It hadn’t been altogether simple to scrape together a functioning and fully manned surveillance group, and before he got the whole thing in place he had been compelled to dispatch a few from his own operation. He tried to make the best of the matter and carefully informed little Jeanette that the only person she was to have personal contact with, in her new role as liaison and coordinator, was himself, but the very fact that there were others around her, young, well-trained male police officers who, when it came right down to it, had only one thought in their crew-cut heads, was enough to bother him. One of them was named Martinsson but was generally known as Strummer-an extraordinarily remarkable nickname for a policeman. He had just turned thirty, played guitar and wrote his own songs, and wore his long hair hanging loose. He had already acquired his nickname when he was in the academy and surely after having lubricated a good many female police officers. Waltin himself had picked him from the narcotics unit with the Solna police a little more than a year earlier, but this was hardly a person that he wanted to get close to a young, innocent girl like Jeanette, who was only seventeen years old.
Whatever. Early on Thursday morning, the thirty-first of October, Martinsson’s immediate chief made a phone call to Waltin. Might the police superintendent have a chance to meet with him and young Martinsson? They had possibly found an in to Krassner.
“Tell me,” said Waltin and nodded toward Martinsson, who was on the other side of the gigantic desk, admiring himself in the mirror on the wall behind Waltin’s back. “Göransson, here,” Waltin, with a turn of his head indicated Martinsson’s twenty-years-older and somewhat balding boss, “is saying you’ve found an opening for us.”
Martinsson nodded. Leafed through his black notebook with his sleeves rolled up so that the surrounding world would be able to enjoy the play of muscles on his forearms.
“I believe so, chief,” said Martinsson. “It was me and the guy who took over his case yesterday evening.”
“I see,” said Waltin, pinching his well-pressed trousers.
“It was the press club as usual. I went along inside. He was talking with a few of our own assets and among others with that Wendell from Expressen, and he had some younger female hacks with him, one of them had fucking decent tits. Lots of ladies around that man-Wendell, that is.”
“Yes,” said Waltin and sighed quietly. Get to the point if you don’t want to go back to the patrol cars, he thought.
“He left right before one, and for once he was a little drunk-he had five beers instead of the normal two. He’s a little guy,” Martinsson said in a tone of voice that naturally followed from the fact that he was twice as big and four times as strong.
Whatever that has to do with things, thought Waltin, who himself was just slightly above average height.
“So I followed him on foot,” said Martinsson.
And here I thought you were watching him from the air, thought Waltin wearily. “Yes,” he said.
“He took the direct route down to doper square and the first person he runs into is Svulle Svelander.”
“Svulle?” said Waltin.
“Jan Svulle Svelander, well-known pusher, well-known junkie, he’s been at it since Noah’s ark. Tattooed over his whole body so he looks like a Brussels carpet. Has a rap sheet long enough to wind it twice around a hot-dog stand.”
“And what did they do then?” asked Waltin, even though he already knew the answer.
“He bought grass,” said Martinsson. “Krassner bought grass from Svulle. A fucking lot of grass, in fact.”
CHAPTER VII
Between Summer’s Longing and Winter’s End
Albany, New York, in December
[SUNDAY, DECEMBER 8]
It wasn’t like along the Ångerman River; there it was flatter and broader, and the water usually flowed gray and turgid between the green, forest-clad hills, which faded into blue and disappeared along with the sky far away. The sky was always blue when it was summer, and Lars Martin and Mama and Papa and all his siblings used to take the car and trailer down to Kramfors to do shopping and see Aunt Jenny and live it up in town and eat herring and meatballs and watch Papa swallow his shots from Aunt Jenny’s cut-crystal glass.
“How you doing, kids?” Papa used to say and wink at them just before he drank his shot, and then he used to tousle Lars Martin’s hair because he was the littlest of the ones whose hair he could still tousle. Lars Martin’s little sister was of course even smaller, but she was so little that she mostly lay in her basket and peeped when she didn’t get the breast from Mama, and Papa never used to tousle her hair.
One time when Lars Martin came out onto the farmyard he had seen his father lift up the whole basket and the baby carriage in which it sat, and then his father had walked around with his little sister and the basket and the baby carriage and said something that Lars Martin didn’t hear. He had just hugged it all and put his head down into the basket and mumbled something. Then Lars Martin got sad and decided to leave it all behind, and he walked on the old road south toward Näsåker, and when he had been walking for several hours, and there really wasn’t any way back, his big brother had suddenly shown up and taken him by the arm and asked him what in the name of all the devils of hell he was up to. Then he got to sit on his big brother’s shoulders the whole way home and it wasn’t at all as far as he had thought. And pretty soon he stopped crying too.
But this was something else, thought Lars Martin Johansson from his comfortable window seat. For this was no river in Ångermanland but rather an American river, and sometimes it was deep and sometimes it was shallow and sometimes it was narrow and sometimes it was broad and all together it was exactly like the rivers in the matinee films that he used to see at the cinema at Folkets Hus back home in Näsåker when he was only a child. Drums were heard in the background, and Indians built fires and sent smoke signals to each other and the cavalry came galloping with only minutes to spare while the trumpets blared and he and all the other kids in Näsåker cheered.
He hadn’t discovered any Indians, but after a little less than an hour’s journey he had seen the star-spangled banner fluttering on a high promontory on the opposite side of the river. West Point, thought Johansson, feeling the draft from the right wing of the eagle of history sweep past him at rather close range, and less than two hours later he was there. There was whirling snow in the air and the temperature was in the midteens, and there was only one taxi in the parking lot outside the station.
“Two-hundred-and-twenty-two Aiken Avenue,” said Johansson and leaned back in the seat while he pondered what he would say. If she’s even home, he thought gloomily, for suddenly he regretted the entire trip and even that he had gone to the United States at all, which had actually been decided long before and didn’t have a thing to do with his private expedition.