by Jens Lapidus
“Let’s go there right now.”
They reached Hallunda an hour later. Thomas’d driven carefully. He was thinking about all the chaos in the city. A huge snowstorm was blowing in over Stockholm like a premonition: the citizens needed to be protected in the face of a catastrophe. Soon a new year would begin—with plenty of white snow, for once. Without there being time for it to be soiled and turn the usual color of snow in Stockholm: grayish-brown, full of gravel, dirt, and the inhabitants’ melted expectations.
Welcome to the Hallunda Mall. They’d created a logo for the mall that appeared on every sign: a red H followed by a period. Thomas thought about the way it’d been when he was growing up—early eighties, before the age of the malls—he and his buddies used to travel in to Södermalm and wander all the way downtown, to Sergels Torg, by cruising between shops. Records, clothes, stereo equipment, comics, and porn magazines. Maybe he saw a connection: that was the time before the malls and before the scum from the projects took over the city.
The P.O. box company didn’t have any windows facing out toward the actual mall. Instead, you entered through an anonymous glass door. They looked up the company’s name on a board, took an elevator up, above all the stores. It said, P.O. BOX CENTER in the same colors as the letters of the Hallunda Mall signs. The tagline was: Do you need a P.O. box? Are you new in town and haven’t been able to secure a permanent residence? What bullshit—everyone knew what type of people used P.O. boxes like this.
A door. A doorbell. A surveillance camera.
Thomas rang the doorbell.
“P.O. Box Center, how may I help you?”
“Hi, this is the police. May we come in?”
The voice on the other end fell silent. The speaker crackled like it was trying to speak on its own. A few too many seconds passed. Then the lock clicked. Thomas and Hägerström stepped inside.
The space: max 320 square feet. The walls: lined with two different sizes of metal-colored mailboxes with Assa Abloy keyholes. Along one short end: a small built-in booth covered with a sheet of Plexiglas. In the booth was an overweight man with a downy mustache.
Thomas walked up to him, flashed his badge. The guy looked scared out of his mind. He was probably trying frenetically to remember the instructions he’d been given in case a cop stopped by for a visit.
“Would you mind stepping out from behind there?”
The guy spoke in broken Swedish: “Do I have to?”
“You don’t have to, but I guess then we’ll have to drag you out.”
Thomas tried to smile—but he could sense that it wasn’t a very pleasant smile.
The guy disappeared for a few seconds. A door opened next to the booth.
“What do you want?”
“We want you to get in touch with one of your customers and tell him that he has to come here.”
The guy thought it over. “Is this a search?”
“You’d better fucking believe it, buddy. We have every right to get information about your customers. You know that. And if you don’t know that, I’ll make sure that every single box in here is broken into at your expense, and you’ll have to take full responsibility for the damage. Just so you know.”
The P.O. box guy started going through a binder with customer contracts. After a few minutes, he seemed to find Ballénius’s contract.
“Okay, so what are you going to do now?”
Thomas was growing impatient. “Call him and tell him a package arrived for him that is too big for you to take care of and that he has to pick it up today, or else you’ll send it back.”
“What did you say?”
“Quit it. Either you do what I just told you to do, or else we’ll make life really fucking sour for you.” Thomas walked into the booth. Pulled binders out. Started flipping through them. He found Ballénius’s contract. Actually: there was a number listed that he didn’t recognize.
Hägerström watched the situation unfold. The P.O. box guy seemed bewildered.
Thomas looked at him. “What, you want something?”
The P.O. box guy didn’t respond.
Thomas stepped back out from booth. “Maybe you didn’t understand what I just told you.” He walked over to a P.O. box. Rummaged around in his pocket. Fished out the electrical skeleton key. Started working on the lock.
The guy looked terrified. “Shit, man, you can’t do that.”
“Call John Ballénius right now and tell him that there’s a huge package here for him,” Thomas said. “Big as a bike or something like that. Just call.”
The postbox guy shook his head. Still picked up the phone. Dialed the number. Sandwiched the receiver between his chin and shoulder.
