by Jens Lapidus
“What you mean, fifty-fifty? The risk is much lower than that.”
“Yeah, but still not. Either he was with the cunts or he wasn’t—there are two alternatives. It’s one or the other, that’s fifty-fifty. So I think you can say it’s fifty percent chance.”
Jorge grinned. “Eres loco, hermano.”
At the same time, the questions were piling up in his head. Who was it they were gonna go see? How did they know he wasn’t some pig infiltrator? Were they gonna make a deal with him? And if not, what were they gonna do about the tax man and the Yugos? The Swedish government and the underworld’s government were about to gang-bang the shit out of the café.
The car’s heat vents were spurting sound. The windshield wipers were squeaking.
Maybe: on their way to the biggest gig ever.
Maybe: on their way to a fresh start.
Twenty minutes later. Södertälje. More like a suburb to Stockholm than like a city in its own right. The two of them took turns going there every other morning. The place where left-wing extremists burned down grocery stores, housing project teens shot at the police station with assault rifles, the X-team warred against the Syrian brotherhood, and the industrial bakeries baked the fluffiest ciabatta north of Italy. The city from which Suryoyo TV and Suryoyo Sat broadcast all over the world, the place that was actually called Little Baghdad.
Södertälje: where it was rumored that over half of all CIT robberies in Sweden were planned.
They parked in a parking garage behind the pedestrian street in the center of town.
Mahmud pulled out a steering wheel lock.
“What’re you doing?” Jorge asked.
“This is Södertälje, man. Every other kid born here is a soccer pro, and the rest are car thieves.”
“Yeah, but we go here every day.”
“But not here here. Not downtown.”
Jorge grinned. “I think you’re a little jumpy, buddy. We’re in a parking garage.”
They got out. Walked down to Storgatan. The weather still sucked. All around: mostly old people, kids, and mustachioed men drinking tea in the cafés.
Mahmud pointed at the old men. “That’s what my dad looks like.”
Jorge nodded. Knew: if Mahmud got going, he could talk for hours about how Sven Sweden’d betrayed his old man. How Beshar first hadn’t gotten a job, lived on welfare, then got a job—a job that fucked up his back so bad, he had to go on disability for the rest of his life. His buddy was right, but Jorge didn’t have the energy to listen.
They veered onto a side street off Storgatan.
Jorge’s phone rang.
Paola: “It’s me. Que haces, hermano?”
Jorge thought: Should I tell her the truth?
He said, “I’m in Södertälje.”
“At a bakery?”
Paola: J-boy loved her. Still, he couldn’t take it.
He said, “Yeah, yeah, ’course I’m at a bakery. But we gotta talk later—I got my hands full of muffins here.”
They hung up.
Mahmud glanced at him.
Up ahead, the place where they were going: Gabbe’s Pizzeria.
A bell rang when they opened the door. A dank pizza place. One wall was exposed brick; the other had a poster tacked to it: NEW: MEXICAN TACO PIZZAS. Jorge thought: Yeah right, real new. That ad must’ve been there since the nineties.
There were old ladies’ magazines and tabloids on the tables. It was four o’clock. The place was completely empty.
A man emerged from the kitchen. Flour-stained apron, T-shirt with red lettering: GABBE’S DOES IT BETTER. Two fat gold link chains hung from his neck.
Jorge winked at the pizza baker. “Vadúr sent me.”
The dude stared at them. Mahmud squirmed anxiously behind Jorge. The pizza baker disappeared back into the room behind the counter. Spoke quietly with someone, or into a phone. Came back out. Nodded.
They walked out the back of the store. A black Opel. Jorge quickly sized up the car: the passenger seat and the backseat were filled with pizza boxes. The pizza guy climbed in behind the wheel. Jorge and Mahmud had to squeeze in with the cardboard in the back. They rolled away from downtown. Past the mall, the district court, the parking lots. Outside the city: the Million Program high-rises coiled like mountain ranges—same scenery as his home turf.
