Stockholm Noir

by Nathan Larson

  I check the address again, Sköllerstagatan, and then the map.

  * * *

  When Erik reported on the case to his colleagues that morning—it’s months ago now—I instantly knew what kind of case it would be. In certain investigations something breaks into me, hits me, and starts to communicate with something deep in my body, forever forgotten. Draws out a nasty, stirring anxiety and forces it forward. Forces me to return to the place I never want to come back to. The place I always return to, in every investigation that draws my attention. Some inexorable magnetic power. Pushes me back to the day that turned me into who I am, the day that repeats itself in my life, a repetition I have transformed into a profession, into a hypersensitive instrument. Shivering, it searches its way into each case that awakens my sleeping unease with vague promises of something I cannot understand, something I can sense but not see, brute patterns and indistinct connections on their way to forming. A raw anxiety that gives no rest until every possibility is reviewed, every opening is searched out, and the evasive tracks of a perpetrator are decoded and identified. It is an instrument I bear like an imprint of the past, of the hours I cannot recollect: the lost hours my thoughts grope for in the investigations, but will never comprehend. As if a part of me should exist there, somewhere in the cases.

  I can see my parents, I can see them perfectly clearly, although I was only one and a half years old when they found us and I know what I see is my own creation, something I’ve gleaned and put together from scant reports and the four photos the social services sent with me. I can see their eyes when he leaves them, their eyes in death. He killed them for the five grams of heroin my father hadn’t yet shot up his veins and some cash. I’ve never returned to the place we lived, have avoided it all my life, I never went back to that side of the city.

  When they found us I was lying beside my mother, she had been dead the whole night. A night that forever induced a distance to my feelings and cut them loose from my thoughts: cold, raw, and harsh, my thoughts live their own lives, grope about in the investigations like an alien machine. A night that made me inseparable from those I hunt. By chance we are each on opposite sides of the law, predestined to devote our lives searching for each other, as if searching for our lost half.

  * * *

  “Hey,” Leila says and runs her fingers through my hair when I come home in the evenings. “Don’t worry, baby, everything will be fine.” Our daughter Mia looks at us with the face of a three-year-old who already knows she’s not quite like either of us, and knows just how lonely that makes her. Her unfathomable gaze on my face, as if she can touch me with it. She’s always had that gaze, since the moment she came into the world, lying on Leila’s stomach in the delivery room. She lay there and observed us with her dark, enigmatic eyes, not making a sound. She struck me speechless, as if setting me in a scene I couldn’t grasp; for hours she would just lie there looking at us. “Everything will be fine,” Leila says, but she doesn’t know that the force coursing through my veins is my element and the water I drink, owning me so profoundly I might not survive if it were to suddenly disappear. Like Epaminondas’s spearhead, the spearhead he kept stuck in his heart, knowing that as long as it remained there he would live, but if he pulled it out he would die.

  Leila strokes my hair, but knows nothing of who I am, what moves in my interior; she is lighthearted. Or perhaps she does, in her own remarkable way. With Mia it is different, everything is there between us, as if she saw straight through me from the very beginning.

  * * *

  I hold Kim’s picture in my hand, in the emptiness that ensues when a case is solved, when all tension disappears, the emptiness I never know what to do with. I get up from the desk and slowly collect my things. I look at her address again; it tells me nothing, nothing but a closed case.

  I phone Erik. I can tell he’s sitting in the car as I hear the police radio in the background. There’s a moment’s silence when he absorbs what I’m telling him, that I’ve found her, that I know who she is.

  “Her?” he asks, bewildered.

  “Her.”

  I give him the address, still holding the photo in my hand, my fingers close around her face.

  “Okay, I’ll meet you there.”

