Stockholm Noir

The Wahlberg Disease by Carl Johan De Geer

Translated by Laura A. Wideburg

Drottninggatan

Those nights on Drottninggatan! The building was an island in a sea of ruins; soon they’d be erecting Celsing’s bombastic Culture House, including an artificial pond with a huge phallic sculpture made of glass, surrounded by spraying water. Though at that time, there was nothing but a huge hole left by demolition, noisy by day and gloomy by night.

Drottninggatan 37 is in the center of Stockholm, now mostly known for a shoe store called Jerns. The original building was from the eighteenth century, but it had been rebuilt many times. In 1964, I had access to rooms there on the top floor, previously an old photography studio once used by the legendary photographer Arne Wahlberg. An enormous sloped glass roof over the main room let in plenty of light. Several smaller rooms had been used as storage space and an office.

I wasn’t actually renting the rooms. I’d run across an old friend and colleague, a fashion photographer, who’d rented the place with what in those days was called a “demolition contract.” He’d just moved out, relocating his studio to a more permanent address. We were having a beer at Löwenbräu, at the time still located on Jakobsgatan, just a block from Drottninggatan.

“Take them,” he said, tossing a key ring onto the table. “The building is completely abandoned. They’ll start tearing it down pretty soon. You can hang out there for now. The light is good. You’ll have to figure out the keys on your own.”

The building had been designated as a historical landmark by the Stockholm City Museum, which gave it some protection — at least, as far as the façade went. When I walked in, the abandoned shoe store seemed spooky. I had to go through it to get to the stairs. Shards of glass and unswept gravel covered the floor. In the evenings, the atmosphere was desolate and the crunching noise my shoes made echoed in a creepy way.

If you want to see what it was like, you can go to the library and look at page 49 in my photography book The Camera as Consolation: Part One (published in 1980). In Wahlberg’s former studio, my closest friends and I set up a ping-pong table. We met every Thursday at three o’clock in the afternoon. Håkan, Pierre, Staffan, Jackie, and me. We’d have little tournaments, and Staffan always won. When he was a teenager, he’d played for the team Engelbrektspojkarna. We should have realized that it was a bad omen: that our previous meeting place for ping-pong, the Co-op Union’s abandoned slaughterhouse and sausage factory, had burned to the ground one year before. The flames had eaten up our ping-pong table, complete with its net, paddles, and balls. We had no way of knowing that the same thing would happen again.

So I ended up spending lots of my time at Drottninggatan 37, high up on the sixth floor, working on my barely existent photography career during an extremely unhappy period in my life. I often had to stay in the building overnight. It wasn’t always easy. I realized right away that candles would be too much of a fire hazard. And flashlight batteries were expensive. Sometimes I’d have to choose between a Spartan dinner or a working flashlight at night. Earlier in the fall, things were more or less fine, since there was still running water and electricity, but as winter approached, the utilities were cut off. Soon I’d have to abandon the place.

As I said, it really wasn’t easy sleeping there. I would lie down on a lump of old clothes that smelled bad. I heard strange sounds in the supposedly empty building. I knew some homeless men lived here and they were restless at night. They had it rougher than I did; they slept right on the broken glass and trash. It was a real hell. They’d light fires in old tin cans, which made me nervous. They also snored. The most alarming sounds, however, were the determined footsteps coming up the stairs — and the knocking on my door. Then I’d grab my bag containing my ten-year-old Hasselblad 1000F. I’d gotten it cheap when Hasselblad released the 50 °C and all the professional photographers dumped their old 1000Fs — their shutters were loud and unreliable.

The sound is easy to imitate: cla-DUM-hiss. If that last hiss did not come, the shutter had frozen, which meant the shoot was over. I also had two magazines for 120 film, a Linhof tripod, and a Lunasix light meter. My camera bag was always packed so I could take off whenever I wanted. My only other possessions were a thermos and the clothes on my back.

The neighborhood around my building, with all its condemned and half-demolished buildings, did not invite strolls at night. I’d read that slums incited people to crime — a belief the psychologists and doctors of Sweden had held for a long time. According to them, this is how it worked: in these slum quarters, children and young people ran around without control, they’d shoplift, fight, and vandalize. A certain doctor by the name of Beijerot kept trumpeting this on television debates and in newspaper articles. Slums are vectors of criminality, he believed. The obvious cure was to tear them all down. I think he confused cause and effect; a rather common problem then, just like today.

Then a new concept came along to replace the old one: modernity. The city politicians, listening to the doctors, got caught up in the spirit of the times. Old buildings needed to be torn down because they were in the way. Highways were to be built through the city, opening it up to light and fresh air.

One night, smoke came in from under my door. I have never woken so fast in my life. I rushed down the stairs to locate the source. Broken furniture and heaps of old newspapers were burning in the stairwells of the fourth and fifth floors. I grabbed some fire buckets filled with sand (complete with small spades), part of the obligatory equipment of any office in those days. It was possible to put out small fires with them, which is what I did. I was coughing and sweating, my face and arms covered in soot, my clothes torn ragged by the time I got back up to the sixth floor. I opened all the windows I could and stood there for a long time, breathing in the city’s cool night air. I still had hot water left in my thermos, so I went to make coffee in another room. I used freeze-dried coffee, which I liked a lot back then. I also wanted to appear to be modern.

In those days, the old patriarchal society was falling apart. Changes in trade and manufacturing during the end of the fifties meant that many men (and it was mostly men who worked outside the home then) were losing their jobs. They comforted themselves with alcohol and, in their frustration, sometimes they beat their wives and kids. However, a new social structure was coming into being. Women started to demand, and get, divorces. If there were children, the women had the right to keep the apartment, so their former spouses were out on the street. Some of those became alcoholics with no other place to live but the street and they often met an early death. Perhaps it was a just punishment for treating their wives and kids so brutally.

When I was young, I loved cars. I had a Ford Prefect, one of the worst vehicles ever made, which was a somewhat larger version of the Ford Anglia, also just as bad. The Prefect was a four-door and I’d bought it one day when I’d managed to scrape together eighty kronor. It didn’t last long. It wasn’t Mr. Frost’s fault. This homeless guy had chosen to sleep in its backseat one chilly night. This car was so tall and narrow it had gotten the nickname “Hot Dog Stand.” The reason Mr. Frost (yes, that was really his name) could sleep there at all was because he was constantly exhausted. Whenever I’d go on an errand, he would be there in the backseat.

We didn’t talk much. I’d try to give him food, sandwiches, but he’d refuse them. He would just vomit up all real food. His alcoholism was so far advanced that the only calories he got were from sweet strong wine. He found it himself. I did not want to go to the State Liquor Store and get it for him. I looked young, so I had trouble buying alcohol. The cashiers mistakenly believed I was just sixteen with a fake driver’s license. I was, in fact, ten years older. Anyway. Once I was driving up the Western Bridge heading south when Mr. Frost got scared and started screaming. Smoke had begun to fill the inside of the vehicle, and I quickly opened the retractable front windshield, a feature not found on later models. (This one was from 1953.) Air streamed in but it made no difference. Cutting off the engine while still going up the bridge would be a mistake, I thought, but as soon as we crested the top, I let the car roll down to the Långholmen exit. Thanks to the fact that we still drove on the left in those days, I was able to pull off immediately and I parked the still smoking car on a piece of lawn. (Right-hand traffic was introduced three years later, even though a large majority of the Swedish population had voted against it.) When I opened the hood, I saw that a bit of rusty metal had fallen on the battery and shorted it out.

I abandoned the car where it was, and Mr. Frost and I hoofed it, somewhat unsteadily, through the city (images of destruction beneath white powdered snow) back to Drottninggatan 37. I let him in, and he disappeared immediately into the office of the former shoe store. Afterward, I stopped locking the front door. I was never sure how many individuals this saved from freezing to death on the streets; at least they could have a roof over their heads.

In the forties, Arne Wahlberg started getting migraines whenever he had to focus his camera. When I found that out, I began to call it the Wahlberg Disease. There was just one way to focus a camera in those days: you had to slowly turn the lens. On larger cameras, you’d expand or contract the bellows using a rack-and-pinion system until the image appeared in focus on the ground-glass screen.

As a photographer myself, with the same tendency to get migraines, this wasn’t surprising. Straining the eye to focus the camera could set them off. You never get used to migraines. My siblings had them and so did my mother. Still, you got used to one thing: the nervous anticipation that, all of a sudden, it could go bang inside your brain. So I felt fine with the idea that the man who’d been here before me had suffered from the same illness. In the end, Wahlberg’s migraines forced him to give up photography. I hoped I would not be stricken by the same fate.

