Stockholm Noir

Stairway from Heaven By Åke Edwardson

Translated by Laura A. Wideburg

Birkastan

The sun in the window behind me was starting to set over Stockholm. Like a freshly powdered corpse, it’s always most beautiful in the twilight. Stockholm can’t bear the day; it lives at night, like a vampire.

The light shone into the eyes of the woman walking into my office. She could see me as nothing more than a silhouette, but I could observe her in detail.

She didn’t wear much makeup. She sat down in what passed for an armchair in front of my desk. Well, neither the armchair nor the desk were worthy of the name, but they were what I owned and obviously she decided they were enough.

For what? For help?

That’s what goes through my head each time I meet a new client. Self-esteem is not one of my strong points. I’m still fairly good at my job, but my grip on things is growing more tenuous by the day. The signs are all there — sentimentality, compassion, thoughtfulness, all those complicating emotions tied to goodness — but I can scarcely help myself these days, especially that day, as I was hungover and had already downed the hair of the dog, a bad sign for sure, but of late my life has consisted of one bad sign after another, my job of bad news, really bad news. I had tried to lighten my depression by reading the book on the desk in front of me, but the words made no sense, even less than usual.

Human beings, in the shape of angels or demons, come into my office in Birkastan somewhat randomly. The woman sitting in the armchair in front of me, now crossing her legs, resembled an angel who had determined to forsake the light of heaven to glide down the stairway to the dark, to the earth. To me. But her eyes were cold, as if she’d already seen everything, been everywhere down here.

“Can I get right to the point?” she asked.

“Sure.”

“I need your help to find John.”

“Who’s John?”

“A man I know.”

“I’ll need more than that.”

“He’s disappeared,” she said before looking at something out the window behind me — but there was nothing there, just Stockholm dying her death in beauty. The woman shifted her gaze to the bookshelf just to the left of my window. It was filled with crime novels. Dostoyevsky, Gogol, Borges, Stendhal, Yates, Burroughs, Hemingway, Strindberg. She examined the open book on my desk.

“What are you reading there?”

“Finnegan’s Wake,” I said. “James Joyce.”

“Is it good?”

“I’ve just started.”

“You’re at the end,” she said, nodding toward it.

“I always start at the back,” I replied.

“Is that how people read Joyce?”

“That’s how people should read this book. I’ve solved the riddle.”

“I see,” she said. “I never read.”

“Reading is good for the soul.”

“So what should I read? Any suggestions?”

“The Red Room by August Strindberg,” I said. “It’s about Stockholm.”

“I’m tired of Stockholm.”

“If you’re tired of Stockholm, you’re tired of life,” I said.

“So you’re a philosopher.”

“You get that way in this job.”

“You look tired,” she said.

“Not that way.”

“Can you philosophize some help for me?”

“Is John your spouse?”

She stared at me as if she didn’t understand the word. Spouse. Sounds a little old-fashioned, but I’m an old-fashioned man. I keep a bottle of Dewar’s White Label in my desk drawer. I wear a suit and tie. I was about to lighten the bottle a bit when she came in. I listen to Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath, in that order. When evening falls, I like to remember my youth, 1969 and 1970. I can say I had a year of real life, which many people don’t even get.

“Are you married?” I asked to clarify.

“Yeah, but not to each other,” she said, elegantly fluttering her wrist.

I considered my ghostly memory of her long after she’d gone. She’d told me her name was Rebecka, and it could be true enough — I didn’t ask for her ID, I’m not the police. And, well, my name could be Jimmy Page or Tony Iommi, for example, or even Peter Kempinsky, which is what it says on the office door. It’s a nice name. I chose it myself.

I sat as the electrified darkness shone in through the window from the street below. Birkastan. My part of Stockholm. I wasn’t born here, but I’ve come to call it home. Lost in my reflections, my hangover intensified and I suddenly needed my medicine, so I opened the desk drawer and pulled out the bottle, poured two fingers in the glass that had been set in front of Malcolm Lowry on the bookshelf. I lifted the glass and drank, feeling the warmth go through my chest as it burned my throat. The water of life. The devil’s drink. The devil’s music. I held the glass up toward the window. The alcohol was clear and it shimmered in the night, pure and true — it wasn’t grubby like the rest of life. I took another swig. My desk drawer also held my other medicine; I knew that the only place I’d remember to look for it was next to the whiskey bottle. Venlafaxin Hexal and Dewar’s, an extraordinary combination to battle depression, a cure not unknown but condemned by psychiatry. The pills have no taste.

John, John, John, I thought. Follow John, I thought. Where are you, buddy? I’d taken the job. I’d told her it wasn’t going to be easy. People who want to disappear can manage it pretty well. I glanced at the photo she’d handed me. John stood against a neutral background. He seemed neutral himself, good-looking, friendly. It would have been better if he’d looked like an asshole.

“He hasn’t been accused of a crime,” she’d told me, recrossing her legs.

“How do you know that?” I’d asked.

She didn’t answer. I believed her, naive as I am.

“He could be anywhere,” I said. “Here in Stockholm, out in the countryside, abroad.”

“No, he’s in Stockholm. I’m sure of it. In fact, I’m sure he’s still in Birkastan.”

“How do you know? Lots of people leave Stockholm, not to mention Birkastan.”

“Not him. Not John. He can’t.”

“Why not?”

She didn’t answer this question either. Perhaps she would later on, but I hoped we wouldn’t meet again. I had no desire to see her again — it wouldn’t be good for either of us. Her beautiful legs looked artificial, as if they’d been carved from an endangered wood.

She paid and left. Five hundred thousand royal Swedish kronor, cash, in an envelope. Half my fee. Too high a sum? I needed it, and she was ready to pay. I knew who’d told her how much I charged, and I planned to spring for a glass of Glenfarclas, the forty-two-year-old bottle, the next time I saw him. She had been absolutely certain that I was the right one for the job, and she was right, but for the wrong reason.

There were hints of spring in the air as I walked down toward the Atlas wall. The promise of light. Stockholm would soon melt into another summer. It was the same miracle every year. The city was bigger than life in that way, bigger than all of us; it had been here before we arrived and it would be here when we were gone. I had no plans to leave this mortal plane anytime soon, but I wasn’t so sure about John. I had a hunch, but I could be wrong. It’s been known to happen. I’m just a sinner with a bad conscience.

On the other side of the inlet, Kungsholms strand glittered with gold. I hardly ever walked over the bridge. Kungsholmen is a part of the city that nobody with brains would ever trust. It’s always smiling but its smile is false. Even now, it winks with its red and yellow cat’s eyes, but nobody who comes from the northern part of town is fooled.

It smelled like charcoal and fire and thyme inside Degiulio’s. They’d left two tables out on the sidewalk, as if some tourist would want to sit there and dream of spring. As if Italians eat outside when it’s forty degrees Fahrenheit.

I took my usual table at the back of the room. Maria had set flowers on the table, as she always did. That day they were yellow tulips, my favorite. I leaned toward them and drew in a deep breath, feeling like a real person for a moment.

Maria was at my table already. My only human friend in this world.

“You look tired, Peter,” she said.

“A glass of that red varietal you had yesterday,” I said. “A large glass. Thanks.”

“It’s called Alba,” she said.

“Yeah, that’s the one.”

She walked over to the bar and poured the wine, returning with a large glass. The flames inside the oven refracted the red color. There are so many shades of red. I’ve seen most of them.

“You have any lasagna with mushrooms tonight?” I asked. “No meat.”

“You can have whatever you want,” she said.

“Then I want a grappa too.”

“You drank too much grappa yesterday, Peter,” she warned.

“That’s why I need another glass today.”

She gave me a look that triggered a long-forgotten memory: someone had leaned over me once when I was a small child; a good person, but not my mother. It was my first memory. I could never catch it and hold onto it, but I knew it had been the happiest moment of my entire life.

“Then get me a second glass of the Alba instead.”

“You haven’t finished the first one yet,” she said.

“I’ll drink it while you’re getting the second glass. I thought I could have anything I wanted.”

“You seem really unhappy this evening,” she said.

“I have to find somebody.”

“That’s not news.”

“I think I’m losing my grip,” I said.

She paused. “On what?”

“I’ll try to figure that one out while you’re getting my second glass.” I lifted the Alba. The color was deep red. “Tell the cook not to use too much cheese. Cheese is the corpse left over from milk.”

“What’s that supposed to mean? It sounds terrible.”

“It means just what I said.”

“Did you think that up yourself?”

“No, Bloom did.”

“Who’s Bloom?”

“Ulysses. James Joyce. Bloom eats cheese. The cheese eats itself. It’s self-consuming. Just like dogs. They eat themselves, they vomit, they eat themselves again.”

“Cut that out,” she said.

“I can’t, Maria.”

“Then stop talking. I don’t like it.”

“But it’s true,” I said. “Everybody eats everybody. The city eats itself.”

She left me alone at my table after that. I looked around, but there was no one new to observe. I was the only customer at a table. Most evenings I’m the only one. Birkastan people usually just pick up their brick-oven pizzas. Nobody sits while they wait. I drank and closed my eyes. Maria was playing nineteenth-century opera at a low volume. Opera and pizza were a perfect combination. Large gestures, large promises, large voices — but most of it empty and superficial, followed by a heavy, greasy feeling in your belly, as if your body has been weighed down with concrete.

A young woman came in from the twilight and I overheard her ordering three pizzas: one Margherita, another Margherita, and... Margherita. She was clearly a creature of habit, as am I, simple is best. She was beautiful in an old-fashioned way and the kind I like, as if she’d stepped out of a Swedish film from the forties. Her round face, her pageboy haircut, that certain style of trench coat. Jussi Björling could have been singing in the background, although there weren’t any pizzerias in Sweden in the forties, let alone takeout places. Though perhaps in my decade, the fifties, you could find boiled hot dogs in paper, or fried herring. I was born after the war, in 1953, part of the smallest generation of children ever born in Sweden. I wonder how many of us are still around. Maybe I’m the only one. Though the Met in New York City was Jussi Björling’s main stage for decades, he died of a broken heart in Stockholm’s archipelago. He was forty-nine years old, ten years younger than I am now. It’s not right. He was a true artist in a false profession. He drank... but who doesn’t? He always had a black dog following him... but who doesn’t?

The woman looked in my direction. I lifted my glass in greeting. It was numero due. Not much was left in it either. She glanced away, without nodding or smiling. To her, I was a lone drunkard — that’s a good old-fashioned word, drunkard — sitting in a lonely pizzeria in the loneliest part of town. But she’d be wrong. I’m a thinker. Right then, I was thinking about my own youth, when I was two months shy of my sixteenth birthday and Led Zeppelin released their first album, on January 12, 1969. That was the life, then. And I was one month shy of my seventeenth birthday when Black Sabbath released their first album, on Friday, February 13, 1970. Led Zeppelin changed rock music forever and Black Sabbath picked up their riff and created heavy metal. The sound existed on Led Zeppelin’s first album, but the evil heaviness had been lacking. It was born with Sabbath, and everything since then has been nothing but repetition, just like my life. Like here, at Degiulio’s, where the woman had picked up her pizzas and was heading back out into the darkness without looking in my direction. By now, I was working on my third glass of Alba and my lasagna was in front of me. A perfect portion. I inhaled the aroma. It was slightly bitter from the portobellos, chanterelles, and black pepper.

My phone vibrated in my breast pocket, like a pacemaker with a low battery. I pulled it out: the client.

“So?”

“Somebody saw John,” she said.

“Where?”

“Karlberg station,” she said. “He was leaving.”

“Where was he heading?”

“I don’t know. God, time is running out!”

“Who saw him?”

“Does it matter?”

“It matters to me,” I said.

“It’s not important.”

“I’m hanging up now,” I said. “I’ll call back later tonight.”

I ended the call and got up from the table. Maria glanced at me.

“I have to go out for a while,” I said.

“Take care of yourself,” she said.

Night had fallen over the city. I heard noises above my head and looked up. A dozen ravens were flying in loose formation toward the west; the flock looked like a Rorschach test against the electric sky. I didn’t want to interpret what I saw, it would just scare me. The ravens were cawing, hoarse and scoffing, as if they knew everything.

