Two Soldiers Read online

  Thom opened the bottle and turned it upside down, two lines like a cross on the floor.

  “Six lines of paraffin will meet exactly here.”

  He checked his watch.

  “And you have to be finished precisely fifteen minutes after I’ve left.”

  A cigarette lighter in his hand.

  “You set light to the middle of the cross. And then take the lighter and the bottle with you. No traces.”

  He went down on his knees and pointed the lighter at the dust and gravel on the concrete floor.

  “Hold it here for at least five seconds and then you’ll see a clear blue flame.”

  A quick check over the twelve linked cars by six stairwell entrances.

  “Thirty meters. That means between fifteen to twenty seconds before the flame reaches each gas tank.”

  Her pale cheeks, heavy breathing. And she was the one who had always been so strong, so sure, so determined.

  Now so agitated.

  He looked at her.

  “A car fire—afterward no one will see anything other than that. We put out burning metal several times a week.”

  And he lowered his voice.

  “The flames will move toward the gas tanks, but you will have plenty of time to get out of here and to check that no one else comes in. It’s always the gas fumes that burn first, not the gas itself, a car has to burn for a long time before the tank really goes up.”

  She nodded, the disquiet at once determination again, and he continued.

  “And that is when, exactly when, you’ll raise the alarm, when you’ll call 911.”

  ———

  “I’ll take your call, and ninety seconds later I’ll be in the truck. When we leave the fire station, I’ll call the police and explain to them that the six stairwells nearest the source of the fire have to be emptied and all the tenants evacuated, that the shared garage is now a powerful blow torch and the elevators are conduits for poisonous smoke.

  “That’s exactly what I’ll say, a powerful blow torch and conduits for poisonous smoke, as that’s precisely how the fire will behave. And everyone who sees it will assume that it was the heat from the fire that caused it, even though flames don’t make explosives explode. It’s energy that makes it explode and you need a lot of fire and a lot of heat to do that, more than this fire will ever produce. Your neighbors will be evacuated in good time. And everyone who saw it will have seen a dangerous fire that caused the explosives stored in six elevator shafts to explode.

  “I want you—and this is the first thing you must do when you’ve raised the alarm—to run to the doors in every stairwell that we’ve been to, and open them wide. That is essential. You have to check and make sure. Six metal doors wide open.

  “I will know when all the tenants have been evacuated and then wait until I have confirmation that every apartment has been checked. When that’s confirmed . . . we’ll detonate.

  “I’ll see the buildings explode. One after the other. And it won’t get any worse, there won’t be any more, the aggressive garage fire that we have not yet managed to control will suddenly go out. The explosions, the blast wave after the explosions, will extinguish the fire.”

  “One of the elevator shafts is in your building.”

  “Yes.”

  “It will also explode and be on fire.”

  “Yes.”

  ———

  “I’m going to go back now. To Södertörn fire station. When you’ve sounded the alarm, you’ll be taken to Råby school gym right away. When I come there and you see me and I nod to you, you’ll know that everyone has been evacuated. Then it’s your turn again. Then you’ll make the phone call.”

  He rolled up the left sleeve of his shirt.

  “My watch says that it’s exactly zero three sixteen. This will be over by . . . zero four thirty, at the latest.”

  He looked at her, no hand in hers, not even on her shoulder. They didn’t know each other in that way and they were only going to see each other once more, at a distance, in a school gym full of other people.

  She had just closed the door to an apartment on the third floor that wasn’t very many steps from an elevator that was hiding a large store of explosives at the bottom of the shaft. She went down the hall and into the kitchen and had sat down at the table with a big, cold cup of coffee when she heard the first siren. And she did what she had always done, stood up and went over to the window and peered into the dark, looking for the smoke and flames, trying to remember how many times it had been in the last twenty-four hours.

  Five fire engines, more than normal.

  Ana saw them drive toward the garage and a couple of buildings farther down, but one drove straight toward her and stopped outside her entrance.

  It appeared that someone had started a fire in the garage, maybe one of the cars, and the flames had spread to several stairwells.

  ———

  She counted the minutes, but still didn’t know how long. The time it took to drink a cup of cold coffee. That was when she heard the first footsteps on the stairs.

  Someone rang her bell.

  She took her time, after all, she was asleep, took off her clothes, put on her nightie, ruffled her hair, now she had just woken up, walked toward the door, opened it.

  It smelled of smoke and she thought she could almost see it, not especially thick, but visible.

  A policeman and a firefighter, both in uniform; she didn’t know either of them, they didn’t know her.

  It was the policeman who spoke. He was tall and pale and not much older than her own son. Than her own son would have been.

  “There’s a fire in the garage under the building, under the whole street. It’s starting to spread up here. We have to evacuate the building. Please could you get a coat and follow us.”

  When she looked out, past the uniforms, more tenants were waiting there, she counted eleven neighbors, the ones she never spoke to, but who lived their separate lives only meters away. She got her red jacket from the hat shelf, it already smelled of the smoke she was now walking through, then a pair of white sneakers that probably smelled the same, she went out and followed the group down the stairs.

