Two Soldiers

by Anders Roslund

  Threats. Fifty thousand. Violence. Threats. Seventy-five thousand. Violence. A hundred thousand. And threats.

  One hundred and twenty-five thousand in an hour.

  “Gabriel, you have to ask for help!”

  She gave him the cell phone.

  “Thirty-five minutes left.”

  He held it, fingered it.

  The Greek music had disappeared, the TV program had changed, the hammering was replaced by first a drill and then a vacuum cleaner.

  “Thirty-five minutes left.”

  He dialed the number. Two rings.

  “Police.”

  He hung up, looked at her, and she looked at him.

  He dialed again.

  Two rings.

  “Police.”

  “Um . . . the guys who escaped . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “. . . the man who’s in charge of the investigation, I want to talk to him.”

  “I can’t just transfer . . .”

  “And he wants to talk to me.”

  “He does?”

  “If he wants to know where those guys are . . . then he wants to talk to me.”

  One ring. And one more. The voice, the same as the last time. A man, an older man.

  “Grens.”

  “. . .”

  “Hello?”

  “You . . . you’re leading the investigation?”

  “Who’s asking?”

  A deep breath.

  “Hello?”

  More, deeper.

  “I can hear that you’re still there. Who is it that’s asking?”

  The breathing continued.

  “If you want to talk to me, talk now.”

  A throat being cleared.

  “I . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “You have to . . .”

  Gabriel clutched the handset, looked at Wanda, her face, her stomach.

  “. . . help me.”

  ———

  Ewert Grens drove the red Volvo toward the garage door that whined as it rolled up. The instructions were to pass the police car that was on guard and then go on into the underground garage and swing to the left after the first three rows of parked cars. He counted the gray metal doors, the seventh, an old Chevrolet, he was to park in the space behind it. He turned off the engine and put his gun on the seat close to his left thigh.

  He didn’t realize until he looked around. He had been here before. Eighteen and a half years ago. Another gang leader who had asked for help, after he’d tried every way he could to get out; he’d phoned, arranged a meeting.

  Leon Jensen’s dad.

  “Grens?”

  He opened the door to the passenger seat. Tall, Ewert Grens guessed about one meter eighty-five, short hair, black hoodie, and black track pants. He looked like all the others. If it hadn’t been for the dried blood all over the clothes. The wounds on his face. Eyes with different-size pupils and a right leg in spasms. And the way he bent over when he looked into the car, broken ribs.

  “You’re the pig who’s . . . working on this?”

  Grens recognized him. Despite all the injuries. He’d seen him several times in the past twenty-four hours, high up on a wall.

  The other leader. Gabriel Milton.

  “Sit yourself down. You’re not wanted. You haven’t formally committed any crimes.”

  He’d done time in prison and served sentences for other crimes. According to all available sources he was a serious criminal and one of the two brains behind one of the country’s most criminally active gangs. But for the moment, innocent until they could prove otherwise.

  “Even though I know that you know where Leon Jensen is. And even though I know that you’ve got something to do with the explosion that killed one of my colleagues.”

  An uncomfortable silence, they sat side by side in the front seats and looked into the gloom of the garage, each waiting for the other.

  “I . . . need help.”

  He turned a fraction, groaned, he was in pain.

  “Your help, I mean. Yours. The pigs.”

  A strong smell of vomit on his breath in a closed car.

  “I have to get away. We have to get away.”

  “I see.”

  “Don’t you understand, you bastard? We have to get away. And we need help.”

  “Why?”

  “I can’t answer that.”

  Ewert Grens glanced over at him, he was sitting there talking to a policeman in the way that he’d always spoken to the police—he didn’t know any other way.

  “If you want my help, you’ll answer my questions.”

  His breath, like vomit. Grens wound down the window on the driver’s side.

  A car drove into the garage, he followed it in the rearview mirror until it disappeared down to the next level.

  “Why?”

  “Someone’s threatening us.”

  Ewert Grens looked at his face properly for the first time. Five round marks, burns from a cigarette. He remembered the earlier documentation about Gabriel Milton, the description and pictures of burn scar tissue all over his body, except on his face. And he remembered the smell of burned flesh.

  “Who?”

  “I can’t answer that.”

  Grens raised his voice.

  “This is not a fucking interview. This is a conversation. About how you’re going to survive today. Who is threatening you?”

  He lowered it.

  “There are only two ways out. Either you die. Or you hand over your brothers and are given witness protection.”

  “That’s just bullshit. To get me to snitch.”

  “You can call it whatever you like. I call it an exchange. I want to know where Leon Jensen is. And then where Marko Bendik is. And then where Uros Koren is. I’ve been doing exchanges with gangs in Råby since before you were born. You’ll be dead by twenty. Or you’ll inform on your brothers under a witness protection program. There is no other fucking way out.”

  The smell of vomit. Or the smell of a dusty garage. He didn’t know which was worse but decided to roll down the window a bit farther.

  “I won’t inform on my only brother.”

  “To be part of our witness protection program, you have to inform on him.”