I followed Atlasgatan to Sankt Eriksgatan, then took a right and went south to Norrbackagatan.

Everything was quiet in front of Karlberg station. It was the time of day where normalcy rules, where healthy humanity draws inward, does the dishes, puts the kids to sleep, works on the crossword, all those things I’ve longed for all my life.

No John there. Nobody had seen him. To me, it seemed that the client knew who’d spotted him. Perhaps she had. She was nuts, really, which was why I was standing there uselessly.

I walked back the way I’d come. I met no one.

Maria nodded when I stepped back into Degiulio’s.

“Let’s start over from the beginning,” I said. “Including the wine.”

I sat at my table and called Rebecka.

“Nothing,” I said.

“Did you really go there?”

“Yes, and now I’m having my dinner,” I said.

“But it could be too late!” There was a note of desperation in her voice, raspy like a file. I’d heard it before. The client comes to me with a practiced cool air, with practiced replies, but those soon collapse and blow away just like bad rock music or bad literature. Only naked panic is left.

“It’s never too late,” I said. My own practiced reply, superficial and false.

“I trusted you!” she said.

“Congratulations.”

“He might take off again!”

“Then I’ll find him again,” I said. I put my fork into the fresh lasagna Maria had set before me. It was new, not the old portion warmed up in the microwave. The food steamed, just like it should, you could burn your tongue on it if you wanted; you ought to at least have the option.

“You didn’t find him!”

“No.”

Maria brought the wine. It had the same refracted color as before.

“But I will,” I continued. “Was John seen anywhere else?”

“No, just here in Birkastan.”

She’d tripped up. Earlier, she’d said she lived in Östermalm, that she was heading back there straight from my office.

“Give me something more specific,” I said. “Besides the station.”

“Have you been drinking?” she asked.

“Answer me,” I said.

“It sounds as if you’ve been drinking.”

“I’m trying to eat my dinner.”

She said something I didn’t catch, and I hung up and dropped my phone back into my breast pocket so I could eat. I remembered when I was a child, I’d gone with an uncle to the woods around Nykvarn to search for mushrooms and we found a glade that shone like real gold from the chanterelles, and that was the last time I was ever happy, actually happy, like the people in magazines and on TV. I thought about John. I thought about the song “Good Times Bad Times,” the single from Led Zeppelin’s first album.

The train station was once again as silent as the sky above Karlberg Lake. If John had been here earlier in the evening, he was certainly gone now, sucked into the glittering city. There’s a lady who’s sure all that glitters is gold. I thought of this other Led Zeppelin song as I glanced over at the bike rack with its long row of locked bikes with stolen wheels. Can’t trust anything or anybody these days. It resembled an art installation, a commentary on something about which I ought to be aware. This is true art as far as I’m concerned: pictures sent directly to my insides, lighting them up, something pure and clear and simple.

I saw a missed call from Rebecka and rang her back. A commuter train slowly pulled out of the station, a lit worm on the way north.

“I need to know who saw John this evening,” I said.

“Are you out in the city now?”

“I’m at the station. Who saw him?”

She didn’t respond. She knew the answer; actually, this meant my assignment was over. Everything depended on silence. If she had broken that silence, she’d be in big trouble now. I wonder if she understood this, really understood what it meant.

“I’m going home,” I said. “Nice to have met you.”

“Wait!” she shouted.

“For what?”

“John was the one,” she said.

“Excuse me?”

“John was the one who called.”

“So you’re telling me that your missing John called and let you know where he was?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“He was worried.”

“Ha-ha.”

“It’s not a joke. Somebody’s after him. Somebody’s looking for him.”

“I’m looking for him.”

“He doesn’t know about you.”

“So what made him think this?”

“We didn’t... he didn’t have a chance to tell me. He hung up. He’d called from a prepaid mobile phone. It’s dead now.”

It’s always the past, I thought. Nobody can ever escape the shadows of the past. It was a banal thought, but still true.

Perhaps she really was crazy, my client Rebecka. Perhaps John only existed in her mind. But if there were a real John wandering around the streets of Birkastan and somebody else was following him, I’d be out half a million Swedish kronor.

“So I won’t go home,” I said. “Where are you?”

“A pizzeria on a side street. The only place that’s open.”

“Degiulio’s. You’ve been following me.”

“No,” she lied.

“I’ll meet you there,” I said.

John lived on Drejargatan, on the second floor. As soon as Rebecka had left my office I’d gone straight there and rung the doorbell. Nobody opened. The last name Beijer was on a sign on the apartment door. Nothing else. Now I was standing there once more. I rang the bell again. It was pretty late. John’s wife ought to be home if she were in Stockholm, but nobody opened the door.

I took out my skeleton key. The lock clicked and I pushed the door open. The lights of the city illuminated the hallway like a spotlight. I could smell the silence. I took my gun from my shoulder holster, followed the artificial light down the hallway into a room, glimpsed the contours of something, walked closer, saw it was a body. She lay on the sofa with an arm over the side as if she were resting, waiting for nightfall, but night was over for her, and day too, and all the other days forever and ever, amen. One day we all will die, but we have to live those remaining days and nights still left us. Her big day had already arrived. I touched her arm and it was cool, not cold; she’d died today, shot in the throat. The wound resembled a scarf which should protect from the cold, but it was warm in the room. From the heat, I saw condensation collecting on the window facing the street; I saw the woman’s face, still beautiful even in its death grimace, and I didn’t even know her name.

John, I thought. John, did you do this?

In the small V-shaped park between Drejargatan and Birkagatan, I saw a shape sitting on one of the benches. I knew there were ten benches altogether. They were green in the daylight.

“Who’s there?” the silhouette asked. I recognized the voice.

“Kempinsky,” I said.

“What are you doing out here this late?”

“And what are you doing, Arne?”

“Just waiting to go to bed.”

I walked closer. Arne was one of the homeless guys in our neighborhood. He was visible now, under the light of the streetlamp, the skin of his face already showing the tightness that makes alcoholics in the last stage of the disease start to appear Asian.

“If things ever calm down around here,” Arne said. “No privacy.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’m staying up here,” he said.

“What do you mean by if things ever calm down?” I asked.

“People coming and going,” he said. “Damned traffic.”

“Under the bridge?” I asked.

“Where else?”

When I got back to Degiulio’s, Maria had already placed the chairs on top of the tables. She was alone in the restaurant.

“Was there a woman here?” I asked. “She was supposed to wait for me.”

“Nobody’s come in since you left,” she replied. “Since you left the last time, I mean.”

“Yeah, I come and go.” I called Rebecka’s number. No answer. I didn’t leave a message either. I stepped outside again.

The arches beneath the Sankt Eriksgatan Bridge are a popular spot for the homeless to sleep. Walking twenty yards in, I was overwhelmed by the stench of urine and shit and filth, dust and damp cement, illness, death. I saw not a single person; only God and the devil knew what was hiding in the shadows. Nothing moved. The place was lit by naked bulbs from a few fixtures built into the walls; the cast was blue like a dead iris. A toilet of broken porcelain — Rörstrand — stood in the middle of the shitty cement floor. Yet another incomprehensible tableau that spoke to me. In the distance, I could see discarded gym equipment twisted in awkward positions.

Graffiti covered the bare walls. Rough pictures, rough words, messages from a world beneath the underworld. There’s a sign on the wall but she wants to be sure, ’cause you know sometimes words have two meanings.

A word can have more than two meanings, I thought, words are just the surface layer. I walked over to read something resembling a headline: EXTRA! EXTRA! Entire Cat Family Missing! Has the Collector Struck Again? It meant nothing to me. It was a joke or maybe it wasn’t a joke. It was a headline that fit this environment. The Collector existed in the real reality’s unreality. Everything smelled like paranoia here, fear, desperate words, desperate situations, but the answers were not there, just the insane questions. Ozzy Osbourne had searched his entire life and what did he find? I can’t see the things that make true happiness, I must be blind. He was singing my song too, one of the blind seers.

I thought I heard something to my left. I turned. Could be a cat, could be the Collector. Hundreds of painted faces covered the walls over there, like a Warhol work, all black-and-white, men and women. It was as if I had stepped into an art gallery, and perhaps I had, as it had been months since I was down here last, and everything around me might have been classified as art while I was aboveground. They all seemed to watch me, their eyes following me, the old optical trick painters have played with for thousands of years. I walked closer. One of the faces farthest to the right was a little bit smaller than the others; it had a different black-and-white nuance. It was still, but not as still as a painting. I saw the outline of a body and a pair of shoes on the ground.

“John?” I said.

No answer. The eyes stared at me. They seemed less real now, as if they were part of the collage. I blinked, and the face was still there when I glanced again. I felt the weight of my Colt Peacemaker in my holster, as I always did when my senses were on full alert, when things were reaching their end. Perhaps this was not the best weapon for my purposes, but it was the fourth version of the SAA, adapted to a new world.

“Peter Kempinsky here,” I said. “You can come out.”

“Who the hell are you?” the face asked. It flowed out from the shadows. “Why are you persecuting me?”

He was a few yards away. A man my age, about my height, wearing a suit like mine, nice features, we could have been friends if it weren’t for Rebecka.

“Why are you persecuting me?” he repeated.

“Why are you running away?” I asked.

“I’m not running anywhere. I have the right to be anywhere I want to be in this city.”

“So you chose this place,” I said.

“I’m afraid,” he said.

“Afraid of me?”

“Of whoever is following me.”

“Why would anybody follow you?”

He ran his hand across his chin, a desperate gesture. His eyes darted, as if he’d just realized where he was. He looked at me.

“She’s the one,” he said.

“Who?” I asked.

“Rebecka. She sent you. She can’t take no for an answer. So she’s sending you, whoever you are, a policeman, private detective, friend, or whatever the hell you are, to convince me to go back to her.”

“You’re wrong, John,” I said as I drew my Colt. “She sent me to kill you.”

The fear in his eyes was as real as life and death, I’d seen that black light many times in the seconds before I killed someone. But this guy was not done with life. I don’t know what I was waiting for.

“You’re making a mistake,” he cried.

I’d heard that many times before too. A professional killer hears all kinds of excuses. But the mistakes were never mine; they were from the past lives of my clients or my victims.

“It’s my job,” I said.

“No, no! You don’t understand! She’s as dark and as dangerous as the water under the bridge down here! She wants revenge! Then she won’t let you get away.”

“Interesting,” I said, lifting the revolver. The place was perfect, a ready-made cemetery for professional killers. In the best of all possible worlds, I would be back at Degiulio’s tomorrow evening, Rebecka would give me the rest of the money, I’d drink a well-earned grappa, and perhaps go home with Maria — it had happened before — or maybe with Rebecka; anything is possible in this city.

“She’ll knock you off too!” John yelled.

I didn’t reply. I’d heard that before as well, but I liked that old-fashioned expression, knock off.

“She killed my wife!” John yelled. It sounded like the last lie of a drowning man.

Try to show a little dignity, I thought. And as we wind down on the road, our shadows taller than our souls. I’d always liked that part, often wondering about what it meant. The soul for me is something like the back side of the moon, something everyone knows and talks about, but that nobody has ever seen. I try to see if the soul flies out of people when I kill them, but I’ve never succeeded. A tiny, flying shadow would have been enough for me. A tenth of a second of a breeze. But no.

“Why’d you call her tonight?” I asked.

“What?”

“You called her from the Karlberg station and said someone was following you.”

“Jesus Lord God,” he said. “She’s really fucking you blue.”

“Watch your language, please,” I said.

“Don’t you get it?” he screamed, his voice echoing as if it were the soundtrack accompanying the graffiti on the walls, perhaps Velvet Underground, music for the black-and-white scene we found ourselves in. “I ended it, but she can’t accept that. She’s crazy! She won’t accept it from you either.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“If you kill me, she’ll kill you.”

He abruptly calmed down then, as if revealing this truth would comfort him on his way to heaven. I glanced back at the stairs behind a crooked apparatus for training on a trapeze. The stairway led up into the darkness and perhaps to the light of heaven. John would reach it, with my help.

