Two Soldiers (21 page)

Two hours and twenty-four minutes.

He had no choice. They were here. And those who knew where they were, were too.

“Hermansson.”

He pointed at something, perhaps her feet.

“You stay here.”

Mariana Hermansson looked at him, at the buildings behind him, at the square farther back with empty benches and overturned bicycle shelters, and farther away, a deserted platform between two metro lines, and if she stretched up, a glimpse of the highway exit.

“No.”

“To keep going where we’re heading is my responsibility alone.”

He had seen her annoyed, even angry before, her eyes like those he remembered in another face long ago that had been the same age, and worn the same uniform, and disappeared, no longer existed.

“What exactly are you saying?”

He had liked it. He still did.

Someone demanding.

“You know, I grew up in a place like this. You know that. Rosengård, Malmö, what happened there, Jesus, Ewert, Stockholm, you’re years behind.”

“I don’t care, Hermansson. You’re staying here.”

She gripped the hand that was pointing at her, or maybe it was her shoes it was pointing at, forced it down, to one side.

“Look around.”

He didn’t. High-rises. Asphalt. He had already seen it all. High-rises. Asphalt.

“I can read this better than you can, Ewert. And I’m more protected here than you will ever be.”

She had grabbed his hand, forced it away.

Someone who demanded something.

Ewert Grens smiled, perhaps, he wasn’t sure.

She had been sitting in her office when he went to look for her in the middle of the night. People who do that don’t need to mix with other people who talk too much and tell you that you’re playing your music too loud; they don’t need to celebrate Christmas Eve or New Year’s Eve or even birthdays, which come around with such regularity, because he or she is doing something important and that means that he or she can continue being alone. She had stood up and he hadn’t needed to explain, she had changed out of her uniform into her own clothes, known how high-rises like these, asphalt like this, worked.

His smile, the one that was almost proud.

———

A seven-story building like all the others, rows of even darker windows, balconies with alternate orange and blue doors. Grens tilted his head back, three floors up, somewhere in the middle. The only window with lights on.

They had stopped by the edge of the huge parking lot that separated the building called Råby Allé 67 from the others. About half of the clearly marked spaces were empty, the other half was a long row of older, well-used cars.

With two exceptions.

The detective superintendent sighed.

Every damned investigation. So unbelievably predictable. So unbelievably fucking wearisome that they always lived up to the
preconceptions, as if they intentionally reinforced the stereotype until they became it. I am a gangster. I put on my gangster costume so you’ll know that I’m a gangster because then I look how you think I should look. Even the same fucking car models. This one, the black shiny one that was parked nearest, Audi R8, the sort that people used to escape the police, four-wheel drive, powerful engine. And the one parked beside it, a silver Mercedes CLK 500, the sort that successful criminal role models bought with cash and then drove around in while everyone else admired it and longed for it.

“Sven?”

Ewert Grens had gone over to the gleaming, silver car. With one hand leaning heavily on the hood, he looked up into the lightening dark, in his other hand a cell phone.

“Yes?”

“Are you still sitting in the car?”

“Yes.”

“Go to the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency.”

He could picture his colleague waiting in the car, a slim, middle-aged man who now undid the safety belt and leaned over toward the passenger seat in order to reach the computer on the dashboard.

He imagined he could even hear him pressing the three buttons.

“OK?”

“Look up BGY 397 and . . . hang on a moment . . . GZP 784.”

More tapping.

He wondered whether the slim body was still leaning over, or whether it had moved over and was sitting up straight in the passenger seat.

“Mercedes, silver, 2013 model. Current owner, Gabriel Milton. And . . .”

“Yes?”

“. . . Audi, black, 2013 model. Current owner, Gabriel Milton. Previous owner, Leon Jensen.”

Hand still heavy on the shiny hood.

He was standing on the other side of the parking lot, facing the block of apartments.

“You don’t get it, do you?” Hermansson nodded at the two cars.

“That this is what it’s all about?”

Grens shook his head, rapped the metal with his hand.

