“Maybe you’re starting to get old, boss,” said Mattei.
“Yes,” said Johansson. “Even I’ve gotten older.” No matter how unbelievable that may seem, he thought.
74
The same evening Johansson met the special adviser at a seminar of the Turing Society. Though he had more important stuff he ought to take care of, because things had finally started to move after more than twenty years. Or more than thirty, perhaps, depending on how you calculated.
High time, thought Johansson. High time that a real police officer finally got to see the light at the end of the tunnel. In other respects the tunnel was completely different from the one the walking catastrophe who was in charge of the Palme investigation to start with had raved about. A completely different light too, he thought. A sharp white glare that struck him and people like him right in the eyes, without their being able to turn away or even blink.
The Turing Society was named for Alan Turing. Mathematician and code breaker during the Second World War. A great mathematician and the greatest of all code breakers.
Initially, it had mostly been an illustrious society where his Swedish colleagues, other mathematicians, statisticians, and linguists who had a past within the military intelligence organization were given occasion for both edifying conversation and a decent meal. They would meet quarterly to listen to lectures, hold seminars, or simply socialize. At the obligatory Christmas dinner, the first Sunday in December. At the exclusive gentlemen’s club Stora Sällskapet in Stockholm, Christmas buffet, tails, academic vestments. Numerous shots and bottles of red wine. No one and nothing was lacking.
It was the special adviser who had invited Johansson. First when they had run into each other in Rosenbad. When they had bumped into each other at a reception at the American embassy a few days later, he had repeated his invitation.
The special adviser had been chairman of the Turing Society for many years, and during his tenure the society had taken in a new influx of members. Not only pure academics, but also the sort who mostly worked with military intelligence operations. Even an esteemed politician or two who took pleasure in talking about problems that ordinary people were not supposed to discuss.
“The subject of the evening really ought to entice someone like you,” the special adviser tempted him. “We’re going to talk about a particular aspect of the Palme assassination.”
“The Kurd track or Christer Pettersson?” said Johansson.
“Not really,” said the special adviser. “A purely academic discussion. The main speakers are going to start by presenting an analysis of the consequences of the various so-called tracks. If it turned out to be one way and not another. What political and economic consequences that would have, over and above the purely legal ones.”
“Will there be many people there who were involved in the investigations?” asked Johansson, who had not the slightest desire to meet a certain female prosecutor in Stockholm.
“Are you joking, Johansson?” said the special adviser. “This is an educated society. That’s why I’m so eager for you to come.”
“I have quite a bit to do,” said Johansson.
“For my sake, Johansson. For my sake.”
“I’ll come,” said Johansson.
“Excellent,” said the special adviser, beaming like the sun. “Then you’ll also have the pleasure of meeting my successor. He’s going to give the introductory address.”
He was not particularly like the man he would apparently succeed. A tall, bony academic, half the age of the special adviser, with thick blond hair that stuck out in all directions and eyeglasses he constantly moved between the tip of his nose and his hairline.
He spoke slowly and clearly, chose his words with care, and took pains with both pauses and punctuation. Almost as if he were reading from a written text, while he also made a strangely absent impression.
Another one of the guys with a lot of letters in his poor head, thought Johansson in his judgmental way.
At the same time the speaker’s message had been simple and clear. The advantage of the solitary madman who murdered a prime minister was that, in a social sense, he was primarily free of consequences. A man such as, for example, Christer Pettersson. What remained was the loss of a significant politician-controversial, to be sure-but otherwise nothing, and society would cope. As is known, even loss passes.
“Time heals all wounds,” the evening’s introductory speaker observed. He pushed his glasses onto his forehead and turned the page.
Despite the evening’s purely academic orientation, the opening speaker had nonetheless granted himself a slight digression. Christer Pettersson also offered another essential advantage, not to be overlooked, because any critical thinker who was familiar with this case could not but conclude that he really was the one who murdered the prime minister.
“In a purely intellectual sense the Palme assassination is solved,” he explained to his audience. “What remains to consider is thus not the collective trauma resulting from the unsolved murder, but rather the individual trauma that ensues from the fact that different recipients of this purely factual message have different bases for understanding how matters really stand.”
What remains is to convince numbskulls like Holt, Lewin, Mattei, and me, thought Johansson.
The Kurd track and other similar descriptions of the event had limited consequences for Swedish politics and Swedish society. The geographic, cultural, and political distance between ordinary Swedes and types such as, for example, Kurdish terrorists made it possible to discuss the problem in terms of “us” and “them.” Formulating a clear “dichotomy” where “we” were primarily all the ordinary, decent people while “they” in all essentials were only a kind of strange collective from a very distant part of the world. There would be certain limited effects on the general view of immigrants, refugee policy, and related issues. Increased resources to various agencies of social control, obviously. Calculated in budget terms, problems in the magnitude of several hundred million each. “In total at the most one billion per year, in the ongoing budget. Measures which in addition lend themselves to being handled within the already established bureaucratic structure.”
Nice to hear that we don’t need to come up with anything new, thought Johansson.
But then it quickly got worse. From an ordinary sneeze to a bout of influenza. What remained was more or less the choice between plague and cholera. Far-reaching political and social effects, social costs in the billions, collective mistrust of politicians and social institutions, loss of large portions of Sweden’s credibility abroad. Suddenly a Sweden that had been reduced to an ordinary banana monarchy in the pile of African and Central American republics where heads of state, governments, and ministers were replaced without the least thought of political choices. And without triggering more than a yawn in the UN Security Council.
Whether the assassination did in fact concern a political conspiracy of the sort that befell Gustav III, or what was summarized in Swedish debate under the designation “the police track,” was according to the speaker’s considered opinion “a toss-up.”
Because this comparison surely astonished many in the audience, he also wanted to take the opportunity to further clarify himself.
“In the society in which we live today, the police constitute a social foundation accorded the same respect as, for example, uncorrupted and democratically controlled political organs such as parliament and the government. The police today have a far greater significance than the military in Swedish society. We also live in a world in which security is discussed in police terms; although the means we use are still traditionally military. The point of view, the arguments underpinning it have their basis in a police mind-set, and focus has been moved from war to terrorism. The traditional military balance of terror between nations and blocs of nations is now history. Calculated in terms of damage, and compared with, for example, the so-called Kurd track, with the police track we are talking about social damages that are in the magnitude of a couple of powers of ten higher, and in which the majority of the loss comes from the outside world’s depreciation of Sweden’s democratic credibility,” the introductory speaker concluded, adjusting his glasses down to the tip of his nose and inspecting his pensive audience.