Between Summer's Longing and Winter's End

CHAPTER XV

And all that remained was the cold of winter

Sundsvall over Christmas and New Year

Johansson’s oldest brother lived by the sea about ten miles outside Sundsvall in a big old wooden palace that had been erected as a summer place for a rich country squire during the golden years in the middle of the nineteenth century. It hadn’t gotten smaller since his brother had taken over.

Let’s see now, thought Johansson, who was an old detective and had a good memory. He’s asphalted the driveway, extended the parking area, and bought a new car for his wife.

On the morning of Christmas Eve they hunted hares on one of the islands. It was an old tradition from their upbringing at home on the farm outside Näsåker, and the only thing wrong with it had been that the foxhound used to run off more often than not and that Mama Elna was usually good and angry at them when they finally came home, whether they had a hare with them or not.

This time it went better. The sea was not frozen over, so neither the foxhound nor the hare had any choice but to keep on dry land. On the other hand, the dog was still chasing flat out when his brother looked at his watch and reported that it was time to go home if they weren’t going to miss Christmas Eve lunch.

“What do we do with the bitch?” said Johansson, who would happily have stayed behind to shoot one more.

“The hunting boy will take care of that,” said his brother, nodding in the direction of the wooded hillside where their dog driver had been stationed for more than an hour.

“I had no idea there were so many hares out here on the islands,” said Johansson, jerking his chin toward the three chalk-white corpses that lay on the bottom of the boat as they went home.

“Christ, there aren’t any hares out here,” said his brother, grinning.

“Where did these come from, then?” asked Johansson, who had shot one and almost gotten another.

“The boy set them out last week,” said his brother, grinning. “Who do you take me for?”

Nice to hear you haven’t changed, thought Johansson.

The luncheon on Christmas Eve was not just the opening but also the high point of the Christmas celebration at home with Johansson’s oldest brother, and they always ate in the kitchen. By knocking out the ceiling and the walls between the attic, the original kitchen, the serving areas, and the old dining room of the forest squire, his brother had created a great room large enough for the latter-day Viking chieftain that he of course was. The buffet was spread out on the table to avoid unnecessary running, a log fire blazed in the open fireplace, and Johansson’s brother sat as usual in the high seat at the short end with Mother to his right and Father to his left, all of his children along the long sides, and his wife and Lars Martin at the opposite end.

“Merry Christmas to you all,” said Johansson’s big brother, smiling with his strong, yellow horse-trader teeth and raising his brimful schnapps glass.

You haven’t changed, thought Johansson.

Papa Evert and Mama Elna, seven children, three sons-in-law, three daughters-in-law, twenty-one grandchildren, five great-grandchildren, and even with outside additions in the third generation, not even big brother’s kitchen would have been sufficient if they had all come. But despite the fact that annual family reunions had been held at home in Näsåker going back several generations, the majority of the large Johansson family had chosen to celebrate Christmas elsewhere, at their own places, as always happens when family feelings have cooled and other feelings and commitments have intervened, even without serious conflicts or quarrels.

For obvious historical reasons, Johansson’s parents chose to celebrate Christmas with their eldest son when they themselves had gotten too old to gather the family at home with them. That was why Papa Evert sat at his oldest son’s left side. Nowadays he was only half the size of “Little Evert,” and with every Christmas more and more like something that had been hung to dry at home in the sauna on the family farm north of Näsåker.

After lunch there had been an exchange of presents in the living room, yet another blazing log fire, and enough sofas, armchairs, and other chairs to accommodate even those who hadn’t come. Johansson had as usual been Santa, wearing a red stocking cap but refusing to wear a mask, pleading the heat from the fire, far too many shots at lunch, and the decisive circumstance that the youngest member of the company was actually fifteen years old and clearly old enough to lace his Christmas cider with one or two strong beers when he thought his parents weren’t watching. Although of course he hadn’t said that last thing. It was Christmas, after all, and what did he have to do with it?

At last, however, it was over, and all the food and all the drinks were beginning to have their effect in earnest. The final present from the last of the rows of bast-fiber laundry baskets was doled out; as always to the woman of the house, from the master of the house and without Santa’s assistance. As always more expensive than the rest of the arrangements combined, and as always it was passed around so that everyone could express their proper admiration for the host’s generosity, warm heart, and magnificent financial condition.

“Not too bad,” said Johansson in order to make his brother happy while he held up the glittering necklace. And certainly long enough to go around her waist, thought Johansson, smiling approvingly at his nicely shaped and nowadays, regardless of the season, always suntanned sister-in-law.

“Yes, I’ll be damned how good we rich people have it,” his brother chuckled jovially, waving his thick Christmas cigar and puffing smoke on his youngest brother.

Watch out, thought Johansson, or I’ll sic the business squad on you, and then he withdrew to a corner to talk with his old father in peace and quiet.

“How are you feeling, Papa?” said Johansson in a loud voice as he carefully patted him on the hand.

“Don’t shout, boy, I’m not deaf,” said Papa Evert, grinning with delight at his favorite son and at the same time pushing him in the stomach with his free hand. “It doesn’t look like you’re in want of anything, in any case,” he stated contentedly with a glance at Johansson’s ample middle.

“Papa seems spry,” said Johansson at a normal volume and with filial concern in his voice.

“Oh hell,” said Papa Evert, shaking his head. “It’s probably a good while since I did that sort of thing, and that’s not really something you talk about with your children,” said his papa, who heard what he wanted to hear. “Although I’m spry and sharp, yes indeed, despite all the crap you hear on the radio and read about in the newspaper.”

Almost ninety, almost deaf, half the size he was in his prime, and thin as a rake. But spry, thought Johansson, and you could have it worse than that.

Then Papa Evert got onto his favorite subject-the increasing crime rate that nowadays was more and more often afflicting even Näsåker and its vicinity. There had been a break-in at the school and someone had put their mitts on one of the forestry company’s machines.

“Although with that business at the school I’m damn sure that it’s Marklund’s little bastard, despite the fact that he’s never there otherwise,” said Papa Evert.

It was worse, though, about the forestry machine, considering that such a thing cost several hundred thousand crowns-it had been almost new-and that it was probably someone from outside the district who’d been at it. Lars Martin should send up a few good fellows from the national police in Stockholm. Norrlanders preferably, but it would be best of course if he could come himself.

“You can always ask that brother of yours if you can borrow that bitch of his so you can take the opportunity to do a little hare hunting at the same time,” said Papa Evert, who gladly mixed business with pleasure.

He himself had gotten rid of his hunting dogs the year he turned eighty.

“That’ll be good,” said Papa Evert in order to underscore the weight of his argument, nodding toward his youngest son.

Johansson sighed, not simply from longing for another life than the one he was now living. But before he got involved in a discussion that he preferred to avoid, two of his nephews took over and he went and sat down with his mother.

From the frying pan into the fire, thought Johansson five minutes later, for Mama Elna was not only small, thin, spry, and without the least thing wrong with her hearing, she was worried besides.

“You don’t look healthy, Lars,” said Mama with her head to one side. “You seem overworked, and then I do think you’ve lost a lot of weight since I last saw you.”

Always something, thought Johansson, and at first he almost felt a little encouraged, but that was before she got onto her personal favorite among all the things that worried her where little Lars Martin was concerned.

“You haven’t met anyone,” said Mama Elna, tilting her head from left to right in order to truly show how concerned she was.

“You mean women, Mama,” said Johansson, smiling like a good son.

“Yes, what else would I mean?” said Mama Elna watchfully.

“I guess you always meet one or two,” said Johansson evasively, because he didn’t have the slightest desire to tell his mother about the school of two where he’d wallowed around like a killer whale last week.

“You know what I mean, Lars,” said Mama Elna, who didn’t intend to give up. “I mean something solid, something steady, something like… well, like Papa and me.”

No, thought Johansson. Not like you and Papa, for that kind of thing doesn’t exist anymore.

A while later he excused himself, wished a merry Christmas and good night to all, took his Christmas presents with him-mostly books, including several that clearly appeared to be readable-and went up to his room to read awhile before he fell asleep. For reasons that weren’t entirely clear to him, he also thought about the woman he’d met at the post office up on Körsbärsvägen almost a month ago. Pia, thought Johansson. Pia Hedin, that was her name. Maybe after all, thought Johansson, and then he fell asleep.

