by Arne Dahl
“Fuck, isn’t that the leaning tower? Did you drive us to Spain, you bastard?”
“Italy! Italy! I long for Italy, the lovely beaches of Italy …”
“Shut up!”
“It’s the gas tower—the only thing that’s leaning is your head.”
“The leaning brain of Skarpnäck.”
“The leaning minibus of Frihamnen. What curve-taking skills!”
“Where the fuck are you going? Matte!”
He looked over his shoulder.
It was an awful mess back there. It would take the whole morning to clean up after them. The bottles were mixed up with their bandy sticks, and the hazy figures seemed to be throwing themselves on top of each other in a sad, homoerotic cluster of snakes.
“Gärdet,” he said. “You live there, Steffe. As you may recall.”
“But you drove around all of fucking Gärdet! We shouldn’t have let you drive.”
“Says the man who blew the driving test six times.”
“Come on, try to go the right way. I know you’re from Nynäshamn, but you must have been to Stockholm once or twice.”
“Or heard of it.”
“The king lives there. Maybe that’ll help.”
“Does he really live in the palace? Or is it Drottningholm? Trick question.”
“What the hell? Are you going to send him fan mail?”
“ ‘Dear King, can you send a lock of Victoria’s pubic hair to a pining bachelor with roots in the working class of Säffle?’ ”
“Take a right. A right, you moron!”
“Dumbass!”
He got tired of it all and turned left out of pure spite. A general bellow spread through the minibus.
“Psycho!”
“Dipshit!”
“Idiot!”
The minibus glided on along a little dark road that split into four; he randomly chose one of them, and it seemed like the bus might be stopped at any second by a sudden iron fence and a severe, macho Latino border guard with a cigar in the corner of his mouth.
That didn’t happen. Instead, he could see a Volvo station wagon fifty yards away. Exhaust was rising from its tailpipe. The car was blocking the road.
He braked until they were almost standing still. They were thirty yards from the car when he saw a man next to it. He was in full motion. His head was covered by a balaclava. He shoved something into the back of the car, threw himself around the side, and roared away with shrieking tires. When the smoke settled, Matte noticed something lying on the ground. A large package with alarming contours.
Three of the guys who were somewhat sober leaned forward, above him.
“What the fuck was that?”
“A burglary?”
“Fucking hell! What have you gotten us into, Matte? Let’s split.”
He let the bus slowly glide up to the blanket-wrapped package. The headlights made the rain come alive. It whipped at the blanket.
He stopped the bus and went out into the storm. They followed him. He bent down and started to unwrap the blanket.
A face stared up at him. Chalk-white, with surprising facial features under the ruptured eyes. The rain beat against the eyeballs. The eyelids made no effort to avoid the drops.
They recoiled and stared silently at the white face that stuck out of the dripping blanket, shining through the night.
“Shit!” someone whispered.
“Let’s split,” someone else whispered.
“We can’t just leave him,” he said.
Someone grabbed the lapels of his jacket and brought his face close. “Yes. We can. Do you hear me, Matte? This has nothing to do with us.”
“You’ve been drinking,” someone else said soberly. “Think of the consequences.”
They went back to the minibus. The mood was different now.
He remained standing there for a moment, observing the corpse with reluctant fascination. It was the first time Matte had seen a dead person.
He returned to the driver’s seat. The bus was dripping with rain that would eat its way into the upholstery and make it mold. But that was the farthest thing from his mind as he turned the key in the ignition.
12
Gunnar Nyberg lived in a three-room apartment in Nacka, just one block from the church where he would much rather be, singing loudly. When his bed had collapsed a few nights ago, he saw it as an omen. He awoke with two microscopic pincers driven into his throat. They grasped his vocal cords; he would never be able to sing again. It took a long time to get them out—not out of his throat but his head. He lay there among the wreckage of his bed and let the pincers fade away. Sharp, broken planks were sticking up around him. It slowly dawned on him how lucky he’d been. He started to laugh. It was several minutes before he was able to stop.
His near-accident resulted in two concrete actions. For one, he started a diet. It was hardly the right time, with the Kentucky Killer running riot outside his window, but his need for it had become more and more acute, and the collapse of his bed was the last straw. For another, he bought a new bed, specially designed for overweight sleepers; it was looking the truth in the eye, he thought, pulling himself together.
In this specially designed bed for the overweight, a classic bachelor dream about intensely horny young women was interrupted by a horrible ringtone. It had been a long time since he had received a nighttime phone call, and it took a long time for him to realize what it was. At first he thought it was, strangely enough, his ex-wife. Had something happened to Gunilla? When he heard a typical police voice echo through the receiver, it struck him that he was probably the last person who would be contacted in that case.
“Is anyone there?” the police voice said for a second time.
Nyberg got some life into his voice, which he thought sounded like a threshing machine: “Nyberg here.”
“This is the Stockholm police,” said the voice. “We have standing orders that so-called ‘suspicious deaths’ must be reported directly to you. Is that correct?”
“I don’t really know what it means, but that’s correct, yes.”
“We have a murder in Frihamnen that can probably be classified as such.”
