Stockholm Delete

by Jens Lapidus

  Mats was afraid, living on the run, though he hadn’t been able to bear not seeing his kids. That was natural. The cottage in Värmdö was some kind of safe house, somewhere he could see Lillan and Benjamin. But someone had gone out there and tried to attack them. Maybe they’d managed. Maybe Mats was dead. For real this time.

  It had to have something to do with that network; Emelie shared Teddy’s conviction. Mazern wasn’t in charge, he’d been as much an errand boy for whoever it was as Teddy. In a way, they hadn’t really uncovered anything of value. Everything led straight back to square one.

  There were three restaurants in the little square. The sound of water lapping at the shore, a warm breeze blowing in from the Mediterranean. They could see small pricks of light in the distance—probably from boats even bigger than those she’d seen today, anchored out there in the darkness.

  She’d been here before, with her mom and dad, when she was eleven. Magaluf: it wasn’t far from Palma. Her only clear memory from that trip was that her father had almost drowned in the hotel pool. A German tourist had jumped in to rescue him: hauled him up out of the water like a drowned rat. He’d stayed in their room for the rest of the holiday, playing patience and listening to the radio.

  It was eleven o’clock. Teddy paid the bill. They went back to the hotel, and the receptionist told them that unfortunately, there were no free rooms.

  “Maybe I should try to find somewhere in another hotel, then,” said Emelie.

  Teddy picked up her bag. “At this time of night? I’ll ask for an extra bed instead, and you can sleep in my room.”

  The room was nice: fresh. Pale walls, a sober-gray bed, iPhone speakers in dark wood. A terrace facing out onto the hotel grounds, the outdoor bar and the pool below.

  The small boats in the marina bobbed in the breeze. She stood there for a while, looking out to sea.

  Teddy was busy making up the extra bed. He was wearing just a T-shirt and boxers, and in the warm light from the bedside lamps, he looked unbelievably powerful, like an animated superhero, tired from saving the world. Such calm, simple movements—a peace that spread through the room. He was as far from being her type as you could get—jailbird, former professional criminal, still half-crazy—but she realized that she’d never been afraid to be alone with him, no matter how dangerous he might be.

  The darkness wasn’t overbearing. It felt safe. Still, there was a certain tension in the room. She listened to Teddy’s breathing, the way he twisted and turned in the spare bed—it creaked. Emelie couldn’t sleep.

  And she could hear it: he couldn’t, either. He was lying awake, too.

  She’d been so ballsy a few weeks earlier: “You don’t want to stay over, do you?” She couldn’t understand why she’d been so obvious about it.

  She tried to push those thoughts from her mind. Go over Benjamin’s case. Nikola’s. The whole Mats story. She thought about the food from that evening, the garlic—maybe that’s why she couldn’t sleep. The room was warm, too: she should turn up the air-conditioning, but it was already humming loudly. She thought about who they’d be meeting in the morning. She saw images: the barn, ablaze.

  Until she couldn’t do it any longer. “Are you awake?”

  “Yeah,” he whispered back.

  “Your bed is creaking. It might be better if you come over here.”

  She heard him get up, three soft steps over the carpeted floor. His warm body next to hers.

  Her fingers brushed his cheek: his stubble like sandpaper against her fingertips.

  The white-painted wall. The yellowish building behind it. Carrer del Bisbe Miralles, number nineteen again. The next morning. Ten o’clock sharp—just like the voice on the intercom had said.

  The sun was already bearing down on Palma. Emelie was tired. They hadn’t slept until about four. Clung onto one another like they never wanted to let go. Fucked like it was the last time they’d feel another person’s touch.

  The gates swung open. A short man with a mustache came out to meet them. “Por favor, síganme.”

