Formosa Street, number 3. It seems like her computer spent a few days in Little Venice.
She shuts her computer and stares out at the dawn light on the street outside. Little Venice. Not exactly an area you’d think was full of anarchists and hackers. But at least it’s a place to start.
“Are you coming?”
Klara jumps and looks up from the screen. It’s been five hours, she’s very close to finishing her part of the report now, and has been so engrossed in her work that she hadn’t noticed when someone appeared in the doorway of her office.
Charlotte is standing there in one of her usual long, flowing dresses. Big earrings and her dark, curly hair pulled back in a messy bun at her neck. Klara thinks, not for the first time, that there’s something encouraging about the fact that Charlotte always seems to look like she’s headed for a yoga convention. But she hides a spine of steel beneath that bohemian facade.
“You didn’t forget that we’re having lunch today?” Charlotte says with a smile.
Klara glances at the screen. Is it already twelve-thirty?
“No,” she says, guiltily. “I didn’t forget, just didn’t realize it was so late.”
She saves the document just as the first heavy drops of rain hit her attic window. As she rises, bright lightning streaks across a dark sky.
“Dear lord,” Charlotte says. “I hope you’ve got your umbrella.”
There’s something liberating about the sudden storm, and Klara has no objection to the warm rain on her bare legs as they run along Catherine Street to the little Italian restaurant where Charlotte made a reservation.
The waiters seem to know Charlotte, and they quickly relieve them of their umbrellas and find a table by a window facing the street. After they sit, Charlotte cautiously dries her face with a linen napkin and smiles.
“Is there mascara all over my face?” she says.
A thick line is actually smeared slightly at the corner of Charlotte’s eye, but it doesn’t look bad, quite the contrary. Combined with her big, brown eyes, high cheekbones, and messy bun, it looks rather sexy. Klara shakes her head.
“Not at all.”
Charlotte bends over the table and winks at her.
“Shall we have a glass of wine?” she says. “I know you have to finish your part of the report, but one glass won’t hurt will it?”
A pleasant anticipation awakes in Klara’s body.
“Gladly,” she says. “If you’re having one, I will as well.”
They order their late-summer pasta with porcini mushrooms and white truffles and sip their wine. The feeling of relief when the alcohol hits her blood makes the stress of work and the stolen computer fall away for a moment. She feels so relaxed she suddenly decides to tell everything to Charlotte, but it’s too complicated now, especially after she glossed over what happened last Sunday. She’ll go down to that address in Little Venice first. Maybe after that. Depending on what she finds out.
“So what do you say?” Charlotte says. “You’re almost done with your section now, right? It’s just a few days left until the presentation.”
Klara takes a small sip of wine, dry and mineral rich. She feels like closing her eyes and escaping into that feeling for a while; the taste for some reason reminds her of early summer mornings on Aspöja when the sky is clear and warm, the grass still damp with dew or light rain. She wants to forget about the report and the computer for a while. Instead she nods.
“Yes, of course,” she says. “I’m almost done. How’s it going for you? You’re the one who’s doing the heavy lifting.”
Charlotte also takes a small sip of wine and looks out onto the street where the rain bounces on the cobblestones.
“Well, it will most likely be fine,” she says, nodding thoughtfully. “But it’s certainly not simple.”
“A lot of people have strong opinions about this, I suppose,” Klara says, searching Charlotte’s face.
“Definitely,” Charlotte agrees and turns her gaze from the street toward Klara, looks her straight in the eye.
“Things aren’t always what they seem,” she mumbles quietly and takes another small sip of wine, then breaks off a piece of white bread and dips it thoughtfully into the dish of olive oil on the table between them.
“What do you mean?” Klara says and lays down her own piece of bread on the plate in front of her.
There’s something about how Charlotte said it that reminds her of her meeting with Patrick in the courtyard the other day. He used the exact same phrase. Now she sees Patrick’s mind map in front of her. All the arrows and names.
