by Jens Lapidus
She was snowed under with work at Leijon. It was like Magnus was giving her twice as much to do as normal. He hadn’t said anything directly, but when she was in his room, reporting on something, he’d interrupted her midsentence: “Anders Henriksson is starting the restructuring of Kungsborgen tomorrow. They’ve already had some preliminary meetings with their chief counsel. I recommended you to head up the DD team.”
It was clear what that meant: good-bye summer. He was probably in a huff because she’d turned down his New York offer. This was her punishment. The only plus was that Jossan had also been put on sunshine duty, as she called having to work over the summer. “I’m actually not that bothered,” she said. “My plans were pretty boring anyway, if I’m honest. All my friends have boyfriends, some of them’ve got kids now, and I hadn’t even dared hope you’d be free. You’re in your own little world. By the way, are you sleeping with anyone these days?”
Emelie couldn’t help but smile.
“Yeah, a bit,” she answered.
“A bit? How do you sleep with someone a bit?”
“You have sex, but you don’t know if it’s with the right guy.”
“Aha, in that case, I’ve never slept with anyone a lot.”
Emelie laughed.
Jossan: “It’s not a lawyer from the office anyway, I’m sure of that.”
“How do you know?”
“Going with my gut.”
“Your gut’s not good enough for you to guess who, though.”
For some reason, she wanted to talk about Teddy, but at the same time, she would’ve died if Jossan worked out who she was actually sleeping with.
“Maybe not,” Josephine said, “but if I know you, it’s someone who lets you stop pretending. Someone who makes you relax, be yourself, and forget all about being a sensible career woman. That’s what you need. But—and this is your problem, Pippa—he might not be what you expected. He might not be someone you’d choose on paper.”
“Who do I want on paper, then?”
“Idiots.”
“And who makes me be myself?”
“You might not even know that yourself. But your muscles down there, they worked it out a long time ago. So you should listen to them, stop fighting it.”
Her phone rang. Direct from reception this time.
“Delivery for you down here.”
“Can you see what it is, Viveca?” Emelie didn’t think it could be more flowers from Nikola.
“Yeah, it’s from the prosecution authority. Folders and documents, a case of some kind. I guess it must be a mistake?”
“Yeah, guess so. Keep it there, I’ll come down and have a look.” The preliminary report. Rölén must’ve sent it to the wrong place: Emelie had never given Leijon’s address. Still: she felt her pulse pick up, wanted to grab the files and start reading right away. Did they know who the dead man was? Could they tell Mats had been in the house?
56
A shady gathering. He hadn’t seen these guys for years. Teddy: the elephant in the room. Or maybe that should be: the elephant on deck. Anyway—to the others, he was like a fish in water, one of the gang.
A different kind of party: Dejan’s thirty-fifth birthday. Flag raised. His friend had rented a boat: a fucking yacht. Not quite as big as those beasts Teddy and Emelie had seen in Palma, but big enough to look like a huge white spaceship, screaming new money from where it was docked on Nybrokajen.
Black Pearl, it read in huge letters at the back. After more than a week of heavy rain, the sun had finally come out. Dejan welcomed them onto the quarterdeck: grinning like a man who’d just won a boat in some kind of bet. Though he hadn’t—the boat was a rental, Teddy realized that much.
“It’s so fucking sweet. Hydraulic swimming platform at the back, three Jet Skis. Shit, man, today’s gonna be fun.”
Dejan showed them around: Teddy and a few of the others took in the luxury. Dejan blabbing away: high gloss black American walnut on the floors, a Gaggenau grill in the bar, and its own sauna, with an entrance from the swimming platform at the stern. “Sunseeker Manhattan 84, eight years old. Sweet, right? Top speed over thirty knots, they said. Gonna cost twenty grand for the juice alone.”
Teddy guessed that the rental for his friend’s huge toy was at least four times that. But to Dejan: blowing that much dough was part of the charm.
