Never Fuck Up: A Novel

by Jens Lapidus

  Mahmud thought about the Arlanda hit, and Jibril.

  “You can buy recipes for CIT knocks in Södertälje,” Robert said. “I know people.”

  “Yeah, but then they gonna skim off the top again. Fuck, man, we gotta be on our own. Mahmud, don’t you know some Yugo who could teach us?”

  Mahmud almost got pissed.

  “You playin’? Those aren’t my people.”

  “But maybe they know this shit. They’re warriors. Seems like most of ’em were down in Yugoslavia ten years ago.”

  Robert kept sucking on the blunt. “I’ll tell you something—never trust the Yugos. They don’t got a proper hierarchy, not like the Hells Angels, the OG, or the Brotherhood. No rules. They’re not working for the next generation. Every Yugo’s just thinking about his own skin and don’t build nada for no one else. You know why they done so well in Sweden? ’Cause they were here first and ’cause they get a fuckload of support from their country down there. They’ve fucking owned this town for twenty years now, kept restocking with Serbian gats from their war, new soldiers who’ve been primed to come up here for work. But know what I think? They gonna disappear. They a clan, not an organization. They don’t got a chance against the HA and the others. The Yugos’ time is over. One more thing. They’re getting all Sven and shit. You feel me?”

  Mahmud was shook—the Yugos’ time was over? Had he bet on the wrong fighter? He didn’t even want to think about what Rob’d just said. He had to get cash.

  They kept buzzing.

  After a while, they hatched a tight idea—they should crash a party nearby that Babak knew about. Babak sold E to the guy having the bash, Simon. So it was his time to cash in on some of Simon’s debt tonight: sweet Sven with a severe smiley habit. It was the kid’s birthday. And Babak wasn’t invited. That alone was a reason to show the boy who was boss.

  The mood heightened. After a few minutes, it got even better—Robert surprised them with a bonus for the night: Rohypnol.

  Three pills and two beers. Unbeatable combination: Benzo-buzz. Aggro-energy.

  Mahmud felt it clearly: his blood was pumping better than the others’—he could do whatever he wanted.

  They rolled to Simon’s birthday party.

  It was cold out. They parked Robert’s car. Mahmud, Babak, and Robert waited outside the kid’s building. Babak’d called. Asked to come up and say happy birthday. Simon’d been reluctant. Worlds colliding—he didn’t want his low life to mix with his high life. The whole thing was simple: Babak wasn’t invited. Babak wasn’t happy. Simon knew that Babak wasn’t invited. Ergo: Simon knew that Babak wasn’t happy. Simon’d managed to have Babak agree to meet outside. Pleaded, “It’s my birthday, can’t you cut me some slack today?”

  The guy came out of the building. Stood waiting outside by the road. A pale bean pole with hair dyed black. Another guy, maybe Simon’s friend, remained standing in the entranceway. Hard to see, the streetlight was reflecting in the glass section of the door.

  Babak: high as a Dubai skyscraper. Looked at Simon.

  “Happy birthday. You got my cash or what?”

  Mahmud remained in the background. Eyed Babak’s forehead. He was breaking out. His forehead gleamed. Typical side effect of muscle pills.

  “Babak, I’m not supposed to pay you until next Sunday. And there’s no chance in hell I can get it for today, anyway. Forget about it. You’ve already pocketed half of what I made last month.”

  Simon knew the rules. He had to be punished now. But the thing about tonight: he would’ve been punished either way.

  A shove. Simon stumbled back a couple of steps. Babak was steaming. Robert was steaming. Mahmud felt so happy—back on the street, a chance to score. He wanted in. Wanted to feel the kick. Took a step forward.

  “You fucking cunt. What are you, slow? Hand over the cash.”

  The friend stuck his head out through the front door. From a distance, he looked tired, dark circles under his eyes. He yelled, “What the hell are you doing?”

  Babak took a solid grip on Simon’s arm.

  “Tell your nasty little buddy over there to shut up. You say you don’t got cash, but someone’s gotta pay, right? You bought four bottles from me, but you only paid for two. Who you think’s gonna cover the other two, huh? You promised you’d fix it. You want me to spend my own money, huh?”

  “But I promised I’d get it.”

  “Forget that. We’re gonna go up to your little fag fest and you’re gonna get the dough now.”

