Free Falling, As If in a Dream
Page 56
“Nothing else?”
“Nothing you want to hear about,” said Persson. “That particular part I took care of when I and the woman I’m involved with took the boat over to Finland. Somewhere on a level with Landsort where it’s supposed to be three hundred feet deep. She’s Finnish, by the way, so we were going to see her elderly parents. Old as the hills, frisky as squirrels. Must be the sauna.”
“Berg,” said Johansson. “Did you tell him?”
“No,” said Persson. “Why would I do that? He had enough troubles of his own.”
“So why did you wait fifteen years with Hedberg? Couldn’t you just as well have left it at that?”
“Your fault, Lars,” said Persson. “When you showed up at my place a few months ago and started asking about Waltin, I realized the hour had come. You’re the man who can see around corners,” said Persson and grinned.
“So it was really my fault,” said Johansson.
“Depends on what you mean by fault,” said Persson, shrugging his shoulders. “True, you did say to me that you wanted to boil the bastard for glue, but I really did it for Erik’s sake.”
“For Erik Berg’s sake?”
“Who else?” said Persson. “What do you think would have happened to his reputation if you’d dragged Hedberg into Stockholm District Court? What do you think would have happened to the organization? To you too for that matter. You were operations head with us for six years. If Erik had still been alive, he would surely have ended up in jail too. I did it to be on the safe side, if nothing else. I think you would have been able to keep from laughing when the media vultures started feasting on you. Because you don’t really think they would have been content with Waltin and Hedberg?”
“I understand what you mean,” said Johansson, and as he said that he thought of his wife.
“So who helped you?” said Johansson. It’s over now, he thought.
“Last question,” said Persson. “Are we agreed on that?”
“Yes,” said Johansson. “After this we draw a line through this.”
“Cheers to the deceased,” said Persson, raising his glass. “That man was more than just a mouth.”
“Cheers to him,” said Johansson. You already knew that, didn’t you? he thought.
“I have a present for you, by the way,” said Johansson. He stuck his hand in his pants pocket and handed over the copper-sheathed lead bullet he had brought with him from work when he went to the funeral.
“The renowned seventy-five-percenter,” said Persson, holding it up between his thumb and index finger in his improbably large hand.
“So you know that,” said Johansson.
“Our deceased friend told me,” said Persson. “He had pretty good ears, you know.”
“I’ve understood that,” said Johansson.
“I have three brothers and three sisters,” said Persson. “Combined they’ve collected a dozen kids. Have I told you that?”
“No,” said Johansson. “I actually have three brothers and three sisters too.” Combined we have even more children than you all, he thought.
“I know that too,” said Persson, studying the bullet he was holding in his hand. “My nephews and nieces are grown now, although when they were little I used to do magic tricks for them. Whenever they had a party, Uncle Åke would do magic for them. I got pretty good, actually. Probably could even have supported myself doing that. It’s in your fingers, and once you learn it, it never goes away.”
“I believe you,” said Johansson.
“Good,” said Persson. “How would it be otherwise? If people like you and me couldn’t trust each other.”
“Not so good. Really bad, maybe. I believe that,” Johansson agreed, sipping his highball.
“So what do you think about this?” said Persson. He pulled down the sleeve on his right arm, showed the bullet he was holding in his fingers, raised his hand, clenched it, turned his giant fist before he opened it again and showed his empty hand.
“Abracadabra,” said Persson.
104
The same evening, when his wife came home and they’d gone to bed, he dreamed. The only nightmare he could remember having as an adult. No ether-induced stupor this time; he hadn’t had very much to drink, and he was definitely not eleven years old anymore. Even so he had fallen freely.
Fallen freely, as if in a dream. Simply whirled down and down, fell headfirst into a black hole that never ended. He sat upright in bed without knowing whether he was alive or dead. He must have done something more, because Pia was holding his arm so hard that it hurt. Even though his muscles were tensed like rope.
“What’s going on, Lars? God, I was frightened.”
“I’m alive,” he said. Am I? he thought.
“Of course you’re alive,” said Pia, stroking his cheek. “It was only a dream. A nightmare. I guess you’re not used to them. Don’t forget you’ve promised me to live to be a hundred.”
“I haven’t forgotten. I promise,” said Johansson, shaking his head. I’m alive, he thought.
“Nothing else has happened? Is there anything you want to say? Nothing you’ve forgotten to tell me?”
“I’m going to quit my job,” said Johansson. “I’ve already talked with them. I’m through with this now. I really thought I never would be, but now I am.”
“And nothing else has happened? Something I ought to know?”
“Nothing,” said Johansson. “Nothing has happened.” Finally, he thought. Finally it’s over.
Truth, myth, or just a simple tall tale? Regardless of which, early on Friday morning the first of December a single shot echoed in the park behind Mary Magdalene’s College in Oxford. The previous night had been cold. The ground was white with frost, shrouded in fog that rolled in from the river Cherwell, when the largest of the park’s deer had to sacrifice his life. Still the largest of them all but declining the past few years. Now he mostly created disorder in the herd, bothered the hinds and held back the younger, more energetic stags. For that reason someone decided he should be removed.
