“Interesting,” said Johansson mendaciously. “How’d you find that out?”
“Our colleague Söderhjelm,” said Wiklander. “Didn’t I mention that we were going to have dinner together yesterday evening?”
Evidently one thing had led to another, and without going into details Wiklander had ended up somewhat later in front of Söderhjelm’s well-stocked bookshelf, inherited from an uncle with literary interests, where by pure chance a book about great Swedes in mathematics had caught his eye, and with Forselius freshly in mind one thing had led to another.
“Pure chance,” said Wiklander modestly.
“So how was dinner?” said Johansson as a diversion.
Nice, according to Wiklander. So nice, in fact, that he was now considering forgetting about the Canary Islands and going instead with Söderhjelm to Thailand on a three-week-long diving expedition.
“Sounds nice,” said Johansson neutrally. “Say hello from me, by the way, and thanks a lot for the help.”
I am her boss, after all, he thought as he set down the receiver and returned to Krassner and the concluding and messiest part of his manuscript, which had been messy from the get-go. And because he’d instinctively mistrusted everything in it when he’d done the first run-through, he decided to read it extra carefully now.
Concurrently with his growing political success, Pilgrim had also acquired international ambitions, and by the end of the 1960s he had already actively expressed his support for just about every movement or conflict hostile to the United States that could be found on the political map. First he’d turned against the U.S. struggle for peace and freedom in Vietnam, then he’d started to give support to Castro in Cuba and various South and Central American rebels, and as the cherry on the cake he’d stood up for Arafat and his Palestinian terrorists.
According to Krassner he’d done so because he was now, and had been for a long time, an agent of influence for the Soviet Union-he hadn’t mentioned even a word about his possible political convictions-and whatever the case he’d driven his old comrades-in-arms Buchanan and Raven crazy. Raven was the more furious of the two because he wasn’t the person everyone believed him to be but was rather merely an ordinary, hardworking, true American CIA agent. And he was also a Jew, so it was the support of Arafat and the Palestinians that vexed him the most.
Raven wanted to strike back and reveal Pilgrim’s past. Buchanan was hesitant. Accustomed as one easily became in his line of work to doubters, defectors, normal traitors, and double agents, regardless of the factual background it was “bad for business” to expose old agents. As things were, with Raven exerting pressure and wanting to retaliate by messing with Pilgrim, and Buchanan trying to hold him back while other solutions were being considered, the whole thing had solved itself at the beginning of May 1974, by way of the “probably white,” “probably dressed in a suit,” “probably early middle aged,” and quite certainly “everyday” man who walked into Raven’s office and shot his head off.
…
“On the usual inscrutable roads where the intelligence agents of the world travel,” wrote Krassner, Pilgrim’s Russian comrades had evidently intercepted what was going on, and Pilgrim’s friend and agent contact, the Russian KGB general Gennadi Renko, member of the Politburo and the Central Committee, had quickly seen to cleaning up Pilgrim’s history. This was the situation in which Buchanan made his decision. Regardless of the fact that he was now risking his life, his temporal support, and his posthumous reputation, he didn’t intend to take this lying down, and what made him the most furious was that Pilgrim had had the nerve to send a condolence card to a man he’d had killed. Therefore he told his story to “his nephew, young friend, and faithful squire,” and “demanded of him a sacred oath” to see to it that “justice was served and that perhaps the greatest traitor in European postwar history got his just punishment.”
“And this was the only, the simple, and the obvious reason that I’ve written this book,” Krassner concluded his manuscript. The end of the very last sentence he’d evidently decided to cross out, possibly from false modesty or because he’d gotten cocky, but as it was carelessly done with the aid of a ballpoint pen and the last page, like the page before it, was an original and not a photocopy, Johansson could still read the original typewritten text from the back side of the paper: “despite the fact that I am obviously well aware that I am thereby running a considerable risk of being murdered myself.”
On Epiphany Johansson drove home to Stockholm in a car that he’d borrowed from his brother and that he was to deliver to a car dealer on Surbrunnsgatan of whom he had a vague police memory that he would rather not think about. Instead he thought about other things, mostly about Krassner and the papers he’d gotten from him. He was in an unusually good mood the whole time, mostly pondering a small detail in Pilgrim’s farewell letter to which Krassner hadn’t given him an answer. Not even the hint of an answer.
That time when he’d fallen free, like in a dream?
…
What was it that had really happened back then? thought Johansson. And before him, in the twilight land of his imagination, he saw a rebuilt Lancaster bomber with sound-muffled motors that in the middle of the black night was searching under Polish radar. The jumping hatch was already pushed open and there stood Pilgrim in black overalls and a tight-fitting leather hood with only his hawk-nosed profile sticking out. Every muscle tensed while he held tightly to the cable on the roof. Now, now he got the high sign, and after a decisive nod he jumped straight out just as he released his hold on the cable and fell freely, like in a dream, through all the blackness, toward all the unknown down there.
Think if a real writer got to sink his teeth into Krassner’s material, sighed Johansson. What a story it could have been. It wouldn’t even have to be true, he thought.
CHAPTER XVI
And all that remained was the cold of winter
Stockholm in January and February
Waltin never tried to get hold of Hedberg. Instead he was seized by boredom while the days simply slipped away without his being able to get anything reasonable accomplished. He even broke off the training of little Jeanette, despite the fact that now was when he ought to have had the time to seriously attend to it. Instead he just sat there brooding about all the idiots who surrounded him fixated on only one thing-how to get at him and hurt him. Berg, for example, who quite obviously was trying to put the blame on him for the fact that that crazy junkie Krassner happened to tumble out his window. And he would rather not think about what that lunatic Forselius was up to along with his bosom buddies in the government building. Then that red-haired sow and her miserable husband-that is what they were called, regardless of whether or not they were fulfilling their marital duties-who had more or less accosted him on Christmas Eve. What she was in the process of cooking up he would rather not think about either.
Of course he stayed away from work-a benefit of the external operation-because he’d heard through the grapevine that Berg’s fat stable boy, Chief Inspector Persson, was sneaking around, asking strange questions. If there was anyone he didn’t want to encounter it was Persson. Primitive and brutal and completely unscrupulous, fully capable of coming up with just about anything as soon as the master snapped his fingers. Not Persson, anyone but Persson, thought Waltin.
For a few days he tried to get some temporary relief by fussing with his collections. He had hundreds of Polaroids, and quite a few regular pictures as well, which to be on the safe side he’d had processed abroad, and almost as many hours of videotapes and tape recordings, so as a private collection it ought to be the finest in the country, but there were also irritating imperfections and blemishes.