The Assignment Read online

  PER WAHLÖÖ

  The Assignment

  Born in 1926, Per Wahlöö was a Swedish writer and journalist who, alongside his own novels, collaborated with his partner, Maj Sjöwall, on the bestselling Martin Beck crime series, credited as inspiration for writers as varied as Agatha Christie, Henning Mankell, and Jonathan Franzen. In 1971 the fourth novel in the series, The Laughing Policeman, won an Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America. Per Wahlöö died in 1975.

  JOAN TATE

  Joan Tate was born in 1922 of English and Irish extraction. She traveled widely and worked as a teacher, a rehabilitation worker at a center for injured miners, a broadcaster, a reviewer, and a columnist. She was a prolific writer and translator, well known for translating many leading Swedish-language writers, including Astrid Lindgren, Ingmar Bergman, Kerstin Ekman, P. C. Jersild, Sven Lindqvist, and Agneta Pleijel. She died in 2000.

  ALSO BY PER WAHLÖÖ

  Murder on the Thirty-first Floor

  A Necessary Action

  The Generals

  The Steel Spring

  WITH MAJ SJÖWALL

  Roseanna

  The Man Who Went Up in Smoke

  The Man on the Balcony

  The Laughing Policeman

  The Fire Engine that Disappeared

  Murder at the Savoy

  The Abominable Man

  The Locked Room

  Cop Killer

  The Terrorists

  FIRST VINTAGE CRIME/BLACK LIZARD EDITION, JUNE 2013

  Translation copyright © 1965 by Michael Joseph Ltd.

  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 Uppdraget by P. A. Norstedt & Söners Förlag, Stockholm, in 1963. Copyright © 1963 by Per Wahlöö. This translation originally published in Great Britain by Michael Joseph Ltd., London, in 1965, and subsequently published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 1966.

  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.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data for this edition has been applied for.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-74477-7

  www.vintagebooks.com

  Cover design by Gregg Kulick

  Cover photograph © Holly Wilmeth/Aurora/Getty Images

  v3.1

  To Maj

  whose cooperation made

  this book possible

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author and the Translator

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  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

  The car was a 1937 eight-cylinder Packard. It was black, like the soldiers’ uniforms and the American motorcycles in the escort. The time was three minutes past eight in the morning, and it was already very hot. The two people in the back of the car were talking.

  “Father, are you never afraid?”

  “What is there to be afraid of, my dear?”

  “All these people …”

  “Barking dogs don’t bite. You must remember one thing: always rely on the army—it is the only stable force here—as long as it has the right leaders. You ought to have had time to learn that by now.”

  “Why don’t you forbid the servants to read the leaflets they drop?”

  “What difference would that make?”

  A silence fell in the car. The General turned his head and looked at the white villas rushing by without really seeing them. The convoy cut its way down through the long steep bends and onto a level road covered with gray-white stone chippings. The engineer corps had constructed it three years earlier and it was still usable although the edges had begun to crumble. At the foot of the hill the artificially irrigated area came to an end, the escort sounded their sirens and swung out into the wide, cobblestoned main street which ran dead straight from north to south through the capital of the province.

  On either side of the road were whitewashed walls which the Fascist regime had begun to put up fifteen years previously, but the work had never been completed. In several places there were gaps in the walls, and in others the poor cement had crumbled away and the blocks of stone had collapsed. Ordinary fencing had been put up then, but now the barbed wire was already rusty and here and there the natives had cut through it with pliers and wound it into oval openings. Through these open gaps one could see the buildings behind the walls, a confused jumble of sacking, boards, and crooked shacks.

  A white jeep which had been parked at the side of the road closed in behind the convoy. Four men were sitting in it. Their helmets and uniforms were white and their brown peasant faces were stiff and expressionless. They belonged to the Federal Police.

  “I have seen so many kinds of policemen, under so many regimes,” said the man in the car—distractedly and indifferently, as if he had not been referring to anything in particular nor addressing himself to any specific person.

  The escort drew a screaming black line through the suburbs. It was not traveling very fast, but the sirens gave an impression of efficiency and urgency. Chickens, naked children, and thin black pigs leaped away from the road.

  Just before the entrance into the center of the town there was a man-high inscription scrawled in red on the rough white wall: Death to Larrinaga! Someone had painted it there during the night. In a few hours’ time the men from the administration would come with their buckets and whitewash over it. The next morning it would be there again, or somewhere else. The General smiled and shrugged his shoulders.

  The escort thundered between the short, dusty palm trees along the main street. Here the buildings were tall and modern, square white boxes of glass and concrete, but there was little sign of life on the sidewalks as yet. The few pedestrians stopped and stared as the convoy went by. Many of them wore uniforms and nearly all of them were armed.

