Life Deluxe (26 page)

She’d picked up the binders that she’d hidden at Tove’s house the night before—and not slept a wink since. Just read what was in the binders, page by page, pen in one hand and a notepad in the other. Highlighted everything that seemed interesting, stuck on page markers. Jotted down questions that she had to ask. She didn’t know whom to ask. The lawyer they’d hired to deal with the estate seemed nice enough, but he wasn’t suited for this kind of thing. Maybe Goran would know.

The binders were in front of her on the floor: seven of them, black, thick. The Kranjic coat of arms on the spines. There’d probably been hundreds of them at the accounting firm. At least fifty of them in Dad’s office. And the cops’d confiscated every single one except for these.

First she’d flipped through them at random. Then she’d sat down and looked closer. She found something that made her stop.

This was an opportunity to learn more about Dad. Above all: to try to find leads to figure out what’d happened. Who’d carried out the attack.

WHO?

She tried to wrap her head around the material. Create some semblance of order. Find a structure. Prioritize what might be important and what was patently uninteresting.

Two of the binders were full of receipts and copies of receipts. Five years of Dad’s life—in consumption. He seemed to have saved receipts no matter if it was for a dinner at Broncos or a luxury car for 150 euros at Autoropa. There were Levi’s jeans from the NK department store, a pair of handmade shoes every year, cufflinks from Götrich—that men’s store near Biblioteksgatan where he always liked to shop—probably two hundred dinners out, many cell phones, Bluetooth gadgets, computers, lampshades, Hugo for Men perfume, face lotions, plane tickets to England, Belgrade, and Marbella, furniture, and even a few meals at McDonald’s.

Four of the binders were divided into sections. Within the sections were documents for different companies. There were annual reports for the recent few years and other things: accounting paperwork, correspondence with accountants. In total: twenty-one tabs—in other words: twenty-one companies. Natalie wrote their names down on a slip of paper, as well as what their turnover was during the years that she’d found the income statements for.

Honestly: she knew she had a head for numbers. Kranjic Holding AB and Kranjic Holding Ltd., the Demolition Experts in Nälsta AB, Clara’s Kitchen & Bar, Diamond Catering AB, Dolphin Finance AB, Roaming GI AB, and so on. She recognized some of the names: Kranjic Holding AB was Dad’s parent company. Well, she hadn’t known that there was a foreign company too, but she wasn’t surprised. Dad’d run Clara’s for ages, same with the catering firm, and Goran and the others often talked about the Demolition Experts. But it wasn’t really the fact that there were companies she didn’t know about that surprised her—it was the sheer quantity of them. More than twenty companies. Four of them’d reported zero turnover over the last few years. Five had over twenty million in turnaround each. She knew that Dad was good at business—but this: he was
big
, for real.

But it was what she found in the last binder that made her react. Minutes from AGMs, prospectus, purchasing contracts, and a few documents about keys and alarm systems. Everything was about one and the same thing: an apartment on Björngårdsgatan on Södermalm.

She read the apartment prospectus over and over again. It was a loft apartment, top floor, 893 square feet. Open floor plan. Luxury renovations with solid materials: floors made of limestone from Gotland, walnut wood paneling, kitchen from Poggenpohl. Apparently someone named Peter Johansson’d bought it for 5.3 million.

In the margin, next to a heading in one of the minutes from the co-op board meetings, there was a handwritten note:
Dangerous
.

DANGEROUS
.

The thing about the note: it was written in Dad’s handwriting.

The heading in the minutes was about how the apartment on the top floor wasn’t inhabited by the person listed as a member of the housing co-op.

Despite the name of the owner, Natalie was certain this apartment had something to do with Dad. Dad had some sort of connection to an apartment in Stockholm that he hadn’t told them anything about at home. And it’d been dangerous in some way.

She had to find out more. She wondered again who she could talk to.

There was only one person.

She called Goran. “I’ve got binders here that the cops want.”

