The Troubled Man (38 page)

An elderly man in blue overalls was crouching over a lawnmower that had been turned upside down. He was poking at it with a stick, removing large chunks of compressed grass from the blades. Wallander asked about Fanny Klarstrom. The man stood up and stretched his back. He spoke with a broad Smaland accent that Wallander found difficult to understand.

‘Her apartment is right at the far end, on the ground floor.’

‘How is she?’

The man looked at Wallander with an expression that was both searching and suspicious.

‘Fanny is old and tired. Who are you?’

Wallander produced his police ID, and regretted it immediately. Why should he risk exposing Fanny to gossip about a policeman coming to visit her? But it was too late now. The man in the blue overalls studied the ID card carefully.

‘You’re from Skane, I can hear that. Ystad?’

‘As you can see.’

‘And you’ve come all the way here, to Markaryd?’

‘I’m not actually on police business,’ Wallander explained in as friendly a tone as he could muster. ‘It’s more of a personal visit.’

‘That’s good for Fanny. She hardly ever has any visitors.’

Wallander nodded at the lawnmower.

‘You should wear earplugs.’

‘I don’t hear a thing. My ears were ruined when I worked as a miner as a young man.’

Wallander entered the building and set off along the hallway to the left. An old man was standing by a window, staring out at the back of a tumbledown building. Wallander shuddered. He stopped outside a door with a nameplate, beautifully painted with flowers in pastel shades.

Just for a moment he considered turning on his heel and leaving. Then he rang the bell.

When Fanny Klarstrom opened the door - immediately, as if she had been standing there for a thousand years, waiting for him - she gave him a broad smile. He was the longed-for visitor, he just had time to think before she ushered him into her room and closed the door.

Wallander felt as if he were entering a lost world.

Fanny Klarstrom smelled as if somebody had just lit a fire of alder wood right next to him. It was a smell Wallander remembered from the short time he had spent as a Boy Scout. His troop had gone for a hike. They had set up camp on the shore of a lake, probably Krageholm Lake, where Wallander had experienced several depressing happenings later in life, and lit a campfire made from newly sawn alder. But then, do alders really grow by lakes in Skane? Wallander thought that was a question to answer later.

Fanny Klarstrom had wavy blue hair, and was tastefully made up - perhaps she was always ready to receive an unexpected visitor. When she smiled she displayed a beautiful set of teeth that made Wallander jealous. His own teeth had begun to need filling when he was twelve, and since then he had been fighting a constant battle with dental hygiene and dentists who seemed always to be tearing a strip off him. He still had most of his own teeth, but his dentist had warned him that they would soon start to fall out if he didn’t brush them more often and more efficiently. At the age of eighty-four, Fanny Klarstrom had all her teeth, and they shone brightly as if she were still a teenager. She didn’t ask who he was or what he wanted, but invited him in to her little living room, where the walls were covered in framed photographs. Well-tended pot plants and climbers stood on windowsills and shelves. There’s not a single grain of dust in this apartment, Wallander thought. He sat down on the sofa she had gestured towards, and said he would be delighted to accept a cup of coffee.

While she was in the little kitchen he wandered around the room, examining all the photographs. There was a wedding photo dated 1942: Fanny with a man with slicked-down hair in a formal suit. Wallander thought he recognised the same man in another photo, this time in overalls and standing on a ship, the picture being taken from the quay. He deduced from other photos that Fanny had only one child. When he heard the clinking of china approaching, he sat down on the sofa again.

Fanny served coffee with a steady hand; she retained the skill she had acquired during many years as a waitress and didn’t spill a drop. She sat down opposite him in a rather worn armchair. A speckled grey cat appeared from nowhere and settled on her knee. She raised her cup, and Wallander did the same before tasting the coffee, which was very strong. It went down the wrong way and made him cough so violently that tears came to his eyes. When he recovered, she handed him a napkin. He dried his eyes and noticed that ‘Billingen Hotel’ was embroidered on it.

