Backstrom: He Who Kills the Dragon (Vintage Crime/Black Lizard Original)

by Leif Gw Persson

  “He’s on here,” the other bouncer said after a quick glance at the list.

  “I thought I recognized you,” the first bouncer said, attempting a smile and stepping aside.

  “Once doesn’t count,” Motoele said, giving him a look as he turned his gaze inward and looked at himself. One day you and I will meet, he thought. Until that day, I will meet many more that are like you.

  God, what a creepy fucker, the bouncer thought, watching him as he disappeared into the club.

  “Did you see that nigger’s girl?”

  “I bet you she’s one of those ones who eat their prey alive,” his colleague declared, shaking his head.

  It wasn’t particularly difficult to locate the Ibrahim brothers and their cousin. The huge Talib’s shaved head shone like a beacon across the packed club.

  “Let’s split up,” Frank said, smiling as if he had said something completely different.

  Magda Hernandez smiled back. She tilted her head to one side. Showed the tip of her tongue to tease him.

  I could eat you alive, Motoele thought, as he watched her go. Would little Miss Magda like to make a baby with me? he thought.

  Five minutes later she was back. She had also put on a large pair of sunglasses even though the club was dimly lit.

  “Hi, Frank,” Magda said, stroking his arm, as every male gaze in the vicinity wandered over her red top, her red mouth, and her white teeth.

  “I think we’ve got a problem,” Magda said, putting her arm round his neck and whispering in his ear.

  “Okay,” Frank said. “Switch with Sandra. Tell Linda, and see if we can get a decent photographer here.”

  “See you later, then, darling,” Magda said, stretching up on her slender ankles and kissing him lightly on the cheek.

  54.

  Sandra Kovac, twenty-seven, was the daughter of immigrants, raised in Tensta. Her dad was Serbian, with far too much hair on his chest for his own good, and he left her mom when Sandra was two years old, only to cause problems for his daughter seventeen years later when she applied to the Police Academy in Solna.

  “I presume you’re aware that Sandra Kovac is the daughter of Janko Kovac,” the assistant commissioner for submissions said with a nervous smile toward the application committee’s female chair.

  “I’ve never believed in inherited sin,” the female chair had said. “What did your dad do, by the way?” she added, looking curiously at the assistant commissioner.

  “He was a rural priest,” the assistant commissioner said.

  “Really?” the chair said.

  The same day that Sandra Kovac finished at the Police Academy, a well-trained man in his forties had knocked on the door of her student room out in Bergshamra. A fellow officer, Sandra thought. A soon-to-be fellow officer, she thought, since such distinctions were important. Even though she was only wearing her dressing gown and was starting to get ready for that evening’s party with the other graduates, she had opened the door.

  “What can I do for you?” Sandra Kovac said, tightening the belt of the gown a bit just in case she had missed something.

  “Quite a lot, I hope,” the well-trained man said, smiling amiably at her and showing his ID. “My name’s Wiklander,” he said. “I work for the Security Police. A superintendent, actually.”

  “Surprise, surprise,” Sandra Kovac said.

  A week later she had started work there. Five years later she had gone with her boss to National Crime, seeing as their mutual boss had moved up the chain and been given responsibility for the National Crime Squad, the National Rapid-Response Unit, helicopters, foreign activity, and everything ranging from all the secret stuff that belonged to the Security Police to all the stuff that was still public.

  “You’re coming with me, Wiklander,” Lars Martin Johansson said the day before his promotion was made public. Hadn’t even pointed with his whole hand.

  “Can I bring Sandra?” Wiklander asked.

  “Janko’s daughter,” Johansson said.

  “Yes.”

  “Couldn’t be better,” Johansson said, because he could see around corners.

  Magdalena Hernandez, twenty-five, was the daughter of immigrants from Chile. Her parents had fled the night that Pinochet seized power and ordered the dictatorship’s lackeys to kill the country’s elected president, Salvador Allende. A long journey that had begun on foot over the border to Argentina had finally come to an end when they had got as far north as it was possible to get if you come from Valparaíso in Chile.