  I have done what I can.

  For every floor down, the smell of smoke got stronger and more obvious and a rumbling sound that got louder, she knew what it was as it sounded just like she’d had it described to her—the fire getting closer to the elevator shaft. When she opened the entrance door to go out, she paused, tried to see two floors down to the bottom of the elevator and to what was lying there under a black blanket.

  I have done what I can and those who gave up, those who said this is not our problem, sort it out yourselves, you’re the ones doing each other harm, they will now be forced to come back.

  The blue-and-white police van had nine seats. She had to stand, but they weren’t going very far.

  ———

  Ana sat on the floor in a corner of the Råby school gym, near to one of the handball goals and a small, dim room with vaulting boxes and high jump frames. It wasn’t packed, but there were enough bodies for everyone to have to stand or sit or lie next to someone they didn’t know. She’d tried to count, maybe four hundred, a couple dozen dogs and as many cats, a whole aviary of caged birds, and the boy sitting beside her had a small aquarium in his arms.

  And yet, so quiet.

  They didn’t seem to be frightened, more restless, confused bodies that had been asleep and were looking for calm again.

  They had no idea what was about to happen.

  ———

  She found herself looking toward the big entrance doors at the other end of the sports hall, more and more often. When I come there and you see me and I nod to you, you’ll know that everyone has been evacuated. Then it’s your turn again. Then you’ll make the phone call. Apart from the clock, there were some scoreboards on the wall next to a basketball basket, fifty-two minutes, there couldn’t be many more people to evacuate.

 
———

  She didn’t see him at first.

  For a moment she had her gaze fixed on the boy’s aquarium, one black and one gold fish, crispy flakes from a red tin, and the little boy’s hand that fed them often and plenty.

  Then she saw the tall fireman.

  Quietly searching the hall, and she stood up and they looked at each other briefly, it was enough.

  She was to call now.

  ———

  She waved at the boy with the goldfish as she passed, and he waved back. She tiptoed between two elderly women who were settling down on the sports hall floor to try to get some sleep, and then took a long step over a man who was already snoring. The small room with the vaults and high-jump frames was about as out of the way as she could get in a hall with four hundred tenants and their pets. She sat down on the box for red soccer balls, the cell phone in her hand and the number she’d been given when he stood by her front door. She dialed the number and waited.

  “Grens. City Police.”

  He’d answered immediately. He’d been awake. But his voice was deeper than she remembered, as if he was lying down.

  “I want to talk to you.”

  “Right.”

  She had spoken to him six times in nineteen years.

  When he forced her onto the kitchen floor. When he questioned her, when he watched her son being born, when he delivered him back having acted as a babysitter for a couple of weeks in an apartment in Sveavägen. When he came to her shortly after the escape from Aspsås prison; and the day before Leon was arrested, when he came to her again and explained that an eighteen-year-old boy who had once been her son was at risk of dying if he wasn’t arrested.

  Six times.

  This would be the seventh.

  “Do you have a pen?”

  Ana heard the cumbersome body get up, limp a few steps, and then a drawer being opened.

  “Yes.”

  “I want you to call me. On this number: 0704244818. In exactly ten minutes.”

  He was breathing heavily. He was tired.

  “What’s it concerning?”

  If you need any help, call me.

  “You’ll understand then.”

  “If you want me to call, you’ll tell me what it’s about.”

  “You’ve come to me in the past couple of days. You’ve wanted to talk to me. Now it’s my turn to talk to you. About what we spoke about last time. That only the one who started all this can put a stop to it.”

  “If you—”

  She hung up.

  The cell phone gave off a faint light in her hand in the dark room.

  In ten minutes.

  ———

  She had stood at the back of a hall full of tired people.

  They had looked at each other. He had nodded almost imperceptibly and she had nodded equally vaguely back.

  Now it was her turn.

  Thom had then gone up the stairs, stopped at the top by the exit to the upper gallery. The large window, the one that opened in, from here he could see the whole of Råby Allé, dark clouds of smoke blanketing the empty concrete blocks.

  He looked at his watch.

  Four minutes to go until a call was made to a cell phone that had been transferred.

  He leaned out into the September night. He had just ordered all the firefighters who were extinguishing the fire by the first elevator shaft to move into the second section of the underground garage in a concerted effort to put out two new fires that had just started after he’d prepped two more cars with cotton rope and paraffin, and then hurried over to Råby school gym to give her the all-clear. And the others—who were near the five other elevator shafts that would follow the first at ten-second intervals—would in accordance with security instructions run out and away from the buildings when they heard the first explosion.

  Two minutes left.

  All the tenants had been evacuated. And all the firefighters would be at a safe distance from the six elevator shafts.

  If no one is to be harmed.

  Thom leaned out even farther, a gentle breeze on his face. He breathed in the faint smell of smoke. And was just about to stretch up a bit more when all of the windows in one of the blocks were blown out at the same time, glass like raindrops to the ground, and the blast wave, a powerful wind that lasted only a moment.

