Top Dog

by Jens Lapidus

  Date: 22 September 2006

  Out: I just got a strange call from ME saying he’d found some weird films on a computer at your event, he must’ve copied them. I’m guessing it happened when he was helping me with my little audit crisis. I don’t know which computer or what the films are. You know?

  In: No need for you to worry about that. I’ll figure it out.

  Out: Perfect.

  TELEPHONE CONVERSATION 108

  To: Hugo Pederson

  From: Unknown

  Date: 23 September 2006

  Time: 21:45

  HUGO: Hello?

  UNKNOWN: Hi, it’s me.

  HUGO: Who’s that?

  UNKNOWN: Don’t you recognize my voice?

  HUGO: Yeah, now I do, sorry. Hi.

  UNKNOWN: I’ve got some questions about your consultant.

  HUGO: Who do you mean?

  UNKNOWN: I think you know who I mean.

  HUGO: You mean M.E., Mr. Money Man?

  UNKNOWN: Exactly. Do you know where he works?

  HUGO: No idea.

  UNKNOWN: Where do you normally meet him, then?

  HUGO: We don’t meet very often.

  UNKNOWN: But you must sometimes meet to hand over documents?

  HUGO: Yeah, occasionally, but we usually choose different places.

  UNKNOWN: Where does he live?

  HUGO: I don’t know.

  UNKNOWN: You could make a bit of effort to answer my questions here.

  HUGO: But I have no idea. We don’t have that kind of relationship. If you’re so curious, you can just Google him yourself. It’s not like he’s a secret, he’s got a normal job too. Why do you want to know all this?

  UNKNOWN: I think you know.

  HUGO: I don’t know that I do.

  UNKNOWN: I think you could be a bit more helpful. You’ve used the meeting room at my office several times, after all. I’d like you to organize a meeting with ME at Odenplan the day after tomorrow, at 9 a.m.

  HUGO: What’s going to happen then?

  UNKNOWN: We’ll see. Just arrange it with him.

  TELEPHONE CONVERSATION 109

  To: Pierre Danielsson (co-suspect)

  From: Hugo Pederson

  Date: 23 September 2006

  Time: 21:47

  PIERRE: Hey.

  HUGO: Hi. Something shady just happened. The lawyer called me and started asking a ton of questions about Mats.

  PIERRE: Hmm, but you answered them, right? We can’t get drawn into all that. We’ve got no idea about those films. It’s none of our business.

  HUGO: Okay, but it just didn’t feel right. Plus, he wanted me to organize a meeting with Mats at Odenplan the day after tomorrow, 9 a.m. What should we do?

  PIERRE: We?

  HUGO: Come on, you’re using Mats’ services too. He’s your consultant as well.

  PIERRE: Yeah, but I’m not his contact person, that’s you. And it was you who didn’t have a computer of your own, despite all the crap with the Financial Supervision Authority, so we had to borrow the guy’s computer.

  HUGO: Oh come on, I can’t just announce that we have to meet at Odenplan. This really doesn’t feel good.

  PIERRE: I’m sure it’s fine, Hugo. Don’t give it another thought, it’s really not our problem.

  44

  The first thing she did when they released her was to call Nikola. Maybe she should have tracked down Z or gone to see her parents, but speaking to Nicko felt like the most natural thing to do.

  “You’re out already?” he said when he heard her voice. Roksana almost thought he sounded happy. What she was trying to work out was whether he sounded very happy. “I’m out,” she replied. “And I’m seriously pissed off.”

  She really was furious. She felt like suing the Police Authority, demanding compensation from the arresting officers, prosecuting the cop who had knocked her to the ground, going to the press and writing a debate piece. We brought happiness to Stockholm and this is the thanks we get. “Those fascist bastards,” she said.

  Nikola agreed. “Plenty of them are racists,” he said. “But fascists? What do you mean by that?”

  Roksana didn’t really feel like it was the best moment to get into the concept of fascism, and, if she was perfectly honest, she wasn’t entirely sure she knew what it meant. She just knew that the world seemed to be overflowing with idiots right now.

  “Listen, Roksy, they let you go after a day,” Nikola then said in a calm voice. “You should be happy about that. It looks pretty good if you ask me. They’re not accusing you of a ton of worse stuff.”

  “Maybe not. But they probably still have Z. And they took the whole Nike bag, all our money. Everything. I don’t know what we’re going to do. I want to see my lawyer today and prepare my counterattack.”

  “You’ve got a lawyer already?”

  Roksana laughed. It was the first time she had felt even a glimmer of happiness over the past twenty-four hours. “No, I thought maybe you could be my lawyer. Could you?”

  “I’d like to see you,” he said. “But I’ve got some stuff I have to straighten out first.”

  They hung up. The Täby Centrum shopping mall loomed behind her, completely colorless and numb. Roksana really was furious—just like she had told Nikola. Though maybe she wasn’t quite so angry, because what he had said was right, something Roksana had realized for herself fairly quickly. She was actually more worried than anything. And afraid.

