MemoRandom

by Anders de la Motte

  “Half brother,” Atif muttered, without taking his eyes off the guard.

  The man’s body language had suddenly changed. He had taken his gun off and was now holding it in both hands, and all of a sudden seemed to be taking his duties more seriously. The man let out a whistle and the sound brought all activity in the square to a halt.

  A dark-colored car with military registration plates and tinted windows was slowly approaching. The guard raised a hand to his forehead, in a sort of hybrid between a salute and a wave. The atmosphere in the square was transformed in a matter of seconds. The drivers dropped their cigarettes and stubbed them out, and exchanged nervous glances. The workmen quickened their pace.

  Even the dogs seemed to realize that something was going on. They drew back further into the shadows as they warily followed the dark car with their eyes. It stopped and a man in uniform and dark glasses got out. Atif didn’t need to look through the binoculars; the reaction of the other people in the square was enough to tell him who it was.

  The man he had been looking for.

  The top dog.

  Atif reached out his hand and picked up the pistol from the wobbly little table and tucked it into the back of his trousers. He tugged his shirt looser to make sure the gun couldn’t be seen.

  “I’ve got to go,” he muttered into his cell.

  “Atif, wait,” the voice said. “It sounded important. Properly important. You should probably call home.”

  Saturday, November 23

  The inner city seems to be full of blue lights. They bounce between the facades of the buildings, only slightly muted by the falling snow before reflecting off the dark water under the bridges. Some of the emergency vehicles have their sirens on, but most of them race through the night in silence.

  The six students walking north along Skeppsbron are already bored of the commotion. They had stood for a while at a good vantage point up at Slussen, watching the circus down on the long highway bridge. Loads of ambulances, fire engines, marked and unmarked police cars, so whatever it was that had happened inside the tunnel had to be something serious.

  A couple of the students had held their cell phones over the ice-cold railing in the hope of capturing some of the action. But when several minutes passed without anything much happening, they quickly lost interest. The intense cold and falling snow persuaded the group to carry on toward the city center.

  The snowball fight starts somewhere near halfway along Skeppsbron. One of the boys, it isn’t clear which one, stops and picks up an armful of snow from the windshield of a parked car. He quickly forms an uneven snowball and throws it at the backs of his friends, and then everything kicks off. All six of them are running along the sidewalk, dodging one another’s snowballs and stopping to make new ones.

  The young woman in the red woolly hat is the one who makes the discovery.

  “Look, there’s someone sitting in here asleep,” she cries, pointing at one of the parked cars, from whose windshield she’s just swept an armful of snow.

  “Hello, wake up! He looks like he’s passed out.” She laughs as her boyfriend catches up with her. Through the black hole in the snow he can make out a large, fair-haired man. The man is sitting in the front passenger seat, with his head resting on the dashboard. It looks as if he’s asleep.

  The young man on the sidewalk knocks on the windshield as well, and when there’s no reaction he starts clearing the snow that’s still obscuring the view. Slowly at first, then faster and faster, until at last almost the entire windshield is clear. He clears the side window as well. The man in the car still hasn’t moved.

  In the distance they can hear the sound of motors and the pulsing roar of a helicopter approaching. Something makes the others stop their snowball fight and approach the car. Cautiously, as if they’re not really sure they want to see who or what is concealed inside the car. But the girl in the red woolly hat hasn’t noticed the change in mood.

  “Come on, leave it,” she says, with laughter in her voice. “I’m freezing, let him sleep.”

  She tugs at her boyfriend’s arm, trying to pull him with her. But the young man doesn’t move. As soon as the snow on the side window is gone he presses his nose to the glass.

  “Shit,” he mutters.

  “What is it . . . ?” Suddenly the girl’s voice doesn’t sound so amused. More like scared. The noise of the helicopter’s rotor blades is getting louder.

  “Shit,” the young man repeats, mostly to himself.

