by Jens Lapidus
The new Stockholm. The city that at least used to try. Now: sold out. Tired walls and graffitied stations. Those who could afford to used the app-based taxi companies. Even in the outer suburbs, house prices were going stratospheric—but in order to mortgage your life, you first had to be accepted by the bank—and the few tenancies still going were traded on the black market by criminal networks who wouldn’t hesitate for a millisecond before fucking up anyone who talked back. EU migrants lined the streets, but no one talked about how people averted their eyes. Romanian and Nigerian whores sold their services in mini brothels—things that had always taken place on the street in the past had now moved behind the closed doors of the city’s apartments and villas. Designer drugs ordered online were delivered faster than takeout from Lina’s. And at the same time, certain people: those who carried society on their backs—they did what they wanted beneath the surface. Predators.
He got on a tram. Saltsjö line. Thought about Kum’s words.
The new Stockholm: where the divisions were so clear, it was like someone had scratched them onto a map of the city with a needle.
And now he himself had more money than ever. Not that he wanted to use it for anything other than getting his father and sister out, helping Nikola.
Twenty minutes later, he walked up to Drevinge farm. Loke had helped him narrow down where Lillan might be.
The horses in the pastures looked happy. Kids everywhere: exclusively girls, from small children to teenagers. In the distance, he could see more of them, sitting straight backed in the saddle.
He walked into the stalls. Same thing there. Horses, all different colors and sizes, standing in their boxes, or whatever those small stalls were called. Girls of all ages mucking them out, pulling on leather straps, carrying hay bales.
Lillan looked just like her brother. Like Mats. Teddy recognized her immediately. Sixteen years old.
She was busy with a horse in one of the boxes. She had a brush in one hand. Dressing it, maybe.
He went over. Tried to make eye contact.
Stockholm County Police Authority
Interview with informant “Marina,” 20 December 2010
Leader: Joakim Sundén
Location: Högdalen Centrum
MEMORANDUM 6 (PART 1)
Transcript of dialogue
JS: Do you think we’ll finish up today?
M: I’ve only gone through a year and a half so far, so there are about four years left—from 2007 on.
JS: Probably not, then?
M: I can try to just give more of a rough outline.
JS: Okay, good. How did it feel to talk about the kidnapping yesterday?
M: There are some things you never forget, no matter how much you want to.
JS: I know. Well, let’s continue from where we left off. What happened after the kidnapping?
M: Everything went dark. They talked about PTSD—post-traumatic stress disorder. I kept having flashbacks from the torture. And not just when I was having nightmares—the smallest thing could set off a powerful reaction. If I saw a table that was the same color as the box, for example, I’d panic. If I smelled the chewing gum they’d chewed, I’d break down and have horrible cramps. They talked about emotional isolation, a lack of interest in normal activities. I was even admitted to the hospital for four days. They gave me Zoloft. They said I was suicidal. After a few weeks, they decided I had post-traumatic depression.
And then on top of that, there were the police interviews and the trial, and I had to go through it all again. It was really awful.
JS: Were you working?
M: Not during the first four months. Then I went back to my old job. I started feeling better. It just took a while. I started phasing out the anti-anxiety pills, too. My nails grew back, though they were all uneven. The police had given me alarms and security routines, but I knew they wouldn’t come back as long as I kept my mouth shut. They’d gotten what they wanted.
JS: What about Cecilia? What did she say?
M: Not a lot. I mean, she felt sorry for me, of course, but we never talked everything through properly. She probably just wanted to forget it, too.
JS: And Sebbe?
M: Yeah, Sebbe. He called me quite soon after I got back home, but I didn’t want to talk to him. Then he just turned up at our house one day, a few weeks after the kidnapping. I was at home in bed, half-high on painkillers and anti-anxiety pills, when he rang the bell. Cecilia was at work, and the kids were at school and nursery. I crawled out of bed and pulled on a dressing gown.
“There’s nothing for you here,” I hissed through the door.
The police had sealed up the mail slot after everything that’d happened.
“Mats, listen to me. Let me in. I want to talk.”
“I don’t want to talk to you.” My fingers were on the alarm button they’d installed.
“Okay, I get that, but listen: I’m not the one who ordered that shit. I swear on my mother’s grave. I was pissed off with you ’cause you stole my money, and you know what happened then, not that we ever planned on you being home. But this thing…I swear…what they did was really shitty….I just wanted to say that.”
I think my voice cracked when I replied. Maybe he heard it through the door. But the thing was, I knew he was telling the truth. He had nothing to do with it. He hadn’t kidnapped me.
“Get out of here, Sebbe,” I said anyway. “And don’t come back.”
Eventually life started getting back to some kind of normal routine again, even though I wasn’t working full-time. But things felt harder, everything seemed to take much longer. After I got the kids ready in the morning, I’d have to lie down in bed for a whole hour. Going shopping might give me a headache that lasted all afternoon. I wasn’t performing at work, either. Niklas understood, he said, but I could see he was disappointed. I needed to get my strength back.
