by Jens Lapidus
“Absolutely. And nothing I have will get out.”
“Your father was a successful man. He built something in this city. And the state wants to take it from him. They’re going through things that they shouldn’t be going through. They’re digging for stories that should remain buried. As I’m sure you’ve seen, I did everything I could, in my interrogation with the cops, to keep from giving them unnecessary information. I hope that’s the way everyone is acting. It’s not easy for you to know what information is important and what is just the pigs’ attempt to ruin your father’s business. Right?”
Natalie didn’t respond.
Stefanovic lowered his voice.
“I want you to give me the investigation material and not try to play around on your own. I want you to leave this investigation alone. You should let the police do their job and let me do mine. Do you understand? I want you to drop your own little attempts to dig around in what happened to Kum.”
Natalie refused to take it. She said she didn’t have time to talk any longer—ended the call.
Called Goran immediately.
“Stefanovic is fucking crazy.”
“He is not your friend.”
“No, I knew that. But now he’s calling me and asking me totally fucking openly to hand over the investigation material. And he’s the one who didn’t say shit to the cops in order to help. What should I do?”
Goran growled—he sounded like one of Viktor’s cars. “Natalie, you have to choose your own path.”
Natalie thought: He is right. She had to choose. She had to choose a life for herself.
And now: two more headaches to deal with. Her finances. And the situation at home.
The last few weeks. Stefanovic’s predictions’d come true. Opened envelopes. Letters that were spread out over the entire kitchen table—the blue and black logos on the letterheads were ingrained in every Swedish person’s consciousness: SEB, Handelsbanken, the tax authorities, the Enforcement Administration. And there was something from American Express and Beogradska Banka too.
Shit.
At first she thought: Jebi ga—fuck it. She hadn’t had the energy to sit down with the stuff. But now she gathered the letters. Went through them, one by one.
SEB: overdrawn accounts. She thought: that was to be expected, she didn’t give a shit about SEB. The Enforcement Administration’d already issued a seizure order for the estate’s SEB account anyway.
Handelsbanken: endowment closed, the last securities, sold—nothing left in the account. She knew about that—she’d been the one who’d sold off the final assets in order to get cash.
The tax agency: memos about tax evasion in two different companies that’d belonged to Dad. Either way Natalie didn’t give a shit—they’d hired a lawyer for that. He’d have to do his job. Anyway, it would take several years for the tax authorities to reach a decision.
The Enforcement Administration: new attempts at repossessing Dad’s cars and his boat. Luckily, they were registered in other people’s names. But the lawyer had to fight so the state didn’t win.
The situation was unchanged—there was nothing for her to collect in Sweden anymore.
But there was worse news. American Express was informing them that both Natalie and Mom’s cards were being revoked. The credit hadn’t been paid in over three months.
And the worst was saved for last. A shit-storm. A lethal blow. A serious threat to everything they had and owned. Beogradska Banka: suggested that the property Dad owned in Serbia be sold off in order to cover the debt. It was mortgaged. And the accounts were empty, overdrawn, finito.
Natalie felt the worry in her gut: the house down there was nearly the last thing they had. Except for the cash that Dad’d left behind in the safe at home and in the safe deposit box in Switzerland. Natalie was happy that she and Mom’d emptied the safe before the economic crimes investigators’d paid a visit to their house.
And then she grew irritated: How could the accounts be empty? The last time she’d checked her balance, there’d been good coverage. No wonder American Express was complaining—the credit line was connected to Beogradska Banka. Everything depended on the assets down there—the stuff the Enforcement Administration in Sweden didn’t know about.
Again: Who had access to the accounts in Serbia? Why had all the problems arisen after Dad was murdered? Either it was a pure coincidence, or else Dad’s finances’d been rocky all along and he’d concealed that fact. Or someone was making this happen right now. And this other person must be someone who was able to control the accounts. Someone who’d had insight into Dad’s finances, his tax solutions, his setup.