  Magda was born and raised in Sweden. After her twelfth birthday all the men she met stopped looking her in the eye and started staring at her chest instead. All the men between seven and seventy, she thought, as her seven-years-older brother bloodied his hands for her sake on a daily basis for the same reason.

  The day of her fifteenth birthday, she had spoken to him.

  “I’ll get rid of them, Chico,” she said. “I promise.”

  “I want you to keep them,” Chico said, nodding seriously. “You have to understand something, Magda,” he added. “You’re God’s gift to us men and it isn’t up to any of us to change what He has given us.”

  “Okay, then,” Magda said.

  Ten years later she met Frank Motoele, thirty. She had finished her shift at six o’clock in the morning and, even though she needed to sleep in her own bed, she had gone home with him.

  “Would Miss Magda like to make a baby with me?” he asked, turning his gaze outward as he lifted her up on his bed so that he could look her right in the eye without having to bend his neck.

  “I’d love to,” Magda said. “Just promise to be careful.”

  “I promise,” Frank Motoele said. “I’ll never leave you,” he added. Because my fire burns brightest in the North, he thought.

  Frank Motoele came from a children’s home in Kenya. He had met his parents twenty-five years ago. His dad, Gunnar, a carpenter from Borlänge, had got a job on a hotel project run by Skanska in Kenya, and he had taken his wife, Ulla, and stayed for two years. They picked Frank up from the children’s home the week before they were due to go back to Sweden.

  “What about all the paperwork?” Ulla wondered. “Don’t we have to get all that sorted out first?”

  “It’ll be all right,” Gunnar Andersson the carpenter said. Then he shrugged and took his wife and son home.

  At Arlanda they had to spend twenty-four hours waiting, but eventually it had been sorted out and they were allowed to go home to Borlänge.

  “That white stuff out there is snow,” Gunnar Andersson explained, pointing through the windshield of the rental car. “Snow,” he explained in English.

  “Snow,” Frank repeated, nodding. Like on the slopes of Kilimanjaro, he thought, because the nice lady in the children’s home had already told him. She had also shown him pictures, so it was easy to recognize even though he was only five years old. Like white ice cream, tons and tons of it, he thought.

  The day of his eighteenth birthday Frank Andersson had spoken to his dad, Gunnar. He had explained that he wanted to adopt his original name. Change Andersson to Motoele.

  “If you don’t mind,” Frank said.

  “Not at all,” Gunnar said. “The day you deny your roots is the day you deny yourself.”

  “So it’s okay?” Frank asked. Just to be sure, he thought.

  “As long as you don’t forget that I’m your dad,” Gunnar said.

  “You fucked Frank, didn’t you?” Sandra Kovac said the next day when they were standing down in the garage and waiting for a former children’s home child from Kenya who was already a quarter of an hour late for his shift.

  “Yes,” Magda said, nodding.

  “Impressive,” Sandra Kovac said with a sigh. “But don’t worry, once doesn’t count,” she said, because she was still Janko Kovac’s daughter and probably lived on a different planet to someone like Magda Hernandez.

  “He wants us to have a child,” Magda said.

  “I tho
ught you were going to transfer to us here at surveillance?” Janko’s daughter said. “At least that’s what Linda said when I spoke to her.”

  “Well, that’s what he said,” Magda said. “To me,” she said.

  “If he said it, then he must mean it,” Sandra said. He didn’t want to have a fucking kid with me, she thought.

  “I told him, all in good time,” Magda said.

  “How did he take that?”

  “Like all romantics,” Magda said with a smile. “And sexists,” she added, smiling even more.

  “Oh, well, then,” Sandra said.

  55.

  On Saturday morning Grislund, thirty-six, had opened his heart to Superintendent Jorma Honkamäki, forty-two, head of Toivonen’s surveillance unit and usually the acting head of the Stockholm Police riot squad.

