Top Dog

by Jens Lapidus

  13

  Teddy was on his way to meet Emelie and Jan at the apartment where she had found Katja’s body. Emelie had called him immediately. Her voice was composed, despite the fact that she should still be more or less in shock.

  Axelsberg, Gösta Ekmans väg. Teddy’s father lived nearby. The area had changed while Teddy was in prison. In the past, it had been home to normal, working-class Swedes and migrant workers, but now: Axelsberg, Örnsberg, Aspudden—they were all small, wannabe versions of Södermalm. The same trendy black rolled-up beanie hats; the same brown laced boots. The same kids called Harriet and Folke.

  Teddy was early. He studied himself in the rearview mirror. His hair was mid-length. For the first few years after he got out, he had barely wanted to cut it at all, but now he kept it neat. His nose was stubby, his eyes big. They looked even bigger in the mirror, like black holes where the mirror effect disappeared.

  He didn’t know what they were hoping to find out here, but it was worth a visit all the same. Maybe one of them would spot something the police hadn’t noticed.

  * * *

  —

  He had met Nikola at an Espresso House by Södertälje Station a few days earlier. It was the middle of the day, and the place had been half-empty. Nikola went for an energy drink; Teddy ordered a coffee with milk. The cashier had given him a searching look. “What kind of coffee?”

  “Just an ordinary coffee, please.”

  She had put her hands on her hips. “We’ve got flat white, macchiato, or cappuccino; we’ve got caffe latte, fudge latte, frapino, and single estate filter coffee from Lubanda, Monte Alegre, Monte de Dios, and Sidamo. Then there are the special brews.”

  Teddy had tried to process all that information. “You choose,” he eventually said. “So long as I can have milk.”

  “Okay. Would you like lactose-free, almond milk, or organic oat milk?”

  Teddy didn’t know whether he should laugh or scream. “Do you have normal milk? White, runny? From a cow.”

  He and Nikola had sat down in a quiet corner. The leather armchairs had an artificial patina on them, but they were comfortable. Teddy had noticed an oily layer floating on top of his coffee. Nikola was moving slowly, as though he was in pain. Teddy had just heard from Linda that Chamon had been shot and killed two days earlier.

  “Nicko, I’m so sorry.”

  Nikola took a sip of his energy drink.

  “How’re you holding up?”

  His nephew was wearing a Stone Island cap pulled low on his forehead. “I’m cool.” But Teddy could see that his nephew was far from cool. His shoulders were tense, his face pale, his nails in bad shape. That was one of the things his father, Nikola’s grandpa, liked to say: you can always judge a man by his nails.

  “It’s okay to feel broken. He was your friend,” Teddy said.

  “I’m done grieving.”

  “It doesn’t work that quickly.”

  “What would you know?”

  For the first time, he had noticed Nikola’s eyes beneath the brim of his cap. They weren’t just full of pain; there was something else there, too. They were burning, smoldering. The look Nikola gave him could have killed—it blazed with rage.

  “I know how much Chamon meant to you, believe me. But don’t do anything stupid, Nicko. Promise me that. Don’t do anything stupid.”

  Nikola had pulled out his phone and turned it off. Then he had dragged his armchair closer to Teddy’s. “Teddy, Ujak, how could they kill a helpless man in the hospital? What happened to honor?”

  Teddy tried to think of an answer. “Same thing, I’m afraid,” he said, “that’s going on across the world right now. The idiots are taking over. They want to replace anything complicated with something simple, something easier for the bastards to live by. But if the world’s upside down, that doesn’t mean you have to be.”

  “I can’t live like that, though. Can you help me? Find these bastards.”

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea. Please, Nicko, stay away. Don’t start anything. Don’t do anything you’ll regret.”

  Nikola’s voice had been hard when he replied. “But I need to get something back.”

  “It’s too late.”

  “So you’re not going to help me?”

  “Not to get revenge, no.”

  When Nikola looked up, his eyes hadn’t even been blazing any longer—they had just been full of darkness. “Teddy, you were my hero. You’re the one who taught me about honor.” Nikola had crushed the empty can without even realizing he had done it. “You remember what you used to say when I was a kid, when I came to visit you inside?”

  Teddy shook his head.

  “You said that sometimes, you have to walk through the fire to come out clean on the other side. But you’re not who you were, Ujak. You’re not who I thought.”

  * * *

  —

  There was a knock on his car window. It was Emelie, accompanied by Jan from Redwood Security—the ex-cop turned private security consultant who had helped them with investigations in the past. Jan was wearing some kind of shiny coat, something that was probably meant to both look presentable and keep out the rain and snow. He had been a huge help on the Emanuelsson case, spotting things other people had missed. Teddy gave him a hug. “Jan the man,” he said. Then he approached Emelie.

  “How are you?” She deserved a hug after what she had been through, but she took a deliberate step back.

  “Not okay. But we need to get to work.” There were dark circles beneath her eyes.

  Teddy scratched his forehead, his fingertips feeling the frown lines there; they seemed to have grown exponentially since he learned that Emelie had found Katja dead.

