Between Summer's Longing and Winter's End

CHAPTER XXII

Falling free, as in a dream

Stockholm in March

On the Sunday after the murder the chief constable held his first press conference, and considering its national significance it had been decided to broadcast it live on TV. It was with a certain excitement that Waltin settled down on his large sofa, since he’d already understood at the investigation command’s first meeting what the major news that the chief constable intended to present would consist of.

Little Jeanette was also on the scene, despite the fact that he’d already decided to get rid of her. She had aged noticeably recently, and that sort of thing just didn’t work, but be that as it may, this event demanded an audience, so she had to put on her little rose-colored slip while she served him the malt whiskey that he needed in order to get into the right mood.

As the whole thing dragged on for a while Waltin unfortunately got more than a little intoxicated, so when it was finally time he was forced to lie down and cover one eye with his hand in order to focus right. The advantage on the other hand was that he avoided seeing little Jeanette, who was sulking as usual. But at last it was finally time. The chief constable leaned forward, nodding seriously but nonetheless smiling toward his audience, and after a well-timed pause he held up two revolvers in front of him while he was met with a veritable cascade of flashbulbs, wave after wave streaming toward him.

“These, ladies and gentlemen,” said the chief constable, “are two revolvers of the same type as the one that the perpetrator used when he shot our prime minister.”

You don’t know how right you are, thought Waltin with delight. After the investigation command’s meeting he had seen with his own eyes how that little pompous ass Wiijnbladh demonstrated them for his top boss.

“I’m guessing it’s the one in your left hand,” Waltin had yelled, “the one with the short barrel,” and when he did so he’d been overcome by a violent fit of laughter. Exactly like when he’d stood on the escalator that time and thought about dear Mother, who’d just left him for good on the tracks down below.

He is, God help me, not all there, thought Assistant Detective Jeanette Eriksson, age twenty-eight. And he can’t fuck like a normal person, either. And now I’m going to forget the lunatic.

By Monday Bäckström’s little investigation was already wrapped up, and all that really remained was to collect the murderer. But because everyone clearly had so much going on, a few more days went by before he finally got an audience with the chief constable. Evidently he was working all night too, for it was almost ten before that little nausea-inducing Grevlinge finally let him into the chief constable’s office.

What the hell are all these homos doing here? thought Bäckström when he saw the three civilians who sat in shirtsleeves and red suspenders around the chief constable’s conference table. True, he already knew that business with Babs, for Babs himself had told Bäckström that he was best friends with the chief constable when Bäckström had questioned him that time Babs had been robbed by a seaman that he’d brought home to play Donald and Daisy Duck with, but those other two? Where did they come from?

The older one was suspiciously like that Queerlund that SePo used to run around and drone on about, and that somewhat burlier character was even more like the man who was a cashier at the Society for Swedish Leathermen down on Skeppar Karls gränd, where the board of directors used to hang members up on hooks from the ceiling the whole night. Damn, this doesn’t add up, thought Bäckström, for the chief constable himself had a reputation for being a real threshing machine with the ladies. What the hell is going on? thought Bäckström. I must warn him, he thought.

“Sit down,” said the chief constable cordially, indicating an empty chair with his hand.

“Yes, don’t be shy, now,” said Queerlund, winking, while Leather Man only looked damned eager. The only one that behaved himself was actually Babs, who doubtless still remembered the investigation that Bäckström had conducted.

“Thanks,” said Bäckström, sitting down on the edge of the chair as he felt the sweat start running inside his shirt collar. “Yes, I believe I’ve found the one who did it,” he said, clearing his throat nervously, for he hadn’t felt this uncomfortable since the time when that half-monkey Jarnebring had attacked him and snatched his beer.

“We’re all ears,” said the chief constable, nodding benevolently. And if this doesn’t add up, we always have the Kurds, he thought confidently.

At about the same time as Bäckström was sitting with the Stockholm chief constable, another meeting about the murder of the Swedish prime minister was starting. Four thousand miles west (in round numbers) at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, and if nothing else this was an illustration of what a small world we humans live in.

It was the head of the Office of Scandinavian Affairs, Mike “The Bear” Liska, who called the meeting, and the reason was that they wanted to make a summary of the case that at the bureau-and for several years-had had the code name the Buchanan Papers. The agency’s analysts thought that a connection probably existed between the Buchanan Papers, the murder that the Swedish secret police operative had in all likelihood perpetrated on Buchanan’s nephew John P. Krassner, and-possibly-the murder of the Swedish prime minister.

What was worrying the analysts was that if such were the case they couldn’t understand either the motive behind the murder of the Swedish prime minister or which persons were behind it. Everything they had been able to produce up till now argued strongly instead that it must have been the work of a so-called isolated madman. A bewildering case, thought Liska, and despite his long-term experience of the Swedish field he felt completely at a loss. The story quite simply didn’t hang together. It was “un-Swedish” in some way, he thought, and now of course he had no one that he could ask directly.