So far the pizza baker hadn’t said a word to them.
Mahmud leaned close to Jorge, whispered in his ear: “That player’s gonna drown. Look how much he weighs.”
Jorge whispered back, “What, why?”
“The gold he’s got ’round his neck’s gotta weigh more than a bowling ball. If homeboy doesn’t watch himself next time he’s cooking up red sauce, he’ll fall in and never come back up.”
Jorge almost laughed. The fact that Mahmud was joking felt good, cut the stiff air a little. Really, there wasn’t anything to be afraid of today. If it worked, it worked. That’s all there was to it.
They got out by a high-rise.
The pizza baker pressed the button for the elevator. They waited. The metal doors squeaked. Carvings with tags, telephone numbers to alleged hookers, Arabic curses.
They rode up. Jorge almost got that dropping sensation in his stomach, like you get in very fast elevators. The sixth floor. They stepped out. The guy fished out a set of keys. Unlocked a door. Jorge managed to glimpse the name on the mail slot: EDEN. It felt like a sign.
The apartment looked empty. No clothes, no hangers, no shoes or shoe racks. No carpets, mirrors, dressers. Just a single bare bulb suspended from the ceiling in the entranceway. The pizza baker gestured: I have to frisk you.
Jorge looked at Mahmud. Hombre didn’t look so jokisimo anymore. Now they just had to go with the flow.
Rapid, light movements: a pro.
The pizza guy gestured again: You can go in.
Jorge walked first. Short, silent steps. A hallway. Gray walls. Bad lighting. They reached a larger room. Three chairs were set up inside.
The dude left them alone. Another man entered the room.
He was wearing black jeans, a dark hoodie, and a ski mask pulled down over his face.
The man said, “Welcome, have a seat.”
The chairs creaked. Jorge took a deep breath.
The man spoke perfect Swedish.
“You can call me the Finn. And you, Jorge Salinas Barrio, did time with my buddy Denny Vadúr. So I’ve got reason to trust you. Vadúr and me, we go way back.”
“Denny’s an all-star,” Jorge said.
The dude was silent for a moment. Then he said, “Yes, he’s nice. But he isn’t an all-star—those are your words. He talks too much. And he made a fool of himself last time. Well, you know where you met him. He tried to do his own thing. That’s what happens when you try to fly solo. But with me, it’s different.”
It sounded like the Finn was eating something—he kept smacking his mouth at the end of every sentence.
Jorge waited for more.
“You’ve sought me out because you want a recipe,” the Finn said.
“Yes.”
“That’s not the kind of thing I just give away. You understand that, right?”
“Of course, it costs.”
“That’s right, it costs. But that’s not all. It’s about the right feeling too. I have to trust everyone involved one hundred percent. Let me put it this way: I deal in planning. I sell designs. Recipes. But no design works, no matter how good, if the right people aren’t involved. It’s a whole, the sum of many parts. Do you understand?”
Jorge nodded, but didn’t say anything. Unsure if he was understanding fully.
“You might be right for this. You could be the parts that make up the whole.”
Jorge and Mahmud didn’t dare interrupt.
The dude kept smacking with his mouth. “I want you to get five guys you trust. And they can’t be idiots. I want a list of their names and personal identification numbers. Handwritten.”
Jorge waited to see if
the guy had more to say. The Finn was silent.
Finally Jorge said, “No problem, we got that.”
“And that’s not all. Do you know what else you need?”
Silence again. Jorge didn’t know what to say. This whole situation: shady. This wasn’t how he’d thought it would go down. He’d expected a guy like him, a couple years older maybe: some concrete hustler who was livin’ large. A self-made G. A man who’d leaned back—let others do the dirty work. But this whole deal with the ski mask and the fancy talk—fine, maybe people wanted to hide their identities, but this seemed more Hollywood than reality.
At the same time, Jorge knew: it was real. He’d heard stories in the pen, in Sollentuna, from his homies, and from his homies’ homies: the guys who sat on the recipes were serious. Meticulous. Cautious in the extreme.
