Two Soldiers (25 page)

———

A beige jacket. Only a few meters in front of him. It didn’t turn around. But the big-framed body and bald head and the manner of leaning with one hand up on the wall, shifting the weight over to the right leg, was all too familiar.

“Grens?”

Ewert Grens had heard steps that weren’t his own or Sven’s, now the voice. They were not on their own any longer and he turned around.

“Morning.”

Grens looked at the policeman who was pretty well middle-aged, but still had thick, dark hair, was still slim, and had friendly eyes, even when he was agitated.

They hadn’t aged at the same rate.

“So you’re here again, Grens, eh?”

The detective superintendent from City Police shrugged.

“Yes. And I need your—”

“You were here earlier this morning.”

José Pereira nodded demonstratively at his other guest, a younger man, closer to the door.

“You were
both
here this morning. You were clocked. And because you didn’t even consider following the directive, you managed to undo a whole night’s work within twenty minutes and put
our
strategy in danger.”

Ewert Grens turned back to the wall and the group of nine staring faces.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Pereira.”

“That your unnecessary foray this morning is exactly the kind of thing that we’ve learned we don’t need.”

The silent, beige jacket.

“Smashing windows and breaking into apartments. Warning them. And putting the hostage’s life at risk.”

José Pereira stared at the back he had worked with for some years so long ago, until Grens shrugged again.

“I still have no idea what you’re talking about. I’m here to work on a murder investigation. Because the murderer is here as well.”

A young woman in a prison warden uniform
.

Pereira closed his eyes briefly; it sometimes made things more bearable.

He had his cell phone in his hand, wanted so badly to call the twins who had got into another patrol car later, to hear the voices glowing on the way home in the way voices often do when a match ends three–two, he wanted to keep hold of it a bit longer, the real life, kiss the mouthpiece, hang up.

A young woman in a prison warden uniform walking beside him down a cold prison underground passage, on their way to D1 Left
.

Only a few seconds, it was so good, simply not to open his eyes.

She’s there, walking, advising a serving policeman not to go into the unit where she herself works alone, because she knows that it would be extremely dangerous
.

She’d had reason to be frightened.

“She said so.”

He stood shoulder to shoulder with the older policeman who had just shrugged then continued to stare at a wall of faces.

“She said that she was frightened, Ewert.”

They’d stood in front of this wall before, in the early nineties, different faces but the same staring eyes, most of them dead now—they always died young—a few others with new lives. José Pereira had spent his first years after graduating working with what was later called the Fittja Commission; Ewert Grens was mid-career in the police and had been tasked with developing and implementing the first—and what later proved to be a very poor—witness protection program for gang members, their only way out, and during those years they had both, each from his own perspective, discovered a world with no laws.

“His dad.”

Grens was still looking at the group of faces that had just been moved over to the left-hand wall, between
X-Team
and
Red & White Crew
, below
Hells Angels MC
and
Bandidos
, mostly at the one whose eyes continued to follow him.

Pereira nodded.

“I remember him.”

If they were alike.

If someone who saw them when they were the same age would only see the similarities that he saw.

“We’ve moved them up.”

“I can see that.”

“Four members were already outside. Five more got out yesterday evening.”

“You know what I think about your lists.”

“Disturbance. Hostage-taking. Escape. Break out. Murder.”

“They’re already here. Outside your window.”

“They’ll be at the top soon.”

“They’ve got nothing else. They don’t want to go anywhere.”

“There’s always a turning point, Grens. When a ridiculous club of little boys with a ridiculous name becomes something else. When a logo, a top, a tattoo becomes a symbol that doesn’t mean anything if it’s not given substance.”

José Pereira stood beside the detective superintendent who was looking at a boy’s face that was supposed to look dangerous.

“You’ve got . . .”

Pereira put his hand out to the beige jacket, just below the collar.

“. . . I think it’s . . . Ewert, you’ve got a piece of plastic there.”

He picked off the piece that clung to the back of the collar.

“Thank you.”

José Pereira rolled the plastic between his index finger and thumb, aimed for the trash can.

“Some little boys who called themselves Råby Warriors for a long time, who we first heard about . . . it must nine years ago, now. A gang from the southern suburbs that you, if anyone, should know, Grens, the kind that we’ve got so many of out here that we’ve lost count.”

A little piece more, there on the shoulder, plastic that stuck to his fingertips when he pulled it off and handed it to the detective superintendent.