Thomas could hear his own breathing.
After fifteen seconds.
“Hi, this is Lahko Karavesan at P.O. Box Center in Hallunda.”
Thomas tried to hear the voice on the other end of the guy’s phone. He couldn’t.
“We’ve got a package for you that’s way too big for us to keep here.”
Something was said on the other end of the line.
“It’s big like a bike or something, but I don’t know what it is. Unfortunately, if you don’t pick it up today we’re gonna have to send the package back.”
Silence.
Thomas looked at the P.O. box guy. The guy looked at Hägerström. Hägerström looked at Thomas.
The guy hung up the phone. “He’s on his way, soon.”
Damn, that was some luck.
The buzzer in the office went off. Four customers’d passed through the P.O. Box Center while they’d been waiting. Said hi discreetly to the poor guy who worked there, exchanged a few words, emptied their boxes. Continued running their anonymous companies, their front-man operations, their porn stashes hidden from their wives.
The P.O. box guy signaled to Thomas and Hägerström. A man walked in. The same sad, gray face. Same thin hair. Same thin, rickety body. Ballénius.
The guy didn’t have time to react. Hägerström was positioned by the door and stepped up behind him. Thomas, in front, leaned in close. Ballénius didn’t even seem surprised; he looked despondent.
Hägerström cuffed him.
Ballénius didn’t resist. Didn’t say anything. Just stared at Thomas with tired eyes. They led him out. The P.O. box guy exhaled, as though he’d been holding his breath for the entire time that Thomas and Hägerström’d been in there.
Hägerström climbed into the front seat. Thomas in the back, next to John Ballénius. It was snowing so much outside that Thomas couldn’t even see the Hallunda Mall sign anymore. Warm air was pouring out of the car’s air vents.
Ballénius was sitting with his hands in his lap; the handcuffs weren’t pulled too tightly. Waiting for them to drive him to the interrogation.
Hägerström turned around. “We’re going to conduct the interrogation right here, just so you know.”
“Why?” Ballénius asked. The guy’d been around the block—knew: regulation interrogations were never conducted in a car.
“Because we don’t have time to mess around, John,” Thomas responded.
Ballénius groaned. His exhalation created a cloud of steam—it still wasn’t all that warm in the car.
“You know the drill. You’re an old hand at this, John. We can goof around and play nice. Laugh at your jokes to pretend to be pleasant. Coddle you, cajole you into talking.”
Theatrical pause.
“Or else we can just be straight with you. This is not an ordinary investigation. You know that, too. This is the fucking Palme murder.”
Ballénius nodded.
“You’ve laid low. You know something and you know that someone wants to know what you know. Me and Hägerström here, we also want to know. But there are others, too. Understood?”
Ballénius kept nodding.
“I understand that you don’t want to talk. You might get in trouble. But let me put it this way: you’ve probably read in the papers that they’ve arrested a man
for the murder of Rantzell. Do you know who it is? The media isn’t printing his name. He’s Marie Brogren’s son.”
Thomas tried to see if Ballénius reacted to the news. The guy lowered his gaze. Maybe, maybe a reaction.
Thomas briefly went over the suspicions against Niklas Brogren. Hägerström sat with his gaze fixed on Ballénius. Five minutes passed.
“You know what this means. Niklas Brogren is probably going to be convicted of the murder of Claes. But he isn’t the one who did it, is he? Niklas Brogren is innocent. And the ones who are really behind all this, and who were behind Palme, will go free. But you can change that, John. This is your chance. The chance of a lifetime. And that’s because Hägerström and I are not part of an official investigation. We’re doing this privately, on the side. So everything you tell us will stay between us, it’ll never go public. Never.”
Ballénius looked down again. Near silence in the car. It was warm now. Too warm. Thomas was still sitting with his jacket on. Saw his own reflection in the window across from him. He felt tired. This had to end now.
Hägerström broke the silence.
