The Terrorists (18 page)

He sat in silence for a while, looking down at his hands. There was dirt under the rims of his cracked stubby nails. Then he raised his eyes and looked out at the pouring rain.

“I still hate him, even though he’s dead,” he said.

Now that he had decided to talk, all Martin Beck had to do was insert a question here and there.

He told how it was on his journey back from Copenhagen that he decided to kill Petrus. His daughter had told him how Petrus had treated her, and her story had come as a shock to him.

As early as when she was still in school, Petrus had enticed Kiki up to his office. For a long time she didn’t dare go but he told her about her rare charm and unique radiance and promised her that if he could put her in a film, she’d be an instant star.

The very first time she visited him, he offered her hash. She went on seeing him, and he soon switched over to giving her amphetamines and heroin. After a while, she became totally dependent on him and finally agreed to be in his films if only he’d supply her with drugs.

When she left school and moved away from home, she was already an addict and could no longer manage on what Petrus gave her. She moved in with some other addicts, and turned to prostitution to pay for her habit. Finally she went to Copenhagen
with a whole gang of young people, and there she had stayed.

When her father came to see her, she admitted that she was hopelessly addicted and said she wasn’t even going to try to do anything about it. Her habit had grown and she had to work hard to pay for it.

He did what he could to persuade her to go home with him and go into a clinic, but she said she didn’t want to live much longer and was going to go on until it killed her, which she figured wouldn’t take long.

At first Sture Hellström had blamed himself, but when he thought about the talented and lovely girl his daughter had been before Walter Petrus got his hands on her, he began to see that the fault had been entirely Petrus’s.

Hellström knew that Petrus visited Maud Lundin regularly, and he decided to kill him there. He began to follow Petrus to Rotebro and soon realized that he was often alone in the house for a while in the mornings.

On the night of June sixth, when he knew Petrus was going to Maud Lundin’s, he took the train to Rotebro, waited in the garage until morning and then went into the house and killed Petrus before the man knew what had hit him.

That was the only thing he regretted. With the weapon he had had available, he had been forced to take Petrus by surprise. If only he had had a gun to threaten him with, then he would have told him first that he was going to kill him, and why.

Hellström had left the house by the back door, walked across the field, through some woods and an old overgrown garden, then out onto the Enköping road. Then he had walked back to the station, taken the train to Central Station, a bus to the East Station and returned home on the Djursholm train.

That was all.

“I never thought I’d be able to kill a human being,” said Sture Hellström. “But when I saw my daughter as deep in shit as a person can get, and then had to watch that swine walking around the place all fat and smug there was nothing else I could do. I was almost happy once I’d made up my mind.”

“But it didn’t help your daughter,” said Martin Beck.

“No. Nothing can help her. Or me, for that matter.”

Sture Hellström sat in silence for a while, then said, “Maybe we were doomed from the start, both Kiki and me. But all the same I think I did right. Anyhow, he can’t do anyone else any harm now.”

Martin Beck sat looking at Sture Hellström, who looked tired, but quite calm. Neither of them said anything. Finally Martin Beck switched off the tape recorder that had been revolving for the last hour, and then got up.

“Let’s go, then,” he said.

Sture Hellström got up at once and walked ahead of Martin Beck toward the door.

In the middle of August, Rebecka Lind was evicted from her apartment in south Stockholm.

The building was old and run down, and now it was going to be demolished, to be replaced by a new apartment house from which the landlord could extract at least three times the rent after installing all kinds of substandard but modern conveniences, and unnecessary decorative touches of poor quality but luxurious appearance.

After her month’s notice had expired she took her little daughter and their few possessions and moved in with some friends who shared a large apartment in a similar substandard building in the same area, also due for demolition.

Rebecka furnished the maid’s room with her mattress, four large red-enameled beer kegs that served as shelves, a large basket for sheets, towels, clothes, and Camilla’s bed, which Jim had made before he left. Under Camilla’s bed she shoved the small suitcase she had brought with her from home, but which she had never really unpacked. Inside it were drawings she had done at school, photographs, letters and some small articles she
had inherited from her mother’s aunt, wrapped up in an old embroidered cloth.

Rebecka was content to have a roof over her head. She enjoyed being with her friends and liked her little room, which faced out onto a large yard where two tall trees spread their broad branches. She was still waiting to hear from Jim. When one of her friends advised her to forget him, she calmly replied that she knew him too well to believe that he would abandon her without a word of explanation.

Inwardly, however, she began to feel certain that something must have happened to him, and her anxiety increased day by day. Before her ill-fated attempt to borrow money for the journey to America, she had written to Jim’s parents at the address he had given her. She had had no reply. It had been a great effort to get the letter together; the English she’d learned at school had improved considerably during her year with Jim, but she still had great difficulty with spelling.

One evening, when Camilla was asleep, she sat down cross-legged on her mattress and using one of the beer kegs as a table she wrote another letter to Jim’s parents.

Dear Mister and Missis Cosgrave
, she wrote slowly, carefully making the letters as clear as possible.

Then all she could do was go on waiting. With autumn coming soon, the person who had first right to her room would be back and she would be forced to move again. She did not know where, but hoped to find someplace with friends.

*       *       *

Just before Rebecka was about to move, the reply to her letter to Jim’s parents arrived.

