by Jens Lapidus
Silence, tension. Thomas thought he could almost hear the seconds ticking inside the cell phone’s digital clockwork.
“Okay,” the tech chick said. “No problem. We’ll do our best. Just send that fax and we’ll get started.”
Thomas breathed out. Just one problem left now: the fax had to come from the police station. He had to fix this thing with absolutely no suspicion.
The next day he was walking on eggshells. Woke up at 7:00 a.m. without an alarm. Ate breakfast with Åsa. Flipped through travel catalogs with her. It felt good, incredibly good. At the same time: he was thinking of when the best time was to go to the station. When were the least people there? How would he spin it if Ljunggren or Hägertsröm showed up right when he was standing there by the fax machine ready to send the shit? Or worse: Adamsson.
After Åsa left, he sat down in the living room. Remembered how he’d sat there and listened to Springsteen. How he’d made up his mind to keep going. A promise that would be kept.
It felt good. His life needed a boost, to be remodeled from scratch. Like the Cadillac.
Quarter past five: plenty of time before six o’clock. The perfect time of day if you wanted to visit Skärholmen’s police station unnoticed. Right after the second shift’d taken over. The first shift’d left. The new guys would be in the locker rooms.
The fax was next to him on the passenger seat. He’d printed it at home in order to speed things up: in, send, out. Just one thing he couldn’t forget: to bring the fax receipt.
Weird feeling when Skärholmen’s enormous modern-art piece appeared in his line of vision from the highway: a hundred-foot-high rust-colored metal beam with a knot on it. Thomas hadn’t been gone this long from Skärholmen over the past ten years. He didn’t park in the parking garage—all his colleagues parked their private cars there. The risk of running into someone was too great. He parked by the square behind the mall instead.
The clock struck six. He took a deep breath. Got out.
Walked his usual route. Didn’t bump into anyone.
Used the main entrance: most people used the employee entrance when they went home. Swiped his key card. Punched in the code.
The elevator: two detective inspectors in the youth squad stepped out. Greeted him. They weren’t close. Either they didn’t know that he was under investigation and on so-called sick leave, or else they just didn’t give a damn.
Took the elevator up. The hallway looked empty. He walked past his own office, the one he’d shared with Ljunggren and Lindberg. Peeked in. The picture of Åsa was still in its usual place. All the tired old notes from the National Police Association were still pinned to the message board. Ljunggren’s Bajen soccer scarf was still hanging on the wall, as usual. Hannu’s speedway medals were hanging in their normal spots.
Per Scheele was sitting in a room, typing on a computer. He looked up when Thomas walked past. “Hey there, Andrén. Good to see you. How is everything?”
Scheele, two years in the department. Too green. Probably didn’t understand what it was all about or else he was playing dumb. Thomas just nodded, said everything was fine.
The fax was grouped with the other gray plastic monsters: the copy machine, the printer, the scanner.
Preprogrammed phone numbers: Kronoberg, the Western Precinct, the Northern Precinct, the jail, the Southern Prosecutor’s Office, and so on. Thomas fed his letter to Telenor into the fax. Double-checked that it was placed with the right side up. The ultimate mistake would be sending it so that Telenor got a blank page.
Dialed the number. Pressed send. The letter was sucked in. A police secretary walked past behind him in the hallway. Elisabeth Gunnarsson. Not someone that Thomas’d talked to much. She greeted him nicely without any small talk.
His calculation’d been correct: this really was the time of day when the place was the most deserted—except maybe for two in the morning when the night shift started.
The letter was fed out the other side.
Thomas heard a voice behind him. Finnish dialect.
“Andrén, it’s been ages!” It was Hannu Lindberg. “We were almost starting to think that you’d burned out, as they say these days. Didn’t seem like you.”
After Adamsson, Ljunggren, and Hägerström: Lindberg was the worst person he could’ve run into. On the surface: a joking, jovial, happy fart who didn’t turn down a drink or shy away from getting a little rough at work. But at the same time: Thomas’d never had any confidence in him, even though he was always entertaining to listen to. He didn’t trust Lindberg the way he trusted Ljunggren or any of the other three boys he shared the squad car with. There was something about Lindberg that didn’t tally. Maybe it was his smile, which seemed to say: I’ll make you laugh as long as I know you’ve got my back. But if that changes, I’ll be laughing at you.
