Clinch (24 page)

I cross the bridge and head towards the torch procession.

The shop signs creak on their hinges and occasionally make a snapping sound in the wind. I peer into the dark doorway. My heart is racing. I’m close now, I can smell it.

I put a cigar between my lips and rummage in my pockets, then open the door and step inside. The light switch clicks redundantly. Slowly, my eyes accustom themselves to the darkness. A long, sober line of black-dressed men in fur hats and woollen mittens passes in the street outside. The flickering of their torches penetrates the window set into the door. I read the nameplate of the residents. Nothing. A smooth-worn stone staircase winds upwards through the building. There’s an abiding smell of mulled wine.

I take the gold lighter from my pocket, shake it and, without success, try to make it work. Muttering, I turn around to face the stairs.

As I put my foot on the first step, a short, desperate scream cuts through the gloom and echoes between the stone walls. I freeze. The hair stands up on my neck and a shiver runs all the way down my spine, leaving my skin goosebumped. I stare up the staircase and listen.

The shop signs are still creaking. I can hear the gentle clattering sound of hooves further up the street. The scream must have come from the first or maybe the second floor.

I run up the stairs quickly, panting. Before I step onto the first-floor landing, I pause and listen again. Everything is silent. It must have been some Christmas drunk having a crack at his wife. I go up the two remaining steps in one leap. Immediately I wish I hadn’t.

‘Oh good God!’

At the far end of the stairwell, some three or four metres ahead of me, one of the wooden doors is open. I can see directly into the flat. The light of the hall lamp falls over a worn doormat and a pair of high ladies’ boots someone has put there. The hall is small and narrow. Someone has obstinately squeezed a secretaire into a cramped space by the door, but the piece lacks a chair. On top of it is a two-armed brass candlestick. An overcoat and a ladies’ umbrella hang from a couple of hooks in the light, floral wallpaper.

Sonja looks at me with her slanted eyes. She’s lying on her stomach in the hall, her head towards me, her lipstick smudged across her chin. In her dark sleeveless dress, her arms shine palely against the floor. Tears have painted long black stripes down her cheeks. Whimpering quietly, she holds out a pearl necklace in her bleeding hands as if offering it to me as a Christmas present.

The German with the bowler hat greets me with the same smile as in Yxsmedsgränd. He’s standing over Sonja, straddling her, his black overcoat buttoned all the way up, black gloves on his hands. In his right hand he holds a blood-caked stick bayonet that is near on half a metre long. The bastard nods, as if greeting me.

Sonja moans again. She manages to slide forwards a little. I take a step towards her. The blood from the bayonet is whisked all over the hall when the German lifts it up and thrusts the blade down.

The tip penetrates Sonja’s neck, cuts right through her throat and strikes the hall floor with a dull thud. Her eyes widen, then their light is extinguished. Her hand thumps against the floor, and the pearls make a rattling sound.

I turn and run down the stairs.

A horse with bells pulls a creaking gig across the bridge over Kungsgatan. I throw my unlit Meteor over the railing. The freezing air claws at my nose and in my lungs like steel wool. The banks of snow on either side of the street mute the sound of the race. I know that I’m slower than the murderer. I hope I can stay ahead until we catch up with the procession.

Quickly I draw closer to the march struggling up the hill. My pursuer is keeping up with me; I can hear his thudding boots. Do I have ten metres on him? Five? I don’t know, there’s no time to check.

I reach the tail end of the torches and change into a higher gear. I gain a couple of metres and throw myself into the left flank of the procession. Embers are flying through the air of the dark afternoon with a smell of burning paper and rank wool. Someone raises his voice but I can’t hear what he’s saying. I force aside a few more lines of men while, at the same time, removing my hat. For a moment I think I’ve got away from the German fucker, maybe I was hoping that he might have been looking the other way when I threw myself in among hundreds of witnesses, but then I see his dead left eye sparkling in the light of a torch just a few rows behind me.

Gradually I work my way to the right. When we pass Alcazar and cross David Bagares gata, I crouch down and slip away from the procession. Half running, I slip into a side street, open the first door I find on the right-hand side and throw myself inside. I press myself against the wall of the corridor and try to catch my breath.

