Never Fuck Up: A Novel

by Jens Lapidus

  Mahmud climbed into his Benz. Followed Dejan’s car. First the high-rises. Then a couple of single-family homes. Then industrial buildings. A bunch of nature. The road was winding. Away from the concrete. After ten minutes: a sign. THE VIEW, CAMPGROUND—TRAILER AND RV.

  Set up in the November rain: twenty-odd trailers. Five run-down cars. A sea of mud. Sparse trees all around. Electrical wires led to the trailers from poles.

  Dejan parked his car. Mahmud pulled in behind him. What a nasty fucking trailer park.

  Dejan walked up to one of the campers. The white paint was gray. A faded sticker on one of the windows said: Go Gästrikland!

  They walked in. The smell of smoke hit Mahmud in the face like an uppercut. Low radio music. First, he didn’t see the girls. It was like they were a part of the furnishings. Gray, beige, brown. Boxes of food, pizza cartons, Coke bottles on the kitchen counter. They were sitting at the doll-sized table. Dark brown hair. Chopstick skinny. One was very pale. Thin lips. Sorrowful eyes. The other: rosier cheeks, but even darker eyes. In front of them on the table: packs of counterfeit Marlboros. The feeling: grody. Dejan said something in Russian or a similar language. The girls seemed disinterested. Didn’t even look up.

  Dejan explained in his crap Swedish: “This, Natascha and Juliana. Maybe not juiciest meat we got, but okay.” He grinned. “Here, we got real tasty ones. Promise.”

  Mahmud didn’t know what to say.

  “Now you know who they are. That’s enough,” Dejan said.

  They stepped out. Dejan brought him to seven more campers. Two whores in each. The same bored attitude. The same smoke-saturated rooms. The same empty stares.

  On the way back to the car, Mahmud asked, “So, what do you want me to do?”

  Dejan stopped. Threw his arms open.

  “This our stockpile, yes? You keep track a little of stockpile. Make sure nothing get lost, transport sometime. If client here—not allowed to hurt stockpile. Days, only. When you not do your other business.”

  Mahmud got it: they saw him as some kind of fucking poon-nanny. Man, if his dad found out.

  That night, he took care of his usual business. Slung more than sixty grams to a contact who represented an Iraqi family that owned restaurants.

  Jamila called around ten o’clock. Wanted help installing a new DVD player. Shit, she was living it up on the bills he slipped her when his business boomed. Just these past few weeks, she’d bought a Gucci bag with a bamboo handle for eight thousand, high-heeled shoes for three G’s, and a silver necklace with fat letters on it: Dior. Crazy, but Mahmud couldn’t help but love the glitter in her eyes when she came home with the stuff. He was gonna keep outfitting her and his little sis. The real deal.

  He fiddled with the DVD player. Was planning on hitting the town later. Had arranged to meet up with Robert. Piranhasize Stockholm. Maybe that Gabrielle chick would be out tonight. If not, he was gonna find someone else.

  Jamila told him about the latest Louis Vuitton bag, the latest Britney gossip, and her plans for the future: start her own tanning salon. Mahmud thought, Don’t let the Yugos fuck it up for her. She told him about nasty texts she’d gotten from her ex.

  “He doesn’t dare do shit,” Mahmud said. “That loser.”

  Jamila sighed. “I don’t know, Mahmud. He’s crazy. And that Niklas guy moved away, too. He was so sweet.”

  “Yeah, he was tight. Where’d he move?”

  “Not far.” He’d given her the address.

  “Okay, he like you, or what? You know what Dad would say about him.”

  “He doesn’t feel like that kind of guy. I think he just wants to help me. Honestly, you know?”

  “Maybe.”

  Mahmud had a thought. Niklas seemed like a good Sven. What’s more: like a real commando, special-ops style. Maybe he should get to know him better. And another thing: the soldier guy could keep an eye on Jamila now and then.

  Jamila dug the idea. And she was the one who usually screamed and sulked as soon as Dad said she needed to be controlled more. Mahmud grinned at her. “Come on, sis, you’re a little sweet for that Sven. Admit it.”

  They decided to pay him a visit. Niklas didn’t live far away.

  They rang the doorbell.

