Never Fuck Up: A Novel (12 page)

After dinner, he went in to the computer. Closed the door behind him. Turned it on. The Windows logo jumped around on the screen like a lost soul.

Clicked on the Explorer icon. Was reminded of his greatest fear—that Åsa would get computer savvy enough one day to know how to find his porn searches in Explorer’s history. He should ask someone at work if it could be erased.

But that wasn’t what he was here to do this time. He rummaged around in his pocket. Pulled out a USB memory stick. Thomas: as far from a computer geek as you could get, but it felt better to carry what he needed in physical form than to e-mail it. At regular intervals, he’d checked nervously that the USB was still there. If he were to drop it, if someone were to find it, check what was on it, and realize it was his—the questions would pile up worse than at a hard-core cross-examination in court.

He inserted the memory stick into the computer. A plopping sound. A window opened on the screen. One file on the memory stick, named Autop.report.

The computer made a spinning sound. Adobe opened up. The autopsy report was less than three pages long. First he scrolled down
to the bottom—signed by Bengt Gantz, chief forensic pathologist—as it should be. He started reading from the beginning. It took time. He read it again.

And again.

Something was weird. Nasty weird—in the autopsy report, there was no mention of the track marks in the arm or if they’d tested the body for increased levels of drugs or other junk.

It couldn’t be a coincidence. When Thomas’d seen his report at Hägerström’s, and realized that the last lines about the potential cause of death were missing, he’d wondered, sure. Thought it was strange, but hadn’t thought more about it. But a forensic pathologist didn’t miss stuff like that. The track marks were conspicuous. Either the examiner didn’t want to write about them for some reason or—the thought hit him and stuck right away—someone else’d edited it out. And this same someone must’ve edited out the same thing from his report.

He had to calm down. Feel it out. What he should do. How he should act. Never during his years as a cop had he experienced anything like this.

Åsa was tidying in the kitchen. Didn’t even look up when he opened the door and stepped into the garage. It was routine. Thomas worked on his Cadillac whenever he had time. Anyway, it was an investment. He could put some of the extra cash he made in the field into it without anyone asking. But even more important: the car was like mediation for him. A place, like the shooting range, where he relaxed. Felt at home. It was his little Nirvana.

There was another thing in the garage too: the big locked gray metal cabinet. Åsa and he called it the tool cabinet, but she was the only one who thought there were tools in it. Sure, he kept some tools and gear for the car in there, but 80 percent of the cabinet was filled with more important stuff: weed confiscated from a bunch of Arabs in Fittja, hash plucked from Turkish druggies in Örnsberg, amphetamines surrendered by Sven junkies in the subway, a couple packs of Russian growth hormone found in a parking garage in Älvsjö, cash from countless hits along stops on the red subway line. And so on. His little gold mine. A kind of retirement fund.

The car gleamed. Cadillac Eldorado Biarritz from 1959. A beauty he’d found online six years ago. It was in Los Angeles, but he didn’t hesitate. Every single time he’d confiscated something from the dregs, this car’d been his goal. Without the money he’d made outside of his
crappy police salary, it would never have been his. But it was. He’d picked it up with his old man, who was still in good shape back then. Drove it from Los Angeles to Virginia in one stretch. Twenty-seven hundred miles. Fifty-five hours on the road. At the time, Åsa wondered how he’d been able to afford it and it’d been twice as expensive as he’d told her.

It was wonderful. The Cadillac’s V8 engine—better known among car lovers as a Q-345—the pistons alone had taken him six months to fix. Now they were like new. It guzzled gas like a truck.

The car that was parked in front of Thomas now was from a different planet than modern junk. He was almost done. Had fixed the chrome, bought new upholstery, installed purple metallic power-seat adjustments, mounted the back fenders, imported a new grille from the States, played around with the new synchromesh gearbox. Gotten the right whitewall tires, fog lights, air-conditioning, tinted windows on the sides. Adjusted the back axle, the carburetor, the brakes. Acid-washed and zinced every single metal part.