Jim’s mother wrote that they had recently moved to another state, far away from where they had lived before. Jim’s punishment had not been the mere formality he had promised; he had been sentenced to four years’ imprisonment for desertion. They could not visit him because the prison was too far away, but they could write to him. They presumed that the prison authorities censored his mail and that was why Rebecka had not heard from him. Rebecka could try to write, but his mother could not be certain the letters would reach him. They could do nothing to help either him, her, or the child, as Jim’s father was very ill and was undergoing expensive medical treatment.

Rebecka read the letter carefully several times, but the only words that really penetrated her mind were “four years’ imprisonment.”

Camilla had fallen asleep on the mattress on the floor. She lay down next to her, curled up with the child held close to her and wept.

Rebecka did not sleep that night and it was not until it began to grow light that she fell asleep. When she was awakened by Camilla a short while later, she at once knew to whom she should turn for help.

Hedobald Braxén’s office was as shabby as the man himself, though centrally located on David Bagaresgatan. He had no secretary and no waiting room, only one single room with filthy windows and a kitchenette where he occasionally made coffee—when there was any coffee, and if the supply of plastic cups had not run out.

In the room, which was very small, there were two cats and a cage containing a rather tatty and bald old canary. The greater part of the floor space was taken up by a big desk, extremely old
and so large that it was amazing that some brilliant moving men had ever succeeded in getting it through the door. Crasher himself, in jest no doubt, used to say that it had been built inside the room when the building was constructed seventy years before.

That Rebecka Lind’s case had been allotted to Crasher had been a stroke of luck for her, at least so far.

“Well,” he said to her, stroking the cat from its nose right out to the tip of its tail, “we won the case. They did not appeal. All the better. There are blockheads in the High Court who simply regard the laws in the light of their own peculiar literal interpretations. It would have been very difficult to convince them of the truth—sometimes I doubt the word is even included in their vocabulary.”

He noticed that the girl was looking distressed.

“So, Roberta …”

“Rebecka,” said the girl.

“Exactly, yes, Rebecka,” he said. “So, Rebecka, what’s on your mind? Has something happened?”

“Yes, and you’re the only person who has ever helped me.”

Crasher relit his cigar, which had gone out. Then he put another cat on his knee and scratched it behind the ears until it began to purr.

He did not interrupt her once during her presentation of the case.

Finally she said helplessly, “What shall I do?”

“You can go to Social Welfare or the childcare office. Since you’re unmarried, you’ve probably got a social worker already.”

“No,” she said immediately. “Certainly, definitely
not
. Those people already chase me like I was an animal. And when they had Camilla while I was locked up, they didn’t take care of her.”

“They didn’t?”

“No, they gave her the wrong kind of food. It took me three weeks to get her stomach functioning normally again.”

Then she repeated, “What shall I do?”

Braxén lifted the cat aside, an unusually ugly specimen, mottled yellow-ocher, black and white, and said, “A long lifetime’s struggle against various authorities, and especially those who have more power than others, has taught me that one can seldom
get anyone to listen, and even more seldom convince them that you’re right.”

“Who rules this shitty country?” she said.

“Officially, Parliament, but in practice the cabinet and the committees and the capitalists and a number of people who have been chosen because they either have money or can control politically important groups, the trade-union bosses. The head bossman so to speak, is—”

“The King?”

“No, the King has no say in the matter. I mean the head of the government.”

“The head of the government?”

“Haven’t you ever heard of him?”

“No.”

“The head of the government, or the Premier or the Prime Minister or the Minister of State or whatever you like to call him. He is the leader of the country’s politics.”

Crasher rummaged around on his desk. “Here,” he said. “Here’s a picture of him in the paper.”

“How awful. And who is that in the cowboy hat?”

“An American senator who is shortly coming on an official visit. He was governor of the very state your boy friend comes from, as a matter of fact.”

“My husband,” she said.

“Well, one never knows what word to use nowadays,” said Crasher, with a belch.

“Can a person go and talk to that man who’s head of the government? He does speak Swedish, doesn’t he?”

“Yes, but it would still be difficult. He doesn’t receive just anyone, except just before an election. But one can draw up a writ, which means sending a letter.”

“I couldn’t do that,” she said resignedly.

“But I could,” said Crasher.

From the bowels of his remarkable desk, Hedobald Braxén unfolded a flap on which an ancient Underwood was mounted. He pushed two pieces of typing paper with a carbon paper between them into the machine, then started typing easily and nimbly.

“Won’t it be very expensive?” said Rebecka uncertainly.

“As I see it, it’s like this,” said Crasher. “If someone who is really guilty of something criminal or who injures society can receive free legal aid, then a person who is totally innocent should certainly not have to pay expensive lawyer’s fees.”

He glanced through the letter, gave the original to Rebecka and put the copy away in a file.

“What shall I do now?” she asked.

“Sign it,” said Braxén. “My address here is at the top of the paper.”

She signed it, her hand trembling a little, while Braxen addressed the envelope. Then he sealed the envelope, affixed a stamp showing a picture of their powerless king and gave her the letter.

“If you turn right when you go out of the building and then turn right again, you’ll find a mailbox.”

“Thank you,” she said.

“Goodbye, Ro … Rebecka. Where can I get hold of you?”

“Nowhere at the moment.”

“Then come back here. In a week’s time at the earliest. We cannot expect a reply before then.”

When she had closed the door behind her, Braxén folded the flap with the typewriter on it back again and lifted the mottled cat back onto his lap.

The tall, blond man had a British passport, made out in the name of a businessman called Andrew Black. He arrived in Sweden on the fifteenth of October and used the best possible entry, from Copenhagen via hydrofoil to Malmö, where the passport police, if they are even on duty, spend most of their time yawning and drinking coffee.