Life Deluxe (38 page)

“I was twenty-one years old when I had you. Do you understand? Would you want to be a mom now, huh?”

Natalie tried to make her stop. “Mom, calm down.”

It didn’t work.

“You don’t want to see who he was. You’re naïve. Stupid and naïve. Your father was not a human being,” she spit. “He was an animal.”

That was enough. Natalie walked out into the hall. Raised her voice and directed it like a missile into the den: “Shut up. Now. If you say one more word about Dad, I’ll kick you out of here.”

Back at the university. Foundations of civil justice.
Pacta sunt servanda
. Contracts must be adhered to. Alliances must be kept. Honor must not be debased. Families may not be broken up. Bonds of friendship must be strengthened. People who can be expected to be loyal must remain loyal.

Fuck it
.

Natalie rose from the table where she was sitting. Louise and Tove remained in their seats—looked after her as she walked toward the bathroom.

Her head was spinning. All the nerdy students around her were sitting with their heads buried in their books. Trying to appear important. What did it matter? Everyone was just playing the game—pretending that they had their lives under control. They were spoiled. They knew zilch about reality. They were princesses who’d never been forced to get their hands dirty.

There was wall-to-wall carpeting in the library. She opened the door to the bathroom. Heard her high heels click against the tiled floor in there.

She sat down on the covered toilet seat. Set her purse down. Hugged herself with her arms. The panic came in waves.

She leaned forward.

Ten minutes later—the floor was glistening with tears. She rose. Felt better. She could handle this. Her studies. Mom’s crazy attacks. The grief after Dad.

Stefanovic’s betrayal.

She had the investigation material. She was sitting on information. She would find out who’d ended Dad’s life—and make sure that whoever was responsible would pay.

She looked at herself in the mirror. You could tell she’d been crying. She picked up her purse.

She was thinking about the summer. It was as though Viktor hadn’t been able to handle Natalie’s feelings after everything’d happened with Dad. She’d wanted to stay home—he’d wanted to go out for coffee, drink beer, or party. She’d wanted to watch movies or TV—he’d wanted to go to MMA events, celebrity parties, or the gym. They’d never been particularly in sync, but during the weeks after the murder it had grown painfully apparent.

When her thoughts weren’t with Dad in the past, they were with Dad’s world in the present. She spoke with Goran several times a week. They took frequent walks together: downtown or out by Natalie’s home in Näsbypark. They divided up the work between them. They discussed Stefanovic’s changed position. Milorad and Patrik’s attitudes. Thomas’s loyalties. They analyzed information. Bounced ideas back and forth constantly. How they ought to take control over Dad’s bookkeeping. How long the money would last.

They had Thomas break into the loft apartment—it’d been cleared out. Someone’d carried out the furniture, broken down bookshelves, removed the Jacuzzi, even taken out the faucets from the shower and the sink. Natalie had to ask the lawyer who actually had the right to sell the place. Formally, a front man owned the place on paper. The lawyer told them, regretfully: the apartment was already sold—a new owner would get access to it soon. Nobody knew what the purchase price’d actually been, and it was impossible to get hold of the front man.

But there were moments of light in all the darkness. Leads. Among other things, the police’d confiscated the film from Dad’s surveillance cameras at home. Stefanovic’d installed a bunch of them after the assassination attempt in the parking garage—each camera saved film for over forty-eight hours. Goran asked Thomas to get his hands on the footage.

Again: she had the threatening letter to the cop fuckers to thank.

Thomas analyzed the material. Natalie’d almost expected to see some assassin sneaking around the bushes with a gun in hand. Instead, she saw something else that unnerved her: during the two days in question, a green Volvo had driven past the house several times.

She blamed herself. Remembered first when she saw the films: she’d seen the green Volvo in the parking garage before the assassination
attempt. And maybe she’d seen it once outside their house too? She should’ve been more on her guard, should’ve warned Dad that something was going on.

Thomas was keeping the men whom Melissa Cherkasova met at hotels under constant surveillance. Natalie’d even sat in her own car outside the Belarusian’s apartment a few times. Jotted down when she’d come home and when she’d left, in a notebook. Tried her best to shadow her.

Thomas’d done some more research on the girl. Thank God for his old colleagues on the force. Melissa Cherkasova had permanent residency in Sweden. She’d been married to a fifty-year-old Swedish man for six months—that’s how she’d been able to enter the country in the first place. She’d never been convicted of anything, but she’d been prosecuted for fraud four years ago. Thomas ordered the paperwork from the trial—apparently, Cherkasova’d gotten hold of two Swedish men’s personal identification number and credit card information and then ordered flights to Belarus and France on their dime. The interesting part: neither of the two plaintiffs’d wanted to report her; the fraud was discovered by the credit card company. When it was time for the trial, they didn’t even show up in court—Cherkasova was freed. She was registered not at Råsundavägen 31, where Natalie’d seen her, but at an address in Malmö, in the south of the country, in the home of a woman with a Belarusian name. But she spent so much time at the Stockholm address that it was obvious she was actually living there. Mostly, she stayed at home. Sometimes she traveled to various hotels at night. A few times they saw her go buy groceries. On one occasion she went to a home in Huddinge, and one time Natalie saw her walking with another woman who had a dog. As far as they could see, she never went back to Radovan’s apartment on Södermalm again. What’s more: they never saw her meet anyone who might be her pimp. And they couldn’t find her services advertised anywhere on Internet. Neither Thomas nor his former cop colleagues could find any information in the police databases that suggested that Cherkasova was a prostitute. Maybe she hadn’t had anything to do with the murder. Maybe it was a bogeywoman they were chasing.