  “How do we get into the apartment?” he asked.

  Jan shrugged. “What don’t we do in this line of work?” He held up what looked like a small screwdriver. A skeleton key.

  “Did Katja live here alone?”

  “No, she shared the apartment with her partner, Adam, and occasionally his son.”

  “And where’s Adam now?”

  “He’s the main suspect. But they haven’t managed to track him down yet. There’s a warrant out for his arrest.”

  “And the son? Where’s he?”

  “He lives with foster parents,” Emelie said, stepping out of the elevator doors, which had opened with an ominous creaking sound.

  * * *

  —

  There was no sign that the police had gone through the apartment with a magnifying glass or that a brutal murder had taken place there just a few days earlier.

  Emelie’s silhouette was tense.

  “Everything okay?” Teddy tried to ask her, but she disappeared into the living room as though she hadn’t heard him.

  “In here,” she said loudly. “She was lying here.”

  The brown sofa, the coffee table, the solitary straggling plant in the window. On closer inspection, the place seemed to have been carefully cleaned; Teddy could barely see any possessions.

  Jan got to work. Teddy had seen him in action before. Though the apartment was bright, he used a small pocket flashlight. He poked at certain surfaces with his little cotton swabs, crawled around on the floor like some kind of Sherlock Holmes with a magnifying glass. Teddy knew he shouldn’t touch anything he didn’t need to touch and that he shouldn’t bother Jan with stupid questions. He just walked through the various rooms and looked around.

  The hallway. The kitchen, with two unwashed coffee cups. A bedroom with an unmade double bed and the curtains closed. A teenager’s room with its own TV and a PS4. A bathroom with a cracked sink and a dirty tub.

  Teddy peered out through the windows. Gray skies. Three below zero out there. The building on the other side of the yard was identical to the one they were in. He wondered how many apartments there could be in ea
ch of them, at least a hundred. The uniform rectangles, the flat roofs, the monotonous colors—people’s lives would be housed in similar shapes.

  Down below, a car was trying to parallel park in front of Teddy’s Volvo. Everything was so quiet around here. But there was something moving in the distance; something flapping around, disturbing the peace.

  Teddy glanced over to the other building. Birds. There were too many birds on the opposite roof.

  “I’m going out for a bit,” he said.

  * * *

  —

  The other building had the same entry code as Katja’s, and he took the elevator to the top floor. Once there, he found a set of stairs that led up to a roof hatch. It was locked with a padlock. Teddy went back down to his car. He didn’t drive around with a full toolbox, but he always kept a few things in the car—things like a Stanley knife, for example.

  The padlock wasn’t an especially sturdy specimen, and he jammed the knife into the lock and applied pressure. The lock held, but the fastening on the hatch didn’t. Teddy climbed up the metal ladder to the roof and immediately spotted the flock of birds in the distance. The roof was covered in snow and ice, but it was also completely flat, so it was just a matter of walking over there. There were ventilation shafts rising up here and there.

  Magpies and crows: birds that didn’t have the sense to leave Sweden over winter. Teddy felt the draft from their wings as they frantically flapped away. He was close to the edge now, where the birds he had seen from Katja and Adam’s apartment had been gathered.

  There was something on the roof. He moved closer.

  It was a backpack.

  There was a tear in one corner, a huge hole, probably from an animal biting or ripping it open. All around it, he could see crumbs of some kind. Teddy bent down. He yanked the stiff zipper and pulled out the contents.

  Power Bar wrappers and a thermos flask. He continued to rifle through the bag. Found something hard and black. He held up the object. It was a pair of binoculars.

  * * *

  —

  The windshield wipers squeaked. Emelie was sitting next to Teddy in the passenger seat. The car was still cold, and it had started to snow.

  “So whoever was lying up there had energy bars and coffee,” he said.

  Teddy had called Emelie and Jan, and they had come up to the roof to see what he had found. Afterward, Emelie had phoned a police officer called Nina Ley.

  “The coffee in the thermos is ice-cold,” Jan had explained. “Rats or birds have probably bitten a hole in the bag. But someone was up on that roof, using those binoculars. You can see straight into Katja and Adam’s living room and kitchen from up there. And I think that whoever was up there also put the padlock on the hatch. It doesn’t look like the type normally used on that kind of thing.”

  * * *

  —

  The car was hot now, warm air pouring out of the vents. It was six o’clock, and they had been waiting for the forensic team who was now examining everything on the roof. Jan had already gone.

  “What are you doing now?” Teddy asked.

  “Going home to do the same as the past few days.”

  “Trying to sleep, having nightmares?”

  “Basically.”

  “You don’t want to get dinner with me, then?”

  The rhythmic whining of the windshield wipers was almost hypnotic.

  “I’m guessing your finances aren’t rock-solid, but are you offering?”

  “I thought business was going well?”

  “That was before someone started killing my clients.” Emelie smiled—for the first time all afternoon. It sent a heat wave through Teddy.

  * * *

  —

  They sat down at Raw Sushi & Grill. Teddy had managed to find a parking space right outside Emelie’s place. “They’re endangered. As rare as pandas,” Emelie had said.

