Stockholm Noir

by Nathan Larson

  By the age of twenty-six, I was riding a career roller coaster. I was part of the cultural life of the capital city. The marriage, if you’re still wondering about that, was not exactly burning brightly. Although we weren’t living together, my wife and I, we’d get together for work. She was in the theater and was an excellent fashion model. The fashion house Mah-Jong bought our photographs. We hadn’t gotten around to getting a divorce, because in the late sixties people didn’t bother with empty conventions like that.

  I had built a somewhat precarious living as a photographer by visiting the editorial offices of all the magazines in Stockholm, showing them my photos. And on those occasions, I would make an effort to seem like a congenial coworker. Some editors gave me small assignments; they would test me and then try someone else. In those days, everyday transactions were done on a cash basis. Whenever I’d been given a job and delivered my pictures, I’d go to the cashier and pick up an envelope with bills. I usually thought the amount was too small. My ability to use a camera was greater than my ability to fit in with the job and its jargon.

  This jargon had no words for the ideas I turned over in my mind—for example, the words to seriously define the problems with/of photography. The most important of these was the one most often ignored: the psychic energy needed for each photograph. They say when photography was invented, around 1840, many people refused to be photographed as they believed the camera would steal their living souls and leave them as empty shells. In a way, that is true. But it’s not the subject who becomes an empty shell, it’s the photographer. Every exposure demands concentration. I did not use a flash (my technique was based on natural light and the steadiness of the tripod), but the inside of my own head flashed each time I hit the cable release. Migraines lie in wait for every photographer.

  Another issue in photography: the subject is flattened and always smaller than reality. Larger prints don’t help; the real landscape or cityscape is at all times larger than the print.

  Theoretically, a portrait could be different. August Strindberg, when he contemplated opening a portrait studio in Berlin, had the theory that the human soul could be captured only if the negative was the same size as the subject’s face. He had written a short story he would read while the picture was being taken. The person sitting for the photograph had to remain perfectly still while the photographer (in this case, also the writer) would remove the cap from the lens and then put it back on it after the last line was read. The story, therefore, became a timer replacing the mechanical one. The story lasted twenty-five seconds. Strindberg’s homemade lens was as slow as the glass plates of the 1880s. The negative format was probably 24 x 36 cm and the glass plates had to be specially made. Not impossible, this required painting light-sensitive emulsion onto glass plates in a darkroom. On the other hand, he could never get his homemade camera—with a simple lens from a kerosene lamp—to work. You can have many plans—but not all of them will be realized. Just ask me.

  Capturing the range of exposure is another problematic factor. Think of a room right before twilight—outside the window a street is lit by the setting sun. For the person inside, it is easy to differentiate both the light outside and the darkness inside, thanks to the human eye’s exceptional optical range. Now think of a photograph. It’s necessary to choose an exact exposure. If the outside is clear, the inside is black. If the room is clear, the outside is completely white, or washed out as we professionals say.

  But I had my subjects—not portraits of people, as I was much too inhibited for that. Strindberg’s excellent ideas about a portrait studio were not possible for me considering my own level of expertise. But cityscapes, where people appeared at a distance, that was my specialty. I saw them, but they didn’t see me. I liked to study their movements in an almost scientific way.

  The movements of people. Yes. Very interesting. Perhaps you remember the old theory that cars about to turn didn’t really need their turn signals? The beginning of the turn, that subtle initial indication, the slight deflection of the front wheels as they turn to the left or to the right, should be enough for other drivers to know what would happen. People’s walking movements can be interpreted in the same way. That man there will soon turn—or stop; that woman with him—or not—are they walking beside each other because they are friends or colleagues, or are they strangers who just happened to be walking near each other at the same moment and will soon head in different directions? All of this is endlessly fascinating. You could draw them as figures on a graph.

  One November day, the snow-covered but sunny Drottninggatan outside my window felt like the right choice as my photographic subject. An f-stop of 16 and five hundredths of a second. In spite of the strong light, mysterious figures seemed to sneak about trying not to be seen. I wanted to capture them, list them, make it clear to myself what was about to happen. But in the photographs, they were always turned away. Then I decided to take pictures of the room instead. The window became a rectangle without detail. The floor covered in glass shards and dirt. The furniture smashed. Artistic pictures, perhaps, but to what end?

  The spirit of the times: the realization that injustice was exploding in countries all over the world demanded that stenciled pamphlets must be written and distributed. The subjects included Vietnam being bombed by the United States and France, with an independence movement in the North. Spain, Greece, and Portugal—dictatorships all, with Portugal fighting a gruesome war against the independence movement in their colony of Angola. Latin America, where many regimes relied on torture. South Africa, with its unsustainable apartheid system. Just a few examples. We young people were outraged by all the neglect and oppression going on in the world. Perhaps we were less observant when it came to the disparity on our own streets.

  During the evening, I would observe the movements of the people outside my window and develop my own theories. On the other side of Drottninggatan, all the buildings had already been torn down. A large construction site was extending in all directions around a gaping pit in the center to form a so-called super-ellipse. The remaining residents had to use temporary stairs and wooden walkways. These were rebuilt every week and were not easy to navigate.

