Two Soldiers Page 52

  He didn’t answer.

  The fucking phone, it shouldn’t really be on the steering wheel. It wasn’t good to have it in view of the traffic. He moved it down to the passenger seat, but then it was difficult to hear what she was saying, so he hung up.

  It looked as it had when he had left two days earlier.

  He parked by the blue-and-white plastic that cordoned off the area around six buildings that housed a total of four hundred and twenty apartments. Black, torn buildings that had collapsed and the smell of soot hit him as the wind moved around the burned-down jungle gym in the playground and the ash from the trees and park benches that had been set out some years earlier to break up the asphalt that now was the only thing left.

  He had thought it already.

  This is not a crime scene where I have to tread carefully. This is a tragedy. Someone else’s everyday.

  He counted eight cars from the bomb unit, who had resumed their search after the arrest of Leon Jensen; three cars from Forensics, who were there to get down on their knees and search for things that no one else could see; and two patrol cars and a van from Södertörn Police with uniformed officers who stood guarding the cordons. If he went up on his toes, he could see the bomb dogs and experts moving between two entrances on the other side of Råby Torg. The past three days equaled fifteen hundred apartments in twenty-five buildings, as well as elevator shafts, cellar corridors, and garage sections, which had all been searched. He pulled the summary that he received regularly from the inner pocket of his jacket. Bomb technicians in protective clothing had now searched a fifth of Råby and found four thousand three hundred and five rifle cartridges, seven hundred and six pistol bullets, two hundred and nine revolver bullets, seven smoke grenades, six fragmentation grenades, five sticks of dynamite, three anti-tank weapons, three stick grenades, and a good kilo of military explosives. In the course of their search, they had also seized twenty-five homemade ninja stars, twenty-two sawed-off shotguns, fourteen army knives of various sorts, nine nunchucks, seven bayonets, five AK4 automatic rifles, three Kpist submachine guns, and two Kalashnikovs.

  Grens looked around.

  Another time. And still the same.

  He started to walk, his body close to the plastic cordon. He was on his way. She’d said that and he’d had no idea. His anger had been grief. She’d said that as well. He stopped and held on to the blue and white. She’d stood beside him, Sven on the other side, the first funeral he had chosen to go to because he wanted to go and he hadn’t been ashamed or given himself a hard time afterwards for not having gone to hers. They had stood at a distance and watched as José Pereira’s coffin was lowered, he hadn’t known that there were still people who did that.

  He walked on toward the building that lacked walls in several places, where faces had recently looked out through the windows, and he stopped again.

  José Pereira. Julia Bozsik. Leon Jensen.

  What if a police sergeant named Ewert Grens had not arrested a young woman and taken a young man away nearly twenty years ago? If a boy who had been born had grown up somewhere else?

  He looked at all the soot, a deep intake of the acrid smell, the wind was playing with the ash again.

  Råby Allé 12.

  He got closer. According to Krantz’s report and several unanimous witness statements, Råby Allé 12 was the building that had exploded first and then collapsed completely.

  Pictures from the former Yugoslavia. Or Lebanon. From news programs with serious voices, houses that had been destroyed by civil war, it looked like that.

  “I want you to call me . . . In exactly ten minutes.”

  Her voice.

  It had been calm and he’d done as she asked.

  The cell phone with the earpiece that wasn’t working was in his pocket; he got it out and pulled up the menu for outgoing calls, ran his finger down to three days ago. He had made fourteen calls that day. Four in the morning.

  One of them, he’d already realized and now saw, at 04:34.

  He kept walking. Råby Allé 25. The next stairwell and elevator shaft that had exploded and which, according to Krantz, had also hidden fragments of a cell phone.

  He was holding a phone that three nights earlier had made a call to a number he didn’t know. He called it again. No reply. He called directory assistance. No registered subscriber. He called Nils Krantz.

  “The pieces from the cell phone that detonated the first explosion.”

  “Yes?”

  “I want you to look at them again. See if you can identify a number on the SIM card.”

  “If you come here, we can look together.”

  “Here?”

  “I’m in one of the Forensics vans. I can see you right now.”

  Krantz was on his knees in the middle of the van when Ewert Grens opened the two back doors. The forensic scientist crawled around among the black bags and long wires and powerful lamps with different kinds of light, and something else that looked like measuring equipment.

  “I’ve got a picture. Here.”

  He pointed at the laptop standing on a foldable basin.

  “Can you see it?”

  Something black in the enlarged image.

  “No.”

  “A piece, a few millimeters big, found one and a half meters from the elevator shaft. To the left of the picture . . . there. Two digits. The only ones that are still visible. About the middle of the number.”

  Grens followed Krantz’s finger. He still saw nothing.

  “The first one . . . two. The second . . . I’m fairly sure it’s a four.”