The inside was posh. Ice buckets and bottles of champagne everywhere. Star-patterned cushions and a real Yankee feeling from the leather sofas. They went up to the bridge. The guys who recognized him said hello. Champagne glasses in hand. Hawaiian shirts and T-shirts. Sunglasses en masse. Alex, Safia, Birra, Denko, guys from before. New faces, too. Younger guys in short sleeves and Bermuda shorts, fresh-looking tats and pumped-up guns.
Teddy wasn’t rocking shorts today: the usual chinos instead. Under them: cold steel—a combat knife, carbon fiber. Just in case. He was still lying as low as he could, moving from crappy hotel to crappy hotel and only making calls from secure numbers—and he wanted to make sure he could defend himself if he needed to.
The dark green treetops in Berzelii Park were like a calm backdrop beyond the dock. The Raoul Wallenberg monument under the trees: like great cool lumps of lava. Teddy thought about his father. In his world, Raoul Wallenberg was the greatest Swede ever to have lived. “One of the few times a Swede did something other than stand to one side, moaning at the rest of the world,” Bojan said.
Teddy was actually surprised he’d even been invited. He wondered whether it was such a good idea, leaving town for a whole day. He had things to do. But all the same: someone might know what happened to Mats. Someone might know Sebbe. Or Peder Hult.
The engine hummed. The gangway was pulled in. Dejan shouted: “We’re off. All those fuckers with sails better watch out.”
The skipper pulled down on the handle: the boat picked up speed. Teddy pushed a piece of snus beneath his lip and chewed a stick of gum.
In the distance, he could see the turrets and towers of the Nordic Museum—like something out of a Disney film. He’d thought it before: the city was divided into sections as clearly as the countries in a game of Risk.
Two hours later. It was four in the afternoon. The sun was almost too warm. Dejan’s dog, the Mauler, looked like it had passed out. They were floating off Vaxholm. “Heading for open water.” Dejan laughed. “Time to drop the anchor and get the Jet Skis out soon, eh man? Then it’s party time.”
Teddy had kept mostly to the bridge. Let people come and talk to him, not the other way around.
A guy came up the narrow staircase. Moved slowly toward Teddy, like he was posing for a camera. Some people were like that: their entire lives played out like they were in an action film. The dude had a wide nose, flat forehead—his whole face looked like he’d run straight into a wall as a kid. He grinned. “Hey, man, been a fucking while.”
It was Matteo—he and Teddy had done two years together in Hall. The guy’d earned himself five years for aiding and abetting in an aggravated robbery. He looked exactly the same as he had when they were inside, other than the fact that his T-shirt was straining tightly against his stomach. They embraced like men: wide hug, back thumps—always careful not to be too intimate.
“What’re you up to these days?”
Teddy could see Alex and Safia out of the corner of his eye: their ears like satellites—of course they were interested in what Najdan “Teddy” “Björne” Maksumic was doing. None of them had spent anywhere near as long inside as he had.
“Not a lot.”
“I heard you were, like, a lawyer or something.” A gold tooth glittered in Matteo’s mouth. “But that can’t be true, right?”
“Nah, it’s not. What’re you doing?”
“Small invoices, man.”
Teddy understood. The past few years: that kind of fraud had spread quicker than a new fashion fad in Stockholm. Identity theft, benefits being paid to made-up people with fake disabilities and other stuff like that. Fake invoices f
or a few thousand kronor, companies would pay them without thinking. The last of these: Matteo’s thing.
His friend from the slammer picked up a handful of cheese puffs. “Send out a hundred invoices a day. It’s enough if five people pay, y’know, then I’ve made twenty-five. You get the math? It’s like a cookie jar. You just gotta help yourself.”
Teddy looked out across the water and tried to seem interested: his old world—the constant pull of what you might be able to bring in from various crimes.
There were lots of sailing boats out today. He’d never been on one, and immediately, it felt like that fact belonged to the life Matteo still lived. Never having been sailing: what, exactly, did that say about Teddy’s childhood?
“You remember the equation we used to do?” Matteo asked.