There weren’t too many people to choose from.
There really weren’t many.
After going through the letters, Natalie went in to see Mom. She was sitting in the den, as usual. She seemed to need TV more than sleeping pills ever since what’d happened to Dad. Desperate Houswives, Cougar Town, and movies featuring Hugh Grant played around the clock.
Natalie wanted to talk about their financial situation.
She put her hand on Mom’s knee. “Hey, Mom. How are you?”
Mom didn’t move a muscle. Her gaze was hazy, unfocused.
“Are you thinking about Dad?”
“No, don’t worry about me.”
“I think about him all the time.”
“I understand.”
They sat in silence for a little while. Watching Eva Longoria’s fake smile.
Mom turned toward her. Her eyes weren’t glazed over anymore. “You have to try to let him go.”
“Maybe. But thinking about him gives me strength too.”
“I think you’re naïve. You only see what you want to see.”
Natalie didn’t understand what Mom was talking about. “Stop it,” she said.
“No. You listen to me now.”
Natalie rose, backed out of the den. She really didn’t want to deal with Mom’s nagging right now.
But it was too late. Mom exploded.
“You don’t understand much, do you? You worshipped your father like a god. But do you really think he was a god?”
Natalie stopped in her tracks.
Mom raised her voice. “How do you think it’s been for me, huh? Being treated like a damn trophy. Like a baby maker. And then like a nanny. I always had to guess what your dad was really up to. That I wasn’t his only woman. Do you know what he did? What kind of a person he was? Huh? Answer me!”
Natalie stared at her. They’d fought many times. When she’d come home four hours past her curfew at night ’cause she’d gone with Louise to some afterparty, when Mom’d found Rizla papers and a Red Line Baggie in her jacket pocket, when she’d smelled vomit in the bathroom. When she’d discovered that she’d spent over ten thousand euros on Dad’s card after a weekend in Paris when she was a senior in high school. But all those battles belonged to a far-gone past. During the past few years, she and Mom’d been like girlfriends. Like buddies who spent time together, went for coffee, watched movies, talked about the three Gs: guys, girls, garments. And not even back then, back when they’d been arguing, had Natalie heard anything like this. This was insane. This was scary.
Mom was screaming. A bunch of crap about Dad—what a sleaze he’d been, how he’d laughed at her straight in the face, ignored her. She didn’t cry, but it was as though desperation were shooting from her eyes. She was beyond control. She was hysterical.
“I was twenty-one years old when I had you. Do you understand? Would you want to be a mom now, huh?”
Natalie tried to make her stop. “Mom, calm down.”
It didn’t work.
“You don’t want to see who he was. You’re naïve. Stupid and naïve. Your father was not a human being,” she spit. “He was an animal.”
That was enough. Natalie walked out into the hall. Raised her voice and directed it like a missile into the den: “Shut up. Now. If you say one more word about Dad, I’ll kick you out of here.”
> Back at the university. Foundations of civil justice. Pacta sunt servanda. Contracts must be adhered to. Alliances must be kept. Honor must not be debased. Families may not be broken up. Bonds of friendship must be strengthened. People who can be expected to be loyal must remain loyal.
Fuck it.
Natalie rose from the table where she was sitting. Louise and Tove remained in their seats—looked after her as she walked toward the bathroom.
Her head was spinning. All the nerdy students around her were sitting with their heads buried in their books. Trying to appear important. What did it matter? Everyone was just playing the game—pretending that they had their lives under control. They were spoiled. They knew zilch about reality. They were princesses who’d never been forced to get their hands dirty.
There was wall-to-wall carpeting in the library. She opened the door to the bathroom. Heard her high heels click against the tiled floor in there.
She sat down on the covered toilet seat. Set her purse down. Hugged herself with her arms. The panic came in waves.
She leaned forward.
Ten minutes later—the floor was glistening with tears. She rose. Felt better. She could handle this. Her studies. Mom’s crazy attacks. The grief after Dad.