  A heart that was already wide-open, since he had opened it three days earlier to his old friend Fredrik Åkare, fifty-one, who was sergeant-at-arms for the Hells Angels out in Solna. The same Åkare who was absolutely livid when he stepped into his workshop—and what real choice had he had, a simple car mechanic and father of two? Grislund thought.

  “Okay, Grislund, unless you fancy drinking the oil from your own drip tray, I suggest you tell me where I can find little Nasir,” Åkare said, kicking the contents of the tray across Grislund’s well-scrubbed concrete floor to underline the seriousness of what he had just said.

  Grislund had revealed everything. He was a simple man but even he realized it was time to choose a side. Naturally, Grislund was not his real name: No one would really be called Pigpen. He actually came from a noble family. He was called Stig after his father and Svinhufvud after his mother, a fetchingly old-fashioned name meaning “pigheaded,” because she refused to become a Nilsson upon her marriage to Grislund’s father. Her happiness meant her son’s unhappiness, and sadly, in spite of her fine background, she didn’t possess a single krona that could have softened the blows her son had to endure.

  Back in nursery school his friends had nicknamed him Grislund, and the only advantage was that he had been able to eat like an ordinary person all his life, and fairly soon he was living up to his own nickname. As a lad his dad had called him Stiglet. Then, when Grislund told his mom that he and a friend were going to open a car repair shop out in North Järva she had stopped talking to him. Dad still called him Little Stiglet. Either because he didn’t know any better or because he wanted to wind up his wife. It’s probably more to do with Mom, Grislund thought—he had just turned seventeen and had just completed his mechanics course out in Solna.

  The repair shop had gone well, and his old friends had done what they could to help. Mostly Farshad Ibrahim, whom he had got to know in secondary school in Sollentuna. Plus all the others that Farshad even then could count among his retinue.

  He had met Åkare much later. One day he just turned up and rolled an old van off the back of a truck, telling him to scrap the fucker before sunset. Grislund had done as he was told and had earned yet another customer.

  Everything kept on rolling, so to speak. There had been the occasional little hiccup with grouchy cops sniffing around the repair shop, but nothing he couldn’t live with. Up until seven o’clock the evening before, when all hell had broken loose.

  He was lying happily beneath his labor of love, a Chevy Bel Air from 1956, tightening some old nuts, mainly for the fun of it. Suddenly the repair shop door had flown open and before he even had time to turn his head and look, someone had grabbed his ankles and pulled him out. It was a miracle that he didn’t crack his head open on the frame of the Chevy.

  “Grislund,” Jorma Honkamäki said, smiling at him with his small eyes. “Call your old woman and tell her not to bother getting you any tea, and I’ll take you for sausage and mash back at Solna.”

  Compared with Åkare, Honkamäki had behaved reasonably, and because it was never wrong to get yourself a bit of extra insurance, he had opened his heart one more time.

  Admittedly, Honkamäki had started by winding him up. They’d evidently found a few things: steel wire, solder, all the necessary tools, a dozen caltrops that he’d knocked up and then forgotten about, a few old number plates that it was always useful to have in reserve. It didn’t really amount to much, if only that had been all.

  If only Nasir hadn’t asked him to look after that hundred-gram bag when he looked in on Monday last week to pick up a whole sack of caltrops.

  “Only until the end of the day,” Nasir had assured him. “I’m on a driving job later today, so, in case anything goes wrong.” An eloquent shrug of his slender shoulders.

  “Okay,” Grislund said, because he was a kind, decent man, and as far as possible he liked to keep his customers happy. Especially if they had an older brother called Farshad Ibrahim. Besides, Nasir had promised to pick the bag up later that evening. After he finished the job, he and his girlfriend were heading down to Copenhagen to celebrate. Meet up with a mutual friend of his and Grislund’s. Let their hair down, have some fun.

  “After all, I don’t drink like you and the other Swedes,” Nasir had said.

  “A hundred grams of coke,” Honkamäki said. “We’re talking fourteen days per gram, Grislund, your prints on the bag, and what is it that makes me think you’ve suddenly gone soft in the head?” Four years, Grislund thought, because he could count perfectly well. It was high time to open his heart.

