Another Time, Another Life (28 page)

“Sure,” said Johansson dryly. “You didn’t need to be Einstein to figure that out.”

“No,” said Wiklander. “I realized it when I was watching it on TV. Even though I was still in school.”

Right man in the right place, thought Johansson contentedly, nodding at him to continue.

Thus it was mostly out of personal curiosity that Wiklander had ordered the old binders from the archive. Among the first things he noticed were the traces of Bureau Chief Berg’s sanitary efforts a few years earlier.

“First,” said Wiklander, counting on his long, bony fingers, “there have been suspects noted in the files. Second, they were removed during a review that was done by Chief Inspector Persson a little more than two years ago. Persson—wasn’t he the one who was Berg’s confidant?” And a man who was uniquely perverse, thought Wiklander, who had met Persson and was far from as ignorant about what was going on as he tried to pretend to be.

Bureau Chief Berg and his right hand, Chief Inspector Persson, they were real policemen, thought Johansson with warmth, and now both were out of the building. Persson had retired a year before Berg turned things over to Johansson.

“What’s the problem?” asked Johansson. “Were they Swedes? The accomplices, that is,” he clarified. He at least had thought as much twenty-five years ago as he sat on the couch in front of the TV in the company of his two runny-nosed children. Despite the fact that he had only been a single observer high up in the grandstand.

“I think so, but I don’t know for sure,” said Wiklander, shaking his head. “As I said, they’re cleaned out of the file and I intended to come back to this. On the other hand I’m fairly certain there must have been four of them.”

“You don’t say,” said Johansson. “How can you be so sure of that?”

Wiklander’s suspicions were based on a combination of three factors. For one thing, the same entry appeared in several different registers, which gave a sufficiently clever person with access to all the registers a chance to trace at least some of the erasures that had been made in the register. Obviously—and this was the second factor—assuming that the one who did the cleaning was not as shrewd or careful
as the one who checked the cleaning. The third thing was the use of a certain standard format for personnel notations in one of the registers of operatives for the secret police.

“It’s this standard format in one of our registers of operatives that makes me pretty certain it must concern four different individuals,” Wiklander explained. “I don’t know how much you know about computers, Boss,” he added hesitantly.

“Enough,” said Johansson curtly. “I’m listening.” Who do you take me for? he thought.

The connections hadn’t exactly been easy to explain. Wiklander was compelled to run through them twice before Johansson was quite certain he understood how the whole thing stood.

“I’m a hundred percent sure that these four people must have wound up in the current register of operatives,” said Wiklander. “Everyone who’s entered in there has the same format. Simply put it’s a matter of a standardized page for each individual, and it’s the same for everyone regardless of how much information there is about the various individuals in other registers or in their personnel files, if there are any. The link is made the same way for everyone with a reference code of ten characters.”

“But they can’t be so fucking dense that every individual who’s registered or removed is loaded as a separate entry,” said Johansson with a hint of indignation.

“No … not really,” Wiklander replied, shaking his head. That would have been almost criminal, he thought.

“But you’ve figured out anyway that just four individuals have been cleaned out,” said Johansson. “Four forms in a standard format, each of which contains one individual?”

“Yes,” said Wiklander, seeming not entirely displeased with himself.

Around this time two years earlier there had been some rather energetic cleaning in the relevant register of operatives. The various cleaning persons even had to be put on a waiting list while the computer operators executed their orders and the quantity of characters stored in the computer was reduced at the same tempo as the orders were taken care of.
Because each order was signed both by the person who requested it and the person who carried it out, it had been no great challenge for Wiklander to find Chief Inspector Persson and his business on the day in question. Not to mention the colleagues ahead of and behind him on the list of secret police officers in need of cleaning.

“This is where they messed up,” said Wiklander. “The character count in the computer is recorded consecutively. So to put it briefly, it’s possible to see how many characters colleague Persson alone had ordered removed. And because I know the number of characters on each form—down to a few dozen—he must have cleaned out exactly four individuals who had been entered in the register because they were included in the event file for the West German embassy.”