  “I won’t hand him over.”

  “Then you can leave.”

  Ewert Grens looked straight ahead, out into the grim garage.

  Even when the eighteen-year-old in the seat beside him opened the door and got out, walked toward the gray door, bent double.

  ———

  He stopped. Dizzy. A pain in his side and his chest, a rib digging even deeper in. He stood in the dark when the pig bastard started his car and drove off, waited as the door rolled open and the car disappeared. Then he went to another exit, Råby Allé 34, took the elevator up four floors.

  Gabriel stood in front of her door for a long time, the name plate, TOMAS, it had always been there.

  He rang the bell. Maybe she wasn’t home. She was, he heard her turning the lock, lifting the security chain.

  “Can I come in?”

  Ana opened the door, but only a couple of centimeters. She saw a boy she’d known since he was nine, and her instinct was to close the door and hate everything he now represented. But she also saw something else, eyes that didn’t look away or through her, then the bad injuries, and she knew who.

  “Can I?”

  It was hard to see if there was anyone behind him through the narrow crack. But she was sure there was no one else there.

  The stairs were empty.

  And he had asked for permission. That was a long time since.

  “It’s just me.”

  He seemed different. Not so aggressive. Almost reminded her of the boy she had met and let in so many years ago.

  “Come in.”

  Gabriel walked down the hall he knew so well, past Leon’s room that was no longer Leon’s room—repainted, it had been green and now it was white, a TV set where the large desk
had been—past her bedroom and the big bed that they’d jumped on and hidden stolen goods under, into the kitchen and the table he had sat at almost every day. He lifted the tablecloth, four marks from four plunges of a knife.

  “I don’t know anyone else.”

  There were two full cups of coffee on the table and he’d seen a pair of big boots in the hall.

  “Is there someone here?”

  She picked up the two cups and poured out the contents.

  “No.”

  He stayed sitting and looked around the kitchen and she saw a little boy who was big and had chosen the same chair as back then.

  “Leon . . . you and him . . . like me and him.”

  He curled up, he was in pain.

  “I don’t know . . . love . . . I don’t really know, do you understand? Leon is love, like her fucking belly . . . and Wanda . . . I’m going to be . . . a dad, do you understand?”

  Five round burn marks on his face, the skin he had always been so proud of.

  She understood. One love, brother.

  And she put her hand on his cheek, bristly, unshaven, fingers around the burns from a cigarette.

  He didn’t move.

  “He’s my only . . . brother. Do you understand?”

  “No. Because it’s you that is his only brother.”

  He was crying, big tears down the torn cheeks.

  “Brothers! Do you understand? And now . . . he’s . . . not there.”

  Ana sat in front of a person who was heading somewhere, in the way that she was heading somewhere, it was perhaps not visible, but you could feel it.

  “It’s not him that’s not there. It’s you that’s not there anymore.”

  Her hand still on his cheek, it was getting wet, sticking slightly.

  “But you, you . . .”

  “I love him. But I don’t have a son. Not anymore.”

  He should have got hold of it, forced it away. But he didn’t.

  “And you don’t have a brother anymore.”

  And he cried as he had sometimes done back then and she held him as only she had ever been allowed to hold him. She looked at him, then at the empty place beside him, the other boy who used to sit there.

  ———

  Gabriel walked slowly down to the cellar and out into the garage and back to Råby Allé 114, keeping his eyes closed as much as he could to keep out the light, bending forward to ease the stabbing pain around his ribs.

  He sat down on the elevator floor.

  He had paid and the debt had grown. If he continued to pay, it would keep growing, if he didn’t pay, they would die, both of them.

  You can’t leave me.

  The sixth floor, he got up onto his knees and crawled out. No Greek music, no hammering. Wanda was sitting by the wall under the trash chute and stretched out her arms when he got there, held him.

  “The pigs?”

  “No.”

  She moved apart slightly, her cheeks flushed.

  “It’s an hour and five minutes now!”

  “I . . .”

  “And you haven’t paid, you know, you know what they’ll do!”

  He didn’t answer.

  “Gabriel? An hour and six minutes!”

  “I won’t inform on them.”

  “You’ll die! I’ll die!”

  “Never, not my brothers.”

  “Then I’ll go there myself.”

  She had just reached the elevator when he got up, took a couple of shaky steps, regained his balance, and hurried after her.

  The first time outside since the escape, fresh air and slightly damp, it was going to rain. The sharp sunlight sliced his brain in pieces and he screwed up his eyes, pulled the hood over his head. A wide circle around the area to avoid being seen, around the back of the police station and the small parking lot, and he saw it immediately, the red Volvo, he was still there. Gabriel sat down behind it, took the cell from Wanda’s hand, phoned the City Police switchboard, and asked to be put through to Ewert Grens.

  ———

  He’d never gone into the police station via the staff entrance before; up the stairs, the limping pig bastard moved as slowly as he did.

  He’d sat there, in the Section Against Gang Crime, several times before.

  Opposite Pereira, conversation, conversation and information, questioning.