Even if the German only stays with the procession for a few metres before he notices I’m no longer there, I’ll be safe. It’ll give me time to scamper down the steps to the Royal Library and disappear into Humlegården, which I know like the inside of my pocket.

But I don’t have time to take my plans any further. I’ve only just put my hand on the door handle when my pursuer is standing outside. He smiles as he draws the long bayonet from his coat, then opens the door and steps into the darkness. I back away. Sweat is running down my brow, stinging my eyes. Stumbling backwards, I tug at the doors on my left.

‘
Sagt hallo zum tot!
’ My pursuer slowly closes the space between us, holding the bayonet in front of him like a fencing foil.

Somewhere behind me a flight of steps goes up into the house, but I daren’t turn my back on him.

I keep tugging at the doors until one of them opens, and I tumble into a restaurant kitchen. Someone at Alcazar has been sloppy with the routines.

It’s a big kitchen with several worktops and a floor of black tiles. On the far side are four cookers under a row of windows where a bit of light comes in. Kitchen implements, pots and trays gleam in the comparative gloom. Quickly I look around for something sharp. My opponent makes an attack at once.

I dodge to the right and grip the knife-wielding arm with my left hand at the same time as I throw a hook with the other. The German flinches but the fist connects nonetheless and smashes into his left eye. There’s a crunch in my hand, and shooting pains. Something’s snapped.

The false eye jumps out of its socket and makes a little arc through the air before smashing against the hard floor. I put my right palm under his chin and push him back into one of the worktops with all my strength. As the edge of it crunches into his
lower back, making him snort with pain, I bend down and bite the fingers of his right hand as hard as I can.

The bayonet clatters as it hits the floor. The remains of the enamelled eye crunch under my foot. The iron-rich taste of blood eggs me on, and I take him in a clinch, though I might as well have embraced a main mast: he has no soft parts, only the sharp edges of muscle and bone. He smells rank. I let the blood and bits of skin run down my chin.

Despite my right fist being broken, and even though I’m the shorter of us, I feel I have the upper hand. I have spent many hours in situations no worse than this.

My old trainer once said that boxing, at its best, makes you feel properly alive. This is wrong. Boxing is at its best when you’re completely empty inside, pressing on like some kind of automatic doll. One movement is no more than a natural extension of another. The body is abandoned to the fight, pre-programmed and choreographed to answer in a certain way to a given situation, hardened through thousands of hours of training. The fight turns into a physical self-examination, a receipt for the time that’s been invested. Street fighting is really no different; it just lacks a system of rules.

Accompanied by the slamming of saucepans and cooking implements hitting the floor, we spin a couple of times in our furious dance between the benches. Both of us are quietly grunting with the exertion of it. Our cheeks graze against one another. My eye is right up close to his black eye socket.

I keep on his blind side. I chomp after his ear with my bloodied mouth but he reads my movement and clashes heads with me. My neck muscles smart, and my breath is wheezing. I shift myself into a lower position so I can push my skull bone into his carotid artery.

If I can work my shoulder and upper arm round on the other side, I can put him in a lock that way. He pushes me forwards but suddenly stops and steps back. There’s a stinging pain in my body when he thrusts his knee into my crotch.

While the pain is still hurtling inside my belly, he grabs hold of my back. He hangs himself on me, curls his legs around my body and locks one arm around my neck with the other.

I don’t have much time. My head is thumping with oxygen depletion. I stamp the heel of my boot on his toes, then drive my elbow as hard as I can into his side, but this fails to break the hold around my neck. I throw myself backwards in the hope that he’ll let go of me when we smash into the floor.

The fall winds him. Little droplets of saliva shoot up and land on my swelling, heated face. He’s moaning in my left ear but still clamped onto me.

We’re lying there between the worktops and I thrash with my legs, my eyes flickering and my field of vision starting to reduce. I claw for his healthy eye, but can’t get hold of it.

In a last expenditure of energy I fumble over the floor and find a sharp object. Without ever having held one, I know right away what it is. Everything I can hear seems to be heading into a great darkness. I close my hand around the fat handle and drive the meat thermometer into him.

The world around me is shaking and vibrating. I make another stab at him.

All the light is retracting into a black sun. Dusk falls quickly.

I stab again.

