by Jens Lapidus
He cautiously opened a door. A well-lit room: it looked like a mocked-up bedroom. The only genuine thing in it was the large bed in the middle of the floor. He opened another door. This room was tiled, but it wasn’t a bathroom—there was some kind of swing hanging from the ceiling. He opened a cabinet on one of the walls: it was full of leather straps, whips, masks, packs of condoms, dildos, pillboxes, lace underwear, small metal batons that seemed to contain batteries, handcuffs, tubes of various lotions, ball gags, and all kinds of other crap. I’m definitely in the right place, Teddy thought—they’re dogs.
Right then, he heard a sound from the third room. He focused: it could be Fred O. and his passenger.
Teddy stepped back into the hallway and opened the third door. This room looked more like an office, with a desk and a sofa.
Fredrik O. Johansson was leaning over the desk, tipping something into a Samsonite suitcase—papers, contracts, possibly DVDs. The old man was evidently cleaning up.
“That’s enough now,” Teddy said.
Fredrik looked up. Uncomprehending. Surprised.
Then he recognized Teddy. They were standing fifteen feet apart, in the half light, but it was perfectly clear. The old bastard looked like he had just seen John Lennon or Olof Palme walk through the door.
“You shouldn’t be here,” Fredrik said in a strangely bright voice.
Teddy could feel the blood raging through his veins. The old Teddy really was back: he was Bruce Wayne about to become the Dark Knight; Bruce Banner about to transform into the Hulk. He wanted to beat the man in front of him to a pulp. Wanted to tear off his dick and shove it down his throat. He never wanted to hear his squeaky voice again.
He hissed: “You just keep calm and stop whatever you’re doing. It’s over, Fredrik.”
He wasn’t going to let Fredrik the monster Johansson go, not under any circumstances. But, at the same time, he wondered what he was doing. He really should have called the police a long time ago, or at least called in Dejan. Plus, he thought he could hear sounds from out in the hallway—was that Fredrik O. Johansson’s passenger?
Fredrik slowly stepped forward, pulling the suitcase behind him. He was like a new man coming toward Teddy: he was no longer a terrified, busted, shameful old man. Fred O. was growling, his fists clenched, his body tense. He attacked like an animal. They tumbled into the hallway.
Teddy lashed out. He felt Fredrik O. Johansson’s nose break.
At the same time, he saw something else from the corner of one eye: the passenger was coming down the hallway toward them—another middle-aged man.
Teddy had to knock Fredrik out right now. He was landing blows like a machine. Blood splattered. Teeth flew. Fredrik cried out in pain.
Teddy waited for the passenger to launch himself at him, but he just grabbed the Samsonite case. Teddy tried to get up, but Fredrik O. Johansson wouldn’t give in: the man had twisted, wrapping his legs around Teddy’s waist, and was pushing him backward—like some kind of UFC fighter. The other man vanished with the bag. Teddy rolled over. This time, it was Fredrik who was first to his feet. But he was no longer punching or kicking—he was running. And he was much quicker than he looked.
Down the corridor, through the bar, up the short staircase, out through the door.
The grass was damp with dew. Fredrik was a few feet ahead of Teddy, running like a hundred-meter sprinter.
Teddy couldn’t even see the other guy, the one who had disappeared with the suitcase—but there was no damn way he was going to let Fredrik O. Johansson escape.
Teddy was panting, gaining on the man. Ten feet away.
Five now.
He threw himself at him, American football–style. This time, he wasn’t going to let go.
The man struggled. Teddy crawled on top of him, got him in a leg lock. Just held on. Gripped. The seconds passed.
Fredrik pulled and tore at him. Teddy continued to hold him back.
The minutes passed. Fredrik was flapping like a fish on a hook. Teddy could feel himself getting weaker, but the man had to be even worse. Teddy tried to pull out his phone to call Dejan.
“What do you want?” Fredrik hissed.
Teddy didn’t reply.
