Stockholm Noir

by Nathan Larson

  “So you’re a philosopher.”

  “You get that way in this job.”

  “You look tired,” she said.

  “Not that way.”

  “Can you philosophize some help for me?”

  “Is John your spouse?”

  She stared at me as if she didn’t understand the word. Spouse. Sounds a little old-fashioned, but I’m an old-fashioned man. I keep a bottle of Dewar’s White Label in my desk drawer. I wear a suit and tie. I was about to lighten the bottle a bit when she came in. I listen to Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath, in that order. When evening falls, I like to remember my youth, 1969 and 1970. I can say I had a year of real life, which many people don’t even get.

  “Are you married?” I asked to clarify.

  “Yeah, but not to each other,” she said, elegantly fluttering her wrist.

  * * *

  I considered my ghostly memory of her long after she’d gone. She’d told me her name was Rebecka, and it could be true enough—I didn’t ask for her ID, I’m not the police. And, well, my name could be Jimmy Page or Tony Iommi, for example, or even Peter Kempinsky, which is what it says on the office door. It’s a nice name. I chose it myself.

  I sat as the electrified darkness shone in through the window from the street below. Birkastan. My part of Stockholm. I wasn’t born here, but I’ve come to call it home. Lost in my reflections, my hangover intensified and I suddenly needed my medicine, so I opened the desk drawer and pulled out the bottle, poured two fingers in the glass that had been set in front of Malcolm Lowry on the bookshelf. I lifted the glass and drank, feeling the warmth go through my chest as it burned my throat. The water of life. The devil’s drink. The devil’s music. I held the glass up toward the window. The alcohol was clear and it shimmered in the night, pure and true—it wasn’t grubby like the rest of life. I took another swig. My desk drawer also held my other medicine; I knew that the only place I’d remember to look for it was next to the whiskey bottle. Venlafaxin Hexal and Dewar’s, an extraordinary combination to battle depression, a cure not unknown but condemned by psychiatry. The pills have no taste.

  John, John, John, I thought. Follow John, I thought. Where are you, buddy? I’d taken the job. I’d told her it wasn’t going to be easy. People who want to disappear can manage it pretty well. I glanced at the photo she’d handed me. John stood against a neutral background. He seemed neutral himself, good-looking, friendly. It would have been better if he’d looked like an asshole.

  “He hasn’t been accused of a crime,” she’d told me, recrossing her legs.

  “How do you know that?” I’d asked.

  She didn’t answer. I believed her, naive as I am.

  “He could be anywhere,” I said. “Here in Stockholm, out in the countryside, abroad.”

  “No, he’s in Stockholm. I’m sure of it. In fact, I’m sure he’s still in Birkastan.”

  “How do you know? Lots of people leave Stockholm, not to mention Birkastan.”

  “Not him. Not John. He can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  She didn’t answer this question either. Perhaps she would later on, but I hoped we wouldn’t meet again. I had no desire to see her again—it wouldn’t be good for either of us. Her beautiful legs looked artificial, as if they’d been carved from an endangered wood.

  She paid and left. Five hundred thousand royal Swedish kronor, cash, in an envelope. Half my fee. Too high a sum? I needed it, and she was ready to pay. I knew who’d told her how much I charged, and I planned to spring for a glass of Glenfarclas, the forty-two-year-old bottle, the next time I saw him. She had been absolutely certain that I was the right one for the job, and she was right, but for the wrong reason.

  * * *

  There were hints of spring in the air as I walked down toward the Atlas wall. The promise of light. Stockholm would soon melt into another summer. It was the same miracle every year. The city was bigger than life in that way, bigger than all of us; it had been here before we arrived and it would be here when we were gone. I had no plans to leave this mortal plane anytime soon, but I wasn’t so sure about John. I had a hunch, but I could be wrong. It’s been known to happen. I’m just a sinner with a bad conscience.