  There were fourteen people in the apartment, a large studio with a spacious kitchen. The boys were playing FIFA on a PS3. Ill graphics.

  Babak went straight into the kitchen. Dragged Simon along. Mahmud sat down in front of a computer, scrolled through the MP3s. Fucking pussy music. Didn’t they have any black beats?

  Robert leaned against the wall. Arms crossed. Both he and Mahmud knew something was gonna pop. Knew they were perceived as gorillas. Waited for Babak’s signal.

  Obvious: Robert was bugging out. Mahmud could feel the brass knuckles in his pocket. Babak was out in the kitchen with Simon, could feel the vibes, was probably tweaking.

  The party seemed more like a dull night in than a birthday bash.

  Aside from Babak and Simon, there were some chicks in the kitchen. When Babak walked in, the bitches went into the living room.

  One of the chicks put her hands on her hips. Said, “You have to stop playing. It’s so boring when you just sit there.”

  No real response. The soccer playing continued.

  Obvious tension in the room.

  Babak came into the living room. The number one blatte. No sign of Simon. Mahmud dug the situation. Babak nodded. Finally time to rumble. Babak took a step forward. Mahmud positioned himself in front of the couch, broad stance. The gamers looked up.

  Babak, with a thicker accent than usual: “Turn off the fucking PlayStation. This is a robbery.”

  Real R2-aggression, no boundaries. Mahmud slipped on the brass knuckles. “And don’t whine, you’ll regret it.” He slid his hand over his throat. Robert, next to him: backed up with a butterfly.

  “Empty your pockets. Cash, phones, subway passes, whatever you got. You know what we want. Put the shit on the table.”

  The guys looked like they were gonna shit themselves. Mahmud thought the girls’ faces grew as white as cocaine, despite the layer of self-tanner. They pulled out their cell phones reluctantly. A couple of them fished out subway passes and wallets.

  Mahmud did the collecting. Emptied cash out of wallets. Left the plastic. Gathered the subway passes and cell phones. Hauled stuff over to Babak and Robert. They shoved it all into their jacket pockets.

  So easy. The Svens just handed it over.

  One of the girls looked totally gone. Like someone’d slipped a Valium in her beer. Mahmud shoved her.

  “Ey, yo. Give us your stuff.”

  She hardly reacted. Handed over her subway pass. Nothing else.

  Time to split.

  Robert was riled up. Wanted to fight. Started roaring. Waving the knife around. Aimed a kick at one of the guys in front of the TV. Mahmud dragged him out. Babak slammed the door shut.

  They ran down the stairs.

  The high was still thick. He felt so fucking angry.

  Could easily’ve beaten the shit out of anybody.

  Yelled in the stairwell.

  Almost forgot all the stress and anxiety over his problems: the Gürhan fucker, Erika at the parole office, Dad’s whining.

  Down on the street.

  Into Robert’s car.

  Tried to calm down.

  One final roar. They rolled the window down, hollered, “Alby forever!”

  The effect of the Rohypnol was dropping off. Soon back to reality.

  They counted the money in the car: 4,800 kronor. Twelve subway passes. Could be flipped for 200 kronor a pass. Sweet phones. Twenty DVDs from Simon’s bookshelf. And, yup: the PS3 game. Nice haul. Mahmud tried to do the math in his
head. Hoped the boys would lend him more. Maybe it’d be enough.

  Babak and Robert: angel homies—let Mahmud keep the whole enchilada on credit.

  Now he had one day to flip the subway passes, the phones, the movies, and the game.

  He hoped it would be enough.

  17

  Niklas and Benjamin ordered a second round of beers. Type: Norrlands, bottles. The Swedish smoking ban was sweet. But Benjamin was complaining. “Honestly, before all you had to do was treat the ladies to a smoke, get a free reason to start chatting.”

  His T-shirt today was black with Outlaws written in white letters across the front, plus the image of a motorcycle. Niklas thought either his old buddy was acting like a bad boy, or he actually was one.

  The bar was situated in Fridhemsplan. According to Benjamin: Fridhemsplan was sweet dank-dive paradise. And this bar, Friden, was apparently the mother of all dank-dives. They laughed.