  Frost on the inside of the glass is obscuring the view, and the inside of the car is dark. But the sleeping man is no more than an arm’s length away and the young man has no problem seeing enough details. The leather jacket, the embroidered logo on the back, the tribal tattoo curling up from the man’s collar like a snake, across his thick neck.

  But it’s the dark patch at the back of the sleeping man’s head that catches the young man’s interest. A little hole, full of black ice crystals, each one just a fraction of an inch across, forming a thin pattern of pearls over the stubble at the back of his neck.

  The sound of the rotors is deafening, echoing between the buildings and rising to a howl as the helicopter passes straight over them.

  “Shit . . .” the young man says, for the third time, without anyone hearing him. Then he takes a long step backward and starts to fumble for his cell phone.

  • • •

  David Sarac isn’t aware of any of the rescue effort going on around him. Not the agitated voices. Not the firemen drenching the car with foam and struggling intently with their hydraulic tools for almost a quarter of an hour before they manage to free him. Not the paramedics who use a curved piece of apparatus to force an oxygen tube into his throat and stop his lungs from collapsing at the last minute. Where Sarac is, there is no pain, no anxiety, no fear. Instead he feels an immense sense of peace.

  His body is nothing more than a number of carefully bonded molecules, a temporary union that—like all other solid matter—is on its way toward its inevitable dissolution.

  He can hear sounds around him, machines making warning signals, the focused discussions of the rescue team. An unpleasant gurgling sound that he gradually realizes is his own breathing.

  But he isn’t scared. Not the slightest. Because he understands this is the universe’s plan. His time to be transformed. To reconnect with the universal stream.

  Not until someone lifts one of his eyelids, calls his name, and shines a light directly into his brain does he get scared. Not because of the bright light or the voice calling out to him. What frightens him is the shadowy figure in the corner of his eye. A dark, threatening silhouette on the edge of his field of vision. Sarac tries to keep track of it, but the silhouette keeps evading him. He manages to see a leather jacket, a pulled-up hood whose shadow transforms the silhouette’s face into a black hole.

  “. . . need to get out of here now. The helicopter’s just arrived,” someone says, presumably one of the paramedics.

  But the silhouette doesn’t move, it just hovers at the corner of Sarac’s eye. Somewhere a cell phone rings. Once, then again.

  The sound only exacerbates his fear. It grips Sarac’s rib cage, making his heart race and setting off a painful fusillade of fireworks in his head. Then the paramedic lets his eyelid fall and he slips back into the merciful darkness.

  Friday, October 18

  Jesper Stenberg flushed the condom down the toilet, showered carefully, and then dried himself with one of the thick towels in the bathroom. He inspected his appearance briefly in the bathroom mirror, checking as he always did that there were no telltale signs on his body or face. Then he quickly put his clothes back on before returning to the main bedroom.

  It was 9:32 p.m.; his parents-in-law were looking after the children and Karolina had gone out to dinner with her girlfriends. She had offered to postpone it, but he had persuaded her to go. They could celebrate properly tomorrow. His father-in-law had already arranged everything. Dinner at his favorite restaur
ant, champagne, cognac, expensive wine. And of course his father-in-law would foot the bill and would go on about the future, and the possibilities that lay ahead of them, as long as they played their cards right.

  She wasn’t lying in bed as he had been expecting. Instead she had poured herself a drink and was sitting on the sofa in the living room. She was still naked, and he couldn’t help admiring her body. Small, firm breasts, long, lithe legs, porcelain-white skin, and a toned stomach that suggested diets and an exercise regime he could barely imagine. He was going to miss her body. And the things she let him do with it . . .

  But times were changing. From now on everything was going to be different.

  “So, Jesper, you’ve been asked the question,” she said.

  He went over to the drinks cabinet and poured himself a stiff whiskey in one of the heavy crystal glasses. He shouldn’t really have any more to drink if he was going to drive. But he needed a drink; he realized that the moment she opened her mouth.

