Biding its time.
Hollowing me out.
MONDAY 3 DECEMBER
T
he man in black landed on the train platform without making a noise. His knees bent with the impact, muffling part of the sound, and the rubber soles of his shoes absorbed the rest. He exhaled and looked around: he was the only person to get off the train. A quick turn and he closed the door; his departure was supposed to go unnoticed.
The air was fresh and cold. A sense of triumph began to course through his veins.
Ratko was back in Sweden. Everything had gone exactly the way he had planned. All you needed was the drive, the will, the lack of compromise. They thought they had him, that he was under their thumb.
The hell he was.
The conductor opened a door further up. Ratko moved silently and fairly swiftly towards the station building – someone passing in the night at the Nässjö train station, a restless soul.
He glanced at his watch: 03:48 – the train was almost on time.
As he walked around the corner of the station, he glanced over his shoulder. The conductor had his back turned: he hadn’t noticed him at all. And why should he?
He turned to face the sleeping town. The Norwegian citizen Runar Aakre was presumably slumbering in his sleeping compartment, headed for Stockholm.
He walked down the esplanade. It had been ages since he’d been here. Suddenly he was struck by a sense of uneasiness: what if something had gone wrong? It was better not to take anything for granted. Anything could have happened to the car: it could have been stolen, be iced over, or the battery might be dead.
Counting on bad luck, that’s certainly the last thing I should do,
Ratko thought irritably.
He cut across Stortorget, the main square, already cold. This was going to be one long chilly walk.
A bunch of bicycles were parked outside the culture centre on Rådhusgatan. Quickly, he selected an unlocked lady’s bike.
This would be even chillier, but it would speed things up. Heading north towards Jönköpingsvägen, he pedalled quickly.
It was hell: headwinds, slippery roads, darkness. He was panting already.
Soon,
he thought,
I’ll be there soon.
The trip had taken its toll. The phoney passport had felt like it was burning in his pocket. At every border control he’d been nervous, almost unhinged. He knew why.
Ratko no longer had the upper hand. They had taken away his power. He had been allowed to keep his nightclub, but the rest of his privileges were gone. Something like that was very noticeable in a city like Belgrade. People lost respect for him. His wife asked for a divorce. Not even his reputation as a war hero was any good: to his people he was a has-been who hadn’t done the right thing in Kosovo, to his superiors he was the guy whose mismanagement had cost them a shipment worth fifty million. The workers at the cigarette factory had been forced to work without pay. The entire organization lost momentum. Now everyone had to work twice as hard to make up for the loss, the loss caused by his mistake. How could ten-year-old clean-up actions compare to that?
He pedalled away. Damn, it was hilly, he’d forgotten about that – hilly and mossy and sheer hell.
They’d expected Ratko to give up, certain that the threat of the Hague tribunal would reduce him to crawling off to some suburban hell-hole and spending the rest of his life going to soccer games once a week, screwing jailbait and guzzling slivovitz. The hell it would.
He was a free agent now, his own man. He would do as he damn well pleased.
And she could sit there and rot, that deceitful whore of a wife of his, and figure out who the hell would pay for her clothes and drinks in the future.
The trip back to Belgrade a month ago had gone smoothly. No one had challenged his passport and the guys had been waiting for him in Skopje as planned. The journey by car to Belgrade had been as tedious as usual, but some slivovitz had helped him pass the time. They were all pretty sloshed by the time they arrived and no one remembered to take the bogus passport away from him.
After that, Ratko was left out in the cold. His superiors no longer contacted him. If he wanted to have bodyguards, he had to pay them himself.
The bitterness ate away at him and he pedalled more furiously.
They were weaklings, he thought, they had no idea what it was like to operate out in the field. They didn’t know how to survive in the enemy camp.
A downhill slope. He relaxed, once again filled with triumph as he braved the piercing winds.
He sure fooled them! Just slipped away without their knowledge. No one knew where he was: he had gone up in smoke.
