Abdula’s mobile buzzes.
“I need to get going.”
“A deal?”
“The less you know about what I do, the better.”
Their hands meet in the air.
Then Abdula heads out into the Stockholm night.
31
THE GLASS of beer in Zack’s hand is still half full, and he lingers in the bar. It’s half past eleven and AG is full of drunk people.
He looks around. Can’t see any solitary single women, they’re all in groups. And that pretty, short-haired waitress has finished for the evening.
He gets his cell out and brings up the number of the beautiful brunette hairdresser they saw earlier in the day.
Rebecka.
Should he call her?
He hesitates.
Stop it.
Go home to Mera. Now. At once. That’s the right thing to do.
He walks as far away from the speakers as he can and dials Rebecka’s number.
Two rings.
Maybe she’s asleep.
Three.
“Hello?”
Her voice doesn’t sound sleepy.
“Hi, it’s Zack.”
A short pause. Then:
“Dance partner or policeman?”
She’s quick.
“Which would you prefer?”
He takes a taxi to Tegnérlunden. Taps in the door code she gave him, opens the heavy wooden door, and walks up the stairs to the fourth floor.
The stairwell is very smart, elaborately decorated. He wonders how a hairdresser can afford to live here.
Maybe she inherited money, like him.
Or perhaps she’s been doing business with Suliman Yel and his friends?
In which case, what are you doing here, you moron?
She opens the door dressed in a white undershirt and gray jogging pants.
He hesitates, unsure of what to say.
“Hello, you,” Rebecka says with a smile. “Come in.”
There’s something about the way she looks that makes Zack feel like a thirteen-year-old on his first date without his parents.
The living room is illuminated by just three large candles on a silver dish, set on a low, square table in front of a bulging red sofa. An old-fashioned table lamp stands like a statue in the window. Zack sits down among a mass of subtly colored cushions and Rebecka sits down right next to him, facing him.
“I’ve made up my mind,” she says.
“About what?”
“About who I want you to be. I don’t want the policeman, I want the guy at the club.”
Zack laughs.
“Sure. Whatever you want.”
“Good, so you’re not a policeman now?”
“No.”
“So if there’s any coke in the apartment and someone offered you some, you wouldn’t arrest them?”
“You don’t get arrested in Sweden. You get taken into custody,” Zack says. “But, no, I wouldn’t take that person into custody.”
“Well, then.”
She stands up and goes into the bedroom. Zack watches her, checking out her firm body beneath her saggy trousers.
He hears her open a drawer and rifle through it. When she comes back she’s got a small bag of white powder in one hand, and a silver case in the other.
She sits down on the sofa and opens the case. It contains a mirror, a razor blade, and a small chrome tube. She tips the powder onto the mirror, chops it up, and divides it into six lines.
“Peruvian,” she says. “The purest you can get right now.”
She hands the tube to Zack.
“Guests first.”
Zack leans over the table and snorts one line. Then another, in his other nostril. The effects kick in and he leans back in the sofa, takes some deep breaths, and feels a combination of calm and clarity spread through his body.
Any trace of tiredness vanishes.
He hears Rebecka snort one of the lines. Then she leans toward him and puts her feet up on the table.
“Do a lot of police officers take drugs?” she asks.
Not judgmental, just curious. But Zack feels his stomach clench, in spite of the cocaine.
“I don’t actually know,” he says. “I don’t think so. But plenty are hard drinkers.”
“Are they?”
“You should see our staff parties.”
He looks at her, and sees the way she’s studying him, as if she was looking for an answer.
“What?” he asks.
“I’ve been thinking about something since you came to the salon and I realized you were a police officer. When we met at the club, were you the one who tipped off your colleagues later that night?”
“No, of course not. Did you really think it was?”
“I honestly don’t know. I don’t know you. All I know is that you’re a police officer who takes coke at illegal clubs, and that now you’re sitting here doing it again with a girl you questioned about some secret criminal investigation earlier today.”
He laughs quietly, but it just sounds brittle and fake.
There’s a floor-length mirror on the other side of the room, but he avoids looking at his own face.
He ought to get up off the sofa and go home, but the cocaine is making him feel wonderfully fluid, and right now it doesn’t seem to matter. He stares out into the room and nods to himself.
“Detective Double Standard,” he says.
She gently takes hold of his chin and turns his face toward her.
“But you are very handsome,” she says.
Her lips move closer. She presses them to his and he wants her never to take them away. She kisses him for a long time, and then she sits astride him and pulls his T-shirt off. He tugs off her undershirt and she kisses him again and is gentle with him in a way he discovers that he’s been missing.
He lays her down on her back and removes the rest of her clothes, and as he throws her trousers away they hear a hissing sound followed by a small thud, and see that one of the candles has fallen onto the rug. It starts to smolder and Zack leaps off her and stifles the fire with her trousers.
She giggles, and he becomes aware that he’s sitting on her floor naked with a pair of charred jogging pants in his hand. She stands up and takes his free hand and they go into the bedroom and get into bed.