The quiet life in the country, Johansson thought a few days later. And for reasons he wasn’t clear about either, and without knowing anything about it, it was life in the Russian countryside he had in mind. The life that was lived in the time of the czars, before the revolution and by a small number of landed gentry. Must be something I’ve read, thought Johansson. Perhaps it was the birch groves down toward the sea, the stillness, the lack of activity while he read his books, took long walks, ate and slept, and watched his brother drive away and come home again in his constant business affairs, the particulars of which he preferred not to think about. No sleigh rides with blazing torches, of course, but no wolves howling in the winter night, either. No balls with champagne and women with plunging necklines who flirted wildly behind open fans in order to keep the cold at a distance. But no anxiety, either, that the cold you caught while you were doing that would also end your brief life.

…

Days came and went, and he himself was only an ordinary, temporarily appointed police superintendent who would soon become a bureau chief and in the meantime was charging his batteries. That was how you ought to look at it. On Saturday, the twenty-eighth of December, the Stockholm chief constable was the birthday child of the day in the big evening tabloid, and because Johansson had met him on several occasions he devoted almost a quarter of an hour of his usual walk to thinking about the day on which his birthday fell. Holy Innocents’ Day, thought Johansson, and regardless of what you thought about the fellow-he had a definite opinion-he was hardly an innocent. Neither in the original meaning of the word nor in the general, everyday pejorative sense it had gotten later. I’m afraid it’s probably worse than that, thought Johansson as he lengthened his stride. For whatever reason, it was certainly the most exciting thing that happened that day.

On New Year’s Eve his brother and sister-in-law had a big party with champagne, hired serving personnel, and a number of female guests with plunging necklines and men in tuxedos.

“I forgot to say that,” said Johansson’s brother. “It’s formal, but if you want you can borrow my old one, which I don’t use anymore. In the worst case you can just say to hell with buttoning it.”

How nice, thought Johansson. So I don’t have to rent one.

Buttoning it had also gone well. Despite the fact that the jacket was double-breasted it felt roomy, and when Johansson observed himself in the mirror in his room, he looked like any other middle-aged car salesman.

“Christ, little brother, you almost look human,” said his brother contentedly when Johansson came down to the living room a while later.

“Pity you have such short legs,” said Johansson. “Otherwise it would have fit perfectly.”

“You can keep it,” said his brother generously. “I have several.”

“You don’t know a dwarf who’s sufficiently short and fat?” said Johansson.

“Christ, little brother,” said Johansson’s big brother, putting his arm around his shoulders and hugging him. “Tonight we’re going to have fun. We’ll eat and drink and dance and be nice to the ladies. By the way, did I say that I’ve arranged a surprise for you?”

Johansson’s surprise had arrived approximately in the middle of the crush of guests, which was quite all right considering who she was and who the other guests were. And in a low-cut dress, which she hadn’t been wearing the last time they’d had dinner at his neighborhood restaurant.

“Lars,” she said, sounding both happy and surprised. “What are you doing here?”

“I live here,” said Johansson.

Because Johansson’s big brother was not one to leave anything to chance, not least if he was in cahoots with Mama Elna, for that’s what must have happened, thought Johansson. Obviously they were seated next to each other at the table and had lots of time to talk about both this and that.

“You never called me the way you promised,” said Johansson’s table companion, sounding almost a little hurt when she said it.

How about you, then? thought Johansson, but he didn’t say that. Instead he looked at her with his honest blue eyes and lied.

“Of course I did. I called you the same week I came home from the U.S., and at the switchboard they promised to leave a message,” said Johansson, who knew from experience just how certain such a thing was.

“They’re completely hopeless,” said his table companion with feeling in her voice.

“And then I’ve been really busy,” said Johansson.

Which was at least a bit more true, he thought.

“How do you know my brother, by the way?”

…

They had evidently met at a Rotary meeting where the police had been discussed, and only a week later the invitation had come in the mail.

Still, you must have said something else, thought Johansson.

“And because my ex-husband and I had finally decided to go our separate ways, then… well, here I am anyway,” she said, smiling in a manner that could hardly be misunderstood.

He ate and drank, quite a lot even, and then he danced, and he mostly danced with his table companion, and more than once he noticed his big brother’s shrewd grin in the throng behind his back. At the stroke of twelve he gave her a kiss and got a kiss in return, but instead of replying to it he gave her the same wolfish grin that his best friend used to give women when he needed time to think.

“I didn’t think they let women into Rotary,” said Johansson.

“Rotary?” said his table companion, confused and more than a little drunk. “Rotary? You’re probably thinking of the Masons.”

Then a light supper was served in the large kitchen, and even though she didn’t have a fan her intentions were clear enough. And what the hell do I do now? thought Johansson, who suddenly was not the least bit interested. Much less here at home with his own older brother and his gingerbread-colored wife.

“When are you coming to Stockholm next time?” asked Johansson distractingly while he removed his hand from hers, which was only half as large. He could always give the baseball cap he’d bought at the FBI to someone else, he thought.

But it finally resolved itself, and the farewell kiss she gave him before she left in the taxi along with several other guests was sufficiently cool for him to understand that this was probably not the moment for him to change his mind.

“Christ, Lars,” said his brother crossly when they were sitting alone in the large living room in the middle of all the rubbish that the guests had left behind, “you’re starting to lose it.”

“I have a hard time with thin women,” said Johansson, who both knew his brother and knew that his sister-in-law had gone to bed.

“What do you think I’ve said to the wife?” said his brother with feeling. “Thin women are an abomination. But do you think she listens? Hell, no,” he sighed gloomily.

“Skoal,” said Johansson, and then he finally went to bed.

On New Year’s Day after dinner he and his brother sat in front of the TV, not really watching, sipping highballs, and exchanging small talk the way you do when you know each other well and most everything has already been said. On the evening news there was a long, live-broadcast New Year’s interview with the prime minister. According to the introduction, which sounded peaceful enough, it was to have been about what had happened during the year just passed and what was going to happen during the year that had just begun, but it quickly changed to being only about the prime minister himself and his various private doings, and of course it took this turn in a way that was clearly planned from the start. The reporter pulled and tugged at the prime minister like an angry terrier with a trouser leg while the interview victim tried to protect himself with his usual arrogant eloquence; without his having seemed to grasp it, this was the very point of the whole performance.

Those bastards probably can’t even spell “Christmas peace,” thought Johansson, who was just as fond of journalists as all real policemen, but his brother seemed greatly amused.

“Poor devil,” big brother chuckled with delight. “He never learns.”

“You’ve stopped voting for the social democrats,” said Johansson innocently.

“Don’t be an ass, Lars,” said his big brother good-naturedly while he reached for the remote control and switched off the TV.

“I had a salesman once,” said his big brother, “and he was, so help me God, exactly like that wretch that they always come down on so hard as soon as he shows himself on TV.”

“I see,” said Johansson. What should I say? he thought. “So, what was he like?” asked Johansson.

“He was probably the friendliest devil this side of the Dal River,” said Johansson’s brother, laughing a little at the memory as he poured more whiskey into his glass.

“Friendly?”

“Well, he could barely manage to open the hood on the damn car he was showing before he was practically on top of them. Babbling like a windmill about the family and the weather and serving them coffee and almost tying himself in knots to please them. Although they just wanted to buy a car. He was completely unbeatable, the poor bastard.”

They don’t sound especially alike, thought Johansson. “You’ll have to excuse me,” he said. “It must be all the Christmas food, but I don’t really understand.”

“What is it you don’t understand, little brother?” said Johansson’s big brother indulgently.

“They don’t sound especially alike,” said Johansson. “Your salesman and the prime minister, I mean.”

“So help me God he was exactly like the prime minister, except the other way around,” Johansson’s brother clarified. “They were alike as two peas where it counts.”

“I still don’t get it,” persisted Johansson.