  For a moment he got it into his head that she had already realized. That this wasn’t going to be as hard as he imagined. But her tone of voice instantly dashed any hopes of that nature. Obviously he should have realized she wasn’t going to make it easy for him. Sophie Thorning never made things easy for anyone. In that respect she was just like her father.

  “Everyone’s got what they wanted. You’ve got your big chance, John gets to pull the strings, and your ambitious little wife and her power-crazed family have finally got themselves a new launchpad.” She laughed, a low, mocking laugh that he didn’t like.

  “And now you want to break up with me, don’t you? Minimize the risks, reestablish control?” She made a slight gesture toward the bedroom with her glass.

  He still didn’t answer her, just turned away and looked out the window. Far below he could see the exit from the parking garage. In just a few minutes he would be down there. In the car, on his way home. Ready to put all this behind him.

  “Everyone’s got what they wanted. Everyone except me,” Sophie went on. “I’m just expected to back down and act like the last few years never happened. Is that what you’re thinking, Jeppe?”

  He turned around slowly. She knew he hated that nickname.

  “Jeppe on the mountain, like the old story.” She leered. “An idiot who thinks he’s something special. That he’s suddenly someone to be reckoned with. But in actual fact he’s just a marionette, a puppet who jumps whenever anyone pulls his strings. Does that sound familiar?”

  He opened his mouth to tell her to shut up, but stopped himself at the last moment. Sophie knew precisely which buttons to press. He mustn’t let himself be provoked.

  “Ooh, did that make you cross?” She smiled. “You know what they say—the truth hurts. But you like pain, don’t you, Jeppe? Just like me. You get a real kick out of forbidden pleasures.”

  She twisted around and crossed her long legs, slowly enough for him to get a good view of her hairless genitals.

  “I think we should go back to the bedroom to celebrate your success properly. I’ve got a few ideas that I’m sure you’d enjoy, things Karolina would never agree to.”

  Stenberg emptied his glass and put it down slowly on the island unit between the living room and kitchen.

  “No, Sophie,” he said. “This was the last time. I’m leaving now. From now on we’ll only see each other in the office, and any interaction between us will be strictly professional.”

  He held up his hand before she had time to say anything.

  “No, no, I know how the game works. This is when you pull out your trump card, and threaten to tell Karolina or your dad. Maybe even both of them?”

  She turned her head slightly and her face cracked into a mocking grimace.

  “But you don’t seem to have realized that the game has changed,” he went on. “You’re quite right, other people have helped elevate me. I accepted that a long time ago, and realized it was the only way to get where I wanted to be. And now I’m there.” He paused for a moment, collecting himself.

  “Sophie,” he began, adjusting his tone of voice to show a hint of regret. “A few months ago you really could have spoiled everything. You could have ruined my life. But your trump card lost all its value the moment I was asked the Question.”

  He gestured toward the telephone on the table.

  “Call Karolina if you want. She’d never leave me now, just as my father-in-law would never advise her to.”

  Sophie’s smile had stiffened somewhat, but she still didn’t seem to have quite understood.

  “John,” she said, “Daddy would—”

  “Come on, Sophie.” His tone was perfect now, a cocktail made up of equal parts concern and condescension. “Do you seriously believe that John would sacrifice me for your sake? Now that his investment is finally about to pay off?”

  He nodded toward the phone.

  “Please, call Daddy and cry on the phone to him. Tell him everything, be my guest.” He smiled, copying her mocking grimace.

  Sophie glanced at the phone. She licked her lips, once, then several more times. Then she looked down. Stenberg breathed out. The match was over, he had won. All of a sudden he felt almost sorry for her.

  “Smart decision, Sophie,” he said. “It would have been a shame if you’d had to spend Christmas in the clinic again.”

  He regretted saying it the moment he heard the words leave his mouth. Bloody hell! The glass missed his head by a whisker, hitting the wall behind him and sending a shower of crystal shards across the oak floor.

