Two Soldiers

by Anders Roslund

  The security camera from the jeweler’s shop continues to roll from its position above the counter.

  Large pieces and tiny pieces of glass all over the floor.

  “And from then on . . . abuse, robbery, arson, blackmail, minor drug offenses, assaults on officers, aggravated blackmail, serious drug crimes, abduction, armed robbery, aggravated assault, attempted murder.”

  The first curious onlookers in the left-hand corner of the picture, they look in and one of them points.

  Then suddenly one of the hoodies comes back.

  Him.

  “He was only missing one thing, and he notched that up last night.”

  The onlookers move slowly back while the twelve-year-old boy opens the door to the shop, goes in, walks over to the window, and picks up the square paving stone.

  “Murder.”

  He holds it in his right hand, goes farther into the shop, approaches the camera, turns to face it, looks straight into it briefly, then throws the stone and the picture goes dark.

  “And her?”

  Mariana tried to pin Ewert Grens down with her eyes, looking for the answer she didn’t get before.

  She was like her boss. The sort who never gave up.

  “The dad—she still doesn’t know? Why he disappeared? Where?”

  “Her son who became so good at throwing stones was taken from her immediately at birth. A social worker and senior social worker were waiting in the cell by the bed and an ambulance was on standby outside the window. As far as she was concerned he had a mother in prison and a father who had disappeared. That was all she knew.”

  “She doesn’t know?”

  “How many times do I have to say it?”

  “Why doesn’t she know?”

  “Because it wasn’t part of my job.”

  “And now?”

  “It’s still not part of my job.”

  ———

  Ana was sitting in the kitchen that she loved so much, by the kitchen table she’d had since she moved from home, since before Hinseberg prison. She drank the lukewarm coffee, always nearly half milk. She hadn’t crept past the empty hat shelf for a few hours, hadn’t even bothered to look out when more fire engines came, she was tired, almost peaceful. She filled the cup up when the doorbell rang and someone shouted police, open up. She finished her coffee, still wrapped in peace, put down her cup, and went out into the hall toward the voice that was still shouting. She stopped on the doormat, she knew who it was, knew why. It was good that they’d come, they always did, and she couldn’t stand waiting any longer. She stood just by the mailbox, police, open up, and felt the eyes looking at her feet.

  “It’s not me you’re after.”

  “Open up. Or we’ll break down the door.”

  “It’s nothing to do with me—”

  “Open up!”

  “—I’m on my own here.”

  “You know how it works. We’ll break your door down.”

  “It’s open.”

  She went back into the kitchen, half a cup more, then lay down on her stomach with her hands behind her back and waited. She had lain like this before, a long time ago, the big policeman had pressed her hard against the same kitchen floor. There were more of them this time, eight, and they pressed her arms closer, heavy bodies on hers, she looked out into the hallway, at the hat shelf, it was still empty.

  ———

  No more almond slices. Only half a pastry left in the bag. Ewert Grens held it out to his guests, who all shook their heads, so he took it himself.

  Hermansson changed the image on the screen, twelve-year-olds robbing a jeweler’s shop in Skärholmen now became a white car leaving Storboda prison and an eighteen-year-old laughing as he leaned out and fired wild shots with the gun in his hand.

  “Nineteen thirty-three. Almost seventeen hours. The last picture we have.”

  The map was still spread out, crooked, between the two windows.

  She loosened the tape in two corners, tugged it gently, then pressed the tape again, considerably straighter.

  “We’ve got more now.”

  With a red pen, she started to draw on the green and blue that was the northern part of Stockholm municipality.

  “Storboda prison. The last breakout. I’m fairly sure that in order to get south, they drove here—through Rosersberg—and here—Norrsundsvägen that crosses Stockholmsvägen—and here, through Upplands Väsby.”

  She looked at them. And didn’t need to explain. They had all heard a road tanker honking at someone in a car who got out of the driver’s seat and opened the trunk.

