The Believer

by Joakim Zander

  I wait in the grove behind the school until dusk. Rumors spread quickly, and I have to keep to the shadows, have to bide my time. And when the shadows are long enough, I throw my bag over my shoulder and head toward the shopping center. Only the kids are out now. Like seagulls flapping and croaking in the playground, spitting sand and gravel at each other, jumping around and squawking. It makes me sad to see them. I want to go to them, line them up, and tell them. I want to sit down on the slanting bench in front of them and point to my thin arms, my shaved skull. Want to say to them:

  “Look at me! Leave this place while you still can.”

  When I get there, I let my gaze wander up the cracked walls of the high-rise apartment building. I don’t even know which apartment is his, but I know it’s here.

  I take out my cell phone and send a message without thinking about it anymore. Just two words. Come out.

  Then I wait a little farther down the bike path, where I’m hidden from any windows. And it doesn’t take long for him to come out the door, stretch, and look down along the asphalt. I stand up and stay perfectly still. He squints, maybe he doesn’t recognize me at first. Then he walks toward me slowly, his face pale.

  “Seriously,” he says. “This can’t be happening.”

  He stops and hesitates, runs his hands over his face. Closes his eyes and looks again, as if he thinks I might disappear, as if I’m just a film in front of his eyes that he can wipe away.

  We stand like that for a moment. I don’t look away. I know what he sees. A shadow from the past. A hologram, shaky and so thin it’s almost completely transparent.

  “Fadi?” he says at last. “Brush, is that you?”

  I don’t say anything. It’s been so long since Mehdi and I even talked. He’s come closer now and looks scared, hesitates, stops, squints at me, seemingly ready to bolt at the slightest provocation.

  I just nod, try to smile, hold open my arms. It’s been a long time since I had any right to expect something from him. He takes a hesitant step closer.

  “This is crazy,” he says. “Brother . . . You were dead? We heard you were dead. Everyone thought you were dead.”

  He falls silent, still hesitant, as if I were a ghost. I try to smile again.

  “But I’m not, len,” I say. “Many of my brothers are, but not me.”

  He looks at me, curious and surprised. Then he takes another step toward me and opens his arms and puts them around me.

  “Fadi,” he says. “I swear, we thought you died in Syria. They said it was a drone strike, bre? Like a fucking movie, you know? They talked about it on the Internet. All the shunos from the projects wiped out along with some ISIS leader?”

  I nod, shift my eyes away.

  “Do you have a smoke?” I ask.

  Mehdi stands completely still, just looking at me, as if I still might be a ghost.

  “Yeah, yeah sure . . .” he says at last and hauls a pack of Marlboro Reds out of his jeans pocket.

  I light one and cough on the first drag, gasping for breath. It’s been over half a year since I smoked.

  “There was a strike,” I say. “A lot of people died, brother.”

  I gesture down the street.

  “Come,” I say. “Let’s go, I don’t like standing still here.”

  So we go across the asphalt, away through the smell of pine, away from our childhood and adolescence and who we are now. The playground is dark and empty, and as crappy as usual. We sit in the sand, like when we were kids. Let it flow through our fingers.

  “Why did you come home?” Mehdi says. “You were so fucking haddi, brother, had the beard and everything. Fluffy beard!”

  He laughs. It’s been a long time since I heard someone laughing, so I laugh too, and I’m amazed by how it sounds, high and straggly and not at all like me, so I fall silent again.

  He looks at me, bends forward to study my face, and it feels so intrusive that I back away.

  “Damn you’re skinny, len. And your eyes? Shit, you look dead. Maybe you really are a ghost.”

  “I only came home for one thing,” I say quietly. “Just one thing.”

  I turn my eyes to his again, hold his gaze with mine.

  “I came home to kill the fuckers who betrayed us,” I say.

  It’s not cold, but I shake in my light clothes as I tell Mehdi everything. About my false brothers, about my trip down. About my true brothers in the red sand, about brother Tariq. About their heads and exploded chests and feet. About the shoe with a shin in it. Everything.