“Hey there, Lindberg,” Thomas said.
Lindberg looked surprised. “What’re you doing here, you old boxer?” He laughed.
“I had to come in and deal with something. But you know Adamsson’s the one who wants me to be on sick leave, not me.”
Lindberg looked down at the fax. The letter lay with the blank back facing up in the tray. No fax receipt yet.
“Yeah, I figured as much. The whole thing is so fucking messed up. You’ve got our support, just so you know. A couple of us toasted you when we went out for beers on Friday. Ljunggren, Flodén, and me. You should’ve been there. Hell, Adamsson can’t have anything against that, can he?”
The receipt was fed slowly out of the fax machine. Thomas shook his head. “No idea what Adamsson would think about that. The whole thing makes me sick. But hey, Åsa’s waiting down in the car. I just had to fax this one thing. Tell everyone I say hi. Hasta la vista, Hannu.”
Lindberg grinned. Thomas picked up the letter and the fax receipt. Hannu Lindberg looked at him. Was that a hint of suspicion in his eyes? Thomas tried to see if he was eyeing the letter.
He took the stairs down. His heart was beating in time with his steps.
It was done. Smooth.
Like butter.
Back in the present. There he was, alone in a sun chair on Gloria Palace’s terrace. Seventy-seven-degree pool water and a group of smoking-hot Danish twenty-year-olds in front of him. And yet he felt so damned lost.
Still: all cops with balls had to go through tough times sometimes. It was over twelve years since Thomas’d graduated from the Police Academy, always with his sights set on working the streets, to be of some real use. He’d started as a patrol officer in the Southern District right away. Four years later, he was promoted to police inspector. A triumph. A sign that he’d picked the right career. His dad was proud. After that, three calm years. He met Åsa, made sure to end up in the same group as Jörgen Ljunggren and the others. After a while, things went a little too far, he was written up twice for excessive use of force. Some protest in Salem where he’d been called and some fucking wife-beater’d gotten too out of hand. He got off with warnings. And then Åsa had her miscarriage. He’d already realized the world was ankle-deep in shit. Now it just sank a little deeper. He tried to calm down by tinkering with the car. It didn’t work. He beat people up ten times worse, several times a month. Pounded on junkies. Split immigrant lips. Smashed shoplifting Sven swillers. But the spirit in the department was good. There was honor, a code. People didn’t say anything about Thomas using the harder method. You didn’t rat out a colleague who did his job.
Okay, maybe he was a dirty cop. A quasi-racist, overaggressive, degenerate police officer. A rotten human being. But sometimes he missed the good old beat. The part that was about seeking out the truth and nothing else. In the middle of all the shit he’d brought down on himself, in his lust for easy money, there was still a little bit of cop left in him. The one who’d been given a job to do by society: to fight crime. And yet . . . other thoughts elbowed their way to the front. What would he do about Radovan Kranjic’s offer? He hadn’t made up his mind yet—maybe he’d let the internal inv
estigation’s verdict decide.
At home in Sweden, all the reports from the telephone companies would be waiting for him. They’d promised him that.
At home in Sweden, in a few days, he would know if he would stay or not.
At home in Sweden, reality could do what it wanted with him. He felt ready.
Or not.
28
The cunt parole office at Hornstull was lamer than ever. Mahmud’s mood: cuntier than ever. He’d been an hour early. The receptionist claimed that Erika Cuntwaldson refused to come out and see him. “I’m sorry, she’s in another meeting.” Yeah, right—sure she is. Humiliation tactics were their thing. To always let Mahmud wait. He was gonna fucking pork that bitch in her “other meeting.”
Mahmud eyed the magazines and newspapers. Thought: Gracious Home, Dagens Nyheter—so gay. Name a single ordinary blatte who read shit like that. But the car magazine was okay. Mahmud flipped through it. An article about the new Ferrari. He drooled for a while. Then he thought: Should he split? Clock on his cell read fifty more minutes to go. He should split. But still: Erika was okay, after all. Plus: if things got messy with the parole office the cops would be all up in his shit, and if the cops were up in his shit social services would be all up on him, and so on. If you thought about it, the principle was clear enough: never end up in the system. ’Cause once you’re in, they won’t let you go. Ever.
