by Jens Lapidus
Teddy would be here soon.
* * *
—
She had met Oliver, Adam’s son, the day before. He had called her and asked to meet.
The boy lived with a foster family in Bredäng, but he had wanted to meet in the square. She spotted him from a distance. His stride was determined, but his body language seemed uncertain overall. He kept glancing around, as though he were worried about being seen by someone, and it had looked as though he was keeping to the walls of the buildings as he approached. He couldn’t be much older than twelve or thirteen, but it was obvious whose son he was—he had small teeth, almost like he hadn’t lost all of his milk teeth yet. Unlike Emelie, he had been properly dressed for the weather, with a down coat, hat, and gloves.
Why do I never learn, Emelie had wondered. She had been shivering in the cold.
She held out a hand. “Oliver?”
The boy had looked down at the ground and taken off one glove.
“Do you want to go to a café or something? Or would you rather speak here?”
The boy had sighed. “We can talk here.”
People were streaming out of the metro station. A train from the north must have just arrived.
“Do your parents know we’re meeting?”
“They’re not my parents. I just live with them. And I’ve told them I want to meet you. They don’t think I should be doing this. They think it’s enough that the police have asked me about Dad.”
“I see. So why did you want to meet?”
“You were going to help Katja, so I thought maybe you could help Dad now that the police have him.”
“In what way?”
“He didn’t do what they’re saying. He didn’t kill Katja. I know it. They can’t send him to prison.”
“But he must have a lawyer by now. He has someone to help him.”
“Yeah, but are they any good? Can you tell me that? Does he have a good lawyer? Is he going to get out?”
Oliver’s mouth and eyes had shifted, as though he had forgotten which expression went with which word. Emelie knew the lawyer who had been appointed to Adam Tagrin: she was one of the best.
“I’m afraid I can’t help your dad,” she had explained. “There are certain rules, and they say that I can’t be his lawyer. That’s just how it is. I’m sorry.”
Oliver didn’t seem to have understood. Emelie had tried to explain again.
“So, I was Katja’s lawyer, and now your dad is suspected of having done this to her. It means I can’t be his lawyer, because it would be like playing for different teams at the same time.”
She didn’t know how good an analogy it was, but it seemed like the boy had finally gotten it. He pulled up the hood of his coat and quickly turned around and walked away.
“Call me if you have any questions,” Emelie had shouted after him.
She was talking to the back of his head.
* * *
—
Teddy came into her office. She took a step forward. He took a step forward. He looked tired. He could have that: she was more tired.
They stood opposite one another. Shook hands. Like people who didn’t know one another, who shrunk back from the other’s touch.
“How are you?”
“Okay,” Emelie lied. “You?”
“I’m okay.”
They sat down. Teddy glanced around like he had never been to her office before.
“You wanted to meet,” he said.
“You too,” Emelie replied. She had realized when they agreed to meet that he had things he wanted to tell her.
“But you most of all,” he said.
Emelie couldn’t help but smile. She played with the pen on the desk in front of her. “Yeah, maybe,” she said. “They’ve arrested Adam. So the whole thing might be over now.”
She briefly went through what she had found out about the cuts on Adam’s hands.
Teddy said: “I hear what you’re saying. I’ve done everything I can to find out who Adam Tagrin is and where he’s been over the past few weeks, and I haven’t found anything that rules out him killing Katja. But none of it explains the bag on the roof. It could hardly have been Adam’s, could it?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Do you remember what you said to me last time I was here? Just after Katja got in touch with you?”
“Not really.”
“You said that we’d never found who was really behind all this. We gave up halfway. And that there was something more to this. So if we’re going to get those pigs, we have to keep going. We can’t stop now.”
“But what happened to Katja might have nothing to do with the network.”
“It has everything to do with it.”
Emelie knew he was right.
“So what do you want us to do?”
Teddy cleared his throat: “There’s only one person who can help us.”
* * *
—
Nina Ley spat her pouch of snus tobacco onto the ground. It looked like a reindeer dropping—Emelie remembered getting up early as a child and seeing the small lumps on the lawn. Once, she had pulled on a pair of winter gloves and gathered them all in a bucket. Her mother had been furious, but her father had just laughed: “Maybe we should hire you as a poo hunter?”
“You wanted to meet,” Nina said once they reached the top of Kronobergsparken—the same place as last time.
“What is Adam Tagrin saying?”
“He denies any wrongdoing. Otherwise, I can’t give you much, you know that.”
“Have you analyzed the bag we found on the roof?”
“No, not yet, there’s a backlog at forensics. Why?”
“I’m just wondering. It doesn’t fit.”
“You wanted to meet just so you could ask me that?”
“No.”
