The Laughing Policeman. Джонатан Франзен

to regard them as a homogeneous group, for the crowd comprised every possible kind of person, from thirteen-year-old schoolgirls in jeans and duffel coats and dead-serious political students to agitators and professional trouble-makers, and at least one eighty-five-year-old woman artist with a beret and a blue silk umbrella. Some strong common motive had induced them to defy both the rain and whatever else was in store. The police, on the other hand, by no means comprised the force's élite. They had been mustered from every available precinct in town, but every policeman who knew a doctor or was good at dodging had managed to escape this unpleasant assignment. There remained those who knew what they were doing and liked it, and those who were considered cocky and who were far too young and inexperienced to try and get out of it; besides, they hadn't a clue as to what they were doing or why they were doing it. The horses reared up, chewing their bits, and the police fingered their holsters and made charge after charge with their truncheons. A small girl was bearing a sign with the memorable text: DO YOUR DUTY! KEEP FUCKING AND MAKE MORE POLICE! Three thirteen-stone patrolmen flung themselves at her, tore the sign to pieces and dragged her into a squad car, where they twisted her arms and pawed her breasts. She had turned thirteen on this very day and had not yet developed any.

      Altogether more than fifty persons were seized. Many were bleeding. Some were celebrities, who were not above writing to the papers or complaining on the radio and television. At the sight of them, the sergeants on duty at the local police station had a fit of the shivers and showed them the door with apologetic smiles and stiff bows. Others were less well treated during the inevitable questioning. A mounted policeman had been hit on the head by an empty bottle and someone must have thrown it.

      The operation was in the charge of a high-ranking police officer trained at a military school. He was considered an expert on keeping order and he regarded with satisfaction the utter chaos he had managed to achieve.

      In the apartment at Skärmarbrink, Kollberg gathered up the chessmen, jumbled them into the wooden box and shut the sliding lid with a smack. His wife had come home from her evening course and gone straight to bed.

      ‘You'll never learn this,’ Kollberg said plaintively.

      ‘They say you need a special gift for it,’ Martin Beck replied gloomily. ‘Chess sense I think it's called.’

      Kollberg changed the subject.

      ‘I bet there's a right to-do at Strandvägen this evening,’ he said.

      ‘I expect so. What's it all about?’

      ‘They were going to hand a letter over to the ambassador,’ Kollberg said. ‘A letter. Why don't they post it?’

      ‘It wouldn't cause so much fuss.’

      ‘No, but all the same, it's so stupid it makes you ashamed.’

      ‘Yes,’ Martin Beck agreed.

      He had put on his hat and coat and was about to go. Kollberg got up quickly.

      ‘I'll come with you,’ he said.

      ‘Whatever for?’

      ‘Oh, to stroll around a little.’

      ‘In this weather?’

      ‘I like rain,’ Kollberg said, climbing into his dark-blue poplin coat.

      ‘Isn't it enough for me to have a cold?’ Martin Beck said.

      Martin Beck and Kollberg were policemen. They belonged to the homicide squad. For the moment they had nothing special to do and could, with relatively clear consciences, consider themselves free.

      Downtown no policemen were to be seen in the streets. The old lady outside the central station waited in vain for a beat officer to come up to her, salute, and smilingly help her across the street. A person who had just smashed the glass of a showcase with a brick had no need to worry that the rising and falling wail from a patrol car would suddenly interrupt his doings.

      The police were busy.

      A week earlier the police commissioner had said in a public statement that many of the regular duties of the police would have to be neglected because they were obliged to protect the American ambassador against letters and other things from people who disliked Lyndon Johnson and the war in Vietnam.

      Detective Inspector Lennart Kollberg didn't like Lyndon Johnson and the war in Vietnam either, but he did like strolling about the city when it was raining.

      At eleven o'clock in the evening it was still raining and the demonstration could be regarded as broken up.

      At the same time eight murders and one attempted murder were committed in Stockholm.

       2

      Rain, he thought, looking out of the window dejectedly. November darkness and rain, cold and pelting. A forerunner of the approaching winter. Soon it would start to snow.

      Nothing in town was very attractive just now, especially not this street with its bare trees and large, shabby blocks of flats. A bleak esplanade, misdirected and wrongly planned from the outset. It led nowhere in particular and never had, it was just there, a dreary reminder of some grandiose city plan, begun long ago but never finished. There were no well-lit shop windows and no people on the pavements. Only big, leafless trees and street lamps, whose cold white light was reflected by puddles and wet car roofs.

      He had trudged about so long in the rain that his hair and the legs of his trousers were sopping wet, and now he felt the moisture along his shins and right down his neck to the shoulder blades, cold and trickling.

      He undid the two top buttons of his raincoat, stuck his right hand inside his jacket and fingered the butt of the pistol. It, too, felt cold and clammy.

      At the touch, an involuntary shudder passed through the man in the dark-blue poplin raincoat and he tried to think of something else. For instance of the hotel balcony at Andraitz, where he had spent his holiday five months earlier. Of the heavy, motionless heat and of the bright sunshine over the quayside and the fishing boats and of the limitless, deep-blue sky above the mountain ridge on the other side of the bay.

      Then he thought that it was probably raining there too at this time of year and that there was no central heating in the houses, only open fireplaces.

      And that he was no longer in the same street as before and would soon be forced out into the rain again.

      He heard someone behind him on the stairs and knew that it was the person who had got on outside Ahléns department store on Klarabergsgatan in the centre of the city twelve stops before.

      Rain, he thought. I don't like it. In fact I hate it. I wonder when I'll be promoted. What am I doing here anyway and why aren't I at home in bed with …

      And that was the last he thought.

      The bus was a red doubledecker with cream-coloured top and grey roof. It was a Leyland Atlantean model, built in England, but constructed for the Swedish right-hand traffic, introduced two months before. On this particular evening it was plying on route 47 in Stockholm, between Bellmansro at Djurgården and Karlberg, and vice versa. Now it was heading north-west and approaching the terminus on Norra Stationsgatan, situated only a few yards from the city limits between Stockholm and Solna.

      Solna is a suburb of Stockholm and functions as an independent municipal administrative unit, even if the boundary between the two cities can only be seen as a dotted line on the map.

      It was big, this red bus; over 36 feet long and nearly 15 feet high. It weighed more than 15 tons. The headlights were on and it looked warm and cosy with its misty windows as it droned along deserted Karlbergsvägen between the lines of leafless trees. Then it turned right into Norrbackagatan and the sound of the engine was fainter on the long slope down to Norra Stationsgatan. The rain beat against the roof and windows, and the wheels flung up hissing cascades of water as it glided downward, heavily and implacably.

      The hill ended where