Free Falling, As If in a Dream Read online

  “I’m as healthy as a horse,” said Johansson. “Now, if you’d seen me on TV—”

  “Nicely done,” said Jarnebring. “I saw it. You’re your usual self. Administrating away so that everything’s just so. Say the word when you want a real job and I’ll put in a good word for you down at the county bureau.”

  “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,” said Johansson with a streak of melancholy in his voice.

  Johansson abandoned that subject to talk instead about more essential things. The menu that he and his Italian restaurateur had jointly composed, in honor of the evening.

  “Because we haven’t seen each other all summer I thought we should do a thorough job,” said Johansson. “The whole program, and I’ll pick up the tab. Do you have anything against that?”

  “Is the pope a Muslim?” said Jarnebring.

  The whole program. First two deft waiters spread out the little smorgasbord that was a necessary prerequisite for having both beer and aquavit. A deplorably neglected part of the otherwise outstanding Italian food culture, but at this particular place set to rights long ago by Johansson.

  “Nothing remarkable, a few mixed delicacies, that’s all,” Johansson explained with a deprecating hand gesture. “Those mini-pizzas on the plate over there—”

  “No bigger than my thumbnail,” Jarnebring interrupted. “Without the black lines though.”

  “Exactly. Small pizzas topped with Swedish anchovies and chopped chives, and baked with Parmesan.”

  “Is the pope Catholic?” said Jarnebring.

  “Then we’ll have sardines in a marinade of garlic, mustard, capers, and olive oil.”

  “The bear shits in the forest…”

  “That ham there,” said Johansson. “It’s not Swedish or Italian. It’s Spanish. It’s called pata negra, blackfoot ham. Free-range hogs that wander around eating acorns until they’re slaughtered, salted, and dried. The world’s best pork if you ask me.”

  With the fragrance of Sierra Madrona’s green-clad mountains, thought Johansson, picking up the scent with his long nose. He would never dream of saying that. In male company, between real policemen there were certain things you never said, and who was he to worry his best friend unnecessarily.

  “Damn good pork, if you ask me,” Johansson repeated, raising his full shot glass.

  “Cheers, boss,” said Jarnebring. “Shall we drink or shall we talk?”

  When after his second shot Johansson described the impending entrée, Jarnebring expressed a certain hesitation. It was the only time during the evening, and it was mostly out of old habit.

  “I thought we’d have pasta as an entrée,” said Johansson.

  “Pasta,” said Jarnebring. Is Dolly Parton suddenly sleeping on her belly? he thought.

  “With diced grilled ox filet, mushrooms, and a cream and cognac sauce,” Johansson tempted.

  “Sounds interesting,” Jarnebring agreed. Dolly must be sleeping the way she always does, he thought.

  Three hours later they had finished off the usual. First they talked about their own families and everyone near and dear. Ordinarily that part would be finished in five minutes, so that the rest of the evening could be spent discussing all the idiots they had encountered, regardless of whether they were fellow police officers, hoods, or ordinary civilians. Not so this time, because Jarnebring suddenly started talking about his youngest son and what it was like becoming a dad when you were over fifty and had decided long ago not to have any more children. That this in particular was probably the greatest thing that had ever happened to him. Despite all the crooks he’d arrested over the years.

  Must be the good pasta that has brought out a new, gentler side of dear Bo, Johansson thought.

  “So suddenly there you are with two new little rascals. The boy then. Yes, and the girl of course,” said Jarnebring, shaking his head thoughtfully. “The boy’s no slouch. Let me tell you, Lars.”

  “But his big sister,” said Johansson divertingly. “How are things going for her?”

  “You mean little Lina,” said Jarnebring with surprise. “The spitting image of her mother, if you ask me.”

  Depends on what you mean by little, thought Johansson. Must be fifteen by now. He and Pia never had any children. It hadn’t turned out that way, he thought. For various reasons he didn’t want to talk about, and then he changed the subject.

  “Speaking of crazy colleagues,” said Johansson, “I ran into your dear police chief the other day.”

