by Jens Lapidus
“Let me try,” Roksana said.
“I don’t think you’ll be able to force it open,” said Z. “I mean, if I can’t.”
Roksana took the bolt cutters and opened them slightly—then she drove them into the side of the cabinet as hard as she could. It made a small hole in the steel. She repeated the maneuver. It hurt her shoulders, but the hole grew bigger. Now she could push the cutters far enough in to start cutting.
Five minutes later, they had twenty-two vials of Ketaminol vet, 100 mg in their bag.
Then Roksana heard something. No hallucinations. No fantasies. It was real this time. A noise. She put her ear to the door again. It was clear now: there was someone humming out there. A song without any words. She even recognized the tune. It was “Live Tomorrow” by Laleh.
“What should we do?” Z whispered. His eyes were as big as vinyls.
Roksana lay down on the floor—it was virtually spotless. She couldn’t see a single fleck of dust. She squinted through the crack beneath the door, out into the corridor. The humming sounded clearer now, it had moved closer. A man. She turned her head so that it was parallel with the floor. Then she saw them: the soles of a pair of shoes and wheels of some kind. Followed, a few seconds later, by a mop moving forward and back across the floor.
The cleaner—it had to be the cleaner. And he was coming closer with every second.
Z got down beside her and tried to see out. “Shit, shit, shit,” Roksana heard him whisper with every breath—it didn’t even seem like he was thinking it himself.
They waited. The cleaner’s shoes swam and multiplied before her eyes.
* * *
—
She thought back to the patch that an optician had decided she should wear over her eye as a child, to stop her from seeing double. “It might itch a bit to begin with, but you’ll get used to it,” the optician had said. But even on the way home, it had started to itch more than the mosquito bite she had gotten at soccer practice, more than the eczema she had behind her knees sometimes, and more than the knitted sweater she had been sent by Aunt Etty. Still, her mother had said that she couldn’t take it off. The next day, at school, everyone had looked at her like she was some kind of alien. The girl with one eye. Her desk mate had turned away from her, the girls she usually jump-roped with had gone to a different part of the playground. Even her best friend had asked whether she had to wear that horrible bit of skin over her eye. That afternoon, she had torn off the patch and shoved it into her pocket, and everything had immediately returned to normal. Life had resumed. Her desk mate had whispered secrets as soon as the teacher turned her back, the girls had wanted her back at the rope. At four that afternoon, Roksana had stood by the window of the classroom, peeping out. She needed to spot her mother before her mother saw her—and when Roksana saw her over by the gates, she had done it. She had pulled the patch out of her pocket, unfolded it, and run a stick of glue back and forth across it. Then she had pasted it back over her eye, as though it had been there all day. Roksana had done the same thing the next day. Went to school with her eye covered, taken it off the minute she got into the classroom, pasted it back on before she went home. It became some kind of game, managing to put it on every afternoon before she was picked up. The glue chapped her skin, turned it red and made her eyebrow fall out, but Mom had never noticed a thing. Six weeks later, they had gone back to the hospital. They had tested Roksana’s vision, and when the doctor gave her verdict, there had been something knowing in her eye. “No improvement at all, nothing actually.” Roksana had glanced at her mother. The doctor had said: “The patch doesn’t seem to be helping, so I think we should try glasses instead.”
* * *
—
The light in the storeroom went out, and Roksana felt Z jump beside her. “What’s going on?” he whispered.
But she understood, and he should have, too. They had been lying still for too long, and the motion sensors controlling the lights no longer thought they were there. The darkness was now like a warm blanket around them. Z’s almost inaudible panting sounded as though it were coming from a stranger. She thought about the girl who had promised to take the aptitude exam for her: Imagine if she blabbed to someone? And how would it feel later, if the girl passed the exam and Roksana used the result to get onto the psychology course?
The cleaner was nowhere to be seen; maybe he was mopping another room now.
Roksana got up. The lights came back on. She grabbed the backpack.
“We’re making a run for it,” she whispered, opening the door before Z had time to protest.
They rushed out. Down the hallway.
They had made it halfway out when they heard someone shout.
The cleaner had spotted them. He appeared in the hallway behind them. Shouted again.
They sped up. The backpack thudded against Roksana’s ass.
The cleaner yelled. Roksana could practically hear her father’s voice.
Z was quicker than she was, and he tore open the door to the goods entrance. The cleaner’s Crocs slapped against the floor behind them.
Shiiit.
They ran down the next hallway.
Out the back door.
The cleaner was fifteen feet behind them now.
Roksana was panting. They rushed toward the fence. Threw themselves at it, clambered over.
She rushed, sprinted, pounded concrete like Usain Bolt. The buildings around her had transformed into fuzzy, dark gray bodies.
She didn’t look back. She ran as though she were in a tunnel.
Eventually she stopped. Z was a few meters ahead of her. She glanced back. The cleaner shouted something inaudible 150 feet behind. She could taste blood in her mouth.
Dawn was creeping across the sky behind the clinic as they climbed onto their bikes.