On the other hand: the men she met were interesting. Thomas saw a total of six different dudes at three different hotels downtown. They always arrived alone. Cherkasova always arrived alone. One was a Brit—they couldn’t find out much about him. He worked for a British
aircraft manufacturer and lived alone in London. One was the guy from the Sheraton, whose room Cherkasova visited five times during the summer. Two of them were younger Swedish men—three or four times with them. The final two looked Indian or something like that—she met them four times each.

“This isn’t some damn book or movie—this is for real,” Thomas said. “Do you know what that means? It means that, most of the time, I’m just sitting in my car, on the phone, or in front of a computer. And I hate computers.”

Natalie liked Thomas. She thought:
He is a former cop, but he doesn’t talk like a cop. He talks like a human being
.

Thomas worked cautiously. Waited outside the hotels. Later at night he followed the men home. They lived all over the city. He got their addresses—everyone except the guy at the Sheraton. He was more careful. Always used some side entrance to leave the hotel. Thomas failed to get hold of him. The younger Swede was named Mattias Persson. He was twenty-nine years old, worked at an IT company, had been living with his eight-years-younger girlfriend for four years. The other Swede lived in Örebro and was single. One of the Indian-looking dudes was named Rabindranat Kadur, was forty-nine years old, a small business owner in the textile industry, married for twenty years to a Swedish woman. The other man wasn’t Indian—he was from Iran, and his name was Farzan Habib. He was forty-five years old, worked as a travel agent, and had been divorced for eight years. Thomas couldn’t find anything shady about those johns, but he kept on talking about his gut feeling: it was screaming at him that the guy from the Sheraton was interesting somehow. The guy was overly cautious.

At the end of July, Natalie had been close to giving up.

One morning her phone started ringing. A Skype call. Thomas.

Mom was eating breakfast in the kitchen. Natalie walked out into the garden. She never took these calls inside the house.

“Hi, it’s me.”

His face appeared on the screen. The office behind him: cluttered bookshelves, ugly wallpaper, crappy lighting. He was picking at his teeth while he spoke. If Dad had seen that, he would’ve ended the call right away—in his view: picking your teeth—only junkies and bums at bars in Belgrade did that, people who didn’t understand the importance
of brushing your teeth, people who’d never had dental care in their entire lives. For Dad, it was a matter of status: good teeth equaled a good background.

“A breakthrough today,” Thomas said. “One of my contacts recognized the Sheraton man. His name’s Bengt Svelander, fifty-two years old. He doesn’t live in Stockholm.”

“Fantastic. Do you know anything else about him?”

“That’s the thing. This guy isn’t just anybody. He’s been a politician for years, is an elected member of Parliament, serves on a bunch of committees and shit.”

“Damn.”

“This is a guy with power. I’m going to keep my eye on that horndog.”

Natalie got up. Studied her face in the mirror of the university bathroom. She’d been in there for twenty minutes. Louise and Tove must be wondering where she’d run off to. She’d finished putting on her makeup. Painted over the signs of sorrow. Her exterior was restored to a dignified level.

She opened the door. Outside: the history section. The surrounding shelves were filled with books about the Roman Empire. The rise and fall of the Kranjic Empire.

No, there would be no fall for her family. She had Goran. She had Thomas.

Natalie walked back to her table in the university library. The girls were still sitting where she’d left them. The exact same books, the same positions, their heads tilted at the same angle. Louise looked up.

“Where’ve you been?”

“I didn’t feel good.”

“Oh no. Let me know if there’s anything you want to talk about, sweetie.”

“I’m fine, thanks.”

“Let’s get a coffee. These criminal cases are starting to make my scalp crawl. Like, ruining my new highlights. Do you like them, by the way?”

They walked down toward Trean, a café situated in the third of the several university high-rises. The stairwell in the middle of the library: runway show for the poor philosophy students, linguists, and history
of ideas scholars who would never be able to land chicks like Natalie, Tove, and Louise. Natalie felt her phone vibrate in her pocket. Skype.

She excused herself. Walked off a few yards. Saw how Tove and Louise looked at her funny. She tucked the earbuds into place. Saw Thomas’s face. She whispered when she picked up.

“It’s me,” he said.

“I can see that.”

“Another breakthrough. A
real
breakthrough.”

Natalie held her breath. Three weeks’d passed since he’d identified the politician john. This call felt like it had something similar in store.

“I had someone tail Svelander. Followed his car into the city. No hotel meeting or anything. He went to Gondolen, you know—the luxury restaurant by Slussen. Does that ring any bells?”

Naturally, Natalie was familiar with the restaurant. She’d been there with Dad and Mom several times.

“I’ve been there.”

“I suspected as much. ’Cause your Dad liked to bring people there. So anyway, this politician went into a private room. I couldn’t see who was there to eat with him. But I saw a dear old friend leave the restaurant a few minutes after Svelander left.”

“Who?” Natalie got a déjà-vu feeling. The same feeling as three weeks ago, when Thomas’d been tailing the john.

“Stefan Rudjman. Stefanovic.”

“Oh, fuck.”

“And the other interesting part is that twenty minutes later, I saw Stefanovic hand an envelope to someone named Johan ‘JW’ Westlund. Do you know who that is?”

“No.”

“Ask anyone, they’ll tell you he’s not a reputable type. He just got out of prison, was convicted for gross narcotics crimes. But if you ask Goran, he’ll be able to tell you a whole lot more about JW. He’s well known as a money launderer, adviser, and investment specialist in the shady-to-pitch-black section of the economic spectrum. He works with Mischa Bladman, who has MB Accounting Consultant. Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“They’re the ones who helped your Dad with, among other things, the holding company and the account in Switzerland.”

Natalie didn’t have coffee with the girls. She left the building instead.

Breathed in the sweet September air. Students were coming and going around her. She was standing still.