“I realized that they’d made their decision sometime at the start of summer. The turning point, the logo that had to be fulfilled. And every time, those we have so many of become something bigger . . .
it happens fast.
Ghetto Soldiers
. A name that already existed. A prison organization established in Aspsås by some of the older inmates, a criminal network inside, power and protection for as long as you’re there. I was getting clear indications that they’d decided on the name, that they would adopt it.”

He poked around on his desk that was full of files, opened one of them.

He put four badly lit photographs down on the middle of the desk, all taken by a forensic technician, slightly too shiny, but very clear.

From different angles, a left knee that had been shot.

“New name, new structure, new rules.”

José Pereira stretched over the file that was on the floor, he slowly flicked through it, and somewhere in the middle, the plastic sleeve,
GHETTO
SOLDIERS
and
ASSOCIATED
, three more pictures.

“The first one, the one with the knees, is called Javad Kittu. This one was called Daniel Wall.”

“A cell that isn’t far from the ones that Jensen and Bendik and Eriksson escaped from.”

“Multiple shots to both knees. A TV cord wrapped hard around someone’s neck. At exactly the same time. Because the two
hangarounds didn’t scream
police cunts
in answer to every question when they were interviewed in connection with a preliminary investigation that became a long sentence.”

The forensic technician’s photographs were still in his hand when he got up from the desk.

“I know that you’ve got your reasons. And I’ve got mine.
But we have to catch them fast, Grens
. We’re working with the intelligence units in communities with high-rise blocks, the kind of places we pass by, and
these guys, Grens
, right now they’re role models for gangs in Stockholm and Gothenburg and Malmö and Uppsala and Västerås and Eskilstuna and Örebro and Gävle and Sundsvall and . . . wherever the fuck you want.”

The middle-aged policeman, who devoted all his working hours to various stages of the eyes they were looking into right now, started to systematically pull out the drawing pins that were holding them up one by one, moving one face at a time to the left, to the other side of the ones called
X-Team
.

“I’m moving them again. They’ve only got two stages left.”

Tiny holes in the white wall as he pinned the young men, or pictures of the young men, in a position that meant even more dangerous.

“They got long sentences, were held in high security prisons, took a hostage, escaped, committed murder. Their logo has been validated now. And every hour that they continue to run around out there, they’ll reinforce it, in the way that every little kid we know who dreams about being part of it will one day reinforce their own.”

They both took a step back; it was easier to see the wall then.

“Role models, Grens. They’ve succeeded.”

They were halfway across the parking lot when Grens stopped
and looked at Sundkvist.

“We’re not leaving here, Sven. Not yet. I want you to go back to the apartment.”

He nodded at the high-rise.

“The one with
SANTOS
on the door. And the windowpane that’s perhaps a bit damaged.”

The faint smell of marzipan
.

“A bomb squad and dog will be there in ten minutes.”

The smell of the taste of marzipan
.

“I want you to be there. And to report back to me.”

“Did you listen at all to what Pereira was saying just a minute ago?”

“Sven?”

“Yes.”

“Just go.”

The detective superintendent looked at his closest colleague, the only one who put up with him, because he had
chosen
to put up with him. Then he turned around and crossed the parking lot with his stiff leg.

“Ewert?”

“See you at the car in forty-five minutes. I’m going to talk to someone I should have spoken to a long time ago.”

———

He made his way over to one of the proud, guarded high-rise blocks that seemed perpetually to take note, to remember who went where and when.

He wondered if she still lived there.

If the building remembered the last time.

———

A fire engine drove down one of the paved paths at full speed. Grens stopped and waited until it had also stopped and he could pass, turned slowly and looked all the way around without seeing any smoke or fire, he knew that it was normally something like a trash can, a cellar storeroom.

Råby Allé 64.

A main entrance that looked like all the others and he went into the stairwell and over to the lift.

Strong smell of urine. Four broken floor buttons. Hard to read the graffiti on the walls.

He hesitated. It didn’t feel reliable. It wasn’t something he did very often, walk up the stairs by choice, he was breathing heavily when he got to the third floor and five identical brown doors.
DORDEVIC.
MUHAZABI.
HANSSON.
PITKÄNEN.
STENBERG
. Two steps closer to the sixth, squeezed in between a fire hose and a fuse box that had been broken open many times.

TOMAS
.

The same door. Another time.

It sounded like the doorbell worked.

He waited. Eighteen years ago. He rang it again.

Her eye through the peephole. He heard her, she didn’t try to sneak to the door. Then she opened it. And they stood there looking at each other.

“Do you remember me?”

He had stood there just like that. He’d had more hair and been a lot thinner, maybe in his forties.

“Yes. I remember you.”

She looked well. All her teeth. Good skin. No visible ticks. Four years at Hinseberg prison often left more of a mark.

