Gentlemen (Klas Ostergren) (FO8)

by Klas Ostergren

  At any rate, Stene Forman had now given Leo an order to go straight to the source. The editor-in-chief of Blixt had thought it all through, and under false pretences he had rung up the Zeverin Precision Tool Company AB to find out if there might be any employees still working there who had been with the company more than thirty years. A sharp and obliging personnel manager had cheerfully informed him that a fellow named Berka – he was listed as Bertil Fredriksson on his pay envelope, but he had always gone by the name of Berka – had worked at that very workshop all those years, ever since the Zeverin Precision Tool Company AB had moved to the Sickla docks. There was no doubt about it – Leo had to go down to Hammarby Harbour and find out what this Berka knew about Tore Hansson.

  That’s where he was now headed, that feverish Leo Morgan, walking past General Motors and the Hedlund Brothers, which was now part of the Grängeskon Corporation; past Luma, Osram and several other small workshops until he reached the Zeverin Precision Tool Company AB, which had been absorbed by the Griffel Corporation. It was a brown-brick building with a zigzag roof with dirty windows above four long aisles where welders, lathe operators and about fifty different machinists and precision-tool makers were producing a deafening noise with sledgehammers, files, machines, tongs, shears, grinding machines and welding equipment. Leo shrank back from the noise as he slipped through a small door and put his hands over his ears. Several younger guys in overalls with ‘Zeverin’ on the back didn’t seem to notice him and kept hammering away at their arduous piecework. A foreman was dashing around, clad in a blue apron and holding a safety representative’s clipboard with a pen stuck behind his ear. He was demonstrating a new blueprint. A state of frenzied activity prevailed. Leo instantly felt like an interloper, a bacillus, a disturbing element in this snorting organism.

  Finally he mustered what courage he had and went over to an older lathe operator to ask for someone named Berka. The man sniggered, shook his head and pointed towards the locker room. That’s where Berka could usually be found.

  Leo kept close to the wall as he headed down an aisle, trying not to attract anyone’s attention, until he came to the locker room. There he found a coffee vending machine, and in front of the vending machine was a stooped and disreputable-looking little man with a furrowed face and brown skin. He was wearing a painter’s cap with the word ‘Beckers’ on the turned-up visor. Leo asked for Berka, and the little man nodded and shouted that it was him, he was none other than Berka. He smelled of stale alcohol.

  Berka was not the least bit reticent. He was perfectly willing to submit to an interview regarding what it felt like to be nearing retirement, but the bosses didn’t like anyone poking around in the workshop so it would be best if they went somewhere more secluded. Berka coughed as if he were about to heave out his lungs, spat out some yellowish green goop onto the asphalt floor, and then swept away the mess with a push broom. He pointed at a little shed towards the end of the aisle. ‘More private,’ Berka said, trying to look sly and wink one eye, but he couldn’t manage it; he winked both his eyes at the same time.

  Berka led the way, all of a sudden looking both cocky and pompous. He was going to be interviewed by the press. No photographer? Well, maybe that could be arranged later on. He was so damn photogenic, after all. He had the broom over his shoulder and was waddling like a little tyke on his way to the football field. He also attempted to whistle, but then he just started coughing up that nasty slime again. It was a cold that he had. This damned springtime, everyone was going around with a runny nose. Yes, dammit, a fucking springtime cold.

  Inside the little shed he switched on a bare bulb and closed the door behind his guest. It was slightly less noisy in there, but Leo still had to shout to be heard. He offered Berka a smoke and introduced himself as Peter Erixon. Berka accepted the cigarette and introduced himself correctly as Berka.

  Purely as a formality, this Peter Erixon asked a couple of questions about what it was like to work at the Zeverin Precision Tool Company AB – the type of questions he assumed that a real journalist would ask. Berka made a great effort to concentrate, and when he resolutely gave his answers, he tried to sound like a politician on TV, using words that he would otherwise never use and whose meaning he didn’t know. Leo, alias Peter Erixon, kept a straight face and occasionally wrote down a few notes.

