Two Soldiers Read online

  Gabriel didn’t meet Wanda’s eyes when he opened the door, went over to the sofa, lay down. They couldn’t stay here much longer. The conversation with Leon was equal to the pigs suddenly having a reason to question someone who wasn’t suspected of a crime.

  He started when she turned on the light in the sitting room, which always happens when eyes meet light after concussion. She sat down and put her hand on his cheek, in the way that he couldn’t.

  “This is never going to end, Gabriel.”

  He didn’t answer.

  “Your face, Gabriel, five cigarette burns! Your thigh, they’ve sanded the skin off! They’ve beaten you up and you’ve paid and they were going to cut the baby out if you didn’t pay again. So you paid again and they beat you up again and now he wants you to pay. Again! And Leon, is it still true, Gabriel, is he still your fucking brother?”

  “He’s doing what he has to do.”

  “It’s never going to end!”

  “It was Leon and me who wrote the rules.”

  “Don’t you get it, Gabriel . . . it’s never going to end!”

  He closed his eyes to block out the light and the nausea.

  “I want you to call.”

  She took his hand and he looked at her, the fragile face and body that couldn’t take any more.

  “Ask for help, Gabriel.”

  That was it. He knew it.

  There wasn’t any other way.

  He got up and started to retch immediately, colored the floor and rug. He tried again, reaching out for the cell phone and dialed a number he had long since learned by heart.

  “Police.”

  It’s never going to end.

  “Well . . .”

  He would pay.

  “Yes?”

  As long as he had the money, they would make him pay.

  “Um . . . that investigation.”

  “Yes, so?”

  “The ones who . . . escaped. Råby. The guy who’s leading it . . . he’s the one I want to talk to.”

  And when the money ran out. That was when they would kill them. First the girlfriend. Then the traitor. He was one of the ones who’d written the rules.

  “I’m sorry. But I can’t transfer you directly to him. What was it about?”

  “A tip-off.”

  “A tip-off?”

  “I know . . . where they are.”

  It was as if she was considering for a moment. Whether she should let another weirdo through. Whether she risked missing someone who really knew.

  “OK. I’ll put you through. A detective superintendent from Homicide. His name is Ewert Grens.”

  ———

  A deserted apartment.

  He’d known that it was pointless, wasn’t even disappointed, the third time after more than an hour. The door had been removed, the rope outside the broken window. The same approach but against another kind of apartment. The other two had had mattresses and pillows on the floor and had otherwise been empty. This one was furnished, lived in, a young woman’s home, someone whom the gang had forced out and then given some kind of compensation under the false pretense that it was a mutual agreement, paid a few thousand a week in rent.

  His cell was ringing and Ewert Grens answered.

  “Yes?”

  “Switchboard. I’m transferring a call.”

  “Who?”

  “I don’t know. Someone who claims to have a tip-off.”

  A faint humming.

  “Yes?”

  Nothing.

  “Hello?”

  Someone hung up.

  Grens closed the phone again and looked around.

  He had ordered another raid at the same time that he knew would be equally futile, with no result apart from another earful from Ågestam and another report to the internal committee on breaches of duty. On the apartment where Gabriel Milton had been when he called the only phone he wasn’t supposed to ring.

  Nothing there either.

  Except for a heavily blood-stained sofa and fresh vomit on the sitting room floor.

  So now the only link to the one they were looking for had also disappeared.

  ———

  Sven Sundkvist had stayed on the bench outside Råby Backe 17 and watched Ewert Grens, who had neither seen nor heard him even though he was sitting so close.

  Fear came creeping. That feeling that had accompanied him since the first meeting in the middle of the night in Ewert’s office.

  When Anni, Ewert’s wife, had died a couple of years ago as a result of an operation after half a life in a nursing home, he had sat on the floor in the Kronoberg archives with a twenty-seven-year-old investigation in his lap, and was unreachable. He had responded with shock, but not grief, and he had never been frightening.

  Now he was frightening.

  Sven saw someone who was being eaten up from the inside, an animal—a strange picture, but the only one he had—a wounded animal that neither limped nor lay down despite the fact that it couldn’t move, as though the pain was smothered and drowned out by large amounts of adrenaline, until it was no longer there. The kind of animal that races around in the forest until the adrenaline runs out and it falls down, lifeless.

  Seven thousand two hundred and eighty more apartments. They would have to wait.

  Sven Sundkvist had already pulled off the green helmet, hood, visor, and now he took off the armor designed to protect against blast waves and splinters, the knee protectors and gloves, and finally crept out of the warm overalls and carried the equipment he’d borrowed from one of the bomb experts over to the car parked at the back of the damaged police station, drove the distance to the city and his own workplace, hurried to the CCC and the large room and the round table with a perpetual, live staff meeting.

  “I need your help.”

  Sven turned to the man with both his elbows on the table—Erik Wilson, his boss.

  “You do?”

  “It’s about Ewert.”

  “OK.”

  “I’m worried.”

  Erik Wilson excused himself from the meeting, asked Sven to come with him to the enormous wall of screens, out of earshot.

