by Jens Lapidus
Isa talked about guidance courses and work plans. Her desk was made of pale wood. The floor was linoleum, the walls covered in white textured paper, and the chairs felt plastic. Behind her, there was a glass panel through which Teddy could see other employment officers and his own reflection. He was tall and always felt like his hair was invisible somehow: ash blond, shortish—or maybe it was mid-length.
With the exception of Isa’s earrings, everything in the room reminded him of prison. It wasn’t a personal room, it wasn’t Isa’s own office, it was a meeting cell, a place that looked in to the employment service but not out onto reality.
Though maybe Teddy did know what his problem was. After all those years in prison and his subsequent years of freedom, he still didn’t know anyone but the people he had met inside and those he had known before he was sent down, people who belonged to his old life. He could count the number of people he was close to on one hand: his sister, Linda, and her son, Nikola. Dejan, from the past. Tagg and Loke, from his corridor in Hall Prison. Those were the people he felt comfortable around. It was in their company that he could be himself. Then there was Emelie, of course, but he didn’t want to think about her right now. In any case, none of them could offer him a job, other than possibly Dejan. But that work would hardly contribute any tax to the Swedish state. In fact, there was a risk it would actually lead to increased costs for the country—in the form of a greater burden on the law enforcement agencies investigating whatever Dejan was up to.
Maybe he should just accept his predicament: realize that he didn’t fit in. Teddy would never be a part of the Sweden that he had longed for while he was inside, ever the outsider. But that wasn’t the same thing as saying he wanted to be a criminal again.
“Are you listening, Teddy? You have to listen, otherwise I can’t help you.”
Teddy stretched out his legs beneath the table. They had almost gone stiff from sitting still for so long. “Sorry. I was just thinking about a friend who might be able to help me find a job.”
It was a long shot. But what was he meant to do? None of the courses, placements, or group seminars had led anywhere. Dejan was bound to be able to help him, for old times’ sake. Isa tapped away at the keyboard as Teddy told her about his friend’s construction company. Then she cocked her head and gave him a serious look.
“I’m sorry, Teddy, but I think it could be tricky with your friend. I don’t want to sound judgmental, but his firm has a very modest turnover, and he hasn’t declared any income for the past ten years. I don’t think he can offer you a real job. Not a job that I can approve, anyway.”
Isa was right.
But she was also wrong.
2
It was six in the morning, and the crazy thing was that Nikola didn’t even feel grumpy. George Samuel, his boss, had a particular way of smiling, which meant that his entire face crumpled up around his eyes. Nikola wondered whether George could even see when he smiled.
“Morning, Nicko, know what we’re doing today?” he said as Nikola stepped into the cramped office.
Nikola put on his tool belt. “Yep. We’re starting our biggest ever job. You haven’t talked about anything else for a week.”
They walked out to the van together: George Samuel Electrical in elaborate script on both sides. His tool belt jangled. Nikola didn’t have his own ride, which was why he always met his boss at work and traveled with him to their jobs. Plus, it gave them a good opportunity to chat.
It was his mother, Linda, who had found him this placement with George Samuel. And now Nikola worked like any other Swede: five days a week. Up with the first radio broadcasts, lunch at eleven thirty on the dot, then back home before it even got dark in winter. Sometimes, he slept for an hour before dinner, just so he could manage to stay up past nine.
* * *
—
An unfinished shopping center rose up out of nothing in Flemingsberg, tucked between the train tracks and the court—like someone had buried an enormous concrete egg there, and it had only just started to hatch. It really was a huge job. George Samuel wasn’t the only electrician who had been contracted, but for him and his apprentice, it meant ten months of full-time work all the same. A guaranteed customer for almost a year—that was invaluable, Nikola knew.
