by Jens Lapidus
“That’s fine, it’s enough for me,” he said, starting to rinse himself off. As the clay ran away in the shower, it looked black again.
The Thai masseuses left. Yusuf started moaning again, going on about how he had expected something other than forty-year-old Thai women with chubby hands. But he was in a good mood all the same, wanted to go into the sauna, talk plans, drink beer.
“What d’you guys do with all your cash?” he wanted to know.
Nikola gave an evasive answer. “I’m a simple man, I don’t earn much.” It was also true.
Yusuf said: “I’ve got a guy who drives down to Denmark in a rental every other weekend, there and back in one day, no problems. I stash all mine there.”
“How d’you know you can trust your guy, though?”
“They have to be scared of you. That way they won’t screw you over.”
Nikola was now just waiting for them to climb into the pool. That was when it would happen. But Yusuf wanted to warm up first.
The sauna was big. The thermometer on the wall showed eighty degrees. Bello’s leg had started shaking again—balls, he needed to hide it. Yusuf was sweating like a pig wrapped in plastic wrap. He was still wearing the gold cross and chain he had gotten from Chamon—what a traitor. The towel was still wrapped around his hips. A beer in his hand. The sweat had started to glisten on his chest. Pool soon. Nikola closed his eyes.
He thought back to the first time he and Teddy had gone to the adventure pool in Södertälje. His school class had taken swimming lessons every Tuesday, but since Nikola realized that almost everyone but him could already swim, it was embarrassing. Time after time, he made his excuses: he wasn’t feeling well, he had eczema, he’d forgotten his swimming trunks. In the end, he hadn’t gone to more than two lessons in the pool; he still couldn’t swim. But he hadn’t told Teddy any of this when they climbed into the pool that day. He stuck to the edges, tried to move his legs the way he had seen his friends do in swimming lessons. But the whole time, beneath the surface, he had been clinging to the edge of the pool. Teddy swam alongside him, playfully splashing him with water. Asking if they should jump in from the edge. Nikola had tried to reply, tried to laugh, but he had been terrified of getting water in his mouth. He was scared of the surface, which felt like it was closing in on top of him. There was no power in his legs. His body had sunk, he had tried to grab the edge more tightly, to pull himself forward—but he couldn’t. The water dragged him down. The depths cried out for his body. He was going to drown. But then Teddy had grabbed him: “Come on, hang on to my back for a while.” His uncle had swum over to a shallower section. Then he stood up and held Nikola beneath his stomach. “Your strokes look good, show me again.” Nikola had kicked his legs. After twenty minutes, they left the pool. They had gone back there every weekend for the next six weeks. The same routine every time: Teddy holding him beneath his stomach and asking him to do his nice strokes. Little by little, his uncle had let go, until he was no longer holding Nikola, until Nikola could move three feet through the water, push off from the edge and make it six feet on his own. Until he really was swimming. And not once had Teddy said anything. Not a word about Nikola not being able to swim. Not a word about Teddy needing to teach him how to kick. Nothing. He had just acted.
A creaking sound. Was that the door to the sauna opening? Maybe the Sturebadet staff were back again, despite Nikola having told them they wanted to be left alone. Maybe it was Bello or Yusuf needing to go and cool down. But the steps sounded harder than someone walking barefoot. Nikola dragged himself back to reality.
A guy in sweatpants and a T-shirt: clothes that had no place in a sauna. Clothes that definitely didn’t belong to the staff from Sturebadet. He recognized the man: Fadi—one of Yusuf’s guys.
Fuck.
It was a setup. Yusuf must have seen through their plan from the very beginning.
Fadi stepped inside. Even Bello understood now: his eyes were wide, like he had seen a ghost. Fadi: a big guy, everyone knew he was Yusuf’s muscle. He was holding two switchblades, and he handed one to Yusuf.
FUCK.
Fadi was in front of Nikola now.
F-U-C-K.
