Two Soldiers (39 page)

Gabriel lay down on her white sofa and looked at them. He
was bleeding a bit, the material took on another color.

He had almost never been to her place. Now it was his only home.

He’d known before they even rang the bell and told her that she had to go out, he’d known they would come. She had to go out and go anywhere but here. Wanda had cried for a while, protested, but without raising his voice, he couldn’t do it, his ribs like knives, he’d held her by the shoulders and walked beside her to the door and the stairs, and then gone in again without locking the door, without even closing it.

He was lying there now while they went through her apartment and aimlessly picked up her things that meant nothing to any of them but was just a demonstration of power. They’d sat down at the sitting room table, Jon, Big Ali, Bruno. He could have challenged them. Maybe even hurt them, even killed. But he hadn’t challenged—they weren’t doing anything wrong, just as Leon hadn’t done anything wrong. The kicks, the punches, not even the five round burn marks on the only part of his skin that was untouched, Leon had just done what he had to do.

And that fucking awful moment when he was lying on his back on the floor and Leon opened the door again and they’d looked at each and known that it was the last time.

Gabriel undid his pants and pulled them off, nodded at Big Ali, Jon, Bruno. Their eyes that weren’t laughing and weren’t crying. He was grateful that they’d taken knock-off Rohypnol, eight milligrams each no doubt; it was his fault, not theirs, they had to look at him without feeling. He lay down, it would be easier for them to get to
it then, and Jon pressed the round sanding disc against his right thigh and the month-old tattoo that was still raised, and Big Ali put the plug in,
you’ve got fifty thousand in fines
, he bled heavily when the sanding machine reached maximum speed, but he said nothing and they stopped after a while, sat down by the table while his thigh bled all over the rest of her white sofa,
you won’t get fucking fifty thousand, it was fucking me who started all this
, they had to wait for half an hour, four milligrams more of Rohypnol and the beginnings of a scab that they sanded again,
fifty thousand in fines and you’ve got three hours
, and between each round, a bit more color bled away, he moved after a while so that a big pool wouldn’t develop, and that was when he heard the explosion and felt a flutter of pride; he knew exactly what it was.

———

Martha Pereira closed the door and he had stood for a while outside. He had never met her before. Now a single parent with two children. The person she had chosen to share her life with would never open the door again, sneak up behind her, kiss her neck, whisper her name, ask who was going to pick up the two girls from soccer. She had asked Grens to leave in a friendly manner and closed the door.

There was nothing more to say. That’s the way it is. No one sneaks up behind you anymore, no one whispers your name, no one kisses your neck. And you don’t react in the way others expect you to react because you’ve never understood how you’re supposed to react. There are no fucking words.

Ewert Grens gripped the steering wheel with both hands as he drove away, he would drive until this was over, one hand to the wheel when his cell phone rang.

“Ewert?”

Gunnar Werner from floor eight. He’d stopped.

“Yes?”

“Zero four forty-two.”

“Yes?”

“You were right. He called. Again.
Exactly
then.”

That smell. Inside his head. The smell of marzipan when he ran through the soundless dark without footsteps and without shattering glass blasting out and falling to the ground.

They were hunting for someone who was also on the hunt, who knew that they were listening and wanted them to be there just then.

04:42.

He’d called. And a building had exploded.

“Where from?”

“I don’t know yet.”

“Werner, I . . .”

“I need four towers to determine the exact position. I’ve only got two. The others . . . one of the servers isn’t responding, but to hazard a guess, another ten minutes to get an update, perhaps a quarter of an hour.”

———

Grens held both his hands firmly on the wheel. So you let the image of what’s no longer there block out the images that press in on you because you don’t understand that what you’re frightened of has already happened.

“Ewert?”

Gunnar Werner and the cell phone and just one hand.

“Yes?”

“Zero four forty-two. We’re there. We know where from. And how.”

“Werner?”