Runar Aakre of the Red Cross had rented a car in Belgrade for a trip to Hungary. At the border he had explained, in English, that he needed to deal with a few things in Szeged, and that it would only take an hour or so. He had all his papers ready, the green card, the international insurance policy. The Customs officers had studied him, shining their flashlights through the car windows. A copy of
Verldens Gang,
the Norwegian evening paper, was resting on the passenger seat in front. It was twenty-five days old, but the Customs officer didn’t notice; knowing that it would come in handy, Ratko had taken it with him from the airport in Oslo.
They waved him through.
Of course, he didn’t go to Szeged. He continued all the way to Budapest. There he slept a few hours in the back seat of the car before abandoning it in a furniture store parking lot.
The tickets were waiting for him at a downtown post office box. He had booked them over the phone in a bar, paid for them with a clean credit card and used the post office box as an address. He had used it before.
The wind shifted direction and increased in force, whipping at him sideways. The bike’s tyres skidded in the slush and Ratko groaned. Oh well, he could take the cold weather in his stride. Soon he would never have to deal with it again. His new operations would be based in locations where it never ever snowed. All he needed now was to finalize things: the financing end, the customers, his associates.
It was certainly foolish to leave Serbia when the Hague tribunal was sniffing after him. No one had believed that he would do such a thing – they all expected him to rot away in that suburban hell-hole. But you could travel through Western Europe without being seen, as long as you took local express trains. Attempting the milk runs from the former Eastern Bloc was unthinkable, but the commuter trains for the business set destined for major cities barely slowed down as they crossed borders. It was a roundabout route, but it was necessary. He had to reach Sweden and he had to meet his eastern contact.
The train trip had been nerve-racking but uneventful: Vienna, Munich, Hamburg, Copenhagen. Ratko had gone ashore in Limhamn last night along with four hundred homeward-bound Swedes, all carting crates of beer. He had even lugged along a crate himself just to blend in. And he had sung along with a stinking-drunk man from Trelleborg as he passed through the passport-control zone.
The night train to Stockholm had pulled out exactly on schedule at 10:07 p.m. He had slept like a rock until 12:30 a.m.
He rode past Äng, pedalling swiftly and silently, not wanting to be seen. The entire town was asleep.
Then he made a right turn, disappearing into the woods, an uphill ride. The tree trunks supplied cover, making him invisible again. The road was in poor shape, making it even harder to ride a bike, and Ratko fell twice. Finally he saw the road he was looking for coming up on the left. He braked and realized how spent he was. His legs were shaking, his hands were showing the first traces of frostbite and his nose was running copiously. He rested briefly, leaning on the handlebars and panting. He hurled the bike into the woods –
Rust to pieces, you fucker –
then strode along the dry crusty snow to the garage.
There it was, the shed painted in the traditional brick-red paint developed in Falun, in Sweden’s iron-mining district. His pulse rate stepped up. What if something had gone wrong, what would he do?
Fingers shaking, Ratko felt the wall at the back of the shed, thinking for a split second that it was gone, feeling panic welling up inside. Then he found what he was looking for. The key was there, exactly where he had left it.
He staggered over to the front of the shed, unlocked the doors and pushed them open, having to put his shoulder against the door to plough away a thin layer of snow. He stood there looking at the car, an unremarkable heap of junk, a two-door Fiat Uno from 1987. He pulled out the sticker that he’d peeled off the licence plate of a truck back in Malmö. The plate number didn’t match, but no one would notice that unless they looked closely. He secured it in place, using the double-side tape that he had in his pocket.
This was it.
Ratko walked around the car, groped on top of the front right-hand tyre and found the car keys. He unlocked the car, got in and turned the key in the ignition.
The engine caught, sputtered, coughed and died.
He swallowed.
One more try: sputter, cough, now she was running. Relieved, he expelled his breath and noticed that his forehead was beaded with sweat despite the cold. He revved the engine a few times while the car was still in the garage, allowing the engine to get warm and the oil to flow freely.
