Black asphalt,
shining neon,
the stench of urine from the tile of the subway,
in the station john a junkie dies of an overdose,
Stockholm, city of cities,
A dove pecks on the window ledge where I live,
there is Hope!
Under the chief constable’s poem someone had written with the same black felt pen, “Give me a real policeman from Ådalen,” and when Johansson saw the brief assertion something touched his Norrland heart. Nice to know you’re welcome.
An unusual lot of poets around lately, he thought as he walked down the long corridor in the direction of his office. Prime ministers and police chiefs and God knows what. Perhaps you ought to write something yourself, he thought, but because that idea was so absurd he immediately dismissed it. A real policeman never wrote poems, and personally he’d already quit that kind of thing when he was a kid. Long before he became a policeman.
Bureau Chief Berg used to think about Swedish defense as a cheese, an unusually hollow, large-holed cheese of the classic Swiss model, and the primary reason for this was the stable and resistant foundation of stone on which the nation rested, for in it you could make holes, and in holes you could put things. He was more hesitant about the hedgehog the military used to talk about, and when they sometimes pulled out the Swedish tiger from the days of the cold war he was definitely not with them anymore. A taciturn Swedish tiger? The very thought was preposterous, Berg used to think, because if the Swedes really had been taciturn there would be no need for people like him. Berg existed, for good reason, because certain people talked too much, and it wasn’t any more complicated than that.
The hollow cheese was a better image than both the hedgehog and the tiger because it was there that all the necessities of war were stored, from coffee and underwear to fuel and grease, plus an artillery piece or two that must be on hand when you wanted to strike back. The good Swedish rock foundation was crisscrossed with mile after mile of secret passages and ten million square feet of secret spaces where everything that would be needed could be stored, just in case.
The practical problems connected with this choice of strategy dealt in all essentials with the requirements for heat, ventilation, air humidity, and dehumidifying, and it was hardly by chance that Swedish industry was also the world leader in these technical areas. In Sweden there were thus two multinational corporations that produced and sold everything from fans and pumps to air-conditioning and dehumidifying installations, with customers over the whole world, regardless of whether their requirements were military or civilian.
These products were sold on an open market and protected in the usual way through patents and licenses, and so far didn’t involve spies, but as soon as they were installed in military installations it became a completely different matter. For the materiel to be put into place and function demanded a thorough knowledge of the installations where they were to be placed, and based on this knowledge a number of interesting variables could then be calculated: site, size, and range of application, type of materiel, and quantity of various products and commodities, in order to codify those that concerned military capacity, strategic direction, and endurance. Depending on who the purchaser was, a banal, ordinary industrial fan might quickly be transformed into an espionage assignment of the first order.
A good year and a half earlier, detectives in the secret police conducting routine surveillance of an official with the Soviet trade delegation had gotten wind of a previously unknown Swede who, after the customary checks, was shown to be working as a sales engineer at the smaller and faster growing of the two multinational Swedish companies in the business. When the alarm had been sounded Berg had been on vacation, the first real time off he’d had in several years, and it was Waltin who filled in for him. When Berg came back the case was already closed and evidently disappeared, for however Berg rooted in his memory, he couldn’t find the least trace of it.
…
“And you’re quite certain that it was in June of the summer before last,” asked Berg.
“Quite sure,” said Persson. “Waltin took it over just as soon as it came in. It was the sixth of June, National Day, in fact. It was concluded less than a month later, the first of July.”
“So what did he do?” said Berg. “Waltin, that is.” While Marja and I were in Austria, he thought.
“Unclear,” said Persson. “The person involved quit rather abruptly, so the basic tip-off is that Waltin contacted the company executives. We don’t seem to have done anything here in the building, in any event.”
“This sounds completely unreal,” said Berg. “Why in heaven’s name did he do that?”
“Personally I can only think of one reason,” said Persson.
“Yes?”
“Their single largest export market is the United States. How do you think the Yanks would have reacted if they’d found out that the company was the object of an espionage investigation? That concerned the Russians?”
“But why on earth would Waltin do something like that?”
“There’s only one reason,” said Persson, suddenly looking rather satisfied.
“Yes?”
Persson held up his large right hand with the back of his hand toward Berg and rubbed his thumb against his index and middle fingers.
“Maybe he needed to buy a new watch,” Persson grunted contentedly.
I don’t believe my ears, thought Berg.
“We have to talk with him,” he said.
They had the first weekly meeting of the new year the third week in January. None of the issues Berg chose to bring up were especially important or urgent. He did not touch on the prime minister’s personal security awareness in any way. Most likely because he was now beginning to resign himself to the thought of having to live with it as it was-that is to say, nonexistent, or at best insufficient.
Kudo and Bülling as usual reported a great number of questions “of the utmost importance for the security of the realm” during the operations bureau’s preparation of those cases that he needed to take up with the government, but personally he’d been content to communicate to his political superiors that all appeared calm on the Kurdish front. Contrary to his habit, the minister of justice didn’t come up with any moronic follow-up questions, either, contenting himself with nodding in concurrence.
Berg devoted most of the time to the ongoing survey of extreme right-wing elements within the police and military, but even there he was able to provide reassurance. According to the operations bureau’s informants, activities within these groups appeared, if anything, to have decreased, and the future would show whether that was due to the fact that they’d eaten too much Christmas food or to something else.
Then final questions remained, and because that point traditionally was given over to a somewhat more lighthearted summing-up and give-and-take, it came as a total surprise when the minister of justice started asking questions about very sensitive command-and-control procedures in connection with the work of the secret police. As a breach of etiquette it was almost shocking, but etiquette was clearly the thing they were least interested in talking about.
“I guess I’ll get right to the point,” said the minister of justice, who suddenly sounded like a completely different person than the one Berg had become accustomed to, “for unfortunately it is the case that this so-called external operation has concerned us a great deal.”