“A call from one cell phone to another. The exact position of Leon Jensen’s phone—Råby Allé 146, fourth floor. The exact position of the receiving phone . . .”

“Yes?”

“. . . Råby police station. In a corridor right outside the Section Against Gang Crime.”

Ewert Grens checked the dashboard clock: 05:37. Nearly an hour, like last time, he was long since gone.

———

Even when he had ordered twelve members of the special firearms command and four civilian intelligence officers to raid the apartment
on the fourth floor of Råby Allé 146, he’d realized that they would be hiding somewhere else. An hour and thirteen minutes was an eternity in an anthill with passageways to eight thousand apartments and as many cellar storerooms.

Five mattresses and five pillows. Beer cans and cake wrappers.

Grens looked out through the open window, Råby police station down there, you could see it so clearly from here, the three big windows on the first floor that were gone, one of the fire brigade’s small red command vehicles parked in front of them, alongside Nils Krantz’s dark blue forensics van, the curious and distressed onlookers on the paths trying to get closer, and at the front, the pens and cameras that he always avoided.

You were standing here. When I turned around and looked for you, when I went in, when I went out, you could see me all the time. You knew and you were in control. And now you know that we know that you knew. And you don’t have control any longer.

Ewert Grens adjusted the communications radio that was hanging from his breast pocket.

The voices, hectic, but he could follow them.

They had managed to move somewhere else, but this time he had three dog patrols at his disposal, which had already picked up several trails and disappeared in different directions.

“
He lost it down by the door to the cellar
!”

Something scraping, labored breathing. Grens turned up the voices in his breast pocket.

“
But he picked it up again, I’d guess about twenty-five meters away
!”

The fugitives had separated for the first time and were no longer running in a pack. They would never leave Råby. And splitting up here, in such a limited space, increased the chances of the dogs keeping track of at least some of them.

Grens left the window and walked toward the abandoned front door.

He had got closer.

———

The crowd was bigger than it had seemed from above. Several rows, tightly packed, and the crush that always develops when lots of bodies wait together, moving forward, a wave of energy. Ewert Grens systematically elbowed his way through, climbed over the police cordon at precisely the spot where he’d turned and run back a few hours ago when he’d realized what was about to happen.

Three big holes where there had recently been windows, the Section Against Gang Crime where he had spent so much time over the past day or two. Large and small shards of glass on the ground, he walked over several, an unpleasant jarring sound as they were ground against the asphalt. He had got as far as the red command vehicle when he
Detective Superintendent Grens
heard the first voices that he’d never understood the point of and
just a minute, Detective Superintendent Grens
had therefore never paid any attention to. They wanted something and he was supposed to give it. He wasn’t interested in such one-sidedness. So he did what he always did, didn’t bother to turn around. Until one of them jumped over the cordon and ran after him, put his hand on his shoulder.

“We need a statement, Grens.”

Ewert Grens stopped in his tracks.

Quite a tall man, at least ten years younger than himself, thrusting a horrible little recorder to his mouth. Grens counted a further twelve reporters, at least, behind him, and as many photographers, and he could see four TV cameras.

“Take your hand off me.”

“Just one—”

“And then walk carefully backward and stand behind that blue-and-white plastic cordon again.”

The tall man did as he was told, started to walk backward, waving his recorder in the air.

“We need facts! A statement! Answers, Grens!”

Every step they took, every new scrap of information, there wasn’t a newspaper, radio, or TV channel that wasn’t constantly writing or talking about
serious organized crime
and
the Stockholm suburbs
and for twenty-nine hours he had crumpled up the yellow Post-it notes with
names and telephone numbers that were still being left on his desk by hands that couldn’t find the trash can.

And there were no fewer after the police station had been bombed.

“Hey, you.”

The tall man who had just clambered over the cordon, held out his recorder, and leaned forward.

“Yes?”

“You want answers?”

“Yes, please.”

