by Jens Lapidus
Magnus could see him thinking. “What do you think of my latest find?”
Teddy thought he was supposed to be in a hurry, but Magnus still pointed to the photographs. “Three deplorable men as children. I think it’s an interesting question, when does evil emerge. Because no child is evil, are they? And yet at some point, the child’s innocence transforms into conscious evil.”
Teddy’s chair creaked.
“Anyway,” said Magnus, “I’m doing you a favor by seeing you now, I hope you understand. You know what I thought of what you and Emelie were up to, but I still like you, Teddy, for some reason I do. You did a good job when you were here. So tell me what you need.”
Teddy’s chair creaked even more as he leaned forward.
“I’m here because I’ve been trying to get in touch with a number of individuals, and I don’t know anyone who can get through to people like them. Other than you.”
“Aha, and why do you need to speak to them, if I may ask?”
Teddy didn’t reply. Instead, he said: “I have their names and I know who they are, but I need a way in. I need a good chat with each of them.” He reeled off the five names.
“Is this to do with Mats Emanuelsson?” Magnus sighed.
Teddy leaned back. For some reason, the chair didn’t make a sound this time. How could Magnus have known?
Magnus got up and put on his jacket. He carefully pulled down each sleeve so that only a quarter inch or so was peeping out from beneath the arm of his jacket. “You know I’m bound by confidentiality. So even if I did know these people, I wouldn’t be able to help you. That’s just how it is in my world. Anyway, I have to rush off now.”
Teddy got to his feet. Magnus gestured for him to leave.
Teddy said: “Don’t try to brush me off. I know you can help me.”
“I have to go. I’ve told you.”
Teddy was blocking the doorway. “I’ve worked for you—you know that I know things about how you run your business, right? Do you see what I mean?”
Magnus’s cuff links glittered in the light from the window.
“I think I understand,” he said. “Let’s talk further.”
26
Mr. One had been in custody for more than a month now, suspected of all kinds of crap: tax fraud, serious accountancy fraud, the usual drug offenses—it was a classic. If they couldn’t get you for the real crimes, they followed the money. Isak wasn’t allowed to talk to or see anyone but relatives. The Swedish system wasn’t as open as some people thought—but it was naive all the same. Because the truth was this: right now, Nikola was standing in front of the metal door outside the custodial prison in Huddinge, pressing a button beneath a sign that read Central Guard. He heard a tinny voice over the speaker and saw the round black eye of the surveillance camera staring at him.
“Yeah, hi.”
He didn’t know what he was supposed to say. He had been held in custody himself, but had never visited anyone on his own. Was he supposed to say his name and who he was visiting? Or did they already know he had booked a time?
“Rimon Nimrod, I’m here to visit my uncle.”
“And who’s that?”
“He’s called Isak…”
“Aha, got it. Wait a moment.”
The metal door clicked, and Nikola took ahold of the handle with both hands and pulled. It was crazy heavy.
The elevator doors were also made from brushed metal. He pressed the up button and waited. From a loudspeaker, the tinny voice barked: “Don’t touch anything. We control the elevator from here.”
Like he said: naive. Isak’s lawyer had called Nikola a week earlier and asked him to apply for a visit. The lawyer had come up with a way it could work—according to him, they weren’t all that sharp within the Prison Service. And so Isak had filled in his visit form and named his nephew, Rimon Nimrod. Nikola had signed the form, sent it back, and borrowed Rimon’s ID. The kid was four years younger, but if Nikola styled his hair the same way, they actually looked pretty similar.
In a few minutes’ time, he would be able to sit down with Isak and go through what he had found on Chamon’s phone. And who had answered when he called.
But he wasn’t inside yet.
The main guardroom was on the fourth floor. He thought of Kerim Celalî—the guy he had become friends with through the bars when they had exercise hour at the same time. Kerim must have had a wizard of a lawyer, because he had apparently only been given three years. Given that he had been in custody for so long beforehand, and a year and a half had since passed, he should be out by now. Maybe Nikola should get in touch—Kerim was a cool boss.
