter in the afternoon of the same day Palme was shot. Not much was said.”

  “How would that look, Johansson? If someone like me exchanged confidences with people like that? It’s bad enough that they exchange confidences with each other, and I’m actually a little surprised that Berg, who was a relatively well-organized person for being a policeman, had the poor judgment to submit a memo about our secret conversation into the investigation. And what is it that suddenly causes me to sense the sweet odor of a so-called conspiracy in the vicinity of the victim?”

  “We’re that way, us cops,” said Johansson. “We wonder about strange coincidences, write little notes to each other.”

  “Yes, I’ve realized that. Personally I keep such things in my head. My own head.”

  “Tell me about it,” said Johansson. “You knew the victim. Personally I never met him. What was he like? As a person?”

  A talented person. At the same time a person of feeling. An impulsive person. In a good mood a very charming, entertaining, and considerate person. In a bad mood he was a different person, and in the worst case his own enemy.

  “I’ve understood that he was very talented,” said Johansson.

  “Oh well,” said the special adviser. “He had that quick, superficial, intuitive gift. Verbal, educated, the right background. He had all that in abundance. Although the really difficult questions he preferred to avoid. The questions that don’t have any definite answers. Or, in the best case, several answers, none of which is clearly better than the others. The kinds of questions that I, and you too, Johansson, are drawn to. Like the moth that’s drawn to the kerosene lamp. Although what you want to know is actually something else,” he added.

  “What do you mean by that?” said Johansson.

  “You’re wondering if he had the habit of running around among his co-workers, asking them what movies he should see?”

  “Did he do that?”

  “When he was in the mood. As I already suggested. When Olof was happy and suddenly stood there in the doorway to your office and just wanted to talk a little, then you were happy too. Genuine happiness and not so strange perhaps considering who he was and considering who you were. One time he even asked me if I could recommend a film.”

  “So what did you say?” said Johansson.

  “That I never went to the movies,” said the special adviser. “That I thought it was an overrated diversion. The temple of the fearful. Wasn’t that what Harry Martinson said? Besides, I thought it was inappropriate for purely security reasons for him to do that. If it really was absolutely necessary for him, I assumed he would inform those responsible for his security in good time. The secret police, myself, all the others affected.”

  “So what did he say?” asked Johansson.

  “That I was a real cheerful little fellow,” said the special adviser. “He was in a good mood that day.”

  “The day he was murdered then,” said Johansson.

  “The only time he asked me for movie advice I’ve just mentioned to you. That was long before he died. Then I think he never returned to the question. I know I would recommend the occasional ethnic restaurant to him. Sure. Could he have asked someone else? Perhaps. I don’t know. I didn’t even know that he had such plans the day he was murdered. I remember that Berg was nagging about that when we talked on the phone in the afternoon.”

  “But you didn’t talk with the prime minister about it?”

  “No,” said the special adviser. “It never happened, but considering what did happen perhaps I ought to have done that.”

  Suddenly he’s as clear as crystal, thought Johansson. Not a trace of all the wine he’s poured into himself. Suddenly a completely different person.

  During the remainder of the evening the special adviser quickly recovered his usual amiable self—given that he was in the mood—and, just as expected, the dinner degenerated in the pleasant manner that bourgeois dinners supposedly never deviated from in the good old days.

  First they played billiards. The evening’s host insisted. He demanded to teach Johansson how you played billiards. If Johansson refused, it wasn’t the first time the issue had come up, the alternative was that Johansson teach him how to shoot a pistol and on the police department’s own firing range besides.

  “Believe it or not, Johansson, but when I did my military service I was actually an excellent rifleman.”

  Faced with this alternative Johansson had no choice. He played billiards with the special adviser, and even though it was the second time in his life he thrashed him soundly. The special adviser excused himself citing all the good wine with dinner and offering difficult-to-interpret statements about the obligations of being a good host.

  Then they had a light supper in the special adviser’s laboratory-like kitchen. Herring; crayfish; and Jansson’s temptation, grilled sausages; small beef patties topped with fried eggs; a multitude of various kinds of schnapps; and an improbable selection
of beers. Despite their health-impairing qualities and obviously solely out of consideration for his guest.

  “I thought you would surely want a little pilsner before going to bed,” said the special adviser, raising his foaming glass.