  But it had never looked like this. The walls were gone and the paper faces were strewn in small bits across the piles of porcelain and wood and plaster, and without thinking, he looked for his own.

  They had been at the top.

  Every breath still cut him up inside. But he couldn’t feel it. Because he was smiling.

  They had done exactly what they had decided to do.

  “I want those two out.”

  Gabriel spat at a middle-aged man and a younger woman who were sitting on chairs in the blasted room, dressed in civvies, but still obviously police.

  “Sven Sundkvist. Mariana Hermansson. They work with me.”

  “And I’ll only talk to you.”

  Ewert Grens nodded to Sven and Hermansson, they were to leave the room, then sat down on one of the two chairs and pointed at the other one.

  “Sit down.”

  The eighteen-year-old boy stayed standing.

  “No recorders.”

  With exaggerated, clear movements, Grens turned off the recorder and took out a pen and paper.

  “And no notes.”

  The detective superintendent paused, then dropped both to the floor; the pen bounced and rolled away, while the paper floated, hesitating, then fell into place between their feet.

  “We will, sooner or later, link you to the escape. Protecting a criminal. To the car. Vehicle theft. To the gun that was used to threaten. Serious firearms offenses. And with your record . . . I’m guessing four years.”

  “I can do my time.”

  “That’s not good enough. If you want our help—we want yours.”

  “I will never inform on my brothers.”

  Two chairs facing each other in the remains of an office. Grens got up and walked on whatever it was crunching beneath his feet, stopped in front of one of the piles of unsorted trash, and moved the pieces of porcelain from a toilet that lay on top. The broken plaster boards gave off a cloud of dust when he pushed them to one side, then some way down he found what he was looking for, a piece of metal from somewhere. He cleaned it on his pant leg, then on the sleeve of his jacket, a thick layer of white dust divided into a cloud in the air and a loud stripe on the material.

  He held it up.

  “Look in this.”

  The boy who was in so much pain did as he was told.

  “And?”

  “What do you see?”

  “What do I . . . see?”

  “Yes.”

  “Like a . . . mirror. I see . . . me.”

  “You can see your face. Five craters. He burned you.”

  Gabriel searched in the piece of metal. He hadn’t known what it looked like.

  “Yes.”

  “And?”

  “I’ll do my time. But I won’t inform on my brother.”

  The piece of metal in the air, it landed on the pile again, clattering before it got wedged between two legs of a chair.

  “Take a look at this.”

  The laptop had been in Grens’s bag.

  “I was sent this by three colleagues only a couple of hours ago.”

  Pictures from a security camera in a gas station outside Nyköping, a young man assaulting a woman and then pointing a gun at the head of a man who rushes in.

  “Not even a week ago.”

  “I’ll do my time. But I won’t inform on my brother.”

  Pictures from a security camera on a pedestrian street in Jönköping, a young man running out of a bar and smashing a shop front.

  “You can show me whatever you like.”

  A third security camera, pictures from Copenhagen police, a young man on Hovedbanegården, robbing an amphetam
ine dealer in the early morning.

  “I won’t inform on him.”

  “Aggravated assault. Serious threat. Gross theft. Armed robbery. All in less than twenty-four hours. If I were to guess, eight, maybe ten years in prison.”

  “What is it you don’t understand, pig bastard? I won’t inform on my brother.”

  Ewert Grens was close to screaming. But not here, not now. They were both fighting for the upper hand. Instead, he left the chair without a word, out into the corridor with footsteps that whipped the walls, and into the staffroom, over to the table where Sven and Hermansson had been banished and were sitting with a cup of coffee each.

  “Sven?”

  The vexed detective superintendent was red in the face.

  “Your baton.”

  Sven Sundkvist had heard what his boss said but stayed sitting where he was.

  “Now, Sven!”

  His jacket was hanging over the chair beside him. Sven took the twenty-centimeter-long black baton of sprung steel out of the inner pocket and handed it to Ewert, who pressed the button at the bottom, waited for the sound and the feeling when it extended to three times the length. First he hit the concrete wall above the stove, then the back of a chair—which split in two places.

  “Thank you.”

  Grens handed it back without attempting to close it, then back through the corridor and into the gang room to someone who was half lying on the chair.

  He had explained that by the end of the investigation they would be able to link him to the escape, four years. He had let him see a ruined face. He had shown clear pictures of a frustrated teenager’s rampage through Sweden, eight years.

  Ewert Grens had played all his cards. Except one.

  “You came here because you needed my help.”

  The laptop again, no pictures this time, just sound against a black background.

  “A telephone conversation. Only a few hours ago.”

  “No one leaves us.”

  “He’s threatening you.”

  Ewert Grens leaned in to the eyes that looked away.

  “And you, Gabriel . . .”

  “He’s threatening your girlfriend. What she’s carrying.”

  “. . . Daddy . . . you can’t leave me.”

  He reacted.

  The boy who was sitting in the place he hated most, but who didn’t have a choice, who had come here and asked for help, Grens was sure, he’d reacted.

  And he moved the cursor, played one single word again.