I went down to the club a few times. It was the only place I felt calm. Boggan, Bosse, and the others didn’t ask me what happened. They just knew what they’d read in the papers. I hadn’t told them about the computer. Neither had Cecilia. As far as the police and the courts were concerned, it was about money. The logic was simple. Someone thought I had loads of money because I played poker, and I’d been kidnapped because they wanted it.
The months passed, and that spring, I was going to the club at least two nights a week.
One night, something happened. Bosse and Boguslaw were there. Boggan had started with ’gammon, too, but he’d switched to poker over the past few years. He was pretty overweight, so he laughed every time he saw me: I looked like a stick, and I’d been thin even before the kidnapping. Then there was Bosse—or Bosse with the Boa, that’s what he got called. The man with Stockholm’s biggest…(inaudible)…if you see what I mean, he used to talk about it constantly.
“Shit, you on some new diet, or did you just catch a bit of HIV? I heard vitamin C’s good, cures it all,” he said when he saw me. They wanted me to liven up a bit, tried the same kind of talk as before.
We sat down at the table, and the cards were dealt.
Boggan was keeping his cards close and Bosse was going on like usual. The younger guys around the table didn’t know whether to roll their eyes or laugh along with him.
“Honestly, though,” Boggan said after a while. “How’re you doing?”
“Head up, back on my feet,” I said.
“You really don’t look great, though. I know it must’ve been tough. You wanna talk about it?”
The younger guys’ eyes flitted between us. They didn’t know what Boggan was talking about.
“Nah, it’s okay,” I answered, and folded.
Bosse just grinned even wider. “It’s not okay. You need cheering up, my man.”
It was an odd discussion, but somewhere, deep down, I liked it. They were treating me like normal. Messing with me, trying to make me feel good. Eventually I said: “You’re probably right.”
“Okay, then,” Bosse roared. “On
ce I’ve won this pot, I think we should move on to the strip club on Roslagsgatan.”
“No, count me out.”
“Yeah, you. Come on, you need to feel good tonight.”
They kept going on about me tagging along. They just wanted the best for me. Once, about twenty years earlier, I’d gone to one of those places—this was before Cecilia was on the scene—but I’d found the whole thing embarrassing. The girls’ glittering eyes, the way they moved so close to my body, their artificial laughs. It all felt so dishonest, not that I had any plans to do anything with those women, but still. It was the atmosphere, the hierarchy, the crass falseness of it all, that’s what bothered me. But that night with Boggan and Bosse, I was exhausted. I was too tired to say no.
The sign above the door proclaimed that it was a gentleman’s club with Stockholm’s most glamorous ladies, but the entrance felt anything but luxurious. Black sheets of plywood and red fabric curtains framed the anteroom.
“One thing, boys: I don’t normally go places like this. It’s all for you, Mats. Girls like this get scared when they see me, if you know what I mean,” Bosse boasted.
Boggan and I knew exactly what he was hinting at, but the huge bouncer in the doorway, a guy in a thick Canada Goose jacket with an ACAB tattoo on his neck, didn’t seem to get it. He grunted. “The fuck you talking about? The girls are gonna be scared of you?”
Bosse acted like he always did. “Nothing for you to worry about, my friend.”
“You wanna come in here or not?”
Behind the ACAB bouncer, another man had turned up. He was even bigger than the first one, if that’s possible.
Bosse said: “I really, really want to come in. I was just joking about my one-eyed friend. The ladies get scared when I don’t give them advance warning.”
The other giant moved forward toward Bosse, grabbed his chin, and pushed him up against the wall.
“What’re you doing?” Bosse tried to protest.
The giant snapped: “Take your friends and get out of here.”
We should’ve just left then. Turned around and walked away. Those two men were full of aggression. It might’ve felt shameful and crappy, but we would’ve forgotten all about it by the next morning.
But for some reason, I stepped up to the giant. He still had ahold of Bosse. “Let him go.”
“Who’re you?”
“None of your fucking business. Just let him go.”
Sometimes, it feels like certain moments in life play out in slow motion. They must, otherwise it’d be impossible for so many thoughts to rush through your head in such a short space of time. A movement that takes no more than a second, but I’d had time to think about everything, from whether Bosse had been bluffing on that last hand to whether I was going to need stitches. I thought about how my life had turned out: there I was, arguing in the entrance to a strip club. That’s not what I’d planned back when I learned how the doubling cube worked in backgammon, in that crappy little café in Södermalm.
The punch wasn’t so hard. He hit me on the side of the head, but I fell over anyway. Probably because it was the first guy, the one with the tattoo on his neck, who’d hit me from behind.
Boggan launched himself at the ACAB guy, and Bosse started kicking the guy who was holding him.
I’d never been in a proper fight the whole of my adult life, despite all the stuff I’d been through, so when I was lying on the floor, trying to get up, I grabbed my phone. I was yelling like an idiot into it.
Then I looked up. The ACAB guy looked like he was about to kill Boggan. He’d pushed him against the counter and was slamming his head into it over and over again.
Bosse had managed to get away from the other giant, but he was going to start up again at any minute. I could see in his eyes how scared he was.
