Two Soldiers

by Anders Roslund

  They stood in front of the wall. The one he scorned and the one that the kids out there aspired to and that always seemed to be in the middle of the office, no matter where he was in the Section Against Gang Crime.

  Nine young faces and seven even younger faces, far too close.

  As they had become more violent, José Pereira had moved them from the desk to the other wall and then farther up and then to the main wall, and farther up. Two steps left. Two groups above them. Bandidos and Hells Angels. Until Grens took the pictures one at a time and put them on the top.

  “If you insist on having your damn rankings. These ones . . . they’re the most dangerous. Not the fat asses on motorcycle. These guys are younger, have more hate, they’ve invited themselves in and taken their place in the only way they know how.”

  He had just been standing in an apartment with no door, leftovers and shards of glass and mattresses on the floor next to four TV screens with bullet holes in them.

  “We’ve looked up and checked out all the sources close to the group, the ones you described as stable, reliable, well informed. And nothing. No one has seen or heard anything, none of them know.”

  You didn’t disappear ten minutes before a raid by chance, did you?

  “And the bomb dogs, yesterday evening, last night, nothing. Fourteen hours and five hundred and four apartments. Seven thousand four hundred and ninety-six left.”

  You let us listen to you committing murder—the only phone call during your escape, to a voicemail—as if you wanted us to hear. And then you’re not there when we got here—next phone call, and this time to yourself—as if you wanted us to know and strike.

  You had the initiative. You lent it to us for fifteen minutes. And then you took it back again.

  “It’s them, Pereira, it’s him who decides!”

  I’m surrounded by houses and apartments and you’ve got access to several of them, ways to get there that only someone who is born here would know, the sort of ways that ten or a hundred or even a thousand police officers would never find without the local knowledge they will never have.

  “And we . . . we can only wait!”

  ———

  Fourth floor, Råby Allé 146. Leon checked the time on his cell phone. It had taken them less than three minutes.

  This one was bigger, one more room, with five new mattresses and pillows and blankets on the floor and a fridge full of beer, Coke, pizza, even some packets of chips and candy, and Gabriel had written the phone number down in felt-tip pen on the counter in this kitchen too, the number he would call shortly.

  Leon lifted the blind, looked out into the same dark Råby that would sleep for half a night yet.

  She had jeered at him, just like your dad, and he had hit her once on the chest and kicked her twice in the thigh and hip.

  He had hugged him, my only brother, I want out, and he’d pressed the cigarette into his forehead and his cheeks, and he’d just lain there, passive.

  He didn’t need her. He didn’t need him. He would never see them again, or talk to them, or even think about them.

  Leon opened the blind a crack more. He could see the police station now. And the window on the first floor where the light was on.

  They had broken down the door and run into an empty apartment. And they’d gone back to the room that he’d expected them to go back to. Down there. There in the building about a hundred meters away. They were in there, he could see them moving around, the dark shadows back and forth across the window, and his hands were shaking and his cock was hard; they were sitting there.

  ———

  Ewert Grens moved closer to the wall and the circle of new pictures around the nine faces that called themselves Ghetto Soldiers, the blurred ones that José Pereira had taken from a distance and the brightly colored ones that he’d cut out of school yearbooks.

  “Here.”

  Pereira had picked up a folder from the top of one of the piles on the desk and was holding it out.

  “All the information about the ones under fifteen. Twenty-one of them. Personal details, family situation, behavioral patterns, status in the gang, observation reports.”

  Grens opened it, children sitting on various benches, smiling, next to other children.

  “Known names for the last six months at least. The ones who look after guns and sell drugs and move stolen goods around.”

  Ewert Grens nodded at Sven and Hermansson, who came into the office while he was looking through the documents about the cut-out children’s lives, a personal ID number by every face. He figured out that the oldest was fourteen and the youngest was eleven.

  “We’ll pay them all a visit. One at a time. Some of them must know.”

  He tossed the folder back to Pereira, who had to stretch over to catch it.

  “Which one, Pereira?”

  Grens waved his hand at the wall, by the faces that were valuable until the day they could be sentenced.

  “Which one shall we visit first?”

  Pereira looked at the restless detective superintendent, then at the wall, pointed at one of the faces, with slicked-back hair and a thick gold chain, posing eyes.

  “Him. Eddie Johnson.”

  Ewert Grens looked at a child.

  “He’s the one who was sitting on that chair only a few weeks ago and who’ll be sitting there, at the top of the wall, in a few years’ time.”

  ———

  The low building. The big office with the light on. They were there. And no one had blown up a police station before.

  Uros was lying on the mattress next to him, breaking off small bits of frozen pizza that he couldn’t be bothered to heat—it was a year since he’d smashed the window of one of the trucks that transported bulk industrial explosives to a rail tunnel in Södertälje and driven off with it, seven sacks, one hundred and seventy-five kilos. Alex on the mattress in the kitchen and he was already asleep—six months since he’d made a hole in the roof of a construction site work store, some big house in Tyresö, sixty-two sticks of dynamite and a couple of thousand detonators. The cell phone from when they robbed the shop on Kungsgatan in the middle of the morning and the rucksacks that Bruno went in and took from the outlet shop on Skärholmen.

