Two Soldiers

by Anders Roslund

  *

  Marko slowed down as he passed Leon’s cell, wanted to make sure that he could be heard and that the brother lying in there would be proud. He’d been given his initiation test. He was going to do it, had longed to switch from nothing to something, from him to them. Out of D1 unit, up the stairs, into D2. Five minutes without guards. Past the fish tank, a quick glance over at the glass, no blue uniforms, past the cards corner where everyone was careful to keep their backs turned, past the bogs and the showers, past Cell 2 and 4 and 6 and 8, opened the door to Cell 10 and took the chair leg that was just inside that had been unscrewed from one of the chairs in the kitchen at lunchtime, Cell 12, he knocked on the door.

  ———

  Javad walked fast, he was late and didn’t want to keep Gabriel waiting, maybe he’d make it if he ran the last bit from the metro to his mom’s. Gabriel had phoned and said that they would meet there. Felt a bit weird at first as they’d never met there before, but then Gabriel had talked about a package that was to be kept for the family. Javad ran even faster and got to the door, but no one was there. Not until he turned around and saw Bruno coming up behind him, and then Gabriel coming down the stairs where he’d obviously been sitting waiting.

  *

  Danny heard the knocking on the door.

  Marko Bendik?

  And he’d come to see him?

  He’d heard that Marko Bendik was in D1 Left, the floor below, and he knew that it wasn’t usual for anyone from down there or any other unit for that matter to come in here and risk the consequences, so it must be important. Danny smiled, flattered and proud, and they gripped each other by the hand, he opened the door wide and waved him in. He knew who Marko was, what he was doing time for, why he’d been transferred here from Mariefred prison, it wasn’t often that one of them talked to someone like him.

  ———

  Javad turned to Bruno, then to Gabriel, whatever it was that had felt weird didn’t anymore—he could see the plastic bag in Gabriel’s hand, the one he was going to look after and that Gabriel was opening now, a black gun and a full magazine.

  “Glock. Seventeen bullets.”

  Javad held his hand out but wasn’t given anything. Gabriel pushed the magazine into the butt, pulled back the slide with his thumb and index finger, it was loaded. Javad couldn’t understand why they were standing there showing it to him, put his hand out again for what he was supposed to be looking after.

  “You got a cigarette?”

  Gabriel looked at him, he didn’t actually smoke, certainly not Camels, but he’d asked for one and now got two and a lighter.

  He was glad he’d taken the knock-off Rohypnol. He always did, take a few grams when he didn’t want to feel anything, it was easier then.

  He dropped the cigarettes he didn’t want onto the floor and threw the first blows to Javad’s nose and cheek. Javad tried to make a break, but Gabriel and Bruno helped each other to hold him down and throw more punches and when he crumpled and lay there, they both kicked him in the stomach and then Gabriel held the pistol up high enough for him to see, aimed it at his head, then lowered it to his chest, to his stomach, his groin, his thigh.

  *

  Marko looked at Danny, who seemed pleased and asked him to come in, and it was when he turned around to sit down and talk to his visitor that Marko whacked him on the back of the neck as hard as he could with the chair leg. Danny fell forward onto the bed—it was important that he landed softly, there would be other marks on the back of his neck from the noose anyway, but nothing should be visible on the front.

  He was pretty sure that Danny was already unconscious when he landed.

  ———

  Gabriel couldn’t help looking Javad in the eye when he aimed at him. He knew he shouldn’t do it and the Rohypnol should have stopped him. Never look in the eye of someone who’s going to pay.

  He actually liked the guy. Javad Hangaround had done so much for the family.

  But he should have said I’m not going to answer that question.

  Gabriel was almost standing over him, one foot on either side, with a meter at most from the barrel to his left knee when he took the first shot—you could normally hear them crack as they exploded—and then another shot, to the right knee.

  *

  In every cell there was a space between the head of the bed and the heavy table next to it, and it was across this space that Marko lay one of Danny Hangaround’s books. He’d taken the cable from the TV on the table in the corner where they played cards, and tied it around the book, and with the other end—which was hanging down in the space—he now knotted a noose. He positioned Danny on his knees and placed the noose around his neck.

  With the book jammed as an anchor at the other end, taking Danny’s weight, he would stop breathing pretty soon.

  ———

  There had been two loud explosions which were amplified by the stairwell. A couple of tenants on the same floor cautiously opened their doors a crack but then closed them again when they saw who was out there, looking at them, only a couple of meters away. Gabriel and Bruno each took a phone out of Javad’s pockets and then walked away, and just as they were about to get on a train at the metro station, they heard the first sirens.

  *

  Marko closed the cell door and walked back through D2 Left, backs still carefully turned and still no guards, then hurried down the stairs to the floor below and his own unit and own cell, slowing down as he passed number 2, a light tap on the door, Leon would hear it, Leon would know that he was now one of them.

