The Brother

by Joakim Zander

  Mehdi shrugs.

  “We have to get out of here,” he says. “Before the cops get here.”

  “I’m not going anywhere,” Yasmine says.

  She suddenly feels the weight of the gun again and aims it at the man on the grass, at his other leg.

  “I’m not going anywhere until this fucker tells me where Fadi is and how he’s connected to all this. Time to talk, bre, otherwise I’ll fuck your other leg up, too.”

  There’s something intoxicating about all this. Something almost arousing. After all she’s had to take, all the blows and shit. She has the power now. The violence is in her hands. She almost hopes he’ll keep his mouth shut. She wants nothing more than to put a bullet in his right leg, too. But Mehdi pulls on her shoulder, sobbing.

  “No, Yazz,” he says. “I swear, he doesn’t know anything about Fadi. I swear! Nobody knows. No one besides me.”

  *

  They’re all the way to the high-rise where Mehdi and Parisa live with her mother when they hear the sirens singing over the expressway, then slow down and turn off on the other side of Bergort.

  “Damn, they were fast,” Mehdi mumbles.

  Yasmine doesn’t answer, just snatches open the door to the staircase. She doesn’t have time to care about what just happened. All she can think about is—Fadi is here, Mehdi’s been with him the whole time.

  She stops inside the damp, echoing stairway and turns to Mehdi.

  “And now?” she says. “Where are we going?”

  He walks past her, unlocks the door to the stairs to the basement, and heads down in front of her. Their footsteps echo dully behind them. He leads them farther down into the dampness, past rusty, dripping pipes and a humming laundry room. Finally, he stops in front of a white steel door that’s identical to all the other white steel doors down here.

  Yasmine’s head is pounding, and she’s having a hard time breathing. Mehdi goes to the door and leans forward to insert the key.

  “Wait,” she says.

  She sinks down on her haunches, and her throat feels thick and rough from suppressed tears. It’s been four years since she left him. Four years of betrayal and emptiness, and life without him and Bergort. Just weeks ago she learned that he was dead. She closes her eyes and sees the cat hanging from a lamppost, the symbols on the walls, the burning cars. Sees Fadi when he was small, asleep on her arm. Sees his eyes that last night, when she left him to his fate. She sees blood on the grass in the grove just minutes ago. What happens now? she thinks. Where do we go now?

  She swallows and looks at Mehdi, gestures for him to open the door. He knocks gently.

  “It’s just me, brother,” he says.

  Then he pushes open the door to the basement storage room, and Yasmine closes her eyes, unsure if she’s able to do this. When she opens them, Mehdi has turned on the light in a bare and empty room.

  “He’s gone,” he says.

  But he’s holding something in his hand, a small bundle of handwritten papers.

  “But I think he left something for you.”

  50

  London—Friday, August 21, 2015

  The sight of the man on the other side of the street paralyzes Klara. All she can see is his black T-shirt, his black jeans, and his long, messy hair. She suddenly remembers his sinewy hands as they tore away her backpack. Remembers what he whispered to her.

  When she gains control of her body again and manages to stand up, she backs up toward the building behind her, without looking away from him. She sees he’s holding his hands up, as if to show he’s unarmed.

  A car drives slowly down the street, creating a moment of distance between them. But as soon as it’s gone, it’s as if she’s hypnotized again, she can’t look away from him, can’t run, can only back up slowly toward the wall.

  Remember, remember, the fifth of November.

  That’s what he whispered to her, that’s what he has tattooed on his wrist, and now he’s slowly crossing the street, with his hands still held up, palms outward, trying to show he’s not a threat. But he’s already proven he’s a threat, already proven what he’s capable of.

  Remember, remember, the fifth of November.

  She backs up until she’s against the window of a vintage boutique. He walks slowly toward her, steps up on the sidewalk now, just a few yards away. A group of young Spanish people laugh outside the shop behind her and disappear down the street.

  He waits until they’re farther away.

  “Klara,” he says calmly.

  His English sounds American, and his voice is surprisingly friendly and strangely high, almost childlike and alarmingly harmless.

