Slugger

by Martin Holmén

  I remain standing awhile as the sound of the parade approaches. In a few minutes there will be soldiers between us.

  I wait.

  This eternal waiting.

  I rustle around in my pocket and produce a small coin. The fisherman looks like a poor sod and could probably do with the dough. I briefly think of Ma’s proposal to track down Ploman and the Reaper’s secret transports. God knows I need the money, especially since Jensen the abortionist stitched up my forehead, and I have tailed people before. I turn my head here and there in search of the man in the white hat but see no one I recognise but the Bumpkin.

  The drum rolls rattle and I continue westward until I come to Norr Bridge. I undo my tie and look to see where the soldiers have got to. The blue and yellow caterpillar is working its way towards the Royal Palace. Sweat is stinging the soldiers’ eyes and turning them red. The austere drum major is the first to turn onto the bridge. I knot the tie and roll it up in my pocket.

  God damn it.

  The band marches breathlessly past with drums, brass instruments and bright-red faces, and then the horsemen follow brandishing Swedish banners and garrison flags. The sun flashes on their helmets, their brass instruments, the backs of their well-groomed horses and polished silver saddlery.

  The fisherman in the leather cap draws up his fishing rod and disappears behind the parade. I crouch down and stare between the horses’ legs as they clop past. He baits the hook with a maggot from a jar and gets up. I get up as well, stretch my neck and button up my jacket. Ever since the washerwoman opposite Lundin’s died, I have been concerned about my light-coloured shirts and I don’t know how cooperative this Bumpkin is going to be, with or without my small change.

  The sweetish scent of fresh horse manure spreads on the breeze coming in from the sea, and the final recruits march sweatily on, followed by a trail of boisterous kids. The Bumpkin has got his fishing line in the waves again and is standing and tugging at it gently. I look around, note that there are no police in the vicinity and cross the street.

  An old man with a big prophet-like beard is standing by the bridge abutment. He has a box resting on his stomach, hung from a leather strap around his neck. It is filled with cigarettes and multicoloured metal tins of cigars, under which he almost certainly keeps a collection of immoral postcards for those in the mood. This means he wouldn’t risk testifying as a witness.

  I walk up to the angler, clear my throat and put on my most devilish voice.

  ‘Hear that maggots make the best bait.’

  The skinny man in front of me flinches, pulls up his hook and puts the fishing line aside. He looks me up and down quickly with his watery eyes. No indication that he likes what he sees. He pulls his leather cap off his crown and holds it politely with both hands in front of his flea-bitten, badly patched jacket. I bend down and pick a whitish maggot from the jar of earth by his feet. It coils into a fat ring between my thumb and forefinger. I stare at the man. I could blow him down with a sneeze if I had to. I drop the coin back into my pocket with a jangle. I’ll be damned if I’ll waste any money on him.

  ‘Don’t know nothing about it,’ the fisherman squeals.

  I have been around a long time and know how to spot a liar. Everybody makes the same mistake of looking diagonally upward when they try to fib. Or is it the opposite?

  Shit.

  I grab the Bumpkin’s jaws in my left mitt and press my fingers into his cheeks, forcing his mouth open. He doesn’t have many teeth left. I drop the maggot inside and hold my hand over his gob.

  ‘Three days ago. You were digging around in the Katarina cemetery in the wee small hours. I believe you saw someone. If you don’t want to end up in the water like your son, you had better talk faster than the Devil himself.’

  I have never threatened someone with a maggot before. Say what you like about this pissing job, but it is full of surprises.

  The Bumpkin squeezes his eyes shut and shakes like a street dog taking a shit. A few half-choked squeals squeeze out through my fingers. I release his mouth and wipe my palm against his lapel. The maggot lands on the paving stone in a pool of phlegmy saliva.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Didn’t see no one. No one at all.’

  Swedes and their rock-hard, stubborn silence. They can be extremely reticent and often need softening up. They take pride in their silence but the only thing it gets them is a worse thrashing. The Bumpkin wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. His eyes are frozen in fear. I grab the bloke by his lapels, lift him straight up and heave him over the bridge’s cement railing.