But Charlotte just shakes her head, as if trying to wake up, and a renewed focus appears in her eyes when she looks at Klara.
“I don’t mean anything really,” she says. “Just that issues like these are . . . complicated.”
The waiter puts two steaming plates in front of them, and their little universe by the window is filled with the wonderful scent of truffles. Charlotte spins some spaghetti on her fork, puts it in her mouth, and chews with intensity while turning toward the window and rain gushing down outside.
The days since Klara came back from Aspöja have been confusing—computer theft and Patrick’s strange behavior. And now this vague talk with Charlotte—she’s tired of running into question marks. She takes a deep gulp of wine and musters her courage.
“Do you know a company called Stirling Security?” she says.
Charlotte turns toward her quickly and raises a glass of water to wash down the food she has in her mouth. Something glimmers in her eyes and then rapidly disappears, replaced by a blank, puzzled expression.
“What’s that?”
“Stirling Security,” Klara says quietly. “I don’t know, it was just a name I saw somewhere, in some context.”
“In what context?”
Charlotte leans back in her chair, now with wineglass in hand, and looks calmly at Klara. There’s a tone in her voice that’s equal parts indifference and threat, and Klara knows instinctively that she’s stepped onto thin ice, that she probably never should have brought this up.
“Nothing,” she says. “Just a name I saw in some report, I think. I’d never heard of it before. But I guess you haven’t heard of it either?”
Charlotte shakes her head but doesn’t release Klara from her gaze. Slowly she takes a sip of her wine.
“But this naturally leads to why I wanted us to have lunch today. The report, Klara, it’s time to wrap it up now,” she says. “We’re presenting on Sunday. I should have had your section the day before yesterday. It’s time to focus on work.”
Klara’s cheeks get hot. It’s the first time she’s heard anything critical from Charlotte at all. And for no reason.
“Yes, I know, but I lost the computer and all of that. I’ll give it to you this afternoon . . . I’m basically done.”
“Yes, but you’re usually a little sloppy and biased in your writing,” Charlotte continues. “And this time it’s especially important to have all the facts and formulations done well, so I may have to rewrite part of the text. All the more reason that you send it to me pronto, rather than holding on to it. Do we understand each other?”
Klara’s head starts to buzz and her throat starts to close up. Sloppy and biased? As if objectivity weren’t the foundation of her reasoning. Is there anything worse you could accuse a lawyer of?
She nods but isn’t ready to surrender completely.
“I haven’t seen your section either,” she says quietly. “It’s a little hard to finish the background if I don’t know what your recommendation is going to be.”
“Klara,” Charlotte says, and her voice is as smooth as steel. “This is my report. You are my assistant, nothing more. If you can’t deliver then maybe we need to rethink our arrangement? Can I be any clearer than that?”
Klara shakes her head and feel tears rising behind her eyes. She reaches for the wineglass.
“You’ll have my section after lunch,” she says quietly
.
“Good,” Charlotte says, smiling only with her mouth.
26. STOCKHOLM—THURSDAY, AUGUST 20, 2015
WHEN YASMINE PULLS back the heavy curtains of her window at the Lydmar and looks out at the gray morning, she sees a late summer rain perforating the surface of the bay like tin foil pierced by thousands of tiny needles.
The news is on the TV behind her. It was a restless night in Bergort. There are images of stones being thrown and cars burning. Police officers in riot gear and teenagers in tank tops are so far away from the camera they hardly look real. Yasmine sat glued to the story the first time it was played a half hour ago, her heart pounding, her eyes searching, searching for a glimpse of Fadi, or whatever, whoever. But the feature was short and void of any real information. The police said they didn’t know what was behind the riots, but they’d also “noticed signs that something had been going on for a long time.”
Signs, Yasmine thinks. All of Bergort is fucking papered with signs. Stars and fists. A cat hanging from a lamppost. Symbols that no one seems to want to talk about, not Ignacio, not Parisa. Symbols that get you threatened if you ask about them.
