The Invisible Man from Salem

by Christoffer Carlsson

  ‘Tell me.’

  He looks around and leans in towards me, his small eyes wide and glossy.

  ‘I was the one supplying her with the junk.’

  ‘And why does that look bad?’

  ‘I’m not fucking you around, so don’t fuck me around,’ he says sharply, before apparently composing himself a bit. ‘You know what I mean. This sort of thing happens for two reasons. Either she owes someone money, and that someone would of course be me, or else she’s seen something she wasn’t supposed to. The most likely is the former. So,’ he says, and takes a cigarette from the inside pocket of his trench coat, ‘it looks pretty fucking bad.’

  I look at Felix’s shoes as he lights the cigarette. They’re small Converses, several sizes smaller than mine. And several sizes smaller than the shoe that left a print on the floor in Chapmansgården. He could have had other shoes on, but I doubt it.

  ‘You want one?’ he asks and offers me a cigarette.

  ‘I’ve got my own. Tell me what you know about her.’

  Felix pulls the smoke in, and breathes out through his nose. His eyes are constantly assessing the surroundings, hoping to make sure he isn’t being seen anywhere near me.

  ‘She wasn’t from here. I think she was from Nyköping or Eskilstuna or somewhere, a smaller city anyway. She’d been here a couple of years. Typical dosser, just like the rest of them. She moved here to work or study, but pretty quickly she fell in with the wrong crowd. The guy she started seeing was a completely wasted Yugoslav junkie from Norsborg. He dragged her down into the shit, before he died of an overdose. That’s when she came to me.’

  ‘Is that when she started selling?’

  He takes a drag.

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘What was she selling?’

  ‘Whatever I gave her. But the only thing she was doing herself was heroin.’

  ‘And what did you give her?’

  ‘You know me.’ Felix is smiling. ‘Everything. You can’t specialise in just one thing; it doesn’t work like that anymore. You need to be able to get hold of everything. Heroin, morphine, amphetamine, coke, bennies, Marios, all that shit.’

  ‘What are Marios?’

  ‘You know Super Mario, the Nintendo character?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He looks at me as though that is an explanation.

  ‘The game is full of mushrooms? You’re losing it, Junker. You’ve been off the streets for too long.’

  ‘Yet it still only took me less than an afternoon to find you.’ I light a cigarette, and my smoke mixes with his. ‘Did she have problems with anyone?’

  ‘We all have problems with each other.’

  ‘You know what I mean.’

  Felix smokes some more of his cigarette, and plays with his tongue in the corner of his mouth.

  ‘Not that I know of, no. She did what she was supposed to. She was almost never late paying me. I couldn’t tell you whether she’s had dealings with others. Since she wasn’t from round here, she didn’t have many friends.’

  ‘Where did she live?’

  ‘Nowhere, everywhere.’

  ‘Where was she most recently?’

  ‘She hasn’t had a fixed address recently. That’s why she was sleeping at Chapmansgården.’

  ‘She had no possessions with her at Chapmansgården, but she must have at least had a bag of stuff?’

  ‘Fucked if I know; I suppose she must have?’ He flings his arms out and coughs, before taking another strained drag. ‘She would often get the southbound Red Line, even after her bloke in Norsborg did himself in. Maybe she knew someone there, stayed with someone.’

  ‘Do you have the names of her friends?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What was her boyfriend’s name?’

  ‘Miroslav something.’

  ‘Miroslav Djukic?’

  Felix nods again, excitedly and jerkily.

  ‘Yes, that’s it.’

  Felix hesitates for a moment, before cocking his head to one side and smiling broadly, as though he’s just realised something. It’s a strange gesture to make, but the pattern of his movements is completely unpredictable, as if he’s forgotten which expressions go with which words.

  ‘Can I go now?’

  I wave my hand wearily.

  ‘You know who you need to talk to, right?’ he says, walking away, his coat flapping behind him as he walks into the sunshine and takes a look around.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Course you do.’

  ‘No.’

