Life Deluxe (56 page)

“All right, well then find out what happened before you call and whine to me.”

She hung up. He had to cool it. If he bitched one more time, it was over.

Before she even had a chance to put the phone back down on the table, it rang again. A hidden number this time too. Had Viktor not gotten the message?

She didn’t pick up.

Her phone beeped: a text.
You have one new voicemail
. She listened to it. “You have one new voicemail. Today, two-twenty-one a.m.”

She had a feeling it would be something bad.

“This is Mischa Bladman. I’m speaking for me and for JW. Stop what you’re doing. Your conflict is tearing the city apart. And now Moscow’s getting fed up. They just called me and asked me to convey that they want to see results, they don’t want any more fuss, no matter who has the material. Natalie, call me right away.”

*

When the changes happened, there was a lot for us to do. The Russian economy was put through an acid test. If you wanted to get ahead, you had to jump at the right chance at the right time, have the right contacts, and be willing to walk over bodies. And that was exactly what made business boom in my industry
.

There were a lot of people from KGB, GRU, Stasi, Securitate who were ready to solve people’s problems. Personally I came from OMON, via my detour in the gulag—and was educated at the Gorkovskij Institute
.

We reeducated ourselves quickly so that we suited the new market economy. When we’d learned the trade from a privatized perspective, we realized just how much work there was to do. Because what we were doing was actually the ultimate market liberalism: the survival of the fittest without state intervention
.

And we came from the state, so when the state was reconfigured, we were already part of the reconfiguration. A lot of people thought the state would cease to exist in Russia. In fact, it grew stronger than ever. Us, the state, and the market—the bonds were unbreakable
.

Some of the old sly foxes are dead now. Others have risen within the organizations, enabled the oligarchs to get to where they are today. Many have themselves become avtoritety of rank: Orekhovskaya Banda, Izmaylovskaya, Malysjevskaya—those are just a few examples of groups that are controlled by people like me
.

Few of them are independent, few are as active as I am in my field
.

In Italy people like us have always been needed. Sure, Cosa Nostra, ’Ndrangheta, and the Camorra mostly hire their own men, but they still need outsiders sometimes. There were jobs to do for the frogs in North Africa and les Dom-Tom. Proud France has always had a need to control its colonies and former vassal states. The power of oil and the longing for power is greater than most people understand. In Great Britain and Ireland our services were used when Northern Ireland’s problems needed solving. We were also called in sometimes when the gangsters of London and Manchester needed to mark their territories. The Russians made headway in Scandinavia and Germany. They hired us when they needed to do some weeding in their own ranks
.

I spent a little over three years in OMON before I was convicted. But it was enough. I became a master at what I do. We executed missions in Nagorno-Karabakh and in Georgia. I partook in the attack on Latvia’s parliament. Those who heard my name and knew who I was all felt the same thing. Fear
.

Bigger job offers started coming from Moscow. From former brothers in arms, from banks that had problems with government authorities, from oligarchs who ran into problems with one another. And later, after a few years, I got assignments all over Europe. It wasn’t just recovery operations, reprimands, and private protection gigs. In 2001 I was given my first international mission: to execute a Turkish pimp in Frankfurt who was trying to take over the wrong streets
.

By that time I knew how to kill, but I had yet to learn the organization around it all. If anyone in this industry were to study my methodology when I ended the Turk, they would laugh at my mistakes. But today, that’s all history. Just like the failure in the parking garage
.

I don’t look back
.

In Sweden time passed slowly. She’d learned from her father’s mistakes. She was more careful than an
avtoritet
in hot water with Putin
.

But that made no difference. I was paid to wait
.

J-boy: the king with many names. El Bernadotto, El Bhumibolo,
El fucko the policía
. He had time to think: call me what you want—but you’re never putting me away again.

FTP—Fuck the Police.

Four police officers dressed in black stormed the place. Helmets, bulletproof vests, MP5s pointed at Jorge, Javier, and Hägerström. Screaming like only pigs do. Ordered the cab drivers to get out, disappear. Two of them pushed Javier down to the floor. Two shoved Martin Hägerström down over the coffee table. Another two leaped in through the door. Threw themselves at Jorge.

He flung himself out of their reach.

Them: pros.

Them: yelling at him to get down on the floor.

Red dots of light from their laser sights danced over Jorge’s body.

Them: losers.

Jorge threw himself straight for one of them. Fired off a jab. He wasn’t really a fighter, but this time: luck—perfect hit. He could feel his knuckles smash into the pig’s snout.

But the cop fucker hardly even flinched. Instead, he grabbed hold of Jorge’s arms. Folded them behind his back. Doubled him over. The sound of cracking. Hurt like hell.

He screamed, “What the hell are you doing?”

Javier hollered from the floor, “Why the fuck you going
loco
?”

The Hägerström guy growled, “Take it easy, dammit.”

The cops were efficient, did their thing. Cuffed Javier. Cuffed Hägerström.

They had to put up more of a fight with J-boy. He was really fucking pissed off now. The adrenaline tap was switched on: he became like the Hulk combined with some ill MMA fighter. Kicked, punched, tensed his whole body like a crazy person. Windmilled his arms, bit one of the
cops in the finger, through his glove. Made himself impossible to cuff. Jorge: wild. Crazy.
LOCO
.

Still: they managed to get his arms behind his back again. A knee in his back. He thought he was going to break in half. He tasted the linoleum floor. Heard Javier yelling. Heard the metal sound of the handcuffs they were planning to put on him.

It was over now. The planning with his bros, the meetings with the Finn, the CIT—the heist of his life. The time in Thailand.

He thought of Mahmud: his café brother would be spared at least. He wondered if Tom and Jimmy were still over there.

