Studio Sex

by Liza Marklund

  Annika followed Patricia behind the bar and poured herself a glass of Coke.

  “Doesn’t it get you down having to look at this all night?” Annika said into Patricia’s ear.

  “Put a bottle of champagne on the bald guy,” one of the nudes said, and Patricia went over to the cash register.

  Annika went back out to her foyer. She shuddered; it was cold out here. Sanna wasn’t there. Annika sat down on a barstool she’d pulled in behind the roulette table.

  “How’s business?”

  Joachim was standing in the office doorway, arms across his chest and a smile on his lips.

  Annika immediately jumped down from the stool. “So-so. Yesterday was better.”

  He came up to the table, still smiling and holding her gaze with his. “I think you’ve got a real future here.” He came up beside her behind the table.

  Annika licked her lips and tried to smile. “Thanks.” She batted her eyelashes.

  “How did you decide to come work here?” His voice was a few degrees cooler.

  Lie, she thought, but keep as close to the truth as you can.

  “I need money.” She looked up. “I got sacked from my old job, they thought I was a troublemaker. One of the… customers complained about me and my boss got cold feet.”

  Joachim laughed, then caressed her shoulder, his hand lingering just by her breast. “What was the job?”

  She swallowed, fighting the instinct to recoil from his touch. “A grocery store. I worked in the deli section at Vivo on Fridhemsplan. Slicing salami all day long isn’t exactly my idea of fun.”

  He laughed out loud and removed his hand. “I can understand why you quit. Who did you work with?”

  Her heart stopped. Did he know someone there? “Why?” She smiled. “Do you have connections in the sausage business?”

  He guffawed. “I think you should give the stage some thought.” He moved closer to her. “You’d look fantastic in the spotlight. Have you ever wanted to be a star?”

  He pushed both his hands into her hair and gave her neck a hug. To her dismay, she felt a pang of excitement in her genitals.

  “A star? What, like Josefin?”

  The words slipped out of her before she had time to think. He reacted as if she’d punched him, let go of her head, and took a step back.

  “What the hell? What do you know about her?”

  Jesus, how fucking stupid can I be? she thought, and cursed her big mouth.

  “She worked here, didn’t she? I heard about her,” she said, unable to control her trembling voice.

  Joachim backed off farther. “Why, did you know her or something?”

  Annika smiled nervously. “No, not at all, I never met her. But Patricia told me she used to work here.”

  He went up and stood face-to-face with her. “Josefin came to a really fucking bad end,” he said in a tense, deliberate voice. “We get some powerful people here, and she thought she could con some money out of them. Don’t. Don’t ever try to roll anyone here. Not the customers, not me.”

  Joachim spun round and went up the spiral staircase.

  Annika was holding on to the roulette wheel, ready to faint.

  Nineteen Years, Seven Months, and Fifteen Days

  I’m driven by my wish to understand. I realize that I’m looking for explanations and a framework where there aren’t any. What do I really know about the terms of love?

  He isn’t really bad— only vulnerable and thin-skinned, scarred by his childhood. There is nothing to suggest his powerlessness will always find the same expression. When he becomes more mature, he’ll stop hitting. My own mean doubts run stakes of shame through my abdomen; I’ve judged him far too rashly. I take my own development for granted, his I completely ignore.

  Yet the chill has built a nest in my breast.

  Because he says

  he will never

  let me go.

  Saturday 8 September

  She felt strange using the elevator again. She remembered the last time she’d stood here, thinking she’d never be here again.

  Nothing is forever, she thought. Everything goes around in circles.

  The newsroom was bright, quiet, and weekend-empty, just as she preferred it. Ingvar Johansson had his back turned and was on the phone; he didn’t see her.

  Anders Schyman was sitting behind his desk in his fish tank.

  “Come in.” He indicated for her to sit down on his new burgundy leather couch. Annika pushed the door closed behind her and looked out at the newsroom behind the tired old curtains. It felt strange that everything should look exactly as it did when she’d left, as if she’d never existed.