“No. I don’t get it. You rob a bank. You don’t want to be suspected. You don’t want the police to see. And . . . then . . .
then
you go out and buy something like this, something shiny for eight hundred thousand. No. I don’t fucking get it.”

“Because the benefits of looking rich, Ewert, successful, far outweigh the risk.”

She stood between the two cars that cost as much as she earned in five years.

“Three things—be seen, heard, and acknowledged. You need it. I need it. We all need it. It’s human. Otherwise we don’t function. At all. But here . . . just running around robbing banks and getting loads of money you can’t show to anyone . . . that’s of no interest. But what
is
interesting, however, is showing that you’re successful. And to do that, you need shiny trophies like this. And you show them off and don’t give a damn about a detective superintendent with an apartment on Sveavägen who doesn’t get it. Seen, heard, and acknowledged, Ewert. That’s all.”

He rapped the metal of the hood once again and started to walk across the parking lot toward the seven-story building and a window in the middle where there was still light. Apartments that had been just as gray nineteen years ago, he had spent a lot of time in several of them, slowly, gradually herding motivated gang members, one by one, into the witness protection program and afterwards been so pleased with himself—after all, he had defined what was to be seen as a one-off incident, something that should be observed, but that was part of a passing phase.

He hadn’t fully understood the extent of it, the impact. That it would grow, and was still growing.

Ewert Grens nodded to Mariana Hermansson, beside him in front of the dark building and the window that broke the darkness with its
light, and they went in different directions along the asphalt that led on to a strip of grass around the back; they met again but still didn’t say anything, they didn’t need to, another window with the light on up there, the same apartment, on the second floor, somewhere in the middle.

The elevator in the stairwell wasn’t working and Grens panted loudly as he tried to keep up with Hermansson, climbing the stairs that were too shallow, out onto the balcony, the warm dawn air on his cheeks and brow.

He stopped.

The door was waiting, about fifteen steps away.

In a search of the police authorities’ database just before they left Kronoberg, Ewert Grens had got thirty-two hits when he opened the Criminal Intelligence Database,
observed at Hötorget twenty minutes after an armed robbery of Securitas cash-in-transit delivery at Kungsgatan
, then looked through the Suspect Identification and Recognition Database and got a total of eighteen hits,
questioned in connection with suspected illegal possession of firearms
, and finally eight hits in the police criminal records,
major theft, §4 Chapter 8, assaulting a police officer, §1 Chapter 17, aggravated assault, §5 Chapter 3
. Via three computer screens he had met the teenager who had recently been behind that door.

“We can’t go in, Ewert.”

Ear to the door, silence.

“Ewert, right now, no one is suspected of a crime.”

He pressed the doorbell that didn’t work, then kicked the orange surface and took a step back.

“And that is why we don’t have a search warrant. Are you listening, Ewert? We
cannot
go in.”

“She’s lying in a trunk. I don’t need any damn papers, I need information.”

He kicked the door again, a bit higher up this time.

“If we go in it . . . it would be trespassing.”

He pointed at the name on the mailbox—
SANTOS
, written in spiky letters on a scrap of paper.

“The boy named Gabriel Milton is not paying any rent. He doesn’t have a lease. Someone named Santos does. We’re not the ones trespassing, Hermansson. He is.”

Grens had his black gloves in the outer pockets of his jacket, he pulled them out and put them on. Mariana Hermansson saw him do it, opened a holster strapped to her chest, and pulled out a gun, pulled the slide back with her thumb and index finger until she was certain that the bullet was ready in the chamber.

“That’s not necessary. They’re not here.”

He pressed down the door handle. Locked. He balled his hand, moved slightly to the left, and hit the oblong window between the door and concrete wall, put his hand through past the jagged edges and turned the lock.

There was only one light on and Ewert Grens walked into a hall, empty but for something leaning up against the wall that was shiny and had rows of identical small white pearls around the edge. He lifted it up, weighed it, a shoehorn.

“They won’t be coming back here. But we’re looking for information, anything that might show where or how members who are free might help members on the run. If she’s alive, Hermansson, we have to know.”