They make love gently, and when Zack pulls her hands up and holds them tight above her head, out of habit, she whispers in his ear, telling him to take it easy, and he lets go and she puts her arms around him, showing him the way.
Afterward they lie side by side in silence. The cocaine rush has faded. She lights a cigarette and he gets up from the bed and goes over to the sofa and gets dressed. Then he goes back into the bedroom and kisses her on the forehead.
She doesn’t ask him to stay.
* * *
OUT IN the street it’s dark. Or as dark as it gets in June at almost one o’clock at night.
He hails a taxi.
“Kungsholms Strand.”
When the driver pulls up at his door he asks the driver to wait. Five minutes later he gets into the backseat again. His hair is wet from the shower, he’s wearing a fresh T-shirt, and has swapped the Rick Owens jacket for a sweater. He doesn’t want Mera to see the bullet holes.
“Where now?” the taxi driver says.
“Floragatan, Östermalm.”
Mera is angry when she opens the door.
“I thought you were going to be here much earlier.”
“I had to meet an important source.”
“Your hair’s wet.”
“Then I went to the gym.”
“Time for more exercise now.”
In the bedroom she gets out the handcuffs.
“Tie me up.”
Her eyes flash as Zack takes control. When he makes her beg and plead.
She screams out loud when she orgasms, almost a scream of pain, and Zack can hear his mother in that scream and wonders why he’s thinking about her again when he
’s having sex with Mera. And he wonders if she screamed when she realized that everything was coming to an end, far, far too early.
Did she scream because she didn’t want to leave me?
Afterward they lie naked on a soft, striped Missoni blanket in front of the fire in the huge living room. The blanket feels like ten thousand dollars against Zack’s skin, and he wonders how long he’d need to save up to afford the furniture, paintings, and interior design items in Mera’s living room.
“I read about the latest murder,” Mera says. “The man who was pushed off a balcony. They said it had something to do with your case.”
“He wasn’t pushed. He was being chased, and he fell.”
“Was he the murderer?”
“We don’t think so. But we don’t know enough yet.”
He pauses.
“Anywhere near enough.”
“I heard there’s a journalist at Expressen who’s been looking into the involvement of criminal gangs in Thai massage parlors, apparently he’s working on some sort of scoop,” Mera says. “His name’s Fredrik Bylund.”
“I know who that is,” Zack says.
“He’s pretty go-ahead.”
“That’s putting it mildly. But he’s okay to talk to. I’ll try to arrange a meeting and find out what he’s got.”
He reaches for his phone and looks at the time. Quarter past two.
“Have you got his number?”
“You’re going to call now?”
“No, I’ll text him. Evening tabloid reporters are always up late. And if he doesn’t want to be disturbed he’ll have his phone switched off.”
Mera fetches her own cell and sends Zack the number. He taps out a quick suggestion of a meeting over breakfast.
“He’s bound to want something in return,” Mera says.
“I can feed him an unimportant side line for him to get excited about.”
“The way his colleagues at Aftonbladet got excited about you?”
“You could tell it was me?”
“Of course I could. Who were you chasing?”
“The owner of a massage parlor. The four women who were killed worked for her. She thought I was the murderer and panicked when we turned up to talk to her.”
Mera moves closer to him. Strokes his ribs with her stiff nipples.
“I got a bit excited when I saw the film.”
She moves her arm toward his groin and takes hold of him in her hand.
Then her mouth.
She decides she wants to be taken from behind, and Zack is aggressive and in the heat of the fire sweat runs down their bodies.
“Zack, wait,” she says.
He stops moving, but stays inside her warm dampness. She turns her face toward him. Looks him in the eye.
“Can’t you . . . I’d really like it if you used one of those lumps of wood and . . . burned me with it. Just a little bit.”
“What the fuck, Mera . . . ? No, I’m not doing that. That’s not on.”
“I just want to know what it feels like.”
She looks beseechingly at him.
“You can feel this instead.”
He grabs her arms and pulls then back hard, so she falls forward onto her stomach on the blanket, then he twists them up behind her back and pushes them higher. She’s screaming with pain now and squirming beneath him, but she can’t move at all, and he uses his body weight to push her down and then thrusts into her, hard and fast.
She screams and screams.
He thinks of Rebecka and her softness, and pushes still harder into Mera, unable to stop himself thinking about right and wrong, and what it is she actually wants from this.
Mera falls asleep on the blanket with a smile on her face. Zack grabs a poker and pushes the wood toward the back of the fire, beating out any sparks nearest the grate. Then he fetches her duvet from the bedroom and lays it down beside her so she can pull it over her when the heat of the fire dies down.
His cell buzzes just as he closes her front door and is on his way down the stairs. A text from Fredrik Bylund.
Working late, I see. Sure, happy to meet. Hotel Diplomat, 9.00 a.m.? It’s on you.
Zack replies, “OK,” and shoves the door open. The pavement is wet and the damp air smells pleasantly of summer rain.