  Niklas opened the door. In his face: both surprise and joy. He began to speak with Jamila in his half-assed Arabic. Mahmud eyed the guy properly for the first time. Dressed in a T-shirt with DynCorp written on it; it was tight over his pecs and biceps. The guy looked built. Not like Mahmud—built like a safe—but tougher, more sinewy, endurance muscles. He wondered what DynCorp was. The guy looked sweaty. Maybe he was working out at home. Mahmud tried to catch a glimpse of the apartment. Saw a computer, a bed, lots of paperwork, tools, junk. Saw something else too, on the table: a long, shiny knife. Shit, Niklas seemed a little psycho.

  They left a short while later. It’d been nice, anyway. Jamila was glowing. Mahmud laughed again.

  “Cut that out. You know what Dad would think.”

  Jamila turned to him. Her eyes: serious.

  “Don’t talk about what Abu would say to me. If he even knew a tenth of all you do, he’d die.”

  Mahmud stopped. “What’re you talking about?”

  “You know what I mean. He’d die of shame.”

  It hurt. Like a knife being twisting into his gut.

  Die.

  Of shame.

  He knew how right she was.

  His entire body was screaming at him. Get away from them. Step off before it’s too late.

  Break up with the Yugos.

  44

  Niklas got out of bed. More tired than usual. Four hours of sleep. His cameras kept rolling at night. The footage he’d speed-scrolled through didn’t show anything interesting. But it would come. He wanted proof. Righteousness was his thing. Strömberg, Jonsson, Ngono—he already knew enough about them. Niklas was a man of honor: if one of them didn’t show himself to be that kind of man, he wouldn’t attack. It wasn’t about morals, it was about action.

  After breakfast, he strapped the heart-rate monitor on. Got dressed: underwear, workout clothes.

  The air was colder now. The asphalt was wet. He jogged at a calm pace. The air was cool to breathe. It felt so good.

  Home again: He practiced katas with the knife. Felt in better shape than in a long time. The sweeps through the air. The knife’s arch-shaped movements staked out a blocking area in the room. Smooth stabs. Nimble jabs. The knife had to follow the will of the hand’s muscles as if it were a sixth finger.

  He showered longer than usual. Yesterday, he’d seen Jamila’s brother, Mahmud, again. Not the kind of person he would’ve gotten to know ten years ago. Even less the kind of person he would’ve met down there. The question at hand: Was he a person he ought to know now? Maybe Mahmud could help him with the fight? Niklas knew the dude didn’t share his beliefs, but the guy had drive. Something in his eyes. Not the vermin’s sparking spitefulness. Something else.

  Above all, the Arab seemed as hot for cash as Niklas was. Niklas couldn’t care less what Mahmud wanted to do with his money. Money was a means to an end. But maybe, maybe the Arab could be something else for him? Benjamin was a traitor. The anarchist-feminist activists weren’t willing to participate in the Operation. Mom was out of the match. The Arab might prove to be a puzzle piece in the war.

  After the shower, he ate again. His financial situation was starting to reach crisis level. He didn’t have the energy to think about that right now. He didn’t know what to do.

  He climbed into the Ford. Missed the Audi, somehow. He needed to think.

  He drove slowly. Tried to figure out where he wanted to go.

  Thought about his money situation again.

  He drove out of the city via Nortull. Kept thinking about Mahmud. How could he use the Arab? The Biskops-Arnö people’d just talked and talked. The only people they influenced were one another—the rest of society didn’t give a damn about them. Then he thought about Mom again. Why could
n’t they talk anymore? Why couldn’t she just accept? Everything he did, he did for her.

  Niklas looked around. It was strange. He was in Edsviken, Sollentuna. Where Nina Glavmo-Svensén lived. The woman who’d sold him the Audi. He drove toward her street. Pictured her green eyes. The baby on her arm. Her crooked smile.

  He reached the area. Vikingavägen ran like an artery through adjoining plots of land. The small streets were like detours leading into the inner realms of an idyllic world.

  There, a hundred feet farther up, was the house where she lived. Number twenty-one. The yellow wood siding didn’t look as shiny in the drizzle as it had during the summer, when he’d been there last. The trees were barren. He thought about what things must be like for her. A man who denied her the right to a life. She needed Niklas. That much was clear. Crystal clear.

