Pen 33

by Anders Roslund

  They hit a red light at the hill that led up toward the hospital. Sparse late-night traffic. Then a siren and blue lights came from behind him. He stopped while the ambulance passed by.

  “We’re here, Lund. Thirty seconds. Get ready. We called and a doctor will be here soon to take a look at you.”

  He refused to speak to a kiddie fucker. Always had. His colleague knew that. Ulrik Berntfors thought the same way he did. They all did. But Ulrik didn’t hate them.

  “So we won’t have to wait for breakfast. And you won’t have to sit in the waiting room wearing those.”

  Ulrik Berntfors pointed at the man called Lund. To the chains on his stomach. At his belly chains. He’d never used them on anyone before. But those were his orders. Oscarsson had called specifically about them. When he’d asked Lund to take off his clothes, he got a smile and a slow thrust of the hips as his answer. A metal belt around his stomach, four chains down his legs fastened to shackles at his ankles, two chains across the upper body fastened to handcuffs. He’d seen them on the news and on professional visits to India, but never here; Swedish prison services controlled their inmates numerically, more guards than perps, sometimes handcuffed, never with chains under their shirts and pants.

  “How thoughtful. I’m very grateful. You’re good guys.”

  Lund spoke quietly. Barely audible. Ulrik Berntfors couldn’t decide if he was being ironic. Until Lund leaned forward, the chains making a metallic sound as they rubbed against each other, and rested his head on the edge of the window separating the front seat from the back.

  “Seriously, guards. This isn’t working. Chains are a pain in the ass. If you take this damn metal dress off me, I promise not to run away.”

  Åke Andersson stared at him through the rearview mirror. He accelerated violently up the hill toward Emergency and then hit the brakes. Lund struck his chin hard on the edge of the window.

  “What the hell are you doing, you fucking pig? Are you as retarded as you look?”

  Lund was calm, spoke with care. Until he was crossed. Then he screamed and swore. Åke Andersson knew that. They don’t just look alike. They are alike.

  Ulrik Berntfors laughed. Inside. Fucking Andersson, he wasn’t quite all that he should be. He did that sort of thing.

  “Sorry, Lund. Sorry. Orders from Oscarsson. You’re classified as dangerous, so that’s just how it is.”

  Ulrik had trouble controlling his words. The words did as they pleased, pushing their way out of his mouth, even though he could control his face, afraid of the boisterous laughter that might slip out, further antagonizing the person they were being paid to transport. He spoke, but he stared straight ahead, just like Andersson did.

  “If we remove that crap against Oscarsson’s orders, we’d be in breach of our duty. You know that.”

  The ambulance that had just overtaken them was standing at the doors of Emergency. Two paramedics were running with a stretcher between them, up two steps, toward the entrance. Ulrik Berntfors caught a glimpse of a woman, her long, bloody hair clinging to one of the orderly’s legs. It occurred to him that the orange of the uniforms didn’t match the red of the blood and wondered why not since they must get blood on them now and then. Strong emotions always filled his head with pointless thoughts.

  “Damn! Fucking Oscarsson! What the hell! Can’t he just trust me when I say I won’t go anywhere! I told him that at Aspsås!”

  Lund shouted through the window into the driver’s compartment, then whipped back his head and threw himself headlong toward the windowless wall of the driver’s side. The chains at his waist clanged against the metal wall, and for a moment Åke Andersson thought that he’d driven over something and looked around for a vehicle that wasn’t there.

  “I told him, pigs. And now you don’t trust me either. Well then. Then we’ll say this. If you don’t take this fucking metal off my body, I will leave. Do you understand that, pigs? Leave. Are you sure you understand that?”

  Åke Andersson searched for his eyes, adjusting the rearview mirror to find them. He felt the hatred wash over him. He had to hit something. The bastard had gone too far—one pig too many.