  Niklas liked the place. It wasn’t his first time there, but his first in eight years. Exemplary pricing: the beer hardly cost more than when he’d left Sweden. Cute waitresses. Comfy couches, loud volume, cheap grub. Wood paneling along the walls. A number of banners with different soccer-team emblems were hung up above the paneling. Beer ads and glitter that looked like Christmas decorations. Their beers arrived in warm glasses straight from the dishwasher. The peanuts were served in bowls that resembled ashtrays. Mixed crowd: mostly AIK soccer fans and drunks, but a bunch of younger types, too. He dug the atmosphere.

  Benjamin went to the bathroom. Niklas studied his right hand. There was some swelling over the middle knuckle. He remembered: three fast punches. Good technique: 80 percent of the punch’d been absorbed by the knuckles on his pointer and index fingers. Broken at least one of the asshole’s ribs. Rightly so.

  Benjamin returned. Tried to pinch one of the waitresses in the butt before he sat down in the booth with Niklas. She didn’t even react. A relief. Niklas didn’t want any trouble.

  Benjamin smiled. “It’s damn strange. The stench in the bathrooms in this place is exactly the same as the stench in the bathrooms in the ER at Mariapol, remember? That nasty place we got sent when we were smashed as kids?”

  “When was the last time you were in the ER there? That’s gotta be ten years ago.”

  “Sure, but I promise you, that stench gets stuck in your nostrils like a fucking piercing.”

  “Good thing we’re near the entrance, then, so you can get some fresh air.”

  They laughed. Benjamin was okay, after all. Maybe Niklas would get used to living in Sweden.

  Two beers later. Niklas was starting to get buzzed. Benjamin claimed that he needed at least eight brewskies for it to even show up in a cop’s Breathalyzer. Niklas said he talked more bullshit than a merchant in the souk. They laughed again. It felt good to laugh together.

  The entire time, in the back of Niklas’s head: he’d made the world a better place the other day. A safer place for innocent women.

  They kept talking. Benjamin went on about the shooting club, about some chick he was going on a date with later that night, about some business he had up his sleeve. Sometimes he asked Niklas a lot of questions. About how often he’d been under fire in Iraq, how you reload in the dark, if you could grease a gun with olive oil, when you used dumdum ammunition. The theater of war, like make-believe. But overall, Benjamin was a know-it-all—thought he knew everything about weapons he couldn’t even spell the names of. Niklas told him stories from Iraq. He left out details like names, but he could feel how much he loved to describe life in the sandbox. In actuality, though: no one who didn’t have operational experience of combat in war could ever really know what it was about. You couldn’t read your way to stuff like that or watch movies or play video games to understand it.

  Something was happening by the entrance to the bar. They looked over. A fifty-year-old guy was engaged in a loud discussion with a bouncer in charge of the coat check.

  The guy was holding a liquor-store bag in each hand. Apparently wanted to check them and still be allowed to bring a bottle inside. Niklas and Benjamin looked at each other again. Laughed. But it was a fake laugh. The man reminded Niklas of darker times.

  Two large men sat down next to them. Ordered a beer each. Benjamin eyed one of them. Leaned over. Spoke to Niklas in a low voice, “Check out his jacket. Looks like he’s in the same shooting club as me. Cool.” Niklas wasn’t as impressed.

  Benjamin started to ask him questions again. Niklas thought he was raising his voice. Did he want the men at the table next to them to hear? He couldn’t care less. Started telling his story.

  “You know, we were lugging around so much equipment that we sounded like a wandering junkyard when we left base camp. Battle rattle, that’s what we call it. Call radio, flak jackets, night-vision equipment, at least twenty magazines apiece, grenades, med kits, helmets, sleeping bags and tents in case we weren’t coming back that night, food boxes, maps, everything. We thought it’d take three hours there and three hours home, same route. The only good thing about dragging all that junk around was that the beer would be six hours colder when we got back.”

  Benjamin laughed out loud.

  Niklas continued, “In and out, none of our boys were gonna get hurt. That’s the rhythm of missions like that. The Red Crescent or Amnesty International can tally the points when we’re done. Honestly, we’re not the ones turning those villages into targets. They turn themselves into targets. Give food and shelter to suicide bombers and the suicide bombers’ brains. They only have themselves to blame. No matter what happens, no way we could kill more people than they did with their car bombs all over Bahgdad.”

  Even though Niklas was speaking loudly, Benjamin wasn’t really listening. His eyes danced. Kept glancing at the man wearing the shooting club’s emblem at the table next to them. Finally, Niklas stopped himself.

