A Darker Shade of Sweden (29 page)

Helena nods. Of course she did.

“Just let it go.” Her partner turns in at her street. “We did something good today, Helena. Think about that instead. It sure doesn't happen every day. Now let's go home. It's fucking Christmas. Smile and be happy. This was one of the good days.”

Police officer Helena Svensson goes to bed early. A large cup of tea on her bedside table. She leafs through a glossy magazine. A recipe for gingerbread cupcakes, a home decoration article full of embroidered silk cushions. A famous actress talks about her family Christmas traditions. She wants to teach her children the joy of giving.

Helena turns pages, reads, starts over again when she is done. She is wide awake. Unthinkingly reads the same article again and again, unable to concentrate on how to make a sugar-frosted Christmas garland out of spruce twigs. Her mind is full of dirty yellow bruises and a little girl clinging to Stefan's neck.

Even at the police academy they talked about it. About the worst threat to little girls not being a dirty old man with his pockets full of candy and an imaginary puppy in the trunk of his car. The dirty old men are few. Many more children have mothers who can't take it any more, have fathers who never help out, are always told that they are hopeless and clumsy and stupid. And get bruises even if they never dare climb a tree.

The apartment where Emma lived was warm. Her mother wasn't a drunk. She cooked meatballs and kept a laundry basket by her door, had bought detergent and booked the laundry room.

Let it go. That's what her partner had said. And why shouldn't she? Petra already led a tough life. Alone with two kids. She certainly doesn't need to get social services on her back. And Helena has other things to worry about.

Tomorrow was another day. Her shift would start at eleven and the weather forecast said it would be cold. Cold drove the homeless to places where they became visible, into stairwells where landlords complained about their smell and into shopping malls where they didn't fit in with the Christmas decorations. Tomorrow would be a hard day and tomorrow night even worse. She can't worry the small stuff like this. She'll burn out before finishing her first year.

Helena throws the magazine on the floor and switches off the light. She turns on her side and kicks at the covers to get her foot free.

Let it go? Is that really what I'm supposed to do? Is that really how it's supposed to be? When it's soon fucking Christmas. Was this really one of the good days?

Born Malin Persson in Stockholm in 1969, Malin Persson Giolito is the
daughter of celebrated crime author and professor of criminology Leif G.
W. Persson. Herself a lawyer, she worked for ten years at the Stockholm and Brussels offices of the international law firm Mannheimer Swartling; in late 2007, she accepted a position with the European Commission, the executive body of the European Union. She lives with her husband Christophe Giolito in Brussels. Her first, noncrime novel,
Dubbla slag (Two-Front Battle)
,
was published in 2008; it has so far been followed by two crime novels that have established her as one of the most interesting young Swedish crime writers. Her novels are carried by strong characterizations and serious, topical themes: in her second book,
Bara ett barn (Only a Child),
crimes committed against children; in her third,
Bortom varje rimligt tvivel (Beyond All Reasonable Doubt),
miscarriage of justice.

THE MULTI-MILLIONAIRE

M
AJ
S
JÖWALL AND
P
ER
W
AHLÖÖ

For thirty-five years, Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö were the indisputably best known, most highly regarded, and most read of all Swedish crime writers. Their ten police procedural novels featuring Detective Inspector Martin Beck and his team of investigators, initially published in Sweden 1965 through 1975, were translated worldwide; won numerous awards, including the Mystery Writers of America Edgar Allan Poe Award for best novel; were made into movies in the United States, in Sweden, in the former Soviet Union, in Germany, and in the Netherlands; and have remained in print throughout the world.

Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö met in the summer of 1962. Wahlöö was a well-known writer and journalist, thirty-six years old, married, and with a daughter. Sjöwall was twenty-seven, a journalist and magazine art director, twice divorced, and with a six-year-old daughter. The attraction was instant but the situation was difficult. They met in bars, worked together, wrote together. Within a year, Wahlöö had moved in with Sjöwall. Their first son was born nine months later. They never married, but in Sweden their romance, one that had started out as virtually a public scandal, became envied and almost legendary: they were inseparable. A year after they met, they began planning a series of crime novels in which they would apply their common, radically leftist perspective. The series title, The Story of a Crime, in fact was meant to refer to the political agenda of the novels: the crime referred to was society's abandonment of the working classes.

They wrote their novels in longhand, alternating chapters. They would then switch, editing the other's work as they typed the final copy.

Apart from their ten novels, Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö had time to do very little collaborative writing. For most of their time together, for economic reasons, they had to keep their day jobs. But they did work on movie scripts and occasional shorter nonfiction and fiction. All told, they published only three short stories. These stories follow a similar pattern: the authors are themselves present as observers and relate to their readers what they have heard and seen. “The Multi-Millionaire” is the only short work by Sjöwall and Wahlöö to reflect both the psychological and, by implication, political concerns that drive their ten famous crime novels. It is the story of an unusually successful con artist.