  The car rolled slowly down the street. He leaned his head back. Tried to look in through the windows, see if there was a light on in there. Fifty feet from the house. He saw that the garage doors were closed. The autumn sky was the color of chromed steel. Nina lived somewhere in there, in the warmth.

  He could feel it: she was home. He drove past the house. Slowly. Peered. Stretched to try to see in. Saw a movement further in, inside a room. She was there.

  Niklas turned right. Up a hill. His palms were sweaty. The wheel was sticky. Right again. Down. Back on the street. His heart was pounding. Number eleven. Da-dum. Number fifteen. Da-dum. Soon, number twenty-one again.

  He wanted to ring her doorbell so badly. See her. Touch her. And she probably wanted to see him.

  He stopped the car outside the house. Too bad it wasn’t the Audi anymore. That would’ve made Nina happy.

  So happy.

  45

  Jasmine showed up late to the club. Thomas saw it right away. Thought: There’s something different about her tonight. She was wearing a baseball cap pulled down low over her eyes, a baggy hoodie, a knee-length skirt over tight jeans. Tanning-salon bronzed like a mulatto after two weeks on la playa. What was it that didn’t tally? He looked again. She wanted to hide something. Her choice of dress was speaking loud and clear: the hoodie, the skirt. The tan, the baseball cap.

  Then he saw: the lips. They were pouting like on someone goofing off. Then he saw more: the breasts. Also pouting a stupid amount—either she’d stuffed two handballs under her sweater or, more likely, she’d filled up with at least two pounds of implants in each tit.

  Thomas grinned. “You look—how should I put this? Thriving.”

  At first, Jasmine was dead serious. Acted like she didn’t understand. After three seconds: she grinned back at him. “Whaddya think?”

  Thomas gave a thumbs-up. “Sure. But the lips? Are they gonna settle a little, or what?”

  Jasmine laughed. “I think so. I’m switching fields, so I need this.”

  “Chapstick model, or what?”

  “Ha-ha, real funny. I’m gonna make a career.”

  “Oh yeah? Are you gonna tell me what you’re gonna do, or do I have to guess?”

  “Erotica.”

  Thomas was silent for a second too long. Jasmine noticed his reaction.

  “What? You got a problem with that?”

  He didn’t want to argue. To bare your body in front of people and run the register now and then at a well-guarded strip joint maybe wasn’t the best gig in the world, but still—it paid good money. And he was there to keep track of the rabble-rousers. But porn felt dirtier somehow. He couldn’t explain why. He liked porn. But he also liked Jasmine—they laughed a lot. Not just at the same jokes, but together at the same jokes. As if they understood each other. He didn’t want her ending up in trouble.

  “The producer paid for the implants and everything. It’s totally free. Can you believe it? You know what this kind of thing costs?”

  “I have no idea. But is it really the right thing for you?”

  “Of course.” Jasmine went on to describe how good the erotica business was going to be for her. Told him about her plans, different career paths, routes to fame.

  “Erotica is, like, much better than stripping. There’s no money in stripping in Sweden. And, you know, the strippers are bitches with a nasty attitude. But everyone says it’s the opposite in the film industry. That it’s like one big, happy family, you know?”

  Thomas shut her out. It hurt to listen. He’d watched too much porn to care to imagine Jasmine in the scenes he usually jerked off to.

  Later that night, Ratko showed up. Laughed at Jasmine too. “I think things’re gonna go well for you, honey,” he said, like he was her dad or something. What bullshit.

  Ratko sat down next to Thomas. Put his arm around his shoulders. Jasmine was inside, doing a show. One of her last.

  “What do you think about Jasmine’s plans?”

  Thomas looked around the room. Wondered what Ratko was trying to get at. Was it a provocation? He didn’t care either way—he always spoke his mind.

  “I think it sounds like shit. That’s a dirty business.”

  “So, you think this is a lot better, then?”

  “We keep order here.”

  At first, Ratko didn’t answer. Thomas turned to him. “Was there something you wanted?”

  A crooked smile on Ratko’s lips. “You do a good job, Thomas. We think you’re performing. Just so you know.”

  Ratko got up. Walked into the show area.