  “Then . . . Mälarvägen, past Edssjön—the cyclist who was almost knocked over—and on down to here, Söderby, where we found the car this morning.”

  A new map on top of the other, she taped it up and they were both straight now.

  “We know that three stolen cars were reported in the Söderby area this morning. One of them was a Mercedes Benz, registration number EBN 927. We’ve checked all the speed cameras within a ten-kilometer radius from where the car was found. And we have one hit.”

  The red felt-tip pen carried on more or less directly south, getting closer to Stockholm.

  “Twenty twenty-seven hours. Location, Bergslagsvägen by Åkeshov. The stolen car. And through the window . . . well, you can see for yourself.”

  She held up a very enlarged picture, handed it to Grens, who studied it then put it down on the table between Sven and Ågestam.

  Two faces in the front seats. Leon Jensen to the left. Alexander Eriksson to the right. Behind them, another three, not as clear, but for someone who had studied the full face and profile photographs of Marko Bendik, Reza Noori, and Uros Koren through the morning, they were in fact clear.

  “My guess is that they got here via the Lunda industrial park and Bergslagsvägen past Vällingby and Råcksta. But I actually know which route they took after that.”

  She drew a line from the speed camera at Åkeshov to Brommaplan, southwest past Drottningholm and onto Ekerövägen.

  “They passed by here—the very tip of Ekerö. Some woods. There is a sharp bend in the road down to the water and it meets another road precisely here.”

  She drew on the map with her felt-tip pen. A cross. Something that had four legs. And perhaps a gun.

  “A hunter in his sixties, at around nine o’clock yesterday evening. Out with his dog to see if he could find a deer that he’d shot. His description is reliable and detailed. The dog had picked up the trace of the deer at the Jungfrusundsvägen–Bryggavägen crossroads when a car approached at high speed. He’d raised his gun in anger, followed it in the night vision scope, he could have fired, he said that several times, young men trying to run over his dog. He aimed, could see them clearly. Then this morning on the news—the same faces, he was certain of it.”

  She pointed at the green and blue and sometimes yellow map. At the tip that was stretching out into the water.

  “I’ve just come back from there, met the man . . . here. Then continued in the direction that the car was heading until the road stopped. Continued along the water’s edge. Didn’t need to go very far. It was parked . . . here.”

  It was less than a kilometer from the abandoned car to the other side of the bay. To the mainland. To the high-rise blocks in the southern suburb called Hallunda.

  And from there, a twenty-minute walk in the dark on asphalt.

  To Råby.

  He gathered up the plastic cups and cake crumbs and moved one of the chairs, hadn’t noticed that anyone was hovering in the doorway.

  “I wanted to talk to you.”

  Grens turned around to face the voice that shouldn’t still be there.

  “Did you, now.”

  Hermansson. And she looked at him with an expression that wanted an answer.

  “Coffee?”

  “We just had coffee.”

  “Another one then. The café on Bergsgatan?”

  He sometimes went there in the morning and had
a cup of black coffee and a multigrain roll with cheese, the round table in the corner by the window. This time he sat down, but not alone. An odd feeling. His table. And Hermansson pulled out one of the three vacant chairs, beside him.

  “Wouldn’t it be better if you sat there?”

  He pointed at the empty chair opposite. She nodded, got up, and sat down there.

  “You’re right, then we’ve got eye contact.”

  “And you’re farther away.”

  Never too close. Even on the short walk over here, through the police headquarters and over the street, she was there, walking too close, and he’d wanted to take a step to the side.

  She smiled.

  “And it’s easier for me to put my hand on yours, like this. Like you do when you’re talking in confidence.”

  As if she’d hit him.

  He was so terrified of looking like an old man getting too close to a young woman, of human warmth becoming invasive and too much.

  She knew that. And let her hand rest on his until he realized that it was there and he pulled back and looked out of the window at nothing in particular.

