Two Soldiers

by Anders Roslund

  Another door, this time to the cleaning closet.

  First he checked the reflection in the glass, they were sitting comfortably, drinking their coffee, so he could open the cleaning closet door without being disturbed, move the cleaning cart and vacuum cleaner and take out the metal bucket. Which just fitted in the sink and he filled it almost all the way up with warm water. He opened the food cupboard and took out three slices of bread from the bread box, the sort that tasted of syrup and stuck to your teeth, broke each one into five pieces and put them in the water. Some bags of apples, red and sweet, from a shelf higher up, twenty of them, quartered, and dropped in the water. A couple of bags of stale cinnamon buns in the water, half a box of sugar lumps in the water. A quick glance over at the precisely angled door to the telephone cubicle and the bucket went back into the cleaning closet, behind the cart and the vacuum cleaner and two mops, a black trash bag over the top.

  Fourteen days. It would be ready then. When he needed it.

  ———

  Back in his cell, Leon had lain down again to wait for the lunch break from books in the classroom and drills in the workshop. They’d come back one by one from their various places to the wooden table, the best place in the yard, as far from the watchful eyes in security as from the dusty gravel on the football pitch. They sat there with their faces to the sun and five cards in their hands and if he closed his eyes, if he couldn’t see the seven-meter-high wall that kept them in—Alex beside him on one side and Marko on the other, they could have been sitting on the other side.

  “Oi, you.”

  At the next table, Smackhead and two guys from Denmark, or Skåne or wherever, who were just as fucked, were playing poker and holding the cards hard in their skinny, scabby hands, playing as if their lives depended on it, half a gram in the pot for every deal.

  “Oi, YOU.”

  Smackhead looked up and turned around, scrawny thirty-five-year-old body and twitching face.

  “Come over here.”

  Leon used his whole arm to wave him over and the guy at the next table dropped his cards and practically ran over, smiling as he got nearer, stiff lips, slightly open.

  “This guy.”

  Leon put his arm around Marko.

  “Very soon. The same.”

  The rag-and-bones cast a glance at Leon’s right thigh, what he had written there only a few days ago, then at Marko, and at Alex, and Leon again. It was as if he only now fully understood and was overcome with fear.

  “Who?”

  He knew what was about to happen. If someone was going to carry the same emblem. There was only one way to become a full member.

  “You don’t need to fucking know.”

  An initiation test. A murder.

  He didn’t want to die.

  “But—”

  “Not you.”

  Over the twenty years that he’d spent in prison, he had regularly tattooed new full members and there was a strange feeling, the way they always shone, like they’d just left a mouse on the sitting room floor and expected payment and praise, so proud of having just taken away someone’s breath.

  “Not me?”

  “Not you, Smackhead.”

  The smile softened.

  “The name’s Sonny. I want—”

  “One like that.”

  A smiling skeleton that could barely stand on his feet, eyes switching between Leon’s thigh and Marko’s thigh. They couldn’t care less what he was called. It made no fucking difference, he didn’t care and he couldn’t remember what they were called, always some new little shit who he didn’t know, who told him what he was going to do, and then lashed out if he didn’t do it.

  “Then I want more. Fifteen g.”

  “What the fuck, you—”

  “They confiscated it. The searches. But . . . I can still do it. Needles. It’ll take longer. And then I want more. Fifteen g.”

  “We’re not getting any in today.”

  “And I want it up front.”

  Leon leaned closer.

  “You . . . I don’t think you’ve understood how it works.”

  Smackhead’s smile, his mouth smelled putrid.

  “If you . . . if we haven’t got any use for you, we’ll kill you too.”

  ———

  Lennart Oscarsson stood between the table stacked with sixteen TV monitors and the small fan that circulated warm, stuffy air around the cramped central security office. He looked out through the window at the prison yard, the gravel, the inmates. If he turned around, he could see through the other window: the wall, the church, the sky.

  His world. He had only questioned it once.

  The time when Martin had been lying there on the monitor in the middle, curled up with a gun to his head.

  Maybe that was why he came in here so often, stepped out of the governor’s office for a while to look at the TV screens that flicked through the images from sixty-four security cameras. He focused on one of them, a black-and-white picture from a warm prison yard and a thin man getting up from a game of cards, rolling in the way that people with sore feet do—his name was Sonny Steen and he’d had a handmade tattoo machine hidden under his mattress, a fucking electric shaver.

  And he knew the prisoner who Steen was talking to right now, Leon Jensen, serving a long sentence, confirmed gang member, the one that José Pereira had first asked questions about and then asked to see, inside the unit. The picture was unclear, no color or sound, but it was still obvious that the older guy was frightened of the younger guy, constantly moving from one foot to the other, as if he wanted to run away.

  “The day’s catch?”

  Martin Jacobson had come into the office without knocking and sat down on the only chair, automatically reading the images from the yard, the wall, the corridors.

  “Right. The day’s catch.”

  “Plus or minus?”

  They smiled at each other. A strange game. Counting time.

  “Plus.”

  “Lunch?”

  “Yep.”

  Martin Jacobson checked his papers.

