by Jens Lapidus
Marcus placed his bag on the floor. It was made from dark green canvas and looked pretty expensive. She didn’t know much about his background; all she knew was that he had gone to high school in Kärrtorp, in the suburbs, and now lived centrally, in trendy Södermalm. The salary she had offered him was one thousand kronor less than he had been getting from the small-family law firm where he had been working before—and the fact that he had agreed to it was proof of his commitment. If he was as good as she hoped he was, he would soon be on commission.
“So,” she said, pushing a laptop over to him. “This is your computer. You’ll need to choose a password and that kind of thing. You’ll be in the room next door. I’ve ordered you a desk and a chair, but they’re not being delivered until next week. Sorry about that, but until then you can work in here. Hope that’s okay.”
“Absolutely, but would it be okay if we turned off the light?”
Emelie looked up. She didn’t understand.
“It’s just, I’m allergic to electricity. I can’t handle it. I prefer to work by candlelight or with a paraffin lamp, and I like to use a pen and paper rather than a computer.”
Emelie stared at the young lawyer in front of her. She had made up her mind about Marcus Engvall immediately after her interview with him: he had top grades from his placements and kind words from his previous employers, and he was passionate about people-centric law. He also seemed to have a sense of humor, a good temper, and courage—the former were important for the clients, and the latter essential for this type of work. Courage: not many people talked about it, but it was the most important quality in a defense lawyer. But now: her suspicions should have been raised at caffeine-free tea. What was this? Allergic to electricity? That wasn’t even a thing.
Marcus smiled, winked. “Don’t worry, I’m just kidding. I’m happy to work in here. With the lights on.”
He placed his phone on the desk. The screen was cracked.
“And I don’t have anything against electrical devices. In fact, I’m a bit of a tech nerd.”
Emelie laughed. Marcus did, too. So he did have a sense of humor.
It was actually Magnus Hassel who had given her Marcus’s name a few months earlier. Emelie had been waiting for Josephine, who still worked at Leijon, at a restaurant called Pocket City when she heard someone say her name. She had turned around and realized that two of her old bosses were sitting at the next table. Magnus Hassel and Anders Henriksson. How could she have missed them? Back when she was at Leijon, they were the ones responsible for her yearly development meetings, something she didn’t exactly miss. She remembered them well.
Anders Henriksson was somewhere north of fifty, but he probably dyed his hair and Botoxed his forehead to make himself look closer to thirty. A few years earlier, he had married a secretary twenty-five years his junior, and yet the transformation wasn’t quite complete: he still thought Zara Larsson was a Spanish clothing brand and saw Harvey Weinstein as a hero. But that wasn’t his claim to fame, nor was his so-called EQ—in that respect, it was probably fair to talk about him being exceptionally challenged. Where Anders Henriksson really shone was in his performance. He was behind several of Sweden’s most respected M&A deals, known for not winding down despite approaching retirement age, and listed in all the most important rankings as “A brilliant analyst—creative and authoritative.”
Magnus Hassel, on the other hand, had never needed any further introduction. He was Mr. M&A in Sweden; anyone who was anyone in the Swedish business world knew who he was, and not just the lawyers. He had held the hand of the biggest business leaders, MDs, and industry giants, and led them to even greater riches. According to Dagens Industri, Magnus Hassel had brought in twenty-five million kronor in bonuses in the last year alone.
But all that belonged to her old life. Emelie had entered a new arena now. Far removed from the flashy offices, billionaire clients, and exotic jurisdictions. And with half the income.
It was Magnus who had forced her to resign, who had turned up while she was defending Benjamin Emanuelsson in court and spent an entire day listening to her in the public gallery. She should hate him. And yet she knew he had a high opinion of her and that he really had tried to make her change her mind, to stay at Leijon. Emelie couldn’t dislike him 100 percent. Only 98.
“I didn’t think you came to these parts anymore,” Magnus had said. He was casually dressed: a green tweed jacket, jeans, and a pink shirt. Jeans—during her three years at Leijon, Emelie couldn’t remember ever having seen him in anything so casual. “I thought people like you stuck to Kungsholmen and the satellites.”
Technically, he was right. The majority of Stockholm’s criminal law firms were based in Kungsholmen. Its proximity to the Stockholm district court, police HQ, and the main custodial prison made it the natural neighborhood for anyone who liked to be able to walk to their meetings, interviews, and hearings. She spent much of the rest of her time at the district courts in Södertorn and Attunda, or the smaller custodial prisons in Huddinge and Sollentuna.
“The satellites,” as Magnus called the inner suburbs, made Emelie think of the Eastern Europe of the past. Satellite countries, Soviet vassals.
“I’m meeting Jossan,” Emelie had said. “And she doesn’t like straying far from sanctuary.”
Magnus had laughed. Anders Henriksson, on the other hand, hadn’t reacted. Emelie had thought back to his scarlet face when he and Magnus first confronted her about taking on the Emanuelsson defense.
“I’ve heard things are going well for you,” Magnus had said, raising his glass as though to toast her.