This wasn’t what was supposed to happen.
Nikola had time to get up. Fadi’s hand moved quickly, but the motion was too obvious. Nikola clocked the direction, parried the stab. Full contact—the pain shot up his arm like lightning. But he hadn’t been stabbed; they had just bumped arms. And Nikola could be quick, too. He brought his knee up to Fadi’s dick. The guy bent double. Screamed.
From the corner of one eye, Nikola could see Bello trying to fend off Yusuf. Both men were naked.
Nikola shouted, kicked at that Fadi bastard again. This time, he was too slow. He didn’t see the stab, just felt it in his thigh. It burned, as though Fadi had shoved a firecracker into his flesh and set it off. His leg gave way. He dropped to the floor. This was some Eastern Promises shit, for real. He saw his own blood. Heard his own cry, it almost sounded distant, as though it belonged to someone else. He opened the door to the sauna, crawled out into the pool room and toward the exit. Fadi came after him. He heard Bello shouting inside the sauna.
Fadi kicked him in the stomach, a full-on soccer player’s kick. Nikola couldn’t breathe. He twisted, gasping for air. Rolled around. The edge of the pool was five feet away. The marble shone.
Fadi took aim again, but Nikola grabbed his leg—the guy fell. Nikola launched himself at him. Tried to land blows like an MMA fighter, but the pain in his thigh put the brakes on him. Behind them, the door opened—Yusuf came out with the shitty knife in his hand. What had he done to Bello back in the sauna?
Nikola tried to get up, his leg shaking. Yusuf swung at him. Nikola twisted his body, moving his side around the stabbing motion. Yusuf tried again. Missed.
Suddenly he felt Fadi’s arms around his waist—shit, he couldn’t let himself be held down—that would be it.
Yusuf pulled back his arm to stab again, but he was too obvious about where he was going. Nikola risked everything, tore himself away. The knife hit flesh—but not his.
Yusuf looked shocked, his eyes wide. Fadi looked even more confused: enormous eyes—the knife was in his stomach, not Nikola’s. Yusuf had stabbed his own boy.
Fadi gurgled, blood running from his mouth. The knife was still in his stomach.
Yusuf shouted: “Dachri.” His head turned from his hitman, who was sinking to the floor, to Nikola, whose guard was raised. The pain in Nikola’s leg was tearing at him, and all he wanted was to drop down, lie still. Rest. But he forced himself to stay in position.
Facing Yusuf.
One second.
Yusuf had accidentally cut down his own bro.
Five seconds.
Maybe Nikola was alone now. Maybe Bello was lying dead in the sauna. He felt like his leg was about to give way beneath him.
Ten seconds. Two pairs of eyes locked on to one another. Two terrified naked men who had both thought things would end differently.
Nikola moved first. Swung at Yusuf. Tried to be like a cobra, full force. He hit air. Yusuf threw himself to the floor instead: toward the knife sticking out of Fadi. Nikola was stupid for not thinking of it. Yusuf yelled, grabbed ahold of the knife. Both men fell. Rolled around on the marble floor by the pool. Trails of blood following them like they were carcasses in a slaughterhouse. They wrestled, fighting for the damn knife. Nikola wouldn’t be able to keep going much longer. His wound was tearing at him. He didn’t know how much blood he had lost. If he didn’t come out on top now, he was dead.
Yusuf launched himself at Nikola with the knife in his hand. Nikola ended up on his back; he grabbed Yusuf’s arm, tried to force it back. His strength was running out. Yusuf’s teeth were bared, not far from Nikola’s face. The tip of the knife moved closer: it was like a blurry gray dot just an inch away fro
m his eye.
He wasn’t going to make it. It would dig its way into his brain through his eye. He pushed back. Tried. Sweated. Heard his own strained breathing. Saw images pass by: Mom, Teddy.
Then the pressure disappeared.
