The Abominable Man, page 1
Praise for
MAJ SJÖWALL and
PER WAHLÖÖ
“The series of detective stories by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, starring Martin Beck, has maintained such a degree of excellence that comparisons are near impossible.”
—Minneapolis Tribune
“The first great series of police thrillers.… Truly exciting.”
—Michael Ondaatje
“Anyone who doesn’t know their work and likes murder mysteries has a real treat coming, namely reading one of their books.… Person ally we like Beck even better than Simenon’s Inspector Maigret.”
—Indianapolis Star
“The Martin Beck books are exemplary police procedurals.”
—The Washington Post
“So many of the elements that have become integral … in the police procedural subgenre started life in these ten novels.… Their plots are second to none.”
—Val McDermid
SECOND VINTAGE CRIME/BLACK LIZARD EDITION, OCTOBER 2009
Translation copyright © 1972 by Random House, Inc.
Introduction copyright © 2009 by Jens Lapidus
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in Sweden as Den vedervärdige mannen fian Säffle by P.A. Norstedt & Söners Förlag, Stockholm, in 1971. Copyright © 1971 by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö. This translation originally published in a slightly different form in hardcover in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 1972, and subsequently published by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 1980.
Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage Crime/Black Lizard and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:
Sjöwall, Maj, 1935–
[Den vedervärdige mannen från Säffle. English]
The abominable man / by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö; translated from the Swedish by Thomas Teal.—2nd Vintage Crime/Black Lizard ed. 1. Beck, Martin (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Police—Sweden— Stockholm—Fiction.
I. Wahlöö, Per 1926-1975, joint author. II. Title.
PZ4.S61953 Ab 1980 [PT9876.29.J63]
839.7’3’74—dc22
79022673
eISBN: 978-0-307-77284-8
www.vintagebooks.com
v3.1
Contents
Cover
Title page
Copyright
Introduction
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
About the Author
Other Books by This Author
Also by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö
INTRODUCTION
Few writers have influenced an entire genre in the way that Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö have. It is not surprising then that so many colleagues read the Story of Crime series as soon as the books were published, or shortly thereafter. They raced through the books in a matter of days, in breathless admiration. And they are happy to tell that they discovered and were influenced by this new way of writing crime early on. A new voice. A new angle.
I wasn’t even born when The Abominable Man was published, as the seventh book in the series. And I didn’t read my first crime novel until I was twenty-five. I know that may sound a bit nerdy, but it’s the truth. I was more of a quasi-intellectual, who wandered around in a worn parka and generally read Russian or American classics. Crime novels were not good enough.
But I always knew about The Abominable Man. And despite my lack of interest in the genre, it affected me indirectly and helped to shape my understanding of how Stockholm and Sweden could be portrayed. Only not in book form.
Like so many others, I was introduced to the book by the film adaptation, Mannen på taket (The Man on the Roof), which was made in Sweden in 1976. I was only two in 1976. But about ten years later, toward the end of the 1980s, a series of Bo Widerberg’s films were shown again on Swedish television. I argued with my parents for days. I fought for the right to see what I understood to be the greatest Swedish action film ever. “No,” they said. “It’s too disturbing, too violent. It might have a negative effect on you.”
“Yes,” I said. “Everyone else is going to watch it and they’ll all be talking about it at school tomorrow. It’s not fair.”
And for some reason, they gave in (which, by the way, they didn’t when it came to Hitchcock’s Psycho or Don Siegel’s Dirty Harry, which were also shown on TV that year). Perhaps it was because they shared Sjöwall & Wahlöö’s left-wing ideals. Or perhaps it was because the film was Swedish, which in my parents’ eyes meant that it would be, by definition, less corrupting than anything Anglo-Saxon.
However, the film was anything but “Swedish.” It was modern American action of the most graphic sort. For example, a Bell 206 Jet Ranger crashes into the entrance of the men’s toilets on Odenplan in central Stockholm. This isn’t actually where the police helicopter crashes in the book, but that doesn’t matter—it was happening in my town, at a place that I knew. In my world, for real. It was the first time I had seen anything that felt so authentic, and the image of that painted helicopter often still pops into my mind when I take the metro from Odenplan.
I was struck by the same feeling years later when I finally got over my literary snobbishness and read The Abominable Man. It was the feeling that someone had for the first time managed to describe criminality and police work in Stockholm adequately, in a way that was real, as it might actually have happened. In a way that I could still recognize, even though the book had been written more than thirty-five years ago.
