…
Obviously he’d thrown away the ink ribbon and the typing element, so his brother’s electric typewriter would be of no help if someone happened to think of that.
“If you don’t have any questions then I can wait while you read it,” said Johansson.
“If you don’t have anything against it,” said his host. “Perhaps you’d like more coffee after all?”
Experienced reader that he was it had only taken him five minutes, and when he was done there were two things he had noted in particular. Forselius had clearly been right all along, and Berg’s judgment of Johansson seemed to fit to a tee.
“Are you certain that SePo killed him?” asked the special adviser.
“Not SePo,” said Johansson, shaking his head. “I believe their operative landed in a situation he wasn’t able to handle and so he killed him and then solved his own problems by feigning a suicide.”
“In that case that’s shocking,” observed the special adviser, without showing any particular feelings. “In that case they’ve made themselves guilty of a murder,” he continued.
“Not they, but he,” said Johansson. “My colleagues have written it off as a suicide, and the only reason they’ve done that is that they’re convinced it was one. And should this person not appear and confess, then I see no possibility at all of opening a preliminary investigation into the case. All possible evidence of anything else is unfortunately already gone.”
And what you’ve gotten from me isn’t sufficient for that in any case, he thought.
“Do you know who the operative is?” asked the special adviser.
“Not the faintest idea,” said Johansson. “You’ll have to ask SePo about that.” Then you’ll have to see if they answer, thought Johansson.
“Correct me if I’m wrong,” said the special adviser. “Your colleagues have written off the case as a suicide, from conviction you say, and there is no evidence whatsoever that might give support to suspicion of anything else, not the least reason to open a preliminary investigation. You can’t even open a preliminary investigation, if I’ve understood the matter correctly.”
“Quite correct, couldn’t have put it better myself,” said Johansson, smiling.
“Excuse me if I appear tedious,” said the special adviser, “but you yourself are still convinced that he was murdered.”
“Yes,” said Johansson. “He was murdered all right.”
Not my department anymore, he thought a quarter of an hour later as he stepped out into the winter sun outside Rosenbad, and the relief he felt was noticeable even in the weather. What if I were to call up Jarnebring? Go out and eat a little and ask what they want for a wedding present. If she’ll let her new fiancé out, of course, and for some reason he’d also started thinking about that dark woman he’d met at that little post office up on Körsbärsvägen just two months ago. I really ought to look her up, he thought. Now that I’m a free man.
As soon as he’d said that about Fionn, the special adviser had excused himself and gone out to his secretary and called Forselius on her telephone, and unexpectedly enough he had answered at once and sounded completely sober, despite the fact that it was already late morning.
“Who is Fionn?” asked the special adviser.
“Fionn, Fionn,” teased Forselius. “Why are you asking, young man? That was long before your time.”
“Please excuse me,” said the special adviser, “but we’ll have to discuss that later.”
“Fionn, alias John C. Buchanan,” said Forselius.
“Buchanan was Fionn,” said the special adviser in order to avoid misunderstanding.
“Fionn was Buchanan’s code name, one of them,” said Forselius, “and the only reason that I’m saying it on the telephone is that he’s dead. Not because it’s you who is asking.”
“Thanks for the help,” said the special adviser.
“Thus I would never dream of saying what your boss had as a code name,” Forselius droned contentedly. “Regardless of what I think about him.”
“We’ll discuss that later,” said the special adviser.
As soon as the peculiar Norrlander left, he said to his secretary that he didn’t want to be disturbed for a couple of hours, and then to be on the safe side he locked himself in, in the event that his boss might nonetheless come rushing in as he had a habit of doing when he wanted to talk about something important or just socialize in the most general way.
With the help of the memorandum he’d received, his own reading habits, and the mental capacity that a generous creator had given him when he must have been in an especially good mood, it only took him a couple of hours to go through the papers he’d received. Wonder how long it took him, he thought, leafing through Johansson’s memorandum, which in itself was quite uninteresting since his own problem was a different one: that he couldn’t arrive at even a marginal objection to what was there. Berg was right about that business with the corners, he thought. So it was only to be hoped that he was also right about his being taciturn, he thought.
I have to think, the special adviser decided, and then I’ll have to see what I should do. As things were now, there was only one thing he knew for certain. Regardless of everything else, he certainly wouldn’t say anything to his boss. What he doesn’t know won’t hurt him, he thought, and factored into this was an awareness that he now knew things about his boss that he had never known for certain before. He’d sensed it, figured out how it probably must be, which was not so strange considering his own background and Forselius’s habits with alcohol and all his more loose-lipped confidences, but at the same time he had no reason to believe that his boss suspected that he knew anything. And it has to stay that way, he thought. Out of pure concern for him, he thought, for he would prefer not to think about himself.
…
The secret police operative had not only killed Krassner. In order to arrange a credible suicide in the way that he’d chosen, he must have gone through Krassner’s papers and taken with him anything that might in the least jeopardize the credibility of Krassner’s suicide note. Probably it was as simple as that, thought the special adviser, that he’d come across a largely finished manuscript. What Johansson had received by unclear means plus the parts that Krassner had written during his time in Sweden, which hopefully were not as scandalous as what his uncle had supplied him with.
At the same time it didn’t appear particularly believable that Krassner had any documentation with him of the type that Johansson had gotten hold of. For one thing it wasn’t required for the work he was doing in Sweden; for another he appeared careful to the point of paranoia, so his basic source material was certainly not something he was dragging around. Probably a largely finished manuscript-true, à la Krassner bad enough-but probably no documentation, the special adviser concluded.
The documentation Johansson had received was mostly copies, but the simple explanation for that was that Buchanan probably hadn’t had anything else to give to his nephew. The few original documents were those that had been sent directly to Buchanan and that he, quite certainly against his instructions, had chosen to retain. The probable conclusion was that Buchanan’s employer, the CIA, was sitting on the originals of at least the majority of the documents Buchanan had copied, certainly also counter to his instructions, and then turned over to his nephew.
In some mysterious way that Johansson hadn’t wanted to go into, which he himself had avoided asking about, and which he hadn’t succeeded in figuring out, the same papers had after Krassner’s death ended up in the hands of Johansson, who had chosen to turn them over to him. So that he in turn could give them to his boss? On that point Johansson had not been especially clear, much less insistent, so it was probably as simple as he’d said. He had just wanted to be rid of them, and that also spoke strongly against the fact that he himself would have copied the files. It also appeared highly improbable that he could be sitting on any more originals. Not least considering the antique appearance of the document copies and that he’d actually turned over originals originally emanating from the prime minister himself.