by Jens Lapidus
She had called and sent texts to the numbers he had been using recently. She had written a letter and sent it to his apartment. She had even gone out to Alby to knock on his door—thinking about the bomb that Nikola had gotten caught up in there. Was this Teddy’s way of saying that she had burned her bridges by ignoring so many of his calls over the past few weeks? It made no difference. Emelie had called his father and sister, but they hadn’t heard from him in a long time, and they didn’t have any numbers but the ones she already had. Then she had called the only one of his friends she knew well—Loke Odensson—but even he had no idea what Teddy was up to or where he was. She should talk to Nikola, she thought, but when she finally managed to get ahold of him, he hadn’t been willing to talk, for some reason. “I’m in Dubai,” he had said. “And I have no idea what Teddy’s number is. We don’t talk anymore.”
* * *
—
She had moved in with Josephine on Norr Mälarstrand—she could no longer handle living on her own, and she didn’t trust anyone but Jossan. Even though she didn’t know exactly what had happened on the estate, she instinctively felt that there was something off about the whole thing. She had tried to manage a few things for work, calling Teddy at regular intervals. She had even sent Marcus to two court hearings on her behalf—she didn’t feel safe going in herself.
“Don’t forget your tie,” she had said to him, half-joking, half-serious. Even though Emelie herself didn’t have even a fifth of the interest in clothes that someone like Jossan had, it was important to make the right impression in court. In many respects, a lawyer’s job was to play a part; the different actors in the courtroom each played out certain roles. The prosecutor prosecuted, the judge judged, the lawyer defended. It made no difference what you yourself thought or felt: the positions were fixed, and your duties stemmed from that. That was why clothing was so important—defense lawyers had to dress the part. In many European countries, they wore capes, and that would probably have been easier in Sweden, too—making it even clearer for everyone involved that you weren’t there as an individual but to carry out your predetermined task.
Marcus had handled it well. At one of the hearings, the client, an old junkie, had failed to show up, meaning the trial was adjourned. At another, he had handled the drunk driving and illegal driving charges so well that the trial had ended with a court-imposed care order—which was unusual. The old fellow was thrilled to have avoided prison, and Marcus had probably found himself a client for life.
The media was still speculating about what had happened out at Hallenbro Storgården. Emelie knew more than most: it had to be the estate that Mats Emanuelsson and Katja had talked about—meaning there was a definite link to Teddy. After a few minutes of trawling the gossip pages online, the link had become even clearer: the murdered financier, as the papers were calling him, was Fredrik O. Johansson—one of the names Mats had managed to mention in Oslo. Emelie became obsessed, trying to find out everything she could about the man. His businesses, his family, his friends. Yet it hadn’t brought her any closer to what had actually happened out at the estate.
In the background, another question was constantly on her mind, niggling away at her. What was she going to do about the baby?
The story of Katja and Adam’s son was so sad. A child who didn’t want to be abandoned by his father; a man who wanted to protect his girl. If Katja and Adam had been planning to leave Sweden to avoid testifying, why couldn’t they just have taken Oliver with them? Why couldn’t his son go, too?
A child was a commitment.
* * *
—
Emelie carefully grabbed the metal handle and tried to lift it straight up. The machine was for shoulder, thigh, and core exercises, but Jossan had given her a considerably more detailed analysis of what the machine could do. Next to Emelie, a middle-aged man in a blue sports top, pale tights, and a hat was doing sit-ups. He looked like he was about to hit the ski run, even though they were indoors. Josephine was at the other side of the room, taking long, rhythmic strokes on the rowing machine. Emelie was wearing the baggiest clothes she could find—ordered online and delivered direct to her door.
Anneli had called from the office yesterday and said that Adam Tagrin had turned up. Emelie had immediately climbed into a cab and gone in.
Adam looked like a cross between a living ghost and a psych case. The truth was that she had never seen a person look so confused. It was understandable, given what had happened. Emelie was surprised he had even managed to make it there.
“Sit down,” she had said.
She thought back to when he and Katja had come in a few months earlier.
Adam placed his hands in his lap, but Emelie had been able to see that they were shaking.
“I’m so sorry,” she had said quietly. “It’s awful. I can’t imagine what you must be going through.”
Adam’s body rocked back and forth. “Do you know what Katja used to say?”
“No.”
“She used to say that there were two mistakes you could make on the way to the truth. Not going the whole way or not starting at all.” He stopped rocking. “She wanted to do the right thing. But she was a broken woman. Trust didn’t come easy to her. And Oliver…”
Emelie had barely been able to listen.
“Oliver,” Adam said again. “He only trusted one person in this world, and that was me. And I betrayed him.”
He had bent down and buried his face in his hands. He sat like that for a moment, and Emelie had realized there was nothing she could say to comfort him.
Once he was sitting upright again, his voice had been different, containing a hint of anger. “But there’s one thing I haven’t even told the police. I don’t trust them.”
“What?”
“I know you’ve been involved in this mess for a while. Katja trusted you, so I trust you. Is that right of me?”
“Katja was my client.”