  “If there’s something you want to say to that guy, just say it.”

  Benjamin nodded. Turned to the guy at the table next to them.

  “Hey, I just gotta ask. Are you active in the Järfälla Gun Club?”

  The man turned his head slowly. Like he was thinking, Are you stupid, or what? Interrupting me in the middle of a conversation? He eyed Benjamin.

  But what came out wasn’t aggressive.

  “Yes, I’ve been a member for over twelve years. Are you interested in joining?”

  “I’m already a member. Joined a few months back. But I gotta say, it’s awesome. How often do you shoot?”

  Niklas eyed the man. He actually looked interested in the conversation. The guy had short blond hair. Close to forty. A striped shirt unbuttoned at the neck and blue jeans. Maybe it was the focus in his eyes, maybe it was the fact that he looked so put together but still hung out at Friden. The man had to be a cop.

  They chatted. The guy told them about the shooting club. About the number of members. About what guns he owned. Benjamin absorbed it all like a sponge. The shooting club guy’s colleague joined in. Told them about his firearms. Turned out, they were both cops. Right every time—Niklas’s eye for people never failed him.

  An hour later. More gun talk than he’d ever experienced among the boys in the barracks down there. The two cops were nice. The bar was nice. The conversation was decent.

  Benjamin got up. He had to go meet his date. Was apparently already late. Shook hands with the cops. Niklas and he decided that they’d be in touch later that week. Was Niklas making a friend?

  One of the policemen, the one who wasn’t a member of the shooting club, also got up. Had to go home to his family. Niklas and the cop who remained seated looked at each other. Really, it was weird to stay with someone you didn’t know—but what the hell, why not?

  They ordered another round. Kept talking guns. Niklas was getting drunk.

  The cop ordered Salisbury steak with pepper sauce. “A classic,” as he called it. “This place has really great, classic grub. Might be hard to believe, but.”

  Nikl
as ordered more peanuts.

  When the gun talk ran dry after fifteen minutes or so, the policeman asked him, “So, what do you do?”

  “I’m looking for employment.”

  Niklas’d learned that that’s how you said it. Not “unemployed”—that was not a dynamic state of being. Instead you should be on your way, in motion, on the hunt—for a job. Bullshit. He was unemployed. And he was fine with that for now, but the money would run out at some point.

  “Okay. So what kind of job do you want?”

  “I could imagine doing some sort of security guard job. Maybe in the subway. But not just sitting still somewhere guarding a building. That’s too dull.”

  “That’s good. We need more good security guards. And people who have the guts to roll their sleeves up, if you catch my drift.”

  Niklas wasn’t completely sure he understood. The cop sounded bitter somehow.

  “Yeah, sure. I’d roll my sleeves up. I’ve worked hard in my day.”

  They looked at each other.

  “What kind of work’ve you done?” the cop asked.

  “I’ve been in the armed forces. I can’t really talk about it.”

  “That’s understandable. We need people like you. Do you understand what I mean? Someone’s got to clean up the trash. The security guards are often too sissy. Not to mention the police. They’ve started to recruit such whiny pussies that it makes you wonder if ordinary men are supposed to be in the minority.”

  “You’re right. The police need more authority.”

  “Addicts, pedophiles, men who beat up their women. People don’t care as long as it doesn’t affect them. But we’re not allowed to get rough, ’cause then everyone gives us a lot of grief. I’m going to tell you something. You really want to listen to a bitter old cop?”

  “Absolutely.” It was interesting. No one could agree more that the cops should be harder on men who abused women.

  The cop really got into it.

  “I take my job seriously. I really try to stop the rabble that’s taking over this city. So, the other day, they sent me on the beat with a little girl. Fresh out of the Police Academy, no experience at all. Thin, delicate chick. I don’t understand how they recruit these days. Anyway, we got sent to a twenty-four-hour bodega where some drunk’d seen red and started picking a fight with the staff. The problem was, I recognized the guy. He’s an old boxer, strong as hell. Aggressive like a teenager. But my colleague, she was too green, didn’t get what was going on. It got ugly. The boxer-boozer attacked her. She couldn’t stand up to him. It got even uglier. He attacked me too. And when we were trying to bring him down, and it wasn’t easy, let me tell you, it got uglier still. The old guy was mad as hell, strong as a bull, swinging punches like fucking Muhammad Ali. Look at my nose.”