Two Soldiers (36 page)

———

Four cellar storerooms. Five apartments.

This was the first one and where he’d be for the next few hours.

It had been five months.

And he would be able to hug him again soon.

Gabriel went up the stairs of Råby Allé 124. The whole building was silent. Ordinary tenants who were sleeping so they could get up early tomorrow morning and live ordinary lives.

It didn’t feel like he’d thought it would.

He’d gone up three nights earlier with Jon and Bruno and Big Ali, cardboard boxes from the supermarket full of pizza and beer and candy, suitcases with bedding and pillows, and then once more with four newly stolen boxes that had been stored in the trailer in the garage that Leon wanted to be kept in one of the wardrobes. He’d filled the fridge and put out the mattresses and he’d felt it in his chest, his brother was going to sleep here and the whole fucking country would know that Ghetto Soldiers had escaped, and later, to be able to hug him again, it was already in his body, something laughing inside.

And yet it wasn’t like that. He was on his way to something else. The fire once again.

He stood in front of the door. If he continued. If he took Wanda with him and the thing that couldn’t be seen. If he opened and went into an apartment full of another kind of love, the kind that he and Leon had written rules for.

———

Gabriel stood in the hall. And when he breathed, he was almost calm.

Most of all in his stomach. And throat. If he was angry or frightened or sad, that was where he felt it. Now there was nothing. Every breath slipped in and down without pressing and pulling and burning inside.

Alex was lying on one of the mattresses over by the wall in the sitting room. Uros and Reza were closer, by the door. And if he stretched over and looked into the kitchen—Marko Bendik, in the space between the stove and the fridge. They heard him, nodded, but couldn’t say anything yet.

The fifth mattress was empty.

A step farther in. He could see him now.

Leon was standing by the counter in the kitchen, his back turned, the white plastic bag beside him—the one that only a few weeks ago had lain on a seat on the metro between Norsberg and Råby, only a few weeks ago, that they had then left on a hat shelf—the gun in three pieces, the slide on one side of the bag, frame on the other, and the actual barrel in one hand and a cleaning rod in the other, slowly in and out.

He turned around. They looked at each other, started to walk toward each other at the same time, arms outstretched. A hug. Long. Warm.

“One love, brother.”

“One love, my only brother.”

That feeling. But it wasn’t everything at once. It had always been that. All his yearning and joy and security and trust and someone who was part of him.

He tried to feel it. He
wanted
to feel it.

The first hug had always been everything at once. He held on to Leon and neither of them wanted to let go and Gabriel waited for the feeling that didn’t come.

Another feeling instead. He recognized this too. Shame. Stronger than he’d ever felt it before.

They hugged until Leon let go and walked over to the closet in the hall, opened it, and took out four cardboard boxes; carried them into the sitting room, unpacked four recently stolen portable television sets, mounted the small antennas, and put the four remote controls down on the floor in front of him.

“I’ve been waiting for you, brother.”

He picked up two of the remote controls and held them out.

“You put on SVT and Sky News. I’ll put on Text TV and TV4.”

Gabriel tried. But it was hard to meet Leon’s eyes.

Shame.

He took both of the remote controls, weighed them in his hands.

“Brother . . .”

“Switch them on.”

“We have to talk, brother.”

Leon was standing in a living room with no furniture and bare walls. He nodded at Alex, at Marko, at Uros, at Reza, held one of the remote controls over his head, pretended to aim and shoot, switched on the TV set to the far right. Text TV, showing a square with yellow letters that was at the top,
Head of investigation warns the public
, the square with blue letters just underneath,
Biggest police operation since Malexander
. He aimed and fired and switched on the next set, TV4 and a special newsflash,
escape, hostage, breakouts, murder
, every half an hour.

“Brother, turn them on!”

“Talk, brother. We’ve got to talk.”

“Turn it on! We’ll talk later.”

He’d never known that shame could be so invasive, that it could grab you by the throat and never let go. He tried to look into his beloved brother’s eyes and pretended to aim as well, pressed the remote control, pointed it at the TV to the far left. News special on SVT. A woman he recognized and then pictures of the prison wall at Aspsås and five passport photos of faces that right now were looking at themselves and then some other pictures of a white car with an open trunk.

