Clinch (4 page)

‘Someone died in a fire in the night,’ says a lady in a skirt, jacket and blue cape, apparently a secretary on her way home from work, when I speak to her. ‘Someone called Zettergren.’

I clench my fist in my pocket.

‘Zetterberg,’ corrects a delivery man, clearly in no hurry to get anywhere.

‘He lit the gas himself,’ says a grey-haired bloke with a goatee and an elegant walking stick. I think I’ve seen him before but my memory isn’t quite what it used to be. Several people in the group back him up.

I’ve heard enough. It wouldn’t be the first time that some indebted wretch chose that way out. Quite the opposite. Nowadays, hardly a minute goes by without scores of executives and high-ranking public officials jumping off the edge.

‘They haven’t brought him out yet,’ says the lady in the skirt and jacket. Her eyes shine as eyes often do when humans sense blood.

‘Why not?’

‘They said they were waiting for the county medical officer.’

I have a sudden headache. I take the cigar out of my mouth and massage the top of my nose. I shouldn’t have gone in so hard. ‘Should have given the mirror a miss.’

‘What was that?’ The old man stares at me.

‘You what?’

‘You said something about a mirror.’

‘I’ll be damned if I did.’

One of the goons shakes his sabre at a couple of curious kids. A half-full tram passes by, a boy in a Vega cap cadging a ride on the carriage’s back coupler.

‘Here they come!’ the lady next to me cries in falsetto. First out, carrying one end of a stretcher, comes a corpulent young man whose tight-fitting trousers stick around his wide thighs. Zetterberg has been covered with a clean sheet. The other bearer is small of stature, grimacing with the exertion, and his face is quite red. I remember the taxing stairs to Zetterberg on the top floor.

Halfway to the mortuary car, Zetterberg’s arm drops away from the body, falling out and dangling like a pendulum. The signet ring drops off the corpse’s thin fingers and hits the street. It bounces a few times before it stops in the gutter.

A sigh goes through the spectators. The small bearer seems to swear silently to himself. He bends his legs, rests one of the stretcher’s handles on his knee and reaches for the ring. For a moment the stretcher is on the verge of overturning, but in the nick of time the bloke picks up the ring and manages to get
Zetterberg back into balance. The lady next to me is panting with agitation.

I’ve seen enough. I leave the little crowd. The cold, razing December wind finds its way under my collar and into my sleeves, leaving the skin goose pimpled. My feet are colder than ever.

The bell on the door tinkles welcomingly when half an hour later I arrive at Lundin’s Undertakers, bending my head as I go in. The premises seem to strain under the weight of the house’s five floors, like a delivery boy under a piano. The office consists of a little tobacco-smelling reception, a desk, a couple of visitors chairs, a telephone and a potted palm tree with brown fronds.

A woman is sitting with her back towards me. Under her black hat is a grey knot of hair. Her head is bowed and her shoulders shake from time to time, although she doesn’t make a sound. Her long skirt has dragged through the gutter on the way here.

‘We can arrange for a more elegant hearse from Frey’s rentals agency if you wish,’ says Lundin in his timid salesman’s manner. He looks her over and nods at the wall-mounted telephone. I shake my head. Out in the street a car honks its horn and a couple of agitated voices are swearing. A gang of excitable boys are causing a racket. I move an invisible bottle to my lips, as if having a drink. Lundin nods again, and the old woman blows her nose sonorously. I start pacing about on the spot.

‘And what do we do about flowers?’

I run my hand across my chin several times and make a dry, smacking sound with my lips. One after the other, the clocks of St Stefan and St Johannes, and Lundin’s American timepiece inside the flat behind him, toll, seven times each.

Weddings and funerals entitle one to extra rations of schnapps, and Lundin often takes a part-payment for his services in spirits, which he then sells on at high prices or dilutes with embalming fluid and flogs on the cheap. The rationing system, he likes to say, is the best thing to happen to the country apart from the Spanish Flu. He keeps the bottles in the safest place in the funeral home: a child’s coffin in the cool room. I take a deep breath and button up my overcoat.