Eldorado Biarritz: the car that’d first introduced the back tail fins and the twin back lights. A style icon without compare, a miracle, a legend among cars. The most rock ’n’ roll money could buy. Most of these cars were no longer even drivable. But Thomas’s car rolled smoothed as hell. It was unique. And it was his.

The only big thing left to do was to fix the hydraulic suspension. Thomas knew what he wanted—to return to the original suspension, it was as simple as that. He’d saved it for last. Otherwise, the car was perfect.

Thomas put on his overalls, strapped on his headlamp. Rolled in under the car. His favorite position. Darkness surrounded him. In the light from the headlamp, the car’s undercarriage appeared like a world of its own, with continents and geological formations. A map he knew better than any other place in the world. He didn’t pull out the wrench right away. Studied the car’s parts. Just lay there for a while.

Someone’d deleted both his and the pathologist’s description of the track marks and the possible cause of death. The pathologist himself? Someone within the police? He had to do something. At the same time—it wasn’t his problem. Why should he care? If the doctor didn’t want anything written about the track marks, maybe he had his reasons. Annoying to have to write a bunch of extra crap about that in the autopsy report. Or else it was one of Thomas’s colleagues who didn’t
want it known that an unidentified dude’d been injected to death. So, let it be that way. He wasn’t the type to rat anyone out, to screw things up, to dig up dirt when it concerned other officers. He wasn’t like that guy Martin Hägerström.

On the other hand—he could wind up in trouble himself. If the mistake in the autopsy report was investigated, the question could arise as to why he’d left relevant information out of his own report. That was a risk he didn’t want to take. And whoever’d deleted his text was unknown. It’s not like he was messing things up for some colleague he knew. If you wanted to cover something up, then at least come clean to your co-workers.

It wasn’t okay. He should talk to someone. But who? Jörgen Ljunggren was out. The dude was almost dumber than a reality-TV blonde. Hannu Lindberg, one of the men Thomas usually drove with, might understand, but the question was if he’d agree. To Hannu, anything that didn’t concern money or police honor was not worth bothering about. The other guys on the beat didn’t feel close or reliable enough. They were good men, that wasn’t it, but they weren’t the kind who wanted to think too much. He thought about Hägerström’s comment: “The desk people together with the guys who are really out there. There’s so much knowledge that’s lost today.”

Thomas didn’t have the energy to think more about it. He turned the headlamp off. Continued lying where he was for another three minutes before he rolled himself out.

Stood up. Rinsed his hands under a hose in the garage.

Pulled out his cell phone. He’d saved Hägerström’s number.

Martin Hägerström picked up. “Hägerström.”

“This is Andrén. Are you alone?”

“Absolutely. You’re not on patrol?”

“No, I’m off. Calling from home. There’s something I want to talk to you about.”

“Shoot.”

Thomas began in a monotone voice. Didn’t want Hägerström to think he’d become friendly toward him.

“I took the autopsy report home. I know it’s material that’s under investigation and that you’re not supposed to take it out of the building, but I don’t give a shit about that crap. I didn’t want to print and read it at the station. And you’re right, it doesn’t mention the track marks. You’re probably not surprised since you said there wasn’t
anything written about them in my incident report either, but I know I wrote about them. It’s not likely that Gantz, the forensic pathologist, who’s used to carving up bodies, would’ve missed them. To be completely honest, no one, not even you, could’ve missed them. Did you see the body?”

Silence on the other end of the line.

“Hägerström?”

“Yes, I’m here. I’m thinking. What you’re saying sounds very strange. It seems to me there are only two explanations: Maybe you’re messing with me. You didn’t write shit about any holes or cause of death at all and only want to screw up my investigation. That’s the most likely solution to your little mystery. Or something’s really wrong. Something that I’m going to get to the bottom of. And I haven’t seen the body. But now I intend to do so. Just so you know.”