  After a while they left the restaurant and trotted home to Johansson’s for the usual concluding session. Halfway there they ran into four younger men who came toward them four abreast on the sidewalk with expectation in their eyes. Jarnebring stopped, looked eagerly at the biggest one, and when he saw that he recognized Jarnebring the rest was pure routine.

  “How’s it going, Marek?” Jarnebring asked. “Planning to get yourself killed?”

  “Respect, boss,” said Marek with frightened eyes, stepping ahead of his friends onto the street.

  “Take care of yourselves, girls,” Jarnebring grunted.

  We’re too old for that sort of thing, thought Johansson, putting the key into his door and seeking the peace and safety on the other side. Wrong, he thought. You’ve always been too old for that sort of thing. Bo is who he is and he’ll always be that way.

  “Tell me about Palme,” said Johansson ten minutes later when they were sitting in armchairs in his large study. Jarnebring with a respectable whiskey toddy and the bottle at a comfortable distance. He himself with a glass of red wine and a bottle of mineral water. At his age you had to take care of yourself, and apart from the obligatory introductory shot, because he would never give that up, these days he was content with beer, wine, and water. Plus the occasional cognac, to help his digestion. Though not Jarnebring, of course. He was who he was. With a physique that defied human understanding and seemed completely unaffected by alcohol.

  I wonder why he drinks, thought Johansson.

  “Tell me about Palme,” he repeated. “You were there when it happened.”

  “You want ideas about how to put all the binders on the shelves? Personally, I usually set them with the spine out. Then I paste little labels on them so that I can tell what’s in them,” Jarnebring teased.

  “Forget about my binders,” said Johansson.

  “It went to hell,” said Jarnebring. “If we’d done it the usual way of course we would’ve caught the bastard. If those of us who usually took care of it had been able to do it the usual way,” he clarified. “If we had not had a lot of crazy lawyers telling us what to do. You certainly would have found him if you’d been involved from the start. You wouldn’t have needed more than a month or two. But I guess you had your hands full with your binders as usual.”

  “So who did it?”

  “Who the hell knows,” said Jarnebring, shaking his head. “But it wasn’t Christer Pettersson. I knew him, by the way. Don’t know how many times I dragged that asshole to jail over the years. May he rest in peace,” said Jarnebring, raising his glass.

  “He seemed crazy enough anyway,” Johansson objected.

  “Christer Pettersson was crazy, with a certain degree of sanity. For example, he was never so crazy that he tried to attack me the times I arrested him. He knew, you see, that he would get a sound thrashing and he never got that crazy. He drank and did drugs, carried on and was generally disorderly. Fought with smaller, drunker companions and his ladies. Though it wasn’t more than that, and he didn’t understand firearms. Besides, I think he liked people like Palme. It was people like you and me he didn’t like.”

  “The one who shot Palme was a skilled shooter,” said Johansson. Wonder what Palme would have thought about Christer Pettersson, he thought suddenly. A social outcast? A person who only happened to end up on the outside? Through no fault of his own?

  “The one who shot, yes,” said Jarnebring. “He was just as good a shot as you or me. Forget all our colleagues who
complain that it’s no big deal to shoot someone a few inches away—but in that case how could he miss Lisbeth Palme when he shot at her? Forget all that bullshit from everyone who’s never shot at anyone in a crisis situation, when people move around and start jumping and running like dazed chickens as soon as it goes off.”

  “I see what you mean,” Johansson agreed.

  “The bullet that strikes Lisbeth Palme goes in on her left side, passes between the skin and her blouse, the whole way along the back, level with her shoulder blade and out on the right side. If you miss like that you’re a damn experienced shot. If she’d just twisted her upper body a tenth of a second later he would’ve clipped off her back. So he could really shoot. I’m a hundred percent sure he was convinced he’d shot her through the lung, and because he also knew that was enough, with interest, he was content to get out of there.”

  “She falls down on her knees beside her husband,” said Johansson.

  “Sure,” said Jarnebring with emphasis. “First he shoots Palme. Hits him from behind in mid-step, and he falls flat on his face on the street. He had a bruise the size of a silver dollar on his forehead. In the next second he aims at Lisbeth, targeting the middle of her back, but just as he fires she twists her body to see what happened to her husband who has suddenly fallen headlong in front of her feet. She hasn’t even seen the shooter behind her.