“And you’re supposed to be a policeman,” sighed big brother. “Neither of them could keep their distance,” he clarified. “That damn salesman I had was like a Band-Aid without you even having to ask him, and that wretch we just saw on TV with his well-oiled yap would risk making an enemy for life out of any old idiot just to have the last word, when he ought to have the sense just to keep his mouth shut and nod and go along because everyone knows that he knows better.”

Finally, thought Johansson.

“I understand what you mean,” he said. “Did he sell any cars?”

“He must have sold one occasionally,” said Johansson’s brother, shrugging his shoulders. “He got fired. No one can afford that type if you’re going to make a living from it,” he added, taking a good-sized gulp from his glass. “People who aren’t like everyone else, I mean.”

I understand exactly, thought Johansson, who had been to a course and heard the same thing, although expressed in a different way and in other words.

Krassner, he thought. I must do something about that wretched Krassner.

“I’m going to need to work for a few days,” said Johansson. “Do you have a free desk in the house?”

“You can borrow my farm office,” said Johansson’s brother. “No one will disturb you.”

If you’re going to do something anyway, it’s just as well to do it methodically, Johansson always thought, and he did so this time as well, despite the fact that he had seldom felt so ambivalent and poorly motivated. The day after New Year’s Day he carried Krassner’s papers down to the farm office, and when he could finally pack them in his suitcase again it was already Epiphany and high time to go home to Stockholm.

There hadn’t been much vacation, either, between sessions at his borrowed desk. True, every day he’d taken a long walk, but it was Krassner and his papers that occupied his thoughts the whole time. At the family meals he became more and more monosyllabic, and when his brother suddenly had to go away on business for a few days he almost experienced it as a liberation, despite the fact that they seldom had time to meet.

He’d been forced to drive in to Sundsvall twice to go to the library, and he’d made several calls to Stockholm; he’d spoken on the phone three times with a more and more perplexed Wiklander. But on the day before Epiphany, he was done; he’d even written a long memorandum on how he viewed the matter. What am I really up to? thought Johansson. It was of course not a matter of an ordinary crime investigation, even though he was now convinced that Krassner had been murdered and even though he felt he had a more than reasonable conception of why and how it had been done. He had learned a great deal about the prime minister, he certainly had. He knew just about as much about him as about the perpetrators and victims whose lives he used to survey when he worked investigating especially violent crimes. And a great deal, besides, which only a very few knew about.

The problem, thought Johansson, was simply that however he twisted and turned the matter, the prime minister was neither the perpetrator nor the victim in the part that dealt with Krassner. With the exception of himself, the perpetrator, and a probable few shadowy characters whose existence he could only intuit, everyone else was ignorant not only of this but probably of the entire story. It’ll work out, thought Johansson, for he already had an idea of how he would be able to leave Krassner and his papers behind him.

He devoted the first day to reading through Krassner’s manuscript and the remaining documentation that he’d come across-to get an overview and because he always used to do it that way. That was also the most frustrating day of all, and what irritated him above all else was the author’s way of writing. With the exception of the first chapter, each section was introduced by a text in which the author, at length, with great seriousness and unshakable confidence in his own importance, recounted his feelings and thoughts about the various facts and other circumstances that he later described. And even in the running account there were reflections and passages inserted according to the same pattern. And what a cockeyed style, thought Johansson with irritation, traditional reader that he was, and firmly convinced that a factual condition is best described with facts and only facts, the colder the better. Crap, thought Johansson acidly, pushing aside the piles of papers and deciding it was high time to call it an evening. Besides, his belly was growling seriously.

The following day he finally went to work on the factual questions themselves. From everything that he’d read, what was true, what was false, what was questionable? Krassner’s manuscript began with a sensational story said to have played out in March of 1945 in Stockholm. It was a detailed narrative with names, places, times, and several persons involved in the action. If nothing else that bit could be checked out, thought Johansson.

There were quite certainly several aims behind Krassner’s choice of introduction. A good way to whet the reader’s appetite for what was to follow, besides being a simple and effective presentation of two of the book’s main characters, his own uncle John C. Buchanan and a Swedish mathematics professor by the name of Johan Forselius. The actual aim, however, was quite certainly different-namely, to describe how the Swedish military intelligence service in the final phase of the war had collaborated fully with its American counterpart, and the way in which that might have been done.

The protagonist of the story was a Polish captain by the name of Leszek Matejko. When the Germans attacked his country in September 1939, Matejko was a young lieutenant of the Polish cavalry with its fine old traditions, which was crushed under the treads of the German tank divisions in a matter of days. Matejko had escaped with no more than a fright and a bloody rag around his head, and when the Polish defeat was a fact he succeeded in making his way to England by dangerous paths to continue the fight. Once in London he became one of the first Polish officers enrolled in the “free Polish armed forces.”

Their need of cavalrymen had been limited, but because Lieutenant Matejko was a talented young man he had quickly been made into an intelligence officer, and in that capacity he remained in London during almost the entire war. It was also here that he got his anglicized nickname, Les. In the fall of 1944, when the Russians had driven the Germans a good way back into his old homeland, Captain Les Matejko was moved to the British embassy in Stockholm as a liaison officer, you “hardly needed to be a military person to understand why,” wrote Krassner. Of course, thought Johansson, nodding, for even he understood that, even though he always considered himself highly civilian in outlook. What he didn’t understand, on the other hand, was why Krassner hadn’t continued to write the way he’d started. This could have been really good, thought Johansson, sighing disappointedly.

…

At about the same point in time the American major John C. Buchanan showed up at the American embassy in Stockholm where he, almost immediately and apparently quite without embarrassment, seems to have initiated cooperation with his “colleagues” in the Swedish military intelligence service. One of the Swedes he met, with whom he even started to socialize privately, was the professor of mathematics Johan Forselius. According to his nephew the author, and not described particularly respectfully, the friendship was primarily due to the fact that they had another great interest in common besides intelligence activity, namely alcohol. A commodity to which Buchanan, accredited to the American embassy and in contrast with his dried-out Swedish comrade-in-arms, had free and unlimited access.

One more lush, thought Johansson, and before he could read on, for some reason he saw the glass pyramid in Buchanan’s coal cellar again.

Forselius was an interesting person, thought Johansson, making a note on his pad.

Born in 1907, a mathematician and clearly not a bad one: He defended his dissertation at the age of twenty-seven and was named professor at Uppsala University at only thirty-three, approximately the same time as the Germans occupied Denmark and Norway. That was also the point when he had to leave the academic world. Forselius was called up as a regular, noncommissioned officer assigned to the intelligence department at army headquarters as an analyst and code breaker. When he was discharged at the end of the war, in 1945, he was still just a sergeant. At the same time he was a legend among code breakers the world over.

What do you mean, sergeant? thought Johansson, making a new note on his pad. A Swedish sergeant who is a drinking buddy with an American major, professor of mathematics, world-renowned code breaker…

And is discharged as a sergeant? There’s something here that doesn’t add up, thought Johansson, who had done military service himself and been discharged as a master sergeant.

Late winter in Europe, 1945. A broken-winged German eagle had fallen to the ground. The United States and England and their Soviet allies were perfunctorily striking final blows from their respective positions while their strategic thinking was headed in a completely different direction. How should you position yourself for the decisive test of strength that military logic said must come soon, the struggle between the democracies of the Western world and Stalin’s dictatorship in the Soviet Union?

Late winter in Stockholm in 1945, the agents of the Western world flocking together, and here it seemed the choice had already been made, for Forselius and Buchanan and Matejko and all their associates on the right side of the field were completely at home with each other while the talk was of their great new joint concern: the powerful neighbor to the east. It’s then that things started to happen.

Clearly it was Buchanan who sounded the alarm. Despite his anglicized nickname, there was intelligence from the OSS indicating that Captain Leszek “Les” Matejko’s heart was with the Russian comrades-in-arms who would probably soon be the main enemy in the decisive test of strength between good and evil. Considering Matejko’s background and origins, and considering the overall strategic situation, it was not a simple problem they’d been presented with, and the first decision that had been made was to keep the Englishmen out of it and turn the whole thing into a purely Swedish-American operation.

Forselius got to set the trap, and he’d done it in a very cunning way, by distributing coded messages to various presumptive suspects, then trying to intercept them through the usual radio surveillance to see which way they’d gone.