The man who held the shotgun was a thirty-year-old professional hunter from one of the nearby estates. Among many other things his employer was also a senior fellow of Magdalen, and his own hunter took care of the wildlife at the College as a part-time job. But no proctor in a Spanish cloak and tall black hat, because that belonged to a time long past. Instead a young, very professional game warden in a green cap and oilskin jacket who made certain there was a proper backstop behind the prey before he shot, who had loaded the bullet the evening before so as not to unnecessarily disturb the peace in the halls of learning, who made the suffering brief and put the bullet in the deer’s neck.
The deer that collapses on the spot, on head and horns, with curled-up front legs and a few final kicks with the back hooves. The red blood that colors the white frost, the final snorting exhalation. Red blood that shows up especially well against white frost, time that stops for a moment. But no more than that, and for the others in the herd life will immediately go on.
Truth, myth, or just a simple tall tale? Regardless of which, on the first Sunday in Advent, Sunday the third of December, there was a dinner at Magdalen College in memory of a recently deceased honorary fellow. Not a remarkable dinner, simply a typical English gentlemen’s dinner, with venison steak, brown gravy, and overcooked vegetables, but the wine they served was excellent. A Romanée-Conti from the great year of 1985, a large quantity of which the special adviser had purchased long before at three-hundred-year-old Berry Bros. & Rudd on St. James Street in London, and also took the opportunity to send a couple of cases to the wine cellar at Magdalen.
The English upper classes have the good custom of almost never giving speeches during dinner. Dinner is eaten every day, dinner speeches are given only on special occasions, and this particular day one of the dinner guests did give a speech. A memorial speech to the deceased.
The speaker was himself both an honorary fellow and a member of the governing bo
dy of another college. It had been founded more than five hundred years later and in a completely different era than when the buildings were erected to honor the memory of the foremost of Jesus’s female disciples. It was called St. Antony’s College, which was an honorable enough name compared with all the other colleges at Oxford, but insiders simply called it “The Spy College.” Founded after the most recent world conflagration by donors who almost always wanted to be anonymous and all of whom seemed to have unlimited amounts of money. As an academic institution the logical answer to the Western powers’ demand for better, more educated, and more reliable brains in the Western security agencies. Perhaps the historical inheritance of the five traitors from Cambridge, if you preferred to think along such lines.
The dinner speaker was named Michael Liska, born in Hungary during the Second World War, fled as a teenager to the U.S. after the revolt against the Russians in 1956. He had no notable academic credentials, especially not in the company in which he found himself. He had worked his entire adult life for the CIA, a successful career, and when he had retired a few years ago he had been deputy director of the organization. Even substituted as its director on a few occasions when circumstances compelled the president of the United States to make rapid, radical changes.
A big, burly fellow who was always called “The Bear,” even though “Liska” means “fox” in Hungarian. Michael “The Bear” Liska, who was now a healthy retiree of sixty-seven. Even though as a teenager he climbed up on a Russian T54 in the streets of Budapest, threw a Molotov cocktail through the open turret door, and sent a volley of bullets through the body of the driver when he tried to crawl out of his burning tank.
About this and other things of the same sort he had of course not said a word. Instead, for his learned listeners he talked about his Swedish friend and comrade-in-arms of almost forty years.
He began his memorial oration by recounting his friend’s scientific achievements. The decisive contributions he had made to harmonic analysis in mathematics, about their significance for coding and encryption in an intelligence operation.
Liska also placed him in a historical perspective. The last, and youngest, of the three great Swedish mathematicians who used the gift that only the Lord God Almighty could have given them, to protect freedom and law.
Arne Beurling, who had been the first of them. Professor of mathematics at the University of Uppsala, who in 1940 reluctantly reported for service as a sergeant with the Defense staff’s intelligence division. Then in fourteen days he broke the Germans’ secret telecommunications codes with the help of paper, pen, harmonic analysis, and a highly unusual mind.
His contemporary colleague Johan Forselius, professor of mathematics at the Royal Technical Academy, who with the computers of the new era and his own contributions to prime number theory made sure that the messages the democracies of the Western world chose to conceal would also remain concealed in practice. In the spirit of the time that was then required.
Then the youngest of the three, for whom they were now gathered to grant a final farewell. Forselius’s disciple, professor of mathematics at the University of Stockholm at the age of twenty-nine. His dissertation on stochastic variables and harmonic divisions for many years considerably facilitated the uncovering of every dictator’s evil projects and secret traps.
Liska concluded his talk by quoting the final words in a letter he had received from his old friend only a month or so before he died.
“Regardless of whether truth is absolute or relative, and quite apart from the fact that many of us constantly seek it, in the end it is nonetheless hidden from almost all of us. As a rule out of necessity, and if for no other reason than out of concern for those who would not understand anyway.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Leif GW Persson has chronicled the political and social development of modern Swedish society in his award-winning novels for more than three decades. Born in Stockholm, Persson has served as an adviser to the Swedish Ministry of Justice and is Sweden’s most renowned psychological profiler. He is a professor at Sweden’s National Police Board and is considered the country’s foremost expert on crime.
Also available in eBook format by this author:
Between Summer’s Longing and Winter’s End • 978-0-307-37947-4
Another Time, Another Life • 978-0-307-90705-9
Coming in Spring 2015 from Leif GW Persson:
Linda—As in the Linda Murder • 978-0-307-90766-0
For more information on Pantheon Books:
www.pantheonbooks.com