  But I do. Felix disappears round the corner and I’m left alone with the cigarette in my hand.

  I need to talk to Sam.

  SAM IS NOW TOGETHER with the owner of Pierced, the most famous piercing studio south of Mälaren. His name is Rickard, but he calls himself Ricky. Besides countless piercings, he’s had Sam tattoo Carl Orff’s ‘O Fortuna’ on his back, in the original Latin. This is a man who, perhaps for obvious reasons, I have never really been able to take seriously, even though I’ve only heard stuff and have never actually met him.

  Sam and I met at a party in a flat on Nytorgsgatan. I’d just started working under Levin at the city police, and I was there to catch up with old friends who I no longer had anything in common with. It seemed pointless, yet I felt duty-bound to do it. Sam was there for the same reason. It was summer, and her skin was tanned. Her hair was streaked with highlights in a range of lighter shades. A fat pencil bound it into a loose bun on her neck, and locks of her curly hair were hanging loose. Her shoulders were covered in tattoos — sharp black lines, icy blue and steely grey. She was standing on her own with a milky-white cocktail in her hand and a look on her face that, more than anything, showed her intense desire to be somewhere else entirely.

  Later that evening, she came over to me in the kitchen, where I was mixing myself a drink, and we started talking because the alcohol had got her in a better mood. She was easy to talk to, once she’d dropped her guard and let me into her world. She was attentive, and could listen without losing concentration, without being passive or withdrawn.

  She is, to this day, the best conversation partner I have ever had. Sam has the ability to get the best out of me. Unfortunately, she also brings out the worst in me.

  ‘I own a tattoo parlour,’ she said. ‘It’s over on Kocksgatan.’

  ‘Kocksgatan,’ I repeated and finished off my drink.

  ‘I have to go there now.’

  ‘Now? Are you going to work now?’

  It was way past midnight.

  ‘I forgot my house keys,’ she slurred. ‘I’ve got my work keys and my house keys on different key rings.’

  ‘How … impractical.’

  I was also slurring, involuntarily.

  That night we had sex in the tattoo parlour, standing against her big brown sofa meant for waiting customers. Trousers round ankles, me with one hand against her chest, the other gripping her hip tightly. Her hair in my face, the smell of hairspray and ink, her nails on my skin, the realisation that this was something I hadn’t felt for a long time.

  Two weeks later, we became an item. It was Sam that asked me, and I laughed because I found the question itself so youthfully innocent. Soon we were sharing everything, apart from a flat. We spent very few nights apart. As often as possible, we would stay in and watch a film or bad TV series. We went out for dinner, we went to the cinema, we took long walks along Söder Mälarstrand. We had sex in the morning, at lunch, and in the evening. In bed, in the shower, on the floor, on the kitchen table, in Sam’s tattoo parlour again, in the toilets at Sergel Cinema, in the Katarina lift, in the middle of the night against the fence along Monteliusvägen, with all of Stockholm laid out beneath us. The months whizzed past and we exchanged keys, and soon I moved i
n with her on Södermalm, renting out my flat on Chapmansgatan.

  It was about a week after we met that Sam found out I was a policeman. I didn’t tell her, because I was afraid she would back off. In fact, she’d suspected it right from the start, she told me later. I should have known. I’d claimed to be a salesman — couldn’t think of anything better to say. Afterwards it felt pretty silly.

  Sam lived on the fringes of the underworld. Dangerous men appreciate good tattoos, and Sam knows what she’s doing. The tattoo artist is like the local hairdresser, who knows a lot about the world her customers inhabit, simply through her job. And Sam had nothing against it, nor did she have any desire to get more involved. We perched on each other’s outer limits, and I think that’s why we were drawn to each other.

  Then she got pregnant. We weren’t sure at first, but we decided to keep the baby. We bought a ring each, not for an engagement but to have a tangible mutual bond until the baby arrived. That was the beginning of the happiest seven months of my life. We were expecting a boy; we were going to call him Viktor, after Sam’s granddad. One night we were in a car on the way home from a party. Sam was driving, and I was sitting next to her, radio on, and I remember someone singing about asking the world to dance.

