A hundred times more worrisome. At least, thought Lars Martin Johansson, even though math had been far from his favorite subject in school. Even though we’re only talking about two crazy policemen who never should have been policemen, he thought.
After the concluding debate they were invited to dinner at Rosenbad, where the government had made its own dining room available to them.
“So what did you think about my young successor?” asked the special adviser.
“Interesting person,” said Johansson, who always tried to avoid quarrels when he accepted an invitation. “What does a young man like that occupy himself with?” When he’s not talking shit in general terms, he thought.
“Military signals intelligence,” said the special adviser. “But only because you’re the one who’s asking, Johansson,” he added, holding his index finger up to his moist lips. “That’s the young man responsible for the realm’s connection with the American intelligence service. You know, all those eyes and ears high up there in the blue that see and hear everything we’re up to.”
“Yes, it’s quite amazing,” said Johansson. “Quite amazing,” he repeated. To be putting something like that in the hands of someone like our crazy lecturer, he thought.
“Yes, it really is,” the special adviser concurred, smiling happily. “And this they have the gall to call satellites.”
After dinner was over the special adviser took Johansson aside once again to speak with him in private.
“By the way, what did you think about the wines?” he began. “For once really decent, even in this simple context, if you ask me.”
“From your own cellar?” Johansson wondered.
“Not so, not so at all. A little haul that one of my co-workers made. Hidden away in a closet down at Harpsund. Someone forgot them, certainly. A regular little warehouse, actually, that we took the opportunity to walk off with.”
“Is that really true?” said Johansson. “Or is it like with those deer in that park in Oxford?”
“Completely true,” the special adviser assured him, nodding eagerly. “The previous owner seems to have left in some haste. By the way, have you thought about what truth is, Johansson? Really thought about it, I mean.”
“Yes,” said Johansson. My whole life, he thought.
“When an important truth is revealed to you,” said the special adviser, who had now become so excited that he was tugging on the sleeve of Johansson’s jacket, “when an important truth is revealed to you…you can be affected much more painfully than when you reveal a great lie. Truth touches you much, much more than a lie. When you truly see it before you, you fall freely, as if in a dream. As in one of those unpleasant dreams, you know. When you suddenly plummet, fall headlong straight down into a darkness that never ends, and it is so terrible that when you finally wake up it feels as if your chest could explode. When it can take several minutes before you are sure whether you’re really alive or dead. Have you ever had a dream like that?”
“Never,” said Johansson. “But once when I was a little boy they took out my tonsils and that was the first time I had anesthetic. With ether, actually, and the odor still sits in my nose. I remember that I fell like that. It wasn’t particularly nice.”
“But never in a dream,” said the special adviser. “You’ve never done that in a dream? Completely exposed, lost and beyond all help?”
“Never in a dream,” said Johansson.
“You are a fortunate man, Johansson,” sighed the special adviser. “You’re also happily married to a woman who is said to be beautiful, wise, and good.”
Is he trying to tell me something? thought Johansson.
75
That same night Johansson had a hard time falling asleep. Not because he’d been dreaming, but because he’d suddenly been reminded of his childhood. Reminded of the time when he was eleven years old and had a cold the whole autumn. His worried father at last drove him all the way to the general hospital in Kramfors to have his tonsils removed.
A fresh memory, fifty years later. How he had to take off all his clothes and was handed over to them, in a white nightshirt from the county council. How they strapped him in an ordinary dental chair. How they bound his arms and legs with leather straps. How they bound his head tight. How they pried open his mouth. Two grown-ups with masks over their faces and holes for their eyes. Then they pressed the rag with ether over his nose and mouth. How he tried to tear himself loose before they suffocated him. The pungent odor of ether. Much more acrid than the gasoline, diesel, or even chlorine that he knew from life on the farm.
How everything turned black before his eyes, how his head roared, how everything around him started spinning, how he himself fell headfirst straight down into the darkness, and how the last thing he thought about was his dad, Evert, who had not been allowed to come in with him, even though he had held him by the hand all the way up to the door.
76
Marja Ruotsalainen lived in a small apartment in Tyresö, a few miles southeast of central Stockholm. Considering the life she’d lived, she appeared to have managed well. A skinny little woman with a lot of henna-colored hair, who smoked constantly and only stopped when her hacking cough prevented her.
She did not seem particularly happy to see them. But she hadn’t called them “fucking pigs,” and she didn’t tell them to go to hell. She even offered them a crooked smile when they sat down at her kitchen table.
“Girl cops,” said Marja. “So what have you gals been up to the past twenty years?”
She did not offer them coffee. That sort of thing mostly happened in crime novels, but in reality people like her almost never offered police officers coffee. Nothing else either, for that matter. On the other hand she softened and started talking.
She and her boyfriend at the time had been at the Chinese restaurant on Drottninggatan that evening when the prime minister was murdered. She was living at his place. Hiding with him. She had been on the lam for several months. It was Friday evening and she was almost climbing the walls. Had to go out into town. Get out and move around so she could breathe, even though there were more suitable areas than downtown Stockholm where someone like her could go.
She was also the one who had recognized the plainclothes policeman who was already in the restaurant. Recognized him from ten years before, when she was only seventeen and she and another of her boyfriends twice her age had been arrested in a dope pad out in Tensta.
“A real fucking fascist. The type that twisted your arms up behind your back, called you a whore, and stayed standing in the doorway staring while the dyke jailers told you to take off all your clothes,” Marja Ruotsalainen summarized.
Preserved as a bad memory. A year later she had seen him again, when she had yet another boyfriend twice her age. It was outside the Parliament Building, and the nameless policeman and one of the same sort got out of a big black Volvo and held open the door for a well-known politician they then escorted into the building.
“They just radiated SePo,” said Ruotsalainen. “Might as well have had it printed on their foreheads. How clueless can you be?”