Never Fuck Up: A Novel

by Jens Lapidus

  No gun.

  It remained still. As big as a cat, he thought.

  The panic started creeping up on him.

  Someone moved inside the entrance to the building.

  The rat reacted. Jumped off the electrical cabinet.

  Disappeared along the side of the building.

  Niklas opened the door and stepped into the entranceway. Inside, a girl was throwing out trash. Maybe twenty-five years old, long, dark hair, coal-black eyebrows, brown eyes. Pretty. Maybe she was a haji, what the Americans called the civilians down there.

  He started walking up the stairs. Sweaty. But it didn’t feel like it was from the run. More from the rat shock.

  The girl followed. He fumbled with his keys.

  She stood outside her door, on the same landing. Checked him out. Opened the door.

  Dressed in sweat pants, a big sweatshirt, and flip-flops.

  Then he realized—she was his neighbor. He should say hi, even if he didn’t know how long he’d be living here.

  “Hi, maybe I should introduce myself,” he said.

  Without really having the time to realize it himself, he heard his own voice say, “Salaam alaikum. Keif halek?”

  Her face broke into a completely different expression—a broad, surprised smile. At the same time, she looked down at the floor. He recognized the behavior. Over there, a woman never looked a man in the eye, except the whores.

  “Do you speak Arabic?” she asked.

  “Yeah, a little. I can be neighborly, anyway.”

  They laughed.

  “Nice to meet you. My name is Jamila. I guess I’ll see you around. In the laundry room or something.”

  Niklas introduced himself. Said, “See you later.” Then she disappeared into her place.

  Niklas kept standing outside his door.

  Happy, somehow. Despite the rat he’d seen down there.

  In the kitchen, four hours later: him and Mom. Niklas was drinking Coca-Cola. She’d brought a bottle of wine. On the table: a bag with almond cookies that she’d picked up too. She knew Niklas loved those particular cookies. The dry, sweet taste when the cookie got stuck in the roof of your mouth. Nursing-home cookies, Mom called them. He laughed.

  The apartment was sparely furnished. There was a worn wooden table in the kitchen. Covered with round stains from warm mugs. Four wooden chairs—extremely uncomfortable. Niklas’d hung a T-shirt over the back of Mom’s chair to make it a little softer.

  “So, tell me. What really happened?”

  It was like pushing a button. Mom leaned over the table as if she wanted him to hear better. It poured out of her. Disjointed and emotional. Hazy and horrified.

  She told him how a neighbor’d woken her up. The neighbor said something’d happened in the basement. Then the police showed up. Told everyone, “No need to worry.” They asked strange questions. The neighbors were standing outside, on the street. Talking in low, frightened voices. The police cordoned off the area. Sirens on the street. Armed policemen in motion. They took pictures of the stairwell, the basement, outside. Asked her to produce identification. Wrote down her telephone number. Later, she saw a wrapped human body being rolled out from the basement on a stretcher.

  She slurped wine between words. Her head hung over the glass. Her poor posture was apparent even when she sat down.

  And then, today, they’d brought her in for questioning. They’d asked all kinds of things. If she had any idea who the dead person could be. Why a murdered man was found in her apartment building. If she’d heard anything, seen anything. If any of the neighbors’d been acting strange lately.

  “Was it scary?”

  “Very. Just imagine. Being interrogated by the police as if you were involved in a murder, or something. They asked over and over again if I knew who it could be. Why would I know that?”

  “So they don’t know who it is?”

  “I have no idea, but I don’t think so. If they did, they wouldn’t have asked so many times, right? It’s so terrible. How can they not know? The police don’t do any good these days.”

  “Did you see the dead guy?”

  “Yes. Or, no, actually. I saw something that could have been a face, but it’d been covered up so much. I don’t know. I think it was a man.”

  “Mom, there’s something I need to ask of you. It might sound strange, but I really want you to think about this. You know, considering my background it would be best if—”

  He interrupted himself. Poured more Coke. It clucked out from the can.

