The photocopier stopped and just sat there gasping for breath until the fan fell silent and it died altogether.
Antonia picked up the bundles, put the originals back in their files, placed the copies in a plastic bag that she stuffed into her handbag, and left police headquarters.
Time seemed to weigh heavily on him these days. So heavy and unmanageable he could never ignore it. If he did, it felt like he was suffocating. So the only thing Tommy could do was rush away from it. And rushing away from time was something you did by constantly keeping busy, keeping on the move.
Tommy Jansson sat in his car, parked on the road in front of his row house with his engine switched off. The air in the car was warm and dry and full of problems.
He left the car, walked the few steps up to the door.
—
The hall with its fabric-texture wallpaper. Tommy hung his leather jacket up on a hook in spite of Monica’s endless nagging to use a hanger. He slipped into the bathroom.
His bulging stomach had gotten bigger, he couldn’t see it when he peed anymore. Young Mr. Jansson, he had always called it. Back when he and Monica were able to make jokes, Jansson’s Temptation. And they used to have fun, most of the time, it was the glue that held them together. A sort of affectionate humor with a lot of warmth and lightness that acted as a backdrop for their shared, if tacit, conviction that life was actually difficult—dangerous, even. But the backdrop had collapsed when Monica’s illness was diagnosed. The humor and warmth disappeared. All that was left was confusion, gloom, and a large portion of bitterness.
Monica was sitting in the kitchen, being strong and ill. He hated her I’m-strong-and-positive charade. Tommy couldn’t bear it, just as little as he could bear her illness.
She did crosswords, drank coffee, tried to do normal things. But her right hand no longer obeyed her, her speech was becoming slurred, and she couldn’t walk without the help of crutches, although she refused to use the walker the nursing aide had given her.
“Hi, Tommy.”
Her pronunciation was thick and heavy. She was smiling, but only with half her mouth. It tore at his heart—he loved her so much.
He filled a mug with coffee and sat down at the kitchen table, talked about nothing, drank the coffee, helped her with her crossword without actually being any help. Then she said his name in that soft, pleading way. Tommy. An attempt to sound loving, with the implicit plea, Please, Tommy, listen to me.
And he knew what was coming. Practical things he ought to know about when she could no longer do them, and later, when she died. She had figured out what he needed to do in various situations, like buying food, the budget for the girls’ clothes, their menstrual cycles, contact with their teachers. It was a long list. He couldn’t deal with that sort of thing, and he stood up.
“Where are you going?” She gave him a beseeching look.
He didn’t answer as he made his usual escape to the basement.
Tommy sat down at the little desk in the workshop, fished a quarter bottle of transparent liquor from a drawer, and struggled to swallow a few swigs. The horrible taste of gin. He put the bottle back and pulled a folder out of the same drawer.
Bank withdrawals from accounts held with banks based in shady regimes. Two in western Africa, one in the Middle East. Expensive as hell, but hidden and safe from tax. The amounts were large, and unreal.
Six months earlier, in a apartment on Södermalm, Tommy was with two colleagues, Gunilla Strandberg and Lars Vinge. Tommy had shot them both. Vinge hadn’t been much of a problem; he was a wretched little man, a nobody who’d run himself into the ground. The “suicide shot” to his temple had felt almost like an act of mercy. Gunilla had been worse. A friend, a colleague, an ally. She was the one who had paid in the money that had been in those accounts. Gunilla had been corrupt for years. Together with her brother Erik, she had embezzled money from the cases they worked on. Tommy had had no idea. He had been tipped off by Lars Vinge, who wanted justice and some advantage to his career in exchange for the revelation. The old Tommy had thought that sounded reasonable. But Gunilla approached him with a counteroffer….He should have dismissed it as the solid, honest cop he had always been. The new Tommy was born there and then, when he realized that the money she was offering him could change things, primarily Monica’s illness.
