by Jens Lapidus
“Could I talk to him?”
“I’ll tell him you called. Then we’ll see.”
The tone of Z’s father’s voice was clear: he wasn’t particularly enamored with Roksana. She wondered what Z had said about her.
She tried Billie. “Billie, can I borrow some money from you?”
Billie’s voice sounded cheerful. “Sure, how much?”
“A few hundred thousand?”
There was silence on the other end of the line.
Billie replied jokingly, in Norwegian: “Kødder du?”
“No, I’m not kidding. Z and I are in a really shitty situation.”
“What happened?”
Roksana could hear one of Billie’s partners in the background. “I can’t talk about it right now.”
“Gotcha,” said Billie. “I want to help you, but I don’t have a hundred thousand to spare. Maybe three.”
Roksana sighed and they ended the call. She was still clutching her phone. She called the cute guy, who promised to lend her ten grand—as soon as he found a new job. She phoned a whole slew of old friends, but no one was especially keen to lend her any more than a hundred or so. She even called Ora Flesh, who said she could lend her a lot, but only if Roksana came over with at least twenty grams of K.
She dropped the phone onto her bed
Thought back to Tehran. To the back street that she, Leila, and Val had passed one evening, and that had been full of cars—Mercedes, BMWs, and so on. “What’s going on there?” she had asked. It was the first time Roksana had seen Leila with a bitter expression: she looked insanely surly. “That’s where the prostitutes go,” she had said. “But now let’s show you something else.” Val had turned onto another back street. In the distance, Roksana could see cars and people standing in groups outside a building. Leila turned around. “This is Super Jordan.” They had climbed out of the car. All you could see of the place was the light shining through a glass door. The shops all around it were closed. “Rumor is that the owner has a direct line to the mayor.” The shop was no bigger than a newsstand, but it was full of people. Music Roksana recognized was playing in the background—the Rolling Stones. The shelves were full of cigarettes, bags of peanuts and other snacks, bottles of tonic water, soda, and strawberry drinks. The customers seemed to be avoiding eye contact with one another, and some were covering their mouths. Roksana had stared. But then she understood. There was no mistaking it: the smell of alcohol from the customers’ breath had to be obvious even out on the street. “Half of north Tehran comes here when they need something after midnight,” Val had explained. Leila laughed. “The only thing you can’t buy at Super Jordan is your own success.”
Roksana got up from the bed. It was over. She was having no luck whatsoever—a complete loser. She was out of ideas. And it would be her father who would suffer.
She should just take an overdose or something, bury herself here, in her old room. Never return.
She thought about her cousins again. The way they spoke. Their simple closeness.
Closeness.
She called Nikola.
49
He kept guard over himself all night, utterly determined not to make the same mistake again: to fall asleep in his cell. Virtually without any food: Teddy refused to eat anything but Kex bars or Snickers, wrapped in their original packaging—but he wasn’t allowed to buy as many as he wanted from the kiosk; there were rules about that.
Emelie had tried in vain to track down a prison employee who had taken medical leave because of an eye problem, but the prison refused to give out that kind of information. Still, Teddy knew what he was waiting for. What was going to happen today.
“You’ve got a visitor,” said one of the guards who peered into his cell at regular intervals.
The guard led him down the hallway. The smell reminded him of a high school.
* * *
—
Marcus was already waiting in the visitor room. Teddy had never seen him before, but Emelie had repeatedly insisted that he could be trusted. Marcus’s face looked as though someone had powdered it—he was that pale.
“Has Emelie told you how this is going to work?” was the first thing he asked.
“Yeah, she was here yesterday.”
Teddy couldn’t help but admire her for getting her deputy to go along with this, and he had even more admiration for Marcus, who clearly had a deep sense of respect for his boss. Teddy had never heard of anything like it.
“Are you sure you want to do this?” Teddy instantly regretted giving Marcus an opportunity to back out.