“So what did she pay you?” he asked. “Half a million? She’ll just steal it back. Think! Think! Why would she tell you that I called her? Why’d she lie about it? Why don’t you ask about my wife? Why don’t you ask me about Maud?”

“I didn’t have the chance,” I said.

“So you know?”

“Just like you do,” I said.

“No, no, she did it!” he yelled. “I came home too late!”

“She paid me a million, actually,” I said, caressing the trigger like a lover, my only friend, but before the explosion killed the silence forever in that disgusting place, I glimpsed a shadow up where the stairway disappeared into darkness.

She moved down the stairway like a seraph. The gleam I’d seen was a pistol in her hand. Looked like a Glock 17, semiautomatic, dangerous in the wrong hands. The light from the walls made her shimmer like a blue angel. I still held my revolver, and it was still aimed at John’s head.

“Shoot him,” she demanded. “Do your job, Peter Kempinsky.”

“Not under orders,” I said. I let the barrel drop slowly so it now pointed at the broken porcelain toilet — the color as white as Rebecka’s face. Her mouth was a black wound, reminding me of Maud’s throat. She stood one step up from the ground.

John froze. His face was in shadow again, as if he’d stepped back, but he hadn’t moved an inch.

“I paid you to do a job,” she said.

It’s an expression I like very much, do a job, and I’m good at doing my job, but I’d made my decision, really made a decision: I didn’t like her.

“Did you murder John’s wife?” I asked.

Her laugh sounded like ice cubes hitting cement.

“What’s it to you?” she asked.

“I don’t work for murderers,” I replied.

“You’ve been drinking too much,” she said. “You don’t know what you’re saying. You’re a murderer yourself.”

“I’m a killer who takes jobs only from the innocent,” I said, and I shot her in the throat — just once since I’m a good shot.

Her Glock slid to the ground, not breaking when it hit the cement — there are those who say a Glock is mostly plastic, but that’s a myth. Rebecka fell and became a part of the stairway that would lead her neither to the ground nor back to the darkness above.

“You just lost half a million kronor,” John said.

He still sounded calm, as if he were under the influence of something strong, perhaps the taste of death, its smell.

“She didn’t have the money on her anyway,” I said. I slipped my revolver back into my holster and walked away. I felt nothing and it made me sad, a longing for something I’d never had.

The moon was huge and strong up over the Atlas wall. It was much brighter outside than from where I’d come. I turned onto Völundsgatan and stood next to the James Joyce International Literary Society, just a hole in the wall with one window. The room inside was lit up, a nightly séance.

I pushed open the door and walked inside. It smelled like coffee and ink. Some people were sitting around a table. They looked at me, two men and two women, all middle-aged. I knew them. One of the men wore a plaid cardigan. I liked it. The room smelled like whiskey too; I breathed it in. I saw the bottle, a forty-two-year-old Glenfarclas.

“How did it go?” the man asked me.

“Relatively well,” I replied.

“It did?”

“I owe you a drink,” I said, nodding toward the bottle.

“That’s why I brought it,” he said, and the others laughed. I laughed too. It felt good to laugh. There were books lying on the table. I lifted one of the volumes in my hand.

“So this is the one we’re working with tonight?” I asked.

“Dubliners. Have you read it?”

“Just once,” I said, and turned to the last page.

Still in Kallhäll by Johan Theorin

Translated by Kerri Pierce

Kallhäll

The murder plan was perfect, Klas knew — after all, his intended victim was old and in a wheelchair.

The plan was simple. The murder easy.

The only problem was getting out of Kallhäll alive.

The thing was, a person could die a slow death in Kallhäll simply by living there, as Klas himself had done for the last six months.

Still in Kallhäll, he thought every morning when he woke up in the suburb — in the one-room apartment on the fourth floor, in a large concrete building that doubtless had slumbered for fifty years like a giant on the bedrock, just waiting for something to happen, which never did this far out from downtown Stockholm. Kallhäll was located where once there had been forest and isolated cottages, until the capital really began to expand.

The Ditz snored gently beside Klas, deciduous trees sighed outside the window, and birds sat in them and sang, undisturbed by roaring traffic — all of which reminded him that he wasn’t in the city’s center.

He hated his girlfriend. He hated trees. He hated birds.

Most of all Klas hated how the fuckers who called the shots in Kallhäll desperately tried to make him comfortable. Did they actually think they could simply build longer jogging trails, more residences, and new health centers and keep him here forever?

Klas had no intention of staying in Kallhäll. He was resolute, and on Thursday he’d take his tight leather gloves and a wool cap with him to the city — that way, he wouldn’t leave any evidence behind.

Klas Svensson was good at covering up his tracks. He’d left Falun the year before, forced to break all ties with his hometown because of some stupid petty debts he owed to the wrong people, and a hysterical bitch who had threatened to report him for assault. It felt natural to head down to Stockholm; all the young men went there and there was plenty of work to be had.

Within a week he’d snagged a job at Sailor Store in Östermalm. With its wide glass windows, it was only a few blocks from Stockholm’s most exclusive street, Strandvägen, where imposing stone buildings towered over the Nybroviken Bay. Plenty of boaters lived there; they waltzed into Sailor Store with sunburned faces and dazzling white teeth and shamelessly fished out their fat wallets. Klas thrived in Sailor Store.

A place to live was another matter. In the beginning he stayed in a hostel on Fridhemsplan and hunted for a rental flat in the city’s center, but there was nothing — no available apartments in Stockholm. A number of his Sailor Store colleagues still lived at home with their parents despite the fact that most were at least thirty years old. Others subletted apartments, or lived in some hole-in-the-wall for which they shelled out at least five thousand kronor. Some had taken out several million in loans to buy a studio apartment.

Without any money, Klas was forced to look for an apartment farther and farther away from downtown — all the way out in Kallhäll. There he found a furnished studio and moved in.

In the beginning, he was overjoyed that he’d actually managed to find a place. After all, Kallhäll was close to the water, maybe he could buy himself a sailboat. At work and in bars in the city he told chicks about his new place, but all he got were empty stares.

“Where do you live?”

“Kallhäll.”

“Kallhäll? Where the hell is that?”

“Northwest,” said Klas, “past Jakobsberg. It’s not too far, you just hop on the commuter train and...”

But as soon as he began to explain, the woman he was talking to had already stopped listening. No one pays attention once they realize you live in the suburbs.

In the center, your life matters. Outside the center, you’re just a loser.

During his second week in Kallhäll someone slipped a brochure through the mail slot. He read it before ripping it up.

The commuter train into the city — it quickly became the only thing Klas liked about Kallhäll.

Though it wasn’t on the train that he’d met the Ditz, it was in Stockholm. On a break from Sailor Store, he’d gone, as usual, down to Strandvägen to wander along the dock and take in the boats and stone buildings. Wishing and dreaming.

Out of one of the wide doors, number 13B, came a young woman in white jeans and a black quilted jacket with a large suitcase in her hand. The suitcase was a horrible color, hot pink, and seemed heavy. She carefully closed the door and left.

Klas wouldn’t have given her another thought if he hadn’t seen her again that same evening after work. It was the hot pink suitcase he recognized, only this time he saw it in Kallhäll. The chick from Strandvägen was carrying it, only now she also had a paper bag of groceries. She schlepped everything over the bridge from the station toward Kallhäll’s small center, past the shops on Gjutarplan, before continuing along the rows of apartment buildings.

What was she doing out here?

Her ass wiggled nicely as the struggled with the suitcase. Klas smoothed his bangs, put on his best sailor grin, and approached her.

“Do you need help?”

She turned around, smiled, and nodded, just like a grateful ditzy girl. Her ass was more attractive than her long, pale face, but the face would do.

The suitcase was heavy; Klas struggled with it up the stairs.

“It’s filled with books,” the Ditz explained, laughing nervously. “Just some heirlooms.”

“Heirlooms?”

“From my grandfather. He lives in the city, on Strandvägen. He gives me things in advance, before I can inherit them. He’s alone, the poor guy...”

Klas nodded and thought about the wide doorway: 13B. He helped her home and accepted a coffee in her small kitchen. The rest of the evening he listened to her sob story: how her grandfather, an old major general, was the only one she had left. No parents, no siblings. She’d been two years old and strapped in a car seat when her father had tried to pass a truck outside of Varberg. The family was killed — her father, mother, and older brother — but she’d remained firmly stuck within the protective casing and had survived without a scratch.

Klas listened. He accepted a vegetarian dinner, and watched while she sliced and diced with intense energy as she simultaneously flipped on the TV. Turned out her evening entertainment was cooking programs, and her major passion was root vegetables. Chopped beets, sliced carrots, diced rutabagas.

Klas thought about the hot pink suitcase and realized he wasn’t in love. She told him her name, but he knew he’d always think of her as the Ditz.

Still, three weeks later they were a couple. Six weeks later he moved in with her.

It was the apartment he’d fallen for.

Not the one in Kallhäll, obviously, but the big one on Strandvägen. Her grandfather’s apartment, which the Ditz was going to inherit. And after two months Klas got to see it himself when the major general invited them to dinner.

It was magnificent. Five large rooms on the fifth floor with gorgeous stucco work and a wide balcony that looked over the docks and the water. A century-old parade apartment. A bit dark and dusty, but that was easy to fix — just a matter of tossing all the old furniture, polishing up the parquet, and painting the walls white.

Klas wanted to live there, absolutely. He saw himself walking around the apartment in a Turkish robe, alone (the Ditz was missing from this particular fantasy), saw himself standing out on the balcony with a cappuccino and studying the street life down below. In the center. High above the rest of the world, far away from Kallhäll...

He opened his eyes and studied the Ditz’s grandfather. The major general sat in a wheelchair at the dining table, looking like a tattered crow in a cardigan with a bent neck and a croaking voice. His hand trembled as he lifted a large brandy glass. Now and then he threw a severe glance at the wall clock. Did he want them to leave?

“No, Grandfather’s just a little time crazy,” the Ditz told him on the train ride back to Kallhäll. “His routine is always the same, year round. At half past eight he rolls out on the balcony to make sure the Swedish flag has been hoisted up on Kastellholmen, so he knows that we aren’t at war. At ten the home help comes and drops off lunch and at twelve he eats. At one he has a glass of brandy. And he listens to the news on the radio all day...”

“Does he ever go out?” Klas asked.

“Only out onto the stairwell,” the Ditz said. “He rolls out at three thirty to water the fig tree.”

Klas remembered that tree — it stood in a large limestone pot outside her grandfather’s door. He nodded at the Ditz and pondered.

He decided to become more punctual.

Every morning, after having met the Ditz’s grandfather, he went into the city earlier than he needed to and headed down to Strandvägen. Just before eight thirty, he stood on Strandvägen in the shelter of some trees and observed the windows of 13B.

The Ditz was right: her grandfather was like a cuckoo clock. At exactly eight thirty the balcony door opened and the major general rolled out in his wheelchair. Five minutes later the door shut again.

Like a fucking cuckoo clock. And this suggested that he was equally punctual the rest of the day too.

With his eyes locked on the apartment’s high window one morning, Klas decided what he was going to do.

It was a Thursday like any other that he took the cap and gloves to work at Sailor Store. Later that afternoon he complained of a sudden migraine and went into the staff room to rest. He carefully locked the door, but didn’t make it onto the couch; the store had a back door and he used it to sneak out.

Out on the sidewalk he glanced at the clock; it was 3:18. The day was cloudy, but there was no rain in the air.

He started across the dry asphalt. He didn’t run, but took long strides. Down to Strandvägen.

Six minutes later he was at the door of 13B. It was locked, but he had memorized the code the Ditz had punched in.

Half a minute later he stood inside the dark stairwell and pulled on his gloves and cap. He listened anxiously for any sound. Everybody was at work, everything was still. And so was he, after he’d snuck up the wide marble steps.

At 3:28 Klas reached the second floor and listened again. The stairwell was silent, all the apartment doors were shut.

A minute later he stood in the dark on the fourth floor. Waiting.

At exactly 3:30 he heard a door open on the fifth floor. The old man coughed. A soft creaking noise, the sound of rubber wheels rolling across the stone floor.

