What Anna Holt was up to was unclear. Lewin and Mattei on the other hand devoted the whole weekend to going through the investigation’s material on more qualified perpetrators. So far, however, none of the individuals they had scrutinized was particularly impressive, measured by Johansson’s standards. Mattei was also struck by the fact that the number of suspects of foreign origin was surprisingly small. Normally this number would be considerable, and haunting the back of her mind was also the testimony of Witness Three, the woman who shouted “fucking gook” at the man who’d run into her only two hundred yards from the crime scene.
Mattei was clear about why almost immediately. As so often before, it was due to the way the case files had been registered. The usual proportions obtained, but this time the perpetrators of foreign origin had been piled under common lead files with titles such as “German Terrorism,” “PKK Track,” “Middle East including Israel,” “South Africa,” “Iran/Iraq,” “Turkey,” and “India/Pakistan.” Clearly the most common reason that an individual ended up in one pile and not another was the suspected perpetrator’s ethnic origin, or more precisely the Swedish police’s perception of his ethnic origin, but the exceptions were numerous and the logic far from crystal clear.
In the lead file that dealt with German terrorism, a number of Swedes appeared that SePo had surveyed in the 1970s and ’80s in connection with the drama at the West German embassy and the plans to kidnap the Swedish minister for immigration Anna-Greta Leijon. It was also here that Mattei stumbled on the first spotlighted perpetrator who fit Johansson’s template. A Swedish former paratrooper from Karlsborg who during the seventies was suspected of having robbed a number of banks in Germany along with some members of the Red Army Faction. What he had been up to later was unclear. Where he was, whether he was alive or dead, was also unclear.
On the other hand it was clear that he had attracted the interest of the Palme investigators. Along with thirty-some other named Swedish military personnel, he was also included in the so-called “military track.” There were even two cross-references in the files to make it easier to find him. That was something that Mattei was not otherwise accustomed to finding in the course of her diligent reading.
Why he would have reason to murder Palme was, however, veiled in darkness.
So what do I do about you then, little old man? sighed Mattei, even though he must be almost twice as old as she was if he was still alive.
Serbs and Croats, Bosnians and Slovenes, Christians and Muslims all over the place, and even though they’d been at one another’s throats since ancient times the Swedish police finally united them all under a joint lead file, “Suspected Perpetrators with Yugoslav Connection.” Police logic left it at that, both in the Balkans and elsewhere in the wide world outside Sweden.
Basically every Yugoslav gangster who had been active in Sweden and had sufficient hair on his chest was also on the investigation’s list of conceivable or even probable Palme assassins. The majority of them were ordinary felons, convicted for murder and robbery, blackmail, hired gun and protection rackets, and everything else that could provide a person with a decent income without having to stoop to ordinary wage labor.
Where committing violence against others was concerned they had an impressive list of credits. Aggravated and instrumental violence to enrich themselves. Their motives for also having murdered Sweden’s prime minister, like the reasons that were provided, were consistently weak or nonexistent. Various anonymous informants, the classic means among hoods and bandits to rat out a competitor, old police prejudices pulled out of the archives where they’d been unexamined for years.
The oldest contribution to the “Yugoslav track” came from the Swedish secret police and was already fifteen years old at the time of the assassination. Three terrorist actions from the early 1970s: the occupation of the Yugoslav consulate in Gothenburg in February 1971, the embassy occupation and murder of the ambassador in Stockholm two months later, the airplane hijacking at Bulltofta in Malmö in September of the following year. The perpetrators were in all cases Croatian activists involved in armed resistance against the Serbian administration of the Yugoslav republic.
In the extensive investigation, mixed reasons were given for why these terrorists could have murdered Palme. As individuals they were described as “fascists,” “political extremists,” “aggressive psychos,” and “extremely violence prone.” In addition they were “hateful” toward the prime minister and the Swedish government that had kept them locked up in jail for fifteen years. On the other hand as far as the law itself was concerned the evidence was nonexistent, the indicators weak and contradictory, the investigative results nil.
If they really had murdered Palme—“that they had very strong reasons to want to see Olof Palme eliminated and that this motive is one of the most convincing in the entire investigation”—then of course their categorical denial conflicted with their whole terrorist tradition, their worldview, and their own personalities. “It was the most ridiculous thing I’d ever heard,” as one of them summarized their common attitude, when before an interrogation he was named as being suspected of complicity in the murder of the Swedish prime minister.
I’m inclined to agree with you, and because you’ve been in prison in Kumla the whole time it wasn’t you at any rate who ran into Witness Three on David Bagares gata, thought Lisa Mattei, taking out the binder with the “Iran/Iraq track.”
All due respect to the violent traditions of the Balkans, but what do we have here? she thought.
