Two Soldiers

by Anders Roslund

  He tried to feel something. Leon had won. Pay, or we’ll hurt your family. It didn’t feel like he’d expected it to feel. It didn’t feel like anything.

  It was easier to get up from the sofa this time, all his weight on his left leg when he went into the kitchen and pulled out and turned around the top drawer in the cupboard beside the sink and pulled off one of the rolls of banknotes that were taped to the back. The apartment door again, the metal frame was standing there and he kicked it, a quick glance through the glass at the large crowd outside the police station. He would have liked to be able to go there and stand among the onlookers and see the consequences of the explosion he himself had planned and created. They had nothing on him. He wasn’t formally a suspect, just as Jon, Big Ali, and Bruno weren’t formally suspects. The police search out there was for the five fugitives who had killed a prison warden first, and now a policeman. He should be able to go out there, move around freely, but knew that someone who is not suspected of anything, and therefore cannot be arrested, might well have information and so could be pulled in for questioning and information and he wanted to avoid that—sit there in that building, look at the floor, and refuse to answer the questions. So he hurried past the glass door two floors down and chose—when he cautiously opened the metal door into the underground garage and spotted a couple of police cars on guard by the entrance—to crawl along the filthy concrete between the rows of parked cars to the rusty Chevrolet that had stood in the same place for a few years. And that no one touched. Their mailbox. He had detached the roll of tape from under the bumper and attached the banknotes in their place near the back left-hand wheel, one hundred five-hundred notes.

  Leon had won. And Gabriel didn’t feel anything.

  ———

  Ewert Grens was still holding the communications radio in his hand, careful to catch every word. “I can see them again!” He rushed out of the half-blasted office that had once constituted the heart of the Section Against Gang Crime, crossed a floor covered in bits of porcelain and plaster and wood and the sort of metal that was used in cell phones. “Still two of them! On their way in the door!” Out of the building, past shouting mouths and four hundred and fifty meters to a vandalized entrance in a graffitied wall, Råby Backe 17, he got there at the same time as fourteen members of the Special Firearms Command.

  ———

  Gabriel lay absolutely still behind the truck that was parked two spaces away. A couple of minutes, here they came, Jon and Big Ali, creeping as he himself had just done. They knew exactly where to feel with their hands under the rusty Chevrolet that had stood in the same space for several years. One hundred five-hundred-kronor notes just by the back left-hand wheel. He waited until they’d disappeared, then crept back toward the stairs and ran past the stripped stroller and into the apartment.

  ———

  Both in hoodies and track pants lying side by side on their stomachs, arms out at an angle, hands behind their necks. The three dogs waited eagerly, barking and wagging their tails, hoping that one of them would move.

  The SFC took over from the dog handlers, a firm grip on their arms and legs when they ran with them, screaming and swearing, toward the floor of the waiting van, they had both been bitten on the lower leg and were still bleeding when the vehicle left the place.

  Ewert Grens sat down on one of the park benches that had once been green and now were a tapestry of sprayed colors.

  They had caught two of them.

  The biggest police hunt since Malexander, and they had caught two of the five and the only thing he felt was this damn fury.

  Alexander Eriksson. Reza Noori. They meant nothing.

  He was still out there.

  The one who had murdered and who was a continuation, because every intervention had a continuation.

  ———

  She was sitting on the bloodied sofa when he came back, holding a cell phone in her hand, and looked at him in a way he didn’t like.

  “Leon called.”

  Gabriel was all ears, moved closer.

  “He said that you have to pay.”

  “I have paid.”

  “He said that you have to pay seventy-five thousand more.”

  “I have just . . .”

  “He’ll cut out the baby. That’s what he said. If Gabriel doesn’t pay seventy-five thousand more, I’ll cut that fucking fetus out of your belly.”

  Gabriel looked at Wanda but felt a knife. Deep in his body. And it was cutting something out of him, throwing it away. His first thought was to hit her as he always had when he felt like this. He raised his hand and held it high but then let it fall and grabbed her cell phone to dial the most recent incoming number. No reply. He sank down into the sofa that was brown with coagulated blood, toward the coffee table and his own cell phone, the number that could only be found there.

  “Brother?”

  The breathing, he recognized it.

  “You’re calling me? On this phone?”

  “I tried the one you’d called from. You didn’t answer.”

  “You put—”

  “Enough, brother.”

  Threats, violence. More threats. He knew how it worked.

  “You’re not my brother. Are you?”

  “Leon, enough. I’ve paid my fifty thousand. And I don’t give a shit about you burning the rest of my face. But don’t touch her.”

  He had done it himself, used violence against anyone who doubted, after all, he was one of the ones who’d made the rules, and he didn’t feel any hate, Leon was his brother, after all.

  “No one leaves us. And you, Gabriel . . . Daddy . . . you don’t leave me. I want seventy-five thousand more.”

  ———

  Sven Sundkvist ran toward Råby Backe 17, the heavy bomb suit snagging with every step, restricting his movement. Halfway there he pulled off the visor and hood and helmet, air around his neck and face, and there, down there on the bench, Ewert.