A small drawer shot out; the guard on the other side glared at Nikola and asked for his ID.
The moment of truth: exactly how thorough was the Prison Service? This was when it would all be put to the test. Nikola couldn’t quite see the person behind the Plexiglas; it was too reflective. Instead, he saw his own mirror image staring back at him. He didn’t look normal in his new Rimon style, but it was actually something else making him look like a different person: the deep shadows beneath his eyes—deep as Chamon’s grave.
The speaker crackled. He waited. They were probably checking his ID. A memory. They were only sixteen, but Chamon had already had a beard that could compete with any IS fighter. He had let it grow for two weeks and then they had borrowed his cousin’s stroller. “You reckon people’ll think I’m a homo now? ’Cause Swedes and poofs are the only ones who bother with paternity leave, right?” On the way to the shop, they had stopped an old man and tested it out: “How old d’you think I am?” They had carefully stuffed the stroller, and if you only gave it a quick glimpse, it did look like there might be a baby tucked up inside. The old man didn’t seem to have anything against their guessing game, and he had scanned Chamon from head to toe. The beard, the stroller, the chinos—Nikola had never seen Chamon in anything but sweatpants before—the neatly combed hair, and, most convincing of all: the bottle. They had filled a bottle with juice and put it in the stroller’s cup holder. All they were missing was a kid—but Chamon’s cousin had refused to let them borrow her four-month-old baby, no matter how much Chamon begged.
Nikola had waited outside. It was only ten in the morning—a plausible time for a man on paternity leave to be stocking up on beer before a family dinner at the weekend. He had tried to peer in through the window. He could see Chamon strolling about inside, with the stroller and a basket in his hand, completely at ease. His friend and a few members of AA had been the only ones waiting when the shop opened. If you were on paternity-homo leave, surely there was no reason to stress? Eventually, Chamon had gone over to the cashier and hauled a couple of six-packs onto the conveyor belt. Nikola had had a pretty clear view of it, the exit was closest to the windows, and he saw the cashier, who didn’t look old enough to have grown hair on his balls yet, say something to Chamon. Nikola had spotted the small notices by the registers: If you’re under 25, please show us your ID. Chamon seemed to reply, Nikola had tried to work out what was going on. Chamon had shaken his head. The cashier gestured. Then Chamon had taken the cans off the conveyor belt. Shit. Balls. It hadn’t worked. They had wanted to see his ID.
Chamon had pushed the stroller slowly ahead of him, its wheels squeaking.
“I was watching through the window,” Nikola said once they met fifty yards away from the shop. Chamon’s face had been dogged.
“We should’ve had a real baby, I told you.”
“Can you be bothered trying the shop in Lunagallerian? Might have better luck there?”
“Just having a stroller’s not enough to buy four six-packs.” Chamon had bared his teeth, then bent down and started rifling beneath the stroller. He had pulled out two bottles of Absolut Vodka. “But it’s enough to nick some spirits.”
If Nikola leaned forward now and used his hands to cast sha
dows on the Plexiglas, he would probably be able to see in—but it would also be a really weird thing to do. Maybe they were just checking that there were empty visitation rooms on the computer. Maybe they were calling the police right now, asking them to come and arrest him for fraudulent use of ID, or whatever it was called.
“Okay,” the guard said over the speakers. “You can’t take any cell phones or other electronic equipment in with you, so put it all in one of the lockers over there. Then you just need to open the door here. I’ll buzz you in.”
* * *
—
The door opened and Isak was led into the room. Mr. One was wearing prison-issue plastic slippers and a green tracksuit; he looked homeless.
“Rimon,” Isak said loudly. Nikola saw that the boss was trying to hide a smile.
Once the door closed, he roared with laughter for at least a minute. “Nikola, you sure your dad’s really your dad?”
“All I know about my dad is that he was a cunt.”
