by Jens Lapidus
Z had opened the box as, like always, he explained what was what. “This thing calculates the composition of different substances with real precision, only cost sixty-nine kronor. You won’t find one any cheaper.”
He had held up a small ampoule that was transparent at the bottom. There was some kind of liquid inside it. “You take a sample the size of a pinhead,” he read aloud in English from the minimal instruction sheet, scooping a pile of powder the size of a fingernail onto a teaspoon.
Roksana had studied the description on the packaging. “That’s too much. That’s not a pinhead.”
Z had turned to her. “Which of us is the expert here? That’s about a nail’s worth.”
“Yeah, but pinhead doesn’t mean nail. Though maybe you thought the instructions were in Azerbaijani? Because in Azerbaijani, it means testicle.”
Z had mumbled something as he Googled the word pinhead on his phone. “Okay, you’re right,” he managed to say, shaking off some of the powder. Next, he had tipped what was left on the spoon into the ampoule and screwed on the lid. He shook it. Roksana had thought about Ray, her chemistry teacher from high school. He’d had a yellow mustache and wore leather waistcoats, and he’d had violent outbursts at some of the guys in her class practically every lesson. But he had always calmed down quickly and continued the lesson with untiring enthusiasm—and he had loved Roksana’s curiosity.
“Okay, that’s been two minutes. The reaction should be done and we can compare it to the color chart.” Z had held the ampoule up to the light with the instruction sheet next to it. Roksana had studied the different colors. Red: ketamine. Greenish yellow: amphetamine. Blue: cocaine. Purple: MDMA. Yellow: Ritalin. Burgundy: PMA.
The color of the liquid in the ampoule was clear to see—it was red.
“It’s ketamine,” Roksana had said.
“I’ve always wanted to try it,” Billie replied.
“They say it’s better than DXM,” said Z.
“They’re usually right,” said Billie.
“Who’s they?” Roksana had asked.
“No idea,” Billie had replied. “But who cares. We’re trying it.”
Stockholm County Police Authority
Case #: dnr 0104-K3941
OFFICIAL NOTES
The following are extracts from a selection of telephone conversations and SMS messages between suspect Hugo Pederson and a number of other individuals. The monitored phones have the following subscriber numbers: 0733-475734 and 0704-343222. The conversations were recorded between 2005 and 2006.
TELEPHONE CONVERSATION 1
To: Hugo Pederson
From: Louise Pederson (wife)
Date: 23 September 2005
Time: 21:34
LOUISE: Where are you?
HUGO: At work.
LOUISE: Do you think you’ll be back before I go to sleep?
HUGO: Mousey, that depends when you go to sleep. If you doze off in front of Sex and the City like usual, you’ll be snoring like a little pig when I get home, because I’ve got loads to do here.
LOUISE: Aha, like usual then. Oh, by the way, I talked to Isabelle today, and I got so annoyed. Do you know what they’re doing?
HUGO: No.
LOUISE: They’re using Stacek for their renovation.
HUGO: That’s good, isn’t it? I mean we’re using him too.
LOUISE: Exactly, but they’re planning on getting him in before us. And they’re going to gut the whole place, tutti banutti, Isabelle went on for half an hour about Dornbracht taps, Kvänum kitchens, Gaggenau ovens, limestone in the hallway and recessed spotlights in the ceiling.
HUGO: Good for them, so long as it doesn’t overlap with when we were planning on doing our thing.
LOUISE: Our thing, our thing, Hugo, our thing isn’t even a thing compared to what they’ve got planned. We’re just changing the kitchen and repainting the bedroom. Our thing is a poor budget version, a cheap joke. I think we should redo the bathroom as well, and at least get the wiring redone. It’ll be embarrassing otherwise. Everyone else is redoing everything, and we’re just fiddling with the kitchen worktops.
HUGO: Everyone is not redoing everything.
