Top Dog

by Jens Lapidus

  Nikola opened Isak’s phone using the code. 7586.

  He saw the usual apps. Isak had simple tastes, just like Chamon: it was natural when he didn’t hang on to his phones for more than a few weeks. Messages, pictures and camera, the actual phone function, WhatsApp, Vicker, Snapchat, Maps, and YouTube. He scrolled through the text messages but didn’t find anything. Then he went through WhatsApp.

  And he saw it. On the day they had attacked the gym, when Chamon’s jaw had practically been shot off.

  Mother. Fucker.

  All that shit was still there, preserved by six months on the bottom of the phone graveyard—a message sent from Isak’s phone.

  He’s here now. Come and get him.

  Nikola read it over and over again. He tried to gather his thoughts, to see the bigger picture. He thought about the conversation he’d had with Isak when he went to visit Chamon in the hospital. How Isak had wanted to know how long Nikola would be staying by his friend’s side, how the murdering bastards had arrived after the two hours Nikola had initially said he would stay. How they had found their way up to the ward far too quickly.

  He knew two things. The first: Isak was the one behind Chamon’s murder. Nikola didn’t know why Mr. One had decided to order Chamon’s death, but the boss was guilty, that was 1,000 percent certain.

  The second: everything he had believed in now meant nothing. The only way was forward. He had to take down Isak. It made no difference how high the cost was. He had to do what he had to do.

  At the same time: How the hell was he going to manage it? He needed to know more. Get more information. Find out whether anyone would be loyal to him.

  He needed to talk to someone. And there was only one person who might be able to help: Simon fucking Murray. The pig.

  47

  There was some kind of fever burning inside her, only without her temperature rising above 99.5. It was as though nothing made an impression on her, like everything she saw and heard just ran straight off. Sometimes, she didn’t even know where she had woken up—which might actually be understandable, given that she didn’t even dare stay with Josephine any longer, and was moving from hotel to hotel. Sometimes, during the day, she forgot where she was going, and before she tried to sleep she realized she had forgotten to eat. The whole time: she had the feeling of being watched, like someone was studying her, listening to what she said over the phone. She knew that Teddy had been sleeping in a car, living on the run, but not only so that he could keep away from the police. Every time she turned around on the street, she thought she saw the same people slipping away. Every time she checked into a hotel, she had the feeling that the man with the Bluetooth earpiece, sitting in an armchair in the lobby, was staring at her. Maybe she was just being paranoid again, like she had been in the garage when she hit her head. She had thrown the alarm the police had given her down the drain.

  Midsummer was only a few days away.

  Someone had tried to take Teddy’s life in his cell. It was insane, terrible—one of the worst things Emelie had ever heard of. Because even if she didn’t hold the Swedish justice system above all else in the world, even if she was aware of its shortcomings, the easy remand orders and the long periods of isolation, she fundamentally believed in the overall system: Sweden was still one of the world’s most just countries. Yes, there might be corrupt officers, and some might go too far at times. And yes, there were fights between inmates in their prisons, leading to serious crimes being committed—but this went way beyond any of that. The fact that someone locked in a remand cell, isolated and under full restrictions, could be subject to an attempted murder was unprecedented.

  “We’re aware that Teddy Maksumic has been talking about that, but no one here saw anything,” the officer in charge told Emelie when she raised the issue. “He’ll have to file a police report for someone to come here and talk about it.” The officer’s lips glistened as though he had just smeared them in oil.

  Great idea, Emelie thought, someone who will probably try to kill him again.

  “But you must have surveillance cameras in the hallway here?”

  “Sure, I did actually try to check them when your client first started talking about it, but unfortunately there was nothing saved from that night.” The cop’s lips were glistening so much by that point that she could practically see her reflection in them.

  “And you didn’t think that was a bit strange?”

  The so-called officer in charge pulled out a tub of some kind of lip balm: For cold sores and herpes, Emelie managed to read. “No, not really,” he said. “It’s almost always that way, sadly. The prison system’s not what it used to be. And, you know, some inmates do actually try to kill themselves, a lot of them are suicidal, and hanging themselves in their cells is the most common way, unfortunately. So, we can’t rule out that that was what your client was trying to do. We’ll be checking him four times an hour now. So he can’t try again.”

  * * *

  —

  Emelie was trembling when she stepped into the room where Teddy was waiting. The marks around his neck looked like small red bumps. She knew he wasn’t suicidal.

  She told him what the officer outside had just said.

  “I can almost understand him,” said Teddy. “Never in their wildest dreams would they believe what happened.”

  Emelie squirmed. “But they must know whether one of their employees got a paper clip in their eye? I’m going to try to find out.”

  They were sitting opposite one another in the little visitor’s room where it felt like time had been at a standstill since the 1980s. The filthy linoleum floor, the scratched veneer on the rickety plywood table screwed to the floor, the old telephone with the curled cord—the kind you only saw in films nowadays.

  “I spoke to Dejan. He’s prepared to testify,” she said. “But, as we’ve discussed, I’m not sure it’ll help. There’s a risk it’ll have the opposite effect.”

