Into a Raging Blaze

by Andreas Norman

  “Oh. Fuck. What a drag.”

  She nodded and said it was all right. She asked what he did, in an attempt to change the subject. He was a developer at a company. Developed systems for logistics. He shrugged his shoulders and looked around; for a brief moment they hovered in a strained silence, surrounded by the roaring party.

  She was grateful when a girl, who had been mixing a drink, leaned forward and said, “Are you Carina?”

  “Yes.”

  “Hi. I’m Alex.” She proffered a hand. “Join me; I’m going out for a smoke.”

  It felt good to get out on to the balcony. The tempo of the party had increased; the music was beating against the windows of the apartment. Sooner or later, someone would be knocking on the door to complain, she thought.

  It was chilly outside. From the balcony, it was possible to see the center of the suburb of Fruängen, the darkened shops, and the subway station: a pale, neon installation with platforms that curved into the darkness. In the abrupt silence, she could hear the humming of a train in the station.

  “Thanks for having me.”

  “Of course. Friends are always welcome.”

  Alex was a girl you took notice of. Short and toned, she was dressed in baggy jeans and a large gray T-shirt with a skull embroidered across the chest. She had a kind of serenity about her that Carina almost envied, a low-key assurance that demanded to be taken seriously. Alex dragged on the cigarette, moved her thick, dark hair to one side with an indolent head movement, and looked at Carina.

  “So you want to find a dude in Brussels?”

  “Yes. I need to meet him.”

  “What’s so special about him?”

  “He gave me a document,” she said and stopped, unsure how she should summarize the last few days. What she’d experienced had been so unexpected that even now she occasionally felt like it had happened to someone else. “I had problems afterward. I need to find him and sort them out.”

  Alex nodded. “Greger said you’d been fired.” She puffed on the cigarette. “I normally run a tight ship on my site. But he asked me, and I thought it sounded . . . interesting.”

  She began to thank Alex for her help, but Alex made a small, impatient gesture, brushing away the words.

  “It’s not entirely legal, but I’m sure you know that.” Alex looked at her sternly, then laughed. “Not that I’m bothered. Just so you know.”

  “I understand.”

  She shivered; it was cold outside. Alex didn’t seem affected by the chill.

  “You really want to get hold of this guy.”

  “It’s my only chance. They threw me out of my job, and this afternoon the police came to my house. But I haven’t done anything. Only he can tell me what the hell is going on and explain to the people at the MFA that I haven’t done anything wrong.”

  “We’ll find him.”

  She met Alex’s gaze; it was hard and clear.

  “Politicians don’t give a damn about normal people,” Alex said. “Not really. I was part of the campaign against the FRA legislation and it was disgusting how much the politicians lied. They said that they cared about citizens’ privacy and that was why they were voting for the FRA legislation. Do you understand? These people lie; it’s their job. That report you got, the EU proposal, is just an example of how they try to control everything. So, no, if you’re wondering—I don’t have any problem helping you.”

  Alex stubbed out her cigarette against the balcony rail.

  A tall, skinny girl danced up to them when they came back inside. She hugged Alex and said something Carina didn’t hear through the music. It was past midnight; the party had begun in earnest.

  “There you are.”

  Greger plodded across the room. “What’s up?” He looked cheerfully at them.

  “We’re planning a world revolution.”

  “That’s good.” He laughed. “How are you? Do you feel better?”

  She smiled, nodded. She did feel better. Something about the way Alex spoke had made her feel calm. She wasn’t alone. She felt like things would be resolved, even if she didn’t know how. She finished her whiskey.

  Somewhere during the evening, a gap in time appeared. Carina clearly remembered standing and talking to Alex and Greger. Then she was offered another glass of whiskey, and spent a long time in the kitchen talking to three guys, but she couldn’t remember what they looked like or what they had talked about. For the first time in several days, she forgot about the Ministry, the report, everything to do with her life. She danced for hours. Time disappeared. She didn’t remember when everyone left; rather, she only noticed they had gone when the apartment was so empty that Alex was wandering around picking up empties, while a few guests lingered, talking. Greger was there, and a big guy with piercings. Carina was lying on the sofa and could hear their low voices while the apartment flew around above her in a slow spiral. She was so drunk. It was nice to lie there and close her eyes.

  At some point—it must have been early morning—she awoke with her heart pounding and a feeling of desperation coursing through her body. The room was empty and dark. Around her, empty bottles and cans glimmered. Someone had thoughtfully put a blanket over her. When she tried to get up, the apartment capsized and threatened to overturn her, so she lay back down. She had shooting pains in her legs. What was the time? That thought and the thought of how she would feel the next day then appeared like small, sobering glimpses before everything vanished into a roaring, wordless blackout.

  27

  Stockholm, Tuesday, October 4

  Carina squinted against the bright daylight streaming through the large windows. She had woken up a moment earlier with an unpleasant, floating feeling and she didn’t know where she was. She was lying on a sofa and must have slept there for a long time, judging by how light it was. She was so dazed that she couldn’t say with certainty what day it was. Tuesday, maybe—or Wednesday?