I slept so uneasily on Drottninggatan, I would wake to make nightly rounds. I soon became familiar with each and every corner of the building so that darkness was never a problem. The shoe store and its offices on the ground floor. The import firm on the second floor. The former lawyer’s offices on the third floor. The strange firm on the fourth floor — I never figured out what it had been. And “mine” on the sixth floor. All of it a labyrinth. Each room had its own smell.

Everywhere, except on my floor, were sleeping men. The rumor of an unlocked building spread and so the number of homeless men was growing. Bundles of men wrapped in blankets and rags. Some of them talked nervously in their sleep. Others seemed to plunge straight into unconsciousness. Mr. Frost was one of the latter. I felt I was being a good person. By leaving the front door unlocked, these individuals were saved from sleeping outdoors. One night, I even counted them: there were thirty-seven.

My own living arrangements were a bit marginal for some time. I had moved from one temporary address to another. It’s funny how memory can trip you up when it comes to years gone by. I remember 1964 to 1967 as three years of loneliness, filled with paranoia and masturbation. But if I check the facts, I was actually married during those years — in fact, I got married twice. And I remember relationships on the side as well. I remember one woman, also married, who would sneak off from her job as an office manager to meet me at number 37. Perhaps you’re wondering why I wasn’t living with my wife if I was, indeed, married. But I couldn’t live with her, even though we were friends, because she, too, was homeless. In those days she was living temporarily at the apartment of a writer on Västerlånggatan in Old Town.

By the age of twenty-six, I was riding a career roller coaster. I was part of the cultural life of the capital city. The marriage, if you’re still wondering about that, was not exactly burning brightly. Although we weren’t living together, my wife and I, we’d get together for work. She was in the theater and was an excellent fashion model. The fashion house Mah-Jong bought our photographs. We hadn’t gotten around to getting a divorce, because in the late sixties people didn’t bother with empty conventions like that.

I had built a somewhat precarious living as a photographer by visiting the editorial offices of all the magazines in Stockholm, showing them my photos. And on those occasions, I would make an effort to seem like a congenial coworker. Some editors gave me small assignments; they would test me and then try someone else. In those days, everyday transactions were done on a cash basis. Whenever I’d been given a job and delivered my pictures, I’d go to the cashier and pick up an envelope with bills. I usually thought the amount was too small. My ability to use a camera was greater than my ability to fit in with the job and its jargon.

This jargon had no words for the ideas I turned over in my mind — for example, the words to seriously define the problems with/of photography. The most important of these was the one most often ignored: the psychic energy needed for each photograph. They say when photography was invented, around 1840, many people refused to be photographed as they believed the camera would steal their living souls and leave them as empty shells. In a way, that is true. But it’s not the subject who becomes an empty shell, it’s the photographer. Every exposure demands concentration. I did not use a flash (my technique was based on natural light and the steadiness of the tripod), but the inside of my own head flashed each time I hit the cable release. Migraines lie in wait for every photographer.

Another issue in photography: the subject is flattened and always smaller than reality. Larger prints don’t help; the real landscape or cityscape is at all times larger than the print.

Theoretically, a portrait could be different. August Strindberg, when he contemplated opening a portrait studio in Berlin, had the theory that the human soul could be captured only if the negative was the same size as the subject’s face. He had written a short story he would read while the picture was being taken. The person sitting for the photograph had to remain perfectly still while the photographer (in this case, also the writer) would remove the cap from the lens and then put it back on it after the last line was read. The story, therefore, became a timer replacing the mechanical one. The story lasted twenty-five seconds. Strindberg’s homemade lens was as slow as the glass plates of the 1880s. The negative format was probably 24 x 36 cm and the glass plates had to be specially made. Not impossible, this required painting light-sensitive emulsion onto glass plates in a darkroom. On the other hand, he could never get his homemade camera — with a simple lens from a kerosene lamp — to work. You can have many plans — but not all of them will be realized. Just ask me.

Capturing the range of exposure is another problematic factor. Think of a room right before twilight — outside the window a street is lit by the setting sun. For the person inside, it is easy to differentiate both the light outside and the darkness inside, thanks to the human eye’s exceptional optical range. Now think of a photograph. It’s necessary to choose an exact exposure. If the outside is clear, the inside is black. If the room is clear, the outside is completely white, or washed out as we professionals say.

But I had my subjects — not portraits of people, as I was much too inhibited for that. Strindberg’s excellent ideas about a portrait studio were not possible for me considering my own level of expertise. But cityscapes, where people appeared at a distance, that was my specialty. I saw them, but they didn’t see me. I liked to study their movements in an almost scientific way.

The movements of people. Yes. Very interesting. Perhaps you remember the old theory that cars about to turn didn’t really need their turn signals? The beginning of the turn, that subtle initial indication, the slight deflection of the front wheels as they turn to the left or to the right, should be enough for other drivers to know what would happen. People’s walking movements can be interpreted in the same way. That man there will soon turn — or stop; that woman with him — or not — are they walking beside each other because they are friends or colleagues, or are they strangers who just happened to be walking near each other at the same moment and will soon head in different directions? All of this is endlessly fascinating. You could draw them as figures on a graph.

One November day, the snow-covered but sunny Drottninggatan outside my window felt like the right choice as my photographic subject. An f-stop of 16 and five hundredths of a second. In spite of the strong light, mysterious figures seemed to sneak about trying not to be seen. I wanted to capture them, list them, make it clear to myself what was about to happen. But in the photographs, they were always turned away. Then I decided to take pictures of the room instead. The window became a rectangle without detail. The floor covered in glass shards and dirt. The furniture smashed. Artistic pictures, perhaps, but to what end?

The spirit of the times: the realization that injustice was exploding in countries all over the world demanded that stenciled pamphlets must be written and distributed. The subjects included Vietnam being bombed by the United States and France, with an independence movement in the North. Spain, Greece, and Portugal — dictatorships all, with Portugal fighting a gruesome war against the independence movement in their colony of Angola. Latin America, where many regimes relied on torture. South Africa, with its unsustainable apartheid system. Just a few examples. We young people were outraged by all the neglect and oppression going on in the world. Perhaps we were less observant when it came to the disparity on our own streets.

During the evening, I would observe the movements of the people outside my window and develop my own theories. On the other side of Drottninggatan, all the buildings had already been torn down. A large construction site was extending in all directions around a gaping pit in the center to form a so-called super-ellipse. The remaining residents had to use temporary stairs and wooden walkways. These were rebuilt every week and were not easy to navigate.

The patterns that people made, evening after evening, interested me very much. Three men were different from all the others. They seemed together and yet were not. They moved stealthily as if they did not want to be seen. They spied and wrote down secret things in their black notebooks. I would sketch them and their movements. My sketchbook was filled with page after page of identical labyrinths. I called them the Three Wise Men. Agent Caspar, Agent Melchior, and Agent Balthazar. The patterns they made would form the letter Z or the number 8. What did they want? Sometimes a fourth person would appear, a woman in a brown dress and a small hat. She seemed to be their boss. In my notes, I called her Maria. She’d use slight tilts of her head to indicate to the other three where they should go.

The late fifties and early sixties were an odd time in the history of Stockholm. Huge swaths of downtown were demolished. It was the largest rearrangement of an inner city in Europe, especially for a country that had not been bombed during the war. That area we now call “city” looked so much like a war zone then that my pal from art school, Håkan Alexandersson, and I made a short war film there in 1960. In those days, every household in Sweden had received a brochure called If the War Comes about the dangers of falling atomic bombs. We titled our film Until the Fire Is Out due to the ridiculous advice in that brochure which in our minds minimized the danger. If your clothes start to burn, roll on the ground until the fire is out.

One afternoon, I had a desire to search for any of Wahlberg’s leftover negatives and — with the help of a crowbar — I broke open a Masonite wall to find a closet-sized space of about two square meters. Both walls had cracks. The space itself was empty. Of course, it felt only natural to test one of the cracks with my crowbar. A layer of broken bits fell to the floor. Dust flew up and I couldn’t see much for a moment, but when it settled, I found a very old door. Crack! The crowbar did its work; the door fell toward me and I jumped out of the way. The dust had to settle once more before I realized I’d found an old passage to the building next door, Drottninggatan 35.

There were a number of conspiracy theories in those days. One of the basic theories speculated that the owners of Stockholm’s old buildings let them decay until tearing them down would become inevitable. Repairs and renovations were held off until it was too late to do anything. Over eight hundred buildings were torn down in Stockholm from the midfifties to the midseventies. Most of these had been constructed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Very few were considered part of our cultural inheritance. One exception was my building, Drottninggatan 37, which, of course, was irritating for the developers. All they saw was space to exploit with a protected building in their way. That they would go so far as to set fires to the buildings themselves — that was a theory that even I, a diehard Communist, found hard to believe.

