The Terrorists (22 page)

“You’re wrong there. All demonstrators are to be allowed within sight.”

“If the government doesn’t get scared and talk you out of it, yes. What can you do if the Prime Minister suddenly calls you up and says all the demonstrators are to be transported to Råsunda stadium and kept there?”

“Then I’ll resign.”

She looked at him for a long time, her chin resting on her drawn-up knees and her hands clasped around her ankles. Her hair was tangled after the sauna and shower and her irregular features were thoughtful.

He thought she looked beautiful.

Finally she said, “You’re great, Martin. But you’ve got a hell of a job. What sort of people are they you get for murder and other horrors? Like the last one—some poor working slob who tried to hit back at the capitalist bastard who had destroyed his life. What’ll he get?”

“Twelve years, probably.”

“Twelve years,” she said. “Well, I suppose it was worth it to him.” She did not look happy.

Then she changed the subject, abruptly, as she often did.

“The kids are upstairs with Sara, so you can sleep without them jumping on your stomach. On the other hand, I may step on you when I go to bed.”

It often happened that she went to bed after he had fallen asleep.

She changed tack again. “I hope you’re aware that this highly honored guest has tens of thousands of lives on his conscience. He was one of the most active forces behind the strategic bombing in North Vietnam. And he was right in there even during the Korean War. He supported MacArthur when he wanted to drop atomic bombs on China.”

Martin Beck nodded. “I know.” Then he yawned.

“Go to bed now,” she said firmly. “I’ll bring you breakfast in the morning. What time shall I wake you?”

“Seven.”

“Okay.”

Martin Beck went to bed and fell asleep more or less instantaneously.

Rhea cleaned up in the kitchen, then went into the bedroom and kissed him on the forehead. He did not react at all. It was warm in the apartment and she took off her jersey, curled up in her favorite armchair and read for a while. She had difficulty sleeping and was often awake long into the small hours. At one time she had tried to cure her insomnia with red wine, but nowadays she made a virtue out of necessity and read a great number of boring papers and suchlike at nights.

Tonight she read a paper on character appraisal that she herself had written a few years earlier. When she finished it, she looked around and caught sight of Martin Beck’s briefcase. Rhea Nielsen was inquisitive, mostly in a very straightforward way, so she opened it without much thought and began to study the papers, thoroughly and with interest, finally opening the file Gunvald Larsson had handed to Martin Beck just before he left. She examined the contents for a long time, with intense attention and not without a certain surprise.

At long last she put everything back into the briefcase and
went to bed. She stepped on Martin Beck, but he was sleeping so soundly he didn’t wake up.

Then she lay down close to him with her face turned toward his.

The Army Museum in Stockholm was on Riddargatan in Östermalm, in the old barracks behind a spacious yard containing neatly kept and grouped old artillery pieces. It filled the whole block between Sibyllegatan and Artillerigatan. The nearest building was not very military: Hedvig Eleonora Church, which despite its fine dome was not one of the city’s historic buildings, nor much to cheer about.

Nowadays there was not much to cheer about in the Army Museum either, especially since it had been revealed that part of the Security Service had been tucked away in the building, with the museum as an innocent front.

The heart of the museum was a great hall filled with ancient cannons and various old muskets, but it was not an interest in history that had brought the chief of the Homicide Squad on a visit.

A fat man was sitting at a desk in a small office studying a chess problem. It was an unusually difficult one, mate in five moves, and now and again he made a note in a shorthand notebook, which he then almost immediately crossed out again. There was a possibility that this was not what he was supposed to be doing, as on the table lay a dismembered pistol and beside his chair a wooden crate full of firearms, some of them with cardboard labels that carried no information at all.

The man with the chess problem was Lennart Kollberg, Martin Beck’s closest colleague during many difficult years. He had said farewell to the police force about a year before, and his resignation had caused considerable uproar and some acid
comment. The fact that one of the country’s best policemen—a man with a solid position of command—had resigned because he could no longer stand being a policeman had not looked so good. Stig Malm had chased through the corridors like a dog with its tongue hanging out trying to carry out the Commissioner’s order that the matter not be made public.

