Two Soldiers Page 21

  There had been sparks from a window at 17:14.

  The difference between being locked up and freedom. Prisoner and on the run. Violent, full of hate, classified as dangerous and monitored, or violent, full of hate, classified as dangerous and someone anyone could meet on the street at any moment.

  He moved forward through the seconds that became minutes, first at normal speed, then twice that, four times, eight times.

  Nothing.

  No movement, no sparks, not even a bird.

  He let time stop by the slightly broader line that marked 18:00, rubbed his bloodshot, tired eyes, then normal speed, second by second.

  Just as empty, just as silent.

  Perhaps not quite so light, slightly more wind if you looked carefully at the uncut grass that could be seen and the rebellious halyard on the bare flagpole.

  A few minutes.

  One more.

  Now.

  An obvious movement to the left of the picture. The same cell window. A head. A person.

  Him. It is a man, gradually appearing from the graininess, the fuzz.

  Then the movement stopped, the hunched body waits, presses against one side of the barred window.

  You’re on your way.

  Ewert Grens looked at the two colleagues he trusted most in the building where he’d spent his entire adult life. Sven Sundkvist and Mariana Hermansson were sitting close together, faces watching a body that was half out, half in.

  You, who don’t want to go anywhere, don’t want anything.

  He looked at Sven’s concentrated eyes, at Hermansson’s concentrated eyes, and wanted to explain to them that they were watching much more than a body with an unclear outline, that you could build a machine with a cursor that moved time back and forward, but that what had happened had damn well happened and that only someone who had been there from the start could know what and why.

  You’re on your way, and I know where to.

  This damn unease that he couldn’t shake off no matter how hard he tried.

  He ran the cursor over the screen back to the folder with nineteen documents, CAMERA 9, the same time from a different angle, from above, installed on the roof of Block D, looking over the edge, straight down.

  The empty asphalt.

  A bird again, probably a seagull, flying close to the camera lens that watches the plaster façade from above.

  There.

  A blurred body that slowly gets bigger, forcing its way out. Feet in light-colored shoes on the windowsill, arms and hands and fingers around the metal bars, back pressed against the bars and gray concrete.

  Thirty seconds. Sixty. Ninety.

  Then the picture changes.

  In the right hand corner—a warden in uniform, a woman, she’s young and on her own, approaching the corner of the building, coming around it.

  A strange feeling, watching him waiting while she knows nothing, to be there and not be able to shout, warn her.

  He can clearly hear the footsteps that aren’t there in the silent film.

  He bends his legs, prepares himself.

  She passes, doesn’t look up, why would she?

  So she doesn’t notice someone landing behind her, taking two, maybe three steps and raising an arm, hitting her on the neck with great force.

  ———

  Sven Sundkvist leaned back and looked at the older man who was sitting on the worn corduroy sofa, wearing a beige jacket that looked new, with small pieces of plastic still stuck to the top right sleeve and middle of the left shoulder.

  Ewert Grens.

  His boss, a colleague that few could bear to approach. His intoxicating quickness that so easily tipped over into anger, lashing out, sometimes into cruelty.

  A large man who could look so small.

  One of the informal powers of the police headquarters, who had spent his whole life with a crutch under each arm: Anni, Siw Malmkvist—an absent wife, a present voice; a past that had never ended but then abruptly did, and once he had fallen he had slowly gotten to his feet, started to walk on his own, still limping with a gammy leg, but under his own steam. There wasn’t anyone to visit every Tuesday anymore, no longer a wall of sixties music, not as much fear masked with aggression.

  But this, he’d never seen this. Ewert’s face—it could perhaps be rage.

  Sven looked for the vein on his right temple that should be pulsing, for his mouth that should be twisted, eyes that should be narrowed.

  But they weren’t there.

  This, this rage was like sorrow.

  Sven Sundkvist had a sudden urge to lean forward again, touch the cheek that he had never been near, the person who no one was allowed to touch.

  ———

  “She’s just a thing.”

  The mouth that wasn’t twisted had raised its voice.

  “A pawn for negotiation, something to exert pressure with.”

  The temple that wasn’t pulsing was flushed red.

  “Do you see? For him, from now on, there . . . there when he hits her . . . from now on she’s just something he can harm, destroy, cast aside.”

  The eyes that weren’t narrowed, raged.

  Ewert Grens had said nothing when the piece of metal was pressed against her throat and when it cut deep into the back of her thigh and when she fell to the ground in pain and was forced back up and used as a shield.

  He had moved the cursor back, studied the sequence again, and now, now he screamed.

  A hand slammed the coffee table.

  Then he opened a new file on the screen—ÖSTERÅKER, twenty-two documents, CAMERA 2. Another prison and the security camera on the drive up to the main gate. He froze the picture when a large white car passed at high speed at 18:44.

  “How many can you see?”

  Sven studied the grainy faces.

  “Three.”

  “And you?”

  Hermansson nodded.

  “Three.”

  He hit out again. The plastic casing on the computer. Sufficiently hard for a small, but obvious crack.

  “One person is missing.”