LOUISE: Isabelle and Anders are doing everything, and you know that Ebba and Pierre completely renovated their villa last year, they even built an extension. Anna and Carl-Johan fixed up their entire apartment in London, too. So yes, everyone is doing everything. Except us.
HUGO: But our bathroom’s perfect. Why do we need to redo it? The previous owners only renovated it two years ago. They changed everything, every last tile.
LOUISE: You just said it, it’s already two years old. It’s 2005 now and I hate those terracotta tiles. And the freestanding toilet. No one has freestanding toilets anymore, they need to be fixed to the wall, otherwise you might as well have a compost toilet.
HUGO: But I think we should wait, the place was expensive enough as it was.
LOUISE: Hugo…
HUGO: What?
LOUISE: I’m ashamed of our home.
HUGO: Mousey, come on…
LOUISE: No, I think it’s embarrassing. I barely even want to invite people over when it looks like something out of an Ikea catalogue. Good night.
TELEPHONE CONVERSATION 2
To: Carl Trolle (friend)
From: Hugo Pederson
Date: 23 September 2005
Time: 22:42
HUGO: Hey, man, it’s me.
CARL: I can see that. What’re you up to?
HUGO: Fixing.
CARL: Mmm.
HUGO: Night shift for me.
CARL: But you love that. I’m at home.
HUGO: I’m not just going to sit still and wait for business, that’s hard work. Did you do a half day today?
CARL: Ha, ha, funny. Fredrika’s eating out at Teatergrillen with work, so she’s probably having a good time, but I…
HUGO: You’re doing what you do best, I bet. Chafing your palm.
CARL: Honestly though, have you seen Porn Hub? What a site, you can click your way to anything.
HUGO: What’d you say it was called?
CARL: Porn Hub
HUGO: I’ll give it a go.
CARL: Now? At work?
HUGO: Nah, I’m not like you.
CARL: We put in an offer on an apartment, by the way.
HUGO: Yeah? Where?
CARL: Kommendörsgatan. Eighteen hundred square feet.
HUGO: What do they want for it?
CARL: Sixty-five thousand per square foot. This city’s sick.
HUGO: You need to do anything to it?
CARL: Yeah, of course. Fredrika wants to gut the place, open plan, Carrara in the bathroom, she wants it bright and fresh, etc. It’s actually pretty cool.
HUGO: Aha.
CARL: But we don’t know if we’ll get it.
HUGO: Nah. So you’re going big on the renovation.
CARL: Of course, I told you. You’ve got to. You want to make it your own, you know? You don’t just want to move into someone else’s world. So I completely understand Fredrika. It’s a bit embarrassing not to do it these days, if you ask me. It’s not like it’s rented.
HUGO: Nah, that’s true.
CARL: Exactly.
HUGO: Listen, I’ve gotta go. Speak later, man. Speak later.
CARL: Ciao.
5
There was a sign above the garage: Car Wash, Reconditioning—Central and South Stockholm. On the flags fluttering alongside it: Unbeatable Prices and Rental Cars Available.
Teddy was in the passenger seat next to Dejan. Dejan’s dog, the Mauler, was in the back. They weren’t here for the comprehensive car wash or the unbeatable prices, even if Dejan did have a new ride: a Tesla Model X. When he first told Teddy he had ordered the T
esla, Teddy hadn’t believed him. “Are you going all eco-warrior in your old age?”
Dejan had replied with dead eyes. “Just wait till you test drive it.” There were certain things you just didn’t joke about with Dejan: his dog was one of them, his cars another. And his friend had been right about the car, even if it did look like an overgrown Peugeot. The Tesla felt so high-tech inside that it reminded Teddy more of a tablet computer than a car. The falcon wings—or back doors, as they were known to ordinary people—opened upward, like on a Merca SLR, with the one difference that this was a four-wheel drive beast that didn’t use a drop of petrol. Craziest of all was one of the settings on the touch screen: Ludicrous Speed. The thing could do 0–60 in three seconds flat—without any gears. The sickest part about that experience was the silence—it was like leaping into a precipice, with nothing but the wind in your ears. Teddy’s hand instinctively sought out the handle above the passenger-side door; he needed to hold on to something, to limit the height of the fall, and his stomach felt like it was an inch away from being turned inside out. Dejan, on the other hand, was shouting loudly: “Whooah!”
