After American elementary and secondary school, with grades that were well above average, Krassner started at the state university in Albany, where he studied political science, sociology, and journalism, and finished his degree. After that he had worked as an intern at a local newspaper, moved on to a local TV station for just over a year, then returned to the newspaper where he had started his career, but now as an investigative reporter with his own byline. And after a few years he himself had wound up in the newspaper on the basis of a grandly planned series of articles, “From Refugee to Racketeer.” The English has a better bite to it than the Swedish translation, thought Waltin.
According to the newspaper’s investigative reporter John P. Krassner, an economically successful and socially respected Vietnamese family had built up a local crime syndicate in Albany and its environs behind a façade of restaurants, convenience stores, and coin laundries. The local uproar had been widespread for a time. Police and prosecutors had been interested, but rather quickly shook their heads and suspended their investigations. The Vietnamese family, on the other hand, had not taken the matter so lightly. They had sued the newspaper and its owners for several million dollars for libel, reported all those involved for illegal discrimination, and started to agitate in the state legislature through their local politicians and a national organization for Vietnamese boat people. The newspaper had crept to the cross, made a public apology, and paid significant damages after a settlement. Krassner had been thrown out on his ear.
What he had done after that was less clear. First he sold the house that he had inherited from his mother and where he lived after her death, to move in with his uncle, his only remaining relative. He enrolled in the university’s evening courses and gradually completed a master’s degree in “investigative journalism.” In addition he supported himself as some type of intellectual jack-of-all-trades with freelance assignments for various media, as a lecturer in courses on journalism, and for a short time as a copywriter at an advertising agency in Poughkeepsie, about sixty miles north of New York and roughly just as far south of Albany.
Waltin leafed among the faxed papers: the hired detective bureau’s exemplary systematic summary; appended copies of the parents’ wedding certificate and divorce decree; Krassner’s birth certificate; his school grades and class photos from high school; a copy of his driver’s license and his university degree; his mother’s death certificate; and a considerable packet of copies of the offending newspaper articles. At the bottom of the pile Waltin also found an obituary of his uncle and a copy of the uncle’s will, and it was now that this started to be seriously interesting.
The uncle, John Christopher Buchanan, known as John, was born in 1908 in Newark, New Jersey, and had “peacefully passed away in his home in Albany on Tuesday afternoon, April 16, 1985,” almost exactly six months before Waltin had occasion to be informed of his life and work. After completing secondary school he matriculated at Columbia University and by and by earned a doctorate in political science in 1938. At the time of Pearl Harbor he was working as an instructor in the same subject at Northwestern University, outside of Chicago, but like “the true patriot that he was” he had immediately left the academic world and trained to be a reserve officer.
After staff service of an unspecified nature in Washington, D.C., he had in the final stages of the Second World War been transferred to Europe with the rank of captain. In the spring of 1947, Lieutenant Colonel Buchanan had been appointed assistant military attaché at the American embassy in Stockholm, where he stayed for more than four years. Then his history got less clear, but in any case in 1958 he left the military as a full colonel and returned to academic life in the form of a professorship in contemporary European history at the State University of New York in Albany. The same year as his twelve-years-younger sister died of cancer, 1975-probably no connection-he had retired “in order to enjoy, by virtue of his age and after an honorable life in the service of his country, his well-earned leisure.”
Wonder if he drank, thought Waltin. Otherwise he ought to have done something more.
The most interesting thing was his will. After the introductory and obligatory enumeration of the possessions he had left behind-the house where he lived, various liquid assets in bank accounts and pension funds, his library, a collection of “European military collectibles from the Second World War,” furniture, art, and other personal property-John C. Buchanan had willed “all of the collected property left by me, the material as well as the intellectual, to my nearest relation, dear friend, and faithful squire, John P. Krassner.”
The material assets had been easy to account for. According to the court proceedings, these amounted to $129,850.50, after deductions for funeral expenses. Not one word about what the intellectual property left behind consisted of.
“But this is just fantastic,” said Assistant Detective Eriksson, and she smiled with both her mouth and her eyes at her well-dressed boss. “How did you do it?” He must be supersmart, she thought.
Waltin smiled modestly and made a slight, dismissive shrug.
“We can take that up on a later occasion,” he said. “I thought that you could turn in copies of everything plus your own information to Berg.”
Cool, thought Eriksson. That really can’t hurt in this place.
Berg didn’t seem equally enthused.
“ ‘All of the collected property left by me, the material as well as the intellectual…’ The intellectual? What does he mean by that?”
“The papers he left behind, his notes, his diaries, old photo albums from his active period. What do I know?” Waltin turned up his hands. Not everyone’s like you, Erik, he thought.
Berg shook his head and dragged his hand along his chin.
“This doesn’t sound very plausible. It’s standard procedure for the responsible authority to see to such things when someone leaves. That would be violating the whole basic principle for this operation.”
Sure, and the stork is the father of all children, thought Waltin.
“Okay,” said Berg. “We have to find out what this character is actually up to.”
“Intellectual inheritance,” said the special adviser, looking at Berg with his customary wry smile. “What does he mean by that?”
“That’s what we’re going to find out,” said Berg. “I really don’t believe he’s shown up here to gather material on his uncle’s time with the embassy in Stockholm.”
“I’ve read Krassner’s so-called investigative reporting,” said the special adviser. “The content and intellectual substance, not to mention the language, instill me with a more than slight sense of unease. Not least considering the fact that Buchanan was his uncle.”
“We’re going to find out what he’s up to,” said Berg with emphasis.
“And I should be much obliged to you if you could do that,” said the special adviser and nodded without the slightest hint of a smile.
Waltin disbelieved Forselius. A senile old man who surely took every opportunity to get himself a little socializing on his own terms and at a low price in an otherwise meaningless existence. In addition he could not for his life understand what it was that could be so important. With all due respect to Sweden’s political history-for Berg had hinted at that every time he asked-even the media usually let go of such things after the customary run of a few weeks, and as far as he was concerned the whole subject left him cold. Waltin preferred living in the present, but his boss hadn’t given him any choice.
Despite his doubts, Waltin had been compelled to engage more people. He had viewed this as a simple and practical way to get closer to little Jeanette, who was actually only seventeen years old. What all of this was really about was just him and her, and in the scenario he had planned there was definitely no place for a lot of younger, testosterone-laden colleagues. It was bad enough that she had chosen to approach that black guy who was living in the same corridor as Krassner. Black men had gigantic cocks; Waltin knew that for he had read it in a dissertation that dealt with the length and thickness of the penises of entire groups of inducted draftees from various countries. It was an international study carried out by the U.N., and the statistics that the African member countries reported were, to put it bluntly, frightening. In addition he had seen this with his own eyes when his German colleagues at Constitutional Protection had dragged him along to a private sex club outside of Wiesbaden after a security conference a few years earlier.