Two Soldiers Read online

  “Don’t talk to me like that!”

  She looked at him when she gave him a slap across the face, and when she undid her seat belt. But looked away when she got out of the car and started to walk down the middle of the highway.

  Grens drove slowly behind her and she kept walking between the cars that were passing so close.

  He rolled down the window.

  “Get in.”

  He shouted a bit louder to be heard above the vehicles passing at a hundred and forty kilometers in a ninety-kilometer zone.

  “Hermansson, get in!”

  She turned around, just once.

  “Go to hell.”

  And then kept walking.

  ———

  The empty platform came closer.

  She tried to see out of the metro-train window that had become a scratched film in the strong sunlight. Råby. Penultimate stop on the red line, the station between Hallunda and Norsborg, she stood up when the doors opened and got out at a station where no one got in.

  She was wearing a pair of yellow pants and an orange top.

  They had shouted outside her door and forced her to the floor and she was still in her dressing gown and slippers in the back of the police car when they drove away. The yellow pants and the orange top, some kind of misplaced kindness, one of the men in helmets and uniforms who had locked her arms in handcuffs had opened her closet to take out two pieces of clothing that she no longer wore and certainly would never wear together.

  Ana stopped on the platform, waited while Deniz ran her fingers through her hair, which had been wet when they were taken in, and now was uncombed and sticking out every which way, then straightened her dress that was too long, which some police officer in a helmet and uniform had chosen from her closet.

  In the car, they had continued to stare at her and repeated where and she had looked straight ahead and continued to say it’s not me you’re after, and the sharp edge of the handcuffs had bitten her wrists where is he and her shoulders had ached because her arms were being pressed so hard against her back this has nothing to do with me and when they got to the garage at Kronoberg they had led her from the car to the elevator, up to the fifth floor and then released her hands and pointed at a cell with a green door. The woman in a police uniform had followed her in and sat down on the only chair in the cell and there were more questions, longer questions where is Leon Jensen right now, where is Gabriel Milton right now, are you aware that you are now guilty of protecting a criminal but the answers were just as silent. The uniform had left the cell after a while and she had sat on her own on the end of the bunk in complete silence and looked at the locked door until the one and a half hours now were as long as the four years in Hinseberg prison, all that time ago.

  Deniz had tidied her wild hair and dress that was too long and they walked together to the end of the platform and out into Råby, without saying anything, it wasn’t necessary, they had recently just sat on either side of a mute cell wall. They had been taken from their homes with force and raised voices and it felt as if in order to return they had to walk through it all again with heads held high—Råby Torg and police cars and uniforms that get the fuck away from me were searching two young men and at the same time holding a group don’t touch me you pig bastard of even younger men at a suitable distance. The asphalt pathways and a bus OPERATIONS CENTER parked in the area that was otherwise used as a small soccer field. Several more police uniforms as they got closer to Råbyvägen, that was formed like a wide circle, its protecting arms embracing the high-rise blocks, someone honked and someone else get out of the car for fuck’s sake screamed in the line of cars up by the road block, a metal barrier stopped all traffic going in and out and they were searched and guarded by police with automatic weapons. And as they got closer to Råbygången, even more police uniforms accompanied by dogs, tails wagging, ears pricked, eyes watching the handlers’ hands, moving from one stairway to the next, doing what they were trained to do and longed to do. Ana and Deniz had been in no rush, now they stopped, gave each other a hug, and then continued their separate ways toward their own front doors, Deniz toward Råby Allé 102 and Ana even farther up to Råby Allé 34.

  She opened the door and was in the stairwell when she caught the smell of smoke.

  She turned around, and now she saw it, from a building four blocks down, she started to run, tried to guess how many times the fire engine she passed had been back and forth today.

  She recognized his back.

  He was holding a microphone in his hand, the cord disappeared into the neck of his heavy overalls, some kind of communications radio, and she waited until he was done.

  “Hello again.”

  He hadn’t heard her coming, turned around, and saw the woman he’d hoped not to see again.

  “You?”

  “A moped at quarter past six. A container at twenty past eight. And a police car just before ten. That was the morning. How many times have you been here since then?”

  “I asked you to leave me alone.”

  “I’ve been in town for a few hours, but if I was to guess . . . seven more, a total of ten times? If it’s been a normal day for you, that is. And this, well, this looks like . . . yet another trash can.”

  He turned his back to her again, the one she knew so well, hurried over to a colleague and a hose that had to be attached to the pump.

  She followed him.

  “I need your help.”

  She looked at the back that didn’t answer.

  “Put it this way . . .”

  She went up to it, prodded it, tugged at his black and yellow and brown overalls just where EMERGENCY SERVICES SÖDERTÖRN met LEADING FIREFIGHTER.

  “Why do you bother putting them out?”

  He turned around.

  It was hard to tell whether the tension in his face was the sort that stemmed from anger.

  “Because it’s my job.”

  “So your job is to protect Råby even when the people who live here want it to burn?”

  He was listening, she was sure of it.

