Down for the Count

by Martin Holmén

  A door slams.

  ‘You should have a last drink, shouldn’t you?’

  I look up and try to focus. I see the dim outline of the table legs and the chairs. With a moan, I sit up on my arse.

  ‘Come on! Crawl if you must.’

  Although I still have both hands manacled in front of my body, I press them against the floor, push and get onto my feet. I’m swaying. My stomach wants to chuck up, but I fight the urge.

  The table where the small man is sitting is only two metres away, but I still manage to head off in the wrong direction a couple of times before I get there at last. I grip the side of the table and stand there, swaying.

  The bloke is wearing a double-breasted pinstripe suit that fits snugly around his slender body. He pushes out the chair in front of him with his foot. I sit down with a sigh.

  ‘Kvist, you look like a crock of shit. Luckily I’m used to handling shit.’

  I meet his eyes, as dark as a dog’s, with long eyelashes. On one cheek sits a large birthmark, like a rust-coloured bluebottle. A smile hovers at the corners of his mouth.

  ‘Well, you shouldn’t take it personally, Kvist. It’s a question of national security. Not much to argue about there.’ He shakes his head. ‘You’ll have to excuse us.’

  I make a wheezing sound, then clear my throat: ‘So the tittle-tattle is true, then?’

  ‘And the old man’s in good vigour. We do our best.’

  ‘And when he gets tired of someone, or ends up in trouble, he orders you to take care of the problem?’

  The Little Shit makes a croaking sound:

  ‘Oh, Mr G has no idea. Just like he doesn’t ask himself who puts out his slippers in the morning, or why there’s always food on the table, or who cleans his damned toilet. Some of these deaf-mute lads just disappear. The arrangement has by and large worked excellently until that cunt in the laundry started sending letters.’

  ‘Beda.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Her name was Beda.’

  There’s a soft sound of pouring liquid as the man beside me fills two three-sided fluted glasses. Carefully he pushes one of them over to me. A spilled drop runs into the scratches in the tabletop.

  ‘Condemned men have always had the right to a last drink in this country.’

  He doesn’t look me in the eye but he does smile. He raises his glass. With my fettered hand I do the same. I shiver and clear my throat: ‘Ever hear the story of the bloke who drank half his last drink and promised to come back to finish it?’

  ‘Except he didn’t, did he?’

  ‘I guess not. What’s the time?’

  We look into each other’s eyes. I cough and, at the same time, break off the thin flute of the glass in my hand. There’s a snapping sound but the man in front of me seems not to hear. The sharp tip of the flute cuts into my palm, which burns when the schnapps runs down my hand.

  ‘Stop talking about the fucking time, will you? For King and country?’

  The man on the other side of the table winks at me. He smiles and moves the glass to his lips.

  ‘And for Petrus and Beda!’

  The foot of the glass clunks as I let it fall to the tabletop. I let the three-sided bowl drop slightly in my hand, exposing the broken stem. Quickly I lean across the table and stab it into his eye.

  His eyeball gives way to the shard of glass like a boiled egg. The stem sinks halfway into the socket. A viscous liquid gushes out around the glass and over my hand. He falls backwards in his chair, with a cry like a seagull’s squawk, and crashes to the ground. A plume of blood seems to hang suspended in the air, before the drops cascade down to the floor as if competing to see which of them can get there first.

  His roar bounces between the walls as he thrashes about on the floor, his hands clamped to his face as a clear liquid pours out between his fingers. I crawl over the table with my arse up in the air, throw myself down on top of him, sit astride his chest and press down with all my weight on the glass. Red gunge spatters all around us as I push the stem in as far as it’ll go.

  There’s a popping sound inside his skull.

  He sighs, and I do the same. Basically, what I’m doing here is waste management, nothing more than that. He wriggles under me; I keep both hands on the glass and pin his arms with my knees. He stops moving before too long. I slide off, slump onto my side and groan with pain. Wrong bloody side.

  I lie naked on my back next to him, my face beside his. For an instant he seems to raise his forearms; they hover just above the floor before falling back.

