Slugger

by Martin Holmén

  A hell of a lot of violence gathered at one table. I greet the two sons with a casual salute and then take my seat next to Svenne Crowbar. Nix is wearing a shirt as red as the devil himself. Narrow collared and ironed. At first glance it looks ridiculous but then I feel a sting of envy. The bloke knows how to dress at least. My thoughts are interrupted by the maître d’hôtel, who sashays over with four drams. Ma gets a man’s dose as well.

  ‘And a grog of whisky and Pommac for the gentleman.’

  He puts down a square glass in front of Svenne Crowbar and excuses himself with a slight bow.

  ‘I must say I find it fascinating when people mix Pommac with spirits,’ says Ma. ‘It ruins the drink. The grog becomes diluted, and you lose the alcoholic taste.’

  She flicks her napkin.

  ‘Soda water also works with whisky but can go wrong if you’re too cautious. The drink dies and loses all pleasure.’

  She spreads the linen over her lap.

  ‘Citrus flavour is the commoner among mineral waters. Only choose it if you wish to appear uneducated.’

  Finally she raises her glass.

  ‘Welcome, friends and sons. Help yourself to the smorgasbord first to abate your hunger. Then we shall discuss business. Cheers, and enjoy.’

  The spirit is warm as it runs down my chest and into my stomach. We all nod in unison at Ma’s words, then get up and follow Svenne Crowbar, who races over to the plentiful buffet table. Soon I have goose liver melting on my tongue and I sigh with pleasure. Makes a change from the herring rissoles and mincemeat I ate in my childhood, when I got anything to eat at all.

  Svenne Crowbar shovels salmon into his gob and chews with his mouth open despite Ma’s disapproval. Nix has some Strassburger pâté in his moustache. I have glanced in his direction a few times but the fact that he killed a vagrant today doesn’t seem to have dampened his appetite – quite the opposite. Hiccup is sitting in his chair, big and stout and quiet. He is working methodically through his gigantic portion, from the left edge of the plate to the right.

  I bring the fork to my mouth with care. Ever since the launderette opposite closed last year, I usually eat in my underwear at home so I don’t spill on my shirt and cause unnecessary costs. It is safe to assume that I am the only one here who does that. I might be able to afford a reputation stained with prison sentences, but I worry about my clothes.

  When the initial gluttony is sated I check my pocket watch under the table. If it is to be trusted, it’s already ten past eight. I go completely weak at the knees when I think of Rickardsson, that bastard. My heart, cold and inert since last winter, seems to have reawakened.

  He is probably already out for his evening stroll. I can picture him now in my big cast-iron bed. I would rather be at home in Sibirien licking the scent of schnapps off his chin than sitting here at the Grand. What a time to encounter a handsome man, in these dangerous days.

  ‘A good feast soothes the soul.’ I am shaken out of my thoughts. Ma dabs her lips with a corner of her napkin. ‘First they restricted the Swedes’ right to a little nip at lunchtime, and then they impeded the use of narcotic powder, gambling and the gee-gees, but we gave the people what they wanted. When the vice squad persecuted the whore girls and prostitute boys under vagrancy laws, they turned to us for protection. If only they forbade man’s right to food our success would be utter and absolute. Cheers to law enforcement!’

  Hiccup clucks and Ma’s sons hum in agreement. She picks up a compact mirror shining with mother-of-pearl, opens it and touches up her lipstick.

  The menu is in French. I point to the top line but the waiter informs me that the words mean ‘starter’. I go for his recommendation, which is some sort of winged delicacy. Ma orders a few bottles of Bordeaux. That’s somewhere I’ve been at least, even if I didn’t get shore leave that time.

  ‘So Kvist is going to the States,’ she says once her glass is filled. ‘I hear that they drink iced water with their food over there, even in the finer establishments, and no one is interested in wine.’ The deep-red liquid rolls around her glass. ‘A bizarre people.’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘However, as I have said, they know how to tackle the heat. And apparently in the winter they set up hot chocolate vending machines on street corners for anyone to use.’

  ‘Is that so?’

  ‘We intend to hijack the van.’

