Never Fuck Up: A Novel (22 page)

Niklas liked the place. It wasn’t his first time there, but his first in eight years. Exemplary pricing: the beer hardly cost more than when he’d left Sweden. Cute waitresses. Comfy couches, loud volume, cheap grub. Wood paneling along the walls. A number of banners with different soccer-team emblems were hung up above the paneling. Beer ads and glitter that looked like Christmas decorations. Their beers arrived in warm glasses straight from the dishwasher. The peanuts were served in bowls that resembled ashtrays. Mixed crowd: mostly AIK soccer fans and drunks, but a bunch of younger types, too. He dug the atmosphere.

Benjamin went to the bathroom. Niklas studied his right hand. There was some swelling over the middle knuckle. He remembered: three fast punches. Good technique: 80 percent of the punch’d been absorbed by the knuckles on his pointer and index fingers. Broken at least one of the asshole’s ribs. Rightly so.

Benjamin returned. Tried to pinch one of the waitresses in the butt before he sat down in the booth with Niklas. She didn’t even react. A relief. Niklas didn’t want any trouble.

Benjamin smiled. “It’s damn strange. The stench in the bathrooms in this place is exactly the same as the stench in the bathrooms in the ER at Mariapol, remember? That nasty place we got sent when we were smashed as kids?”

“When was the last time you were in the ER there? That’s gotta be ten years ago.”

“Sure, but I promise you, that stench gets stuck in your nostrils like a fucking piercing.”

“Good thing we’re near the entrance, then, so you can get some fresh air.”

They laughed. Benjamin was okay, after all. Maybe Niklas would get used to living in Sweden.

Two beers later. Niklas was starting to get buzzed. Benjamin claimed that he needed at least eight brewskies for it to even show up in a cop’s Breathalyzer. Niklas said he talked more bullshit than a merchant in the souk. They laughed again. It felt good to laugh together.

The entire time, in the back of Niklas’s head: he’d made the world a better place the other day. A safer place for innocent women.

They kept talking. Benjamin went on about the shooting club, about some chick he was going on a date with later that night, about some business he had up his sleeve. Sometimes he asked Niklas a lot of questions. About how often he’d been under fire in Iraq, how you reload in the dark, if you could grease a gun with olive oil, when you used dumdum ammunition. The theater of war, like make-believe. But overall, Benjamin was a know-it-all—thought he knew everything about weapons he couldn’t even spell the names of. Niklas told him stories from Iraq. He left out details like names, but he could feel how much he loved to describe life in the sandbox. In actuality, though: no one who didn’t have operational experience of combat in war could ever really know what it was about. You couldn’t read your way to stuff like that or watch movies or play video games to understand it.

Something was happening by the entrance to the bar. They looked over. A fifty-year-old guy was engaged in a loud discussion with a bouncer in charge of the coat check.

The guy was holding a liquor-store bag in each hand. Apparently wanted to check them and still be allowed to bring a bottle inside. Niklas and Benjamin looked at each other again. Laughed. But it was a fake laugh. The man reminded Niklas of darker times.

Two large men sat down next to them. Ordered a beer each. Benjamin eyed one of them. Leaned over. Spoke to Niklas in a low voice, “Check out his jacket. Looks like he’s in the same shooting club as me. Cool.” Niklas wasn’t as impressed.

Benjamin started to ask him questions again. Niklas thought he was raising his voice. Did he want the men at the table next to them to hear? He couldn’t care less. Started telling his story.

“You know, we were lugging around so much equipment that we sounded like a wandering junkyard when we left base camp. Battle rattle, that’s what we call it. Call radio, flak jackets, night-vision equipment, at least twenty magazines apiece, grenades, med kits, helmets, sleeping bags and tents in case we weren’t coming back that night, food boxes, maps, everything. We thought it’d take three hours there and three hours home, same route. The only good thing about dragging all that junk around was that the beer would be six hours colder when we got back.”

Benjamin laughed out loud.

Niklas continued, “In and out, none of our boys were gonna get hurt. That’s the rhythm of missions like that. The Red Crescent or Amnesty International can tally the points when we’re done. Honestly, we’re not the ones turning those villages into targets. They turn themselves into targets. Give food and shelter to suicide bombers and the suicide bombers’ brains. They only have themselves to blame. No matter what happens, no way we could kill more people than they did with their car bombs all over Bahgdad.”

Even though Niklas was speaking loudly, Benjamin wasn’t really listening. His eyes danced. Kept glancing at the man wearing the shooting club’s emblem at the table next to them. Finally, Niklas stopped himself.

“If there’s something you want to say to that guy, just say it.”

Benjamin nodded. Turned to the guy at the table next to them.

“Hey, I just gotta ask. Are you active in the Järfälla Gun Club?”

The man turned his head slowly. Like he was thinking, Are you stupid, or what? Interrupting me in the middle of a conversation? He eyed Benjamin.

But what came out wasn’t aggressive.

“Yes, I’ve been a member for over twelve years. Are you interested in joining?”