Ewert Grens turned and swept his arm toward the building that was missing three windows.

“So do I.”

He continued toward the main door. That’s how it was, if you decided not to hear when someone behind you was shouting at your back, you didn’t.

A strange feeling, to open the door, now, afterwards. To walk into what had so recently been alive and was now dead. On his way up the stairs, he met a fireman on his way down. They greeted each other, had never met before, but right now were connected by someone who was no longer alive.

A well-built man, as tall as the reporter who’d waved his recorder around out there,
LEADING
FIREFIGHTER
on his helmet, jacket, pants.

“Ewert Grens, City Police.”

“Thom Håkansson, Södertörn Fire Brigade.”

The fireman carried on, but Grens caught his hand and made him stop.

“In there . . . the extent?”

He waited until the detective superintendent let their hands slip.

“No more than you see yourself. Explosives with low-detonation velocity that extends the blast wave. I’ve turned off the electricity and water. You can carry out all the investigations you need.”

All the way up the stairs, corridor to the right toward the SAGC, just as it had been an hour and a half ago, apart from the long, gaping crack down the ceiling.

He had run. José Pereira had still been alive then.

The toilet had been on the other side of the wall from the office. Big chunks of porcelain thrown all over the floor and there, crouching down in the middle of a pile of shattered plasterboard and ripped wooden beams, Nils Krantz.

“It was in here.”

Grens went closer.

“Most probably hidden in the toilet cistern, made of the same components that we identified in the kitchen in the apartment. I’ve secured traces of ANFO and dynamite.”

He went farther into the room and an internal wall that was no longer there, the faces no longer staring.

“Bulk industrial explosives. A person’s body in the same room is exposed to extreme pressure for a long time, so Pereira was pressed together, everything inside him squeezed until he burst, he exploded from the inside.”

All that was left was a spot on the floor.

José Pereira had been sitting there, thrown against and then supported by one of the walls that remained standing, which then pushed back and reinforced the blast wave. And Grens, who had never avoided dead bodies at a crime scene—in fact, he often got closer, touched, forced himself to show that he felt nothing—had looked away, walked away, alarmed.

That bloody spot.

He stood completely still, looked at it, felt himself starting to shake, faint at first, then violently.

Sven. And Hermansson.

He could have lost them.

“A piece of a battery.”

Krantz pointed to a centimeter-long piece of metal lying about two meters into the room, and then another.

“A piece of a printed circuit board.”

There were a few more similar pieces, the forensic scientist picked them up with his latex gloves, one at time.

“A couple of hours ago, Grens, they were all part of the same cell phone.”

The one he’d called. One, maybe two rings. Enough current to activate the detonator.

It was here. While we were in the room next door
.

Grens needed air, three windows to choose from, gaping holes. He leaned out and avoided listening to the people right at the front, shouting his name, and instead focused on what was behind, the other Råby that was waking up.

“
A new trail, I’m sure of it
.”

Electronic beeps followed by voices in his breast pocket, he turned them up, held the radio in his hand so he could hear it better.

“
I can see them
!”

The loud barking, the tense voices.

“
Two of them! I’m sure
!”

And the dog handler’s footsteps got harder, slapping on the asphalt.

“
They’ve got guns . . . don’t let the dog loose
!”

———

It smelled of smoke.

Gabriel was certain of it, but not in here and he raised himself up from her sofa, looked around the sitting room.

He was stuck. The red on Wanda’s white fabric had dried and got darker, almost brown, and was sticking to his thigh. He was freezing, the pain that earlier had come from inside now blended with what came from outside, his swollen thigh, the sanding disc against his skin and muscle and sinews. He didn’t know how long he’d been lying there, a few hours, maybe two. They’d sat at the coffee table in front of him and he’d heard the muffled bang and looked at his thigh that was oozing blood and tattoo ink, it was him who’d made the bomb and sorted out how to get it there—it was like running away, backwards, looking at what he was leaving behind.