Klas clenched his jaw. He summoned the old rattling elevator up from the first floor so that the racket would cover any other noises. Then he started up to the fifth floor.

Now he could see the wheelchair on the landing right above him; the back of a naked head visible. The Ditz’s grandfather was hunched over in his chair, facing away from Klas.

The major general mumbled to himself as he fiddled with his fig tree. The chair’s back wheels were only a few inches from the top step.

The elevator continued to rattle. All the doors were shut. Klas was set.

Now.

He stepped up with an outstretched hand, grasped the wheelchair’s steel rim, and quickly jerked it back in one sharp move. The wheels went over the marble edge, the whole chair tipped back. Klas stepped aside and saw the major general’s hands flap like startled birds in the air. He fell down, the back of his head first, his body somersaulting down the stairs, landing with a low thud at the bottom.

Klas didn’t even glance at the old man. He stopped the wheelchair’s fall so it didn’t make a loud clatter, climbed the stairs, and dragged the heavy stone pot toward him.

Turning around with the pot in his hands, he saw that the major general was still alive. He’d landed on his back with his head to the side. Klas bent over him, balancing the stone pot on the stair right above the old man’s wrinkled brow.

The Ditz’s grandfather recognized him; when their eyes met he understood exactly what Klas was about to do; he opened his mouth and let out a terrified breath of cognac. However, no cry for help could escape before Klas let the stone pot fall. The pot’s edge struck its target perfectly, causing the major general to shudder one last time.

Klas was finished here. He stood and fled. The elevator had since stopped on the fourth floor, but he took the steps in long strides. The stairwell remained empty the whole way down to the bottom floor. No one had heard or seen a thing. He stripped off the cap and gloves on the fly.

Out through the door, out onto the street. Look relaxed now, not hounded.

He was back at work five minutes later — it was only 3:43. He entered through Sailor Store’s back door, stepped into the shop, and told the boss that he felt better.

His boss looked him over. “Are you sure? You seem sweaty.”

Klas smiled quickly and wiped his forehead. “Just a slight fever.”

At five thirty that evening he headed home to Kallhäll, where the Ditz stood slicing beets.

Klas closed his eyes and kissed her neck. Then he sat next to the TV, awaiting the vile veggie meal. And, obviously, anxiously waiting for the telephone to ring with a call from Stockholm.

And so it did late that evening. It was a death report, a tragic fall down the stairwell, an accident that sometimes happens to old men, especially when there is alcohol in their system. The police didn’t suspect any foul play, and Klas wrapped his arms around his sobbing girlfriend and sighed.

The reading of the will was held eight days later, and the Ditz took the commuter train alone to the lawyer’s office. She had several handkerchiefs with her, she was still grieving.

Three hours later she arrived back in Kallhäll, her eyes red-rimmed, and immediately began slicing and dicing in the kitchen.

Klas joined her at the sink and quietly asked: “How did it go, sweetheart?”

“Good,” she said softly.

“Did they read the will?”

“Yes.”

“And you’re inheriting...?”

“Yes...”

Klas closed his eyes in the narrow kitchen and felt nearly intoxicated by success; he was tired, he’d slept poorly this last week, but he saw an enormous apartment with a broad balcony before him. Mine, he thought.

“... and my cousins.”

“What did you say?”

“My cousins and I are to inherit everything,” said the Ditz. “It was cool to see them again.” Her voice actually sounded a little happier now. The beets were chopped, she began to mash them in a glass bowl.

“What cousins?” asked Klas.

“My mother’s brother’s kids,” she replied, smiling.

He stared at her, didn’t smile back. “You said he was alone. That you were all he had.”

“Grandfather? Yeah, he was totally alone. I mean, my cousins are only teenagers... Obviously, they didn’t come by so often. They were too young for that—”

“Where do they live?” Klas interrupted. “Here in Stockholm?”

“Live?”

“You have to tell me where they live. I want an address.”

Just teenagers, he thought. Teenagers don’t sit in wheelchairs and they hardly drink cognac, but they can still meet bad ends. Get run over by a car, or pushed from a ferry.

Klas stepped closer to the Ditz. “I’ll take care of it. We’ll make it out...”

“What are you talking about?”

He nodded toward the kitchen window, toward the forest beyond. “... out of here. We’ll move into the city. You’ll inherit everything, the whole apartment... just like I planned for you.”

The Ditz stared at him, confused. “Grandfather fell,” she said softly.

“It was no accident,” Klas said. “I was there... Don’t you get it, you fucking ditz?”

She shook her head blankly.

Finally, Klas snapped. There was no reason to smack her — but suddenly he’d done it, right across her face so that she fell back against the sink. No reason, but it felt good. Klas stepped forward and raised his hand again.

The Ditz shrieked, lifted her hands protectively, and reached for something. At first Klas didn’t know what it was, but then he saw that it was one of the knives from the counter, the chef’s knife.

“Drop it!”

He threw himself at the Ditz, tried to twist the knife from her hand; they danced around the long kitchen sink and knocked over the bowl of beets. Klas slipped on the mash with his arms around the Ditz and hit the floor beneath her — hard.

He tried to push her off him and get up; the only thought in his brain was: Where the fuck did the chef’s knife go?

Then he felt an icy weight in his breast and knew the answer.

Anna Nyman couldn’t have been happier in Kallhäll. She loved the forest and the birds and the close proximity to Mälaren. She appreciated the health center and the senior get-togethers at the Munktell Museum and the little square with all the shops. She’d lived on Bondegatan in Stockholm for many years and had moved out here to retire, away from the noise and congestion, and it felt like the powers-that-be in Kallhäll had done all they could to make her comfortable.

Her only problem was with some of her neighbors. Sometimes they played their music too loud, and some weekends you could hear fighting. Up until now, the young couple in the apartment right next to hers had been quiet; but this evening loud voices came through the wall.

Then it got worse; Anna heard an insane shriek and the sound of shattering glass. After that it was quiet for a few seconds and then the outer door opened. Heavy steps staggered out into the hallway. Someone summoned the elevator up from the ground floor, but didn’t get in.

Anna cautiously opened her door. She glimpsed someone in the hallway. It was the young man from the neighboring apartment, slouched against the wall. He stared at her with heavy lids, and then stumbled toward the elevator and slowly lifted his hand, but seemed unable to open the steel door.

Anna went outside to help and it was only when she’d opened the door fully that she saw the neighbor’s white shirt was shredded. Red splotches were spread across the breast.

“What happened?” Anna asked.

Without answering, the man stumbled into the elevator and collapsed onto the floor.

Anna followed and bent over him. He looked around, slowly opened his mouth: “Where am I?”

“You’re home,” Anna said. “In Kallhäll.”

He coughed blood and began to laugh to himself, and almost immediately the floor beneath them shook. The elevator began to descend.

“There now, stay calm.” Anna took the man’s hand and tried to comfort him, but he closed his eyes like she didn’t exist.

“Still in Kallhäll...” he mumbled, and laughed and coughed blood onto the elevator floor, the entire way down into darkness.

The Smugglers by Martin Holmén

Translated by Laura A. Wideburg

Rörstrandsgatan

Twilight comes on quickly.

The pub is housed in a small shed in the back courtyard, not far from Rörstrands porcelain factory. The dank premises measure barely thirty square meters. Black smoke is thick on the walls and across from the door a scratched wooden bar runs down the long side of the room. On the far end of the counter, a tiger-striped tomcat with scarred ears sits cleaning his fur with slow strokes of his tongue.

Behind the counter, there is a man wearing a soiled apron over his protruding stomach. He runs his hand through his enormous walrus mustache. One of his thumbnails is missing.

The fire crackles in the cast-iron heater in the corner. From the building across the Vikingagatan comes the furious song of the riveting machines from the porcelain factory. Their monotonous clatter is broken by the dull thump of four bronze candlesticks hitting the surface of the bar counter.

“Light is on the house.”

The bartender strikes a match and lights the candles. He’s set the candlesticks down between two men sitting at the bar. They both wear blue shirts and the heavy vests of rock blasters. The older man is carrying a trowel in his belt as if it were a weapon. Their wooden clogs are spattered with white mortar. The younger man nods listlessly, his elbow on the counter. He’s holding a three-cornered schnapps glass in one hand. It’s empty.

The back door creaks, and a girl, her blond hair in a bun, enters. Cobwebs stick to her knitted cardigan. She wears wool socks with her clogs and carries a wicker potato basket filled to the brim with sawdust.

“Make sure you do a better job than last time! Spread the stuff out all the way to the corners!”

The bartender shakes out the match and puts it back into its box. The girl nods and with a rustling sound she shakes the sawdust over the floor. She works methodically from one side of the room to the other. She kicks the sawdust under the tables and chairs. The men at the bar follow her movements in silence. The scent of resin and fresh shavings fills the room.

In the corner, beneath a warped rectangular window, a woman sits at a table and the grease stains on her wide-brimmed hat gleam in the grainy, fading light that comes through the dirty, lead-rimmed panes. She’s darkened her eyebrows with burnt cork and black flecks have fallen onto her eyelashes. Her lips are painted red. She holds a cigarette between her fingers. On the table, there’s a pack of Bridge and a broken white enamel cup holds a number of cigarette butts stained with red lipstick.

As the girl with the basket of sawdust approaches, the woman shifts her skirt aside and lifts her high-heeled, worn-out, lace-up boots — she’s not wearing stockings. A large bruise shows on her pale calf. The girl looks away as she kicks the last of the sawdust beneath the woman’s chair.

“Well, what a shrinking violet we have here! Don’t worry, soon she’ll be making a living with her legs in the air too, just wait and see.” Slurred, but loud, the woman’s voice cuts through the clatter of the machines. The men at the bar hold back their laughter, but their shoulders shake. The younger man slaps the older one on the arm. The girl says nothing. She makes her way quickly over the sawdust and sets the basket by the back door. She looks down, smoothing her apron with both hands.

The front door opens and the leather curtain made of pigskin is pushed aside with a swish. The flames of the candles flicker in the draft. The men at the bar turn around. The tomcat pauses in his cleaning, his tongue halfway out of his mouth.

The sawdust crunches under heavy soles as the youth walks into the room. He’s wearing a sailor’s cap that seems to be a few sizes too large. He hides his mouth behind his hand as he glances around. Fish scales glisten on the frayed sleeves of his jacket.

He chooses the table farthest from the door and pulls out a chair. Beneath his slight blond mustache, his upper lip has a cleft that stretches halfway along his nose. The edges are pale pink. His yellowed front teeth show through the gap.

He sits down with his back to the wall, facing the door. The girl comes to him with a schnapps glass and an unmarked bottle. She shows him the bottle and the youth nods. The girl quietly fills the glass to the rim. The oily surface of the liquid glimmers as she strikes a match and lights the candle on the table. She is already turning away when the youth raises his hand. She stands silently, holding the bottle in the crook of her arm.

The young man grips the narrow stem of the glass with three fingers and lifts it up a few millimeters before setting it back down on the table. He closes his eyes. His chest heaves twice. Then, in one swift movement, he brings the glass to his lips and drinks it all down. He grins crookedly with his mangled lips. The girl pulls the cork from the bottle with a plop and he nods. She fills it to the brim again before he waves her away.

The front door opens again; the leather curtain is drawn aside and the breeze makes the flames of the candles dance. One flickers out. A black line of smoke drifts toward the ceiling. The cat jumps softly down onto the sawdust. He lifts one of his forepaws and shakes it slightly before he heads toward the door. He slides between the newcomer’s well-polished leather boots and disappears outside. The constant clatter of machines stops suddenly when the whistle of the factory signals the end of the workday.

The new arrival bends his head slightly to avoid hitting the top of the doorframe with the bowler hat that sits atop his head. He has a rolled-up newspaper under one arm while in his large hand he carries something wrapped in an oil-stained piece of sackcloth. With his free hand, he fishes out a watch with a gold chain from his vest pocket. He checks it and looks around. The bartender nods toward him and he nods back. The woman in the corner hastily stubs out her cigarette in the enamel cup. She gathers her skirts and disappears out the door behind the man’s back. The door slams shut behind her with an echoing thud.