Mahmud glared at Jorge. He had to say something now.
“There’s a lot we need,” he responded. “We need good planning. We need good organization.”
The Finn played the ball right back to him. “That’s correct. But listen and learn. Here is my first piece of advice. No big-scale gig has ever succeeded without someone on the inside. You need an insider—that is the founding principle of any heist. Someone who’s in the know about—and preferably has access to—the CIT in question. I’ve planted people like that for years now.”
Jorge could muster only one word: “Damn.”
“You might say that. The one I’ve been in touch with for the longest time has worked for over seven years in the security guard industry. He’s entrusted with all kinds of assignments. So if we’re gonna do something, we’re gonna go big.”
Jorge couldn’t stop smiling inside. This was so huge. This was the beginning of the end of his time as a café owner. The beginning of the end as a blackmailed pauper. El grande muffin massacre.
He saw images in his mind. Ski masks. Dark security bags. Stacks of five-hundred kronor bills.
He saw easy money.
2
Deputy Inspector Martin Hägerström drove Sturegatan down toward Stureplan. The suit-people on the streets were on their way to their banks and law firms. They were correctly dressed, well combed, appropriately stressed out. Some were leaning forward slightly, as though they were chasing something in life and needed to reach to get there. At the same time, Hägerström was aware of the fact that he was generalizing—he knew too many suit-suckers personally to actually believe that their lives were only about chasing money. His brother Carl, who was three years younger, worked around three hundred feet from here. His future brother-in-law worked here. Many of his old friends hung out in this neighborhood.
But the morning was no time for deeper reflection, so Hägerström allowed himself to simplify reality.
It wasn’t difficult to succumb to bad thoughts at this time of day. And it wasn’t difficult to predict which two tracks his bad thoughts would take.
Four months had passed since his father Göran’s funeral, and seven months had passed since he fell ill.
And it had been one year, three months, and fourteen days since Pravat was taken from him. He counted every hour like an atomic clock. The images in his head were as clear as if it had happened yesterday. The way Anna had slammed the door and walked away with Pravat in hand. How furious Hägerström had been, but how he hadn’t wanted Pravat to see him lose control. How she had been completely calm.
Now, in retrospect, it was almost scary to think how structured Anna’s actions had been. He had waited in the apartment for two hours, calmed down a little. Then he started calling. But she didn’t pick up, and she didn’t come back. He had called the day-care center and her sister. He had called her friends in Saltjöbaden. But he couldn’t find out where she had gone. Where she had taken Pravat. Then, almost a week later, he was able to get some information. Pravat was in an apartment on Lidingö. Anna had signed a lease on it in secret two months ago. Pravat was going to eat his snacks on Lidingö, sleep in his little bed on Lidingö, had apparently gotten a spot at a day-care on fucking Lidingö.
One year, three months, fourteen days.
They said he only had himself to blame. In the beginning, he had begged and pleaded: “Come back, come home, please.” She ignored him. Hung up when he called, didn’t respond to his texts, e-mails, or Facebook messages. It took another week before she chose to respond. At that point, she had already started getting Pravat used to the new day-care center.
The paper war took over. Lawyers, mediation meetings, court documents. Meaningless attempts to try to make her understand. You can’t just separate a child from his father without a reason. A child needs both his parents. She didn’t care—there were reasons, that’s what her lawyer claimed in writing. There were people who were not suited to be parents. People who never should have been allowed to adopt a child. According to the lawyer, Hägerström had acted extremely irresponsibly when he had taken part in a police operation with Pravat in the backseat. Hägerström knew that it had been an idiotic thing to do. But he was still a good father. And his son should be allowed to see him more than a few measly days a month.
He drove up to the police building on Kungsholmen. The area outside the main entrance was crowded with motorcycles. Men with bikes were definitely overrepresented among Stockholm’s finest.