“I’ll tell you. It’s about why Katja didn’t want to go to the police interviews, why we were planning to run away from it all. It’s like this. The night before the interview, someone came over to the apartment. I wasn’t home at the time, but Katja told me afterward. Some middle-aged man who wanted to come in, but Katja refused, so they talked in the doorway instead. His message was clear enough, in any case. He said that if she continued to spread lies to the police, there would be consequences.”
“Did she know who he was?”
“No.”
“So that was when the two of you started talking about disappearing?”
“Yes. Or more like it was the final straw.”
“Why didn’t she say anything to the police?”
“She didn’t dare.”
“I understand. But she didn’t say anything to me, either.”
“She did, indirectly. She asked you to come over, she wanted to tell you we were leaving. But by then it was too late.” Adam’s voice had cracked. “We spent the whole night getting ready to run. Those were the discussions Oliver overheard.”
* * *
—
The gym could be an energizing place if you felt stable. The man doing sit-ups next to her seemed relaxed. The equipment was fresh, despite the hundreds of people who must sweat over it every day.
Emelie hoped that Jossan would want to go home after their session, so that they could walk together. She didn’t want to be out on the streets on her own. It was insane that she didn’t dare live in her own home, but that was how it was.
She loved her apartment on Rörstrandsgatan. The tiny thing had cost a fortune when she bought it a few years earlier, seventy-seven thousand kronor per square foot. Her parents had wondered whether she had come down with something. Their own house was 1,720 square feet, with a garage, ground source heating, and views out onto Lake Vättern, but they would never have been able to sell it fo
r anything close to what Emelie had paid for Rörstrandsgatan. Since then, prices in Stockholm had risen by at least 40 percent, so she would be a millionaire if she sold today. She was up to her eyes in debt with the mortgage, of course, 85 percent, and even if she paid off ten thousand a month—something she definitely couldn’t afford to do on the income she brought in from her firm—she wouldn’t finish paying it off for almost twenty years. And now there was talk of interest rates rising: the Trump effect. It wasn’t enough that the old man seemed crazy—he was threatening to ruin Emelie’s finances, too. The property market in Stockholm was psychotic. Over the past twenty years, prices had increased tenfold, while protected tenancies had been hunted like crazy; they were practically an endangered species these days. She didn’t understand the logic behind it: how were young people ever meant to find a place of their own if it cost three million just for somewhere to sleep?
Then she thought about her own job again. She doubted her firm would survive if she didn’t get back to working like normal soon, giving it some momentum. Suddenly it struck her: the firm wouldn’t survive if she went on maternity leave. Marcus couldn’t run it on his own: he wasn’t bringing in any new business.
Interest rates possibly going up.
A company that might collapse.
A father who would probably be sentenced to life in prison.
A mother who couldn’t live at home.
She pulled out her phone and did some Googling. Checked that Josephine was far enough away. Then she called Ultragyn’s abortion clinic.
“Hi, could I book an appointment?”
The man doing sit-ups glanced over to her.
“It’s regarding an unwanted pregnancy,” she said.
36
The things had arrived at the post office just over a week after she flew home. Home? She felt confused, different from how she had felt before she left. “Home” had become a strange word. She knew her way around Stockholm; it was where her parents were, her brother, Z, Billie, and all her other friends. It was where her memories were, linked to people and places. But home? Did she feel at home? In Tehran, things had felt different. Everything was new to her there, the wide streets flanked with umbrella pines, the way people touched one another and laughed, the smell of exhaust fumes, the mass of the Alborz Mountains looming up as though Tehran were some kind of hidden treasure to be shielded from the eye of the world. Somehow, all that was hers, it belonged to her. They had demanded she travel on an Iranian passport—and she really could understand why.
Plus: when she got home, there had been bad news waiting for her on the mat in the hallway. A score of 1.9 on the aptitude test hadn’t been enough to get into the psychology program at Stockholm University. She had known it would take a high score, but it had never, as far as she knew, required more than a 1.9. Maybe this was her punishment for cheating. Money in the ocean. Morals down the drain. She didn’t know how she was going to explain it to her parents. But right now, she and Z had bigger problems.
They had been jittery as they scanned the area outside the post office in Akalla Centrum to make sure there weren’t any police waiting for them. Z had suggested they give the collection card to a beggar or homeless person and ask them to collect the parcel; it was undeniably safer that way. “But that feels immoral,” Roksana said. She was willing to pick up the crap herself.
* * *
—
The delivery was much heavier than they were expecting: eight parcels in total, each as big as a moving box. Roksana couldn’t manage to lift even one of them on her own. The question was how risky it would be for her to stand around guarding the boxes in the square while Z dragged them home one by one. It would take hours, and if someone she knew came by and asked what was in them, she wouldn’t know what to say.
“I won’t be able to carry one of these more than a few feet at a time, either,” Z said. “I’m already sweating like an athlete on dope. This natural, organic deodorant that Billie made me buy is useless. I’m just going to stick to Axe in the future.”
