‘Older than the Reaper?’
‘Right.’
‘And the moustache?’
The Bumpkin nods. ‘White as dead moss.’
He grabs hungrily at the note I am holding out. I blink at him.
‘For your bad memory.’
On the way back to the car I think about the Reaper and Berglund’s handshake at the harbour, and how one can certainly earn a coin with a poor mind, despite what Lundin says. I open the car door and put on my sunglasses.
I would like to test the power in the engine but the rambling lanes of the Klara district don’t offer the opportunity. I would also like to test the power of the guns. Something tells me that they kick back hard but a life at sea and in the ring has toughened my arms so the recoil shouldn’t be a problem. Deep down, part of me hopes that the Detective Chief Inspector does follow us tonight so I can blow the bastard into smithereens in good conscience. And part of me hopes he just stays away.
I find a deserted back street not far from Lindkvist’s casino in the Sköldpaddan district. I sit and smoke in the driver’s seat for a long time. I like smoking in a new car. I turn the evening’s plan over in my mind. If all goes well I am soon to be a very happy man.
The door slams. I go around to the passenger side and step on the cigar butt. A few labourer youths slink past with their Friday litres and their girls. They are already ravaged by hard graft, with lopsided bodies that they must have inherited from generations of working men.
I feel a hankering for schnapps, but the contents of the hip flask will probably benefit me more later. An old jailbird like me isn’t trusted by the damned schnapps company any more, and there is no time to hunt for contraband.
During the lean years, when I was a proper boozer, I might have fleeced one of those lads out of his litre, but that was before I became weak and withered.
It was Gabrielsson who helped set me straight, and I have honoured the promises I made him ever since. It is very rare that I have any hard liquor between my breakfast nips and the three o’clock full ration at the restaurants.
I wait until they have passed, take off my shirt and waistcoat and open the door. With a glance down the sun-drenched street, I put on my double shoulder holster and the jacket over it. I crouch into the car and take out the black-shining revolvers: two heavy Smith & Wessons with twenty-centimetre-long barrels. I open the cylinders to check that they are filled. According to Ma, they take a new kind of cartridge that the police use in America to pierce gangsters’ cars.
This is going to be beautiful.
I holster the shooting irons and fasten one button. I let a handful of cartridges rattle in my trouser pocket but leave some in the box. They might come in handy.
Soon we shall see. Tonight is the first night of the rest of my life – or my last.
I walk towards Drottninggatan, with the sun on my back. I take out my pocket watch in my left hand.
Assuming it is correct, it’s less than twenty-four hours until the boat sets sail from Oslo.
I clear my throat and spit in the bone-dry gutter.
‘Kvisten’s final round.’
FRIDAY 24 JULY
Ma and I don’t meet many people as we amble along the avenue between the lanes of Karlavägen. The residents of Östermalm have probably left the bustle of the city to spend the warm weeks in the countryside or the archipelago. Utterly deserted, like a salt flat, except for the black-clad gatekeepers standing to attention at every other house looking like sweat rags. In the trembling sunlight the air is still and hard to breathe.
‘Peace hangs like a threadbare mantle around Svea’s shoulders. People are flitting from one branch to another like frightened birds. We are living in truly uncertain times.’
I agree absently and finger the letter from America in my pocket. I haven’t summoned up the strength to read it again, let alone throw it away.
A lady in fine livery with a short riding crop trots past. The sun’s rays filter through the leaves of the linden trees and play in Ma’s silk dress. Patches of light dance on the gravel path as we walk.
I am close now. I can feel it. Part of me is there already.
Ma glances in my direction.
‘Cross a poor victim of the arrows of Mammon and he will become dangerous. We have chosen a shady business where loyalties shift quickly, even if trust is the only guiding principle we have.’ Ma breathes smoke out of her nose. ‘If you’ve got a full trough there will always be some piglets who come along for a nibble.’ She takes another drag. ‘The only thing one can trust is one’s own blood, but I see Kvist as a mixture of both my sons. A mixture of their more reprehensible qualities.’
