“Believe it or not, Johansson, but when I did my military service I was actually an excellent rifleman.”
Faced with this alternative Johansson had no choice. He played billiards with the special adviser, and even though it was the second time in his life he thrashed him soundly. The special adviser excused himself citing all the good wine with dinner and offering difficult-to-interpret statements about the obligations of being a good host.
Then they had a light supper in the special adviser’s laboratory-like kitchen. Herring; crayfish; and Jansson’s temptation, grilled sausages; small beef patties topped with fried eggs; a multitude of various kinds of schnapps; and an improbable selection of beers. Despite their health-impairing qualities and obviously solely out of consideration for his guest.
“I thought you would surely want a little pilsner before going to bed,” said the special adviser, raising his foaming glass.
When Johansson was standing on the front steps with his hand extended to say farewell, his host anticipated him in the most Mediterranean manner. Got up on tiptoe, placed his arms on his shoulders, and gave him two moist kisses, one on each cheek. When the taxi drove away he was still standing there. With raised arms, the baggy green jacket pulled up over his belly. In his delicate boy tenor he’d given his guest a concluding homage in song. The choice of music quite certainly inspired by the instructive conversation they’d carried on during dinner.
“We’ll meet again, don’t know where, don’t know when, but I know we’ll meet again…some sunny day…”
30
What Anna Holt was up to was unclear. Lewin and Mattei on the other hand devoted the whole weekend to going through the investigation’s material on more qualified perpetrators. So far, however, none of the individuals they had scrutinized was particularly impressive, measured by Johansson’s standards. Mattei was also struck by the fact that the number of suspects of foreign origin was surprisingly small. Normally this number would be considerable, and haunting the back of her mind was also the testimony of Witness Three, the woman who shouted “fucking gook” at the man who’d run into her only two hundred yards from the crime scene.
Mattei was clear about why almost immediately. As so often before, it was due to the way the case files had been registered. The usual proportions obtained, but this time the perpetrators of foreign origin had been piled under common lead files with titles such as “German Terrorism,” “PKK Track,” “Middle East including Israel,” “South Africa,” “Iran/Iraq,” “Turkey,” and “India/Pakistan.” Clearly the most common reason that an individual ended up in one pile and not another was the suspected perpetrator’s ethnic origin, or more precisely the Swedish police’s perception of his ethnic origin, but the exceptions were numerous and the logic far from crystal clear.
In the lead file that dealt with German terrorism, a number of Swedes appeared that SePo had surveyed in the 1970s and ’80s in connection with the drama at the West German embassy and the plans to kidnap the Swedish minister for immigration Anna-Greta Leijon. It was also here that Mattei stumbled on the first spotlighted perpetrator who fit Johansson’s template. A Swedish former paratrooper from Karlsborg who during the seventies was suspected of having robbed a number of banks in Germany along with some members of the Red Army Faction. What he had been up to later was unclear. Where he was, whether he was alive or dead, was also unclear.
On the other hand it was clear that he had attracted the interest of the Palme investigators. Along with thirty-some other named Swedish military personnel, he was also included in the so-called “military track.” There were even two cross-references in the files to make it easier to find him. That was something that Mattei was not otherwise accustomed to finding in the course of her diligent reading.
Why he would have reason to murder Palme was, however, veiled in darkness.
So what do I do about you then, little old man? sighed Mattei, even though he must be almost twice as old as she was if he was still alive.
Serbs and Croats, Bosnians and Slovenes, Christians and Muslims all over the place, and even though they’d been at one another’s throats since ancient times the Swedish police finally united them all under a joint lead file, “Suspected Perpetrators with Yugoslav Connection.” Police logic left it at that, both in the Balkans and elsewhere in the wide world outside Sweden.
Basically every Yugoslav gangster who had been active in Sweden and had sufficient hair on his chest was also on the investigation’s list of conceivable or even probable Palme assassins. The majority of them were ordinary felons, convicted for murder and robbery, blackmail, hired gun and protection rackets, and everything else that could provide a person with a decent income without having to stoop to ordinary wage labor.
Where committing violence against others was concerned they had an impressive list of credits. Aggravated and instrumental violence to enrich themselves. Their motives for also having murdered Sweden’s prime minister, like the reasons that were provided, were consistently weak or nonexistent. Various anonymous informants, the classic means among hoods and bandits to rat out a competitor, old police prejudices pulled out of the archives where they’d been unexamined for years.
The oldest contribution to the “Yugoslav track” came from the Swedish secret police and was already fifteen years old at the time of the assassination. Three terrorist actions from the early 1970s: the occupation of the Yugoslav consulate in Gothenburg in February 1971, the embassy occupation and murder of the ambassador in Stockholm two months later, the airplane hijacking at Bulltofta in Malmö in September of the following year. The perpetrators were in all cases Croatian activists involved in armed resistance against the Serbian administration of the Yugoslav republic.
In the extensive investigation, mixed reasons were given for why these terrorists could have murdered Palme. As individuals they were described as “fascists,” “political extremists,” “aggressive psychos,” and “extremely violence prone.” In addition they were “hateful” toward the prime minister and the Swedish government that had kept them locked up in jail for fifteen years. On the other hand as far as the law itself was concerned the evidence was nonexistent, the indicators weak and contradictory, the investigative results nil.
If they really had murdered Palme-“that they had very strong reasons to want to see Olof Palme eliminated and that this motive is one of the most convincing in the entire investigation”-then of course their categorical denial conflicted with their whole terrorist tradition, their worldview, and their own personalities. “It was the most ridiculous thing I’d ever heard,” as one of them summarized their common attitude, when before an interrogation he was named as being suspected of complicity in the murder of the Swedish prime minister.
I’m inclined to agree with you, and because you’ve been in prison in Kumla the whole time it wasn’t you at any rate who ran into Witness Three on David Bagares gata, thought Lisa Mattei, taking out the binder with the “Iran/Iraq track.”
All due respect to the violent traditions of the Balkans, but what do we have here? she thought.
On March 5, less than a week after the murder, an anonymous informant called the Swedish secret police with a tip. The day before in the morning “on Riksgatan between the two parliament buildings” he had observed “a slightly balding man, about thirty-five years old, dressed in a brown coat, black pants, and black shoes.” The man appeared to be “under the influence of something, behaved aggressively, and called out Olof Palme’s name at least three times.” According to the informant, he was “Iranian or possibly Iraqi,” was named “Yussef, or possibly Yussuf, Ibrahim,” and “worked as a dishwasher at the Opera Cellar,” a few blocks away from the Parliament Building.