Two Soldiers

by Anders Roslund

  “. . . Daddy . . .”

  He paused, moved the cursor, one more time.

  “. . . Daddy . . .”

  “Do you want to hear that again?”

  He could see it clearly now, a slight shift in the face that was so hard.

  “He’s threatening your child.”

  Grens moved the laptop down onto the floor.

  “A child . . .”

  The eyes, it always started there.

  “. . . you won’t meet it until it’s finished school.”

  Lips taut, jaws tense.

  “You choose. You join a witness protection program. You tell me where Leon Jensen is. And I . . . I might not press for two new preliminary investigations, protecting a criminal, vehicle theft, serious firearms crime, and aggravated assault, unlawful threats, gross theft, armed robbery, to be opened and completed, as no one else seems to know about them. And . . . I guarantee that your pregnant girlfriend will be given full protection from now on.”

  His face, he wasn’t even trying to conceal it anymore.

  “You choose.”

  And he left the chair and went over to the internal wall that wasn’t there anymore and the toilet that had been on the other side. It had just been there, the bomb.

  “Where was he standing?”

  “Who?”

  “Bastard Pereira pig. When he died.”

  Ewert Grens knew what he was after, a final shred of power in the only way he knew how, but his heart was beating so and his cheeks were flushed.

  “He was standing exactly there.”

  “And then? Where was the pig lying?”

  Grens’s anger was on its way out; he couldn’t hold back what he so needed to hold back.

  “He wasn’t lying. He was sitting. Leaned back against the external wall, that one there.”

  The eighteen-year-old who still hadn’t said the only thing that Grens wanted to hear was going to cling to any sense of worth he still had for just a little bit longer.

  “See . . . did you see him?”

  Not yet. This raging fury. Not yet.

  “Yes. I saw him.”

  “With his intestines in his lap? That’s what I heard. And how . . . did it feel?”

  It was so long since he’d hit a person.

  But when the rage pressed until you no longer had a choice, the grinning face with five craters from a cigarette had repeated bastard Pereira pig and intestines in his lap one time too many and Grens had stood up, raised his arm to hit someone who right then lowered his head.

  ———

  It was over.

  Gabriel Milton had lowered his head. He hadn’t been able to take any more.

  And Grens had stood there with his balled fist in the air and it was still a long, long time since he’d hit a person.

  ———

  “Do you know how it works?”

  “Wanda?”

  “You can never come back.”

  “Wanda, for fuck’s sake!”

  “We’ll look after her. You won’t see each other again for several years.”

  What had earlier been warm and damp was now gentle rain, the first drops tentatively wetting the roof of the red car as it moved from one police station to another. Grens got into the driver’s seat and Sven and Hermansson got into the back from either side, and the boy in the hoodie and track pants covered in dried blood stood there and waited his turn.

  “Here.”

  Grens nodded to him as he stood with his hand on one of the back doors, looking in at the full backseat.

  “In the front. You can sit here. You’ve not been arrested for anything.”

  He’d been on his way to the place where he always sat, handcuffed between two police officers.

  Ewert Grens made sure that the cars were in place with their engines running, gave the all-clear sign to the one driving in front and checked in the rearview mirror that the one following behind kept the right distance.

  The rain got heavier, the sound of the drops falling harder on the roof blended in with Gabriel Milton’s irregular breathing. Grens asked Sven to take his cell phone from his jacket pocket, to dial the last called number and then hand it to him.

  “What have you got? Where?”

  Erik Wilson.

  “I don’t know yet, but find two available safe houses.”

  The first secure, protected place. He only needed it for a couple of days.

  “One in Rosvik—somewhere between Piteå and Luleå. And one in Korsberga, Småland—the road from Vetlanda to Växjö.”

  “Too far away.”

  “There isn’t anything else.”

  The windshield wipers were working harder, it was going to start pouring.

  “Then I’ll figure it out myself.”

  He looked over at the boy whose cheeks were getting paler and paler.

  “But I need some help with clothes. Male, one eighty-five tall, normal build. Anything that isn’t a hoodie and track pants.”

  He hung up and turned to the passenger seat.

  “A brown corduroy sofa.”

  Gabriel didn’t look at him, didn’t answer, didn’t even register that someone was talking to him.

  “It’s comfortable to lie on. If you need to.”

  ———

  The City Police Homicide corridor.

  Sven just in front, Hermansson just behind, and Grens beside him. Gabriel Milton was moving even slower and his breathing was even more labored, as if he had started to relax during the journey, now that his girlfriend had protection and he himself had made a decision and was on his way, somewhere.

  The detective superintendent stopped by the coffee machine, selected the button without sugar and milk, pressed and filled a plastic cup.

  “Would you like one?”

  The young face didn’t answer.

  “Anything to eat? An almond slice? A roll?”

  Now it turned away.

  The door to Ewert Grens’s office was open, on the desk in a pile between the telephone and the alarm clock—a pair of blue uniform pants, a white T-shirt, black socks, white underwear, white sneakers.

