Лейф Перссон - Another Time, Another Life

“Not in the slightest,” said Johansson emphatically. “Why should he?” Just a little private question I have, thought Johansson, and why I’m asking has nothing to do with you.

“Sure,” said Wiklander. “I’ll take care of it.” I wonder what this is really about, he thought.

At eight o’clock on Sunday morning, Holt called her boss Lars Martin Johansson at home to obtain permission to proceed with Helena Stein via the methods she had learned during her more than ten years as a detective — shadowing, wiretapping, and the whole ballet, so something would finally happen. Others could sit and peck at a computer or bury their heads in a pile of binders, like her colleague Lisa Mattei, for example, who loved that sort of thing and was better at it than almost anyone else.

In contrast to the morning before, Johansson didn’t answer until the third ring, and he was if anything even more direct than the first time Holt had called him at home that weekend.

“Good morning, Holt,” Johansson muttered. “How can I help you?”

“I’d like to initiate external surveillance of Stein,” said Holt. I don’t want him to get the idea that I’ve become fond of him, she thought. Calling two mornings in a row is perhaps a bit too much?

“Forget it,” said Johansson politely. “Call me again when you’ve placed her in Eriksson’s apartment. Give me three good reasons, and then I promise to think about it.”

So a wiretap is out of the question, thought Holt.

“And you can also forget about tapping her telephone,” said Johansson, who despite his nonexistent social skills was apparently a mind reader.

“Then I’ll have to say thank you, Boss,” Holt said politely, “and I do hope I haven’t disturbed you on a Sunday morning.” And how would I manage without you and people like you? she thought sourly.

“Forget about that too,” said Johansson. “And a piece of advice: Someone like me doesn’t bite on something like that,” and he hung up.

Oh my, thought Holt. But there isn’t much time.

Martinez too had gotten stuck in the bureaucratic mud. All the technicians who were on duty at SePo’s tech squad were fully occupied with a matter that had suddenly come up, top priority and so secret that they wouldn’t even say when they might be returning to the building on Polhemsgatan.

It wasn’t possible to get hold of on-duty technicians at the police department in Stockholm, though in a way it was simpler with them because no one was even there to answer the phone, much less anyone else who could tell her anything at all.

“Don’t ask me, they’re probably out running around somewhere, as usual,” said an irritated chief inspector at the City squad’s detective unit when Martinez finally got hold of him.

“Thanks for your help,” Martinez said politely, putting down the receiver. Idiot, she thought.

Both Holt and Martinez had to resign themselves to their fate — keeping Mattei company in front of the computers and piles of binders that were neatly arranged in the project room they’d moved into in order to be left alone with their mission. Mattei was happy as a clam and promised to show them some interesting new software after lunch — “Assuming you’re interested of course,” she added. Holt decided to make the best of her circumstances and, for lack of anything better to do, refresh her knowledge of the Eriksson case. What Martinez was actually up to at her computer was less clear, but she mostly seemed to be surfing on the secret police’s own network and taking full advantage of her temporarily expanded access.

Johansson had devoted the day to his wife, Pia, or Peppy Pia as he called her at home when he was in the mood.

The first time he had met her was almost fifteen years ago. He had run into her when he was investigating a mysterious suicide he had been dragged into, an American journalist who supposedly took his own life by jumping out of a sixteenth-floor window. The reason he had started to pay attention to Pia was more private than professional.

He had spoken with her as one of several witnesses, and because she looked the way she did and was the person she was, he immediately became interested in her, considerably more interested than he normally would have been. This was highly unfortunate given the way he had met her. On that point Johansson was very old-fashioned. Women he met in connection with his job, even in a situation like this, which was somewhere in between personal and professional, he did not meet as a man but rather as a police officer.

When he had finally put the case of the dead journalist behind him, not suicide but murder, he looked Pia up again, not as a police officer but as a man. But at the time she’d had something else going on, and what that was he never asked, because he knew anyway. He had hidden Pia far back in his mind among all the other things that certainly could have been significant in his life but for various reasons never were because he had never made up his mind. He had thought about her sometimes when the solitude that he all too gladly resorted to became too tangible. Then he thought about her with a special sense of loss that did not feed on all that had happened but only on the things that hadn’t but perhaps might have.

Several years later, when he had basically stopped thinking about her, he accidentally ran into her in his own grocery store, in the neighborhood where he lived. Luck of the draw, thought Johansson happily, and despite his estimable talents as a detective, for once he had no idea how things really stood.

Less than a month earlier Pia, who often thought about Lars Martin Johansson for more or less the same reasons he thought about her, happened to read a lengthy interview with Johansson in a tabloid, and immediately decided that if anything was going to happen in that area of her life, she was probably the one who would have to take the initiative. It was just a sudden impulse that she followed because over the years she had caught herself thinking about a man she had met only twice in her life. She found out just as quickly where he lived and that, at least in a legal sense, he was as single as could be. After that she figured out where he probably did his grocery shopping, and because she too lived on Söder it wasn’t difficult for her to change to a different store. On the fifth visit, just when she was thinking the whole project was starting to seem a little ridiculous, she had run into an absent-minded Johansson standing in deep contemplation in front of the meat counter. And that’s the way it was.

“What are we doing today?” asked a pleased Johansson as he squeezed grapefruit and oranges for his still half-asleep wife. “What do you think about starting the day with a long walk? The weather is almost as good as yesterday,” he added.

“What do you think about coming back to bed?” Pia proposed. “Then we can think about it while we’re considering something else.”

“Yes,” said Johansson. “Do you want juice now or do you want to wait?” Not a bad idea actually, he thought, and they could always go for a walk later.

“Later,” said Pia, suddenly looking very attentive.

“Good,” said Johansson, reaching out his hand for her slender neck.

After ordering out sushi for the second day in a row, Holt, Martinez, and Mattei devoted the afternoon to their daily war council.

“I’m starting to put together quite a bit on Stein now,” said Mattei, pointing to an impressive pile of computer printouts and other papers. “I almost feel she and I are getting to know each other in some way. This is really exciting.”

“You’ve never thought about writing a novel?” asked Martinez innocently.