  On the other side of the inlet, Kungsholms strand glittered with gold. I hardly ever walked over the bridge. Kungsholmen is a part of the city that nobody with brains would ever trust. It’s always smiling but its smile is false. Even now, it winks with its red and yellow cat’s eyes, but nobody who comes from the northern part of town is fooled.

  * * *

  It smelled like charcoal and fire and thyme inside Degiulio’s. They’d left two tables out on the sidewalk, as if some tourist would want to sit there and dream of spring. As if Italians eat outside when it’s forty degrees Fahrenheit.

  I took my usual table at the back of the room. Maria had set flowers on the table, as she always did. That day they were yellow tulips, my favorite. I leaned toward them and drew in a deep breath, feeling like a real person for a moment.

  Maria was at my table already. My only human friend in this world.

  “You look tired, Peter,” she said.

  “A glass of that red varietal you had yesterday,” I said. “A large glass. Thanks.”

  “It’s called Alba,” she said.

  “Yeah, that’s the one.”

  She walked over to the bar and poured the wine, returning with a large glass. The flames inside the oven refracted the red color. There are so many shades of red. I’ve seen most of them.

  “You have any lasagna with mushrooms tonight?” I asked. “No meat.”

  “You can have whatever you want,” she said.

  “Then I want a grappa too.”

  “You drank too much grappa yesterday, Peter,” she warned.

  “That’s why I need another glass today.”

  She gave me a look that triggered a long-forgotten memory: someone had leaned over me once when I was a small child; a good person, but not my mother. It was my first memory. I could never catch it and hold onto it, but I knew it had been the happiest moment of my entire life.

  “Then get me a second glass of the Alba instead.”

  “You haven’t finished the first one yet,” she said.

  “I’ll drink it while you’re getting the second glass. I thought I could have anything I wanted.”

  “You seem really unhappy this evening,” she said.

  “I have to find somebody.”

  “That’s not news.”

  “I think I’m losing my grip,” I said.

  She paused. “On what?”

  “I’ll try to figure that one out while you’re getting my second glass.” I lifted the Alba. The color was deep red. “Tell the cook not to use too much cheese. Cheese is the corpse left over from milk.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean? It sounds terrible.”

  “It means just what I said.”

  “Did you think that up yourself?”

  “No, Bloom did.”

  “Who’s Bloom?”

  “Ulysses. James Joyce. Bloom eats cheese. The cheese eats itself. It’s self-consuming. Just like dogs. They eat themselves, they vomit, they eat themselves again.”

  “Cut that out,” she said.

  “I can’t, Maria.”

  “Then stop talking. I don’t like it.”

  “But it’s true,” I said. “Everybody eats everybody. The city eats itself.”

  She left me alone at my table after that. I looked around, but there was no one new to observe. I was the only customer at a table. Most evenings I’m the only one. Birkastan people usually just pick up their brick-oven pizzas. Nobody sits while they wait. I drank and closed my eyes. Maria was playing nineteenth-century opera at a low volume. Opera and pizza were a perfect combination. Large gestures, large promises, large voices—but most of it empty and superficial, followed by a heavy, greasy feeling in your belly, as if your body has been weighed down with concrete.

  A young woma
n came in from the twilight and I overheard her ordering three pizzas: one Margherita, another Margherita, and . . . Margherita. She was clearly a creature of habit, as am I, simple is best. She was beautiful in an old-fashioned way and the kind I like, as if she’d stepped out of a Swedish film from the forties. Her round face, her pageboy haircut, that certain style of trench coat. Jussi Björling could have been singing in the background, although there weren’t any pizzerias in Sweden in the forties, let alone takeout places. Though perhaps in my decade, the fifties, you could find boiled hot dogs in paper, or fried herring. I was born after the war, in 1953, part of the smallest generation of children ever born in Sweden. I wonder how many of us are still around. Maybe I’m the only one. Though the Met in New York City was Jussi Björling’s main stage for decades, he died of a broken heart in Stockholm’s archipelago. He was forty-nine years old, ten years younger than I am now. It’s not right. He was a true artist in a false profession. He drank . . . but who doesn’t? He always had a black dog following him . . . but who doesn’t?