Emelie thought of Mats Emanuelsson, who was probably living under a different name in another northern European country, with a different personal ID number and possibly even a different appearance. His children, Benjamin and Lillan, were no longer in Sweden, either. Teddy had apparently tried to talk to Cecilia, his ex, but she had said that she didn’t know where Mats was, and that even if she did, she wouldn’t have told him.
Emelie said, “Now that you have Adam Tagrin, I wanted to know if you still needed our help.”
Nina pushed a new pouch of snus beneath her lip. “I do.”
“In that case, we need to talk to Mats Emanuelsson.”
Nina studied Emelie, adjusting the tobacco with her tongue as she did so.
“I’m afraid that’s impossible. His identity is protected, covered by the witness protection program.”
“Nina, you want to solve this as much as I do. I’m not just talking about Katja’s murder here, but everything you’ve been investigating this past year. You don’t seem to have had much success so far, I have to be honest.”
“That’s true. But we’re slowly moving forward.”
“Then there’s only one way. We only have one demand for helping you.”
“And what’s that?”
“I’ve already told you. That you make sure we can meet Mats Emanuelsson.”
20
It could have been a sweet evening. Under Bron was about to make the switch to Trädgården—the indoor club was shedding its skin to become the outdoor space, in other words. UB was held in an old building beneath the Skanstull Bridge, a building that might have been one of Stockholm’s most beautiful if they hadn’t decided to build the capital’s biggest bridge right over the top of it. The club opened its doors in September every year, closing again in spring when TG took over. Right now, people were allowed to move between the two spaces, indoors and out, like drifting beads of mercury. The focus was on dance music, with resident DJs a
nd international guest artists.
It could have been an insanely social evening. Billie and her entourage were there, as was the cute guy and tons of other people who had loved Roksana over the past few weeks. Z was there—and he seemed to be doing well, despite the fact that two of his fingers were in plaster.
Billie didn’t know anything about what happened. She was going on about a new art project she had started, which involved sneaking around at night spraying vaginas onto various public sculptures and statues.
“I call it guerrilla pussification. The genital organs of people like us, the people society defines as women, have to become part of the public sphere.”
Z laughed like an idiot and offered Billie a hit—the very last one. He must have had a small bag left in his pocket. Roksana didn’t know what Z was thinking; everything seemed to be business as usual with him—despite the broken fingers, threats, and chaos.
* * *
—
After they went to the hospital to get Z’s hand seen to, they had gone to eat lunch at a café in Akalla. There was a cold band of rain hanging over the center, more like a wet fog than raindrops. It found its way to Roksana even when she stuck too close to the buildings, beneath their overhanging roofs. Some things just got through to you, no matter how much you tried to run.
There was a picture of an icon hanging behind the till. Roksana had ordered cardamom buns and cappuccinos with regular milk for both of them. If Billie could have seen her then, she would probably have tried to have Roksana carted away to be detoxed: white flour, sugar, and lactose, more dangerous than dirty heroin.
“This bun’s so good it’s like a party in my mouth,” Z had said. It seemed like he had already put his recent trip to the hospital behind him.
“What are we going to do, Z?”
Z had enjoyed a few more bites. “We’ll have to try talking to them, reasoning with them. Work out what they really want from us.”
And so they had tried. The psychos had agreed to meet at the Star Inn in Haninge.
* * *
—
Z and Roksana had arrived at the hotel room first. Three floors up. The curtains were already drawn. She wondered whether reception usually prepped their rooms for this kind of meeting.
After a while, the door had opened, and the same guy who had come to their apartment stepped into the room, followed by another man. The first was wearing the same clothes as before. Hoodie and similar Adidas sweatpants to the ones Billie usually wore. The other guy looked roughly the same age, wearing similar clothes, though he was heavier and his hoodie was leather and said Gucci in small golden letters on the chest. Good taste didn’t exactly seem to be these gangsters’ strong point. Still: he was the calmer of the two. It was clear who was in charge.
The leader had shaken their hands and then pulled out the desk chair to sit down. The first guy stayed by the door with his arms crossed. Roksana had thought about how he hadn’t been able to look when he broke Z’s fingers. Suddenly she became aware of how claustrophobically small the room was, that their only escape route had just been blocked.
No one had said a word.
Z was pressed up against the window—stiff as an ice pop, the hand with the broken fingers hanging by one leg. Roksana was still sitting on the bed. The room’s air-conditioning was loud. The bed was uncomfortable, far too soft. It had felt like she was sinking into the floor. She had waited for Z to say something.
The leader had nodded to him. “How’s the hand?”
“It’ll take a few weeks,” Z had replied, holding it up to them.