  The light was on in the office.

  They were sitting and walking around down there, a couple of steps away from what one of the kids had taken in and hidden in the cistern behind the toilet.

  One single phone call.

  One signal of radio waves that reached the detonator and cut-off wires—a bomb that would be a blast wave that would rebound when it hit the external walls and would press and blow to bits any bodies that were in the way.

  No one had blown up a police station.

  ———

  It wasn’t particularly cold outside.

  It was still some time until morning and the dark was full drizzle. Grens had started to button up his jacket but then he stopped and undid it, puffed his astonishment into the almost warm September night.

  “Fourteen years old?”

  “Yes.”

  They were going to visit them one at a time.

  “Thirteen?”

  “Yes.”

  Ewert Grens and Pereira were going to go in one direction, Sven Sundkvist and Hermansson in the other.

  “And this one . . . twelve?”

  They weren’t even out of sight when Grens stopped and turned around.

  “Hermansson?”

  She heard his voice bounce off the walls and she stopped on her way to another twelve-year-old, a piece of white paper in hand, a photograph of a child, but a description of grown-up crime.

  “Can you come here a moment?”

  She turned and went back to her boss, who was standing still, and had asked Pereira to wait a bit farther up.

  “Yes?”

  “Did it feel good yesterday?”

  “Good?”

  “No one has ever slapped me before.”

  When she’d placed her ha
nd on his, it had felt like she hit him.

  When she hit him hard in the face, he hadn’t even felt it.

  “It was about time.”

  Without realizing, he rubbed his cheek where she’d hit him, palm against what had been flushed. He hadn’t understood. It was she who had started, kept pushing, asking things that were none of her business.

  And then walked away down the middle of the E4.

  “Maybe.”

  He was quiet, cleared his throat, looked down at the ugly asphalt.

  “And well . . . you . . . maybe you were a bit right.”

  She heard what he said and should have been overjoyed, hugged him. It was more than she could ever have wanted from someone who found it so hard to get out of his own head.

  “About, well, that . . . fear.”

  He coughed again, searching for the words.

  “And that it’s about Anni. And about Leon Jensen. But mostly . . . mostly it’s about . . .”

  His eyes left the asphalt, looked up, but not at her, at the blocks behind her.

  “. . . loneliness.”

  She didn’t dare move, or breathe, anything that might frighten away this timid creature.

  “When the only person you’ve chosen to trust disappears . . . you’re well . . . alone.”

  He looked at her for the first time.

  “And sometimes . . . I don’t want to be alone anymore.”

  She dared to say something now.

  “Ewert, you . . .”

  “So there.”

  He was done.

  “So there, Hermansson.”

  He had said what he wanted to say and didn’t need or expect an answer, and had already started to walk toward Pereira, who was waiting on a bench outside the school.

  “Oh, and by the way . . .”

  He’d turned around.

  “In the car, yesterday.”

  “What?”

  “Comes under assaulting a police officer.”

  He smiled.

  “And obviously I’m considering reporting it.”

  They walked through an area where José Pereira could always find his way, no matter how dark, and that Ewert Grens had randomly become part of over the past twenty-four hours, past the block that housed a female tenant on the third floor who would never let Grens into her home again, the parking place where two new cars had long, vivid gashes from something sharp across the paintwork, stairs up to an apartment with a broken window by the door and a lonely shoehorn in the hall and a hundred-thousand-kronor rug in the bedroom. They were close to Råby Allé 102 and the document at the top of the blue folder.

  “They take all sorts of risks, commit crimes constantly, every new thought and action is the start of another crime.”

  Pereira held up the piece of paper, on it a face that lived in the building in front of them with his mother and little sister.

  “But never for their own gain. The drug deliveries, gunrunning, break-ins are not for themselves, but for the family, members who exploit these kids’ desire to belong.”

  Ewert Grens went in through the entrance and into the lift, took the piece of paper that Pereira was holding out.

  And he sighed.

  I’m sixty years old. I’m on my way to see a twelve-year-old. I’m walking through a suburb with buildings I only visit in connection with crime. I don’t belong here. I’m out of place. I shouldn’t be doing this.

  A bell that was louder than normal. And then silence. After a while, quick steps across the floor and the door was pulled open.

  A six-year-old girl. Maybe five. Even four. Grens couldn’t tell the difference.

  “Is your mom at home?”

  The long hair was tousled from sleep and she looked only at Pereira.

  “You’re a pig.”

  “Yes. I’m a pig. Is your mom in?”

  “You’ve been here before.”

  “Yes, I have. Is she there?”

  She tugged at her long hair, stared at him, and when she was done, she stared at Grens, until she turned suddenly and disappeared down the hall.

  They waited.

  “Mommy?”

  And they heard her voice blend immediately with another, older one.

  “Yes?”

  “The pig and an old man are here.”