Yusuf rolled away. Blood was bubbling from his mouth. Bello was standing behind him with Fadi’s knife in his hand. He had driven it into the back of Yusuf’s neck.
Yusuf’s mouth was moving. It looked like he was trying to speak. There was something calm about him, something that had stopped fighting.
“Nicko,” he gurgled, without finishing. His eyes rolled back.
The man on the marble floor in front of them was no longer living.
Nikola bent down and took Chamon’s gold chain and cross from him. “You shouldn’t have those,” he said quietly to himself. He staggered to his feet. “Bello,” he said. “Thanks.”
* * *
—
Fifteen minutes later: Bello had called a cousin and asked him to drive over like crazy in his car. The guy should arrive in another fifteen. Nikola was still reeling from how lucky they were that Yusuf had given Bello only a bit of a kicking in the sauna, rather than stabbing him.
They had found an emergency exit in the lounge and managed to pry the door open. It could work: the exit led to a stairwell that Bello had followed all the way down to a door onto Grev Turegatan. But the bodies—what were they going to do with those? And what about Nikola’s wound?
Bello wound towels tightly around Nikola’s thigh until the bleeding stopped.
In each of the lockers, there was a large frotté towel and a dressing gown like the ones they had been wearing. They wrapped them around the bodies like funeral shrouds and then they dragged them behind the sofas in the lounge. Jesus, they were heavy. Nikola whimpered.
Bello rinsed off the sauna with a hose that he managed to find, and then did the same in the pool room. Carefully: walls, floor. Walls, floor again. Nikola lay down on the floor in the changing room with his leg raised on a bench. He glanced into the pool room. The majority of the blood had run away down the drain, but not all of it. Shit: the water in the pool had turned pale pink from the blood which had run into it. SH-IT.
They couldn’t leave any trace of what had happened.
So crazy. It was all so fucked-up. All they had been planning was to waterboard Yusuf and make him talk, but now they were stuck with two dead bodies.
Bello’s phone rang. His cousin was waiting for them down on the street.
“Park your car as close to the metal doors on Grev Turegatan as you can, opposite Grodan. Leave the keys on the seat,” Bello instructed him. “It’s best if you aren’t in the car yourself. You don’t want to get caught up in this.”
It was time.
Bello tried to drag the first body into the stairwell, but it was too heavy for him on his own. Nikola got up, swayed. Tested his leg to see if it would hold.
“Bello, I dunno if I can do this.”
“You can’t drop now. Just think of your uncle or something. You grab that end, I’ll grab the top.”
Nikola took as deep a breath as he could, stopped the pain from taking over.
They carried the first body down to the street. The car was parked five feet from the door. Bello’s cousin was nowhere to be seen. They folded down the backseats and shoved the body inside.
Nikola could feel the shitty lightning approaching. He had to lean against the handrail in the stairwell. Bello said: “What do we do about the pool? You can tell it’s got blood in it.”
Nikola staggered back into the lounge. He blinked. Spotted the bottles of spirits on the bar. Saw a couple of bottles of wine.
“I’ve got an idea,” he panted.
He staggered over to the bar. Grabbed two bottles of red wine. Shuffled back into the pool room and smashed both bottles on the floor. The red wine gave the pool water even more color.
Bello was behind him.
“You’re smart, bro.”
31
Josephine had forced her to meet for a drink in town. Emelie didn’t feel like going, but Jossan was stubborn and had also agreed to pick her up.
“Hello, Pippa,” Jossan said, practically stumbling in through Emelie’s front door. For some reason, she practically always tripped through doorways—a bit like Kramer in Seinfeld—something which Emelie couldn’t usually stop herself from laughing at. But not now. Not tonight.
They hugged. “I wanted to give you a bit of a cuddle after all the strange stuff you’ve been through lately. I do technically have an STA to be working on, but it’ll have to get finished tomorrow.”
“Can’t we just stay in? It’s ten o’clock—there’s no way you can be your sharpest self right now, either.”