  Ewert Grens pointed at the picture.

  “She’s already lying there. In the trunk.”

  Finger pointing at the screen, at the back of the white car.

  “Something that will soon be thrown away.”

  “. . . like a piece of meat. She’s not a person. No one he knows. For Christ’s sake, she could have been out there drinking a latte with all the others. Meat! Until he throws her aside and looks for someone else he doesn’t know and for that very reason can tear them apart.”

  ———

  Grens looked at the alarm clock standing on his desk between the telephone and one of the piles of ongoing investigations. The young woman named Julia Bozsik had been taken hostage at exactly eighteen oh five. Forty minutes later, she was lying locked in the trunk when the escape car passed camera number 2, which was installed on the driveway up to Österåker prison.

  If she was alive.

  That was eight hours ago.

  If she was alive.

  ———

  His large body back and forth in the room that felt cramped without music to hide the sound of restless feet on a tired floor and open hands on ulcerated walls. He had continued to open document after document, different angles and distances and time intervals, then stopped at what was called CAMERA 7, Österåker prison’s high red-painted wall seen at an angle from the front, clear focus on the upper corner.

  A face that stared straight at him.

  Ewert Grens had studied the neck and back standing on the concrete that was supposed to keep him in, far below the shadow of someone kneeling by the inner fence. The neck and back had been on guard, that was obvious, the powerful gun in his hands when he turned and aimed at the lens. Such a proud smile, as if he was posing, for a second like every picture of young gang members that filled every cell phone seized in connection with every criminal investigation, always photographed by another gang me
mber, with their logo on the front of a black hoodie, someone who was eighteen, waving one hand in the air while he held death in the other, every time the same weapon, the same hate.

  Unmasked. Smiling.

  Ewert Grens closed his eyes, took a deep breath, looked at the face on the screen one more time.

  The gestures, stature, features.

  He looked just the same.

  He was even the same age.

  As his father.

  ———

  The obvious crack in the middle of the computer’s casing, Ewert Grens had hit it hard and when he grabbed the screen and turned it, the gap seemed to grow, even longer.

  The last file. The third and final prison.

  STORBODA.

  He selected two pictures.

  CAMERA 14. The white car drives up to the prison that has a high fence with rolls of barbed wire on top, instead of a wall. Three men get out and start to run toward the fence when one of them, the driver, stops by the trunk, punches it, and shouts something.

  Grens froze the picture, zoomed in, his mouth in close-up.

  “She’s lying in there.”

  The detective superintendent rewound the sequence and they all saw the same fist again slamming into the trunk, driving home the message to the person inside, someone who not long ago had controlled him, opening his cell door if he wanted to piss and locking it again before he went to sleep, someone who was now lying there and had to listen.

  “She’s still alive.”

  CAMERA 18. The white car leaving the driveway to the prison, accelerating and then stopping abruptly. I hate you. The one driving leans out of his window, turns to the camera and holds up the automatic in one hand, shoots at the building for five seconds. I hate this fucking place. Ewert Grens froze the picture again, paused on a face that was eighteen and had the kind of power that only those who have never had power can have. I could have killed you. And the kind of control only those who have never had control can have. If I’d wanted.

  ———

  A frozen face.

  He recognized it. He didn’t recognize it.

  Every step a person takes changes them. Every action, every thought has a consequence.

  Whether what I do is right. Or wrong.

  Ewert Grens scrolled down the picture on the screen, the mouth that was shouting something, the eyes that didn’t see.

  He knew it. He had always known it.

  Every intervention a policeman makes will have consequences. Every intervention he himself had ever made, makes, or would make, would have consequences.

  It wasn’t his job to assess them, to weigh them up, try to understand how long the consequences would last.

  Not even now.

  In front of a frozen face that he almost recognized.

  ———

  “At eighteen twelve the duty guard called on all available units, twenty-three patrols, to come to Aspsås prison.”

  He had seen it all before.

  “Redirected them to Österåker prison at eighteen forty-six.”

  Just as all of them had seen it all before.

  “Redirected them again to Storboda prison at nineteen twenty-seven.”

  The escape from a cell was reminiscent of Popescu’s escape at the end of the eighties.

  “Three breakouts, five prisoners.”

  The escape from Österåker was a copy of Maiorana’s escape from Kumla prison fifteen years before.

  “All—and we’re certain of this—members of what was previously called Råby Warriors and now is called Ghetto Soldiers. And apart from that . . .”

  And this one, Grens looked at the frozen face that still filled the computer screen and the driveway up to Storboda prison, planned and executed step by step like the escape from Norrtälje prison a year or so ago.

  “. . . we know nothing.”

  He pointed at the paused picture sequence, leaned in toward the computer and pressed play again, STORBODA and CAMERA 18 and a young man laughing as he fired with a big black gun in his hand.

  The last picture they had.

  In a couple of hours they would have access to the traffic movements, moment to moment, through the evening and night from all the speed cameras in the area. And a couple of hours after that they would have the first general overview of observations of the older Mercedes and the five young men who had already been spotted all over half of Sweden as well as a couple of places in Finland and some others in Denmark and Norway.