  Teddy sighed: a long, groaning sigh. Emelie had never heard him sound that way before, not like that. She glanced up at him. Even though the strange cosmetic procedures had made him look different, she thought he seemed more tired than usual. As though beneath the firmer skin, there was an expression that hadn’t been there last time they met. She immediately realized what it was.

  “Emelie, I’m scared,” he said, reading her mind. The last word seemed to leave such a bad taste in his mouth that he practically spat it out. “I would’ve been able to live with that in the past. But not now, not when I have two more people to worry about. I have to get out of here somehow. It’s that simple. I have to fix everything. For your sake, and the baby’s.”

  Emelie knew, in the same way she could usually tell when she was getting ill, that he was right. He had to get away from custodial prison.

  * * *

  —

  Ten times a day, she tried to track down the Uber driver. When he eventually answered, she tried talking to him; he sounded like a young man from some Arabic-speaking country, and his vocabulary was limited to only fifty or so words in Swedish, even fewer in English. They met face-to-face: Emelie offered him a one-thousand-kronor note to talk. He could see the ride in his log. January 19, Gösta Ekmans väg, an eighteen-minute journey. The route was like a blue snake on the map in the guy’s app. He had dropped off the customer at the crossroads of Regeringsgatan and Mäster Samuelsgatan. The only problem: that address didn’t tell her much; it was in the very heart of the city. And even worse was that the phone number registered to the customer seemed to belong to a prepaid sim. She had tried calling it a few times, but the phone on the other end was always switched off.

  Emelie studied the few documents relating to the ownership of Hallenbro Storgården that she had managed to track down. Suarrez Augustin Landman was the legal firm representing the companies that, in turn, owned Nordic Light Investment Group Ltd. via Paradise Nor
dic Estates Ltd., and so on. She had flashbacks, jolts of familiarity—the whole thing stunk of her old life in the world of corporate law. She did more research into the old companies Mats had had time to mention before he was shot in Oslo. Companies linked to the men he had met at the estate ten years earlier. She requested records from financial authorities in more than ten different jurisdictions. She called old colleagues at law firms around the world. She mind-mapped the whole thing on her computer: drew circles, rectangles, and lines. Common board members—lawyers who acted as gatekeepers for the real owners—addresses, dates when the companies were registered. She worked around the clock. The child inside her kicked. She drank milk and ate licorice. She spread out notes on hotel room beds. She held her bump, wrote as though her fingers were independent of her body, as though they had ten times more energy than she really had right now; she drank coffee with huge amounts of milk, called people in Hong Kong, Malta, and Panama. She made up cases, claimed to be calling from Leijon, claimed to be clued in. Sometimes she got answers, but more often they refused to say anything, maintained confidentiality. She paid for access to documents from a pedantically organized whistleblower system online. Several of the companies featured there, and you could also see the names of real people behind them. A pattern had started to emerge. It wasn’t a pretty picture, but somehow she wasn’t surprised.

  Several of the companies had been established in Sweden, and the firm that had helped them get set up in various parts of the world was one that was all too familiar to her: Leijon Legal Services. Surprise, surprise—though possibly not.

  She knew that Loke was working in parallel, using the trojan Teddy had managed to install on the police computer system before his arrest. “I’ll find something, sweetie,” Loke promised. “But you have to give me time.”

  All the while: she had to find something to get Teddy out. She weighed up calling on Dejan anyway: coaching him properly, going against all the ethical rules to come up with a story that would hold up, rather than cast suspicion on him. But it wouldn’t work: Dejan had already been arrested once, when Teddy arranged to meet Nina at Slussen. They knew he was involved. Plus, the main hearing was at least a few months away—and she needed Teddy by her side now.

  Who else was loyal to him? She thought about Nikola, but he seemed to have disappeared from Teddy’s life. The thought rumbled through her mind: Who else was there? There had to be someone she could trust. She called Loke and Tagg—his old friends from prison—but they were unanimous in their advice: “Getting someone out of custody is impossible. The only time we heard about anyone escaping was when that gang leader the kids call the New Kum escaped from the roof in a helicopter. But that was insane.”

  There had to be someone else. She could think of only one more person, someone Teddy should really hate.

  * * *

  —

  Kum was sitting on the other side of her desk, and he looked unimpressed. He wasn’t even trying to hide the fact he was staring. “You should have better furniture,” he said, gesturing toward Emelie’s white Ikea desk and cheap chairs. “Clients like well-built furniture. It suggests stability and competence.”

  The upper section of Kum’s face was completely motionless when he talked, unmoving, as though it belonged to another face or a different person. Emelie was convinced that Jossan would have called the mafia boss’s forehead Botox smooth.

  It had been easier to get ahold of him than Emelie had expected: he was registered to an address in Lidingö and had answered politely when she called his landline.

  “I’m a lawyer. So this isn’t entirely uncomplicated for me,” she began.

  Kum barely seemed to be listening; he ran a finger over the door of her document cupboard. “Is this Ikea, too?” he asked.

  Emelie wondered if he was trying to provoke her somehow.

