The Steel Spring (14 page)

The instructions for general police conduct in connection with street demonstrations also came direct from the Ministry, and when read in chronological order they indicated a clear trend. It was apparent that police efforts to stop street disturbances and riots had escalated markedly through the month of October.

The orders issued at the very end of September and start of October were pretty routine in nature and dealt mainly with general regulations for the maintenance of law and order and instructions for redirection of traffic. From the tenth of October onwards, the tone stiffened. All reference to protection of demonstrators disappeared and was replaced by talk of forceful intervention to prevent disturbances hostile to the state, and on the fifteenth there were directions for all police officers to be armed when on duty. Five days later, the limitations to police use of firearms then in force were lifted until further notice. This was justified with reference to the Riot Act.

The arrest lists had arrived in swift succession, one on the twenty-fourth and the other on the twenty-sixth of October.

There was only one red file of any later date in the archive. Its wording was somewhat cryptic:

This order, too, bore the seal of the Justice Ministry. It was dated the thirty-first of October. According to the diary record, that was the day after large parts of the government and the top police commanders had left the country.

It was impossible to see which particular office within the Ministry had issued these orders, but they all bore the same code name: Steel Spring.

Steel Spring must therefore have something to do with the police.

Inspector Jensen once again consulted his stand-in’s notes in the diary and compared them with what he had written in his own notebook.

A broad outline emerged.

From the twenty-first of September onwards, unrest of a political nature had occurred. It had grown more serious through October and culminated on the second of November.

After that day, calm had been restored and everything had returned to normal.

Eleven days later, the epidemic had broken out. Although all possible measures had been taken against it, it had reached such proportions that within two weeks, the authorities had lost control of the situation.

There was no verifiable link between these events.

Only four or five days previously, the medical authorities had stated that the epidemic was under control. But simultaneously, the state of emergency had been tightened and all lines of communication had been broken.

Police organisation had collapsed, and evidently all military structure, too.

These events did not seem to interrelate in any logical way.

Jensen turned over to another page of his notebook and read the last thing written there, a reminder to himself.

What was it about his friend’s wife?

He wrote down two more questions.

What happened on the second of November?

What is the Steel Spring?

He pulled open a desk drawer and took out a transistor-type portable tape recorder.

The man in the room next door had woken up and was shifting about restlessly. Presumably he was trying to reach the cup of soda.

‘You were right,’ said Jensen. ‘There seems to have been a security service answerable directly to the Justice Minister. I wasn’t aware of that.’

The man on the sofa laughed.

‘That’s great,’ he said, ‘having secret police who are so secret that not even the police know about them. Maybe the people who belonged to it didn’t even know they worked there.’

‘That seems unlikely.’

‘Perhaps. Thanks to our special contact in the Ministry we were able to find out how the secret police came to be set up. More or less. Would you like me to tell you?’

‘Not really. There are two other questions I want answers to.’

‘Well I’ll tell you anyway. Some years ago, they did away with the old security police. Do you remember?’

‘Yes.’

‘It had disgraced itself and become such a laughing stock here and abroad that it just couldn’t be allowed to carry on. So it was abolished, its professionals were pensioned off and the secret registers were burned. It was officially left to the armed services to spy on each other and themselves.’

Jensen drummed his fingers on his notepad.

‘Admittedly the military also kept on making grotesque blunders, like sending planes in over the ports of our socialist
neighbours to see if there were any ships there, and trying to send old war criminals in disguise in as spies, putting them ashore from surfaced submarines. It didn’t really matter that the planes were shot down and the infiltrators were caught before they even had time to ask the way to the nearest rocket base. It’s pretty much taken for granted that reactionary military types will behave like lunatics, and anyway, you could always swear black was white and play the injured innocent for public opinion, which they did, at every opportunity. Besides, the military had already sold all the secrets worth selling, to the socialist states for money and to the capitalist countries for a pat on their star-studded shoulders. But the big question was: who was going to spy on ordinary people?’

Jensen looked uninterestedly out of the window. It had stopped snowing. Drizzle.

‘So they made a virtue of necessity and abolished the ludicrous security police and burned its painstakingly but injudiciously compiled opinion register. But before they set fire to it and converted the archive space into a table tennis hall, they took photocopies of the documents and shipped all the material off to the Justice Ministry. And ever since, a few low-profile employees have been sitting there fiddling with their register and the budget they use for paying informers. It’s as simple as that.’

‘What was strange about your friend’s wife?’

The man’s expression changed. He looked at Jensen in obvious distress.

‘She’s dead.’

‘Was that what you were referring to?’

‘No. I only brought her up as an example of how people started to react abnormally. It wasn’t just that lot throwing
stones and bottles at us and driving their cars into pushchairs, or having hysterics like that reactionary bank director and his senile old bat of a wife, it was people one knew and thought one knew well. She … she suddenly started behaving differently.’

‘In what way?’

‘If you’re going to understand this at all, you need to know what sort of person she was, and always had been. I knew her and her husband very well indeed, almost as well as I know myself.’

He frowned.

‘She was a calm, sensible girl. Seemed a bit shy, but that was because she wasn’t a spontaneous person at all. She always considered matters very carefully before she said or did anything, and she was a huge asset to us in the society. Thanks to her ability to keep a cool head, for example, she was able to hang on to that job at the Justice Ministry. She reckoned we’d be able to make good use of it at some stage.’

‘Get to the point.’

‘If you don’t let me explain the background there’ll be no point to get to.’

‘Go on, then.’

‘Like most of our generation, she was physically and mentally damaged by her environment.’

‘In what respect?’

‘Emotionally. It’s a widespread phenomenon here, and when it occurs in someone whose character is fundamentally lacking in emotion, the result is obvious.’