The room hardly measures twenty metres square and has no windows. The walls are tiled in white porcelain. The cold is sudden and harsh, and smells of forgotten, foetid flowers. A set of black tails lies on one of the long benches, but on the other are two small, white coffins of the simplest model. Under the benches are spacious basins in which Lundin, in the summer, keeps large blocks of ice under a layer of wood shavings. Beneath each of the basins is a drain.

The desolate echo of my steps rings out as I cross the rustred clinker floor. I slide my fingers under the lid of one of the child’s coffins. The sweat breaks out of my pores. My hands are trembling, my nails scrabble intensely at the edge. It sounds as if I’m with a Marconi operator on a ship in distress.

‘For Christ’s sake, Kvisten.’

I don’t recognise my own voice. The lid opens. Inside the coffin, the bottles lie in neat rows, wrapped in flimsy brown or green paper. I don’t check the manufacturers’ brands.

A half-litre
, I mime at Lundin on my way out and hold up the bottle. He nods. Over the door hangs a white tapestry with the words
Order in All Things
embroidered in red thread.

Moments later I’m sitting in my kitchen. On the windowsill lies a dusty, brown-speckled conch shell with six spikes. Flames crackle in the fireplace. Next to the fireplace is a basket of wood
and a short axe. A couple of rag rugs from Ström cover the floor. A cigar goes out in the ashtray.

I sit at the table hectoring myself to get through the half-litre of aquavit. My shirt is unbuttoned and my hair stands on end. The newspaper lies untouched in front of me. I share
Social-Demokraten
with three of my neighbours. I get to read it last on the condition that the crossword has been left unsolved. The front page announces that the Swedish Match Company is under new management, diphtheria is raging up in Katarina parish, and Hitler and his regiment of scouts are on the rampage in Berlin.

A jazz trumpet wails from the radio of the spiritualist who lives on the other side of the wall. The aquavit sizzles through my system, making the vein on my forehead throb violently. My hands rest on the table between the bottle and my schnapps glass. My trainer always said they were too small in relation to their strength. The scars run higgledy-piggledy across them, my fingers crooked from all the little fractures. My left-hand little finger ends abruptly in a knot of red-streaked skin. Sometimes I still feel a smarting pain where the topmost joint should have been. I still feel iron eating its way through flesh and bone.

I lift my hand and gaze at the crackled photograph I have hidden underneath it. I close one of my eyes. She had pigtails and a cornflower-blue dress. I know that, I bought her the dress on the same day that I bore her on my shoulders to the photographer. She’s mainly her mother’s daughter: the eyes are hers, also the mouth.

I fire new life into the cigar with the gold lighter. I read the name engraved on it and remember Leonard’s hand touching my cheek. The empty schnapps glass jumps when I thump my fist on the table. I refill the glass, raise it in a toast, and mumble,
‘Zetterberg! Cheers to you, you damned self-slaughterer! You’ve swindled me out of four hundred and fifty kronor!’

I throw my head back and chuck down the contents. A dog barks from somewhere up in Vanadislunden. I peer out of the kitchen window. The top of the hill is crowned by the water tower that holds tens of thousands of litres. I imagine the brick building breaking apart, and the water pouring down the hill and washing away the whole district.

I fill the glass a final time, then pick up the letter from Elofsson, which has been lying on the kitchen table, and read it again. The chair topples over backwards when I stand up. I laugh emptily, regain my balance, and go over to the fireplace. I open the hatch with the fire poker. Heat radiates over my hands. I toss the letter inside and go back to the table. I toast the empty air, and the warmth of the schnapps washes through my chest and stomach.

Drunk as I am, at first I mistake the hammering, believing it to be Lundin nailing down the lid of yet another poor man’s coffin. But soon enough I realise that someone is thumping at the door.

Goon knocking.

Two men in black suits and sturdy overcoats are standing outside the door. The younger of them is a pale sod, with ginger tufts of hair sticking out from beneath his bowler hat, and a downy, sparse moustache. The older of them has tired brown eyes and a receding chin. A thickset type, he stands slightly behind his colleague. These are no normal goons, but they are still goons. I can smell it.

‘Harry Kvist?’ The elder of them holds up his silver badge. Number 26, Criminal Division.