Nyberg’s reaction was immediate. “Does the victim have two holes in his neck?”
“Are you awake?” the police voice said suspiciously. “Vampires belong in dreams.”
“Just answer the question.”
“I don’t know,” the voice said tersely.
Nyberg obtained directions, hung up, shook some life into himself, pulled on his customary sloppy clothes, got his apartment key and car key, dashed—he thought—down the stairs, and drove off in his old Renault.
He had the rain-whipped streets to himself. He tried to think about the Kentucky Killer; about the little pincers that, with one simple motion, could rob a person of her most unique outward feature, her voice; and about the series of similar American influences, but it didn’t really work. His awakening had forced onto him the thing he was trying to repress most of all.
During the early 1970s, Gunnar Nyberg had been Mr. Sweden, an internationally recognized body builder; he was simultaneously on active duty with the Norrmalm police and had a certain amount of contact with what would later be called the Baseball League, the most ruthless cops in the history of the Swedish police. But by then he had already moved to Nacka and shelved the steroids. And lost his family.
He had been a truly rotten bastard. When he thought of it, he always had to close his eyes, which actually worked very well out on the empty Värmdöleden.
Everything poured through him when he closed his eyes for just a second … all the abuse, all the patience he’d lost before anything even happened, all those steroid attacks of extreme rage.
About a year ago he’d started speaking in schools pretty regularly. He was an early victim of the side effects of anabolic steroids, and in his work he saw each day how their abuse was increasing out on the streets; he could sniff out a steroid user immediately. His
pastor had asked if he might consider helping out, and with great reluctance he had gone to the first high school and spoken. But they listened; even though most of his muscle mass had gone to the fat that broke his bed, he was still an impressive figure. He kept a low profile and showed frightening pictures while talking in a matter-of-fact voice, and possibly someone somewhere had abstained from using steroids thanks to him.
But the veil of penance was thin and was torn away again. Behind his eyelids came what he knew would come—it always did. The last time he abused his wife, he split—no, burst—Gunilla’s eyebrow, and her frightened look, and the frightened looks from Tommy and Tanja, settled in his brain forever. He knew that those memories still existed. The family had moved to Uddevalla to get as far away from him as possible. He hadn’t seen them for over fifteen years, not once. If he had run into his children on the street, he wouldn’t have recognized them. His life had closed up around a giant void.
He had to stop the car.
I sing for you! he shouted without making a sound, as though pincers were clamping his vocal cords. Don’t you realize I sing for you!
But no one heard him, no one in the world.
He drove slowly out onto Värmdöleden again, rounded the long curve at Danviksklippan, and crossed the Danvikstull bridge in the pounding, smacking, striking rain.
Then he was there. He didn’t know how it had happened; it was as if the last few miles were gone, blown into the great void.
When he’d gone a ways into the port warehouse district, he saw the familiar blue lights rise, sweeping through the rain clouds. He followed their signal, drove slowly in on the narrow roads, and stopped the car at the blue and white stripes of the police tape. The blue lights flew through the air uninterrupted.
There were three police cars there, and one ambulance. And Jan-Olov Hultin.
He was standing under an umbrella in the middle of the soaking-wet collection of police officers, and even in this weather and this situation, he was managing to look through a bunch of papers.
Nyberg sneaked in under his umbrella, but three-fourths of his body didn’t fit. “What have we got?” he said.
Hultin looked at him neutrally over his owlish glasses. “See for yourself.”
“Holes in his neck?”
Hultin shook his head.
Nyberg sighed heavily. He walked over to a bundle of blankets in the middle of the narrow road. A white face with dead eyes looked up at the black-as-night skies. The rain struck the irises relentlessly.
Nyberg bent down and took mercy on the man’s eyes. He closed the eyelids and, crouching, studied the body.
It was a man of about twenty-five. A young man.
It could have been Tommy, he thought.
Then he shuddered. Maybe it was his son. There was no chance he would recognize him.
Nyberg shook his uneasiness away, a giant bulldog in the pouring rain.
He looked at the exposed throat. No marks. But right where his heart would be, in a perfect pattern, were four bullet holes. Very little blood had run out. Death must have been instantaneous.
Groaning, he pulled up his heavy body and returned to Hultin, whose papers were still dry under the umbrella.
“Does this really have anything to do with us?” Nyberg asked.
Hultin shrugged. “It’s the most promising thing so far. There are certain details.”
Nyberg waited for him to continue. There was no point in trying to get under Hultin’s umbrella; the last dry spot on his own body had disappeared.
“At three-twelve a security guard from the company LinkCoop called the police and reported a break-in on their premises. By then the police were already on their way. Because just before that, at three-oh-seven, emergency dispatch got a call from an anonymous man in a telephone booth at Stureplan. Want to hear?”
Nyberg nodded.
Hultin bent down into one of the police cars and popped a cassette into the stereo. At first there was a crackling sound. Then an agitated male voice: “The police, please.”
Then silence and crackling again and a woman: “Police.”
“There’s a corpse in Frihamnen,” the excited voice hissed.
“Where, exactly?”