  “Daaamn,” Mehdi says. “What the fuck! It’s like a fucking movie, ey? Except you lived it.”

  A horror movie, I think. A nightmare.

  “Where are you gonna live now? With your parents?”

  I shake my head.

  “I have to keep a low profile. Everyone thinks I’m dead. Them too. That’s how it has to be. I have to be a ghost, len. You have to promise me, OK? Promise I can remain a ghost. You know, we grew up together. Then came all that shit. I know I ratted you out. I know I never apologized for it. But I’m begging you, brother, help me with this.”

  Mehdi puts his hand on my shoulder and leans toward me.

  “For sure,” he says. “I’m here for you, brother.”

  He falls silent and seems to be thinking.

  “Maybe you can help me with something too.”

  40. STOCKHOLM—FRIDAY, AUGUST 21, 2015

  TEGNÉRGATAN IS HOT and dusty now, just before eight in the morning. The traffic is constant and low-key, strollers exiting beautiful fin de siècle buildings. It took her only a minute to find number 10, and she’s been standing for a half hour in the sunshine on the other side of the street, slowly drinking hot coffee from a paper cup she bought on her way here.

  It had been easier than she thought to find the owner of the car she’d seen in Bergort yesterday. Or both easier and more difficult. She’d Googled how to find out who a car is registered to. Found the site, put in the number of the car the upper-class guy was driving. The only problem was that it was registered to a company. Merchant & Taylor. Some kind of public relations firm—it wasn’t clear from their website what they did. “We create a climate for change,” it said in the Swedish version; they seemed to be all over the world.

  But one thing they were proud of was the appearance of their staff, all of their pictures and names were posted on the website, and the Stockholm office only had three guys who looked similar to the one in the car. All upper-class, bleached teeth, and smooth fucking skin. Golfers, sailors, whatever. But she knew immediately which one it was. Saw it in his fearful eyes, which he couldn’t hide even in a picture in which he was supposed to appear confident.

  George Lööw. A lawyer apparently. A specialist in “Government Relations” and “Interest Mobilization.” Whatever that meant. Fuck it. She was only interested in his address, which took a second to find by Googling his name.

  She closes her eyes and runs her hand through her hair.

  How the hell did you get yourself into this, Fadi?

  When she opens her eyes again, she sees George Lööw coming out of the front door of the building. He’s a real yuppie—dark suit, glossy blond hair. His white shirt is unbuttoned two buttons, which gives you a hint of a muscular chest beneath. In his breast pocket, he’s carelessly stuffed a red-dotted handkerchief.

  “Wolf of Wall Street,” she says under her breath.

  She detaches herself from the wall and follows him quietly in the direction of Döbelnsgatan.

  George Lööw walks rapidly toward the inner city, and sometimes she almost has to run to keep from losing him. But he’s tall, and it’s easy to follow his bobbing lion’s mane along the green of Johannes Cemetery.

  At Malmskillnadsgatan, Lööw pauses and slips into a small kiosk. Yasmine stops and waits a bit farther up the sidewalk, unsure of what to do, but it only takes a minute before he’s out on the street again with a bundle of what seems to be Sweden’s four largest newspapers in his hands. She has n
ever seen someone buy so many papers at once before. His eyes dash over the front page of a tabloid, then he folds it and checks one after another.

  “Damn,” she thinks she hears him say.

  All the front pages are covered with pictures of burning cars, masked boys, and faceless policemen. Bergort is everywhere, riots so sudden and intense that the middle class can’t look away. Lööw speeds down the street, and Yasmine follows calmly after. Suddenly he takes advantage of a temporary break in the traffic and crosses the street just before the Malmskillnadsgatan bridge over Kungsgatan. She hesitates a moment, then follows him, maybe thirty feet behind.

  There’s a yellow Dumpster on the street, which he disappears behind, and she loses sight of him. It’s as if he’s been swallowed. Did he enter a building? All she can see is an office building. But no upper-class guy. Fuck! Where is he?