“Will you let me in?”

He had taken her boyfriend from her.

And then stood at her door with a search warrant. A kilo of heroin in a pasta jar in the pantry.

Always the girlfriend with no criminal record.

Ana didn’t reply.

She could see it was the same face, but from nearly twenty years ago. It was as if someone had put a rubber face over the one she remembered, a temporary face with new lines and furrows and even a different color. She wanted to reach out and touch it tentatively with her fingertips. She wanted to feel if it was real.

“Will you let me in?”

He moved in a way that showed pain in one leg that made it difficult to balance his weight. She’d heard what he’d said, but remembered how, all those years ago, she’d tried to pull the door shut and how he had grabbed hold of her, forced her to the floor in her own kitchen. And maybe she remembered only a few weeks ago, four young men ringing on the doorbell, just as he had now, and put a foot out to block her door, then they’d come in and left a plastic bag on the hat shelf.

She gave a slight nod and opened the door a little.

“You know.”

He was standing in her hallway but didn’t have the answer. How can you start a conversation that’s been half a life in the waiting?

“Don’t you? Where he is?”

The evening before she had seen her son smiling on a passport photo in one of the many news flashes on TV.

“No.”

“You know where he’d choose to hide.”

“I don’t know anything about him anymore.”

“Is there anyone else?”

“You know there isn’t anyone else. No brothers. No sisters. No grandparents.”

Every intervention will have consequences.

“And no father.”

Every consequence will then give rise to more consequences.

And no father
.

It had just been a job. To collect. To protect. To hide. To leave. Just a job.

“What
I
know is that he abducted a female prison warden considerably younger than yourself at knifepoint.
I
know that he for various reasons is also suspected of taking her life.
I
know that out there . . .”

Grens indicated behind her with his arm, over there, pointing at one of the windows perhaps.

“. . . there’s a lot of policemen ready to arrest him, fully equipped and armed. And
I
know that if you don’t cooperate, more people will die.
He
will die.”

She looked at him as she had done since she opened the door, but she didn’t say a word.

“Protecting a suspect is a criminal offense.”

“Then arrest me.”

She didn’t let him go. Her eyes followed him.

“Again.”

He lowered his arm, the one he’d used to point.

“I’m here to help you.”

“You’re here to do your job.”

Her voice, it was scornful.

“You can’t help me. You can’t help anyone here.”

———

The elevator smelled like before.

He avoided it, slow steps down, the blue main door, and a lungful of air.

One more.

Something tasted of gas. Maybe oil. Or metal. He looked to where he’d met the fire engine earlier.

Gas, oil, metal.

A car.

They hadn’t found any more trash cans today.

On the wide pathway to Råby police station, he greeted a fireman who was turning off the water and unscrewing a pump from
a hydrant, then kept on walking and the taste of gas and metal got stronger, he guessed it was one of the cars near the police station.

The first thing he saw was Sven.

On a bench by the red-brick wall of the station, phone in hand.

Then he saw the fire engine, the one that was much bigger close up, with four firemen buzzing around it carrying the things that firemen carry. It looked like they’d put out the fire.

Then finally he saw the car. Half of it covered in soot, half of it without color, and four tires that had melted into nothing.

He went closer, hand in what was left of the white foam that lay soft and sticky on the hood and all the way back to the trunk.

Their
car.

They looked at each other and then at what had until very recently been a new vehicle worth four hundred thousand kronor.

“The last two cassettes were in there, Sven. At the back of the glove compartment. Did you know?”

A vehicle that would never be roadworthy again.

Grens dried the white foam on his pants, shrugged.

“Are you done?”

Sven Sundkvist nodded.

“I’m done.”

“Well, then we’d better start walking.”

“We don’t need to. I’ve ordered a new one for us.”

“We don’t have time, Sven.”

Ewert Grens went over to Råby police station and one of the police cars in front of the main entrance, a young policeman in the driver’s seat with an equally young passenger.

The detective superintendent rapped on the window.

“We need your car.”

The young driver had wound down the window halfway. Now he smiled.

“Well, I’m afraid we do too.”

“Ours has been set on fire.”

The smile still on his face.

“There you go. But, you see, we’re not here to file your report.”

Grens lightly slapped the metal of the driver’s door.

“Get out. I’m requisitioning this vehicle from now.”

The two young officers stayed where they were.

“Well . . . you see, we actually work here. So I, and the police command, would be very grateful if you left us now, if you don’t mind, it would make things a lot easier for us.”