  Nineteen hours and six hundred and eighty-four apartments. Seven thousand, three hundred and sixteen left.

  Six bomb dogs had become twelve when reinforcements from Malmö and Customs and Excise joined the search, which had become even more urgent following the explosion in the Section Against Gang Crime office, where a person he had recently gotten to know had had his internal organs squeezed out. A colleague. A father. Of children the same age as his own son. If it had exploded twenty minutes earlier, half an hour later. He had been sitting there, the bomb was only a few meters away, ready to be detonated at any moment. If it had been him. If it had been Anita that Ewert had gone to see. If it had been Jonas who no longer had someone to call Dad.

  There had been a bomb and someone had detonated it when they wanted it to be detonated. There might be more.

  He was running a bit faster now, the vandalized entrance in the graffitied façade, they had arrested someone, this damn madness was perhaps nearing its end. Ewert sat on the park bench, his bulky frame sagging, hands on his knees.

  “It was me that started this.”

  He didn’t look at Sven, not even when he sat down beside him.

  “I came as fast as I—”

  “Two down.”

  “—heard that—”

  “Two down and it makes no difference at all.”

  The detective superintendent’s hands were rubbing the fabric of his pants hard against his knees, got hold of it, pulled at it.

  “He’s still out there.”

  “Ewert?”

  “He’s still out there.” Ewert Grens whispered, he didn’t often do that, and Sven didn’t like it.

  “Ewert, you . . .”

  The detective superintendent got up and started to walk; he didn’t limp and his neck wasn’t stiff. Sven had never seen him move like that.

  “It was me who started all this. And it’s me who’s going to finish it.”

  ———

  The apartment he hadn’t visited for eighteen years and that he had now been to twice in less t
han twenty-four hours. This was the third time. Ewert Grens rang the doorbell. She didn’t open.

  “You and I have to talk.”

  He continued to ring the bell, he could hear her inside the door.

  “I explained to you yesterday evening. You—”

  “We were talking about your son, who had murdered someone.”

  “—will never come into my home again.”

  “He’s murdered someone else now.”

  ———

  Grens saw it immediately. She’d only opened the door a crack, but had obvious injuries on her face, perhaps also on her torso, the way she was holding her body and weight.

  “Are you in a relationship at the moment?”

  He studied her again, she was leaning to the right to ease the pain, and one of the blows had been hard, to her neck on the left-hand side.

  “Well, are you?”

  Ana wanted to whisper what kind of a fucking question is that? But she didn’t. She knew why he was asking.

  “No.”

  He lowered his gaze demonstratively to a pair of men’s boots in the hall. A type he recognized. A fireman’s boots. He thought he’d heard someone moving in the sitting room already.

  “Have you got a visitor?”

  “Yes.”

  He indicated her hip and face.

  “Was it him who . . . ?”

  “No.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “It wasn’t him.”

  Ewert Grens had his gun in a worn, brown leather holster across his shoulder. He undid it, the black gun in his hand when he cocked it and forced his way past her and made for the sitting room, gun aimed and at the ready. The fireman, who had left his shoes in the hall and was now sitting in an armchair, looked very like the one he had just met on the stairs on his way into the destroyed police station and who’d had LEADING FIREFIGHTER written on his helmet, jacket, pants. The detective superintendent nodded at him, lowered his gun, and put it back in the holster before returning to the obvious injuries to her body.

  “If it wasn’t . . . the fireman in there, and it wasn’t a boyfriend . . . then he’s been here.”

  She shook her head slowly at the floor.

  “You’re standing there asking me to report him?”

  “I—”

  “You’re standing there . . . making demands? And who . . . who are you to make demands? Where were you when the only big shop we had, the men’s clothing shop, moved to Älvsjö two weeks ago, to avoid being constantly burgled here? Where were you when the last restaurant closed after the seventh break-in this year—I think they’d driven a car into the window? Where the hell were you when the ticket collector on the metro was murdered and Stockholm Public Transport refused to let their staff work here for a long time, when the post office closed down, when the ATMs were dismantled, when . . .”

  She swallowed, tried to catch his eyes, which were focused on the swelling on her left cheek.

  “Your colleagues don’t even bother to come here to investigate anymore because it’s too dangerous. We’re encouraged not to go out after ten in the evening because it’s too dangerous. The rights and obligations that are so important for all the other citizens in this country, that are talked about so much—how they should be upheld and maintained—they don’t apply here.”

  When he chose to concentrate on the other swelling instead, the one that merged her chin with the greater part of her right cheek, he could see that it had grown a bit.

  “I—”

  “They don’t apply here!”

  “I know that—”

  “They don’t apply here because everyone, society, has long since abandoned us, moved away, bit by bit! And you . . . you stand here making demands?”

  “Your injuries, I know that he . . .”

  She shook her head slowly again, laughed. Not very loud, not very merrily.

  “The first time, yesterday. You asked if I remembered you. I said that I did.”

  She opened a bit more, took a small step toward him.