  My lungs rattle like a leaky pair of bellows. I get up, grimace and bury my face in my hands, trying to get my thoughts together. It’s like my brain’s stuffed with wood shavings. I almost keel over, but I manage to grip hold of the table to steady myself.

  The bloke on the floor trembles all of a sudden. I take the bottle of vodka off the table and knock back a mouthful before stepping over him. I put a foot on each side of his face.

  I lean over him and empty the bottle over him. The vodka pours over his face; he recoils like a snake, makes a couple of stifled moans and then lies absolutely still.

  I slowly rattle my thoughts into place by gently shaking my head. I look around the room. I don’t know how much time I have before that damned heavyweight comes back.

  I bend over the corpse and dig out his pocket watch from his waistcoat. The lid snaps open with a crisp sound: the long hand is on two.

  Ten past eleven. My dream of the cigar shop has gone to hell but my hopes of Doughboy are still alive: fifty minutes to go.

  That’s plenty of time for Kvisten.

  ‘Never even taken a count.’

  I find the keys to the manacles and manage to get them off. I search the bloke on the floor for his service weapon but don’t find one. God only knows how he was planning to deal with me.

  I look around. I catch sight of the broom in the corner and move towards it, but soon drop to the floor, with all the pain I’m in, and I have to crawl the last few metres.

  A spider has woven its web between the broomstick and the plank wall. I lean the broom against the wall and stamp through the wood, snapping it in the middle. The vibrations shoot through my chest. I wince with pain.

  I pick up the metre-long upper part of the broomstick and pick it clean of splinters. I’m left with a sort of short spear, like a matador’s banderilla – no colourful strips of fabric on it perhaps, but perfectly serviceable for a bull’s neck. I try the tip against my thumb.

  Just then I hear a car reversing up outside. I stagger over to the closed door and place myself behind it.

  The corner I’m standing in stinks of cat’s piss. I raise the broomstick over my head and wait. The effort of holding my arms in the air makes them tremble.

  I hear steps coming towards the door, then the handle is pressed down. A streak of daylight falls over the floor, and the door almost hits me in the face as it opens. The big bloke takes a single step into the room.

  The sight of his downy hairs sticking out from under his collar makes my dry mouth fill with saliva.

  ‘What the fuck?’

  Two steps.

  Three.

  I rush him from behind and stab down. He lets out a long scream as the spike goes into his right shoulder. I press it as far into his body as I can, then let go. For a few seconds he spins around in a macabre dance, trying to get hold of the broomstick. His fat round face turns red. He looks at me and opens his mouth but can’t get any words out. He fumbles to get at his shoulder holster.

  I shove him hard in the chest, throwing him back against the wooden wall, and pressing the broomstick home even further, making him scream again, his spittle flying over my head. I grab his chin with my left hand, push his head back, then release a straight right-handed punch at his throat. His Adam’s apple crunches under my fist, and gives way like a rotten fruit.

  The man falls on his side, with one hand around his throat. He’s making gurgling sounds, and h
is face turns even redder. Naked as I am, I lean over him and check his pockets while he’s kicking his legs and hissing. His lips have turned purple; the nails of his other hand scrabble frantically against the floorboards. I remove his service weapon from its holster. For a few seconds I consider whether to put him out of his misery. The pistol clatters against the floor when I throw it out of reach instead.

  I find my ragged clothes in one of the fruit boxes. As I’m getting dressed, still shivering, the body on the floor stops thrashing.

  The bullfight is over. I take a look at the watch. I have forty-three minutes to get to Långholmen and meet Doughboy. I grimace as I stretch my arms to put on my shoulder holster.

  I pick up my hat from the floor: ‘Kvisten doesn’t doff his cap to anyone. Especially not with this damned hairstyle.’