‘Namely?’

‘Namely complete absence of sensuality. Zero interest in sex. Why do you think the curve of the birth rate graph looks the way it does in this country?’

‘But she was married, after all.’

‘That was just for practical reasons.’

Jensen sat in silence.

‘Well anyway, that’s the way she was. But some time in September or early October, she started to change.’

‘In what way?’

‘She got more worked up, more spontaneous. Seemed very nervy.’

‘Was that all?’

‘No. One day in the middle of October we were all hard at work at our club premises. I remember it was after the big affray on the tenth, because we were talking about what had happened then. We were weighing up whether to stop the demonstrations for the time being.’

‘Why?’

‘Several people had almost lost their lives that last time. Lots had got hurt. Everybody there had been scared by the violence and the police passivity. In fact we only ever had one more demonstration.’

He stopped, staring hollow-eyed at Jensen, and said under his breath:

‘The second of November.’

‘We’ll come back to that. What happened that day in your club premises?’

‘She and I were busy with the duplicating machine; my friend was mending banners and flags that had got ripped on the last march. We were running out of paper and he went out to get some more. We knew it would take him about twenty minutes.’

‘Go on.’

‘As soon as he left, she went into the other room. I didn’t really think much about it. She was back almost straight away,
and came right up close to me. I didn’t look up until she took my arm. She’d taken off all her clothes. She was standing there stark naked.’

‘I see. And then?’

‘She stared at me and I stared back. Then she said: “Fuck me. Now. This instant.” She wanted us to have sex.’

‘Clearly. Was that all?’

‘What more do you expect me to tell you? What she looked like?’

‘For example.’

‘She had this really odd look in her eyes. Other than that there was nothing remarkable. I’d seen her naked before. In other circumstances, of course.’

‘Such as?’

‘Well, in the sauna. When we went swimming. Occasionally when a number of us were sharing a room at a summer camp. We weren’t particularly prudish in our circles. She was a normal girl with little round breasts, small, pale-brown nipples and fairly broad hips. Black hair on her cunt.’

‘Mind your language.’

‘Genitals then, if you prefer. That was the other strange thing, incidentally. Her genitals. They looked twice their usual size, open, wet, it was running down her thighs. She was standing with her feet wide apart.’

‘What did you do?’

‘I told her to get dressed, of course. But I had to say it five times and even then she only put her shirt on. I got so tired of her that I left before her husband came back.’

‘Was that all?’

‘Yes. And quite enough, too, as far as I’m concerned. Her behaviour was completely absurd.’

‘Perhaps not as strange as you think.’

‘What do you mean by that?’

Jensen did not reply. Instead he said:

‘What happened next?’

‘To her?’

‘No, in general.’

‘Things got worse and worse. People were incredibly worked up. When we stopped holding our public meetings, they transferred their attentions to the embassies of the socialist countries. Mobs stormed one embassy and set fire to it. The police hardly bothered to intervene at all, even though they had guns by then. In the course of a few days, about ten residences and consulates closed and the staff were sent home.’

‘And what did you do?’

‘Nothing. Decided to wait and see. Then out of the blue came the announcement that the elections had been put off. That was on the twenty-first of October, less than a week before election day.’

‘How was the announcement made?’

‘In the papers and on TV and radio. A member of the government spoke. The Minister for Ecclesiastic Affairs, I think. He said very briefly that the elections had been cancelled until further notice and that people should revert to orderly behaviour. He urged everyone to stay calm. And at just the same time …’

‘Yes?’

‘At just the same time, all that official baiting of us socialists stopped. Nobody said or wrote anything about any event, past or present. It was as if it was all over. In actual fact it had only just started.’

‘What happened on the second of November?’

‘Something unimaginable.’

The man suddenly clapped his hands over his eyes. It was a few minutes before he could go on.

‘It was announced on the Monday that the elections were being postponed. On the Saturday of that week, the police started detaining people. Lots of card-carrying socialists and their sympathisers were arrested and taken away. Some escaped. Two days later there was a new wave of arrests. That time we were better prepared and the police didn’t catch as many. Lots left the city. We three stayed on. We had a room in the basement for emergencies that not many people knew about, where we were safe even if the police raided the society premises. The next day there was a complete about-face. That minister appeared on TV and radio again and said there’d been a series of errors of judgement. He said the police had exceeded their legal powers and that the general public had misconstrued the situation.’

‘What else did he say?’

‘That the arrests were illegal and that everyone detained on political grounds would be released immediately. He stressed that he knew both the police’s and the public’s actions had been motivated by righteous national indignation, but that the methods used could not be tolerated.’

‘Well?’

‘That all sounded very fishy, but the fact is, all those arrested by the police were released the same day. Friends of ours told us they’d all been shoved into enormous basement rooms in the new and as yet unfinished central detox unit. They’d been pretty much beaten up by the police and guards, and then suddenly they’d been let out.’

The man still had his hands over his eyes. He spoke in a lifeless monotone.

‘The next day there were more government bulletins. This time there was no actual spokesperson. The announcements basically said that the country had a democratic constitution and that everyone had the right to express their political ideology without fear of reprisals. They said the election would be held in fourteen days’ time and that, as part of the final campaign phase, the Accord regime urged all socialists to take part in a mass meeting that Saturday, that is, the second of November. Military units would be called in to support the police in maintaining law and order. It was guaranteed that there would be no risk to life or limb. All socialist and radical left-wing organisations and societies were invited in writing. The venue named on the invitations was the city’s biggest sports stadium. Representatives of the government and all other interested groups of citizens would take part in a major political debate there. The boulevard that led to the stadium was assigned to the socialists as the approach route for their demonstration and march. The police and military would close it to all other traffic.’