Two Soldiers

by Anders Roslund

  That smell. He recognized it.

  He relaxed a little. The tin of Rizla papers and leather pouch with tobacco and the small round bottle’s three drops of cannabis oil.

  Bruno lit it, like Gabriel used to, inhaled.

  A half cigarette, Eddie watched the white paper shrink. Until he heard footsteps.

  Until he heard footsteps.

  The kitchen. He was sure of it. Jon. Big Ali. There, through the kitchen door.

  The dryness in his mouth.

  “Sixteen thousand. Twenty g. And tomorrow . . .”

  His heart.

  When they looked at him without saying anything and sat down, one on the sofa and one on the chair that was leaning against the wall under the TV.

  His fucking fucking heart.

  “. . . tomorrow, I’ll get the rest, I promise, I . . .”

  He held the roll of five-hundred-kronor notes in a rubber band, held it out to Bruno, who took it and put it down on the table without counting it.

  “It’s cool.”

  He inhaled again, tobacco, cannabis oil, leaned in closer.

  “You do well, every time, for the family. Reliable accounts. No bullshit. Look after our weapons. Stash our hot goods.”

  Eddie heard him, but not what he was saying.

  “And you haven’t talked. You’ve never talked. Not once. Not even when they questioned us all day.”

  Bruno’s mouth was moving, Eddie couldn’t understand why it was moving.

  “And the police station. You kept the bomb. You planted it.”

  Eddie left the mouth in favor of the hands; now Bruno’s hands were moving, rolling another cigarette, three drops of cannabis oil, lit it, and held it out.

  “Here.”

  Eddie looked at the others who were still sitting there silently, then moved his fingers toward it, around it, a quick puff.

  Bruno’s hand.

  He stretched it out across the table.

  “One love, brother.”

  Eddie heard it, he did, but he didn’t understand.

  One love, brother.

  He looked at Jon. At Big Ali. And back at Bruno and his hand.

  Maybe they were smiling.

  And now Jon held out his hand.

  “One love, brother.”

  Big Ali.

  “One big love, brother.”

  Eddie looked around.

  It wasn’t Leon. It wasn’t Gabriel. Not anymore.

  One love, brother.

  It was him. And he was one of them. He had brothers. He had a family. From this evening on, he would have a tattoo on his right thigh.

  And he smiled, for the first time in a long time, he smiled and he could feel it way down in his belly, as he sometimes did.

  another day later

  It was light outside.

  If he lay down, if he stared hard enough at the blind without blinking either of his eyes, it could for a blurred moment become a blanket that not long ago was red shot with yellow and had a thin white stripe around the edge. He’d never liked that blanket. It hadn’t covered the whole dirty window; the sun had forced its way into the room and onto the bed and in between his and Wanda’s naked bodies. Now he missed it. Or maybe it was the room he missed. Maybe the days when they lived in the dark and slept through the light and woke again when the evening and night returned.

  The blind closed everything in, hid everything outside.

  Gabriel blinked and it was clear again.

  If he lay on his side, if he looked around the room with a bed and a wardrobe and a sink and a small table and a chair. Cell. But it wasn’t, no metal door, no bars in front of the window, but the same emptiness lived here, it stood still, and the same air that he’d breathed in Mariefred prison and Johannisberg secure training unit and Sundbo secure training unit, breath that was black and tasted of dust and was never enough even though he breathed and breathed.

  It had been seven days and seven nights now. He was sure of that, because he drew a line with a ballpoint pen on the head of the bed every morning. When he was in hospital, he’d been given a piece of paper with four pictures of different houses and a map with four red circles on it and had then been given the choice between a youth hostel some way outside Växjö, one somewhere between Karlstad and Säffle, and one between Hudiksvall and Ljusdal, and then this one that was called Hargebaden, which was quite close to Aksersund. The policewoman had told him that from the same day, Wanda was being held in the women’s unit in Kronoberg remand prison and would be charged with serious drug offenses and be sentenced to at least four years and a couple of months, and that there was only one possible prison, Hinseberg. This circle on the map had been closest. Eighty-three kilometers. It had been easy to choose and point.

  She had been the last one.

  On his way from the police headquarters, he had given her up too.

  But only when he’d understood that she would otherwise give birth and live under constant threat in a Råby that he could never go back to.

  The first floor of a yellow wooden house with white frames around every window, door, and corner. If he pulled up the blind. Grass and trees and water a hundred meters away, Hargeviken, a big sandy beach; he had walked there once.

  Oscar.

  Once he’d chosen the youth hostel, he was given another choice, Oscar, Erik, or Carl.

  Oscar Hansson.

  He couldn’t even think it.

  He lay on a bed and looked up at the ceiling. He didn’t need it. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, the police station in Askersund was open between nine and three and if he wanted to walk along the cobbled streets past the other wooden houses and visit the policeman who was now his contact person, he could. He’d been there a couple of days ago. He probably wouldn’t do it again.

  He thought about Leon sometimes.

