Henning Mankell - The Troubled Man

ALSO BY HENNING MANKELL

Novels
Chronicler of the Winds
Depths
The Eye of the Leopard
Italian Shoes
The Man from Beijing

The Kurt Wallander Mysteries

Faceless Killers
The Dogs of Riga
The White Lioness
The Man Who Smiled
Sidetracked
The Fifth Woman
One Step Behind
Firewall
The Pyramid

A Kurt and Linda Wallander Mystery
Before the Frost

Other Mysteries
The Return of the Dancing Master
Kennedys Brain

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
AND ALFRED A. KNOPF CANADA

Translation copyright 2011 by Laurie Thompson

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Alfred A. Knopf Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

www.aaknopf.com
www.randomhouse.ca

Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Knopf Canada and colophon are trademarks.

Originally published in Sweden as Den orolige mannen by Leopard Frlag, Stockholm, in 2009. Copyright 2009 by Henning Mankell.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Mankell, Henning, [date]
[Orolige mannen. English]
The troubled man / by Henning Mankell; translated by Laurie Thompson.
p. cm.
1. Wallander, Kurt (Fictitious character)Fiction. 2. PoliceSwedenFiction. 3. SwedenArmed ForcesOfficersCrimes againstFiction. 4. Missing personsFiction. I. Title.

PT 9876.23. A 4907613 2011
839.7374DC22 2010049169

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Mankell, Henning, 1948
The troubled man / Henning Mankell; translated from the Swedish by Laurie Thompson.
Translation of: Den orolige mannen.
eISBN: 978-0-307-59537-9
I. Thompson, Laurie, 1938 II. Title.
PT9876.23.A4907613 2011 839.7374 C2010-904262-X

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Jacket photograph by Mark Dye
Jacket design by Barbara de Wilde

v3.1

People always leave traces.
No person is without a shadow.

You forget what you want to remember
and remember what you would prefer to forget.

Graffiti on buildings in New York City

The story begins with a sudden fit of rage.

The cause of it was a report that had been submitted the previous evening, which the prime minister was now reading at his poorly lit desk. But shortly before that, the stillness of morning held sway in the Swedish government offices.

It was 1983, an early spring day in Stockholm, with a damp fog hovering over the city and trees that had not yet come into leaf.

When Prime Minister Olof Palme finished reading the last page, he stood up and walked over to a window. Seagulls were wheeling around outside.

The report was about the submarines. The accursed submarines that in the fall of 1982 were presumed to have violated Swedish territorial waters. In the middle of it all there was a general election in Sweden, and Olof Palme had been asked by the Speaker to form a new government since the non-socialist parties had lost several seats and no longer had a parliamentary majority. The first thing the new government did was to set up a commission to investigate the incident with the submarines, which had never been forced to surface. Former defense minister Sven Andersson was chairman of the commission. Olof Palme had now read his report and was none the wiser. The conclusions were incomprehensible. He was furious.

But it should be noted that this was not the first time Palme had gotten worked up about Sven Andersson. His aversion really dated back to the day in June 1963, just before Midsummer, when an elegantly dressed gray-haired fifty-seven-year-old man was arrested on Riksbron in the center of Stockholm. It was done so discreetly that nobody in the vicinity noticed anything unusual. The man arrested was Stig Wennerstrm, a colonel in the Swedish air force who had been exposed as a spy for the Soviet Union.

When he was arrested, the prime minister at the time, Tage Erlander, was on his way home from a trip abroad, one of his few vacations, to one of Resos resorts in Riva del Sole. When Erlander stepped off the airplane and was mobbed by a large crowd of journalists, not only was he totally unprepared, he also knew next to nothing about the incident. Nobody had told him about the arrest, and he had heard nothing about a suspicious Colonel Wennerstrm. It is possible that the name and the suspicions had been mentioned in passing when the minister of defense held one of his infrequent information sessions with the prime minister, but not in connection with anything serious, anything specific. There were always rumors circulating about suspected Russian spies in the murky waters that constituted the so-called Cold War. And so Erlanders response was less than illuminating. The man who had been prime minister without a break for what seemed like an eternitytwenty-three years, to be exactstood there openmouthed and had no idea what to say since neither Defense Minister Andersson nor anybody else involved had informed him of what was going on. During the last part of his journey home, from Copenhagen to Stockholm, which barely took an hour, he could have been filled in and thus been prepared to say something to the excited journalists; but nobody had met him at Kastrup Airport and accompanied him on the last leg of the flight.

During the days that followed, Erlander came very close to resigning as prime minister and leader of the Social Democrats. Never before had he been so disappointed in his colleagues in government. And Olof Palme, who had already emerged as Erlanders chosen successor, naturally shared his mentors anger at the nonchalance that had resulted in Erlanders humiliation. Palme watched over his master like a savage bloodhound, as they used to say in circles close to the government.

He could never forgive Sven Andersson for what he had done to Tage Erlander.

Subsequently, a lot of people wondered why Palme included Andersson in his governments. However, it was not particularly difficult to understand why. Of course Palme could have refused; but in practice it simply wasnt possible. Andersson had a lot of power and a lot of influence among the grass roots of the party. He was the son of a laborer, unlike Palme, who had direct links to Baltic nobility, had officers in his familyindeed, he was a reserve officer himselfand had come from the well-to-do Swedish upper class. He had no grassroots support in the party. Olof Palme was a defector who was no doubt serious about his political allegiance to the Social Democrats, but nevertheless, he was an outsider, a political pilgrim who had wandered into the party.

Now Palme could no longer contain his fury. He turned to face Sven Andersson, who was sitting hunched up on the gray sofa in the prime ministers office. Palme was bright red in the face, and his arms were twitching in the strange way they did when he lost his temper.