  Here we go.

  Time to spill.

  Or drown.

  My back aches as I hold him. The Bumpkin is dangling five, six metres above the water. The sun is glinting on the surface. Excrement and flushed condoms float among the waves. He is kicking his legs.

  ‘I can’t swim!’

  The man screams as if he is about to explode and it echoes under the bridge. I look around. Too many people around for this kind of move. Some are pointing and staring. The sound of a jacket seam giving up the ghost suddenly breaks through the July heat.

  I grip harder but one by one the stitches surrender and the Bumpkin begins to fall towards the water with his hands waving in the air. I still have some reflexes left from my glory days. I let go of the jacket cloth that has remained in my grasp and grab for his wrist. My left shoulder shrieks with pain. I grunt and the Bumpkin screams for help.

  ‘Fuck it!’

  The angler’s sweaty wrist is slipping through my hand and his thin fingers dig into my flesh. I grab hold with my right too. Blood throbs in my hands. I grunt from the strain. A few seagulls emit a throaty cackle. I pull the fisherman over the railing and think I can hear his legs clattering like castanets against the cement.

  The Bumpkin collapses into a gangling heap at my feet. I lean forward with my hands on my knees. Another coughing fit. I pull the fisherman up to his feet. He is as pale-faced as if he had actually spent a week in the water. Brutality seethes in me. I hold my hands up in front of him threateningly.

  ‘You see this fist? Look at the damn thing! Broken it so many times I’ve lost count. Look at it, I said! What I’m about to do is going to hurt me just as much.’

  The Bumpkin looks like he wants to vomit. I take a few small coins out of my pocket again, to soften the blow. He is trembling so hard that tears can’t be far off.

  ‘One was the Reaper. P-p-ploman’s gangster,’ he stutters.

  I lean my head back to the cloudless sky and take a deep breath. The sunbeams feel like they are cutting me into small pieces.

  The bell of St Stefan’s Church announces half past seven with a solitary chime and Johannes responds from the south with a heavy clang. Roslagsgatan, the smoke-ravaged windpipe of Sibirien, cuts across the body of the city, sooty and almost deserted. A single car passes by and old man Ljung is leading one of his hire horses home. The road dust swirls around its hooves.

  The city is dying of thirst, withering right in front of my eyes, and flakes from the amber house fronts are blowing in the lukewarm breeze. The undertaker’s sign screeches on its rusty fixing.

  I stand by the open window with a schnapps glass in my hand. Anger is shrouding my mind in darkness. Poor folk have it worst in the evenings when the long working day is over and we sit alone with our hearts. Then come the thoughts.

  On the windowsill is the notebook, the aniline pen and the photograph of Ida weighted down by my Husqvarna pistol. Beside it is a litre of Östgöta Sädes schnapps.

  The memory of Evy Granér and her ‘precious’, the child growing inside her, comes to mind. I don’t understand why my thoughts keep turning to that woman. I wonder if she managed to leave the city and get to Motala.

  I hope so.

  I look up at the brick shack opposite, where Roslags laundry used to be. All is calm in the soft golden-yellow evening light that only a Swedish July can offer. I think of the friendly washerwoman, Sailor-Beda, and
her violent death last year.

  And now Gabrielsson.

  When Lundin takes down his screeching sign I will have no one to call friend. I have so little to lose.

  ‘The Reaper.’

  The Bumpkin said he had seen two blokes, on the thin side, in Katarina cemetery the morning of the murder. Both were well dressed and in later middle age, one older than the other. He said he’d recognised one of them as the Reaper.

  I don’t know his real name but would recognise his skinny frame and sunken cheeks from a hundred metres. And I have heard the stories. Like when he found out that it was Fridolf Five-Bob who hijacked one of his lorries in December of ’29. Ploman’s gangster sliced a furrow in his belly, from one hip bone to the other. Fridolf Five-Bob carried his own intestines in his arms through a snowstorm for a whole block before he collapsed at the crossroads of Sveavägen and Odengatan and caused the biggest traffic jam of the season.