The suspicions against Matejko had been strengthened, but it was far from being the case that the trap had closed on him, and there were several in their own ranks who not only expressed uncertainty but even pleaded his case. But time was starting to run short, and information came in indicating that Matejko was intending to disappear to his old homeland securely behind the Russian front. In that situation they decided to take no chances, and on the evening of March 10, 1945, an expedition embarked from the military’s secret building on Karlaplan in Stockholm to Matejko’s residence two flights up from the courtyard on Pontonjärsgatan on Kungsholmen.

The mission of the expedition was far from clear. Who had actually dispatched it was shrouded in mystery because in principle of course it concerned a suspected case of espionage, with suspicions directed against a person with diplomatic status. Considering who he was, Matejko was to be approached as carefully as the situation allowed. Try to ascertain his intentions and sympathies, in any event secure his person, and as far as possible do so by peaceful means. Whose decision this actually was, however, is not evident from Krassner’s manuscript. He doesn’t seem to have even understood the problem.

The expedition had five members, and its composition was strange, to say the least: professor and conscript Sergeant Johan Forselius and Major John C. Buchanan, both in civilian clothes; Second Lieutenant Baron Casimir von Wrede; Second Lieutenant Sir Carl Fredrick Björnstjerna; and Captain Count Adam Lewenhaupt, all three of the last-named officers in the intelligence service’s security detail, dressed in uniform and armed with service pistol model 40. The whole company rode in a gasoline-powered black 1941 Buick, Buchanan’s service car from the embassy, and it was Buchanan who drove. What the others possibly didn’t know was that he had also brought along “his only friend in life,” the American Army’s.45-caliber Colt pistol.

After fifteen minutes’ drive through a depopulated, darkened Stockholm, they arrived at Matejko’s home address on Kungsholmen, walked up, knocked on the door, and were let in. Buchanan concisely, “in his laid-back, amiable way,” recounted the reason for their visit, whereupon Matejko-Polish cavalry officer and gentleman that he was-told them to go to hell and leave him in peace. In that situation a tumult arose in the small apartment as Second Lieutenants von Wrede and Björnstjerna tried to calm Matejko down. Kicks and blows were delivered. Captain Lewenhaupt drew his service pistol and placed himself in the doorway, whereupon Matejko, clad in dressing gown and pajamas, promptly jumped out of the window from the third story straight down to the courtyard.

In contrast to the unfortunate Krassner, he escaped with a sprained foot and limped out onto the street. His pursuers took the stairs down and when they came rushing out of the entryway, the limping, swearing, and shouting Matejko had gotten a good head start in the direction of relative security up on Hantverkargatan. Then Major John C. Buchanan drew his Colt pistol, dropped to his knee on the sidewalk, gripped it with both hands, aimed, and shot him in the back.

This hadn’t lessened the confusion. They somehow dragged the still wildly swearing and now profusely bleeding Matejko into the car, forced him down in the backseat, and drove away. Wild palaver now broke out about where they should take him. Despite the fact that he seemed to be in good condition verbally, there was no doubt that Matejko was badly wounded. There were two fully equipped civilian hospitals right in the vicinity, Serafen and Sankt Erik, but for various reasons of discretion and secrecy it was decided to drive him to the naval garrison hospital out at the Waxholm Fortress.

The atmosphere in the car was also less than good. Matejko was not happy, and when they came out onto Norrtäljevägen, Captain Lewenhaupt started to express doubts about the suitability of Buchanan going along out to Waxholm. Buchanan, an officer but not a gentleman, asked him to shut up and shove it, and at approximately the same time Matejko stopped swearing, gave up the ghost, and died.

The rest of the group were quite naturally seized by a certain dejection. They stopped at the turnoff to Waxholm for a brief war council, during which they decided to drive back to town and turn over the concluding parts of the operation to Major Buchanan. Buchanan let his comrades out on Valhallavägen and continued alone with the corpse. Unclear to where, but according to his nephew and biographer, he and his colleagues at the American embassy were said to have taken care of the body “in accordance with customary routines and in an established manner.” Sounds like a normal body at sea, thought Johansson. On his pad he made note of four names in alphabetical order by last name: Björnstjerna, Forselius, Lewenhaupt, and von Wrede, and after that he called Wiklander at work.

Sweet Jesus, thought Johansson as he leaned back in the desk chair to collect his thoughts. If you were to believe Krassner, it was clearly those two lunatics Forselius and Buchanan who made a secret agent out of his own prime minister.

The main character of the piece delayed his entry until the second chapter of Krassner’s manuscript, and apart from the introduction it was a section that Johansson could very well have written himself. A concise description of the prime minister’s personal background, childhood, and upbringing, which correlated with the more or less official descriptions that Johansson had studied elsewhere.

Fine background, fine family, fine upbringing, went to a fine school where he’d taken his diploma with fine grades, and all this fineness was also the very point of Krassner’s introduction. The prime minister was, namely, no common traitor to his country who only made the author “ready to vomit”; there was a deeper idea underlying Krassmer’s gastrointestinal pains as well. In contrast to common traitors who only betrayed their country-and possibly fundamental human freedoms and rights, if they came from the West and not the East-the traitor/ prime minister was playing across a considerably broader register. He had also betrayed his class, his childhood environment, his family, even done violence to his own “natural personality” and the particular “ethos” that, according to Krassner, characterized people like him-that is to say, not this prime minister in particular but rather the kind of person he would have been if he hadn’t been a traitor after all.

Johansson was content to sigh deeply over all this sordidness that supposedly characterized the country’s highest political leadership and instead, hardened as he was, leafed a few pages ahead, for now things were starting to get seriously interesting. The war ended the same month the future prime minister began his compulsory military service with the cavalry. The Germans had had enough, cremated their self-shot leader at the Chancellery compound in Berlin, and thereafter surrendered unconditionally. The victors initiated the dividing up of the European continent and an eighteen-year-old Swedish cavalryman began building his life.

First sixteen months of military basic training; out as a sergeant, fine marks, of course, and directly to the university for more academic pursuits. Scarcely two semesters later, back to the military for six months of reserve officer training, and at some point during that time one of the secret recruiters from the military intelligence service must have taken notice of him. On July 5, 1947, Professor Forselius sent a letter to his armor-bearer Buchanan. It was written on a typewriter from that era with the usual sprinkling of uneven keystrokes, individual worn-out letters, and an “a” that continually leaned to the left. A rather short letter in English, barely a page, and the introductory lines about summer drought in Stockholm and the “damn rationing” suggested that the recipient, Dear John, was already at home in the United States.

After the usual greetings and a little manly grumbling, the letter writer had quickly gotten to the point. “I’ve been thinking a great deal about our conversations concerning the intellectual aspects of our offensive in Europe, which has further confirmed our common conviction that this is a question of the utmost strategic importance, and I have come to the conclusion that we ought to proceed to practical action very soon. I also believe that I have found a person who can be of great value to us in the execution of regular field operations.”

Forselius had received a tip about the person in question from one of his contacts at the Swedish intelligence service a few months earlier, and he had used the intervening time to personally take a careful look at the person mentioned. Obviously his inspection had turned out to his great satisfaction, and the letter concluded with his warmest recommendations: “True, he’s a slender little lad, but he seems to have a hell of a big heart and a damn bravado when it really counts.”

As if this weren’t enough, he was also “highly gifted, far above the average for his fellow officers,” with “stable conservative views,” spoke “several languages fluently,” appeared to have “the exact right mental disposition for the type of work that we’ve talked about,” and in addition intended to “go to the U.S. already this autumn to study for a few semesters at an American university,” which gave them “a heaven-sent opportunity to proceed to action,” according to a very contented Forselius.

At the end of August that same year the future prime minister began his studies at a first-rate university in the Midwest, and when Professor John C. Buchanan had suddenly shown up at the same place a few months later to give a series of guest lectures on the theme “Europe after the Second World War, the politics of Soviet occupation, and the risk of a third World War,” the secret thought behind this event was sufficiently enticing for a twenty-one-year-old future politician to sign up for them.