  “So all that about Pettersson, you can just forget. Cheers, by the way,” said Jarnebring. “There’s way too much talking at this party, if you ask me.”

  It was definitely not Christer Pettersson. Completely wrong type, according to Jarnebring. Just as wrong as that nonsense about the Kurds, those guys would eat out of the hands of someone like Palme. Or the “thirty-three-year-old” for that matter.

  “Usual fucking pathological liar,” Jarnebring summarized.

  “So who did it?”

  “Someone very familiar with the area, good physique, experienced shot, presence of mind, sure of himself, full control of the situation, sharpness and the capacity to resort to violence when it was time. Ice-cold devil. Not at all like Pettersson, because he would be jumping around yelling for a while, then waving his arms if his opponent seemed small and harmless enough. If he’d tried to kill Palme he would have started by doing a war dance around him, and then he would have done the wave and given him the finger afterward. But this perpetrator didn’t do that. He did what he needed to do, calmly and quietly, and then he just left.”

  “I hear what you’re saying,” Johansson agreed. “An ice-cold devil who only needs to pull a trigger to be able to shoot another person from behind. Not the least like Christer Pettersson.”

  “Could be me. The one who put Palme out of business, that is,” said Jarnebring and grinned.

  “No,” said Johansson. “I don’t think so, despite all the rest, because I do believe that.”

  “Someone like me then,” Jarnebring persisted.

  Not you, thought Johansson. Not someone who is only bigger and stronger than everyone else and never lost a fistfight. Another type, someone who can just pull the trigger and suddenly change from person to executioner, he thought.

  Although he’d actually thought that the whole time, so they didn’t talk about it anymore.

  Wednesday, October 10.

  The bay outside Puerto Pollensa on north Mallorca

  After an almost ten-minute run, two nautical miles from the harbor and even with the cape outside La Fortaleza, Esperanza corrected course twenty degrees port in the direction of the tip of Cap de Formentor. To port and starboard is land, the steep cliffs of north Mallorca, almost impossible to ascend from the sea. Straight ahead is only the sea. The same sea that awoke after a calm night and breathes with a slowly heaving swell. The sea. Esperanza. The sun quickly climbing up the pale blue wall of sky. The haze letting up. Then the sea under Esperanza. Just as deep as the spiny heights in the reflecting water. The keel, hull, plating, the five feet between that carries her over the deep below her. Alone on the sea. Esperanza, a beautiful boat with a beautiful name.

  11

  Seven weeks earlier, Wednesday, August 22.

  Headquarters of the National Bureau of Criminal Investigation on Kungsholmen in Stockholm

  “Our colleague Flykt has a valid excuse,” said Johansson, smiling at Holt, Lewin, and Mattei. “He suddenly has a lot of tips to take care of.

  “I thought you could start, Jan,” he continued. “Tell us ignorant people what happened that unfortunate Friday evening the twenty-eighth of February 1986.”

  “I’ve written a little memo about it,” said Lewin with his obligatory, cautious throat clearing. “It’s in your e-mail. You have it in front of you too. I suggest we take ten minutes so you can all read it in peace and quiet.”

  “Excellent,” said Johansson, getting up. “Then I can get coffee for us and take the opportunity to stretch my legs.”

  Johansson seems pleased and satisfied, thought Holt. Suspiciously pleased and satisfied, she thought, taking Lewin’s memo out of the plastic folder in front of her. What’s this? she thought. Twenty pages of text plus another ten pages with some kind of index at the end. The latter listed almost two hundred individuals, with full names and social security numbers, each name accompanied by one or more reference numbers.

  “The witnesses who were interviewed about the various sections as reported in my memo,” Lewin explained, having evidently noticed her wonder. “The numbers reference the interviews in the Palme material where the information is reported.”

  “I see,” said Holt and nodded. What’s wrong with Jan? she thought. He’s not the type who tries to call attention to himself. Pull yourself together, Anna, she thought, starting to read.