“I don’t know the name of the road. A narrow road, a ways in, near the water. He’s in the middle of the road. You can’t miss him.”
“What is your name, and where are you calling from?”
“Forget that. A guy in a balaclava was shoving a similar bundle into a car. We surprised him. He drove away really fucking fast.”
“Make of car, license plate?”
Then just the crackling sound and then silence.
Hultin popped out the tape and put it back in his inner pocket.
“And that was all?” said Nyberg.
Hultin nodded. “It could be a double murder. And the balaclava might indicate a certain amount of professionalism.”
“That’s still quite far from our man,” said Nyberg. “Is the security guard here?”
Hultin nodded and gestured. They pushed their way through the throng of police. The ambulance crew moved the corpse up onto a stretcher; out of the corner of his eye, Nyberg could see that it was as stiff as a board.
They made their way around a few rows of buildings and arrived at a sentry box in front of a row of warehouses that belonged to LinkCoop; an almost bizarre logo was blinking spiritedly, in four colors, above the entrance, in glaring contrast with the faint light that floated out through the rain from the sentry box.
They stepped into the microscopic sentry box, dripping water. A uniformed guard was having coffee with three police officers, also in uniform.
“My, what a well-guarded guard,” said Nyberg.
“Out in the rain,” said Hultin neutrally.
The three officers went off with their tails between their legs.
The guard rose quickly and stood at attention. He was a young man, apparently in his twenties, with a nearly shaved skull and genuinely pumped-up muscles. The scent of steroids struck Nyberg’s very sensitive olfactory organ with force. As the guard stood there at attention, he recognized the type: a commando or ranger background, solid training in the hierarchy, substantial use of steroids, possibly a few rejected applications for officer and police training, a not entirely tolerant attitude toward immigrants, homosexuals, people on welfare, smokers, civilians, women, children, people …
Gunnar Nyberg had to be careful not to throw stereotypes around as heartily as his imagined stereotype did.
The guard presumably spent his nights here, along with an extensive selection of men’s magazines, Nyberg thought, sinking deeper into the swamp of stereotypes. He would have liked nothing better than to glimpse a CD of Schnittke’s Requiem and the magazine Modern Art Forum in the quickly closed desk drawer; unfortunately, what swept by under the experienced hands of the guard was the porn mag Aktuell Rapport.
Hultin paged through his bone-dry papers. “Benny Lundberg?”
“Present,” Benny Lundberg said distinctly.
“Sit down.”
The guard followed orders and took his place at his worn desk in front of eight television monitors, all of which displayed the pitch-black interiors of warehouses. Hultin and Nyberg pulled up stools, already warmed by police backsides, and sat. The rain beat on the little booth intensely.
“What happened?” Hultin asked curtly.
“I was going on my usual three o’clock rounds, located a door on one of our warehouses that had been broken into, went in, found the warehouse in disarray, and called the police.”
“End of story,” said Nyberg.
“Yes,” said Lundberg seriously.
“Was anything stolen?” Hultin asked.
“I can’t answer that. But boxes were lying all over the place.”
“What kind of boxes?” Nyberg asked without much interest.
“Computer equipment. LinkCoop is an import-export company in the computer industry.” Lundberg sounded l
ike he was reciting something he’d memorized.
“Shall we look at the warehouse?” Hultin said with about the same amount of interest as Nyberg.
The guard led them through the rain toward the LinkCoop buildings. They took a left at the entrance with the absurdly blinking logo and approached one of many doors on a loading dock alongside the building. The blue and white plastic police tape was already in place.
They looked for stairs but found none nearby, so they had to heave themselves up; it took some time. Inside the forced door were the same three police officers who had recently been having coffee in the sentry box. Perhaps they should have expected that their superiors might be on their way.
“You sure don’t like rain, boys,” Nyberg observed, surveying the building. It was a classic warehouse; boxes of various dimensions were stacked on well-marked shelves. Many of them were on the floor now. Computer equipment peeked out of some of them, a bit jumbled. Very little seemed to have been stolen.
“Maybe they had other things to do,” Nyberg said aloud.
Hultin gave him a quick but expressionless glance and turned to Benny Lundberg. “Is this exactly how it was when you came in?”
Lundberg nodded and cast a furtive glance at the three unfortunate fellows who were still standing inside the door, at a loss since no orders had been forthcoming.
Hultin and Nyberg dutifully poked around the large warehouse, then thanked Lundberg and went back out into the autumn night.
“Two unrelated incidents?” said Nyberg.
“Hardly,” said Hultin.
“A dispute between burglars about the division of loot?”
“Hardly,” Hultin said, with little variation.
“At three-oh-seven our anonymous tipster calls about the body. Five minutes later, the steroid stereotype Benny calls about the break-in. The time is now four-oh-six and ten seconds, beep. Where’s the connection?”
“You’ll have to talk to LinkCoop tomorrow.”
“Today,” Nyberg corrected him, wondering whether there was any point in going home and sleeping for two hours.
“You look like you need those two hours,” said Hultin telepathically.
He himself appeared to be thoroughly need-free as he made his way dry-footed through the rain toward his Volvo Turbo.