The Invisible Man from Salem

by Christoffer Carlsson

  It was wide enough up there that you could have your back against the body of the tower, your legs outstretched, and your feet against the fence-like railing, without being seen from below. The railing came up to your thighs. Up here the wind was stronger, and Salem spread out below me — the heavy buildings with their small windows, the low, detached houses with their sloping roofs and warm colours, the sporadic greenery, and the dark-grey, heavy concrete. The landscape looked even weirder from up here than it did at ground level.

  I looked at the hand holding the cigarette. He wasn’t holding it like a smoker would, but uneasily, with three fingers at the base of the filter.

  ‘It is you shooting,’ I said.

  ‘What makes you think that?’

  I recognised him. He went to Rönninge High School, but he was in a different class from me. He had short, blond hair and a thin, angular face; he was wearing baggy jeans and red Converses, and a grey hoodie with the hood up. His eyes were deep green and clear. He was holding a heavy, brown air rifle, and next to him was an open box of pellets. He tipped his head back, closing his eyes.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Shh. You have to listen.’

  ‘To what?’

  ‘The birds.’

  ‘I can’t hear anything.’

  ‘You’re not listening.’

  I pulled on the cigarette and heard nothing but rustling from the trees, and someone aggressively beeping the horn in a car nearby.

  ‘I’m John,’ he said eventually.

  ‘Leo,’ I replied.

  ‘Sit still.’

  He opened his eyes, raised the weapon, and put his eye to the black telescopic sight on the rifle; I followed the line of the barrel, trying to see what he was aiming at. In the trees around us, everything seemed still. John breathed in and held his breath. Instinctively I pressed myself against the wall. The bang was followed by more rustling in one of the trees. I couldn’t see it, but a bird fell to the ground.

  ‘Why are you shooting them?’

  He put the rifle down.

  ‘I don’t know. Because I can? Because I’m good at it?’ He looked at my right arm. ‘Does it hurt?’

  The climb had really made it ache, and I was massaging it. The pain reminded me of Vlad and Fred, two older guys in Salem; they had hard knuckles. They always punched me at exactly the same point, right on the nerve, giving me a dead arm followed by pain as the feeling came back. They’d stopped doing it ages ago, but when I put any strain on the arm it sometimes started aching in a way that made me remember them.

  ‘I walked into a bannister today.’

  ‘Bannister,’ John repeated.

  ‘Yes. Do you come here a lot?’

  ‘When I want some peace,’ he said. ‘You need somewhere to go when you can’t go home.’

  ‘Shall I go?’

  ‘I didn’t mean it like that.’

  I smoked the cigarette right down to the end of the filter and threw it over the railing, my eyes following it down till it disappeared.

  ‘What else are you called, apart from John?’

  ‘Grimberg.’

  John Grimberg had a big hold-all next to him, the kind the footballers in Rönninge used to drag around with them. He opened it and put the gun away, then pulled out a bundle of cloth and unwrapped it: a bottle of vodka inside a T-shirt. He screwed the top off and took a swig without wincing. I thought about how high up we were. Below us, Salem was slowly being swallowed by fog.

  ‘People call me “Grim”,’ he said. ‘Well,’ he corrected himself, ‘people who know me.’ He looked at the bottle in his hand. ‘There aren’t that many.’

  ‘That makes two of us.’

  ‘You’re lying.’ He looked at the bottle, seemed to be weighing up whether or not to offer it to me. ‘I’ve seen you at school. You’re never on your own.’

  ‘You can still be lonely even when you’re surrounded by other people.’

  John seemed to be contemplating the truthfulness of this until he shrugged his shoulders, more to himself than at me, and took another slug from the bottle. Then he offered it to me. I took it off him and drank some of the clear liquid. It burned, and I spluttered, clearing my throat, which made John laugh.

  ‘Pussy.’

  ‘It’s strong.’

  ‘You get used to it.’

