by Jens Lapidus
He picked up an old issue of Spider-Man from the floor and started reading. His stomach was growling. He’d learned at school—that meant you were hungry.
Yes, he was super hungry.
No real food came, even though the hours passed. He ate toast with jam and drank chocolate milk instead. The potatoes that Mom’d peeled were lying unboiled in the pot. Out in the living room were two empty pizza cartons, a bunch of empty beer cans, and Mom and Claes on the couch. They were watching some other movie. His Lethal Weapon, which a friend’s dad had copied for him, was still lying on the floor in front of the VHS player.
But it wasn’t the unfairness of not being allowed to finish the movie that hurt. It was the volume of Claes’s voice. Niklas knew what it meant.
Sometimes when he was this drunk, he was nice. But more often, he was scary.
It was only eight o’clock.
He went back into his room. Tried to concentrate on Spider-Man. There was a huge fight with the Juggernaut. Spider-Man threw his web over the entire street and hoped that it would stop the tank-like man.
Claes’s laughter and Mom’s giggles could be heard through his reading.
Juggernaut didn’t care about Spider-Man’s web. He kept walking with heavy steps that made deep impressions in the New York pavement. The web was stretched more and more.
Suddenly, the door to his room opened.
Niklas didn’t look up. Tried to seem unconcerned.
Read a few more panels: Spider-Man’s web didn’t break. The buildings shook.
It was Claes.
“Niklas, why don’t you go down to the basement for a while? You can play that table-hockey game or something. Mom and me, we need some time to ourselves.”
It wasn’t a question, even though it sounded like one. Niklas knew that.
Still, he kept reading. Juggernaut kept walking. The web held up. But the concrete in the buildings where Spider-Man’d fastened it didn’t.
“Did you hear me? Can you go downstairs for a while?”
He hated it when this happened. He wondered what they did when he had to go down to the basement like this. Claes asked now and again. The worst part was that Mom was always on the jerk’s side. Since she seemed happy tonight, Niklas did as he was told.
He got up. Rolled the comic book in his hand, grabbed the house keys in his other hand, and left the apartment. The stairwell was dark; he had to turn the lights on.
He pressed the button for the elevator.
It usually didn’t last for more than a half hour or so. Then Mom would come down and get him.
14
Last night: Niklas was in a tunnel. Spots of lights in the ceiling. Echoes of heavy breathing. He turned around. He wasn’t being chased. He was the one doing the chasing. The tanto knife in one hand. The tunnel brightened. Who was ahead of him? A man. Maybe it was some bearded warrior from down there. Maybe it was the illegal broker. Then he saw: Claes turned his head. Opened his eyes wide. There was spit around his mouth. Niklas took long strides. The Mizuno shoes held up. The old guy stared. White light filled the tunnel. It was impossible to see anything.
Taxi Driver for the second time today. Knife katas for two hours. Niklas, bare-chested. Like Travis. The sweat dried. Concentrating on the katas took its toll. He went into the kitchen and drank a few gulps of water. A luxury: to be able to drink straight from the tap. In Iraq, what came out of the tap was sewer water, if anything came out at all.
He felt nasty tired. The nightmares were really hitting him hard.
He sat down. Looked around. Despondent.
Mom’d moved back home. That heightened his loneliness. Eight years with buddies. Now: six weeks of loneliness. It was about to break him. He needed a job. Needed something to do. A goal in life. Very soon. Then there was the other thing too: Mom’s suspicions. She’d told him she was completely certain the dead guy was Claes. Niklas thought of his nightmare again.
It was raining outside. What kind of summer was this, anyway? Thank God for the rain to wash the trash off the sidewalk.
He ate from a bag of chips. Saw Claes’s face in front of him. Crunched the ruffled, fried potato slices between his front teeth. Claes was gone now. The story’d gotten a happy ending. Niklas felt relieved.
He turned the DVD on again. His favorite scene. Travis tries to apply for a job as a taxi driver. The guy hiring asks, “How’s your driving record? Clean?” Travis’s pitch-perfect answer: “It’s clean, real clean. Like my conscience.”