I wake on the murderer’s arm. It’s still dark outside. I’m cold. We’re both lying on our backs. I turn my head and look at him, staring at me now with his empty eye socket. That bowler hat of his has gone. He has one puncture wound through his cheek, and one on his forehead. The meat thermometer in his throat shows thirty-three degrees but I don’t know how long I’ve been out.

I stay where I am, trying to get a sense of whether I’m hurt. My right fist pulsates with pain and my head aches, but that’s all. I stand up on shaky legs, all sour with blood and coughing. I give the corpse a decent kick with the side of my foot. It jumps, rattling the fallen saucepans around it.

I kneel over the dead man. The German is smooth-shaven, with close-cropped hair like a con from Långholmen. The yellow, grinning teeth between his pale lips are undamaged, but the left side of his scalp is scarred in patches, as if he was hit once by a hail of shotgun pellets. For a moment I consider closing his blue eye.

I search him. I find some sort of badge in silver and gold in the shape of a flower, a key ring with about ten keys on it, an automatic lighter, a wallet with thirty kronor in banknotes, and a photograph with a group of smiling soldiers. I do not recognise their uniforms.

I take the money and replace his wallet in the inside pocket of his overcoat, then close the coat at the front and give the corpse a little pat. I am so glad that I kept my leather gloves on through
the entire fight – there’s less to tidy up, and now I’m in a bit of a hurry. I check the meat thermometer. It’s fallen to thirty-two degrees. I get out my comb from my inside pocket and pull it through my hair.

‘Kvisten doesn’t bare his head for anyone,’ I mutter as I pick up the hat from the floor and press it down on my head. Time to make my way home. I have to get rid of all my clothes and I should fix myself up with a water-tight alibi; it’s only a question of time before the police find both bodies. If I’m lucky, Alcazar will be closed tomorrow, but presumably the door to Sonja’s flat is still open, unless they’re already there. Luckily it’s not far to get home to Sibirien, and the streets are almost deserted even though it’s only seven o’clock.

‘Doris. Kvisten’s high-society alibi.’

It doesn’t get much tighter than that. If I can convince her to be there for me and put her reputation on the line, I’m home and dry. Anyway she doesn’t have much of a reputation to worry about. She’ll do it. She has to do it.

Before I leave the place, I wash the blood off my face under one of the taps, and do up all the buttons of my coat. On my way out I accidentally step on the bowler hat of the German.

After sneaking out the same way as I came in, I find that the blustering wind that comes hounding up Birger Jarlsgatan finds its way under my coat at once, and starts tearing at my bloodied rags. I pick up a handful of snow, pressing it against my right hand, and then quietly jog past the timber yard on the left and go down the stairs towards Engelbrektsplan.

I pass the mouth of the Brunkeberg Tunnel, lying there like the snout of a huge boar in the snow, and then hurry past the tobacconist’s. I’m dying for a damned smoke. The row of bare trees on Birger Jarlsgatan can already be glimpsed through the
falling snow. From there it’s more or less straight on all the way to Sibirien. I hardly meet a soul. The snow consumes all the sounds of the city, and everything is absolutely still.

Doris is waiting for me at home in the bed. All the lights in the flat have been left on. She’s wearing a white slip that clings to her bony body. The ashtray perched on her stomach is full of cigarette butts, gooey with lipstick. She has twiddled her way to a radio station playing jazz.

‘Evening.’

‘Where have you been?’ She looks at me with an uninterested expression. She’s been at her medicine again, and now has the same, soulless eyes that one sometimes sees in resigned, impoverished folk once their anger has brewed for too long, and is now transforming itself into an acidic bile that’s slowly corroding them from the inside. The only difference is that she has plenty of dough.

‘Just having a look around. What are you doing?’

I go into the wardrobe and root out an old sailor’s sack. I can hear Doris mumbling something as I come out and start undressing. The pain is burning in my right hand. A trumpet wails from the radio.

‘Did you say something?’

‘Listening to music.’

I empty the pockets of my clothes, stuff them into the sailor’s sack, change into a clean shirt and trousers and jump into a pair of old clogs. I pick up a cigar and bite off the end.

‘Are you finding anything good?’

She shrugs. The ashtray is in danger of overturning in the bed. ‘Why don’t you use the cigar cutter I gave you today?’ ‘Cigar cutter’ is difficult for her, and she slurs as she attempts it.