  It turned out to be true. Berka had worked at the Zeverin Precision Tool Company AB way back when the plant was located on Norra Stationsgatan near Norrtull. Back then the business was called Zeverin & Co. and it manufactured a number of other things, including items made of wood. Then Berka had stayed with the company when it moved out to the Sickla docks, and he was present at the opening of the new, big, modern workshop. That was right before the war started, but business was still good. Hermann Zeverin, the CEO, had handled things well. No one was laid off. On the contrary. Berka was a lathe operator, and he had continued in that trade until the early seventies, but lately his hands were so shaky that he could no longer do the work. He was supposed to retire a year ago, but he had refused. He knew exactly what happened when a man sat at home as a pensioner – after six months he became senile, another six months and he developed cancer and then he died. All that stuff about ‘retirement age’ was very slyly calculated. But that was not for Berka. If a person had been getting up at five thirty every morning since he was a little fellow, he couldn’t stop doing it just because some arsehole had come up with this idea of retirement. He coughed again and brought up a sizable amount of yellowish-green slime, which he spat into a half-empty coffee tin on the floor. It didn’t look like very good odds that he would reach the age of eighty, not under the present circumstances.

  Leo, alias the journalist Peter Erixon, offered Berka another smoke to calm the man’s lungs. Berka lit a match and took a couple of deep drags as he muttered and then launched into a long harangue about the fact that his damned job at the workshop probably hadn’t been very healthy. But he was an ordinary, simple fellow, and he’d had to take the first job that was offered, and he had never shirked his duties and had never been without work for over fifty years.

  The interviewer listened attentively, occasionally jotting down notes. He was feeling a bit stressed and didn’t know how he was going to handle this conversation. He could let the little man go on jabbering away for hours. Berka could undoubtedly keep talking for a very long time. But sooner or later Leo would have to lay his cards on the table and bring up the subject of Tore Hansson. If that didn’t work, he could just thank the man for his help and take off for home and forget about the whole thing.

  Berka started getting a bit glassy-eyed after an hour inside his private shed. He used the foreman as an excuse and went out to sweep, mostly for the sake of appearances. He had to pretend to be a bit worn out towards the end of the day. It was just past four, and he should at least make a show of working, because he wasn’t here on charity, after all; there was no reason for them to keep him on if he did nothing for his reduced wages.

  When Berka came back to his private shed a bottle stood on the table, a whole, virgin bottle of Absolut Pure Aquavit. Under the bottle were five brand-new hundred-krona notes. Berka came in, pretending not to notice anything, dug in his overall pockets for a smoke, and then accepted one from Leo. He tried to whistle, but just started coughing again.

  He was almost exploding with curiosity, but he sat down without looking at Leo or the bottle or the money. Then he stood up again. Finally it was too much. Berka picked up the bottle in his fist, quickly hid it in the corner under the table, snatched up the banknotes and counted them: one, two, three, four, five … He stared at Leo and stuffed the dough in his pocket.

  Berka wondered what this was all about. This was no ordinary interview – even he could see that. Leo nodded, blew smoke up at the ceiling, and remained silent. Berka asked if this had to do with Leffe, Leffe Gunnarsson, and that damn car. In that case, he had nothing to say, not a single word. He was innocent. Leffe Gunnarsson had simply bolted. No
one knew where.

  Leo shook his head. This had nothing to do with Leffe Gunnarsson. Berka sucked nervously on his cigarette. If it had to do with Stickan and if he had broken in somewhere, Berka was again totally innocent. He hadn’t seen Stickan in a year, and he no longer had anything to do with him.

  Leo kept on shaking his head. He said that this had to do with Tore Hansson, a fellow who had worked there a long time ago. Tore Hansson, who had disappeared back in 1944.

  ‘Fucking hell’ was Berka’s response. ‘Bloody fucking hell.’ He asked if he might uncap the bottle, and Leo nodded. Berka took two big gulps of the aquavit and smacked his lips; a shiver passed through his whole body. ‘Bloody fucking hell,’ he repeated. Tore Hansson again. So Peter Erixon wasn’t the Old Bill after all.