Thomas didn’t know what to say. Hägerström belonged to the other side. But, strictly speaking, the guy was handling himself impeccably. Strictly speaking, Thomas should hang up. Never let a rat like Hägerström talk to him that way. Anyway, patrol officers like Thomas shouldn’t meddle with detectives’ investigations. Still, without knowing why, he heard himself say, “I think it’s best if I come with you. So that someone can show you where those track marks were.”

Early signs of summer: small white flowers in brown lawns, outdoor seating being set up at cafés, defrosted dog shit. Thirteen-year-old girls in too-tiny miniskirts even though it was only fifty-seven degrees out. Soon it would be here: the Swedish summer. Warm. Light. Filled with chicks. Mahmud longed for it. Now he just had to bulk up in time and iron out the shit he’d ended up in.

He was hanging out by a little hole-in-the-wall shop. Hair wet after his workout. Aching muscles. Sweet exhaustion.

Waiting for his homie Babak. It was six o’clock and they should be closing in there by now. Weird that he hadn’t come out yet. Mahmud tried to call. No answer. Fired off a text, pulled a standard joke: “Remember when we rode the train and I stuck my head out and you stuck your ass out. Everyone thought we were twins. Call me!”

Irritated. Not really with Babak, the boy was always late, but with the whole situation. Everything was going to hell. Less than five days left. Mahmud hadn’t scraped together more than fifteen thousand in cash yet. It didn’t even cover a fifth of what Gürhan wanted. What the fuck was he supposed to do? Same thought on repeat like a sampled loop: the Yugos are my only chance.

He eyed the electrical cabinet he was leaning up against. Covered in tags, Ernesto Guerra stickers, the Giant face sprayed on, sticker ads for, like, forty thousand different record stores. He thought, The Svens did so much crap. That was their luxury—they could follow unnecessary, unfathomable, unmanly pursuits: demonstrate in order to trash small shops in Reclaim the Streets riots, organize weird Goth parties in Gamla Stan where everyone looked like corpses, hang out at cafés and study for a whole day. But the Svens didn’t know shit about life with a capital L. What it was like when you had to translate at the welfare office so your parents could explain that they couldn’t afford winter jackets. What it was like to grow up in the Million Program concrete
without a future. To see the dignity in your father’s eyes crushed every time some official mistrusted him—a highly respected man where he came from who was dragged through the Swedish dirt like a whore over the square in the home country. They questioned why he didn’t get a better job even though he was an educated engineer, why he didn’t speak better Swedish—gave him forms to fill out even though they knew he couldn’t read the Swedish alphabet. Pork their mothers.

Mahmud loved his dad and his sisters. He had his homies: Babak, Robert, Javier, and the others. The rest could go fuck themselves.

He was gonna beat them all. The Born to Be Hated players. The Sven pussies. The Stockholm brats. The Ernesto Guerra clowns. Make a comeback. Show who was boss. Cash in. The
blatte
from the Million hood was gonna be king. Crush ’em. Pluck ’em. Only the Yugos would help him.

Four hours earlier he’d called and told Stefanovic yes—he was gonna find Wisam Jibril for them. King Mahmud Bernadotte—when he was done with the assignment, Gürhan was gonna taste his fat cock.

Mahmud thought about what he had to do. To count with the Yugos was to count with everyone. If he succeeded with this—plucking the Lebanese, fulfilling Radovan’s wishes—his name would spell Mahmud the Man. Not like today: Mahmud the Dude Who Wants Up but Hasn’t Gotten Anywhere Yet.

Right after the call to Stefanovic, Mahmud called Tom Lehtimäki—a buddy from way back. Tom was into econ and stuff like that. Worked for some debt-collecting agency. A golden contact who stepped up right away. Two hours after the call, Tom’d already asked a court to fax over all the paperwork from the trial regarding the Arlanda Airport robbery. They refused to fax that much paper. Sent the shit snail mail instead. Apparently the case’d been closed—the prosecutor’d given up the hunt for the perps. But there was still a battle going on between the bank and the transportation company. Mahmud could hardly believe it—the court was giving him good service. Sometimes he loved Svenland.