On March 5, less than a week after the murder, an anonymous informant called the Swedish secret police with a tip. The day before in the morning “on Riksgatan between the two parliament buildings” he had observed “a slightly balding man, about thirty-five years old, dressed in a brown coat, black pants, and black shoes.” The man appeared to be “under the influence of something, behaved aggressively, and called out Olof Palme’s name at least three times.” According to the informant, he was “Iranian or possibly Iraqi,” was named “Yussef, or possibly Yussuf, Ibrahim,” and “worked as a dishwasher at the Opera Cellar,” a few blocks away from the Parliament Building.
The secret police’s searches had yielded no results. At the Opera Cellar there were “so many dishwashers and janitors of foreign extraction that the tip based on the description was of very limited use.” It was thus not possible to locate any “Yussef, alternatively Yussuf, Ibrahim at the referenced place of business.” The one who best agreed with the meager facial description, a Tunisian, first name Ali, had an alibi for the relevant points in time and was still filed in the “Iran/Iraq” binder despite his place of origin and despite the fact that the secret police had eliminated him over twenty years earlier.
Wonder how the informant knew his name was Yussef? thought Mattei and sighed. And only after another three hours of browsing and reading was it time for her to take yet another binder out of the pile.
Suleyman Özök, born on February 28, 1949, and thus thirty-seven years old to the day when the prime minister was murdered, had come to Sweden in 1970, trained as a mechanic, and at the time of the murder was working as a repairman at Haga Auto Body Repair on Hagagatan in Stockholm. According to the informant “only a stone’s throw from the crime scene.”
The informant had not demanded to be anonymous other than in relationship to the perpetrator about whom he intended to turn in information. Fourteen days after the murder he visited the detective bureau on Kungsholmsgatan in Stockholm and reported that he was “a hundred and twenty percent certain that Suleyman Özök had murdered Sweden’s prime minister.”
According to the informant, Özök was actually a secret agent for the Turkish military dictatorship and his work at the auto body repair shop was only a cover. His real mission was to keep the Kurdish refugees in the country under surveillance and if needed conduct “wet work” for his employers.
Özök was an almost notorious Palme hater, and the reason was the support that Palme and the Swedish government had given to the Kurds who fled from Turkey and sought asylum in Sweden. Özök had access to “at least one pistol and a revolver” that he had shown the informant on several occasions. Most recently, on Tuesday of the same week the prime minister was murdered, he had taken the revolver out of the glove compartment of his car, shown it to the informant, and on the same occasion said that over the weekend he “intended to celebrate my birthday in an honorable way by shooting that swine Olof Palme.”
The same evening the prime minister was murdered the informant “by pure coincidence” happened to pass Tegnérlunden in Stockholm, “only a stone’s throw from the Grand cinema,” and then discovered that Özök’s private car was parked on the street on the north side of Tegnérlunden. Because he did not know that the prime minister “was sitting watching a movie just then only a stone’s throw farther down the street,” he hadn’t thought any more about it, but instead took the subway home to his apartment on Stigfinnargränd in Hagsätra, where he also spent the night.
When he turned on the TV the next morning he was in such severe shock that it took fourteen days before he managed to gather himself to the point that he could contact the police.
Apparently he had made a deep impression on them. Özök had immediately been categorized under the lead file that then still went under the designation “Turkey/PKK.” The investigator presented the case to the prosecutor, who decided that Özök should be picked up for questioning without prior summons and that the police should do a search of his house in Skogås, his car, and his place of work.
The efforts were extensive. The outcome meager. No weapons had been found. The closest they got was some fishing equipment. Özök was an enthusiastic sports fisherman both in Stockholm’s archipelago and in various lakes in the vicinity of the capital. In addition he liked soccer and had been a loyal Hammarby supporter for many years. Most of all he was upset at the police and their informant.
He had never had any firearms. Thus he could never have shown anyone any. He admired Olof Palme, a great man and politician. He had never expressed criticism of him. Much less threatened him. On the contrary, he had taken his side in a number of political discussions at his workplace, Haga Auto Body Repair. He had been a Swedish citizen for many years. He did not intend to return to Turkey even on vacation. Turkey was a military dictatorship. Suleyman Özök was a democrat, a Social Democrat to be precise, and a proud one. He preferred to live in social democratic Sweden despite the sorrow and loss after Palme. He had given up hope on his old homeland long ago.
Finally he had a message for the anonymous informant. If he did not immediately stop harassing him and his new woman, Suleyman would deal with the matter personally. On the other hand he did not intend to make a police complaint. In an auto body repairman’s world there were more substantial, manly means, if such were required.
“You can tell him that if he even tries to touch my lady I’ll stuff a welding iron up his ass,” said Suleyman Özök to his interviewer, but it hadn’t amounted to more than that.
