The Invisible Man from Salem

by Christoffer Carlsson

  We live in a time when people feel insecure among strangers. Somewhere close by, there’s the sound of heavy, throbbing dance music. Pontonjär’s Park is in front of me, silent and full of shadows; some distance away, the noise of screeching brakes is followed by the sound of an engine cutting out. At the crossing, a man and woman stand arguing, and the last thing I see before I head off is how one raises a hand to the other. I think about how they are hurting each other, about the dead woman in bed 7 and the little object that glittered in her hand, about the words I saw on the tunnel wall earlier today — Sweden must die’ — and I think that whoever believes that and wrote it might be right.

  I TURN ONTO Chapmansgatan again and light another cigarette; I need to keep my hands busy. The mute blue lights drift across the wall and disappear, again and again. More uniformed police are moving around outside the building now, busy cordoning off parts of the road, diverting traffic and pedestrians. The police wave people on forcefully and irritably. Bright white light from large searchlights illuminates the tarmac. A big tent is unloaded from a van, as a precaution in case it starts raining.

  Chapmansgården’s open window is swinging and bumping gently in the wind. Inside I can see heads sweeping past — Gabriel Birck, a forensic technician, and Matilda. Under the window the pavement is waiting to be inspected; I want to study it more closely, but the commotion in front of the house hides it from my view.

  I look at my phone instead. A new day started half an hour ago. I hear the humming noise of a nearby bar, and music coming through its open windows. I put the cigarette out, turning my back on Chapmansgatan.

  A LITTLE STRIP of pale tarmac links two of the larger streets on Kungsholmen. I don’t know what it’s called, but it’s short enough that you could kick a ball from one end of the street to the other. In one of the buildings jammed along it there is a wine-red door. Written on it, in faded yellow paint, is a single word: BAR. I open it and see a head of blonde, tousled hair resting on the bar. As the door slams behind me, the head lifts slowly and the wavy hair falls down into a centre parting. Anna looks up, her eyes half-closed.

  ‘Finally,’ she mumbles, as she runs her hand through her hair. ‘A customer.’

  ‘Are you drunk?’

  ‘Bored.’

  ‘A bit of advertising on the door would get more people in.’

  ‘Peter doesn’t want advertising. He just wants to get rid of the place.’

  BAR is owned by an uninterested thirty-something entrepreneur, whose father bought the premises in the early Eighties, turned it into a bar, and owned the place until he died. BAR was left to Peter, who, in accordance with his father’s wishes, was not allowed to sell it for five years. That was four-and-a-half years ago; so, barring Armageddon, Anna has six months left behind the taps.

  BAR is the sort of place you would only find if you were looking for it. Everything in here is made of wood: the counter, the floor, the ceiling, the empty tables, and the chairs that are strewn about the place. The lighting is warm with a yellow hue, making Anna’s skin seem browner that it really is. She carefully dog-ears a page in her thick book and then closes it, pulls out a bottle of absinthe from a cupboard, grabs a glass, and pours what I guess is supposed to be a 20-ml measure but is in fact significantly more. It’s illegal to sell the stuff, but a lot of what goes on in bars tends to be illegal.

  ‘It’s quiet in here.’

  ‘Do you want me to put the music on? I turned it off — it was annoying me.’

  I don’t know what I want. Instead I sit on one of the bar stools and drink from the glass. Absinthe is the only spirit I can cope with. I only drink occasionally; but when I do, that’s what I choose. I found this place early this summer; I’d been on my way home, high, and I stopped to light a cigarette. I needed to lean against the wall to keep still enough. Everything in my vision tugged leftwards the whole time, making it impossible to focus. When I finally did, and saw the word BAR on the wine-red door across the road, I was pretty sure it was a hallucination, but I stumbled over the road anyway and started banging on the door. After a while, Anna opened the door, baseball bat in hand.

