Zack

by Mons Kallentoft

  Sonny Järvinen gets a very unpleasant look in his eyes, and he leans forward, closer to Zack.

  “We’re not frightened of anyone. You need to get that seriously fucking straight. Why would anyone want to fuck with us?”

  “Maybe someone doesn’t like the fact that you killed four of their women?”

  Sonny Järvinen turns and looks out of the window, and this time he remains silent.

  12

  ZACK CATCHES sight of her the moment he opens the front door.

  No, he thinks, not now.

  He’s too tired, too hung over, suffering too much withdrawal.

  He’s got too much to deal with.

  He wouldn’t even be able to handle Mera.

  But there she sits, Ester.

  A skinny eleven-year-old girl with perfectly straight light ginger hair that just reaches her shoulders. She’s wearing a blue-and-white striped summer dress, and is sitting on the stairs leaning against the wall, with her knees pulled up and an open book in her arms.

  She lights up when she sees him. A weary glow in her almost cobalt-blue eyes changes to something alert and hopeful, and dimples appear in her cheeks below her short, pointed nose.

  “Hi, Zack.”

  “Hello, Ester.”

  All he really wants to do is slump on the sofa and do nothing. Be on his own. Against his will he starts thinking of an excuse, but then he sees that she’s a bundle of expectation.

  He feels ashamed.

  This isn’t about me now.

  She stands up and greets him with a big hug. He can feel her warmth as she wraps both arms around him and leans her cheek against his chest. He hugs her back with one arm while he gets the keys out of his jeans pocket with the other.

  “Do you want to come in for a bit?”

  “I’d love to.”

  She bends over and picks up the book and a red folder that was next to her on the floor.

  Ester Nilsson lives in a small two-room apartment on the second floor with her mother, Veronica, a fifty-three-year-old on sickness benefits who suffers from long-term depression and holds her soul together with the help of various psychiatric drugs.

  We’re very similar, you and I, Ester, he often thinks when they’re together. The child who has to shoulder far too much responsibility, longing for the parent who disappeared, and forced to look after the one who is still there. You’re never angry, and nor was I. I used to watch the boys playing football down in the yard. But I never got angry. I used to dream.

  Hid my anger inside me.

  No one should have to be that alone.

  Like you are.

  Like I was.

  He unlocks the door, kicks off his shoes, and hangs his jacket on a hook. The holes made by the bullets are clearly visible in the expensive leather. They seem to belong there, though. Rick Owens would probably have put them there himself if only he’d thought of it.

  Two window envelopes and a copy of the free newspaper the Heart of Kungsholmen are lying on the doormat. He leaves them there.

  Sometimes he finds drawings from Ester among the mail on the floor. Usually exciting fairy-tale images involving trolls and witches. She’s good, Zack thinks, especially when she uses pencils and felt-tips. Then she manages to draw shadows and more natural nuances of color. Her subjects are almost always unpleasant, with danger lurking among the trees or under the water.

  On one occasion, about two years ago, he came home and found a very colorful drawing on the hall floor. The picture was dominated by a large red heart, and inside it Ester had written his name in beautiful, shaded dark blue letters:

  Zacharias.

  He had picked up the drawing.

  Read his own name over and over again.

  Smelled it.

  He had taped the picture to his fridge, and there it remained until a month ago, when Ester asked him to take it down because it was so embarrassing.

  It’s dusty in the gloom of the flat, and the air is stale.

  Zack rolls up the blind and opens the side window as far as it will go. It’s turned eight o’clock and the traffic on the street immediately below the window has thinned out.

  To start with he had trouble shutting out the noise of the traffic, particularly in the mornings and afternoons. He didn’t only have to get used to the cars and buses on Kungs-holms Strand, but also the Klara highway and the eight railway lines on the other side of the water.

  He tugs his holster off and tosses it on the bed. As usual, he’s forgotten to lock his pistol in the weapons store at Police Headquarters. He must be due his second official warning for that.