  They entered the villa. From the outside, Emelie had thought there were two floors, but now she saw it: the grandeur on the inside was striking; the ceilings were at least sixteen feet high. Yellow stone walls, sculptures, and other objects on pedestals, small tables and display cabinets. What looked like antique mirrors and sconces on the walls. There was a small marble fountain in the hallway. Leopard- and tiger-print cushions on the sofa. Emelie had never seen anything like it: there was a feeling of luxury that not even Bosse’s or Magnus’s place came close to.

  A woman came toward them. She looked roughly the same age as Emelie. She had short, dark hair, thin white linen clothes, and flip-flops on her feet. Sunglasses covering her eyes. Her breasts were straining beneath her shirt—they looked unnaturally large.

  “Hello,” she said in Swedish. “I thought you’d be coming alone, Teddy.”

  “Everything I know, Emelie Jansson here knows, too. I hope that’s okay.”

  The woman looked Emelie up and down. Then she nodded.

  51

  They sat down beneath a pergola by the pool.

  Teddy didn’t say a word, just stared at the woman. There was something familiar about her, but he couldn’t say what. Maybe she looked like someone else.

  “Would you like anything to drink?” she said. Emelie asked for juice. Teddy for water. The man with the mustache served them.

  Teddy was tired. Emelie had lowered her guard last night. It didn’t feel like it had just been about the sex, but maybe he was fooling himself. He’d wanted something more for so long now, he realized. They hadn’t talked much, but it felt okay. In their own way, they were in sync.

  The woman took a sip of her gin and tonic. “I’ve been wondering what the hell you’re up to.”

  Her Swedish didn’t sound entirely natural—maybe she had been living abroad for so long, it had affected her pronunciation. But then he realized what it was: she had a Serbian accent. He didn’t know how he could’ve missed it.

  “What d’you mean?”

  “Exactly what I said. You’ve set fire to a garage and been charging around Stockholm like an idiot. Attracting all kinds of crap and drawing attention to yourself. What’re you up to?”

  “Who are you to ask?”

  The woman opposite was probably staring at him from behind her sunglasses. “You don’t recognize me?”

  Serbian accent. A woman who looked around thirty, a woman he definitely recognized. He should get it—but his mind was blank.

  “You shoot at my dad and want to know about Mats Emanuelsson, but you don’t know who I am?”

  With that, it all fell into place in his head. She’d been much younger the last time he’d seen her, at a party at Clara’s years ago. The woman sitting opposite him was Michaela Mazer-Pavić.

  “You’re Kum’s daughter. Do you want to know why I’ve been doing what I’m doing, or do you just want to hear your own voice?”

  Michaela lifted her sunglasses. Her eyes were red; she looked tired.

  “Take it easy,” she said. “Tell me what’s going on.”

  Teddy briefly explained the same things he’d told Kum. That Benjamin Emanuelsson was being held on suspicion of murder, what they’d managed to find out themselves, what Kum had told them.

  He said: “I knew your dad knew something, but he wouldn’t talk at first, so I had no choice but to smoke him out. Then he tells me you know even more.”

  Michaela shouted for the man with the mustache. “Miguel, puedo conseguir otro? Gracias!” He was quick, her little butler. There was a fresh G&T on the table in less than a minute.

  When Teddy was finished, she leaned back. “Well, everything my dad told you is true.” Her glass looked frosty.

  She started to talk. About how Mats had owed Sebbe because of his gambling debts. How he’d helped them with their money on the side of his normal job. How she’d been his assistant and his supervisor. It had been a crazy time: the system
hadn’t stood a chance against their methods—the EU, the U.S., and the Swedish authorities were like babies in comparison. And Mats was the driving force, the cog wheel, and the oil that made everything run smoothly.

  “But then he tried to screw us over. Sebbe went crazy and wanted to scare him. He set their place on fire. The plan was never for Mats to be there, but for some reason he’d rushed home that day. Sebbe was the one who called the fire department, because our man had passed Mats in the stairwell. Something happened there, after the fire. Mats’s wife, Cecilia, she saw something on a computer and forced him to go to the police. Then, a few weeks later, he got kidnapped. On my dad’s orders. By you.”