  I don’t know how old she is. She could be twenty. Her parents own a mansion in Uppland, just north of Norrtälje. Fifteen years ago, Anna’s father had started an internet business at exactly the right time, and then sold it just before the bubble burst. He invested the money in new companies, which he allowed to expand. It’s this sort of manoeuvre that makes people rich nowadays. Anna fluctuates between needy self-interest and enormous contempt in her dealings with him. She’s studying psychology, and works part-time at BAR, but I never see her reading textbooks. All she reads is great thick books with ambiguous covers. That’s all I know about her. It’s almost enough to pass as friendship.

  I catch my reflection in the mirror hanging behind the bar. I look like I’m wearing borrowed clothes. I’ve lost weight. I’m pale for the time of year, which is a tell-tale sign that someone’s been keeping a low profile. Anna puts her elbows on the bar and rests her head in her hands, looking at me with a cool gaze.

  ‘You look awful,’ she says.

  ‘You’re very perceptive.’

  ‘Am I, hell! It’s completely bloody obvious.’

  I drink some absinthe.

  ‘A woman was shot in my apartment block,’ I say, putting the glass down. ‘There’s something about it that … bothers me.’

  ‘In your block?’

  ‘In a homeless shelter on the first floor. She died.’

  ‘So somebody killed her?’

  ‘If anyone’s likely to die an untimely death in this city, it’s the addicts and the whores.’ I stare at the glass in front of me. ‘But more often than not it’s an overdose or suicide. The few who do get killed by someone else are nearly always men. This was a woman. It’s unusual.’ I rub my cheek and hear the scratchy sound. I could do with a shave. ‘It looked so … simple. Discreet and clean. That’s even more unusual, and that’s what bothers me most of all.’

  In the courtyard of my building there are a few kids — all one family, I think — who are always racing each other across the yard, from one side to the other, noisily, laughing, so that the sound echoes between the walls. I don’t know why I’m thinking about that now, but there’s something about that image, the way they look and the way they sound, that means something to me — an image of something that has been lost.

  ‘That’s not your department, is it?’ Anna says. ‘Investigating homicide?’

  I shake my head.

  ‘What is your department then?’

  ‘Have I never told you?’

  She laughs. Anna’s mouth is symmetrical.

  ‘You don’t say much when you’re here. But,’ she adds, ‘that’s fine with me.’

  ‘I work on internal investigations.’

  I drink from the glass, realising I want another smoke.

  ‘You investigate other police?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I thought only sixty-year-old gents got the honour of doing that. What are you, thirty?’

  ‘Thirty-three.’

  She looks at the bar, dark and clean, then frowns and grabs a cloth, and sets about making it even cleaner.

  ‘It is unusual,’ I say. ‘To get thirty-three-year-olds in IA. But it happens.’

  ‘You must be a good cop,’ she says. She puts the cloth back, and then leans against the bar.

  Anna is wearing a black shirt with the arms rolled up, unbuttoned over her chest. A black piece of jewellery hangs round her neck on a thin chain. I look from the necklace to the glass, and the lighting flickers. There are no windows.

  ‘Not exactly. I have certain faults.’

  ‘Who doesn’t?’ she says. ‘Are you really thirty-three?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I thou
ght you were younger.’

  ‘You’re lying.’

  She smiles.

  ‘Yeah. Take it as a compliment.’

  I glimpse myself in the mirror again, and for a second my reflection dissolves, becomes transparent. I’ve been out of the game for too long. I’m not really here.

  ‘Why did you become a cop?’

  ‘Why did you become a barmaid?’

  She seems to be considering her answer. I’m thinking about the little chain I saw in the dead woman’s hand. I wonder what it was. An amulet she needed so she could get to sleep? Perhaps, but unlikely. It looked as though it had been placed there. I get my phone out, open the picture of the woman’s face, and stare at it, as if her eyes might open at any moment.

  ‘I suppose everyone has to find something to keep themselves busy until they work out what it is they actually want to do,’ she eventually replies.

