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out for the vehicle in question and preferably also take a swing past the embassy and talk with the person who had called. Stridh had taken the assignment,and to keep things simple he had driven straight to the embassy without looking for any Mercedeses en route. There were plenty of cars of that make in that particular area.
    At the embassy Stridh had spoken with the guard who had called the police. He was about thirty-five, Norwegian, a nice guy who without asking served coffee and cookies while they were talking. Norway, Norwegians, and the Norwegian embassy did not have a score to settle with anyone, yet the embassy guard had observed the vehicle in question on at least four occasions in as many days. Considering that the Germans were right across the street, after his second sighting he had decided to call the police.
    “Have you talked with your colleague at the German embassy?” asked Stridh.
    He had not. If he could avoid it, he did not talk with Germans for personal reasons. He preferred to talk with the Swedish police.
    “They put my father in Grini,” he explained, and that was good enough for Stridh, whose major interest in life was not police work but modern European history. In contrast to some of his colleagues he had never had any problems with his historical sympathies.
    “I know what you mean,” said Stridh with a Norwegian intonation and smiled. Nice guy, he thought.
    When he drove away half an hour later he first intended to write a few lines about the matter, but on closer consideration he decided to let it be. A simple mental note would have to suffice, for regardless of whether the guard seemed to be a good, reliable fellow, his information was far from certain. Thus he could not say without a doubt that it had been the same car all four times. Two times it was, for then he had managed to get the license plate number. And unfortunately he had a rather uncertain memory of the driver. The first time it was a young man who drove, and he had someone beside him in the passenger seat; this the guard was “rather certain” of, but he had not managed to see if it was a “boy or a girl.” The second time that he had taken the license plate number he was “almost sure” that the car was being driven by “a boy” and that he was alone in the vehicle, but if he was also the same young man as the one who had a passenger with him on the earlier occasion he could not say.
    After having pondered the matter further, Stridh decided that there must be some banal, natural explanation and to refrain from the mental note as well. Right before lunch on Thursday the twenty-fourth of April 1975, he changed his mind. The next morning, despite the fact that he was dead tired after working far into the night, he drove to the station, borrowed a typewriter, and wrote a lengthy, completely perspicacious summary of his observations and his conversation with the guard at the Norwegian embassy. This he gave to his boss, who nodded and promised to pass it on to “the spies up at Kungsholmen.”
    After that nothing happened. No one called, and as time passed he forgot the whole thing. You just had to assume that one of the secret police colleagues had checked the whole thing out and reasonably come to the same conclusion that he himself had at first—namely, that there was some banal, very innocent explanation.
    Therefore he had been extremely surprised when almost fifteen years later, in the middle of December 1989, a Commissioner Persson from the secret police rang the doorbell to his pleasant little two-room apartment on Rörstrandsgatan and wondered whether he had time to talk about the observations he had made in connection with the events at the West German embassy in April 1975.

Part 2
Another Life

1
Thursday evening, November 30, 1989
    It turned out to be an alarm with a number of obstacles, and considering that it also turned out to be a murder it was unfortunate that it took so long before the police arrived at