Two Soldiers (37 page)

It smelled of burned flesh.

An unpleasant smell that invaded your nose and overpowered every other taste in your mouth.

He’d phoned twice, they’d listened to the engaged tone and were on their way, they would sit down there, together. The first call would bring them there. The next call, the number that Gabriel had written on the counter in the kitchen, just one signal to a cell phone wrapped in a plastic bag in a cistern behind a toilet.

Leon stood in the hall of the empty apartment that they’d slept in for twenty-four hours and had to leave immediately. Thirty minutes max, maybe twenty, no more. Four to choose between, all connected to the underground garage and with a view of Råby police station.

Five white circles.

Gabriel was still lying on the floor in front of images on TV screens with no sound.

Five white circles with small black specks in the middle, like ash scattered on snow. Two circles on each cheek and one on the forehead. In a few hours, seeping blood blisters, in a few days, infected wounds, in a few weeks pink craters in the skin, in a few months tender scars.

Leon stepped over the silent TVs and went out to the kitchen counter.
You will never leave us
. He pulled the plastic bag that only recently had been lying at the bottom of a trash container toward him.
You will never leave me
. He lifted up the bolt and barrel, fitted it to the slide and frame, pushed in the full magazine, eight bullets.
You’re my brother, my only brother, we’re on the top fucking wall, you and me, you and me, Gabriel
! One piece left, a decimeter long, black, round piece of metal, he picked it up and screwed it onto the muzzle.

“You can burn the rest. I won’t be back.”

The long, black thing on the muzzle of the gun was a silencer, it was easy to see when he held it up, pulled back the safety lever with his thumb, and aimed at the burned circle on his forehead.

“Do what the fuck you like. I’ve made up my mind. I’m out.”

Leon aimed, finger on the trigger.

And then turned around, fired one shot at a time, a hole as big as a five-kronor coin in each screen.

“Well, fifty thousand then,
Daddy
.”

“You’re not getting any fucking money from me.”

“That’s what it costs.”

“It was fucking well you and me that built this up!”

“Fifty thousand. And then you can leave. I don’t need you.”

———

Ewert Grens walked with Gunnar Werner through the Kronoberg garage to a car with the Västerort Police emblem on the door.

Twenty-eight hours of silence from someone on the run. Then suddenly . . . a sign of life.

Werner had picked up a telephone signal.

Twelve seconds the first time and eighteen seconds the second time.

You rang yourself. Twice. You risked being discovered. As if you wanted to be discovered.

“Address?”

“Råby Allé 124.”

“Floor?”

“Six.”

That rush—closing in on a murderer, someone who has declared that another person’s life is less valuable than their own and has taken it with them—it came from deep down inside and carried him through nights of hell.

Grens looked at the telephone that had been lying on a plastic surface on a passenger seat.

Sixteen missed calls.

Werner.

He nodded, thanked a police sergeant who had done more than he needed and was now on his way back to other voices that would become sound files in a court case.

“Where are you?”

Ewert Grens had got in, turned the ignition key, and made a call.

“Råby, the big office. And I’ve finished putting together the information about the minors. Even when I don’t include the ones who don’t really have enough connection, there’s still twenty-seven left. I’ve got addresses, observation logs, reports . . .”

“Not necessary.”

“. . . a list of . . .”

“Pereira, it’s not necessary.”

José Pereira’s voice was tired, but not because it was night or he was sleepy.

“I’m listening.”

“He’s there, Pereira. Close to you.”

“Where?”

“Less than four hundred meters away.”

Ewert Grens had seen him being born
.

“I want you to wake the firearms command team on duty.”

José Pereira had seen him grow up
.

“I want them to do a raid.”

They’d known ever since where he was heading, where it would end
.

“In fifteen minutes.”