  It was winter, and it turned out that the driver of the car in front of us had such high levels of alcohol in his blood that he really should have been unconscious. Then something happened, and Sam gasped and wrenched the wheel. I still don’t know what it was, can’t remember. The road was slippery, and there were patches of ice everywhere. The world turned upside down as the car flipped over. Everything went black until I opened my eyes and saw a clear, starry sky. I was lying on my back on a stretcher, and my head was pounding. Every breath brought sharp pains to my torso, as though someone were pushing nails through me. I had four broken ribs. Next time I came round, I was lying under a bright white light at Södermalm Hospital. When I asked about Sam, they told me she was still in theatre. She was going to be okay; it was Viktor they were trying to save.

  They couldn’t. Sam had lost a lot of blood, and Viktor had sustained serious internal injuries. I was alone when they told me. Sam was still in a recovery room, coming round from the anaesthetic. I remember how bright the light was, how cool it was in the room, how there was a little wooden flag on the table next to me.

  The man in front of us, the one who had lost control of his car, was convicted of reckless driving. He was given a six-month suspended sentence. I never told anyone, but late one night about a year later, I looked him up, knocked on his door, and when he opened it I hit him with a knuckle-duster. He offered no resistance.

  Viktor’s death caused an irreparable crack in our relationship. We stuck it out for a year. But then, as things got worse and life itself seemed to become painful, rows began to erupt — eyeball to eyeball, flying crockery versus flying crockery, back to back in the dark. Spectacular rows about nothing, yet simultaneously about everything that mattered. We tried to paper over the cracks by having sex, which just made things even worse.

  Sam and I were one another’s first refuge, the first person we would turn to when something went wrong, and she knows the darkest corners of my soul. And I know her. I know she’s scared of the dark. The walls of her studio are plastered with posters for Fight Club, The Godfather, and Pusher, but her favourite film is actually Some Like it Hot. I know that she has a tattoo on the inside of her thigh, two doves, which sit so high that one of the dove’s wingtips strokes her groin. I know that Sam’s mother was abused by Sam’s father.

  But while Viktor’s ghost tore away at us, we buried ourselves in our jobs. Whereas this had worked pretty well in the past, perhaps because Sam and I had kept our relationship secret from so many, it now merely created new points of conflict. She rubbed shoulders with the underworld. She got to hear things. When word got out that she was seeing a cop, she didn’t just get fewer customers; she got threats from several of them. Sam was outwardly calm, but I could tell that she was shaken. As was I, feeling that it was my fault.

  ‘You should give it up,’ I said. ‘Try something else.’

  ‘Why should I give up my job? Why not you?’

  ‘It’s easier for you.’

  ‘It isn’t easier at all,’ she hissed. ‘You don’t love being a cop. I love what I do.’

  ‘You love tattooing serious criminals?’ I screamed back. ‘Noble work, Sam.’

  ‘You have to twist everything I say,’ she said, her voice breaking with a mixture of rage and bitter disappointment.

  And so it went on, day after week after month.

  ‘You’re not going to split up, surely?’ one of Sam’s friends asked over coffee.

  ‘Not today,’ Sam answered.

  WE SPLIT UP two weeks after I’d given her a little necklace with black cubes on it, in an attempt at reconciliation. Around her neck it looked a lot like someone had her in a snare, but she liked it. I moved back to Kungsholmen and Chapmansgatan, and a year later I was involved in what was to become the Gotland affair.

  She rang me after seeing the explosion of media coverage; she wanted to know how I was coping with it all. I didn’t want to talk just then, but I did call back later. It turned out to be a call full of silence and unspoken words. Maybe that was why, a few days later, I called her again. This time I was high. Sam put the phone down, and I didn’t ring back — at least not for a few days. Then I called again. I don’t know why; I think I just wanted to hear her voice. It reminded me of how everything had once been so straightforward, so promising. I’d turned thirty without anything dramatic happening, but perhaps now the consequences of being an adult had arrived. I still dream about Viktor.