  “Two that left. This morning just before eight—an inmate with seven and a half years to go was moved abruptly from solitary confinement to Karsudden hospital and a closed psychiatric ward. Barely an hour later—an inmate in Block C with two years and seven months left was taken by the police to Kronoberg remand on suspicion of assaulting a fellow prisoner in the prison library.”

  Ten more years of longing, somewhere else.

  “And in exactly . . . twelve minutes, two new prisoners will be registered at reception. From Gothenburg remand—eight and a half years, serious drug crime, allocation G2 Right. From Huddinge remand—fourteen years, murder, allocation B3 Left.”

  Twenty-two and a half years of longing, here.

  “Minus eight years. Plus twenty-two and a half. You’re paying for lunch.”

  Martin Jacobson nodded to the governor, smiled, and went on to the next document.

  “There will be twelve visitors this afternoon. Five first-time visitors who will be observed. Four lawyers. And three where dogs have been ordered—Lundgren, Block B, Jensen, Block D, Syrjämäki, Block K.”

  Lennart Oscarsson studied the TV screen again, three young men who were shouting at an older man on his way back to another table. And he thought about the equally young female prison warden, and the chaos she had told him about that indicated amphetamines, about Jensen smacking his lips, obviously high, that it wasn’t often someone was so obvious about being wired. And he was expecting a visitor today—he had registered a visit from a young woman called Wanda Svensson and they were certain that she was the one who had supplied the whole unit on her last visit and that this time she was going to get a different reception.

  “Sniffer dog. And if there’s the slightest indication, a full body search. Everything’s clear: doctors, female police officers, and a search warrant.”

  The older guy with the rolling gait had reached his table, and the youths had
turned away, cards on the table, their faces to the sun, and it looked like they had their eyes closed to the summer warmth.

  ———

  Leon almost relaxed. The strong sun burned on his skin, it was so good, like the bedside lamp when he pointed it directly onto his face.

  “You talked to the guards this morning.”

  He still had his eyes closed, but had turned toward Alex.

  “I was in bed. Listening. And you . . . you talked to the bitch.”

  “Fuck, brother . . .”

  “Fine. Two thousand.”

  “Brother, I just answered back . . .”

  Alex fell silent, cleared his throat, paused a bit before he carried on.

  “One love, brother.”

  “One love.”

  Sun and no wind, it was easy to hear the heavy gate opening and a car that started, rolled in, and stopped again. Leon got up from the table, careful to walk alone across the prison yard toward the place where you could see through a gap into central security. He’d heard correctly. It was the gray Volkswagen bus. And when the doors opened, three uniformed police did get out. And when they gave the all-clear, a black Labrador did jump out of the back.

  They had been given the information that she was coming soon. And they had done exactly what he wanted them to do.

  Leon ran across the yard toward the unit and the guard opened the door for him when he said he needed a piss, and when he was sure that he was on his own, he put down the toilet seat and stood on it, just reaching the strip lights and the cell phone that lay hidden there, the one he shared with Frank and that he knew was not tapped.

  He dialed the number; they should be in Täby now.

  ———

  He had reached over to touch her breasts and her sex and she had turned away—not today, not tomorrow, you know that, but after—and now they were sitting in the front of the car and Gabriel handed her the bag and plastic-wrapped package. They said nothing, had already said what they needed to, and she got out of the car, walked past the gas pumps and the water and air, toward the back of the building and the toilets.

  Every two weeks, same routine.

  The walk through Råby to the metro, twelve minutes to Skärholmens Centrum, bottom level of the car park. A green Mercedes today—00:31—pretty good going. Then north on the E4 and Essingeleden and past the city in the middle lane all the way to the Shell station by the Täby exit.

  Wanda turned around the moment she was inside and locked the toilet door. She was anxious, wished that he was with her, but knew that she had to do it and that Gabriel was sitting right outside in the car, and he’d still be there when she went back.

  She had to do what she normally did.

  She wiped the floor around the toilet with some wet toilet paper, a couple of times, maybe that made it a bit cleaner. She unbuttoned her jeans and pulled them down, along with her underwear, to her knees. She lay down, back on the floor and feet on the toilet seat.

  And yet not quite.

  She sat up, put the plastic-wrapped package on one side of the sink. She opened the plastic bag and carefully sprinkled the contents over it, ten grams of loose amphetamine, careful not to get any of it stuck on her fingers. She leaned forward and sniffed the package, a strong smell of acetone that should be enough.

  She lay back down, back on the floor, jeans around her knees.

  From her jacket pocket, some baby oil, a few drops in her palms and around the package until it was completely covered, then her oily fingers into her vagina to lubricate the outside, inside, then the flat plastic package in bit by bit, a bit farther until the first pain and then she stopped.

  She had to lie there for ten minutes and she thought about Gabriel’s face again, so good when she pretended to be asleep, the only part of his body with no burn scars. He had glanced over at her in the car as well, on the way, when he thought she wasn’t looking, and it had been the same, his face had been good, relaxed.

  Ten minutes. Until the strong acetone smell was locked to her insides.