“Yeah, I actually have a bit too much to do. I should probably hire an assistant.”
“You should be happy, then. But you still can’t be earning as much as you were with us?”
Emelie had wondered whether his mocking was friendly or whether he was genuinely trying to provoke her. She had raised her still-empty glass to him. “You pay a price for being at the top.”
Anders Henriksson’s face had changed color at her last remarks. But Magnus just laughed.
“Listen,” he had said, leaning forward. “I actually think I know a kid who would be a great fit for you. He applied for a job with us last week, he’s a newly qualified lawyer, he’s been in court, seems smart, hardworking, like you.”
“Why didn’t you hire him, then? I thought you liked workaholics?”
Magnus had leaned even closer, his mouth practically brushing her ear. “He talked about working for the rights of the individual and defending a system that should provide support to everyone. He actually sounded worryingly like you. He’s a vegan, too, and there’s no trusting people who don’t want to eat dead things.”
Emelie leaned back and studied Magnus. His eyes glittered.
“Tell him to send me an application,” she said.
* * *
—
Back at the office. Anneli called through. “I’ve got a woman on the line for you. She sounds really desperate,” she said, transferring the call.
“Is this Emelie Jansson?” asked a bright voice on the other end.
“Yes, speaking.”
“Good, great. My name is Katja. I need to meet you. Today.”
Emelie leaned back in her chair. Marcus was sitting in silence opposite her, fiddling with his computer.
Everyone always thought that their case was particularly urgent. Perhaps that wasn’t so strange—if you had been accused of something or were the victim of a crime, it was almost certainly a traumatic experience, something you wanted to deal with immediately.
“I’m fully booked today, and my new lawyer has just started. Would you have time for a meeting next week?”
“No, no. We need to meet right away. It can’t wait.”
“Could I ask what this is regarding?”
The other end of the line went si
lent.
Emelie repeated her question. “What is this regarding?”
She heard Katja take a deep breath. When she next spoke, her voice seemed to tremble. “It’s not something I can talk about over the phone. So when can you meet?”
There was something in the tone of the woman’s voice that caught Emelie’s attention, rather than what she actually said.
“Could we do Monday? I don’t usually arrange meetings for Saturdays and Sundays.”
“I don’t know. You absolutely can’t tell anyone that you’ve spoken to me.”
“We have strict confidentiality rules here.”
Emelie wondered what this was about. The young woman had barely said anything, but the stress in her voice was clear.
“I really need to see you as soon as possible—could it happen before Monday?” Katja asked.
Emelie knew that you had to stick to your principles where clients were involved, otherwise there was a risk they would eat you alive. But something felt particularly urgent here, and so she said: “Okay. Let’s meet tomorrow.”
4
Saturday dinner at Mom and Dad’s house in Kista. Baba was depressed again, Mom said, and Roksana wanted to find some way to help him, but first he had to accept that he needed other people, that he wasn’t alone in this.
She was sitting on one sofa and Caspar on the other, the same leather sofas they had fought on as children. The glass table that Roksana had once fallen onto, when she was seven or eight, was in the middle of the thick Persian rug. Her father had had a fit when that happened, because he had been convinced it was broken. Roksana thought about that sometimes: hadn’t Baba been afraid that Roksana might be broken? The brass tray of teacups was on the table, same routine as always—bringing in the tray was the first thing her mother had done, before Roksana even had time to take off her coat in the hallway.
Some things never changed.
There was a football match on TV. The curtains were half-drawn and the cushions on the sofa were plumped up in color order: red in one corner, green in the other. The wooden display cabinet was full of golden carafes, brass trays, and vases; Roksana could have closed her eyes and still described exactly how they were set out. Her mother’s most prized possessions were the candlesticks she had been given by her father. “Dokhtaram, these are the most valuable items I own,” she often said. “Not because we might get a lot for them at auction, but because they were your grandmother’s family’s dowry to Grandad. They’re the only memory I have of my mother’s family.”
Caspar’s eyes were glued to the TV. He was older than Roksana, but he still lived at home—not that that particular fact was something they discussed. They weren’t allowed to mention it—Caspar might feel degraded otherwise.
Baba came in and Roksana hugged him. “I’m glad you’re here,” he said in her ear. He smelled of Aramis, like always. “It’s the perfume of all perfumes, the original, the father of all male scents,” he had once said when Roksana asked why he wore “old man perfume.” Not that she had put it like that.
He was wearing a white short-sleeved shirt tucked into a pair of jeans. They were actually pretty nice, very norm core, as Z would say, but that wasn’t the kind of thing Dad was aware of. When he sat down on the sofa, he said only one word: “Caspar…”
Both Caspar and Roksana knew what that meant—Baba wanted to change the channel.
“But Man U are playing. Zlatan, for God’s sake,” Caspar hissed.
Their father took the remote control and switched off the TV. “Football is nice when Team Melli play. Do you remember that match?”