  A garbage truck rumbled along the street below, making the windows rattle. She sat up painfully. The blanket had wriggled down around her; she pulled it away. The headache came like a slow pressure-point against the side of her skull. If felt like her head had shrunk two sizes during the night; the very smallest movement made her brain slide sideways and hurt.

  It had been a long time since she had woken up in a strange apartment. The room looked completely different now: it was large and strangely peaceful. Someone had tidied up; the bottles were gone. A sudden feeling of shame came over her. At this time of the day, everyone was at work and she was here. When she tried to stand, she almost threw up. Cold sweat clung to her back. She sat stock-still until her stomach had calmed down.

  The apartment was bigger than she had initially thought. Apart from the living room and the bedroom, there was also a study. In the kitchen, trash bags were lined up on the floor and a battery of bottles filled the counter, along with mountains of dirty dishes.

  No one was home. She was grateful for that; she didn’t want to talk to anyone right now; she just wanted to concentrate on forcing back the nausea and getting over the dreadful hangover. She hadn’t had one like it for at least ten years. She had almost forgotten what it felt like the day after a real drinking session. She found the bathroom and took a quick, cold shower. She found a tube of toothpaste in the bathroom cabinet, squeezed some on to her finger and rinsed her mouth until she could only taste mint. She felt better already.

  Standing in the bathroom, she heard the rattle of the apartment door. As if being discovered in the middle of a break-in, she held her breath and waited as the person in the hallway closed the door, took off their shoes, and withdrew into the apartment. She dried herself and dressed quickly.

  In the kitchen, the girl, Alex, was making coffee in a Bodum French press. “Good morning,” she said. “I thought you were gone.”

  “Hi. Yes, I . . .” Carina looked at the clock on the wall. “Is it half past three?”

  Alex smiled at her. “It seemed like you really needed to sleep. Coffee
?”

  She nodded and stayed in the doorway to the kitchen, shy about being there, an unknown guest in an unknown apartment. Alex handed her a mug and looked at her with an amused smile.

  “How do you feel?”

  “Okay,” she lied.

  She sipped the coffee; it was so hot it tasted of metal. Outside the window, the pines swayed slowly. They looked alien.

  “You look great.”

  “What?”

  Alex held out her cell. On the screen was a picture taken late in the evening. Carina had an arm around Greger and was laughing with her mouth wide open. She was trashed. A girl she didn’t know was hanging around in front of her and sticking out her tongue.

  “I don’t remember any of that.”

  Alex laughed.

  They sat down and looked through the pictures from the party on Alex’s cell. Carina didn’t really feel like it, but was so weak that the mere thought of doing anything other than remaining seated and looking at the pictures seemed like an insurmountable effort. One of the last pictures was of her lying on the sofa with her head at a peculiar angle—she looked unconscious.

  “Jesus Christ. I hope Greger doesn’t put them online.”

  She hadn’t thought about the report once since she had woken up, or the police, or the MFA; for a few hours, she had been free. But now it all came back. Reality regained its sharp contours. She needed to talk to Jamal. She finished her coffee.

  “I think I need to go,” she said. “Thanks for letting me sleep here.”

  “Already?” Alex looked at her in surprise. “You can stay, if you like. I’m just going to be working here for a bit.” She nodded to a laptop on the kitchen counter.

  “But . . .” The police, she wanted to say. But she was embarrassed; her tongue glued to her mouth. “I need to go home.”

  “Greger said that you probably shouldn’t go home.”

  She looked up. Lively, brown eyes met her gaze.

  “No, maybe not.”

  She leaned back and watched while Alex continued moving around the kitchen.

  “Stay here for a few nights,” said Alex with her back turned. “Then perhaps things will have sorted themselves out.”

  Alex reached into a cupboard, pulled out a box, rooted around, and handed her a small object. “Here.” A plastic Mickey Mouse figure, and, dangling from its head on a chain, a key.

  Alex wanted to show her something, and took the computer with her to the living room sofa. Carina watched while Alex opened her browser and logged in to a website—a forum with different discussion threads, as far as she could tell. Alex opened up a link and let her read it. It was in mid-thread and it was hard to understand what it was about. The posts were short, like telegrams. A number of usernames were throwing around different addresses and numbers.

  “What is this?”

  “This is our little secret,” said Alex. She scrolled slowly through the thread. It was long, with hundreds of posts during the last two days alone. This was what Greger had talked about. They were looking for Jean.

  “My God,” she whispered.

  “This is Greger.”

  A photograph had been uploaded by the username Redstripe, next to a post. The photograph.

  He was there in the background—Jean. He had been circled and Greger had uploaded an enlarged picture of his face.

  Carina took the laptop and scrolled onward through the thread. Around ten users were currently online and posting in the thread, and the thread had a total of over five hundred posts. New ones were appearing every minute.

  She shook her head, as if she needed to jolt her brain to understand what it was that she was seeing. It was incredible.

  “You see,” said Alex. “You’re not alone.” Her cell rang. She got up and left Carina with the computer.