  The escort officer swung diagonally across the beautifully laid stone plaza, drove up to the entrance of the Governor’s Palace and raised his right hand to signal a halt. The square was large and white and empty. Only two people were outside the entrance: an infantryman in black uniform and a policeman in white. The policeman had a Luger in a holster on his belt and the soldier a submachine gun on a strap around his neck. The submachine gun was American with a straight magazine and a folding iron frame.

  We still have far too few of that sort, thought the General.

  “Despite everything, they’re more important than all the agricultural reforms,” he mumbled to himself.

  The Packard had stopped, but the couple in the back remained inside. The escort officer jerked his motorcycle up onto its stand, pulled off his gloves, and personally opened the car door. Then the General moved for the first time. He leaned over to one side, kissed his daughter on the cheek, and got stiffly out onto the sidewalk. He returned the guard
s’ salutes and walked through the swinging door. The escort officer followed three yards behind him.

  General Orestes de Larrinaga went into the white marble hall. Straight ahead of him lay the wide staircase and the elevators, to his left a long smooth counter, and behind that a messenger in a uniform cap and a black sateen jacket. The General gave him a friendly look and the man smiled.

  “General,” he said, and then nothing more.

  He bent down and took something from a shelf beneath the counter. The General paused and nodded amiably. The messenger was a very young man with an open face and dark-brown eyes.

  He looks frightened, thought the General. People are frightened, even here.

  Ten seconds later General Orestes de Larrinaga was dead. He lay on his back on the marble floor with his eyes open and his chest shattered. Red patches were already spreading over the material of his uniform, as if on white blotting paper.

  He had had time to see the automatic pistol very clearly, and his last thought was that it was of Czech manufacture with a wooden butt and a circular magazine.

  The escort officer had seen it too, but he reacted much too late.

  Outside in the square the soldiers and the girl in the car heard the short hammering salvo and soon after that the more distinct cracks of someone firing an 11-millimeter Luger.

  The southernmost province of the Federal Republic is the poorest and the least prosperous. Three hundred and forty thousand people live there, and the landowners number less than two thousand. Eighty per cent of the population is made up of the natives, most of them agricultural or mine workers. Nearly all of them are illiterate. The other fifth are descendants of European settlers; it is this group that owns the land and controls the means of production. The province has been deemed too poor and thinly populated to become self-governing. It is under federal administration and its chief official is an officer, the Military Governor. His seat is in the capital of the province, which has about seventeen thousand inhabitants and is situated on the high plateau between the mountains in the northern area of the district. The white population lives in the middle of the town and in the villa district on an artificially irrigated hillside to the northeast. The forty thousand odd natives subsist in the jumble of shacks which are spread out at a comforting distance from the modern buildings in the center. Most of these natives work in the coal and manganese mines up in the mountains. Straight through the town runs the wide cobblestoned highway that enters from the north, but only a mile or two south of the town boundary it narrows into a stony winding mountain road, barely adequate for ordinary traffic. At the southern entrance there is also a row of large white stone barracks. The Third Mechanized Infantry Regiment is stationed there.

  The disturbances in the area began in March 1960, when terrorist groups, in patrols of about ten men, began to infiltrate the mountain tracts in the south. Trained in a neighboring Socialist state, they were well armed, and they soon gained experience and efficiency.

  In the summer of that year, mopping-up operations on a large scale began, but the typography and the attitude of the inhabitants toward the army favored the guerrillas, and after six months or so the results were disappointing. In fact, far from being eliminated, the disturbances had spread to all parts of the province. The previously disbanded Communist Party appeared again in the guise of an underground Socialist organization, the Liberation Front, which sought to obtain recognition through lightning strikes and sabotage. At the same time the white population formed a Citizens’ Guard, which replied to the sabotage with terrorist tactics. In September 1961 the situation had become untenable. No work or transportation of goods was possible except under military guard. Most of the properties in the southern area of the province had been abandoned by their owners, the number of terrorist murders increased, and more and more people were executed after summary trials by military courts.

  At this stage the federal government fell, and in the new presidential elections, the Liberal candidate, Miroslavan Radamek, a self-taught lawyer and son of a peasant from one of the agricultural states in the north, was victorious. The elections were held in an atmosphere of powerful international pressure, and Radamek’s name was put forward as a compromise designed to placate all parties.

