“Nah,” said Johansson. “I thought that since I was here anyway…”
“So you thought you’d take the opportunity to see how he lived, perhaps have a chat with a neighbor, snoop around a little…”
“More or less,” said Johansson.
“Sure,” said Jarnebring. “Just don’t come up with anything stupid. I have it here. Have you got pen and paper?”
“Fire away,” said Johansson.
On Friday afternoon, when Johansson and his two travel companions were sitting on the plane to New York, each with a small whiskey as a counterbalance to all the watery American beer they had been drinking that week, his colleague from narcotics suddenly started to laugh.
“Yes?” said Johansson. “Out with it, now.”
The colleague from narcotics nodded.
“Yes,” he said. “I was thinking about the last conference I went to. It was with the narcotics unit, on the boat to Finland.”
“Yes?” said Johansson.
His colleague started laughing again.
“Yes, hell,” he said. “It wasn’t exactly like this one, if I may say so.”
Johansson smiled and nodded.
“I know what you mean,” he said.
CHAPTER IV
Free falling, as in a dream
Stockholm in autumn
There hadn’t been much mushroom picking, Berg would always think when he looked back at that autumn before everything happened. He and his wife had a little cottage up in Roslagen and usually they picked quite a few mushrooms during the fall. Mushrooms are good, thought Berg, it was nice to walk around in the woods thinking while his wife darted aimlessly among the bushes. It was a small contribution to their finances as well. True, he was a department head and earned more than almost all his colleagues within the corps, but every little bit helps, he would think.
But not that autumn, for the demands of his political superiors had become more and more exacting, and the prime minister’s adviser started showing up at meetings again; if he really was as intelligent as they said, Berg for one could think of better ways to make use of the gifts the good Lord had clearly bestowed on him. He wasn’t even ironic anymore, just treacherous, and everything he said required Berg’s entire analytical capacity simply to interpret. But after many trials and tribulations it was finally ready, the first report on “Anticonstitutional Movements and Elements Within the Open Police Operations in the Stockholm Police Department.”
Toward the end of this work, he had been forced to personally intervene to organize the content and form, despite the fact that his coworkers were doing all they could and despite the fact that he assigned several of his best forces to the task. People who obviously, and preferably, should have been used on more pressing assignments. Unfortunately he was the one who had established the boundaries of the task and decided on the title of the report, something he would have to eat at numerous meetings during the fall; for a while, in fact, it threatened to paint him into a corner where he easily could have lost control of the entire ongoing process.
His wretched excuse for a nephew was of course part of the material, which he had counted on in general, but when the whole thing was done he could say that, unfortunately, this simple fact demanded as much psychic energy as the work itself. Should he set out the names of colleagues included in the material when he gave a summary of it to his superiors? Obviously not; it went against established routine, and created considerable, quite unnecessary risks. Would there be gossip and talk? Probably. Would he get any questions about this? Probably not. Would it be used against him regardless of what he did or didn’t do? Certainly.
It was not a long report. Including appendices, it was just over a hundred pages, and enumerated a corresponding number of policemen, almost all of whom had in common that they worked in the uniformed police in central Stockholm and that they, individually and collectively, in various ways and with varying frequency, had expressed extreme right-wing or flat-out neo-Nazi opinions. The way in which they’d done so varied essentially. There were individual policemen who openly took the first opportunity to express themselves disparagingly or even hatefully about female colleagues, about immigrants, about the so-called clientele with whom they worked, about people in general, about social democrats, about the left in general. In short, about everyone except themselves. There were others who behaved inappropriately as soon as they were around more than two pairs of eyes in the heads of anyone other than their fellow police officers; who would wear a swastika on the inside of their coat lapel; who gave the Hitler salute at the bar, who made toasts to Adolf Hitler, or said that the prime minister ought to be shot, or that you ought to make glue out of all immigrants.
There was also a hard core, organized in various ways, that had regular gatherings and maintained high security and discretion in the presence of the world around them. Of course it was within this core that Berg found his own nephew; as a foreground figure, moreover, both a formal and an informal leader. “Policeman B appears to play a leading role in this connection. It should be pointed out, however, that his superior gives him extraordinary evaluations and among other things describes him as one of the best policemen in the district, with good judgment and good conduct.”
They held meetings in rented halls as well as at the police station, had joint exercises and other open-air leisure activities, had dinner together at a so-called men’s club with special invitees, listened to lectures on the good life in South Africa, on Hitler as a political thinker, on why no Nobel Prize winners were black, and on the left-wing slant in the press. German marching music was played and a joint Hitler greeting was made before, during, and after the meal. “It should, however, be noted that consumption of alcohol at these social gatherings was always moderate,” Berg’s infiltrator noted in one of the surveillance memoranda he submitted.
Reporting to his superiors in the blue room on the seventh floor at Rosenbad. Outside the windows a pale September sun was shining. And now the misery can begin, thought Berg.
“If I’ve counted right in your document,” said the special adviser, observing Berg with his constant, irritating half-sneer, “which isn’t always easy for the mathematically inclined,” he added with a faint chuckle.
Berg was content to nod.
“So, your material includes between a hundred and five and a hundred fifteen so-called members of the Stockholm Police Department’s various uniformed divisions, all of whom have in common that they seem to harbor a certain faiblesse for”-he savored the words almost sensuously-“or the brown and black colors on the political palette.”
Berg was content to nod. Where is he going? he thought.
“How many policemen are there in the divisions included in your survey?” the special adviser asked.
“Somewhere between twelve hundred and fifteen hundred,” answered Berg quickly. “I apologize that I can’t give you a more exact number than that.” So now he’ll convert that to a percentage, he thought.
“Nine hundred seventy, according to the information which I’ve received from the highest leadership in the Stockholm Police Department. Which should give us a percentage of between eleven and twelve percent. If this impromptu calculation is correct.”
Don’t put on airs, thought Berg, but he didn’t say that.
“That sounds about right,” said Berg, “but I think your base sounds a little small. Just under a thousand policemen, I’m almost certain that there are considerably more.”
“Which should give us a percentage of between seven and eight if there are fifteen hundred as you say. That sounds almost comforting.”