  We hang up and I sit back down for a few minutes until I pull myself together and stand up again. Sköllerstagatan. I don’t even consider taking the official car there, as if this isn’t a place I can get to by car, drive to myself. As if somebody else must take me, but Erik is in Norsborg, so I must go by subway. I pull my pistol out of the holster, insert a new magazine, stuff the gun back into the holster, and strap it on. It rests just under my armpit, close to my body, like a metal-and-leather protuberance, concealed from the world by my jacket. It’s autumn outside on Surbrunnsgatan, the air is clean and clear, the colors so beautiful, and the cold bites my face. When I walk down toward Sveavägen, there are loud noises from children playing soccer in the empty basin of the fountain next to the Stockholm Public Library with the Observatory Grove above. Two of them stand a bit apart from the group, near the edge that separates the shallow basin from the street. Two girls, maybe nine or ten years old, they look like they’re whispering about something. One of them lays a hand on the other’s shoulder, studies me as I walk past; they make me think about Mia, make me wonder what she’s doing. I close my eyes for a second; she’s somewhere in the preschool, maybe in the room with building blocks and Legos, sitting on the floor with the other kids, lost in a game. When I drop her off there in the morning, she throws off her coat, runs in to join the others. It’s her own world, a world to which I’m not admitted, which is hers alone, and I find myself standing outside with her brightly colored coat in my hand, following her with my eyes before I slowly hang up her coat on the little hook that bears her name in the entrance hall. Sometimes I stand awhile outside in the courtyard, peering through the window, watching her play without her knowing, before I tap on the windowpane and she looks back at me and waves. Some mornings she’s sad, I see how she keeps herself together, trying not to show it, she sucks on her fingers while something in her eyes distances her from me. As if it’s she and not I who finally says: Go now.

  I feel the weight of the pistol as I walk down to the subway at Rådmansgatan in the chilly air. Passing through the turnstiles, I choose the stairs, not the escalator. The 19, the line I catch every day I don’t take the car, although never in this direction. I stand on the platform and wait. Something makes me nervously feel for the pistol, touch it lightly with my hand, as if its weight isn’t enough to reassure me of its existence. The train arrives and I take a window seat, see my face reflected in the glass in front of the tunnel’s darkness, and feel her presence, feel the inexorable motion that makes the distance between us shrink, melt together to nothing. Hötorget passes on the left, then Central Station, and when the train exits the tunnel at Old Town the city is gorgeous, stunning, the colors of the trees in the south are mirrored in the water, yellow and bloodred; the beauty makes something well up inside me, almost like tears. There are a few women around me, a young girl, and a man in a suit. I get the feeling that they’re staring at me, that they see something inside me, and sweat penetrates my T-shirt, like I’m losing control, like they’re sucking it out of me in complete silence. We pass Slussen, Medborgarplatsen, and at Skanstull I can’t stand it any longer, have to get off with blood rushing to my head, the cold sweat like a film on my skin when I lean against a pillar on the platform.

  After a while everything clears, I head to Åhléns department store on Ringvägen, go to the cosmetics department, as if I need time, as if I want to drag it out. I walk around between counters of perfume and makeup, nod at some of the saleswomen, ask a few questions; this is routine, but it’s a tactic that always works while my eyes wander over the products behind them. I know what things are worth, I’ve learned to pick out what’s expensive and reject what’s cheap. I decide on a fragrance from Jimmy Choo.

  In the ad behind it
, a woman leans her head so far back that you can scarcely see her face, her collarbones catch all the light, the dress’s plunging neckline forms a V between her breasts. I test the scent on my hand, cedar and something floral I can’t identify; when the salesgirl turns her back I pull out one of the drawers below the samples, find the right product, and take it with me. I smile in her direction and nod at the guard by the exit; he follows me with his eyes as I take a few turns, holding the small paper box in my hand. The faint, pleasant scent of cedar accompanies me among the shelves, just a hint of it, and I let the box drop into my pocket. Then I select an inexpensive bottle of shampoo from the shelves, and walk toward the cashier. The calm that spreads out when the salesperson wraps it, it’s like a drug, I hand her my credit card and she slides it through the slot. The small sum burns in the card reader, and she tiredly returns the card with the bag, not looking at me. It’s a movement she repeats, mechanically, over and over again, hundreds of times a day.