She called Caspar, but he texted her to say that he was in a lecture. She called Billie, who said that she didn’t think they needed to use a car just because they had a few boxes to move, that everyone had to make an effort to reduce their carbon footprint. She had just started an action group with some of the other students in her law program, to study the legislation around diesel cars.
“Oh, come on,” Roksana groaned. “If I promise to start using a menstrual cup?”
Billie was silent—she had been going on about this for months now: “It’s partly because it’s good for the environment—do you know how many tampons the average woman uses in her lifetime? It’s also because it doesn’t dry out the mucus membrane, and because tampons are just some invention thought up by men to con women out of money. But the most important thing is”—and Billie had practically started shouting with excitement at that point—“that it enables you get to know your pussy. And that’s something those of us involved in guerrilla pussification really value. They don’t want us to know our own bodies. Our bodies are taboo, forbidden by the patriarchy. But we’re going to change that.”
When Billie next spoke, her voice sounded happy. “Okay, then,” she said. “You can borrow the car if you’ll try a menstrual cup. But remember: smooth driving reduces emissions. Smooth driving saves Mother Earth.”
* * *
—
They were planning to prepare everything at home, just like before, but after only one round it was clear that their kitchen wasn’t made for producing industrial quantities of mindfuck. Roksana felt so light-headed that she had to go out onto the balcony every fifteen minutes to get some fresh air. They were going to have to find another solution—the crazies had demanded their money again a few days ago. Roksana and Z didn’t know how much time they had, but she knew they needed to get the money together. How were they going to manage this?
Palm Village Thai Wok: Roksana’s new favorite restaurant, where she often cycled to order food for her and Z, and where she had once met Nikola. The owner was a Swedish guy married to a supercute woman named Sunee. She was from Thailand and she seemed to be about twenty years younger than him. In truth, it was Sunee who ran the place, and Roksana had started exchanging a few words with her whenever she went in, mostly to help Sunee with her broken Swedish. In any case: Sunee had nothing against letting Roksana and Z use the basement space—it was empty anyway.
“What you do there?” she had asked when, for the third time, Roksana tried to explain that they were just going to be producing healthy flour.
“We’re just making and packaging flour. You know flour, the thing you use to make bread.” She used her hands to butter an imaginary slice of bread. “But it’s healthy flour, it doesn’t actually contain any cereals. You know, so you don’t get as fat.” She gestured again, showing what happened to your stomach if you ate cereals.
“I talk to Lelle,” Sunee said, calling her husband, Lennart. They spoke for a moment in Thai—Roksana hadn’t known that Lelle spoke Sunee’s language, but it explained why her Swedish was so patchy.
After a few minutes, she turned to Roksana. “It fine. Thousand kronor month.”
That was dirt cheap.
* * *
—
Z bought four blowtorches with tripods, gas cylinders, metal sheets, and water baths. He got ahold of two fans to keep the heat down and another to remove the steam—plus a large white box he claimed was an air purifier. “We don’t want Sunee’s customers tripping on K. Not unless they’re paying for it, anyway,” he said with a snort. Roksana laughed with him—she felt like they were back on track.
They bought gloves, white overalls and masks, pipettes, glass measuring jugs, cylinders, and other lab equipment. They got ziplock bags, labels, and milligram scales. She also ordered a menstrual cup online.
Once they h
ad all the equipment lined up, once the burners were linked up and Z had set up the extractor fan, he went out to fetch one last box.
“Tadaa!” he shouted as he cut it open. It was a speaker. “Saved the most important thing till last. This is Bose’s best. Now we can get going.”
* * *
—
Two days after Sunee gave them the key, they started production. At ten times the scale this time. This was the real shit: she and Z looked like serious Walter White clones, like nuclear technicians. They reduced liters of Ketalar. They listened to Axel Boman, Kornél Kovács, and stuff Z himself had produced and recorded. They burned themselves on the hot metal, had coughing fits from the smoke that rose up as the liquid turned to steam, and burst out laughing when Z, on the third day, started to complain about hair loss. “It’s either the K smoke or that natural, organic shampoo Billie sold me.” They listened to Linda Pira and First Aid Kit, they drank coffee and smoked smokes, they talked about Billie’s different hair colors, house parties in Tehran, and the insane fact that the Sweden Democrats were polling 20 percent according to the latest reports—despite a leading representative of theirs, some idiot with the exact same name as all the others, saying that there should be regulations on the number of globalists and tree huggers within the media—meaning Jews and members of the Greens. They worked late into the night. Sweating. Dancing around their bags of K. Shouting along with one of Linda Pira’s songs. They set up a computer and watched the sixth season of Girls over and over again—even Z said it was the best thing he’d ever seen, and he usually dissed Roksana’s suggestions. Their legs ached from standing up all day, so Z went to Ikea and bought bar stools on wheels. They pushed one another around and pretended they were go-karting. The Ketalar bubbled like lava. They listened to Tove Lo, Asaf Avidan & the Mojos. Roksana’s menstrual cup fit like a glove—it was the world’s best invention. They smiled at Sunee and ordered noodles with tofu, extra cashew nuts, and thick, strong sauce.