They stood side by side: worked as a team. Single-phase, three-phase, junction boxes. Cables, fuses, and amps. Nikola’s technical vocabulary had swollen so much that he knew more electrical words than he did slang terms for drugs. Sometimes, it felt like his job meant more to him than the rest of his life put together, but that was okay—he liked it, aside from when the workmen started drilling in the distance. That sound reminded him of the explosion.
Eighteen months earlier, he had been on his way inside his uncle Teddy’s place. When he turned the handle to open the door, a bomb had exploded, throwing Nikola against the opposite wall. He had suffered injuries to his abdomen, chest, and hands, which, out of sheer reflex, he had used to cover his face. It had meant a week in intensive care followed by a month on the ward. His mom and Teddy had been there every day, but the girl he was dating at the time, Paulina, had dumped him. It was just as well—clearly she wasn’t worth his time.
Like always, George had set up his dusty old radio on the floor. They listened to Mix Megapol—Bebe Rexha’s cocky voice was singing the same line over and over again. It was like working to a particular rhythm.
George turned down the volume. “You know that next week, you’ll have done your sixteen hundred hours?”
“Really?”
“Yes, really. You’ve been doing really well, Nicko. I’ll help you finish your certification. Your apprenticeship’s over, the board’ll approve you straightaway. You’ll be a qualified electrician. What do you say about that?”
George Samuel chuckled—his eyes narrowed again, and Nikola couldn’t help it: he had to laugh, too. He had to laugh hysterically. George Samuel, blind from laughter—Nikola, almost an electrician. It made sense. He would have a real job. A real wage.
Who would have believed that eighteen months ago? While he was lying in intensive care after the explosion and Linda was beside herself with worry about him being on the wrong track. Who would have believed that life could be good? Who would have believed that it might actually be really good?
* * *
—
They were all proud of him. Teddy, who had found him his apartment, patted him on the shoulder every time they met: “Glad you’re not following in my footsteps, Nicko.” His grandpa still tried to make him go to church, but now he just smiled when Nikola refused. “You’re on the right track, moje malo zlato. Your grandmother would have cried tears of joy.” Even the boss of Spillersboda Young Offenders’ Institute had called to congratulate him on his change of lifestyle: as though Nikola had uncovered three identical symbols on the millionaire scratch card.
But it was his mom who was happiest of all.
“Do you know what I think’s so good?” she had said one day that spring, when he was still attending classes at the adult education college and had told her his grades. They had been walking along the canal, and Nikola had glanced over toward Södertälje Centrum. The birds were twittering like crazy, and there was dog shit on the path.
“That I broke away from my old life?” he tried.
“No, actually. The best thing is that change is possible. I was worried while you were in Spillersboda, you know, and even more once you got arrested and after the explosion. But now we have proof. That people can change.”
Linda had a salon tan and was wearing Ray-Bans that covered half of her face, but Nikola could hear it in her trembling voice all the same: she might have been shedding a tear or two behind her glasses.
“You know, Nicko, you don’t need to believe that you have to be someone anymore, that you have to strive for status and that kind of thing,” Linda had said, pau
sing for effect. “Because you’re already someone.”
They had stopped at a park bench. Nikola had turned to her. She was wearing a Houdini fleece and walking pants of some kind: they didn’t really go with her tan and glasses. Body: outdoorsy Swede. Head: MILF warning. Ahh, strike that last part—that wasn’t the kind of thing you thought about your own mother.
The ground beneath the bench had been covered in seed shells. Albuzur—sunflower seeds. Nikola was a big fan. It meant that someone had spent a while sitting there before them, thinking things through. He had sat down. “I’ve got my Swedish exam next Thursday, and I have to submit an essay.”
“Exciting. What’s the essay on?”
“The Count of Monte Cristo. Have you read it?”
“No.”
“It’s one of Grandpa’s favorites, you know.”
“I can imagine. He’s a big reader. It’ll be fine, I know it.”