“Did you take something in there?”
Roksana didn’t understand. She barely had the energy to pedal, much less talk. “Only what I’ve got in the bag.”
“But did you take something? Like, did you pop something?”
“Nah.”
“Because you were running like a horse on fucking dope.” Z laughed.
Roksana breathed in the night air, pedaled: she was still wearing the protective shoe covers. “Horses with blue foot covers always run fast.”
She raised her face to the sky: laughed loudly. Kept laughing. She laughed like she had never laughed before.
When they got home, they took the bikes into the apartment. Everyone knew that it took less time to lose a bike in Stockholm than it did to say the words “insurance claim.” Plus, both of their rides were new—bought with the ketamine money. Roksana took off her new shoes and her backpack, heard her phone beep. An email: Test Result University and Higher Education Council.
Shit, the results of the aptitude test had arrived. She opened the email. Click this link for your test result. She clicked, typed in her personal ID number and password, and then logged in to the results page.
1.9.
She read it again.
One point fucking nine.
It was fantastic—it had worked. Or, at least, she was 90 percent sure: there was actually a slight risk that she would need 2.0 to get onto the psychology course. But still: this gave her a real chance. And yet, deep down, she could make out a faint musty smell—it was all a lie.
Z leaned his bike against the wall.
Roksana wrapped her arms around his neck. “I got 1.9 on the aptitude test.”
“I didn’t even know you’d taken it. That means we’ve got two things to celebrate. Congrats.”
She wondered whether to tell him what had actually happened. But maybe it was just as well she kept it to herself.
* * *
—
Later: they were dressed like total Breaking Bad clones. Aprons, sunglasses, mask
s. Z had Googled like crazy for instructions on what to do. They closed the blinds and started opening the boxes: the bottles of animal medicine they had grabbed. Each bottle: they unscrewed the lid, tore off the security plastic, poured the liquid into a glass carafe—to minimize the risk of spilling anything.
They were going to extract the ket.
They spent the majority of the time laughing hysterically—but they were focused all the same. Using the stove, they boiled water in two pans and then placed a roasting pan directly on top of those. They waited until the steam had heated it up. Z grabbed a pipette that he had bought from the pharmacy and squirted two drops of water onto the roasting pan: it immediately turned to steam, giving off a hiss. “Right,” he said, turning down the heat. “It’s hot enough now.” Roksana slowly poured the liquid from the carafe until the roasting pan was covered. Z’s hands were constantly on the dials, making adjustments—Roksana didn’t think he really knew what he was doing, but both of them were aware that the liquid couldn’t start to boil. After a moment, thin columns of smoke started to rise from the roasting pan, like living spirits reaching up to the extractor fan. They didn’t say anything, just laughed and stared at the horse medicine that slowly turned to steam, evaporated.
After twenty minutes, they were left with a thin, crystalline mass on the pan.
Roksana used a knife to break up the layer. It sounded awful. The crystals were brittle. A monotonous scraping sound filled the kitchen. It squeaked. The same movement of the wrist over and over again. She glanced at Z. He had taken off his mask.
“What are you doing?”
“No matter how this ends, I’m planning to experiment with my own psyche while we do it. Z versus the K-cloud.”
Roksana laughed so hard that she thought she would die in a coughing fit.
* * *
—
After a total of three hours’ work, they had seven bags: a gram of powder in each. It had worked. And yet, it was the biggest disappointment since the American presidential election. Roksana pulled off her mask. “That’s no more than five grand.”
Z frowned like she had never seen him frown before; Z, the eternal optimist.
“Shit,” he said. “We need so much more than this.”
They were going to have to find another 995,000 kronor for the madmen.
25
After the doctor broke the news of Emelie’s pregnancy, Teddy and Emelie didn’t speak for several minutes. They just climbed into a taxi, heading back to her place, in silence. It was like neither of them could speak. Each of them probably had far too many thoughts to put in order. Or at least that was what Teddy was trying, and failing, to do.
When the car pulled onto Rörstrandsgatan where Emelie lived, she turned to him. The tape on her forehead seemed like it was glowing.
“The baby’s yours,” she said.
Teddy thought he saw the taxi driver jump. Exactly what kind of conversation was going on in his car?
Teddy tried to lower his voice when he replied, “Are you sure?”
Emelie nodded and then looked away, out of the window.
“We need to talk,” he said.
“Yeah,” Emelie replied. “But not today. I need to get some rest. And to think.”
The world: surreal. Life upside down. He was going to be a dad. He couldn’t stop that thought from swirling around his head. Emelie was pregnant, with a baby she claimed was his. They were going to have a baby.
He was thirty-six years old and it had never even occurred to him that it might one day happen. It was something that happened to other people; Dejan sometimes joked about all the illegitimate children he must have, Loke had a kid. But for him—Teddy Maksumic, who had spent half his adult life in prison—it had never been part of the plan.
Children.
It was a contradiction in itself. And yet the only thing he could think was this: his child couldn’t be born into a world in which the predators ruled.
