Top Dog

by Jens Lapidus

Emelie couldn’t help but smile. “I want to come to the fortieth anniversary party for alumni on Midsummer’s Eve.”

  Jossan laughed again, but differently this time. “Nope, it’s too late, that’s only three days away. I can understand why you didn’t say yes, but the RSVP date is long gone.”

  “I need to be there,” said Emelie. “I have to get into the office, take a look around.”

  “I’m getting the strong feeling you want to come to the party and look around for a different reason.”

  “You could say that, but you don’t need to know any more. Just arrange it so I can come.”

  Josephine poked Emelie’s stomach. “Okay, Pippa, I’ll make sure you get in, on one condition.”

  “What?”

  “That I get to be godmother to the little cutie in your belly.”

  52

  Roksana had dreamed things last night that she had never dreamed before. Or had she been dreaming? Maybe she and Nikola really had been flying over the roofs of Akalla on a motorbike, on one of the lightest nights of the year. Maybe they had turned off, across the forest, circling until they found a meadow where they could land, climb off, lie down, and look up at the brightening sky. But she knew it was a dream—because Nikola wasn’t there.

  Her life felt schizo right now: on the one hand, she had stronger feelings for the guy than she had ever felt before—an exhilaration that filled her with bubbles. But on the other, she wasn’t anywhere close to meeting the psychos’ demands, even if Nikola had lent her all of his money. She was genuinely considering asking her parents to visit Etty in Tehran, despite the fact her father had never been back. It was Midsummer in two days’ time—her last day. The leader had announced that they would meet at five. Z was still refusing to get back to her—Roksana was thinking about going over to his parents’ fucking house and dragging him out with her own two hands. The only problem was that she didn’t know exactly where they lived.

  It all rested on her. She really was screwed now. Baba was screwed.

  She pulled the covers up to her chin. How could the apartment be so cold in the middle of summer?

  She wondered why Nikola hadn’t been in touch. The truth was that over the past twenty-four hours, he had answered his phone only once, and he had seemed preoccupied with other things and refused to say where he was or let her come to him. Despite the sweet feelings, irritation came creeping up on her. She was worried that she knew why he was staying away—he had said something about going to war. That didn’t sound good.

  She heard a key turning in the front door. Someone was here.

  * * *

  —

  A moment later, she was sitting in the living room with Z in front of her. It felt good to have him back, even if she still had no idea why he hadn’t called her. There was a suitcase and a cardboard box on the floor in front of him. He was wearing ripped jeans and a T-shirt which had to be from the U.S. election: a blue and red picture of hair standing on end, plus two combs. We shall overcomb Trump, it said.

  “I’m moving out.”

  They hadn’t spoken since he was released, and this was the first thing Z said to her. “I’ve promised my parents I’d leave Stockholm. Dad’s found me work experience with some accountancy firm in Västerås.”

  Roksana looked down at his box. He had wrapped the stereo in towels and packed it away. “But what about the psychos?” Roksana asked. “We’ve got to get the money together to pay them. And we only have two days, otherwise they’ll kill my dad.”

  Z studied her. His eyes seemed strange, as though he were looking at some K buyer or someone else he didn’t know, as though she were no longer his best friend and roommate, as though everything they had been through over the past six months hadn’t happened. Two days. It was insane. She didn’t understand how Z could act so cool, but it had been the same thing all along, just pretending that it wasn’t happening. This shit was constantly on her mind, like a cold, sopping wet blanket—two days. Then they would go after Baba.

  Z closed the suitcase and taped up the box. Roksana didn’t know how he was planning to move it all, though maybe he had borrowed Billie’s car. She followed him out into the hallway.

  “What are we going to do, Z? We have to come up with something.”

  Z had that look in his eyes again. He opened the door and moved the suitcase outside, placing it and the box on the floor in the stairwell. After that, he moved to pull the door shut behind him, leaving only a tiny gap. “I’m leaving now.”

  “Are you listening to what I’m saying? We have to come up with a way of scraping together the money.”

  “I’ve done my part.”

  “What did you say?”

  “My dad helped me take out a loan. I’ve paid them 500,000 kronor. I couldn’t do it anymore. They were threatening to kill my family, too.”

  “But we owe them a million.”

  “I know, but their leader said if I could give him half, then he was done with me. So I did. I don’t owe those psychos anything now. I was about to have a breakdown, Roksana. But now I’m free.”

  Her head was spinning. Her heart felt wounded.

  “But they still want five hundred thousand from me, right?”

  Z started to open the door again. “Yeah, they want their money from you. But I’ve done you a huge favor. Now you only need to find half, not the whole million.”

  He looked away. Moved to pick up his bag.

  “So you’re leaving now. I thought we were in this together,” said Roksana.

  “We can’t always stick together.”

  “Don’t you have an ounce of pride?”