  Teddy was still holding his glass in his hand, realized he hadn’t drunk a single drop.

  “I know about the computer. But how did the files get onto it? Where did Mats get it from?”

  “We don’t really know. Mats would never say. But we think he got it from someone linked to a guy we called Peder.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “Peder Hult was his name. We did business with him for a while. Mats was his contact. But Hult was so fucking secretive, we don’t know much about him. I’m not even sure his surname was actually Hult. After the kidnapping, Mats refused to keep working with him.”

  “But how could anyone have known that Mats’s wife was pressing him to go to the police?”

  “We wondered that, too. But you know what the cops are like in Sweden. There must’ve been a leak. Someone on the inside selling information. Pay them more, I reckon, and they’ll stop behaving like such greedy bastards.”

  Michaela paused, gave them time to take in what she’d said. Then she continued: “Mats came back, though. He worked with us for years after that. But then something happened, and it made him jump from that ferry.”

  Teddy leaned forward in his cane chair. “We know he didn’t kill himself.”

  Michaela nodded. “Yeah, my dad told me you knew that.”

  “So what I want to know is why? Why did he need to fake his own death?”

  Michaela took a sip of her drink. “I don’t know.”

  “And who helped?”

  “Both of us helped him.”

  “Both of you?”

  Michaela looked downhearted. “Sebbe Petrovic and I. We did what we call a Stockholm Delete. Know what that means? Sometimes we needed people to disappear from a business, so we’d organized stuff like that before. But it was mostly Sebbe who helped out. He’s the one who knew why it needed to be done. He kept me out of it. The less I knew, the better.”

  “So Sebbe helped Mats fake his own suicide?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Where is he now?”

  Michaela took a breath. “I don’t know if he’s even alive. I’m worried it might be him they clipped in Värmdö. These guys are clearly willing to do anything to stop this mess from getting out.”

  The dark rings beneath her eyes suddenly looked bottomless. “Or maybe it was Mats they killed. Maybe he got himself deleted for real this time. I haven’t heard from either of them since.”

  Stockholm County Police Authority

  Interview with informant “Marina,” 20 December 2010

  Leader: Joakim Sundén

  Location: Högdalen Centrum

  MEMORANDUM 6 (PART 3)

  Transcript of dialogue (continuation)

  M: Just like Sebbe said, that boss got in touch with me. This was 2008. It turned out to be Stig Erhardsson. I hadn’t heard from him in almost three years. And he wasn’t just a branch manager anymore, he’d moved on—he was CEO of something called Forum Exchange now, the second biggest chain of currency exchanges in Sweden. In fact, we were already doing some of our transfers and withdrawals through them.

  We met at their head office on Vasagatan. They had their biggest branch on the ground floor, but farther up in the building, that’s where they had their numbers guys—their equivalent of me, basically—plus the management.

  Stig came down to meet me in reception. He was fatter than last time we’d met, and he had a thin beard. It suited him.

  He showed me into his office. It was sparse, minimalistic. Nothing on the walls, nothing on the desk—not even a computer. The only thing indicating it was Stig’s room was a framed photo on the windowsill. A little girl in a dress, with a ribbon in her hair. She was the spitting image of her dad. The photo made the room seem a tiny bit more personal, but I was sure he normally had his meetings in one of the conference rooms.

  We went through all the usual niceties first.

  Then Stig lowered his voice. “I understand you’re involved in a number of transactions through us again.”

  I didn’t know if it was a threat or a cautious promise. By then, Michaela and I weren’t supposed to be visible anywhere in what we were doing.

  “Maybe,” I said.

  “I think it’s great you choose to use us as often as you do. And I’d like to see you using us even more. So, I have a proposition.”

  This Stig was a different man than the one I’d met before. I thought about how Sebbe and Michaela had laughed at his sweaty shirt. How they’d talked about wrecking his fancy Merc. Now, though, he was relaxed and confident, like a heavyweight boxer ahead in the first round.