* * *
—
The days passed. He called Emelie several times a day. Nine times out of ten, she rejected his call. “But the baby in your belly is mine. And we’re at war with them,” Teddy told her when she eventually answered.
“You might be at war. I still haven’t decided about the fetus.”
“Are you getting any help? Do you feel safe, considering everything that’s happened?”
“I’ve done the best I can.”
Before Teddy had time to say anything, she hung up.
Perhaps he should have kept researching Adam Tagrin, but at the same time: Adam was the police’s problem now that he was in custody. There was so much else to deal with: Teddy’s job now was trying to track down the people Mats had mentioned in Oslo. Twelve names, that was what Teddy had to go on: Peder Hult, Fredrik O. Johansson, Gunnar Svensson, and so on. Mats probably could have given them more details about the men, but he was still in a coma in a Norwegian hospital.
Teddy drove around town. He wanted to keep moving—and he experienced Stockholm with new eyes. Filtered vision: child-tinted glasses. He saw parks, pushchairs, mothers with big bellies. He saw sandboxes, swings, discount offers on car seats. He was no longer living at home—the attack in Oslo had been clear enough. He kept moving, slept like crap. Chewed gum and loaded up on snus.
He wanted to understand what had happened when they met Mats, but according to the Norwegian papers, the police still hadn’t made any progress in their investigation. In any case, it was clear that there must be leaks within the force, and that the network’s reach was far greater than he had ever realized. He hoped Emelie was being careful.
He had to do something, and he had twelve names on his list—twelve names Mats had mentioned. After a few days’ research and help from Loke, he had found out that five of the men were dead. One of a heart attack. One in a boating accident. One of cancer. One had been killed by a robber in Brazil. And one had driven into the side of a mountain in Falkenberg.
One had moved to Switzerland.
One had simply disappeared.
But no Peder Hult matching Mats’s description seemed to exist.
Still, the other five were living and registered to addresses in the Stockholm area.
He called their secretaries and receptionists. None of the men had public telephone numbers. The women asked what it was regarding, Teddy answered evasively, and they replied that the men may be in touch. May. He called their wives and employees. All he wanted was their private telephone numbers. Some people were helpful—gave him the number for the men’s work, numbers he had already tried ten times.
Teddy asked Loke for help again. “I just need a few phone numbers. It can’t be too hard.”
Loke said: “Cutie pie, I’m helping your nephew with something I can’t talk about right now, but I should be able to find you a phone number.”
Teddy didn’t want to wait too long. He continued his research on his own.
He drank Red Bull and took Ritalin to keep going. He studied the city anew. Put it through an X-ray. Viewed it with a criminal’s eyes. He saw the hookers hanging around on Malmskillnadsgatan, outside the apartment brothels. He noticed the hash sellers trading more or less out in the open in Husby. He saw the coat pockets on the hordes of young kids in Alby torg: weighed down with knives, knuckle-dusters, and guns. The papers wrote about murders and violence, and everyone pretended to be upset, but if it had been white, inner-city kids shooting one another, the prime minister would have declared a state of emergency and sent in the army. There was a difference.
He drove past his old school: Lina Grundskola. The trees were still bare, and the playground looked more like a gravel pit. They still hadn’t tidied up after winter. The same buildings as when he had been a pupil, but they had repainted them, a darker shade. Or maybe it was just his memory playing tricks on him. Maybe the buildings had se
emed lighter when he was a child purely because he had seen the world in a different light then. Everything that came later seemed to be part of his dark penance. And he had thought that he had atoned for his crimes when, right after being released from prison, he had rescued another person who had been kidnapped. Teddy had been recruited by Leijon to help on that case, which was how he had met Emelie for the first time.
Leijon, he thought again—maybe they could help.
* * *
—
Teddy was in reception.
The receptionist recognized him. Once, when he had still worked at the firm, she had asked whether he wanted to grab a glass of wine one evening. Teddy had politely turned her down, but it was a stroke of luck that she was working today.
“Magnus doesn’t actually take visitors, but he might make an exception for you,” she said with a smile. “It might take a while.”
Teddy sat down in the uncomfortable designer chair to wait. He thought back to the first time he had sat here, when Emelie came out to get him. The small, round table still had a pile of boring business magazines on it, but unlike before, there were also a number of iPads on the table. Anyone could have taken one, but Teddy knew the caliber of clients the firm had—to them, an iPad was worth less than they earned in a minute.
An hour later, he was sitting in Magnus Hassel’s office.
“Teddy, I don’t know what you want, but you’ve got ten minutes, then I have to rush off,” the partner who had once recruited him said.
The walls were covered with crazy paintings like always, and the low bookshelves held the same cryptic artwork as before: a human skull flecked with oil paint, a bird’s skeleton and a tennis ball in a bell jar, something that probably represented a greenish vagina made from plastic and marble. There were also three small photos, all seemingly taken at least a hundred years ago, depicting young boys. In each of them: a boy around ten, with dark hair and an uncertain smile. Teddy squinted and read the text beneath them. Stalin. Bin Laden. Hitler.