Niklas agreed. Whatever he’d done, his conscience was clean. There was a war out there. Fabricated moral strictures collapsed under extreme circumstances as easily as a concrete Iraqi house under a grenade attack. Just the rebars remained, stuck up out of the ruins like sorrowful arms.
He turned the movie off. Unpacked his real knives, not the weapon he trained with. Spread them out on the coffee table. One MercWorx Equatorian, a heavy knife with a hefty bolster. Amazing to slice with—you didn’t even need to put any force into it. Next to it, a CBK, a concealed backup knife. A compact little fucker. The handle was shaped like a half circle at a vertical angle from the blade in order to rest in the palm and make the knife shorter, easier to hide. The sheath was specially designed with a lock mechanism so that you could strap it anywhere: behind your back, under your arm, around your calf. Last but not least, his baby: a Cold Steel Recon Tanto. Crafted according to Japanese tradition with a single blade in layer upon layer of Damascus steel—the Rolls-Royce of knife metal. Freakishly well balanced, the blood groove perfectly positioned on the blade, an ebony handle that fit like it was tailor-made for his hand. He gazed at his reflection in the blade. Beauty defined. So gorgeous. So clean.
It was unusual to use a knife in war. But really, it was the ultimate form of combat. Man to man. No high-tech heat-detecting weapons with night vision. Just you against your opponent. Just you and the cold steel.
Niklas leaned back against the couch. Claes was dead. The world was a little bit better. Mom was a million times freer.
He snapped the movie back on.
“It’s clean, real clean. Like my conscience.”
Niklas thought about calling her to hear how she was doing. But he was too tired right now.
Something was bothering him. Loud voices. From the neighbors again. He lowered the volume. Got up. Listened. Same Arabic as the last time he’d heard screaming. He turned the TV off completely. Put his ear against the wall. Almost stopped breathing. Heard everything.
A man’s voice: “You gotta understand, you’re hurting me.”
The girl, Niklas’s neighbor Jamila: “But I haven’t done anything to you.”
“You know what you’ve done. It hurts me. Get that? I can’t do this, I can’t live my life like this.”
They kept on. Screaming. Arguing. Wouldn’t give up. Didn’t seem like it was going to turn violent this time, at least.
Niklas sat back down on the couch, but didn’t switch the TV back on. Heard fragments of sentences from the argument.
Fiddled with one of his knives again. Took out the sheath. Slowly pushed the knife in.
The racket on the other side of the wall continued.
Fifteen minutes went by.
He turned the movie back on. Could barely hear them. Travis got to know Iris, Jodie Foster: they had coffee together.
Half an hour went by.
The fight in the apartment next door grew louder. Niklas raised the volume on the movie.
Iris to her pimp: “I don’t like what I’m doing, Sport.”
The pimp didn’t give a shit. “Ah, baby, I don’t want you to like what you’re doing. If you like what you’re doing, then you won’t be my woman.”
Niklas stared at the screen. Tried to shut out the sounds from the neighbors. But he could hear them over the movie.
He raised the volume. Iris screamed. The pimp screamed louder. The volume was unbearable. But it shut out the noise from the fight in the apartment next door. Niklas tried to concentra
te. His thoughts came crashing down: Claes murdered, his mother unhappy. Niklas’s childhood neighbors must’ve raised the volume on their TV sets, too. Tried to erase the noise from Mom. From him. From Claes.
But somehow, he could still hear it. He knew things weren’t right over there on the other side of the wall.
The movie was moving toward its climax. The crescendo. The moment of truth. The victory of justice. Travis takes things into his own hands. He passes by the pimp on the street. “Do I know you? How’s Iris? You know Iris?” And the pimp just lies straight to his face. “I don’t know nobody named Iris.”
This couldn’t go on. The volume. The neighbors. Claes. Travis.
He could hear thuds against the wall again. He had to turn the TV off. Couldn’t let what was happening over there happen.