Forselius had obviously been correct in his judgment of the prime minister’s “mental disposition,” for just before Christmas Buchanan wrote to thank him for his assistance with a successful recruitment to the CIA’s “more intellectual operations in the European field.”

“Just a few short lines to thank you for your help with Pilgrim. We had lunch last week after he’d returned from the introductory training, and I must say that he is developing in a way that exceeds even my wildest dreams.” The photocopy of the handwritten letter was found among the rest of the papers.

I see, and you got a code name too, thought Johansson, and then he interrupted his study of Krassner’s intellectual inheritance to consume a good lunch from the Christmas and New Year’s leftovers that his gingerbread-colored sister-in-law had set out. After lunch he napped for an hour, because she had forced both beer and two aquavits on him-she herself kept to mineral water-and when he woke up he took a brisk walk in the dense twilight to clear his skull before he returned to his borrowed desk. Damn, this is starting to get really exciting, thought Johansson as he stamped off the snow in the entryway to his brother’s farm office.

Late in the summer the following year, Pilgrim returned to Sweden, obviously bringing with him very fine American grades, resuming his studies at the university as well as beginning a career as a student politician that was so successful that his new employer, Sweden’s United Student Corps, chose just a few months later to send him to West Germany for an extended “study and contact trip.” Despite the fact that he was clearly “a particularly talented young man,” it was nonetheless a career that was a bit on the fast side for Lars Martin Johansson, with his more traditional police officer’s disposition, and it was Krassner who fueled his suspicions.

According to Krassner, as soon as neutral Sweden had become clear about which way things were leaning, this was the way that military cooperation with the United States had been initiated. This had also gone so far that it was now becoming possible to extend things covertly, without openly doing violence to the official position of a “continuously maintained strict Swedish neutrality.” In general this had concerned military intelligence operations directed against the traditional Swedish enemy and previous ally of the United States, the Soviet Union.

The United States provided the Swedish military with money and technical equipment while the Swedes contributed their geographic position and the personnel required for the job itself to get done. Krassner needed only a few pages to describe-mostly in passing, as it appeared-both the overall features and a number of astonishing particular events in this unofficial (to say the least) Swedish foreign policy.

A primarily defensive military cooperation, just in case. The other side of the coin was the more offensive and intellectually oriented strategy that enthused both Forselius and Buchanan along with their spiritual brethren within the Western world’s intelligence organs. For Forselius and Buchanan the underlying thought was simple and obvious and, of course, axiomatically elitist in a way to which a thinking person with stable conservative values didn’t need to give any thought.

What would decide the future of Europe was the direction in which the young, developing elite would go in a political sense. Because the work of influencing that issue, like all other superior and essential human endeavors, was best carried on in organized forms and preferably with organized tasks and goals as well, the student movements had become both the new armies of the cold war and the field where the battle was fought.

Against this background it wasn’t so strange that it was the American military headquarters in Frankfurt that had taken care of Pilgrim in matters both large and small when he’d finally arrived to “begin his studies” and “make his first international contacts.”

Certainly an interesting time, thought Johansson. Pilgrim had clearly not been a bad haul. As soon as he’d gotten his feet wet he’d started running like a shuttle behind the iron curtain that had just been pulled down: East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia. International symposia, conferences, lecture tours, study visits, debates, and ordinary simple gatherings were sandwiched with secret nighttime meetings, smuggled-out messages, agents to be recruited, and sympathizers to be won over to the right cause. But also the sort of people they hadn’t been successful with, who had become suspect and uncovered, who had let them down. One or two had even disappeared or died.

And the whole time Buchanan had held his fatherly, protective hand over his young favorite Pilgrim. They had frequent and ongoing contacts by letter and telephone and in all the customary secret ways, and all of a sudden Buchanan might suddenly show up, nod at Pilgrim, and take him out to a restaurant regardless of whether it was in Stockholm, Frankfurt, Berlin, London, or Paris. But never in Warsaw, never in Prague, never on the wrong side of the curtain.

An exceedingly generous father figure with almost inexhaustible resources, it appeared, if one were to believe Krassner’s writings and the documentation he’d received from his uncle. Pilgrim had been active as an agent for the CIA within the international European student movement for almost five years, from the autumn of 1948 to the summer of 1953, and during all of that time Buchanan had had his spending hat on and his wallet wide open. Among Krassner’s papers was a neat, handwritten compilation of the amounts transferred to “Pilgrim and/or Pilgrim Operations and/or Pilgrim Operatives” during the years in question: Buchanan’s handwriting, the usual type of copy, the amount of the sum, whether it was disbursed by check, postal order, or in cash, as well as the date and year of the disbursement.

In addition to this compilation there were also twenty-some copies of both Swedish and foreign checks and postal orders that were either drawn blank or to “the holder” or “the bearer,” and none of them had been issued by the CIA or any other official, semiofficial, or covert American authority whatsoever. Instead the money came from American institutions, foundations, and not-for-profit organizations: from the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, from the Beacon, Borden, Edsel, Price, and Schuhheimer foundations, most often from the last named.

Generous guy, thought Johansson, a perception clearly shared by Krassner himself, who in one of his messy and partly handwritten footnotes had scribbled that “Bartlett K. Schuhheimer was a true American and patriot who willed his entire fortune to the fight against the red menace” at the same time as he named his “good friend and comrade-in-arms Col. John C. Buchanan to oversee and distribute the assets of the foundation.”

The whole thing had started on a relatively modest scale. During November and December 1948, Pilgrim had received $1,248.50 for “board and lodging, travel costs and expenses.”

He would hardly have anything to complain about, thought Johansson.

However that might be, by the following year Pilgrim, judging by the costs, had evidently really gotten the operation going. Buchanan had transferred more than $30,000, or almost a 150,000 Swedish crowns in total-a sum corresponding to the combined average annual salaries of fifty-some Swedish industrial workers in the same year. Johansson knew that because he had just refreshed his knowledge of economic history with the aid of a book he’d borrowed from the library in Sundsvall.

During the following two years it had gone even better; almost $60,000 during 1950 and more than $70,000 the following year. But then something dreadful must have happened to Pilgrim or his operation or the branch as a whole, for only a year later the costs had gone down to about $25,000, and by 1953 they were broadly speaking back to where they’d started, a piddling $9,085.25 for the whole year.

According to Krassner it was Pilgrim himself that was the explanation. He had found other, more important things to do and started winding down his involvement both as a student politician and as a secret agent. The operation that he’d built up would be turned over to others, and all of it, by the way, happened with Buchanan’s consent.

High time to call it an evening, thought Johansson, for the clock in his stomach had already said it wanted to have dinner, and the one on his wrist as usual had no objections.

His brother had returned from his business dealings and after dinner they sat in front of the fireplace in the living room to have a quiet highball before going to bed.

“Well,” said Johansson’s big brother demandingly and with a look of curiosity. “How’s it going?”

“What do you mean?” said Johansson, smiling amiably.

“I’ve heard from the wife that you’re sitting by yourself fiddling around all day long,” said his brother. “Is it something secret you’re working on?”

“No,” said Johansson, shaking his head. “I’m just sitting, reading a book.”

“I didn’t know they made books with loose pages,” said his brother, chuckling.

“It’s not printed yet,” said Johansson.

“I peeked in through the window before I left yesterday morning,” his brother explained. “But you didn’t see me or hear me. So is there anything interesting in it?”

“So-so,” said Johansson. “Do you remember that DC-3 the Russians shot down out in the Baltic when I was a little boy?”

“Yes,” said big brother, nodding. “I remember, that was when Papa started cleaning his moose gun even though there were almost three months left till moose season. Did they shoot down any others as well?”

“A Catalina plane that was out searching for the DC-3,” said Johansson. “It was the sixteenth of June, 1952. The DC-3 was three days earlier, the thirteenth.”

“I do remember that,” said Johansson’s big brother, smiling wryly. “Papa Evert was damn tipsy and considering what a bad shot Papa is, I guess we were really lucky the Russkies stopped messing with us.”

“The reason that the Russians shot them down was that they were out spying on the Russians on behalf of the Americans,” said Johansson. This is going to be interesting, he thought.