  “ . . . I don’t want you to tell the police about me. Don’t mention that I’m home again. Don’t mention that I was living with you. Can you promise me that?” Niklas looked up at Marie.

  She was sitting in silence. Staring at him.

  6

  They stopped for coffee—Thomas and Ljunggren, as usual. Even though it was only four o’clock in the afternoon, Ljunggren was already on his eighth cup of the day. Thomas wondered: Was Ljunggren’s stomach made of steel, or what?

  The café: a taxi joint by Liljeholmen. A TV in one corner playing an Italian league soccer game on high volume. Uncomfortable metal chairs and tables with checked tablecloths. Spread out on the tables: newspapers and housewares catalogs. Perfect place for cops to chill—they were waiting for an assignment worthy of the name.

  Ljunggren’s radio handset was on the table. The calls from dispatch could hardly be heard over the soccer announcer’s excited commentary. Fiorentina was proving that it wanted to join the top of the Italian league and was mopping the floor with Cagliari. The Dane Martin Jørgensen’d just made the 2–1 goal. Well placed. Beautiful.

  They were each reading a newspaper. As always, not much conversation. They nurtured their peaceful rapport.

  But Thomas had trouble focusing. The articles in the newspaper just floated on past. He flipped through it, distracted. Couldn’t stomach the Fiorentina buzz either. He couldn’t drop that basement thing. Normally, he’d forget as soon as he was back at the station. Showered, dried himself off, put on his civilian clothes. Assault, murder, rape—whatever it was—it ran off with the soap. But this was eating away at him. The image of the busted face kept coming back. With every page he turned of the newspaper, he’d see the tatters of flesh; the sunken, broken nose; the swollen eyes. The track marks on the arm. The bloody, peeled fingertips. The empty mouth.

  Thomas thought it was a strange routine for real cops—as soon as things got exciting, the crap was turned over to the house mice. Desk cops—the criminal detectives—dudes who’d crawled off the street and into paper shuffling. They were often older officers with bad backs or knee problems—as if sitting still at a desk all day was going to help your back. Or else they came with other baggage, they’d “burned out,” as they say. Everyone knew that was just baloney. But sometimes: young jokers fresh out of the Police Academy who were too feeble to do the real job. Thought they could be Kurt Wallander. Thomas knew—90 percent of the investigations they dealt with were shoplifting and bike thefts. Yeah, high drama. Sure.

  Dispatch announced, “We’ve got a drunk driver who thinks he’s Ayrton Senna on the E4, southbound. Anyone near Liljeholmen? Over.”

  There was a break in the soccer game. Thomas heard the radio loud and clear.

  Saw on Ljunggren’s face that he’d heard it too.

  They grinned their usual grins.

  Responded, “We can’t take it. We’re near Älvsjö. Over.”

  A little white lie to get off scot-free. Dispatch had no idea how close to the place they really were.

  Thomas thought, You could call their work ethic shitty. Call it lazy. Call it cheating. But the ones in charge deserved what they got—if you don’t invest in the police, don’t expect to get anything back. And some drunkard who thought the highway was a racetrack would never get more than a month anyway—so what was the point?

  Ljunggren poured his ninth cup. Slurped.

  Ljunggren had to drive the last hours of the day’s sh
ift alone. Thomas was called to an investigation meeting. Or, as it was formally called, a debriefing. They wanted him to describe his vibes from the early morning of June 3. Give the suits a broader, better, richer story to go on. They needed more than just the technicians’ photos, written reports, and interrogation transcripts.

  He was going to headquarters, which is to say, Kronoberg. Which is to say: paradise for detective house mice/paper pushers/little girls. He got a ride with a female cop he’d never met before. Didn’t have the energy to chat. Greeted her politely—after that, they kept their traps shut for the rest of the ride.