“What binders?”

“Company stuff, binders that were at our house. They were here
yesterday, the economic crimes guys, but I managed to get hold of some material.”

“Hide them in a safe place. We’ll look at them together.”

“I’ve already gone over them. I almost know them by heart.”

She didn’t say anything about the note in the minutes for the apartment.

“Okay,” he said. “Just hide them. We’ll have to talk about them as soon as possible.”

“Yes.”

“And one more thing, Natalie. Don’t do anything that you’ll regret. You have to understand something: your father’s life was not always easy. Some say he chose the easy path, but one thing is certain—not many walked that path with him. There were a lot of people who hated him, do you understand that? So now you have to choose your own path—remember that. And doing bad things won’t make it any easier.”

For a second, Natalie considered asking what he meant. But she decided not to—he was right. Dad’s path hadn’t been easy. And she didn’t know what she wanted for herself right now.

She was going in for questioning at the police station soon. She knew what she was going to do before then. Mom’d put Dad’s jackets in the office. They hadn’t even talked about it—what they were going to do with all his things: cell phones, watches, pens, computers, clothes. But Mom didn’t want the jackets hanging in the hall. Natalie agreed—no one wanted to be reminded needlessly right now.

She walked into the room. A glimmer of hope in her mind. A goal.

She gathered the jackets and his overcoat. They’d been hanging out in the hall up until the day before yesterday. A trench coat from Corneliani that must’ve cost a fortune. A Helly Hansen sailing jacket that seemed too young for him. A no-brand leather jacket—that felt the most like normal Dad.

She went through them. The outer pockets, the inner pockets, the breast pockets. The sailing jacket had at least ten pockets.

She didn’t find anything.

She did the same thing one more time.

Nothing.

She sat down on the floor in her room. The binders were spread
out around her. Thought:
Where might Dad’s key chain be?
Maybe the police’d found it and taken it with them.

Then it struck her. Of course he must’ve had it on him the night he was killed. So it couldn’t have been in one of the jackets that he left hanging at home. But he hadn’t been buried in it, she knew that. Either Mom must’ve got it back from the police and put it somewhere or else it was still with the police.

She made a lap around the house. Mom was sitting in the den. Natalie continued on to her and Dad’s bedroom. She approached the closet where Dad used to keep his clothes. Opened it. They were still there.

A wave of pain washed over her body.

She almost couldn’t look. Dad’s pants, sweaters, and shirts in the part of the color spectrum that stretched from white to pale blue to dark blue. His belts: on three hangers on the inside of the closet door. His ties: on four retractable tie hangers on the other closet door—the family crest on several of them. His jackets and suits, organized by color.

His smell.

Natalie wanted to turn and leave. Run into her room again. Stretch out on the bed and cry away the afternoon. At the same time, what she was feeling now: she knew what she wanted—she wanted to find the keys. She wanted to get somewhere.

She took a deep breath.

Pulled out a drawer in the dresser. A humidor. A small dial on the outside displayed the humidity. She opened it—Cohiba for thousands of kronor. No keys.

She pulled out another drawer in the dresser. Cufflinks and tie clips with the K-emblem on them, lots of silk scarves, three empty wallets, a money clip with the Kranjic coat of arms on it again, four watches that probably weren’t expensive enough to be kept in the little safe by the bed: Seiko, Tissot, Certina, Calvin Klein.

And: a key chain.

She picked it up.

Maybe.

They began early today. Jorge’d been awake since five a.m. Opened his eyes without an alarm, like a baby who can’t fall back asleep. Had been thinking only about the hit.

He made coffee. Walked around, in just his boxers. Drank water. Pissed over and over again.

Jorge could feel his stomach. That damn anxiety: the curse of all G-boys.

Today: the outbreak of war—D-day. Super Bowl Sunday. The CIT day.

To conclude: the day when J-boy would become the most loaded Latino north of the Medellín cartel. Still: the worry was creeping around inside his body worse than during a bad trip.