The burly newcomer slips his watch back into his pocket. He glances around the room one more time before he moves forward to the table where the youth with the cleft palate is sitting. In the total silence in the wake of the stopped machines, the other people in the room can hear the young man inhale deeply. The large man smiles broadly and sits down across from him. There’s a clunk of metal as he sets the sackcloth on the table. The youth nods in greeting and stares down at the full schnapps glass in front of him.

The bartender goes over with a filthy rag and wipes down the table, avoiding the sackcloth bundle and newspaper between the two men. He brushes crumbs into his cupped hand as he speaks.

“Good that Belzén sent you, Hickan. I sent word to him two days ago that I—”

The man called Hickan holds up his hand. “I’m here for another reason.”

“I understand, I understand! Do you want the usual?”

Hickan nods. “The usual.”

The youth glances up for a second. Both of the men at the bar are counting coins. They put their money on the counter and head out the door without waiting for change.

The bartender comes back with a bottle of Estonian vodka. He fills a schnapps glass for Hickan as Hickan stares at the youth. The bartender sets the bottle on the table and walks away. Hickan smiles as he lifts his glass.

“For better luck next time!”

Both men throw back their heads and let the schnapps run down their throats. Hickan shrugs his shoulders and shudders. The youth runs a finger over his thin mustache as he glances at the package in front of him. Hickan takes out cigarette paper and a small silver box, placing both on the table.

“So, how are things on the islands?” Hickan removes the lid from his silver box. There’s a slight whisper as he drops tobacco into the cigarette paper he keeps pinched between his fingers.

The youth clears his throat: “The windstorm last week got up to gale force eleven.” His voice is high-pitched, and he has a slight lisp.

“And?”

“The gale hit when we were out. The boathouse, where we live right now, lost part of its roof. Lindén up on the hill was able to loan us some sheet metal to keep the water out for a while.”

“There was a bit of wind here in the city as well.”

Hickan rolls the tobacco in the paper, licking the adhesive side, sealing the seam of the cigarette tightly. The youth keeps stroking his sparse mustache.

“I was with Lindén and we had to anchor that night with a defective engine. We drifted a few hundred meters and then the chain broke. I put together a sail from a bunk to guide our drift.”

“And that worked?”

“With Neptune’s help, as Lindén put it.”

“You archipelago fishermen have always been resourceful.”

“You take what you have and you do what you can.”

“I have a story about Olsson, the Berghamn pilot. You know him?”

“Only by name.”

“Oh well, I’ll leave it for another time, then.”

The match scratches against the tabletop and flares as Hickan lights his cigarette. He rolls it between his fingers and watches the smoke curl and make its way to the soot-covered ceiling.

“I used to smoke that English brand Mixture but it got difficult to get ahold of. During the war, I started smoking Windsor, but it was too harsh for me. Now I keep changing brands, but I can’t seem to find one I like. This one is Perstorps Prima.” Hickan nods toward the silver box. “You’re welcome to roll one of your own.”

“No thanks. I prefer to chew.”

Hickan smiles and brushes some ashes from the tabletop. Behind him, the bartender is putting clean glasses on the shelf. They clink as they touch.

“So I hear your engine broke down the day before yesterday.” The end of Hickan’s cigarette burns through a full centimeter of paper.

The youth nods and looks away. “The coast guard was after me.”

“Yeah?”

The youth clears his throat. “Yeah, they were after me. I was pushing the engine hard and thought I’d gotten away when it started dying just outside of Yxlan. Pund-Ville was on the island and saw what was going on so he fired a couple of shots into the air to distract them. But it didn’t work. A few minutes later, the engine died completely.”

“I had two men waiting for you in Gröndal.”

“The boat is ready to go. I fixed it. The fuel looked like coffee grounds when I pumped it out. I took the whole motor apart and cleaned it. I even paid for a new filter.”

“And the barrels of alcohol?”

“The engine works just fine now, even better than before. It purrs like a kitten.”

“The barrels?”

“I had no choice.”

“Can you search for them in the water?”

“Not in Norrviken. It’s too deep.”

Hickan stubs out his cigarette in the mug. There’s a slight glug-glug sound from the bottle as he refills their drinks. He lifts his own glass while putting his other hand on the sackcloth package.

“If the coast guard caught you with the alcohol, at least there’d be a written report. Now we have nothing but your word.”

The youth stares down at the table. The back door creaks and then slams shut, as the bartender and his helper slip out. Someone inserts a key from the outside and there’s a thud as the bolt slides home. Hickan nods toward the young man’s glass.

“I imagine you’re too young to remember that pub called Hamburg Cellars? They closed about seven or eight years back.”

The youth lifts his glass with a shaking hand. Hickan smiles.

“It wasn’t much bigger than this place here, but it had an interesting story. You could find it at the crossroads of Götgatan and Folkungagatan not far from Södra Bantorget. The horses would stop there on their way to the gallows at Skanstull. In this country, we’ve always thought a man deserves one last drink. A nice custom, don’t you think?”

Drops of liquor spill between the fingers of the youth’s shaking hand. Sweat slides down his face beneath his sailor’s cap.

“They had a special cupboard there. All the glasses were on display. They engraved the name and the date.”

The spilled liquor collects in one of the grooves in the table, making a small pool.

“They say one of the condemned refused his drink and told them he’d come back for it. Of course, he didn’t.”

“My wife... she’s in that way.” The youth’s voice could hardly be heard.

“How far along?”

“Seven months.”

“Let’s drink to her health. Skål!”

Both men throw back their drinks. Hickan pulls at a corner of the sackcloth and opens it, revealing a revolver. It’s black with a grip made from light wood. Right beneath the drum there’s something stamped in Cyrillic letters as well as the year: 1915. Hickan places his huge hand over it.

“Do you know why Belzén trusted you with this job?”

“Because I know every bay and inlet in all the islands and know all the good hiding places.”

“Like pretty much every other inhabitant of the archipelago.”

“So why did he trust me?”

“Because your brother vouched for you. He’s worked for us for years. It’s the only way to get into our little organization. Would you say that you’ve let him down?”

“Perhaps I have.”

“As well as us?”

“Maybe so.”

Hickan runs his hand over the hard contours of the revolver. Outside it is starting to rain. The first drops hit the dirty pub windowpanes. Night has fallen.

“I have two daughters myself. The youngest just started elementary school. It seems like yesterday when I held her in my arms for the first time.”

Hickan holds up his huge hand. Between the middle finger and the ring finger, a wide scar runs all the way down his palm. He laughs.

“There’s nothing I wouldn’t do for them. A man who can’t take care of his family is not a real man at all.”

The rain is picking up. It hits the tar-papered roof with an intense clatter, like the riveting machines had made earlier. The revolver scrapes against the tabletop as Hickan pushes it toward the youth.

“Don’t you agree?”

The youth smiles quickly and he puts his hand on the revolver. Hickan nods.

“It’s a Nagant. You have seven bullets, no more, no less.”

The youth nods eagerly. He takes the revolver and stuffs it under his belt, pulling his shabby jacket tight around his body. He clears his throat. “I won’t disappoint Belzén again.”

“Make sure you don’t.”

“Who’s the mark?”

“One of our own. A piece of crap brazen enough to steal an entire truckload right from under our noses. We’ll send you his name in a few days.”

“I don’t know if I—”

“As we see it, you don’t have a choice.”

The youth nods and pulls his wallet from his pocket. Hickan raises his huge palm.

“No, it’s on the house.”

The youth nods, pushes the chair away from the table, and stands up. The two men shake hands.

“So, you’ll hear from me in a few days.”

The youth pulls up his collar and with his fist outside his coat he leaves the pub. Hickan fills his glass and rolls himself another cigarette. He doesn’t notice the cockroach climbing up one of the table legs.

Almost immediately, the bartender and the girl come back in through the back door. The girl is carrying the tomcat in her arms. The rain has left dark patches on their clothes and has plastered their hair to their heads. The bartender runs his hand over his walrus mustache, shakes the liquid from his hand, and then makes his way across the sawdust. He has a slight limp. He sits down across from Hickan and brushes his hand over the table before he starts to speak.

“You scared away all my other customers!”

“They’ll be back.”

“So, did you tell him the Hamburg Cellars story?”

“Works every time.”

The bartender’s laughter echoes throughout the bar. He’s missing a few of his upper teeth. He runs his hand through his hair. The cockroach climbs over the edge and stands on the table, its long antennae sweeping back and forth.

“As I told you, I contacted Belzén a few days ago. We’re running out of inventory and I need a delivery as soon as possible.”

“I understand. Unfortunately, we have a break in our supply lines at the moment.”

Hickan picks up his newspaper and rolls it tightly and laughs. “That kid?”

He raises the newspaper over his head. “We can stand to lose a few hundred liters overboard. But his brother is a piece of crap...” Hickan smashes the cockroach with his newspaper, then turns it over to survey the mangled remains. He wipes them off on the edge of the table as he lowers his voice. “Did he really believe he could make off with one of our trucks? And get off scot-free?”

The bartender laughs and twirls his mustache. “So they’ll both learn a lesson.”

“It was Belzén’s idea. Business is business.”

The bartender nods, pulls the cork from the bottle, and fills both glasses.

Outside the bar, the youth sees Rörstrandsgatan is nearly deserted. The factory workers have all hurried home through the rain. An old woman with a scarf over her hair waddles out of the general store at the corner of Birkagatan. She peers up at the rainy sky. From the wicker basket under her arm the necks of milk bottles with their patent corks and rolled-up cones of newspaper poke out.

The youth with the cleft palate walks along, his collar up and his shoulders bent. A horse and open wagon go past. Empty beer bottles rattle, while the ragged hooves plod along on the cobblestones. From down near Sankt Eriksgatan Square, a streetcar bell rings. The youth glances around as he crosses the street. A train blows its horn on its way to Central Station.

Behind him, the city is cloaked in darkness from the rain and smoke from kitchen fires. He comes upon a lamplighter, an old man wearing a moth-eaten military coat and carrying his long pole over his shoulder. The guy stops by one of the square gas lanterns to light it. The gas socket hisses and its tongue of flame flares in vain against the glass, unable to escape. The yellow light reveals the old man’s wrinkled face, reflected in the puddles below.

The youth lets his gaze follow the row of streetlights that look to him like lighthouses out in the archipelago leading the way into the city. He puts his hand into his coat, clutches the cold revolver, and sticks out his chest before continuing south.

His upper lip, cleft in two, gapes as he smiles.

The Splendors and Miseries of a Swedish Crime Writer by Malte Persson

Translated by Laura A. Wideburg

Gröndal

I was busy with another murder when my cell phone rang unexpectedly. In media res or in flagrante delicto or whatever the proper technical term may be. The victim was a young woman, yet another of all these young women who have to die, and unfortunately she also had a rather striking resemblance to my famous ex, Anette. I had my priorities, so I ignored the call. Not answering the phone makes one look busy and important these days, I told myself, and kept my hands hovering over the keyboard. I’m a writer.

That’s another thing I kept telling myself. A crime writer. I knew that status was far from reality. At the moment, I was a minor criminal who’d worked in advertising. I was nobody.

Still, these were my words on the smudged laptop screen:

I changed light-blue to forget-me-not blue. I deleted small mouth and put in a different sentence: Her mouth was covered by police tape. I added, In her lap, a volume of the Swedish law book, Regulations Concerning Property and Buildings, was open to the famous Chapter 12: How Pigs Should Be Let Loose in an Oak Forest. This I deleted again. It was too ridiculous, even by the standards of Swedish crime novels.

The whole scene was nothing but a piece of shit. Deader than the victim it described. Nothing left to do but start over; but I couldn’t concentrate. When you stop answering the phone, after a while people stop calling. The only ones who keep on trying are people who believe they are too important to be ignored. And so my thoughts immediately turned to...

I picked up my cell phone. Just as I suspected. Anette.

Of course, I had no intention of calling her back, but as I was about to put it back down, it buzzed with an incoming text message. Anette again: Am in town. Want to get together?

Get together? Did I want to get together?

I looked out from my office window: the factory buildings, the rusty water towers, the glittering water...