  Two fingers in and she felt the plastic, took hold of it, then it got stuck and she tried to get hold of it again, pulled it and it got stuck and then pulled it a bit more and it slipped out.

  It was good to stand up again as the stone floor was always so hard and everywhere stank of urine.

  She had to do what she always did. And yet not quite.

  She put the plastic package in the toilet, hesitated, then flushed and it disappeared.

  Soft paper towels and liquid soap from the dispenser on the wall, she washed the sink and the toilet seat and rinsed her hands again, a quick look in the mirror as she went out, her mirror face.

  ———

  Gabriel was sitting in the driver’s seat, cell phone in his hand. He was waiting for her to come back, for his precious brother to call.

  She’d been in the station toilet for more than ten minutes. He’d gotten himself a Coke, then when she didn’t come, another Coke, the same woman as two weeks ago, he’d walked from the fridge straight out of the door and she’d stood there looking down at her feet.

  Wanda and Leon.

  If he thought about them. If he tried to think about them.

  There wasn’t enough room. Not for both of them at once. His mind couldn’t stretch to both of them, as if he could only think of them one at a time.

  There she was. He looked at her with a critical eye, the walk from the toilet door to the car, it looked like she was walking normally.

  “You put it in, then dumped it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Dumped everything?”

  Wanda and Leon. The whore and his precious brother. They’d both seen him without turning their faces away.

  “Answer me, whore!”

  “Yes.”

  “Yes, what?”

  “Everything.”

  He tried to put his hand on her cheek, she was upset, he could see it, he shouldn’t have shouted at her, shouldn’t have called her whore, she didn’t like it.

  It was ringing now, his cell phone, the number he knew was secure.

  “Where are you?”

  “Just leaving the Shell station by the Täby exit.”

  “And the whore . . .”

  The Whore.

  “And the whore . . . does she smell?”

  Her name is Wanda.

  “She smells.”

  “Carry on then. The dogs will notice. The pigs will body-search her.”

  Back to the middle lane of the highway, twenty kilometers north.

  “Bro?”

  “Yeah?”

  Leon should have hung up and was breathing in that way that Gabriel knew meant he was agitated.

  “When’s she moving out?”

  Gabriel looked at her in the windshield, just where it was shiny and he could see her reflection and he pressed the phone harder to his ear.

  Wanda. And Leon.

  “When you come.”

  “One love, brother.”

  “One love.”

  ———

  The gray Volkswagen van was still there. Two of the uniforms—a man and a woman—were on their way in. The third one hung around outside central security with the black dog on a leash, he was talking to someone, the guard from the unit, the one who pretended she wasn’t scared.

  Leon waited by the window on the stairs between the two floors, D2 and D3. The best place for keeping an eye on the prison gate and the road in from the highway past the church.

  A green Mercedes.

  They were driving slowly. He had a clear view of them stopping some distance away at the parking place on the hill by the field that separated the prison wall from the churchyard.

  She got out and walked across the asphalt toward the wall, normal movements, she was completely empty.

  ———

  Freezing, sweating, freezing.

  She had never been arrested, apprehended, or held in custody. She didn’t have a criminal record, wasn’t in any of th
e police registers, anywhere. She had never even seen a prison until Gabriel asked her to visit Leon, Reza, Uros once every two weeks.

  The dogs will notice. The pigs will body-search her.

  The bell by the prison gate, ID at central security, keys and money and cell in the locker in the room to the left. She was freezing and sweating. Not less, but more. She had no idea why she did it, but suddenly she stopped in the changing room by the two trash cans, stood there and looked at them instead of going out into the entrance hall and the metal detector and the uniforms and the fucking dog, and after a while she took out both her contact lenses and dropped them. She was shaking so much and sometimes it was just such a relief to be in fog for a while, to keep a distance, and maybe then she’d freeze and sweat a bit less too.

  “Wanda?”

  She was barely out of the room, hadn’t even closed the door behind her, when they called her name for the first time.

  “Wanda Svensson?”

  She turned around. A fuzzy uniformed policewoman. And a fuzzy big black dog. And further behind, two more fuzzy uniforms.

  “My name’s Lena.” She waved her arm at the other two. “These are my colleagues. And we have to give you a full body search.”

  They were fuzzy. But it didn’t help. She was shaking just as much as before. And it was freezing.

  But she knew what she had to do. She had to protest.

  She wasn’t sure why, she had asked once when Gabriel had his nice face on and it had quickly changed.

  “You can’t. No way are your hands going touch my body, feel inside me.”

  The black dog came closer.

  “And that, it can’t sniff me.”

  Even closer.

  “We know the ground rules.”

  “Take it away then!”

  The woman called Lena pulled out a chair.

  “I’ll take it away when you sit down here.”

  Do you remember last time? I’m frightened, Gabriel. Do you remember or don’t you? I remember. Good, because you have to make sure you’re heard, just like you did then.

  “No.”

  “Is that one of the rules as well? That we can’t order you to sit down?”

  She sat down.

  “Good. Then you can get up again.”

  She stood up and everything was fuzzy when the uniform pointed to the chair and the dog jumped up eagerly and sniffed around, scratched.