  Thomas’d written half a page, his incident report. It was bullshit: standard phrases, abbreviations. Off. Andrén and Off. Ljunggren were called at 00.10 hours on the night in question. Arrived at 10 Gösta Ekman Road at 0016 hours. Some members of the general public were gathered outside the building as well as ca. 8 people in the stairwell. A list of times, names of officers that’d arrived on the scene, senior officers, info-reporting, and so on. After that, brief descriptions: Undersigned attempted CPR. CS photographed. Observations: traces of blood and vomit on the walls/floor. VIC, WMA, facedown, severe swelling and wounds. In back pocket: receipts, unidentified slips of paper. BUS on the scene at ca. 0026 hours. SOCO arrived at ca. 0037 hours.

  Thomas hated to write incident reports for two reasons. First of all, he couldn’t handle a keyboard. Simple problems tripped him up. He hit the Caps Lock key by accident. Took three minutes to understand what’d happened. He hit the Insert key when he was trying to backspace—every single letter he wrote deleted the text he’d already written. He couldn’t handle that shit. Had a fit. Rewrote half the report from scratch because it was deleted in time with the edits he made. His irritation almost boiled over. Who’d invented those keys, anyway?

  Second: It didn’t matter what actually happened. What mattered was that you showed that you’d followed the rules. In reality, he’d skipped doing CPR. But anyone would’ve skipped that part. You have to protect yourself—such is the life of a cop. What made it into the report was another thing altogether.

  The main entrance on Polhemsgatan was newly renovated. Gleaming marble floors, polished metal, and huge white designer lamps. Thomas couldn’t believe how they chose to spend their money. Some dudes in the Southern District’d been using the same service weapons for twenty years, but here, at the home of the fancy cops, they spent millions on redoing an entranceway. How exactly did a luxury foyer give Swedish citizens a better city? No end to the fucked-up priorities.

  He flashed his badge at the welcome desk. Asked them to call the inspector he was there to see: the head of the preliminary investigation, Martin Hägerström. Room 547. Fifth floor. Odds were: a great view.

  On the ride up the elevator was crammed with desk people, mostly women. He didn’t recognize a single face. Did they fill the entire department with girls these days? He fixed his eyes on the elevator buttons—the button with a 5 on it, to be more precise. Adhered to strict Swedish elevator etiquette: get on, sweep your eyes over who’s in there, then fix your gaze on a point on the wall, the control panel, or the inspection certificate. Then keep it there. Don’t move. Don’t turn your head. Don’t look around again. Above all: don’t, under any circumstances, look any of your fellow passengers in the eyes.

  Every single button was lit. Someone was getting off at every floor. It was going to be a long ride.

  Fifth floor: he found his way to the room. The door was closed. He knocked. Someone called, “Come in.”

  Inside: chaos—so messy you could’ve easily hidden a motorcycle in the room. A bookcase along one wall, filled with books, magazines, and binders. Expanding files bursting with paper in piles on the floor. Incident reports, seizure reports, witness contact information, case documents covered the rest of the floor—some in plastic folders, others not. The desk was cluttered with similar stuff: witness-interrogation transcripts, preliminary-investigation memos, and other junk. Coffee cups, half-empty bottles of mineral water, and orange peels everywhere. Chocolates, tobacco tins, and pens in a pile right in front of the computer screen. Somewhere under all that paper, there must be a keyboard. Somewhere in all that mess, there must be a detective inspector.

  A thin guy stepped forward. The dude must’ve been standing behind the door.

  Extended his hand.

  “Welcome. Thomas Andrén, right? Martin Hägerström is my name. Detective inspector.”

  “Newly appointed, or what?” Thomas didn’t like his clowny style: the corduroy pants, the green shirt with the top two buttons undone, the chaos in the room, the dude’s messy hair. The un-uniformed ease.

  “Not really. I was transferred six months ago, from Internal Affairs. They have so much work piled up here. Needed backup, you know. How are things over where you are? Skärholmen, right?”

  Hägerström moved some documents piled on a Myra designer chair. Gestured for Thomas to have a seat. Two words were echoing in his head: Internal Affairs—the rat squad. Martin Hägerström was one of Them. The two-timers, the quislings, the traitors. The ones whose job it was to nail other cops, colleagues, brothers. The unit to which they brought people plucked from other districts in the country so that they wouldn’t have any buddies in the area where they worked. All cops’ number one worry. All normal men’s number one enemy. All hierarchies’ lowest rung.