And when the new Tommy was born, the old one died. It happened fast. And the new Tommy started to think. It had been unavoidable; they would never have been able to share the spoils. He knew her, he knew his new self. The appeal of a new arrangement seldom lasted very long.
It wasn’t about the money, more about fear, his own warped fear. He had realized it with the passage of time. His fear of Monica disappearing. What the hell was he going to do without her? Who would look after him when he got old? Who would make sure the girls didn’t marry idiots? Who the hell was going to do the cooking? And buy his clothes? Who was going to be sociable when people came over? Who was he going to talk to after work so he didn’t find himself in an eternity of silence? Monica was his lifeline, in every conceivable sense.
So when he found out about the money, he saw his chance. The pair of them, Gunilla and Lars Vinge, died in Lars’s apartment, and Tommy made it look like a personal dispute: Vinge shot Gunilla, then himself. He took the money she had accumulated over the years, and set about his mission at once. Tommy contacted researchers and specialist doctors in the USA, France, Japan…everywhere people were conducting research into ALS. They all said the same thing: no medication, no cure. But financial help would at least speed up the eventual discovery of drugs that could delay the illness, and at best find an actual cure. Tommy took this on board and began the laborious task of withdrawing all the millions from the bank accounts and sending them anonymously to organizations all over the world. His working life was now constructed around his frantic efforts to plug any holes that might end up linking him to the murders of Gunilla Strandberg and Lars Vinge.
Tommy leaned forward and stared at the amounts on the bank statements. There wasn’t much left now. Half a million kronor in cash buried out in the garden behind the shed. One and a half million in Africa, just over a million in the Middle East. And those banks had negative interest rates. They charged for hiding the money. The rate was based upon an index of dictatorships. The fewer dictatorships there were in the world, the higher the negative interest was, more or less. And the interest was mounting. Soon the money would all be gone….
Tommy could feel a slight pressure on his chest and took shallow breaths, rubbing his face with his hands, letting his palms cover his eyes like blinkers. Darkness. He breathed slowly and the darkness was dark, fucking dark. Was this where Monica was heading?
There was a knocking sound on the ceiling. Monica’s crutch on the floor up above. She needed help to get to the bathroom.
The woman’s backside was at eye level. The G-string was barely visible. She was holding the pole with her right hand and leaning forward. Their eyes met, upside down. Miles Ingmarsson looked away.
There were only three other men there, spread out around the room with as much distance between them as possible. He recognized a couple of them, but recognition wasn’t encouraged. Total anonymity was the aim.
The girl on the shiny pole was named Sanna. She was new, thirtysomething, older than the other girls, different. He wasn’t sure in what way—the way she moved, perhaps, or her manner? Her long legs, maybe? No, it was something else, something he couldn’t put his finger on. She wasn’t the type, she shouldn’t be there.
The woman unsettled him, and strippers didn’t usually have that effect on him. But this one was different.
Miles looked at Sanna, her cropped blond hair, red lips, milk-white skin….There was an underlying sense of joy in her, the world was evidently a decent place….
His phone vibrated in his jacket, and Miles swallowed and answered.
“Yep.”
“Hi, Ingmarsson.”
It was Tommy agai
n. He knew exactly when to call.
“Hi, Tommy.”
“How’s it going?”
“Oh, OK.”
“What does that mean?”
“No idea.”
Tommy coughed into Miles’s ear.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“Having lunch,” Miles replied.
“Where?”
The signal kept coming and going, Miles guessed Tommy was in his car, on a hands-free device.
“City center.”
“Is it good?”
“What?”
“Your lunch. Is it good?”
“Yes, I suppose so.”
A loud car horn. Presumably from the traffic around him.
“What are you having?”
“What am I having?”
“Yes, what are you having?”
Miles laughed. “You ask some odd questions, Tommy.”
“There’s nothing odd about asking what you’re eating, is there? What’s so odd about that?”
Sanna was squatting down, legs wide apart, and was sucking on her thumb for far too long, in and out, in and out.
