Stockholm Noir
Page 5
The new arrival bends his head slightly to avoid hitting the top of the doorframe with the bowler hat that sits atop his head. He has a rolled-up newspaper under one arm while in his large hand he carries something wrapped in an oil-stained piece of sackcloth. With his free hand, he fishes out a watch with a gold chain from his vest pocket. He checks it and looks around. The bartender nods toward him and he nods back. The woman in the corner hastily stubs out her cigarette in the enamel cup. She gathers her skirts and disappears out the door behind the man’s back. The door slams shut behind her with an echoing thud.
The burly newcomer slips his watch back into his pocket. He glances around the room one more time before he moves forward to the table where the youth with the cleft palate is sitting. In the total silence in the wake of the stopped machines, the other people in the room can hear the young man inhale deeply. The large man smiles broadly and sits down across from him. There’s a clunk of metal as he sets the sackcloth on the table. The youth nods in greeting and stares down at the full schnapps glass in front of him.
The bartender goes over with a filthy rag and wipes down the table, avoiding the sackcloth bundle and newspaper between the two men. He brushes crumbs into his cupped hand as he speaks.
“Good that Belzén sent you, Hickan. I sent word to him two days ago that I—”
The man called Hickan holds up his hand. “I’m here for another reason.”
“I understand, I understand! Do you want the usual?”
Hickan nods. “The usual.”
The youth glances up for a second. Both of the men at the bar are counting coins. They put their money on the counter and head out the door without waiting for change.
The bartender comes back with a bottle of Estonian vodka. He fills a schnapps glass for Hickan as Hickan stares at the youth. The bartender sets the bottle on the table and walks away. Hickan smiles as he lifts his glass.
“For better luck next time!”
Both men throw back their heads and let the schnapps run down their throats. Hickan shrugs his shoulders and shudders. The youth runs a finger over his thin mustache as he glances at the package in front of him. Hickan takes out cigarette paper and a small silver box, placing both on the table.
“So, how are things on the islands?” Hickan removes the lid from his silver box. There’s a slight whisper as he drops tobacco into the cigarette paper he keeps pinched between his fingers.
The youth clears his throat: “The windstorm last week got up to gale force eleven.” His voice is high-pitched, and he has a slight lisp.
“And?”
“The gale hit when we were out. The boathouse, where we live right now, lost part of its roof. Lindén up on the hill was able to loan us some sheet metal to keep the water out for a while.”
“There was a bit of wind here in the city as well.”
Hickan rolls the tobacco in the paper, licking the adhesive side, sealing the seam of the cigarette tightly. The youth keeps stroking his sparse mustache.
“I was with Lindén and we had to anchor that night with a defective engine. We drifted a few hundred meters and then the chain broke. I put together a sail from a bunk to guide our drift.”
“And that worked?”
“With Neptune’s help, as Lindén put it.”
“You archipelago fishermen have always been resourceful.”
“You take what you have and you do what you can.”
“I have a story about Olsson, the Berghamn pilot. You know him?”
“Only by name.”
“Oh well, I’ll leave it for another time, then.”
The match scratches against the tabletop and flares as Hickan lights his cigarette. He rolls it between his fingers and watches the smoke curl and make its way to the soot-covered ceiling.
“I used to smoke that English brand Mixture but it got difficult to get ahold of. During the war, I started smoking Windsor, but it was too harsh for me. Now I keep changing brands, but I can’t seem to find one I like. This one is Perstorps Prima.” Hickan nods toward the silver box. “You’re welcome to roll one of your own.”
“No thanks. I prefer to chew.”
Hickan smiles and brushes some ashes from the tabletop. Behind him, the bartender is putting clean glasses on the shelf. They clink as they touch.
“So I hear your engine broke down the day before yesterday.” The end of Hickan’s cigarette burns through a full centimeter of paper.
The youth nods and looks away. “The coast guard was after me.”
“Yeah?”
The youth clears his throat. “Yeah, they were after me. I was pushing the engine hard and thought I’d gotten away when it started dying just outside of Yxlan. Pund-Ville was on the island and saw what was going on so he fired a couple of shots into the air to distract them. But it didn’t work. A few minutes later, the engine died completely.”
“I had two men waiting for you in Gröndal.”
“The boat is ready to go. I fixed it. The fuel looked like coffee grounds when I pumped it out. I took the whole motor apart and cleaned it. I even paid for a new filter.”
“And the barrels of alcohol?”
“The engine works just fine now, even better than before. It purrs like a kitten.”
“The barrels?”
“I had no choice.”
“Can you search for them in the water?”
“Not in Norrviken. It’s too deep.”
Hickan stubs out his cigarette in the mug. There’s a slight glug-glug sound from the bottle as he refills their drinks. He lifts his own glass while putting his other hand on the sackcloth package.
“If the coast guard caught you with the alcohol, at least there’d be a written report. Now we have nothing but your word.”
The youth stares down at the table. The back door creaks and then slams shut, as the bartender and his helper slip out. Someone inserts a key from the outside and there’s a thud as the bolt slides home. Hickan nods toward the young man’s glass.