She laughs. I leave the letter alone and feel instead to check I still have the little cocktail umbrella in my breast pocket. There have been several times over the past six months when I have bitterly imagined death as a blessing. Once, at my worst, I considered ending it all by my own hand. I have seen fellow inmates in Långholmen, at least as sane as me, throw themselves off the suicide walkway, down into the three-storey-deep cement valley.
All those thoughts are gone. Now, with happiness within reach, death frightens me. The stakes are too high. This morning I felt exhilarated; now I want nothing more than to wake up tomorrow.
We approach an old lady sitting on a wooden bench on the level of the secondary grammar school. Life has carved razor-sharp lines in her sunburnt face. She dunks an old crust of bread in milk and shoves it in her mouth. She holds out a cupped hand as we pass. A moist, slovenly sound comes from her toothless mouth, almost like when you poke some bastard’s eyeball. Ma avoids a steaming pile of horse shit.
‘Is Kvist listening?’ she says suddenly.
‘What did you say?’
‘Well, I said that my father was a man of the cloth who couldn’t handle my wilful ways. I fell pregnant. Had a healthy girl. After the birth he took the child, wangled the church records and drove me out of the rectory with nothing but a tirade of expletives to live on. I was as alone, as I believe Kvist has been.’ I kick at a stone. ‘Here comes the Baroness with her first and second chambermaids.’
I look up and see a lady with a parasol. A woman in uniform walks one metre behind her, and another follows a metre behind her.
‘At that time it was unthinkable for a woman to be independent, and I must admit that I traded my body for a while. Father was probably right when he said that sin originated in women, and so continually seeks to return to its source.’ She coughs lightly. ‘And it’s true that I rarely turned down a little Nachtspiel when it was offered, it has to be said. One might choose to see that as a weakness. In a woman.’
Ma nods in greeting to a gathering of several gentlemen dressed in very dapper summer suits, each with a little dog on a leash.
‘I couldn’t trust my own father, but I got another in recompense. Georg was good to me; not once in all our years did he raise a hand to me. It could have been because he knew I would leave and never return, but I think it was a case of that oh-so-complicated yet simple phenomenon: we grew to love each other.’
‘Mmm.’
My eyes wander aimlessly. The sun reflectors in the groundfloor windows shine across the pavement on the other side of the street. A horse and carriage pass by. The carriage’s rubber wheels glint in the sun. It smells like summer. Gay piano notes come from an open window above the Swedish–American tailor’s, and mix with the hammer blows from the construction site up ahead.
‘Georg came from a long line of butchers but had Finnish blood in his veins. Maybe that was what drove him onto the criminal path. Poor folk go where the road takes them. For my own part, perhaps I had no excuse.’
‘Mmm.’
I glance sidelong at her. Strange that she is confiding in me all of a sudden.
‘One thing that Kvist and I have in common is the thirst for revenge.’
She drags her ivory cane along the low iron fence that runs the length of the avenue. The hollow clanging is so loud t
hat the horse up ahead takes a few skittish sidesteps and the lady has to pull on the reins. Ma stops and turns to me.
‘I have issued dozens of death sentences but never personally taken a man’s life.’ For a moment she seems to look straight through me. ‘It does something to a person, I have come to realise. In some ways it is two lives extinguished in one go.’ The gravel crunches under our shoes as we resume our walk. ‘It makes no difference to me. In a way, I was already extinguished with that car bomb on the seventh of February 1924.’ Ma taps the cigarette out of her holder with her forefinger, stretches out her lame leg and crushes the butt under her shoe. ‘I will probably be gone before this year is through.’
I check the time.
‘Something happened to me in November last year,’ I mutter.
I peer at the building over her shoulder. I hear the rhythmical blows of hammer against rivet and watch the trainee masons balancing on wooden frames with shovels in their belts. A couple of painters in paper hats mix up the paint. Someone is shouting orders.
‘What do you mean?’
‘It was a Wednesday.’ My voice feels thick. I clear my throat. ‘I remember.’