When they pulled over in Flemingsberg, his friend had explained: “It’s over one G, apparently. This little beauty accelerates faster than if we’d fallen out of a plane.”
Teddy nodded, swallowed—that explained his near-puking-death experience. “Maybe I should become a tree hugger, too,” he said, leaning his head back against the headrest. “When I can afford it.”
He hoped Dejan would take it a little easier on the way back.
* * *
—
There was no way Dejan’s car would fit through the narrow garage doors, but he was here on a different kind of business. Teddy was with him for the simple reason that on the kind of business Dejan wanted to do, you didn’t want to be alone. Not even Dejan. Teddy was his friend’s backup. His life insurance. His parachute. This was just the kind of job with Dejan that Isa from the employment service didn’t want Teddy to take. He understood her. But what was he supposed to do?
They rang the buzzer on the metal garage door. Though it was only three in the afternoon, darkness had fallen. The bzzz sound was loud: they barely heard the click of the lock—but there was clearly a surveillance camera above them somewhere. Dejan pulled open the door, and they walked down the ramp inside.
Concrete floor, Ditec signs on the walls, posters for maintenance products, service packages, equipment, polish, and wax. The garage was gloomy, and it smelled of exhaust fumes. There were five cars parked along one wall: battered rust buckets of unflashy makes. Dejan’s space car would have felt uncomfortable inside, like a prince among paupers, or whatever the expression was. On the other side, there was a stud wall that formed an internal room, probably some kind of office space. Otherwise: a hydraulic lift on the floor and plenty of equipment—probably all the kinds of things you needed for this kind of outfit.
But, again, Dejan was here on a different kind of business.
Teddy turned his head, scanned the place. He couldn’t see any movement. But then they heard a voice from inside the office. “Dejan, you little Serb, come in.”
A man with a neat beard, a hoodie, and sweatpants came out of the office. Teddy felt like a dwarf in comparison, despite being almost six and a half feet tall. He had seen plenty of big guys in his time, in the prison gym, in the circle around Mazern, the task force cops who had crushed him when he was arrested. Guys who worked their asses off on the bench press every day, or who hung from the pull-up bar only to end up with necks that looked like spaghetti in comparison to the lump in front of him now.
Dejan and the giant shook hands. Mumbled to one another. “So where’s Abdel Kadir?”
The man led them toward the office. Dejan nodded in the direction of the guy and hissed to Teddy in Serbian: “Hajduk.”
They stepped into the office. There was another man sitting behind the desk, also dressed in casual sporty clothes. His beard, however, was far from neat; it looked more like it could belong to Santa. He had a white crocheted hat on his head. His name was Abdel Kadir—the Beard Man.
The room was bigger than it looked from the outside, and there was some kind of curtain hanging behind the desk. There were pictures of various cars on the walls, alongside Arabic text. Dejan sat down opposite Abdel Kadir. “It’s been a while.”
No chairs for Teddy and the giant; they would have to hover in the background.
“Four years. I blew a hundred grand that night, did you know that?” Abdel Kadir’s voice was soft, but his eyes were cold. “But I don’t gamble anymore. Don’t drink, either.”
The giant stepped over to the curtain and pulled it to one side.
Abdel Kadir held out a hand. “This is the factory.”
“Okay, smaller than I thought,” said Dejan.
“It doesn’t need to be any bigger.” Abdel Kadir bared his teeth—he was probably smiling behind his beard. “This is the actual printer,” he continued, pointing to one of the machines. “It’s not printing the driving licenses that’s the difficult thing. What takes experience and skill is achieving the right paper quality.” He gestured to the next machine, which was smaller. “That’s a hologram printer. You’ll never have any problems there, it takes care of itself, and no one even checks the holograms on ID cards these days, anyway.”