  “I can guarantee you a much smoother process than you’re used to, no problems, no unnecessary questions. My little twinkles can sort everything out.”

  “Your little twinkles?”

  “Yeah, the young girls in the office. They’re so nice and simple to deal with.”

  “Sounds very interesting.”

  Stig scratched his beard. “But we’ll need to come to some kind of mutually beneficial agreement, you and I.”

  “Of course. How will it all work, from a purely theoretical point of view?”

  We discussed the practicalities for a few minutes. A timer-controlled awning started to lower down over the window.

  Stig said: “Your people will have to use phrasing we’ve agreed to in advance. It’ll be our key, let’s put it like that.”

  “I’m all ears.”

  “The first time, your man should say he wants everything in an envelope in a blue plastic bag. We can vary it a little after that, but let’s do it like this the first time. That’s the only important thing, that he says that.”

  Things were pretty calm on the Cecilia front. I’d moved out of the house a few weeks after she told me she wanted a divorce. I quickly realized that she’d been thinking about it for a while. Or actually, that she’d made up her mind the year before and just kept putting it off. The kids were obviously upset. Lillan took it hardest—she couldn’t understand why Mom and Dad couldn’t just keep on living together. “You don’t even fight,” she said. “Not like Axel and Ebba’s mom and dad—they’re always shouting at each other.”

  But that was the problem, I thought, or that’s how Cecilia saw things. We’d started out on a journey together, but for the past three years, we’d been traveling in such different directions, we couldn’t see one another any longer.

  I found a flat in Östermalm. There was no more talk of tiny amounts in an envelope from Sebbe anymore. Every month, I made sure I transferred at least fifty thousand euros to different accounts I controlled in Switzerland, the Isle of Man, Dubai.

  I still saw Benjamin and Lillan every other week, Thursday to Sunday. We would have a cozy night in or go to the movies. Sometimes, we’d all go to Lillan’s stables and help her with the horses. The only difficult part was Sunday evenings, when they went back to Cecilia. I hated being without them.

  A while after that, it was time for the first of our new Forum Exchange transactions. I sat down at the desk in Clara’s. It was ten in the morning, and the branch on Vasagatan had just opened for the day. That’s when there were the fewest people there. Maxim had promised to keep me updated over the phone.

  “I’ve told him what to do hundreds of times. Trust me,” he’d said. “The little smurf’s gonna go up to the counter and
ask for a rigid plastic pouch. He’s going in now. I’m two hundred yards away.”

  We all waited on the line. My heart was beating like mad.

  “See anything?” I asked after a while.

  “Not a damn thing. It’s snowing.”

  The minutes passed. I thought about how good my life was, despite everything. My finances were good—even if it was all abroad. I’d just had a great weekend with the kids. Cecilia and I virtually never spoke, apart from when we needed to decide on times to drop the kids off. That was just how I wanted it.

  Maxim said: “He’s coming back now.”

  “How’s he look?”

  “Like normal. Sunken mouth, rotten teeth, bleary eyes.”

  “What?”

  “Just kidding. Wait a sec.”

  Every second that passed felt like a minute.

  I heard rustling and a fuzzy conversation between Maxim and someone else, I hoped it was the smurf.

  Maxim came back on the line. “Yup, four million cash in eight envelopes, every one of them in a really soft plastic pouch. The code works. Uncreased five hundreds. And the smurf didn’t even need to fill out any form about what the money’s for. Congrats to us.”

  It was incredible. No questions, no forms to fill out, no waiting—no know your client crap. I felt electric. Endorphins. I felt the kick—it was like wiping the table in poker.

  That’s when we really got going.

  After three months, I let one of our companies buy a Mercedes AMG GTS, and we rented it out—for zero kronor—to our friend Stig Erhardsson, as thanks for his help. It was twice as fancy as the Merc we’d smashed up for him the first time we met.