The woman on the other side was weeping. Screaming. Niklas knew what was going on. Everyone knew. But no one did anything.
He strapped the Cold Steel knife behind him, under his jeans. Stepped out of the apartment, into the hallway.
Listened. It was still going on in there. The man yelling. The woman whimpering.
He rang the doorbell.
Silence.
He rang it again.
They said something to each other in voices too low for him to hear.
The peephole grew dark; someone was eyeing him from the other side.
The door opened.
A man. Maybe thirty years old. Stubble. Black shirt. Wide jeans.
“Hi, what do you want?” The guy looked completely calm.
Niklas shoved him hard in the chest. Into the apartment. Closed the door behind him. The guy looked shocked. But snapped out of it faster than expected.
“What the hell are you doing? You stupid fuck.”
Niklas ignored the provocation. He was a pro. A fighting machine.
In a calm voice, he said, “Never hurt your woman again.”
At the same time, he grabbed the back of the guy’s head. Shoved it down. Against his knee. Force from two directions. The knee’s upward power, and both his arms tearing the head down. Until they met.
The guy tumbled into the wall. Spit blood. Teeth. Howled. Cried.
Niklas let fly three fast jabs with full force into the guy’s ribs.
The man collapsed.
Niklas kicked him in the back. The guy shielded his head with his arms. Screamed. Begged for mercy.
Niklas bent down. Pulled his knife out. The tip against the guy’s pulsating throat. It gleamed more beautifully than ever.
“Never do that again.”
The guy sniffled. Said nothing.
“Where is your woman?”
The guy kept sniffling.
“Where is Jamila?”
He really didn’t have to ask.
The neighbor girl stood in the doorway leading to the living room. A fat lip and a bruise over one eye.
In Arabic, Niklas said, “Never let him hurt you again. I’ll come back.”
15
The reliability of people who claim to have witnessed things was ranked. The National Police had their own internal guidelines: a rating system for eyewitness accounts, evaluation criteria for reliability. Really, it was self-evident stuff that just wasn’t formally recognized: what an orderly Swedish small-business owner said held up better in court than what a pot-smoking eighteen-year-old nigger might try to explain. What a regular, working Sven witnessed was always valued higher as evidence than whatever some heroin-rotted disability-check collector claimed. The investigative work had to be focused, which is to say reduced—only prime-minister and foreign-minister assassinations were allocated unlimited resources. The machine-gun method—to shoot at every clue you had in the hopes that you hit something—didn’t work. Society couldn’t waste endless amounts of cash. So, you knew who to listen to. Whose accounts garnered results. Served as good evidence. For a prosecution and for a conviction.
A policeman’s account was always given the highest reliability rating. That’s the kind of account you’d put resources toward following, the kind that held up in court.
The situation now: two policemen had seen the track marks on the unidentified man’s arm. Two policemen could confirm that the cause of death’d not been properly investigated by the forensic pathologist. That an additional autopsy was required. That Adamsson’d stopped them from photographing the corpse, the arm, the marks. Something was wrong. According to the worldview of the court, two policemen didn’t lie.
Still, nothing happened.
Thomas just didn’t get it. It was obvious: Stig Adamsson’d wanted to stop them for some reason. But Adamsson wasn’t just anybody. Thomas actually liked the guy. Everyone knew him: he belonged to the real old school. A man whom Thomas would ordinarily ally himself with, a man who dared to call a spade a spade, who didn’t meddle when something had to get done. In a way, he reminded Thomas of his old man—honest in a tough way—except Adamsson was right wing, politically. Adamsson was a reservist in the army and a shooting fanatic. Warm advocate for tougher caliber, harder methods, fewer weaklings on the force. Well-known opponent of the influx of women and niggers. There were other rumors circulating about Adamsson during the seventies and eighties when he was a part of the Northern District’s feared SWAT team. Drunks grabbed by the team and dumped half-dead in abandoned lots outside the city, junkies picked up for nothing and worked over with wet phone books—to avoid visible fractures and wounds—union cops who were bullied, women in the department who were sexually harassed until they transferred out. That kind of stuff often impressed Thomas. A lot of Adamsson’s kind’d probably been weeded out over the years, but not him—the old guy was too good.