  Who cares? he thinks as he walks to the fridge and takes out a Coke.

  “Do you want one?” he asks Ester.

  “No, I’m only allowed to drink that on Saturday, you know that.”

  Zack sinks onto the sofa. Ester sits down close beside him, so that they’re touching, and it’s nice to be near someone else, someone who doesn’t want to shoot him, or have more from him than just a bit of closeness.

  He takes deep gulps of the chilled drink and Ester watches him as if he were stupid.

  “Do you know there are nine teaspoons of sugar in a can like that?”

  “Only nine?” Zack says. “That makes it almost a health drink.”

  He nudges her gently in the side with his elbow.

  “Oh, stop it,” she says, trying not to smile.

  She opens the folder.

  “Can you test me on my English homework?”

  “Is this for that summer course you’re doing?”

  “Yes.”

  “I thought you were doing math?”

  “It’s math and English.”

  Zack knows that Ester wants to get onto the new specialist math course at Engelbrekt School when she starts year seven. And for that she needs to pass the entrance test. But she’ll be fine.

  He can see her presenting her PhD at the Royal Institute of Technology in fifteen or twenty years’ time. Smartly dressed and so brilliant that her debating partners lose their thread. On that day he will sit in the audience in his best clothes and congratulate her with the biggest bouquet of flowers that has ever been seen in a Swedish lecture hall.

  “Okay, where’s this homework, then?” he says.

  She pulls a sheet of letter-size paper out of a plastic sleeve and hands it to him. It’s a list of forty words. Difficult words, in Zack’s opinion, and many of them relating to mathematics. Circumference, ruler, calculator, cubic foot estimate.

  Ester runs through all the vocabulary without hesitating once. As usual.

  Zack passes the sheet of paper back to her.

  “What was that book you were reading out on the stairs?” he asks.

  “The Count of Monte Cristo.”

  “I read that when I was your age. Actually, I was probably a bit older. Are you enjoying it?”

  “Haven’t decided. It’s a bit old-fashioned, but I like that Edmond never gives up, and that he manages to escape from prison. But I haven’t got to that bit yet.”

  Ester looks down at the cover and Zack in turn looks at Ester. You’re a little Edmond Dantès, he thinks. Innocent, but sentenced to a dreadful life. But maybe you’ll find your own treasure in the end.

  You’ve got to.

  No question.

  Zack dreams about her sometimes. Her disembodied smiling face against a white background.

  He looks at the time. Eight thirty-five p.m.

  “When do you have to be home?”

  “Mom’s already asleep.”

  She never quite manages to conceal her shame when she talks about her mother. Zack knows how she feels, and he takes care never to ask how things are at home, or how her mom is. Ester comes down to see him for some fresh air, not to be given the third degree.

  He got sick because you were so difficult.

  One of the teachers at Bredäng School told him that once.

  About Dad.

  And he believed it at the time. An
d felt ashamed in a way he doesn’t ever want Ester to have to feel.

  “Would you like to watch a film?”

  She lights up.

  “Which one?”

  “Shall we watch our favorite?”

  “Yes, let’s!”

  Zack hunts through his films and puts Chaplin’s The Great Dictator in the Blu-ray player.

  Then he clears a messy heap of magazines off the coffee table: the Economist, Vanity Fair, Fighter magazine, and Filter.

  He puts his feet up on the table and Ester does the same.

  They spend the first forty-five minutes laughing at Hynkel the dictator’s ridiculous behavior. Then Ester falls asleep with her head on his arm.

  He lets her stay like that until the film is over, then he carries her out of the apartment and up the stairs, unlocking the door with the key she carries around her neck. The flat smells of old food, and large dust balls blow across the floor when he opens the door.

  He carefully lays Ester down on her bed and tucks her in. The cute faces of One Direction stare up at him from the duvet cover. Zack knows that Ester doesn’t actually like the boy band, but her mom gave it to her, and she doesn’t mind pretending to like them in order to make her happy.