I rushed forward, started pounding the doorman’s back. Somehow, I managed to push back the panic that was welling up in me. Images of the way they’d thrown me into the back of the van rushing through my head. The inside of the box. The glowing eye of the cigarettes they’d stubbed out on my cheek.
“Just leave him alone,” I shouted.
Boggan’s face was bloody. His head was lolling back and forth.
We had to get out of there, we were like field mice in comparison to those beasts.
I tried to pull Bosse away, and we opened the door. Felt the cold autumn air hit us. But then I remembered Boggan. He was still inside.
I turned around, went back in. “Let him go.”
The ACAB guy snarled back at me: “You faggot. You’re just embarrassing yourselves.”
They knew no one called the police when they got abuse in a place like that.
So we stood there like that, fifteen feet between us, hissing back and forth for a few minutes. They refused to let Boggan go. We refused to leave him behind.
Eventually it all started up again. There was no stopping it. I ran inside to do what I could for my friend.
But those idiots weren’t just big, they were quick, too.
The ACAB guy kicked me in the calf. My leg crumpled beneath me. I was on the floor again.
I tried to get up, onto all fours. Then I felt a kick to the chest. It was like someone had snapped a match, only the match was my body.
I collapsed.
Bosse yelled something in the background.
I felt another kick.
I curled up in the fetal position. Could see Boggan; he was on the floor, too.
I covered my face.
Tried to tense my body.
But there were no more kicks.
I wondered what had happened.
I unwrapped my arms just in time to see a baseball bat hit the ACAB guy on the back.
Two men, wearing balaclavas, were standing over us. The doormen were on the floor.
“You fucking bitches. Attack people your own size,” the man with the baseball bat shouted.
He brought the bat down on the ACAB guy’s thigh: thud—it sounded like when you kick a really hard penalty.
I scrabbled to my feet. We tried to pick Boguslaw up.
Thud, again. The bouncers were shouting in pain. Spitting out splintered teeth.
Thud.
I saw bodily fluids on the floor.
I saw a nose that looked more like a bloody lump.
Thud.
I saw a jaw that seemed to be hanging weirdly.
We dragged our friend out.
“Now you’ve got us to deal with, you motherfuckers. Sons of bitches,” the guy with the baseball bat yelled.
Thud.
No one was shouting anymore.
The entrance was silent. The bouncers were motionless on the floor.
The man raised the baseball bat again, over the doorman’s head.
To crack his skull. Bash his brains out.
“Wait!” I shouted. “Take it easy.”
He paused. Pulled the balaclava up just enough so I could see his face.
“Shit, man, you called me, didn’t you? You should be happy.”
It was Sebbe. And I had called him—even though I’d been trying to push him away. There hadn’t been any other way—I’d gone too far in a direction I couldn’t control, and we would’ve been beaten to death without him.
I don’t know if I was happy to see him. But I know I was relieved, and I knew right then that Sebbe was the most loyal person I’d ever met.
Memo continued on separate sheet.
44
In her room at work. Saturday evening. The holiday season had started—for the rest of Sweden, anyway. But in the office, things were going full steam ahead like always. Jossan wasn’t there, but at least twenty-five of the others were working away in their rooms. Associates, partners, even some of the so-called administrative staff. The secretaries. The Leijon offices were like a communist state in that respect: even the partners worked their asses off, 365 days a year. But there was a huge difference: as a senior partner, you could expect a decent bonus of at least te
n million kronor at the end of the year.
Emelie’s office was on the seventh floor. She could see all the way to Södermalm from the window. The towers and spires of the Laurinska building, the old Mariahissen elevator, and the spire of the Katarina Church rose up in solitary union. Even farther in the distance, she could see the huge hulking mass of the Globe, the ball-shaped arena built twenty years earlier. There’d been a wave of arena-building in recent years—the Globe was a midget now, in comparison.
Her fingers returned to the keyboard.
Irritation. Too many things were bothering her.
It wasn’t just the workload. She only had herself to blame for that. If you wanted to be a highly functioning business lawyer and play public and private defense on the side, you had to be prepared to work like a dog. But reality had caught up with her. It was payback time. She had things to finish before the holidays. In truth, the problem wasn’t that the lawyers wanted their summers off—if a client said jump, the idea was that they asked “how high?” No, the problem was the clients themselves, they were the ones who wanted to take time off. They wanted to disappear. To Saint-Tropez. Båstad. The Hamptons. And they wanted to know that their deals were closed before they left.
Her mom and dad were bothering her, too. They’d arrived the night before. “It’ll be nice, Emelie. We’ll come up the first week of the holidays,” her mother had said. They would be sleeping in the living room. Her mom on the sofa and her dad on an inflatable mattress on the floor. Why couldn’t they just limit their holiday like normal people?
Not being able to train bothered her, too. She’d only been down to see Leo four times since all this crap with Benjamin began. She’d worked ridiculously hard each time—or maybe it was just that she got tired more quickly because she was in such bad shape. She shouldn’t have let herself get caught up in all of this. But it was too late now.