  “Prime Minister Olof Palme (hereafter designated OP) left his office in the government building Rosenbad (address Rosenbad 4) approx. 18:15 on Friday, February 28, 1986. As far as is known—no information of a different import has been reported in the investigation—he walked the shortest route home to his residence at Västerlånggatan 31 in Old Town.

  “OP passes through the main entry to Rosenbad, turns left down to Strömgatan approx. 55 yards, then turns left up Strömgatan to Riksbron approx. 66 yards. After that OP turns right and, on foot, passes Riksbron, Riksgatan, and the bridge across Stallkanalen up to Mynttorget, a total of approx. 220 yards. From Mynttorget OP continues up Västerlånggatan in a southerly direction, approx. 270 yards. He arrives at his residence about 18:30 or right before that. The total walking distance of just over 650 yards corresponds to an approx. ten-minute walk at a normal pace, and this time period is thus compatible with the times and other circumstances as stated above.

  “OP walked home alone and does not appear to have spoken, or had other contacts, with anyone during that time. Right before 12:00 the same day he explained to his bodyguards that he would not need them anymore that Friday. His two bodyguards state in interviews that he told them he was going to spend the afternoon at his office and the evening and night in his residence together with his wife, Lisbeth Palme (hereafter designated LP), and that therefore he would not need them anymore that Friday.

  “One of the bodyguards then contacted his immediate superior at the secret police bodyguard squad by telephone, who in an interview states that he, ‘based on what the surveillance object himself stated, ordered them to suspend guarding for the remainder of the day.’”

  Classic Lewin, thought Lisa Mattei. Jan Lewin—hereafter designated JL—she thought, and to cover her smile she held her right hand over her chin and mouth in a meditative gesture before she turned the page and continued reading. Lewin hadn’t noticed. He seemed completely absorbed in his own text.

  “OP spent the time between approx. 18:30 and right after 20:30 in his residence together with his wife, LP. No other persons were present or visited them during that time. OP spoke on the phone with three individuals, party secretary Bo Toresson, former cabinet minister Sven Aspling, and his son Mårten Palme (hereafter designated MP
), and had dinner with his wife, LP. It was also during this time period that the Palmes decided to go to the cinema that same evening. After the conversation with MP it was decided together with MP and his then girlfriend (later wife) to see the film The Mozart Brothers (directed by Suzanne Osten) at the Grand cinema on Sveavägen, situated approx. 350 yards northwest of the scene of the crime at the intersection of Sveavägen and Tunnelgatan. This decision was only made at approx. 20:00 according to what has emerged in the interviews with LP and MP.

  “Right after 20:30 OP and LP leave their residence on Västerlånggatan in order to go on foot to the subway station in Old Town. OP and LP turn left on Västerlånggatan and then right on Yxsmedsgränd. The total walking distance between the residence and the stairs down to the subway station is approx. 275 yards, and the estimated time expenditure approx. three–four minutes…”

  It must be angst, thought Holt. Only strong inner anxiety can explain this manic interest in details. She was forced to change her way of reading. A whole page of text and our victim isn’t even on the subway in Old Town yet, and damn you, Jan Lewin, she thought. Then in six short sentences she summarized a full two pages of Jan Lewin and located the Palmes in their seats at the Grand.

  “Gets on the subway in Old Town approx. 20:40. Rides three stations and gets off at Rådmansgatan approx. 20:50. Enters the cinema right before 21:00. Talks with their son and his fiancée. OP buys tickets for him and LP. In their seats in the theater approx. 21:10,” Holt noted on the back of one of Lewin’s many papers.

  “The screening was over right after eleven o’clock, and once they were out on the street the prime minister and his wife talked with their son and his girlfriend for a few minutes. Then they went their separate ways. The Palmes in the direction south toward the city center on the west side of Sveavägen and now the time is approximately a quarter past eleven. The temperature is twenty degrees Fahrenheit, wind speed of six to seven meters per second, and many people are moving about. A number of witnesses observed the prime minister and his wife. They walk at a rapid pace, side by side, he on her left side, closest to the street. At Adolf Fredriks Kyrkogata, the cross street before Tunnelgatan, they cross to the other side of Sveavägen. Stop a minute or two at a display window and then continue in the direction of the city center. This side of the street is deserted for the most part.