Nikola’s grandfather was a reading wizard: a man who had moved to Sweden from Belgrade sometime long ago and who had always taken Nikola seriously. He remembered his grandpa sitting on the edge of the bed, reading aloud from “the classics,” as he called them. The Jungle Book, The Three Musketeers, The Count of Monte Cristo.
At the same time, his grandpa had also raised Uncle Teddy—one of southern Stockholm’s legends in his day. Nikola couldn’t reconcile the two in his mind.
* * *
—
Chamon’s Audi A7 was parked in the middle of all the construction machinery outside the half-finished shopping center. Like always: his friend’s collection of parking fines was fatter than one of Escobar’s wads of cash. Not that Chamon cared—the car wasn’t registered in his name. They never were. Vorsprung durch Technik—or, as Chamon liked to say, “Forward through Babso.” That was the name of the guy who had four hundred cars registered to him in Södertälje.
It was Thursday, but Nikola wouldn’t be working tomorrow. In other words: it was the weekend. George Samuel had agreed to let Nikola go at two thirty. They would see one another again on Monday, like usual.
Chamon started the engine. “You heard that Audi’s releasing a new flagship model, the Q8?”
“Yeah, I read about it. It’s gonna have the V8 engine. But weren’t you talking about getting the new Lexus, the LS?”
Chamon stared at him. “Are you kidding me? I’m from Södertälje. I only drive German.”
Things were going well for Chamon—clearly—and his car was the strongest evidence of that. Then the watch, then the other jewelry, then where he went on vacation; people didn’t care where you lived. They never talked about where Chamon got his money from—even if Nikola knew that he dealt to chalk-white inner-city kids at their insanely wild rave clubs. You didn’t talk about that kind of thing, even with your best friend—especially not if that person wasn’t part of The Life themselves. Nikola did sometimes long for it: for what he’d once had. The freedom. The lack of control.
They went back to his place, watched a few episodes of Narcos for the second time: loved it when Escobar inspected the coke factories in Medellín. They went down to buy kebabs. Chamon pulled out a couple of grams of weed, which they smoked in Nikola’s hookah—Nikola needed these chill moments. Ever since the explosion, something had happened to him, even if he couldn’t quite put his finger on what.
He and Chamon laughed. Listened to music. Leaned back on the sofa and just chatted.
After a few hours, Chamon looked up. “Nicko, do you believe in God?”
“Nah, not really.” This was classic Chamon crap talk. “I believe in fate. And my dachri.”
But Chamon didn’t laugh. “Do you believe in God or not?”
“Shit, man, I don’t know.”
Chamon drew on the pipe, then he kissed the thick gold cross that hung around his neck on an even fatter chain. “I do.”
“Why?”
His friend’s eyes were glossy. “ ’Cause there’s got to be something other than this.”
“Than what?”
“Bro, I don’t get any sleep at night. I wake up every fifteen minutes and peer round the curtains. If I hear a noise on the street behind me, I drop to the ground. The minute I see a car I don’t recognize, my stomach turns. I’m getting fucking ulcers.”
“But you’re free. You don’t have to get up at five every morning like I do.”
“I dunno, man, maybe you don’t have it so bad. It’s hard to explain, but sometimes I feel like I can’t do it anymore, like I’m tired of the whole thing, I don’t have any power. You know how many people’ve been killed these past few years? You know how many brothers have vanished? But the people making the decisions don’t give a shit. They’re all such whores, you know. I want to do something else sometime. Travel, you know? Or try out music or something. You know what I mean?”
“Music?” Nikola didn’t recognize his friend: want to do something else sometime—that sounded more like his mom’s nagging than Chamon.
“I mean, I’d like to learn an instrument. I was playing football for a while, but my mom always said I had an ear for music, that if I heard a tune once, I could sing it back perfectly later. She said I was musicalistic, or whatever it’s called. But dachri, these days all the undercover cops and snitches are fucking my head so much, I can’t hear a thing in there. Won’t be long before there’s none of me left. Not even sweet tunes.”