  ———

  Eddie was standing where he was supposed to when Gabriel and Bruno got off the train at Råby station, to the right of the exit and a bit farther down along the track.

  “Clean it.”

  The plastic bag switched from Gabriel’s hand to Eddie’s eager, waiting hand.

  “And then look after it.”

  Eddie’s heart was pounding as he ran off with the plastic bag in his arms, not stopping until he opened the main door to the school and was standing in front of his locker.

  Not many people about, the school day was over and those who were there were the sort who did soccer, or who just hung around and played cards, or some with guitar cases who normally stayed in the auditorium.

  He opened his locker, took out the other plastic bag that was lying there under a couple of books and then went into the toilets, checked twice that the door couldn’t be opened.

  First the white plastic bag that he’d just got from Gabriel. A gun, a Glock, seventeen bullets. He pressed the button on the side of the butt to release the magazine, pulled back the slide so that the bullet that was still in the chamber came out, then bent down under the sink to pick it up from the floor. The second bag was always in his locker: two towels and a bottle of degreasing solvent. He turned the magazine upside down and pushed out one bullet at a time with his thumb; there were fifteen in all, so they’d used two. He sprayed them and then the gun, dried it all with a towel, and put the bullets back into the magazine, one by one.

  Voices outside. Someone tried the door. He sat on one of the toilet seats, completely still, waiting, he recognized the voices, some people from seventh grade, he could have shot them if he wanted.

  Then footsteps died away, silence.

  Towel around the gun and into the plastic bag, he opened the door to the toilets and then to his locker, looked around, there was just enough room for it under the math book and the geography book.

  Leon turned the light on, off, on.

  He had just heard the muffled sound of prison-issue gray shoes come back down the unit.

  Marko was done.

  In a couple of hours, the staff at Aspsås would find a dead person and confirm that an inmate had hanged himself in his cell, by lying down in the space between his bed and the wall, with a book holding one end of a cable that was tied around his neck. Yet another suicide, one of those tragic incidents in Swedish prisons that would lead to a dea
d-end inquiry because no one had seen or heard anything.

  Gabriel was done.

  A short while ago, a young man was taken by ambulance from the first floor of a tower block in Masmo to ER in Huddinge hospital, both legs in agony after a presumed shooting, according to one witness.

  He turned the light on, off.

  The whore had dumped her load and reeked of it, and the guards had wasted their papers and their doctor and couldn’t do it again next time.

  The kids had sold everything and settled for what they were supposed to settle.

  And now—they had flushed out two.

  Leon looked out through the barred window as he normally did in the evening when the sun was still there, the wall and the church spire and the sky and the white clouds that he followed for a while across the blue, on their way south toward Stockholm, toward Råby.

  It had been a good day.

  thirteen days to go

  It was difficult to get used to the coarse, bitter coffee from the machine that stood in the corridor at Råby police station. José Pereira closed his eyes and gulped it down—alone in the room that was the heart of the Section Against Gang Crime, he had to stay awake for a few more hours as the evening, night, dawn hadn’t been enough to digest it.

  The faces on the wall stared down at him. The desk was full of files about gangs and networks that were at the start of their criminal career; they lay in the way. He moved them from the desk down onto the floor and instead spread out some photos of a splintered knee.

  X-ray department admission note: young man, seventeen years old.

  The officer on duty had put in a call from the County Communications Centre at 17:37 to report a shooting in west Masmo that was presumed to be gang-related.

  Shot in both left and right knees.

  Circulation stable.

  He had sat in the car, called home, and Martha had answered. She told him she missed him and he said that he wouldn’t be able to pick up the girls, who this evening were wearing green soccer socks that went well above their knees and white soccer shorts that would only be white until the first tackle and green and white soccer strips with the numbers eight and nine on the back; two girls who looked identical to anyone who wasn’t family, who had been born on the same night eleven years ago and were now standing side by side on a soccer field near Nynäsvägen waiting for the referee and the whistle and the week’s match that was in two thirty-minute halves.

  He had arrived at Masmo Allé 23 at 17:52, at the very moment when the back doors of the yellow ambulance closed and it sped off. An initial sweep of the crime scene, then knocking on all the doors on all the six floors, talking to neighbors who’d been there at the time of the shooting but were adamant that it had been a normal evening, no strange noises, no unusual visitors. He had learned to understand that fear never talks.

  He had then driven to Huddinge hospital, called Martha again, who was at Tallkrogen playing fields. One of the twins in the green and white team had made the match 2–2 just before halftime, and as he put the phone down he could hear the coach shouting in the background, so it was with a lighter heart that he had parked outside the hospital entrance and made his way to the surgical ward with another reality crowding his chest.

  José Pereira leaned closer to the desk, adjusted the reading light slightly, used a magnifying glass. X-ray report. He had seen black-and-white pictures of shattered kneecaps before. Multiple fractures to the patella, distal femur, proximal tibia and proximal fibula. And yet still couldn’t grasp what he was looking at, or perhaps quite simply didn’t want to. Multiple bone fragments and extreme soft tissue swelling. But he knew what it meant and how it should be interpreted, a clear message: don’t talk to the pigs.