I stagger backwards into the cramped, dark hall. Narrow spaces are good if you get too many of them coming for you at the same time. They close in fast. I narrow one eye. My right punch flies through the gloom. I don’t know if it’s the drink or the older man’s lack of a chin, but I miss by a couple of millimetres. His stubble rasps against the top of my hand.

The other goon hits me hard across the left knee with a wooden baton. The blow sends me reeling.

‘Too low!’ I drawl. ‘Too low, damn it!’

The older one jabs at me with his right, but I duck and reappear on his starboard side. The baton comes flying from port. I hide my chin behind my shoulder and press my fist against my temple and ear. My hand shrieks as if it’s broken. It isn’t, it’s just full of old bits of bone.

I fall backwards to the floor with both the goons on top of me. The younger of them straddles me at once. He lands his right
fist on my eye and immediately follows this up with a baton blow across the top of my head. A lovely, pure flash of pain cuts through my intoxication. I shake my head to see if I’m bleeding. I try to resist but my muscles won’t do as they’re told. I think I’m smiling. I can’t feel my legs.

‘The swine is drunk and all.’

They heave me onto my side and clap my hands in irons behind my back before dragging me out of the flat and down the stairs, each goon firmly gripping one of my upper arms. They’ve hung my jacket over my shoulders and pressed down my hat on my head. My feet, thumping on every step, seem to wake some life into my legs again.

The cracked leather seat in the back of the squad car is cold against my hands. The motor splutters and starts; we steer into Roslagsgatan. I am also spluttering.

Outside, the dark city flickers by rapidly. I close one of my eyes. The dairy company’s new automated illuminations have been switched on. A man has loaded several long planks across the saddle and handlebars of his bicycle, and is sitting on these, pedalling with his knees pointing out. Droves of unemployed blokes are hanging about by Vasaparken.

My breathing feels heavy. I make a wheezing sound and cough again. A group of dockers are hanging about outside Restaurant NORMA, close to the Atlas wall, the scene of a notorious murder of a whore in March. They gesticulate wildly, as if in dispute about something.

I look at the two short-cropped necks in front of me. Something in the car smells of old sweat. In the middle of St Eriksplan, a cluster of street missionaries stand together, immersed in prayer and holding hands. The blue neon of the tobacconist’s shines like phosphorescence. Its glow envelops the members of the
congregation, their eyes closed, and transforms them into a sickly little bunch.

The vehicle lurches all over the place, and I have difficulty staying upright in the bends. These goons are not the normal, beat-patrolling drunks with sabres, and they don’t take me to the Ninth District station house, which would have been the closest. The car banks hard to the left towards Kungsholmen, and I tumble into the door on the right. My hat falls off. The leather seat creaks as I fly around. There’s a thumping pain under my left eye, and I wonder if they’ve opened the fracture in my zygomatic bone that ‘The Mallet’ Sundström gave me in 1922.

‘You think I’m afraid of goons, you bastards?’

It doesn’t sound convincing. My mouth is well oiled with schnapps and the words come slithering out in any old way they like. The younger policeman in the passenger seat turns round quickly. The first baton blow comes in from the side. I pull my face back. The second attempt is also directed at my head. From above, this time. The baton thumps against the ceiling. The shoulder is the only possibility. I throw my head and body to the left, let the blow roll down towards my elbow. The jacket they’ve hung over my shoulders glides off. The pain is bracing, sharpening the senses.

‘Take it easy!’ the policeman at the wheel yells at his colleague. He purses his mouth under the moustache.

I laugh, cough, and laugh again. ‘I could drink twice as much and still be quicker than you, you bloody swine!’

It’s true. With my hands free I could go fifteen rounds against him without taking a single punch. The greenhorn’s baton moves a little, but he manages to control himself.

We go across the bridge to Kungsholmen and turn abruptly to the left. A girl is watching her reflection in a window, the hem of
her skirt under her coat stiffened with the dirt of Fleminggatan. The Strand is showing a film starring Harold Lloyd.

What the hell do the goons want? I turned the kid onto his side in Bellevue, surely he can’t have choked on his own blood? Or frozen to death? And I didn’t go in so bloody hard when I was collecting the bicycles. In the end, whatever it’s about, it’s bad news for Kvisten.