A FEW YEARS AGO, WE MADE THE ACQUAINTANCE OF A DOLLAR MULTI-
MILLIONAIRE. You don't meet multi-millionaires every day. Particularly not in dollars. When all's said and done, there is something special about dollars.

If you consider the place where we met, perhaps the occurrence wasn't all that strange. It happened on board the
Queen ­Elizabeth
—the real
Queen Elizabeth
, the one nowadays moping around as a hotel somewhere in Florida—and not only that, but in first class, where they probably had more than one millionaire. There were also a lot of blue-haired American ladies and tottering English lords. But we particularly remember our man because he told us a story. A story complete with a moral.

From the poop deck we watched as we sailed out to sea under the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, and when Ambrose Lighthouse had disappeared in the sun haze we went to the bar and that's where we first saw him.

He sat alone at a table, his back bent in its light-blue cashmere pullover as he brooded over a double whiskey. It was fairly early in the morning. He gave us a cursory glance as we each climbed on one of the bar stools. The three of us and the man behind the bar were the only ones in the room and it was still more than an hour to lunch.

The man looked close to sixty; later we learned that he was forty-two.

At the same moment we were ordering drinks the man dropped his pack of cigarettes on the wall-to-wall carpet. Then he fixed the bartender with his violet-blue stare and said: “Please hand me my cigarettes.”

The barman went on mixing our drinks.

“My cigarette pack fell to the floor. Please hand it to me,” the man on the couch said.

The bartender vigorously stirred our drinks and pretended not to hear.

“Shall I blow my top?” the man asked.

Unconcerned, the bartender rattled the ice while the man on the couch sat immobile, staring hard at him with his truly conspicuous violet eyes.

We started to get interested and awaited further developments.

The man in the light-blue pullover slammed his glass down on the table and said, “Okay, I'll blow my top.”

So he did. Which meant that he got furious. He stood up, heaped abuse on the bartender, behaved like a hysterical five-year-old and left the bar with quick, mincing steps, leaving his pack of cigarettes on the carpet. The bartender didn't bat an eyelid. After a while a bar assistant arrived and put the cigarettes back on the table.

“A loathsome man,” we said.

The bartender's face was sphinxlike.

For this trip we had been seated at the table headed by the purser and the ship's doctor. At the table we met the man from the bar again. Not at lunch, when his chair was empty, but at dinner. He was in a bad mood, since he had been expecting to sit at the captain's table. After all, he was a multi-millionaire.

The crossing took four days, fifteen hours and twenty-five minutes.

This isn't a very long time, historically speaking, but aboard a large ship it can feel rather long.

Since there were relatively few first-class passengers on the trip and meals tend to be many and long and we also sat at the same table, we came to talk a lot to the man who was a multi-millionaire.

We even learned his name: McGrant. That he was an American there was no reason to doubt for even a second.

When we asked him where he lived, he raised his eyebrows in great surprise and said, “In McGrant, of course.”

And so it was. He came from a town called McGrant somewhere in Mississippi or Kentucky or whatever state it was in. His great-grandfather was a Scot and had come there and founded the town and then it had been passed on to his heirs. Quite simply he owned the town that bore his name: the bank and the department stores and most of the buildings and, indirectly, also almost all of the land. It was a fine town, he said, of around ten thousand inhabitants, and they all lived in their own houses and were white, even the servants, and of course he also had control of the local party organization.

He liked his Bentley, he said, but he liked his Rolls-Royce better, even if both of his Cadillacs were more American, and he regarded us as friends of his since we shared our bread and our salt and Cunard's peculiar desserts, which looked like swans made from jelly pudding, and sat at the same table.

He threw indignant glances at the elderly, stodgy peers at the captain's table and said that of course he couldn't have known we would end up at the same mess table that first time in the bar when he delivered his first fit of rage and let his pack of cigarettes fall to the long-suffering deck in the old
Queen
's barroom.

We listened to him in badly hidden amazement and watched his antics in sadness mixed with terror.

He never opened or closed any door, never sat down in a chair unless someone pushed it under him and never retrieved any of the objects that with regular and usually very short intervals he let fall from his hands. And however fast the servants were he would tell them off. That was part of the system, an integrated component of his method.

If any of us, or any other passenger, in some way tried to help him along, he was put off.

Somehow that was inappropriate.

We wondered: How can any person become like him?

And he must have read that question in our eyes, for that was when he told us his strange story.

The beginning wasn't so strange. The story of the single son of an inhumanly demanding father. And the son, who within a year would take it all over but who first had to prove himself capable of making his own way. What was strange was the rather particular method.