  He had sat and waited in the corridor during the operation that was intended to get the body functioning again, but not to make it perfect; the seventeen-year-old boy who was rolled into a room of his own on a shiny hospital bed would never walk normally again. The woman sitting there beside him, Javad Kittu’s mother, had stood up and followed the sleeping boy who had once had two older brothers, who had both turned into criminal youths and who had both been shot with two bullets each, in different parts of the body. The weeping, waiting woman had several times tugged at his jacket sleeve and begged him to reassure her that the one son she had left would not die before he was nineteen as well.

  An hour and twenty minutes later Javad had come to, had looked at Pereira and answered all of his questions in the same way, which, with the exception of the swear words and hate and threats of a frightened seventeen-year-old, could basically be interpreted as You know just as well as I do that if I do the same thing again, if I even consider answering, they won’t aim at my knees. Pereira had left the room, then come back, sat down again and reformulated his questions, but had been forced to stop when the mother had screamed at him and hit him, I won’t let you ask my son all those questions, and then leaned over the bed with an ashen face, Don’t answer, never answer anything ever again.

  He moved the pictures of the shattered knees and scene of the crime, splashes of blood on the stone floor in a cold stairwell, and replaced them with one of the files from the low bookshelf by the desk, leafing through until he got to GHETTO SOLDIERS and ASSOCIATED and the fourteen staring faces defined as hangarounds, seventeen defined as prospects, and sixteen defined as kids with no criminal record; a total of forty-seven very young people who burned with a desire to belong and who were prepared to do anything at any time if it meant that they might at some point become a full member. He had used plastic sleeves that were slightly too small and too thin and the photo paper stuck to the sides when he pulled out three of the photos—profile left, full face, profile right—held them briefly over the trash can, then let go; Javad Kittu’s face settled at the bottom, upside down, no longer relevant.

  “Leon Jensen.”

  He hadn’t even closed the file and put it back before the phone rang. Lennart Oscarsson. He was already in his office at Aspsås prison, even though it was barely morning.

  “What about him?”

  “The criminal network that previously called itself Råby Warriors.”

  “Yes?”

  “When you were here . . . you asked me to contact you if there was any suspicious behavior.”

  “Go on.”

  “Yesterday, sometime between five and six o’clock.”

  José Pereira gave the trash can a gentle kick and one of the three photos at the bottom turned the right way around.

  “There was a . . . hmm, for the moment let’s just call it an . . . incident involving one of our inmates who, according to the report from the prison service intelligence unit, is associated with the group you’re investigating. An inmate in the same building as Jensen, the floor above, D2 Left. And I’ve just read in the prison service records that he was sentenced—albeit a shorter sentence—for his part in the armed robbery for which both Jensen and Eriksson are doing time.”

  Pereira listened, without knowing where the prison governor was going, only that it was a direction that neither of them wanted.

  “Wait a moment.”

  He bent down and picked up the photographs of someone who had two holes in his knees, turned them around at different angles, dropped them on the floor again.

  Between five and six yesterday evening.

  The same time.

  “I’m listening.”

  Lennart Oscarsson cleared his throat and it sounded like it was in some way constricted, as if he was looking down and reading from a piece of paper.

  “An inmate called Daniel Wall. Who was found dead in his cell.”

  José Pereira was breathing heavily.

  “Hang on a moment again.”

  He opened the same file, pulled out the paper with GHETTO SOLDIERS and ASSOCIATED—the three pictures were in the fourth row, the one known as Danny Hangaround.

  “Dead?”

  “Yes.”

  “Murder?”

 
“We don’t have murders here. There will of course be an inquiry, based on the usual assumptions, probable suicide.”

  Pereira held the receiver in his hand even though the conversation was long since over, he didn’t have the energy to put it down.

  Javad Kittu had answered some questions in the investigation that led to a prison sentence for four full members. Daniel Wall had answered some questions in the investigation that led to a prison sentence for four full members.

  Javad Kittu was shot in both knees yesterday sometime after five. Daniel Wall was found dead in his cell yesterday sometime after five.

  A murder and two shattered kneecaps that were linked to nothing.

  Because no one saw anything, no one heard anything.

  Because fear never speaks.

  José Pereira took out another three photos, dropped them into the basket where they ended up beside the other face. A frustrated foot rammed the trash can, which toppled over and rolled around the room. He wanted to call Martha again. He wanted to go back to the other reality, to his two daughters in oversized soccer socks, it had been 2–2 at halftime and the next time he looked at the clock it was suddenly too late to call and he didn’t know if the two tired and sweaty girls in the back of the car had talked and talked and talked, as they always did after winning, or if they had sat silently in a corner each as they always did after losing.