  He didn’t even need to open his phone and check against the list of outgoing calls. But he did anyway: 0704244818.

  Two digits in the middle.

  A two and a four.

  Nineteen years earlier he had forced a woman down onto her own kitchen floor. He had been responsible for her subsequent arrest; she was detained on remand, convicted by a unanimous court, and sent to prison. And for security reasons, she had given birth to a child in a locked cell.

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

  That only the one who started all this can put a stop it.

  Ewert Grens gripped the forensic scientist’s laptop and looked at the picture of a greatly enlarged part of a cell phone and noticed that both his hands were shaking. He had phoned the number she’d given, waited until the signal was connected and generated an electric current. And just when the first explosion drowned out all other sounds, the same signal had been transferred and connected to the next phone and the next explosion. He had triggered it.

  He put down the computer without looking at Krantz and left the van in a rush, started to walk.

  Six buildings, four hundred and twenty apartments.

  It had been him.

  It had been her.

  And it was as if just at that moment they’d caught up with each other, the restlessness and unease that had hounded him since he’d been given an assignment in the middle of the night a week earlier, as if it was now so close, reached out a hand and prodded him on the back, gave him a push.

  He passed Råby Torg and the greengrocers’ stalls that hadn’t been there for a long time and then the large shopping center with more dark, closed shops than open ones; he walked along the asphalt walkway toward the metro station and turned off just before the entrance, continued along the tracks with the sound of a train coming through every ten minutes.

  He’d worked on the police force in the capital for twenty-seven years and still believed in the same values as he had the day he collected his first uniform as a young trainee. Perhaps it was too obvious, too simple. Maybe it wasn’t even particularly deep. Anyone who aggrieves another party should have balls enough to pay for it afterward. That’s just the way things were, the only way he could deal with anyone who had given himself the right always to cause permanent harm.

  The sound of a train on his left-hand side blended with that of the E4 and thousands
of cars in the distance. He sat down on a park bench with nearly no graffiti, a good place for him. He wanted to see the whole community, as well as the partially bombed houses and two traffic arteries that cut it into equally large chunks.

  He hadn’t thought about her, about him, about their son, afterward, not even once. Why should he?

  The following working day their lives had been someone else’s.

  But then they’d forced their way back in years later, led him back to what he’d left behind so long ago. Three consequences of an arrest that it was not his job to take responsibility for afterward.

  He got up, wiped the back of his jacket free of the kind of dust that builds up layer by layer with every passing train. He started to walk again, back to the car and the high-rise blocks guarded by policemen in front of a blue-and-white cordon.

  His world for a week.

  They had smashed a highly dangerous gang, and crime in the area would die down for a while until the next gang took over; there was always someone ready to build a reputation. They had taken four fugitives to separate prisons, where they would serve out their sentences. And they had removed two eighteen-year-old gang leaders from the street, one of whom was sitting in a room in a youth hostel close to the green of the forest and the blue of the water, trying to stay clean while he waited for his girlfriend, some eighty kilometers away, to give birth to their child.

  much later

  She’s lying on her back, as still as she can, looking at the ugly plastic bag with a tube and a syringe and the transparent drop that slowly gets bigger, she can see it, watches it grow, lose its hold, fall.

  Oxytocin.

  Yet another milliliter diluted with half a liter of saline solution.

  One of the people in green scrubs told her that. The one in charge of the infusion pump had inserted the catheter into a vein on her arm. Fifteen milliliters per hour leave the plastic bag and are pumped into her body.

  It was to speed things up. Some hours ago she had only been one centimeter dilated. The drops opened her more. And the other person in green had inserted a long needle and pressed and pressed until the two membranes broke and the warm water ran out over her thighs and knees, washing her feet.

  ———

  There are more people in the room.

  The two green people stay near her the whole time, their hands on her stomach or some of the equipment that ticks and peeps. The others are standing farther away. They’re wearing long white coats that reach to the floor, and sometimes when she turns her head a little she sees clearly that it’s just something to cover their dark pants and dark shoes.

  ———

  It felt like period pains. The first few times. Now it’s stronger. Someone punching her from inside. More often. Longer. She’s tried to count, thought one second at a time, and it’s been slightly less painful, only two minutes between the last three, which took forty-two and forty-seven and forty-four seconds to stop.

  ———

  It’s a big cell.

  She thinks about the one that Gabriel showed her a picture of, from the prison that’s just outside Mariefred, and some others from prisons without walls that she can’t remember the names of. She thinks about the one that Leon once described when she brought him a delivery in the visitors’ room in Aspsås, and the ones that Reza and Uros were in when she delivered to them at Österåker prison and Storboda prison. Their cells had been much smaller. A pregnant inmate who, for security reasons, is not given permission to give birth in Örebro hospital or the one in Karlskoga, needed to have one that was big enough to accommodate a metal bed in the middle and all the equipment that ticks and peeps and six people in green or white scrubs who are working or waiting.