When she turns, her gaze falls on the gun she took from the apartment, which she put on the bureau in front of the bed. It looks even more insane here, on that natural-colored bureau under a shining, polished mirror with a matte frame, in this clean, upper-class environment.
She’s never felt as much like an outlaw as when she packed the guns into an old football bag, threw it over her shoulder, and walked out the front door.
But what was the alternative?
She couldn’t leave the weapons in her childhood home, couldn’t allow them to be used for something unimaginable. And she couldn’t call the police. Not the police they hid from the whole time she was growing up. The ones who dislocated Red’s shoulder, who knocked Karim’s teeth out and left him in a field in Botkyrka. Police put them in the back of the police van and called them cunts, sand niggers, camel fuckers, monkeys. The police would kill Fadi if they found him. And she’s already betrayed him enough. If this was going to be fixed, she was going to have to do it herself.
She almost took both weapons on the subway, but at the last second she decided to hide the Kalashnikov in a dense thicket of rose hips in the grove behind the school, where they used to hide their shit when they were kids. It seemed like walking around with one gun in her waistband was enough.
She’d left a note under Fadi’s mattress. Just her phone number. Nothing else. You don’t lose a machine gun. Not even in Bergort. Especially in Bergort. He’d have to call her now.
In the meantime, she’s gonna find who has been talking about her and caused someone to threaten her. And then she’s gonna lure the little snitch out of his hole.
Ignacio sounds completely calm and relaxed on the phone, happy to meet her after work. But fuck it. It doesn’t matter how you sound on the phone. Lying is the first thing you learn in Bergort.
She can’t wait to find out exactly why Ignacio didn’t want to tell her what those symbols meant. And she’s even more anxious to know why he would get people to threaten her.
What the hell is going on? Could he really have turned into that big of a coward?
Stay away from Bergort, whore.
On TV clips from Bergort are still rolling by, and she’s sure that symbol has something to do with the riots. And she’s sure Ignacio is involved. The question is how involved is Fadi.
She stands up and looks into the mirror above the gun. Everyone says she’s skinnier, and maybe it’s true. The swelling next to her eye is purple now. It seems to change color like the light in the conference room at Shrewd & Daughter.
She takes a deep breath and gently picks up the large, dull gun, takes it by both hands, and backs up a step toward the bed. David forced her to go to a shooting range in Flatbush last spring. They’d shot several different guns, and she’d found it unexpectedly liberating. They went back several times over a period of a few weeks when David was trying to cut down on partying and just drank in the evenings, smoked some weed, nothing more.
Slowly she raises her gun and points it at her own reflection. She sees the muzzle, large and dark, her face taut behind it. She feels the strength inside her now. A single direction. Despite all the bullshit. Despite David, her mother, and all of fucking Bergort. Despite Ignacio’s betrayal. It’s all about this now, she thinks. This is about Fadi. There is only one thing to think about. Only one thing to do. Find him and do what she should have done from the beginning: protect Fadi from himself.
When she finally leaves her room around five o’clock, she sees the quiet Swede at the reception, so orderly and clean with his little mustache and fancy, dotted bow tie that she has to stifle the impulse to tell him she has a big black gun pushed down the waistband of her jeans. Would he have raised his voice then? Would his perfect service be compromised?
Instead she asks him to order her a taxi and sits down in one of the tasteful armchairs in the lobby to wait. The gun is cold and feels surprisingly secure against her lower back.
It’s still raining, or raining again, as she climbs onto the loading dock in the parking lot near Kärrtorp Centrum and squats down in the shelter of an overhang, pulling her hood down over her forehead to avoid being recognized. In the taxi, she looked up directions from Johansson’s Moving Company, where Ignacio works, to the subway, and she’s guessing he’ll cut through this parking lot. And here, in this alley, she’ll ambush him.