  It was quarter past ten in the morning, the day after their legendary club: the police had held her for exactly 25 hours and 44 minutes. Her mobile phone and card holder were in the brown paper bag they had handed her when she was released. She had countless missed calls and more than seventy messages from people thanking her for the experience, praising the organization, the performances, the love that had been in the air.

  Oddly enough, she had slept like a rock in her cell, deeper and more soundly than she had in a long time. She hadn’t had any nightmares about Z’s broken fingers or her parents’ disappointed faces when they found out what she was up to. No jolting awake with her breath in her throat and a sense of stress a hundred times worse than ahead of Our Land Club; no weird K sweats with an extreme urge to pee, a shaking body and soaked sheets. The truth was that she couldn’t remember having slept so well since they first found the ketamine. But now that she was awake, the anxiety was tangible, like a rat crawling around her body. The police station where they had kept her locked up in the basement looked like some kind of nice-ish travel agency from the outside, or maybe the employment service. But it was far from nice inside, she knew that now.

  She got onto the bus that would take her into town, where she would have to change to the metro. It would probably take her more than an hour and a half to get home, but she didn’t know any other way. Täby and Akalla were in such different parts of Stockholm: like fire and water, land and air. Though, maybe she was exaggerating; maybe it was just the worry dirtying her thoughts.

  She tried to think about what the police knew and what she had actually told them. They had interrogated her for only an hour and a half. Most of their questions had been about whether she and Z had had the proper licenses for their club, how they had kept track of the ticket sales and overheads for the DJs, handymen, door people, and all the others. Roksana had been expecting questions about the other stuff at any minute: about the large number of small plastic pouches they must have found in the trash, about the traces of powder on the inside of those bags, about the cash in the duffel they had seized, about all the guys they must have grabbed with backpacks full of powder bags. But they never came. Maybe they thought that the cash in the bags was from ticket sales alone.

  She worried about her own tracks. After all, she and Z had shifted kilos of the mindfuck in larger bags. But, at the same time:
she had put safety first. Billie’s advice about always keeping a pair of latex gloves in your bag in case you had to use a disgusting shared toilet had proved useful in more than one way—Roksana hadn’t touched the ketamine at Our Land Club even once without a pair of those transparent plastic gloves on her hands. Not because she thought there were particles of piss on them, but because it felt right. Intuitively.

  Still: despite the gentle interrogation and despite the fact that they didn’t seem to have anything on her as far as the drugs were concerned, anxiety was creaking away inside her like a big, rusty machine. The cops had still taken the money. Money meant for the psychos.

  What were they going to do now?

  She tried to call Z, but he didn’t answer.

  She called Billie.

  “Have they let you out? So cool that you were remanded, so fucking authentic,” she yelled, and Roksana immediately wondered if Billie had even less of a grasp of reality than Joshua Pfefferman in Transparent. Roksana hadn’t been remanded, just held. And it hadn’t been a particularly authentic experience.

  * * *

  —

  She lay down on the bed. Didn’t even take off her clothes, just curled up her legs. Fetal position. Her roller blind was down. The apartment felt lonely without Z. She tried calling him again. “This number cannot be reached right now,” said a robotic woman’s voice, without an ounce of compassion or sympathy.

  She tried to listen to music, but couldn’t find the right cables for Z’s complicated stereo equipment. She thought about calling her dad but didn’t have the energy right now. She had no appetite, but she was freaking starving all the same—all she had eaten in her cell was a bit of cold rice. The yellow slop they had called curry smelled like dishwater; she hadn’t even tried it. Still, she couldn’t be bothered to get up to see what they had in the fridge.

  Suddenly her phone started to ring. A number she didn’t recognize. Maybe Z had been released.

  “What are you playing at?” It was the leader of the psychos. A conversation she really didn’t want to have. “I’ve tried calling you twenty times,” he hissed. “Who the fuck do you think I am? Some telephone salesman, or what?”

  “I’m sorry,” Roksana began. “But I was locked up for twenty-four hours. We’d just got your money together, but then something happened, the cops came.”

  It sounded as though the leader was blowing his nose over the line. “Little girl, you seem to think this is some kind of negotiation.” He paused; now it sounded like he was drawing back the mucus in his throat, swallowing several times, really savoring it. “But it’s actually very simple. You know what we want. And you’ve had three weeks. I want my money now. That’s it.”

  “Please, we do kind of have the money, I just can’t get at it. So far, we’ve always paid you the minute we get any money. But the police took everything we had yesterday, it was completely crazy, so right now we can’t pay a single krona. Can’t we put the deadline back a few weeks?”

  The leader seemed to have an inexhaustible amount of mucus in his throat, and he continued to swallow it as though it were dessert. “I heard what happened. You organized a party, over several days.”

  “Then you know, it was an insane success. We got your money. But they confiscated everything.”

  “So how’re you planning to fix this? How am I gonna get my cash?”

  Roksana had no answer to that. “I don’t know,” she said carefully.

  “You don’t know?”

  “We had it.”

  “You’ve said that a hundred times now,” said the leader. Then he shouted: “But you haven’t said WHEN I’M GONNA GET PAID.”

  She was on the verge of tears now. Nothing she could say would calm him down. She was out of ideas.

