“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.