  He took the bottle from me, drank from it, and looked out over Salem. The fog moved in, enveloping everything.

  ‘Have you got any brothers or sisters?’ I asked, for some reason.

  ‘A little sister. You?’

  ‘A big brother.’

  At the same height as the ledge, just an arm’s length from the rail, a black bird swept quickly past and squawked, then another one, and then a long, long procession of birds that became a blurred, black stripe in front of us. I looked at John’s free hand — the one not holding the bottle — but he didn’t make any attempt to reach for the rifle.

  ‘Did he hurt your arm?’ he asked instead, when the birds had passed. ‘Your brother?’

  I was thrown by the question.

  ‘No.’

  John tipped his head back again and drank some more.

  ‘How old is your sister?’ I asked.

  ‘Fifteen. She’s starting at Rönninge High this autumn.’ With his eyes still closed, he turned his face towards me and sniffed the air, inhaling three, four times. ‘You live in the Triad, don’t you?’

  I nodded. The Triad was what the three identical concrete blocks that were encircled by Säbytorgsvägen and Söderbyvägen were called. The roads looped around, crossing each other and forming an irregular circle around the three buildings.

  ‘In the one on the left, if you’re coming from Rönninge. How did you know that?’

  ‘I recognise the smell from the stairwell. I live in the middle one. Those blocks all smell the same.’

  ‘You must have a good sense of smell. And good hearing.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Later we walked home, giggling and slurring our words together, back through a foggy Salem, and straight away it felt like a bond between us had been formed, like we shared each other’s secrets. A year passes quickly when you live between the high-rise blocks, yet the time that followed felt like an age.

  I REMEMBER THIS, that on the outskirts of Salem there were nice detached houses and small row houses with well-kept lawns, and when you went past in the summer you’d smell barbecued meat. The closer you got to the train station, the more the little houses gave way to heavy concrete blocks and tarmac, graffiti. Young and old, small-time criminals, teenagers and hooligans, electro fans and ravers and the kids into hip-hop — this was where we all hung out, and I remember a song I used to hear a lot, a sharp voice that sang about a head like a hole, black as a soul. We sat on benches and drank spirits, and tipped over soft-drink vending machines, and ones with sweets in, and sprayed them with paint. Quite a few others got done for threatening behaviour, assault, and vandalism, but we always got away with it by running into the shadows that we knew so much better than the people who were chasing us. In the adults’ eyes, we were all aspiring gangsters. Things had been bad in Salem for a long time, but not this bad. Even Salem Church had been broken into, and they’d had a party inside. I heard about it at school — I hadn’t been there myself, but I knew who’d done it, because they were in the parallel class and we did Swedish together. A few weeks later, the church was broken into again, and they hung a Swedish flag the size of a cinema screen with a big black swastika on it. No one could see the point of it — maybe because there wasn’t one.

  Salem. At school we were taught that it had once been called Slaem, which was a compound of two words meaning sloes and home. Then, at some time in the seventeenth century, the name was changed; no one really knew
why, but the teachers and local historians liked the notion that it had something to do with the biblical Salem, as in Jerusalem. It made Salem sound like a peaceful place, since the word means ‘peace’ in Hebrew — a place our parents had moved to, long before it got this bad, in search of a happy life.

  And in our blocks on the estate we would stand at the windows when we couldn’t go out, observing each other at a distance. Once we were out, we kept away from people who could hurt us. We were drawn to those like us, like me and John, who hung around outside the entrances to each other’s blocks when we had nowhere to go but didn’t want to go home; in the distance you could hear shouting, screaming, and laughter, and car alarms echoing through the night.

  IV

  The incident tape around Chapmansgatan is flapping in the wind as I go out onto the balcony, with the gentle buzz of Serax around my temples. A little distance away, a woman crosses the street with a boy, perhaps her son, in a wheelchair. The boy is hooked up to tubes and is sitting completely still, as though he were just a shell.