  He said: “You’ll have to come up with something real fucking clever. It’s that simple. I’m a generous man. You can have two more weeks, just ’cause I think midsummer seems like a good time to get paid. There’s something nice about it, y’know? Celebrating the summer with cash. But that means I want interest, so we’ll put it back up to a million. Since I’ve had to wait like an idiot. And if you don’t pay up then, you can forget about your friend. It’ll be worse than a few bent fingers.” The leader suddenly sounded different, almost as though he were sad.

  Right then, Roksana’s phone beeped, and she saw that someone had sent her an MMS from an unknown number.

  She opened the picture message. It was a photograph of her father.

  The leader continued: “I’ll personally see to it that the old bastard in that picture ends up at the bottom of a lake.”

  Roksana was on the verge of hanging up. The picture must have been taken recently, outside her parents’ house. The leaves on the trees in the background were pale green.

  “Understood?”

  Roksana couldn’t make a single sound. She swallowed and swallowed.

  “You understand, or what?”

  A croaking, gurgling sound. “Yeah,” she tried to say.

  “All right then, now you know,” he said. “Two weeks. One million. Simple math.”

  Roksana slumped back onto her bed. The phone was like a dead weight on the pillow next to her. She and Z genuinely didn’t have a kronor. It wasn’t just something she had said. Plus, they owed money to everyone who had worked for Our Land Club. It wasn’t just talk now: this time, the psychos were serious. Her stomach ached. It had been hard enough pulling off eight hundred thousand before they came up with the idea of the club. But now: one million—in two weeks.

  ONE MILLION. TWO WEEKS.

  She and Z would never be able to cook up that much K themselves, and having enough time to sell the crap was out of the question—even if Nikola helped out. Maybe she should just run—fly to Tehran, stay with Etty, Val, and Leila until the leader and his boys died in some gang dispute or until they retired as old men. But what would they do to Dad then? Shit, shit, shit.

  How could things have ended up like this? She and Z: they had just found a bit of ketamine hidden in a closet—that was all. They hadn’t robbed anyone; they hadn’t stolen a thing: it was in their apartment. She couldn’t understand how it could have gotten this far. Why hadn’t she hit pause: tried a little herself and then saved the rest of the powder until the psychos turned up? Something inside her had forced her further. Upward. Toward a worthless top.

  She twisted back and forth, stared out the window. The sky was still blue: two weeks until midsummer. The lightest time of the year. The darkest time of her life. She had to get herself a life, for real. It had been stupid to ask someone to take the aptitude test for her. She should have taken it herself—but right now, she wasn’t in top form.

  Maybe it was the crowds of people who had suddenly started appreciating her. Billie, who had wanted to hang out with her; the invitations, the art shows, all the friends who had loved her, acknowledged her. Though at the same time, she thought, it was something else. The danger. It was the danger that had tempted her: the feeling of doing something as far removed from her parents’ expectations as she could get. The tingle of banking on top marks, a prestigious university education, and being their good, clever girl while also being the K queen par excellence. Stockholm’s fucking top dog number one.

  But she hadn’t fooled anyone—other than herself.

  And now they were going to go after Baba. She couldn’t even bring herself to think about that.

  45

  The courtroom on Polhemsgatan. A lame irony—he had been arrested less than two hundred feet away, aboveground, in the police station itself. Sometimes, he imagined he could hear the footsteps of all the police officers above him. Pig steps. Pig land. Piggy honor—for some stupid reason, he had trusted Nina Ley.

  It was a Sunday in early June, and the prosecutor seemed to think there was some kind of rush to have him remanded in custody. They could hav
e just waited until Monday to hold this hearing otherwise. Instead, with it taking place at a weekend, they had to use these special premises. The district court was closed and deserted.

  The room was belowground, and Teddy had been led there through the hallways beneath Police HQ, straight from his cell. Fifty feet of earth, rock, and concrete above him, it felt like someone had forced him to bench-press four hundred pounds and then left the bar lying across his chest.

  When Emelie walked into the small waiting room, he thought that her bump seemed even bigger than when she had come to see him in his cell. They hugged as best they could. He felt her belly push against him like a soft pillow.

  “How are you?”

  “I’m okay.” Emelie sat down on the only chair. “Almost halfway now. I have to take iron pills, but otherwise everything’s fine. But we don’t have time to talk about it now, sadly. I just got the remand order from the prosecutor, right outside.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  Emelie waved the stack of papers held together with a paper clip, size XL. “Nope, it’s always the same. The defense never gets any time to prepare ahead of remand hearings. Maybe you’ve forgotten?”

  The hearing was due to begin in ten minutes’ time. Emelie removed the enormous paper clip and spread out some of the sheets in front of her. Teddy leaned forward and tried to read at the same pace.

  We request that Najdan “Teddy” Maksumic is remanded in custody on suspicion of the murder of Fredrik O. Johansson at Hallenbro Storgården, Malmköping, in May.

  – There is a risk that the accused, through the destruction of evidence or other means, may attempt to obstruct the investigation.

  – For the specified crime, the prescribed sentence is no fewer than two years’ imprisonment, and no reasonable grounds to deny custody have been established.

  – It is of particular importance that the accused is detained pending further investigation of the crime.