“Good,” said Danne.
The theme music of the local news came on, just as abbreviated as his son’s reply.
“Here comes some great television art,” said Paul Hjelm. The rest of the family looked at him skeptically.
It came on right away. The anchorwoman spoke excitedly about a big crackdown on narcotics at Arlanda this morning-and about the dramatic assault of a top police officer in front of their cameras. Sensitive viewers were warned. Hjelm’s expectations rose.
Then Waldemar Mörner, the deputy commissioner of the National Police Board and the A-Unit’s formal boss, appeared on the screen.
His well-coiffed blond hair was impeccable, but he was breathing heavily, as though he had just personally chased some criminals through Arlanda. Presumably he had just tumbled out of the helicopter before he had any idea of what had happened; perhaps he had been jogging in place inside the helicopter. Neither his breathing nor his ignorance stopped him from looking confident and efficient-or from lying with no inhibitions.
“Waldemar Mörner, deputy commissioner of the National Police Board,” the reporter began. “What happened at Arlanda today?”
“The NCP acted on indications from the American police that a large quantity of narcotics would arrive at Arlanda today from the United States. I can’t go into specifics on the action itself.”
“Has anyone been apprehended?”
“At least one American citizen has been taken into custody in connection with smuggling narcotics, yes. We are expecting further apprehensions shortly.”
A man in handcuffs was seen at the edge of the screen. Hjelm recognized the notorious drug smuggler Robert E. Norton, surrounded by four armed Arlanda police officers. As they watched, he managed to kick Mörner’s backside, knocking Mörner over with a shrill cry. When he fell, he grabbed the microphone, so the reporter followed him to the floor. The microphone cord must, in turn, have been wound around the cameraman’s legs, because he plunged to his face. Over the lengthy footage of Arlanda’s ceiling, they could hear the cameraman whimpering, the reporter moaning, and Mörner’s verbal gunfire: “Fuckinghellgoddamndildofuck.”
The producer didn’t cut until then; it wasn’t hard to imagine his sadistic smile.
Yet it was too early for the anchorwoman in the studio. As the camera caught her, she shouted in a panic, “Am I really supposed to read this?” When she realized she was on the air, she pulled herself together and struggled heroically to keep her composure as she read “Fortunately, no one was seriously injured in the drug dealer’s attack. Our reporter, however, suffered some oral injuries when the microphone, which had been pushed into his mouth, was removed.”
On the sofa in Norsborg, no one was required to keep their composure. When the gales of laughter ebbed, Paul returned the remote control to Danne. He caught Cilla’s glance. As she dried her tears and restored her face, her eyes were serious. She realized something was brewing.
They went to bed rather early; both had long days at work ahead. Danne was allowed to keep watching MTV; it wasn’t an evening when they really had the energy to be responsible parents. Experience told them that he was probably doing his homework as he watched.
Neither of them could really understand how multitasking could be so quickly upgraded.
“What’s going on?” Cilla asked with a flashing spark of attention as sleep tried to envelop her.
“Nothing yet,” Paul said as he unpacked a few books onto the nightstand. “But the risk that something will happen has increased.”
“And what about the wound on your lip?” she said more faintly.
“The TV celebrity,” he snickered. “The one who kicked Mörner in the ass.”
“Is it really all about drugs?”
“No,” he sighed. “This thing kills faster.”
She was already halfway into the realm of sleep. “A weapon?”
“Not exactly. It’s best if I don’t say more. But there’s a risk that I’ll have to put in some overtime. Good thing summer’s over.”
Then she was asleep.
He patted her cheek, then turned to the pile of books on the nightstand. On his way back from Marieberg he had stopped by the library at Fridhemsplan and looked up “Hassel, Lars-Erik,” in the new computer system. He got hold of the Maoist manifesto from 1971 and two parts of the somewhat later documentary novels.
The manifesto was unreadable-not for ideological reasons, but because it presupposed an understanding of the technical terminology of dialectical materialism. Hjelm didn’t understand a word. And this was written by the man who later freely lambasted Swedish authors with accusations of elitism.
The documentary novels, though, were profoundly educational. The plot of one centered on a manor in Västmanland at the turn of the century. Step by step the reader could follow each class, from the landowner, whose inherited brutality was hidden behind fancy upper-class manners, to the oppressed farm laborers’ heroic struggle for their daily bread. Hjelm was vaguely familiar with the concept. The problem was that everything was hyperidealized. The message overshadowed the characterizations. The uneducated masses had to be schooled in politics. It was like a medieval allegory, an undisguised textbook in the true faith. The censorship of sleepiness was relentless.
The day on which one of Sweden’s last levees broke ended with yet another assault on a police officer. Just as the living room clock struck midnight, Lars-Erik mounted a posthumous attack on Paul Hjelm: the right corner of The Parasite of Society struck his left eyebrow.
The Kentucky Killer’s visit to Sweden entered its second day.
8
Arto Söderstedt lived with his wife and five children in the inner city and thought it wonderful. He was convinced that the children thought it wonderful too, from the three-year-old to the thirteen-year-old. Every time he dropped them off at day care and school, he found himself surrounded by self-tormentors who were convinced that their children’s greatest dream was to have their own garden patch to romp around in. He often thought about the psychosocial mechanisms that caused the majority of inner-city parents to have a constant guilty conscience.
The suburban parents he met were different. All of them made an extreme effort to convince their friends that they had found heaven on earth. As a rule, upon closer inspection, the heaven that was suburbia turned out to consist of three things: one, you could let the children out in the yard and avoid being in their vicinity; two, it was easier to park your car; and three, you could grill outdoors.
The tension-loaded contradiction between thwarted conscience and inflated self-esteem often resulted in yet another family moving van heading north, south, or west.
Söderstedt had seen the grass on both sides of the fence. When the A-Unit was made permanent, his family had moved from Västerås, with its private homes, to Bondegatan on Södermalm. Personally, he didn’t miss the forced interaction with neighbors he had nothing in common with, nor the competition-oriented self-righteousness that came with homeownership, nor the fixation on the car, nor the enormous distance to everything, nor the useless public transportation system, nor the barbecue parties, nor the tranquil state of vegetation, nor the artificial proximity to nature, nor the predictable discussions about hoses, nor the lawn and the garden that sucked up more time than money, nor the architecture that lacked history and fantasy, nor the empty roads, nor the absolute lack of culture. And when it came to the children, he had produced a small list of arguments for use by inner-city parents when aggressive suburbanites pressed them up against the wall with accusations of child abuse. Memories of childhood follow a person throughout his entire life, and if these memories are of playgrounds, gravel lots, and lonely roads rather than diverse building facades, church steeples, and people, then that’s a deciding factor. In the city the likelihood that a child will get a good education is greater, visits to the theater and museums are considerably more numerous, access to activities is enormous, encounters with people of all sorts are legion. In general, in the city one’s powers of observation and vigilance are developed in a way that lacks a counterpart outside.