  When Johansson was standing on the front steps with his hand extended to say farewell, his host anticipated him in the most Mediterranean manner. Got up on tiptoe, placed his arms on his shoulders, and gave him two moist kisses, one on each cheek. When the taxi drove away he was still standing there. With raised arms, the baggy green jacket pulled up over his belly. In his delicate boy tenor he’d given his guest a concluding homage in song. The choice of music quite certainly inspired by the instructive conversation they’d carried on during dinner.

  “We’ll meet again, don’t know where, don’t know when, but I know we’ll meet again…some sunny day…”

  30

  What Anna Holt was up to was unclear. Lewin and Mattei on the other hand devoted the whole weekend to going through the investigation’s material on more qualified perpetrators. So far, however, none of the individuals they had scrutinized was particularly impressive, measured by Johansson’s standards. Mattei was also struck by the fact that the number of suspects of foreign origin was surprisingly small. Normally this number would be considerable, and haunting the back of her mind was also the testimony of Witness Three, the woman who shouted “fucking gook” at the man who’d run into her only two hundred yards from the crime scene.

  Mattei was clear about why almost immediately. As so often before, it was due to the way the case files had been registered. The usual proportions obtained, but this time the perpetrators of foreign origin had been piled under common lead files with titles such as “German Terrorism,” “PKK Track,” “Middle East including Israel,” “South Africa,” “Iran/Iraq,” “Turkey,” and “India/Pakistan.” Clearly the most common reason that an individual ended up in one pile and not another was the suspected perpetrator’s ethnic origin, or more precisely the Swedish police’s perception of his ethnic origin, but the exceptions were numerous and the logic far from crystal clear.

  In the lead file that dealt with German terrorism, a number of Swedes appeared that SePo had surveyed in the 1970s and ’80s in connection with the drama at the West German embassy and the plans to kidnap the Swedish minister for immigration Anna-Greta Leijon. It was also here that Mattei stumbled on the first spotlighted perpetrator who fit Johansson’s template. A Swedish former paratrooper from Karlsborg who during the seventies was suspected of having robbed a number of banks in Germany along with some members of the Red Army Faction. What he had been up to later was unclear. Where he was, whether he was alive or dead, was also unclear.

  On the other hand it was clear that he had attracted the interest of the Palme investigators. Along with thirty-some other named Swedish military personnel, he was also included in the so-called “military track.” There were even two cross-references in the files to make it easier to find him. That was something that Mattei was not otherwise accustomed to finding in the course of her diligent reading.

  Why he would have reason to murder Palme was, however, veiled in darkness.

  So what do I do about you then, little old man? sighed Mattei, even though he must be almost twice as old as she was if he was still alive.

  Serbs and Croats, Bosnians and Slovenes, Christians and Muslims all over the place, and even though they’d been at one another’s throats since ancient times the Swedish police finally united them all under a joint lead file, “Suspected Perpetrators with Yugoslav Connection.” Police logic left it at that, both in the Balkans and elsewhere in the wide world outside Sweden.

  Basically every Yugoslav gangster who had been active in Sweden and had sufficient hair on his chest was also on the investigation’s list of conceivable or even probable Palme assassins. The majority of them were ordinary felons, convicted for murder and robbery, blackmail, hired gun and protection rackets, and everything else that could provide a person with a decent income without having to stoop to ordinary wage labor.

  Where committing violence against others was concerned they had an impressive list of credits. Aggravated and instrumental violence to enrich themselves. Their motives for also having murdered Sweden’s prime minister, like the reasons that were provided, were consistently weak or nonexistent. Various anonymous informants, the classic means among hoods and bandits to rat out a competitor, old police prejudices pulled out of the archives where they’d been unexamined for years.

  The oldest contribution to the “Yugoslav track” came from the Swedish secret police and was already fifteen years old at the time of the assassination. Three terrorist actions from the early 1970s: the occupation of the Yugoslav consulate in Gothenburg in February 1971, the embassy occupation and murder of the ambassador in Stockholm two months later, the airplane hijacking at Bulltofta in Malmö in September of the following year. The perpetrators were in all cases Croatian activists involved in armed resistance against the Serbian administration of the Yugoslav republic.

