Gentlemen (Klas Ostergren) (FO8)

by Klas Ostergren

  Since Henry the actor was once again down south in Skåne to shoot additional footage for the feature film in which he had a role, things were extremely calm in the flat on Hornsgatan. Leo had plenty of peace and quiet to work, and he had transformed his two-room quarters into a temporary editorial office with a direct line to Blixt magazine. Editor-in-chief Forman rang a couple of times a day to get regular updates on the latest developments. This was no longer dynamite, as Forman said, it was now fucking nitro-glycerine. Leo was going to be world-famous after this, Verner’s wrongs would be redressed, and Blixt would become just as renowned as the Washington Post.

  By the end of April – Leo had presumably lost all sense of time and place – he had gathered everything together in a neat file folder containing about fifty typewritten A4 pages. Stene Forman gurgled, wheezed and burst with curiosity; he asked his sleuth to come up to the editorial offices that very evening. It would be off the record, and nitro-glycerine was at its best in the darkness of night.

  The April evening’s stubborn twilight descended over the bay and Norr Mälarstrand where, in the distance, the skyscrapers of the major newspapers could be seen, with their rotating neon signs. Leo walked as if in a fog, a trance of weariness, and in his fevered imagination he pictured the hundreds of pros up there who would be green with envy soon, when tiny, nearly bankrupt Blixt made its infamous move.

  Leo greeted the sleepy fellow sitting in the guard’s office and was allowed to enter without any problem since he was expected by Forman, the editor-in-chief himself. All the editorial offices on the fifth floor were dark and deserted, and the glass doors leading from the lift entrance were locked. Leo rang the bell, and Stene Forman instantly appeared out of the darkness to open the door. He gave Leo a welcoming slap on the back, shook his hand and then led the way to his office, a room separated off from the open office landscape where workstations and desks stood in listless silence in the dark.

  Forman looked at least as tired as Morgan did. He had a big office with a marvellous view of Rålambshov Park and Riddarfjärden. Behind his desk was a narrow couch where he sometimes spent the night. Everything had become such a damned mess with all his former wives and the alimony and financial experts, so he was lying low; here he considered himself ‘unreachable’. But that’s how things were in life; they would always work out.

  The editor-in-chief invited Leo to have a seat in a visitor’s chair, held out a box to offer him a cigarette, and gave him a healthy glass of whisky. He deserved it. Leo countered by nonchalantly producing his neat folder with the documents that would soon explode with a bang that was sure to send reverberations even as far as the government.

  The evening news was on the radio, pounding out the story that the last Yanks had left South Vietnam after a lightning-quick evacuation, and that the Saigon government would most likely capitulate and agree to an unconditional surrender. This was undoubtedly a day of victory and triumph for justice and truth.

  Leo was shaking with fever and sleepless nights. He took a swallow of his whisky and smoked a cigarette. Absentmindedly he leafed through a couple of back issues of Blixt, presumably trying to transform his own sensational material into future headlines. They might be: ‘GRIFFEL CORPORATION EXPOSED – SECRET WEAPONS DELIVERIES DURING WAR’ and the next, follow-up headline could be: ‘YESTERDAY’S CUSTOMERS NAZIS – TODAY’S IMPERIALISTS’, culminating in the inevitable third part: ‘BLACK-OUT’, explaining the disappearance of Tore Hansson and Edvard Hogarth. But they probably weren’t very good headlines. Leo was no good at composing headlines; that takes a special art within the field of journalism that he had never learned. Leo was an amateur and would remain one. He would be a knight and a gentleman to his dying day.

  ________

  Anno Domini 1929 is known as the year when all the stock markets crashed and people went insane and killed themselves. But the stock markets were not the only things to collapse. On gloomy, shadowy Heleneborgsgatan on Södra Malmen in Stockholm, a building scaffold – which, in the subsequent investigation, clearly turned out to have been negligently assembled – collapsed with a monumental crash. One workman broke his leg, while a young assistant ended up underneath the entire load of planks, pipes and timbers. When the whole mess had been frantically moved aside – it took a good half hour – and they found the young boy alive, the entire neighbourhood of curious bystanders heaved a sigh of relief and thanked the Lord for His mercy.