  Z smirked. “Like Ester Nilsson says in Willful Disregard: ‘I have no pride because pride is linked to shame and honor, and I’m shameless and have no concept of what others find honorable.’ ”

  They often quoted Lena Andersson to one another, but did he really think Roksana was going to laugh now? She was still in the doorway, trying to think of something to say. Z was going to leave—he had solved his problem.

  “See you, then,” he said, closing the door, an inch away from her face. She wanted to tear it open and say something to him, but she couldn’t move. No, actually, she didn’t want to say anything. She wanted to scream in his face. Spit on him. Hit him. Show him what honor meant.

  Above all: she needed Nikola now, more than ever. But he wasn’t here. Not even he was here for her when she needed him—instead, he was busy with his questionable lifestyle.

  Anger bubbled up in her like lava.

  They were pigs, all of them.

  53

  Kum’s entertainment room, or rather his renovated basement, was Teddy’s new prison. It was also his sanctuary. He no longer had to curl up in a car to sleep, and he and Emelie could now really get to work on everything without him having to hide behind dark glasses, face changes, and strange beards.

  They had made a number of breakthroughs: they knew, for example, that Leijon Legal Services was involved somehow. Emelie was going over there tomorrow, but there was no guarantee she would be able to find the material that Fredrik O. had tried to clear out of the estate. The documents could be anywhere, if they even still existed.

  They needed more. They continued to dig.

  That evening, Teddy found something. Among the piles of material was a preliminary investigation into insider trading and tax evasion from 2006. It ran to more than seven hundred pages, primarily analyses of the deals and the market movements of different shares. But a significant portion of it also came from the wire tap of someone called Hugo Pederson, as well as three police interviews with him. The investigation itself had been shut down—the Economic Crime Authority didn’t think they could prove that the deals really had taken place as a result of the exploitation of information that wasn’t publicly available—so-called insider trading—and were probably
put off by their terrible track record when it came to that kind of case.

  What Teddy couldn’t understand was why this investigation had ended up here. Had Loke included it by mistake? Teddy started to read through the documents, none of it making sense until he came to the last few sections: Hugo Pederson’s logged phone calls. Suddenly he understood.

  Once he was finished, he read through everything a second time. At the very end of the preliminary investigation, there was a long police interview with Pederson. Ninety percent of it was about the supposed insider trading. Pederson had gallantly explained that he and his buddy hadn’t wanted to pay tax on the money they earned and that that was why they had used separate phones for their calls, but he insisted that all their deals had been carefully calculated and based on information that was known to enough people to be considered official. Teddy could understand why the ECA had dropped its case—it would have been difficult to prosecute Hugo Pederson, especially since he had made voluntary declarations and paid both his tax and the fines he was given. Toward the end of the interview, they had asked him about the kidnapping he had witnessed. Teddy felt the hair stand up on the back of his neck. He glanced over to Emelie from time to time, wondering whether she could see the effect that Hugo Pederson’s answers were having on him.

  She was half sitting on the sofa with the computer on her lap. She looked tired, but Teddy knew she was working, too.

  Hugo was the man who called himself Peder Hult, something he also admitted in the police interviews. He refused, however, to name a single person from Hallenbro Storgården or to say who the contact who had invited Mats to attend was. The police officers had pressed him, you could tell from their questions—but this Hugo Pederson held firm. Teddy could see the link all the same: the man Hugo Pederson never mentioned must have been Fredrik O. Johansson. But there was another active figure, from phone conversation 108. He read the tapped phone conversation ten times. He read the opening lines twenty times.

  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 Pederson—aka Peder Hult—knew who he was talking to; he recognized the voice. He knew who had ordered him to make sure Mats Emanuelsson was in the right place to be kidnapped. But he had never given that name to the police.

  Teddy searched online for a phone number for Hugo Pederson. He had to track the man down. But it was late: his call was met by an answering machine.

  “This is Hugo Pederson. Please leave a message after the beep.” He wondered why the guy was speaking English.

  “Hi, I’d like to meet you as soon as possible. It’s incredibly urgent and relating to the old police suspicions against you,” Teddy said, leaving a phone number Pederson could reach him at.

  Emelie had curled up her legs beneath her on the sofa. It almost looked like she was sleeping, but she opened her eyes. “Who were you calling?”

  “I need to leave here tomorrow, too,” Teddy said.

  She glanced up from her computer. “You celebrating Midsummer without me?”

  Teddy laughed. “You’re going to a fortieth anniversary party.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I have to visit the man who reported me to the police, the one who got me locked up for eight years. Hugo Pederson’s his name, but he called himself Peder Hult, and I think he knows who has the documents you need to find at Leijon.”

  54

  “Thanks for the licorice, I’ll never forget that.”

  Kerim Celalî almost looked fat compared to how Nikola remembered him from prison: the last time he had seen the New Kum, he was being winched up through the hole he had sawed in the bars, to a helicopter hovering above the prison building, like some crazy Independence Day spaceship.

