Two Soldiers

by Anders Roslund

  He could hit him. Beat the shit out of him.

  Leon followed the thin hand, the sawed-off chair leg, met the smile. And put ten yellow-and-white capsules in the same place he had previously, and when the giggle that cut through his brain was on the way out he’d already decided that it couldn’t be heard.

  ———

  Smackhead now lifted up one of the bolts and screwed it into one of the predrilled holes on the metal pipe, the one at the very end that would take the force of the whole bolt mechanism, the steel spring.

  Ten capsules.

  ———

  One of the pieces of short, solid iron piping, the one that was three centimeters long and a few hours earlier had been part of one of the forklift trucks in the laundry and was now lying close to the head of the bed with a new drill hole from one end to the other, thin fingers holding it, pressing in a concrete nail from the hand towel holder in the shower room and a metal circuit board that had been on the TV cable, a pungent smell of glue between each part.

  Ten capsules.

  Thin fingers threading the nine-centimeter steel spring from the unit’s hair clippers around the nut.

  Ten capsules.

  Thin fingers holding up the metal piping with the bolt and cement nail and steel spring and nut, the gun’s bolt mechanism, feeding it into the long, hollow pipe.

  Ten capsules.

  Thin fingers picking the last piece of lead piping from the sheet, the one from the laundry’s other forklift, four and a half centimeters long, and the gun’s barrel, with a drill hole to fit a .22 caliber bullet that he’d collected from Petrovic in Block F at lunch and now carefully inserted.

  Ten capsules.

  ———

  He giggled as he pushed the bolt mechanism into the chair leg until the spring was coiled, then pushed in the barrel, fixed the pieces of metal together with four small screws, giggled again and held out a finished zip gun.

  ———

  “The Count, that was his name, it was a long fucking time ago, in Hall prison, I think, he was the one who taught me.”

  He was holding three hundred and fifty grams of amphetamines in one hand, the pistol in the other.

  “Nine. Made inside the walls.”

  He was almost smiling for real.

  “Three unsolved murders. Two escapes from maximum security prisons. One escape from a young offenders’ institution. Two for . . . well, debt collection. And one that . . . that I can’t say what the fuck it was used for.”

  He held the pistol out a bit farther.

  “The tenth. Who?”

  Leon leaned against the metal door that wouldn’t go any farther back.

  “Who are you going to use this on?”

  He looked at the piece of metal, at the fucking bastard smile.

  “My dad.”

  It was darker, dusk on its way into late evening, it was no longer possible to see the wall from the cell window. And out there in the corridor, behind his back, the guards preparing for lockup.

  He didn’t have much time.

  “I asked who.”

  “And I answered.”

  The skinny hand was still holding the pistol it had just made in a firm grip.

  “I asked who you were going to use it on?”

  “And I answered. My dad.”

  That fucking smile, even when someone only a few meters from him shook their head.

  “That’s no fucking answer.”

  “It’s the only answer you’ll get.”

  The yellow teeth, the labored breathing.

  “OK. OK, boy.”

  He prodded his young visitor in the chest with the pistol.

  “Do you want it then?”

  “When you’ve put the trigger on.”

  Smackhead was breathing heavily, this was going well, he was the one who decided.

  “Oh . . . you want a trigger as well? But that’s not so . . . ah yes, that’s right . . . your currency, your speed, it ran out, didn’t it?”

  Leon raised his arm.

  Not yet.

  Not before it was ready.

  “I’ve paid three hundred and fifty. There is no more in here.”

  Not before next week.

  “Your chain.”

  Smackhead giggled again, pointed a yellowed finger at Leon’s throat, almost touched it.

  “If you take off your gold chain. And put it down there on the bed. Then I might be able to find and attach a trigger.”

  Not yet. Not yet.

  Leon undid the heavy clasp on his chain, weighed it in his hand, threw it down on the disarray of sheets.

  “Well done, son. You can do it.”

  The skinny body in the middle of the bed, holding the gold chain in both hands, the thickest gold chain in the unit and the last symbol of authority that someone who now reigned would take from someone who until recently had reigned. Trembling fingertips as they fastened the chain around his neck and let the soft metal slip between them, a warm buzz like the one that filled him when he injected Koffazon, anyone who owned a chain like this was really someone and you’d do business with them, they carried the security for every deal around their neck.

  “The trigger.”

  “In a minute.”

  The final piece was lying on the crumpled sheet. One of the bolts. Thin fingers dug it out, screwed it into the last hole on the bolt mechanism leaving a few centimeters free—the head of the bolt had to stand clear, so that the marksman could hold it.

  ———

  He tried to feel something, wanted to feel something.

  He felt nothing.

  Not even when he turned the pistol on someone who was sitting on a bed giggling with a gold chain around his neck.

  “You.”

  The chain, it was so nice, fingers holding it tight.

  “It’s you I’m going to use this on.”

  He obviously hadn’t heard.