Kronoberg: Stockholm police headquarters. A large building—so many hallways, interrogation rooms, and coffee break nooks that he didn’t even know about half of them. He nodded to the guard in the main entranceway while he slid his key card through the reader and followed the automatic turnstile inside. His office was on the fifth floor.
It was eight o’clock. He looked at himself in the mirror on the elevator ride up. His side part was a little tousled and his face was pale. He thought the wrinkles on his cheeks had deepened since yesterday.
Room 547: his world. Messy as usual, but for Hägerström there was an internal order that was invisible to others. His former colleague, Thomas Andrén, used to say that you could hide a motorcycle in there, and not even the technicians from the forensic lab would be able to find it. Maybe there was something to it. Not a motorcycle but possibly a mountain bike. Hägerström grinned to himself—the strange thing was that, at home, an anal, German style of order ruled.
Along one wall was a bookshelf filled with books, newspapers, and above all, binders. Next to the bookshelf were piles of bursting file folders. The rest of the floor was covered in preliminary investigations, incident reports, seizure reports, informational material, and reconnaissance reports, with or without plastic sleeves. The desk was cluttered with similar stuff. It was also covered in coffee mugs, half-drunk bottles of mineral water, and Post-it notes. There were thirty-odd pens in a pile right in front of the computer screen. There was a framed photo of Pravat in the middle of the chaos, and up against it Hägerström had recently propped another photograph. It was a photo of Father wearing a summer shirt, linen pants, and loafers without socks, taken ten years ago out at Avesjö.
The pens and the photos—the pillars on which his work rested. He needed his pens—going through things over and over again was his method. He marked up the material, underlined, drew arrows, and scribbled notes in the margins. Fit one piece of the puzzle to the next.
And the photographs: he thought about Pravat all the time. The photo gave him strength. He thought about Father alarmingly seldom. Maybe the photograph would serve to remind him to do so more often.
Fika, the ceaseless coffee break his Swedish countrymen so loved, was going on in the fika room. Hägerström could hear his colleagues’ voices from a distance. Micke was making gay jokes as usual. Isak was laughing too loudly as usual. He remembered what Father used to say about the coffee breaks: “Fika—that’s what they call it in the public sector, right? You fika more than you work, don’t you?”
His father had always been an inveterate enemy of what he called the “Titanic sector.” But not even Father thought the police force ought to be privatized. And what’s mo
re, Hägerström was convinced that there would be just as much fika-time if some venture capitalist bought the whole mess. Cops have coffee pumping through their veins—it’s in their genes.
But maybe he was more affected by Father’s attitude than he wanted to be, because he usually skipped the coffee breaks. There was hardly enough time to get everything done as it was.
A knock at his door.
Cecilia Lennartsdotter poked her head in.
“Martin, why don’t you come have a cup of coffee?”
Hägerström looked up at her. She was wearing her holster and service weapon even though she was here, inside. And she had even strapped an extra magazine to her belt. For the hundredth time, he wondered if Cecilia really thought things were going to escalate up here on the fifth floor—maybe one of the secretaries would get it into her mind to rob the fridge?
There were always colleagues who overdid it. But then, maybe everyone here overdid it. He had nothing against Lennartsdotter. Actually, he liked her.
“No, unfortunately, I don’t have time today,” he said.
“As usual, then? You work while the rest of us have a good time.”
“Yes, as usual.”
She winked at him.
Hägerström turned back to his keyboard. Pretended that he didn’t understand that she was joking.
The hours ticked on. Hägerström was working on a preliminary investigation regarding a serious narcotics case. Amphetamines had been smuggled in from Estonia in the double-welded floors of minivans. Seven suspects had been detained for five months. Been interrogated a total of four hundred hours. There were thousands of pages to go through. Some of the suspects were mules, some of them were dealers, and one was the brain behind the smuggling operation. Now they just had to determine who was who.
His phone rang. A phone number that Hägerström didn’t recognize.
“Good morning. This is Inspector Lennart Torsfjäll.”