  She thought sushi was a perfect choice; Teddy was just happy that they had niku on the menu—different types of grilled skewers. The plates were square and the tables black. He ordered a beer. Emelie went for half a bottle of white. He wanted to ask how she was doing, talk more about Katja’s apartment and the murder scene, but the people at the next table were too close; it felt like they would hear every word.

  Instead, he said: “So how’s your firm really doing?”

  “Managing. I actually hired another lawyer. He’s insanely ambitious, often stays later than me at night.”

  “You two in a relationship?”

  “Come on.”

  He sipped his beer. Emelie picked up a maki with her chopsticks and held it in the air.

  “What about you, what are you doing these days?”

  “I’ve been helping my old friend Dejan with a few things.”

  “I remember him. Isn’t he…?”

  Teddy put down his glass. “I know what you’re going to say. You sound just like my caseworker at the Public Employment Service. You both think Dejan’s a criminal, and by that you mean he’s not clean.”

  “I don’t know what I mean.”

  “He’s done a lot of bad things, I’ll give you that. Just like I have. And he’s not completely aboveboard now, either, at least not on the financial side. But somehow, I don’t see him as the big criminal anymore, not when I read in the paper that the owner of Ikea and thousands of other filthy rich Swedes don’t pay any tax at all. The people with the most pay least, isn’t that strange?”

  Emelie topped up her glass.

  “And they’re the people you used to help, when you were at Leijon,” he continued.

  “If you’re going to sit there and provoke me, then we might as well ask for the bill right now.”

  Teddy didn’t want to attack Emelie; it was just that he had felt like this before: she saw him as improper. He was someone she would never introduce to her friends.

  * * *

  —

  Two hours later, they got up. Emelie had drunk two more glasses of wine, Teddy three beers. He didn’t feel drunk, but he was definitely light-headed.

  “You can’t drive home,” she said, hanging her bag from the crook of her arm. “Can you take the train? Karlberg Station is pretty close.”

  “No, there’s no train out to Alby. And taxis cost a fortune from here.”

  “Aha.”

  He opened the door for her. The cold was even worse now. Maybe she was slightly unsteady.

  “Aren’t you coming up, then? For coffee, as they say?”

  Teddy could just imagine her softly lit bedroom, her scent. He pictured Emelie’s body before him, not wearing any clothes.

  “No,” he said. “I don’t think of us like that. Or rather, you don’t.”

  14

  The funeral: there were more than a thousand people there, possibly even two. Nikola didn’t know. All he knew was that Saint Aphrem Syriac Orthodox Church was spacious, that the Hanna family was large, and that they had a lot of friends. People were crowded onto the pews—the women on one side, the men on the other. Others were standing along the walls. Some hadn’t even made it in: Nikola knew there were people waiting outside.

  It was his first funeral, and the first time he had ever been to a Syriac church. He had been to Saint Sava in Enskede a few times, with Grandpa, but that was Serbian Orthodox, and as small as a caravan compared to this.

  Choirs and incense. Men in black suits and ties, older women with shawls covering their heads. Nikola was in the third row. He wasn’t family, wasn’t blood. But still—Chamon had been his best friend. Nikola was glad his mom was there, too, even if she was sitting on the other side of the aisle.

  The coffin was at the very front, surrounded by a sea of red and white roses. There was a framed picture of Chamon on a chair, with a black silk ribbon draped over one corner. Tall candles on either side.

&
nbsp; Up on the podium, there were several people wearing capes and small hats. The man in the middle had a huge beard, and he was holding a golden scepter. Nikola assumed they were all bishops and priests. They said mass, everyone sang along, someone spoke in a powerful voice. A younger priest translated certain things into Swedish. Two boys played the violin and piano. The women cried. The men hugged one another. It was all so sick. He couldn’t make sense of it: Chamon.

  Gone.

  * * *

  —

  Nikola had been released two days after the murder. For some reason, they had initially thought he was involved. That was always the way: if you came from Ronna—the most ghettoized area in Södertälje—you were an automatic suspect. The cell they put him in had given him flashbacks to his time in custody for the Ica Maxi job. The minute Nikola touched the walls, it felt like his body was about to shatter. He had curled up in the fetal position on the green PVC-coated mattress: the thing was like Hästens’ most luxurious model in reverse form. The plastic mattress from hell was only two inches thick, and the floor felt like the coldest thing on earth. Apparently the state’s generosity was limited: yet again, he hadn’t been given a pillow, not even anything to put on his feet. The cement walls were covered in graffiti, and the concrete floor stunk of piss. No toilet, no TV, no phone, nothing to read other than the carvings on the walls. Just him and his panic. His devastation. His anxiety.

  He had failed to save his best friend, and the cops were refusing to even tell him whether any of the killers had been caught.

  They had put handcuffs on him and led him to the interview room the next morning. He still didn’t know why they had taken his freedom: he was a witness, not a killer. The doctors and nurses: surely they could confirm that he hadn’t been part of the death squad that attacked Chamon?