Stefanovic’s betrayal.
She had the investigation material. She was sitting on information. She would find out who’d ended Dad’s life—and make sure that whoever was responsible would pay.
She looked at herself in the mirror. You could tell she’d been crying. She picked up her purse.
She was thinking about the summer. It was as though Viktor hadn’t been able to handle Natalie’s feelings after everything’d happened with Dad. She’d wanted to stay home—he’d wanted to go out for coffee, drink beer, or party. She’d wanted to watch movies or TV—he’d wanted to go to MMA events, celebrity parties, or the gym. They’d never been particularly in sync, but during the weeks after the murder it had grown painfully apparent.
When her thoughts weren’t with Dad in the past, they were with Dad’s world in the present. She spoke with Goran several times a week. They took frequent walks together: downtown or out by Natalie’s home in Näsbypark. They divided up the work between them. They discussed Stefanovic’s changed position. Milorad and Patrik’s attitudes. Thomas’s loyalties. They analyzed information. Bounced ideas back and forth constantly. How they ought to take control over Dad’s bookkeeping. How long the money would last.
They had Thomas break into the loft apartment—it’d been cleared out. Someone’d carried out the furniture, broken down bookshelves, removed the Jacuzzi, even taken out the faucets from the shower and the sink. Natalie had to ask the lawyer who actually had the right to sell the place. Formally, a front man owned the place on paper. The lawyer told them, regretfully: the apartment was already sold—a new owner would get access to it soon. Nobody knew what the purchase price’d actually been, and it was impossible to get hold of the front man.
But there were moments of light in all the darkness. Leads. Among other things, the police’d confiscated the film from Dad’s surveillance cameras at home. Stefanovic’d installed a bunch of them after the assassination attempt in the parking garage—each camera saved film for over forty-eight hours. Goran asked Thomas to get his hands on the footage.
Again: she had the threatening letter to the cop fuckers to thank.
Thomas analyzed the material. Natalie’d almost expected to see some assassin sneaking around the bushes with a gun in hand. Instead, she saw something else that unnerved her: during the two days in question, a green Volvo had driven past the house several times.
She blamed herself. Remembered first when she saw the films: she’d seen the green Volvo in the parking garage before the assassination attempt. And maybe she’d seen it once outside their house too? She should’ve been more on her guard, should’ve warned Dad that something was going on.
Thomas was keeping the men whom Melissa Cherkasova met at hotels under constant surveillance. Natalie’d even sat in her own car outside the Belarusian’s apartment a few times. Jotted down when she’d come home and when she’d left, in a notebook. Tried her best to shadow her.
Thomas’d done some more research on the girl. Thank God for his old colleagues on the force. Melissa Cherkasova had permanent residency in Sweden. She’d been married to a fifty-year-old Swedish man for six months—that’s how she’d been able to enter the country in the first place. She’d never been convicted of anything, but she’d been prosecuted for fraud four years ago. Thomas ordered the paperwork from the trial—apparently, Cherkasova’d gotten hold of two Swedish men’s personal identification number and credit card information and then ordered flights to Belarus and France on their dime. The interesting part: neither of the two plaintiffs’d wanted to report her; the fraud was discovered by the credit card company. When it was time for the trial, they didn’t even show up in court—Cherkasova was freed. She was registered not at Råsundavägen 31, where Natalie’d seen her, but at an address in Malmö, in the south of the country, in the home of a woman with a Belarusian name. But she spent so much time at the Stockholm address that it was obvious she was actually living there. Mostly, she stayed at home. Sometimes she traveled to various hotels at night. A few times they saw her go buy groceries. On one occasion she went to a home in Huddinge, and one time Natalie saw her walking with another woman who had a dog. As far as they could see, she never went back to Radovan’s apartment on Södermalm again. What’s more: they never saw her meet anyone who might be her pimp. And they couldn’t find her services advertised anywhere on Internet. Neither Thomas nor his former cop colleagues could find any information in the police databases that suggested that Cherkasova was a prostitute. Maybe she hadn’t had anything to do with the murder. Maybe it was a bogeywoman they were chasing.