After an aborted attempt at reflection, I texted back: If you want to meet me, you’ll have to come to my end of town. I don’t know why I used those exact words (I was thoroughly interrogated about them later on), but my idea, in addition to playing hard-to-get, was probably the chance to meet like we used to — at a bar in Hornstull. Those were my best years, when I held down both her job and mine. I was a copywriter, and I hadn’t started to think so damned much.

It was now just about a year since we had broken up, ending our own personal party, which had gone on, with few interruptions, for thirteen months. We’d hit the town, mostly as part of Södermalm’s promiscuous and sorrow-free — or perhaps soulless — art and media circles. Her ambition then was to be a fashion designer, a dream of so many young women.

Anyway, we met at work and soon went on to happy hour, which merged into parties and weekends at bars and clubs, including gatherings on apartment balconies during the light summer nights. Events. Retro raves. Pretend-bourgeois dinner parties. Microbrews and MDMA. Sex in bizarre places. That idiotic conviction of youth that everything you hope for will come true.

Not long after she left me, I lost my job. Hit by depression, I self-medicated with uppers and downers, and it seems I said a few things to my boss and coworkers, things I didn’t have enough talent to get away with. I was also the last hired, and then the economy tanked, so I was the first to go.

But I’d bounced back.

Or so I told myself.

This past summer, I’d been spending many late nights by my wide-open window in the cramped office. I watched the guard dogs running around off leash on the grounds of the cement factory across the street. Often, when I would hear the bass booming from one of the nearby clubs, I’d think of it as the rhythm of a life that was no longer mine. A life retreating farther and farther away.

In retrospect, I’m amazed that I ever met a woman like her. She was way out of my league, even back then, or should have been. She was always the center of attention. The kind of person people say could be a model and who later actually becomes one, moving up and away from their lives and toward other parties in other cities. (I assume you’ve seen a photo of her somewhere. By then, I was already out of the picture.) And what did I have? Besides a reasonable face and a reasonable fashion sense?

So if I was going to go out and see her again, I wouldn’t hurt my reputation to have our acquaintances see us together again.

But that’s not how it turned out. She interpreted my text message more literally than I’d intended. Or perhaps she was hit by childish inspiration. She wrote: Playing hard to get! Still, I have an errand close by. Let’s meet at the swimming dock, 6 p.m., okay? I’ll bring wine!

She meant the little floating dock down by the lake so quaintly named the Triangle. You can find it between Liljeholmen and Gröndal. Just a few hundred meters from my tiny office. I thought it would be embarrassing — we’d skinny-dipped there one late, drunken evening, shortly after we first met — but I couldn’t see how to get out of it. So I agreed. I didn’t believe her about that errand in the vicinity. Either she wanted to relive her teenage years (I knew she’d attended a Waldorf school not too far from there) or she was working on her image of being spontaneous and crazy.

I sighed and started a new crime scene, one a bit less far-fetched. They found her naked body, cut to pieces, in the water...

The hum of a sewing machine came from the office next door. It was three hours until six. I had time to think about the details.

Details matter to losers. I really wanted to see myself as a careful, rational, and methodical person that year — sitting, as I was, in a tiny office between Liljeholmen and Gröndal, wanting to become a crime writer. I had read interviews with successful crime writers. According to them, all it took was a bit of discipline. The only thing that mattered was regular work hours and a strict schedule. Don’t deviate from the conventional narrative arc, follow it without sentimentality, and you will reach the pot of gold at the other end. I had also read countless articles on “How to Write a Best Seller.” The pathways to achieving this miracle differed only slightly. A story that worked always began with presenting the protagonist, preferably in a different situation from what he finds himself in at the end. Step two is introducing a conflict that forces the protagonist to act. And so on, until all seems lost before it eventually reaches a perfect conclusion — neatly tying up all loose ends.

That was the plan. And how hard could it be if you had enough pens and Post-its, a computer and a sick imagination, and a tiny office in an old rundown building?

Wanting to become a crime writer was not the most original or even greatest of ambitions. In Sweden, there are police officers and lawyers and criminals and psychologists all writing crime novels; poets and intellectuals all writing crime novels; hundreds of journalists and doctors and teachers and housewives all writing crime novels. This was a country where even the minister of justice wrote crime novels!

So the general impression was that anybody could write a good mystery, and once you’d written one, you’d become an international success. Who gives a shit that there are fewer homicides in all of Sweden in a year than in any large American city in one or two months? That’s exactly what makes Swedish murders so tantalizingly exotic and symbolically loaded. And if your prose is a bit lacking, your foreign editors would improve it. Yep, you didn’t even have to write well to write crime novels. An equitable business worthy of the world’s most equitable society: the Swedish Model!

Even I wanted to write a detective novel, of course. Then I’d make some money and gain some status and — not the least important thing — I’d be able to revel in macabre scenes of violence in a socially acceptable way. Which, when you get down to it, is exactly why so many people read these books.

Perhaps it’s not surprising that I soon got tired of my pathetic plots and wound up in a never-ending cycle of creating new descriptions of crime scenes and murders. Not being all that rational of a person, I seldom came up with a good method.

Oh, I forgot to mention how I supported myself. Inspired by my own drug use I had set up a modest and discrete mail order business. It was based on the ability to receive mail under a false name at this old rundown office building, where nobody kept track of who was renting which space. The same dynamic also got in the way at times. It meant a lot of running up and down the stairs and new faces all the time, who were, as Stockholm people are in general, often hard to tell apart. But I thought of this business as just something temporary until I achieved my dream of being a real writer, and, of course, that’s why I had this tiny office in the first place.

A common piece of advice to aspiring authors is to write about what you know. It was just about six when, reinforced by a few well-chosen pills, I left my office and walked into the heart of what I knew best. In front of me, the street with the streetcar tracks. To the left, the tracks went past the barracks-like building of the City Mission, and then on past the new, very sterile Liljeholmen — the shopping mall had just been completed and the square was decorated with benches designed to keep people from sleeping on them. To the right, the tracks swung past Gröndal’s small fifties-style center and past the marina with its derelict boathouse — a special place, where you can still find some of the last old eccentrics side by side with the well-off newcomers, polishing their old mahogany boats as if they were sarcophagi getting ready for their last trip down the river to the ruler of the underworld...

I felt an irrational loyalty to this place. But if I were going to impress the international audience I was dreaming of, I would certainly be forced to change this last remnant of an unexploited side of Stockholm to a darker, more derelict, and more dangerous place than it actually was. Isn’t that what they all do? Sure, somebody had been shot here a few years back. Sure, everybody heard that some pizzerias were really fronts for the cocaine trade. But not even the mafia from the Balkans could stand against the incoming tide of middle-class families. Soon the only poor people in this part of the city would be members of the so-called artistic class — my neighbors in the office building. Then, soon enough, they’d all disappear too. Real estate moguls were looking for locations like old factories and harbor areas for renovation. The building where I had my tiny office was doomed to be turned into luxury condos or offices. The reason none of this had happened yet was that it was very difficult to move the cement factory docks.

I didn’t walk to the left or the right, but straight across the street past the assisted-living building. I’d worked there one summer when I was a teenager. There were old folks who remembered how things used to be: when both this side and the other side of the water were working-class neighborhoods that people looked down on. The jail on Långholmen had still been open, and there was an infamous workhouse for the poor somewhere in Tanto...

I headed toward the Triangle past the pest control company Anticimex, to the swimming dock. They say the water still has large concentrations of heavy metals: one of the few reminders that this area once harbored an entire complex of workshops and small manufacturing plants. Bo Widerberg had used some of the decrepit factory buildings when he directed his film Joe Hill in the seventies. To find any traces of this activity these days, you have to know what to look for.

It was that time of year when summer turns to fall. Not all that warm anymore. Still, the sky was clear and the sun had not yet set.

She was perched on the edge of the dock and, at first, I didn’t recognize her. She had a new look, more mature. She wore a coffee-with-too-much-milk coat and her hair was done up in a retro-forties look. She greeted me with a huge smile, which I did not like one bit. I thought, She’s trying to be extra nice because she’s feeling sorry for me. She doesn’t know how, so she’s overdoing it. Then I thought, She’s still stunningly beautiful.

“You’re not mad at me anymore, right?” she asked.

“Of course not,” I replied.

“Good,” she said. She pulled two small bottles from her coat pocket. White wine with screw tops, the kind you get on airplanes or from a hotel minibar.

The swimming dock was deserted and totally pointless if one didn’t want to go swimming. Neither of us said anything, we just started walking together, following the path counterclockwise around the lake.

I held my bottle in my hand and tried to act nonchalant. I commanded my brain, Make small talk.

When she asked me what I was up to these days, I told her I was writing a mystery novel.

“How original,” she said. “So what is your mystery about?”

“Well, murder...” I shrugged and continued: “It’s tougher than I thought. I want it to be really noir. But look around you! The sun is glittering on the water and we live in the world’s safest and most secure country. The worst crime is if a few immigrant kids get caught smoking pot and the police break a minor law or two hauling them in.”

“I disagree,” she said.

“Why?”

She glanced around nervously. I followed the direction of her gaze: a dark-skinned guy in sweats leaned against a fence not far away. He was looking at us, and then he turned away. Nothing special about him.

Then she seemed to calm down again and surprised me (in the way that still surprised me when she abruptly shifted from being childish to being highly articulate) by giving me a mini-lecture on Stockholm’s past. Its soul, as she put it. She reminded me that during her lifetime both the prime minister and foreign minister had been assassinated in this very city.

“What? Were you even born when Olof Palme was killed?” I asked.

Apparently she’d been conceived by then.

I looked her over and tried to imagine how she’d appear dead in one of my crime novels, but it was hard. She was so alive right beside me. All I could imagine was fucking her. With a certain bitterness, actually a great deal of bitterness, all things considered, I remembered our last time together. She had been on top, and right after I’d come, she stood up in a no-nonsense way and walked to the bathroom to clean off the semen that was already coming out of her. She was beautiful right at that moment too. Efficient and beautiful at the same time, just like that damned midcentury modern furniture I’d let Commissioner Almqvist’s wife collect.

“Are you in Stockholm for a reason?” I asked.

“Every chance I get, I come back. I’ve been offered a part in a movie. It’s a small one in some kind of horror or fantasy film. What do you think about that?”

I’d heard that fantasy was going to be the next big thing after crime but I thought it was just a temporary trend. I shrugged. “You could always play the dragon,” I said.

“I wish! That would be a great part! But no... more like running around and showing skin...” She turned her head, and I could see her white neck.

I asked why she’d even wanted to see me.

She said there was something she needed to ask me. She’d remembered the photos I’d taken of her. Mostly innocent enough — photos from the parties we attended and the like, but there were a few nudes and a few more, well... unusual ones. Some taken in a cemetery, for example. I wished I had been able to forget about them. Not easy, when every single day I tortured myself by looking at them.

“Oh, the photos,” I said, “I’d almost forgotten them.”

“Anyway,” she said, “I just wanted to check in with you to make sure you weren’t still angry with me and that you had no intention of doing something stupid.”

Stupid? I’d never do anything like that. I used them for myself, masturbating and crying and keeping them as inspiration for my artistic ambitions. “I’d never do that,” I said.

“It’d be great if you just deleted them.”

“Sure. Trust me,” I lied.

We stopped by the fence. A jogger ran past us.

“How’s it going with the drugs?” she asked.

“Pretty much quit,” I said, but I noticed that even as I said it, my speech was slurred.

She asked me if I had a few “test products” on me. I’d expected her to ask and I handed over — after checking behind my shoulder to see whether the dark-skinned guy was still hanging around and looking at us, but he was gone — an envelope. What she was interested in was a medical product not available to just anyone. A niche drug.

“How much do I owe you?” she asked, reaching for her purse.

I stopped her by grabbing her wrist.

“Ow,” she said. I have strong hands. I’d grabbed harder than intended.

“I’m not going to sell to you,” I said. “And if I ever sell to you, I won’t do it like this.” Then I let go of her wrist.

As I walked back, it was starting to get dark. The sun peeked though the pillars of the highway bridge, as it got ready to prepare another beautiful sunset over Vinterviken Bay. If things had been different, we could have walked back together to watch the sun set.