  Ewert Grens let the sequence of an empty road run for image after image, a bicycle that passed in the distance where it met a bigger road, several white or light-colored birds, maybe a hare.

  The last picture they had. He paused there and put the computer down on the floor.

  “Aspsås prison, Österåker prison, Storboda prison.”

  The detective superintendent had moved his cumbersome body over to the desk and the map he had taped onto the wall between the two windows.

  “They’re not here.”

  His hand over a green and blue area to the north of Stockholm municipality.

  “And they’re not in Finland, Norway, or Denmark. They’re not in southern or northern Sweden.”

  It was crooked, the map, as if he’d been in a hurry when he hung it up, as if he didn’t care. He stood in front of it and looked at Sven Sundkvist and Mariana Hermansson with temples that weren’t pulsing and a mouth that wasn’t twisted.

  “They won’t even reach the forest or water.”

  The hand moved in toward the gray area on the map that indicated inner city and roads, carried on down.

  “They only know asphalt.”

  His bent fingers over south Botkyrka: Tumba and Tullinge, over north Botkyrka: Norsborg, Alby, Fittja. And the small area squeezed between them, closest to the E4: Råby.

  “And I know where they’re heading.”

  The capital was always most beautiful at rest, a couple of hours into the dark and a few before daybreak. These days he seldom went to sleep before then, the voices in the Homicide corridor had to fall silent, the running around down in the courtyard between various parts of the building that housed the different police organizations had to die down, only then did he dare let loose the thoughts that were conducive to sleep. There had been another time, he had been young and she had been young and they had chosen to get up at this hour, she had forced him to walk close to her through the sleeping city streets that were waiting for first light, and her face had been soft and he had kissed her cheeks and she had laughed a lot and sometimes he had laughed too, a hollow sound that was more energy than anything else. Her hand, Anni’s hand, he could still feel it—it wasn’t bewildered and damp anymore, but warm, and he knew that she wasn’t there, he knew that.

  “Hermansson?”

  “Yes?”

  “Drive faster.”

  Detective Superintendent Ewert Grens was sitting in the back of one of City Police’s civilian cars, Sven in front in the passenger seat, Hermansson in the driver’s seat—they had their places and sat in silence in anticipation of what had always been filled by music, his music. They had listened to Siw Malmkvist’s voice and lyrics from the sixties for so long that they had never really learned how to talk to each other in a car and now it was too late to start. Grens glanced over at the glove compartment to the right of the dashboard—close to one of Sven’s arms. He could ask him. In fact, he could even order him. It would be so easy. He knew that there were still two cassettes in there, alongside the ice scraper and the car manual. Right there. The two that had never been packed away and forgotten and that called to him every time they sat together in silence, compilations that he’d made himself, photos that he’d taken himself and cut out and glued on. It was as if they couldn’t come out, as if they couldn’t be stuffed into the boxes in the store that would never be opened again. Every journey in the car, he sat in the backseat leaning forward and staring at the compartment, didn’t dare sit in the front, didn’t trust his hand, itchi
ng to open it. Sven probably knew that they were in there and Hermansson probably knew that they were there too, but neither of them said anything, they could just lie there, as a part and confirmation of something he’d left behind.

  “Hermansson, faster.”

  Dark beyond the regularly spaced streetlights on the E4 and dazzling lights from the occasional car passing in the opposite direction, the girl named Julia Bozsik was out there, somewhere. She’d had a sharp object pressed into the back of her thigh and then her throat at 18:12 on the timeline. One and a half hours later she was locked in the white car trunk, the last picture they had. Ewert Grens looked over at the dashboard, an avoidance tactic, the clock beside the glove compartment, more than nine hours had passed.

  Västberga, Fruängen, Segeltorp, the sleeping southern suburbs.

  Nine hours.

  In his thirty-seven years in the police he’d been involved in eighteen kidnappings and hostage-takings—police cadet, police constable, detective sergeant, detective superintendent—and had learned that every hour lost between someone’s freedom being snatched and someone else being caught was an hour closer to death. Every time they had failed, not found the hostage alive, more than twelve hours had passed from the time of the disappearance to finding them.

  The dashboard clock again. Quarter past three. Two hours and fifty-five minutes left.

  “Hermansson?”

  “Yes?”

  “Even faster.”

  The eight-lane highway, Bredäng, Sätra, Skärholmen, so familiar, he had driven along it every day, to and from, in those years at the start of the nineties. Someone had just opened the door to a world the police had thus far only observed from the E4, one hand on the wheel and the other winding up the window after spitting at the ugly buildings that didn’t belong. Opened it and discovered networks that were gang primers and weapon depots that were control and power, already greater than its counterweight, and a police station that had been built and then abandoned and was being built up again and he’d been more or less ordered there to create and establish a witness protection program, the way out.

  Hermansson drove faster until the streetlights seemed to blend together and he leaned back.

  Witness protection.

  The only solution for those who wanted to jump ship. The way out in exchange for a protected identity, a new environment, no contact.