  Thirty-two years. A job a job a job. He couldn’t take it anymore. Not today. Sooner or later, it all goes to hell. He tore off his seat belt. He opened the door. Ulrik Berntfors knew but wasn’t fast enough. Åke was going to whip that perv like he’d never been whipped before. Ulrik sat there smiling. He didn’t have anything against that.

  It was those most silent few minutes after four. After the last patrons of the Hörnan bar had made their way noisily from the harbor, along the water, toward the old bridge to Tosterö, but before the newspaper deliverymen on Stor Street started opening front doors and mailboxes to drop off the Strengnäs Times, an edition of the Eskilstuna Courier with the front page and page four replaced with pictures of local life.

  Fredrik Steffansson knew what time it was. It had been quite a while since he’d slept through the night. He lay with the window open listening to a small town fall asleep and wake up again, filled with people he probably knew or at least recognized. That’s just what it’s like to live in a small town—it’s not far to the other side. He’s lived here for most of his life. He’d read Ulf Lundell and Jack Kerouac and moved to Stockholm, studied the history of religion then moved to a kibbutz in northern Israel not far from the border with Lebanon. But he always came back here, to the people he knew, or at least recognized. He’d never really moved on from his home, from his childhood, his memories, the loss of Frans. He’d met Agnes, fallen violently in love with this urbane, black-clad woman who was always searching for something more. They’d lived together and were about to separate when Marie arrived, and then they’d lived as a family for about a year before splitting for good. She lived in Stockholm now with her beautiful friends. She fit in better up there. They weren’t enemies, but they didn’t talk much anymore either, except about picking up and dropping off Marie.

  Someone was walking outside. He looked at his watch. A quarter to five. Fucking nights. If only he could think about something useful, like the next two pages of his book, but it was as if he had no thoughts at all, just listened to time passing through the half-open window while doors closed and cars started. He could barely write anymore. The days just stood there. Marie left for preschool, and he sat in front of the computer overcome by fatigue, hours without sleep, three chapters in two months. It was a disaster. And his publisher had already guessed what he wasn’t doing.

  A truck. It sounded like a truck. They usually didn’t arrive until five thirty.

  The thin wall of Marie’s room. He could hear her through it. She was snoring. How could a child of five, cute, with a high voice, snore like an old man? He thought it was only Marie who snored like that, but then David slept over and together they were twice as loud, filling the silence between each other’s breathing.

  It wasn’t a truck. A bus. He was sure of it.

  He turned away from the window. Micaela lay there naked, as always, with the blankets and sheets in a pile at her feet. She was so young, only twenty-four years old, she made him feel horny and loved and now and then very old—when they talked about music, and books, and movies, when one of them referred to a composition or text or scene, it suddenly became clear: she was a young woman and he was a middle-aged man. Sixteen years is a long time when it comes to film quotes and guitar solos.

  She lay on her stomach, her face toward him. He caressed her cheek, kissed her lightly on her bottom. He liked her a lot. Did he love her? He couldn’t think about that right now.

  He liked the fact that she was lying there next to him, that she wanted to share his hours. He hated loneliness, because it felt meaningless and suffocating, because not being able to breathe meant death. He lifted his hand from her cheek, stroked her back. She moved restlessly. Why was she here? With an older man, who had a child? He wasn’t particularly good-looking, not rich, not even that much fun. Why did she choose to spend her nigh
ts with him, when she was so beautiful and so young, with so many more hours to live? He kissed her again on her hip.

  “Are you still awake?”

  “I’m sorry. Did I wake you?”

  “I don’t know. Haven’t you slept at all?”

  “You know how it is.”

  She pulled him close to her, her naked body against his. She was warm from sleep, awake but not quite.

  “You need to sleep, old man.”

  “Old man?”

  “You’ll be exhausted otherwise. You know that. Sleep now.”

  She looked at him, kissed him, held him.

  “I’m thinking about Frans.”

  “Fredrik, not now.”

