He did not even need to plan his rehabilitation. He avoided planning. The more carefully you planned, the greater the chance that you would meet with the unexpected, the uncontrollable, which meant that all your plans were suddenly turned upside down. He had simply done what he had always done. Had the goal before his eyes, a simple framework for action as support, waited for the opportunity and seized it in flight.
That was his strength. Seizing opportunity in flight. That was what he had done that morning he’d seen him on the beach below the hotel. Seized the opportunity in flight, because he was all alone, not a person in the vicinity and no need to wait any longer. He stood up in the boat he’d rented. Waved to him, watched him swim toward the boat, grasped his hand, helped him up on deck. Then he won back his solitude, his freedom. Afterward he decided to build Esperanza and never soil her with the sort of thing he had just been forced to do.
Nowadays he didn’t even think about it. Not fifteen years later. Not now when everything was over and nothing else could happen to him. One time was no time for anyone who was his own master, and the other times when he had been alone from the start had never bothered him. He and Esperanza. A beautiful little boat, an insurance policy, a constant reminder.
62
Wednesday, September 19, three weeks remaining until October 10.
Headquarters of the National Bureau of Criminal Investigation on Kungsholmen in Stockholm
Their usual meeting was canceled on short notice. Johansson was otherwise engaged, and he let it be known by phone that he would be in touch as soon as he had time and no later than that afternoon. As far as the team’s continued work was concerned, he still wanted the name of the bastard. Preferably immediately and no later than the weekend.
Holt and Lewin would finish the survey of Waltin. They agreed that Lewin should run the desk work while Holt would take care of the field efforts. She knew she needed to get out and move around.
Before Mattei returned to the Palme investigation’s archive and the police track, she took care of Johansson’s request and did a search on the four members of the Friends of Cunt Society, founded in 1966, dissolved, finished, dormant five years later.
First she typed in the names and social security numbers of all four members. In alphabetical order by surname: attorney Sven Erik Sjöberg, deceased in December 1993 after a long illness. Former chief prosecutor Alf Thulin, now a member of parliament for the Christian Democrats, member of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on the Administration of Justice and even mentioned in the media as a possible conservative minister of justice. Banker Theo Tischler, for many years now with a registered address in Luxembourg. Claes Waltin, former police chief superintendent with SePo, dead in a drowning accident on north Mallorca in the fall of 1992.
The rest was a matter of pushing the right keys on the computer, and a mere fifteen minutes later she sat with three hits on names and ten references to the investigation files that produced the hits.
Attorney Sven Erik Sjöberg had been interviewed on two occasions due to his possible connection to the “Indian weapons track” or the “Bofors affair.” He had been a Bofors attorney for many years, even served on the company’s board for a few years. He had not been able to contribute anything of substance to the investigation of the murder of Olof Palme. Besides, his personal opinion was that every such assertion-that the murder of the prime minister could have had anything whatsoever to do with the company’s sale of artillery to the Indian government-was “completely ridiculous.”
The deal stood on its own steady legs. The Bofors long-range 155 millimeter field howitzer was by far the best artillery piece on the market. It was no more complicated than that, and the Indians should simply be congratulated for making the best choice. If you wanted to inquire into things that concerned business secrets, military secrets, or secrets between two friendly nations, you would have to take that up with someone besides him. The Munitions Inspection Board, the Ministry of Defense, the Ministry for Foreign Affairs, the Swedish and Indian governments.
That part of the matter had then been concluded by the national prosecutor, who at that point in time was the formal leader of the preliminary investigation into the murder of the prime minister.
In connection with the usual summer vacations in the prosecutor’s office, chief prosecutor Alf Thulin had substituted as one of the “Good Guys.” In part for the colleague who had been leader of the preliminary investigation in the Palme case during the summer of 1990. After that he had returned as an expert and technical adviser in one of the many review commissions set up by the government. In the minutes from a meeting of the commission, which for unclear reasons ended up in a binder in the Palme investigation, he had expressed his definite opinion on the Palme case. It was Christer Pettersson who murdered Olof Palme, and what the prosecutor’s office’s work now “concerned in all essentials” was trying to construct a petition for a new trial that the Supreme Court could accept.
Banker Theo Tischler ended up in the investigation due to three different tips that were turned in from the group of private investigators in the Palme murder. According to these tips he was supposed to have had close contacts with police chief Hans Holmér, even after Holmér had been fired as investigation leader. According to the same informant, Tischler was supposed to have offered several million to Holmér so he could continue working on the so-called Kurd track. That was what every thinking private investigator right from the beginning understood to be a red herring, set out by Holmér and his associates to protect the real perpetrator.
Tischler had been interviewed for informational purposes about this in the summer of 2000, over fourteen years after the murder. He had not minced words. He had never met Holmér, much less given him any money. On the other hand he had been asked to do so by a mutual acquaintance a year or two after the murder. After having talked with his own contacts “within the social democratic movement and close to the administration” he decided not to give a krona to Holmér and his allies. In conclusion he then congratulated the two interview leaders for the swiftness with which they seemed to be running this case.
“If I did business the same way you gentlemen run police work, I would have been in the poor house thirty years ago.”
The one interview leader regretted his attitude. Personally he and his colleagues were doing the best they could, and the mills of justice ground slowly as everyone knew.
“Sorry to hear that the bank manager has that attitude,” said the interview leader.
“I’m a private banker,” said Tischler “Not a fucking bank manager, for in that case I might just as well have applied for a job with the police.”
The only one of the four that Mattei couldn’t find on her computer was Claes Waltin, which made no great difference because Lewin found him anyway.