“Yeah, hell,” said big brother and shrugged his broad shoulders in an eloquent gesture. “You can have pure hell with your prostrate.”
“Prostrate,” repeated Lars Martin vaguely.
“Yeah, you know Great-Uncle Einar. They had to take him to the hospital in the middle of the night and drive a whole canister up his prick so he could finally take a piss.”
A whole canister, thought Lars Martin, and our great-uncle was certainly a full-grown man, but still, wasn’t that impossible?
“A canister?”
“One of those hospital canisters,” his brother clarified with a fateful voice. “It was Bergqvist who told me when I was hunting with him right afterward. Think about it. A canister, I mean, hell…” His brother shook his head exhaustedly.
Bergqvist was the town alcoholic but a very highly regarded district physician, and big brother used to act as a hunting helper for him, so there was nothing wrong with the informant, thought Lars Martin. But a canister? Certainly only a hospital canister, but how much smaller could it be? Doctor Bergqvist was twice as big as the teacher at school.
“So let me give you a good piece of advice, if you don’t have ladies around then it’s a matter of beating off. And at least two or three times a day, otherwise it can go straight to hell,” big brother summarized.
So this was the mecca of the Western police world to which I’ve made a pilgrimage, like a pilgrim from the snow-covered North, thought Johansson, in an excellent mood as he began his brisk morning walk after finishing breakfast. But no minarets and no prayer callers, for this mecca was a little less than forty miles south of Washington, D.C., on the Potomac River, unobtrusively bedded down among Virginia’s gentle, forest-covered hills.
At the heart of the premises were twenty-some buildings of brick and whitewashed stone-built in some sort of postwar functional vernacular, which at ground level were joined by a network of glassed-in corridors. There were offices, laboratory facilities, workout rooms, a swimming pool and a library, classrooms, lecture halls, and a movie theater. There was a restaurant, a cafeteria, and three large buildings for accommodations with a few hundred individual rooms of between sixty and a hundred square feet for the lecturers, students, and other guests staying at or visiting the academy.
What this looks most like is a smaller American university, thought Johansson, who had never visited such a place but still had a definite and in fact quite correct idea of how things looked at a small, modern American university. Typical campus, Johansson decided knowledgeably. Although then it no longer added up: not with a small, modern American university, in any case.
Not far from the central facilities was a small American city, Hogan’s Alley, with a courthouse building, church, school, post office, bank, shops, theater, and casino, and what all those things had in common was that they weren’t real. It was here that police-related arts were practiced and perfected against hired actors playing murderers, robbers, bootleggers, thieves, swindlers, and con men. A Disneyland for people who want to play cops and robbers, thought Johansson, setting a course for the surrounding terrain with its gentle, tree-covered hills.
But there were only obstacle courses, jogging paths, and shooting ranges. In any case, none of it had been intended for brisk walks under a cloudless sky. This he gathered from the muddy, run-down surface and from the glassy stares he got from the totally exhausted runners racing along across the terrain. Damn, thought Johansson. They’re not even running, they’re trying to do themselves in. This is no university with teachers and students. This is an army encampment for an order of knights with castles and fortifications and a jousting field and fencing halls where preparations are being made for a holy war.
When he returned from his morning walk, his good mood was gone, his feet were muddy, and he went back to his room and lay down on his bed to read. Then he must have fallen asleep, for when he opened his eyes it was getting dark outside the window and he had missed lunch. Dinner in an hour, thought Johansson, feeling a bit more alert. After dinner he and his two travel companions from the National Bureau of Criminal Investigation seated themselves at the bar, each ordering a beer, and chatted a little about things past and future. On one point they were touchingly in agreement. There was a bit too much boot camp about the place. The food was good, though, and it was clean and tidy too, and their hosts were cordial with a vengeance. Exactly as it should be in a secret order, thought Johansson.
“I took a turn on the cross-country track,” said the chief inspector from the narcotics squad, who was both a brother of the order and an exercise addict. “They were running like someone was chasing them with a blow torch. I was forced to put it in overdrive to get a little peace and quiet.”
“I took a brisk walk myself,” said Johansson. “The main street down and back.” He intended to keep his experiences of the surrounding terrain to himself.
“Hoover Road, after J. Edgar Hoover, head of the FBI for almost fifty years and the person who founded the place where we’re sitting right now with our beers before going to bed.” The chief inspector from the Interpol group smiled and raised his beer glass.
“I thought he founded the whole FBI,” said Johansson.
“There you’re mistaken, chief,” said the Interpol chief inspector, wiping a little foam from his upper lip. “The FBI was founded in 1908 as a special division of their department of justice. Hoover became its sixth director in 1924. On the other hand, he did found the academy we’re now visiting.”
“Not a day that you don’t learn something new,” said Johansson, smiling a little while his colleague from narcotics leaned forward and cleared his throat conspiratorially, at the same time wiggling his right hand a little.
“I’ve heard he wasn’t sure which locker room to use,” the narcotics chief inspector said, smiling wryly.
“Yes, interesting, isn’t it?” The one from the Interpol group nodded. “In the middle of everything, head of the FBI, macho man to the nth degree, deeply conservative, a believer, Christian American right wing, merciless persecutor of the least liberal peccadillo, not to mention anything to the left of that, and there he was, living in a lifelong relationship with another FBI agent. They lived in the same house, and officially he was Hoover’s chauffeur, servant, and bodyguard, but anyone who knew anything knew that they were a couple. And that his boss used to change into a dress on major occasions.”
“Yeah, what the hell,” said the narcotics chief inspector, shaking his head. “What a life.”
“Let’s hope they loved each other,” said Johansson in a neutral tone and raised his glass.
[MONDAY, DECEMBER 2, TO FRIDAY, DECEMBER 6]
The days had gone by quickly. Planned way in advance, scheduled down to the minute, filled with the content given in the program but only that and nothing else. Three meals a day, half an hour for breakfast in the morning, an hour for lunch, and an hour and a half to have dinner. After that the evening beer at the bar, included as a free social activity, which of course ended at ten o’clock at the latest, in spite of the fact that it didn’t say in the program that it should. Conference sessions, meetings in groups, lectures, seminars, and a scheduled hour per day for physical training.
Those who were naturally a part of the place-recruits, special agents, instructors, and higher officials-all looked as if they were cloned from some type of archived agent probably stored in utmost secrecy at headquarters in Washington. Medium height, hair cut short, straight-backed, head lifted, and eyes directed toward the person with whom they were speaking, broad shoulders, narrow waists, thick thighs and calves. And almost always small feet and small, chubby hands.
The sounds, the voices, the uniforms. The irregular popping from the pistol shooting range, the crackling bursts from the sharpshooter’s rifles, the coughing attacks of the automatic weapons. Wild shrieks from down at Hogan’s Alley, testifying that there was a breakthrough in an ongoing hostage situation. Recruits in columns, rhythmically treading marching boots, voices in chorus, the words impossible to make out, en route from one exercise to another, blue baseball caps, blue fatigues, loosely hanging trousers stuffed into the high shafts of boots. Yes, sir. Good morning, sir. No, sir. Good evening, sir.