…
Best to let the taxi wait until I see that she’s home, thought Johansson when they had stopped outside a large white house with a porch, mansard roof, at least two bay windows, and a tree decorated with lights on the drive.
“Can you wait?” Johansson asked the taxi driver, who nodded, shrugged his shoulders, and mumbled something he didn’t hear.
Big house, thought Johansson. It stands to reason that she would have a family, although she was listed alone in the phone book; if there was a man in the house, snow-shoveling was clearly not his great passion. Johansson congratulated himself yet again on the purchase of his new American shoes, and now he was standing on her porch and lights were on inside and he even heard music, and there really was no going back. Johansson sighed, took a deep breath, and rang the doorbell.
She was small, with a mop of frizzy red hair. Rather pretty, thought Johansson when she nodded at him with polite expectation, making note of his taxi down on the driveway from the corner of her eyes.
“I am looking for Sarah Weissman,” said Johansson politely.
“Yes,” she said. “That’s me.”
“My name is Lars M. Johansson,” said Johansson.
“Finally,” she said and smiled broadly with white teeth. “An honorable Swedish cop. Guess if I’ve been waiting.”
CHAPTER VIII
Free falling, as in a dream
Stockholm in November
Waltin’s entire childhood had revolved around illness, suffering, and death; it was his mother who led him onto that path at an early stage. As long as he could recall-his first memories went back to the age of three-she had been steadily dying of everything that could possibly be looked up from A to Z in The Home Medical Book, and treatment or relief were all too seldom to be found in her own dog-eared copy of The Complete Drug Reference. There was a daily drama in their existence together as they were tossed between her acute gallstone inflammations, colic, migraines, and asthma attacks. There was also a more drawn-out suffering in the form of a cancer that was eating her up from the inside while psoriasis, all kinds of allergies, and common eczema nibbled away at her exterior. There was also a mother’s heart, which like a flickering flame pressed her thin blood cells through hopelessly atrophied and calcified blood vessels while her lungs, liver, and kidneys continuously failed. She spent most of her time at various hospitals, rest homes, and doctor’s offices while little Claes and his upbringing were left to a slightly retarded housekeeper his mother had inherited from her father, who, practically enough, had been a wealthy man who had had the good taste to die early.
Waltin had few memories of his own father, because for the most part he had been absent until he disappeared for good when little Claes was about five and his father moved to Skåne to marry his mistress. It was then that his mother had finally been offered the opportunity to add a more psychiatrically oriented aspect to her disease profile.
Waltin promised his mother at an early age that he would become a doctor when he grew up. When he and his playmates captured bumblebees and grasshoppers in matchboxes, his friends used to play radio, but he chalked a red cross on the matchbox and used it as an ambulance. The patients were often in bad shape and they were immediately transported to the Claes Waltin Clinic, where the professor and head of the clinic himself operated on them with a surgical kit he had borrowed from his mother’s sewing box, but despite all the resources that he brought to bear, as a rule all was in vain and mortality was total. It was only dear mother who survived, year after year after year, completely against the astronomical odds of her continual and immediate demise.
When at last his mother departed earthly life, it was in the most unexpected and banal manner. Bloated on port wine and high on pills, she had fallen off the platform at the Östermalm subway station en route to her daily visit to the doctor; it had taken a whole train to put an end to her lifelong suffering. Claes was at the university, studying law. He had given up his plans to become a doctor long before, which was practical considering his wretched grades. As a human being he was fully formed; lies were the breath of life for him; he was a warm and very charming psychopath with a strong interest in women, whom he hated deeply and heartily, without realizing it. When his dear mother finally died it had been the first real step forward in his life.
He had also found her will in the nick of time, which undoubtedly spared him a great deal of hardship. It was twenty pages long and began with a long list of donations to various organizations for the most frequently occurring causes of death, with the exception of tropical diseases. The funeral was not to be shabby either, and the list of specially invited mourners included fifty-some members of the capital’s medical profession in private practice. He himself chose a more practical solution: a coffin of pressed cardboard with a funeral pall that the parish loaned out for free, no flowers, and no one invited and how sweet the sound, and as soon as the touching ceremony was over and done with-he had wept for joy the whole time-he had seen to it that they cremated the old lady and tossed out the ashes in a wooded area of the northern cemetery where there was no risk that he would end up even by chance.
…
His good luck had also held up during the following years. He had completed a degree in law so mediocre that he would scarcely have been able to serve in court in Haparanda. He couldn’t even intern in a prosecutor’s office, so the only thing that remained was to apply to police-chief training. This he had managed brilliantly, and he had celebrated his degree by sticking a chair leg up the vagina of a simple woman of the people, just a little too far. But fortunately she had the good judgment not to file a complaint, contenting herself with financial compensation that he could easily afford. He decided to truly exert himself in the future to improve his precision in the sexual arena. His fantasies were fragile things, his sexual instincts a constant balancing act, difficult enough without an unsympathetic environment becoming informed of his somewhat special preferences.
Then he met Berg, who wasn’t even half as shrewd as everyone believed, and Berg had picked him for the secret police. Then when the time was ripe and the external operation started to be built up he had become its first head, and as such he was successful, well liked, and in all essentials invulnerable. Certainly there were problems, but problems existed to be solved and he had seldom lost the game. He wasn’t planning to do so now either, when it was a matter of finding out what this mysterious character John P. Krassner was actually up to with his wanderings from the student dormitory where he was living to various libraries and archives, and regular evening visits to the press club’s bar on Vasagatan.
That fool Martinsson had given him a possible way in, and because this was Berg’s project he had discussed it with him thoroughly. What did Berg think about turning the matter into a normal narcotics case? A simple house search where first you put Krassner in the pokey and scared the shit out of him, then went through his earthly and intellectual possessions in peace and quiet. Berg had been unencouraging to say the least, and in a way that signaled that he had carefully prepared his counterarguments.
Krassner was a very sly type, Berg maintained, however it was he knew that-for according to Waltin’s own little female informant he seemed mostly nervous, high-strung, and increasingly paranoid-and under no circumstances was he to be alerted before they had found out what little secrets he was sitting on. Should it prove that these were pure products of imagination, Berg obviously had no objections to concluding the whole thing with an indictment for narcotics-related crimes for which Krassner would get a month or two at a Swedish correctional facility before being deported. But that was out of the question before they were completely sure of the matter. If Krassner was dealing in hard goods, a narcotics intervention could even backfire and be seen as an unadulterated provocation on the part of the secret police, a planting of evidence with the simple intention of concealing shocking things of a completely different magnitude.