  “You’re looking good.”

  I’ve heard that one before, Annika thought. “I wasn’t that tired before,” she said, and sat on the couch. The upholstery was hard, the leather cold.

  “How was the Caucasus?”

  She wasn’t following and pressed her lips together.

  “You were going,” Schyman said.

  “There were no last-minute trips left. I went to Turkey instead.”

  The deputy editor smiled. “Lucky for you. It looks like war down there. They seem to be mobilizing the army.”

  Annika nodded. “The government forces got hold of some weapons.”

  They sat in silence for a while.

  “So what have you got cooking?” Schyman said after a while.

  Annika took a deep breath. “I haven’t written it. I don’t have a computer. I was going to outline it to you and see what you think.”

  “Shoot.”

  Annika pulled up her photocopies from the bag. “It’s about the murder of Josefin Liljeberg and the minister.”

  Anders Schyman waited in silence.

  “The minister is innocent of the murder,” she said. “As far as the police are concerned, the murder has been cleared up. The boyfriend did it, the strip-club owner Joachim. They can’t nail him, though, as he has six witnesses that give him an alibi. They couldn’t prosecute them all for perjury, but the police are convinced that they’re lying.”

  Annika fell silent and leafed through her papers.

  “So no one’s going to be brought to trial for the murder?” Schyman said slowly.

  “Nope. It’ll remain unsolved unless the people giving the alibi start talking. And in twenty-five years the statute of limitations will expire.”

  She got up and put two photocopies on the deputy editor’s desk. “Check this out. Here’s the receipt from Studio 69 from the early hours on July twenty-eight. Seven people spent fifty-five thousand six hundred kronor on entertainment and refreshments. Josefin rang it up— you can see that on the code here, and it was paid for with a Diners Club card in Christer Lundgren’s name. Look at the signature.”

  Anders Schyman picked up the photocopy and studied it. “It’s illegible.”

  “Yep. Now look at this.”

  She held out the invoice for the Tallinn trip.

  “Christer Lundgren,” Schyman read, and looked up at Annika. “The two signatures were written by different people.”

  Annika nodded and licked her lips. Her mouth was completely dry. She wished she had a glass of water. “The minister for foreign trade was never at the strip club. I think the Studio 69 receipt was signed by the undersecretary at the ministry.”

  Anders Schyman picked up the first slip and held it close to his glasses. “Yes. Could be.”

  “Christer Lundgren was in Tallinn that night. He flew out on Estonian Air at eight in the evening of the twenty-seventh of July, you can tell from the invoice. He met with someone there and flew back in a privately chartered plane the following morning.”

  The deputy editor changed papers. “What do you know… What was he doing there?”

  Annika drew a light breath. “It was a highly secret meeting. It had to do with an arms deal. He didn’t want to hand in his invoices to his own ministry where they could be found, so instead he sent them to the National Inspectorate of Stra
tegic Products.”

  Schyman looked up at her. “The authority that controls Swedish arms exports?”

  Annika nodded.

  “Are you sure?”

  She pointed at the verifications.

  “Indeed,” said the deputy editor. “Why, though?”

  “I can only think of one reason. The export deal wasn’t quite, shall we say, all in order.”

  A furrow appeared between Schyman’s eyebrows. “It doesn’t make sense. Why would this government do a shady arms deal? Who with?”

  Annika straightened up and swallowed. “I don’t think they had any choice,” she said quietly.

  Schyman leaned back in his swivel chair. “You’ll have to be precise.”

  “I know, but the fact is that Christer Lundgren went to Tallinn that night on some business that’s so controversial he’d rather get caught up in a murder investigation and resign than make it public. That’s a fact. And what could be worse?”

  She was standing up and gesticulating. Anders Schyman watched her with interest.

  “I imagine you have a theory,” he said, amused.