  He hadn’t understood at first when they sat there talking about him. One of the happy families at the table in the dining room, eating their youth hostel breakfast, as he made his way, thirsty, to the fridge. They were holding the papers and reading out loud to each other about an eighteen-year-old who had escaped and murdered two people and then was himself found dead in a cell in Aspsås prison. Gabriel had heard what they were saying and moved closer to the table and looked at several black-and-white pictures of Leon’s face, but hadn’t understood until he got back to his room with the rolled-down blind and lain down on the bed and closed his eyes. He had decided not to feel anything and then lain there all day and all night and occasionally with his fingertips had traced the five round scars from a glowing cigarette pressed against the skin on his face, and could have stayed lying there even longer. Until he couldn’t anymore. In the morning he’d drawn a line on the head of the bed and breathed in the black and dusty air, and then started to cry silently. Not much, but more than he had done since before the fire and his dad and in a different way from when he’d sat in the car between Råby and Södertälje a couple of weeks ago with a gun loaded with one single bullet and pressed it hard against his temple. He’d sat up on the edge of the bed and forced the fucking tears back down his throat to his chest, to his stomach, and whispered I love you, brother until there was nothing left.

  He pulled out the chair by the small table and sat down. Strong sunlight outside, sharp light through the blind fabric. He looked again at the door that wasn’t metal, which he could open whenever he wanted and go out. He wouldn’t do it today. He’d stay in his room. As he had yesterday. As he would tomorrow. There was nowhere else to go.

  That fat fucking pig with the stiff neck and gammy leg had explained that he would live like this. No contact with Råby meant no contact with Råby. That someone who first informs on his brothers and then his woman in order to live under a witness protection program might feel that breathing is black and dusty and give up, relapse, go back.

  He wasn’t going to do that. He had decided.

  He would wait here in an empty house exactly eighty-three kilometers from Hinseberg, close to Wand
a, who was pregnant and in eight months would give birth to his son in a cell that was much bigger than the others, maybe he would even visit them one day, get to know someone who would get to know him.

  yet another day later

  The brown corduroy sofa was too soft—especially on the nights when he slept several hours in a row. It was too short—with a stiff left leg that couldn’t stretch out. And it was too warm—the fabric was worn and rubbed against his back. But he slept so much better there than anywhere else, he belonged in it in the way that it belonged in the room. It had stood there in the corner, as far from the wardrobe as the window, longer than most people had worked in the building.

  Ewert Grens lay down to avoid the piles of paper on the equally aging coffee table. It didn’t move, the letter on top didn’t disappear. He’d been standing out in the Homicide corridor, two cups of blackness and an almond slice, when he looked over at his pigeonhole and the note that someone had written encouraging him to empty it. Why do they bother? He’d sighed, gone over, stuffed the pile under his arm, and then lain down to open one letter at a time, but he hadn’t got any further. The envelope on top—it must have been put there that morning—white, A4, Prison Service and Fridhemsplan Probation in the right-hand corner. He had looked at it for a long time, had chosen to drop it, and had been lying there avoiding it for half an hour now.

  He sat up. Fingered it, lifted it up, weighed it in his hand. He went over to the window and the view out to Kronoberg courtyard. Back to the coffee table. It was still there. He lifted it up again, coughed, pulled his index finger from the opening on one side of the envelope to the other side.

  A single sheet of paper. An official form he’d seen before. And at the bottom, a request.

  He folded the sheet, walked over to his desk and one of the piles that lay there, went through the files until he found the one he was looking for. Another letter that had been found in a red Adidas bag during a house search, sent from an inmate in Block D at Aspsås prison to a peer in an apartment on the second floor of Råby Allé 67.

  He held both documents out in front of him, side by side, compared the signature at the bottom of one with that on the other.

  It was written by the same hand.

  He hurried out into the corridor again, three rooms down, Erik Wilson’s office. His boss was sitting hunched in front of the computer screen when Grens crossed the threshold and went in.

  “I got a commission from you.”

  He held out an envelope, newly opened, Prison Service and Fridhemsplan Probation in the right-hand corner.

  “Because I was suited.”

  They had stood together in a cell in Hinseberg prison for women. Neither of them had understood then that it was a day that would live on. It had. This morning in a white envelope.

  “I got this today.”

  Erik Wilson opened it and read the single sheet inside. An official form that he’d seen before too. And that was always followed by a request. It was remarkable how often criminals, just as they were on their way to being locked up, sat in the remand prison and filled out a form about their probation officer—the person on the other side of the prison wall who would be their contact person and who they had to trust—and wanted the very policeman who had questioned them for days and wrangled with them over the truth, or even the policeman who had pursued them for so long and made sure that they were arrested.

  “A request, Ewert . . .”

  This form, this request for a probation officer, had been signed by Leon Jensen.

  “. . . that I would have immediately turned down.”

  Wilson looked at the detective superintendent in front of him, who somehow managed to make every room feel small, folded the piece of paper, and handed it back together with the envelope.

  “If it had still been relevant, that is.”

  Someone had died. Someone they had both seen being born. They had never talked about it, and they never would.

  “Not for his sake. For your sake, Ewert.”