———

Leon turned off the cell and put it in the pouch of his black hoodie. A bugged telephone can be traced. That was what he’d wanted and he knew that it didn’t matter who he called, what he talked about or for how long. He didn’t want it anymore. They had about five, he guessed, max ten minutes left. Alex, Uros, Reza, and Marko were on their way out into the hall, and he’d hung back by the TVs on the sitting room floor that had just shown a face from the front, profile from the left, profile from the right, by the crossed-out digits in black felt tip on the kitchen counter that were the number of a cell phone in a plastic bag
in a toilet that he would ring when
they
were there. And by someone who had been the only person he’d ever trusted and who now had five circular marks on his face.

“If I was you, I’d get my ass out of here, fast.”

He held open the front door, turned around.

“And don’t forget . . . fifty thousand.”

He closed it. Opened it again right away. Gabriel was still lying on the floor and they looked at each other. Not for very long, neither of them had much time, but enough for it to hurt.

———

Ewert Grens had perhaps driven faster out of the city than ever before as he headed south on the E4.

He’d seen him being born. He was going to see him arrested
.

Someone who was wanted had turned on the phone, phoned himself, waited a while, then turned it off.

Is that what you want, to be found?

The road block they’d been stopped at the night before, Grens wound down the window to the same helmet and bulletproof vest, a lowered gun with a sharp beam of light.

“We met yesterday.”

“We did.”

“And this time?”

“This time I think I’ll let gold command through.”

The helmet and vest smiled briefly, then grinned when he saw that the person he was smiling at was smiling back.

The highway exit and the main road and then the asphalt walkways to the door of Råby Allé 124. Ewert Grens parked between the deserted playground and two park benches, walked over to three police vans and two police cars and another two from the dog patrol.

“Sixth floor?”

“Six apartments. Hit them all at the same time.”

Two policemen on either side of the main door, dark helmets, visors down, new uniform, and automatic weapons in their hands.

“When?”

“Four minutes ago.”

The detective superintendent carried on over to the stairs when one of the dogs, an Alsatian, jumped up, front paws on his shoulders, growled in his face, snapped at a beige jacket sleeve to show that he’d come too close. Grens pushed his hand against the animal’s chest, a hard thrust, and it lost its balance, four paws on the ground, and he looked at it, shouted
sit
in a loud voice until it did. He nodded to the dog handler who had a dog that did its job, and went up the stairs, running as fast as he could up the six flights of steep stairs.

An elevator that was standing still. Five apartments that were temporarily sealed off. And the sixth that was open, or rather, didn’t have a door.

He went closer.

The door had been removed and was leaning against the wall by the entrance, splintered wood where the hinges had been—a piston and the pressure of compressed air.

He paused briefly in the hall. The smell, faint but recognizable, of burned flesh. And it was stronger in the living room, by the four TV sets in the middle of the floor, each screen with a hole in it and, if he got down on his hands and knees and felt them with his finger, bullet holes. Mattresses, pillows, he counted five beds. Empty beer cans and half-eaten cakes. The parquet floor was covered in splinters of glass from two windows, a rope outside each that was moving gently in the wind, forced entry from two sides at the same time.

“I’ve spoken to the neighbors on this floor.”

José Pereira picked up a box and shook it, which according to the picture on the side had had a TV in it.

“Three of the apartments were abandoned in full haste. They saw what was happening and got frightened and vanished so they wouldn’t need to talk. So that leaves two. The neighbors on . . .
this
side, a family with three children who’ve seen nothing, they were all asleep when we forced entry. And . . .
here
, two sisters, I’m guessing Polish, who described being woken up by loud voices and then what they called a dull bang, three, maybe four times.”

They turned and looked at the four TV sets that didn’t work anymore.

“They crept out to have a look through the peephole, two at different heights, so they could both look at the same time. And they both agree. Five young men, all in hoodies and track pants, left the apartment first and then some minutes later, a sixth one left.”

Ewert Grens kicked one of the cardboard boxes lightly and it slid across the parquet floor. TV sets?

“When?”

“They think about ten minutes before we got here.”