‘Perhaps I should begin by telling you why I’m here,’ he said.

‘Friendly people are always welcome,’ said Fanny Klarstrom.

She spoke with an unmistakable Stockholm accent. Wallander wondered why she had chosen to grow old in a place as far off the beaten track as Markaryd.

Wallander placed a printout of the newspaper article on the embroidered cloth that covered the table. She didn’t bother to read it, merely glanced at the two pictures. But she seemed to remember even so. Wallander didn’t want to jump in at the deep end, and began by expressing a polite interest in all the photos hanging on the walls. She had no hesitation in telling him about them, and in doing so summarised her whole life in a few words.

In 1941, Fanny - whose surname then was Andersson - met a young sailor by the name of Arne Klarstrom.

‘We were madly in love,’ she said. ‘We met on one of the Djurgarden ferries, on the way back from the Grona Lund amusement park. As I was going ashore at Slussen, I stumbled and fell. He helped me up. What would have happened if I hadn’t fallen? Anyway, you could say that I literally stumbled into the love of my life. Which lasted for exactly two years. We got married, I became pregnant, and Arne dithered and dallied and wondered if he dared to continue working on the convoy traffic, given the circumstances. It’s easy to forget how many Swedish sailors died when their ships were mined during those years, even though we were not directly involved in the war. But Arne no doubt felt he was invulnerable, and I could never imagine that anything would happen to him. Our son, Gunnar, was born in January 1943 - the twelfth, at six thirty in the morning. Arne was on shore leave at the time, and so he saw his son just the once. Nine days later his ship was blown up by a mine in the North Sea. Nothing was ever found - no wreckage of the ship and no bodies of those on board.’

She paused, and looked at the photographs on the wall.

‘Anyway,’ she began again after a while, ‘there I was on my own, with a son to look after and the love of my life gone forever. I suppose I tried to find another man to live with. I was still young. But nobody could compare with Arne. He was my true love, my husband, no matter whether he was alive or dead. Nobody could ever replace him.’

She suddenly started crying, almost silently. Wallander felt a lump in his throat. He slid the napkin she had just given him towards her.

‘I sometimes long to have somebody to share my sorrow with,’ she said, still with tears in her eyes. ‘Maybe that’s why loneliness can feel so oppressive. Just think, having to invite a total stranger into your house so that you have somebody to cry with.’

‘What about your son?’ Wallander asked tentatively.

‘He lives in Abisko. That’s a long way from here. He comes to see me once a year, sometimes alone, sometimes with his wife and some of his children. He keeps trying to persuade me to move there, but it’s too far north for me, too cold. Old waitresses get swollen feet and can’t cope with cold temperatures.’

‘What does he do in Abisko?’

‘Something to do with forestry. I think he counts trees.’

‘But you have settled here in Markaryd?’

‘I used to live here when I was a child, before we moved to Stockholm. I didn’t really want to leave. I moved back here to prove that I’m still just as obstinate as I always was. And it’s cheap. A waitress isn’t in a position to save up a fortune.’

‘And you were a waitress for a long time, weren’t you?’

‘For all those years, yes. Cups, glasses, plates, in and out, a conveyor belt that never stopped. Restaurants, hotels, and once even a Nobel Prize banquet. I remember having the great honour of serving Ernest Hemingway his meal. He actually looked at me once. I longed to tell him that he should write a book about the terrible fate of so many sailors during the Second World War, but of course I didn’t say a word. I think it was 1954. In any case, Arne had been dead for a long time by then. Gunnar was practically a teenager.’

‘But sometimes you also worked in private banqueting halls, is that right?’

‘I liked to have a bit of variety. And I wasn’t the type to keep quiet when a restaurateur didn’t behave as he should. I used to speak out on behalf of my fellow workers, not just for myself, and of course, that meant I got the sack now and then. I was very active as a trade unionist in those days.’

‘Let’s talk about this particular private party facility,’ said Wallander, judging that the right moment had now arrived.