  The young assistant was only fourteen years old, and his name was Tore P.-V. Hansson. Although he was definitely alive when the big, strong carpenters and bricklayers dug his body out from under all those timbers, his life was not going to be an easy one. A huge beam had crushed his right foot and a rough board had dealt him a blow to the head. His foot healed surprisingly well – the boy had a limp, but after only a couple of months he was hobbling around. Things did not go as well with his head. The boy developed a stutter and spasms that made many bigoted people categorise him as ‘punch-drunk’, which was not true at all.

  When this Tore P.-V. Hansson, a little more than ten years later, set about completing the highly original and cunningly worded application form at the Zeverin Precision Tool Company AB, he did so with great brilliance. There was obviously nothing wrong with his intelligence. Naturally, the boy had stopped working in the construction business. His limited mobility made him more suited to sedentary types of work, so he became a precision-tool maker, a lathe operator. He made a name for himself as an extraordinarily skilled worker who was meticulous to the point of being finicky, although among his co-workers he was generally known as an easy target and a buffoon. That didn’t bother Tore P.-V. Hansson, because he was just glad to have any kind of steady job, considering the state of the world in the late thirties.

  So Tore P.-V. Hansson was among those newly hired workers that the Zeverin Precision Tool Company AB decided to focus on when, with much pomp and circumstance, the new facilities near the Sickla docks at Hammarby Harbour were opened. Along with a lad named Berka, Tore was lucky enough to avoid conscription. Things were good for them; they were allowed to follow the war from a sufficient distance. And Tore read the reports from the war with the same exactitude that he applied to everything else in his life.

  Perhaps this exaggerated sense of accuracy was another result of the injury to his head. He tormented himself by repeatedly checking and examining everything he undertook; he had a habit of always going back to double-check the gas, the lights and the lock on the door whenever he was going out somewhere, and he kept himself impeccably groomed.

  The flat on Brännkyrkagatan into which his betrothed moved looked like a showroom for a model home in the year 1939. Tore P.-V. Hansson couldn’t bear untidiness, dirt or clutter. He cleaned the flat like an experienced housekeeper, running his index finger over mouldings and door frames to track down any dust whenever he cleaned the house, which he did a couple of times each week.

  His wife accepted his behaviour because she truly loved this lame, stammering, slightly eccentric man. He in turn loved her as meticulously as she wanted to be loved. He never forgot a single special holiday or neglected any little occasion to give her presents, and she presumably wondered whether true love wasn’t mostly a question of concentration. Tore could concentrate on her like no other lad had ever done before. Ordinary boys played football, went to cafés and came up with a thousand excuses to avoid staying at home. For obvious reasons Tore could not play football, and he didn’t have many interests outside his job and his extremely orderly home. In her eyes, he was the perfect husband.

  Every morning Tore P.-V. Hansson would be among the first to arrive at his lathe at the Zeverin Precision Tool Company AB at the Sickla docks. He had his tools – chisels, hooks, callipers, files and keys – arranged according to a very carefully devised system. Everything was laid out so that he could reach for a tool without even looking. He had the pattern etched into his memory, with the result that he could work very efficiently, moving faster and wit
h greater precision than most. He had come to the attention of the foremen, who regarded him as a model for the entire workshop – especially for Berka, who liked to show up rather late and smelling of stale lager.

  Hansson stood at his lathe, turning out machine parts, small cylinders and rods and other components that required great precision. He was the perfect person for this type of delicate task, and he was fully aware of his own worth, without being arrogant or haughty about it. He would always hobble with blatant nervousness over to his lathe, as if to avoid his co-workers. He was only interested in work, and he never took a break. Tore P.-V. Hansson was so damned loyal.