  “IB. The lost archives, original documents that would sink the Social Democrats for a long time.”

  Schyman leaned forward. “But they’ve been destroyed.”

  “I don’t believe so. A copy of the foreign archive turned up at the Defense Staff Headquarters on the seventeenth of July this year. It came from abroad, via diplomatic mail. I think it was a warning to the government: do as we say or we’ll make the rest turn up. The originals.”

  “But how would this have happened?”

  Annika sat on his desk and sighed. “The Social Democrats were spying on the Communists all through the postwar era, storing up as much information on them as they could lay their hands on. Meanwhile, do you think the guys over here were just sitting around doing nothing?” She pointed over her shoulder toward the Russian embassy. “Hardly. They knew exactly what the Swedes were up to.” She got up, got her bag, and pulled out her pad. “In the spring of 1973, Elmér and the boys at IB knew that the journalists Guillou and Bratt were on their heels. The Social Democrats began to panic. Of course the Russians knew. And they knew that the Swedes would try to sweep away all traces of their spying. So what did they do?”

  She held out her copies of the news items in the broadsheet from April 2, 1973.

  “The Russians stole the archives. The Stockholm embassy’s KGB man saw to it that they were taken out of the country, probably in large courier’s bags.”

  Schyman took her pad and read.

  “And who was the Stockholm head of KGB in the early seventies?” Annika said. “Yes, the man who today is the president of a troubled nation in the Caucasus region. He even speaks Swedish. This president has one gigantic problem: he’s got no weapons to fight the guerrillas with and the international community has decided that he can’t be sold any.”

  The deputy editor was fingering the papers.

  Annika sat down on the couch to deliver her conclusion. “So what does the president do? He digs up the old documents from twenty-four Grevgatan and fifty-six Valhallavägen. If the Swedish government doesn’t supply him with weapons, he’ll see to it that they lose power for a long time to come. At first the government refuses to listen. Maybe they don’t believe he has any archives, so he sends his warning to the Defense Staff Headquarters. A selection of copies from the foreign archive— not enough to topple the government, but enough for the Social Democrats to be saddled with an IB debate in the middle of an election campaign. So the prime minister decides to send his minister for foreign trade to meet the president’s representatives. They meet halfway, in Estonia. They make a deal and agree on the consignment of arms to be delivered immediately via some third country, probably Singapore. The army prepares for war.”

  Annika rubbed her forehead. “Everything goes according to plan. Except there’s a hitch— a young woman is murdered outside the minister’s front door on the same night that the meeting in Tallinn takes place. Through the most ill-fated coincidence it turns out that the minister’s undersecretary has brought a bunch of German union reps to the strip club where the murder victim worked and paid the check with the minister’s credit card. The minister’s up the proverbial creek— his hands are tied. He can’t say where he’s been or what he’s been doing.”

  The silence in the office was tangible. Annika could see that Schyman’s brain was working at full speed. He fiddled with the pad and the photocopies, made a note, scratched his head.

  “I’ll be damned. I’ll be damned…. What does he have to say for himself?”

  Annika swallowed, desperately trying to moisten her throat. No success. “I’ve only spoken to his wife, Anna-Lena. Lundgren refuses to come to the phone. Then I tried reaching him through his former press secretary, Karina Björnlund. I gave her the whole scenario, how I think it all came about. She was going to try to get a comment, but she never phoned back.”

  They sat without talking for a while, then the deputy editor cleared his throat. “How many people have you told this to?”

  “None,” Annika instantly replied, “just you.”

  “And Karina Björnlund. Anyone else?”

  Annika closed her eyes and thought. “No. Only you and Karina Björnlund.” She felt herself tense up. The counterarguments would come now.

  “This is incredibly interesting, but it’s unpublishable.”

  “Why?” Annika quickly replied.

  “Too many loose ends. Your line of argument is logical, even possible, but it can’t be proved.”

  “I’ve got the copies of the invoices and the receipts!” Annika exclaimed.