They found her dead in the water the next day. She was right where I had left her. The scene did not match any of the ones I’d imagined: She was in the water with all her clothes on and no obvious wounds. Her hair was loose, the best fashion for drowned people. (A hundred years ago, someone would have written a poem about the scene, and it would have been just as perverse as anything crime novelists write today.)

The cause of death was drowning — but not a typical suicide. In addition to the psychological improbability of the whole thing, it was just not possible to jump into the water and drown right there without rocks or weights in your pockets or a great deal of sleeping pills in your system. Neither of those was found. Yes, a small amount of alcohol, but nothing else, no foreign substances in her blood. How carefully did they check, though? Did they know what to look for? Her purse was missing, and with it, the small envelope I’d given her.

The scene was suspicious — not just because of the missing purse, but also the bruises on her wrists and neck. This could indicate that her head had been held underwater. Or something else. But when the police traced the text messages between us, which they’d gotten from the phone company, and realized I was her overemotional and disappointed ex, it did not look good for me.

I had no alibi, of course. When the police took me in, I pointed out she’d told me she had another errand to run nearby. I told them about the dark-skinned guy who’d been hanging around. What did he look like? “Dark-skinned” and “sweats” were not much to go on. I don’t think they worked very hard to track him down, either. Shortly after that, they confiscated my computer, which, stupidly enough, I hadn’t erased any documents from. The photos of Anette, the detailed descriptions of murder, the records of my side business — it certainly did not look good for me.

So you can imagine how it went. First she appeared in the headlines: “Fashion Model Found Dead.” Then I came into the picture: “Model Murder: Police Suspect Ex-Boyfriend.” And on and on: investigation, arrest, jail, court case. Everything has been written in such detail that it makes me sick to write another word about it. I was no longer a nobody. I was either a killer or a man wrongfully accused. I got hate mail and letters of admiration. There are so many idiots out there.

I was convicted, by a divided court, over my protestations of innocence. Yes, yes, I was guilty of trading in illegal substances, there’s no doubt about that. In Sweden, that’s just as bad as murder anyway. But as far as Anette’s death goes, there was hardly any real evidence — a disturbing lack of it — and my lawyer and many other people knew this. Perhaps I did too.

So we’re in the midst of an appeal, a process that’s slowly moving forward. I’ve begun to serve my sentence. I’m a great prisoner. My cell reminds me of my tiny office, even if it lacks a view of the water.

Prison is not a game, but it has done wonders for my work ethic. I’ve finished my crime novel, such as it is. I now have some new experiences I can use. It also helps that describing murder scenes is no longer an obsession of mine, and I’ve found that I no longer believe crime never happens in Stockholm.

It was easy to find a publisher. I was infamous, hardly a disadvantage. The book is coming out next year. I’m already writing a second. That’s what crime writers do: they write one book and then the next.

Still, my appeal is coming up. My lawyer is convinced I’ll be set free, if I don’t do something stupid (he’s not all that happy about my devotion to the written word). Whatever happens, the dead are still dead, and people will continue to believe whatever they want about the living. Whether the court decides I’m innocent or guilty is just a small detail in the bigger picture.

Only losers care about details.

Horse by Anna-Karin Selberg

Translated by Rika Lesser

Rågsved

I’ve pursued her for months. Waited. Waited for tracks she must have left behind, signs. People think they can be invisible moving through the world, but they always leave something behind. Sooner or later, if you wait long enough. If there’s anything I’ve learned, this is it.

At first, all I could do was sense her, a slender shadow in the investigation, she scarcely existed, but gradually she assumed a body, and finally all her names collapsed into one.

I hold it in my hand. Kim. There’s something about her that almost arouses jealousy in me. Her face in the passport photo, the narrow marked jawline, the serious expression. And then something in the eyes that doesn’t go with the rest of her expression, a slight feminine nonchalance almost creating a touch of condescension around her. Natural, inborn contempt. I can see how she uses it, how with only a glance or gesture she dismisses anything in her surroundings that doesn’t suit her. She knows the art of disdain and I can sense the feeling of being its target. The resentment that would call for revenge. But I’m not someone she can dismiss. She chose me such a long time ago, she waits for me as patiently as I do her. As if our lives sought each other out from the first moment. In retrospect, everything we ever experienced will appear as inevitable steps, slowly closing the distance between us.

I check the address again, Sköllerstagatan, and then the map.

When Erik reported on the case to his colleagues that morning — it’s months ago now — I instantly knew what kind of case it would be. In certain investigations something breaks into me, hits me, and starts to communicate with something deep in my body, forever forgotten. Draws out a nasty, stirring anxiety and forces it forward. Forces me to return to the place I never want to come back to. The place I always return to, in every investigation that draws my attention. Some inexorable magnetic power. Pushes me back to the day that turned me into who I am, the day that repeats itself in my life, a repetition I have transformed into a profession, into a hypersensitive instrument. Shivering, it searches its way into each case that awakens my sleeping unease with vague promises of something I cannot understand, something I can sense but not see, brute patterns and indistinct connections on their way to forming. A raw anxiety that gives no rest until every possibility is reviewed, every opening is searched out, and the evasive tracks of a perpetrator are decoded and identified. It is an instrument I bear like an imprint of the past, of the hours I cannot recollect: the lost hours my thoughts grope for in the investigations, but will never comprehend. As if a part of me should exist there, somewhere in the cases.

I can see my parents, I can see them perfectly clearly, although I was only one and a half years old when they found us and I know what I see is my own creation, something I’ve gleaned and put together from scant reports and the four photos the social services sent with me. I can see their eyes when he leaves them, their eyes in death. He killed them for the five grams of heroin my father hadn’t yet shot up his veins and some cash. I’ve never returned to the place we lived, have avoided it all my life, I never went back to that side of the city.

When they found us I was lying beside my mother, she had been dead the whole night. A night that forever induced a distance to my feelings and cut them loose from my thoughts: cold, raw, and harsh, my thoughts live their own lives, grope about in the investigations like an alien machine. A night that made me inseparable from those I hunt. By chance we are each on opposite sides of the law, predestined to devote our lives searching for each other, as if searching for our lost half.

“Hey,” Leila says and runs her fingers through my hair when I come home in the evenings. “Don’t worry, baby, everything will be fine.” Our daughter Mia looks at us with the face of a three-year-old who already knows she’s not quite like either of us, and knows just how lonely that makes her. Her unfathomable gaze on my face, as if she can touch me with it. She’s always had that gaze, since the moment she came into the world, lying on Leila’s stomach in the delivery room. She lay there and observed us with her dark, enigmatic eyes, not making a sound. She struck me speechless, as if setting me in a scene I couldn’t grasp; for hours she would just lie there looking at us. “Everything will be fine,” Leila says, but she doesn’t know that the force coursing through my veins is my element and the water I drink, owning me so profoundly I might not survive if it were to suddenly disappear. Like Epaminondas’s spearhead, the spearhead he kept stuck in his heart, knowing that as long as it remained there he would live, but if he pulled it out he would die.

Leila strokes my hair, but knows nothing of who I am, what moves in my interior; she is lighthearted. Or perhaps she does, in her own remarkable way. With Mia it is different, everything is there between us, as if she saw straight through me from the very beginning.

I hold Kim’s picture in my hand, in the emptiness that ensues when a case is solved, when all tension disappears, the emptiness I never know what to do with. I get up from the desk and slowly collect my things. I look at her address again; it tells me nothing, nothing but a closed case.

I phone Erik. I can tell he’s sitting in the car as I hear the police radio in the background. There’s a moment’s silence when he absorbs what I’m telling him, that I’ve found her, that I know who she is.

“Her?” he asks, bewildered.

“Her.”

I give him the address, still holding the photo in my hand, my fingers close around her face.

“Okay, I’ll meet you there.”

We hang up and I sit back down for a few minutes until I pull myself together and stand up again. Sköllerstagatan. I don’t even consider taking the official car there, as if this isn’t a place I can get to by car, drive to myself. As if somebody else must take me, but Erik is in Norsborg, so I must go by subway. I pull my pistol out of the holster, insert a new magazine, stuff the gun back into the holster, and strap it on. It rests just under my armpit, close to my body, like a metal-and-leather protuberance, concealed from the world by my jacket. It’s autumn outside on Surbrunnsgatan, the air is clean and clear, the colors so beautiful, and the cold bites my face. When I walk down toward Sveavägen, there are loud noises from children playing soccer in the empty basin of the fountain next to the Stockholm Public Library with the Observatory Grove above. Two of them stand a bit apart from the group, near the edge that separates the shallow basin from the street. Two girls, maybe nine or ten years old, they look like they’re whispering about something. One of them lays a hand on the other’s shoulder, studies me as I walk past; they make me think about Mia, make me wonder what she’s doing. I close my eyes for a second; she’s somewhere in the preschool, maybe in the room with building blocks and Legos, sitting on the floor with the other kids, lost in a game. When I drop her off there in the morning, she throws off her coat, runs in to join the others. It’s her own world, a world to which I’m not admitted, which is hers alone, and I find myself standing outside with her brightly colored coat in my hand, following her with my eyes before I slowly hang up her coat on the little hook that bears her name in the entrance hall. Sometimes I stand awhile outside in the courtyard, peering through the window, watching her play without her knowing, before I tap on the windowpane and she looks back at me and waves. Some mornings she’s sad, I see how she keeps herself together, trying not to show it, she sucks on her fingers while something in her eyes distances her from me. As if it’s she and not I who finally says: Go now.

I feel the weight of the pistol as I walk down to the subway at Rådmansgatan in the chilly air. Passing through the turnstiles, I choose the stairs, not the escalator. The 19, the line I catch every day I don’t take the car, although never in this direction. I stand on the platform and wait. Something makes me nervously feel for the pistol, touch it lightly with my hand, as if its weight isn’t enough to reassure me of its existence. The train arrives and I take a window seat, see my face reflected in the glass in front of the tunnel’s darkness, and feel her presence, feel the inexorable motion that makes the distance between us shrink, melt together to nothing. Hötorget passes on the left, then Central Station, and when the train exits the tunnel at Old Town the city is gorgeous, stunning, the colors of the trees in the south are mirrored in the water, yellow and bloodred; the beauty makes something well up inside me, almost like tears. There are a few women around me, a young girl, and a man in a suit. I get the feeling that they’re staring at me, that they see something inside me, and sweat penetrates my T-shirt, like I’m losing control, like they’re sucking it out of me in complete silence. We pass Slussen, Medborgarplatsen, and at Skanstull I can’t stand it any longer, have to get off with blood rushing to my head, the cold sweat like a film on my skin when I lean against a pillar on the platform.

After a while everything clears, I head to Åhléns department store on Ringvägen, go to the cosmetics department, as if I need time, as if I want to drag it out. I walk around between counters of perfume and makeup, nod at some of the saleswomen, ask a few questions; this is routine, but it’s a tactic that always works while my eyes wander over the products behind them. I know what things are worth, I’ve learned to pick out what’s expensive and reject what’s cheap. I decide on a fragrance from Jimmy Choo.

In the ad behind it, a woman leans her head so far back that you can scarcely see her face, her collarbones catch all the light, the dress’s plunging neckline forms a V between her breasts. I test the scent on my hand, cedar and something floral I can’t identify; when the salesgirl turns her back I pull out one of the drawers below the samples, find the right product, and take it with me. I smile in her direction and nod at the guard by the exit; he follows me with his eyes as I take a few turns, holding the small paper box in my hand. The faint, pleasant scent of cedar accompanies me among the shelves, just a hint of it, and I let the box drop into my pocket. Then I select an inexpensive bottle of shampoo from the shelves, and walk toward the cashier. The calm that spreads out when the salesperson wraps it, it’s like a drug, I hand her my credit card and she slides it through the slot. The small sum burns in the card reader, and she tiredly returns the card with the bag, not looking at me. It’s a movement she repeats, mechanically, over and over again, hundreds of times a day.