  Thomas met his gaze with a steely look.

  “Okay. You’re one of those.”

  Hägerström stared back, giving him an even harder look.

  “That’s right. I’m one of those.”

  Hägerström pulled out a new legal pad and a pen from somewhere.

  “This isn’t going to take long. I just want you to tell me briefly what you saw, who you spoke to, how you experienced the situation in the stairwell and the basement the day before yesterday. I have your report and all, but we haven’t finished investigating the crime scene and I’ve only brought in about a third of the people in the area for questioning. We really don’t know for sure if the basement was the actual scene of the crime. Sometimes you need some fleshing out to get a better picture.”

  Thomas sat down, too. Looked out through the window.

  “What kind of fleshing out do you need? I don’t know anything other than what I wrote in the report.”

  The fastest way to avoid lengthy debriefings was usually to refer to the report. Thomas wanted to get out of there. This was a waste of time.

  “Let’s start with what happened when you got there. How you discovered the body.”

  “Doesn’t it say in the report?”

  “It says here that you, and I’m quoting, ‘found the dead person in the basement, outside storage unit number fourteen.’ That’s all.”

  “But that’s how it was. On the landing, on the first floor, there was a little family dressed in bathrobes wondering what was going on. They told me he was lying down there. I went down. The door was locked so I opened it with a skeleton key. First thing I saw was blood and vomit on the floor of the basement. Then I saw the body. It was lying facedown. But you’ve got photos of that, don’t you?”

  The detective wouldn’t give up. Kept asking for details. What the family in the stairwell’d looked like. How the basement was built. How the body’d been lying. Thomas realized that he’d applied the wrong tactic—he should’ve been more detailed to begin with. This was taking all fucking night. After an hour of questioning, Hägerström stood up.

  “Want coffee?”

  Thomas declined. Remained seated. Hägerström disappeared out of the room.

  Thomas’s thoughts drifted off. He yearned to be somewhere else. He thought about his shooting club. His Infinity gun, his other guns, the powerful focus he felt when he stood with the ear guards on and fired off ten straight 9-millimeter rounds right in the mug of the paper cutout. He could say it without shame: he was one of the Stockholm police force’s best shots.

  Hägerström came back into the room again. Seemed to w
ant to make small talk for a while.

  “You know, you patrol officers are underrated. I often think your first impressions are important. I mean, we usually nail most of the heavy perps through investigations. All the information we collect lets me sit here in my chamber, tie up the loose ends, and get them prosecuted. You know, from my desk. But we need input from the street, from reality. From you.”

  Thomas just nodded.

  “I’ve got ideas for new ways of collaboration. The desk people together with the guys who are really out there. Detectives and patrol officers. You’d set up teams with both. There’s so much knowledge that’s lost today.”

  “Are we done here? Can I go?”

  “No, not yet. I want to discuss one final thing with you.”

  Thomas sighed.

  Hägerström kept going. “We usually talk about different types of violent criminals. I’m sure you remember that from the Police Academy. The professional criminals and the psychologically disturbed. For example, the professional criminals can plan well, are manipulative, and sometimes have psychotic tendencies. Often they are relatively intelligent—at least we’d call them street-smart. The psychologically disturbed, on the other hand, are usually lone wolves. Many have had problems or experienced some sort of trauma growing up. They can live for many years without committing any crime, but then something cracks and they commit some aggravated sexual or violent assault. The thing is that their deeds are different. They move in different fields, commit different kinds of shit. Completely different types of murders. The professional criminals—economically motivated criminals—often kill swiftly and cleanly, leave their victims where they can’t be tied to the crime, and don’t make any unnecessary bloody business out of the whole thing. The psychologically sick have different motives. It can be sexually related, it can be a real mess, they often go after people in their direct vicinity, or hurt many people at once. They might leave their victims as if they want them to be found, like a message to their surroundings. Or a call for help. Considering the nature of this murder, I’m sure you can already guess what my question is. Spontaneously, what’s your view of this murder—professional criminal or psycho?”