  The government made energetic efforts to put an end to the crisis in the beleaguered province. Military operations were halted, and the army received orders to hold themselves in readiness. The responsibility for public order was put into the hands of the Federal Police, which government propaganda had christened La Policia de la Paz, or Peace Force. When the President promised to look into the question of provincial self-government and announced agricultural reforms and numerous social improvements, it seemed that the situation would soon be brought under control.

  Seven months after Radamek’s accession to power, however, the disturbances flared up again. Only a few of the promises of social reform had been fulfilled, the employers harassed their employees more than ever, and the committee that was working on the self-government proposals had made no progress. Open fighting broke out between the Liberation Front and the Citizens’ Guard, and the state of emergency which had been lifted six months earlier had to be proclaimed again. The President now had only one choice: to take up direct negotiations with the opposing parties before a neutral arbitration commission. A Provincial Resident was placed at the head of this commission. The choice fell upon a retired army officer, General Orestes de Larrinaga. He was sixty-two years old, had never mixed in politics, and was generally respected because of his military achievements.

  General Larrinaga’s arrival at the Governor’s Palace brought a temporary relaxation of the tension, but a few weeks later the situation again became critical. Assaults on civilians and attacks on private property resumed. More often than not the surveyors sent out by the reform commission were chased off by the landowners before they had had time to do any work; some of them were murdered and others disappeared altogether. The Liberation Front replied with raids in the countryside, and in the town armed groups of the Citizens’ Guard openly patrolled the streets.

  On May 20 the Liberation Front dropped a leaflet accusing the Provincial Resident of having been bought by the right-wing element and of representing the interests of the landowners and the capitalists. Several days later his life was threatened. Although a representative of the Liberation Front denied responsibility for the threat, it was repeated twice during the week, the last time on the evening of June 5. The threat gave rise to more violence against the natives.

  The only person who seemed unconcerned was the Resident himself. Every morning at eight o’clock he drove with a military escort from his home in the residential sector to the Governor’s Palace. He was often accompanied by his twenty-six-year-old daughter, who taught at the Catholic school.

  Orestes de Larrinaga played his part as a national hero with imposing consistency and great calm. Although little was known about his activities within the walls of his office, he had somehow become a symbol of security for tens of thousands of people.

  This, then, was the situation in the capital of the province on the morning of June 6.

  The new Resident was selected less than twenty-four hours after the murder of General Larrinaga. His name was Manuel Ortega, and very few people had ever heard of him. The appointment reached him by telegram early in the morning on June 17, and he was given exactly four hours to decide whether to accept or decline.

  Manuel Ortega was Assistant Trade Attaché at the Republic’s embassy in Stockholm. He had already held the post for two years and had had time to become used to Sweden. He lived in a furnished flat in Karlavägen in the Ostermalm part of the city, and about six months earlier he had sent for his family.

  Outwardly he was fairly commonplace, a Latin in some ways but no one would have been surprised if he had turned out to be a Greek or a Pole or a Finn. He had brown hair and brown eyes, was five foot ten, and weighed a hundred and fifty pounds. A badly cared-for soccer
injury from his university days had left him with a slight limp in his right leg, but it was noticeable only when he was in a hurry.

  He was called to the embassy just before eight o’clock, and the Ambassador himself handed him the cable signed by the President of the Federal Republic. Manuel Ortega read it slowly and carefully with that lack of surprise one usually experiences in the face of something totally unexpected.

  What on earth is this lousy job? he thought coldly.

  And soon afterward: Might as well say no right away.

  The Ambassador was wearing a smoking jacket and had not yet had time to shave. He was standing up because he was altogether too nonplused to contemplate sitting down and he completely misunderstood the other man’s attitude.

  “Naturally you’re asking yourself why you of all people should have been chosen. I can perhaps help to shed a little light on this point. You’re a lawyer and an economist, used to dealing in a businesslike way. What is needed down there is someone rational with a sense for practical solutions. You are nonpolitical too, and always have been. We others have all got our—well, our burdens.”

  The Ambassador had held various ministerial posts in three consecutive half-Fascist governments, and since then had only with considerable difficulty survived a series of sensitive changes of regime.

  He went on: “This is of course an interesting offer worth looking into. If you make any definite progress down there, you can consider yourself made. If you fail, on the other hand …”

  He cleared his throat and at last sat down behind his desk.

  “Sit down by all means, my dear fellow,” he said.

  Manuel Ortega sat down in the visitor’s armchair and put the cable down on the desk. Then he leaned back and crossed his legs carefully so as not to spoil the crease in his trousers.

  “On the other hand,” said the Ambassador, “the assignment should naturally not be overrated, nor the seriousness of the situation either, for that matter. Our country is large and prosperous and orderly. This border district … Have you ever been there, by the way?”