It was time. And they were all showing it.

Robert and Javier’d called a bunch of times during the night to ask stuff, even though it was against the rules.

Jimmy and Tom’d sent texts about planning stuff, even though they already knew the answers. He had to remind them to toss their SIM cards and phones.

Mahmud and Sergio’d rung his doorbell at seven a.m., even though they’d agreed on eight o’clock.

Even the Babak clown’d called at two in the morning to ask something. The Iranian who, otherwise, always knew best. That’s what he thought—who was the genius now, huh?

Tension in the air so thick, you could cut it with a knife.

In four hours, it would be time. An insanely packed schedule till then.

They’d taken a boat from Värmdö, from the bombed hellies. Tom’d been prepared: had boosted a little motorboat the night before—easy
peasy. It had been tied to some Sven’s summer dock, just locked with a padlock on a chain.

A boat. Again: not something for Million Programmers. Honest—Jorge’d never sat in a dinghy before. Serious thoughts: boats, vacation homes, oceans, cows—for pureblood Svens, that was all probably as natural as taking a shit. For Jorge: as unnatural as forking over a pile of dough in taxes.

The boat rocked. The water was dark. Close. If he were to stretch his arm out, he could touch the surface of the water. He tried to look down. Couldn’t see anything but a shimmer. The motor roared. Cut through the water like a machete. They rode past two other motorboats. A small red lamp on the left side, and a small green lamp on the right. Other than that, they were alone on the water.

But there oughta be full-throttle response over at the helipad base by now. Except they wouldn’t find jack shit, just two dead dogs and two totaled choppers. Sergio’d driven the honest wheels out to the ferry dock and pushed it in.

Back from his mind trip. Mahmud and Sergio were sitting on Jorge’s couch. Sergio
hablando
. Joked, messed around. Buzzed about the helicopter massacre.

“Did you read
Expressen
? They wrote that now they won’t be able to use the choppers to blast the mosquitoes full of poison.”

“Is that true? Fuck, man. That’s terrible. Don’t they have rescue choppers?”

“Yeah, but they can’t use those for the mosquitoes. You get how we fucked the Swedish people—they’re gonna get bit.
Dios mio!
”

Jorge grinned. Ran through his mental lists. The coveralls, the robbery phones, the SIM cards, the cars, the blockades, synching their watches. He thought about his and Mahmud’s own scheme for cashing in—the bonus that was for the two of them alone.

He and Mahmud inspected the weapons. An airsoft gun and the two AK-47s. They worked, at least they knew that by now. The rest of the gear was already with Tom and the others.

They checked their phones. They’d used a separate set of phones for the helicopter bombing. Once they were in their given positions, before the hit, they were gonna turn on new phones. The reason: no way the cops could track the phones to towers near their apartments.

Eight o’clock rolled around. Jorge got a text from Tom.
One zero
. That was the code: Tom was up and ready to go.
Magnífico
.

Sergio and Mahmud studied the maps one final time before they went to burn them down in the garbage room.

Lists scrolled past on the inside of his eyelids. The jammers, the aluminum foil, the walkie-talkies, the angle grinder, spike strips, the wheel loader. The last thing on the list: Jimmy’d gotten hold of one of those—it would crush the Tomteboda gate easier than the Lego set J-boy’d given Jorgito.

Still: Would the guys pull this off?

At eight-thirty, Jorge’s cell started blowing up: four texts:
Four zero, Three zero, Five zero, Two zero
. The G’s were awake and ready to go. He responded with the code:
Good results
. They’d understand: he, Mahmud, and Sergio were in position.

They went down to the street. People on their way to work, to day care with their kids. Stressed, speedy steps, stiff stares. Screaming babies. Whiny bosses. Bus drivers who shut the doors in the face of retirees who hadn’t quite made it to the stop in time. A life that Jorge never wanted to live.