  The patterns that people made, evening after evening, interested me very much. Three men were different from all the others. They seemed together and yet were not. They moved stealthily as if they did not want to be seen. They spied and wrote down secret things in their black notebooks. I would sketch them and their movements. My sketchbook was filled with page after page of identical labyrinths. I called them the Three Wise Men. Agent Caspar, Agent Melchior, and Agent Balthazar. The patterns they made would form the letter Z or the number 8. What did they want? Sometimes a fourth person would appear, a woman in a brown dress and a small hat. She seemed to be their boss. In my notes, I called her Maria. She’d use slight tilts of her head to indicate to the other three where they should go.

  The late fifties and early sixties were an odd time in the history of Stockholm. Huge swaths of downtown were demolished. It was the largest rearrangement of an inner city in Europe, especially for a country that had not been bombed during the war. That area we now call “city” looked so much like a war zone then that my pal from art school, Håkan Alexandersson, and I made a short war film there in 1960. In those days, every household in Sweden had received a brochure called If the War Comes about the dangers of falling atomic bombs. We titled our film Until the Fire Is Out due to the ridiculous advice in that brochure which in our minds minimized the danger. If your clothes start to burn, roll on the ground until the fire is out.

  One afternoon, I had a desire to search for any of Wahlberg’s leftover negatives and—with the help of a crowbar—I broke open a Masonite wall to find a closet-sized space of about two square meters. Both walls had cracks. The space itself was empty. Of course, it felt only natural to test one of the cracks with my crowbar. A layer of broken bits fell to the floor. Dust flew up and I couldn’t see much for a moment, but when it set
tled, I found a very old door. Crack! The crowbar did its work; the door fell toward me and I jumped out of the way. The dust had to settle once more before I realized I’d found an old passage to the building next door, Drottninggatan 35.

  There were a number of conspiracy theories in those days. One of the basic theories speculated that the owners of Stockholm’s old buildings let them decay until tearing them down would become inevitable. Repairs and renovations were held off until it was too late to do anything. Over eight hundred buildings were torn down in Stockholm from the midfifties to the midseventies. Most of these had been constructed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Very few were considered part of our cultural inheritance. One exception was my building, Drottninggatan 37, which, of course, was irritating for the developers. All they saw was space to exploit with a protected building in their way. That they would go so far as to set fires to the buildings themselves—that was a theory that even I, a diehard Communist, found hard to believe.

  All that time, I had to force myself to believe that there had to be a reason for the social heartlessness in Sweden, the architectural helplessness in Stockholm, and my own situation.

  Actually, I have to say that my paranoia was proven justified, because I came to be interrogated by two policemen who wanted me to confess that foreign powers had employed me to bring anarchy to the streets. They had three possible employers in mind: Albania, Cuba, or China. I was brought to the police station on Kungsholmen and I would probably have laughed in their faces about the absurdity of the accusation (these poverty-stricken countries couldn’t afford anything like this) if the policemen hadn’t been so intimidating. They placed me on a small chair in the middle of the room—well, I’ve described this matter in detail before. It had to do with an art installation I’d had at Galleri Karlsson, a little space near Odenplan. And I was declared guilty by the judge, but not for spying, as the police had hoped. Just for desecration of a state symbol and for agitation. The latter stemmed from a lithography where I’d written, Betray your country, don’t be nationalistic.

  I was prepared to be followed after I left the police station. I kept my eye out for agents, peering from a window on the second floor, a window in the same abandoned office where I’d met my married friend. Agents in American films have black suits, ties, and dark sunglasses. Not in Sweden. Here they sport what we call leisure wear in English. Light gray jackets, brown pants, black shoes with rubber soles. Perhaps a water-repellant hunter’s cap with a small brim—you know, those hats you can fold up and put in your pocket in case you need to slightly change your appearance. For the same reason, the jackets could be worn inside out. Their clumsy shoes, for larger-than-average feet, always gave away who they were. At Galleri Karlsson, we had called them “Säpo’s Art Club.”

  At first they didn’t scare me. But one evening at twilight, as I went through the floors of my building, I found about ten kerosene cans behind a stack of empty cardboard boxes. I’d lived in other places that had kerosene heat, but kerosene was not used in Drottninggatan 37. This very building, where I stood with my flashlight, had no kerosene furnaces. It had had water circulating in a central heating system before it was all cut off. No utilities in the building were functional. I had a moment of clarity. The Three Wise Men! The increase of arson! That’s how the final destruction of historic buildings would be handled.

  A bad night. I tossed and turned constantly. My broken sleep was then interrupted by a thundering sound. I got up, fully dressed as always because of the chill. Smoke was seeping into Wahlberg’s studio, the second time this week. Definitely not a coincidence. I was coughing as I ran to my emergency exit—the door I’d found hidden in the closet, the one leading to the building next door. I could hear screaming from the floors below. I stumbled in the darkness, tripping over all kinds of garbage. I found myself in the decaying attic of Drottninggatan 35 before I had any time to think. I’d left my camera case behind. My Hasselblad, the ping-pong table—all gone. Like the paddles and ping-pong balls. Just like before.