Naturally, it got out all the same, although the newspapers, by and large, found it no more remarkable that an old policeman should resign than that a sports journalist, satiated with travel, bribes and drink, should say to hell with it all and decide to spend his time with his children watching football on TV. For Martin Beck personally, it had been a misfortune, but he’d get over it. They seldom met privately, but even so a number of tankards had been raised in either Kollberg’s apartment in Skär-marbrink or Martin Beck’s in Köpmangatan.

“Hi,” said Kollberg now, pleased to see Martin Beck but showing no overwhelming enthusiasm.

Martin Beck said nothing but thumped his old friend on the back.

“This is quite interesting,” said Kollberg, nodding at the crate. “A heap of old pistols and revolvers, mostly from various police districts. A lot of people handed in funny old popguns when Parliament made those new laws on the possession of firearms. But the ones who voluntarily brought in their arsenals were, of course, those who’d never even considered trying to shoot with them. No one here has the time or the desire to go through the whole lot and catalogue them properly,” said Kollberg. “But someone thought I’d do for the job, even if half the top brass in the police keep calling me a communist.”

That someone had been right. Few people could rival Kollberg when it came to being systematic.

He pointed at the dismantled pistol. “Look at that, for instance. An automatic Russian Nagant, eleven millimeters and as old as the hills. I managed to get it apart, but now don’t know how the hell I’m going to get it together again. And here …” He rummaged in the crate and picked out a gigantic old Colt revolver. “Have you ever seen the likes of this Peacemaker? Well looked-after, too. Åsa Torell kept one like that under her
pillow after Stenström was killed. And she kept the safety catch off, for good measure.”

“I’ve seen quite a lot of Åsa this summer,” said Martin Beck. “She’s with the Märsta force.”

“With Märsta-Pärsta?” said Kollberg with a laugh.

“She and Benny did a good job on that murder in Rotebro.”

“What murder in Rotebro?”

“Don’t you read the newspapers?”

“Yes, but not that kind of thing. Benny? Every time I hear that slob’s name, I’m reminded that he actually saved my life once. Of course, if he hadn’t been such an idiot just beforehand, he wouldn’t have
had
to.”

“Benny’s okay,” said Martin Beck. “And Åsa’s become a good policewoman.”

“Well, well, the ways of the Lord are indeed strange.”

Although Kollberg had left the church some years earlier, he not infrequently came out with religious quotations.

“You know,” he went on, “I always thought you and Åsa would get together. It would have been a good solution, and she would have made you a good wife. And you were in love with her, too, though you would never admit it. On top of everything else, she was damned good-looking.”

Martin Beck smiled and shook his head.

“What happened that time in Malmö, anyhow?” Kollberg asked. “You know the time I fixed you up with adjoining hotel rooms?”

“You’ll probably never know,” said Martin Beck. “How’s Gun, for that matter?”

“Great. She loves working and gets more and more beautiful every day. And I really like looking after the kids sometimes. I’ve even learned to cook. Even better than before,” he added modestly.

Suddenly his eye lit on something lying near the dismantled pistol, and his hand shot out. “Got it!” he said. “This pin. Have you ever seen such a helluva pin before? I knew I’d find it, of course. This pin is the key to the whole construction.”

Like lightning, he assembled the firearm, consulted a large loose-leaf file full of stenciled pages, wrote out a card and put
the pistol aside, after having tied a label to the trigger guard.

Martin Beck was not surprised. That was the way Kollberg usually functioned.

“Åsa Torell,” mused Kollberg once again. “You would have made a lovely couple.”

“Would you want to be married to a policewoman and sit and talk shop on your days off?”

Kollberg appeared to think this over. Then he made a typical gesture, sighing profoundly and shrugging his fat shoulders. “Maybe you’re right,” he said. “This new one’s probably better for you. Rhea, I mean.”

“You bet your life she is,” said Martin Beck.

“But she talks so damn much,” said Kollberg. “And she’s too broad-shouldered and she looks a little narrow in the hips. Doesn’t she bleach her hair, too?”

He fell silent, suddenly aware that he might have hurt his old friend’s feelings.

But Martin Beck smiled and said, “I could name some other people who talk too much and whose shoulders are maybe a little too broad, not to say chubby.”

Kollberg hauled a large automatic out of the box, put it down on his chess problem and said, “Well, Martin, what is it you want? I don’t suppose you came here to talk about girls.”