“John, we’re as deep in the shit as you are. Ask any cop. Andrén’s been transferred because of his investigation and I’ve been cut off. We’re not desirable anymore, we’re outside the system. And we’ve gone rogue on this. If that comes out, we’re done as cops. Do you understand what I’m saying? If you want, you can call one of your police contacts and ask.”
“That’s not necessary,” Ballénius said. “I’ve already heard about you.” A vein was pulsing in Ballénius’s neck. “I’ll talk, on two conditions.”
“What?”
“That you release me right afterward and that you don’t tell anyone how you got ahold of me or what you know about me.”
Thomas stared at Hägerström. Then he said, “That’s fine, granted you give us useful information.”
“That’s not enough. If it is as you say, you really don’t have any right to sit here and interrogate me. I want something to hold over you as security. I want to take a picture of us together on my cell phone. If things get bad, I’ll give it to some appropriate inspector who can draw his own conclusions about you.”
Dangerous horse trading. They’d be taking a huge chance. A massive risk. Thomas could feel Hägerström glancing at him again. The decision was his. He was the one most personally affected by this whole thing. He was burning the most. Was pushing the hardest.
Thomas said, “Okay, we’ll buy that. You talk, you take a picture, then you can go.”
Hägerström turned off the heat. The silence sounded like a scream in the car.
The old guy opened his mouth as if to say something. Then he closed it again.
Thomas stared.
Ballénius leaned back. “Okay. I’ll tell you what I know.”
Thomas could feel himself tense up.
“Claes and I weren’t close for long. We spent a lot of time together in the eighties and nineties. Especially in the middle and end of the eighties—you know, there was quite the time being had at Oxen, the bar, and then there were all the companies we were on the boards of. Between us, we made some hefty dough. But neither me nor Classe have ever been any good at holding on to money. Ask my daughter, you know about her, I gather. Claes’s money mostly went to booze and you can guess where mine went. I’ve always loved horses.”
John Ballénius continued to describe his and Claes Rantzell’s lives twenty years earlier. Hash parties, gambling winnings, goalie jobs, alcohol problems, fights, all that crap. Early business structuring in the beginning of the nineties, before the police’d understood how big the front-business bubble was. Names went flying by. Thomas recognized a bunch of them from the tales the old cops’d told from earlier days. Places were mentioned, apartment brothels, underground clubs, drug hideouts. It was a rundown of the rabble of the past.
“I didn’t see Claes more than once or twice a year over the past few years. He was worn down, I was worn down. We didn’t have the energy, you know? But this spring, I heard rumors about him. Apparently he was living it up like he’d won big-time at the track. And then he started calling me. We spoke a few times, then we got together at a bar in Södermalm.”
Thomas couldn’t hold back. “What did he say?”
“I don’t always remember things too good, but I remember that night clearly. He looked like a real suave player. Newly pressed suit, gold watch on his arm, new cell phone. And damn, was he ever in a good mood; ordered bottle after bottle for us to split. I wondered what was up, and when I asked he wanted to go somewhere private. We sat down in a booth. I remember that Classe acted as if every guest was a civvy on the lookout. It was obvious that he’d made a little too much cash for it all to be clean. But that’s how we’d lived all our lives, so. Then he told me how he’d thought it over, turned it over every which way, been racked with angst, shilly-shallied, but finally—they’d paid him. After all these years he’d finally dared make demands and that’s when they folded. He was fucking ecstatic.”
“Who were they?”
Ballénius looked at Thomas.
“Don’t you know that already?”
58
Niklas still hadn’t been in touch and it was the day before New Year’s Eve—the attack wouldn’t happen. Fuck, this was some gay shit. Mahmud didn’t want to let Jorge down, lose the promised cash, let the Yugos win. But without the commando guy, nothing would work.
Where was he, anyway? Mahmud’d continued, today even, to send texts like a maniac. His note under Niklas’s door hadn’t had any effect. But he was gonna wait another few hours.
They’d been over at his place again this morning. Prepped the weapons. Tried not to snort or smoke. They weren’t exactly experts—even if they were always talking about gats and Glocks. They needed to concentrate. They inserted and removed the cartridges from the magazines. Secured them on the weapons. Flipped the safeties, changed between semiautomatic and single-shot settings.
