Murder on the Thirty-First Floor (18 page)

He finished his mineral water.

‘As for the moral qualifications of the people who wielded that power, the less said on that subject the better.’

Jensen looked at his watch. 20.17.

‘The moment the union movement and the private-sector employers reached unanimity, it created an unprecedented concentration of power. Organised opposition melted away.’

Jensen nodded.

‘After all, there was nothing to oppose. All the problems were solved, even the housing shortage and the terrible parking situation. Everyone was becoming materially much better off, fewer children were being born outside marriage, fewer crimes were being committed. The only people who could possibly oppose or criticise the identikit political alliance that had achieved this economic and moral miracle were a handful of
suspicious professional polemicists like myself. The sort who could be expected to ask lots of irrelevant questions. At what cost was this material luxury being won? Why were fewer children being born outside marriage? Why was criminality declining? And so on.’

‘Get to the point,’ said Inspector Jensen.

‘Yes of course, the point,’ the man said drily. ‘The concrete offer they made me was extremely tempting. The group was planning to publish this formidable magazine, as I said. It was to be written and edited by the best, the most explosively and dynamically thinking cultural figures in the country. I remember that exact wording. I was judged to belong in that category, and I can’t deny I felt flattered. They showed me the list of names of those who would be editing it. It surprised me, because the team they’d assembled, about twenty-five of them, amounted to what I would have termed at the time the cultural and intellectual elite of the nation. We would have every conceivable resource at our disposal. Do you see why I was surprised?’

Jensen watched him with indifference.

‘Naturally there were a few provisos. The magazine would have to make a profit, or at least break even. That was one of their articles of faith, after all. The other was that everyone was to be protected from evil. Well, if it was going to make a profit, the magazine would have to be planned very carefully; the definitive form and design had to be put in place. Before that, a series of market research projects would have to be conducted; we could reckon on producing a long series of fully edited sample issues. Nothing was to be left to chance. As regards the content and the subjects raised, we were to have a completely free hand, of course, both in the testing stage and later, when the magazine was launched on the open market.’

He smiled a grim smile.

‘They also said that one of the basic rules in their line of business was complete secrecy for any new publication in its projection and development phase. Otherwise someone else, God knows who, might steal the whole idea. They also pointed out that it had, for example, taken years for some titles – they named various ghastly titles from their standard range – to reach their definitive form. This was to support their advice that more haste might mean less speed, and that we should go about things cautiously and with the greatest discretion, to achieve a perfect result. It was an astonishingly advantageous offer. Within reasonable limits, I was to set my own salary. The salary we agreed was to be paid in the form of a fee for each piece I wrote, which would be entered in the accounts. Even if those fees didn’t amount to the total agreed in advance, that sum would be paid out anyway. Admittedly this might lead to a certain imbalance, meaning that at times I might technically be in debt to the publishing house, or vice versa. Then it would be up to me to restore the balance. If I was in deficit, I could make it up by producing more material; if I had over-produced I would have a chance to take a rest. The remainder of the contract was just routine clauses: I could be fired if I misbehaved, or deliberately sabotaged the group’s interests; I was not to leave my employment without paying off any money potentially owing, and various things like that.’

The man fiddled with his pencil, but without moving it from its position.

‘I signed. The agreement gave me a far higher income than I’d ever had before. It turned out later that everyone had signed the same type of contract. A week later I started work in the Special Department.’

Jensen opened his mouth to say something, but decided against it.

‘That was the official name, the Special Department. The Department 31 label came later. We were put on the thirty-first floor, you see, at the very top of the building. The rooms up there had originally been intended as some kind of storage or loft area; hardly anyone knew they were there. The lifts didn’t go up that far and the only way up was via a narrow metal staircase, spiral steps. There were no windows, either, but there were a few skylights in the roof. The reason we were up there was twofold, they said. Partly so we could work completely undisturbed, partly so it would be easier to keep the project secret through the planning stage. We worked different hours to everybody else in the group, shorter hours in fact. It all seemed plausible at the time. Does that surprise you?’

Jensen did not answer.

‘So we started work, with a good deal of friction initially; you can just imagine two dozen individualists, with minds of their own and without an existing common denominator. The person in charge was a complete illiterate who later got one of the most senior jobs in the whole group of companies. I can add to your store of anecdotes by telling you he’s said to have got top journalist posts because he’s dyslexic, just like the chairman and the publisher. He kept a low profile, though. The first sample issue didn’t go to print for eight months, largely because the technical production side was so slow. It was a good, bold issue, and to our complete amazement the management received it very positively. Despite the fact that lots of the articles were critical of almost everything, including the weekly press, they made no comment on the content. They just urged us to adjust a long list of technical details, and above
all to step up the rate of production. Until we could guarantee a new issue every fourteen days, regular publication was out of the question. Even that sounded plausible.’

He bestowed a kindly look on Jensen.

‘It took us two years, with the resources we had and ever more unwieldy processes of typesetting and going to press, to get into the rhythm of two issues a month. The magazine was always printed. We would be given ten sample copies of every issue. They were filed away for archival use; the need for discretion meant we were strictly forbidden to take copies out of the office. Well, when we’d got that far, the management seemed satisfied, delighted even, and they said all that was needed now was to give the magazine a new layout, a modern design to enable it to stand on its own in the competitive climate of the open market. And believe it or not, it wasn’t until that redesign, which was in the hands of strange groups of experts, had been going on for eight months with no visible results, that—’

‘That what?’ said Inspector Jensen.