  “You fucking bastard!” She took a couple of quick strides toward him, her fingernails reaching toward his face. Her knee missed his crotch by a matter of a fraction of an inch.

  “For God’s sake, Sophie.” Stenberg twisted aside and grabbed hold of her wrists.

  She went on trying to kick him, wriggling frantically in an effort to break free. He dumped her on the sofa, but Sophie bounced up instantly and attacked him again. She was growling like a dog, and her eyes were black. Her lips were pulled back, as if she were planning to bite him.

  The blow was a purely instinctive reaction. Right-handed, with an open palm, but still hard enough to make her head snap back and her body crumple onto the sofa. Shit, he’d never hit a woman before. Not like that, anyway.

  Sophie lay motionless on the sofa. Her arms and legs were hanging limp. Something wet was running down one of Stenberg’s earlobes and he felt his ear without really thinking about it. Not blood, as he suspected, but a golden-brown drop of whiskey that must have flown out of the glass.

  “Sophie,” he said in a tremulous voice. She still wasn’t ­moving.

  In the oppressive silence he could hear his own pulse thundering on his eardrums. He glanced quickly toward the elevator, then at the inert body. Sophie’s eyelids fluttered a couple of times and Stenberg breathed out.

  He turned around and was about to go into the kitchen to get some water. But the floor was covered with broken glass. So he went to the bathroom instead and moistened a towel. On the way back he picked up her white terry cloth robe from the floor.

  She was sitting up when he got back, and he passed her both the towel and the dressing gown.

  “Sophie, I’m—”

  “Get out!” She snatched the towel and pressed it to her cheek. He stood motionless for a few seconds, unsure of what to do. “Didn’t you hear me, get the fuck out of here!” Sophie hissed, covering herself with the dressing gown.

  He backed away a couple of steps and tried to think of something to say.

  “Sophie, I mean—”

  Sudden pain interrupted him. A sliver of glass had cut into his left heel and he swore as he hopped on the other leg and tried to pull it out.

  Her laughter was shrill and far too loud.

  “God, you’re so fucking pathetic, Jesper, can’t you see it? Pathetic . . .”

  He straightened up, tossing the sliver of glass toward the sink. He gave her one last glance before limping toward
the elevator, without saying another word.

  “I’ll do it!” she screamed after him. “I’ll kill myself!”

  He pressed the elevator button, resisting the impulse to turn around.

  “I’ll go to the media, do you hear me, little Jeppe!” She carried on yelling as the elevator doors opened. “I’ll tell them everything! Everything, yeah? You’re finished, you’re whole fucking family’s finished! I’m going to—”

  Her voice rose to a falsetto as the doors cut her off midsentence. He heard running footsteps, then the sound of her fists on the elevator doors. He pressed the button for the garage several times, but it wouldn’t light up. The hammering went on, growing louder and echoing off the metal walls of the elevator.

  Boom, boom, boom, boom . . .

  He kept jabbing at the button, until eventually the little light behind it came on. Then he covered his ears with his hands and the elevator slowly nudged its way down toward the basement.

  • • •

  Atif took a deep breath and then looked up. The night sky was so different here compared to Sweden. Higher, clearer somehow. Yet at the same time it also felt strangely closer. But of course that wasn’t true. Obviously the sky and the stars were exactly the same, it was just that he was looking at them from a different place. A distance of more than two thousand miles had simply given him a different perspective on things. And now he was going to have to switch perspective again.

  “Something’s happened, Mom,” he said, without looking away.

  She didn’t answer; she hardly ever did. She just sat still in her wheelchair with a blanket over her thin legs as she looked at the stars. But Atif knew she was listening. She really ought to have gone to bed a long time ago. But on starry nights like this the nurses let her stay up. They knew it made her calmer.

  He took a deep breath. Time to spit it out.

  “I have to go back to Sweden. It’s to do with Adnan,” he went on. He tried to force his mouth to form the words. But to his surprise his mother spoke instead.