The Terrorists (40 page)
Authors: Maj Sjowall,Per Wahloo
Tags: #Fiction, #Mystery & Detective, #General
Skacke was lying face-down, bleeding profusely, but he was not unconscious. When Martin Beck knelt down beside him, Skacke said at once, “What happened? Where’s Heydt?”
“You shot him. Killed him instantly.”
“What else could I do?” said Skacke.
“You did right. It was your only chance.”
Per Månsson came rushing up from somewhere, surrounded by an aura of freshly made coffee.
“The ambulance will be here in a jiffy,” he said. “Lie still, Benny.”
Lie still, thought Martin Beck. If Heydt had had another tenth of a second of life, Benny Skacke would have lain still forever. Even another hundredth of a second could have made Skacke an invalid for life. Now he would be all right. Martin Beck had seen where the bullet had struck and it was well out in the hip.
A crowd of policemen had appeared and began to clear the gawkers away from the dead man. When the wail of the ambulance sounded, Martin Beck went over and looked at Heydt. His face was slightly distorted, but on the whole he looked pleasant even dead.
The man who answered at the border station at Europe Route Eighteen sounded somewhat irritable. The telephone had rung far too damned often and the line of cars was also growing longer and longer and more and more impossible to survey.
“Yes,” said the border policeman, “he’s here all right. Wait a moment.” He put his hand over the mouthpiece. “Gunvald Larsson?” he said. “Isn’t that the big slob in the millionaire clothes hanging around over by that tree there?”
“Yes,” said colleague. “I think so.”
“He’s wanted on the telephone. This goddamn guy Heydt.”
Gunvald Larsson came in and took the receiver. His remarks were so monosyllabic that it was hard to make anything of what he said.
“Oh, yes … Uh-huh … Dead? … Injured? … Who? … Skacke? … And he’s okay? … Right. So long.”
He put down the receiver, looked at the men at the border station and said, “You can let the traffic through now, and take down the barriers. We don’t need them anymore.”
Gunvald Larsson suddenly felt that he had not slept for a long long time. He drove only as far as Karlstad, then gave up and stopped at the city hotel.
In Helsingborg, Fredrik Melander replaced the receiver and smiled with satisfaction. Then he looked at the time. Rönn, who had been eavesdropping, also had an extremely satisfied expression.
They would be able to celebrate Christmas at home.
Friday the tenth of January 1975 was just the kind of evening everyone hopes for more of. When everyone is relaxed and in tune with themselves and the world around them. When everyone has eaten and drunk well and knows they are free the next day, as long as nothing too special or horrible or unexpected happens.
If by “everyone” we mean a very small group of humankind.
Four people, to be exact.
Martin Beck and Rhea were spending that evening with Lennart Kollberg and his wife, and together they had created the conditions for as good a time as anyone could wish for.
No one said very much, but that was mostly because they were playing a game called “crosswords,” a game that seemed very simple. Each had a pen and piece of paper on which were drawn twenty-five squares, and each person in turn said a letter of the alphabet. The players had to fill in the given letters, and none other, and try to make words that read either across or down. They were not allowed to look at each other’s papers.
“X,” said Kollberg, for the third time in the same game, and they all sighed heavily.
There was possibly one fault with this game, thought Martin Beck, and that was that Kollberg won four times out of five—and the fifth time, Rhea won. But when it came to games, both he and Gun Kollberg were used to being losers, so it didn’t matter.
“X, as in ex-policeman,” said Kollberg, breezily, as if they all didn’t know how impossible it was to squeeze in one more example out of that hopeless letter.
Martin Beck stared for a moment at his paper, then shrugged his shoulders and gave up.
“Lennart?”
“Mmm,” said Kollberg.
“Do you remember ten years ago?”
“When we were hunting for Folke Bengtsson and the police had just been nationalized? Yes, I do, and I guess that is a time to remember. But everything that happened afterward? No, goddammit.”
“Do you think that was when it all began?”
Kollberg shook his head. “No, I don’t. And what’s worse, I don’t think this is where it’s going to end.”
“Y,” said Rhea.
Which shut everyone up for a moment.
A little later, the time had come to count the scores. Two points for a two-letter word, three for a three-letter word, and so on. Martin Beck scribbled the numbers on his paper. He was last as usual.
“Although one thing’s certain,” said Kollberg, “and that is that they made a terrible mistake back then. Putting the police in the vanguard of violence is like putting the cart before the horse.”
“Ha! I won!” said Rhea.
“You sure did,” said Kollberg.
Then he said magnanimously to Martin Beck, “Don’t sit there thinking about all that now. Violence has rushed like an avalanche throughout the whole of the Western world over the last ten years. You can’t stop or steer that avalanche on your own. It just increases. That’s not your fault.”
“Isn’t it?”
They all turned their papers over and drew more squares. When Kollberg was ready, he looked at Martin Beck and said, “The trouble with you, Martin, is just that you’ve got the wrong job. At the wrong time. In the wrong part of the world. In the wrong system.”
“Is that all?”
“Roughly,” said Kollberg. “My turn to start? Then I say X—X as in Marx.”
ALSO BY
M
AJ
S
JÖWALL AND
P
ER
W
AHLÖÖ
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In a country town, a woman is brutally murdered and left buried in a swamp. There are two main suspects: her closest neighbor and her ex-husband. Meanwhile, on a quiet suburban street a midnight shootout takes place between three cops and two teenage boys. Dead, one cop and one kid. Wounded, two cops. Escaped, one kid. Martin Beck and his partner Lennart Kollberg are called in to investigate. As Beck digs deeper into the murky waters of the young girl’s murder, Kollberg scours the town for the teenager, and together they are forced to examine the changing face of crime.
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VINTAGE CRIME/BLACK LIZARD
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