  “You’re worried?”

  “I’m frightened. Everything is going to hell. Since this all started . . . Råby, I don’t know why, but it’s really affecting him.”

  A room with bars on the window and a woman on a bed and a young policeman in his twenties beside an older man in his forties.

  “Erik . . . is there something I should know?”

  He had stood in the closed cell and looked at a colleague who was restless, wasn’t in a good place, and when the birth was over, who’d gone forward to the young woman who had had the baby on her stomach for a short while, the great lump of an older colleague who never touched anyone, had put his hand to the child’s cheek, cupped it around the soft skull.

  “No.”

  Erik Wilson had been twenty-two, newly employed and on one of his first postings other than doing the beat on the streets of Stockholm. He hadn’t yet understood that the detective sergeant would go on to become a detective superintendent and would spend his days and nights in a lonely office filled with the songs of Siw Malmkvist, that what had happened in front of them would be the only time that the now–detective superintendent who approached dead bodies with as much intimacy as disdain, would be confronted with the opposite: life, a birth.

  “I don’t think so, Sven.”

  He looked down at his papers, straightened a pen that was lying crooked on the desk between them, started to walk back to the still ongoing meeting.

  “That there’s anything you should know, that is.”

  ———

  Gabriel lay with his cheek against a cold and hard stone floor, under the trash chute, on the sixth floor between three apartments.

  He had been throwing up violently since he got up from her sofa and had taken the last roll of banknotes from the drawers in the kitchen and crouched down with Wanda when they left the apartment
and moved toward the elevator, which took them as high as they could go. He had known that the pigs were listening to the calls on Leon’s phone and would now be looking for him too, someone who was weak and might want to talk, but with the concussion and vomiting he hadn’t been able to move any farther away.

  He’d rung the police switchboard, but when he’d been transferred and a pig had answered, he’d hung up.

  He had decided to pay for a third time. But every attempt to get up had ended in more retching, and she had had to go and do what he should have done. He had been ashamed and explained where and how; she had taken the elevator down and gone into the garage and put the third roll of five-hundred-kronor notes by the back left-hand wheel of a rusty Chevrolet. When she had started to crawl back between the cars, they’d been standing there. Jon and Bruno. They hadn’t said much, one hundred and twenty-five thousand more in the next hour, just that. She’d pointed to the car and the five-hundred-kronor notes, run up the stairs and sat down beside him on the floor. He’d almost managed to stand up and hold her when she whispered, Gabriel, it’s never going to end.

  An old-fashioned television set, a big, heavy, piece of furniture that requires space and therefore dominates the room. He’d sat down in a comfortable armchair, been drawn into the frozen image on the screen of a young face that he’d gotten to know several years ago, while he listened to the detective superintendent, whom he met earlier by the entrance to the police station, stand in her doorway and ask questions that she didn’t answer. She had closed the front door and gone into the kitchen and poured two cups of coffee, made them a cheese sandwich each, then come back into the sitting room and the other armchair and pressed play on one of the remote controls; a recorded news program that for the first twelve minutes switched between pictures from the security cameras in three prisons and a photograph of some young men from the police archives.

  “Brother, stop. The bitch, she’s . . .”

  They sat beside each other, not close, they didn’t know each other, and listened to a recording from a getaway car, agitated young voices.

  White letters over two black lines. Text at the bottom of a TV picture.

  It was even clearer then.

  “. . . I can’t stand that fucking kicking . . .”

  Thom looked at her, the swollen face, already a faint yellow in some places, adjusting the flowery cushion behind her back in the armchair.

  Her body ached when she poured them more coffee.

  What . . . is it that you want me to do?

  She’d sat in front of him naked and beaten up and talked to him until he’d understood what it was she wanted, and that it was absolute madness, and then later that she wasn’t after all—mad, that is. He had helped her put her clothes back on, and together they’d left the metal frame, which no longer had the fabric of a stroller, in the stairwell that smelled of smoke. They walked toward the apartment that was her home and sat down in her armchairs, and he had continued to listen and understand.

  “I’ll fix this. She won’t kick anymore.”

  It was a long time since he had decided never to allow himself to be provoked, never give his anger to anyone who spat or threatened, while someone else’s saliva ran down his neck onto his chest. But then he had cracked when the gold chain and hair that was shiny and slicked back had first cut up yet another hose and then pointed his index finger at Thom’s head and pretended to cock a gun and fire and whispered I’m going to kill you. And he’d continued to break a bit more when the friendly and decent policeman he liked so much had looked at him with empty eyes in a bombed building. Right now, you’re just so . . . despairing and weary. You’re reachable. She had seen straight through him and he had tried to avoid it, avoid her—there were fires here twelve times a day and he put them out twelve times a day. A forest fire that’s what it was, isolated incidents at first, but when the wind is in the right direction it grows, spreads, in an instant. He talked regularly to colleagues from other towns and cities with other Råbys that were also burning and had to be put out if they weren’t to get out of control.

  On the TV screen, again, that picture.