On the other hand: the men she met were interesting. Thomas saw a total of six different dudes at three different hotels downtown. They always arrived alone. Cherkasova always arrived alone. One was a Brit—they couldn’t find out much about him. He worked for a British aircraft manufacturer and lived alone in London. One was the guy from the Sheraton, whose room Cherkasova visited five times during the summer. Two of them were younger Swedish men—three or four times with them. The final two looked Indian or something like that—she met them four times each.
“This isn’t some damn book or movie—this is for real,” Thomas said. “Do you know what that means? It means that, most of the time, I’m just sitting in my car, on the phone, or in front of a computer. And I hate computers.”
Natalie liked Thomas. She thought: He is a former cop, but he doesn’t talk like a cop. He talks like a human being.
Thomas worked cautiously. Waited outside the hotels. Later at night he followed the men home. They lived all over the city. He got their addresses—everyone except the guy at the Sheraton. He was more careful. Always used some side entrance to leave the hotel. Thomas failed to get hold of him. The younger Swede was named Mattias Persson. He was twenty-nine years old, worked at an IT company, had been living with his eight-years-younger girlfriend for four years. The other Swede lived in Örebro and was single. One of the Indian-looking dudes was named Rabindranat Kadur, was forty-nine years old, a small business owner in the textile industry, married for twenty years to a Swedish woman. The other man wasn’t Indian—he was from Iran, and his name was Farzan Habib. He was forty-five years old, worked as a travel agent, and had been divorced for eight years. Thomas couldn’t find anything shady about those johns, but he kept on talking about his gut feeling: it was screaming at him that the guy from the Sheraton was interesting somehow. The guy was overly cautious.
At the end of July, Natalie had been close to giving up.
One morning her phone started ringing. A Skype call. Thomas.
Mom was eating breakfast in the kitchen. Natalie walked out into the garden. She never took these calls inside the house.
“Hi, it’s me.”
His
face appeared on the screen. The office behind him: cluttered bookshelves, ugly wallpaper, crappy lighting. He was picking at his teeth while he spoke. If Dad had seen that, he would’ve ended the call right away—in his view: picking your teeth—only junkies and bums at bars in Belgrade did that, people who didn’t understand the importance of brushing your teeth, people who’d never had dental care in their entire lives. For Dad, it was a matter of status: good teeth equaled a good background.
“A breakthrough today,” Thomas said. “One of my contacts recognized the Sheraton man. His name’s Bengt Svelander, fifty-two years old. He doesn’t live in Stockholm.”
“Fantastic. Do you know anything else about him?”
“That’s the thing. This guy isn’t just anybody. He’s been a politician for years, is an elected member of Parliament, serves on a bunch of committees and shit.”
“Damn.”
“This is a guy with power. I’m going to keep my eye on that horndog.”
Natalie got up. Studied her face in the mirror of the university bathroom. She’d been in there for twenty minutes. Louise and Tove must be wondering where she’d run off to. She’d finished putting on her makeup. Painted over the signs of sorrow. Her exterior was restored to a dignified level.
She opened the door. Outside: the history section. The surrounding shelves were filled with books about the Roman Empire. The rise and fall of the Kranjic Empire.
No, there would be no fall for her family. She had Goran. She had Thomas.
Natalie walked back to her table in the university library. The girls were still sitting where she’d left them. The exact same books, the same positions, their heads tilted at the same angle. Louise looked up.
“Where’ve you been?”
“I didn’t feel good.”
“Oh no. Let me know if there’s anything you want to talk about, sweetie.”
“I’m fine, thanks.”
“Let’s get a coffee. These criminal cases are starting to make my scalp crawl. Like, ruining my new highlights. Do you like them, by the way?”