  On a rainy, slushy morning in March 1944, Tore came hobbling over to his lathe, as usual among the very first to arrive at the workshop. The air was damp and raw, and he was shivering a bit, presumably thinking that it would be great to get going and warm himself up by working. Once the machines had been going for a while, the temperature would begin to rise in the workshop, and by the time the whistle blew in the afternoon and all the smiths, lathe operators and welders had been working as if in a mad frenzy, the smoke would be thick overhead and the heat in the place could almost be described as tropical.

  Hansson hobbled over to his lathe on that morning and was about to take up where he had left off, but he discovered that all his tools had been rearranged. Nothing looked as it should on his workbench next to the lathe. Some of the callipers and chisels had been piled up haphazardly on the bench. There was no way he would have left his tools like that the day before – it was practically a matter of honour. He shrugged his shoulders and began working, although he was undoubtedly a bit annoyed. This was his lathe, and if anyone had to work overtime, he could do it somewhere else.

  Finding his tools in disarray was really not anything to dwell on; it could happen to anyone in a workshop as large as the Zeverin Precision Tool Company AB. But it turned out not to be a one-time occurrence. If it had, the status quo would probably have remained unchanged.

  When Tore P.-V. Hansson arrived at the workshop at the end of winter in ’44 and each and every day found his tools in a great jumble on his workbench, ruining the whole ingenious system that he had worked out for their arrangement, he started to get properly annoyed. If he had been a different sort of person, someone less meticulous, this never would have bothered him. But he was the way he was, a lad on whose head an entire scaffold had once collapsed, and that kind of person can be either nonchalant or assiduous. Hansson fell into the latter category. And with that his fate was sealed.

  The pattern was repeated for several weeks in a row, and Tore decided to ask the foreman whether any work was being done in the evenings and if so, why it had to be done at his lathe. It was such trouble to set up everything each morning. The foreman merely laughed at the badly stammering Hansson, shook his head, pounded the man on the back and said that he shouldn’t dwell so damn much on details and particulars. Hansson was a real asset to the Zeverin Precision Tool Company AB. There were very few lathe operators with his skills, and the company really appreciated such a talent. But at the same time, he shouldn’t become so obsessed with details – Hansson should look at the big picture and not make himself blind staring at the small things. No work was being done in the evenings, and if Hansson’s tools were in disarray, perhaps it was because his co-workers were pulling a prank on him.

  As a matter of fact, Tore P.-V. Hansson had long ago sensed that his co-workers, perhaps out of a certain envy, often tried to pull his leg just because he kept to himself and worked hard and was so damn loyal. But Tore hadn’t seen any expectant glances in the morning when he, to his great annoyance, discovered that someone had jumbled up his tools again. When people want to play a practical joke, they usually lurk about to watch their victim; otherwise there’s no pleasure in the prank. But Tore didn’t catch the slightest glimpse of any jokers as he morosely rearranged his things on the bench. That was not even a possibility.

  There were very few in whom he could confide. Berka was actually the only person. Berka was largely Hansson’s opposite – an obstinate carouser and absolutely not an adherent of tidiness. But he was still a good friend, a colleague who treated everyone with exactly the same amiable scepticism. Tore asked Berka whether he was aware of any night shift that might be going on among the lathe operators, but Berka wasn’t the least bit interested. He hadn’t noticed anything, he hadn’t even considered the matter. He worked like a slob, and his bench hadn’t been swept or cleaned in years. There could have been a corpse under all that mess on Berka’s bench and no one would have noticed. Besides, as far as he was concerned they could do whatever they liked. He minded his own business, and that would have to do.

  Presumably it was some time towards the end of March 1944 when Tore P.-V. Hansson very impatiently decided to find out once and for all what was happening to the careful arrangement of the tools on his workbench next to the lathe. He had become obsessed with the matter and couldn’t get it out of his mind. Considering he was a fusspot, a control freak, a cleanliness fanatic, and the stuttering and leg spasms he suffered, perhaps it’s not particularly strange that he did what he did.