  “Did you manage to triangulate which tower the intercepted call from Leon Jensen’s cell came from?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “The murder. When he . . . the conversation we listened to. His cell phone was connected to some transmitter or another. I want to know exactly where he was when he phoned. Which tower . . .”

  “Ewert?”

  “Yes?”

  “I heard what you said. But we’re not here to talk about telephone towers.”

  Intimacy. Integrity.

  He can’t see the difference. He has no idea.

  Just like them.

  “I know that Sven has tried to talk to you. And that you wouldn’t answer. The cakes, Ewert. That was nice. But that doesn’t somehow fit with . . . whatever it is that is anger, and yet, somehow not. You’re haranguing us. Yourself.”

  He was still looking out through the window. An older woman stopped to talk to an old man while their dogs sniffed each other.

  “I’m worried, Ewert. And I want to know.”

  He often saw them out here, a brief chat, the dogs sniffed each other, then off they went in opposite directions.

  “Anni?”

  “What?”

  He left the window.

  “This isn’t about her.”

  “Your grief, moving on, you have to—”

  “This is not about her.”

  “Ewert, you have to—”

  “This is not about her.”

  He had stood up, so she grabbed his hand and pulled him back down again.

  “Don’t you understand? You’re just like them.”

  “The telephone towers, Hermansson.”

  “Intimacy. Integrity.”

  “I want to know which tower his phone was connected to, where he was.”

  “They can’t see the difference. Despite all the words. Someone who says love. Someone who calls you brother. I don’t think they know what love means. But I do think that they feel something. That it feels good when they pat each other on the shoulder and say well done, brother, you knocked that bastard down, well aimed, one love, brother. When you don’t really know ‘Oh, is that what love is?’ ‘OK, that’s what it feels like.’”

  She wasn’t sure whether he was listening. Or whether he’d closed off a long time ago like he normally did when she tried to talk to him about the only thing they never talked about.

  “Do you know, Ewert? What love is?”

  If he was listening, he was certainly careful not to show it.

  “Ewert? Will you ever love another woman?”

  “That’s none of your damn business.”

  At least he was listening.

  “Will you ever—”

  “This is not about Anni.”

  He got up again. This time she didn’t stop him.

  “It’s about Leon Jensen.”

  He didn’t wait for her when he crossed Bergsgatan and went into the police headquarters.

  ———

  Lars Ågestam leaned against one of the elevator walls for support. In the mirror, a sweaty neck, tense jaws. From now on we have to use coercive measures. He was shaking. Forty-five minutes ago, he had left Ewert Grens’s office full of cake, following an update on an investigation that was going nowhere. He had walked from Kronoberg and Kungsholmen to the bridge that was like an arm reaching over to Norrmalm, into the offices at Kungsbron 21, up to the sixth floor, and had just gone into one of the public prosecution authority cloakrooms when his phone started to ring in his jacket pocket. Coercive measures? He had put on again what he had just taken off and run down the steps that were not made for running. Later, Ågestam. He had run without stopping all the way back to Kronoberg, in his suit and shiny shoes, past dogs on long leashes and young secondary school pupils on their way to the 7-Eleven to compensate for the lunch they’d skipped, not stopping or breathing until he got into the elevator that he now stepped out of.

  Kronoberg remand jail. Sixth floor. The women’s unit.

  He hurried over to the glass cubicle, knocked hard on the window hiding a young security guard.

  “Name?”

  “Let me in. Unit 6A.”

  “Name and purpose?”

  “Chief District Prosecutor Lars Ågestam. Let’s just say releasing the innocent.”

  He walked toward the unit door that remained locked, no matter how many times he tried it.

  “Open up.”

  “Why?”

  “Six charges who were locked up no more than an hour ago. They’re to be released.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I say so.”

  “We actually need written release papers up here.”

  The prosecutor’s jaws were as tense as they had been in the elevator.