  “Klara, please forgive me, we need to talk.”

  He’s close now, could almost touch her if he held out his hand. His face is pale and smooth as a winter moon, his fingers long and thin. He doesn’t seem like he spends much time outdoors.

  She holds up her hands, signaling that she doesn’t want him any closer—he’s already too close.

  “I don’t know what you know,” he says. “I was the one who took your computer.”

  She nods, steels herself, tightens her fists. A single fucking motion and she could hit him between the legs, just like she kicked Calle in sixth grade when he tried to touch her breasts. None of the boys tried to pinch her after that. And she’s close now, ready to explode.

  “I’m so sorry,” he says. “It was a mistake, OK? So fucking stupid.”

  She doesn’t relax, even if there’s something about him that seems genuine, sincere. She says nothing. Just waits for him to continue.

  “Patrick is dead,” he says. “They pushed him in front of the train.”

  She swallows.

  “How do you know Patrick?” she whispers at last. “Who the hell are you?”

  “You can call me Cross,” he says, throwing nervous glances up and down the street. “I don’t have much time, but do you mind if we take a walk?”

  *

  “It was my idea,” Cross says as they walk slowly along Virginia Road toward the long shadows of the trees in Ravenscroft Park. “A fucking stupid idea. Patrick was pissed off of course. But I’d been up for a really long time, if you know what I mean? Coding and doing speed for a couple of nights. And Patrick was so close to figuring out what this all was about. I knew he needed access to one of your computers, that he’d tried before. Me too.”

  Klara shakes her head, stops.

  “What are you trying to say?” she says. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  But Cross doesn’t seem to care. He just waves at her to continue walking. She keeps her eyes on him, glancing at him sideways, ready to fight or flee if it were to become necessary. Should she even be walking with him?

  “Patrick said you were in Sweden last weekend, so I checked the flights and waited for you at the airport, I thought you might leave your bag unattended for a second. But you never did. Not until you went to that hipster bar. I had some roofies with me, for personal use, I was really speedy. But I had another idea when I got to the bar. So I waited a while and then crumbled a couple of pills into your drink. You drank them up fast, so it didn’t take long for it to have an effect.”

  She just stares at him. What the fuck is he talking about?

  “Wait,” she says, shaking her head. “What the hell are you saying? You put something in my drink? That is fucking deranged.”

  Cross nods, avoiding her eyes.

  “Not my best moment, I have to agree. Would have been better if I just let Patrick do it in his own way. Maybe he wouldn’t have…”

  They’ve arrived at the park now and head down one of the gravel paths toward a park bench. She takes out a cigarette and lights it without offering him one.

  “Are you going to tell me what the hell this is all about?” she says. Cross’s eyes continue to jump back and forth across the park. Finally, he calms down again and turns to her.

  “It’s about your job,” he says. “Something to do with whoever is
paying for your research.”

  She tries to catch his eyes, but they’re hopping across the park again, and Cross has stood up now, rigid and anxious like a hyperactive child.

  “Stirling Security?” she says.

  “He got a hold of some stuff,” Cross continues, as if he hadn’t heard her.

  He shrugs off his backpack and takes out a thick, red cardboard folder.

  “Here,” he says and lays it on Klara’s lap. “I don’t know what it is. Patrick hid it in the courtyard behind the institution where you work. As soon as I realized he was gone, I went and got it. When I came home, someone had ransacked the apartment.”

  Klara feels the weight of the folder on her knees. She puts her hands on it, pulls it closer, and looks up at Cross. He has tears in his eyes now.

  “It was our culture, you know?” he says. “Anonymous. Digital rebellion. But that it would end up like this? That he’d die?”

  “Were you two a couple?” she says quietly. “Was he your boyfriend?”

  Cross nods hesitantly.

  “He was the reason I came to London. You know, he got this job after Harvard? So idealistic. Human rights and all that. But soon he realized something was off about your boss. Something off about the entire institute.”

  Klara gets up too. Gently, she takes his hand.

  “What’s off?” she says. “And why did you take my computer?”