The next piece of equipment was the biggest. “We use this for laminating. No problems here, either.” He pointed to the last machine, which looked like an ordinary computer. “Let’s put it like this, you could buy the rest of the stuff online for two grand apiece, but what we’ve got in this box here, that’s taken us three years to build up. It’s the program and the database. That’s what you’re paying for.”
Dejan ran a finger over the gray lid of the printer. “But it’s a package deal. Not just the stuff here, but the other thing we talked about, too. The thing we agreed on.”
“Of course. I promised you everything, and you’ll get everything. Not just the machines and the database. You can take over the payment system, several manuals, all of our contacts, even the chat.”
“How’s the payment system work?”
“We use hawala. It’s the most secure.”
“Hawala? What are you talking about? You’ll have the CIA and FRA up your ass at the slightest whiff of a fart. Why don’t you just use Forex or Swish or something?”
“The customers deposit the money here, and our hawala guy in Dubai makes deposits into our banks, Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank or Emirates Islamic Bank. The cash never even leaves Sweden, that’s the point. Hawala is based on trust. It couldn’t be any more secure. You understand?”
“What do they take?”
“Five percent in total, three percent to the recipient here, and two to the mother organization in Dubai.”
“So I’d have to open an account in Dubai?”
“It’s not a problem. Norwegian flies there for four thousand return. You don’t even need to stay overnight.”
Dejan mumbled something that Teddy didn’t catch. The mood had turned; Dejan was annoyed about something. The gorilla frowned. Abdel Kadir, on the other hand, seemed oblivious to the shift—he held up a stack of papers and talked about the advantages of the hawala system. If the deal went through, the Beard would soon have 1.2 million reasons to be happy.
Teddy couldn’t help but think of Nikola. On the whole, things seemed to be going well for his nephew. He would soon be an electrician and might be able to keep raising his grades on the side. Going forward, he might even be able to apply to university. But sometimes, it was as though Nikola couldn’t quite be happy that his life was on the right track. Maybe it was the explosion—he was different somehow, like he had developed a hard shell inside himself. And Emelie? She was hard inside, too. All Teddy knew was that she was running her own law firm these days. He had tried calling her a few times afte
r the Emanuelsson trial. He had even sent her a letter. She never replied. He didn’t know why. It wasn’t like they needed to get married and live the rest of their lives together. But they could have gone on a few dates, hung out a bit over the summer? Now it was like they had entered something that would never reach any kind of conclusion.
Dejan spun on his chair and turned toward Abdel Kadir. “Why are you selling up, if everything’s so damn good?”
The Beard Man got up. “I’ve made plenty of money from this. It’s time to move on. I’m going abroad.”
“Where?”
“Doesn’t matter. I’m not the same man I was four years ago. I’ve found my real self.”
“Zakat, what’s that?”
Abdel Kadir breathed out through his nose, making his mustache flutter. “What difference does it make?”
“I’m looking at a receipt here, from Dubai. Three percent plus two percent, you said, but then there’s 2.5 percent zakat. The hell’s that?”
Even the Beard paused now: the atmosphere was terrible. The corners of his mouth turned down. The gorilla’s eyes darted back and forth between Dejan and Teddy, as though he were following a tennis match in aggression.
Abdel Kadir got to his feet. “You ask too many pointless questions, my friend.”
Dejan followed him up. “You told me you paid three percent to the middleman here in Sweden and two percent to the guy in the desert. Then I see another two point five percent.”
“Let me explain, rather than you shouting.”
“I’m not shouting.” Dejan took a step toward Abdel Kadir, both men breathing through their noses now.
“Zakat means alms.”
“And what are alms?”
“A donation, a gift. It’s a Muslim thing, nothing you’ll have to pay.”
“So where does this donation go?”