  ‘Exactly.’ I drink from my glass, look at the picture on the phone, show it to Anna. ‘You don’t recognise her?’

  Anna studies the image.

  ‘No. I don’t recognise her.’

  ‘Her name might be Rebecca.’

  ‘With a “ck” or a “cc”?’

  ‘Why do you ask?’

  ‘Just wondered.’

  ‘Not sure, but right now I think it’s double-c.’

  She shakes her head.

  ‘I don’t recognise her.’

  ‘It was worth a try.’

  I LEAVE ANNA as she puts the first of the chairs up on a table. According to the ticking wall-clock, it’s now a few minutes to three; but, bearing in mind the state of everything else in BAR, there’s no reason to think that the clock is right.

  ‘You can ring me, you know,’ she says, as I stand with my hand on the door and turn around.

  ‘I haven’t got your number.’

  ‘You’ll work it out.’ She lifts up a second chair, and the wood-on-wood makes a loud clunking noise. ‘Otherwise, I’m sure I’ll see you soon.’

  The lights pulse again, and I push down on the door handle, leaving BAR. My head is rocking gently, not unpleasantly.

  The Stockholm night is raw, in a way that it wasn’t earlier. If the clock behind Anna is right, it’s going to be dark for hours yet. Suddenly, a shadow flickers in the corner of my eye, making me freeze and turn around. Someone is following me, I’m sure of it, but when I survey the street there’s no one there — just a traffic light changing from red to green, a car turning a couple of junctions away, and the hum of a big city expanding in the darkness and devouring lonely souls.

  When I get back to Chapmansgatan there are several cars lined up along the incident tape: another police car; cars from the main news agency, from state television, one of the tabloid newspapers; and a shiny silver van, with tinted windows and AUDACIA LTD written in black on the silver paintwork. The street is cordoned off, and people are standing by the barriers, silhouetted by the light from the police car’s headlamps. The odd camera flash goes off. Someone hangs up a drape alongside the van, and the flashes accelerate to an intense, dazzling rattle. I catch a glimpse of a stretcher, a hand grasping its handle, but nothing more.

  The blue lights are no longer operating. The signals of death have been turned off, and only the photographers’ flashes continue; a sigh escapes from those lining the cordon, possibly one of disquiet, but more likely a sigh of disappointment. The drape being held up by two uniformed officers is obscuring everything they’ve come to see. The two men carrying the body get into the silver van and steer it carefully through the barrier.

  I go back into Chapmansgatan 6 via the rear entrance. As I pass the first floor the door is open, and I can hear Gabriel Birck’s voice coming from inside. The incident tape is still up; it will be there for days, maybe longer. I’m detached from it, from everything, and I go up to my apartment and get back into bed as if it’s been just minutes since I woke up.

  STRANGE, how a shudder goes through the room just before morning arrives.

  III

  What was it like growing up in Salem?

  I remember this: the first policeman I ever saw hadn’t shaved in a long time. The second hadn’t slept for days. The third stood at one of Salem’s crossroads, diverting traffic after an accident. He had a cigarette in the corner of his mouth. The fourth policeman I saw pushed his baton between my friend’s legs, unprovoked and without warning, while his two colleagues, equally expressionless, stood nearby looking at something else. I was fifteen. I didn’t know if what I saw was good or bad. It just was.

  I lived there until I was twenty. In Salem, the houses stretched eight, nine, ten storeys up towards the heavens, but never so close to God that He would bother to put out His hand and touch them. In Salem, people seemed to be left to their own devices and we grew up fast, became adults ahead of time, because that was what we had to do.

  IT WAS AFTERNOON, and I took the stairs from the eighth to the seventh floor, and called the lift. You could travel to and from the seventh floor, but never higher. No one knew why. That’s what I remember about Salem: every morning I took the stairs down one floor, and every afternoon I had to climb the stairs that last bit home. And I remember that I never gave a second thought to why it was like that, or indeed why anything was the way it was. We didn’t grow up thinking to question the way of things. We grew up knowing that no one would give us anything if we weren’t prepared to take it from them.

