The Assignment

Born in 1926, Per Wahlöö was a Swedish writer and journalist who, alongside his own novels, collaborated with his partner, Maj Sjöwall, on the bestselling Martin Beck crime series, credited as inspiration for writers as varied as Agatha Christie, Henning Mankell, and Jonathan Franzen. In 1971 the fourth novel in the series,
The Laughing Policeman
, won an Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America. Per Wahlöö died in 1975.

Joan Tate was born in 1922 of English and Irish extraction. She traveled widely and worked as a teacher, a rehabilitation worker at a center for injured miners, a broadcaster, a reviewer, and a columnist. She was a prolific writer and translator, well known for translating many leading Swedish-language writers, including Astrid Lindgren, Ingmar Bergman, Kerstin Ekman, P. C. Jersild, Sven Lindqvist, and Agneta Pleijel. She died in 2000.

The car was a 1937 eight-cylinder Packard. It was black, like the soldiers’ uniforms and the American motorcycles in the escort. The time was three minutes past eight in the morning, and it was already very hot. The two people in the back of the car were talking.

“Father, are you never afraid?”

“What is there to be afraid of, my dear?”

“All these people …”

“Barking dogs don’t bite. You must remember one thing: always rely on the army—it is the only stable force here—as long as it has the right leaders. You ought to have had time to learn that by now.”

“Why don’t you forbid the servants to read the leaflets they drop?”

“What difference would that make?”

A silence fell in the car. The General turned his head and looked at the white villas rushing by without really seeing them. The convoy cut its way down through the long steep bends and onto a level road covered with gray-white stone chippings. The engineer corps had constructed it three years earlier and it was still usable although the edges had begun to crumble. At the foot of the hill the artificially irrigated area came to an end, the escort sounded their sirens and swung out into the wide, cobblestoned main street which ran dead straight from north to south through the capital of the province.

On either side of the road were whitewashed walls which the Fascist regime had begun to put up fifteen years previously, but the work had never been completed. In several places there were gaps in the walls, and in others the poor cement had crumbled away and the blocks of stone had collapsed. Ordinary fencing had been put up then, but now the barbed wire was already rusty and here and there the natives had cut through it with pliers and wound it into oval openings. Through these open gaps one could see the buildings behind the walls, a confused jumble of sacking, boards, and crooked shacks.

A white jeep which had been parked at the side of the road closed in behind the convoy. Four men were sitting in it. Their helmets and uniforms were white and their brown peasant faces were stiff and expressionless. They belonged to the Federal Police.

“I have seen so many kinds of policemen, under so many regimes,” said the man in the car—distractedly and indifferently, as if he had not been referring to anything in particular nor addressing himself to any specific person.

The escort drew a screaming black line through the suburbs. It was not traveling very fast, but the sirens gave an impression of efficiency and urgency. Chickens, naked children, and thin black pigs leaped away from the road.

Just before the entrance into the center of the town there was a man-high inscription scrawled in red on the rough white wall:
Death to Larrinaga!
Someone had painted it there during the night. In a few hours’ time the men from the administration would come with their buckets and whitewash over it. The next morning it would be there again, or somewhere else. The General smiled and shrugged his shoulders.

The escort thundered between the short, dusty palm trees along the main street. Here the buildings were tall and modern, square white boxes of glass and concrete, but there was little sign of life on the sidewalks as yet. The few pedestrians stopped and stared as the convoy went by. Many of them wore uniforms and nearly all of them were armed.

The escort officer swung diagonally across the beautifully laid stone plaza, drove up to the entrance of the Governor’s Palace and raised his right hand to signal a halt. The square was large and white and empty. Only two people were outside the entrance: an infantryman in black uniform and a policeman in white. The policeman had a Luger in a holster on his belt and the soldier a submachine gun on a strap around his neck. The submachine gun was American with a straight magazine and a folding iron frame.

We still have far too few of that sort, thought the General.

“Despite everything, they’re more important than all the agricultural reforms,” he mumbled to himself.

The Packard had stopped, but the couple in the back remained inside. The escort officer jerked his motorcycle up onto its stand, pulled off his gloves, and personally opened the car door. Then the General moved for the first time. He leaned over to one side, kissed his daughter on the cheek, and got stiffly out onto the sidewalk. He returned the guards’ salutes and walked through the swinging door. The escort officer followed three yards behind him.

General Orestes de Larrinaga went into the white marble hall. Straight ahead of him lay the wide staircase and the
elevators, to his left a long smooth counter, and behind that a messenger in a uniform cap and a black sateen jacket. The General gave him a friendly look and the man smiled.

“General,” he said, and then nothing more.

He bent down and took something from a shelf beneath the counter. The General paused and nodded amiably. The messenger was a very young man with an open face and dark-brown eyes.

He looks frightened, thought the General. People are frightened, even here.

Ten seconds later General Orestes de Larrinaga was dead. He lay on his back on the marble floor with his eyes open and his chest shattered. Red patches were already spreading over the material of his uniform, as if on white blotting paper.

He had had time to see the automatic pistol very clearly, and his last thought was that it was of Czech manufacture with a wooden butt and a circular magazine.

The escort officer had seen it too, but he reacted much too late.

Outside in the square the soldiers and the girl in the car heard the short hammering salvo and soon after that the more distinct cracks of someone firing an 11-millimeter Luger.

The southernmost province of the Federal Republic is the poorest and the least prosperous. Three hundred and forty thousand people live there, and the landowners number less than two thousand. Eighty per cent of the population is made up of the natives, most of them agricultural or mine workers. Nearly all of them are illiterate. The other fifth are descendants of European settlers; it is this group that owns the land and controls the means of production. The province has been deemed too poor and thinly populated to become self-governing. It is under federal administration and its chief official is an officer, the Military Governor. His seat is in the
capital of the province, which has about seventeen thousand inhabitants and is situated on the high plateau between the mountains in the northern area of the district. The white population lives in the middle of the town and in the villa district on an artificially irrigated hillside to the northeast. The forty thousand odd natives subsist in the jumble of shacks which are spread out at a comforting distance from the modern buildings in the center. Most of these natives work in the coal and manganese mines up in the mountains. Straight through the town runs the wide cobblestoned highway that enters from the north, but only a mile or two south of the town boundary it narrows into a stony winding mountain road, barely adequate for ordinary traffic. At the southern entrance there is also a row of large white stone barracks. The Third Mechanized Infantry Regiment is stationed there.

The disturbances in the area began in March 1960, when terrorist groups, in patrols of about ten men, began to infiltrate the mountain tracts in the south. Trained in a neighboring Socialist state, they were well armed, and they soon gained experience and efficiency.