Teddy did. Back before he met Sara. When everything he did was about turning coins into bills. Easy money, gliding through life like a lubed-up dick. Teddy and Matteo: worked out what they could earn on different crimes, and what kind of time they were risking if they got caught.
Pieces of cheese puff sprayed from Matteo’s mouth when he spoke. “Kronor per year inside. You remember what had the highest kron-p-y-i?”
Teddy tried to be polite. “No, not really. Whores?”
“No, Christ. They punish love harder here than they do anywhere else. Even if you’re handicapped to the max, you can’t pay for a happy ending.”
“Charlie?”
“Nah, nah, nah—you lost it? Coke gets you ages.”
“Fraud?”
“Exactly, my man, but against businesses. No normal people getting hurt. No violence. I swear, you can turn over five mil a year, easy, and there’s hardly any risk of doing time. Kron-p-y-i record.”
Matteo jabbered on. Talked about how he’d asked his lawyer to shut down his Facebook page the last time he was on trial. Not because he was afraid of what the cops would find. “No, I just wanted to make sure the missus wouldn’t see all the messages I was getting from the girls I had on the side.”
They talked on. Alex and Safia moved over, kept up. Teddy with his own agenda: asked about Sebbe a few times, about Michaela. He carefully tried to squeeze it out of them: How’d you launder money before? Anyone help out?
But it was a mistake: normal guys didn’t talk about stuff like that—simple principle: keep things to yourself, live longer. Matteo was the only one who seemed to want to impress Teddy, like a two-year-old—but on the other hand, he’d also never been part of the inner circle.
Dejan interrupted them, shouted: “Meat’s ready! Come down here.”
Eight hours later. Dark now. A whole day at sea. Warmth on their skin. Happy lines on their faces.
They’d driven the Jet Skis like they were F1 cars. Done a bit of clay pigeon shooting from the deck, strung a rubber ring from the back of the boat, lapped up the sun, popped champagne corks across the whole fucking archipelago. At fiveish, an RIB had pulled up to the Black Pearl. Eight girls tottered on board: twenty-year-olds with dyed-blond hair and floral bikinis.
Matteo, Alex, Safia, and the others almost fell overboard with happiness. They turned up the stereo: cheesy old hits at full volume. Dejan was glowing like the sun. The Mauler swayed along with the music. Wolf of Wall Street vibes, but on twenty-degree water—the guys partied so hard even a teetotaler would’ve had a hangover.
Teddy felt a little light-headed—in more than one sense. Kum was cool with him—and in a twisted way, it was actually nice to have lost the McLoud money: it had been burning a hole in his pocket, shitty as it was. His dad and sister were home now. His nephew was out—he’d definitely been involved in the robbery on that shop, but unless the prosecutor could prove it, all they could do was let him go. Still: Swedish Premium Security, the predator, dishonest cops—people were still out after him.
A few hours later, the boat swayed as it thudded gently against the dock. The guys were making noise in the background.
Teddy and Matteo headed off toward the taxis. The rest of the gang were going out in town with Dejan. They’d booked a table. Arranged some escorts.
He and Matteo would be sharing a taxi; his pal lived in Hallunda, not far from Alby. After five minutes, Matteo was asleep on Teddy’s shoulder. What a player—drooling like a dog.
Teddy leaned his head back. Maybe he should just dump Matteo outside his door and head back into town, stop by Emelie’s place. She should be home by now—Emelie, the dependable, conscientious working woman. But no—he was too drunk for that.
He paid the driver and staggered out of the car. Matteo was crawling along the pavement.
“The ground’s soft,” he slurred.
“Come on,” said Teddy.
“Nah, I’m going, it’s not far.”
The taxi disappeared. The high-rises around them looked like exact copies of one another, or maybe he was just seeing double, triple even. It was dark. Not a person in sight. Matteo was trying to get up, but Teddy still doubted he’d be able to make it home on his own.
Both of them were swaying—like masts in a storm.