“And they’re reliable?”

“Yes.”

So near. And yet so far.

“Then they’ll be in the next apartment already.”

The coffee in Råby police station was much worse than in the
corridors of Kronoberg. Bitter, almost sour, and ridiculously weak. It wasn’t often that Grens said no to a plastic cup of warmth, but having really tried with the first and poured out the second, he just shook his head when Pereira went to get a third.

They stood in front of the wall. The one he scorned and the one that the kids out there aspired to and that always seemed to be in the middle of the office, no matter where he was in the Section Against Gang Crime.

Nine young faces and seven even younger faces, far too close.

As they had become more violent, José Pereira had moved them from the desk to the other wall and then farther up and then to the main wall, and farther up. Two steps left. Two groups above them. Bandidos and Hells Angels. Until Grens took the pictures one at a time and put them on the top.

“If you insist on having your damn rankings. These ones . . . they’re the most dangerous. Not the fat asses on motorcycle. These guys are younger, have more hate, they’ve invited themselves in and taken their place in the only way they know how.”

He had just been standing in an apartment with no door, leftovers and shards of glass and mattresses on the floor next to four TV screens with bullet holes in them.

“We’ve looked up and checked out all the sources close to the group, the ones you described as stable, reliable, well informed. And nothing. No one has seen or heard anything, none of them know.”

You didn’t disappear ten minutes before a raid by chance, did you?

“And the bomb dogs, yesterday evening, last night, nothing. Fourteen hours and five hundred and four apartments. Seven thousand four hundred and ninety-six left.”

You let us listen to you committing murder—the only phone call during your escape, to a voicemail—as if you wanted us to hear. And then you’re not there when we got here—next phone call, and this time to yourself—as if you wanted us to know and strike.

You had the initiative. You lent it to us for fifteen minutes. And then you took it back again.

“It’s them, Pereira, it’s
him
who decides!”

I’m surrounded by houses and apartments and you’ve got access to several of them, ways to get there that only someone who is born here would know, the sort of ways that ten or a hundred or even a thousand police officers would never find without the local knowledge they will never have.

“And we . . . we can only wait!”

———

Fourth floor, Råby Allé 146. Leon checked the time on his cell phone. It had taken them less than three minutes.

This one was bigger, one more room, with five new mattresses and pillows and blankets on the floor and a fridge full of beer, Coke, pizza, even some packets of chips and candy, and Gabriel had written the phone number down in felt-tip pen on the counter in this kitchen too, the number he would call shortly.

Leon lifted the blind, looked out into the same dark Råby that would sleep for half a night yet.

She had jeered at him,
just like your dad
, and he had hit her once on the chest and kicked her twice in the thigh and hip.

He had hugged him,
my only brother, I want out
, and he’d pressed the cigarette into his forehead and his cheeks, and he’d just lain there, passive.

He didn’t need her. He didn’t need him. He would never see them again, or talk to them, or even think about them.

Leon opened the blind a crack more. He could see the police station now. And the window on the first floor where the light was on.

They had broken down the door and run into an empty apartment. And they’d gone back to the room that he’d expected them to go back to. Down there. There in the building about a hundred meters away. They were in there, he could see them moving around, the dark shadows back and forth across the window, and his hands were shaking and his cock was hard; they were sitting there.

———

Ewert Grens moved closer to the wall and the circle of new pictures around the nine faces that called themselves Ghetto Soldiers, the blurred ones that José Pereira had taken from a distance and the brightly colored ones that he’d cut out of school yearbooks.

“Here.”

Pereira had picked up a folder from the top of one of the piles on the desk and was holding it out.

“All the information about the ones under fifteen. Twenty-one of them. Personal details, family situation, behavioral patterns, status in the gang, observation reports.”

Grens opened it, children sitting on various benches, smiling, next to other children.

“Known names for the last six months at least. The ones who look after guns and sell drugs and move stolen goods around.”