“You shouldn’t read that kind of shit,” said his big brother, sighing dejectedly. “I remember you were the same when you were little. You read a lot of shit and then you believed it too. For a while I thought there was something seriously wrong with you.”

“It was a joke,” said Johansson. “Skoal, by the way.” That you believed, he thought.

“You shouldn’t read a lot of shit,” his brother repeated. “Look at me. I haven’t eaten porridge or read a damn book since I started being able to defend myself, and I’ll be damned if I don’t make just as much in a month as you pull in in a year. Skoal, then.”

Certainly, thought Johansson, marking his agreement with his glass. I guess that’s precisely the point, he thought.

The following morning-he’d just sat down to start the day’s work on Krassner’s papers-Wiklander called him despite the fact that it was Saturday.

“I got the number from your brother,” Wiklander explained. “It was those counts and barons you were wondering about.”

“Are you at work on a Saturday?” asked Johansson. Wiklander can go places, he thought.

“I’m slaving at the after-hours unit,” Wiklander explained. “Thought about going to the Canary Islands in January but the holidays can really put a draft in your wallet.”

“I’m listening,” said Johansson, who had never been to the Canary Islands in his entire life and had no intention of ever going there, despite the fact that he was a real policeman.

It had taken awhile even for Wiklander, for none of the subjects of inquiry were in the police’s own register or archives, and for a time he’d almost believed that he would have to go outside the building, but then fortunately he’d happened to think of his colleague Söderhjelm.

“But then I happened to think of our colleague Söderhjelm in the fraud unit,” Wiklander explained, “and it struck me that she’s one of them.”

“One of them?”

“Yes, one of the nobility, that is,” Wiklander clarified. “They usually know everything about each other.”

Personally Johansson had only a faint recollection of a younger, female colleague. Well trained and at the same time courteous but without being the least bit ingratiating, which was actually an all-too-rare combination in the world where he’d chosen to live his life.

“I’m listening,” he said.

“Yes, those people clearly know everything about each other,” Wiklander repeated. “She is supposedly distantly related to that von Wrede too. She arranged for me to chat with someone she knew at the House of Nobles. It’s an organization they have,” he clarified for his obviously commoner boss.

“I’m listening,” said Johansson. Get to the point already, he thought, feeling a slight irritation when he saw the piles of paper in front of him.

“They’re dead,” said Wiklander. “All of them except for that math genius are dead. Although he’s not nobility, of course. Some old family of clergy from Västergötland, the Söderhjelm woman thought. Semirefined, if you like.”

…

All of the aristocrats involved were dead, and no normal causes of death either, according to Wiklander. First out was Captain Count Lewenhaupt, who had passed away as early as 1949 from the complications of a tropical disease that he’d picked up during a safari in Africa.

“Some mysterious worm that crept in under his skin and took up residence in his liver. He died at some special clinic for tropical diseases in London,” Wiklander summarized.

Bilharzia, thought Johansson, who was not the usual policeman and knew a little of everything.

Second Lieutenant Baron von Wrede had died in a traffic accident in 1961. According to Wiklander he’d evidently driven his convertible sports car right into the stable on the estate where he lived.

“The word on the ground is that he was drunk and had argued with his wife,” said Wiklander, who was also a real policeman of a more usual type than Johansson.

“Björnstjerna, then,” said Johansson. “Where, when, and how did he die?”

“Seems to have been a completely normal death, actually,” said Wiklander, his voice sounding almost a little disappointed. “Died at the Sophia Home; in 1964, of cancer. He wasn’t particularly old, either. Born in 1923.”

“Forselius, then,” Johansson pressed. “What have you found out about him?”

“He’s still alive,” declared Wiklander. “Although he was considerably older than any of the others. Seems to be an interesting type. He’s even in the encyclopedia. I trotted down to the public library. Took the opportunity to peek at a few books that he’s written.”

“So was there anything interesting?” said Johansson in a friendly tone.

“Sure,” said Wiklander. “Although it was pure Greek plus a lot of numbers, so I’ll reserve my judgment.”

“Interesting type?”

“If I’ve understood things correctly, I believe he’s worked quite a bit for SePo,” said Wiklander. “Even in later years, actually, despite the fact that he’s as old as the hills. If I haven’t gotten the matter completely turned around, I believe he’s the one who built their computer program for codes and encryption and all that stuff they work with.”

“You haven’t talked to anyone?” said Johansson, and for some reason he felt a faint stab of worry.

“Not my style,” said Wiklander dismissively. “I found it out on my own.”

“Except for Söderhjelm,” said Johansson judiciously.

“She’s like me so, she doesn’t count,” said Wiklander curtly.

“That’s good,” said Johansson. “What else were you thinking about doing this weekend?” he added familiarly, and as a suitable and diplomatic conclusion.

“As soon as I get off I thought about asking Officer Söderhjelm to dinner,” said Wiklander. “Nice lady, actually.”

Nice to hear that someone is normal, thought Johansson, looking at his paper-strewn desk.

“There’s one thing I’m wondering about,” said Wiklander, sounding a little cautious. “If you’ll excuse me, chief.”

“Shoot,” said Johansson. “I’m listening.”

“What is this really about?” said Wiklander. “Is it something I ought to know about, or what?”

“Well,” said Johansson. “If it stays completely between us?”

“Obviously,” said Wiklander.

“I’m actually in the process of writing a mystery,” said Johansson. “I just needed some good characters.”

“So that’s how it is,” said Wiklander, whose voice suddenly sounded very wary. “Too bad they were dead, then.”

“You can’t have everything,” said Johansson tranquilly, and then he thanked him for his help and finished the conversation.

In a normal mystery isn’t everyone dead sooner or later? he thought as he put down the receiver, and you can’t have everything. Or can you? And for some reason he started thinking about the woman he’d met at the little post office up on Körsbärsvägen.

…

During 1953 the prime minister had changed the direction of his life. It wasn’t a dramatic change, but rather a course correction, and he seemed not only to have retained his interest in secret activities but also to have developed them in more conventional, national forms. And according to Krassner, this had all happened not only with Buchanan’s consent but with his clearly expressed approval and support.

First he had begun phasing out his involvement with student politics to switch his sights to greater political goals. As a natural consequence of this, among other things, his activity within the CIA decreased sharply, and after the summer of 1953 there was nothing in either Krassner’s text or Buchanan’s documentation to indicate that he carried out any direct assignments whatsoever on their behalf. On the other hand, according to Krassner, he still had close, recurring contacts with Buchanan all the way up to the spring of 1955, when he’d sent his strange, poetically worded notice that his life between the longing of summer and the cold of winter was now to be seen as history.

During the same year he’d also gotten a steady job-two steady jobs, in fact. Right before the summer of 1953 he’d gotten a position as an “analyst” with the intelligence department at army headquarters, and only a few months later he’d started working as an assistant to the then prime minister. Not a bad job for a highly talented young man with great ambitions in life, and not a bad employer, either. Not least as his professional connection to the twenty-five-years-older prime minister soon appeared to those around them like an almost classic father-son relationship.

The prime minister as a young man, Pilgrim, Johansson’s own prime minister, seemed to have had a genuine interest in security work and intelligence operations. His work as an analyst also appeared to have been relatively unbound by the label his employer had put on his assignment. Whether that was in order to mislead the devil, or only a simple expression of the fact that he actually was a free operator, was beyond Johansson’s ability to judge, and Krassner no longer had any substantial contributions to make, either. But there was hardly anyone trying to rap the old prime minister’s personal assistant on the knuckles, thought Johansson.

To start with, according to Krassner but without particular details or evidence in the form of documents, he was said to have worked on the regular military cooperation between the Swedish and American intelligence services; what this actually involved was to analyze security requirements and in the end to exchange personnel, services, and the necessary material to satisfy those requirements. Here on several occasions he was said to have turned to Buchanan for assistance in both word and deed, but it was unclear what this would have consisted of in concrete terms. Krassner also pointed out that because Buchanan was working in a different branch of CIA operations, his contribution had mostly concerned arranging contacts and generally functioning as a type of door-opener and personal guarantor that Pilgrim was both “a good kid” and of “the right stuff.”