  Four pairs of eyes are on me. The sounds of clinking glasses and howls of laughter from a table of snobby youths cut through the tinkling of the piano.

  ‘Nothing to do with me.’

  ‘We want Kvisten to take part in our little operation.’

  My glass trembles as I take a swig of wine. I stroke my well-shaven chin. I can’t help but think about the occultist’s premonition of impending misfortune.

  ‘I have a lot to do and would like to cross the ocean as soon as possible.’

  ‘What did I tell you?’ says Nix, the fucking robin redbreast, waving his hand and glowering into the distance. Ma looks like she wants to give him a smack with her cane but instead she turns to me.

  ‘We would never suspect Kvist of lying, but we live in turbulent times. People have changed. The tiniest suspicion that you were duping us to escape from the country would be enough. Or even worse, that you were leading us into a trap.’

  ‘But my daughter…’

  I fumble for my wallet to show them a photograph of Ida.

  ‘Daughters!’ Hiccup opens his mouth for the first time since the starters. ‘Those little creatures are impossible to understand. There’s no fucking logic to their actions.’

  Ma interrupts.

  ‘Kvist was seen in conversation with Rickardsson not long before you came to see us. We have eyes and ears everywhere.’

  The man in the white panama hat comes to mind. I wonder just how long they have been keeping track of me.

  Nix lowers his hand beneath the tabletop. I swallow involuntarily and feel the hand gripping my wine glass begin to shake. It wouldn’t surprise me if he had a revolver pointed at my guts. This volatile man likes to shoot defenceless men in their soft parts. My mind struggles to find the words.

  ‘A coincidence. We live on the same street for Christ’s sake.’ I raise my glass, even though it feels like it weighs more than the gold bullion I was forced to abandon yesterday evening. The men are flaying me with their eyes. It feels as if my skin is slipping from my face. My cheeks are stinging. Not much of a choice. I sigh.

  ‘Okay.’ I take a big swig, try to suppress a shudder in my shoulders. ‘Count me in.’

  Ma smiles as two waiters approach with food laid on silver platters.

  ‘Kvist has plenty of fight in him. We might need your fists.’

  I look at the gangster queen. One moment she praises me, the next she implies I have gone soft. She changes positions as quickly as my old trainer Albertsson and I don’t understand why. The aim seems to be simply to confuse me.

  ‘I hear you have a twin brother,’ she continues with a smile.

  ‘How the hell did you know that?’

  ‘As I said, we’ve mapped you thoroughly. Is he of the same calibre as Kvist himself? Hijacking this transport will mean war. We’re going to need every man we can get in the aftermath. In this economic climate the factories seem to have swallowed them all up.’

  ‘Well, not him. He’s as dead as those bears in the foyer.’

  ‘I am sorry.’

  ‘Long time ago now.’

  I taste the food and try to think of something else to talk about. I don’t know what it is I am eating and can’t decide whether I like it. I wash it down with a couple of swigs of wine and refill my glass.

  ‘Maybe you would like to hear the story about when the consul bailed me out in Marseilles?’

  I tell the anecdote about the monsters and the whorehouse that was really a vaudeville theatre. The audience is more obliging than those snotty kids on Roslagsgatan. Even Hiccup and Nix snigger. Svenne Crowbar guffaws until
he chokes and the maître d’hôtel has to rush over with a jug of water. Not far behind him come three black-and-white-clad waiters in a row with the main courses on silver dishes. They look like penguins.

  I saw a small procession of penguins once. With binoculars, off the coast of Chile, from the deck. I thought about bringing one home, but someone told me that, even though they could survive in the Nordic climate, they would die on board on the way over.

  Dixie wouldn’t have liked it anyway.

  On my plate lie two breaded birds facing breast up with their skinny legs in the air. Svenne Crowbar pokes at them with his knife and laughs. Drunkards often see humour in places that sensible men can’t understand. I stare at the plate for a moment. The little bodies are wrapped in American streaky bacon. I tear a piece of meat from one of the babies. It smells good. It tastes good too.

  Other than a few grunts and sighs from the men around the table, we eat in painfully prolonged silence. Cutlery clatters against porcelain, Svenne Crowbar smacks his lips, and at one point I think he breaks wind, even though I don’t hear it. Hiccup looks up from his plate, frowns and sniffs. Ma looks in another direction and ignores it, but I can see her cheeks redden beneath her make-up.