Ewert Grens nodded at Sven and Hermansson, who came into the office while he was looking through the documents about the cut-out children’s lives, a personal ID number by every face. He figured out that the oldest was fourteen and the youngest was eleven.

“We’ll pay them all a visit. One at a time. Some of them must know.”

He tossed the folder back to Pereira, who had to stretch over to catch it.

“Which one, Pereira?”

Grens waved his hand at the wall, by the faces that were valuable until the day they could be sentenced.

“Which one shall we visit first?”

Pereira looked at the restless detective superintendent, then at the wall, pointed at one of the faces, with slicked-back hair and a thick gold chain, posing eyes.

“Him. Eddie Johnson.”

Ewert Grens looked at a child.

“He’s the one who was sitting on that chair only a few weeks ago and who’ll be sitting there, at the top of the wall, in a few years’ time.”

———

The low building. The big office with the light on. They were there. And no one had blown up a police station before.

Uros was lying on the mattress next to him, breaking off small bits of frozen pizza that he couldn’t be bothered to heat—it was a year since he’d smashed the window of one of the trucks that transported bulk industrial explosives to a rail tunnel in Södertälje and driven off with it, seven sacks, one hundred and seventy-five kilos. Alex on the mattress in the kitchen and he was already asleep—six months since he’d made a hole in the roof of a construction site work store, some big house in Tyresö, sixty-two sticks of dynamite and a couple of thousand detonators. The cell phone from when they robbed the shop on Kungsgatan in the middle of the morning and the rucksacks that Bruno went in and took from the outlet shop on Skärholmen.

The light was on in the office.

They were sitting and walking around down there, a couple of steps away from what one of the kids had taken in and hidden in the cistern behind the toilet.

One single phone call.

One signal of radio waves that reached the detonator and cut-off wires—a bomb that would be a blast wave that would rebound when it hit the external walls and would press and blow to bits any bodies that were in the way.

No one had blown up a police station.

———

It wasn’t particularly cold outside.

It was still some time until morning and the dark was full drizzle. Grens had started to button up his jacket but then he stopped and undid it, puffed his astonishment into the almost warm September night.

“Fourteen years old?”

“Yes.”

They were going to visit them one at a time.

“Thirteen?”

“Yes.”

Ewert Grens and Pereira were going to go in one direction, Sven Sundkvist and Hermansson in the other.

“And this one . . . twelve?”

They weren’t even out of sight when Grens stopped and turned around.

“Hermansson?”

She heard his voice bounce off the walls and she stopped on her way to another twelve-year-old, a piece of white paper in hand, a photograph of a child, but a description of grown-up crime.

“Can you come here a moment?”

She turned and went back to her boss, who was standing still, and had asked Pereira to wait a bit farther up.

“Yes?”

“Did it feel good yesterday?”

“Good?”

“No one has ever slapped me before.”

When she’d placed her hand on his, it had felt like she hit him.

When she hit him hard in the face, he hadn’t even felt it.

“It was about time.”

Without realizing, he rubbed his cheek where she’d hit him, palm against what had been flushed. He hadn’t understood. It was she who had started, kept pushing, asking things that were none of her business.

And then walked away down the middle of the E4.

“Maybe.”

He was quiet, cleared his throat, looked down at the ugly asphalt.

“And well . . . you . . . maybe you were a bit right.”

She heard what he said and should have been overjoyed, hugged him. It was more than she could ever have wanted from someone who found it so hard to get out of his own head.

“About, well, that . . . fear.”

He coughed again, searching for the words.

“And that it’s about Anni. And about Leon Jensen. But mostly . . . mostly it’s about . . .”

His eyes left the asphalt, looked up, but not at her, at the blocks behind her.

“. . . loneliness.”

She didn’t dare move, or breathe, anything that might frighten away this timid creature.

“When the only person you’ve chosen to trust disappears . . . you’re well . . . alone.”

He looked at her for the first time.