He pointed to the newspaper article. She put on a pair of glasses that had been hanging on a ribbon around her neck, glanced through the article, then slid it to one side.

‘Let me start by defending myself,’ she said with a laugh. ‘We were paid very well to serve those unpleasant officers. A poor waitress like me could earn as much for one evening there as I was normally paid for a whole month, if things turned out well. They were all drunk by the time they went home, and some of them used to hand out hundred-krona notes like a farmer spreading muck in his fields. It could add up to a considerable sum.’

‘Where was this place?’

‘On Ostermalm - doesn’t it say that in the article? It was owned by a man who had previously been associated with Per Engdahl’s Nazi movement. Despite his disgusting political views, he was a very good cook. He’d made a small fortune working as a chef for some high-ranking German officers who had fled to Argentina. They paid him well, he served them whatever food they asked for, said “Heil Hitler” now and again, and at the end of the 1950s returned home and was able to buy that place on Ostermalm. Everything I’ve just told you is what I was told by reliable sources.’

‘And who might they be?’

She hesitated for a moment before answering.

‘People who had been members of the Engdahl movement, but left,’ she said.

Wallander was beginning to realise that he had not really understood Fanny Klarstrom’s background properly.

‘Would I be correct in thinking that you weren’t only active in trade union circles, but that you also had political interests?’

‘I was an active Communist. I suppose I still am, in a way. The idea of a world in which everybody has a common cause with everybody else is still the only ideal I can believe in. The only political truth that can’t be questioned, in my opinion.’

‘Did that have anything to do with you applying for a job waiting on those officers?’

‘I was asked to apply by the party. It was of some interest to know what conservative naval officers talked about among themselves. Nobody suspected that a waitress with swollen legs would remember what they said.’

Wallander tried to assess the significance of what he had just heard.

‘Wasn’t there a risk that repeating what you had heard could be regarded as an impropriety?’

The tears had dried up now. She regarded him with some amusement.

‘“Impropriety”? Fanny Klarstrom has never been a spy, if that’s what you mean. I don’t understand why police officers always have to express themselves in such a complicated way. I spoke about it to my comrades in the party group, and that was all. Just as other people might talk about the attitudes of bus drivers or sales assistants. In the 1950s it wasn’t only the non-socialists who regarded us Communists as potential traitors. The Social Democrats thought so as well. But of course, we weren’t anything of the sort.’

‘Let’s forget that question, then. But I am a police officer, and justified in thinking along those lines.’

‘It was over fifty years ago. Whatever was said and happened in those days must surely be out of date and of no interest now.’

‘Not quite,’ Wallander said. ‘History isn’t just something that’s behind us, it’s also something that follows us.’

She made no comment. He wasn’t sure whether she had understood what he meant. Wallander steered the conversation back to the newspaper article. He realised that Fanny Klarstrom had a pent-up need to talk to somebody, which meant there was a serious risk that their conversation could go on for a very long time.

Was his own future going to be similar? An ageing, lonely old man who grabbed hold of anybody he happened to come across and held on to them for as long as possible?

*

Fanny the waitress had a good memory. She remembered most of the men in uniform with their various insignia, gathered together on the fuzzy printout. Her comments were needle-sharp, often malicious, and it was obvious to Wallander that she considered every word justified. There was, for instance, a Commander Sunesson who was always telling dirty jokes, which she described as ‘not funny, just coarse’. He had also been one of the most extreme Palme-haters, and the one who proposed quite openly various ways of liquidating the ‘Russian spy’.

‘I have a horrible memory of Commander Sunesson,’ she said. ‘Two days after Palme was shot down in a Stockholm street, these officers were booked for one of their dinners. Sunesson stood up and proposed a toast in gratitude for the fact that Olof Palme had finally had the sense to disappear from the land of the living and could no longer poison the air for all upright citizens. I recall his exact words, and I came close to pouring something over him. It was a terrible evening.’