  I let my gaze glide over the guard’s face without settling, as if he were an object, before I exit onto Ringvägen. The crystal-clear fall air shoots its way into my lungs and I don’t know why I keep doing this. I give away the loot as gifts to Leila. As if I want to be discovered, punished, but I don’t know what for, as if nothing but risk can eradicate the guilt and bring rest.

  When I take the elevator at Götgatan down to the lower level, five o’clock is approaching. The 19 appears in the tunnel again and I board the train. When it shoots out on the bridge between Skanstull and Gullmarsplan a few boats float by in the bay, these are their last trips before winter and I can see straight through the glassy walls of Eriksdal’s indoor bath thirty meters below; the small solitary figures in the swimming pools, dark unprotected silhouettes against the light blue water. We pass Gullmarsplan, Globen, the rest of the stretch I’ve never traveled. Sockenplan, Svedmyra, Stureby. I check my phone, send a text message to Leila, telling her not to expect me for dinner, then look at the display for a few minutes, but she doesn’t reply. She’s busy, I know she’s picking up Mia. I wonder what they’ll eat, think about all the things Mia wants to bring home: the pacifier with the octopus cartoon, the big brown-and-black dog she carries around everywhere, the drawings she’s made. How they cross the little courtyard with the baby carriage. I feel the straps of the holster around my body, as if they’re holding it together. Högdalen comes up on the left, a sign above the housetops reads, Högdalen Center, and a few fathers with small children and two drunks get on before the train starts again. We glide past a park with ramps, teenagers skateboard on them in the autumn sun, and then I can see Rågsved in the distance. My eyes search for two places among the houses, although I know it’s just a coincidence. Hers and mine. Hers must be somewhere among the clusters of apartment buildings on the right side of the tracks, mine on the left. I suddenly realize that maybe she’s not at home or won’t open the door; I haven’t anticipated such a situation, have prepared nothing in advance. But deep inside I know she won’t disappoint me.

  I go through the turnstile, to the left are some wide stairs with narrow iron banisters. Behind them trees in brilliant colors, and above them towering houses, but I don’t recognize them, they could be any houses. I walk in the other direction, away from the past, down through the tunnel under the road, and emerge on a small square. It’s surrounded by two semicircular buildings with shops—Ammouris Livs, Dina’s Pirogues and Sweets, Medihead Home Care, Rågsved Games and Tobacco, an ICA supermarket. In the middle there’s a fountain and a few men sitting on benches, each one by himself. I check the address again on my phone, it must be somewhere on the other side of the square, one of the buildings on the hill visible from the subway. Nervously I check the time, wonder if Erik is stuck in traffic somewhere on the highway. I calculate how long it would take from Norsborg, he should be here already.

  In the beginning I didn’t know she was a female—I assumed she was a man, about my age, just under thirty and completely outside the usual networks, number unlisted but known in other ways. I’d heard her nicknames, Kimsha, Kimmie, Kimo, heard them so many times. Something in the way the junkies pronounced it, it got into me and began to do its slow work. Kimsha, Kimmie, Kimo. At first she was just a series of question marks in a few investigations, investigations that weren’t even related to her, brief notations, before we understood that she was big, that she was the spider in a heroin flowchart, a heart shy of light which at the same constant rate, minute by minute, supplied the central arteries with a substance, a substance that sought out thinner and thinner blood vessels, shot itself into users and made their jerky excited movements subside, their eyes fill with a glassy tranquility. I’d imagined an older man, lean, wiry, and for some reason wearing a black leather jacket, his face radiating a special, peculiar intelligence. Someone who worked alone, who didn’t rely on others, who never revealed to his customers who he was, but who’d succeeded in earning enough respect in the bigger networks to be left alone. Someone who saw it all as a job, any job, and brought in a lot of money, but in some remarkable way without upsetting organized crime, as if it weren’t worth the effort it would take to do something about him.