  “Well, I think about him. I want to think about him. I listen to Marie in there, and I think about how Frans was just a child when he took those beatings, when he saw me take a beating, when he got on the train to Stockholm.”

  “Close your eyes.”

  “Why would you hit a child?”

  “If you close your eyes long enough, you’ll fall asleep. That’s how it works.”

  “Why hit a child who will one day grow up to judge the person who hit him or at the very least judge himself?”

  She pushed him, turned him on his side with his back against her, lying close behind, like two large branches beside each other.

  “A child who will think the beating is a father’s duty? A child who will tell himself that he bears some part of the blame?”

  Micaela was asleep. Her breathing came slow and regular against his neck, so close it was wet. He could hear a bus stopping outside, backing up, stopping again, backing up again. Same as yesterday, maybe a tourist bus, a fairly large one.

  When Andersson opened the front door of the prison transport van and hastily stepped out, he felt something he’d never felt before. His rage, his accursed hatred felt beyond his control. For over thirty years he’d taken shit from inmates. He’d hated them, but sat in silence, driving them from prisons to district court, from hospitals to institutions. He’d let his colleagues do the talking, transported the dregs, stared straight ahead, and did his job. But he just couldn’t take this fucking child rapist. He’d been on the verge of losing control in the past with this guy. He knew what he’d done and what the girls looked like afterward. After his most recent run-in with his sneer and lack of empathy, he’d dreamed of him for several nights, his same offense repeated over and over, and in the morning he’d woken up and couldn’t make it to the toilet before throwing up on the hall floor, as if the control accumulated in his stomach, and when there was no more space, it had to escape somehow.

  He had no idea what he was going to do. He was no longer in control. When he heard pig for the third time, duty and consequences ceased to exist, only pictures of naked little girls and the injuries left by sharp metal objects. His lumbering body was almost running toward the back door of the van.

  ————

  Berntfors had only transported Lund once before—the second trial date for the girls found in the basement storage room. He’d been fairly new to the job back then, and the trial was the biggest one he’d been involved in. It had been the kind of trial where journalists and photographers gathered in rows, jostling one another, in front of each other, because the story of two nine-year-olds moved people and sold. He was ashamed of his own reaction at the time. He hadn’t thought about those girls at all, hadn’t understood. He’d been so inexperienced, and it made him feel special, almost proud, to be walking beside Lund on TV. The reality came later, when his daughter asked him why Lund killed two girls, why he destroyed them—she’d only been a year older than they were and carefully read every news article and always came with new questions—because her father really knew him, had walked beside him on television several times. Of course, he’d had no answers. But slowly he started to understand. His daughter, with her questions and fears, had taught him more about his professional role than any class he’d taken.

  He knew Andersson hated them all. They’d never talked about it, but he’d seen, heard, and comprehended. Maybe that would happen to him, too. When a man like Lund shouted at you a sufficient number of times. So he did all the talking. Someone has to speak to them. That was their job. Transporting them.

  When Lund screamed pig for the third time, he knew. There was no room for more. Even as Andersson got up, he knew.

  If he kept his eyes on the Emergency entrance in front of the bus, he wouldn’t see. If he didn’t see anything, he couldn’t lie to an investigator.

  ————

  It was empty in the Emergency parking lot. No cars and no people. That was what Åke Andersson said afterward. He also said that even if it hadn’t been empty, even if other people had been there, he wouldn’t have noticed them—he’d run toward the back of the vehicle filled with fury and hatred, and it had clouded his sight.

  He pulled the door open. A small handle, his hands were as big as the rest of him, and he could barely fit his right hand between the metal of the car and handle.

  That’s when everything went to hell.

  Bernt Lund screamed pig in a falsetto several times. And then attacked. He held his chains in one hand—the ones under his pants and his shirt, which were bound together by handcuffs and shackles around his ankles. Andersson didn’t even see anything before the heavy iron links tore his face, and he fell to the ground. Lund jumped out of the open bus door, hit Andersson’s head again and again, kicked him in the stomach, in the hip, in the groin until the tall guard lay completely still.