  A blue-and-white patrol car is parked outside the building, and two visibly bored police officers move up and down the line demarcated by the tape. My gaze follows them until one of the pair looks up towards me, which makes me scurry back inside like a startled animal.

  The night’s events have been summarised in a short article in the paper: a woman of around twenty-five has been found dead, shot at a homeless hostel in central Stockholm; the police are working flat-out to sift through the tips that have already come in; a lot of work is still to be done; those who claim to have seen something all report seeing a man in dark clothes running away from the scene. The forensic investigation was reported to be continuing as the article went to press.

  THAT LITTLE ARTICLE is enough to send me back to what happened this spring, and what happened this spring might have started happening much earlier; I don’t know. What I do know is that I was handpicked by Levin, that sly old fox of a chief superintendent, to serve in the Internal Affairs unit after a spell as a detective sergeant with the city’s violent crime squad. The point of this wasn’t, in fact, that I should be part of the Internal Affairs investigative team — those who investigate other police officers suspected of crimes. My role was a step beyond that: to monitor the unit itself from within. Levin suspected that the internal investigations, especially those concerning the work of informers and illicit intelligence, were spurious and fabricated. There was a major problem at HQ, and everyone knew it. Levin was the only one who dared to spell out where the problem really lay: in the self-regulation and investigation of the riskiest parts of the organisation’s activities, where the police knowingly cooperated with criminals, sometimes provoking criminal acts.

  Officially I was just part of the unit’s administrative department, but my real task was to wade through the internal investigations’ reports, looking for short-cuts, omissions, cover-ups, or downright lies, which investigators had been pressured into by those above them while investigating their own. The ordinary files were red. The specially selected ones — those I was really there to work on — were blue, and it was always Levin himself who put them on my desk. He screened every internal investigation; and when something seemed too straightforward or transparent, he would put it in a blue file and give it to me for further examination and checks.

  Often the holes were easy to find. Most of the events were described as ‘incidents’ — a good choice for downplaying their significance — and the account given followed a set pattern:

  The internee’s behaviour led to the incident in lift number four. During the lift’s passage the patrol deemed the person aggressive and forced him to the floor. This caused injuries to the face (L. cheek, R. eyebrow), diaphragm (bruising from second to fourth rib, L.), and right hand (metacarpal fracture). Soft-tissue injuries sustained by the internee resulted from a heavy fall, after the patrolling officers had calmed him down and helped him to his feet.

  The internee in this case, for example, claimed that his injuries were the result of what the police call a ‘drum solo’: repeated baton strikes to the groin. The addict would not submit, instead protesting his innocence. The case went to trial, where two well-presented police officers testified against a man deep in the clutches of a fifteen-year-long opiate addiction. The police, of course, emerged victorious from the proceedings, the only consequence being that an internal investigation was ordered. This was completed one month later, and concluded that the injuries being a result of the fall could not be ruled out. No medical expert had been consulted on the subject. When I contacted one myself, it was in fact immediately clear that this could indeed be ruled out. Cases like this were a regular occurrence, mainly involving young people in the city centre or out on the estates. Other times it was much more difficult, because the police in question had been more adept, the crime far more advanced, and the events themselves much more complicated and tangled.

  I learnt quickly and I was soon good at my job. Everything happened quietly, thanks to the smoke and mirrors Levin so skilfully deployed. I did the groundwork, identified the hole, and handed the file — always blue, always nameless — over to him, and he took over. By early spring, five major internal investigations had been discredited, and the whispers inside the fortress-like HQ had taken off. I was essentially Levin’s mole, and the worst kind of police officer. That’s when it all started to go downhill.