Marcus crossed his legs. “It’s okay. We’ve concluded that I’m not running any risks. It’ll look like you’ve attacked me and forced me into it. And, as yet, surveillance cameras aren’t permitted in these rooms.”
There was a bag on the floor. Teddy knew the routine down at the entrance: the lawyers had to pass through metal detectors and put their bags through X-ray machines, but no one actually checked the contents of the bag, and it wasn’t unusual for lawyers to have large bags with them—sometimes, the material from the preliminary investigation could run to thousands of pages.
“Everything’s in there. The only thing I couldn’t manage was a pair of scissors, because they’re metal,” said Marcus. “Did you manage to fix that?”
“Not scissors,” Teddy said, holding up a yellow Bic razor. “But I got this.”
None of the inmates were permitted to have razors or other sharp objects in their cells, but they were given a single use razor once a week, in the showers. The guards usually just brought in a box and let them help themselves—they had to be handed back once they were finished showering. Teddy had simply taken two.
Marcus pulled out a plastic bag containing a small towel, which he handed to Teddy. The towel was damp, and he started to dab at his beard—hopefully that would make the shave smoother. He wished he had a mirror, but that kind of luxury wasn’t considered necessary in the visitor’s room in prison.
Next, Marcus started to shave him. “I booked this room for two hours,” he said. “That should be enough.”
Teddy could feel the razor tearing at his beard, rather than cutting it.
“They’re used to seeing you with facial hair in here,” Marcus said, continuing to pull the razor in short strokes over his cheeks. First Kum’s skin treatments and now a strange man just a few inches from his face, shaving him so carefully, it was like something out of a razor commercial. Marcus’s breath smelled of coffee masked by toothpaste.
* * *
—
Forty-five minutes later, they were done. Teddy’s beard was on the floor, and his cheeks were smooth for the first time in weeks. He was wearing Marcus’s suit, tie, and shoes, and Marcus, in turn, was wearing his soft green prison uniform and had slippers on his feet. The icing on the cake was the wig Marcus eventually fished out of his bag: it was perfect on Teddy’s relatively smooth head, and was roughly the same style and color as Emelie’s supremely gifted deputy’s hair.
Marcus smiled. “You don’t look exactly like me, but we’ll have to assume that the guards don’t remember exactly what I look like.”
“Is this going to work?”
Marcus grinned even more broadly now. “No, because you look exhausted, like someone who hasn’t slept in a week.”
Teddy rubbed his new face.
“But luckily, my boss thinks of everything,” said Marcus. He held up a small bag.
Fifteen minutes later, they really were done. Marcus had primarily applied the makeup beneath Teddy’s eyes, but there was also some on his forehead.
“Okay, that’s as far as we’re going to get,” he said, putting the bottle of foundation back into the bag. “You’re almost as handsome as me.”
Teddy laughed for the first time in a long while.
Ma
rcus sat down on the floor, and Teddy tied him to the table leg, gagging his mouth with a ripped pillowcase that he had smuggled out of his cell. Next, he hung Marcus’s visitor pass around his neck, opened the door to the hallway, and shouted to the guard who was sitting fifty feet away, in his booth. “We’re done in here.”
The guard waved him over.
Teddy cast one last glance at Marcus. He nodded to him: good luck. Then he closed the door. Now he had to hope that they wouldn’t immediately arrive to take Marcus—aka Teddy—back to his cell.
The hallway was empty. The glass in the guard booth glittered; he was going to have to pass it to reach the first door. He tried to walk like a lawyer would in these surroundings: confident in himself, certain he would never be locked up like his client but slightly stressed all the same, always en route to the next meeting. Almost immediately, he became acutely aware of his gait: never in a rush, always with his arms swinging by his sides—eyes straight forward. Oozing power, oozing self-confidence, oozing repressed aggression—it was ingrained in him. He had to get away from it. He sped up, held Marcus’s bag as loosely as he could, and tried to look down at his shoes: there were surveillance cameras everywhere here, like flies on a warm summer’s day. He didn’t want them to catch his face.
He thought back to when he had been recognized just a few feet away from escaping the police station.