‘I forget that I have it.’

On the wall next to the sleeping-alcove one can see the splashes of blood from the time she whacked me on the nose. I put on my things, go up to her as she lies there with her breasts almost popping out of her shift, and pick up the box of matches that’s on her stomach.

‘Can you fill the big saucepan with water and put it on the boil? I’ll be back in a moment.’

She nods torpidly.

With the sailor’s sack, a bottle of paraffin, and a scrap of sausage for the cats in the yard, I head down the stairs and go out the back door. The night is cold and clear. A big rat from the latrine scurries across the snow and disappears behind the sheds. Someone has left the potato cellar door open. There’s no sign of the cats, and the snow-covered water pump looks like a snowman made by a mentally impaired child.

I kick up an elongated hole in the snow, lay the sack in it and drench it in paraffin. While the clothes are absorbing it, I go over to the potato cellar and stick my head in. It stinks of rancid humidity and rat droppings. The smells remind me of the isolation cells at Långholmen. I shiver and close the door.

When about a minute has gone by, I strike a match and watch as my clothes go up in flames. The sharp smell of paraffin fills the courtyard. As I stand there watching the sailor’s sack burning, I eat the sausage. In the window I see Lundin briefly passing, shaking his head. Pity about the new overcoat and boots, but there’s nothing else for it. The goons’ technicians are too smart.

By the time I come back up into the flat, the water is boiling. Doris has perked up a bit. She’s sitting at the kitchen table with a glass of wine and the newspaper, and she’s even put on a dark dress with a long line of big white buttons.

My clothes fall in a heap on the rag rug. I pour cold water into the bathing tub, shift it to the middle of the floor and top it up with boiling water. Doris stares at me without any reserve.

I get into the water and hang my head, an enormous fatigue emanating through my limbs. I hear her getting to her feet. She lowers a tea towel into the water, then scrubs my back with it.

‘I’ve killed a bloke.’

I’m still hanging my head. The hand that’s washing my back stops rubbing for a few moments.

‘I’m sure he deserved it.’

She goes back to her scrubbing. I exhale.

‘He’s killed at least three people, maybe four, and he tried to finish me off as well.’

‘Well, then,’ she says. ‘Are you in trouble?’

I nod. ‘It’s probably just a question of time before they’re at the door.’ I hesitate, then go on: ‘Would you lie for me?’

Doris drops the towel into the water, stands up, goes around the bathing tub and turns her back on me. She picks up my clothes, starts folding them, and piles them on the kitchen table. When she turns the trousers upside down, the loose change and gold lighter clatter onto the floor. She picks up the lighter and fidgets with a pack of Camels from the table. The lighter clicks a few times without result.

‘That’s a lovely lighter.’ She holds it up before her. Her mouth turns to a bloodless streak. ‘Where did you get it?’

‘It’s broken. Doris? Would you?’

‘Why are you going around with a broken lighter?’

‘Don’t change the subject now.’ I’m cold, sitting there naked in the tub. ‘Would you?’

She puts the lighter back in the trousers and pats them down. Then, in the midst of the deep silence that follows, there’s a hard
knock on the door. Someone tugs at the handle before knocking again. Doris looks up with a harried expression.

‘For God’s sake,’ I whisper, rising from the bathing tub with water dripping everywhere. ‘Would you?’

The goons that have come to put me in irons aren’t the same as the last time. Both are in uniform. One of them is an elderly, red-nosed bloke with spectacles and large, droopy ears. The other is a severe type with a clipped moustache and a hand on the hilt of his sabre. Wearing the towel wrapped around my hips, I reverse into the gloomy hall.

‘Kvist?’ The older of the two men sniffs.

I nod.

‘Turn to the wall!’ The younger of them speaks with an irritable, shrill voice.

‘Can’t one even have a Christmas soak these days?’

I smile and turn around, and as I do so I notice some cobwebs in the corner between the ceiling and the wall. The pain cuts through my right hand when they handcuff me. Someone presses the base of his hand against my shoulder blades.

I can feel them tensing up when they hear the sound of Doris’s heels. With a swishing sound, one of them draws his sabre halfway out of its scabbard. I look around.