The ring signal sounded weird, like the coverage was poor. His call failed.
More time passed. He had to try calling Dejan again, but that was no easy task while he held on to Johansson. His sweat was turning cold on his body. The man was twitching like a fish on a dock, thrashing back and forth—Teddy didn’t know where he was getting the energy from.
Then he saw blue lights over by the gate. The cops had arrived surprisingly quickly, given that they were in the middle of nowhere and Teddy hadn’t called them. He must have set off some kind of alarm when he broke in, or maybe the man who ran off with the suitcase had called them. Or Dejan.
It wasn’t a police car, he saw now: it was a motorbike. Its blue light went out, and a headlight came on instead. The motorbike rolled slowly toward the main building. The gravel crunched beneath its tires. After a few seconds, it turned and started moving over the grass toward them. The beam of the headlight hit Teddy in the face, blinding him, but he could hear the puttering of the engine as it approached.
The motorbike stopped ten or so feet away, and the light went out. The officer started walking toward them, heavy gear rattling.
Teddy slowly loosened his grip on Fredrik O. Johansson’s body. He heard the man groan and he breathed in the cool air—finally. Teddy never thought he would be happy to see a police officer, but now he relaxed slightly. The officer was standing in front of them, still not saying anything, and the visor of his helmet was still down. Teddy wondered whether he and Fredrick would be asked to lie down or hold their hands above their heads.
“Arrest this man!” Teddy said loudly, gesturing toward Fredrik.
The officer turned from him to Fredrik O. The grass was wet. Teddy thought he could hear the rattle of handcuffs, and he looked up at the biker cop again. His dark visor reminded him of a blank TV screen. But it wasn’t handcuffs the officer was holding—it was a pistol.
A gun? That was probably good—Fredrik O. Johansson had to understand how serious this was. But Teddy wondered why the cop still hadn’t said anything.
Then he heard a shot.
Teddy felt something warm and wet. His ears were ringing.
What the hell had just happened?
Teddy turned to Fredrik. At first, he didn’t understand. Then he understood all too well: Fredrik O. Johansson’s face was gone. The cop had shot him in the face.
Teddy raised his head. He was staring straight down the barrel of the officer’s gun.
“What the hell are you doing?” he panted.
The black eye of the pistol stared straight back at him. The cop still hadn’t said a word. If he even was a cop. There was nothing Teddy could do. His only hope was that he would think Fredrik O. Johansson was enough.
Was he about to die?
Was it all over?
Suddenly: SWOOSH. A rushing electronic sound.
The gun was no longer there—and neither was the officer.
The Tesla had appeared in front of Teddy. The passenger side door opened.
“Get in!” Dejan shouted.
Teddy crawled into the passenger seat.
Dejan pulled the door shut. It took Teddy a few seconds to process what had just happened. Dejan had driven straight onto the grass and at the officer, who must have thrown himself to one side. His friend had, in all likelihood, just saved him from a bullet to the head. No one had heard Dejan’s electric car coming—because the Tesla Model X was as quiet as death. And death comes quickly with Ludicrous Speed.
Teddy turned around, saw the cop disappearing into the darkness on his motorbike. Lying on the grass was the cooling body of one of Sweden’s most success
ful investors.
AFTONBLADET
ONE OF SWEDEN’S WEALTHIEST MEN MURDERED
Well-known figure in financial circles
A financier considered one of Sweden’s wealthiest men has been found with a bullet wound to the head on an estate in Södermanland. Parts of the estate were gutted by fire and police are appealing for witnesses.
The financier established his investment company in the mid-1990s and followed a strategy of imitating well-known American investor Warren Buffet. “I only go in on things I understand,” he claimed in an interview eight years ago.
The strategy proved very effective, enabling the financier to count himself among Sweden’s wealthiest individuals for a number of years.
Police were called to a large fire at an estate in Södermanland in late April. Upon arriving at the scene, officers made the macabre discovery of the financier’s body outside the building, with bullet wounds to the head.