Ma chuckles.
‘Kvist is a strange one, but that doesn’t bother me. Do you know Otto Weininger?’
‘Had a donkeyman called something similar once.’
‘Weininger was a German, or maybe Austrian, philosopher.’
‘A whizz at making ships in bottles.’
‘Committed suicide by shooting himself in the heart. In the same hotel room where Beethoven died, of all places.’
‘Got one of his at home.’
‘He proved quite clearly that there is no such thing as masculine and feminine, but that every individual, to varying degrees, is a mixture of the two. The idea spoke to me, and perhaps it speaks to you too.’
I stop.
‘What the hell are you saying?’
‘We are both obstinate in our ways, and perhaps we go contrary to what is expected of us.’
‘Perhaps.’
She lifts her cane and uses it to pat the back of my thigh, kind of like one does to get an old gelding moving. I obey and we continue.
‘There is something else that we have in common.’ Our shuffling walk has brought us nearly all the way to the Karlaplan roundabout with its big fountain. ‘Kvisten’s mind can be of use. I expect you have sent the odd man to the other side.’
‘They’re starting to pile up.’
‘And people still think that you have lost your edge recently. Look at this as revenge. People are going to talk about Kvist, however it turns out, but the talk will be different from what it was before.’
I hum absent-mindedly. Ma stops and pats me firmly on the cheek, like I did to Hasse in the dressing room yesterday.
‘Time to wake up, lad!’
I blink, tense up and look her in the eye. She is squinting at me. There is gravity in her voice.
‘Your associations with Rickardsson have made the boys mistrust you.’
Words fail me. I rub my broken hands hard against my forehead.
‘Oh, for God’s sake! Didn’t I fucking say that we have been neighbours for as long as I can remember?’
I rummage for a cigar.
‘I know. I believe you, of course. I am glad you will be by my side.’
It feels like a spring thaw in my mind when I finally grasp what Ma means. A cold, fatal terror floods through me from head to toe like a bucket of ice water. Ma locks her eyes on mine.
‘You have a lot to lose, but that cannot be helped. Kvist and I will take the van, Ploman and his murderous Mädchen für alles.’
The street is sun-drenched and sleepy. The Cadillac is filled with tobacco smoke and tension as we sit parked on Fleminggatan, a hundred or so metres from the scene of our planned ambush. The sleek mudguards have been lacquered in a deep shade of blue and the number plates have been swapped. The sun’s shimmering rays play on the white body.
From the driver’s seat I can hear Svenne Crowbar biting his nails. He smells of grog and aftershave. The barrel of a machine gun sticks up between his thighs. He has hung his jacket over it.
There is a click from the passenger side as Hiccup opens the drum once more to examine his large-calibre revolver. Then, for the first time since we got into the car, he opens his mouth.
‘Hope the Detective Chief Inspector chases after us so I can shoot the bastard in the face. That’ll be something to tell Lily over Sunday lunch.’ He holsters his weapon. ‘She makes an excellent veal steak.’
I stare at his flabby neck. You could stick a coin in there and it would get lost in the folds. Belzén’s right-hand man hooks his massive forefinger in the trigger guard and lets the revolver swing, as though weighing it. A wide, deep scar runs vertically across his palm.
‘Typist for the police,’ he continues, then looks out the side window with a snort. ‘Didn’t I sing for her every night after her damned mother went crazy?’ He lowers his voice: ‘Hush little baby, don’t you cry. If you live through spring you’ll have your daddy’s eyes.’
I am sitting in the back seat and flicking through the tickets and food coupons I have just been given by Ma. The journey is from Oslo, via Hull and Liverpool, to Halifax in Nova Scotia. I have been to Liverpool before. Maybe Hull too.
Who the hell knows.
I’ll get myself over the American border somewhere. Once I’m there Chicago will be my first stop. People say that it’s almost like home, with Småland folk everywhere.
In the envelope there are also two crisp $100 bills. I pull the elasticated strap off my wallet and put them inside.