  “Sure, but it’s not enough. You know that.”

  Annika didn’t respond.

  “That the minister was in Tallinn is news, but it doesn’t give him an alibi for the time of the murder. He was home by five, the time when the girl was murdered. You remember the neighbor who bumped into him?”

  Annika nodded.

  Schyman continued, “Christer Lundgren has resigned, and you don’t kick—”

  “Someone who’s down, I know. But you can publish facts, the burglaries at the addresses where the archives were kept, the invoices, the strip club receipt…”

  The deputy editor sighed. “For what purpose? To show how the government smuggles arms? Imagine the court case involving the freedom of the press that would follow.”

  Annika stared down at the floor.

  “This story is dead, Annika.”

  “What about the trip to Tallinn?” she said quietly.

  Schyman sighed again. “Maybe, if circumstances had been different. Unfortunately, though, the editor in chief is allergic to this story. He won’t hear the mere mention of either the murder or the minister. And for a minister to go to a meeting in a neighboring country isn’t controversial enough for me to put my job on the line. We’ve got nothing to show who he met or for what purpose. The minister for foreign trade probably travels for three hundred days of the year.”

  “Why did he hand in his travel-expenses invoice to the Inspectorate of Strategic Products?”

  “It’s strange, but hardly worth writing about. The ministries hand over hundreds of invoices for payment every day; this isn’t even controversial. There’s nothing fishy about a minister for foreign trade going abroad.”

  Annika felt her chest tighten. At heart she knew that Anders Schyman was right. Now she just wanted to sink through the floor and disappear.

  The deputy editor got to his feet, walked up to the window, and looked out over the newsroom. “We need you here.”

  Annika was startled. “What?”

  Schyman sighed. “We could do with someone of your character on the crime desk. Right now there are only three people working there: Berit Hamrin, Nils Langeby, and Eva-Britt Qvist. It would do Berit good to have a competent person by her side.”

  “I’ve never met the other two,” Annika said quietly.

  �
��What are you doing now? Did you get another job?”

  She shook her head.

  The deputy editor came and sat down next to her on the couch. “I’m sincerely sorry that we can’t publish your stuff. You’ve done a fantastic piece of research, but the story is simply too incredible to be told.”

  Annika didn’t reply, just stared down at her hands.

  Schyman watched her in silence. “The worst of it is that you’re probably right.”

  “I’ve got something else. I can’t do it myself, but you can give it to Berit.”

  She pulled out the copy of the TV guy’s credit card slip. It was a second-generation photocopy; she’d made a copy of her original copy at the post office.

  “He rented two girls and spent nearly an hour with them in a private room. On his way out he bought three videos. With animals. The thing is, he paid for it all with a Swedish Television credit card.”

  Schyman whistled. “What do you know. This can go straight into the paper— TV star visits brothel, pays with TV license-payers’ money.”

  Annika smiled tiredly. “Glad to be of service,” she said acerbically.

  “Why don’t you write it yourself?”

  “You don’t want to know.”

  “But you’ve got to have something for it. What do you want?”

  Annika looked out over the deserted newsroom, which was bathed in the slanting rays of the fall sun.

  “A job,” she whispered.

  Schyman walked over to his desk and flipped through the pages in a binder. “Subeditor on Jansson’s night shift, starting in November, covering for parental leave. How does that sound?”

  “Sounds fine. Offer accepted.”

  “It’s a six-month contract so I have to take it up with the executive. The hours are awful; you start at ten P.M. and work until six A.M., four days on, four days off. You’ll have to wait for a formal offer of a job, but this time I won’t give in. This contract is yours. How about that?”

  He got up and held out his hand to her. She got up and shook his hand, embarrassed at the cold clamminess of hers.

  “Good to have you back.” Schyman smiled.

  “Just one more thing. Do you remember that they said on Studio 69 that they’d found the strip-club receipt at the Ministry for Foreign Affairs?”