  They were standing by the front of city hall, in the very heart of Stockholm, looking out at the water. “I live here now,” Kerim said with a roar of laughter. “Can you imagine me in a place like this?”

  “Do you like it?”

  “No, not really. I miss Bredäng, but my lady wants to live here. She thinks it means something. But I say: you can take Kerim out of the ’burbs, but you can never take the ’burbs out of Kerim.”

  Nikola was happy he had agreed to meet him right away.

  “You know”—Kerim grinned—“that candy you got to me when they locked me up again, it kept me alive. It’s crazy that ten little pieces of salted licorice can keep your hopes up better than all the money, lawyers, and smuggled phones in the world. Those ten little pieces proved there were good guys out there, not just bastards who want to do me up the ass from every direction. So whenever you want to meet, my man, I’ll always come. Running.”

  The whole of Södermalm was laid out in front of them: rows of old buildings with towers and spires—it looked like something out of a fairy tale, the hill dropping off suddenly like some kind of huge barrier against the water and everyone wanting to get up there. Nikola had never been to city hall before, but he was aware of the place. The outline of the building was on the metro seats—it was the most important symbol of Stockholm, and he had no idea what they even did there.

  “I’m guessing you didn’t just want to check out the view with me,” said Kerim.

  “Nope. I’ve got a serious problem,” Nikola said, explaining what he wanted. After ten minutes, he was done.

  Kerim’s front teeth were in bad shape, and they seemed to be smeared with something that looked just like licorice. “So you wanna be the new top dog? You want to take over after Mr. One?”

  Nikola hadn’t even thought about it like that. “I don’t know,” he said. “But I need your protection when I take that motherfucker down.”

  Kerim’s smile disappeared. “What you’re asking’s not some small thing, my man, and neither’s what you might end up setting off. But I respect you for your determination.”

  Something dignified sounding had appeared in the New Kum’s voice. He was speaking more slowly and clearly, practically spelling out every word. “I respect you as a friend, too. But nothing comes for free. Not even friendship.”

  Nikola waited for what was coming. He knew he was selling his soul to Satan, even if Satan was being pretty friendly right now.

  “I’ll give you what you want. In exchange for a favor.”

  “What?”

  Kerim cocked his head, and it looked like he was pulling at his earlobe. “We get jobs to order sometimes. If the money’s good enough, we take them, keeps us on our toes. You help me with one of those?”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “I don’t know yet, but there’s bound to be one soon. I’ve got a client who’s really damn nervy right now, that’s all I know. We just did a thing for him on the inside and it all went to hell.”

  “In prison?”

  “Yeah, completely crazy, I know. I had a guy working there, but he’s blind in one eye now.”

  “You want me to clip someone?”

  “I don’t know yet. I told you. One of us will be in touch when the order comes in.”

  “And you can trust your clients?”

  “Yeah, for God’s sake. We’ve done stuff for them before, not just on the inside. All you need to do is get ahold of a gun.”

  “I don’t know.”

  Kerim straightened his head and stared at him. “If you’re in, you’ll get instructions about what you need to do. This kind of thing’s in your blood, isn’t it? Your uncle, everyone knows him, he was a legend when I was a kid. He was t
he king of kidnapping.”

  The New Kum: Nikola needed Kerim’s backing. His protection.

  He shook Kerim’s hand. “Okay. Count me in. I’m in.”

  PART IV

  MIDSUMMER’S EVE

  55

  The pre-drinks were served out on the roof terrace, with 360-degree views over Stockholm.

  Emelie was glad that Jossan was there. She was Emelie’s anchor. Though she had worked with the majority of the other guests, she felt like a stranger today. Josephine was her safe point.

  It was a beautiful day. Emelie tried to hold her champagne glass as casually as she could. Every now and then, she raised it to her mouth and felt the small bubbles burst against her lips. She wasn’t drinking—the movement was just for appearances. Her belly was straining, but she was wearing a loose-fitting dress and a cardigan over that, so people might not necessarily realize. If they did, they did. She was thinking about how she was going to make it into the heart of the firm’s offices later—the hallways and rooms that weren’t meant for either clients or former employees.

  After a few minutes, Magnus Hassel rose above them all. Emelie couldn’t see whether he was standing on a chair or a stool. He tapped his glass.

  “Well, I just wanted to welcome everyone and say a few quick words.” He was wearing a pale beige linen suit that seemed far too thin—Midsummer was always cooler than people liked to admit. On his head, he was wearing a panama hat that looked even stranger: as though he were on a beach somewhere in Italy.

  “We’re always thrilled to welcome former employees back to our annual alumni gatherings, but this year in particular is very special. We’re celebrating forty years. And when I talk to you, I realize that once you’ve been a part of the Leijon family, you always carry with you the special feeling we enjoy here at the firm.”