  The woman looked in my direction. I lifted my glass in greeting. It was numero due. Not much was left in it either. She glanced away, without nodding or smiling. To her, I was a lone drunkard—that’s a good old-fashioned word, drunkard—sitting in a lonely pizzeria in the loneliest part of town. But she’d be wrong. I’m a thinker. Right then, I was thinking about my own youth, when I was two months shy of my sixteenth birthday and Led Zeppelin released their first album, on January 12, 1969. That was the life, then. And I was one month shy of my seventeenth birthday when Black Sabbath released their first album, on Friday, February 13, 1970. Led Zeppelin changed rock music forever and Black Sabbath picked up their riff and created heavy metal. The sound existed on Led Zeppelin’s first album, but the evil heaviness had been lacking. It was born with Sabbath, and everything since then has been nothing but repetition, just like my life. Like here, at Degiulio’s, where the woman had picked up her pizzas and was heading back out into the darkness without looking in my direction. By now, I was working on my third glass of Alba and my lasagna was in front of me. A perfect portion. I inhaled the aroma. It was slightly bitter from the portobellos, chanterelles, and black pepper.

  My phone vibrated in my breast pocket, like a pacemaker with a low battery. I pulled it out: the client.

  “So?”

  “Somebody saw John,” she said.

  “Where?”

  “Karlberg station,” she said. “He was leaving.”

  “Where was he heading?”

  “I don’t know. God, time is running out!”

  “Who saw him?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “It matters to me,” I said.

  “It’s not important.”

  “I’m hanging up now,” I said. “I’ll call back later tonight.”

  I ended the call and got up from the table. Maria glanced at me.

  “I have to go out for a while,” I said.

  “Take care of yourself,” she said.

  * * *

  Night had fallen over the city. I heard noises above my head and looked up. A dozen ravens were flying in loose formation toward the west; the flock looked like a Rorschach test against the electric sky. I didn’t want to interpret what I saw, it would just scare me. The ravens were cawing, hoarse and scoffing, as if they knew everything.

  I followed Atlasgatan to Sankt Eriksgatan, then took a right and went south to Norrbackagatan.

  Everything was quiet in front of Karlberg station. It was the time of day where normalcy rules, where healthy humanity draws inward, does the dishes, puts the kids to sleep, works on the crossword, all those things I’ve longed for all my life.

  No John there. Nobody had seen him. To me, it seemed that the client knew who’d spotted him. Perhaps she had. She was nuts, really, which was why I was standing there uselessly.

  I walked back the way I’d come. I met no one.

  Maria nodded when I stepped back into Degiulio’s.

  “Let’s start over from the beginning,” I said. “Including the wine.”

  I sat at my table and called Rebecka.

  “Nothing,” I said.

  “Did you really go there?”

  “Yes, and now I’m having my dinner,” I said.

  “But it could be too late!” There was a note of desperation in her voice, raspy like a file. I’d heard it before. The client comes to me with a practiced cool air, with practiced replies, but those soon collapse and blow away just like bad rock music or bad literature. Only naked panic is left.

  “It’s never too late,” I said. My own practiced reply, superficial and false.

  “I trusted you!” she said.

  “Congratulations.”

  “He might take off again!”

  “Then I’ll find him again,” I said. I put my fork into the fresh lasagna Maria had set before me. It was new, not the old portion warmed up in the microwave. The food steamed, just like it should, you could burn your tongue on it if you wanted; you ought to at least have the option.

  “You didn’t find him!”

  “No.”

  Maria brought the wine. It had the same refracted color as before.

  “But I will,” I continued. “Was John seen anywhere else?”

  “No, just here in Birkastan.”

  She’d tripped up. Earlier, she’d said she lived in Östermalm, that she was heading back there straight from my office.

  “Give me something more specific,” I said. “Besides the station.”

  “Have you been drinking?” she asked.

  “Answer me,” I said.