Roksana knew what he was talking about—they had been there when Iran played an international against Sweden at the Friends Arena in 2015, alongside forty thousand other Swedish-Iranians. It was a memory she would keep for life, a party, and the only time she had ever seen her father in that mood—Iran had lost 3–1, and he had bawled. But Roksana had been able to see that they weren’t just tears of sorrow—there had been something else in there. And the truth was that Roksana had cried, too; that match had woken something in her that she didn’t quite understand—a sense of pride, and a longing for something she thought only her mother went on about, a sense of belonging to something that she and the forty thousand others all shared.
Her thoughts turned to what they had found in the apartment. She, Z, and Billie had stared down at the contents of the box from behind the fake wall in the closet. A space probably constructed for one single purpose.
The box had been full of bags, and through the transparent plastic, they could see the contents. The bigger bags contained smaller ones, all filled with white powder.
They had sat down on the sofa. Z was a pro; he had cut a small hole in the corner of one bag and shaken a tiny amount of powder onto a glass plate. Billie had said: “I think we should turn the lights off. I mean, since I’m going to be a lawyer and everything.”
She was right, even if they’d had the mother of all parties less than an hour earlier, there was a difference between a bit of weed and the bags they had just found. They might be looking at more than ten kilos of the stuff.
All three of them had bent down. Z had licked his little finger and dipped it into the chalky white pile of powder. Held it up in front of his face.
“Looks pretty crystalline.”
Roksana had noticed that, too. The powder reminded her more of sea salt than cocaine or baking powder.
* * *
—
A white tablecloth—nothing beat her mom and dad’s food. The ornate floral plates that they had brought with them from Tehran were carefully set out, with forks and spoons—but no knives; at Mom and Dad’s, you didn’t use knives. Roksana always used to put out knives for her Swedish friends whenever they came over as children.
There was mountains of food: ghormeh sabzi and a special vegetarian version for Roksana, saffron rice, salad, and green beans. When their mother brought out the plate of tahdig, both Roksana and Caspar leaped forward. Tahdig: when Roksana was younger, she had always wanted to help line the bottom of the pan with potatoes, before the rice was added on top, and then make holes for the steam to escape more easily. Her mother was always responsible for turning the whole thing upside down so that the potatoes on the bottom came out on top: a crunchy rice cake, probably the most delicious thing Roksana could think of.
“How are your studies, Roksana joonam?” Dad asked in his eighties Farsi. Roksana had never thought about it before the previous summer, when her cousins from Tehran had laughed at his old-fashioned way of speaking during a visit to Sweden.
Roksana knew roughly what was coming, and she always replied in Swedish. “It’s going fine.”
He took a sip of his wine, which her mother had only poured herself and her husband. Caspar and Roksana were still both expected to drink Coca-Cola, even though both were well over twenty. “Behavioral Science, that’s the name of the course? Isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“And it’s like an easier version of the psychology course?”
“I don’t know if you could say that, but I’ll be able to work in many of the same areas. It feels good.”
“But you could have been a psychologist.”
“I didn’t have the grades, Baba, you know that. The psychology degree at Stockholm University is probably the most difficult course to get into in Sweden. You need something like a score of 22.3, or at least a 1.9 on the aptitude test.”
Her father put down his wineglass with a thud. “You could have achieved a 22.3 if you had knuckled down rather than running off to parties all the time. You’re intelligent, Roksana. You’re smart. Your mother and I have raised you well. Look at your brother: he will be a dentist. It’s a profession that has good jobs. He’ll be a doctor. You could have also…”
“But I didn’t want to be a dentist. I’m not interest
ed in people’s mouths. They’re boring and smell terrible.”
“Come on, now…” said her mother. “No fighting. Will you be able to call yourself doctor, too?”
“No, Mom. I won’t be a doctor. I’ll be a behavioral scientist.”
“But you know how we see it, azizam. We moved here for your sakes. We’ve worked hard for your sakes. We’ve toiled so that you can choose the best jobs and live the best life. We don’t want you to waste your talents. Have you applied for the aptitude test? You have the ability to get into the psychology course, your father and I both know that.”
Caspar poured more cola for himself; the bubbles fizzed in the glass and came close to spilling over. “Stop guilt-tripping Roksana. She’s not like you. You just need to respect that.”
Their mother opened her mouth to say something before closing it again. Their father impaled a couple of peas on his fork. Roksana poked at her rice. She had applied for the aptitude test, to see whether she could improve her results—but she wasn’t going to tell them that.
After a while, Mom poured some more wine. “You know, this is a Shiraz, and I heard that it’s called that because the grapes originally come from Shiraz, your grandfather’s hometown.”
Roksana didn’t say anything. Everyone at the table had heard the Shiraz theory at least 150 times before.
* * *
—
“Look what I’ve got,” Z had said, smiling his best luxury-estate-agent smile. He held up a small box, roughly the size of a paperback. “You’re lucky you ended up living with such an expert. We can check what this white powder is.”
EZ Test, said the top of the box. “I bought this kit online last year. It was just lying at the bottom of the bag I still haven’t unpacked. So good to have when you need to know what you’re taking.”