  No, he wasn’t the Old Bill, Leo assured him.

  ________

  A couple of miles east of the Zeverin Precision Tool Company AB there was a ramshackle cabin on the opposite side of the Hammarby factory road. A narrow lane led down to Sickla Lake, and that’s where the cabin stood, an old, abandoned work-site cabin for construction workers. It must have been blue at one time, but the paint had faded, and unless you knew the cabin was there, you would never even notice it because it seemed to blend in with the slope leading down to the water.

  Berka had acquired this cabin a long time ago, and he used it as a summer cottage, rather like an allotment garden. He headed over there on the weekends and sat there fishing and solving radio quizzes.

  Leo found the cabin without difficulty, since Berka had described the road in great detail. He would join Leo as soon as the whistle blew at the workshop, because they couldn’t sit in his workplace talking about Tore Hansson. That just wouldn’t do. Berka had been mixed up in quite a few things, and he no longer trusted anyone.

  The key was exactly where Berka had said it would be, inside the hubcap of one of the abandoned tyres. Leo unlocked the door and went in. There he found a bed neatly made up with an old military blanket, a dining table, a petroleum stove, a wooden chest with a padlock and a paraffin-oil heater. The cabin was quite pleasant, and when Leo opened the curtains, he could look out across Sickla Lake and perhaps see the sun setting over the city to the north-west. But on this day it was grey and hazy, and there was no sunset to admire.

  Leo waited about an hour, then poured himself a drink and made coffee. The alcohol calmed him down, because he had imagined that this might be a trap. If anyone wanted to get rid of him, this was the most perfect place in the whole realm for a murder. They could torture their victim without worrying about the noise and then sink the body in Sickla Lake and remove all traces forever after, if they liked. But he trusted Berka. The guy seemed on the up-and-up. And Leo would never get anywhere if he didn’t take risks. This was actually the first time in his life that he was taking real risks for the sake of the Truth. This was actually the first time that he was doing something that had anything to do with reality, and he knew that such things always had their price. It is also highly likely that he saw deeper into this affair, saw larger connections than the ones that I’m able to find today.

  In any case, Berka arrived as promised. He was slightly out of breath because he had ‘run like a herring’, as he put it, and then he coughed up another glop of that yellowish-green slime as soon as he set foot inside the cabin. Leo praised his fine summer cottage, and Berka proudly showed his guest several special arrangements he had made so that he could also live there in the winter if he liked. Everything was totally free. No one had ever paid any attention to him, and he had no idea who he should pay for leasing the land, if the issue should ever come up. The cabin had stood there for fifteen years and no doubt would stand there for another fifteen, if Berka lived that long. The odds, as I’ve said, were not good, which he had realised long ago. He had nothing to fear, not even if he recounted what he knew about Tore Hansson.

  Berka lit a paraffin lamp hanging over the table, took out some soft ginger snaps and poured himself some coffee laced with aquavit. As darkness descended over the woods, the lake, and the city off to the north-west, he told Leo everything that he knew about Tore Hansson, the Zeverin Precision Tool Company AB, and 1944. It gave Leo the shivers because it ended up being quite a nasty business.

  ________

  Anyone who has ever in his life picked up the phone to turn in a news tip to TT Wire Service and a few hours later switched on the radio and heard the TT voice, the indisputable voice of Truth, read those very words as part of a news report, a new fact to add to the immensely rich fact-bank of human culture, anyone who has ever done that has most likely been gripped by both an urgent feeling of importance and a corresponding sense of unreality. Every news item has wandered the same difficult route to the collective consciousness. The news was created, planted by various interests and cabled out across the globe to end up at last in people’s thoughts, making fellow citizens either throw up their hands in deep indignation or praise God with profound joy. Anyone who participated in creating this news might feel empty, like after botched sex, empty and blurry, as if the sudden exaltation had taken place solely in a dream during the night.