  “It’s . . .”

  “Me?”

  “Yes.”

  He had heard. But hadn’t quite understood yet.

  “What the fuck—”

  “I said, didn’t I? I was going to use it on my dad.”

  He wasn’t giggling any longer. He sighed, shrugged.

  “Listen, son, I haven’t got any kids.”

  Leon tried to meet the eyes that constantly evaded.

  “Ana.”

  “What?”

  “Ana Tomas.”

  The bony shoulders shrugged again.

  But this time, the shrug of someone who has heard, has maybe even understood and is trying not to show it.

  “Who the hell is she?”

  “My mother. She was seventeen. She did time in Hinseberg.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  A spasm, a shrug again.

  “I don’t have any fucking children.”

  “She was in Hinseberg.”

  “I’ve never had any fucking children.”

  “And I—”

  “No kids. Do you hear me?”

  “—I was born there.”

  ———

  They looked at each other for a long time.

  Even when Leon put his finger on the bolt and slowly released the zip gun’s trigger.

  ———

  He felt nothing.

  ———

  Not even when he put the pistol to his own forehead and released the bolt completely, when the smile in front of him slowly became blurred, disappeared.

  now

  part six

  (four hours)

  What had been blue and then turned yellow was now nearly brown. When she let her fingertips gently follow the skin over her face, hip, pelvis, it was still very tender and swollen. He had hit her and kicked her. For the first time. She was the only one left.

  Ana had for nearly a week now sat on a soft sofa and watched the news specials on every TV channel. A young woman in a blue uniform in a car trunk. A middle-aged man blown up in a police
station. And then a face, his face, a black-and-white photograph from the prison service archives, together with his voice on a recording from the car that the young, pale woman had been lying in.

  He had been eighteen.

  In one month and three days he would have been nineteen.

  When he smiled—as he sometimes had—the cleft in his chin had deepened and his upper lip stretched and was narrower than his lower lip. And when he talked he made the emphasis hard—well, only with some vowels, really—so the words were longer. And when he was small, every time he was a bit thirsty, he’d pushed the milk to one side and demanded sweet rosehip soup—she’d known that it wasn’t particularly good for him, but had sometimes given in and he’d been so happy, balancing the big ceramic mug in his small hands.

  She got up and left without turning off the TV, out into the hall with her coat on.

  I had a child. I have no children.

  She’d followed him as far as she could. She had been a mother who also worked for the authority that was responsible for him until he was fifteen, and when the others had gone home, she often stayed sitting at her desk well into the evening and night, with the green and red files on her knees. And she had, when he became criminally responsible and left the desks of the social services offices for those of the Police Authority and Prison Service, met regularly and spoken with José Pereira, and with his help been able to sit and hold other files.

  Criminal network of young men who have grown up in different Stockholm suburbs, with Råby as the hub.

  Just one of them.

  Just one gang of so many in this area alone.

  Two identified leaders. Leon Jensen. Gabriel Milton. Both eighteen years old. Both classified as dangerous.

  The last time they had met, Pereira had counted seventeen active groups in the southern suburbs of Stockholm that would soon become twenty, twenty-five.

  Prognosis: continued participation in serious criminal activity, prison, short life expectancy.

  And then he’d shown her another file, a joint report by the police and the government about the other five thousand boys from all the other Råbys, who right now, today, were being recruited into the criminal networks they had so long yearned to be part of.

  Ana listened to the sound of the TV, opened the front door.

  Tear down in order to build up.

  She started to walk toward someone who was waiting for her.

  ———

  He had seen a policeman sitting on the floor with his life in his lap and then a woman’s beaten body. Why do you bother putting them out? He had been reachable, decided to listen. So your job is to protect Råby, even when the people who live here want it to burn? For all these years, he had tried to pour water on fires in a world that the young people were trying to burn down as they somehow believed that it was in the way. You stand there and put out burning mopeds and fences and trash cans ten times a day. And still you don’t understand? That what’s happening will keep on happening until someone makes sure that it won’t ever happen anymore?

  Thom followed the asphalt path between the buildings in a neighborhood he visited several times a day, stopped for a while by a pile of black, sooty metal that had once been a car and now lacked any color whatsoever because the paint had entirely burned off.

  Empty holes where the windows had blown out. The hose beside it, cut off. And the text, someone had written in the soot with a finger, pig bastards.

  He carried on past a container that had been set alight the night before and hid the remains of bulky waste that hadn’t actually burned but had transferred the flames to the next building—a nursery that normally accommodated seventy children. He wondered where they were now, if they were at home, if they had been squeezed into other already overfull facilities.

  The body of a building with no roof or walls. Toys making splashes of red and yellow in the black.

  He stopped again, put down his bag, two mothers and a father with four children between them had arrived and pointed and explained until one of them climbed over the cordons and walked cautiously toward the skeleton of the building, looked for something, bent down and picked it up, put it in a four-year-old hand. Thom stretched up and tried to see what it was but couldn’t—something black and sooty that was no longer lost.