‘That the full implication of what they were up to finally dawned on us. When we started to object, they placated us by printing bigger runs of sample issues, up to about five hundred, that were to be sent out to all the daily papers and important authorities. We gradually realised it was all a complete sham, but it took us a while. It was only as we slowly became aware that the magazine’s name was never mentioned and its content was never discussed that we realised copies were never actually distributed at all. That the magazine was only used as a correlative, or rather as an indication of what and how one was allowed to write. We always got our ten copies. Since then …’

‘Yes?’

‘Since then the whole awful thing’s just carried on, basically
as before. Day after day, month after month, year after year, this country’s cultural elite, the last of their kind, have sat in their ghostly offices dutifully but ever less enthusiastically putting together a magazine that’s still, in spite of everything, the only one in this country worthy of the name. And it’s never published! Over the course of that time they’ve had a hundred different excuses for why it has to be that way. The latest design wasn’t acceptable; the rate of production was too slow; there wasn’t enough capacity in the presses. And so on. The only thing they’ve never had any problem with is the actual content.’

He tapped the edge of the table with the middle finger of his right hand.

‘And that content could have changed everything. It could have made people aware of things before it was too late, it could even have saved a lot of them. I know that’s true.’

The man suddenly raised his hand, as if to break off a reply that had never begun.

‘I know, you’re going to ask me why we didn’t leave. The answer’s simple: we couldn’t.’

‘Explain.’

‘Gladly. The way our contracts were drawn up meant we were soon in terrible debt to the group. By the end of the first year, I owed the company more than half the money I’d earned. After five years the sum had increased fivefold, after fifteen it was astronomical, at least for people in ordinary financial circumstances. The debt was a so-called technical one. We were sent regular statements of how much it had grown by. But no one ever demanded that we pay it back. Not until the moment any of us tried to leave Department 31.’

‘But you were able to leave anyway?’

‘Only thanks to a complete fluke. I inherited a fortune, out
of the blue. Although it was vast, almost half of it went on paying my debt to the publishing house. A debt, incidentally, that they managed to keep ramping up by various tricks until the very moment I wrote the cheque. But I was free. Even if it had cost me my entire inheritance, I’d still have torn myself free. Once I’d scented freedom I’d probably even have robbed or stolen to get the money together.’

He laughed.

‘Robbing and stealing, they’re a couple of disciplines without many practitioners these days, eh?’

‘Do you admit that you—’

The man instantly interrupted him.

‘Do you understand the full implication of what I’ve been saying? This is murder, intellectual murder, far more loathsome and distasteful than the physical kind. The murder of countless ideas, the murder of the capacity to form an opinion, of freedom of expression. First-degree murder of a whole cultural sector. And the motive was the lowest of them all: guaranteeing people peace of mind, to make them inclined to swallow uncritically the rubbish that’s forced down them. Do you see: spreading indifference without opposition, injecting a compulsory dose of poison after first making sure there’s no doctor and no antidote.’

He gabbled all this with great vehemence, and went straight on, not even pausing for breath:

‘You may argue, of course, that we all did very nicely out of it, apart from the nine who went out of their minds or dropped down dead or killed themselves. And that it cost the group a lot of money to pretend to publish a magazine it never published. Bah, what’s money to them, with their accountancy lawyers who also happen to work at the tax office …’

He stopped himself, and seemed suddenly tranquil.

‘Sorry for having sunk to that kind of argument. Yes, of course I admit it. You knew I would, from the very start. But I wanted to explain a few things first, and it was also a sort of experiment on my part. I wanted to see how long I could avoid conceding it.’

The man smiled again and said casually:

‘I lack talent when it comes to not telling the truth.’

‘Be more specific about the motive for what you did.’

‘Once I’d wrenched myself free, I wanted to draw at least some attention to what was going on. But I soon realised that my hope of writing something and getting it published somewhere or other was a vain one. In the end I decided there might conceivably still be some kind of reaction to events of a brutal and sensational nature. That was why I sent the letter. I was wrong, of course. That very day I had permission to visit one of my former colleagues in the mental hospital just opposite the head office. I stood there watching the police close off the area and the fire brigade arrive and the whole Skyscraper being evacuated. But not a word was said or printed about the incident, and as for any kind of analysis, forget it.’

‘Are you prepared to repeat your confession in the presence of witnesses? And to sign a statement?’

‘Of course,’ the man said absently. ‘In any case, you’d have no difficulty finding all the technical evidence you might need. Right here in this house.’

Jensen nodded. The man got to his feet and went over to one of the bookshelves.

‘I’d like to present some technical evidence, too. This is an issue of the magazine that doesn’t exist. The last one we produced before I left.’

The magazine was a sober piece of workmanship. Jensen leafed through it.

‘Though the years wore us down, we didn’t get so toothless that they dared to let us go,’ said the man. ‘We tackled all sorts of issues. Nothing was taboo.’

The magazine’s content was astounding. Jensen’s expression remained entirely deadpan. He stopped at a double-page spread that seemed to be about the physical aspects of the falling birth rate and the decline of sexuality. Two large pictures of naked women flanked the text. They were evidently meant to represent two types. One was reminiscent of the pictures in the sealed envelope he had found in the chief editor’s desk drawer: a smooth, straight, well-nourished body with narrow hips and shaven or non-existent pubic hair. The other picture was of Number 4, the woman in whose flat he had been standing twenty-four hours before, leaning on the doorpost and drinking a glass of water. She had big, dark nipples, broad hips and a rounded belly. From between her legs protruded a luxuriant patch of black hair, spreading up across the lower part of her abdomen. Even so, the genitals were visible; they seemed to be protruding from the angle between her thighs.

‘That’s a newly taken photo,’ the man commented. ‘We wouldn’t settle for anything less, but it was hard to get. That type’s apparently even more of a rarity now than it was before.’

Jensen flicked on through the pages. Closed the magazine and looked at the time. 21.06.