I let my gaze glide over the guard’s face without settling, as if he were an object, before I exit onto Ringvägen. The crystal-clear fall air shoots its way into my lungs and I don’t know why I keep doing this. I give away the loot as gifts to Leila. As if I want to be discovered, punished, but I don’t know what for, as if nothing but risk can eradicate the guilt and bring rest.

When I take the elevator at Götgatan down to the lower level, five o’clock is approaching. The 19 appears in the tunnel again and I board the train. When it shoots out on the bridge between Skanstull and Gullmarsplan a few boats float by in the bay, these are their last trips before winter and I can see straight through the glassy walls of Eriksdal’s indoor bath thirty meters below; the small solitary figures in the swimming pools, dark unprotected silhouettes against the light blue water. We pass Gullmarsplan, Globen, the rest of the stretch I’ve never traveled. Sockenplan, Svedmyra, Stureby. I check my phone, send a text message to Leila, telling her not to expect me for dinner, then look at the display for a few minutes, but she doesn’t reply. She’s busy, I know she’s picking up Mia. I wonder what they’ll eat, think about all the things Mia wants to bring home: the pacifier with the octopus cartoon, the big brown-and-black dog she carries around everywhere, the drawings she’s made. How they cross the little courtyard with the baby carriage. I feel the straps of the holster around my body, as if they’re holding it together. Högdalen comes up on the left, a sign above the housetops reads, Högdalen Center, and a few fathers with small children and two drunks get on before the train starts again. We glide past a park with ramps, teenagers skateboard on them in the autumn sun, and then I can see Rågsved in the distance. My eyes search for two places among the houses, although I know it’s just a coincidence. Hers and mine. Hers must be somewhere among the clusters of apartment buildings on the right side of the tracks, mine on the left. I suddenly realize that maybe she’s not at home or won’t open the door; I haven’t anticipated such a situation, have prepared nothing in advance. But deep inside I know she won’t disappoint me.

I go through the turnstile, to the left are some wide stairs with narrow iron banisters. Behind them trees in brilliant colors, and above them towering houses, but I don’t recognize them, they could be any houses. I walk in the other direction, away from the past, down through the tunnel under the road, and emerge on a small square. It’s surrounded by two semicircular buildings with shops — Ammouris Livs, Dina’s Pirogues and Sweets, Medihead Home Care, Rågsved Games and Tobacco, an ICA supermarket. In the middle there’s a fountain and a few men sitting on benches, each one by himself. I check the address again on my phone, it must be somewhere on the other side of the square, one of the buildings on the hill visible from the subway. Nervously I check the time, wonder if Erik is stuck in traffic somewhere on the highway. I calculate how long it would take from Norsborg, he should be here already.

In the beginning I didn’t know she was a female — I assumed she was a man, about my age, just under thirty and completely outside the usual networks, number unlisted but known in other ways. I’d heard her nicknames, Kimsha, Kimmie, Kimo, heard them so many times. Something in the way the junkies pronounced it, it got into me and began to do its slow work. Kimsha, Kimmie, Kimo. At first she was just a series of question marks in a few investigations, investigations that weren’t even related to her, brief notations, before we understood that she was big, that she was the spider in a heroin flowchart, a heart shy of light which at the same constant rate, minute by minute, supplied the central arteries with a substance, a substance that sought out thinner and thinner blood vessels, shot itself into users and made their jerky excited movements subside, their eyes fill with a glassy tranquility. I’d imagined an older man, lean, wiry, and for some reason wearing a black leather jacket, his face radiating a special, peculiar intelligence. Someone who worked alone, who didn’t rely on others, who never revealed to his customers who he was, but who’d succeeded in earning enough respect in the bigger networks to be left alone. Someone who saw it all as a job, any job, and brought in a lot of money, but in some remarkable way without upsetting organized crime, as if it weren’t worth the effort it would take to do something about him.

Someone who was his own boss.

Their faces often come to me, their bodies and character, vague but still with distinct features. Sometimes they coincide with reality, sometimes their real features surface later like a shock that tears down everything I’ve built and strengthens my desire to find them. Avenging the scene that made me who I am. Again and again, as if I live in a frozen time, encapsulated in sheer mechanics.

I sit down on one of the benches, restless. Just opposite from where I sit — within the body of semicircular buildings that extends around the square and ends just in front of Capio’s health center — there’s a pub. The Oasis Restaurant. Three men and one woman sit outside in their jackets, it must be one of the last days for outdoor table service; they sit in the shade with their beer and cigarettes, freezing, they look worn out and are deep in loud conversation. But out here on the square it’s surprisingly warm, maybe the semicircular row of buildings provides protection from the wind. I try to figure out when they were built. It’s a lovely square, you get the idea, the benches, the fountain. I get up and check the time again. The Oasis Restaurant. Abruptly I cross the square — I need to get something.

The men in the sidewalk café call something out when I go in, as if they immediately see that I’m a stranger, that I don’t fit in, but I don’t catch what they say. More people are sitting inside, some men who look like alcoholics are drinking at the bar, two or three guys stand by themselves at the slot machines, a larger group sits at one of the tables. I stand at the bar, without making any eye contact, but I can feel their eyes on me. I never drink on the job, I’m surprised at myself. The bartender comes over, says nothing, just gives me a questioning look. There’s something guarded about him, as if he doesn’t understand what I’m doing here. He takes my order. There are no other single women here, absolutely no one my age. He dries off the glass with a towel in his pocket, sets the beer down in front of me on the counter. I hand him my credit card. My phone says it’s almost quarter to six, Leila hasn’t texted back and I take a few deep gulps of the ice-cold liquid.

Then I get a look at her — she must have been sitting there the whole time on the other side of the bar, looking at me without me seeing her. She’s wearing a red T-shirt, I try to read the faded gray words printed on her chest, something with Plugged. She’s thin and sinewy, has two tattoos on one of her upper arms, two bands in the same black, stylized tribal design, which run around her biceps, separated by a few centimeters. She doesn’t look much like the photo, and she’s not the enigmatic figure she ought to be, given the circumstances, and yet I know this is right, this is her, it can’t be anyone else. Suddenly I wonder what she’s doing when she’s not taking care of business. I see her in an apartment, alone, how she sits there during the day and plays video games. She studies me calmly, almost curiously. Shame and eagerness stun me for a few moments, and I wonder if she can see this, when one of the drunks staggers toward the bar, close to me.

“You’re cute,” he whispers, and I remove his fat hands from my body, take a swig of my beer without looking at him.

After a while she gets up and comes toward us, shoves him aside with her arm and a hard, weary expression on her face. When he goes, she puts her beer down on the bar: I can’t figure out whether she’s amused or contemptuous.

“You don’t live around here,” she says, and I don’t know how to reply, as if nothing I can say would be right.

“No,” I finally answer.

Her forearm against the bar counter, it’s covered with thin strands of hair and I can almost touch the attraction that binds us.

I check the time on my phone again. “Could you wait a minute?”

She nods.

Outside the autumn sun disappears behind the roofs. I dial his number, walking back and forth in front of the restaurant while the call goes through. When he finally answers I tell him that he doesn’t need to come anymore, but I can hear that my voice sounds too harsh.

“What’s happened?”

“She’s not there.”

“Have you already been there? Yourself?”

I see the contours of her body inside, leaning slightly forward, her arms resting against the counter. I don’t really answer him, only repeat that she isn’t there.

“You’ve been there? What the hell are you thinking? You broke into the apartment? Without a warrant?”

“She’s not there. I know where she is. We’ll talk tomorrow, okay?” I answer, fatigued.

It’s cold, and I’ve left my jacket inside — I see it hanging next to her on the barstool. When I walk in again she looks at me quite openly, all the way from over by the bar.

Her apartment is dark, I sense that it has two rooms, that it’s completely symmetrical, one room on either side of the hall and maybe a kitchen between them. When she takes a step toward me I seize her wrists and put her hands around my neck.

“The bathroom,” I whisper in her ear, holding her wrists gently; she doesn’t try to free herself. I lower her arms and put them around my waist, concerned that she’ll place her hands on my shoulders if I let go of her and feel the holster straps through my jacket.

“There,” she nods toward a door behind my back.

I let go of her and walk into the small bathroom, closing the door carefully behind me. I hear her take off the jean jacket and hang it up, then she goes out to the room on the right. I remove my own jacket, the pressure in my chest, as if it belongs to someone else, a cry that isn’t mine. I unbuckle the holster and look around. It’s clean and impersonal, like a hotel bathroom, the only signs of her are the laundry basket in the tub and her clothes inside it, underpants, T-shirts; I want to open the medicine cabinet, but stop myself. Turn on the water instead, wash my face before I carefully bend down, protected by the running water, until kneeling on the floor, and I shove the holster with the pistol as far as I can under the bathtub. The feeling of pressure, as if I’m going to vomit. When I turn off the water I don’t recognize my face in the mirror, it is closed, locked, and I don’t know what’s going on behind it.

It’s still dark in the apartment, she hasn’t turned on any lights, I hesitate, enter the room on the right, and stop in the middle, not knowing where she is. Suddenly she’s close beside me, quiet and agile like an animal. We kiss softly and carefully, the sharp, cutting taste of alcohol and her thin, sinewy body turns beneath my hands. I pull up her T-shirt, she’s not wearing a bra, her breasts are so small they fit in my palms. Her nipples, big as raspberries, are hard between my fingers, she draws me closer, breathless I inhale her scent, feeling her angular hip bones against my own.

“Who are you?” She pushes me back at arm’s length, her eyes searching in the darkness. Black as coal against her pale face, her dyed hair reaches just below her shoulders and I know from the photo that her eyes are green, but it’s too dark to see their exact color.

She strokes my cheek gently. “Come,” she whispers, taking my hands and pulling me toward the bed. She removes my clothes, turns me over like a baby, strokes my back, touches me with firm, open hands, kisses the nape of my neck, takes one of my breasts in her hand, and with the other, presses an open palm against my cunt. It’s like being caressed by a pro, someone who knows my body by heart, someone trained in shooting it straight up. The serenity, the substance that brings everything to rest.

Afterward I try to make her out in the darkness, she’s lying on her side of the bed, naked, but I can barely see the outline of her body. She sits up, reaches across me, and gropes for something beside the night table, gets hold of her T-shirt and a pack of cigarettes, an ashtray and a lighter. She smokes slowly with her back against the wall and I recognize her from the photograph. There’s something self-sufficient in the way she smokes, in the discrete, defined movements distinguishing her body from its surroundings. I can understand why they leave her alone.

“I saw a performance,” she says slowly, exhaling the smoke. “A day or two ago. I never go to such things.”

She leans her head against the wall, waits and peers down at me in the bed. For a second I see Mia’s sleeping body, the nightmares that chase her, how sometimes when she wakes up she doesn’t understand that they’re over until several minutes later. The terror that shines in her eyes before the dreams flow away, until everything clears and grows still.

“A man ran from one corner of the stage, jumped high up, and fell straight to the floor. Then he got up and did it again. Again and again.” She slowly lowers one hand toward the blanket. “How can that be called a performance?”

Something warm shoots up behind my eyes and I smell her cunt through her crossed legs; she’s only wearing the red T-shirt. Plugged Recording. I wonder what it means, where she got it from. She exhales again, suddenly indifferent, before she stubs out the cigarette, gets up, climbs over me, and disappears into the bathroom.

When I wake up she’s sleeping beside me. I gather up my clothes, head to the bathroom, fish out my holster, and fasten it tightly under my arm. Quickly put on my jacket in the hall, then I stand for a while in the doorway to the bedroom and look at her before leaving; sleep smoothes out her face, as if she were dead or a newborn baby.

When I leave her, I choose the street down the hill toward the center of town, and before reaching the small square I sit awhile on a bench in front of a soccer field, beside a home for the elderly. I pull out my phone and call the task force. It doesn’t take more than fifteen minutes, they must have been nearby, I recognize them when they appear in the rotary where the slope ends, in unmarked vehicles. No sirens, just two big vans, one light, the other dark. I get up and go, hear them climbing the hill behind me, I push my hair out of my face, can smell her sex, she’s still there in my hands. Her jawline burned into my retina, just as lovely in reality as in the photo.

She’ll keep her beauty for a long time, long after our contemporaries have lost theirs to old age.