  Veronica is lying on the sofa in the living room, snoring. Zack shakes her gently and she lifts her head sleepily and looks at him with a confused expression on her face. Her breath smells almost as bad as the garbage bags out at the bikers’ clubhouse.

  “It’s me, Zack. I’ve just brought Ester up. She’s in bed asleep now.”

  Veronica’s eyes become slightly clearer.

  “You’re so kind, Zack,” she says in a slurred voice, then falls asleep again the instant her head hits the sofa cushion.

  He goes back downstairs to his own apartment again. It feels empty without Ester. Bare and abandoned.

  Anyone could be living there. There’s really nothing that says anything about who he is.

  An Ikea sofa, an Ikea bed, an Ikea television table. A small bar table with two tall chairs in the kitchen alcove—also from Ikea.

  That’s all. No pictures, no pot plants, no curtains.

  The only thing that stands out is the old oak chest of drawers in the corner, the one he used to have in his bedroom as a boy out in Bredäng.

  On top of the chest is a framed photograph of a handsome man in a suit, with his arm around a young woman in a police uniform.

  His parents.

  From the all-too-brief good old days.

  They were good, weren’t they?

  You were happy then, weren’t you?

  His mom is smiling and looks happy, and the wind is lifting her blond hair, making it look like rays of sunlight against the sea in the background.

  Dad looks strong. Healthy.

  The best bodyguard in Stockholm.

  Zack tries to imagine what it was like, but can only remember how it ended.

  Dad’s cries out in the hallway, waking him at night.

  The fear as he clutched his teddy bear, got out of bed, and cautiously opened his door.

  The telephone handset swinging on the end of its cord. Dad curled up on the floor in a fetal position.

  He sees himself in his soft tiger pajamas, laying his teddy bear next to his father before going back to bed and pulling the covers over his head. Lying alone in a darkness that slowly fills with his own exhaled air. And somehow he realizes that Mom won’t be coming home tonight, possibly never again, and he puts his hands over his ears and screws his eyes shut as tightly as he can to make the bad thing disappear.

  What does never mean to a five-year-old?

  What did the word mean to me then?

  A black, nameless feeling.

  A feeling that he still hasn’t found a name for.

  He looks away from the photograph and sits down on the sofa again. He picks up a copy of Filter from the floor and begins leafing idly through it, but gives up after just a few pages.

  He calls Abdula instead, needs to hear exactly what happened at the club, but the call goes straight to voicemail. He sends a text:

  Want to meet up?

  Abdula answers almost instantly.

  Can’t tonight. Tomorrow?

  Ok. Laters.

  Zack has a slight headache, and can feel a very familiar anxiety and restlessness creeping through his body.

  He hardly ever takes drugs after seeing Ester. It feels nothing but grubby and unpleasant in a way that it never quite does on other occasions.

  He shuts his eyes and listens to the soporific sound of the traffic, but his mind is bursting with unresolved thoughts and images. He sees the murdered women in his mind’s eye. Sukayana Prikon’s stiletto flashing in the sunlight. Hears Deniz scream and sees the blood on her neck. Feels his body respond to the memory as his pulse rate increases.

  This won’t do.

  Zack goes out into the hall and opens the cupboard door. A black plastic sack inside topples over, spilling paperback books onto the floor. Alice Munro, Oscar Wilde, Cormac McCarthy.

  Fucking hell.

  He puts them back in the sack and shoves it hard against the wall. Then he reaches in and pulls out his black biker’s leathers.

  His red-and-black Suzuki Hayabusa is down in the garage, chained securely to the wall.

  His most cherished possession.

  It cost him almost half his inheritance from his dad. The rest went on the deposit for the flat.

  The inheritance.

  A father’s unexpected surprise for his son.

  He had left four hundred thousand kronor in a safe deposit box.

  Money that could have given them both a better life while Dad was still alive. They wouldn’t have had to count every krona.

  But presumably the money was Dad’s way of saying thank you. Thank you, my son, for looking after me.