All that time, I had to force myself to believe that there had to be a reason for the social heartlessness in Sweden, the architectural helplessness in Stockholm, and my own situation.

Actually, I have to say that my paranoia was proven justified, because I came to be interrogated by two policemen who wanted me to confess that foreign powers had employed me to bring anarchy to the streets. They had three possible employers in mind: Albania, Cuba, or China. I was brought to the police station on Kungsholmen and I would probably have laughed in their faces about the absurdity of the accusation (these poverty-stricken countries couldn’t afford anything like this) if the policemen hadn’t been so intimidating. They placed me on a small chair in the middle of the room — well, I’ve described this matter in detail before. It had to do with an art installation I’d had at Galleri Karlsson, a little space near Odenplan. And I was declared guilty by the judge, but not for spying, as the police had hoped. Just for desecration of a state symbol and for agitation. The latter stemmed from a lithography where I’d written, Betray your country, don’t be nationalistic.

I was prepared to be followed after I left the police station. I kept my eye out for agents, peering from a window on the second floor, a window in the same abandoned office where I’d met my married friend. Agents in American films have black suits, ties, and dark sunglasses. Not in Sweden. Here they sport what we call leisure wear in English. Light gray jackets, brown pants, black shoes with rubber soles. Perhaps a water-repellant hunter’s cap with a small brim — you know, those hats you can fold up and put in your pocket in case you need to slightly change your appearance. For the same reason, the jackets could be worn inside out. Their clumsy shoes, for larger-than-average feet, always gave away who they were. At Galleri Karlsson, we had called them “Säpo’s Art Club.”

At first they didn’t scare me. But one evening at twilight, as I went through the floors of my building, I found about ten kerosene cans behind a stack of empty cardboard boxes. I’d lived in other places that had kerosene heat, but kerosene was not used in Drottninggatan 37. This very building, where I stood with my flashlight, had no kerosene furnaces. It had had water circulating in a central heating system before it was all cut off. No utilities in the building were functional. I had a moment of clarity. The Three Wise Men! The increase of arson! That’s how the final destruction of historic buildings would be handled.

A bad night. I tossed and turned constantly. My broken sleep was then interrupted by a thundering sound. I got up, fully dressed as always because of the chill. Smoke was seeping into Wahlberg’s studio, the second time this week. Definitely not a coincidence. I was coughing as I ran to my emergency exit — the door I’d found hidden in the closet, the one leading to the building next door. I could hear screaming from the floors below. I stumbled in the darkness, tripping over all kinds of garbage. I found myself in the decaying attic of Drottninggatan 35 before I had any time to think. I’d left my camera case behind. My Hasselblad, the ping-pong table — all gone. Like the paddles and ping-pong balls. Just like before.

Perhaps those skulking men committed murder. Perhaps not. In extreme situations, certain emotions, like empathy and indignation, disappear. Those screams from below, they came back to me afterward, much later, as an extra-horrible detail in my memory. I should have acted differently. I should have opened the door to the stairway and found the others, shown them the way out. Mr. Frost, with his weatherworn face and his silence, comes to me sometimes at night. I’d heard his screams before, in my car. Did I hear them then? A few minutes have been erased from my memory. In a smoking world, a person can become a robot on autopilot.

The building was later rebuilt with a poured-cement façade to imitate its original wooden one. Behind this façade, there’s a modern office building. On the ground floor, there’s an elegant shoe store.

I still feel, even after such a long time, that nobody takes me seriously.

Nineteen Pieces by Carl-Michael Edenborg

Death Star by Unni Drougge

Translated by Rika Lesser

Hammarbyhamnen

Back then, gentrification hadn’t yet managed to destroy the aggregate of small-scale industries, warehouses, workshops, hovels, and shacks which characterized the area along the polluted Hammarby Canal. Nonetheless, a doomsday atmosphere pervaded the district, partly because the city was ready to level it to the ground, partly because executions regularly took place there. It was easy to dump bodies in the algae-green stream.

It wasn’t the thought of bloated corpses amidst scrap iron and timber down at the swampy bottom that lured Berit Hård to take her daily walk along the water at dusk. Rather, it was a diffuse yet deep sense of solidarity with South Hammarby Harbor’s maladjusted elements. She found a certain beauty in this dilapidated marginal area that was teeming with life, where rats scurried through chemical spills, where she had to zigzag between mossy stacks of boards and rust-eaten machine parts, where filthy old men sat under moldy tarps and burned garbage, over which they would warm themselves or grill sausages.

The smoke didn’t bother Berit; she was a smoker too and could easily find black-market cigarettes in the stalls near the approach to the main road. She could even get cheap bootleg liquor there.

Her great love for these doomed surroundings, despite everything, had roots in a love of a more carnal sort: Rafel. The first time she’d seen him standing and welding sheet metal in a building that resembled a hangar, where the canal widened into a pool, her heart skipped a beat. When he took off the mask, his intense gaze hit her like sparks from the welding gun. Every late afternoon when Berit found her way to this place, she relished the opportunity to look into the mystical depth of Rafel’s eyes.

She moved constantly in the daydream called “hope for the future,” for she was only twenty years old and had seen more life than death.

But that evening in October, Hammarby Harbor’s silhouettes rose up above the fog banks like ghastly skeletons. Or maybe this was only how she remembered things afterward. For this was when she saw a young person lose her life.

She’d witnessed this from a distance just as she was nearing a decommissioned lightbulb factory. The building’s functional architecture appeared like a cluster of wooden blocks, one of which stood on its end, crowned with something that resembled a glass booth on columns. As Berit examines the smashed windowpanes, a body came floating down from a high ledge and disappeared behind a clump of trees. Berit expected to hear something when the body hit the ground, but there wasn’t a sound. She rushed up the grassy embankment, layers of thick fog drifting in front of her as she desperately searched for the body. The mangled form on the ground wasn’t visible until she reached the building.

A slender girl with dark hair, scarcely older than eighteen, lay racked on a big chunk of concrete with protruding iron rods. Her eyes, framed with kohl, were open and her lips, painted black, vaguely stirred. Berit walked toward her and bent down over her body.

— Cos... the girl panted. Cos... mo...

— Cosmos? Berit repeated, as a nasty rattle came from the girl’s throat and she went silent.

The girl’s pulse faded away under Berit’s thumb. Berit set off for the road just behind the factory. After staggering breathlessly for a few seconds, she pulled up her tight skirt above her hips, and once she reached the road, she tried to flag down the first oncoming car. When it emerged from the fog and slowed down, Rafel sat behind the steering wheel in a small olive-green Renault with a disproportionately big rear end he’d built himself, presumably to make room for all the junk he liked to tinker with. Rafel stopped the car and asked Berit what happened. She told him what she’d just witnessed.

— Is she alive? Rafel asked in his deep bass while Berit plunked down into the seat beside him.

— No, she died as I got there.

— Did you see anything else? Rafel grumbled, as he crossed over toward a gas station near the bigger intersection, a frown on his face. His voice sounded harsh and hollow, as if he spoke through a pipe. And despite the seriousness of the moment, Berit felt a shockwave of desire when he turned his dark, inscrutable gaze toward her. Only then did she realize how obscene she must look with her skirt rolled up, revealing her lace panties and garter belt. She clumsily pulled her skirt down while she answered that she couldn’t see so clearly in the fog, but she repeated the word the girl’s lips had tried to utter: Cosmos.

Rafel turned into the gas station and dropped her off. He’d been forbidden to drive and didn’t want the cops to find out, he explained sullenly before clattering away.

Fifteen minutes later, in the din of shrieking sirens and the crackling of a police radio, Berit gave her minimal testimony at the gas station. A cop asked how she felt, would she need “crisis counseling”? But Berit was content to be dropped off on a side street that led down to a group of protected houses where she rented a room. It was a paradoxical idyll, wedged between the water and a forested hill, just below the constant stream of traffic on a nearby road that connected the southern part of the city and the many suburbs along the subway’s southbound Green Line. It was green too in Brovattnet — a lush garden of fruit trees and berry bushes, all well-maintained and yielding huge harvests.

To forget the sight of the young woman whose eyes were numb with pain as rebar pierced her body was, however, impossible. Being impaled must have been excruciating. After a couple of hours in a cold sweat, making fruitless attempts at falling asleep, Berit got out of bed and carefully walked down the creaky stairs. She didn’t want to wake Thea. Thea was a writer and so easily disturbed that she really shouldn’t have had tenants. Thus Berit and Thea scarcely talked to each other, which was fine with Berit; she was a recluse herself. In any event, the blinking blue lights from the bridge abutment must have troubled Thea’s sacred nocturnal slumber, for there was light coming from the kitchen.