“The evidence suggests a deliberate killing,” says the preliminary investigation leader. “But we can’t rule out suicide.”
According to Aftonbladet sources, the police investigation is slowly moving forward. The strongest lead to date is a car seen in the vicinity of the crime scene.
“He had no enemies, as far as I know, and I definitely don’t think he would have killed himself, he wasn’t the type,” says one of the financier’s friends. “It’s all so sad and awful. He was a good person.”
Police are appealing for witnesses.
“The surveillance cameras from the fire-torn building may also provide evidence,” says the preliminary investigation leader. “We’re looking into everything.”
PART III
MAY–JUNE
34
The motion of the plane was making Nikola feel sick. He didn’t say anything to Bello, but the truth was that he hadn’t flown all that many times before. Once with Mom and Grandpa, when they went to Belgrade to visit relatives and to look at the house where Grandpa grew up, but Grandpa had spent that whole journey reading to him from Harry Potter, so he had barely noticed them taking off. Another time, he and Mom had flown to Mallorca, but he had fallen asleep with Jay Z and Rihanna in his ears after just a few minutes: Know that we’ll still have each other / You can stand under my umbrella.
They were on the way home: he and Bello. They had to get back to Little Sweden, even if they should maybe have stayed longer.
They had been in Dubai for a month. They’d needed to cool down. Above all, the situation back home had needed to cool down, by many degrees. The speculation was worse than when Isak had made Nermin Avdic disappear nine years earlier. Nikola was only twelve at the time, but he remembered the chatter. The guesswork. The fear that had spread like a virus through the boys in Södertälje. How they had started to arm themselves. Now: Chamon was massacred, and Yusuf and Fadi were missing.
He and Bello had taken the bodies to Bello’s uncle’s construction site, wrapped them in black plastic bags and dumped them into the concrete slab his uncle was busy pouring. The last thing they saw was the section of bag that must have been covering Yusuf’s face, possibly his nose, sink beneath the gritty mass of concrete, bubbling like the lava in Revenge of the Sith. Nikola could just imagine it: Yusuf reborn as an evil Sith Lord.
Bello’s uncle didn’t ask any questions, but he hadn’t let any of his men see what they were up to, either. “We keep the garbage disposal in the family,” he said, baring his yellow teeth.
Nikola had been close to screaming. He didn’t know how things could have ended up this way. Just three months earlier, he was close to becoming a qualified electrician with George Samuel, heading toward a crazy good future. Now they had killed a man. He had chosen a completely different path—and the sick thing was that when he announced that he wanted to get revenge for Chamon, he hadn’t even considered where it might lead him. Now he knew.
Now: he knew.
“Bello,” he had said. “D’you think we did the right thing?”
“What?”
“I mean, we wanted to make Yusuf talk because he helped the guys who killed Chamon, and it ended with us cutting him down. But that’s not going to bring Chamon back, you know?”
“Nah.”
“Sometimes it feels like we’ve just added more shittiness to the world. I mean, maybe we’re the bastards in all this. Maybe we’re the bad guys.”
Bello had been standing with his hands in his pockets, staring at the hardening concrete. “We’re not bad guys,” he said quietly, as though he had carefully considered every word. “But we’re not good, either.”
“What are we, then?”
Bello’s gaze was distant. “We are who we are,” he said. “That’s it.”
* * *
—
Dubai: the world’s biggest asshole, camouflaged as a tourist trap. Shopping capital of the world, a plastic beach resort full of child-friendly pools shaped like bananas…but if you dug down two feet into the sand on the beach, you hit the concrete bottom. Nikola thought back to the black bag containing Yusuf’s body, how the concrete mix had swallowed it up like it never existed. He wondered: how many Bangladeshi slave laborers were buried beneath the beaches of Dubai?