  But then she understands: The staircase down from the bridge toward Kungsgatan. She runs over to it and sees him halfway down the stairs. She heads down after him.

  At the bottom of the stairs, he turns left. The street is somewhat crowded, and she has to take the last of the stairs two at a time to keep from losing him. He’s walking under the bridge, Yasmine is only fifteen feet behind him now. When he comes out on the other side, he turns left again and disappears into a door that seems to be in the base of the bridge. She bends back and studies the building. The door doesn’t lead into the bridge itself but into one of the two old towers that stand on either side of the street. They look like mini versions of Gotham, like the old skyscrapers on Wall Street, she thinks, but about a third as high. The King’s Towers, she suddenly remembers. Is that what they’re called? No skyscrapers, but at least ten floors high.

  She hesitates a moment. If she followed him this far, she might as well go all the way. She hurries over to the door before it has time to shut behind Lööw.

  The foyer is dark, and it takes a moment for her eyes to adjust and make out Lööw standing inside an old-fashioned elevator made of wood and mirrors. He’s just about to close the door, but when he sees Yasmine step into the foyer, he holds the elevator for her.

  “Are you going up?” he says.

  He sounds annoyed at first, as if he didn’t really want to offer her a spot in the elevator, but some innate civility compels him. She immediately feels a wave of stress. What should you do now, when the person you’re following suddenly addresses you?

  “Yes . . .” she says hesitantly and takes a few uncertain steps toward him.

  “Don’t you know where you’re going?” he says.

  His irritation seesm to have dissipated now that he’s had a good look at her. He smiles a flirty, confident smile. She recognizes that smile. That smile is the same everywhere, in Bergort or in Östermalm. In New York or Tokyo. She thinks of Joey’s clumsy, obvious pickup line in Friends, from the endless reruns she watched on those afternoons with Fadi: How YOU doin’?

  For once it might be to her advantage.

  “Yes,” she lies and smiles back. “But where are you going?”

  She can almost hear Lööw smack his lips with satisfaction that she’s playing along.

  “Fifteenth floor,” he says. “Higher or lower?”

  He runs his fingers over the buttons, and she reads the company names on the small sign in the elevator as quickly as she can. Higher, she thinks. Then maybe she’ll see where he goes when he gets off. On the sixteenth floor there’s something called Stocktown Pictures. It could be anything.

  “Sixteen,” she says.

  George presses the button, and the elevator rattles upward. Yasmine checks the brass plate for the fifteenth floor. Two company names. The name of a law firm is etched into the plate, and beside it another name is printed on a narrow piece of paper, taped to the plate.

  Stirling Security, she reads. There’s something familiar about it, but she can’t put her finger on what.

  “Are you a lawyer?” she says and does her best to sound impressed and subservient.

  Lööw stretches and clears his throat.

  “Not exactly,” he says. “I have a law degree. But I work in PR, I guess you’d call it.”

  “Oh, I thought you were on your way to that law firm?” she says, pointing to the brass plate.

  “No,” Lööw says. “Coulda been, but I’m going to the other company. One of my clients.”

  He winks at her. His eyes glitter, but she sees something else there too, something strained and stressed. There’s something under that polished surface, that’s for sure. He has unexpectedly deep furrows on his forehead, and his eyes are slightly bloodshot. At the same time, he can’t help but let his hand touch her arm slightly as the old elevator makes its rocky way up in the building. Dudes are the same everywhere.

  The elevator stops with a short rattle, and the papers under Lööw’s arm rustle as he fiddles with the complex dial to unlock the grill gate.

  “Bye,” he says and beams one last smile at her.

  It’s the wrong time, she knows it before she even opens her mouth, but there’s something about that smile, that uncertainty, that anxious face, something about the papers under his arm, which makes it impossible to stay silent.

  “Why are you paying guys in Bergort to create chaos?”