“No, I suppose it isn’t.”
“So?”
“Pasta,” Miles lied.
“Pasta. That’s good, Ingmarsson.”
“Yes.”
“Is it à la striptease?”
“Sorry?”
“No, no sorrys. Is pasta à la striptease on the menu?”
It was as humiliating as being kicked between the legs. Ingmarsson wiped under his nose.
“You could say that,” he mumbled.
“Do you think I care?”
“No, I don’t.”
“That’s right. But others might.”
Sanna was on her back, thrusting her crotch toward the ceiling, her black thigh-high boots reflecting the lights.
“So lie low, Ingmarsson.”
“That’s what I’m doing,” Miles said.
“No, you’re not.”
He didn’t quite follow.
“You’ve asked for things….You’ve requested material from the archive.”
“Doesn’t anyone working on an investigation do that? I need to gather all the available material before I can get to work….”
Sanna raised her backside and her underwear came off.
“Forget it.”
“Forget what?”
“Everything. Forget about the investigation.”
Her underwear was spinning around her forefinger, slowly and beautifully. In his head he could hear the sound of rotor blades from some old Vietnam film, whop, whop, whop. Then she let go. They sailed off into the darkness. Miles watched them.
“What?”
“Just sit there and pretend to work, don’t make any effort.”
“Why?”
“Because I say so. Gunilla and Erik Strandberg were investigating Hector Guzman, as you know. Which led to the shootout at Trasten. But they buggered the whole thing up. If you make any progress, you’ll be tarnishing their memory; that’s pretty much it. I don’t want that. They were good friends, and good police officers.”
Sanna was squatting down in the middle of the stage, legs wide apart again, showing Ingmarsson absolutely everything.
“Cops protect cops, don’t they?”
A pause. Tommy Jansson cleared his throat. It didn’t quite work. His voice sounded gravelly when he spoke again: “Besides, who the fuck cares, Ingmarsson? Three dead Russian gangsters…”
A sharp cough from Tommy, this time it worked.
“And Hector Guzman,” he said. “Some Spanish mafioso who’s fled the country or is burning in hell. What more could we ask? In my opinion, our citizens are safe and the case was concluded a long time ago; it concluded itself. There’s no point wasting resources and a load of taxpayers’ money on this. If you get me?”
No, Miles didn’t get him. “What are you saying, Tommy?”
“Go through the motions. Come up with something, I don’t know what, but remember that you’re a police officer, Ingmarsson. A police officer who goes to porn clubs day after day after day. How the fuck do you think that looks?”
Miles just squeezed the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger and shut his eyes.
“Especially now all the lunatics in this country have gone and become feminists. You’d be hung out to dry. Unless…”
Tommy left a dramatic pause.
“Unless what?” Miles asked. He still had his eyes closed.
“We’re cops, Ingmarsson. I protect you, you lie low. We help each other, old-fashioned cops’ honor, OK?”
Miles didn’t answer.
“Good, Ingmarsson, that’s more like it,” Tommy said, and ended the call.
Miles opened his eyes and sat there with his phone in his hand, feeling depressed. “Cops’ honor”—what the hell? He put his cell back in his jacket pocket. This wasn’t how he remembered Tommy Jansson. But people changed, presumably. Tommy had been friends with the Strandberg siblings, Gunilla and Erik, good friends, Miles knew that. So Tommy must have his reasons—he had implied as much when he gave him the job. Miles had realized at once that there was something funny about it, because why else would he have been given a murder investigation? There were a million better cops than him, eagerly sitting and waiting for an offer like that.
Well…
The choice was fairly easy. He realized he could just as easily sit on his backside at Violent Crime drinking bad coffee as sit on his backside at Eco and listen as his older colleagues falsified and exaggerated stories about some golden age of policing that had never existed.