  “And where I come from written arrest warrants are needed. Open up!”

  “I’m sorry.”

  Lars Ågestam didn’t try the locked door anymore. He ran back to the opening in the glass, slid a finger through, lifted the cover until he could get his whole hand through, grabbed the pile of paper lying in the middle of the desk, duty rosters, and pulled it toward him, turned over the top sheet, wrote something on it with the pen that he always had in his shirt pocket, and then threw it back in.

  The young remand guard studied the handwritten instruction and then Ågestam and then the writing again.

  “What does it say?”

  “There, it says Chief District Prosecutor. And there, it says Lars Ågestam, and at the top it says, Release them, dammit!”

  ———

  The young remand guard was much taller and considerably heavier than he’d looked when he was sitting in the glass cubicle. Lars Ågestam followed the broad back through Kronoberg remand’s women’s unit, past cell doors that hid the seven square meters behind a barred window with a view to nothing.

  Sonja Milton. Sofia Eriksson. Deniz Johnson. Ana Tomas. Amanda Hansen. Wanda Svensson.

  He had tried to get through to the detective superintendent for a long time now, put up with him, his disdain, he had tried and tried and then stopped trying, and had been deeply touched one night when he was the first person ever to be invited into Ewert Grens’s home—he had thought that they’d finally had a dialogue, but realized now that they would never speak the same language.

  The first door. The remand guard bent forward for a quick look through the small square hatch, then keys and the sound of a lock turning twice and someone standing up inside.

  When the guard stepped out of the way, the prosecutor met a woman who had just been lying down, her hair was tangled—especially around her neck, even though she hadn’t slept—and her eyes tired. He guessed she was around thirty-five, she was small, possibly looked even smaller in the gray, baggy prison service clothes.

  He held out his hand.

  “My name is Lars Ågestam. I’m the chief district pros
ecutor. And I sincerely apologize for the manner in which you’ve been treated.”

  She didn’t answer, didn’t take his hand, didn’t even look at him.

  He understood her. He would have done the same.

  ———

  Hermansson had looked at him with an expression that demanded an answer, and he had hurried to meet Sven and the car. She had followed and they sat in silence, as they always did, all the way to Råby and the police station on the edge of the estate of high-rise apartments that were hiding a murderer.

  Ewert Grens looked over at her, sitting beside Sven, waiting, at a round meeting table in the Section Against Gang Crime. A red Adidas bag between them, which was the reason why they’d come here and why he would soon sit down. But first he had to try to understand seven new faces with staring eyes.

  The same wall. The most dangerous ones. And the label with two names, Råby Warriors/Ghetto Soldiers, in the same place and under the nine faces that had been there before—four who were free to come and go, and five who he was sure were also somewhere outside the window. The other seven were completely new. They obviously belonged, even though the pictures were different—taken at a distance, cameras with zoom lenses, surveillance pictures of him walking over Råby Torg, and him sitting behind an apartment window.

  “They’ll do whatever it takes to be part of that group of staring faces one day. We can’t really put them under surveillance. Can’t track them. But I . . . the way things are now, Ewert, you need all the knowledge you can get.”

  José Pereira looked at the seven young faces beside those who were not much older. It was for them that he’d left two girls and the first half of a soccer game the evening before. Ahead of a night at the police station, to put together ten years’ surveillance work around kids of the same age who lived a life that was miles apart.

  “Eleven. And he’s twelve.”

  As dawn had turned to daylight, he couldn’t bear it any longer and had gone home to an empty apartment and another reality, so that he could carry on. Laura and Maria had left visible traces of a late breakfast and he put the muesli and cereal back on the bottom shelf in the pantry, wiped the plastic tablecloth clean of cream cheese and marmalade, washed up what was standing by the sink, and then lay down on the sofa in the sitting room. He slept for a couple of hours in a world with no thoughts or anger or a young woman who was scared and now dead.