Teddy glanced around: there were postcards and various regulations stuck up on the inside of the guard booth. A bizarre insult: postcards from other guards who were free to travel the world. The guard sitting inside now was reading a newspaper. Teddy sped up. Said nothing as he passed the booth.
“Bye,” the guard shouted after him.
The blue-painted metal door was heavy, unlocked remotely by the guard booth. Teddy had never been here before, a small room with three elevator doors, but Emelie had explained it to him: the elevators were operated by the central guard. At that very moment, there might be other guards looking down at him from the round, black eyes in the corners. He took a few steps forward and back—another tip from Emelie: it would help them to spot him more easily and send down the elevator. He kept his face angled toward the floor the entire time.
The elevator doors plinged and opened. Shit, there was someone else inside. Teddy stepped in anyway. He could see the shoes of the other man: polished brown leather with brass buckles. He looked at the slacks: gray, pressed. “Hello,” the man said.
Teddy had no choice but to look up. Gray eyes, shirt, tie. The man must be a lawyer.
“Hi,” he said.
“Are you the new person at Ramblings?” The man was probably somewhere around fifty, the knot in his tie loose and his hair starting to recede.
Teddy could feel the sweat on his back. His suit felt uncomfortable, so itchy that he wanted to rub himself against the metal handrail inside the lift.
“No,” he said. “I’m with Emelie Jansson.”
“Aha, I don’t know that firm. Do you work on anything but criminal cases?”
The display in the elevator showed floor three.
“Ah, no, just criminal cases. Plus the occasional asylum case,” Teddy replied, hoping he sounded credible.
“I can imagine that type of case must have exploded in frequency in recent years. I should introduce myself, by the way. Patrik Wallin.” The man held out his hand. “District commissioner.”
Teddy wanted to hit the emergency stop button and throw himself out of the elevator—he didn’t care if it would mean having to climb down the elevator shaft to get away. Of all the possible bastards, he was trapped in an elevator with a senior police officer. Though maybe it was better to be stuck with a high-ranking policeman than someone who actually worked on the ground: the risk of him being recognized must be lower that way.
“Marcus,” was all Teddy said. He had no idea what Marcus’s surname was. His palms were damp with sweat.
The elevator clattered and thudded to a halt. The doors opened.
“I’m sure I’ll see you around,” Teddy almost shouted, virtually running away from the elevator. He was still staring at the floor but gradually slowed his steps—a running lawyer would immediately draw attention to himself on the surveillance screens.
“Wait, Marcus,” the commissioner shouted after him.
Teddy kept walking, as though he hadn’t heard.
“Hey, wait.”
Teddy didn’t want to turn around, he didn’t want to wait for the police officer whose footsteps he could hear a few feet behind him. But he did: calmed his breathing, turned around. The sweat was running down him as though someone were holding a showerhead beneath his shirt. He could see images flashing through his head: The darkness of the cell. The feeling of not being able to breathe. Fredrik O. Johansson’s broken face.
“You forgot your bag,” the commissioner said, holding out Marcus’s leather bag.
The man winked. “It’s not easy being new here. Easy to get stressed by all the locked doors and claustrophobic elevators.”
Lock and key—Teddy wouldn’t be going back.
He went down to the window in the central guard office. “Hi,” he said to the guard, whose face was hazy on the other side of the reflective glass. He held up his visitor pass.
The officer pushed out a small drawer beneath the window, and Teddy placed the pass inside. The whole time, he was trying to appear as relaxed as he could. He told himself that Marcus was just Emelie’s employee, that he had only been working on criminal cases for roughly six months. He shouldn’t be a familiar face here, in other words. He might never have been to Kronoberg Remand Prison before.