  I tear down one of the jute sacks and blink as the daylight comes flooding in. Using the sack as a rag, I start wiping down all the things I may have touched. The blood around the smaller man’s eye socket has already started congealing. I try to get a grip on the edges of the glass, but I only manage to pull out a couple of curved shards. I roll him onto his stomach and turn his jacket collar inside out to check his size. The suit is by Bracco, an Italian brand, and it has fashionable broad lapels. The thick wool material feels expensive. With a few adjustments by my tailor, Herzog, it should fit.

  I think about it for a moment, asking myself if I have time for this, and then I strip the smaller man of both jacket and trousers. His pale legs are covered in black hairs. On his knee are signs of scar tissue from an operation. I tuck the garments under one arm.

  When I get to the door, I look around one last time. I dig out a Meteor from my coat pocket. My ribs crackle as much as the cigar when I puff at it. I step out into the daylight and check my pocket watch.

  Thirty-six minutes.

  There’s a light rain falling from a thick grey sky. I look around the gravelled courtyard, surrounded by a number of single-storey buildings and warehouses with roofs of cracked tiles or corrugated iron. Right ahead of me, there seems to be an abandoned blacksmith’s shed, with the stalls empty.

  Behind the buildings I see the towering chimney of the München Brewery, and I can smell the malt and the fumes from Wicander’s cork factory.

  The Rolls is parked with its back end towards the door.

  I’m not far from the slums around Tavastgatan, where I moved with Emma soon after Ida was born. I had slaved to get the deposit together, working eighteen-hour days, seven days a week, for fifty öre an hour, even though the Dockworkers’ Union had stipulated a minimum of one krona. I’m not proud of that, but necessity knows no law, and I had more or less promised Emma a fairy-tale castle. She had to spend the first evening sweeping out the cockroaches that covered the floor. Not that she held it against me; she wasn’t the type for that.

  I blink into the hazy daylight and have another puff. The cough that follows almost brings me to my knees; my chest is rattling like a desert snake. If I walk across Skinnarviksberget, I should be able to make it to Långholmen within half an hour without running into too many people.

  It’s very quiet. I hang Doughboy’s schnapps-smelling suit over my shoulder and totter out of the courtyard along a winding gravel track filled with puddles from the night’s bad weather. The rain has gouged deep trenches in the gravel, and here and there the base rock emerges. On either side, the narrow lane is flanked by run-down wooden shacks painted yellow and red, but I see no signs of any people. Every step, every breath, hurts me and a thin trickle of blood runs down the side of my face from that damned cut on my head. I wipe it with my handkerchief.

  The sweat is pouring off my body, smarting in the wound on my side. On the next right-hand bend, I stop and rest for a while with my hand on an old grey plank. I breathe as shallowly as I can, then clench my jaw and press on to the next hill. A few times I groan with pain as my foot slips in the gravel.

  I met Emma on the other side of a rock I can see just ahead of me now, at a dance held on Walpurgis Night by the Social Democratic Youth Association. I think it was in 1920. I was a bit worse for wear, but sober enough to take her for a couple of proper turns on the dance floor.

  She was wearing a long dove-grey dress, with a floral-pattern scarf over her shoulders. She screamed with pleasure when I picked her up and spun her round. Her dress billowed from her waist while the tones of the accordions spun their webs around us.

  I had been on more than friendly terms with other lads long before that, and by and large I had never taken much interest in women. But something about Emma was different. I suppose it was a kind of love. She became pregnant, and we had to hurry up about getting married.

  Once we’d got ourselves set up in the draughty one-room flat, and I was being referred to as the country’s best middleweight talent, I used to run up this hellish hill every day, training for the big fight that would be my last on Swedish soil before I turned professional. Emma and Ida had set sail for America a couple of months earlier, and I was left behind on my own. Too lonely for my own good.

  Before that, I had always viewed the ropes of the ring as a clear demarcation between two worlds. Inside the ring it didn’t matter who you were, if you were rich or poor, white or black; it was just two blokes in there competing on equal terms. I was counting on those damned ropes keeping out my other life, but instead they gave way. I lost my family, my good name and my career. All the people I had trusted turned their backs on me.