  Lööw is already out of the elevator when she says it, and her words make him stop as suddenly as a skinny, hungry lion hit by a tranquilizer dart.

  He turns around, drops a couple of papers on the floor in front of him, and has to stoop to pick them up. She holds the door to the elevator open with her foot. Lööw rises slowly and approaches her. The smile is gone, he’s a different person now than he was three seconds ago, but he’s not intimidating, just scared.

  “Who are you?” he whispers, standing much too close to her.

  “Are these the people paying for those riots?” she says, pointing to the inconspicuous door with the tight, red logo of Stirling Security posted on it.

  “Listen to me now,” Lööw hisses. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  He throws a nervous glance over his shoulder. Far below in the building she hears a door opening, steps across the marble floor. Then someone presses the elevator button, but nothing happens because she keeps it firmly on the fifteenth floor.

  “I have a meeting now,” he continues. “And it’s probably the people I’m meeting who have just entered down there.”

  She grabs her phone out of her pocket and pulls up the pictures she took last night. Without hurrying, she holds up the picture of Lööw handing over the money to the guy with the tattoos.

  “This was last night, asshole,” she says. “Your car, len.”

  Down below someone continues to push the button with increasing vehemence. Lööw swallows and pales.

  “This is not happening,” he hisses. “Fuck fuck fuck.”

  He looks at her, something desperate in his eyes now.

  “Are you a journalist?”

  She shakes her head.

  “I’m just looking for someone,” she says. “Someone who’s mixed up in this. I don’t give a shit about you, George Lööw.”

  He jerks when he hears his own name. Uncomfortable that he doesn’t know anything about her, but she seems to know a lot about him.

  “But if you don’t talk to me, you’ll have enough journalist vultures after you, bre. Do you understand? I’ll send the pictures to their tip line, and then it’s game over for you, buddy.”

  She nods toward the papers George has pressed against his chest like a shield.

  “Seriously,” he whispers. “We can’t do this. Not here. Not now. This is not what it looks like, okay? ”

  The corner of one eye jerks, a tic from stress or something else, something deeper. Fear.

  “So when?”

  “Give me until tomorrow, OK? Give me your number.”

  Yasmine just looks at him.

  “Are you kidding?” she says. “A time and a place. Early.”

  “OK, OK,” he sa
ys. “The stairs in front of the City Library at nine then.”

  “Don’t be late,” she says and finally lets go of the door. “Don’t forget I found you today. I can find you again. ”

  And with that, the elevator heads down toward the dark foyer again.

  When she gets there, a short man in a tight, dark suit is waiting for the elevator. He’s probably in his sixties, with a bald head encircled by a garland of short hair. He’s somewhat slender, almost supple, like a gymnast, or martial artist. His eyes are cold and green, equally intense and indifferent, like a dragon.

  “Why you block elevator?” he says in English with a strong Slavic accent.

  “Sorry,” Yasmine says, and looks away as she sweeps past him.

  Is that who Lööw is meeting? If so, she understands why Lööw’s eye was twitching.

  She’s relieved to step out into the summer morning outside. A black Mercedes is parked halfway up on the sidewalk. It looks as evil and indifferent as the man by the elevator. She notes that it has unusual license plates. Blue and with a different combination of letters and numbers than regular ones. DL012B. She pulls out her phone and writes them down. How the hell could this have something to do with Fadi? She feels her desperation growing.

  But maybe this is just a dead end.

  41. LONDON—FRIDAY, AUGUST 21, 2015

  IT’S ALMOST TEN-THIRTY by the time Klara climbs up the stairs to the entrance of the institute on Surrey Street. Her legs feel as heavy as her head. Images from yesterday flash through her mind: glass after glass in the pub while she waited outside what turned out to be Patrick’s house. Then the two men. Why had she been so sure they were following Patrick? They had appeared at a convenient time, definitely. But there wasn’t really anything to suggest they were following him. Nothing except paranoia and too many glasses of wine. Nothing except a shard of intuition that sits deep inside and doesn’t want to let go.