Of the prime minister’s alleged role in the building up of IB, the Information Bureau, Krassner had little to convey beyond what had come out or been suggested in the domestic public debate. Krassner recounted these briefly as generally known, clear facts, and that was all. Pilgrim had played a central role when the secret organization whose primary task was to keep the political opponents of the social democrats under supervision was established, and according to the same source, in a conversation with Buchanan as early as the fall of 1954, he was said to have made it completely clear that he considered his social democratic organization the “natural governing party in Sweden.”

Viewpoints of that type naturally disturbed Buchanan. Especially as they came from a “highly talented young man” with “stable conservative views,” and among his posthumous papers there was also a photocopy of his notations from the conversation with Pilgrim. Judging by the handwriting and the copy, written by Buchanan at the time when the conversation was supposed to have taken place, but as a piece of evidence nonetheless of secondary value because when all was said and done it was Buchanan’s version of what Pilgrim was supposed to have said. Not to mention being generally hard to interpret and cryptic in places.

All the same, thought Johansson, for by this time even Pilgrim was starting to show clear signs that his passion for intelligence operations was in the process of cooling. Instead it was his political activity and ambitions that had come to the fore, and it was also now that his career caught fire and started taking off in earnest. His political assignments started to be piled high and he’d gotten more and more say in his own job in a formal sense as well. At the start of the sixties he’d become head of the prime minister’s chancellery, and only a few years later he’d taken a seat in the government. During the following years he’d exchanged ministerial positions in the direction of the short end of the table, and when his own boss retired, at the end of the 1960s, it was time: prime minister, despite the fact that he was one of the very youngest members of the government and almost an alien species as a social democrat, considering his background, upbringing, and education.

I see then, thought Johansson, looking at his watch. The clock in his stomach had not started seriously ticking, mostly due to the fact that there were still several hours left before dinner, but he felt a strong desire to get out and move about. Not a walk, thought Johansson, for then melancholy would strike him in earnest. Drive into town, he decided, and return the book about economic history he’d borrowed from the library.

Once he was at the library he also took the opportunity to make a few inquiries of his own, and although he was only at a public library in Sundsvall, he more or less stumbled across an interesting piece of information about the mysterious Forselius that Wiklander evidently had missed. Not so strange in itself, thought Johansson, considering what he knew and what Wiklander didn’t know.

First he found a book with the title Great Swedes in Mathematics, and there he retrieved both Sonya Kovalevsky-despite the fact that she was Russian-and Professor Forselius, whose secret activities were passed over in complete silence and in which the further significance of what he’d otherwise done was in any event beyond Johansson. True, he could count, but higher mathematics left him cold. On the other hand there was nothing wrong with his eyes, and he noticed quite quickly that Forselius clearly had a disciple who was no slouch either. Who moreover shared the same name with the prime minister’s special adviser and approximately the same age too. So that’s how it is, thought Johansson, and then he returned home to his brother’s to have dinner.

Johansson lay awake quite a while that night and thought about his knowledge of the country’s prime minister, and for some reason he felt almost exhilarated as he did so. Hardly the man who’s described in the bourgeois press, thought Johansson, smiling as he lay in bed. More like some hero of the Western world out of a random issue of Reader’s Digest. He used to read the magazine cover to cover when he was young, “Humor in Uniform” and a little of the cold war’s musketeers, but no lettres de cachet, for here it was more likely a question of messages written with invisible ink, and no frothing horses but rather an old Buick V-8, rumbling along through dark and stormy nights, and if there were trapdoors they were probably in people’s heads. Although the hollow oak trees where you hid things would have been the same. Oaks could get as old as anything, after all.

There must have been a great deal worth writing about, thought Johansson, for he’d also read that in Reader’s Digest. The scoundrels from the East used to have pens that were actually pistols, umbrellas with poisoned ferrules, and innocent-looking walking sticks that with a quick tap on the handle could be transformed into shining rapiers with razor-sharp blades. But what had Pilgrim actually had, aside from his noble intentions and a good cause?

He would have needed someone like my big brother, thought Johansson. A slightly simpler companion like big brother with his shrewd head and his huge fists and his completely unsentimental ability to punch anyone and everyone on the jaw as soon as things didn’t suit him. Or like Jarnebring, perhaps? True, he wasn’t as shrewd as his brother, far from it, but when it came to genuine hand-to-hand fighting he was unbeatable. Not even James Bond could have managed him even by escaping, for then Jarnebring would have caught up with him and chopped him on the neck and given him a going-over until he was no more than an empty suit coat and a pair of limp trousers from some tailor on Old Bond Street and… About then he fell asleep, and when he woke up in the morning it was with the same smile on his lips.

Sweet Jesus, thought Johansson, laughing a little to himself. Pilgrim and Jarnie, what a radar unit.

High time to tie up my sack, and the sooner the better, thought Johansson, because it was Sunday, Epiphany Eve, and the day before his journey home. It had been a quick shower and an even quicker breakfast, and at six-thirty he was already at his place at the large desk in the farm office.

The piles before him had thinned out and most of it he’d been able to sort out. Of the documentation only a letter with its envelope and a condolence card with a black frame and a three-line poem remained. But these were original documents, not copies, they were handwritten, and according to Krassner it was the prime minister, Pilgrim, who had written them, after he’d become prime minister, and according to Krassner he had written them in May 1974. They were postmarked Stockholm and sent by express mail to Buchanan’s post office box at home in Albany.

Almost twenty years after he’d written his farewell letter, thought Johansson. An entire lifetime, considering all that had happened and all that he’d experienced. Peculiar, very peculiar, thought Johansson.

We ought to be able to check on these, he thought from force of habit while by turns he held the letter, the condolence card, and the envelope between the nails of his thumb and index finger, twisting and turning them. Perhaps there are prints too, he thought. American technicians had succeeded in securing fingerprints that were decades old-he’d read that in the FBI’s monthly journal-and it was almost always a matter of prints left on paper. Where would I get his fingerprints from? thought Johansson with a wry smile.

…

The letter first: It was short, written by hand with Pilgrim’s characteristic, expressively forward-leaning penmanship-like a cavalry charge on paper, thought Johansson, smiling again. The stationery was thick and certainly expensive. When he held it up against the light he saw the Lessebo watermark.

Fionn,

Heard about Raven’s tragic death yesterday. I truly hope that you put away the bastards who did it. Because I’m guessing that you intend to go to his funeral, I would be grateful if you could deliver the enclosed final greeting from me. Don’t ask me why, but Raven was a true lover of Icelandic sagas. Take care!

Pilgrim

Then the condolence card, which he had sent in the same envelope.

If this is Snorre then I’m Japanese, thought Johansson while he read the three lines on the card, written in Swedish:

Death is black like a raven’s wing,

Sorrow is cold like a midwinter night

Just as long and no way out

Must be something that Pilgrim wrote himself, thought Johansson. Perhaps something that only he and Raven understood the meaning of and which now served as a final greeting. What was it she’d said, that extraordinarily talented woman he’d met a month before? A man with a poetic disposition, or rather a poetic ambition?

Johansson leaned back in the desk chair while he stretched his back with his fingers laced together behind his neck in order to think better. But this time it didn’t help. Instead he took Krassner’s manuscript and continued to read. Now only a third of it remained, a thin bundle that already felt limp in his hand and whose written contents seemed to promise little more. According to Krassner, during his active period Buchanan recruited almost a hundred agents in the struggle for Europe’s young, developing elite. He’d had two favorites, and according to his nephew they were the only ones who really meant anything to him. One was Pilgrim and the other was Raven. The first had betrayed him; the other had been faithful to him unto death.

Raven was Salomon “Sal” Tannenbaum, same age as Pilgrim. Born and raised in New York in a prosperous intellectual Jewish family, and according to the “Irishman” Krassner, that was just about the best background you could have in the international intelligence world, regardless of whether you “opened your brown eyes” in Moscow, Warsaw, London, or New York.

Must be your German father, thought Johansson grimly while he hurried through the sparse text.

He’d gotten his agent name, Raven, from Buchanan, an obvious and simple choice, as he looked like a raven and was as wise as two. After studying law at Harvard and an early involvement in the American student movement, he’d met Buchanan, been recruited as an agent for the CIA, and gone over to Europe in order to make a few introductory brushes with the communist student organizations.