  When the whistle blew on that fateful day, Tore P.-V. Hansson arranged his tools as meticulously as always and then hobbled out to the locker room, sat down on a bench and began changing his clothes. He took his time about it. There were not many lads left in the locker room when Hansson pretended to leave for home, although he actually went back inside the workshop. The lights were off and it was dark in there because everyone always rushed home as fast as possible. The buses were waiting out in the yard, loudly rumbling and crowded with weary workers.

  Tore P.-V. Hansson stood for a long time pressed into a corner near the entrance to the locker room until he dared slip over to the end of one of the aisles. There a ladder led up to a bridge to an overhead crane. If you walked along the bridge you came to a span between two posts, and anyone who wanted to be undisturbed could sit there for hours.

  He hobbled as quietly and cautiously as he could along the bridge, finally reaching the post, where he climbed up and sat down. It was very dark in the workshop, and it was smoky where he was, but he did have a perfect view of all five aisles, which made him feel quite pleased. Soon the mystery would undoubtedly be solved.

  Of necessity people in history become more and more fragmentary until, with a few spectacular exceptions, they are nothing more than a name and some dates on a gravestone, and even that has to be considered something of a concession these days. Hansson’s descendants have all been very reticent, and perhaps there really isn’t much to find out about the man. At any rate, that spring he was twenty-seven years old, married to a possibly rather naïve but good wife who by that point had developed a certain form of sternness and sense of purpose. Many years earlier an entire scaffold had collapsed on top of him, with the result that he limped, stammered and suffered from a number of obsessions. There could hardly be any other explanation for why, on a miserable evening in March 1944, he would climb up on a beam in the workshop of the Zeverin Precision Tool Company AB at the Sickla docks, just in order to find out why his tools were in disarray every morning.

  So there he sat, trying to stay awake, hidden behind a post halfway up to the ceiling. Maybe he was thinking about his wife, who was at home waiting with dinner and who would start to worry if he didn’t arrive at exactly 5:55 as usual. But she was going to have to wait; this was more important.

  This really was more important. Tore P.-V. Hansson had nodded off a few times during the course of the evening, when he was awakened by sounds coming from the workshop below. Doors slammed in the locker room, keyrings jingled, and footsteps resounded from shoes with rough soles. Hansson the spy gave a start and was suddenly wide awake, like a hunter on the alert, listening tensely to every sound and movement down there in the dense darkness.

  He could hear voices – muted, sober voices – and footsteps from a large number of feet. This went on for a couple of
minutes until a hissing, shuffling sound overrode everything else. At first Tore had a hard time pinpointing the sound. It seemed to be coming from everywhere and nowhere at the same time. He twisted around, trying to see what it was, but couldn’t see a thing. The hissing and shuffling sound filled the whole workshop, but as soon as it stopped, several lamps were switched on.

  Hansson could now see out across the workshop, and he blinked in the light – the whole place was blacked-out behind enormous black curtains. They had been hauled down from their hiding place in niches up in the ceiling, and Tore now recalled that someone had once told him that the whole Zeverin Precision Tool Company AB would be able to operate even if all of Sweden were under a black-out. It was a very modern security measure and was thought to be a marvellous feature.

  At the same moment that the lights went on, people began streaming into the workshop, and Tore P-V. Hansson couldn’t believe his eyes. He pinched himself to make sure that he was really awake. A good fifty young men came pouring into his workshop, a blacked-out workshop, where they immediately began working, as if part of a top-secret and highly classified night shift.

  He tried to identify some of the men down below, to see whether he could recognise any of them, but he couldn’t. He didn’t have the foggiest idea who they could be, these men who had to work in the middle of the night in blacked-out facilities. Of course he watched his own lathe with particular interest. He saw a hefty fellow in his thirties adjust the lathe and attach small, knobby cylinders to it, checking their dimensions after having milled a flange at one end. It looked as if most of the men down there were working with the same sort of cylinders, about four inches long and an inch in diameter.