“I wondered if you’d do a special little job for me.”

“Paid?”

“Yes, for Christ’s sake. I’ve a good budget. Almost unrestricted.”

“What for?”

“Protection for this senator from the States who’s coming on Thursday. I’m in charge of the security.”

“You?”

“I was forced into it.”

“And what do you want me to do?”

“Just read through these papers, plus one highly confidential document. Look at it and see if you can spot anything crazy.”

“Isn’t it crazy enough to invite the guy here?”

Martin Beck did not reply to the question, but said instead, “Will you do it?”

Kollberg looked appraisingly at the bundle of photostats. “How quickly?” he asked.

“As quickly as possible.”

“Okay,” said Kollberg. “They say money doesn’t smell, and anyway I can’t believe the police’s money stinks any worse than any other. But it’ll probably take all night. What is it that’s secret?”

“Here.” Martin Beck took a folded document out of his jacket pocket. “There isn’t even a copy of this.”

“Okay,” said Kollberg. “I’ll be here same time tomorrow morning.”

“You’re as punctual as a bailiff,” said Kollberg on Tuesday morning. “I read it all. Twice. Took me all night.”

Martin Beck took a long, narrow envelope out of his pocket and handed it over. Kollberg counted the money and whistled to himself.

“Well, it was worth a night’s work. This means a night on the town at least, perhaps even this very evening.”

“What did you find?”

“Nothing really. It’s a good plan. But …”

“Well?”

“Well, if there’s any point in trying to tell Möller anything, then you might draw his attention to the fact that he has two really difficult moments: when this bastard’s standing on Logår-den with the King, and a less difficult situation when the Senator and the Prime Minister are laying that wreath.”

“What else?”

“Nothing, as I said. I think that secret stuff seems a bit crazy. Wouldn’t it be better to disguise Gunvald Larsson as a Christmas tree with an angel and the Stars and Stripes on top and put him up in Sveaplan? And let him stay there until Christmas?”

Kollberg placed the papers in a heap in front of Martin Beck, the most important on top, then took a very small revolver out of the box and added, “So that people would have time to get used to such a horrible and dreadful sight, as Malm would say?”

“Anything else?”

“Yes, tell Einar Rönn that he should never again try to express himself in writing, and that if he does, he simply mustn’t let anyone else see what he has written. Or else he’ll never get promoted.”

“Mmm,” said Martin Beck.

“Isn’t this a pretty little thing,” said Kollberg. “A little nickel-plated lady’s revolver like American women used to carry in their purses or muffs at the turn of the century.”

Martin Beck looked without interest at the nickel-plated firearm as he stuffed his papers into his briefcase.

“Maybe you could hit a cabbage with it at a range of ten inches, presuming that it stayed absolutely still,” said Kollberg as he opened the little revolver with one swift movement.

“I’ve got to run,” said Martin Beck. “Thanks for the help.”

“Peace,” said Kollberg. “Give my regards to Rhea if you like. Otherwise you don’t even have to mention my name. That would be acceptable.”

“So long, then.”

“See you,” said Lennart Kollberg, reaching for one of his index cards.

Over the years, more than one person had wondered what it was that made Martin Beck such a good policeman. The question was discussed as eagerly by his superiors as by his subordinates, and was more often dictated by envy than by admiration.

The enviers were apt to point out that he had few cases, and most of them easy to solve. This was true, for the assignments he dealt with were few in comparison with what overwhelmed other departments of Stockholm’s police. The Larceny, Narcotics and Violence divisions, for instance, had an enormous work load, and their percentage of solved cases was frighteningly low. A great many reports were simply never followed up and eventually
just written off. The Stockholm chief and ultimately National Headquarters always produced the same explanation; shortage of manpower.

In fact, it wasn’t easy to be a policeman in Stockholm, where various mobs and syndicates nowadays wreaked havoc quite freely, where drugs were plentiful and the simplest conflict often released insane violence on both sides. The National Commissioner and many others with him had persisted in the reorganization of the old local police system into a centrally directed, paramilitary force with frightening technical resources. The policeman’s profession was a dreary one with little or no glamour attached to it, and many of its functions automatically produced hostility and unpopularity. Martin Beck’s Homicide Squad, with its established and often exaggerated reputation of excitement and even romance, was an exception.