  I clench my jaw and turn left around the next bend. The tears are falling down my cheeks, making their way through my three-day stubble. Every joint in my body is shaking.

  Doughboy’s Italian suit weighs me down like a fifty-kilo yoke on my shoulder. I step in a puddle and press on up the hill.

  Ever since that time I have wandered alone, branded, and I’ve never thought there could be anyone out there for a bad apple like me. I reach the pinnacle of the grey granite rock. I stand there swaying slightly in the wind. The water extends in all directions below. Two white steamboats seem to be racing each other towards the quays of Kungsholmen. Overhead, a couple of seagulls whirl about, screeching. I let my gaze stray to the left over the Mälaren shipyard and the Väster Bridge. There she lies. The green isle.

  Långholmen.

  WEDNESDAY 27 NOVEMBER

  The bell above the door of the confectioner’s on Bergsundsgatan jingles like a cowbell as I walk in. The sales assistant is a young woman, lost in the dream of some weekly ladies’ magazine and hardly even visible behind a counter piled high with jars of colourful pastilles, burnt almonds, sugar goodies and candied apples. There’s a pleasant smell of cinnamon and Seville oranges.

  I clear my throat: ‘Telephone?’

  ‘Twenty-five öre.’

  She points at the wall-mounted telephone in the corner and holds out her hand, but scarcely looks in my direction. Maybe the close proximity of the shop to the prison has hardened her to the presence of brutes like me.

  I notice she’s wearing an engagement ring as I put the coin in her hand, then I go over to the telephone. I lift the receiver and ask for Standards. Elin answers at the other end. She’s quiet for a second, then speaks: ‘Thank God, it’s you, Harry. How are you?’

  ‘Bearing up.’

  ‘I’m afraid.’

  ‘Not bloody surprised.’

  ‘My nerves are in a state. Didn’t get a wink all night.’

  ‘I caught the odd nap now and then.’

  ‘Are we in danger?’

  ‘Don’t think so, but I’m not sure.’

  ‘What should we do?’

  ‘Nothing. But if you run into me in our neighbourhood, act like I’m invisible.’

  ‘Is that really necessary?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  We stay silent for a moment. My mind is still is in a daze from all the violence. I get out my pocket watch.

  ‘Elin?’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘I read that in America
they’re not wearing waistcoats any more.’

  ‘I doubt that.’

  ‘It’s not fashionable any more.’

  ‘If that’s right, it’s more than I know anyway.’

  ‘Okay.’

  Again there’s a silence. From the crossed lines comes the echo of many voices, almost like ghosts speaking, and then, loud and clear: ‘Take care of yourself, Harry.’

  I nod to myself: ‘Tonight you can sleep well.’

  I break off the call, make a farewell gesture at the shop assistant and step back out into the street. A hundred metres away, I can see the dirty yellow walls through the bare trees. The screws patrolling the walls aren’t visible from here.

  At the Bridge of Sighs I hang Doughboy’s new Italian suit over the red railings and go down to the reed-covered water’s edge at Pålsundet. The willow trees bend over the little canal. Bream used to spawn here not long ago, before the motorboats took over the waters.

  I wash my hands in the ice-cold water; then wet my dirty handkerchief, rub it against my face and wipe the sweatband inside my hat.

  Judging by the water’s surface it’s raining a little heavier now, but the weather will hardly make much difference tonight, when Doughboy and I lie tucked up in my big bed at home on Roslagsgatan. I pick up the suit from the railing and wipe the collar with the handkerchief. Again I check the manufacturer’s label, smiling to myself. It should be good enough and more. I hurry across the arched bridge.

  I hobble up to the door of the prison reception with a few minutes to spare. After tucking my watch into my waistcoat pocket, I light another cigar from the embers of the old one. I flex my feet. It feels easier to breathe now. Maybe the broken bones have settled into place in my chest; or it’s just that the excitement of my expectation is stronger than the pain. I managed to get revenge for Beda and Petrus, as well as making it back here in time with the suit and all. My bottom lip trembles. I’m good at waiting, but a week never felt so long to me.