  Zack starts the motorbike and heads out into the late summer evening. He drives south, through the greenery of Rålambshovsparken and up onto the Western Bridge, and looks out across the shimmering water of Riddarfjärden. The flashy buildings along Norr Mälarstrand are behind him, almost an even smarter address than Mera’s on Östermalm.

  At Hornstull he bears right and crosses the Liljeholmen bridge, then turns off onto Hägerstensvägen just before he reaches the E20 highway.

  He decelerates and drives slowly through the affluent suburban streets of Hägersten. Smells the leafy gardens, full of apple trees. There seems to be no end to the villas. Row after row of them. None of them worth less than five million. Expensive cars parked in the driveways, the water just a stone’s throw away.

  And then it happens, where Mälarhöjdsvägen ends and he turns left into Ålgrytevägen: he crosses an invisible boundary.

  Everything changes. Mälarhöjden becomes Bredäng. Attractive 1920s villas are replaced by gray mass housing. Beautiful becomes ugly. Affluent becomes poor.

  Zack pulls over and stops in front of one of the vast apartment blocks.

  Gröna stugans väg—“Green Cottage Road.” The most misleading street name in the whole of Sweden. There’s nothing that isn’t gray.

  The eighth floor of nine. No balcony. A view of a gray parking lot and the next huge, gray building.

  This was where they had ended up, Dad and him.

  This was where he stood among the banana boxes that first evening, looking out over his new neighborhood. The leaves had fallen, and the surroundings were so drained of color that he could easily have been living in a black-and-white film.

  It was all raw and cold. Strange smells in the stairwell. Names on the doors that he couldn’t pronounce.

  He remembers being aware of his heart beating in his chest more clearly than ever before. He stood on tiptoe and rested his cheek against the glass, trying to see home to Kungsholmen, but all he could see was woodland and more buildings. When Dad came into the kitchen and asked if everything was okay, he quickly wiped his tears on his sleeve and replied:

  “Sure.”

&nb
sp; Zack chains the motorbike to a lamppost and walks along the path to the underground station.

  Rows of gray apartment blocks thrust up to his left. Barbed wire fencing around dismal industrial premises to his right. And, closer to the station, gray walls on either side of the narrow path.

  He turns around just before the fast-food kiosk and walks back up toward the blocks. Hears an underground train approaching and looks through the fence toward the tunnel that’s been blasted through the rock.

  That was where he saw them when he had been helping Dad with the shopping and was running back with three bags from the supermarket more than twenty years ago.

  Three against one.

  The leader had a deep voice and a downy mustache, and he was standing down by the rails at the end of the tunnel, holding out above the tracks a dark-haired boy who only looked a year or so older than Zack.

  Zack didn’t understand how they dared to be down there at all.

  “You’re not so tough now, are you, you little coon!”

  Two more boys stood alongside laughing. One skinny with cropped hair, the other pudgy with a trucker’s cap on back to front.

  They looked slightly older than the leader, maybe eleven or twelve.

  “You’re fucking right there, Seb,” the boy with the cap said.

  The rails started to hum, and Zack almost stopped breathing. Were they going to hold the boy like that when the train came? His head would be crushed!

  Zack let go of the shopping bags and ran back down to the kiosk, where two men in their twenties were waiting for their food. They looked tough, had long hair and black T-shirts with band logos on them. Hard-rockers. Zack would never have dared talk to them normally, but any doubts left him in a flash. As if he had grown, become someone different.

  “Help! You’ve got to help. There are three boys holding another one out above the railway track over there! Quick!”

  “What the . . . ? Show us!”

  Zack ran ahead of them, and when he got there he could see the light from the train approaching in the tunnel.

  One of the rockers jumped over the fence and roared:

  “Let the kid go, you fucking idiot, or I’ll kill you!”

  Then he ran down to the tracks.

  Seb looked terrified. He shoved the boy onto the tracks and quickly scrambled up the rocks on the other side together with his friends.