As Berit stood in the kitchen doorway she heard a gruff voice. A moment later she met his piercing gaze. She couldn’t stop the feeling throbbing through her genitals nor the glow that rushed up, making her face flush. She suffered a “little death” and had to hold onto the doorframe. Rafel stared straight into her innermost self. Berit excused herself and poured a glass of water before shamefacedly padding back up to her room in her nightgown. Maybe it wasn’t so strange that Rafel sat in Thea’s kitchen. He and Thea had been childhood friends in the red-hot seventies, she’d mentioned it once when he’d come by to borrow some tools from the shed. But running into him twice that day still seemed odd.

The dying girl’s gaze and Rafel’s expression in Thea’s kitchen revolved over and over in her mind, and for some peculiar reason she felt guilty, though it was unclear of what. Certainly it was irritating that Rafel brought her to orgasm simply with his eyes, but he probably hadn’t noticed anything.

She didn’t manage to fall asleep until after the early-morning trains had started rumbling over the nearby bridge, and only slept for a short time. She woke abruptly to the shrill sound of a crow cawing while it peered through her window. The day was cloudy, fog still thick over the little yard outside the house. Rafel’s car was nowhere to be seen.

The walls of the room seemed to be closing in on her, as if wanting to push her out. After a quick shower, she got dressed, hoping that the hectic pace of her job at the hospital would make her feel normal again.

On the way to work she kept looking over her shoulder. She felt persecuted, which in a way she was, persecuted by the images in her brain. The obsessive thought of putting herself in the impaled girl’s place wouldn’t leave her. Had it been deliberate? Had the girl seen the iron rods hidden in the fog? If she’d chosen to die, wouldn’t there have been easier ways? Berit stopped on Skanstull Bridge and scouted the accident scene. Dying should be simple, like walking over a bridge. Dying ought to be a slip out of the material world, not something to get stuck in, not being racked by rusty iron spikes, as if life and matter wanted to leave a last reminder of their harshness.

That evening, when Berit came home to Brovattnet, Thea was so sociable that Berit almost suspected something was up. She had intended to go to bed right away and reclaim her lost night of sleep but was instead treated to roast beef and potatoes au gratin and a full-bodied red wine. Thea held forth on the hardships of being a writer and the necessity to sometimes sweep all this aside and to eat and drink well. Despite her youth, Berit knew that effusive cordiality almost always disguised ulterior motives. But the food was delicious, and it definitely beat what she might otherwise grab from a sausage stand. Not until cheese was served and a second bottle of wine uncorked did Thea’s real purpose emerge.

— Why, yes, she said, and pushed back her oat-blond, shoulder-length hair. As a writer I have a well-trained sense for the unsaid, almost as if I possess a sort of X-ray vision sometimes. Somehow I can hear what others are thinking.

Then I hope that you hear what I’m thinking, Berit reflected, namely that your opinion of yourself is way off.

— Exactly, Thea laughed, sensing Berit’s skepticism in her silence. You think I’m up on my high horse, and I understand. Nobody is particularly thrilled when someone comes along and says she has the ability to read their mind. But to the point: you’re pining for Rafel.

Berit stopped chewing; she felt as if she’d just swallowed an ox.

— No harm done, Thea continued, and moreover you’re not the only one. That’s where I was heading. I don’t know if you know about Cozmo LSD.

Berit remembered what the dying girl had rattled out: Cosmos. Or was it only Cosmo?

— It’s spelled with a z, Thea said, and it is — or was — Rafel’s professional pseudonym. So you didn’t know; there’s scarcely anyone else who does. He was always made up to be unrecognizable when he was onstage. I took care of all communication with his record company. He was quite successful, on the top of the charts awhile too.

— What did the music sound like? Berit asked.

Thea went into the living room and came back steeped in echoing gloomy harmonies sung in Swedish in a serene and plaintive voice. But without a doubt Rafel’s voice. A shudder went through Berit.

— You look perplexed, said Thea. I can understand. That’s not the immediate picture of Rafel when you see him, am I right? But don’t we all have dual personalities in some regard? Thea turned off the music and refilled the wine glasses, then continued: Cozmo LSD later changed his name to Cozmo Limited under pressure from the record company. But Cozmo’s cult status grew along with the piles of fan letters, which I also took care of. Rafel never appeared onstage as himself, he avoided publicity, and for every performance that the record company demanded of him, he grew increasingly afraid of being recognized as just another mortal, so to speak. But his status grew alongside his shyness, and at one concert some girls climbed up on the stage, Rafel fled, and the throngs of fans followed the girls’ example; in the ensuing panic, several fans were badly trampled and had to be taken to the hospital. A sixteen-year-old girl died of injuries. Afterward Rafel decided to back out and kill Cozmo Limited. Through me he sent out a press release and then more or less went underground.

Thea lay her hand on Berit’s and her voice spoke softly.

— I saw your face when you caught sight of Rafel last night. But you must give up your dreams of winning him. You have to stop persecuting him.

— Persecuting? Berit inhaled, now more furious than ashamed. With flushed cheeks she stared down at the table and grabbed a corner of the red-checkered tablecloth. Wanting to jerk it away so that everything fell to the floor.

— Sorry if I’ve upset you; you must honestly be shocked by what you witnessed last night, Thea continued with her insufferable insight. Surely you wonder if Rafel has asked me to convey this to you, but first you need to understand the background. As you know, Rafel and I have been friends since we were very young and lived in a collective. He can seem sullen and tough but he’s a sensitive soul — which naturally is an attractive combination to everyone but himself. Through music he found an outlet for his vulnerability, but after the death at his last public performance he was terribly shocked. He feared his own power of attraction, thought that it was cursed. All the yearning fan mail from ragged kids didn’t help either — many of the letters had suicidal undertones and I didn’t know if I should forward them along to the police.

Now Berit understood why Rafel appeared so troubled after the incident. Thea said that the young woman who’d died at the old factory was really a stalker who’d harassed Rafel for years, drowned him with letters, and finally succeeded in ferreting out where he lived. Afterward she’d snuck around the area, on the lookout for her idol. Berit wondered why Rafel hadn’t reported the girl to the police, but then Thea explained that Rafel saw himself as a citizen of the world and loathed the authorities’ surveillance of people. To report a person to the police went against his strongest convictions; but now the cops were going through all of Hammarby with a fine-tooth comb, directing their abuse at those who’d chosen to live outside the system, which is why Rafel had asked Thea to give the voluminous fan mail from the dead girl to the police.

— So perhaps you understand, Thea concluded, that Rafel is terribly shaken by what’s happened. He needs to be alone and he can’t deal with any followers right now.

— You can tell him that he shouldn’t worry, Berit said brusquely, and got up. Besides, I never thought he was all that special.

Thea offered a maternal smile that lingered as Berit grimaced at her reflection in a nearby mirror. Her embarrassment was written all over her face.

The next day the suicide howled from the headlines, as the papers caught the scent of a “pop star.” While there was no commentary from the pop star himself, there were plenty of photos in the archives to run. Moreover, selections from the dead girl’s fan mail had been leaked to the media and were there in print, so every Tom, Dick, and Harry, as well as noted experts, could expatiate on this dangerous idol worship.

The following day the media machinery around Rafel and Cozmo Limited went into even higher gear. Hack journalists had uncovered another suicide that had taken place some years before, which could also be linked to Cozmo Limited. One of his songs was titled “Death Is a Friend,” and parallels were being drawn between it and the Werther effect. Rafel was no longer a “pop star,” now he was a “death star.” The two suicides were swept together with the accidental death at the concert. There was also a glut of new details about the earlier suicide. The girl had fallen from Skansbron, a drawbridge she’d clung to when it was raised, then lowered herself down into the narrow lock where she’d drowned. Both suicides had occurred in Rafel’s neighborhood, and both girls had written numerous fan letters to him. Both of them were outcasts and came from dysfunctional families with absent fathers and maladjusted mothers. They could have been Berit.

In the hunt for scapegoats, no culpability fell on either heredity or environment, rather on the death cult that was allegedly being marketed by Cozmo Limited. This caused various public figures to warn against the media’s anti-intellectual orientation and simplified reasoning which could establish breeding grounds for artistic censorship. Indeed, all the hullabaloo about the “death star’s” victims seemed to end with the question of artistic freedom. When no sexual infractions could be connected to the deaths, despite all the hype, the story lost its steam. Nevertheless, the record company was delighted when Cozmo Limited started climbing up the charts.