  In come the coffee and desserts. Ma lights a cigarette and emits a thin stream of smoke through the corner of her mouth.

  ‘We would prefer to hit the Kungsholm side but the police headquarters is obviously a problem. There are probably more officers than just Berglund involved with Ploman.’

  ‘What about Hiccup’s daughter? Doesn’t she work for the police?’

  Nix is slurring his words and Svenne Crowbar laughs again.

  ‘The young lady is only a typist and interpreter,’ says Ma.

  Hiccup laces his fingers, rests his hands on the table, and the words spill forth.

  ‘I’ll never understand why the hell she went to work for them. I have raised her single-handedly since our other daughter died and her wildcat of a mother ran away. When she got older I arranged a separate apartment for her in the house. This is the thanks I get. Fucking stubborn women.’ He screws his eyes shut and opens them again. ‘I shouldn’t have taken her to work that time.’

  Ma interrupts his muttering by tapping her teaspoon against a saucer.

  ‘Gentlemen. If I had followed my father’s advice we wouldn’t be sitting here enjoying this feast today. A woman must be able to walk her own path, just like a man.’

  I clear my throat to speak.

  ‘I am acquainted with the constable in charge of the Anti-Smuggling Section, Chief Constable Hessler. He has been dismissed but may still have contacts.’

  ‘Persona non grata.’

  Ma stubs out her cigarette in the ashtray. A thick coil of smoke rises to the ceiling.

  ‘Sorry, what?’

  My eyes wander around the table. Nix leans forward.

  ‘He is no longer welcome there,’ he hissed. ‘Kvist knows the story better than most. That fucking snake had to leave when word got out that he was canoodling with men on the sly.’

  Ma leans forward and gives Nix a box on the ear. There is a loud smack as her son’s head recoils. It all happens so quickly that I am quite shocked. The pianist stops playing; the clattering porcelain goes silent. The whole restaurant is holding its breath.

  A flush as scarlet as his shirt spreads across Nix’s cheeks. Perhaps it is more from resentment than the sting of the smack. There is a thick tension in the air.

  ‘Now be quiet.’ Ma pulls ups her gloves. ‘Stay quiet until we get home.’

  The table rattles as Nix pushes himself up with his hands and shoots out of his seat. The white linen napkin flaps over his shoulder and then swoops to the floor like a gunned-down seagull. A few guests with plates full of buffet food hurry out of his way as he resolutely strides through the restaurant.

  Ma takes a few deep breaths and collects herself.

  ‘He gets his fiery temper from his father.’

  Svenne Crowbar coughs and goes as red in the cheeks as Nix did five seconds ago. His coffee cup rattles against the saucer when he puts it down. I can’t for the life of me understand what is going on.

  The pianist resumes playing. The light is beginning to fade. Rickardsson has probably finished his walk by now. Maybe he looked up at my window along the way. Ma inserts another cigarette into her holder.

  ‘I used to think that Ploman, the Reaper, Rickardsson and their rabble were working to become the most powerful organisation in the city. Now it has become apparent that they won’t be satisfied with anything less than the entire nation, with the help of their high-ranking friends and the Third Reich itself.’

  I strike one of the restaurant’s matches, lean over and light Ma’s cigarette for at least the third time in the last few days. The smoke streams out of the corner of her lips and she makes an elegant sweeping gesture about the room with her cigarette holder.

  ‘Look around. Look at the cream of the Swedish elite and establishment, and then look at us. Notice that they don’t feast, they are merely resting in all the comfort that they, and their predecessors, have usurped over the years, at the expense of others. How ironic that it is we, and not they, who are going to prevent a coup d’état.’

  I have followed her cigarette holder with my eyes and looked wearily around the restaurant. Ma leans forward.