A dark Volvo V70 pulled up. All antennae and dark windows.
Two men got out.
Teddy had a bad feeling.
One of them came over to him. Light hair, black bomber jacket.
He punched Teddy in the stomach as hard as he could.
Teddy bent over double. Lost his breath. Still: old habit, he raised his arms to protect his head.
Lucky. The man swung something at him. A searing pain shot up his arm.
He backed up. Tried to find his balance. Jabbed: it was like punching a tree—the guy must’ve been wearing a protective vest under his jacket or something.
He heard them shouting: “Police, get on the ground.”
He groped for his knife.
A noise. He didn’t see what happened, but Matteo ended up on the ground. His friend roared.
Teddy grabbed the handle of his knife.
Blows hitting his chest.
Hitting his face.
He felt something break.
Then, from behind: the other man appeared. Held him tight. He tried to protect himself.
Shouted in pain. He fell to the ground. Felt his blood mix with the dirt.
The man held up something plastic: a Taser.
One last effort: Teddy hauled himself up, still in the arms of one of the attackers, swung his head back. The man yelled.
As he did so, the pale-haired man jabbed with the Taser: Teddy saw his face. From his ear to his mouth: a red mark.
The jolt went through his legs, his stomach, his chest—like someone had run steel cables down his spine and was pulling them back and forth.
Everything went black. His eyes.
Dark outside.
PART IV
JULY
57
PRESS RELEASE
LARGE WEAPONS SEIZURE IN SÖDERTÄLJE
Four were arrested and detained in Södertälje yesterday, on suspicion of possession of firearms.
Within the framework of Operation Secure in Södertälje, the Police Authority has, under the leadership of the International Public Prosecution Office, carried out an investigation into the smuggling of weapons from other Nordic countries. This preliminary investigation was carried out in the Stockholm area, with support from the reconnaissance unit from the so-called Special Gangs Operation.
During a raid on a basement on Oxbacksgatan in Södertälje this week, a large cache of weapons was found. Technical investigations are still under way, but the results so far indicate five automatic weapons of the Kalashnikov variety, and similar foreign assault rifles. Eleven pistols, and a huge amount of ammunition were also found. In the basement and the apartment to which the basement belongs, four men between the ages of twenty-six and thirty-seven were apprehended. All are being held in police custody.
The Police Authority believe that the weapons found were intended for use in the criminal gang environment.
58
Nikola: happy as a guy who’d just dodged a life sentence and scored his own pad to boot. Maybe not so weird: he’d been released. And Teddy had fixed a place for him. It was sweet for real. Genuine payback: stroke of good luck to balance out all the bad he’d had these past few years. Nikola vs. the State: 2–1. Maybe there was a god after all.
But still: things to do. Unfinished business. Metim’s insane raid. His mistake. Isak’s orders—you chickened out, now you fix it.
He did nothing the first few days. Just chilled to the max. Rolled joints but didn’t even smoke them. Stayed home and played with his new iPhone—another gift from his uncle. He had hardly any furniture in his new place, but Teddy had set up a bed, a table, and two chairs. Chamon lent him a TV. That was enough for Nikola. Linda brought him sheets, cutlery, and two bowls. Nikola still just ordered pizza and kebabs with all the extras—ate them straight from the box.
His mom was really happy. Giggling like a fourteen-year-old. “Your lawyer was fantastic.”
But Nikola was cool. “Why’d you run off when I was locked up?”
“It was Teddy, he wanted us to, he didn’t tell you?”
Nikola was hard as stone—not. He softened after five minutes. “Yeah, I know. It’s so good to be out, Mom. I’m gonna pull myself together now, I swear. You know where Teddy is, by the way?”
She didn’t know; she’d been wondering the same thing. They’d both been trying to call him all day, but hadn’t heard a thing.
Tonight: Nikola was going to Chamon’s. He really wanted to show him his new place—but he guessed his friend wanted to celebrate him being out. Release party number two, in the space of nine weeks: might be a fucking world record.