Teddy thought back to when he was released after his eight-year stretch. Dejan had come to pick him up in his incredibly crappy BMW. The engine had sounded like a broken tractor, despite the fact that it wasn’t a diesel, and the exhaust had put out a cloud of smoke like a bonfire. The metallic paint and the eighteen-inch rims had long since lost their sheen, and the only wing mirror was, for some reason, taped over. Teddy remembered wondering whether the car would even make it all the way home. He had thought that it might lose a wheel somewhere around Tumba, or that it might just rattle and die, leaving them sitting for hours in the freezing cold. He had glanced back at the prison as Dejan drove him through the woods, practically counting every tree. Trying to absorb the idea that he was moving farther away from his old life with every second that passed.
The officer said nothing. Just pushed out the drawer again. This time, there was a driving license inside. Marcus Engvall. Teddy picked it up. Clutched it tight in his hand, restrained himself from running.
The next heavy door clicked open.
He walked through the glass passage toward the street.
The last door clicked. He pushed it open with both hands. It felt easy, like it was made of paper.
He was standing on Bergsgatan. The sun was shining.
On the other side of the road was a Porsche Panama with matte black paintwork and matching rims.
The horn sounded, and Dejan wound down the window. Flashed him the world’s biggest grin. “My friend, welcome out!”
Emelie was in the passenger seat beside him.
50
Nikola and Roksana met at Palm Village Thai Wok again. The woman who ran the place called Roksana “my new daughter” and gave them their meal on the house. “We had our factory down there,” Roksy said, pointing her thumb toward the floor.
Nikola wanted her to smile as she said it—after all, it was completely insane that she had cooked up ketamine like some kind of crazy El Chapo Guzmán. He knew how much they had managed to sell at their club, how much they had made from the ticket sales, but he also knew they had lost it all.
After they ate, they went back to her place. The apartment felt empty, as though she were about to move out, but Roksana said that it was Z who had taken
off. “He’s gone to his parents in Tjottahejti.”
“Where’s Tjottahejti?”
“It’s just something people say. Anyway, I don’t care,” she snapped. “All I know is that he hasn’t called me, even though I’ve left him hundreds of messages.”
“Has he dumped you?”
Roksana stopped dead—it was like a serious mannequin challenge. “We were never together,” she said. “I thought you knew that. I mean, you hung out with us for three days.”
Maybe he did know, maybe not. Because the truth was that he also knew two other things: one was that he felt something for Roksana. Ever since they held hands after the club, he had been sure, and there was no kidding himself anymore—he was completely into this girl, for real. And yet, the second thing he knew was that the basic rule was still the same: whoever showed their hand first risked losing out. It was a simple principle he wasn’t willing to compromise on. Telling her what he felt in his heart was a leap into the unknown. A leap he couldn’t bring himself to take—that was why he told himself that she probably already had a boyfriend, that she was with this Z guy. That the reason there was no Nikola and her had nothing to do with his cowardice.
But now he needed to rethink. Now that she had explicitly told him that Z wasn’t in the picture, there were no more excuses. Somehow, Nikola had understood something else: he had to take the chance with this girl—otherwise he would regret it for the rest of his life. He had already lost so much, but now that there was something sweet to gain, he had to do it right. For once, he had to fix it.
He leaned forward, pushed his mouth toward her face. He didn’t dare look; he squinted, waiting for the laugh or the slap. But neither came. Roksana had leaned forward, too. They met in the middle. He wasn’t even thinking about Chamon—he felt balanced.
* * *
—
Nikola turned over in bed. It was the next morning. The sheets were crumpled and had come loose around the edges, the result of last night’s activities. Roksy lay beside him. She was still sleeping, curled up in the fetal position, with the covers half thrown back and her dark hair hanging over her face. Though the blinds were down, the room was bright: he could clearly make out the microscopic lines on her brow, the birthmark above one cheek and the long eyelashes that seemed to tremble with the regular movement of her breathing. Everything about her was still new to him, hadn’t yet become routine. She might be the most beautiful person he had ever seen—not just because her face contained that mix of light and dark that he liked so much, but because she genuinely seemed to get everything he thought and said, without faking it. She didn’t use her openness as a tool to get to him, not like all the counselors, social services hags, and staff in various detention centers he had met.