‘Make sure the street stays empty now,’ says Ma. ‘We don’t want any innocent people involved.’
Without make-up, her true age shows through, with wrinkles and liver spots. She is dressed in a servant’s floor-length grey uniform with apron. She has hidden her hair under a stiff white headscarf folded over her forehead. Only her shiny nail polish reveals her true identity.
A sharp whistle cuts through the yellowing summer evening. I lay my arm across the seat and peer out through the back window. Nix, who is standing posted farther down the street, turns his back to the road and studies the display window of Augustsson’s Second-hand Bookshop. I crouch down in the back seat when I see a black police car driving straight towards us.
Hatred for the police blazes inside me. It is far stronger than the hatred I feel towards the Reaper. All my life I have been hounded by the pigs and especially by Berglund. Like Hiccup, I would gladly see the Detective Chief Inspector full of bullet holes, but I am not prepared to risk my life for it. I shut my eyes and feel the car vibrate as the police vehicle passes. It makes my breathing vibrate too.
The convoy has barely disappeared around the corner before Nix rushes over from the bookshop and opens the door on Ma’s side with urgency.
‘That was them. Police car and van, no more vehicles. But the cop car has a new driver.’
‘One more man makes little difference.’
Ma takes the little glass jar out of her apron pocket.
‘Gentlemen, in about half an hour, it is time.’
My chest feels tight. I need fresh air. I open the door and step out onto the pavement. Nix’s suntanned face immediately sticks up over the roof.
‘Where are you going?’
‘Stretching my legs.’
‘Don’t go anywhere.’
‘I’m not going anywhere.’
I put on my sunglasses and bite the end off a cigar. In the street the tram tracks shine green in the last of the daylight. A lanky man in a bowler hat, collarless shirt and buttoned blazer comes strolling along the pavement. He walks slowly with splayed-out feet, as if he has no aim or purpose to his walk, but his eyes oscillate alertly back and forth over the crossing where we are parked. He is carrying a violin case in his hand. I think I recognise him but can’t remember where from. It happens sometimes. I unscrew the lid of the hip flask
and take a mouthful.
The man passes between me and the car. He bends slightly as if to peek into the driver’s seat. It’s not strange that a well-polished Cadillac draws a certain amount of attention here in Kungsholmen, but there is something about him that gives me the creeps. He stands up and his jacket puckers.
Maybe it’s a weapon, maybe it’s a half-litre bought at the liquor shop on St Eriksgatan. My heart contracts.
I fix my eyes on the bastard’s back, put my right hand into my jacket and grab hold of the butt of my pistol. The bloke cuts across the road. He stops a little way in front of Fridhemsgatan, facing us. Nix hurries over the street and says something to him. After a minute or so of gesturing the stranger in the bowler hat walks on.
A group of scruffy street kids romp past. The whole gang need a good scrubbing. They are armed with slingshots and sticks. The biggest of them is holding a run-over street cat by the tail. Not long after them limps a little one in leg braces. Maybe they are on their way to start a fight with the lads in the next district. I watch them. Doomed to pilfer and make mischief. In a couple of years they will run past feeble men and snatch their watches from their chains.
‘Jailbirds in the making.’
I turn around and take a few steps towards Vilan’s locked café. The chairs are upturned on the tables inside, covered with a layer of dust. A sun-bleached notice on the shop window announces that they are closed for holidays. My memory darts back to last Sunday, the pimp and his mincemeat face.
‘Kvisten has still got it.’
I light a cigar.
‘Just need to show it.’
I see my own face reflected in the dazzling glass.
I am dressed in my pinstripe chocolate-brown suit with an ill-fitting waistcoat, light-brown shirt and red spotted tie.
It has been a long time since I last saw myself in the mirror and felt any kind of pride. I examine my broken face. Among the scars I see worry lines in the hardened skin.
The only good thing that came from that catastrophe in the dressing room was that I no longer had to disguise myself, hide my true self. I didn’t have to act according to other people’s words and deeds. On the other hand, there was no one left to hide from.
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