“Lots of them are. But you must have a bit of Mëdyad in you, I can see it now. You don’t just speak our language, you’re a real brother.”
They sat down on opposite sides of the table. Nikola wanted to ask how Isak was doing, how the boss handled the boredom, the food and being allowed out for only an hour a day. But the boss didn’t want to make small talk.
“We’ve got an hour,” he said. “And lots to get through.”
Isak started reeling off information. Nikola had brought a pencil and some paper. He had assumed they would spend the hour talking about the hunt for Chamon’s killer—he now knew exactly who could have tracked Chamon’s movements through the app—but Isak had other plans. Nikola wrote as quickly as he could: Iztvan owes three thousand a month, Homan owes five thousand a month, and so on. He didn’t need to know exactly what it was about, Isak said: Yusuf, Bello, and the others would take care of everything. Tanning salon in Ronna needs a new director, the company running the restaurant on Badhusgatan needs to declare bankruptcy, etc. Why didn’t Isak just call his lawyer or speak to Yusuf directly to go through all this? Nikola had never said he was getting back into the Life just because he wanted revenge for his friend’s death.
Isak read his mind. “This stuff’s too hot for my lawyer, even though you can trust him. I can’t do it over the phone, either; the pigs listen in on all my calls out of here, I’m sure. And it’s a bad idea for Yusuf to appear too close to me. So it was pretty sweet that you could come. Really.”
Still: Nikola needed to go through his business. He knew something. They had already been sitting here for thirty minutes.
Mr. One continued. A building in Norsberg needed to be bought, one of his cars had to be serviced—though it was leased and registered to Babso, of course—a few contracts for consultancy services needed to be re-signed. Then there were the even more important things. Someone needed to set fire to a Mazda with the registration number MFR490, often parked on Lammholmsbacken in Skärholmen. “It belongs to one of the pigs that’ve been fucking with me in here.” And then the most important part of all: someone had to move his boxes of explosives from a basement on Sjöbergsgatan.
They had five minutes left. “How’s it going finding those bastards?” Isak finally asked.
“I found out someone was following Chamon’s movements through a tracking app on one of his phones. It was linked to a different number.”
“Oh shit. Who?”
Nikola was burning. “Yusuf,” he said.
Isak was silent. Nikola wondered what he was thinking. Yusuf had been the boss’s right-hand man for at least eight years. They had grown up together, Mr. One was a few years older. If Nikola and Chamon were like brothers, Isak and Yusuf were like twins.
“I didn’t want to believe it,” said Isak.
“You thought he was involved?”
“I didn’t want to say anything, but yeah.”
“Why?”
“Because right before those bastards came to the MMA club and started shooting, Yusuf really needed a shit, he was nervous as anything, and he was saying all this weird stuff. I didn’t think much of it at the time, but it makes sense now. He knew they were coming.”
“But why?”
“No idea.”
The door opened and a guard peered in. “Time’s up.”
Isak got to his feet and walked toward the door. As he passed Nikola, he leaned in, a quick movement. A quiet whisper that the guard couldn’t hear.
“Finish that whore.”
27
If Emelie’s calculations were correct, she was somewhere around the ninth week, and she knew that people didn’t normally tell anyone before the twelfth. But surely that only applied to outsiders? Didn’t her mother and father have a right to know? Maybe it was her duty to tell them. The problem was that she still didn’t know if she was actually going to keep the baby, and even if she did, it wasn’t like her parents were the type to hold her hand; they were usually preoccupied with their own concerns. She had canceled her trip to see them.
Besides, she wasn’t living a particularly stable life right now. She had called Nina, who promised to help out. A couple of handymen had come over to Emelie’s place. “We’re from witness protection,” they said, though they would have looked more at home on some TV DIY show. They fitted bars over her door, installed a security system, and gave her a personal alarm—a small fob with built-in GPS and a button she could press if anything happened. It would send an alert straight to the police.
But Emelie still didn’t feel secure—Nina herself had admitted that there were problems within her organization.