Mahmud’d borrowed a cellie from Babak that he’d pocketed at his dad’s store. Could hold hundreds of MP3s. Babak’d loaded it with an ill mix. The baddest beat-bangers: P. Diddy, the Latin Kings, Akon. But also: Haifa Wehbe, Ragheb Alama—real Middle Eastern groove. Mahmud leaned his head back. Chilled. He was never gonna let slip that he waited this long to see his parole officer.
He’d dreamed the nightmare again. Back in the woods. Pine trees and fir trees eclipsed the sky. Arms raised to the heavens. The rifle gleamed in a cold light that seemed to be coming from streetlamps. Lamps in the middle of the woods? It seemed weird even in the dreamworld. On the grass in the middle of a ring of men dressed in black—Mahmud was looking diagonally down as if he were floating above the scene—he saw Wisam. Wisam’s hands were black from the blood on his face. It ran slowly. Warm. Hot like a stream of lava. He lowered his head. Stefanovic pointed the rifle at his neck: “We’re killing you, not because you deserve it but because we need it to show up in our balance sheet.” Wisam looked up. Eyes red from crying. A pulsing cut on his cheek. But maybe not. The blood was smearing his cheeks. His chin. Was running like in slow motion. “Help me,” he said.
It wasn’t the first time. Ever since he’d seen the Yugos pick up the Lebanese bro that afternoon. The dreams were fucking with his head. Patient. Persistent. Sharp like a cocaine rush. The forest clearing. The piss in the grass. Akhramenko’s jabs in the ribs of a faceless opponent. Stefanovic’s smile. Gürhan’s grin. Born to Be Hated. He tried to smoke up before going to bed so that he’d have an easier time falling asleep. Didn’t go to the gym or drink Coke too late at night. Only watched boring TV shows. It still didn’t work.
The memories were whipping him.
Stefanovic’d asked him to get in the car. He was dressed in a suit, with a cell phone in hand, and he was in a radiant mood. He turned to Mahmud, “Great thanks for your help.” Then he kept talking into the phone. In Serbian.
They were driving toward Södermalm. Slavic music on the stereo. A red light on Vasagatan. “Was it hard to get ahold of that asshole?”
Mahmud grinned. “No. Shit, man, I’m a dog-catching king.” Now, two months later, that grin almost felt as disgusting as if he’d laughed at his mother’s grave.
Erika rapped her knuckles on the table in front of him. He opened one eye. She smiled. What the fuck was she smiling at? Mahmud kept his earbuds on. Couldn’t hear what she said.
She knocked him on the knee. Tried to say something that couldn’t be heard through the phat beats, 50 Cent.
He took the earbuds off.
Dragged his feet all the way to her room. As messy as usual. Just as much paper, coffee mugs, bottles of mineral water, dead plants, nerdy posters with weird chunky peeps on them. Caption: Botero. Fuck, man, Botero, that’s what she was—a cow.
“Come on, Mahmud, you don’t have to act like a two-year-old just because you showed up early today.”
Mahmud rolled up his earbuds. “Who do you think you are?” And, in a softer voice: “Cunt.”
Erika stared at him. Mahmud knew: you had to’ve known her for a while to know how angry she really was. Erika: you could measure that chick’s fury by how still she sat. Right now: she was moving less than the naked statue on Hötorget.
Thirty seconds of silence. Then Mahmud said, “Okay, I was too early. It was my fault. Sorry. I just get so pissed at your reception chick. Why couldn’t she ask you to see me a little earlier?”
Erika moved her hand—a good sign.
“It wasn’t her fault. I was in another meeting. The whole world doesn’t revolve around you, Mahmud. You’ve got to understand that. Anyway. Let’s forget that now. It’s fly that you’re here.”
Mahmud grinned at her word choice: fly. Man, did she talk like that? In his heart: he couldn’t help thinking Erika was okay after all.
“How’s the job search going? You’ve practically got to be CEO somewhere by now.”
If it’d been anyone else: Mahmud would’ve lost his shit. On purpose. Taken it as a diss. A way of making fun of him. The thing with Erika: deep down, he knew that’s not what she meant. He usually knew that at other times, too, but here—it’s like he couldn’t have a beef with her for longer than five minutes.