Johansson’s Moving Company, she thinks. She’d be very surprised if anyone with that surname worked there. She leans back against the brick wall and stares out over the half-empty parking lot where rain has turned the asphalt shiny and smooth, while the feeling she woke up with continues to grow. It’s neither fear nor anxiety. No, it’s resignation, which makes her suspect it might be too late. Fadi might already be lost, maybe she lost him when she left him four years ago. Meanwhile, there’s a kind of power in that feeling. If the only thing that matters is already lost, then she might as well sacrifice whatever’s left. No one is more dangerous than someone who’s lost everything.
When she turns her head back toward the alley, she sees Ignacio’s big body in a soaking wet varsity jacket and a Braves cap, baggy jeans, and black Air Maxes, coming around the corner and into the alley. She feels the gun cold and hard against her spine as she stands up. That fucking snitch. Her heart starts to pound as she moves across the loading dock. His time has come.
27. SYRIA—MARCH 2015
FINALLY, I’M ALONE in the dust and the cold. The night is quiet, only crickets and the sound of the minibus disappearing over the gravel, between abandoned, half-finished buildings. I’ve never felt so alone and confused, not even after you disappeared. Not even then.
Back then the feeling crept in, you’d been on your way for so long, and besides Bergort was a cage I knew well. But this? I look around and listen, sink down onto my haunches in the dirt. This is loneliness.
I bend back and see a starry sky that’s so magnificent I lose my balance and fall backwards onto the road.
I don’t know how long I’ve been there when I hear footsteps approaching through what I now think, after my eyes adjusted to the darkness, looks like a village. Maybe even a small, empty town. Quickly, I sit up and grab the bag, get up on my feet.
At the same time I hear a metallic clicking through all the crickets and darkness. A gun being cocked.
“Who are you?” someone asks in broken Arabic.
“As-salamu alaykum,” I say, and my voice is so shrill that I have to clear my throat. “I’m Fadi Ajam from Sweden. Imam Dakhil sent me.”
That’s what they told me to say when I arrived. It should be enough, but it feels like grasping at straws now, here in the dark with footsteps and crickets and unsecured weapons.
“Fadi from Stockholm?” the voice says.
He speaks hood Swedish, but not from Stockholm’s hoods. From the countryside, and I feel my muscles sta
rt to relax, and my heart starts beating again.
“Yes, yes!” I say. “Fadi from Bergort. Imam Dakhil sent me.”
That metallic clicking again, maybe he’s securing his weapon. He’s closer now, close enough for me to make out his silhouette, his scarf wrapped around his head like a mujahid, his dark soldier pants tucked into his boots.
“Yes, yes,” he says and laughs. “I heard you the first time.”
Now he stops in front of me. I can see he’s Somali, and that he has a sparse beard and long hair, his teeth gleam in the moonlight.
“Welcome, brother Ajam. Thank Allah, may he be exalted, that you arrived without any problems. I’m Abu Umar.”
Abu Umar leads me down a village street, where all the windows are gaping black holes, even though it’s no later than eight in the evening.
“Where is everyone?” I say. “Doesn’t anyone live here?”
“This is war, brother,” Abu Umar says and throws a quick, condescending glance sideways at me. “I thought that was why you were here, ey?”
“But,” I begin. “What do you mean? Are they dead?”
Abu Umar shakes his head and looks tired.
“Dead?” he says. “We only kill enemies and traitors, brother. They fled when the fighting was at its worst. Before we liberated this village, thank Allah, may he be glorified and exalted.”
“Were you part of that battle?”
I know I shouldn’t ask so much, since it only exposes how fucking green I am. But I don’t know anything. Everything is new. And I’m curious.
Abu Umar shrugs.
“Not in that battle, brother,” he says. “But in many others. As you too will be if Allah, may he be glorified and exalted, lets you.”
As we walk down a small hill to what appears to be a small, depressing square, I see a couple of houses where a faint light is burning. I get a whiff of mint and grilled eggplant.
“But a few are still here?” I say.
“There’s nobody left in this part of town, brother,” Abu Umar says. “No one but us. And this is where we live. You too now.”
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