But Rafel consistently kept clear of publicity. It was Berit who sensed his presence — on the way home from work his car would glide alongside her for a stretch before he stepped on the gas and drove away; in the garden he snuck around like a fox. If Berit went strolling along the water below the stretch of woodland, he would unexpectedly step out of the little shipyard in his oilcloth coat and stop to watch her, as if she were a wild animal. And at night he wandered around in her dreams.

But then he disappeared, as if he were suddenly swallowed up by the earth, and only remained in the echo chamber of her mind.

One hazy Sunday afternoon Berit decided to resume her promenades on the wild side. She wrapped her long leather coat around her — the weather was unusually mild for this time of year, even though the deciduous trees’ naked shapes told of winter’s approach. She walked by the thermal power station, moved along the canal with swift steps, trembled a little when passing the shuttered lightbulb factory — she hadn’t set foot there since she’d seen the young woman pierced by the rusty iron bars. When she reached the flat slab of concrete she saw that it was covered with flowers, lanterns, stuffed animals, photos, sketches, and other expressions of love. A poster hung on one of the iron rods. A poem painted in graceful handwriting hung from it. Berit read:

Bullshit, Berit thought as she marched toward the ghetto of small workshops — the place she’d first seen Rafel. The ground between the shacks was muddy, a clucking hen ambled around, farther away a mongrel was barking, and here and there came the clattering of tools and machines. Berit inhaled the peculiar mixture of smells — oil, gasoline, earth, marshy ground, garbage, and smoke. This was the way her father smelled when he’d surprised her outside school, before he’d disappeared for good. The only thing I can teach you is this: Always be on guard. Believe only what you see with your own eyes. That’s how he’d spoken, and Berit had tried to follow his advice. But he hadn’t explained anything about love or carnal knowledge. She tramped on, her pulse quickening.

Guitar notes pressed through the cacophony of welding irons, grinders, and sledgehammers. Berit was drawn toward the music — she wove her way along the oil drums, the tarps hanging on their lines, the sheet-metal hangars, and the barracks, until through the darkness and fog she caught sight of a brightly colored trailer beside a clump of trees. Lanterns shone softly from branches around the trailer. It was idyllic, like a fairy tale. The sound of the guitar was stronger now; a voice began to sing, a voice that was powerful and yet as soft as a caress. And there was Rafel sitting on a stepladder, singing to the red-violet trailer with bright green decorations that looked like snakes or plants with twining tendrils. Berit stopped ten meters away and listened.

They were the same words she’d read on the poster at the scene of the accident. But when Rafel sang it with his sensual and full-bodied voice, it didn’t sound banal at all. His voice wound itself around Berit and made her stand up straight, as if rooted to the spot.

When Rafel let the last chord fade away, he got up and went into the trailer, quickly returning without the guitar. He walked straight toward her, his long wavy hair flowing over his broad shoulders, his oilcloth coat open, his hips swinging freely.

Rafel said nothing at all when he stood half a meter from her, nothing when he bent forward with parted lips and beautiful, half-open eyes.

Never had Berit been kissed in this way. It wasn’t only the sugar cube that dissolved between their tongues and made the kiss sweet. Never had a tongue been so soft and rubbed so easily against hers. No lips had so encircled hers and been as easy to meet as his. And somewhere down in his throat lived a singing voice that could take her to the end of the earth.

Rafel led her to the cliff that dropped down into the black water. Behind them rose a group of high-rises on the fringes of this no-man’s-land run wild. From there, occupants could look out over streams and bays and the entrance to the harbor. There the inhabitants of this Venice of the North could huddle up in their houses, gaze out wistfully through their windows, and dream of the far-off summer when they could sail away to the archipelago’s flower baskets.

Rafel and Berit stood on the edge of the cliff. They saw the cars’ headlights creep along the highway like glowworms, saw the glitter from the floating pleasure palaces on their way east, and the gossamer shimmer from the buildings of the city center. It was an amazing view. A wide cloud of mist covered Stockholm like a blanket of whipped cream, and above it the spires of various churches stuck up like candles on a cake.

Berit thought she saw everything as it was. The sky sparkled with a warm fluorescent sheen, and beneath her feet purple and green brooks billowed below the precipice to join the pitch-black canal in a beautiful paisley pattern. It was exactly the same pattern as her father’s scarf. The paisley scarf was one thing he’d cherished, it was always around his neck, even after he’d begun his life as a homeless wanderer.

Rafel walked back a few steps.

— Do you want to be my friend? My personal angel? he asked in a rasping yet sonorous voice, as if singing the phrase.

— Angel? Berit repeated, and imagined she saw the thick white fog spread a pair of wings.

— Death’s angel. Death alone is our friend.

The words flew away and dissolved before she’d caught their meaning. Instead, other words rose within her. Always be on guard. Believe only what you see with your own eyes. She turned around right as the tall figure came rushing toward her, and quickly threw herself to the side. The thick blanket of fog seemed illuminated from within, the light so white that she was blinded. And there — in stark contrast to the fog — was the sharp outline of a big black bat that immediately vanished. Only contours remained, like a piece removed from a completed jigsaw puzzle. She caught the fleeting impression of a hard wind blowing through the hole until the fog closed around it, erased it.

Berit was still sitting on the cliff. The cars’ yellow eyes swept forth below on the main road, but with growing distance until everything went dark. She realized that she was freezing, got up, pulled her coat more tightly around her, and slowly walked one last time through the motley, messy neighborhood where she could once dream herself away from ostentatious civilization. The lights from the shacks and workshops were off, the fires no longer burned. One solitary man with a halting gait walked forward in the rubbish, occasionally bending his neck toward the ground, like a pecking bird. A murder of crows flew from the spot where Berit had first seen a young person die. The poster with Rafel’s lyrics was still there. The first line went right through her: Who were you?

Now she knew.

But death wasn’t a friend. And Berit was no angel.

Over the next few days Berit scrutinized the newspapers, but there was nothing about a man who’d dropped from a great height and lost his life. She neither saw nor heard anything about Rafel anymore. And she never learned if Thea had been trying to protect her. She packed her bag and turned her back on the past. This was how Berit lived, in order to stay alive. She could have gone to the police, but they probably would have believed that it was all in her imagination, and maybe it was. That a couple of scruffy young things, under the influence of LSD, took their idol’s word that they could fly — this would soon be trumped by police work of considerably higher priority, namely the hunt for the man who’d murdered the country’s prime minister. And the tide of time, which is often called progress, swept away the cluster of sheet-iron hovels and illegal workshops in South Hammarby Harbor, for the location proved attractive to a new population. The toxic ground was cleaned up and then came social engineering. Renovated houses with magnificent views went up over the canal, built at a frenzied pace for a growing and socioeconomically homogeneous group of careerists within the burgeoning industries, for which the political and technological new order paved the way. Schools, day care centers, cafés, restaurants, and finely calibrated establishments for the elderly and disabled were built for the resourceful inhabitants. Freedom got a new meaning; its battle cry was, Bet on yourself! The shuttered lightbulb factory was lit up by a TV production company that delivered advertising-financed entertainment to the masses and generous profits to the owners. Being rich was no longer judged harshly, and those who didn’t grow rich only had themselves to blame. Those who now had to blame themselves were housed in the far-off suburbs’ symmetrical storage closets, a safe distance from the exclusive environs along the Hammarby Canal. That a sanctuary for the maladjusted had once been situated there was unimaginable.

Sometimes this tidy enclave is still haunted. You know it by a shiver in the hazy air at the hour of the wolf, when the long winter is on its way; it can come rumbling from the soul of a PR consultant who, despite Bikram Yoga and Celexa, feels encumbered by his own success. Through the big picture window with a “seaside view,” the silhouette of a large bat quickly appears and evokes the yearning to be out and away. Far, far away.

As if death were a friend.

10/09/03 by Nathan Larson

Kungsträdgården

08/09/03

Crap coffee bar, doing my best to hail the Swedish girl behind the counter, the blonde with the ponytail over by the cash register picking at her nails... But this dirty Iraqi or Pakistani or whatever she is won’t get out of my way.

Her saying, “Another Americano?”

For a moment I think she’s asking if I’m an American, and I nearly smack her filthy fucking face. Yes, her Swedish is street garbage, but it’s more that I’m not accustomed to these new names for a fucking cup of coffee.

“Yes. Tusen tack,” I say to her, and smile big... though I would love to pretend to not understand her suburban accent.

However. Last thing I want is to be remembered, so the modus is — keep it cordial, and bland.

I’m working today.