The man who had slapped their door and then demanded to take their car was rummaging for something in his pants pocket and then held it up to the car window. A black leather cover. An ID card and a metal badge, a shield that they recognized in yellow, blue, and red and a symbol showing three crowns above the word
POLICE
.

“Ewert Grens, gold command. The . . .
police command
that you mentioned.”

The two young men studied the ID card and the police badge that seemed to be real and an officer they’d heard about but never seen before.

“We’re . . . stationed at Västerort.”

“I see.”

“So we need the car to get back.”

Grens looked at them without answering until they both simultaneously opened their doors and got out. He got in behind the wheel and Sven sank down beside him. He started the car and had driven about ten meters when he stopped, wound down the window, and shouted to the two young officers who were standing abandoned on the asphalt.

“By the way, boys . . .”

He stuck his head out so that they would hear him better.

“. . . you do know that police in uniform can take the metro for free?”

———

They were about halfway into town and had passed Kungens Kurva and Skärholmen, in the middle lane by Segeltorp and Bredäng, by the time Sven started to feel confident enough that Ewert Grens was in
control of the new car that he dared talk to him without the risk of distracting him.

“The smell of marzipan that you were talking about.”

The detective superintendent slowed down so that he could concentrate better on listening, and it became obvious that he was not used to this car’s clutch and how far to release it in relation to the accelerator.

“The dog searched the hall, bathroom, bedroom, sitting room. Nothing. But the kitchen. When it came in there, it went straight over to the kitchen table and lay down underneath it, sniffed around several times, looked up at the dog-handler until he lifted it up.”

Grens slowed down even more, and the car lurched forward before settling at a steady speed.

“An English springer spaniel, it moved around unrestrained on the tabletop and immediately picked out an obvious stain in about the middle, lay down with his snout close by, eyes looking at the handler again.”

The traffic was getting busier and they had to brake more often and Sven tried not to look anywhere other than straight ahead, they only had a few kilometers to go.

“You were right, Ewert.”

The Söderled tunnel and not too many bends left that required maneuvers involving both the clutch and the accelerator.

“They
do
have access to explosives.”

He didn’t notice, but he lowered his voice.

“And people who have access to explosives blow things up. Where? What?
Who
are they going to blow up, Ewert?”

———

Ana opened the door and went out onto the stairs, past the elevator, kept going down, she moved fast, she knew that there wasn’t much time.

———

He was tired, had probably never felt so empty, forty-eight separate call-outs in one week, two genuine and forty-six intentional: mopeds, cars, cellar storerooms, tires, containers, climbing frames, fences, trash cans, bushes, house gables, trees. This one had developed into big flames and black smoke—someone had poured gas over the car—and the big stones and empty bottles had started to rain on them as usual, but only once they had started to put out the fire and from farther away than normal, but the message had been clear enough,
a police car for fuck’s sake
, he hadn’t been hit more than once on the leg, but the hate felt stronger than usual, the pubescent voices sharper,
it’s a police car for fuck’s sake, let it burn
.

Thom had just pulled in the hose and pump and opened the door to the front of the large truck when he felt a hand on his shoulder. Someone had come too close. He’d heard footsteps but hadn’t registered them and spun around with his arm raised, not more spit and stones, nearly lashed out, his body shaking, when he came face to face with a stranger.

A woman. Thirty, thirty-five years old.

And she pulled back when she saw his hand.

“Oh . . . sorry.”

He lowered his arm, tried to hide it, get rid of it.

“I’m sorry, I thought . . .”

“Don’t worry. I understand. It was me who . . . have you got a moment? Have you got time?”

Dark hair, beautiful eyes that weren’t alive but that had been alive and wanted to live again.

“Time? For what?”

He had been about to hit someone who wasn’t even threatening him.

It wasn’t her.

It was not long ago. He had seen one of them who set fire to the car, a young boy who had darted forward to the rolled-out, water-filled hose and stabbed at it with something that resembled a sword with a curved blade. That was when something even deeper in Thom had burst. He’d ordered the guys holding the hose to turn around and
direct the water jet at the child with the sword, they had hit him on the chest and he’d collapsed, screaming
kill
as they normally did, but even louder,
we’re going to kill you next time
.

It wasn’t her.

“I saw you here this morning.”

The woman with the dark hair and eyes that had once been alive raised her voice to be sure that she was heard.

“Quarter past six, a moped leaned up against a bench on Råby Torg. Engulfed by flames before you got there.”

Maybe she took a step closer.

“Twenty past eight, the blue container by the playground. It was already burned by the time you came.”

Another step.

“And now. I saw what happened. The third time today. Isn’t it?”