  THE WHOLE THING was later referred to as the Gotland Affair, or, by some, as the Lasker Affair, after Max Lasker, the informer who died. A police officer and two suspects were also victims in the case, but their deaths did not become symbolic like Lasker’s did. Lasker was a crafty little rat-like man with moist eyes, dirty nails, and many years of substance abuse behind him. That’s not the kind of person you really want as an informer, but Lasker had contacts, information, and money. This made him valuable, made him the vital link between organised crime and Stockholm’s addicts. I knew of him from my time in the violent crime squad, and I think he trusted me. He’d got word during the spring that a large consignment of weapons was about to change hands on Gotland. He contacted me via a piece of paper with a mobile number on it, which he had hand-delivered to my letterbox on Chapmansgatan.

  By now I had settled in to the job at IA, which essentially consisted of sitting at a desk, reading reports, and making calls to check details. I forwarded Lasker’s information to CID on the ground, without going via Levin. I couldn’t understand what IA would be able to do with the information, but somehow Levin got to hear about it. A few days later he came into my office — flustered and ill-at-ease — and brought me down to the basement and into one of the toilets. He asked me to keep an eye on the operation. The weapons that were going to change hands on Gotland were destined for Stockholm. They were to be sold-on to two emerging rival gangs operating in the city’s southern housing estates.

  ‘It’s going to be a major operation,’ Levin said. ‘There’ll be informants there, along with their handlers from inside this building. That means that someone — probably not the chief constable himself, but someone just under him — is going to put one or maybe two IA guys on the case, to cover their backs if the whole thing fucks up.’

  This was the latest technique — proactive internal investigations, whereby IA supervised operations, advising right from the start. It all came down to one thing: covering your own back. This probably sounds rather alarming to outsiders, but for those of us on the inside it was a purely practical measure.

  ‘And you want me to keep an eye on IA?’

  Levin smiled, without saying anything. I leant against the cold, tiled wall of the toilet cubicle and closed my eyes.

  ‘You know that there are rumours going around, in the building,’ I said, ‘that something isn’t quite right?’

  ‘What do you take me for?’ Levin said, rubbing his great beak of a nose. ‘Of course I know. You report to me, and me
alone. Anyone else contacting you is an attempt to expose you.’

  My task was to observe the IA investigators and only get involved in exceptional circumstances, to save the raid. Levin was the only one who knew I would be on Gotland and about my role on the fringes of the operation.

  A few days before the bust I made my way over to Gotland, to a little hamlet outside Visby. I’d never been there before, and I needed to get my bearings. It was May — grey, windy, and cold. Birds hunted along the coast, as though they were fleeing. Perhaps they were. I walked around, memorising footpaths and tracks, smoking cigarettes, and waiting for something to happen. The closer it got to the raid, the more unsettled I became, without really knowing why. My nights were filled with bad dreams about Sam and Viktor, and I would find myself standing in the hotel bathroom, staring at my own reflection.

  Down in the harbour, a stone’s throw from where the raid was to take place, I was standing, looking at the sky late one evening when I heard a voice behind me. I turned my head to see someone who was dressed to avoid being recognised — baseball cap, big hoodie with the hood up, baggy jeans — waving at me. Lasker.

  ‘What the hell are you doing here?’ he said, dragging me into the shadow cast by one of the larger buildings in the harbour.

  ‘Holiday.’

  ‘Get out of here while you can, Junker. I’ve got a bad feeling about this.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Something’s gonna go wrong.’ He let go of me and started backing away. ‘Everything’s fucked.’

  He disappeared into the darkness, and I stood there smoking, alone. A shiver went through me. Was this an attempt to expose me, as Levin had said? I guessed it was, but I couldn’t figure out Lasker’s role in the whole thing. He was working for us, after all.

  The boat carrying the goods docked two days later. In the meantime I lay low, checked out of the hotel, and stayed at a nearby guesthouse, using a false name. It was important to keep moving. I noted the IA investigators and the firearms unit arriving in Visby, tailed the unmarked cars rolling out of the belly of the Gotland ferry, and made notes of who the officers were, where they were staying, what they got up to. I restricted my notes to a single black notepad, which was always in the inside pocket of my jacket. That gave me a sense of having things under control.