While the car was slowly defrosting he leaned over and opened the glove compartment, trying to locate a tiny brass key. It was there as well.
He closed his eyes, resting while confidence radiated throughout his system.
The money was safe. It was in a safe-deposit box in the vault of the SE-Banken office at Gamla Stan in Stockholm. It was never his intention to use the money himself, it was meant to cover expenses that might arise in his cigarette operations, but they had only themselves to blame. They had sent him out into the cold and now they would have to pay.
Ratko didn’t understand why they had left him in the lurch like this. All right, so that damned shipment was worth a great deal of money, but it still didn’t explain why his superiors would cold-shoulder him. Not even the fact that he was wanted by the war tribunal should have had repercussions like this. Serbia was crawling with suspected war criminals who were still highly respected.
It was something else. He couldn’t quite put his finger on it. Maybe someone, a real high-roller, wanted him out of the way, wanted to take over his power and his authority.
They can never take my place,
he thought.
No one else has my experience, my contacts.
He stepped on the gas and revved the engine again. Heat was beginning to spread throughout the car.
In addition to the money, Ratko had some other unfinished business in Stockholm. The shipment might be long gone, but he didn’t like leaving any loose ends.
Slowly he let the car roll out into the night.
Advent stars hung crookedly in the window of the company apartment. Last Friday, a woman from the contracting company had been there to decorate the place and had put them up. Annika stared at them: stars fashioned out of straw, swaying in the heat rising up from the radiators. She was amazed at the way people put so much effort into meaningless pursuits, like wasting time and energy on Christmas decorations.
She went back to bed and stared at the wall, concentrating on the pattern behind the thin layer of paint, purple medallions. The courtyard building was deserted. Only the hard-rock fan on the bottom floor was in. She closed her eyes and let the bass line resonate.
This is no good,
Annika thought.
I can’t live like this.
She rolled over on her back and stared at the ceiling, seeing the spider webs sway in the draught from the broken living-room window. She traced the cracks, broken and irregular, with her gaze. Found the butterfly, the car, the skull. The note of loneliness began to ring in her left ear. She tossed back over on her side again and put a pillow over her head, but she couldn’t shut it out, could never, ever hide. Despair hit her, causing her body to contract into a hard ball. She threw her head back and heard the sound, her sound, the uncontrolled sobbing. She recognized it and wasn’t afraid, she let it rip through her, knowing that it would end since her body couldn’t take it for ever.
Afterwards she was spent and thirsty, sore from the effort. The back pain was the worst bit, it never really went away. Tension made her stomach churn. She lay there for a while, panting and heavy, and let the tears dry on her cheeks.
I wonder what my neighbours think. They might think I’m losing my mind.
Annika got up, felt dizzy and walked to the kitchen touching the walls for support. The straw stars swayed. The tap dripped. The refrigerator was empty.
She sat down at the kitchen table, sank down with her arms on the cold table top, her head in her hands, and stared at her grandmother’s brass candlestick. Sofia Katarina and Arvid had received it on their wedding day and it had stood on the sideboard at Lyckebo since then.
Annika closed her eyes. Gran was gone. She could barely recall the funeral, only the despair, the tears, the sensation of helplessness. There had been quite a crowd; many staring eyes, whispers and reproachful glances.
Ashes to ashes, dust to dust . . .
She got up and went over to the couch in the living room. A cloud of dust whooshed up in the air as she sat down. She looked at the phone. Birgitta had called after the funeral and asked her why she had been so mean to their mother.
‘Aren’t you ever satisfied?’ Annika had screamed at her. ‘When will you leave me alone? How much do I have to be punished for the fact that I was loved? When will you be satisfied? When I’m dead?’
‘You’re nuts,’ Birgitta said. ‘People are right. Poor you.’
Gran hadn’t owned much, but, as expected, her family squabbled over her possessions. The candlestick had been the only item that Annika wanted.
She pulled up her legs on the couch, rocking, rocking. The grocery bag from ICA covering a window rose and sank, rose and sank.