“I’m already a member. Joined a few months back. But I gotta say, it’s awesome. How often do you shoot?”

Niklas eyed the man. He actually looked interested in the conversation. The guy had short blond hair. Close to forty. A striped shirt unbuttoned at the neck and blue jeans. Maybe it was the focus in his eyes, maybe it was the fact that he looked so put together but still hung out at Friden. The man had to be a cop.

They chatted. The guy told them about the shooting club. About the number of members. About what guns he owned. Benjamin absorbed it all like a sponge. The shooting club guy’s colleague joined in. Told them about his firearms. Turned out, they were both cops. Right every time—Niklas’s eye for people never failed him.

An hour later. More gun talk than he’d ever experienced among the boys in the barracks down there. The two cops were nice. The bar was nice. The conversation was decent.

Benjamin got up. He had to go meet his date. Was apparently already late. Shook hands with the cops. Niklas and he decided that they’d be in touch later that week. Was Niklas making a friend?

One of the policemen, the one who wasn’t a member of the shooting club, also got up. Had to go home to his family. Niklas and the cop who remained seated looked at each other. Really, it was weird to stay with someone you didn’t know—but what the hell, why not?

They ordered another round. Kept talking guns. Niklas was getting drunk.

The cop ordered Salisbury steak with pepper sauce. “A classic,” as he called it. “This place has really great, classic grub. Might be hard to believe, but.”

Niklas ordered more peanuts.

When the gun talk ran dry after fifteen minutes or so, the policeman asked him, “So, what do you do?”

“I’m looking for employment.”

Niklas’d learned that that’s how you said it. Not “unemployed”—that was not a dynamic state of being. Instead you should be on your way, in motion, on the hunt—for a job. Bullshit. He was unemployed. And he was fine with that for now, but the money would run out at some point.

“Okay. So what kind of job do you want?”

“I could imagine doing some sort of security guard job. Maybe in the subway. But not just sitting still somewhere guarding a building. That’s too dull.”

“That’s good. We need more good security guards. And people who have the guts to roll their sleeves up, if you catch my drift.”

Niklas wasn’t completely sure he understood. The cop sounded bitter somehow.

“Yeah, sure. I’d roll my sleeves up. I’ve worked hard in my day.”

They looked at each other.

“What kind of work’ve you done?” the cop asked.

“I’ve been in the armed forces. I can’t really talk about it.”

“That’s understandable. We need people like you. Do you understand what I mean? Someone’s got to clean up the trash. The security guards are often too sissy. Not to mention the police. They’ve started to recruit such whiny pussies that it makes you wonder if ordinary men are supposed to be in the minority.”

“You’re right. The police need more authority.”

“Addicts, pedophiles, men who beat up their women. People don’t care as long as it doesn’t affect them. But we’re not allowed to get rough, ’cause then everyone gives us a lot of grief. I’m going to tell you something. You really want to listen to a bitter old cop?”

“Absolutely.” It was interesting. No one could agree more that the cops should be harder on men who abused women.

The cop really got into it.

“I take my job seriously. I really try to stop the rabble that’s taking over this city. So, the other day, they sent me on the beat with a little girl. Fresh out of the Police Academy, no experience at all. Thin, delicate chick. I don’t understand how they recruit these days. Anyway, we got sent to a twenty-four-hour bodega where some drunk’d seen red and started picking a fight with the staff. The problem was, I recognized the guy. He’s an old boxer, strong as hell. Aggressive like a teenager. But my colleague, she was too green, didn’t get what was going on. It got ugly. The boxer-boozer attacked her. She couldn’t stand up to him. It got even uglier. He attacked me too. And when we were trying to bring him down, and it wasn’t easy, let me tell you, it got uglier still. The old guy was mad as hell, strong as a bull, swinging punches like fucking Muhammad Ali. Look at my nose.”

The cop paused. Niklas was into the story.

“What happened?”

“He clocked me. If I’d been out with a male colleague, someone from my usual gang, for example, that never would’ve happened. But now, now this girl’s there and we can’t bring the asshole down the normal way. He was just too tough. So we used the batons. A lot. Until we got him down and could cuff him.”

Another pause. The cop swallowed. The gravity in his eyes gleamed again.

“And now they’re talking excessive force. You understand?”

Niklas was surprised at the turn. This felt private, intimate.

“Sure. It sounds fucked up. You were just doing your job.”

“This is society’s demise we’re talking about. If the police allow a bunch of violent old fuckers to go around and do whatever they want without us being able to fight back, then who’s going to stop them? If the police let a bunch of junkies deal drugs, who’s going to keep young people from dying prematurely? If the police can’t do anything about domestic violence, who’s going to make sure innocent women aren’t humiliated?”

Niklas nodded in time to the outpouring. The last thing the cop said cut deep. This was bigger than he’d thought—Sweden was in worse shape than he’d expected. If the police didn’t do the job, who would do it?

He felt drunk. The cop kept talking about society’s decline. Niklas’s thoughts galloped off. Again and again: if the cops don’t take care of it, then someone else has to.

*  *  *