The first few weeks had been relatively good. Nikola’s thigh wound had healed nicely. Isak had given them work through his lawyer in Sweden. They were meant to visit a bank with such a long name that he’d had to spell it out seven times just so that Nikola wouldn’t forget. He and Bello had picked up two Rimowa bags with combination locks.
“Sweeeet,” Bello had blurted out as he weighed the bags in his hand.
Nikola hailed a taxi. “It’s probably cash. ’Cause these just need to be moved to another bank, you know, the chain needs to be broken so no one can see where the money’s gone. If anyone tracks this dough, the trail will end at the last bank. Do you know what Isak said when I saw him inside?”
“Nah.”
“It’s only the C-league players and the Hells Angels who try to launder money through Swedish banks and exchanges. Down here, people launder money more often than they wash their own dicks. No one cares.”
Bello had exploded at that, laughing so loudly that two police officers outside the bank started to approach them. Then he had caught his breath. “Aha. How much of this do we get, then?”
“I don’t know yet, but he’s coughing up for our hotel.”
* * *
—
They had checked into a four-star hotel with views out onto the seven-star hotels. Mövenpick Heights Hotel—honestly: Mövenpick as in the ice cream with chunks of cookie dough that his mom always ate when she watched TV shows. The hotel logo was everywhere: on the soaps, the pillows, the towels, even on the toilet paper. On their first day there, Nikola had asked room service to call a doctor to examine the wound on his leg. Nothing vital had been damaged, even if the doctor did wonder who the botchers who had patched him up were. The botchers in question were Bello and Bello’s uncle.
Dubai didn’t smell the way Nikola had expected a hot country to smell. The air there was dry but also metallic. The artificial park beneath the hotel was kept alive with enough water for an entire town, and the air-conditioning whirred like an extractor fan twenty-four/seven. There were huge SUVs everywhere, all matte paintwork and with rims bigger than a tractor’s. The Nigerian cleaners in the hotel bore signs of torture on their hands: burn marks and extracted nails. Every day, one of them left a small flower in the vase in Nikola’s room—he had tried to thank them once, but the maid had just shaken her head: they weren’t allowed to talk to the guests.
Bello loved the whores the porter could arrange at any time of day. “The Ukrainians here are better than in Ukraine,” he had said.
Nikola hadn’t felt like it. “How do you know?”
Bello had guffawed. “One of them told me.”
<
br /> They spent their days chatting by the pool, drinking beer in the roof bar, or walking mile after mile through the shopping centers. Nikola was still trying to work out how involved Yusuf had been in Chamon’s murder, but Bello just said: “It must’ve been some internal thing, maybe Chamon came onto his woman. Everyone’s so fucked-up these days. The smallest thing and that’s it.”
Once a week, they had gone to pick up bags from a bank, hailed a cab and dropped them off at another one, where an account had also been opened in their names. Bello had bought himself a Louis Vuitton backpack and a pair of sneakers from Prada, then his share of the money ran out. Nikola had been thinking about a hoodie from YSL, but he changed his mind when he saw the graphic on the back: it looked like a G clef. Chamon’s words had flashed through his mind: his mother had thought he was musical.
He thought back to the conversation he’d had with Roksana before the spa, before Dubai. He hadn’t helped her. A real man probably would have stepped up—Chamon almost definitely would have. Nikola didn’t even know the woman, but still: he should give her a call when they got home. Check how she was doing, or something.
It seemed like Bello was doing other jobs while they were there. Maybe they were for Isak, maybe for other guys back home, but he had dragged Nikola along to meetings with Germans and Dutchmen. Nikola knew what they were about: guns, flak vests, grenades. His friend was wheeling and dealing. Playing the big businessman. Bouncing figures about like a math teacher.
“Seems like you’re buying up half of NATO,” Nikola had joked after one of the meetings. He and Bello were in a hotel bar down by the water—tourists were allowed to smoke and drink alcohol there until twelve. Some of the guys around them were wearing flip-flops and shorts, others jackets and loafers.