Never Fuck Up: A Novel (50 page)

Mahmud was doubtful. He wanted to get away from them. Get ahold of his life. Sure, he was raking it in, but he couldn’t take the humiliation. The Yugos were fucking with him. Still, he didn’t say anything.

Ratko explained. They needed help during the day. Keep an eye on some girls, as he put it. Mahmud assumed he was talking about whores. The girls lived in trailers at a campground. Ratko wanted Mahmud to make sure the girls had what they needed during the day. “And that they don’t head out on their own. If they do, they might get lost.” Smile. Wink-wink, you-know-what-I-mean.

“Don’t know if I got time.”

“You’ve got time for this,” Ratko said and patted him on the shoulder.

It was an order.

Iraq. With his company. Mike as sweaty as usual. Collin with black-painted streaks under his eyes. Joking that maybe they’d run into Harry, the prince of England, somewhere in the bush. The British accent. The mannerisms. The body language. The strap of the machine gun heavy over his back. Farther up, they glimpsed black smoke. Bubble-gum taste in his mouth. Collin always carried a couple packs of Stimorol with him. Pleasure in the heat. A Jeep was coming toward them. But he couldn’t see the driver. The landscape around him was changing. The stones and cliffs disappeared, were exchanged for burning oil drums. Fires everywhere. The world ignited by heat. The Jeep drew closer. Collin, Mike, and the others’d disappeared. Niklas approached the car. There was a man lying on the backseat. Blood was running from one of his ears. The face was turned down toward the seat. Niklas flipped him over. He could see him now—it was Mats Strömberg. “Why?” he said. The flames around them were licking the sky.

Niklas woke up. Tried to calm down. His heart was beating like crazy. Thought about the dream he’d just had.

He couldn’t fall back asleep. In today’s world, moral standards were served as a smorgasbord. You chose your ethical rules depending on your worldview. The bearded warriors down there chose their ethics based on their hate for the United States. Found support for their beliefs in the Koran and sunna. The Americans chose their rules based on their terror of no longer being the kings of the hill. But Niklas knew the important rules of the game. There was no right or wrong; there were no rules at all, really. Morality grew in the human mind. But there was still one rule: if you don’t act, you can’t change anything. You reach your goals through action. Morality was a human construct, it had no value. His mission was to create peace for women. No nightmares would stop him. Nothing in the real world would stop him.

He stared straight into the wall. Dreary grayish color. The structure of the fibers in the wall were clearly visible.

He thought about the two entry points in Strömberg’s back. Considered whom he should take next. Roger Jonsson or Patric Ngono? Niklas’d trailed both guys even more intensively over the past week, since taking care of Strömberg. Ngono was worse to his woman. But there was something about Roger Jonsson, too. Something that didn’t tally. Niklas’d seen him several times over the past few weeks. The guy checked out of his work. Took the car to Fruängen. Picked up a woman outside a mall. They drove home. Came out again after about an hour. Roger drove her back. Obvious: he was playing two hands. Classic infidelity. But who was the woman? A prostitute, of course. The guy visited prostitutes. Double trouble.

But something else determined Niklas’s decision. He’d ordered as much public information as was available on the two assholes. Not much. Patric Ngono appeared in some old Immigration Services case, but the guy was on the safe side now. Had gotten permanent residency, lived here for more than eight years. Collected welfare at some point, but now he was working. Probably under the table, but still.

There was nothing like that on Roger Jonsson. But there was something much worse. A conviction. Gross Violation of a Woman’s Integrity, between 1998 and 2002. And Aggravated Rape. Jonsson’d served three years. The sentence was public. Niklas ordered all the documents.

The reading almost crushed him. No, never—nothing crushed an elite soldier, one who’d seen the real shit down in the sandbox. On the contrary: it made him stronger. More sure of Operation Magnum.
Si vis pacem, para bellum
.

*  *  *

He’d driven out to the nursing home on a clear day in the middle of September. The surroundings were beautiful. Thomas could glimpse a lake behind the main brick building. The trees were still green, but you could sense that fall was on its way; there was a kind of damp in the air that snuck up on him when he climbed out of the car.

Tallbygården: a private nursing home on the shore of Lake Mälaren. High standard of living and good care, that’s what it said on the place’s website. The home for your idyllic final years. The home where quality care was valued highest. The home where Leif Carlsson—former police inspector, SWAT team member, neo-Nazi—lived.

Stig Adamsson’d claimed that he was going to start a right-wing group whose mission would be to keep an eye on Olof Palme. But what did that mean, really?

Thomas’d tried to read up on the story. A couple of borrowed books and the Internet—it was almost too much for him. The murder of Olof Palme was Sweden’s equivalent of the Kennedy assassination twenty-three years earlier. A web of conspiracy theories that never seemed to end. He made a list of a couple of theories before he lost interest—they flourished like weeds. One basically amounted to: members of Augusto Pinochet’s feared death squads were in Stockholm the week of the murder, but since the intelligence chief, Holmér, thought the two professional Chilean assassins, Michael Canes and Robert Tartino, were one and the same person, the lead was never followed. Another theory claimed that Christer Pettersson’d made a mistake; he’d actually intended to shoot Rantzell—then known as Cederholm—but due to the clumsy work of the police, they were forced to cover up parts of the investigation. Bullets were missing, phone-tapping transcripts were forged, the police authorities refused to explain what the two patrol cars that’d been parked outside the Grand Cinema on the night of the murder’d been doing, exactly. It was endless.

Thomas needed real information. From people. Not from a bunch of circumstantial evidence, detail obsession, and conspiracy craziness. Above all: he needed to understand the connection to the present day—to Rantzell’s mangled body in the basement at Gösta Ekman Road.

Runeby’d mentioned the SWAT team that Adamsson’d been a part of. That’s where Thomas had to begin. Among the people who knew Adamsson—who shared his views—during the time of the murder with a capital M. There’d been eight cops in total, of which Adamsson was one. Their boss, Malmström, was dead. Six people remained. It wasn’t too difficult to find information on them. Jonas Nilsson knew all of them well, most of them were still on the police force, but no longer in positions that were as conflict-ridden. The classic fate of a patrol officer: sit out your final fifteen years in a basement, registering bike thefts.

He made up his mind easily: his first visit would be paid to Leif Carlsson. He was the oldest. He’d been an outspoken Nazi. Above all: the guy had Alzheimer’s—he was the perfect interrogation victim.

Tallbygården appeared peaceful. He saw old people on a few of the balconies facing the greenery. Narrow walking paths wound their way through the trees. He walked into the entrance hall. Ficus trees, couches with Josef Frank fabric, and a message board with notices and information materials pinned up on it:
Singing with Lave Lindér on Thursday. Trosa’s librarian will be here to speak about new books at the library on the 17th, at 8 a.m. Gentlemen’s Aerobics on Tuesday morning is canceled.