  Thomas didn’t bother trying to interpret what the Yugo’d just said.

  When the right moment came along, he was going to ask about Sven Bolinder, the so-called financier, the one Leif Carlsson’d babbled about.

  He woke up around eleven o’clock. Åsa’d gone to work without waking him up, as usual.

  In the bathroom. He let the shaving cream soak in for an extra long time. Shaved meticulously: short strokes with a fresh razor. He looked at himself in the mirror. Tried to really see himself, not just his reflection. Who was he? What did he want?

  He knew what he wanted: to track down Rantzell’s killer and bring home his adopted child. It felt like a good balance. One project to solve outside the home. One to solve at home. But who was he? During the day, he was an upright citizen. At night, he belonged to the underworld. Just like the enemy. Maybe he was the enemy?

  He thought about Leif Carlsson’s muddled answers. Then he thought about Christer Pettersson, who’d almost been convicted for the Palme murder. It wasn’t a question of if there were any connections. It was a question of how strong the connections were. Too bad he couldn’t ask Pettersson himself. The guy’d bit the dust a couple of years ago in what seemed like a natural enough cerebral hemorrhage.

  Thomas’d mixed what everyone in Sweden who was over thirty years old knew about the murder with his more specialized knowledge from the police force. And then he’d done some research too, lately.

  A picture was emerging. Of one of Sweden’s most wanted men: Christer P. The biggest murder investigation ever, a national trauma: the unsolved murder of a prime minister. An unhealed wound in the Swedish consciousness. An unpleasant, stinging mystery for anyone who came from the same background as Thomas—regular Swedish middle-class people who still knew where they had their roots. Whom they had to thank for being where they were today.

  Olof Palme’d been shot in the open, on a public street, more than twenty years ago. Thomas wasn’t as politically interested as his dad’d been, but according to him: Palme—Sweden’s biggest ever politician internationally. A man of honor, a friend to regular Swedes. Executed with a clean shot to the back. It was a good shot, he had to admit.

  Three years later, the District Court convicted Christer Pettersson of the murder and sentenced him to life in prison. The guy was identified by Olof Palme’s wife, Lisbet Palme, during a lineup arranged by the investigators. What’s more, there were apparently witnesses who placed him at the scene of the crime and who said he had the same limp the perpetrator apparently had. Pettersson: an aggressive deadbeat alcoholic. Maybe the perfect scap
egoat. But this was the murder of a prime minister. You couldn’t just make a conviction based on circumstantial evidence and shady claims—the Court of Appeals freed Pettersson. There was not proof beyond a reasonable doubt, that was the claim.

  Claes Rantzell, previously Claes Cederholm, showed up as one of the key witnesses in the federal prosecutor’s appeal to the Supreme Court a few years later. The state really wanted to get Pettersson convicted.

  Claes Rantzell: drug dealer, front man, finally run down on booze and pills himself. In the fall of 1985, a few months before the murder, he said he’d lent Pettersson a Magnum revolver, make: Smith & Wesson, .357 caliber. Rantzell said he never got the revolver back. What’s more, Pettersson’d been over at Rantzell’s house on the night of the murder. Rantzell was the witness who’d been interrogated the most during the entire preliminary investigation, but his memories seemed to vary—Magnum delivery boy, ammunition Santa, canary. A perfect witness to identify Pettersson.

  But the Supreme Court didn’t hear the case. The appeal collapsed. There was no new trial for Pettersson. No conviction for the legend from Sollentuna that time either. But in most people’s eyes, he was still guilty. Lisbet Palme’s poorly handled ID, along with Claes Rantzell’s claims about the Magnum revolver, sank him. The logic of the Swedish people was simple: Lisbeth somehow recognized Pettersson, he’d been near the scene of the crime, and he’d had access to a revolver of the same make as the murder weapon. On top of that: he was an aggressive, down-and-out drunk—that made it all easier, somehow.

  And now Rantzell’d been killed. It might not to be so strange—men like Claes Rantzell died of cirrhosis or other diseases that took out people with crappy lifestyles. Or through violence.

  But in this case: someone was trying to cover up the tracks in a much too sophisticated way.

  This thing was ten times bigger than he’d thought before he knew who Rantzell was.