  “I want you to take off what you’re wearing right now. And if you’ve got anything in the pockets, cell phone, money, put it in that plastic bag there.”

  Ewert Grens had explained what Gabriel already knew.

  You cannot make any phone calls. You cannot take anything with you. You leave your past behind here.

  But the clothes, he went over to them, lifted them up, dropped them again.

  “Those?”

  “Yes.”

  “Not a chance, fucking pig.”

  “Just for today. From the police stores. You’ll get new clothes, bought in town, tomorrow.”

  He went through the pile that was so off the mark, turned toward Grens.

  “How the fuck would you feel in my track pants? In here? It’s the same fucking thing.”

  He looked at the pile of clothes again, then pulled off his hoodie, his T-shirt.

  “Do you want me to wait outside?”

  Mariana Hermansson had stopped by the door.

  “I’d rather get undressed in front of you than those two.”

  The gaping wound on his right thigh, bruising over his whole body.

  Grens tried to see how his stomach and chest were looking, the ribs, but couldn’t tell.

  You have nothing left that can be traced back. And then we’ll empty you of information, over several hours or days, as long as it takes.

  He had changed into new clothes. He was no longer the same person.

  Sven and Hermansson pulled out a chair each while Grens rolled out his desk chair and pointed at the sofa until Gabriel sat down.

  The last drops of coffee, plastic cup on the table.

  “Are you sure you don’t want any?”

  Gabriel shook his head with small movements and the detective superintendent went out only to return almost immediately with two new cups and a cheese roll. He kept
one coffee for himself and put the other and the cheese roll in front of his guest.

  “If you change your mind.”

  Grens drank another half cup, Sven closed his eyes, Hermansson straightened some white papers on her knees, and Gabriel after a while fell back against the brown sofa, it eased a bit then, the stabbing in his side.

  “You can relax now. You can’t get much safer than here. The building is full of police.”

  Ewert Grens held up his key ring, jangled it, then held up a square piece of plastic.

  “I need to use my keys twice and my staff card three times to get in here. And then just as many times to get out.”

  The young man in the blue police-uniform pants and a white T-shirt had not heard what he said. His face was creased with pain and he sank back and down into the sofa with his head on the armrest, where Grens had had his head all these years. He let out a loud groan, sweat on his forehead and temples, a couple of minutes, then his breathing was more normal again.

  Ewert Grens lifted up the recorder that had been sitting on the floor, put it in the middle of the desk, and pressed the button that switched on a small red light for recording.

  It was so silent. Someone should be singing. This office, without music, without her voice, it lacked time.

  Ewert Grens leaned forward, a beige jacket elbow on the only free surface on the desk.

  He didn’t have anything against time. It wasn’t that. Getting older didn’t frighten him at all. It was more that he had no relationship to it. He had never fully grasped how to divide it up into small bits and give them different names and then decide that they meant different amounts.

  That’s not the way it worked. Not for him.

  A second in a car when the back wheel hits a woman’s head was still longer than the thirty-two years that had passed since then. Fifteen minutes by a plot of ground and a white cross would always be as long as the lifetime it had taken to get the courage to go there.

  The other jacket elbow equally heavy beside the one already on the desk, hands under his chin as he looked at nothing in particular.

  That’s just how it was.

  The moment that had been a person’s birth and first breath, the only life he had seen begin, was now, even eighteen years later, so much more than the sum of all the deaths he had already forgotten.

  ———

  “I want you to give us Leon Jensen. I want you to give us Marko Bendik. I want you to give us Uros Koren.”

  He had put in an order for lunch, coffee, dinner, coffee, sandwiches, coffee, for four.

  “I want you to tell us all the crimes that you yourself have committed and not been prosecuted for.”

  He had asked Sven to call Anita and explain that they wouldn’t be watching TV together this evening.

  “I want you to tell us about all the crimes that all the other members, hangarounds, and prospects have committed and not been prosecuted for.”

  He had contacted the medical staff at Sankt Görans hospital and a youth hostel about two hundred kilometers away.

  “I want the names of every single minor you have ever worked with. I want to know what the structure of Ghetto Soldiers looks like. I want you to map out your criminal network in detail.”

  For a long time, he had looked at a very young man who was sitting on his sofa in his place and who in so many ways had lived as long as he had.

  “In short, I want to know everything that you think I shouldn’t know.”

  ———

  There were times when he’d had to sit here like this for three days to gain all possible information. Sometimes two. It could also be over in a matter of minutes.

  The meaning of seconds, hours, years evaporated as it always did when hands were fumbling for the key that would open the door out.

  ———

  “Where is Leon Jensen?”

  Ewert Grens was still sitting there, his jacket elbows on the desk. Sven Sundkvist had twice got up to open the window and then when the buses on Hantverkargatan had got too noisy, closed it again. Mariana Hermansson offered cigarettes and coffee. Gabriel Milton leaned forward ever so slightly, not much but enough to be noticeable, breathing carefully.

  “Wanda?”

  “She’s fine.”

  “What’s she doing now?”