  In the extensive investigation, mixed reasons were given for why these terrorists could have murdered Palme. As individuals they were described as “fascists,” “political extremists,” “aggressive psychos,” and “extremely violence prone.” In addition they were “hateful” toward the prime minister and the Swedish government that had kept them locked up in jail for fifteen years. On the other hand as far as the law itself was concerned the evidence was nonexistent, the indicators weak and contradictory, the investigative results nil.

  If they really had murdered Palme—“that they had very strong reasons to want to see Olof Palme eliminated and that this motive is one of the most convincing in the entire investigation”—then of course their categorical denial conflicted with their whole terrorist tradition, their worldview, and their own personalities. “It was the most ridiculous thing I’d ever heard,” as one of them summarized their common attitude, when before an interrogation he was named as being suspected of complicity in the murder of the Swedish prime minister.

  I’m inclined to agree with you, and because you’ve been in prison in Kumla the whole time it wasn’t you at any rate who ran into Witness Three on David Bagares gata, thought Lisa Mattei, taking out the binder with the “Iran/Iraq track.”

  All due respect to the violent traditions of the Balkans, but what do we have here? she thought.

  On March 5, less than a week after the murder, an anonymous informant called the Swedish secret police with a tip. The day before in the morning “on Riksgatan between the two parliament buildings” he had observed “a slightly balding man, about thirty-five years old, dressed in a brown coat, black pants, and black shoes.” The man appeared to be “under the influence of something, behaved aggressively, and called out Olof Palme’s name at least three times.” According to the informant, he was “Iranian or possibly Iraqi,” was named “Yussef, or possibly Yussuf, Ibrahim,” and “worked as a dishwasher at the Opera Cellar,” a few blocks away from the Parliament Building.

  The secret police’s searches had yielded no results. At the Opera Cellar there were “so many dishwashers and janitors of foreign extraction that the tip based on the description was of very limited use.” It was thus not possible to locate any “Yussef, alternatively Yussuf, Ibrahim at the referenced place of business.” The one who best agreed with the meager facial description, a Tunisian, first name Ali, had an alibi for the relevant points in time and was still filed in the “Iran/Iraq” binder despite his place of origin and despite the fact that the secret police had eliminated him over twenty years earlier.

  Wonder how the informant knew his name was Yussef? thought Mattei and sighed. And only after another three hours of browsing and reading was it time for her to take yet another binder out of the pile.

  Suleyman Özök, born on February 28, 1949, and thus thirty-seven years old to the day when the prime minister was murdered, had come to Sweden in 1970, trained as a mechanic, and at th
e time of the murder was working as a repairman at Haga Auto Body Repair on Hagagatan in Stockholm. According to the informant “only a stone’s throw from the crime scene.”

  The informant had not demanded to be anonymous other than in relationship to the perpetrator about whom he intended to turn in information. Fourteen days after the murder he visited the detective bureau on Kungsholmsgatan in Stockholm and reported that he was “a hundred and twenty percent certain that Suleyman Özök had murdered Sweden’s prime minister.”

  According to the informant, Özök was actually a secret agent for the Turkish military dictatorship and his work at the auto body repair shop was only a cover. His real mission was to keep the Kurdish refugees in the country under surveillance and if needed conduct “wet work” for his employers.

  Özök was an almost notorious Palme hater, and the reason was the support that Palme and the Swedish government had given to the Kurds who fled from Turkey and sought asylum in Sweden. Özök had access to “at least one pistol and a revolver” that he had shown the informant on several occasions. Most recently, on Tuesday of the same week the prime minister was murdered, he had taken the revolver out of the glove compartment of his car, shown it to the informant, and on the same occasion said that over the weekend he “intended to celebrate my birthday in an honorable way by shooting that swine Olof Palme.”

  The same evening the prime minister was murdered the informant “by pure coincidence” happened to pass Tegnérlunden in Stockholm, “only a stone’s throw from the Grand cinema,” and then discovered that Özök’s private car was parked on the street on the north side of Tegnérlunden. Because he did not know that the prime minister “was sitting watching a movie just then only a stone’s throw farther down the street,” he hadn’t thought any more about it, but instead took the subway home to his apartment on Stigfinnargränd in Hagsätra, where he also spent the night.