  “It sounds as if you’ve been drinking.”

  “I’m trying to eat my dinner.”

  She said something I didn’t catch, and I hung up and dropped my phone back into my breast pocket so I could eat. I remembered when I was a child, I’d gone with an uncle to the woods around Nykvarn to search for mushrooms and we found a glade that shone like real gold from the chanterelles, and that was the last time I was ever happy, actually happy, like the people in magazines and on TV. I thought about John. I thought about the song “Good Times Bad Times,” the single from Led Zeppelin’s first album.

  * * *

  The train station was once again as silent as the sky above Karlberg Lake. If John had been here earlier in the evening, he was certainly gone now, sucked into the glittering city. There’s a lady who’s sure all that glitters is gold. I thought of this other Led Zeppelin song as I glanced over at the bike rack with its long row of locked bikes with stolen wheels. Can’t trust anything or anybody these days. It resembled an art installation, a commentary on something about which I ought to be aware. This is true art as far as I’m concerned: pictures sent directly to my insides, lighting them up, something pure and clear and simple.

  I saw a missed call from Rebecka and rang her back. A commuter train slowly pulled out of the station, a lit worm on the way north.

  “I need to know who saw John this evening,” I said.

  “Are you out in the city now?”

  “I’m at the station. Who saw him?”

  She didn’t respond. She knew the answer; actually, this meant my assignment was over. Everything depended on silence. If she had broken that silence, she’d be in big trouble now. I wonder if she understood this, really understood what it meant.

  “I’m going home,” I said. “Nice to have met you.”

  “Wait!” she shouted.

  “For what?”

  “John was the one,” she said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “John was the one who called.”

  “So you’re telling me that your missing John called and let you know where he was?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “He was worried.”

  “Ha-ha.”

  “It’s not a joke. Somebody’s after him. Somebody’s looking for him.”

  “I’m looking for him.”

  “He doesn�
�t know about you.”

  “So what made him think this?”

  “We didn’t . . . he didn’t have a chance to tell me. He hung up. He’d called from a prepaid mobile phone. It’s dead now.”

  It’s always the past, I thought. Nobody can ever escape the shadows of the past. It was a banal thought, but still true.

  Perhaps she really was crazy, my client Rebecka. Perhaps John only existed in her mind. But if there were a real John wandering around the streets of Birkastan and somebody else was following him, I’d be out half a million Swedish kronor.

  “So I won’t go home,” I said. “Where are you?”

  “A pizzeria on a side street. The only place that’s open.”

  “Degiulio’s. You’ve been following me.”

  “No,” she lied.

  “I’ll meet you there,” I said.

  * * *

  John lived on Drejargatan, on the second floor. As soon as Rebecka had left my office I’d gone straight there and rung the doorbell. Nobody opened. The last name Beijer was on a sign on the apartment door. Nothing else. Now I was standing there once more. I rang the bell again. It was pretty late. John’s wife ought to be home if she were in Stockholm, but nobody opened the door.

  I took out my skeleton key. The lock clicked and I pushed the door open. The lights of the city illuminated the hallway like a spotlight. I could smell the silence. I took my gun from my shoulder holster, followed the artificial light down the hallway into a room, glimpsed the contours of something, walked closer, saw it was a body. She lay on the sofa with an arm over the side as if she were resting, waiting for nightfall, but night was over for her, and day too, and all the other days forever and ever, amen. One day we all will die, but we have to live those remaining days and nights still left us. Her big day had already arrived. I touched her arm and it was cool, not cold; she’d died today, shot in the throat. The wound resembled a scarf which should protect from the cold, but it was warm in the room. From the heat, I saw condensation collecting on the window facing the street; I saw the woman’s face, still beautiful even in its death grimace, and I didn’t even know her name.

  John, I thought. John, did you do this?

  * * *

  In the small V-shaped park between Drejargatan and Birkagatan, I saw a shape sitting on one of the benches. I knew there were ten benches altogether. They were green in the daylight.