  If she stretches up a bit, turns her head slightly to the other side, she can see the barred window, through it. It’s evening, quite cold even though it’s spring, and the trees nearby are sporting young green leaves. An ambulance is waiting just outside the window, facing the prison gate. Behind it, another car that looks new, red, shiny.

  She counts again. Not even a minute in between now. And then the pain that presses from inside—exactly fifty-one seconds.

  ———

  She recognizes the two of them by the door. The big one without hair, who she thinks is the one Gabriel phoned. And the one who’s a bit younger, who questioned her along with the woman five times before the trial, before she left Kronoberg remand prison.

  She’ll ask them afterward. She’ll ask them if they know where Gabriel is, if he’s alive.

  ———

  She can’t count the intervals anymore. She knows that it won’t be long now.

  She spoke to the woman in Social Services right at the start. It had only been a few weeks and the sesame seed wasn’t even half a centimeter long; she knew the woman was Leon’s mother, even though you weren’t allowed to talk about it. During their conversation the woman had looked at her belly, it hadn’t even started to show, and asked if she was pregnant. She hadn’t answered. And the woman hadn’t asked again. But said that if that was the case, if she was to get pregnant and have a child, it would probably feel the same as it had for her. Like waves. Like fire. As if something inside her body was punching and pushing and she had no control over it.

  It felt exactly like that.

  ———

  Your dad was born here.

  You will soon be born here.

  This is the same cell. At least, he thinks it is.

  Nineteen years have passed.

  The girl lying there is Wanda. The one who lay there before was Ana.

  Two different young women and another time, but it felt like it was happening in parallel all the same—after a while Ewert Grens was forced to glance to the side where Erik Wilson had stood before and Sven Sundkvist was standing now, run his hand over his head and check that he had no hair, over his stomach that is big in a way that it hasn’t always been, and just to be on the safe side, to stretch a stiff leg that didn’t hurt back then.

  Another time.

  He hears her scream. And then another.

  A ribcage passing down the narrow birth canal, being squeezed, and pressing out the water and a head and mouth that’s already out and fills the lungs with air.

  The first intake of breath.

  ———

  He moves a step closer.

  Every intervention by a police officer has consequences.

  The tiny thing lies on her stomach.

  It’s not his job to assess them, weigh them up, to try to understand how long the consequences will carry on.

  The hair is matted, wet. The head is oval, it has been pressed together, a swelling that would soon disappear.

  Not even now.

  Not even in front of a face he almost recognizes.

  ———

  And yet.

  He wonders, he can’t help it, who will be your Julia Bozsik, your José Pereira.

  ———

  The two others, who are also wearing white coats—a man and a woman—leave their places by the door and walk past him on either side, four hands lift up what has been lying warm and safe on her stomach, open a briefcase, fill in a sheet of white A4 paper, hurry out to the red, shiny car that is sitting behind the ambulance, waiting, and a portable incubator is placed on the backseat.

  ———

  He stays where he is. Silence. The couple in the red car has driven off toward the prison gate and the family unit in Botkyrka, the two who were wearing green scrubs are sitting in an ambulance on their way to Örebro hospital. Sven is waiting farther down the corridor—Ewert Grens hears female voices behind the locked metal doors, alternating between pig bastard and pig cunt—and he just stands there, searching for words.

  “I think . . .”

  He remembers a question. Did you see? He wasn’t prepared then. See what? Sometimes it’s the first time. If it was a boy or a girl? It’s easier the next time.

  “. . . that I saw.”

&
nbsp; “What?”

  “Just now. The baby on your stomach.”

  Her eyes, it’s difficult to make contact, she’s so tired, she doesn’t want to.

  “What . . . are you talking about?”

  He tries to follow her gaze, but can’t. It isn’t there, and he turns slightly, looks higher up, farther away, through the barred window.

  “I saw that it was a boy.”

  from the authors

  With our great thanks to

  R, S, R, and B for trusting us and inviting us in—for some years we have been a part of your world.

  Johan Åkerlund, Section Against Gang Crime, for essential knowledge about the day-to-day reality of a police officer working with gang crime.

  Bertil Ahlgren, Leading Firefighter, for essential knowledge about the day-to-day reality of a firefighter who is constantly under threat.

  Reine Adolfsson, for his expertise in explosives; Peter Blomqvist, for his expertise in forensics; Henrik Druid, for his expertise in forensic medicine; Lasse Lagergen, for his expertise in medicine; Mikael Gilliusson, for his expertise in dealing with the wounded; Leif Nordeén, for his expertise in young people in detention; and Mikael Madenteg, for his expertise in young criminals at large.