  “You stand there and put out burning mopeds and fences and trash cans ten times a day. And still you don’t understand? That what’s happening will keep on happening until someone makes sure it won’t happen anymore.”

  His voice wasn’t aggressive, not even annoyed.

  It was tired.

  “Let me ask you again. Please, just leave me alone.”

  The smell of gray and black smoke faded the closer she got to number 34.

  When she went into the elevator and up to the third floor, it disappeared completely.

  She stood in front of the door to an apartment that had been hers since she left home so long ago, and yet it was as if a part of the security it had taken so long to build up had been taken away at the same time that she was. Gingerly, she put her hand on the door handle, turned it, opened, went into what was no longer hers, and sat down on the kitchen floor in the same place where she’d been forced down a few hours earlier.

  The man who put out fires. She needed him.

  If no one was to get hurt.

  ———

  His cheek was still burning. She had slapped him hard.

  She had called him an old bastard, hit him, got out of the car, and started to walk down the middle lane of the E4. He had rolled along behind her and after a while put on the flashing blue light. He didn’t understand. It was she who had pushed him.

  “I hear that Ågestam had some pretty strong opinions about your raids, Ewert.”

  Erik Wilson had stopped by Grens and the coffee machine in the Homicide corridor at the police headquarters.

  “Yes. He obviously didn’t have any forms that ticked the boxes for violent eighteen-year-olds who are classified as dangerous and who, within the space of a few hours, first escaped from a maximum security prison then forty minutes later from another lower security prison, and then forty minutes later from yet another low security prison, who have committed mu
rder and built at least one bomb, who are still on the run and frightened and aggressive and will become even more frightened and aggressive as time goes by. And when those forms don’t exist, the desk sometimes becomes smaller than reality.”

  Violent eighteen-year-olds classified as dangerous. They weren’t talking about him. And yet they were.

  “Right now I’ve got fifty-seven messages from journalists whose questions I’m trying to avoid and I’m on my way to a meeting with the national police commissioner and then with the minister of justice to answer more questions that I’m trying to avoid, as I don’t have any answers. Do what the hell you like, Ewert. You’ve got my full support. I want you to carry on looking for them, no matter what—and to find them. Meanwhile, I’ll fill out all the forms for Ågestam.”

  Half a cup of machine coffee.

  He had loathed the kind of police work that Erik Wilson was responsible for previously. Criminal informers who committed crimes in order to solve other crimes. Lies and truth in the same corridor. But right now, his outlook, flexibility, made him far easier to work with than his predecessor.

  “So what have you got?”

  Grens shrugged.

  “What have I got? Photographs of a white Mercedes. A red Adidas bag with a letter from a kid who wants to be dangerous, just like all the other fucking letters written by kids who want to sound tough. A bayonet. Two set of nunchucks. A pile of balaclavas. And body armor that could withstand a scud missile.”

  Half a cup more.

  “That’s what I’ve got.”

  Erik Wilson was drinking tea. The green kind.

  “How much longer, Ewert?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “It’s nearly twenty-two hours now.”

  “He’s there.”

  “And his mom?”

  They looked at each other.

  Someone they had long since forgotten. And who could no longer be forgotten.

  “One of the ones Ågestam didn’t give a warrant for, one of the ones he believes we committed a crime against.”

  A baby had lain on her stomach and two police officers had stood on guard in front of the locked cell door. One who had already served half his working life and was in his forties, and one who was still fresh, no more than twenty.

  “Nothing?”

  “Nothing.”

  They were older now. And they both wanted to say more. That it was all a part of the greater whole. That everything was always a part of the greater whole.

  “So what is it you want, Ewert?”

  “We’ve intervened, controlled, searched, and got nowhere. I want to go further. I want a state of emergency.”

  “A state of emergency is passed by the government.”

  “I want Råby cordoned off. I want a curfew. So that from now, no one can come or go from the place without being seen and checked.”

  “A state of emergency, Ewert, is granted when a society’s structure or very existence is threatened.”

  “Yes.”

  “Yes?”

  “South of Stockholm. West of Stockholm. Gothenburg. Malmö. The suburbs are burning. The staring faces of young men who write letters like small children. Boy club rules that take whatever there is to take. In the Råby area alone, we reckon there are seventeen gangs! And five thousand youngsters waiting in the wings, who watch and admire ones like the lot who are about to succeed. Role models! No matter how little we give away and how pointless we make the press conferences, they’ve been in the media spotlight for almost twenty-four hours now. They’re the new celebrities! They’ve escaped and killed someone and planted a bomb that they’ll set off when they want to set it off! I want a state of emergency for the people who right now are creating their own state of emergency!”

  “You won’t get it.”

  “Then we’ll call it something else.”

  The green tea bag had done its job and Erik Wilson dropped it into the trash, tasted the tea, the water was still a bit too hot, but not bad, considering it came from a coffee machine.

  He looked at the older man who had been his boss, once upon a time.

  It had been simpler then, a long time ago.

  “Then we’ll call it something else.”