And perhaps there was something in what Tommy said. Cops protect cops. And Ingmarsson wasn’t about to stop going to strip clubs to look at Sanna, not a chance….
Sanna?
Miles woke from his reflections to find that he was alone in the room. The old men had gone, the show was over. He looked toward the stage and was blinded by a sharp spotlight. Miles squinted and put his hand horizontally above his eyes. Sanna…
She was just standing there in the middle of the stage, her left hand on her hip, wearing those thigh-high black boots, otherwise naked in the sight of Ingmarsson and God.
“Finished for today,” she said. Her dialect was from the north of Sweden, beautiful, good, kind….
Ingmarsson stared at her, and now he saw her more clearly, the line of her jaw, her mouth, her eyes….Everything was beautiful individually, fantastic in combination, divine as a whole.
After a magical eternity she broke into a little smile, turned around, and left the small stage in a way that would make any man fall to his knees and beg for mercy.
It was past lunchtime. Antonia was standing in the elevator as it raced downward. Her cell rang.
“Yes?”
“Antonia Miller?” a male voice asked.
“Yes.”
“Reuterswärd, Security Police.”
She dug around in her pocket for a cough drop.
“Hello, Security Police,” she said.
She found one and popped it in her mouth.
“You’re investigating the Conny Blomberg murder?”
“Yes.”
The cough drop clicked against her teeth.
“In line with our protocols, I wanted to get in touch to say that we’ve been keeping an eye on him over the years.”
The elevator doors opened and Antonia got out.
“Tell me.”
“His case is no longer classified now that he’s dead, so if you need any of our material, get in touch.”
The sun was shining as she emerged onto the street.
“Why do you have material on him?”
“We shouldn’t have, really. But he was involved with people we were interested in, so he fell under our surveillance automatically. He was deemed to be of low-grade interest, but he’s been in our system ever since. This was a long time ago.”
“What do you know about him? Conny Blomberg?”<
br />
Antonia was walking along the pavement, the lunchtime rush going on around her.
“According to his file Conny was a promising footballer in Norrköping in the ’80s. He landed himself with a knee injury and kids at the same time. He started drinking and smoking dope, then bailed out when he realized he couldn’t look after his family, pretty much. He left the provincial idyll and came up to Stockholm, partied hard, and quickly ended up in the wrong company. Was put away a few times for minor offenses, then his crimes got more serious, as did the punishments.”
A brief silence.
“He liked hash and transvestites,” Reuterswärd concluded.
“Who doesn’t?” Antonia said drily.
Reuterswärd didn’t share her humor. “Well, anyway, I’ll send over what we’ve got, it might help you make a start.”
“I have to ask something,” Antonia said.
“Yes?”
“Are you always this considerate?”
“How do you mean?”
“I’ve never heard of the Security Police calling us to volunteer their material.”
Reuterswärd lowered his voice slightly.
“Well, it does happen,” he said.
“But?”
“But that’s not why I called. It’s mostly that there’s a peculiar coincidence.”
“What?” she asked, growing tired of talking to him.
“Sometime last year, toward the end of the summer, if I remember rightly, a former colleague called me here at the Security Police. Anders Ask. He asked about one of the members of that gang, Leif Rydbäck.”
Her world stopped. Ask…Rydbäck. She knew those names. Rydbäck slaughtered. And Anders Ask, who worked for Gunilla and later committed suicide…
“And?” she asked.
“It was Rydbäck you found cut up in pieces at Trasten, wasn’t it?”
“Yes, that’s right.” Antonia tried to sound indifferent.
“That’s not really a coincidence, but I just thought you should know. That’s mainly why I called. An interesting quirk of fate, perhaps. After all, he and Conny were in the same gang.”
“What did Anders Ask say to you when he called, why was he asking about Rydbäck?”
“He didn’t specifically ask about Rydbäck. He asked about someone else in the same gang, someone we’d been trying to pin down a few years before. A man named Håkan Zivkovic.”
The Other Son Page 7