  He seems to calm down for a moment when she holds his hand.

  “Something’s not right about that report you’re writing,” he says. “And the conference in Stockholm. Patrick was sure your boss had been bought, you know? She’s writing the report on behalf of someone, a business or a lobbyist. He thought the report was going to end up having a lot of influence. But we couldn’t get a hold of what she wrote, or what her conclusions were. So Patrick said you were also working on the report, and then I thought maybe we could find it on your computer? But of course you didn’t have it either.”

  Klara shakes her head.

  “Our boss wouldn’t let me see her recommendations,” she says. “But why do you trust me? Maybe they bought me too?”

  Cross looks into her eyes, shrugs.

  “Who else do I have?” he says. “I don’t even know what this is about. Just that I have to leave now. It’s not safe for me here anymore. And if they find out what you have you won’t be safe either.”

  He points to the cardboard folder Klara laid on the park bench.

  “I have to go,” he says. “Get out of London. Do what you want with that. Everything’s over for me anyway. But I’m sorry about that thing with your computer.”

  And with that he turns his back to Klara and disappears deeper into the shadows of the trees.

  *

  Afterward, she’s sitting rigid and perfectly straight in the back of a taxi. On her knees sits the red folder, which she hasn’t even dared to open yet.

  What should she do with it? What does she dare to do? Patrick is dead, probably murdered. The trip to Stockholm is tomorrow. She hasn’t packed. The whole world is upside down again. She needs a drink.

  The taxi stops outside the Library, but when she sees the warm light and the people laughing and having a good time inside, she feels sick again. She leans forward and tells the driver to continue, and with a sigh he drives on. She has to go somewhere. Anywhere at all. As long as nobody knows her there.

  51

  Bergort—Friday, August 21, 2015

  It’s late afternoon by the time I’m back in front of the building I grew up in. It’s as if time has stopped. One second is an hour now. One minute a whole morning. Four or five hours left now until it’s time. I try not to think about it, push it away, push it down, but the adrenaline still makes my head spin. It’s not that I’m afraid of it. On the contrary. I look forward to it. The thought of al-Amin’s eyes when he kneels before me. Will he beg for his life? The man who was ready to destroy me, how will he look when I destroy him?

  Our parents aren’t home, the apartment is dark and quiet and clean. I stop in the living room. Squat down. This is where we used to lie, sister. On the floor in the afternoons. This is where you read the subtitles and quizzed me on the dictionary. This was where we struggled to stay warm, where I lay my head in your lap and felt a sense of security I’ve never felt since.

  For a moment, I think I’m going to cry, but I know it doesn’t matter, there’s no going back. It’s all over now, has been for a long time.

  But when I open the door to our room, it’s as if the world trembles, as if the whole universe hesitates and restarts. I stop at the threshold with my temples pulsing—overcome by a feeling I can’t quite put my finger on. A sense that something has shifted in the foundation, and now nothing is the same. The light streams in through the blinds and across the floor like it always does. Your bed is made and stretched tight like it has been since you left. Nothing is different, yet everything is different. I turn to my own bed and its light blue bedspread. And I see it’s wrinkled now, not smooth like last week.

  Slowly I go over to the mattress. Slowly I lift it up, pull it off, close my eyes. Time is uneven again. It feels like two seconds are an hour, but at last I feel the mattress become heavy in my hands, feel it fall off the bed and onto the floor.

  When I open my eyes I already know the bag is gone. My heart is pounding as I go to the bed and bend over it. A paper is lying there. A folded letter-size page. I pick it up and see your blocky handwriting. Just one line. “I will always protect you.” And your number. Nothing more.

  52

  Bergort—Friday, August 21, 2015

  It’s as if she can’t move and she falls slowly down onto the thin mattress with the letter pressed to her chest.

  Fadi’s jerky handwriting. The desperation of the letter, the confusion that increases throughout the text until it finally ebbs away completely. The last page where the ink has run out, and he’s carved the words into the paper with the dry tip of his pen.

  Somewhere far away, she can hear Mehdi lifting things up and moving them around, as if he’s looking for something.