  ———

  The sofa, the desk. A room that was the only place he could find peace. The mirror in the wardrobe; he checked to make sure that the jacket still looked good, metal comb through his thin hair until it stayed almost where it should. He wondered whether she would have liked what she saw, he possibly wasn’t identical to the man she’d met in the lecture hall for police cadets, way back then, as tall but possibly broader and with a face that had aged in the way faces do. He lay down on the corduroy sofa. On this day, a few years ago, he’d done what he always did on Tuesdays, gone to the care home where she no longer lived and the window where she no longer sat and been told that he was no longer welcome. The following Tuesday he’d got into the car and driven toward the care home, but then stopped on Lindingö Bridge, I don’t want to see you here anymore, he’d turned around and driven aimlessly through a city that had forgotten the lonely, then suddenly stopped at the edge of Solna in front of the building that had once been the police college, long ago, and the place where they’d met. He had started to walk through what had then been trees and bushes and was called Nothing Woods, and was now blocks of apartments and cement, and after a while had ducked into a renovated building and found a café in the same place that they used to drink a cup of smooth black coffee. New staff, shiny interior, but it had felt good and he had since gone there every Tuesday at the same time, a thirty-year date with a care home and someone who’d already stopped living had gradually been replaced by somewhere she had been alive and well and a date with someone he now knew was dead. He grieved, would always grieve, for her sake, no longer for his own.

  Footsteps out in the corridor.

  Maybe he’d fallen asleep. It certainly wasn’t as light outside the window.

  Footsteps that passed by his door. That stopped. That turned. That opened the door.

  Hermansson.

  Her brow was sweaty along the hairline.

  “You and I are going to have a conversation later.”

  She had looked in, said something, and was already closing the door again.

  “Hermansson—”

  She shook her head.

  “Did you keep going?”

  “A long conversation.”

  “In the middle lane?”

  She didn’t answer, he hadn’t expected her to.

  Ewert Grens stretched his limbs, which creaked loudly. A circuit of the office in silence to loosen up. He stopped in front of the map between the two windows with the red line in felt-tip pen that had meant freedom for the youths driving the car and death for the young woman who was lying in the trunk kicking against the metal. If he went closer, carried the line that stopped at the water on across the water, about twenty minutes’ gentle walk to Råby, it didn’t look particularly big from above, white squares around a yellow stripe that was the asphalt on a highway and a black line that was the metro tracks.

  “Sven?”

  He had called someone who was at that moment walking around in one of the white squares, in a passage down in the cellar, behind a bomb technician and his dog.

  “Yes?”

  “So far?”

  “Nothing.”

  “It’s not good enough.”

  “Six hundred and five hours. We’ve managed to go through one hundred and eighty doors. We need assistance.”

  “Tomorrow.”

  “Seven thousand, eight hundred and twenty apartments left, Ewert.”

  “You’ll get six more dogs at half past six tomorrow morning. Two from Malmö police. And four from Customs and Excise.”

  “And locksmiths, Ewert. Two, maybe even three. For inhabitants who refuse to open the door.”

  “They can be there in an hour.”

  He drew another line on the map on the wall,
a fierce, mint-green color—if the highway was one side of a frame, and the metro lines another, then only two short sides were needed to link them together, a long chain of road blocks, patrols, dog handlers, uniformed policemen, and civilian policemen who from now on would surround Råby and become a net that was impossible to break through.

  There was a knock on the door. Again. You and I are going to have a conversation later. So soon?

  “Come in.”

  Lars Ågestam.

  “You?”

  “Were you expecting someone else?”

  “Say what you want and get out.”

  He was carrying something in his hand. And his voice was considerably quieter than it had been a few hours ago.

  “You’re working late today.”

  “What do you want, Ågestam?”

  “Thought that maybe you wouldn’t. Not today, I mean.”

  Grens shifted his weight uneasily.

  “Right?”

  “Is everything OK, Ewert?”

  “Do you want something or not? You’ve said enough today and I’m tired.”

  “You can still be a total idiot sometimes, Grens. And you made a mistake. But that’s not why I’m here.”

  Ewert Grens snorted at the person who was still in his office, but he didn’t shout and he didn’t chase him out.

  “Earlier on today . . . you gave us coffee.”

  “Yes . . .”

  “And cakes.”

  “There’s none left, Ågestam.”

  It looked like the detective superintendent had combed his thin hair again and not that long ago either, and Lars Ågestam couldn’t remember it ever lying like that for several hours in a row. And one thing you can be damn sure of, Grens—I know exactly what day it is! He held out the rectangular wooden box that he’d been carrying, put it down on the desk.

  “I ordered this from Systembolaget. A good vintage. From 1952. Which is exactly sixty years ago.”

  Ewert Grens didn’t reply. But he reached over for the box and opened it. A beautiful bottle. And so strange. Such deep discomfort at the idea that someone should know and approach him and be part of his day. And yet it felt almost nice that someone had. He let it stand between the stacks of files and studied the label in great detail in order to avoid looking at Ågestam.