  She had also been asleep, her eyes tired, a dressing gown around her barely conscious body.

  “Yes?”

  “Deniz?”

  “What do you want?” Her voice was brittle. “Eight of you . . .”

  She had just washed her hair, brushed it in front of the mirror in the bathroom.

  “. . . broke open the door.”

  They’d rung the doorbell, shouted through the mailbox.

  “That was yesterday.”

  The loud screams of a five-year-old daughter who’d come running from the sitting room and her worries about Eddie, who was out there, somewhere.

  “Tonight I want to be left in peace.”

  José Pereira looked at one of six women who were not suspected of any crime, but had been forced to their own floors and driven to the remand jail and locked up.

  “I heard about that. Some policemen make the wrong decisions.”

  He turned toward Grens, who refused to meet his eye, looked at him for a little too long.

  “And I apologize for it. That you were treated like that.”

  He waited for an answer that didn’t come.

  “Eddie isn’t here.”

  “Then maybe you can help us.”

  She couldn’t bear to answer, just stood there and held on to the door handle.

  “How about it? Will you let us in?”

  ———

  He had memorized the black felt-tip number from the kitchen counter and dialed one digit at a time.

  The feeling of holding the whole fucking world in his hand, a push of a button away.

  Then the lights in the room had been switched off. He’d had one number left. A few minutes later Pereira had come out the front entrance followed by three others, a big guy with a limp, a smaller one, and then someone who looked like a woman.

  They’d left the office. But he stayed by the crack in the blind with the cell phone in his hand. They’d be back soon enough.

  ———

  She hadn’t answered. Just left the door open and gone in. They closed it, walked down the unfamiliar hall with big furniture and pictures on the wall, frame to frame.

  “Since you’re still here.”

  A coffee pot in one hand and three cups in the other. Ewert Grens pulled out one of the kitchen chairs and sat down by the table.

  “Thank you.”

  She filled them to the brim and then asked her curious daughter to go to her room.

  Grens tasted the warm liquid that was so much better than what he’d tried to drink earlier in Pereira’s office, then he nodded to her.

  “Ewert Grens, the old man. And I’d like to ask you some questions.”

  It looked like he was smiling. So she smiled back.

  “OK.”

  He finished the coffee and this time took the coffee pot and filled the cup himself.

  “I’m sure you understand why we’re here.”

  She didn’t answer. It hadn’t been a question.

  “We want to know whether your son has been in contact—and really, any kind of contact—with the wanted men?”

  “You know he has.”

  Grens looked at one of all the women who had given birth and loved and probably still loved, but lacked the strength to counter the other love that called them, the one out there, that saw and heard and acknowledged and led them astray.

  “I mean now. Within the past twenty-four hours?”

  She took her first sip of coffee. It was still night, a long time until morning. But she wouldn’t get any more sleep.

  “I don’t know.”

  José Pereira held up a piece of white paper with a young face on it beside a list of documented crimes, put
it down on the table between them, as if to justify their visit. The first time, he wondered if she remembered, he had been sitting in one of the cars watching someone who was nine and hung around with members of a gang who then called themselves Råby Warriors, he’d taken him into the car, driven him home to a mother and little sister, and realized that something that would never end had just begun.

  “You don’t know?”

  Two weeks later he’d driven him home again and in the months that followed, she herself had called the police and social services several times and asked for help to take him into care, relocate him, put him somewhere, anywhere but here; she’d explained that he was slipping away, and that no matter how hard she tried to hold on, it was happening more and more often, longer. Slowly her efforts had ebbed away, and now they only met when her son was arrested for a crime or called in for questioning that required the presence of a parent.

  “I don’t know. And I don’t want to know.”

  Her eyes, as if they’d given up, the knowledge deep down that her son who was twelve today would be eighteen tomorrow.

  “Has he been home over the past couple of days?”

  “He’s my son.”

  “Have you heard him talking on the phone over the past couple of days?”

  “I love my son.”

  “Has he had any visitors?”

  “I miss my son.”

  They weren’t going to get any answers. As she had no answers to give.

  “I . . . everything. I’ve tried everything, I’ve . . .”

  She shook her head, but didn’t cry, she had already done that.

  “I’d like to have a little look around his room. Do you have any objections?”

  She shrugged.

  “Over there. On the other side of the hall.”

  Ewert Grens really only knew one child, Sven’s son, Jonas, and they sometimes chatted when he visited the terraced house and the boy would stay in the kitchen for a while between soccer games and hockey matches. No one else.

  So he didn’t have much to go on. But it seemed like a fairly ordinary boy’s room.

  A bed, a desk. A mirror, posters. A tin of hair wax on the shelf, he opened it and sniffed, remembered the picture of a boy with greased-back hair, an open collar, and a shiny chain. He lifted up the mattress, leafed through magazines, and turned on the computer, some games he didn’t understand. He went down on his knees, a sports bag under the bed, he pulled it out and opened it and one of the pockets smelled distinctly of acetone, not long since some form of central nervous system stimulant had been in there.