Murder on the Thirty-First Floor by Per Wahlöö Page B

kilometres further south. From it, large groups of people were daily flown abroad to spend their annual weeksof recreation at a few chosen destinations where conditions were suitable. The operation was organised to the very limits of what was feasible. Jensen had once been on a trip of that kind, and he did not intend to repeat the experience.
    ‘Back then, a lot of people still thought the rising levels of impotence and frigidity were the result of radioactive fallout. Do you remember?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘Well, the Skyscraper group couldn’t get at our readership. It wasn’t that large but it was consolidated, made up of people who really needed the paper. For them it was the last breathing hole in the sugar glaze. I think that was the main reason the publishing house always loathed us. But they couldn’t break us, we thought.’
    He turned round and looked at Jensen.
    ‘I’ll have to compress everything. I did say it couldn’t all be explained in a couple of minutes.’
    ‘Go on. What happened?’
    The man gave a wan smile and went back to the sofa, where he sat down.
    ‘What happened? The most sordid thing imaginable. They bought us, it was as simple as that. Lock, stock and barrel: our staff and our ideology and the whole damn lot. For money. Or to put it another way: the party and the trade union movement sold us, to the opposing camp.’
    ‘Why?’
    ‘That’s not easy to explain, either. We were at a crossroads. The Accord was starting to take shape. It’s a long time ago now. Do you know what I think?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘That it was just about the time when socialism in othercountries had got over its long crisis and succeeded in consolidating people, as people I mean, made them freer, more secure, spiritually stronger, taught them what work can and should imply, set their personalities in action, inspired them to take responsibility. For our part, we were still ahead in materialist terms, so that should have been the moment for implementing others’ best practice. But something entirely different happened. Things developed along a different course. Are you finding this hard to follow?’
    ‘Not at all.’
    ‘Here, we were so dazzled by our own superiority, so full of blind faith in the results of what was called practical politics, to put it crudely, we thought we’d managed to reconcile, virtually fuse, Marxism with plutocracy and that socialism would make itself redundant, something that reactionary theoreticians had in fact predicted years before. And that was when they started changing the party programme. They simply ditched the sections that were seen as a threat to the Accord. Step by step, they backed away from nearly all their central principles. And at the same time, in the wake of all this general mumble, the moral reactionaries broke through. You see what I’m driving at?’
    ‘Not yet.’
    ‘What they were attempting to do was to bring all the different points of view closer to each other. Perhaps it wasn’t such a bad notion, but the methods that were being used to realise it were built almost entirely on hushing up any antagonism and difficulty. They lied away the problems. They glossed over them with constant improvements in material standards, and hid them behind a fog of meaningless talk pumped out via the radio, press and TV. And the phrase that covered it allwas, then as now, ‘harmless entertainment’. The idea was, of course, that the contained infections would heal themselves over time. It didn’t happen. The individual felt physically looked after but robbed of his spiritual autonomy; politics and society became diffuse and incomprehensible; everything was acceptable but nothing was interesting. The individual reacted with bewilderment and gradually growing indifference. And at the bottom of it all there was this indefinable terror.
    ‘Terror,’ the man went on. ‘I don’t know what of. Do you?’
    Jensen looked at him without expression.
    ‘Maybe simply of living, as