“The other one.”

“Brother?”

“Later.”

It wasn’t much of a pretend aim and pretend shot. He couldn’t. His fingers didn’t even want to press but did, because he forced them to. Sky News. And sports news, baseball, no matter how many times he tried.

Leon’s face, maybe it was disappointment.

“Turn it off.”

Three TV sets on, the fourth silent. They stood, sat, and lay in front of the images that switched between reporters talking and close-ups of barbed wire and the black-and-white slightly grainy ones from various security cameras.

About them
.

Leon stretched out his arms again, embraced Gabriel, pressed hard.

“See that? It’s us!”

“Now, brother. We
have
to talk.”

“In a while. I’ve got a phone call to make first. This one.”

He held up his cell phone.

“They’ll be listening this time. Then we’ll shift. And ring the other one. Those fucking TVs, you know, they’ll just keep coming!”

He pointed the remote control at the pictures of himself, and Gabriel looked at them and then looked away.

“I want out.”

Gabriel wasn’t quite sure if he’d said it out loud or not, maybe it had just been in his head.

“Did you hear me, my only brother? I want out.”

———

When Leon turned down the volume on all three televisions, one set at a time, it was totally silent.

“You understand, brother? I . . .”

They were all looking at Gabriel.

“. . . I . . . fuck, Wanda . . . I’m going to be . . . a dad.”

———

The first blow hit him on the right shoulder and the top of his arm.

“So I . . . I
want
out.”

The next one, more on the chest, almost his heart.

“Her belly, inside . . . about this size . . . like a little person.”

He held his index finger and thumb up in front of him a few millimeters apart, like Wanda had done.

The third punch was to his jaw and cheek.

“You can never leave.”

“Love you, brother.”

“Gabriel,
Gabriel
, you’re a part of the plan, you can’t just fucking leave . . .”

The remote control in Leon’s hand, it was shaking.

“. . .
no one
can leave. You know that! It was
you
and
me
that wrote that.”

“I’ve made up my mind, brother. You know . . . love, I feel . . . her fucking belly, like you and me, like you and your mom before, you know . . . love, brother.”

———

His cigarettes and a lighter were in the pouch of his hoodie.

Leon opened the packet and lit a cigarette. Just one drag. He left the smoking, glowing cigarette on one of the silent TV sets, picked up a remote control instead, and looked at Gabriel, standing like a statue, who met his eyes and let his arms hang loose at the side of his torso. He gripped the oblong piece of plastic in his hand when he punched him with full force on the left temple and then waited while Gabriel fell to the floor.

He lay there.

Arms pressed even closer to his body, still obviously passive, and Leon looked him in the eyes when he aimed the first kick to his thigh.

“No one leaves.”

The next kick higher up, his ribs.

“
No one
.”

———

Gabriel lay on the floor, without moving, when Leon sat on his chest, one leg on either side of a body that knew, was waiting. The smoking cigarette on the TV, Leon turned, took hold of it, and looked at Gabriel’s silent face when he pressed it for the first time against the 15 percent of skin that had never been damaged, on the forehead.

“Your
dad
was burned alive.”

The second time, on his left cheek.

“My
dad
disappeared.”

Left cheek, once more, but this time lower down, the glowing end stuck a bit when he pushed hard.

“Alex’s
dad
kicked the shit out of him and Reza’s
dad
drank himself to death and Uros’s
dad
sits on a bench on Råby Torg and shouts cock at anyone who passes and Marko’s
dad
 . . .”

He turned to Marko, who was standing by the window in front of the closed blinds, and pointed a finger to his head, fired.

“. . . blew his brains out.”

Leon pressed the cigarette into the healthy skin again, on the right cheek now, twice.

“And you . . . you say that you’re going to be . . .
a dad
?”

Gunnar Werner closed the door to the eighth floor and the
Section for Electronic Communications Interception and went over to the elevator. It had been one of those evenings; he had stayed a bit longer, then a bit longer still—a late-night sandwich in a real home, in front of the television, the news and half an hour of Frank Sinatra with his eyes closed in the sitting room armchair had become more and more distant—as if he had been waiting for something without knowing what.

Now he knew.

And he had to be quick.