In Frankfurt, in November 1948, Raven met Pilgrim. Not unexpectedly, they took a liking to each other.

Raven’s contribution on the European front, however, had not lasted long. Instead he’d returned to the United States and started working as an attorney for just about every worthy, politically correct purpose whatsoever that could be found in the great land to the west. Sal Tannenbaum had represented the civil-rights movement, the Black Panthers, Mexican farmworkers, Native Americans, and even Eskimos. He had “stood up” for racial integration, union rights, peace in Vietnam, and of course for world peace. He had thundered against organized crime and capitalist exploitation of the black underclass. He had almost always done it pro bono-and according to Krassner he’d been one of the CIA’s most effective infiltrators of the “radical, socialist, and communist movements” on the American home front for more than twenty years.

Sweet Jesus, sighed Johansson. If this is true he can’t have had it too easy.

In May of 1974 a man, probably in early middle age, probably white, probably dressed in a suit, with an everyday appearance, had come into Tannenbaum’s office. Calm, quiet, and unobserved he walked past the receptionist, who was on the phone as usual, opened the door to Tannenbaum’s office, and shot a bullet right through his head. Then he’d left the place, and considering who the victim was and how little the witnesses had seen, the whole thing was a police nightmare.

Must have been crawling with motives and possible perpetrators, thought Johansson. And if it really was as Krassner alleged, and someone else must have come to the same conclusion, you probably have to multiply them by two, he thought.

According to Krassner it was much simpler than that. The murder of Raven was a contract killing. The person who had ordered it was Pilgrim, and those who’d helped him with the practical aspects were the new masters he was serving, the Soviet Union and its military intelligence services. (Hence the title of Krassner’s book, “The Spy Who Went East.”) Krassner’s explanation was long, complicated, and thin. Firm evidence was completely lacking and instead Krassnerian logic held unrestricted sway. During his twenty years with the police, Johansson had heard a number of Swedish variations on the same theme discussed ad nauseam in police break rooms and among friends, although he’d never heard anything even remotely similar to this.

Fair is fair, thought Johansson while reviewing in his mind’s eye several of the most rabid characters among the colleagues he’d had, all of whom had in common that they never ought to have been allowed to become policemen. Russian spy? Yes, because “everyone knew” that. Murderer? No, and there wasn’t anyone who suggested that, either. And personally he’d always thought-regardless of how he’d voted, for that of course had varied over the years-that the whole thing was pure nonsense. That the prime minister would spy for the Soviet Union was just as improbable as he now found it probable that for several years in his youth he’d been an agent for the CIA. I’ll buy that from you, thought Johansson, and the “you” he was thinking of was that wretched Krassner and his thirsty uncle. But the rest you can just forget.

Having come that far in his musings, he was interrupted by the phone ringing, even though it was only eight o’clock on a Sunday morning. It was Wiklander, and as a real policeman should he’d found something out. Namely that the mysterious Professor Forselius not only knew highly placed persons in the secret police but also was a close friend of the prime minister’s special adviser, the same man responsible for security issues that affected the prime minister and the government.

“Interesting,” said Johansson mendaciously. “How’d you find that out?”

“Our colleague Söderhjelm,” said Wiklander. “Didn’t I mention that we were going to have dinner together yesterday evening?”

Evidently one thing had led to another, and without going into details Wiklander had ended up somewhat later in front of Söderhjelm’s well-stocked bookshelf, inherited from an uncle with literary interests, where by pure chance a book about great Swedes in mathematics had caught his eye, and with Forselius freshly in mind one thing had led to another.

“Pure chance,” said Wiklander modestly.

“So how was dinner?” said Johansson as a diversion.

Nice, according to Wiklander. So nice, in fact, that he was now considering forgetting about the Canary Islands and going instead with Söderhjelm to Thailand on a three-week-long diving expedition.

“Sounds nice,” said Johansson neutrally. “Say hello from me, by the way, and thanks a lot for the help.”

I am her boss, after all, he thought as he set down the receiver and returned to Krassner and the concluding and messiest part of his manuscript, which had been messy from the get-go. And because he’d instinctively mistrusted everything in it when he’d done the first run-through, he decided to read it extra carefully now.

Concurrently with his growing political success, Pilgrim had also acquired international ambitions, and by the end of the 1960s he had already actively expressed his support for just about every movement or conflict hostile to the United States that could be found on the political map. First he’d turned against the U.S. struggle for peace and freedom in Vietnam, then he’d started to give support to Castro in Cuba and various South and Central American rebels, and as the cherry on the cake he’d stood up for Arafat and his Palestinian terrorists.

According to Krassner he’d done so because he was now, and had been for a long time, an agent of influence for the Soviet Union-he hadn’t mentioned even a word about his possible political convictions-and whatever the case he’d driven his old comrades-in-arms Buchanan and Raven crazy. Raven was the more furious of the two because he wasn’t the person everyone believed him to be but was rather merely an ordinary, hardworking, true American CIA agent. And he was also a Jew, so it was the support of Arafat and the Palestinians that vexed him the most.

Raven wanted to strike back and reveal Pilgrim’s past. Buchanan was hesitant. Accustomed as one easily became in his line of work to doubters, defectors, normal traitors, and double agents, regardless of the factual background it was “bad for business” to expose old agents. As things were, with Raven exerting pressure and wanting to retaliate by messing with Pilgrim, and Buchanan trying to hold him back while other solutions were being considered, the whole thing had solved itself at the beginning of May 1974, by way of the “probably white,” “probably dressed in a suit,” “probably early middle aged,” and quite certainly “everyday” man who walked into Raven’s office and shot his head off.

…

“On the usual inscrutable roads where the intelligence agents of the world travel,” wrote Krassner, Pilgrim’s Russian comrades had evidently intercepted what was going on, and Pilgrim’s friend and agent contact, the Russian KGB general Gennadi Renko, member of the Politburo and the Central Committee, had quickly seen to cleaning up Pilgrim’s history. This was the situation in which Buchanan made his decision. Regardless of the fact that he was now risking his life, his temporal support, and his posthumous reputation, he didn’t intend to take this lying down, and what made him the most furious was that Pilgrim had had the nerve to send a condolence card to a man he’d had killed. Therefore he told his story to “his nephew, young friend, and faithful squire,” and “demanded of him a sacred oath” to see to it that “justice was served and that perhaps the greatest traitor in European postwar history got his just punishment.”

“And this was the only, the simple, and the obvious reason that I’ve written this book,” Krassner concluded his manuscript. The end of the very last sentence he’d evidently decided to cross out, possibly from false modesty or because he’d gotten cocky, but as it was carelessly done with the aid of a ballpoint pen and the last page, like the page before it, was an original and not a photocopy, Johansson could still read the original typewritten text from the back side of the paper: “despite the fact that I am obviously well aware that I am thereby running a considerable risk of being murdered myself.”

On Epiphany Johansson drove home to Stockholm in a car that he’d borrowed from his brother and that he was to deliver to a car dealer on Surbrunnsgatan of whom he had a vague police memory that he would rather not think about. Instead he thought about other things, mostly about Krassner and the papers he’d gotten from him. He was in an unusually good mood the whole time, mostly pondering a small detail in Pilgrim’s farewell letter to which Krassner hadn’t given him an answer. Not even the hint of an answer.

That time when he’d fallen free, like in a dream?

…

What was it that had really happened back then? thought Johansson. And before him, in the twilight land of his imagination, he saw a rebuilt Lancaster bomber with sound-muffled motors that in the middle of the black night was searching under Polish radar. The jumping hatch was already pushed open and there stood Pilgrim in black overalls and a tight-fitting leather hood with only his hawk-nosed profile sticking out. Every muscle tensed while he held tightly to the cable on the roof. Now, now he got the high sign, and after a decisive nod he jumped straight out just as he released his hold on the cable and fell freely, like in a dream, through all the blackness, toward all the unknown down there.

Think if a real writer got to sink his teeth into Krassner’s material, sighed Johansson. What a story it could have been. It wouldn’t even have to be true, he thought.