I watch the greenhorn relaxing his jaw slightly in the passenger seat. The other goon, the one without a chin, who’s driving, starts whistling ‘A Sailor’s Grave’. I snort. I’ll eat my hat if we’re not heading for Kronoberg, where the goons have their headquarters.

By a wood pile along one of Fleminggatan’s walls, a boy is holding a run-over rat by the tail, swinging it menacingly at his friends. The grey-black rat sways slowly back and forth like a sooty, rain-soaked flag. When the boy notices me looking, his eyes flash devilishly, and the dead rat is flung against my side window.

‘Damned whelps!’ hisses the ginger-haired goon as the boys make a run for it.

A thick string of blood crawls across the window like a red caterpillar.

They leave me sitting barefoot in the piss-stinking cell for a good while before they come to get me. Two different constables put me in handcuffs, this time in front of my body. I have to walk with my arms hooked into theirs, and my hands on my waistband to hold them up, because they took my braces as soon as I got here. I limp along without making any trouble.

My body, my head and my knee are all aching from the earlier rough treatment. A decent-sized swelling simmers below my left eye. My head is throbbing. The sharp scents of the cell seem
to have impregnated my shirt and trousers. Several times I am almost overwhelmed by the impulse to vomit, and I tighten my sore muscles when the policemen’s grip on my arms grows more insistent.

We go sideways through the doorway into the tobacco-reeking interrogation room. Without removing my handcuffs, they put me on a little wooden chair in front of a table. The room is not much bigger than the corner of a boxing ring. It has no windows. I have a feeling I’ve been here before. The constables walk out.

I need a cigar. My thoughts gnaw at me despite my thumping head. It has to be the boy. Surely he couldn’t have frozen to death in the park? Anyway, I didn’t leave any fingerprints in the sports car, and the rain should have taken care of footprints.

The door opens behind my back. An elderly man with a moustache the colour of a certain kind of driftwood pinches the front creases of his trousers and takes a seat on the other side of the table. The waxed tips of his moustache point upwards, in the style of Kaiser Wilhelm or the King. His well-tailored suit almost exactly matches the colour of his moustache. His necktie is slightly droopy. He removes his gold-rimmed spectacles and gets out a white handkerchief. In silence, he polishes every millimetre of the lenses. His handkerchief is embroidered with a red monogram but I can’t see what it says.

Someone yells on the other side of the wall and a few muted thuds can be heard. Quick footsteps sound up and down the corridor outside. A bloke starts groaning.

The man makes eye contact and nods, with a smile. For an instant, the tips of his moustache seem to point directly up. I smile back and grunt.

‘My name is Alvar Berglund, I’m a detective chief inspector. We have a few questions for you.’

Berglund puts on his spectacles. I wheeze. Berglund produces a fountain pen and a notebook from a briefcase and arranges these items in front of himself. First he puts the pen on top of the book, then he changes his mind and puts it to the right of it, before excusing himself and swiftly leaving the room.

My chair scrapes across the floor as I push it against the wall to my left. I lean my head on the yellow-painted surface, closing my eyes and trying to cross my arms over my chest. The handcuffs cut into my skin. I breathe heavily with my mouth open.

Suddenly my heart leaps. I open my eyes.

The damned gold lighter. Engraved and everything. It’s still in my trouser pocket at home.

‘So,’ says Berglund after coming back and sitting down and making himself and his spectacles comfortable. ‘We’re wondering about your whereabouts last night, between eight and a quarter past nine?’

He smiles and twists the left side of his moustache. His shirt-sleeve is ornamented with a cufflink of gold with two crossed fasces over three crowns. I lift my handcuffed hands and massage the base of my nose with my forefinger and thumb. The pain darts around my head when I accidentally brush against my swollen eye.

‘Between eight and a quarter past nine?’

‘Exactly. In the evening.’

‘I must have been at home. I came home before eight.’

Berglund nods and makes a first note on the white sheet of paper before he goes on: ‘I see. Did you meet anyone after nine?’

I stretch my neck first to the left, then the right.

‘No, I was alone. I did the crossword in
Social-Demokraten
.’

‘Me too,’ says Berglund and adds: ‘It got the better of me.’

‘Not me.’