“And sometimes . . . I don’t want to be alone anymore.”

She dared to say something now.

“Ewert, you . . .”

“So there.”

He was done.

“So there, Hermansson.”

He had said what he wanted to say and didn’t need or expect an answer, and had already started to walk toward Pereira, who was waiting on a bench outside the school.

“Oh, and by the way . . .”

He’d turned around.

“In the car, yesterday.”

“What?”

“Comes under assaulting a police officer.”

He smiled.

“And obviously I’m considering reporting it.”

They walked through an area where José Pereira could always find his way, no matter how dark, and that Ewert Grens had randomly
become part of over the past twenty-four hours, past the block that housed a female tenant on the third floor who would never let Grens into her home again, the parking place where two new cars had long, vivid gashes from something sharp across the paintwork, stairs up to an apartment with a broken window by the door and a lonely shoehorn in the hall and a hundred-thousand-kronor rug in the bedroom. They were close to Råby Allé 102 and the document at the top of the blue folder.

“They take all sorts of risks, commit crimes constantly, every new thought and action is the start of another crime.”

Pereira held up the piece of paper, on it a face that lived in the building in front of them with his mother and little sister.

“But never for their own gain. The drug deliveries, gunrunning, break-ins are not for themselves, but for the family, members who exploit these kids’ desire to belong.”

Ewert Grens went in through the entrance and into the lift, took the piece of paper that Pereira was holding out.

And he sighed.

I’m sixty years old. I’m on my way to see a twelve-year-old. I’m walking through a suburb with buildings I only visit in connection with crime. I don’t belong here. I’m out of place. I shouldn’t be doing this.

A bell that was louder than normal. And then silence. After a while, quick steps across the floor and the door was pulled open.

A six-year-old girl. Maybe five. Even four. Grens couldn’t tell the difference.

“Is your mom at home?”

The long hair was tousled from sleep and she looked only at Pereira.

“You’re a pig.”

“Yes. I’m a pig. Is your mom in?”

“You’ve been here before.”

“Yes, I have. Is she there?”

She tugged at her long hair, stared at him, and when she was done, she stared at Grens, until she turned suddenly and disappeared down the hall.

They waited.

“Mommy?”

And they heard her voice blend immediately with another, older one.

“Yes?”

“The pig and an old man are here.”

She had also been asleep, her eyes tired, a dressing gown around her barely conscious body.

“Yes?”

“Deniz?”

“What do you want?” Her voice was brittle. “Eight of you . . .”

She had just washed her hair, brushed it in front of the mirror in the bathroom.

“. . . broke open the door.”

They’d rung the doorbell, shouted through the mailbox.

“That was yesterday.”

The loud screams of a five-year-old daughter who’d come running from the sitting room and her worries about Eddie, who was out there, somewhere.

“Tonight I want to be left in peace.”

José Pereira looked at one of six women who were not suspected of any crime, but had been forced to their own floors and driven to the remand jail and locked up.

“I heard about that. Some policemen make the wrong decisions.”

He turned toward Grens, who refused to meet his eye, looked at him for a little too long.

“And I apologize for it. That you were treated like that.”

He waited for an answer that didn’t come.

“Eddie isn’t here.”

“Then maybe you can help us.”

She couldn’t bear to answer, just stood there and held on to the door handle.

“How about it? Will you let us in?”

———

He had memorized the black felt-tip number from the kitchen counter and dialed one digit at a time.

The feeling of holding the whole fucking world in his hand, a push of a button away.

Then the lights in the room had been switched off. He’d had one number left. A few minutes later Pereira had come out the front entrance followed by three others, a big guy with a limp, a smaller one, and then someone who looked like a woman.

They’d left the office. But he stayed by the crack in the blind with the cell phone in his hand. They’d be back soon enough.

———

She hadn’t answered. Just left the door open and gone in. They closed it, walked down the unfamiliar hall with big furniture and pictures on the wall, frame to frame.