“I imagine you’re too young to remember that pub called Hamburg Cellars? They closed about seven or eight years back.”
The youth lifts his glass with a shaking hand. Hickan smiles.
“It wasn’t much bigger than this place here, but it had an interesting story. You could find it at the crossroads of Götgatan and Folkungagatan not far from Södra Bantorget. The horses would stop there on their way to the gallows at Skanstull. In this country, we’ve always thought a man deserves one last drink. A nice custom, don’t you think?”
Drops of liquor spill between the fingers of the youth’s shaking hand. Sweat slides down his face beneath his sailor’s cap.
“They had a special cupboard there. All the glasses were on display. They engraved the name and the date.”
The spilled liquor collects in one of the grooves in the table, making a small pool.
“They say one of the condemned refused his drink and told them he’d come back for it. Of course, he didn’t.”
“My wife . . . she’s in that way.” The youth’s voice could hardly be heard.
“How far along?”
“Seven months.”
“Let’s drink to her health. Skål!”
Both men throw back their drinks. Hickan pulls at a corner of the sackcloth and opens it, revealing a revolver. It’s black with a grip made from light wood. Right beneath the drum there’s something stamped in Cyrillic letters as well as the year: 1915. Hickan places his huge hand over it.
“Do you know why Belzén trusted you with this job?”
“Because I know every bay and inlet in all the islands and know all the good hiding places.”
“Like pretty much every other inhabitant of the archipelago.”
“So why did he trust me?”
“Because your brother vouched for you. He’s worked for us for years. It’s the only way to get into our little organization. Would you say that you’ve let him down?”
“Perhaps I have.”
&nb
sp; “As well as us?”
“Maybe so.”
Hickan runs his hand over the hard contours of the revolver. Outside it is starting to rain. The first drops hit the dirty pub windowpanes. Night has fallen.
“I have two daughters myself. The youngest just started elementary school. It seems like yesterday when I held her in my arms for the first time.”
Hickan holds up his huge hand. Between the middle finger and the ring finger, a wide scar runs all the way down his palm. He laughs.
“There’s nothing I wouldn’t do for them. A man who can’t take care of his family is not a real man at all.”
The rain is picking up. It hits the tar-papered roof with an intense clatter, like the riveting machines had made earlier. The revolver scrapes against the tabletop as Hickan pushes it toward the youth.
“Don’t you agree?”
The youth smiles quickly and he puts his hand on the revolver. Hickan nods.
“It’s a Nagant. You have seven bullets, no more, no less.”
The youth nods eagerly. He takes the revolver and stuffs it under his belt, pulling his shabby jacket tight around his body. He clears his throat. “I won’t disappoint Belzén again.”
“Make sure you don’t.”
“Who’s the mark?”
“One of our own. A piece of crap brazen enough to steal an entire truckload right from under our noses. We’ll send you his name in a few days.”
“I don’t know if I—”
“As we see it, you don’t have a choice.”
The youth nods and pulls his wallet from his pocket. Hickan raises his huge palm.
“No, it’s on the house.”
The youth nods, pushes the chair away from the table, and stands up. The two men shake hands.
“So, you’ll hear from me in a few days.”
The youth pulls up his collar and with his fist outside his coat he leaves the pub. Hickan fills his glass and rolls himself another cigarette. He doesn’t notice the cockroach climbing up one of the table legs.
Almost immediately, the bartender and the girl come back in through the back door. The girl is carrying the tomcat in her arms. The rain has left dark patches on their clothes and has plastered their hair to their heads. The bartender runs his hand over his walrus mustache, shakes the liquid from his hand, and then makes his way across the sawdust. He has a slight limp. He sits down across from Hickan and brushes his hand over the table before he starts to speak.
“You scared away all my other customers!”
“They’ll be back.”
“So, did you tell him the Hamburg Cellars story?”
“Works every time.”
The bartender’s laughter echoes throughout the bar. He’s missing a few of his upper teeth. He runs his hand through his hair. The cockroach climbs over the edge and stands on the table, its long antennae sweeping back and forth.
“As I told you, I contacted Belzén a few days ago. We’re running out of inventory and I need a delivery as soon as possible.”
“I understand. Unfortunately, we have a break in our supply lines at the moment.”
Hickan picks up his newspaper and rolls it tightly and laughs. “That kid?”
He raises the newspaper over his head. “We can stand to lose a few hundred liters overboard. But his brother is a piece of crap . . .” Hickan smashes the cockroach with his newspaper, then turns it over to survey the mangled remains. He wipes them off on the edge of the table as he lowers his voice. “Did he really believe he could make off with one of our trucks? And get off scot-free?”
The bartender laughs and twirls his mustache. “So they’ll both learn a lesson.”
“It was Belzén’s idea. Business is business.”
The bartender nods, pulls the cork from the bottle, and fills both glasses.
* * *
Outside the bar, the youth sees Rörstrandsgatan is nearly deserted. The factory workers have all hurried home through the rain. An old woman with a scarf over her hair waddles out of the general store at the corner of Birkagatan. She peers up at the rainy sky. From the wicker basket under her arm the necks of milk bottles with their patent corks and rolled-up cones of newspaper poke out.