“Sloppy damn computer nerds,” said Johansson gloomily. “I hope you stuck the pointer into them.”

“Yes,” said Wiklander. “They were very grateful for the help.”

I can believe it, thought Johansson sourly. What the hell choice did they have?

“Four individuals have been cleaned out—that much is clear—but we have no idea who they were?”

“No,” said Wiklander. “That we don’t know.”

“It can’t have been one of those little elves who were going to take revenge for the West German embassy by kidnapping Anna-Greta Leijon,” Johansson speculated. “If I remember correctly there were at least thirty individuals in jail at various times. Both Swedes and foreigners as I recall. Do any of them seem to have ended up in parliament a few years later?”

“Kröcher and his comrades,” said Wiklander, shaking his head. “No, it can’t have been any of them. As far as the member of parliament is concerned, his name is Juan Fonseca. He was completely innocent, by the way. Got damages as a consolation.”

“You’re quite certain,” said Johansson, looking questioningly at his visitor. Damages my ass, he thought. In certain regards Johansson was an extremely old-fashioned policeman.

“Quite sure,” said Wiklander. “For one thing they’ve been checked out this way and that, and for another they’re still in our registers. There are thousands of pages about them, so there’s enough for a whole raft of
dissertations. They come into the story later, after the West German embassy—to take revenge on Anna-Greta Leijon, who was the minister of labor, in charge of immigration issues and the cabinet minister responsible for terrorist legislation. She was the one who in a formal sense made the deportation decision about the German terrorists.”

Forget the law, thought Johansson, who was well aware that to carry out real police work in a crisis situation, you couldn’t run around with a statute book under your arm.

“So we have four individuals who’ve been cleaned out,” he summarized. “We don’t have a clue who they are, despite the fact that this seems to concern one of the most serious crimes that has been handled in this department. Pretty strange,” Johansson concluded.

“Yes,” said Wiklander. “Although that’s not even the strangest thing.”

“Then what is?” asked Johansson, looking guardedly at his visitor.

What was most strange according to Wiklander was that only a few months ago, right before Johansson took over from Berg, two names had suddenly appeared in the file on the West German embassy. What’s more, they were Swedish citizens who were supposed to have helped the terrorists in the embassy in their planning and preparations before the occupation, and who in a formal judicial sense were guilty, among other things, of being accomplices to two murders, some ten cases of kidnapping, destruction constituting a public danger or sabotage, as well as a few other goodies.

“I’ll be damned,” said Johansson. More than enough for life imprisonment, he thought judiciously.

“Yes,” said Wiklander. “Not exactly a recommendation.”

“So what are their names?” said Johansson. I’m still a policeman, he thought.

“They’re both dead, actually,” answered Wiklander. “One was a TV journalist who was rather well known in his day—we’re talking the late seventies and eighties. His name was Sten Welander, born in 1947. He died of cancer five years ago.”

“I have a faint memory,” said Johansson. A skinny fanatical type with designer stubble and all the opinions that were correct at the time. They were all like that anyway, regardless of when, he thought.

“The other one worked at the Central Bureau of Statistics over on Karlavägen as some kind of official … assistant director … nothing remarkable … Eriksson, Kjell Göran, born 1944.”

“Died from a stroke of course,” Johansson grunted contentedly.

“No,” said Wiklander. “He was murdered in November 1989.”

“You don’t say,” said Johansson. “You don’t say.” This is getting better and better, he thought with delight.

“Yes,” said Wiklander. “I’ve requested the investigation files from Stockholm. It’s still unsolved, but no one has worked on the case since the spring of 1990. After that it went down into the archives … no investigation results, according to the decision.”

“I have some faint recollection,” said Johansson hesitantly. “Eriksson?” What was that about? he thought.

How had Welander and Eriksson, suitably enough both dead, turned up in the file on the West German embassy, and how was it that it had happened when it did? Hardly six months remained before the case would lapse when the statute of limitations ran out, and without anyone seeming to have lifted a finger to investigate the case for more than twenty years. Of all this, and this was what was so strange, there was not the slightest hint in the files that Wiklander had gone through.