They were holding his hand in some sort of grip. Applying pressure between his thumb and index finger. Started to put the cuffs on.

That’s when something happened. A rapid movement. One of the cops fell to the side.

The other yelled something. Jorge turned his head. The pressure over his back eased. He looked up.

Andrés, the dude who worked in the joint, had thrown himself over one of the cops.

A wrestling match on the floor beside Jorge. One of the policemen tried to keep an arm on Jorge’s back while pushing Andrés off at the same time. One of the cops who’d cuffed Hägerström threw himself into the tumult.

Andrés: a big dude. The cops had a problem on their hands.

J-boy: the Olympic sprinter, the ghetto cat with nine lives. The king with many names—this was his chance.

He pushed himself up.

Javier was lying with his arms on his back. Still with two pigs over him. Impossible to save his bro now.

Jorge ran out.

He heard the cops yelling in the background. But Andrés was a hero—was spread-eagle on top of two cops.

It was still raining outside. Dark despite the streetlights. Four uniforms were waiting for him. In the background: terrified taxi drivers who’d wound up in the middle of the ambush of the year and couldn’t stop staring.

He pulled out his little surprise.

In the ditch with the money, he’d also hidden a Taurus nine-millimeter Parabellum—it’d been left over after the CIT. Now he was holding it in his hand.

He threw himself in the direction of one of the cabbies.

Shoved the piece up against the poor man’s temple.

Screamed, “You move, and I’ll blow his head off.”

The four cops stopped.

He saw two undercover cars crawling slowly up the street.

He whispered to the cab driver. “Run in front of me as fast as you can, to your car.”

The dude was maybe thirty years old. Dark stubble covered his cheeks.

Jorge pushed him in front of him with the gun. It looked real, an airsoft gun copy of a Parabellum model.

The cabbie started jogging.

“Faster,” Jorge said.

Raindrops were hitting his face like small bullets. The cabbie was out of breath. For a few seconds, the five-oh stood as if frozen in place. Then they yelled for him to stop.

Jorge didn’t care what they said. He yelled back for
them
to stop, or else he’d blow this guy into next year.

Thirty yards farther up the street: the cab.

He said, “Take out your car keys, unlock the car now.”

The driver dug around in his jacket pocket while he ran. Fished out the key. The car made a clicking sound.

Jorge opened the driver-side door, shoved the cabbie inside. Sat down in the backseat. The entire time: the toy against the poor sucker’s neck. He saw the cops a few yards off.

The driver turned the key in the lock. He sobbed. “I have kids. I have kids.”

“Drive as fast as you can toward Odenplan.”

Jorge almost fell over when the cabbie stepped on it. The cab: a Saab 9-5 with black leather interior. An evening paper shoved into the pocket in the seat in front of him. A sticker with rates on the window. The way all Swedish cabs looked inside.

The windshield wipers swept back and forth.

He saw the two black undercover cars driving behind them.

He felt calm. Leaned back. Let his thoughts flow.

He wondered why Andrés’d helped. Assaulting an officer, protecting a criminal, maybe something more. Andrés’d sentenced himself to the iron box in order to save Jorge. A true human being. An angel. Jorge would repay him.

He saw images in his mind’s eye. The first time he’d been dragged home to Mom by the cops. He’d been eleven years old. Had been up to no good for months—him and his bros went store hopping every afternoon, boosted as much as they could carry. They often had to throw the shit in the trash. It was a sport.

And then one time, he was found out. He’d lifted two bags of candy. He and Sergio’d had to sit and wait in the back room until the cops came. But before they showed up, the store manager came in.

“Who do you think you are, you fucking niggers?”

Jorge stared at him.

The manager squeezed his cheeks together with his knuckles. It hurt.

“I think I’m gonna kick the shit out of you,” he said.

Sergio got up. “Quit it.”

True fact: he still loved Sergio for backing him up in that back room. Some dudes were just real by nature. Maybe Andrés was one of them.

The taxi drove up toward Odenplan. Made a sharp turn to the right. Up along Karlsbergsvägen. The tires screamed. The cop fuckers were still behind them. Jorge held on to the handle in the roof of the car.

He thought about the CIT cash he’d dug up in the woods. Sure: it was six hundred thousand. But
mierda:
most of it was dyed. It hadn’t been the Finn’s guy who’d helped open those security bags, he’d done it on his own. And he hadn’t checked the bills as carefully as the other stacks either.

He’d called JW and asked if there was a way to clean the bills, or to put it more simply—he didn’t need the paper to be white as fleece, he just needed to be able to exchange it and use it in Thailand. They met up, JW flipped through the piles of cash. Said, “There are ways to clean this, but it’ll take a long time, all the drying and stuff. I recommend we exchange it at some exchange point where I’ve got connections. They’ll take stuff like this, just give you a worse exchange rate. It’ll take a few days.”

Yet another setback. Jorge would be forced to stay in Sweden for too long. He regretted that now, more than ever.

The cab turned up on Norrbackagatan. Five-story buildings on all sides.

“Stop here, now,” Jorge said. “And get out.”

The undercover cars’d just turned up onto the street. Jorge heard sirens from the other direction.

He herded the driver in front of him. It’d stopped raining.

They walked over to the entrance of a building. Jorge kicked in the glass section of the door. Reached his left arm in. Opened the door from the inside. The whole time: he held the fake gun against the cabbie’s head.

They walked inside. He told the cabbie to sit down.

He saw two cruisers stop, plus the undercover wheels. Cops leaped out. They were probably wondering what he was doing.

He opened the door to the building a few inches. Placed one of the cabbie’s feet so that it was wedged in the crack in the door. It propped open the door. Jorge held up the gun, showed how he took the safety off. Then he hung the weapon by placing it on the door handle.