  ‘SAM,’ SHE ANSWERS sharply when I call.

  I don’t know what to say. So I say nothing, and I’m ashamed of myself.

  ‘Hello?’ she says wearily. ‘Leo, you have to stop calling me. Are you high?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I’m going to hang up now.’

  ‘No, wait.’

  ‘What, Leo? What do you want?’

  Someone moves in the background — a naked man, in bed, trying to get his girlfriend to stop talking to the man who may still love her. At least that’s what I convince myself I am hearing.

  ‘I miss you,’ I say quietly.

  She says nothing, and it cuts me up inside.

  ‘Don’t say that,’ she says.

  ‘But I do.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘Stop calling here, Leo.’

  ‘I’m not high. I’ve stopped.’

  She scoffs.

  ‘You haven’t.’

  ‘I have.’

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘I told you. I miss you.’

  ‘I’m not going to say it back.’

  We breathe out, and we do so simultaneously. I wonder what that means.

  ‘I need to see you,’ I say.

  ‘What for?’

  ‘I need your help.’

  ‘With what?’

  I hesitate.

  ‘Did you hear about the woman who got shot at Chapmans-gården?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Something doesn’t add up. I think you can help me.’

  ‘Are you serious?’

  ‘Deadly serious.’

  ‘Tomorrow, around twelve maybe?’ she says, hesitantly. ‘I’ve got a customer at ten, and I won’t have time before then.’

  ‘Thanks. Good.’

  ‘Good,’ she says.

  I wonder what she’s thinking.

  ‘Are you happy?’ I eventually ask.

  Sam puts the phone down, and this time I don’t call back.

  IT’S NOW LATE EVENING. I’m surrounded by darkness. From my balcony, I
can see the building where BAR is located, and I think of Anna, who wanted me to call her. Maybe I should. It might be good for me. Then I think that I ought to go to Salem again, and the thought of it makes me feel terrible. I hear a report about the investigation on the radio. Rebecca Salomonsson’s parents in Eskilstuna have been informed of her death. I wonder how they took that news. Losing one another hurts. It’s cold out on the balcony, and I smoke one last cigarette. My phone vibrates in my pocket as I walk back in: an anonymous text.

  i see you, Leo

  I flop onto the sofa, and reply:

  who is this?

  I hear you’re looking for a murderer

  tell me who you are, I send.

  I pop a Serax from the blister pack lying on the coffee table, swallow it, and take a deep breath.

  guess, comes the reply.

  is this a joke? I ask.

  no

  A car starts up, down on the street. I go out onto the balcony and I see it pull away, the city’s lights reflected in its dark, glossy paintwork, the back lights glowing red, the inside dimly lit by the light from a mobile phone.

  I am twelve. My dad calls me his only friend, everyone else is against him. Beverly Hills 90210 is on the telly. Dad says that I’m like Dylan. I don’t see it myself but it feels good. He’s got his arm around me. It’s just the two of us at home. Afterwards we get into the car. We’re not heading anywhere in particular, just driving. We listen to music and the sun is shining. It’s spring. After a while a policeman on the side of the road waves us in. Dad has to blow into a mouthpiece. Then we have to leave the car and get a lift home in the police car. Dad persuades the police to drop us off a bit early, so that we can walk the last bit. I don’t know why.

  Mum doesn’t shout. She doesn’t say anything. She never does. The following spring, Dad agrees to admit himself to a clinic for six months of rehab. He comes home after three days and says that he’s fine, that he’s okay now. We don’t talk to each other anymore because I don’t believe him and he knows it. I tell him so once. He throws a chair at me. I run into my room and lock the door. Dad’s outside and wants to come in and talk. When I don’t open up he gets angry. I put the stereo on and turn it up so I can’t hear his voice. Dad bangs on the door with his fists. He bangs so hard that it makes a hole in the cheap plywood. The splinters cut his hands up badly and he gets a taxi to the hospital for some stitches.