  A motorcycle police officer moving around and the helicopter searchlight comes closer, gets stronger; she had been attractive.

  Ana stopped the recording and stood in front of the frozen image of an eighteen-year-old who had talked on the sound recording and who in all likelihood had taken the lives of two people in the past few days.

  “They’ve abandoned us. Those of us who live here, really live here. Can you hear it . . . shhhhh . . . can you hear them whispering? Let the bastards shoot each other—we’ll go in and get the bodies afterward.”

  She went over to the TV screen, pressed her hand against it, the face that no longer existed.

  “I undressed and showed you the consequences of a balled fist and a pointed shoe so that you would see me, listen to me. I can’t undress for the whole of Stockholm or Sweden. Do you understand? We’re going to do exactly what I did. Only bigger. We’re going to show them the damage, force them to see.”

  When the hand left the screen, a damp print remained, the frozen image slightly blurred.

  “There has to be a deafening explosion, so that they will hear—a bombed police station still isn’t enough. This is our everyday reality, a lawless country ruled by a mere few, and no one out there must fail to understand that.”

  She looked at Thom and they put on their outdoor clothes and left Råby Allé 34 for Råby Allé 12, went in the door; she was in front now, down some steps, and she pressed the call button for the elevator, waited, opened the elevator door, wedged it there.

  Some more stairs down into the cellar.

  With her fingers she picked out the thin, blue-painted screw that was difficult to see, just above the elevator door handle, which hid a square hole.

  She took out a ten-centimeter-long piece of metal and pushed it into the square and turned it around until the elevator door opened.

  She lowered herself into the lift shaft and jumped the meter or so down to the bottom.

  She waved at Thom to follow, turned on her flashlight, and lifted two black blankets.

  Two full twenty-five-kilo sacks of ANFO, the cheapest and least shock-sensitive of all explosives. A box of three hundred and fifty detonators, like small pipes with green and white wires at one end. A packet of dynamite sticks, he counted eleven.

  “And in the others?”

  “Only one twenty-five-kilo sack. But the same amount of detonators and sticks of dynamite.”

  “Are you sure about that?”

  “Råby Allé 25. Råby Allé 34. Råby Allé 57. Råby Allé 76. Råby Allé 102. Five more elevator shafts.”

  He stood there, the flashlight beam moving back and forth, he followed it as it fell on the explosives, detonators, dynamite.

  “How . . . did you know this was here?”

  “You don’t need to know that.”

  “How long have you known this was here?”

  Drugs when they were small. Stolen goods, weapons when they were twelve. This, explosives, she tried to remember, nine, maybe ten months.

  “That’s not something you need to know either.”

  She was on her way up from the bottom of the shaft, turned and looked at the fireman she had been speaking to all day and would continue to speak to once they got back to her apartment. She wanted him to climb up and follow her, someone could come by at any time.

  He stayed standing where he was.

  “OK, not how. Nor how long. We won’t bother about that. But if you don’t tell me how many, I’ll walk away, now.”

  “How many?”

  “How many others have you told about this?”

  “No one.”

  “If you knew about this before the explosion took Pereira’s life, if you—”

  “If I talk about it, I’m . . . dead. That’s the way it works. You, of all people, should know that.”

  He knew that.

 
A light foot on one of the twenty-five-kilo sacks.

  “Bulk industrial explosive. Just like what was used in the police station. Does more damage to anything that’s living than explosives with a high detonation velocity.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  He bent down, opened the sack, and filled his hand with small, round, colorless balls.

  “This explosive, in the sack, ANFO, has low—”

  “What are you trying to say?”

  “I’m trying to say that Pereira was killed by a slow blast wave. The kind that doesn’t break through load-bearing concrete walls, so it bounces back against human bodies again and again.”

  He turned off the flashlight, a long one-meter-step up and out of the elevator shaft.

  “And I guess I’m also trying to say . . . it will work.”

  Ana locked the door with the square piece of metal and waited quietly for him to finish.

  “What you want to do, it will work. If you put together the detonators, sticks of dynamite, and sacks of explosives. If you cut the green and white wires. With all this, to destroy the apartments . . . all we need are the garage doors to be well closed and someone to make a quick phone call.”

  He had propped himself up on the stone floor.

  Dizzy, about to be sick again, but he wasn’t, he could stay sitting up.

  Wanda’s hand holding his arm, but he pushed it away, he could manage alone and her face was so tired, her eyes black, her lips dry.

  Domestic sounds from inside the three nearest apartments. Music from the one to the left, maybe Greek, a TV from the one in the middle, and someone hammering in the one to the right. Gabriel supported himself with one hand against the wall and one against the trash chute as he tried to get up, but was forced to sit down again. The dizziness had intensified, his legs turned to jelly. He tried again, she held his hand and he didn’t push her away, she was stronger than he’d imagined and he managed to stand up for several seconds this time.

  “I want you to call.”

  The Greek music and the TV and the damn hammering and her voice.

  “Gabriel, you know it’s never going to end. You have to call again!”