Suddenly one day his father had said: Here's a ticket to San Francisco. Go there and stay for a year and fend for yourself and come back and take over the town of McGrant. (He ought to have added that he himself would probably die from heart failure within that year, and so indeed he did, that is, die.)

McGrant junior had no other choice than to do as his father demanded. With a couple of dollars in his pocket and a bag with the bare necessities of clothing he took the train to San Francisco. It was a very long way and he had never before been on the West Coast and he knew nobody in the city.

“But I made do,” McGrant said. “Of course I made do. And more than that, I lived well that whole year in San Francisco.”

“So you got yourself a job there,” we suggested.

“A job?” said McGrant, flabbergasted, and looked unsympathetically at us with his round, violet-blue eyes.

It was the third day, a stormy day, and in the afternoon through our binoculars we had sighted Fastnet Rock far away in the northeast quadrant. The swell of the Atlantic was heavy and green and pitiless and manropes had been stretched all around the ship.

We three had been the only diners in the mess—rumor had it that even the ship's doctor was seasick in his bathtub, where he observed the swell of the sea by watching the water in his bath rise and fall—and now we were having coffee and brandy in the very thinly populated salon.

“No,” McGrant said. “No, I certainly didn't get a job, but I did learn how to live in San Francisco. And since you are friends of mine I will tell you how I did it. Perhaps knowing it will come in handy at some point.”

And we listened.

“So I arrived in San Francisco without a cent in my pocket,” McGrant said.

“Without a cent?”

He raised his eyebrows in a very surprised manner above his violet-blue eyes and said: “Don't you really know how to do it?”

No, we said. We truly really didn't know.

And so he told us:

“I came to San Francisco without a cent in my pocket and I had only one chance.”

“San Francisco,” he said, “is one of the toughest towns in the States, and that makes it one of the toughest towns in all the world.”

“Really?” we said. “And how do you get ahead there,” we said.

Questioningly.

And then he told us his story.

It went like this:

“So as I said, my dear father sent me to San Francisco without a cent in my pocket.”

“And then what happened,” we said.

“It was morning, early morning, when I arrived in San Francisco,” McGrant told us. “I was broke and hungry and since I wasn't used to either I didn't know what to do. I walked out of the railway station and saw the line of cabs and it felt strange not to be able to get into one of them and go to the best hotel in town. I stood there with my little bag and I thought: You're all alone now, and you have to manage this.

“But I didn't know how.”

“That's when I caught sight of him. A short, shabby man stumbling along on sore feet along the opposite sidewalk. He was carrying a sign saying:
EAT AT FRIENDLY
—
THE FRIENDLY RESTAURANT
!, and below that, in smaller letters, it said:
TRY OUR GREAT HOMELY FARE—IF YOU'RE NOT SATISFIED, YOU DON'T PAY!

“As I already told you, I was hungry, and the little money my father had given me for travel expenses I had already out of old habit spent on drinks in the dining car. I decided to do as the sign suggested and I decided that I would certainly not be satisfied. “As it turned out, the friendly restaurant happened to be just halfway down the first block on the next crossing street. The dining room was huge and full of breakfast eaters. I sat down at the back of the room and ordered a square meal of ham and eggs, toast, butter, cheese, jelly, juice, coffee, well, basically all I could think of. Now I should mention that I really don't eat much, as you may have noticed already, being my friends at the purser's table. I eat like a bird, always have.”

We nodded. He certainly hadn't indulged much in the way of solid food during these few days.

“At any rate, all the things I had ordered were brought to my table and when I'd just tasted a small sampling of each I was absolutely full. So I called to the waitress, pointed to my seemingly untouched breakfast and declared that it was the worst meal I had ever been served. She got hold of the head waiter. He was sorry that I wasn't satisfied, assured me that of course Friendly would stand by its promise and asked me to sign my name to the check. I wrote the first name that popped into my head: G. Formby. I've always liked the banjo. When I walked to the door, full of food and happy, I noticed that many of the guests had left their tips on the table, you know, coins half hidden under a plate, the we do back in the States. It was an easy thing to snatch those coins on my way out.”

“Well, it wasn't a bad start. The money I found under the plates was enough to rent a room. And can you imagine how surprised I was when I glanced out the window and the first person I saw was an old man carrying exactly the same sign as the one I'd see outside the railway station:
EAT AT FRIENDLY—THE FRIENDLY RESTAURANT!
TRY OUR GREAT HOMELY FARE—IF YOU'RE NOT SATISFIED, YOU DON'T PAY!

“Naturally I went to a phone booth and to my considerable delight I found that Friendly was a huge chain of restaurants with at least a hundred outlets in the San Francisco Bay area. I immediately realized the enormous possibilities hidden within this fact. Obviously I became a faithful patron of these eateries, and the coins I found under most plates meant that I never needed to be penniless. On the contrary, my capital began growing, slowly but surely.