“It’s good you wanted to dialogue,” the man had said, as though Z’s broken fingers had nothing to do with them. Roksana thought: Dialogue’s a noun, fatty, not a verb. Though maybe it was a verb, it suddenly struck her—just like break, abuse. Snap.
“It would’ve been good if we could have talked before you snapped my friend’s fingers,” she said.
The fat leader had leaned forward in his chair. “We’re always willing to talk, but we’re not clowns. And now we’re here. We came because you wanted to dialogue. So, tell me: What do you want to talk about?”
It sounded as though Z had let out a squeak. Then Roksana heard him try to speak. “We’re willing to pay you something, but we don’t have much money, so you can’t be hoping for some huge sum.”
The leader had leaned back. Mouth closed, his jaw still moving—maybe he was working a piece of chewing gum or snus in there. “At first, I thought the kid who rented the place before you had sold my shit to someone else, ’cause my friend here couldn’t find a thing. Believe me, I was a cunt hair away from paying someone in prison to cut that bitch down. But I was wrong. You’re the ones who sold it. And for that, I want a million.”
Roksana’s brain had imploded; she could barely breathe.
A million—they would never be able to come up with that much. She had wanted to jump up and leave right then, but it was impossible.
“But what we found would never have made that much, it was just a couple of ounces,” Z tried.
The leader hadn’t said a word. Just waited. Z had gone on, trying to explain things from his and Roksana’s point of view, how they had just tried a few milligrams and given some to a couple of friends. How there hadn’t been much at all—in their opinion.
The leader’s mouth was moving, but no sound came out: he was chewing or sucking whatever he had in there.
“I think you can understand,” he had said, without acknowledging a word of Z’s half-true argument, “that I need my money. One million. So don’t even start talking about amounts. I know how much the guy who lived there had. And it makes no difference: you two are fucked because you screwed me over.”
Roksana had tried to swallow. It felt like someone was trying to force ten cardamom buns down her throat. Z had been on the bed by that point, his head in his hands.
“But it’s impossible,” she eventually managed to say.
The leader had gotten up. “You’ve gotta find a way, it’s that simple. You can always keep selling the way you have so far. Then we’ll get what we need in the end. But don’t try to fuck me over again. I’ll be really annoyed then. And I’m much more hot-livered than my brother here.”
It’s hotheaded, not hot-livered, fatty, Roksana had thought to herself. In despair.
* * *
—
It was only one thirty when Roksana caught the night bus heading home. Her taxi-riding days were over. People had been approaching her and Z at least once every fifteen minutes, wondering if they had anything to sell, and eventually, it had all been too much. But Z was still out there, and Billie hadn’t noticed that anything was wrong. “Babe, tell me something,” she had said. “Why are the floors in unisex toilets always so wet? I’m all for gender-neutral bathrooms, but they’ve been disgusting since all the cis men started going in. So, I’m wondering: Is the floor wet because the men can’t wash their hands without soaking the place, because the toilets break and leak, or because they can’t aim when they piss?”
Roksana had genuinely tried to smile. An old Patti Smith song was playing in the background; she recognized it because Billie used to play it all the time.
“I always carry gloves with me these days. The toilets at university are gross, too, even though lawyers are such clean people,” Billie had continued, pulling out a small bag of plastic gloves. “So I don’t have to touch anything.”
* * *
—
It was warm at the back of the bus. Roksana didn’t understand how Z could be so calm about everything. They needed help from someone, but she seemed to be the only one who cared. She pulled out her phone and a scrap of paper with a number on it. Called the only person she could think of who might be able to help get them out of this mess.
“Yes.”
“Is that Nikola?”
<
br /> “Yeah, who’s this?”
“Hi, Nikola, it’s me, Roksana.”
“Who?”
“Roksana, we met outside that club a few weeks ago. Do you remember? You asked about your friend.”
“Yeah, I remember you. What do you want?”
“Can you talk on this phone?”
“Yeah.”
“Some people are blackmailing me.”
“Okay.”
“I need your advice.”
“You know who they are?” Nikola asked.
“No, not really. I don’t have any names.”
“You need to keep on top of what’s going on better.”
“What do you mean?”
“Listen, I can’t help you. I’ve got my own stuff to take care of, you know?”
“Please, could we at least meet and talk?”
It sounded like he sighed. “This world has rules, you do know that, right?”
“What world?”
“The world you’ve gotten yourself into. Simple rules. And one is that you always have to take care of your own shit. I think you get that. Plus, I don’t even know you.”
Roksana leaned forward; it felt as though someone was pulling her toward the floor.
“No, we don’t know one another,” she tried one last time. “But there are other simple rules, too.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You help a friend who’s gotten themselves in the shit.”
* * *