‘Did you know that one about the loser at Breitenfeldt?’

‘Tilly? Everyone knows that, don’t they?’

‘Oh yes, that’s right. I’ll remember that. Tilly.’ Berglund’s pen rasps across the paper. ‘How many years of schooling did you have?’

‘Two.’

The dust lies thickly on the glass lampshade dangling over the table. Up in a corner of the room the ceiling has cracked. My headache has changed; it’s grown duller and more persistent. Soon we’ll be there. With Leonard. I know how these bastards work.

‘What were you doing before you came home that evening?’

‘Working. I had a job down on Kungsgatan.’

‘And what do you do?’ His spectacles slide down a bit when he quizzically raises his eyebrows. Does he take me for an idiot?

‘You know,’ I answer quickly.

Berglund chuckles tersely and leans back. ‘Certainly. So you met Zetterberg?’

He notes that I flinch slightly.

‘The suicide,’ I mutter.

‘How’s that?’ Berglund scrutinises me.

Is all this about the suicide who diddled me out of my four hundred and fifty?

‘Yes, I met him.’

I smack my lips to get some saliva flowing. It feels as if someone put cotton wadding against the roof of my mouth. The nausea comes over me again. I cough drily. The boy is probably alive. At least that’s something.

‘Why did you go to see Zetterberg?’

‘To collect a debt. It was a job.’

‘And who hired you?’

I could have predicted that one. Berglund smiles again. What was that backwater called again? I fumble with my recall of the
name. Sometimes I forget the simplest things. I’ve seen the same in many retired boxers, punch-drunk types with more stitches in them than a football, who can hardly tell right from left any more.

I close my eyes and again press thumb and forefinger against the top of my nose. Slowly the letter reappears in my mind. The paper is lined, the letter is written in ink without splodges, and the handwriting is forwards leaning…

‘It was about a payment for a car… A certain farmer, Elofsson, in… Ovanåker parish.’

The relief spreads a warmth inside, like a slug of booze in my stomach.

‘I see.’

Berglund makes another annotation. I lean back in my chair and cough. The handcuffs rattle as I clench my hands in my lap.

‘Did he kill himself? Zetterberg?’

‘Possibly.’ Berglund glances up before he goes on with his notes.

I shake my head. On two occasions I’ve seen it happen. Both times it was prisoners throwing themselves off the top-floor walkway at Långholmen. Like icicles of prison grey, they fell through the air and were shattered against the stone floor.

‘Just for the sake of accuracy,’ Berglund goes on, smiling and leaning forwards. ‘Did this Elofsson telephone you or did he write?’

‘He wrote a letter.’

‘Do you still have it?’

‘I burned it when I heard of Zetterberg’s death.’

‘But you’re certain of the name and the address?’

‘The name I am absolutely sure of; the address, almost sure.’

‘Do you own a light brown overcoat?’

‘No, if your boys had let me dress myself properly, you would have seen that my overcoat is black.’

‘I see.’ Berglund writes. ‘Would you object to my sending a courier for the coat, to verify this?’

‘No, do as you wish,’ I say, thinking about my reserve capital, seventy-five kronor folded between the octagonal plates in the kitchen cupboard, my best china. The pistol in the wardrobe and the notebook would probably be even worse.

‘One moment.’

Berglund stands up, brushes down his trousers and walks out of the room. I hold up my hands. Is it the hangover or tension that makes them tremble? I stand up and pace back and forth across the tiny space. Zetterberg: why do they care about Zetterberg?

‘The bloke puts his head in the oven, the goons go in full strength, and I lose out on a new pair of shoes,’ I mutter hoarsely. A lump of phlegm blocks my throat, and I clear it with some coughing.

I lift my hands again. They’re shaking even worse now.

I bend down and squeeze my knee. It’s badly swollen. Berglund comes back in, but he stops in the doorway when he sees that I’m standing up, and eventually has to squeeze past me. We find ourselves face to face, he averts his eyes. Just like Zetterberg, he uses Aqua Vera. At the tip of one eyebrow, a slight scar spreads the wrinkles vertically. We sit down. The sound of the chairs scraping against the floor cuts through my cranium, as when my schoolmates used to pull their nails across their slates.