Now. Generally speaking, when it comes to an everyday kinda political hit like this one, usually in some asshole or armpit like Bratislava or any of the former Yugoslav territories (take your pick)... generally, I couldn’t be fucking bothered.

Farm it out locally, or if that’s not viable, fly down some disposable thug, and be done with it. You could say my job is more administrative than anything else. But in this instance, it’s different.

I want to see this particular bitch die.

Indeed — I plan on relishing it, giving it special attention. She’s a piggy, soft-handed and pink like a female Goran. And after all: this is on my home court, quite rare in this business.

The Iranian or Libyan or Afghan interloper bangs that scoop-like device they use to make this dago coffee on a railing, knocking the packed grounds out in a puck. These machines, these hyperactive faux-retro contraptions, always with Italian logotypes, Fabrizio, etc., it’s all bullshit, likely constructed in China.

This coffee joint, which really is a piece of shit and to which I hope to never return, does have the advantage of being smack in the middle of Norrmalmstorg, with plenty of glass through which to observe the goings-on.

I tap out a blend. I ask you: what in God’s name was wrong with the coffee of my youth, the coffee of the Konditori, that lovely poison that only seemed to get better the longer it cooked on its burner? The stuff of the farmer, the factory worker, the Swede. That is, was, and forever will be Swedish coffee.

This fantasy dago coffee trend. It will pass, like so many other trends before it.

Yes. This current job is personal. And very local.

Fire up the cigarette, despite the General Snus parked under my lip. I like to double up.

They just banned smoking in bars in New York City if you can imagine that, a horrible trendy pandemic that no doubt the faggots in our parliament will line up in enthusiastic favor of... so we’d better smoke while we fucking can, living as we are in not just a nanny state, but a nanny world.

Trans fats. Sodium. All the components of a traditional diet. They’re trying to legislate, to politicize our diet. Herald loud the death of traditional Swedish food.

Toll the bells for Swedish tradition, period.

Making this current job all the more pressing, all the more essential.

Stockholm. Sure, it’s been a cesspool as long as I can recall, but today? Hardly recognize it. Dark skin everywhere you turn. Dark eyes. I saw the blackest imaginable African and a full-blooded Swede, as white as purest snow, traipsing down fucking Kungsgatan, hand in fucking hand like it was the most natural thing in the world and we are supposed to simply accept the fact of them. It was all I could do to not vomit.

Sushi and Korean “BBQ” — in the same fucking joint.

All the expected American fast-food garbage.

Fucking mosques!

“So varsågod...” The immigrant materializes again.

I’ve worn a Hugo Boss suit I bought at the airport in Frankfurt, faintly patterned white shirt, prissy Germanic metal-framed glasses — the northern European business uniform that makes you absolutely impossible to describe to the cops. He had a blue suit... loafers... a checked shirt... You see? Useless.

The darkie girl drifts away. I glance toward the blonde, who is watching a wall-mounted TV, arms folded. Fucking hell, at least she could pay attention, I’m nearly the only motherfucker in this place.

“And I’ll go ahead and settle up, please.” I don’t know if anyone hears me.

Here’s the situation.

The target is a female, middle-aged.

The target is with a friend, a female civilian, also middle-aged and quite well off.

They’re having a lovely day, two cows getting older, shopping, Fika, etc.

Over the last several months we have observed three other such jaunts, and they generally follow the same pattern — the ladies meet up, work their way to Stureplan by taxi or car, and if the hour is right they lunch at the Oyster Bar.

After this the pair tends to stroll down Biblioteksgatan to Norrmalmstorg (where I am currently situated), where they will visit the Acne, Marimekko, Filippa K, and the Noa Noa stores before proceeding east down Hamngatan to the NK.

And this is where we will take her.

The hope is that they will not go to the outsized Åhlens, which they have been noted to do on one occasion, as the operation would prove much more difficult in that environment. Too many people, very close quarters, less space to work.

The significance of the date, September 10... it’s the most ridiculous thing, but if you can believe it, the client is convinced this will somehow act as a misdirect and point toward Islamists. Incredibly sophomoric, like an unimaginative spy novel, but nonetheless. The client gets what the client wants, within reason, and any day is as good as the next.

More to the point is that this evening, apparently, there is some sort of debate regarding the adoption of the euro, which the bitch supports of course, so eager to join the “Union” is she that all other concerns are swept aside.

Not a political animal, no way. But Swedish money should stay in Sweden. Not to support these fucking aliens (another matter entirely) with their babushkas and hordes of filthy children, but just on principle.

The Norwegians have the right idea with all that oil money. Keep it close. Spend it to make your country great. How can anyone refute this logic?

The client: politician too. Boringly. Perhaps the most unengaging, least charismatic man one can imagine. From our one brief, furtive meeting I can recall his stale breath, his dandruff, cheap suit, his compulsive jiggling of the knee. His stiff, high-pitched speech. Just useless. Muttering about deniability, this being most important did I understand that there must be no direct communication, that discretion is paramount, that he knows no details, droning on and on, as if this were my first rodeo. I had to bite my tongue. The very fucking nerve. Talking to me like I’m new to this.

Somehow this man, I’ll call him Johan, believes he is the true successor to the throne. Old friend of fat-fuck Goran. Been waiting in the wings for a decade and figures it’s his turn, and the only barrier between prime ministership and yet more years on the periphery is this bitch who has inexplicably and rather swiftly positioned herself as the next choice for the goddamn Social Democrats... It’s become, apparently, an obsession. His drug problem certainly hasn’t helped him think straight. And his taste for underage hookers (which I am not ashamed to say I helped provide, it’s sort of something we do on the side, so many eager boys and girls from Latvia, Estonia... what they’ll do for a passport and the promise of a shit job, say, in this shit café I now find myself in, who am I to deny them this life?), well, this information gives me leverage and a bit of control, and the client knows it.

The rub, and I chuckle now thinking about it as I grind out my smoke, the upshot though... there’s not a chance in hell the client could win any election. Not a chance in hell. He’s like a flat cardboard cutout, stiff, awkward, and barely there. He doesn’t have the stuff.

If he had the stuff, he’d do it himself. I’d walk him through it. Throttle the bitch on the floor of Parliament.

But his lack of political future is beautiful. Cos it opens up the field for the true Swedes, friends in the Christian Democrats and the Farmers Party... citizens with the correct ideas, those who will carry us into the future and away from the failure that is Europe. The dirge that has been the Social Democrat era, seemingly endless, will come to an abrupt (and most welcome) halt. The time is now, you can smell it, you can taste it, ripe fruit.

Enough politics. I’ve got a focused pain behind my eye, no doubt brought on by all this political tripe... I take three Alvedon, down the capsules with the last sip of coffee, now cold.

Waiting on the word from Carl-Erik via the radio in my ear. The client wants it nasty. Fair enough... I can accommodate such requests.

“You’re on. No escort,” says Carl-Erik in my earpiece. Meaning the ladies are headed my direction.

And without protection. Naturally.

These arrogant, smug, stupid fucking “civil servants.” One would have thought after Palme it would be a given that SAPO would step it up, but no, that lesson has been completely lost on these fools. They just wander about like drooling geriatrics. The arrogance. That’s what it is, arrogance. Inflexibility. Safe little Sweden.

I rotate slightly on the raised chair. Your usual Saturday crowd, maybe a bit less foot traffic than usual. Get a visual on the ladies easily. The matching glasses, squat little things. They come to a stop before the Filippa K window, consult each other, then wander inside.

Consider next moves. “Get someone in there,” I murmur into my lapel. It’d be ridiculous to lose her.

The decoy is positioned at the southernmost edge of the square on Hamngatan, and will ultimately drift up to NK should they wind up there. He’s not on radio but knows what to do if I indicate I have lost visual.

I need to get out there.

Did I not ask this sand nigger for my check? Don’t want to be ducking out on the bill, they’d remember that.

Of course she’s disappeared, the Kurd, and the blonde remains immersed in the television, an American rap “artist” hopping around like a crazed monkey.

As gently as possible, I try to flag her. For Christ’s sake, the place is empty.

“Miss?”

Takes her sweet time looking my way. Giving me suburban sass. A proper Swede, physically, if a bit too much makeup. The suburban influence. A tragedy.

“Might I pay?”

“What did you have?” she asks as if unbearably put upon, stepping to the register.

“Two coffees. Two, what, Americanos.”

Her fingers are poised over the keyboard, tickling the air. “A coffee or an Americano?”

“I’m sorry?”

“Was it a regular coffee or an Americano?”

Jesus fuck. I can’t help it, I throw a glance back toward Filippa K... I don’t like that I can’t see directly into the store, and in order to speak to this pure-blooded yet stupid cooze I have my back to the shop.

Gentle now.