  “Are you interested in interior design?” His forehead was as stiff as a waxwork. “By the way, I have a crib in my basement, maybe you’d like it?”

  Emelie nodded, mostly to move the conversation on.

  “But, before I give it away,” said Kum, “and before I listen to what you have to say, I want to know whose baby you’re carrying.”

  People could clearly see she was pregnant now, but Emelie hadn’t yet told a soul who the father was. There was no reason for others to know: not while the child’s father was being held on suspicion of murder. But Kum was her last hope.

  “The father is the man who spent eight years in prison for doing something you told him to do.”

  Kum rocked back on his seat. “I suspected as much,” he said—his face still so motionless that it didn’t seem like a single atom could be moving there. “You sounded so desperate on the phone. You can have our playpen, too. It cost a fortune.” A very faint smile spread over Kum’s lips. Did he understand the gravity of Teddy’s situation?

  “I didn’t want to meet so we could talk about secondhand baby paraphernalia,” Emelie said. “I wanted to discuss the situation Teddy is in. He needs to get out.”

  Kum already seemed to know most of it. “You want me to help you get Teddy out of prison, in which case let me say this: you’re a lawyer, and you have your rules to follow. If it ever comes out that you were involved in something like this, they’ll revoke your license quicker than they always confiscate my fake disability permits. I assume you know this, and have taken it into consideration.”

  Emelie nodded again. She knew the rules of the game—she was taking an enormous risk that would ruin her job prospects forever if it all went wrong. Plus: being a lawyer wasn’t just a job for Emelie—it was her identity. But she couldn’t see any other way out.

  Kum said: “I’ve managed many things in my life, believe me. For example, in 1999 I was shot by two hired dogs from Montenegro. They’d gotten ahold of a pickup that they were planning to transport my body in, to avoid leaving any evidence behind. I was standing by the parking meter in Hallunda centrum, this was back when I actually paid to park, and those idiots tried to sneak up behind me. But you don’t become Kum by being slow. You have to have eyes in the back of your head, and I’d spotted their wound-down window when they first pulled into the parking lot. Those dogs tried a shotgun, like I was a fucking duck. Their first shot broke more than twenty-seven car windows—I read that later, in Aftonbladet—but by that point I was already taking cover behind a Saab ’95. Anyway, you know, back then we weren’t as used to drive-by shootings in this country as we are now, but I still carried my old Zastava M70 with me, from the war. I usually kept it in a special holster on the inside of my thigh, it could look a bit weird when I reached for it, but as I lay there under the Saab, really wondering why I hadn’t written a will, I didn’t give a shit if some Swede thought it looked like I was scratching my dick as I reached for my nine millimeter. So, I pulled out the gun and waited under the Saab. Have you ever tried to hide under a car?”

  “No,” Emelie replied, wondering when he would get to the point.

  “No, didn’t think so,” Kum continued. “Anyway, it’s not as bad as you might think. Yes, it’s dirty and it’s cramped, especially for a big guy like me, but it’s also interesting. You really get to understand the geography of the car, its inner nature, if I can phrase it like that. And I remember thinking: if they get me now, I can die happy, I’ve lived life the way I’ve wanted to, I’ve never fucked with anyone who didn’t deserve it, and I’ve gotten to see the camshaft of a ’95. But those two dogs in the pickup deserved it more than almost anyone I’d ever met. So I rolled out from beneath the Saab.”

  The door opened and Marcus peered in. He was holding a tray. “Here’s your coffee.” He set down the tray of cups and the orange Stelton coffeepot that Emelie was suddenly proud she had bought.

  “Thanks,” she said, pouring coffee for Kum. “Sorry for the interruption. Please, go on.”

  Kum took a sip of coffee. “It doesn’t ma
tter.”

  “Yes, you were in the middle of something.”

  “It isn’t important. All I really wanted to say with that little story is that I’ve managed a lot in my time, but that custodial prison is sadly beyond my reach. I can’t help you get Teddy out. I just don’t know how to do it. By the way, could I have some milk?”

  She slowly got up, dejected by Kum’s response, opened the door, and shouted for Marcus. Ten seconds later, he returned with a jug of milk. Kum stared at him.

  Once Marcus had gone, he turned to Emelie. “Who was that?”

  “That’s Marcus, my deputy. He’s basically been running this place over the past few months. Incredibly good.”

  “Loyal?”

  “Very.”

  “Brave?”

  “I think so.”

  “What’s his surname?”

  “Engvall.”

  “Not Maksumic?”

  “No, what do you mean?”

  “Have you seen the way he moves?”

  “I’ve never really thought about it.”

  “Have you thought about his build?”

  “What are you getting at?”

  “I can’t say he’s especially like Teddy, facially, because he isn’t,” Kum said. “But the way they move, their build, they’re practically identical.”

  Emelie poured milk for Kum.

  “I don’t know what importance his posture being like Teddy’s has?”

  “It could have all the importance in the world. And, if we’re lucky, we’ve just cracked how to get your baby daddy out. But you’ll have to trust your little lawyer. And probably offer him a serious bonus. A big fat one, actually, that’s what I’d recommend.”