It has been said many times that it is in fact Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö’s radical perspective that created the Swedish crime genre. They carried on the tradition of Swedish proletarian writers such as Ivar Lo-Johansson and Per Anders Fogelström, and developed a new social criticism that was a natural part of the narrative.
The Story of Crime series is also about Stockholm, the city. It is a joy to follow Martin Beck as he drives through the streets, streets that I myself have walked down a hundred times or more. Or to read about the shooting incident at the Eastman Institute, where I myself went several times as a child to have my braces adjusted. Or to read the descriptions of the buildings and open spaces on the island of Reimersholme, where I go jogging several times a month.
The portrayal of the city means so much to me, but not only because I come from Stockholm. The books describe a city and a country in the grip of change, just as they describe a time of change; a time when the importance of the manufacturing industry in Sweden was on the decline in favor of more service-related industries, when Sweden had really started to accept foreign immigration. A time when enormous changes in infrastructure generated a whole new set of challenges for the Swedish people, but also created new opportunities for crime. It was a time when sexual liberation went hand in hand with political awareness, when the old was truly replaced by the new.
It was also a time when a new way of thinking about humanity took root. The Abominable Man, for example, deals with the issue of the police monopoly on violence. What constitutes a good cop and a bad cop?
In one of the key scenes in the book, Martin Beck interrogates an old colleague who has worked for the police since the 1930s, and who claims that he learned everything from his mentor, a tough cop from the old school. Beck understands what he means and replies: “How to commit perjury, for example? Or how to copy each other’s reports so that everything tallies, even if every word is a lie? How to beat up people in custody?”
In retrospect, such questions may seem natural, and I am certain that Sweden is a better place today. But what is incredible is the fact that the book was written in 1971, in the midst of searing and tumultuous changes in society. Sjöwall and Wahlöö’s ability to analyze and, not least, write about these changes from the inside, as they were happening, and with such literary quality, is spellbinding. And that magic is still there today.
—Jens Lapidus
Stockholm, April 11, 2009
1
Just after midnight he stopped thinking.
He’d been writing something earlier, but now the blue ballpoint pen lay in front of him on the newspaper, exactly in the right-hand column of the crossword puzzle. He was sitting erect and utterly motionless on a worn wooden chair in front of a low table in the cramped little attic room. A round yellowish lampshade with a long fringe hung above his head. The fabric was pale with age, and the light from the feeble bulb was hazy and uncertain.
It was quiet in the house. But the quiet was relative—inside there were three people breathing, and from outside came an indistinct, pulsating, barely discernible murmur. As if from traffic on far-off highways, or from a distant boiling sea. The sound of a million human beings. Of a large city in its anxious sleep.
The man in the attic room was dressed in a beige lumberjacket, gray ski pants, a machine-knit black turtleneck sweater and brown ski boots. He had a large but well-tended moustache, just a shade lighter than the hair combed smoothly back at an angle across his head. His face was narrow, with a clean profile and finely chiseled features, and behind the rigid mask of resentful accusation and obstinate purpose there was an almost childlike expression, weak and perplexed and appealing, and nevertheless a little bit calculating.
His clear blue eyes were steady but vacant.
He looked like a little boy grown suddenly very old.
The man sat stock still for almost an hour, the palms of his hands resting on his thighs, his eyes staring blankly at the same spot on the faded flowered wallpaper.
Then he stood up, walked across the room, opened a closet door, reached up with his left hand and took something from the shelf. A long thin object wrapped in a white kitchen towel with a red border.
The object was a carbine bayonet.
He drew it and very carefully wiped off the yellow gun grease before sliding it into its steel-blue scabbard.
In spite of the fact that he was tall and rather heavy, his movements were quick and lithe and economical, and his hands were as steady as his gaze.
He unbuckled his belt and slid it through the leather loop on the sheath. Then he zipped up his jacket, put on a pair of gloves and a checked tweed cap and left the house.
The wooden stairs creaked beneath his weight, but his footsteps themselves were inaudible.
The house was small and old and stood on the top of a little hill above the highway. It was a chilly, starlit night.
The man in the tweed cap swung around the corner of the house and moved with the sureness of a sleepwalker toward the driveway behind.
He opened the left front door of his black Volkswagen, climbed in behind the wheel and adjusted the bayonet, which rested against his right thigh.
Then he started the motor, turned on the headlights, backed out onto the highway and drove north.
The little black car hurtled forward through the darkness precisely and implacably, as if it were a weightless craft in space.
The buildings tightened along the road and the city rose up beneath its dome of light, huge and cold and desolate, stripped of everything but hard naked surfaces of metal, glass and concrete.