The youth with the cleft palate walks along, his collar up and his shoulders bent. A horse and open wagon go past. Empty beer bottles rattle, while the ragged hooves plod along on the cobblestones. From down near Sankt Eriksgatan Square, a streetcar bell rings. The youth glances around as he crosses the street. A train blows its horn on its way to Central Station.
Behind him, the city is cloaked in darkness from the rain and smoke from kitchen fires. He comes upon a lamplighter, an old man wearing a moth-eaten military coat and carrying his long pole over his shoulder. The guy stops by one of the square gas lanterns to light it. The gas socket hisses and its tongue of flame flares in vain against the glass, unable to escape. The yellow light reveals the old man’s wrinkled face, reflected in the puddles below.
The youth lets his gaze follow the row of streetlights that look to him like lighthouses out in the archipelago leading the way into the city. He puts his hand into his coat, clutches the cold revolver, and sticks out his chest before continuing south.
His upper lip, cleft in two, gapes as he smiles.
The Splendors and Miseries of a Swedish Crime Writer
BY MALTE PERSSON
Gröndal
Translated by Laura A. Wideburg
I was busy with another murder when my cell phone rang unexpectedly. In media res or in flagrante delicto or whatever the proper technical term may be. The victim was a young woman, yet another of all these young women who have to die, and unfortunately she also had a rather striking resemblance to my famous ex, Anette. I had my priorities, so I ignored the call. Not answering the phone makes one look busy and important these days, I told myself, and kept my hands hovering over the keyboard. I’m a writer.
That’s another thing I kept telling myself. A crime writer. I knew that status was far from reality. At the moment, I was a minor criminal who’d worked in advertising. I was nobody.
Still, these were my words on the smudged laptop screen:
The victim was a woman of around twenty years old. Commissioner Almqvist studied her naked body, and thought she was, or rather had been, everything a modern man could reasonably, or unreasonably, desire in a young woman. She was thin, but not unnaturally so, and her breasts were larger than you’d expect with a body like hers. Large, light-blue eyes, which could no longer see. Oval face, narrow nose, small mouth. A bit above average in height, in good shape, but not too muscular. The paleness of the corpse was the only flaw, except for marks from one or more hard punches to her left cheekbone. Otherwise, light-blond hair which you could tell was natural from both her partially shaven pubic area and the roots of her hair. Someone had cut off the victim’s long hair and used it to tie her to a wooden chair—the chair was an Eva design by Bruno Mathsson, something Almqvist knew, since his wife had an expensive interest in classical Scandinavian functionalism. A catheter was inserted below her left breast, which appeared to have been used to empty the blood from her body. Almqvist had, as the expression goes, never seen anything like it.
I changed light-blue to forget-me-not blue. I deleted small mouth and put in a different sentence: Her mouth was covered by police tape. I added, In her lap, a volume of the Swedish law book, Regulations Concerning Property and Buildings, was open to the famous Chapter 12: How Pigs Should Be Let Loose in an Oak Forest. This I deleted again. It was too ridiculous, even by the standards of Swedish crime novels.
The whole scene was nothing but a piece of shit. Deader than the victim it described. Nothing left to do but start over; but I couldn’t concentrate. When you stop answering the phone, after a while people stop calling. The only ones who keep on trying are people who believe they are too important to be ignored. And so my thoughts immediately turned to . . .
I picked up my cell phone. Just as I suspected. Anette.
Get together? Did I want to get together?
I looked out from my office window: the factory buildings, the rusty water towers, the glittering water . . .
After an aborted attempt at reflection, I texted back: If you want to meet me, you’ll have to come to my end of town. I don’t know why I used those exact words (I was thoroughly interrogated about them later on), but my idea, in addition to playing hard-to-get, was probably the chance to meet like we used to—at a bar in Hornstull. Those were my best years, when I held down both her job and mine. I was a copywriter, and I hadn’t started to think so damned much.
It was now just about a year since we had broken up, ending our own personal party, which had gone on, with few interruptions, for thirteen months. We’d hit the town, mostly as part of Södermalm’s promiscuous and sorrow-free—or perhaps soulless—art and media circles. Her ambition then was to be a fashion designer, a dream of so many young women.
Anyway, we met at work and soon went on to happy hour, which merged into parties and weekends at bars and clubs, including gatherings on apartment balconies during the light summer nights. Events. Retro raves. Pretend-bourgeois dinner parties. Microbrews and MDMA. Sex in bizarre places. That idiotic conviction of youth that everything you hope for will come true.
Not long after she left me, I lost my job. Hit by depression, I self-medicated with uppers and downers, and it seems I said a few things to my boss and coworkers, things I didn’t have enough talent to get away with. I was also the last hired, and then the economy tanked, so I was the first to go.
But I’d bounced back.
Or so I told myself.
This past summer, I’d been spending many late nights by my wide-open window in the cramped office. I watched the guard dogs running around off leash on the grounds of the cement factory across the street. Often, when I would hear the bass booming from one of the nearby clubs, I’d think of it as the rhythm of a life that was no longer mine. A life retreating farther and farther away.