Present at the meeting was also the responsible field agent, Sarah J. Weissman, who normally worked as a language expert at the National Security Agency, under the cover of being a freelancer in the publishing industry. Quite naturally, moreover, considering that it was she who had originally sounded the alarm on Buchanan’s increasing talkativeness and the book that her ex-boyfriend from younger days was clearly in the process of writing about John “Fionn” Buchanan and his agent from the cold war, “Pilgrim.”

Given that she had had Krassner’s entire confidence it was also she who had really conducted the case. She’d had a full view right from the start, and NSA had had no objections whatsoever against loaning her out to their colleagues at the CIA. She had even had the decisive responsibility for the screening as well as the preparation of those documents that had finally been turned over to the Swedish former police superintendent Lars M. Johansson, previously head of the Swedish National Bureau of Criminal Investigation.

Regrettably, the case had developed in both a dramatic and unexpected manner through the security measures that Krassner had taken on his own initiative, and of which they had been completely ignorant up until Weissman had the opportunity to read Krassner’s letter to Police Superintendent Johansson, which had been returned to her address, arriving twelve days after the news of his death.

The knowledge of Police Superintendent Johansson’s existence had quickly raised the temperature at the office and generated some extensive activity at the CIA’s unit at the embassy in Stockholm. When it then came to their knowledge that Johansson was evidently in the United States-true, for other reasons, which one might reasonably conclude had nothing whatsoever to do with the Buchanan Papers, as his business trip had been arranged several months before Krassner went over to Sweden-the tension had approached the boiling point.

It had not been reduced by the fact that there were two circumstances that were hard to reconcile. Johansson could not possibly have gotten hold of Krassner’s letter, but at the same time he was inexplicably interested in both Krassner and Weissman. Could it be that he had simply developed suspicions about Krassner’s suicide? They knew about his close friendship with the policeman who had investigated the case, as well as the fact that Johansson was a very competent police officer.

Regardless of the reason for his trip, the analysts’ wrinkled brows had not contributed a thing until Johansson suddenly knocked on the door of Weissman’s home and she herself a full day later had told the whole, improbable story about “a shoe with a heel with a hole in it.”

The jubilation at the bureau had known no bounds when Weissman, in her inimitable Swedish-influenced Minnesota accent, had again related Johansson’s story. Liska himself laughed until the tears ran. Despite thirty years in the business this was the absolute best story he’d heard up till now that he could never tell.

“Jesus, guys,” giggled Sarah, “you should have seen that big Swedish cop just sitting there on my sofa… so full of that country-boy confidence… the real McCoy of the North Pole.”

So as far as Krassner was concerned the matter seemed to be more or less clear, even quite clear. He had actually been murdered because he had most unfortunately been confronted with a Swedish secret police operative, after which the latter tried to save his own rear end. Something that apparently he had also succeeded in doing. Regrettably by taking with him the rather discreet and innocent message they were trying to send to the Swedish secret police to be forwarded on to the person that it ultimately concerned.

…

On the other hand, the murder of the Swedish prime minister was quite a different story. That they had let Krassner carry on at all depended on the fact that all along they had counted on his being caught in the net of the Swedish secret police, which in a certain way he had been. In that way, without unnecessary drama, a “friendly warning” could be sent to Pilgrim-they did have a history in common, after all-the significance of which was that perhaps they were not always unreservedly willing to accept his constant criticism on questions that naturally belonged to the sphere of the political interests of the United States.

Which was why they’d allowed the completely preposterous accusation of the murder of Raven to remain in the papers that Johansson was allowed to take home with him. They themselves knew better, and the only reason the FBI hadn’t arrested the perpetrator was that he was already dead, and that it might have disturbed an ongoing and considerably more important investigation of a Mafia family in Cleveland, which had had a conflict with one of Raven’s clients and solved it by shooting the client’s representative when the latter had become too troublesome.

They had sat for several hours before they had finally come to agreement and decided to place the Buchanan Papers in the files under the usual seventy-five-year secrecy rule and with a special notation that “they, in all probability, had no connection with the murder of the Swedish prime minister” but rather “that this, in all probability, was an action of an isolated madman. Conceivable murderers of the prime minister within the circle of Swedish secret police officers and intelligence agents who had knowledge of Krassner are thus lacking, as are conceivable motives. The case is hereby closed, and no further actions will be taken by the bureau.” Liska noted it all on the cover of the file folder before it was carried down to the archive.

After that the meeting had been concluded on a high note and the majority of the participants had gone out and had two or even more beers together.