  “Take it easy, Jorma,” Grislund said. “You’re talking to a simple foot soldier in the great army of organized crime. Where would someone like me get money like that from?”

  And all thanks to a fucking springer spaniel, he thought. First she had just run round like all the other dogs people like Honkamäki brought with them. Then she suddenly stopped and howled, almost tying herself in knots in front of the big oil tray he had in the workshop. The one that even someone like Åkare would think twice about before kicking. Still less stick in his hand, like the dog’s master had done without a moment’s hesitation.

  So he had opened his heart one more time and explained the way things were. Compared with Åkare, Honkamäki had at least behaved more or less like a human being. He hadn’t started by putting his hands round his neck, sticking his index finger up his nose, and twisting it.

  Nasir and Tokarev had taken off after the shooting out at Bromma. They drove five hundred meters. Abandoned their van twenty meters from the entrance to the Hells Angels’ holy of holies. Their clubhouse itself, practically next door to the airport.

  No explanation as to why. Because red mist was still coming out of the side window? To cause trouble for their rivals? Because they’d just found an empty parking space? Stupidly, Nasir had pulled off his mask as he was running past one of Åkare’s many associates just a couple side streets away, as the sirens began to wail in the background.

  “Nasir,” Grislund concluded. “Drives like a fucking boy racer.”

  “Little Nasir,” Honkamäki said. I wonder how much money his nasty big brother has had to fork out to fix up board and lodging for him this time? he thought.

  “He’s a fucking little brat,” Grislund said. “Do you know what the bastard says when he gets his fucking caltrops and I’ve promised to look after his fucking coke so he’ll leave me alone to get on with my own thing? Do you know what the bastard says to me as he leaves?”

  “No,” Honkamäki says.

  “Oink, oink,” Grislund said.

  “You don’t have it easy, Grislund.” Honkamäki grinned.

  “No,” Grislund agreed. Whoever said we’re supposed to have it easy? he thought.

  “Have you told anyone else this?” Honkamäki said.

  “No,” Grislund said, shaking his head. There are still limits, he thought.

  “A little bird told me that you had a visit from Åkare,” Honkamäki said, sounding as if he were thinking out loud.

  “No way,” Grislund said. What the hell is he after? he thought.

  “It’ll get sorted,” Honkamäki said.

&nbs
p; “What about the prints?” Grislund asked. “On that fucking plastic bag. Nasir’s coke,” he clarified.

  “What fucking prints?” Honkamäki said, shaking his head. “No idea what you’re talking about.”

  Grislund himself had asked to stay in the holding cell. At least until Monday, to prevent any unnecessary rumors from spreading.

  “Make yourself at home, Grislund,” Honkamäki said.

  Then he had called Toivonen to tell him.

  “What the hell would the little bastard want with Copenhagen?” Toivonen said. Anyway, weren’t the Hells Angels on the city council there? he thought.

  “I’ve already spoken to our Danish colleagues,” Honkamäki said. “They’ve promised to keep an eye out for him. If we’re lucky, he’s still alive.”

  And if he isn’t, things will get even worse, Toivonen thought.

  56.

  Roughly the same time that Grislund was opening his heart to Honkamäki, Alm was down in the center of Solna doing some shopping. He had bumped into a very cross Roly Stålhammar outside the state-owned alcohol shop, and, in spite of the glare he received, he still ventured to ask a simple question.

  “How are things, Roly?” Alm said.

  “How the fuck do you think?” Stålhammar said.

  “Seppo,” Alm said. “Seppo Laurén. You know, that lad who used to help Kalle Danielsson,” he clarified.

  “Einstein,” Stålhammar said.

  “Einstein?” What’s he mean? Alm thought.

  “That’s what we called him,” Stålhammar said. “Nice and kind, but a bit lost, not like normal people. Kalle used to take him to Valla sometimes when he was in the mood. He used to run and place bets for us so we could sit in peace and quiet and enjoy our beer.”