  I shut my eyes again. I see Gabrielsson’s dead gaping mouth in my mind, as if he were calling for help. What involvement he had with a smuggler syndicate I can’t imagine. A man of God who almost never touched hard liquor, except once in Buenos Aires, which turned into a night we would never forget, but never speak of.

  Now that I think about it, I never saw him with a woman, even though there are no rules of abstinence in his faith. Maybe Ploman knew something that made Rickardsson, the Reaper and the others try to blackmail the rector out of some money, which he would certainly have refused them.

  It didn’t take long to get the Bumpkin with the maggots to talk but there are no more witnesses as far as I know, and finding someone else prepared to squeal about Ploman’s gang will be harder than getting a dram during Sunday service.

  I hum to myself quietly. Maybe an investigation into Gabrielsson’s past would help. If for no other reason than to map out the rector’s enemies. I open up a clean page in my notebook with a crisp sound. The list is short:

  National Socialists

  Various rich bastards

  The poor sod who tried to nick the church silver a couple of summers ago

  The purple letters stare back at me, challenging me. I cross out the last line, then the second to last. Gabrielsson was known for his anti-Nazi stance and criticised them tirelessly, both in newspapers through his letters to the editor and from the pulpit. I drum my fingers against the windowsill.

  I would much rather go after one of those little brown-clad scout boys but there’s no getting round it. A witness has placed the Reaper at the scene of the crime at the right time, and the gangster is one of the few people in this city who could bring themselves to drive four rail spikes into the body of a priest. The pen scratches against the paper as I strike out the first line too.

  Schnapps gurgles in the glass as I fill it one more time. I could stake out Ploman’s furniture business up by the end of Ynglingagatan but the place is well guarded, and if I had a run-in with the Reaper there, the whole district would soon be after me.

  ‘The end of Ynglingagatan.’ I laugh. ‘That’s right, Kvisten, we’re going to need another nip.’

  I throw back my head and drink in an attempt to force some fighting spirit into my broken body. I glance over my shoulder to see if Dixie has heard my merriment. She hasn’t, the deaf good-for-nothing. I put down the glass.

  Like Ma said: a couple of evenings a week a small convoy led by the Reaper and Ploman drives from their base, through Kungsholmen, to Söder and back. If I can find out when, then I can follow them in Lundin’s hearse and put a bullet in the Reaper’s heart when they get on enemy territory. That would make the retreat a damn sight simpler. My hand trembles slightly at the thought, holding up a third dram.

  ‘What do you think, Kvisten? Do you have cold-blooded murder in you?’

  I light a cigar and blow out great swathes of smoke that colour the summer evening blackish-grey and disappear out through the window. Warmth spreads through my body as the spirits slowly break through the fear.

  ‘Fuck knows but I’ll give it a shot.’ I take another puff. ‘It’s not like I got all these scars by falling over in church one Sunday.’

  Maybe Danilo’s Dance Course can ease my mind. Lundin has torn it out of Svenska Dagbladet every Saturday for a decade so that I can keep up my footwork. I dance alone.

  ‘Pissed Kvist the soloist,’ I mutter and attempt a little laugh. It comes out as a tired cough. I go over to the writing desk and the pile of yellowed newspaper cuttings. The topmost shows the difference between an ordinary tango and the Argentinian variety with black footsteps and explanatory text. Before I know what I’m doing I have taken all the pages, rolled them up and thrown them in the wastepaper basket. I turn back to the window.

  I have managed to get through half a cigar and another two shots when I see a robust bloke come walking along the other side of Roslagsgatan. He has rolled up his shirtsleeves in the heat and is carrying his jacket slung over his shoulder, just like last time. I don’t have to look twice to know who he is.

  ‘Well, I’ll be damned.’

  The words slide around my booze-slippery gob. Rickardsson is out for his evening stroll. I should have thought of this ugly fuck and his contacts earlier. I wedge the cigar in the corner of my mouth.

  He must know.

  I had better get a bloody move on.