Not even in the central city was there any street life at this hour of the night. With the exception of an occasional taxi, two ambulances and a squad car, everything was dead. The police car was black with white fenders and rushed quickly past on its own bawling carpet of sound.
The traffic lights changed from red to yellow to green to yellow to red with a meaningless mechanical monotony.
The black car drove strictly in accordance with traffic regulations, never exceeded the speed limit, slowed at all cross streets and stopped at all stop lights.
It drove along Vasagatan past the Central Station and the newly completed Sheraton-Stockholm, swung left at Norra Bantorget and continued north on Torsgatan.
In the square was an illuminated tree and bus 591 waiting at its stop. A new moon hung above St. Eriksplan and the blue neon hands on the Bonnier Building showed the time. Twenty minutes to two.
At that instant, the man in the car was precisely thirty-six years old.
Now he drove east along Odengatan, past deserted Vasa Park with its cold white streetlamps and the thick, veined shadows of ten thousand leafless tree limbs.
The black car made another right and drove one hundred and twenty-five yards south along Dalagatan. Then it braked and stopped.
With studied negligence, the man in the lumberjacket and the tweed cap parked with two wheels on the sidewalk right in front of the stairs to the Eastman Institute.
He stepped out into the night and slammed the door behind him.
It was the third of April, 1971. A Saturday.
It was still only an hour and forty minutes old and nothing in particular had happened.
2
At a quarter to two the morphine stopped working.
He’d had the last injection just before ten, which meant the narcosis lasted less than four hours.
The pain came back sporadically, first on the left side of his diaphragm and then a few minutes later on the right as well. Then it radiated out toward his back and passed fitfully through his body, quick, cruel and biting, as if starving vultures had torn their way into his vitals.
He lay on his back in the tall, narrow bed and stared at the white plaster ceiling, where the dim glow of the night light and the reflections from outside produced an angular static pattern of shadows that were indecipherable and as cold and repellent as the room itself.
The ceiling wasn’t flat but arched in two shallow curves and seemed distant. It was in fact high, over twelve feet, and old-fashioned like everything else in the building. The bed stood in the middle of the stone floor and there were only two other pieces of furniture: the night table and a straight-backed wooden chair.
The drapes were not completely drawn, and the window was ajar. Air filtered chilly and fresh through the two-inch crack from the spring-winter night outside, but he nevertheless felt a suffocating disgust at the rotting odor from the flowers on the night table and from his own sick body.
He had not slept but lain wakeful and silent and thought about this very fact—that the painkiller would soon wear off.
It was about an hour since he’d heard the night nurse pass the double doors to the corridor in her wooden shoes. Since then he’d heard nothing but the sound of his own breathing and maybe of his blood, pulsing heavily and unevenly through his body. But these were not distinct sounds; they were more like figments of his imagination, fitting companions to his dread of the agony that would soon begin and to his mindless fear of dying.
He had always been a hard man, unwilling to tolerate mistakes or weakness in others and never prepared to admit that he himself might someday falter, either physically or mentally.
Now he was afraid and in pain. He felt betrayed and taken by surprise. His senses had sharpened during his weeks in the hospital. He had become unnaturally sensitive to all forms of pain and shuddered even at the prospect of an injection or the needle in the fold of his arm when the nurses took the daily blood tests. On top of that he was afraid of the dark and couldn’t stand to be alone and had learned to hear noises he’d never heard before.
The examinations—which ironically enough the doctors referred to as the “investigation”—wore him out and made him feel worse. And the sicker he felt, the more intense his fear of death became, until it circumscribed his entire conscious life and left him utterly naked, in a state of spiritual exposure and almost obscene egoism.
Something rustled outside the window. An animal of course, padding through the withered rose bed. A field mouse or a hedgehog, maybe a cat. But didn’t hedgehogs hibernate?
It must be an animal, he thought, and then no longer in control of his actions, he raised his left hand toward the electric call-button that hung in comfortable reach, wound once around the bedpost.
But when his fingers brushed the cold metal of the bed frame, his hand trembled in an involuntary spasm and the switch slid away and fell to the floor with a little rattling bang.
The sound made him pull himself together.
If he’d gotten his hand on the switch and pushed the white button, a red light would have gone on out in the corridor above his door and pretty soon the night nurse would have come trotting from her room in her clattering wooden clogs.
Since he wasn’t only afraid but also vain, he was almost glad he hadn’t managed to ring.
The night nurse would have come into the room and turned on the overhead light and stared at him questioningly as he lay there in his wretchedness and misery.
He lay still for a while and felt the pain recede and then approach again in sudden waves, as if it were a runaway locomotive driven by an insane engineer.