Above all: he’d seen Babak yesterday. First a short phone call. His former homeboy kept his style clipped.
“What do you want?”
“Ey, man. Come on, can’t we start hangin’ again?”
“Why?”
“Can’t we meet up? I promise to explain. Jalla, si.”
Babak agreed. They met up in the afternoon, in the Alby mall. Mahmud drove his Benz even though it was just half a mile. Wanted to show Babak: things’re going good now.
It was snowing like the North Pole outside. Big, fluffy flakes that whirled around. Mahmud remembered the first time he’d seen snow: he’d been six years old, at the refugee camp in Västerås. He’d run outside. First stepped carefully on the thin layer of snow. Then dragged his hand over the picnic tables, gathered enough to make a snowball. And finally, while giggling—attacked Jamila. Beshar didn’t get mad that time. The opposite—he laughed. Made a snowball too that he threw at Mahmud. It missed him. Mahmud knew already then, as a six-year-old, that it was on purpose.
Inside McDonald’s, in Alby: Babak was sitting way in the back, as usual. Hadn’t even bought any food—according to Babak, this meeting wasn’t going to be long. His boy was munching on something from a green bag.
Mahmud greeted him.
Babak remained seated at the table. Didn’t get up. No handshake, no hug.
“Shit, Babak, it’s been a long time, man.”
Babak nodded. “Yeah, long time.” He fished out some green balls from the bag.
Mahmud sat down. “What’re you eating?”
“Wasabi peas.” Babak leaned his head back. Opened his mouth wide. Dropped the wasabi peas in one by one.
“Wasabi? Like in sushi? You gay now?”
Babak popped a few more peas. Didn’t say anything.
Mahmud tried to grin. His joke’d bombed. Said, “I’m really sorry, man.”
Babak continued to eat his peas.
“I made a mistake. You were right, habibi. But if you listen to me,
you’ll understand. Big things’re happening. Real big. Ahtaj musaa’ada lau simacht.”
Mahmud pushed the bag of wasabi peas to the side. Leaned forward. Mahmud spoke in a low voice. About how he’d been working more and more as a whore guard, then gotten in touch with Jorge, that he’d talked to his sister’s ex-neighbor, who was a crazy fucking raider or something. He told him about the planning, the photos, the maps, the bolt cutters. And above all, he told him about the weapons: two assault rifles and one Glock. The illest arsenal since the CIT heist in Hallunda. All the talking probably took twenty minutes. Mahmud didn’t usually talk that much in one go. The last time was probably when he’d told Babak how the Yugo cunts’d picked up Wisam Jibril. That time, he felt angst. This time, he felt pride.
“You follow? We’re gonna storm that Sven party. We’re gonna lay out the Yugos. We’re gonna jizz in their skulls.”
Finally. After that last thing he’d said: a smile on Babak’s lips.
While Mahmud was driving home from Alby, he thought about the dream he’d had the other night. He was back with Mom. Back in Baghdad. They were sitting together under a tree. The sky was blue. Mom was telling him how you knew when the spring’d come because that’s when the almond tree bloomed. She stood up, picked a small pink flower. Showed Mahmud. Said something in her soft Arabic that Mahmud didn’t completely understand: “When the soul is happy, it has the same color as the almond tree.” Then it looked like the flowers were falling off the tree. Mahmud looked up. Saw the sky. Saw the tree. It wasn’t flowers falling, he realized. It was snow.
He was in a good mood. Homies again—he and Babak. His boy dug what he’d heard. Had held Mahmud by the shoulders—looked him in the eyes. They’d embraced. Like two brothers reuniting after many years. That’s how it was: Babak was his brother, his akh. A pact that couldn’t be broken.
After he’d explained everything, Mahmud finally asked the question: Did Babak want in?
Babak thought it over for a while. Then he said, “I’m in. But not for the cash. I’m in for the honor.”