  By the time the sound of the explosion reached them, the walls of the building had cracked.

  The phone call had been made a bit early, but the effect was the same.

  Råby Allé 12, a building with two twenty-five-kilo sacks of bulk industrial explosives in one of the elevator shafts, was still shaking when the body of the house fell into the load-bearing elevator shaft and started to collapse.

  Slowly at first, and then, at least so it seemed from one of the open windows at the gym, ever faster.

  one day later

  The metro was working again.

  One night, one day.

  No trains, no cars, no people.

  He was twelve years old and sure that it had never been like that before. Certainly not as long as he’d been around. Maybe not even before that.

  Råby without the metro was like his body without a heart. Blood on the way in, on the way out, that needed to be pumped out with vigor and returned tired to be pumped back out again. When he got out of the metro car and stood on the platform, it smelled good, like metros do.

  The first night they’d been on mattresses on the floor of Råby school gym, some people had slept on the wooden pews in the church beside the gas station, others in the library at Alby, in the tennis hall at Hallunda, in the trailers by the Eriksberg Industrial park, some had even slept in the corridors of the fire station. He and his mom and Diana were going to move to the house on the outskirts of Norsborg this evening, before tomorrow night, it was to be their home for the next six months until Råby Allé 102 could be rebuilt—he had seen the entrance and elevator, just rubble.

  Eddie walked down the steps and stopped as he often did by the exit, out of sight of the ticket collector. He counted down out loud, started at sixty, and hadn’t stood there for more than three minutes when the skinny guy with short hair who sweated so grossly almost ran into him.

  “Seven.”

  They hadn’t even said hello. Eddie held out his hand, waited.

  “I want seven.”

  “When you’ve said hello.”

  The see-through hand, skin that grated.

  “Seven.”

  “You know that it’s five or ten.”

  “Ten.”

  “Eight thousand. You got it?”

  The guy who was always sweating and shaking dug into his pocket, held out his roll of notes, five thousand six hundred kronor, which would have been just enough for seven grams.

  “I said I wanted seven.”

  An outstretched boy’s hand, on tiptoe when it hit an adult cheek.

  “Eddie’s the name. And I sell five or ten.”

  He was twenty-eight, very red on his right cheek, and had no idea.

  “Five.”

  He stuffed one thousand six hundred kronor back into his pocket, held out the rest, waited while the boy in front of him counted the notes.

  “Konsum supermarket. Bread section. Under the shelves, a bit to the right.”

  It was easy to catch a whiff of him as he disappeared into the shopping center, heading for the shelves of freshly baked bread. He would soon bend down on his knee on the stone floor, pick loose the package that had recently been taped there. Eddie continued through the station’s dark exit, and then it got light, the sun was strong, as it sometimes was. It was easy to see and understand after only a few steps, when all the buildings that had exploded came into view. His hand through his greased-back hair, gold chain around his neck, he pulled down the zipper on his jacket a touch more. He passed the shells of buildings that had been badly damaged and buildings that were whole, and then more that had been badly damaged, and almost liked it—what had exploded and burned
in some way belonged to him.

  Råby Allé 67.

  One of the buildings that was whole. All the tenants had moved back; they’d never stored any explosives in the elevator shaft here.

  He went into the entrance and into the elevator and nodded in the mirror. Every time, it came from inside and he felt it so strongly, he was on his way to Gabriel’s apartment, to what had been Gabriel’s apartment; he could see the name SANTOS and he rang the black bell. After two rings Bruno opened as Gabriel would have done before and might ask him to stand in the hallway, and they would stand by the shoehorn with the small white pearls and the others would be sitting in there, Jon, Big Ali; they would hear that he’d come and they might say his name.

  “In there.”

  “In there?”

  Bruno had stood in front of him, waiting for the roll of five-hundred-kronor notes in a rubber band, when suddenly he swept his arm between them and pointed in toward the sitting room, even farther into their apartment.

  “Yes. Now.”

  In there. No one went in there. Last time they’d put a bulletproof vest on him and taken out a gun, cocked it, and aimed and fired once at his chest and once at his stomach.

  He was seldom scared.

  He quite simply didn’t like the feeling and therefore never was.

  This time, he couldn’t help it. He swallowed and his heart was pounding.

  He looked at Bruno, who was still pointing, looked into the room, stumbled a bit on the threshold, regained his balance by putting his hand on the wall.

  They were alone.

  He didn’t stop until he could touch the big sofa and sat down on the edge where he gradually sank down. His fucking fucking heart. He didn’t dare look at anything and therefore switched between the TV and the speakers and the pile of movies and the spilled beer and the glass table with cigarette butts in a bowl and peanuts in another.

  There were no flowers.

  He knew that was a stupid thought but he’d never been in an apartment without flowers before.

  Bruno looked at him and sat down as well; he said nothing, just sat there. Eddie looked around the room. No one else. Just Bruno and the window without flowers and a heart that was beating and beating.