“Two Americanos. I was told you didn’t have regular coffee.”

The blonde raises her eyebrows, taps twice on the keyboard. “Forty-eight kronor.”

Just a moment. A hot flash of red momentarily obscures my vision, and fuck, I can’t help it, I find myself saying, God I can’t stop it, “Well for fu... How much is a cup of regular, just regular coffee?”

“Oh, twelve kronor.”

Steady now. I hear myself say, “But that’s what I asked for in the first place. That’s what I wanted to begin with. I didn’t ask...”

The blonde believes that I do not see her roll her eyes, but I see it. I have to be careful here. I cast a furtive glance back out the window.

“Sahrish,” she calls.

No credit cards on an op, not ever. I’m fumbling with cash. Coins, bills... gotta get out of this fucking place.

“It’s, ah, quite all right, I’ll just pay for the—” In my ear: “They’re moving. They’re moving.”

“Sahrish,” she calls again.

The gypsy pokes her head out of the kitchen. I should walk out of here but I must not be memorable to these gashes.

“Did the gentleman have two Americanos or regular drip?”

Sahrish or whatever the fuck her name is indicates a coffee machine with long red glitter nails, hooker nails. The machine is wrapped in its power card.

“S’broken. Still.”

“Oh, right,” says the blonde. “So yeah, forty-eight.”

I can’t help it, I slam a fifty-kronor note on the counter. Both girls jump. I try to counterbalance this action, saying reasonably, “Yes, thank you. Keep the change. Keep the change. Thank you.” And I’m up and through the door before I fuck up this whole job by gutting these two irrelevant cunts.

Striding across the square diagonally, my back to the shop and the target...

“To you,” says Carl-Erik.

“Where they headed?” I ask, not turning around.

“Subject attempted to buy jacket—”

“Fuck the details, please...”

“... salesgirl directed her to NK outlet as they didn’t have her size at the store. Seems to be destination as expected. Getting in the van with our friend.”

So all as planned.

Our friend being the “crazy” Serb... who is about to be one busy little Slav.

09/09/03

Connect with “crazy” Serb kid at the Kungsträdgården tube.

Kid has been out of the institution for about five days. We’ve got him stashed in one of our flats and thus far he’s just been shuffling around, not seeming to take an interest in anything. Except for Grand Theft Auto and the DVD player, which we have stocked with nothing but his favorites: Mission Impossible I, Mission Impossible II, and a compilation of our target’s greatest hits, especially her comments with respect to support for the military action in Bosnia, etc., etc.

As promised, the boy is about to meet Tom Cruise, the man who sprung him — and be given his mission orders.

Yes, we’ve been given the intel that this boy has some sort of illusion that Tom Cruise is communicating with him. All we’re doing really is indulging his fantasy. How can there be harm in that?

Down in the dank tube station... watching him at a good distance for about fifteen minutes, concerned for a bit as he seems to get crafty, skulking around the station trying perhaps to figure out where I might be... After all, how thrilling to be meeting with Tom Cruise himself.

I can sense his twitchy nervousness from across the station, me thinking, Fuck, we’re gonna have to reassess.

But now here he is, seated on the number 11, as instructed, which is being cleaned before it reverses course and heads back in the direction of Akalla.

I enter the empty train to his back, slide into the seat behind him in a black hooded sweatshirt. Saying, “Obviously don’t turn around or I fucking kill you. Your apartment satisfactory?”

Kid stiffens, then nods. I speak Serbian, with what I hope is an American accent.

“You ready to do this?”

Kid nods eagerly.

“Have you got the weapon?”

Kid nods again. Simple fuck.

Me saying, “Make it bloody. Make it ugly. This is yours. Gut her. Do it like she’s a dirty fucking Croat. She might as well be. Do it street style.”

Another head-wag.

“You won’t see me, kid, but I’ll be there, so no fucking around. I won’t step in and bail you out should you fuck up. Others will direct you to her. Wear that stupid hat you’ve got on, and a shirt with a recognizable logo.”

“I have a Nike sweatsh—”

“That’s fine. Listen to me. When you’ve finished, walk directly out. Ditch your hat and switch jackets, you’ll be handed a fresh one.”

“What about the—”

“Shut the fuck up. You don’t speak until I say it’s okay. The weapon you drop with your clothing. Do you understand?”

“I can’t believe...” He trails off.

Jesus. I can’t have an actual conversation with this mouth-breather. Even from behind I can tell the kid is smiling.

“I want to turn around.”

“To look into my eyes is to die, kid. You know that. I’ll destroy you with my mind.”

“Yeah. Yeah, it’s just... I can’t believe I’m talking to Tom Cruise,” he mumbles, dreamy. “You’re fucking wicked, man. You’re like a genius. You can speak Serbian, that’s fucking wicked, man.”

“That’s right. I do this using Scientologist technology. Now when the police take you, because they will, what do you say?”

“Deny it, deny it.”

“They show you the video. They smack you around. Looking bad for you, kid. What then, genius?”

“Confess.”

“To what, now?”

“To... to the crime. Shit, am I saying the wrong things?”

“No. But speak properly. Don’t stutter. You say nothing of Leijonborg. Nor that he brought in Tom Cruise. Nothing of this, nothing of the Impossible Missions Force. Nothing of your mission. Yes?”

“Yes. Yes.”

“You confess as a lone actor. We’re watching your mother. Do you understand?”

Nods, laughing. Kid thinks it’s a gas.

“On behalf of the IMF I deputize you, Mijailo Mijailovic, for a period of forty-eight hours. Boom.”

“Fucking wicked...” says the kid, dazed.

“The IMF will admit no involvement. We have agents everywhere.”

“... best day of my life,” breathes the greasy Slav.

Eyeroll. In English I say, “I don’t doubt it. You have your orders.”

And I’m gone the way I came in.

Carl-Erik and I, in the lobby at Berns ten minutes later. He reads Expressen and drinks a mineral water.

“What’s your assessment?” he says, not looking up as I sit to his right.

I open up Aftonbladet. My eye stumbles on something about fucking Estonia and the EU, Jesus wept, just why not let everybody in, you fools?

“Don’t fucking know, do I? He’s nearly retarded, huh? Or maybe that’s how they all behave now, these kids.”

“Nah, certainly not retarded. It’s an act, a defense posture. He’s not all there but he’s well aware of what he’s doing. Kid was abused...”

Boring. I get up, look around the room. Feel a hot rush of anger, perhaps unwarranted. Plop the newspaper where my ass just was.

“So why ask me my assessment? You just gave me yours and you seem to be the more informed of the two of us. Wasting time...”

“Oh come on,” says Carl-Erik nervously. It won’t do to attract attention obviously.

In my peripheral vision I note he almost looks at me. I’ll be docking him for that. But he’s good, Carl-Erik. He’s meticulous, careful.

“Tomorrow is a go,” I say, eyes to the door, now heading toward it.

10/09/03

Moving across the square diagonally toward Hamngatan. I’ll stay in front of the target.

“Nordiska,” I say into my lapel.

Several things will happen now. At a bus stop down the street near the Central Station, the “goth” Nazi will commence defacing the SD poster of the target, in his ridiculous gray trench coat. He will do this as loudly as possible, and we will of course make sure it’s all very well documented. The van will pull up at the side entrance on Regeringsgatan. Carl-Erik and the crazy Serb will remain inside and will move only on my say-so.

Three untraceable phone calls will be placed directly to Stockholm police, the first regarding a fight in progress in the cafeteria at the Kulturhuset. The second regarding a suspicious package in an abandoned taxi at Bromma Airport. The third with respect to an armed man at Djurparken. In the children’s area.

Two bomb threats will be called in, one to the Vasa Museum, and one to the Stockholm Stock Exchange Building.

Just scatter the pigs a bit, not that I’m the least concerned. Useless as they are.

“Plans for the companion?” inquires Carl-Erik.

“Who?” I say.

“Subject’s friend.”

“Not unless there’s interference. But he should be prepared.”

“Right,” says Carl-Erik.

I’m passing the Nordea Bank on my right, some asshole on his cell phone shoulders me. Without a word of apology.

And immediately I’m nearly run down by a flock of terrifying-looking women, all with double-wide prams, bearing down at great speed, blocking the entirety of the sidewalk with smug entitlement. I am forced to press myself against the wall lest I be flattened.

Fucking Stockholm. Fucking women having mongrel half-breed children by the dozen, all on state support, so we might enable their shopping habits. God forbid they should have to work to support their spawn.

“Stand by. Subject has entered Zara.”

I wonder what the fuck Zara is. “Where?”

“Adjacent to the McDonald’s.”