  On the seventh floor, I waited while the lift rumbled up the shaft. I was sixteen and wasn’t on the way to anywhere in particular, just out. Behind the door of one of the flats I could hear heavy, muffled hip-hop, and when I opened the lift door there was a strong smell of cigarette smoke. Out on the street, the sky hung low, white, and cold. The streetlamps came on as I was walking past the youth centre. A fog was on the way. I remember that, too: when the fog came to Salem, it swallowed everything. It washed over us, enveloping the buildings and the trees and the people.

  In the distance, through the trees, I could see Salem’s high, mushroom-shaped water tower, its dark-grey concrete forming a black silhouette against the cold sky, and I wondered if the cordon was still there. A couple of days earlier someone had fallen from it. I didn’t know his name — just that we went to the same school, and that people said he’d written NOTHING TO LOSE on his locker that last day, like a message. The day after his death, when everyone else had gone home and the corridors were empty, I walked up and down along the lockers, looking for the message without success, to the sound of a CD player someone had forgotten to turn off before they threw it in their locker.

  The water tower was the kind of place that the adults in Salem would have liked to put under constant police surveillance, had the resources been available. In the daytime, kids went there to play; in the evenings and at night, parties and drug deals took place. The kids stayed on the ground, as did the parties most of the time, but sometimes we’d climb up it. And sometimes, at night, someone would fall — often by accident, sometimes not, and that water tower was tall. No one who fell ever survived.

  I made my way through the woods that surrounded the tower, and stood at its base. The ground was compacted gravel, and I looked for traces of people who’d been there before me, but found none. No cans, no condoms, nothing. Maybe someone had cleaned up after the guy had fallen. I wondered where the point of impact could have been.

  Somewhere above me I heard a bang, and then a rustling in the treetops, before I noticed something fall, hitting the ground with a thud. I looked up, not knowing what to expect. When nothing else happened, I went over to see whatever it was that had fallen: a bird, black and white, with its beak half open, wings spread and in disarray. In its white feathers I could see dark-red splashes. One of the bird’s eyes was sunken, just an orangey-red open wound, as if someone had taken a teaspoon and gouged a bit of its head ou
t. I stood looking at it, lit a cigarette, and managed to take several drags before one of its wings jerked and a leg twitched.

  I started looking for something heavy to beat it to death with. When I couldn’t find anything, I stared up at the rounded roof of the tower before looking back down at the bird again. It wasn’t moving anymore.

  I dropped the cigarette, stubbed it out, and walked over to the narrow steps that wound their way up the tower. The ladder shuddered under my feet, and I held on to the rail. The exertion made my arm hurt. Halfway up, I heard another shot.

  The water tower had a ledge, and from there a little ladder took you up another couple of metres to a second ledge, right underneath the tower’s mushroom-shaped roof. Above me I heard the rustle of clothes rubbing against each other, and I lit a cigarette, loudly. The rustle stopped at the noise of the lighter, and I peered towards the sky, which seemed unnaturally bright and strong.

  ‘Who is it?’ I heard a voice say.

  ‘No one,’ I said. ‘Are you the one shooting?’

  ‘Why do you ask?’

  The voice was cautious, but not threatening.

  ‘I just wondered.’

  ‘Come up. You’re scaring the birds.’

  I tried to see where he was sitting up there, but couldn’t. The upper ledge wasn’t slatted like the one below; it was solid wood.

  ‘Can you hold my fag?’

  I climbed onto the ladder and held the cigarette up over the rim, then felt a hand take it off me. I grabbed one of the joists that stuck out from the ladder and hauled myself up onto the ledge. The thought that if I did fall I wouldn’t survive briefly crossed my mind.