  ————

  Berntfors had been staring straight ahead for a long time. Andersson was giving that pervert quite a whipping. He listened. Lund was still screaming pig, must be suffering quite a bit. He waited, until he started to feel uncomfortable. Andersson had gone on for too long. Surely Lund had had enough. If Andersson didn’t stop soon, things might turn out bad. Berntfors was just about to open the door and step out, on his way to stop Andersson from making a mistake, when he saw Lund standing beside him. Lund threw his long chain through the window, hitting Berntfors in the face before pulling him out and beating him. The only thing Berntfors would remember afterward was the terrible screaming, and how Lund pulled off Berntfors’s pants, whipping the chain against Berntfors’s penis, screaming that he would have fucked them both in the ass if they hadn’t been so big. Big people didn’t deserve his love, only small people felt longing, only they deserved to have him inside them.

  One hundred and eighty steps from the front door to the iron gate in the middle of the gray concrete wall that dominated their small community. Lennart Oscarsson always counted them. Once, it took him only one hundred and sixty-one steps. That was his record. It was a few years ago, and he’d been working out a lot at the time with the inmates at the institution’s gym. He’d worked out with them until the assault—a long-timer split open by some inmates one morning. They’d used dumbbells and weight plates, according to the doctor—the marks clear and easily identifiable. And nobody had seen anything, nobody knew anything. He couldn’t go there anymore. He wasn’t afraid, no one was stupid enough to risk another legal process for the sake of a principal officer such as himself. It wasn’t fear, but disgust. He would never be comfortable in a room where a man he was responsible for had been deprived of his life.

  He rang the bell and waited for a voice from the speaker, while having the feeling of being watched by the little camera just above his head. As he stood there, he turned around, back toward the home he’d just left, searched the windows of the living room and the bedrooms. Darkness. Shades pulled down halfway. No glimpses of a face, no back near the phone shelf.

  “Yep?”

  “Oscarsson here.”

  “I’ll let you in.”

  The gate opened and he entered. He blinked at the prison walls around him, two different worlds, and he was able to walk between them, just a couple of minutes separating them. He approached the next door, knocked on the window of the gua
rdroom, waved to Bergh, who waved back and pressed a new button. The door buzzed, he opened it, the hallway smelled of scouring liquid and something else.

  Lennart Oscarsson always felt proud when he arrived for another day of work at Aspsås prison. Principal Prison Officer. He had ambitions for further advancement. He took every course, took any chance to study correctional treatment. If you want to get somewhere you have to show it, so he did and knew someone was taking note. He had been named head of the Aspsås Department for Sexual Crimes seven years ago.

  He spent his days with people who were locked up for violating those who were dependent on their protection. People who had broken the only taboo society had left. He was responsible for them and for the staff who took care of them and punished them. That was what they were supposed to do. That was their only task. Care for and punish and know the difference between the two. He thought what he thought, felt how he felt, but he showed that he was willing, and someone would take note of it.

  But this—this was a pretty dismal day. Unit meeting. Department meeting. They were building a labyrinth of meetings around themselves, meaningless decisions about meaningless routines, clinging to the structure. Solving problems required sharp minds and energy, but these meetings did nothing but make them feel secure in their repetition while preserving the nothingness.

  “Good morning.”

  The conference room—long tables, whiteboards, and overhead projector—could be any government department. They greeted each other, eight principal officers and Arne Bertolsson, the governor. These were Oscarsson’s closest colleagues, who he spent time with every day but didn’t meet much outside work. He’d never been in any of their homes, and they’d never been in his. They’d met for a beer in town, or a football game, but never at home. Could you really know each other then? They were all around the same age, looked similar in a uniform of blue pants, a tie, white shirt—a room full of limo drivers.