“It must have been Berg who put them in,” said Johansson. “Have you talked with him?”

“No,” said Wiklander. “I thought I would wait until I knew a little more.”

“Smart,” said Johansson. “Find out how they wound up in the file.” If for no other reason than to satisfy our curiosity, he thought.

“Yes … it’s doubtful there will be any indictment against them,” observed Wiklander, who was not particularly interested in jurisprudence either as long as real police work was involved.

Whether Wiklander was only almost as good a police officer as his boss, the legendary Lars Martin Johansson, was actually of no interest, because he was good enough. When the binders on the unsolved murder of Kjell Eriksson on the thirtieth of November 1989 came up from the colleagues in Stockholm, Wiklander closed the door to his office, unplugged the telephone, and, to be on the safe side, turned on the red lightbulb outside his door. Then he set to work.

Before he left for the day he was becoming certain he had figured out how the whole thing fit together, even if he was far from clear about why he felt that. Police intuition, Wiklander thought philosophically, leaning back in his chair to summarize his thoughts before he went home after a long day.

If I try not to make things unnecessarily difficult, thought Wiklander, then the most likely explanation is that both Eriksson and the now deceased TV reporter Welander were two of the four names that had been cleaned out of the registry just over two years ago. But who were the other two?

Personally he was more or less convinced that the broker Tischler must have been one of them, and according to the searches he had already made Tischler was still alive, allowing for the fact that he had left the country ten years ago and was currently registered in Luxembourg. The simple, obvious explanation for Tischler’s generosity toward Eriksson must have been that they had a history together that would not bear
scrutiny and that Tischler would fall considerably farther than Eriksson if their common secret was revealed.

That left the fourth one who had disappeared from the registry, thought Wiklander. Who was he, or perhaps even she? Despite everything, women were considerably more common in political terrorism than in traditional serious crime, and that must be the motive in this case, he thought.

One of Eriksson’s neighbors? It didn’t seem particularly likely based on the material he’d found in the investigation. One of his coworkers whom the detectives investigating the murder had missed because they didn’t know what they were looking for? Not at all impossible, thought Wiklander, who as a real policeman had a very strong opinion about university graduates in Eriksson’s generation. Eriksson’s Polish cleaning woman? She was in a good category, thought Wiklander, but the problem with her—he had already checked on his computer—was that she hadn’t come to Sweden until 1978, three years after the events at the West German embassy.

It’ll work out, thought Wiklander. In any event, he had already turned over lists of all the neighbors, coworkers, and everyone else who appeared in the investigation to his colleagues at the group for internal surveillance. By the time he arrived at work the next day the names would have been checked against the secret police’s registry of politically motivated hooligans and of everyone else who just happened to be there. Despite all the truth commissions that the outside world persisted in foisting off on him and his hardworking comrades.

But that wasn’t the question that was really interesting. If someone had gone to the trouble of cleaning out those four names just over two years ago, why had two of them been re-inserted in the same registry only a few months ago, and at a time when the top priority was flushing as many names as possible? And why had Tischler avoided making the same round-trip if he had been in the registry from the start, which most of the investigation suggested that he had? Because Tischler, in contrast to the other two, was still alive? Because he had his own channels to power? Because …

This’ll work itself out too, thought Wiklander, getting up and flexing his computer-stiffened shoulders. As soon as he figured out who the
fourth one was, there would be only one completely uninteresting detail remaining, which his colleagues in Stockholm could take care of: who had murdered Kjell Göran Eriksson?

When Wiklander returned to his office the next morning, the lists with the search results were already on his desk. They contained nothing that he had not already figured out or suspected. Only one of the neighbors had produced a hit in SePo’s registry. An old Nazi-tainted major who, granted, lived on the same floor as the murder victim. But the mere thought that he could have had anything politically in common with Eriksson, Tischler, and Welander was preposterous. He couldn’t have murdered Eriksson either, because the Stockholm Police Department’s detectives had given him a better alibi than he really deserved: He had taken part in the celebration of the anniversary of Charles XII’s death on the same evening Eriksson was murdered.