She comes into the living room and sits on top of the desk. Without shaking, she puts a Camel into her cigarette holder. We watch her in silence. In the gloom, her bright buttons shine like the whites of a chimney-sweep’s eyes. She fluffs up her hair.

‘So? Would one of these gentlemen be kind enough to offer me a light?’

I hear at least one of the goons start patting his uniform,
to look for a box of matches. I nail Doris with my eyes, but she doesn’t return my gaze, and then she sighs.

‘Excuse us, my lady, we didn’t know you were here.’

Doris finds a box of matches on the desk. The flame briefly lights up her narrow face, her brown eyes and the beauty spot high up on her cheek. She’s touched up her lipstick.

‘What’s going on?’

The match goes out in a cloud of grey cigarette smoke.

‘You’ll have to excuse us, Miss, we have our orders.’

‘We’ve been here all evening.’ My voice seems nervy. ‘We had Christmas luncheon at Metropol and then we came back here.’

‘Shut up!’ The goon shoves the palm of his hand even harder into my back. My head thumps into the wall. Doris is still refusing to look at me.

‘Let’s take him onto the landing and dress him there,’ decides the younger one. ‘You’ll have to drive him to the station. I’ll have a word with the lady in the meantime. Where are his clothes?’

Doris nods towards the kitchen. The younger one stamps off, while the older one takes me by the crook of my arm and tries to drag me out of the door. I resist. Doris looks at me, nods briefly and puts her hand on her heart. I smile, I can breathe again. The goon pulls me out into the stairwell.

The car is cold. I sit in the back seat, and the older constable drives at a snail’s pace, hunched over the steering wheel. The powder snow whirls all about us as we move along. One of the headlights is broken. I’m shivering. We travel through a ghost city, the restaurants and shops all closed, and no sign of any trams and hardly even cars.

‘You remember when they buried those Ådalen blokes?’ The goon in the front gets out a handkerchief and blows his nose loudly, with one hand.

‘Certainly I do.’

‘Everything stopped. People put down their tools, there was no traffic for five minutes.’

‘Until the factory whistles sounded again.’

‘This is a bit like that, isn’t it? Like the grave.’

In Vasaparken the ice rink lies deserted. A tramp leans against a tree like an abandoned snowman. I have the idea he could be dead. As we pass, a stray dog cocks its hind leg against a tobacco kiosk by St Eriksplan. We turn off towards Gloomholmen.

I wonder what the goon is talking to Doris about. There’s really not so very much he could ask the director’s wife. The subject is too delicate. I’m in her hands. There’s not a lot to be done about it. My head hurts, and my right hand is pulsating with pain.

DCI Alvar Berglund is properly dressed in a jacket, waistcoat and a white shirt, also a tiepin with a swastika. He smiles welcomingly as I walk into the little interrogation room, then he puts down his spectacles, which he is in the process of polishing, and stands up to shake hands. I’ve been let out of the handcuffs, probably on Berglund’s order. We shake hands, his grip cutting into my fist like a punch at an already broken rib. I break into a sweat but force myself to smile.

‘Kvist! How nice! How’s your Christmas been?’

‘I’ve had worse.’

We make ourselves comfortable opposite one another.

‘Have you solved the Christmas crossword yet?’

‘Haven’t had time.’

‘You’ve been busy?’ Berglund smiles again, twists the tip of his grey moustache, and taps his pen at the table as if to mark out the time that passes between each reply.

‘You know how it is.’

‘Yes.’ Berglund nods. ‘We’ve had our hands quite full here as well. Never seen a Christmas day quite like it.’ He stops drumming for a few seconds before he goes back to it.

‘I thought I’d be seeing Olsson.’ I regret the words as soon as they have flown out of my mouth.

‘The head of the Criminal Division? Why on earth would you think that?’

‘I thought it was about Zetterberg?’

‘Olsson is on Gotland for Christmas but you’ll see him. In good time.’

‘So why am I here?’

Berglund smiles again, broader than ever, and stops his tapping before offering a surprise: ‘There’s a witness on Kungsgatan, a widow who sits in the window all day.’

‘I’ll be damned!’ This whole charade is starting to bore me.

‘Yes. And she freed you.’

I meet Berglund’s eyes. Like all goons, he takes a little detour before he gets to the point. I decide to take things into my own hands, to be rid of it.