  Perhaps those skulking men committed murder. Perhaps not. In extreme situations, certain emotions, like empathy and indignation, disappear. Those screams from below, they came back to me afterward, much later, as an extra-horrible detail in my memory. I should have acted differently. I should have opened the door to the stairway and found the others, shown them the way out. Mr. Frost, with his weatherworn face and his silence, comes to me sometimes at night. I’d heard his screams before, in my car. Did I hear them then? A few minutes have been erased from my memory. In a smoking world, a person can become a robot on autopilot.

  The building was later rebuilt with a poured-cement façade to imitate its original wooden one. Behind this façade, there’s a modern office building. On the ground floor, there’s an elegant shoe store.

  I still feel, even after such a long time, that nobody takes me seriously.

  Nineteen Pieces

  BY CARL-MICHAEL EDENBORG

  Slakthusområdet

  Translated by Caroline Åberg

  19

  —No more now, miss. That’s enough.

  My swollen face in the mirror stares back at me. My mouth speaks without intention. My pupils are pistol muzzles, my forehead beaded with sweat, jaws working. There are furrows in my brow that go so deep the ice-cold restroom lighting doesn’t reach the bottom of them.

  My dry lips part again.

  —Just a little more.

  I shake my head, take the wallet from my purse; with trembling hands I manage to open the zipper, take out the stamp-sized paper envelope, stick my finger in it, lick off the bitter, putrid powder, rub the last of it into my gums.

  —Keep it together, Bengtsson!

  I clench my teeth. My lips pucker. A denture sends a sharp pain into my jaw. I clear my throat, put the wallet back in my purse, and leave the restroom. My half-finished beer is there on the counter. Branco looks at me with lazy eyes as I swallow the last of it, washing away the acrid with the bitter.

  —What do I owe you?

  It’s a running joke of ours. He snorts. A few free beers is a good price for a friend at the CID.

  —News?

  —Someone sent me a piece of flesh at work yesterday.

  —Human?

  —I hope not. Would make a nice Sunday roast. Three kilos.

  —Three kilos. Big roast. Bring it here and I’ll give it to the chef.

  I button my coat and use my cop voice, joking in yet another familiar way

  —What’s going on here?

  —Nothing much, Branco laughs, his fat head rolling on top of his shoulders.

  I leave Tucken and step out onto Götgatan, get in my Ford, and head off, through the rain, to work. My jaws are tense. I pop a couple pieces of chewing gum in my mouth. The alcohol warms me up from the inside; the speed cools me down from the outside.

  A thick, low blanket of clouds has been pushing down on the city for weeks. The light never makes it through. I pull out a cigarette and open the window, but change my mind as the raw air slaps me in the face; I roll it up and keep going through the fog.

  18

  Holmén meets me in the hallway outside my office, his face even more red than usual, one of the many drunks on force.

  —You’re late, he says.

  —I’ve been on a stakeout.

  —There’s another package.

  —For me?

  —Pretty disgusting.

  —Define disgusting.

  —Intestines, a liver, kidneys. It’s all been sent down to Linköping.

  I close my eyes and shake my head slightly.

  —What kind of sick bastard is this?

  —Maybe you should find out.

  —Of course.

  I open my eyes and stare at the tall, thin man.

  —I’ll do it for the meat. I want to know where he gets meat so cheap he gives it away.

  Lame joke.

  Lame laughter from Holmén.

  17

&n
bsp; The news reaches me around three in the afternoon the next day. I’m close to solving the crossword puzzle in Expressen when I hear shouting in the hallway. I finish my bathroom business and go out to see what it’s all about.

  Holmén, redder than usual, babbles.

  —Linköping says human, no doubt about it.

  Two older men yawn, a younger talent opens his eyes wide:

  —Dismemberment!

  Holmén continues:

  —And the murderer sends it all to Inspector Bengtsson! The third package contains parts of the back muscles and the left arm.

  I march over to them. My boot heels click on the dull linoleum floor. Holmén cackles:

  —Who do you think’s been murdered, Bengtsson? And who’s the murderer?

  —Your mom. Both of them.

  The two pale ones giggle with a hissing sound. Holmén turns even redder, lowers his voice:

  —The boss wants to talk to you.

  —I’ve heard that one before.

  * * *

  When I enter Superintendent Gunnarsson’s office he’s looking fresh in a black suit and tie, with his bare feet up on the desk and a pained look on his blurred face. I close the door behind me.

  —Your feet hurt, darling?

  —You can’t imagine, Aggan. Sit down.

  He lowers his feet, straightens up in his chair, turns his computer so I can see the screen. On it there are photos of the three packages, my name clearly visible in print, and as a colorful detail: their insides—red, white, and grayish.

  —Why you?

  —I guess I have a secret admirer.

  —My feet hurt like hell.

  —You question some poor runt again?

  —Those where the days.

  —Always the feet.

  He stands up and paces around the room a couple of times. It looks like he’s trying to rub the soles of his feet against the carpet.

  —Some bastard killed another bastard and sends the leftovers to you. At any moment now Expressen will be calling. Can we try and solve this shit right away?