He thinks about Ester, and finds himself hoping that she’ll be sitting waiting for him on the stairs. But it’s half past three in the morning. She should have been in bed asleep for the past seven hours.
He hopes her dreams take her to a world that’s better than this, and hopes that she has the strength to get through yet another day when she wakes up.
He reflects that she might be the only thing in his life that is wholly good.
32
DOUGLAS IS lying in his big, handcrafted bed, sleeping fitfully. His outfit for the next day is hanging on the valet: a blue Egyptian cotton shirt with a matching blue tie and a dark gray suit, tailor-made by Anderson & Sheppard in London.
He twists uneasily between the silk sheets, muttering indistinctly and breathing quickly and shallowly.
He wakes, sits up, and stares out into the large room. The clock radio is showing 03:40.
He doesn’t want to think about the investigation. Or about the rumors he keeps hearing about Zack’s drug use. He needs him now, and Zack is still easy to direct where Douglas wants him.
How the hell am I going to pull this off? he thinks. It’s complicated, so very complicated.
He shuts his eyes. Thinks of the loneliness hiding in every corner of the apartment. He loves being alone, contrary to what everyone believes. He would always be alone if he could.
He drinks a glass of water and tries to get back to sleep. Hopeless. He doesn’t even feel sleepy now.
* * *
SIRPA IS sitting in bed with her MacBook on her lap. The pain in her knees woke her up when she’d only been asleep for three hours. A large cup of steaming hot chai tea is standing on the bedside table, and she’s reading what the online editions of the newspapers are saying about their case. Some newsrooms have chosen to focus on gang rivalries, others are speculating about a lone sexual predator.
She tries to find information about Ingvar Stefansson, but can’t find anything useful. Nothing to help move them forward. They’re going to have to rely on his relatives knowing where he is.
Beside her on the bed lies Zeus, her Rhodesian ridgeback, snoring with his head on his front paws. He always sleeps on her bed. It’s her way of salving her guilty conscience for leaving him alone so much.
He twitches in his sleep and she strokes his back reassuringly.
“There now, Zeus. There’s nothing to worry about.”
She finds herself thinking about men again. How tricky they are. How little they see in her. Zeus is the only male she needs. Even if right now she would prefer a different sort of warmth.
The dog sits up with a start. Holds his head quite still and listens to the night.
Sirpa quickly sits up. Listens as well.
But she can’t hear anything. It must have been a mouse, or a bird. Zeus rolls onto his side and goes back to sleep.
Sirpa closes the laptop and puts it down on the floor. Then she curls up and lays her head on Zeus’s body, close to his heart. Its rhythmic beating resonates through her and she falls asleep again.
* * *
DENIZ IS lying with her arms stretched out above her head in bed in her apartment in Fruängen.
A lamp on the bookcase is spreading a soft red glow, and she feels the tongue moving in her groin, loves it being there.
She reaches down with her hand and feels the mass of blond hair. She squeezes the soft shoulders and can feel herself getting close.
It’s like being given another body, another world, for a short while. But she wants to wait a bit longer.
And then a bit more.
She grabs hold of the hair again, pulls the head up toward her own face.
Skin against skin. Breasts against breasts. She
looks into the green eyes. Thinks: you’re incredibly beautiful, Cornelia.
She kisses her. Tastes herself.
* * *
IT’S ONLY just gone half past three on this night between Tuesday and Wednesday, but Rudolf is already up. Since losing his sight he goes to bed early and wakes up early, and he hasn’t had to set his alarm clock for years.
He can hear the patter of the rain on the roof tiles, and in his mind’s eye sees the dry earth soften at last, and thinks back to when he was a young boy, watching his grandfather dance with joy at the rain after a difficult period of drought that had left the fields yellow.
He refills his coffee cup and sits down at the kitchen table. He spills some on his fingers and pulls his hand away in surprise. It’s a long time since he scalded himself with coffee.
He reaches for some paper towel and remembers how badly he used to burn himself in the early days following his stroke. Time used to feel like it was passing incredibly slowly, and he doubted he could bear to live out all those days the doctors said he had ahead of him.
A difficult time.
But even then he knew it was down to him. It was a fairly straightforward choice: grit his teeth and start again from scratch, or succumb to self-loathing.
He takes a sip of coffee.
It tastes of more now than it used to when he could see it.
33
THE HEAVY rain clouds are obscuring the light of dawn. Large raindrops hit the ground, releasing a smell of dirt and wet tarmac in the center of Stockholm.
A Thai flag hangs like a damp rag outside a metal door on Klara Norra Kyrkogata, and the pink neon sign in the window reflects faintly in the growing puddle where the road and pavement meet.
CITY THAI MASSAGE.
A weak night-light glows in the neat little massage room beyond the lobby. On the floor two women lie fast asleep on thin mattresses. They don’t hear the splash of a shoe stepping right into the puddle outside. They don’t hear the door opening, or the cautious footsteps creeping toward their room.
The muffled sound of a whip crack makes one of the women start. She begins to move uneasily in her sleep, but then the sound echoes again and she is still.
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