  She thought Fadi was dead, only to discover he was alive, and now he’s on his way to die, on his way to choose death. If only she had taken him by the hand four years ago. If only she had put her arms around him and pulled him close. If only she had taken him with her. If only he’d done what he’s asking Mehdi to do in his letter, stay and wait for her.

  Perhaps that’s what he was trying to do? But Bergort wouldn’t let him go. The ties were elastic and pulled him back. In the same way they dragged her back now. She feels Mehdi put his hand on her shoulder, and she opens her eyes.

  “Yazz,” he says. “He’s taken his gun. And he has another gun and a Kalashnikov hidden at your parents’.”

  She shakes her head.

  “Not anymore. I found them and took them away.”

  She pulls the gun out of her waistband.

  “How do you think I got a hold of this?”

  Mehdi nods and squats down with his face in his hands.

  “OK, OK,” he says.

  She looks at him with his head hanging down, his eyes jumping around, his baggy jeans, his sneakers. He looks like he did when he was little. Like when Fadi was little. Like when she was little. All that attitude is gone now, revealed for what it is: bluster and bravado. A façade that hides the usual bad decisions and chaos. Her whole life. Fadi’s whole life. Just bad decisions. Just chaos.

  She shuffles off of the mattress and grabs Mehdi’s arms, takes his hands from his face. He opens his eyes and looks at her in surprise.

  “Ey,” she says. “Mehdi, brother, we need to fix this. You understand? Right?”

  He continues looking at her silently, nods slightly.

  “How?” he says.

  “You have to tell me everything you know. Everything about what just happened up there in the grove. Everything about those fucking symbols. Everything about Fadi and what he’s up to. You understand, len? Tim
e to come clean, OK?”

  *

  Mehdi tells her what Fadi told him. About Dakhil and the men who recruited him. Everything he knows about the mysterious brother al-Amin and the satellite phone. Everything he’s been told and has pieced together. It all sounds like a movie. The drones, the dead brothers in the sands of Syria. Fadi’s eyes and his weapons.

  “I swear,” he says. “If I hadn’t seen his eyes, len. If I hadn’t seen the guns and how he can shoot. If I hadn’t seen his eyes, Yazz. I promise, I would have thought he was crazy, I would have thought he was crazy.”

  And he tells her about Bergort. About the gangster, Rado, who she shot in the leg. About how he showed up out of nowhere a few weeks ago, with a few other dudes just like him. Mehdi tells her about their tattoos and their dead eyes. They’re Serbs, and dangerous as hell.

  “I promise, Yazz, they were like Straight Outta Kumla. Totally psycho. He brought a dead cat with him, len. He hung it on a lamppost! Crazy shit.”

  “But why, Mehdi?” she says. “And why did you stay around? What’s the matter with you? You have a baby now, brother!”

  He shrugs and shifts his eyes, rubs his hands over his face.

  “Fuck, I can’t take it. Neither can Parisa. We weren’t ready, you know? Not me. We live with her mother. In one room. With the baby. Like fucking beggars. This shuno, Rado, who you shot, he put me in command, ya know. The kids looked up to me like a king! And he paid. Fuck, Yazz, Parisa and I don’t have shit. A thousand kronors a day for two weeks is a lot of cash for me.”

  He falls silent and clears his throat, looking embarrassed. But Yasmine doesn’t give a shit about his fucking anxiety.

  “You’re a fucking jackass, Mehdi. I swear, if it weren’t for all this chaos I’d laugh, brother. Do you think people hand out cash for free? So fucking stupid, I swear.”

  “Sorry,” he mumbles. “Of course it was wrong, Yazz. I shouldn’t have snitched about you looking for Fadi. But we were getting ready for the riots, and I thought if you could just calm down for one week that this would go smoothly. I get my cash, and Fadi has time to get his revenge. Everybody would win if you just stayed away. But I didn’t think they’d hurt you. I just told them that somebody was asking questions about the symbols and the riots and that we had to make it stop. And what happened today… that was Parisa’s fault.”