“Honest, it’s not going too good. I haven’t been called to interviews lately.”
They talked. Erika chatted on as usual. Told him he had to sign up for a course, be in touch with some job-placement agency, his social worker. That he had to stay in touch with his dad, his sisters. A strong family was important. A social context was important. Old friends were important.
He felt a headache come crawling on. Disturbing. Wisam: an old friend.
He switched on the look-like-you’re-listening look. But couldn’t relax. Tried to soften the headache that was starting to scream: WHAT THE FUCK HAVE YOU DONE?
It felt like he had to hold on to something. Like he was about to collapse. Fall, crawl around like an insect on the linoleum floor. Felt like he wanted to tell everything, spill it all, to Erika. No. Khara. That wouldn’t work. Never.
He held out. Bit the bullet. Said yes to everything Erika wanted to hear yes to.
Fifteen minutes later, they were done.
Thanks, thanks, see you in two weeks.
Fast. Out.
Two hours later. He was staying with Babak for a few days, couldn’t take Dad’s whining.
Things were going good for Babak. He’d gotten a new forty-six-inch Sony flat screen. “Not some cheap sale model,” as he said. “The real stuff, more pixels than there are blattes in Alby. You feel me?” Babak pushed product like never before: blow, weed, even cat. Could talk about it all day: the coke wasn’t like before. It wasn’t just high-class flyers and the Stureplan clowns that were doing it. The opposite. The Sven Svenssons and the Ali Muhammads next door were ripping lines more often than they downed beers. Everyone was doing it. The prices’d dropped like at an after-Christmas sale. Soon: C would be bigger than weed. Babak transformed every coin into paper. The reward: flat screen, chicks, lackeys. Babak’d gotten two clockers who dealt for him. And that’s when the real profits first started pouring in.
Reward of rewards. Two weeks ago, Babak’d bought the number one blatte man’s wish: a BMW. The ride was an ’07, bought as part of a debt settlement with some poor Finn in Norsborg who couldn’t deliver.
Mahmud felt it strong: he was so jealous. Of his brother. Hated the feeling. At the same time, he promised himself: one day he’d own even flyer shit.
Babak said, “What’re you doing? You’re stressing me out. Habibi, sit down. Le
t’s watch a flick.” Sometimes he sounded so funny: spoke Arabic, but said the word “flick” in Swedish.
Mahmud responded coolly, “Yo, I gotta run some shit by you.”
“No problem. The movie can wait. Fire away.”
“I did something stupid. Cunt stupid.”
Babak did a double take, pretended to look surprised. “Come on, when did you not do something cunt stupid?”
“Seriously, Babak. This stays between us. Only. I betrayed someone I didn’t wanna betray.”
Babak seemed to feel the seriousness. Mahmud paced. Started at the beginning, with the stuff Babak already knew. How he’d been pressed by Gürhan, through Daniel. How his desperation’d grown. How the opportunity’d come like a gift from Allah. The chance to do the Yugos a small favor that they’d pay for royally. To find Wisam Jibril, an old friend from the hood, who’d ripped off Radovan. Babak’d already figured some of it out from before. Been to the Bentley store, heard how Mahmud’d gone door to door in every concrete tower looking for Wisam. But he didn’t know the whole story.
Mahmud stopped his pacing in the middle of the room. “You know, when he came to our place that day and I started talking to him, told him my business idea, suggested we meet up, I knew something else right then.”
“What did you know?” Babak asked.
“I knew I would regret this for the rest of my life. You feel me?”
Babak just nodded.
Mahmud kept going. He described how he’d tricked Wisam into going to the restaurant in Tumba, how the Yugos’d plucked the Lebanese, how Mahmud’d hopped into a BMW and driven off too. But they hadn’t trailed the car that Wisam was in. Instead, they drove in toward the city. Stopped at Slussen. Stefanovic told Mahmud to get out with him. They walked into one of the big buildings behind the Katarina Elevator. Took a cramped elevator up. Stepped out. There was a restaurant up there. White tablecloths, crystal stemware, pro waiters—real deluxe atmosphere. Mahmud’d had no idea there were joints like that on the South Side.