Grens walked toward the kitchen, but signaled to her that she should stay where she was by the partially broken entrance.

A table, some chairs. That was all.

He opened the fridge, lots of empty bottles, some half full, two unopened. Coke and beer. He turned them upside down and emptied the contents in the sink and then left them there, opened the larder and the only thing to be found there was a packet of gumdrops. He emptied that as well, no red or green left. He pulled out drawers of cutlery and plastic bags, opened a cupboard above the stove and emptied a bag of sugar, flicked through a pile of napkins, lifted the lid
on the coffee machine, ran his fingers through a packet of pasta, and unscrewed the bulbs in the ceiling lights.

Nothing.

Ewert Grens sighed, loitered by the sink and the bottles—they weren’t even old enough to carry the content of those bottles out of the liquor store. It was so easy to forget, how young these people who had lived as adults so long actually were.

He went into the bedroom, lifted up the pillows and the covers. A big knife slipped in under the mattress, handle like a knuckleduster with sharp points, a long blade that was partially serrated. He reached in under the bed and found a white tube in a ball of dust,
Hydrocortisone-Urea
, sniffed it, smelled of nothing. He got up and went back toward the door but then stopped halfway, poked the red rug on the linoleum floor with the tip of his shoe. It was thick, soft and didn’t belong. He guessed it probably cost more than everything else in the apartment put together. He smiled, the lonely pearl-studded shoehorn in the hallway and the thick, soft hundred-thousand-kronor rug in here, they were from the same burglary from a large house that wasn’t in Råby.

The sitting room.

Empty beer cans, some rogue peanuts and full ashtrays on a sticky glass table. Pizza boxes stacked in a half-meter tower. A corner sofa with a blue fabric cover that was big enough for three sleeping bodies. He lifted up one cushion at a time, pulled off the dirty-smelling covers, and turned them inside out, in all five square pieces of brown hash fell out, he guessed about thirty grams each.

Down there, spread out along the bottom of the sofa, gold- and silvered-colored coins. Grens picked them up, rubbed them with his fingertips, let them rest in his palm.
KRONOR
—fencer’s currency.
EURO
—drug dealer’s currency. And
BAHT
—for the Thai villages where every small group went to practice their shooting.

Every time the same world came out of pants pockets like these.

He was heading back toward the hall when he went closer to the flat-screen TV, eighty inches on the living room wall, long high loudspeakers on either side.

“Sven?”

He again struggled to take his phone out of one of his jacket pockets, of which there seemed to be so many that trapped his searching hands.

“Yes?”

“Are you still there?”

“Yes.”

“This time I want you to look in CRS.”

Sven Sundkvist stretched over toward the passenger seat again, the computer on the dashboard and the crime reporting system.

“Ewert?”

“A TV. Model number 47LG4000-ZA. Serial number 906WRGX40359.”

Ewert Grens was panting in the way he did on the few occasions he walked up the stairs. Sven guessed he was bending down, squatting in the small gap between the plastic casing and the wall, trying to read the small numbers on the back of the TV screen.

“Reported stolen. Break-in at SIBA’s warehouse in Kungens Kurva at the beginning of June. One of a total of one hundred and four items that were reported stolen in the same incident.”

Grens examined both loudspeakers, a Blu-ray player, two computers. Different model numbers and different serial numbers, but the same answer.

He hung up and pushed over the pile of DVD cases that were leaning up against a chair leg. Violence, pornography, pornography, violence, violence, violence. And, he picked it up, he’d read correctly, a cartoon, eight installments of
Aladdin
at the bottom of the pile.

So big, and yet so small.

———

He breathed in the humid, late-summer air from an evaporating, but still all-enveloping dark.

A hallway, a kitchen, a bedroom, a sitting room.

They had lacked knowledge when they opened the door, and they knew not a bean more when they closed it. Ewert Grens stuck his
hand in through the broken windowpane, as before. He reached over to the lock, turned it. Her eyes on his neck, he could feel them, she hadn’t changed.