“Nope, we’re going out. And don’t say that. You know what working at Leijon is like. You were in my shoes less than two years ago.”
“But my heels were never as high as yours.”
“Ha ha, you’re a funny one, Emelie.”
* * *
—
They sat down at a table in Ling Long, and Emelie went over to the bar to order. Her fingers played with the personal alarm in her bag—this had to stop soon. Over the past few days, she had felt the panic creeping up on her increasingly often: the minute she heard a loud noise or saw someone move quickly. Those shots in Oslo had punched holes in her safety zone.
She thought about Katja’s mother. Though she hadn’t found out exactly what Gunnel had done, Emelie was sure: she didn’t deserve to be called a mother. Emelie wondered how the line preventing a parent from betraying their own child could be so flimsy, whether the human instinct to protect your own offspring was really so weak. It couldn’t be—it was also about choice. Gunnel could have made different decisions. There were always alternatives. Emelie still didn’t feel ready to be a mother herself—she couldn’t see herself in the role. Even less see the child’s father as a dad. She had looked up the regulations: she could do what she wanted until the eighteenth week, but from the thirteenth week of pregnancy, abortions became more complicated—requiring a so-called two-step abortion. She knew what she wanted to do: the world was too cruel, motherhood too uncertain a task. She also knew she couldn’t keep ignoring Teddy. She should call him and let him know.
Then she thought about how Marcus was trying to keep her legal practice afloat while she was a mentally absent boss. A few more weeks and she would have to be on top of everything again, otherwise the entire firm risked collapse. At the same time, she didn’t know how she would manage it. She was spending most of her time with the Katja material: writing her own summaries, making lists. Marking, underlining, making notes. Questions that hadn’t been asked, analyses that hadn’t been completed, samples that hadn’t been taken, boxes that hadn’t been studied, and so on. She didn’t feel quite as unwell as she had earlier during her pregnancy, but she still wasn’t sleeping properly. She drank all kinds of coffee, ate apples, and wolfed down mixed candy like it was amphetamine. She desperately wanted some real pills—but resisted. She didn’t even scroll through the illegal pharmacy sites online.
The police had received the forensic reports from the murder scene. The National Forensic Center’s DNA analysis adhered to the usual scale: Degree of likelihood: + 4. According to the attached explanation, that meant that it was more than a million times more likely that the DNA comes from the person in question than from anyone else (1,000,000 ≤ V). Adam’s and Katja’s blood had been found on the floor close to where her body was discovered—and Adam had a knife wound on his right hand. It was unshakable.
But still.
She bought a nonalcoholic drink for herself and a G&T for Jossan.
“Are you coming to the firm’s fortieth anniversary party, by the way?” Josephine asked as Emelie sat down.
“I haven’t decided yet,” Emelie lie
d. “I got the invite.”
“I’m organizing it, so it’d be cool if you came. Leijon always wants to show off its elite, you know?”
“Natürlich, so why do they kick out the best?”
Jossan winked at her. “You know why you couldn’t stay. And no matter how much I think you did the right thing by taking on that case, you also made a mistake, from the firm’s point of view.”
Emelie couldn’t argue with that.
Jossan started chatting away about something else.
“I’ve started taking holistic magnesium,” she said. “It’s good for the muscles, nerves, protein synthesis, the immune system, and your sex life. It makes you have more friends, too. It’s clinically proven.”
Emelie cackled. “I’ll take three pills now.”
They talked careers, old colleagues. Apparently Magnus Hassel wasn’t happy with the year’s dividends to the partners at Leijon. Anders Henriksson had met a twenty-two-year-old girl at his gym whose body was more than 40 percent silicone. Eva Rudolfson’s son wrote crappy headlines for the tabloids and petitions on social media. It felt good to hear ordinary legal gossip for a change, to avoid thinking about Katja or the shooting in Oslo.