“What I’m trying to say,” said Berg, “is that we could have avoided a great deal of trouble if you had followed my advice and made an ordinary narcotics arrest. I’m not ruling out the possibility that he might have tried to take his own life as soon as he’d been let out of jail, but then this wouldn’t have ended up as close to our table as it does now.”
I don’t believe my ears, thought Waltin. He seems to have become as gaga as old man Forselius.
“With all respect I seem to have a different recollection,” said Waltin with a friendly smile. “I seem to recall that when I suggested that we should do it like that, you rejected the whole idea.” And I never found out why you did, he thought.
“Then I am afraid that our recollections diverge,” said Berg, digging out a paper from the pile on his desk. “I have a notation here that we discussed the matter the day before; it was Thursday, the twenty-first of November, at sixteen zero five hours in the afternoon and I was the one who called you…”
This isn’t true, thought Waltin, but he didn’t say that. He was content to smile and nod, for if it was really going to be like this it was important to keep a good countenance.
“And according to my notes,” Berg continued, “you then told me that you had planned a narcotics arrest the following day. I’ve also noted that I approved that.”
“Sure, sure,” said Waltin. “But that was at the point when Forselius had not yet made contact, but then he did late in the evening and we went back to our original plan.”
Berg moved his shoulders regretfully.
“I have no notes about that,” he said. “Why didn’t you call and tell me about your change of plans?”
My change of plans? thought Waltin. This is not true, dammit, he thought.
“I seem to recall that you’d gone to the Germans,” said Waltin.
“That wasn’t until the following day,” said Berg. “And if so, wouldn’t it have been possible to call me there too? Or what?”
“Yes,” said Waltin, smiling despite the fact that it was starting to be an effort. “Somewhere there seems to have been a breakdown in communication.”
“Yes, unfortunately that does appear to be the case,” said Berg. “A completely different matter,” he added.
Then he discussed the department’s view of the external operation and that he himself would not be opposed to an inspection if one were to be requested. There was no one outside pulling on the door handle exactly, but sometime during the spring it would certainly come up.
“We’ll have to set aside a few days and go through all the papers,” said Berg. “Sometime at the start of the new year.”
“Fine with me,” said Waltin, getting up.
He’s not smiling anymore, thought Berg.
Wonder how it’s going for Persson, thought Berg, leaning back comfortably in his chair after he’d been left alone in his office. The only light in my firmament; wrong, he thought, for there was actually one more, faintly glistening in the distance like the Star of Hope. The hope that he would finally be rid of Kudo and Bülling.
The Stockholm chief constable and Kudo and Bülling had found one another. Given the police context it almost resembled a love story. Not because they slept with each other or even cuddled a little, for they were all fully reliable homophobes, and in that respect no shadow fell on any of them, despite the chief constable’s secret literary leanings, Kudo’s recurring observations of gnomes, and Bülling’s general peculiarities. What was involved instead was a very strong, almost transcendental spiritual communion of the type that can only arise when highly gifted people are united by a common interest even greater than themselves.
“The Kurds,” said the chief constable with ominous emphasis on both words. “Gentlemen,” he continued solemnly, nodding toward his two visitors. “We are talking about what is at the present time the most dangerous terrorist organization in the entire Western Hemisphere. So give me some good advice. What do we do?”
Finally, thought Kudo. Finally someone in the leadership who realizes the seriousness of the situation. Necessity trumps the law, thought Kudo, for he’d read that somewhere, and purely concretely it was the incomprehensible secrecy rules of the secret police that this very necessity had in mind. Then he and Bülling related everything to their new ally, but first they had naturally given him the necessary background.
The very first thing they had related was their secret language. About weddings and other events, about poets and about lambs who were to be butchered. About cakes, pastries, and rolls and all their difficulties in working out what this actually meant.
“We will have a wedding, we will butcher a lamb, we will have two poets, cakes, pastries, and rolls…” The Stockholm chief constable nodded with pleasure while he savored every word… “Exactly like myself, you gentlemen have paid notice to the strongly ethnic character of the codes they’re using.”
“Exactly,” said Kudo. “Exactly.”
“Exactly,” said Bülling, nodding toward the chief constable’s newly polished floor.
“So it’s hardly by chance that they have chosen these particular codes for their operations here in the West,” stated the chief constable. “Tell me,” he said as he rubbed his hands with delight. “Tell me how you’ve solved this ethnically oriented problematic.”
It was Kudo then who told about their new informant. He was himself a Kurd. Political refugee like all Kurds, but in contrast to the rest of their informants he had applied of his own free will. He was a baker besides, and had a brother who was a butcher, and together they ran a little catering business whose customers were almost all Kurds too. For many years they’d been delivering their wares and services to countless Kurdish weddings, funerals, and parties.
In such a context that particular background was unbeatable, Bülling had thought as he made the preparatory analysis. Their new informant knew everything about what deliveries and other arrangements were part of a real wedding, a normal funeral, or an ordinary party. Apart from his special knowledge he could see directly if there was something strange when their surveillance objects were planning their activities, and as a result they were sitting in a tight spot, thought Bülling. Planning a political murder based on the orders for a real wedding was naturally impossible. The operation would be doomed to fail.
The fellow had another quality besides, and it was not so strange that it was his best friend and closest colleague, Kudo, who had discovered it, considering that he himself had received the same gift: Their new informant was also a seer. He could see contexts, connections, and occurrences that were hidden to normal people, and this regardless of whether they were already a fact or were still in the future. At first Bülling had resisted the very thought that it might be like that. Considering his informant’s other qualities, it was almost too good to be true, and Bülling’s critical bent and analytical mission made him generally skeptical of such possibilities. Therefore Kudo had proposed a scientific test, and it was Bülling himself who had set it up and carried it out. Down to the least detail and in order not to leave any imaginable explanation untested.
First he’d pulled out a number of cases that he and Kudo had succeeded in clearing up and of which their new informant could not have the least knowledge. Based on these cases he had then formulated twenty or so specific questions that had taken him and Kudo months to reach a solution to. Their new informant had only required a little less than an hour to answer all the questions, and all of his answers had been correct.