  Stene Forman sounded almost happy in his fervour. He was speaking absolutely off the record, as they said in the White House. He talked incoherently about the Washington Post and the Watergate scandal and FiB/Kulturfront and the IB affair. And actually it wasn’t until now that this story was first called the Hogarth Affair. That day was the first time there was reason to call the affair an ‘affair’, and Stene Forman didn’t hesitate for a moment. Of course it should be called the Hogarth Affair.

  When Leo later saw the morning paper in the kitchen – where Henry, clad in his elegant bathrobe and completely unawares, was making coffee – he experienced that panic-stricken feeling of unreality. In an obituary with a large photo, he read that Edvard Hogarth had been found dead in his home three days earlier.

  One of the newspaper’s prominent, seasoned journalists, a contemporary of the deceased Edvard Hogarth, had been assigned to write the obit of his former friend and comrade-in-arms. Not unexpectedly, Hogarth was called ‘a pugnacious old champion of truth’ and ‘one of the very last, great, encyclopaedic journalists we have had in our country’. As is customary, the obituary developed into a minor apotheosis, recounting in pithy but brilliant terms much more than what Leo knew about the old member of the WWW Club.

  Edvard Hogarth was as old as the twentieth century. He was the only child of a jurist, he studied in Uppsala in the twenties, and he made something of a name for himself as an excellent stylist for the student paper, in which he published light articles in the man-about-town vein. After successfully completing his degree, he soon turned to the field of journalism, ending up during the years of the stock market crash as editor of one of Sweden’s biggest dailies in Stockholm. He wrote with great insight on everything from history, art, and literature to economics and modern science. He quickly made things very awkward for those who couldn’t stand to have the truth brought to light, and his exclusive interview with Kreuger, just before the Wall Street crash, served as a model for generations of future journalists. He possessed a unique ability to get people to confide in him. It was in this connection that it seemed apt to call Hogarth ‘a pugnacious old champion of truth’, since he would rather fight than run away. He would take up the battle, and quite often he brought home a victory. But the tragedy of Edvard Hogarth was to be found in this unwillingness to compromise.

  When his wife passed away soon after the Second World War, he became even less co-operative, if that were possible. After a series of articles about the Cold War – in which he assumed a position that hardly appealed to the legendary editor-in-chief – he soon became impossible to deal with, and he left the public arena. He was dissatisfied with the development of press ethics in Sweden. By the age of fifty, he had already fallen silent, which could be described as a premature and highly regrettable retreat. On numerous occasions the writer of the obitua
ry had appealed to Edvard Hogarth to come to his senses, swallow his pride, and come back to the newspaper, which sorely needed men of his fervour, with his passion for the truth and his monumental refinement. But Hogarth persevered and remained true to his silence – and therein lay his ‘tragedy’. A fitting epitaph might be Melius frangi quam flecti – better to be broken than bent.

  The death notice made a strong impression on Leo. All of a sudden, among all the respectful obituaries, this peculiar old man was given a profile, a past that he hadn’t known before. Edvard Hogarth was suddenly more alive and more flesh and blood now, after he was dead.

  Leo lay down on his bed to think. He could imagine how the scene had looked: Hogarth was lying somewhere in the house when the housekeeper arrived on Wednesday and let out a horrible scream. She called the police and, weeping, threw herself into the arms of some bewildered officer. Mr Hogarth was such a fine and noble gentleman, and no one would understand how he could write the disgusting filth that filled his whole study, because of course that pornographic novel had not slipped the housekeeper’s attention. That was approximately how the scene must have unfolded, and it was with these thoughts that Leo realised that there really was an affair – the Hogarth Affair.

  ________

  The iron was red-hot at both ends, and now it was time to strike. Eagerly egged on by Stene Forman at Blixt magazine, Leo Morgan, in a sort of creative coma, was supposed to put together all the strange information that he had gathered from various sources into a cohesive whole, to write an account of the absolutely scandalous Hogarth Affair. In a rare state of fury, he ferreted through various libraries, archives, and collections of public records that were readily accessible to supplement the fragmentary data which Hogarth himself and the eccentric Berka had contributed.