  She spent a long time reading the discussion thread and almost hoped, for a second, that the posts would stop flowing in, but they kept coming, each and every minute. Perhaps she had gone too far; perhaps this was a mistake. But at the same time, what did she have to lose? She went back to the most recent posts. Greger and his friends were clearly getting close. This was bigger than she had imagined possible.

  “This is . . . impressive,” she said when Alex came back. “But do they know what this is about? I mean, do they know that the police—”

  “Oh, yes.” Alex brushed away all further objections with a small, dismissive gesture. “It’s fine. This is no biggie for them. I know most of them. They’re good people and know what they’re doing. What’s more,” she added, as her phone chirped again, “the site is invite only.” She picked up her cell and vanished out of the room.

  It was dark outside when Carina wandered down toward the center of Fruängen. It was a relief to get out; the apartment just made her restless. An intense sense of unreality still lingered, as if it lay between her and the rest of the world. She had slept most of the day and it still felt like she hadn’t quite woken up.

  It would be good to talk to Jamal; she missed him. Alex was kind to let her stay, but she wasn’t sure she wanted to keep staying there—although going home was no option, not yet; she didn’t dare. And she didn’t have a key to Jamal’s apartment. She sighed.

  She cut across a residential parking lot between the apartment blocks and crossed a large playground. The streetlights had already begun to come on, and glowed with a weak pink hue. The day was already over. What was she doing here? she thought dismally. She was thirty-two years old and a diplomat—at least, until recently—and here she was, wandering around Fruängen, hungover.

  The center of Fruängen in the late afternoon was deserted. All these suburban centers that had been built around the nodes of the underground network felt simultaneously pleasant and depressing. The dream of a good society, but all that was left was these low, barrack-like buildings filled with grocery shops and liquor stores. Some youths were passing the time outside the video store; an older man was in one of the chairs in the hairdresser’s that had fading posters with the hottest styles from the last decade still in the window.

  She found a pizzeria on the outskirts of the center. Three alkies were there, staring morosely at the street. An elderly couple was eating dinner in silence. No one noticed her. She picked a cola from the fridge in the corner and waited while the two guys in front of her ordered their pizzas.

  “Yes, love—what can I get you?”

  “Can I borrow your phone?”

  The pizza baker shrugged his shoulders wearily. There was a phone next to the till, but it was apparently not for customers. He turned around, shouted something in Turkish to someone in the kitchen and got a short response. Yes, okay, he said. He pointed at the phone. Not too long.

  It rang five times before Jamal answered.

  “Badawi.”

  She exhaled. As soon as she heard his voice, it was as if her insides leapt. She leaned against the wall and felt warmth spreading through her body. Jamal was in Vienna, again. The delegation from the Ministry of Justice had entered a second round of negotiations about the budget for the UN agency, for which it controlled the Swedish contributions. Quietly, with one hand over the receiver so that the guy by the pizza oven wouldn’t hear her, she told him what had happened. Vienna was so infinitely far away, but when she talked to Jamal he sounded like he was right beside her, as if he was at home in his apartment. It became quiet at the other end of the line. Where are you now? he wanted to know, his voice somber. She had thought he would shout loudly, get angry, but he sounded very serious, very matter of fact.

  “In Fruängen.” It sounded so odd when she said it, almost absurd; she laughed even though it wasn’t in the least bit funny. A friend of Greger had let her sleep in her apartment, she explained, just for a night or two.

  He wanted to come back to Stockholm. “I can catch the flight tonight,” he said.

  “No.” She said it hard, almost too hard. She closed her eyes. How much she would have liked to say yes, come home, fly home. “It’s no
t necessary,” she said. “It’ll sort itself out.”

  “I’m going to do it.”

  “But you might get involved in this.”

  “I’m already involved.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  He said nothing. Then he burst out with, “But it has to be possible to solve this!”

  “Yes,” she said, without any great conviction. “It must be.”

  She had shown him that damn report, and Jamal had gotten her the classified material from the archive: he was already an accessory. She definitely had to try not to involve him anymore, she thought to herself.

  Jamal said that he had called her. He had gotten worried when she hadn’t answered. She explained how she had forgotten her cell in the park. He wanted to know more detail about what had happened—had the police gotten into her apartment? Oh no, she said, not wanting to panic him. All they had done was ring the doorbell. But of course she had been frightened.

  “I’m coming home on Thursday,” he said. “See you then?”

  “Yes, definitely.”

  They could go for a walk, he suggested. And then have dinner at his. “Things will be okay, Carina.”

  “Yes, I guess so.” She sighed.

  “They will. I’ll help you.”

  She pressed the receiver against her ear and closed her eyes. He loved her. She could hear that he loved her.

  “You’re beautiful,” she said quietly, and leaned her head against the wall.

  One of the pizza bakers appeared behind her and took an order. He glared at her. She edged to one side.

  “Jamal, I have to go. See you soon.”

  28

  Stockholm, Tuesday, October 4

  When she got back to the apartment, Alex was sitting on the sofa with the computer in her lap. Carina sank into a revolving armchair and looked at her. She felt completely empty after talking to Jamal. Standing there in the pizzeria and hearing his voice—a little stressed, a little distant—it had only made her feel more alone after hanging up. Would things really be fine? For the first time, she didn’t think so.