Hägerström almost seemed to take it lightly. He chuckled when Thomas, with mixed feelings, called him the day after the morgue visit. “That old fart Adamsson is going to feel some heat for this. Promise.”
Thomas wanted to know more. To be honest: despite Martin Häger-ström’s background, what he really wanted was for Hägerström to bring him onto the investigation officially.
They talked about different scenarios for a while. Hägerström had theories. “I think it’s probable that the dead guy was an addict. Maybe he was going to break in and rob some stuff or just crash in the basement. Someone followed him down there, or maybe just ran into him by chance, and beat him to death. Afterward, the perpetrator got scared and sliced the guy’s fingertips to make things harder for us.”
Thomas didn’t believe Hägerström’s version for a second.
“That can’t be it. It can’t be a chance encounter. If it was, why all the hush-hush about the track marks? And why would someone go to all that effort for a regular junkie?”
“You might be right.”
“And why did someone slice his fingers and pocket the dentures?”
“Okay, okay. You’re right. The most likely scenario is that someone probably both shot him full of something—drugs, poison, or whatever—and beat him to death. That seems in line with the rest of the way this was executed. Nothing has been left to chance.”
“No, and anyway, the question remains: Why was nothing written about the track marks? Why was my report edited?”
For the first time since Thomas’d gotten to know Martin Hägerström, the man had no ready answer.
There was nothing more to say. But Thomas still wanted to keep talking. He asked, “And the telephone number. That note in his back pocket. Have you gotten anywhere with that?”
Hägerström tried to explain. “We still can’t decipher the last digit in the number. We’ve looked up every possible combination that’s linked to a phone plan. That’s all of them except for two. We’ve looked up the people connected to those plans. Of the eight, we’ve brought five in for informational questioning, and it hasn’t led anywhere. You know, they just don’t have anything to do with this. They have no idea who the dead man might be, two were under twelve years old, and so on.”
Thomas listened tensely. Damn it, n
ot even when he was working on his Cadillac could he drop the thoughts of that murder. He asked the obvious question: “And the two prepaid plans? Have you ordered lists from the phone companies?”
Hägerström laughed. “Maybe you should be a detective, Andrén.”
Thomas ignored the comment. Hägerström probably didn’t mean to mess with him.
Hägerström went on, “We’ve ordered and received the lists. We still can’t see who took out the prepaid plans; you can’t see that with those kinds of plans. But we can see what other numbers the two prepaid cards have called. Based on that, I expect to know who the two plan owners are within a few days. Then we move on and bring them in for questioning. But that’s going to take a whole bunch of phone calls.”
Thomas thought: that kind of busywork was typical detective crap. Hägerström only had himself to blame, that office rat. Still: Thomas would consider helping him.
Later that night: time for some reality—intervention work. In normal speak: patrolling. Thomas was standing by his locker in the changing room. Preparing himself for a night in the cruiser with Ljunggren. Despite the routine, the uneventfulness of it all, the boredom—
patrolling was when things happened. Thomas always looked forward to these rounds. The crackle from the radio, their grins when they ignored a call and chilled in the car instead. And then, sometimes, when shit hit the fan, it really came flying.
Ljunggren hadn’t shown up yet. They still hadn’t talked about the morgue incident the other day. Thomas looked forward to discussing the case. To hearing Ljunggren’s thoughts. He wondered where he was. Ljunggren wasn’t usually late.
Thomas got dressed slowly. Like a ritual. The M04 jacket and pants for outerwear: thick, dark blue material made of aramid fibers. Water-repellent, fire-resistant, junkie-hag-with-dirty-fingernails-proof. But Thomas didn’t like it—the reflector tape over the chest was nerdy, the absence of a drawstring at the bottom of the jacket made it feel baggy, the crisp noise it made when you walked sounded like ski clothes. The old uniform was better.