From the concluding notation in Özök’s file it appeared that “Suleyman has been engaged for some time to a former female acquaintance of the informant. Özök’s fiancée works as a secretary at Stockholm University and lives in a service apartment at Teknologgatan 2, in the vicinity of Tegnérlunden. She does not appear in the crime registry.”
Late on Friday afternoon Lewin and Mattei took a long coffee break at an Italian café in the vicinity of police headquarters and discussed their findings of the past week. They each had a café latte. Mattei threw all moderation overboard and feasted on some tiramisu while the ever-cautious Lewin was content to nibble at the biscotti with almond and nuts that came with his coffee. Despite the weekend calm, the beautiful weather, the cheerful atmosphere at the table, and the article of faith that they must always embrace the situation, it had been a conversation under a cloud of resignation.
Together they had reviewed—or at least read about—almost a thousand suspects who, in at least a formal sense, met their criteria of a qualified perpetrator. Upon closer consideration, few of them proved to fulfill these criteria, and what they all had in common was that nothing tangible argued for their having murdered the prime minister twenty years ago. There was a shortage of motives, and even if the police had found the means and opportunities they still would not have been able to find the motive, although hundreds of man-hours had been devoted to certain cases.
At the same time only a few of the suspects could be ruled out with complete certainty. The normal reason was that they were in a correctional facility at the time of the crime, not on the run or on leave or able to sneak out unnoticed. That it was certain that they had been somewhere else, sufficiently far away or with people who were reliable enough that the police could live with their alibis. In summary almost all were investigative question marks, difficult enough to straighten out back then, probably quite impossible to get straight today.
A contributing reason to the latter was that a strikingly large share of them were now dead. When the prime minister was shot, the median age of the men in the group that Lewin and Mattei were reviewing was just over forty. Today it was sixty plus among the sixty percent of them who were still alive.
There were unusual causes of death. Twenty of them had been murdered over the years. Compared with regular, decent folk this was a hundred times more than the expected rate. A hundred of them had committed suicide, a rate twenty-five times greater than it ought to have been. Another couple of hundred had died in accidents, of drug abuse–related diseases, or of “unknown” causes. That rate was ten times greater than normal. Finally fifty or so had simply “disappeared,” and it was unclear where and why.
“I got the list from our CIS squad this morning,” said Lewin, sneaking a look at a small piece of paper. “But you seemed so occupied by your reading I didn’t want to disturb you.”
“More than a third have died,” Mattei summarized. “Instead of about seven percent, as in the normal population, I mean.”
“I wonder what the mortality rate is among our informants and witnesses,” sighed Lewin, as if he were thinking out loud.
The same as for those they singled out, thought Mattei.
“What do we do?” she asked.
Talk with Anna Holt about it. Look at the military and police track because they’d looked at all the rest anyway. Talk with Johansson. Explain to him that his idea of this variation of an internal investigation lacked any conceivable possibility of success. That it was simply too late. That it was time to wipe the slate clean. That what remained was simply the hope of some decisive lead.
“The one we’ll never get,” said Lewin, sipping his coffee. “Not a moment before the clock strikes twelve in any case,” he noted, shaking his head.
“Oh well,” objected Mattei. “There are still three years, six months, six days, and a little over six hours left,” she said, looking at her watch to be on the safe side.
“Three years, six months, six days, six hours…and thirty-two minutes…if mine is running right,” said Lewin, looking at his watch.
“Yes, and here we are, lazing around,” said Mattei. You’re overworked, she thought.
“I was thinking about continuing that over the weekend, lazing around, that is,” said Lewin.
Then they went their separate ways. Lewin walked to the subway to return to his apartment at Gärdet. He meant to shop on the way. Mattei didn’t have anything particular in mind, until she suddenly discovered that she was outside the entryway to her office in the big police building on Kungsholmen.
I guess you didn’t have anything better to do, she thought as she passed the guard in reception, held up her police badge, and drew her pass card through the card reader in the entry passage.
Exactly three years, six months, and six days left, she thought after a quick look at her watch six hours later.
Then she opened the end paper of the last of the thirty-one individual files that were in the three binders that contained the Palme investigation’s “military track.” The one that concerned a baron and captain who ended up last in the alphabetically ordered list of brethren because he was registered under “v” as in “von” and not under his real surname. He was fifty-five years old when the prime minister was assassinated, and in an opinion piece in Svenska Dagbladet a year before the murder he had criticized the murder victim because he had neglected Swedish defense and had been much too indulgent to the great neighbor in the east. An officer and a gentleman, as well as an aristocrat, politically incorrect, and, in the eyes of the Palme investigators, possibly a latter-day Anckarström.
Ay, ay, ay, now it’s really starting to heat up, thought Lisa Mattei. Then she had a serious attack of the giggles and was forced to hunt for a tissue to dry her tears and blow her nose.