  “I said that I did because I remember every word, every nuance of your face. When you stood here all that time ago, outside my door with a search warrant. When you produced a pasta jar with a kilo of heroin in it. When I asked you about my man and you shook your head, just as I’m doing now. When I gave birth alone. And when you some years later said when you need my help, call me and never got in touch again.”

  The light was falling on her face, making it clearer, and he concentrated on her mouth, one of her upper teeth was missing.

  “Do you know how that feels?”

  “No.”

  “Don’t you understand how—”

  “No. I’ve never had children. No matter how hard I try, I can’t understand how it feels. The only thing I know is that every intervention has consequences. It’s . . . still happening.”

  She could fear her son, even hate him, Grens had met her before, so many like her, mothers who feared and hated, but who had carried and given birth and therefore were always a part of something they no longer understood.

  “It will stop.”

  He had no idea what she was talking about.

  “I see.”

  Ana put her hand to her tender cheek and mouth.

  “What’s happening can’t be allowed to keep happening. And only the one who started it can stop it.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Only that.”

  A park bench. He had just been sitting on a park bench and said exactly that.

  Another voice. His voice.

  “What . . . are you talking about?”

  Her eyes, harder than before and her lips tighter, tense.

  “I’m talking about just that. That only the one who started all this can stop it.”

  ———

  Gabriel lay on the sofa’s layer of blood. Wanda beside him, so close.

  He wanted to touch her in the way that she often touched him, his hand on her cheek. He couldn’t. He had seen others doing it, Leon’s mother’s hand on his cheek when they were little and sitting beside her at the kitchen table. Wanda’s hand that he so often accepted. But he couldn’t. He’d never done it. It felt false.

  It was easier to hit.

  Leon called. That’s what he said. If Gabriel doesn’t pay seventy-five thousand more, I’ll cut that fucking fetus out of your belly.

  The knife through his body.

  He went into the kitchen, another drawer this time, cutlery and white napkins and small tealights that Wanda liked to put on the table, he pulled it out and took a roll of banknotes from the back and hurried down into the garage to the Chevrolet and the same hiding place by the back left-hand wheel, back over the floor and in through the metal door to the cellar, and it was there, in the dark, that Jon aimed the first blow with a heavy iron pipe against the back of his thigh. He fell forward onto the stairs and Big Ali and Bruno were waiting on either side and kicked his body and when he then curled up and protected his head, they kicked his arms and hands until he let go, the last kicks to his chin and cheek as they whispered a hundred thousand more in an hour or we’ll cut the fucking baby out in his ear.

  ———

  Her face, swollen and blue, and the pain that she’d tried to hide in the doorway.

  Leon Jensen had been there. He was moving around, despite all the road blocks, dogs, helicopters, in a world of meandering asphalt walkways and besieged apartments and broken-in cellar storerooms and loyal hangarounds that were an impregnable advantage to those who were born here, which anyone who was just visiting without an informal map in hand would therefore never be able to keep up with.

  Grens zigzagged through the crowd, which had thinned out a bit. The gray smoke floating almost transparent in the air, glass splinters crunching uncleared. From the outside, Råby police station looked intact, except for the three windows, despite the fact that a body had recently been squeezed to death in there.

  He stopped by the lantern with a candle in i
t that someone had lit and put down in front of the entrance beside a bunch of red roses.

  “Ewert?”

  A car had passed through the cordon and was approaching at great speed, yellow, some Japanese make that he recognized from the Kronoberg garage and the face inside the wound-down window was familiar.

  “Yes?”

  Gunnar Werner.

  Despite having worked together all these years, Grens had never seen him outside the police headquarters.

  “So the detective superintendent is still awake?”

  The policeman from the eighth floor had only a few hours earlier discovered an outstretched leg, followed shortly by a whole sleeping body in the trunk of a murder scene.

  “I wasn’t asleep. I was resting my eyes.”

  When he got out, Werner was holding a laptop, which he opened and put down on the car roof.

  “I want you to listen to this.”

  “Brother?”

  “Gabriel Milton.”

  “You’re calling me? On this phone?”

  “And Leon Jensen. Fifty-seven minutes ago.”

  “Enough, brother.”

  “You are not my brother.”

  “A phone call from Råby Allé 114, ground floor. Tenant, Wanda Svensson. Phone call made to Råby Allé 172. Fifth floor. Tenant, Linn Holmgren.”

  “Leon, enough. I’ve paid my fifty thousand. I don’t give a shit about you burning the rest of my face. But don’t touch her.”

  “He wants out.”

  Leon Jensen’s best friend since he was nine. One of the gang’s two leaders.

  “Werner, he wants out!”

  Ewert Grens hit the car roof with his hand.

  “He’s being threatened. His girlfriend is being threatened. And he’s going to be fined and threatened and fined for eternity. If we get hold of him . . . from now on, you see, he’s the way to Jensen!”

  ———

  He lay on the cellar floor. He could feel it most on his left side, more than one of his ribs were broken and the pain turned his body inside out with every breath, forcing his muscles to cramp when he pulled himself up one step at a time. His face was swollen, two fingers on his right hand broken, his back ached and his thigh, where they had sanded off a tattoo, was burning like before.