  ‘We have a plan, seeing as the convoy always follows the same route.’ She lowers her voice. ‘We strike just before they reach their home turf, on Fridhemsgatan. We let the police vehicle turn the corner onto Alströmergatan and we separate the cars, possibly with a baby pram crossing the street. One of the boys and I will take the van, and the rest of you will be parked on Fleminggatan in the bulletproof Cadillac, ready to take care of Berglund if necessary, although we hope the Detective Chief Inspector will play it safe and go back to headquarters. Then we drive the convoy to Belzén of Birka for unloading. Kvist leaves Swedish soil on the same day. You realise what this entails for the Reaper, Ploman and possibly the inspector as well?’

  I do realise. I nod and stare down at my hands where they rest on the table and the scars that criss-cross my knuckles. Like the runes of our ancestors, etched into stone, they tell a history of violence and wild escapades. Somewhere in the restaurant the cork pops from a bottle of champagne. I clear my throat.

  ‘They’re going to die.’

  ‘Yes.’ Ma’s red-painted lips draw apart into a smile. ‘We’re going to kill them.’

  THURSDAY 23 JULY

  I fall asleep as soon as I get home, exhausted from lack of sleep, schnapps and rich food, lying on my good side. About an hour before dawn Dixie crawls up from the foot of the bed. She gives me a tentative kiss and curls up into a ball between my thighs and belly. I lay a clumsy hand on her. The skin on her back twitches a couple of times as if she is shaking off a fly, but that’s it.

  When I open my eyes in the morning, she is cold and dead.

  I recoil as though she might be infectious, and back away.

  ‘Oh, fuck.’

  I move over to the punchbag in the corner of the room. The dust dances in the light streaming through the window. I snatch the bottle of Kron from the desk, and pace back and forth without taking my eyes off her.

  Under her bushy brows her eyes are closed. Her body lies like a rigid, charred pretzel in the middle of the white bed sheets.

  I take a couple of proper breakfast swigs, put the bottle down on the nightstand, tear the bed sheets off from both ends and lift her up.

  Bloody mutt dying on me like this without any warning. Maybe this was the misfortune the clairvoyant upstairs foresaw in his trance. I put the bundled sheet in an old jute sugar sack.

  Roslagsgatan seems to narrow in the bright sunlight and runs like a stone-grey line between the worn façades. I walk south with Dixie’s body. I try to remember the first time I met her. Nothing comes to mind.

  The junk shop smells of rat shit and turpentine. The owner Ström stands behind a counter
of stacked sugar crates, scratching his big beard. He looks like an old man, forgotten on the sidelines of life. He clears his throat and spits on the dirt floor.

  ‘To think that it could be this damned hot in Sibirien,’ he says. ‘Twenty-nine degrees in the shade yesterday. Soon the thermometer won’t go high enough.’

  ‘And so many fucking lice that even the upper-class ladies have to drop their airs and scratch themselves sometimes.’

  ‘Has Kvist ever known a worse July?’

  ‘Did a summer at Långholmen.’

  ‘Was it this hot?’

  ‘My cell was above the barrels where they emptied the prisoners’ chamber pots.’

  ‘Oh, Jesus.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  The junk dealer stares out of the window and scratches himself a few more times.

  ‘It makes the beard curl,’ he says into thin air, before turning back to me. ‘Has Lundin gone west yet?’

  I shake my head.

  ‘Wondering if I could borrow a spade.’

  I take off my hat and dry off the sweatband with part of the sheet.

  ‘Is Kvist a digger now?’

  ‘My dog died.’

  I hold up the bundle with Dixie inside. It is the first time I’ve said it out loud. Grief cuts through me like black lightning. For a moment I shut my eyes.

  ‘The asylum nurse, may he rest in peace, used to have a miniature schnauzer. Walked the dog with a spoon in his pocket in case her eye popped out when the gang boys kicked her up the arse.’

  I recall Wallin, who used to live up the street. He died in all his vileness last autumn.

  Dust billows up when old man Ström kicks at the ground. Something sparkles in his eyes but he avoids my gaze.

  ‘He sold the corpse to me when the day came and I paid well.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘Dog fat, of course. A little sod like that can be cooked down to half a litre if one knows how.’

  ‘What in the hell? So it’s really dog fat, that stuff? I thought it was just a name.’

  ‘Speaking of which, it’s a long time since you bought a jar. Has Kvist stopped caring about a bit of spit and polish?’