“Housecleaning was never John’s strong suit,” declared Sarah.
That’s not the problem, thought Johansson. Where are the traces of the person who’s been living here?
On the wall above the desk hung an old oil painting depicting some horses grazing in a meadow, quite certainly something inherited from his uncle and of highly questionable value as a work of art. In addition a few framed posters, the most memorable of which was a photograph, grainily shot against the light, of a young, vulnerable Marilyn Monroe leaning over a balcony railing.
On the nightstand beside the bed was a clock radio. On the desk were some of the things usually found on a normal desk. An unwashed coffee cup, paper clips, brads, coins, and a number of pens, a cheap watch with a worn-out band, typing paper, and envelopes. A tall, adjustable table lamp screwed tightly onto a strong iron plate. A few paperback books, all of them mysteries or thrillers. But no bookcase, no calendar, no notebooks, no neatly organized albums with photographs, no private videotapes or cassette tapes. Nothing at all.
It looked the same inside the large brown armoire on the short wall across from the bed: jackets, jeans, and shoes, shirts, undershirts, underwear, and socks, stored all over the place, clean clothes mixed with dirty. On the floor was a golf bag with a half dozen clubs and stuck down among the clubs a Remington short-barreled semiautomatic 12-gauge shotgun. Loaded with a full magazine and to be on the safe side with a shell fed into the bore.
“What did he have this for?” Johansson asked as he drew the shell out and locked the safety catch.
“I don’t know,” said Sarah, shaking her head without the least hint of a smile. “He was just like that. Take it away, please.”
Finally they walked around the house. They were even up in the attic and down in the cellar, and the first impression was also the only lasting impression that Johansson had. Most memorable was the enormous pile of empty bottles that they found in the cellar. A mountain of glass: bourbon, Scotch, and Irish whiskey bottles plus a few hundred extra that had contained American vodka, and when Sarah saw the mountain she didn’t lose her cheer.
“Did I mention that the old man drank a bit?” Another giggle.
Then they locked up and went to a Vietnamese restaurant only a few hundred yards farther down the street, lit up with paper lanterns and with its own Christmas tree before the entry.
Phenomenal food, although hardly something you would dare offer Jarnebring, thought Johansson a little more than an hour later. They had started with a soup made of something that looked like seaweed and that according to Sarah was seaweed, a very special and good-tasting seaweed. After that they ordered some kind of Vietnamese ravioli filled with thin strips of smoked duck breast. Johansson drank beer while Sarah drank white California wine and talked and smiled for the most part the entire time.
First he asked her about the house they had just visited. Where were all the paintings, books, art objects, and other personal belongings that ought naturally to have been found in a house of that size? Sold, according to Sarah, over a period of years and apparently for the same reason that had brought about the death of their owner.
“I don’t know what kind of pensions the CIA has,” said Sarah. “I guess you’ll have to call their office in Langley and ask.”
It had been ten years since Sarah had been a guest in the house; according to her recollection it hadn’t been so remarkably furnished even during the time when the colonel had also drawn a salary as a professor.
“It was mostly junk. Not that many books, and the art was roughly like that painting of the horses you saw in John’s room. What I recall the best is that he had a lot of scrap metal with a military connection that he collected, a lot of helmets and swords and medals and that kind of thing. He himself was terribly proud of his collections. I doubt that he got millions for them, but it’s clear they weren’t completely worthless, I guess. This country is full of crazy people who collect such things.”
Then Johansson had led the conversation on to John, and he’d done so using John’s room as a starting point. What had bothered him, “as a cop,” was not that the person who was living there seemed to be a real pig, for Johansson had seen considerably worse, but rather a pig who seemed to lack personal qualities and interests. You didn’t like things like that if you were a policeman, which Johansson was.
Sarah had nodded in agreement. John was a slob who at the same time was conspicuously uninterested in generally accepted human means of enjoyment; a bed was something you slept in, clothes something you put on yourself because it was warm or cold or rained or snowed, and eating was something you did when you were hungry.
“Drinking beer, on the other hand, was something you could do all the time.”
“He must have had some interests, don’t you think?” Johansson persisted.
Few, according to Sarah. What he read were mostly just mysteries, spy novels, and other similar junk, and when he watched TV he seemed to change channels the whole time.
“He wasn’t even interested in sports. That golf bag in his closet must be something he got from the colonel. I know that he was a member of a golf club for awhile, but that he resigned his membership when they started to accept black people.”
Nice guy, thought Johansson, but he didn’t say that.
“John didn’t even like walking; he thought it was a waste of time. When we went out during the time we were together he used to station himself in the darkest corner of the bar and drink beer while he checked out girls and looked mysterious. He thought that was really exciting.”
“But he must have done something,” persevered Johansson, who was starting to get seriously interested.
“John was only interested in John. I don’t think he was even interested in women, in spite of all the conquests that he bragged about. I believe it ran in the family. His uncle was completely uninterested in women. Everything he said and did only concerned other men. Women weren’t part of the equation for him.”
So that’s how it was, thought Johansson, who had worked for more than twenty years as a policeman.
“A true member of the homoerotic society,” Sarah summarized. “Of course he hated gays too.”
“Did John have any friends?” asked Johansson.
“Lots,” said Sarah and giggled. “What do you think?”
John had lived in his own little world. “The John World,” in which there was no place for friends. There were only scoundrels great and small, spies and terrorists, and because he himself was one of the few remaining white knights, his life was in reality a mission.
“To unmask them and see to it that they ended up in jail. That was what life was all about for someone like John. Although he liked men like you. Big, strong cops, and if you’d met him I’m convinced that you would have kicked him in the butt within five minutes.”
I see, one of those, thought Johansson, who had been a policeman for all of his adult life but had still never kicked anyone in the butt, for he used to let his best friend, Bo Jarnebring, take care of that detail for them both in those days.
“I’m quite certain that’s why he became a journalist,” Sarah concluded.
John had worked as a journalist for several years, and for a while he had even been employed as a reporter of some fame at the local TV station.
“He looked so good that no one heard what he said,” Sarah explained. “But then he got ambitions and started at our largest local paper as an investigative journalist, and it was then that the shit hit the fan.”