A few days after she had been to the hospital, she went to the maternity clinic. The operator she had spoken to over the phone didn’t seem to think she was in much of a rush—“You can come in in a few weeks”—but Emelie wanted to see a midwife as soon as possible. She took a taxi straight there and prayed that someone would have canceled their appointment.
The clinic was in Gamla stan, and the minute Emelie stepped through the low door, she felt the atmosphere change. It wasn’t as though the street was hectic: the alley was narrow, dark, and calm, like most of the other gloomy, winding streets in the oldest part of Stockholm. But inside the clinic, everything was moving even more slowly, more deliberately—it was as though no one wanted to bother anyone else, as though some vital, solemn lecture was taking place in one of the rooms, and no one wanted to interrupt.
The midwife’s name was Inga, and she asked how Emelie was doing. She spoke calmly and quietly; she even typed silently. “Do you or the baby’s father have any illnesses or take any medication?”
Emelie knew about herself—nowadays, she wasn’t taking anything. But Teddy? “As far as I’m concerned, the answer is no, but I’ll have to get back to you about the father.”
Inga continued to talk about the risks of smoking and alcohol, about how Emelie might not be able to work as hard as she was used to; how the nausea she had felt would, in all likelihood, pass as she approached the end of her first trimester.
Emelie realized she should have brought Teddy with her, for the child’s sake if for nothing else, so that Inga could carry out her thorough checks. But, all the same: it had nothing to do with him. Emelie was the one with the baby in her belly; she was the one shouldering all of the responsibility just now. She was the one who had to make the decision.
Inga took her blood pressure and asked for a urine sample. She weighed Emelie and took blood samples from her arm. “Your blood type and whether you’re Rh positive or negative,” Inga explained. “It can also show us whether you’re immune to rubella and whether you have syphilis, chlamydia, or HIV.”
To begin with, Emelie didn’t know how she could have let it happen. Her periods had been irregular for several years, and for some reason that meant she hadn’t bothered to take the pill or demand that men wore
condoms. She and Teddy had had unprotected sex, in other words. Chlamydia was something she could live with, but what about the others? She knew nothing about Teddy’s sexual history or health.
“How soon do you get the results from the blood test?”
“It usually takes a few days.”
After forty minutes, they were done. Emelie could feel her hands shaking. “Well, thanks,” she said, trying to sound calm.
Inga paused in the doorway. “There’s something fantastic happening in your body right now, and you’re welcome to call if there’s anything you’d like to ask.”
Emelie nodded.
“And if the father wants to come in and discuss anything, that’s fine, too.”
“I don’t think so,” said Emelie.
“Are you in contact with him?”
“This might sound strange,” Emelie said, grabbing her bag from the floor, “but I don’t actually know.”
* * *
—
Now she was at the office, trying to work. It was eight in the evening. She felt safer here than she did at home.
Teddy had been trying to call her all day, but she had ignored him every time. Somehow, she had to pretend that everything was normal. She had a main hearing in an assault case at the end of the week. Her client was a nineteen-year-old kid who, according to the prosecutor, had participated in the aggravated assault of another boy on the platform at Hallunda metro station. The images from the surveillance cameras were fuzzy, but you could clearly make out a figure in a red hoodie in the vicinity of the victim at the start of the assault. It looked like the figure had knocked the victim to the ground. Things were less clear after that—there were at least five other people moving around the injured party, but it was impossible to tell what the figure in the red hoodie was doing. Fifteen minutes later, the police had arrested five boys by the Thai kiosk outside the station. Emelie’s client was one of them, and he had been wearing a bright red hoodie. They had interviewed him on three occasions, but all he had repeated was: “I’m not the person in the film. I wasn’t on the platform. I met my friends later, when they were getting noodles.” The injured party had gone through a lineup, during which he had pointed out Emelie’s client with 90 percent certainty. The problem was that apart from Emelie’s client, only one other figure in the lineup was from a non-Nordic country. Emelie knew what she thought of that kind of evidence—it belonged in the gutter.