  A third cup of black coffee in the corridor on the way back. And another almond slice.

  He couldn’t bear lying down anymore, looked at the cassette player and the tapes on the shelf, and listened to the silence, then sat down at his desk and randomly pulled something out of the other piles that were there—the explosions three days earlier in six buildings with the same address, Råby Allé. Slowly, and somewhat distracted, he leafed through the thick and until now unread documents. One at a time. Interviews, possible chain of events, more interviews, witness statements, yet more interviews. The last file was Krantz’s technical report. As soon as he read it, he started to get that feeling in his chest that he’d learned to trust and put it to one side, waited a while, and then decided, when the feeling in his chest didn’t let go, to read it again.

  The first pages, overexposed and underexposed photos of cut-off electric wires and undetonated explosives, of burned-out and blasted stairwells and apartments, blackened cellar rooms and a garage.

  Fragments of explosives localized in the communal elevator shafts are almost certainly from the same source as the explosives previously localized on the kitchen floor and kitchen table in the apartment on the second floor of Råby Allé 67.

  Ewert Grens fought to keep down whatever it was in his chest. He couldn’t.

  Almost certainly.

  In a forensic scientist’s world, in Nils Krantz’s world, about as close to the absolute truth as you could get.

  Index finger over the smooth photographic paper on the last page of the report and pictures from the elevator shafts, enlarged fragments of cell phones and the kind of jute that had once been part of sacks of bulk industrial explosives.

  When examining the elevator shaft in Råby Allé 12, several pieces of a cell phone were found. It is very probable that the electrical current generated by the ringing signal caused the first explosion at 04:34, just as was the case with the police station.

  Ewert Grens looked up, took a deep breath, looked down.

  Very probable.

  In a forensic scientist’s world they still had a different way of expressing the truth.

  When examining the other places where an explosion took place, the elevator shafts at Råby Allé 25, 34, 57, 76, 102, fragments of a another five cell phones were found. The time interval between explosions favored by witnesses, eight to twelve seconds, coincides with the time it takes for a signal to be connected, transferred, and connected again. It could be that all six cell phones were transferred sequentially. It could be that the signal to the first cell telephone was transferred to the next and to the next, etc.

  He got up and went over to the window.

  04:34.

  That could be true. Eight to twelve seconds. That could be true.

  Grens left the window and went over to the bookshelf and the tapes and the two photos of someone who calmed him down and took his hand when she sang. He put on a tape, closed his eyes, waited.

  The tears I cry for you could fill an ocean

  That feeling. The one that lingers in your stomach, a bit in your chest.

  But you don’t care how many tears I cry

  It didn’t let go. Her voice, the words, melodies he knew so well, not even they helped.

  It could be true.

  The car was parked on Bergsgatan and he drove too fast up the hill on Hantverkargatan and through the tunnel on Drottningholsmvägen and the first part of Essingeleden, slowed down around Gröndal, and continued at the speed limit in the middle lane. He’d just thought of lying down on the sofa for a while. He hadn’t imagined that two different documents within an hour would lead him back to the place he’d thought he would never return to.

  Krantz’s report, the pictures of what had previously been cell phones, and 04:34 in the morning had linked together restless radio waves and blown up a building every eight seconds. And a white piece of paper in a white envelope sent by the Prison Service, a request to act as probation officer for an inmate
named Leon Jensen.

  Of all damned people, Jensen had written down the name of the one person who wouldn’t be able to answer, since Grens had ceased to understand what he was feeling a long time ago.

  “Where are you?”

  The earpiece didn’t transmit the sound, so he pulled it out and held the telephone on the steering wheel right in front of him with the loudspeaker function on.

  “Can you hear me, Hermansson?”

  “I can hear you.”

  “Where are you?”

  “In my room.”

  “By yourself?”

  She paused.

  “What do you want?”

  A request I would have refused. If it had still been valid.

  “How many murders had I investigated?”

  “What?”

  Not for his sake. For your sake, Ewert.

  “Which towers did you triangulate those intercepted calls from?”

  “What?”

  “How many . . .”

  “I heard what you said. Both times.”

  He’d called her, as he usually did, asked about something different as he usually did, and to be sure, had asked her everything again.

  He wanted something. And had no idea how to do it.

  “What is it that you want, Ewert? Really?”

  He was driving. She could hear the constant sound curtain of heavy traffic.

  “I don’t want anything else. How many . . .”

  “Ewert?”

  “Yes?”

  “What you really don’t want . . . I think . . . we’ve talked about it . . . if it’s about that, at least . . . you’re on your way.”

  “Huh?”

  “You’re on your way, Ewert. Don’t you understand? I saw it, the anger when you went to tell Pereira’s wife that he’d been killed. You thought you were hiding it. I have never seen such anger before. Pereira’s wife could feel it; Sven, the children, and it was good for them, for me. It was the kind of anger that goes hand in hand with real grief. You can feel, Ewert. In a way that you haven’t before . . . as long as I’ve known you. And if you can feel that anger and manage it, then you can also fall in love, dare to fall in love, maybe feel something that isn’t just about you.”