  He carried on past the moped from yesterday and the trash cans from last week and the kiosk that had stood there, half razed, for nearly six months now.

  He saw her already from a distance.

  She was standing outside the entrance to Råby Allé 12, and it seemed as if she had seen him too.

  ———

  They didn’t embrace each other; they weren’t that close.

  Nor did they take each other by the hand, because for people who had decided to do what these two were about to do, that distance no longer existed.

  They didn’t greet each other at all.

  They would never again see each other once it was all over.

  ———

  Thom walked beside her into the stairwell.

  Four days ago she had stood naked in front of him and demanded that he look, forced him to see until he couldn’t take any more; he had followed her home and listened to a person who didn’t want to hurt anyone, only buildings.

  They hadn’t seen each other since.

  They didn’t need to, they had decided.

  ———

  Ana walked past the elevator and down the first flight of stairs, stopped and pressed the call button for the elevator and then waited until it came, opened the door and held it open while Thom opened the locked door onto an empty elevator shaft one floor up, with a key that looked like the one he normally bled the radiators with. One step out onto the roof of the elevator, right foot toward the round, red button for emergency stop, then one step back. He closed the door and walked beside her even farther down into the depths of the building, the lower basement.

  The square metal key again, and Thom opened the door to the elevator shaft. How many others have you told about this? He climbed in and down into the one-meter-deep hole. No one. No one? What she had shown him in the course of a conversation that had lasted seven hours. If I talk about it . . . I’m dead. You, of all people, should know that.

  He lifted off the black blankets and took a five-centimeter aluminum pipe with two thin wires—one green, one white—out of a wooden box, and a considerably longer round red stick from a cardboard box. He stood at the bottom of the elevator shaft and pressed the detonator into the dynamite stick, screwing in the last part. He was given a cell phone and a roll of tape and some scissors, checked that the transfer function was working and then taped the telephone to the stick of dynamite and cut the wires at one end of the detonator. He bent down and put the taped package into one of two sacks of bulk industrial explosives, then put the other on top.

  “Two sacks. Fifty kilos.”

  He put the black blankets back on top to hide what was there.

  “An explosion in a elevator shaft. One of the load-bearing elements of a building.”

  He climbed up and out, closed and locked the door.

  “The whole of the ground floor will be lifted and then . . . the building will collapse.”

  ———

  They continued on to Råby Allé 25. To Råby Allé 34. To Råby Allé 57, 76, and 102. Six stairwells in six entrances connected by an underground garage, and an elevator shaft in each that contained the same secret. A criminal gang’s explosives store.

  The same procedure in each place.

  The detonator was screwed into a stick of dynamite, the wires cut and a cell phone taped on, and then each package placed in a large sack. The only thing that made the other five stairs different from the first was that there was only one twenty-five-kilo sack, rather than two, which would only half explode the building.

  And before he closed and locked every elevator door, he checked that the cell phone’s calls were transferred to the next one along.

  The
y hurried together toward the large garage.

  Thom calculated as they walked—a total of one hundred and seventy-five kilos of explosives, he guessed from some of the various tunnel construction sites to the south of the city—seven kilos of dynamite, probably from one of the E4’s many roadworks between Skärholmen and Södertälje—and a couple of thousand detonators, stolen from any large building site.

  ———

  A concrete garage is so different at night, empty of voices, full of cars.

  A silence that amplifies every scraping sound, every footstep, runs wild, echoes.

  Thom took from his bag a thick roll of white cotton rope, the sort that’s used as a wick in paraffin lamps, only a considerably thinner version. First he cut six pieces of equal length, three meters each, and walked toward the car nearest the elevator shaft that they had just left. A broad screwdriver to open the tank cap and drop in the cotton wick that then started to soak up the gas—then he moved on to the next car, forced open the gas tank cap, and dropped in the other end of the cotton rope. The same procedure by the other five entrances where the elevator shaft was full of suitably prepared explosives—two cars close to the door, forced gas caps, a long, white, gas-drenched cotton wick joining them together.

  Then he divided the rest of the cotton rope into six more pieces, shorter this time, a meter or two each, and tied them to the first piece, so that eventually by all six entrances there were two cars joined from tank to tank by a piece of rope with another piece in the middle that just touched the floor, trailing slightly on the gray concrete.

  “Now it’s your turn.”

  Thom came back to the first pair of cars with a large bottle of transparent liquid in his hand and gave it to Ana.

  “Start to pour out the contents when I go back to the station.”

  He pointed to the piece of rope that was trailing on the floor, then toward the middle of the garage, and started to walk.

  “Pour it in a narrow strip from where the rope touches the ground to about here.”

  He stopped about a parking space away from each car.

  “Do the same thing six times. Paraffin. That’s what you’ll be pouring out. From the short rope, all the way here.”