Nikola tried to work out how serious this conversation was. He thought about George Samuel and about how the most difficult thing he’d done today was to pull four insulated copper wires through a conduit.
And Nikola knew: he had made the right decision. Almost an electrician.
The Life wasn’t for him.
3
Emelie got up, smoothed the creases in her pants, and went out to greet Marcus. Anneli, the secretary she and the other lawyers shared, had already buzzed him in through the door downstairs. If Marcus had taken the stairs, he should be ringing the buzzer in approximately seven seconds. But if he had gone for the elevator, it would be a few more. It was a kind of litmus test, Marcus’s first. Emelie’s own inclination was always to take the stairs, regardless of how heavy the files in her briefcase were. Not that it really made much difference; she had already offered him a probationary position as a lawyer. There was no denying that it was a big step. Emelie had been running her own firm for just under eighteen months now, but the number of cases had exceeded expectations. She no longer had time to handle everything herself, which she knew was a luxury. Still, it was a risk—from today on, she wouldn’t just be responsible for paying her own salary. From now on, Emelie Jansson Legal Services AB would have to bring in enough money to cover two wages every month, one which came before her own. The curse of the small business owner, she thought. If Marcus was ever unwell or unable to handle the work, or if he simply didn’t manage to invoice properly, it was the firm that would suffer, and it might not survive. Her dream might come crashing down. But she needed someone to lighten her load all the same: in that sense, it was a must. She had too much to do.
* * *
—
Marcus was tall and well built, with a thin, neat beard, and as they shook hands, Emelie noticed that he smelled good. He had probably taken the stairs. For a brief moment, she had thought he was expecting a hug, but she was his boss and employer now, even if there were only two years between them. Besides, she wasn’t the hugging type.
“Please, come in. I’m so glad you could start today.”
Marcus was wearing a navy suit, and his slacks were slightly too short, but that was just the fashion right now. The top button of his shirt was undone, and he wasn’t wearing a tie, which was fine, given that he wouldn’t be in court today. To begin with, he would just be getting to grips with everything. The way he moved reminded her of Teddy, she thought: calm and deliberate.
“Let’s go t
o my office,” said Emelie. “Would you like anything to drink?”
She had asked Anneli to make sure there was freshly brewed coffee in the machine, and a couple of bottles of Ramlösa water in the fridge.
“Please. You wouldn’t have any caffeine-free tea?” Marcus asked.
Caffeine-free tea, Emelie thought. That sounded quite un-lawyerlike, though maybe it was just something else that was trendy right now. She turned to Anneli and passed on the request.
“Nope, afraid we’re a bit low on the caffeine-free today,” the secretary said with a wry smile. The only thing Emelie and the other lawyers drank was coffee, coffee, and more coffee.
They went into her office. On one wall, she had a framed Mark Rothko painting. It was a poster, of course, a flat expanse of red that faded to brown and then something close to yellow. Emelie liked it; she thought it brought a sense of calm to the room, even if the fact it was only a poster reminded her of her previous employer, Leijon. Magnus Hassel, the partner she had worked with there, collected contemporary art, and he had both Warhol and Karin “Mamma” Andersson canvases hanging next to works by Giacometti and Bror Hjorth in his office. But that was history now. She had resigned from Leijon because they wouldn’t agree to her taking on a defense case. And then she had taken what had to be seen as a giant leap into the world of law: from being employed by one of Europe’s best corporate firms to renting an office and a quarter of a secretary’s time in a space she shared with three old human rights lawyers. Her former colleagues at Leijon had raised their eyebrows. A downgrade, a desperate fall from the elite to the D-list. She could, at least, have applied for a position with one of the renowned criminal firms, worked for the courts or with the Swedish Prosecution Agency, if what she wanted was to work on human-centric cases like that? It was just that it didn’t suit Emelie—she wanted to be left to her own devices, that felt important, she’d had enough of bosses getting involved. And she knew she could be one of the best.