  Someone who was his own boss.

  Their faces often come to me, their bodies and character, vague but still with distinct features. Sometimes they coincide with reality, sometimes their real features surface later like a shock that tears down everything I’ve built and strengthens my desire to find them. Avenging the scene that made me who I am. Again and again, as if I live in a frozen time, encapsulated in sheer mechanics.

  I sit down on one of the benches, restless. Just opposite from where I sit—within the body of semicircular buildings that extends around the square and ends just in front of Capio’s health center—there’s a pub. The Oasis Restaurant. Three men and one woman sit outside in their jackets, it must be one of the last days for outdoor table service; they sit in the shade with their beer and cigarettes, freezing, they look worn out and are deep in loud conversation. But out here on the square it’s surprisingly warm, maybe the semicircular row of buildings provides protection from the wind. I try to figure out when they were built. It’s a lovely square, you get the idea, the benches, the fountain. I get up and check the time again. The Oasis Restaurant. Abruptly I cross the square—I need to get something.

  The men in the sidewalk café call something out when I go in, as if they immediately see that I’m a stranger, that I don’t fit in, but I don’t catch what they say. More people are sitting inside, some men who look like alcoholics are drinking at the bar, two or three guys stand by themselves at the slot machines, a larger group sits at one of the tables. I stand at the bar, without making any eye contact, but I can feel their eyes on me. I never drink on the job, I’m surprised at myself. The bartender comes over, says nothing, just gives me a questioning look. There’s something guarded about him, as if he doesn’t understand what I’m doing here. He takes my order. There are no other single women here, absolutely no one my age. He dries off the glass with a towel in his pocket, sets the beer down in front of me on the counter. I hand him my credit card. My phone says it’s almost quarter to six, Leila hasn’t texted back and I take a few deep gulps of the ice-cold liquid.

  Then I get a look at her—she must have been sitting there the whole time on the other side of the bar, looking at me without me seeing her. She’s wearing a red T-shirt, I try to read the faded gray words printed on her chest, something with Plugged. She’s thin and sinewy, has two tattoos on one of her upper arms, two bands in the same black, stylized tribal design, which run around her biceps, separated by a few centimeters. She doesn’t look much like the photo, and she’s not the enigmatic figure she ought to be, given the circumstances, and yet I know this is right, this is her, it can’t be anyone else. Suddenly I wonder what she’s doing when she’s not taking care of business. I see her in an apartment, alone, how she sits there during the day and plays video games. She studies me calmly, almost curiously. Shame
and eagerness stun me for a few moments, and I wonder if she can see this, when one of the drunks staggers toward the bar, close to me.

  “You’re cute,” he whispers, and I remove his fat hands from my body, take a swig of my beer without looking at him.

  After a while she gets up and comes toward us, shoves him aside with her arm and a hard, weary expression on her face. When he goes, she puts her beer down on the bar: I can’t figure out whether she’s amused or contemptuous.

  “You don’t live around here,” she says, and I don’t know how to reply, as if nothing I can say would be right.

  “No,” I finally answer.

  Her forearm against the bar counter, it’s covered with thin strands of hair and I can almost touch the attraction that binds us.

  I check the time on my phone again. “Could you wait a minute?”

  She nods.

  Outside the autumn sun disappears behind the roofs. I dial his number, walking back and forth in front of the restaurant while the call goes through. When he finally answers I tell him that he doesn’t need to come anymore, but I can hear that my voice sounds too harsh.

  “What’s happened?”

  “She’s not there.”

  “Have you already been there? Yourself?”

  I see the contours of her body inside, leaning slightly forward, her arms resting against the counter. I don’t really answer him, only repeat that she isn’t there.

  “You’ve been there? What the hell are you thinking? You broke into the apartment? Without a warrant?”

  “She’s not there. I know where she is. We’ll talk tomorrow, okay?” I answer, fatigued.