  I stumble out into the hall, pick up my hat and put it on my head. Dixie’s claws patter fumblingly over the linoleum floor as she carefully sniffs her way out into the hall. My knees hurt as I squat down, stroke her back and slur.

  ‘Bloke stuff. Back soon.’

  I crack my knuckles, open the door and step over the pile of post that has gathered on the doormat. With my hand on the polished handrail I stride down the steps. Only when I am out on the street do I remember that the Husqvarna is still on the windowsill.

  Damn and blast.

  Anyway, I trust my fists more.

  Unless I am mistaken, Rickardsson will cross the street down by Odengatan and come back on this side. I run up to the crossing and push my back into the wall of 41. I kill the cigar under my heel and look around. To the left the road winds up to Vanadislunden and the reservoir fortress. If I can drag Lundin all the way up there on my back, then I can sure as hell carry Rickardsson a couple of steps as well.

  ‘Kvisten doesn’t take his hat off for anyone.’

  From Johannes elementary school comes the incessant distant roar of a football match, which seems determined to continue until sundown. Three cars pass, then a few minutes later the wailing jazz tones start up when the occultist two floors above with his window open starts up his evening practice. I must admit he has made some improvements during the two years he has been at it. The fact that I want to shove the brass down his throat and piss in the horn from time to time, like now, for example, is another matter. I try to listen for footsteps but the music drowns out everything else.

  A five-centimetre oblong stone lies at my feet. I bend down and pick it up. It fits perfectly in my left hand and can serve as a backup. I clasp my fingers around it so tightly that I can feel my pulse beating in my palm, as if I were holding a living heart.

  The trumpeter’s fingers start moving faster on the keys and the tempo increases. Rickardsson steps into my field of view.

  He whistles along to the melody as he passes so close by that I can make out the pores on his nose, but he stares straight ahead. Too cocky to be vigilant.

  You’ll be sorry, you bastard.

  A whiff of Aquavera penetrates my nostrils. The notes are flowing out over the street at an even quicker tempo now, drowning out the sound of my approaching steps. I reach out my hand towards Rickardsson’s broad back.

  Tap a man on the right shoulder and you can bet he will turn on the same foot. Then all you have to do is deck him with your left. The chin is a good point of contact if you want to knock someone out, but if you want to actually talk to them afterwards, you have to hold back to make sure you don’t break the jawbone. It’s a d
ifficult balance that takes years of training.

  Nothing to it.

  I know what I am doing.

  The occultist squeezes out the notes into some sort of climax. I have a good mind to pull out one of the straps of my braces and let it snap back but no, playtime comes later. I tap my fingertips just above and to the right of the dark sweat patch that has spread between Rickardsson’s shoulder blades. He stops. He turns his mug starboard and his body follows.

  That’s it.

  I have decent fists even when I’m drunk. Late one evening after a third-class pub crawl I was staggering past the Salvation Army centre on Långholmsgatan when a Christian soldier opened the door. Meanwhile the rest of the army were inside singing a frightful round of nocturnal hallelujahs that scared the life out of me. Before either of us knew what was going on I had him bloody at my feet. Even as a child the village priest said that salvation wouldn’t come easy for me because I was of dishonourable birth, born in sin.

  Knocking down a Christian soldier by mistake can hardly be compared to beating up one of the city’s toughest gangsters. A thrill rushes through my body. It nearly gives me a hard-on.

  You just keep staring at me and puffing yourself up, grinning all the while, cocky as a rooster. You are about to slip into darkness at the hands of Kvisten.

  I tighten my grip around the stone and squint one eye to better judge the distance. A flood of saliva gushes down my throat. The trumpet tones ride on a gentle breeze and fall down on the street like a fine, much-needed rain. My muscles stiffen and the excitement is replaced with a rare sense of peace.

  With no mother or father I have had to wander rootless through my existence, with a broken rudder, with no chance to mature into morality. Perhaps it was inevitable that I turned out as I did. One thing is sure: you cannot escape yourself.

  Rickardsson’s profile is in line with his shoulder. His sizeable nose sticks out a good way above his full lips.