  “Now?”

  “Yes.”

  “She’s sitting well protected between two police officers in a room in Råby police station.”

  “And me?”

  “I’ve explained that.”

  “I want to hear it again.”

  “We’ll transport you to where we’ve agreed you will go.”

  “Good.”

  “Well, then?”

  “You said map out your criminal network in detail?”

  “I said I wanted to know where Leon Jensen was.”

  “If you’re going to map out our criminal network in detail, you’ll need a pen.”

  Three hours and twelve minutes.

  ———

  He didn’t like his new clothes. His way of sitting, moving, a body that screamed in discomfort, wrong, overdressed.

  He drank his first cup of coffee.

  He poked the lunch slop—meatballs and gravy—with a plastic knife.

  “Wanda.”

  “Yes?”

  “Now?”

  “She’s sitting in the same room. Between two police officers.”

  “Good.”

  “That’s what you asked for.”

  “I said good.”

  “More coffee?”

  “You want to know what the structure of Ghetto Soldiers looks like?”

  “I want to know where Leon Jensen is.”

  “The structure? Are you writing this down?”

  Five hours and thirty-eight minutes.

  ———

  He asked if he could lie down. Grens nodded. Hermansson got one of the cushions that was lying on the floor behind the sofa. He breathed easier for a while, his face relaxed.

  “The name of every single minor?”

  “Leon Jensen.”

  “You said the name of every single minor you have ever worked with.”

  “I said Leon Jensen and that I want to know where he is.”

  “Do you want them or don’t you?”

  Eight hours and four minutes.

  ———

  Coffee. Coffee. Dinner. Ewert Grens guessed cod, maybe coalfish, some sort of fish that tasted of nothing.

  Coffee. Coffee. Sandwiches. Meatballs again with beets on dry, dark rye bread. And some white bread with cheese.

  He seemed to be asleep.

  An eighteen-year-old’s face, nearly relaxed.

  Hermansson adjusted the cushion, he didn’t move.

  She looked at him, then glanced over at Grens.

  Then looked at the boy’s face again.

  If you don’t know what love means. But you feel something.

  How can you know?

  “You said I want you to tell us all the crimes you’ve ever committed and not been prosecuted for. Is that what you said?”

  He wasn’t asleep.

  Maybe he’d gotten frightened by Hermansson’s face coming so close.

  “You said I want you to tell us all the crimes that all the members, hangarounds, prospects have ever committed and never been prosecuted for. Is that what you said after?”

  “What I said was that I want to know where Leon Jensen is.”

  “And I want you to go jerk yourself off. Are you writing this down or not? All the crimes? You’ll need a lot of paper then.”

  Fourteen hours and four minutes.

  ———

  He had his eyes shut again. Hermansson was still sitting beside him on the sofa, close to his face.

  He was in pain. It didn’t help to lie down anymore.

  She moved closer.

  He had known love. Well shot, brother. Then something had changed. His girlfriend got pregnant.

  She straight
ened the pillow again.

  Someone who had never been close, who couldn’t understand, if it happens, if he realizes, starts to love himself, then that other feeling, it will change as well, from inside.

  “I want you to give us Marko Bendik? I want you to give us Uros Koren?”

  “What I want is for you to give us Leon Jensen.”

  “Marko Bendik. Uros Koren.”

  Eighteen hours and sixteen minutes.

  ———

  Ewert Grens hadn’t ordered breakfast, had forgotten that others ate in the morning. He had emptied his top drawer of ten-kronor coins and with them then emptied the vending machine. Rolls wrapped in plastic, cinnamon buns, apples, yogurt, almond slices, two chocolate cookie things. The boy who was lying down had pointed at the chocolate, eaten both, and then lain down again.

  The young person who was breathing more and more heavily and who was to be exploited—of information—had several times been about to fall asleep and Sven and Hermansson had taken turns to prod him.

  He could sleep later. When they were finished.

  ———

  They were so close.

  He was lying there because he’d decided. And they knew that, all of them, him too.

  “Not my brother.”

  Sometimes he tried to shout, but he gave up when the pain was too much. He still sneered, of course he did, challenged them, but it all got lost in the weakness.

  “I’ve given you the others. But you won’t get my brother.”

  When he had cried for the first time, Grens had leaned out of the open window, contacted the Special Firearms Command, and whispered that they should get ready and wait for orders.

  ———

  “More coffee?”

  “No.”

  “Lunch?”

  “No.”

  “I’ve got cigarettes here if—”

  “Five.”

  He cried again, darker this time, from deep inside.

  “We prepared five apartments.”

  Grens didn’t move, nor did Sven or Hermansson move, what had just started could stop any moment.

  “Råby Allé 124. Råby Allé 146. Råby Allé 172. Råbygången 68. Råby Backe 4.”

  He was crying in pain, and because he was no one.

  “And four cellar storerooms. Råby Allé 16. Råby Allé 143. Råby Backe 192. Råbygången 146.”

  But most of all, he was crying because of the excruciating loneliness.