Realize that’s behind me. I pause near a bank of cash machines. There’s an Arab female in front of me, in (I kid you not) a full burka, digging through what could only be described as a beaded coin-purse. Yet another pram, decorated with voodoo black-magic totems, Islamic symbols.

Her ugly child, a little girl, tilts her face up to mine, spits out the Bamse binkie for which she is far too old.

Am I in Libya? Am in a North African medina?

God help us. God help us. This is not Sweden. I stare at the child, willing it sterile. May your womb be dry and barren, child. Her mother turns, and I offer the discolored creature the gift of my smile.

She looks away quickly, returns to her purse, puts her back to me.

No, I can’t stand it. Focus on work. Continue walking...

“Have the twin moved into place.”

Carl-Erik says something in Serbian.

Moving swiftly a half-block, closer now to the entrance to NK, I watch the double enter through the front, baseball hat, grayish Nike sweatshirt, tan work pants. The cameras will have duly noted this for posterity.

Good, good.

“Subject has exited Zara, to you...”

Good, good.

Elsewhere the goth Nazi is defacing yet another poster, at yet another bus station. I wonder idly how useful this will be, but figure the more elements the better, provided they’re contained.

I turn back toward Norrmalmstorg, already feeling that deflated sensation one gets with the completion of a job. Even as I see the pair of tants toddling up the street, might as well be sisters with their stocky lesbian bearing, hardly women at all... even at this moment I’m thinking about my laundry, thinking about what I’ll be doing tomorrow.

Shake this off. Still much to be enjoyed.

Something occurs to me, as the ladies draw nearer, laughing about something. I pause near the column at the department store’s grand entry. A beautiful building, really, completed in 1915 and reflective of early art nouveau architecture, built and designed by Swedes, with good Swedish steel... All this bullshit could be cut short if I just shot the bitch myself, right here and now.

It could be good fun. Sure, a bit whimsical, a touch ad hoc, some improvisation, a little stressful... but think of it: precisely like kiddie-fucker Palme. SAPO would shit themselves. What a glorious scandal.

Allow myself to touch the Sig Sauer near my heart, under my suit jacket. Feel the dense Braille of the grip.

I’m not seriously considering doing it, although nothing would be simpler. Merely daydreaming.

The ladies are almost upon me. Frumps, the both of them. Sexless frumps.

No, nothing so simple as a shot to the head. What we have planned will be so very, very much more entertaining, more colorful.

I can’t help it, I have to tweak it a bit.

I spin and pull open the door to NK, as if I’m rushing through my day, make as if I happen to notice the approaching duo, and then, with maximum gallantry, stand aside and hold the door for them. Again with the wide smile.

As they trudge past me, the target’s eyes flicker across my face, flit away. Her arm brushes my open suit jacket, centimeters from the handgun. I’m pushing it.

As the ladies pass, though, do they thank me? Do they so much as acknowledge my chivalry?

No, they do not.

Because this is Sweden. The cunts have trained themselves out of such behaviors. The men are no longer men, they are lactating, self-hating slaves, forever prepared to flog themselves raw over the sins of their grandfathers.

There goes the back of her head, up the short staircase. Once again, I could simply... but no.

Now that the bitch is inside, it’s just a question of following procedure and, naturally, remaining flexible.

The two security guards who are in our employ will track the cattle from here. I don’t have much left to do but witness events unfold.

Find myself in the makeup section, overly lit.

“Transferring eyes to local law,” I say, “All parties go.”

The Serb and Carl-Erik will be entering the building from the side street...

I’m making my way casually toward the escalator. Take note of a blond salesgirl who, catching me looking at her, makes like she’s wiping off a bit of glass. Then glances at me again.

As I say: I make a note.

The bitches certainly take their time dawdling, but once they descend to the second floor (having started from the top), I see the designated area for the first time since I scoped the whole thing about two weeks back — and realize again why it makes sense.

The Serb is nearby, almost at my heel, doing a very good approximation I must say of the casual tail.

Shame to do it like this, really, but it seems to me that there’s more of an opportunity to really fillet her if there’s some coverage.

Within a store, open plan as they are, he’ll be able to pull her behind a clothing rack, or display case, or something, buying an additional five or ten seconds, which will be invaluable and will make the difference between a maiming and an actual, definitive kill.

Momentarily distressed to see they’ve shifted things around, moved the displays... but it hardly matters.

The shopgirl within is engaged with another customer at the register, who seems to be attempting a complex return of some kind. The girl on the floor has gone in the back for the moment, likely to look for a size for the bitch, who stands there squawking with her friend.

“Okay. Do it now,” I say into the radio.

Carl-Erik walks past quickly and brushes against the Slav — this is the signal.

MM takes it, and moves forward with intention. With swagger.

Good boy. The knife is out, he holds it close to his thigh.

I turn on my heel, begin walking rapidly as if I’m headed past the shop... Manage to see the first two solid stabs: one directly in the chest, thunk, surreal the silence that precedes the realization that this is now happening, the bitch is being cut... A second blow, as her arm comes up in a defensive move, thunk, in the meat of her armpit.

She begins speaking to him, attempting it seems to make this thing rational. She wears a half-smile. She believes, even now, that this is something she can talk her way out of.

For a moment there is, strangely, no blood whatsoever. And all at once, there’s blood everywhere, spraying a rack of white blouses like a Jackson Pollock.

Then more sound: her friend shrieks, the target seems to actually be continuing to talk reasonably to MM, I think, not realizing the inevitability of her situation... another thwack, heavy and wet. I’m wondering how much longer the bitch can keep yammering.

She’s hit again and makes a barnyard noise in her throat as she loses her balance and goes down, at last... There’s the flowering puddle of liquid across the hardwood floor, and the Serb moves in to continue...

And that’s unfortunately as much as I can stick around for, as I’m now moving down the escalator... Much hubbub to my rear, though far less than one would imagine. Still no alarm... our guys in house are seeing to that delay.

Plenty of people, however. Just hovering there. Mouths making little Os. Doing nothing.

Shame I couldn’t really get a long look, shame I can’t take the time to enjoy... but then again, there will be the video, to which I greatly look forward.

Within a minute, MM slams past me, taking the steps two at a time. I smell sweat and something intestinal. Good, he split her open.

MM is free and clear. Turning, I see no one in pursuit. This surprises even me. Nobody? Nobody at all?

I watch the Serb as he hits the ground floor, and moves out of my line of vision, presumably out the door, folks stumbling from his path. Free and clear.

Bon voyage, Slav. If you follow your instructions, the DNA on your discarded clothing will be sufficient to implicate you. We’ll make sure these items are preserved.

At this very moment, a photo of MM in attendance at a Lars Leijonborg rally, his face contorted in a shout, is on its way via e-mail to somebody’s inbox at Dagens Nyheter. It’s all so perfect.

Ah, Stockholm. I must thank you, as tragic a whore as you are. This entire operation would not have worked anywhere else in the world. Well. Perhaps Japan. This entire operation is exactly what Sweden — the distorted, mongoloid Sweden as epitomized by Stockholm, that is — deserves.

Nowhere else would a public figure like this be unprotected, and completely touchable. In these new times, in this New World, with all of its new threats, there remains this stubborn, bovine inability to adapt.

Where else but here, would any number of able-bodied people stand by and, cowering, watch another human get slaughtered? And do nothing. Not out of callousness — out of conditioning.

Nowhere else is blunda so deeply ingrained. Out of risk of embarrassment.

Oh, but I might look silly. I would draw attention to myself. What if they don’t want to be disturbed? What if no one else steps in? What if I’m wearing the wrong shirt? What about this haircut? I’ll be the only one, and I’ll look like an idiot, overreacting... presuming, how dare I think that I of all people can affect a situation like this? No. The officials will handle it. Why, I’d lose my place in line...

In the United Kingdom, amongst the Anglo-Saxons, there is a term — the Tall Poppy Syndrome. This is a much more descriptive expression than the Swedish equivalent. And within it is embedded an implied warning. Grow too tall, and be cut down.

Jantelagen in its truest form.

So in a funny way, I serve the social order. And thus, the cunt is cut down for having the hubris to aspire toward growth.

On my way out, I pause again in the perfume section. The blonde I’d seen previously steps over to me.

“I came back,” I tell her.

“Mmm,” she says. “I see that.”

“Something for my girlfriend...” I raise my eyebrows slightly, to indicate my doubts that said “girlfriend” will remain so for very much longer.

A quick but knowing look from the lovely salesgirl. “Well,” she says, indicating a purple bottle, “this is probably the most popular scent at the moment...” She lifts the flask. “Poison,” she says.

Any response I might give her is drowned out by the blare of the fire alarm.