His cell phone ready in his hand as he approached the basement. In the space of a few minutes he’d made twelve calls and each time after a few rings had been transferred to Detective Superintendent Ewert Grens’s voicemail. After some minutes he’d worked out the possible position of the phone—it was, within a sixty-meter margin—somewhere in the parking lot under the Kronoberg headquarters.

He stepped out of the elevator and into a concrete space.

Many more vehicles than were there during the day. The air was different, less pollution and less oil. And another sound, he could hear the humming monotone of the air vents in the silence.

He dialed again. No answer. He called again and started to walk behind the rows of cars listening out for what he should be able to hear. He kept calling until he came to the main door, turned to the right, around the next corner.

It wasn’t until he approached the closed-off area that belonged to Forensics that he heard it.

Faint at first, then clearer. In there? He opened the unlocked door and went in.

Only one car. A white Mercedes. He’d never seen it before, never stood so close, and yet it was as if he’d sat in it, driven it through the Stockholm suburbs. He knew the sound of it accelerating and braking suddenly, when someone lying down banged on the metal, even how it sounded when someone stopped breathing in the large trunk.

The ringing was louder and he went closer, it was coming from
inside
the car, somewhere near the front seat.

He opened the door on the passenger side. There it was. The dashboard with a small shelf in the middle, between the speedometer and the clock.

A cell phone. But no detective superintendent.

There was a strong smell of glue. Thin plastic like a membrane covering each seat and red and white flags to mark bloodstains. He stood with the door open and realized that what had seemed urgent was probably too late, he closed it again and started to walk toward the exit when he thought he heard someone breathing.

He turned around,
there
, a black shoe.

He approached the pale skin between dark socks and dark pant legs that was sticking out from the trunk.

Ewert Grens. And he was asleep. On his side, legs pulled up, head turned, his body touching every metal wall.

“Ewert?”

No response.

But the large man was breathing steadily between soft snores. Gunnar Werner put a hand on one of the crushed pant legs, tugged at it gently.

“Ewert?”

“Yes?”

His face was creased, his eyes squinting as he looked for the voice that had spoken.

“Ewert, you were asleep.”

“No.”

“You were sleeping in Nils Krantz’s murder scene.”

“I was working.”

Gunnar Werner smiled as he put his hand down into the trunk.

“Good, Ewert, good. That you’re so meticulous.”

Grens saw the same-aged hand and took hold of it, Werner pulled and a large, aching body unfolded. His leg that hurt when he couldn’t lie with it straight. His neck that hurt most of the time. He sat on the edge of the trunk and stretched his arms over his head.

“You obviously wanted something.”

Ewert Grens was smiling vaguely now too.

“Important enough to interrupt an examination of the crime scene.”

The much taller and thinner detective sergeant who was an expert at intercepting and listening to phone calls held out a small digital recorder.

“I didn’t go home this evening. I sat watching a long thin line on a computer screen. And sometimes, you know, we get surplus information.”

Grens was on his feet and Werner closed the trunk, put the recorder on top and checked his watch.

“Twelve minutes ago. And twenty-eight minutes ago. At zero zero twenty and zero zero thirty-six.”

They listened in the cavernous garage that had walls and a floor that carried the sound, made it grow. A faint peep from a button being pressed on a phone immediately became something sharp that penetrated into the recently rested brain.

“Someone dialing a number.”

“I can hear that.”

Ten digits, ten peeps like small daggers. And then another, a peep that was longer knives with shorter intervals.

“Engaged tone.”

“I can hear that as well.”

Gunnar Werner would shortly go back to the Section for Electronic Communications Interception. The fact that he’d spoken to Grens about something he wasn’t supposed to only hours ago was
bad enough, but standing here talking again in a place where anyone might pass was risking more than it was worth.

“Leon Jensen’s phone. Both calls. And he’s ringing himself.”

“Him . . . ?”

“Himself. Engaged. The phone he shared with Mihailovic, that he took with him from Unit D1 Left. The one he used in the car during a murder and that we already have a tapping warrant for in connection with something else.”

He stopped the recorder, put it in his jacket pocket, and started to walk slowly away.

“Two calls from the same place.”

He waited for Grens, who hurried after him, his heels clacking loudly.

“And I’m almost certain I know where from. From which building and even from which floor.”