Never Fuck Up: A Novel (65 page)

Through Jasmine, Thomas’d found out some more information about the party at Bolinder’s. They didn’t try to hide what they were up to from Thomas—but this, the fact that they were going to do an event at Bolinder’s right now, wasn’t just crazy. It was insane. He had to tell Hägerström, he might make something of it. Still, he was reluctant. He didn’t want to advertise his side job. Even if Hägerström was smart—he’d already understood that Thomas was involved with something sort of shady—he didn’t know how deep it was. Telling him could wait.

Hägerström’d brought a large bar of chocolate that he’d put on the table. He broke pieces through the foil. “Dark chocolate is still damn good. And healthy, they say.” He grinned. The chocolate was like a brown film over his teeth.

Thomas laughed. “I’m not going to say what it looks like you’re eating.” He got up. Went to the kitchen. Got two beers. Handed one to Hägerström. “Here, have something manly instead.”

They continued to go through the piles of paper. Company by company. Year by year. It all went so much better when Hägerström was there. They’d looked up the addresses where Ballénius’d been registered. Fourteen different street addresses and P.O. boxes over the years. Other people in the companies: he mostly served on boards alone. Sometimes he was an alternate. Often with Claes Rantzell. Sometimes with someone named Lars Ove Nilsson. Sometimes with someone named Eva-Lena Holmstrand. In older documents, he was often on the board with some other guys whom Thomas’d looked up—they’d all passed away. He ordered printouts from the national criminal records: a few convictions for white-collar crime and many for drunk driving. Typical alcoholic front men.

Lars Ove Nilsson and Eva-Lena Holmstrand weren’t impossible to get ahold of. Hägerström’d talked to the man. Thomas’d interrogated the woman. They didn’t know anything. One’d taken early retirement and the other was living on welfare. Both’d applied for debt relief orders. They said they recognized the names—both Claes Rantzell and John Ballénius—but claimed that they’d never met them. That they’d agreed
to have their names on the paperwork in exchange for a few grand. Maybe they were lying, maybe it was the truth. Thomas’d still applied quite a bit of pressure. The woman’d cried like a child. Hägerström’d rocked the same tactic—if they knew anything, it would’ve come out.

Furthermore: they’d looked up the auditors in a couple of the companies. Hägerström’d talked to them. In some cases, he’d done regular interrogations, according to the rules. Or as close to the rules as you could get in an investigation that was being carried out completely outside the rules. The most important part: he got them sufficiently scared. They didn’t want to be involved in any illegalities, blamed everything on the bookkeepers. And the bookkeepers—the companies all used the same accounting firm—had gone bankrupt. The two owners, who were also the only employees, lived in Spain. Maybe Thomas and Hägerström would be able to find them—further down the line.

More: the apartment on Tegnérgatan was empty. Ballénius was really lying low. Thomas dug up two acquaintances of Ballénius and Rantzell’s, from recent years. They said they didn’t have a clue. They were probably lying too—but no one really seemed to know too much about Rantzell’s last months alive.

The day after the fiasco at Solvalla, Thomas and Hägerström went to see Ballénius’s daughter, Kristina Swegfors-Ballénius, in Huddinge. She was younger than Thomas’d imagined when they’d spoken on the phone. Kicki knew right away that they were cops. Thomas thought, How come people always know?

“Are you the one who called me this summer?” she asked before they’d even introduced themselves.

They pressured her like crazy—ran over her whole story with a fine-toothed comb. She worked off the books as a waitress at a restaurant in the city. Still, she reacted just like the two old front men. Thomas told her how it was. “We’re going to make sure you lose your job and are reported to the tax authorities if you don’t tell us how we can get ahold of your father.” But she held firm to the same story the whole time: “I don’t know where he is; it’s been a long time since I heard from him.”

They gave her a day to get back to them with instructions on how to find him.

They could look up places where the companies’d had their business. Check if there were people there who knew Ballénius. They ought to
talk to the banks, check if there was a specific bank office that usually made payments to him. Maybe look up the customers—see if anyone’d ever met the people who supposedly ran the company they were doing business with. There was a lot left to do and it would take time. Thomas couldn’t drop the thought: on New Year’s Eve, that Bolinder character was going to have a party that Ratko and the other Yugos were helping to organize. He must be able to make use of that somehow. There must be some way.

Hägerström was chugging beer and chewing chocolate. Dropping lame jokes that Thomas grinned at. Even if the guy was a quisling, he was pretty fun, after all. Sharp, a good investigator. He was sitting bent over a pile of paperwork when he suddenly looked up.

“I don’t think Kicki will get back to us.”

“Why?” Thomas asked.

“I could just see it in her face. My unfailing instinct.”

“What do you mean, unfailing instinct? I didn’t think cops had anything like that.”

“Maybe you’re right. But I let a colleague get ears on Kicki Swegfors-Ballénius’s cell phone. We’ve been tapping it since our little visit yesterday. She called him.”

“You’re kidding? So we’ve got a number.”

“We’ve got a number, but he killed it right after that call. It doesn’t exist anymore. And she told him that someone was looking for him and that he shouldn’t call her for a while. She’s protecting him.”

Thomas felt angry, at the same time, mystified—why hadn’t Hägerström told him earlier? “That’s fucked up,” he said. “What a cunt.”

“You can put it that way. Basically, I don’t think the Kicki trail is going to lead anywhere. That’s why I didn’t say anything at first. But I have another idea.”

Thomas leaned forward from the couch.

“I’ve looked up the addresses that Ballénius has had over the years. There’s a pattern with those P.O. boxes. For all the companies that are still alive, he still uses or recently used a P.O. box in Hallunda.”

“And?”

“And that means that address is probably still in use. Which is to say, that he still uses it to pick up mail.”

“Let’s go there right now.”

They reached Hallunda an hour later. Thomas’d driven carefully. He was thinking about all the chaos in the city. A huge snowstorm was blowing in over Stockholm like a premonition: the citizens needed to be protected in the face of a catastrophe. Soon a new year would begin—with plenty of white snow, for once. Without there being time for it to be soiled and turn the usual color of snow in Stockholm: grayish-brown, full of gravel, dirt, and the inhabitants’ melted expectations.

Welcome to the Hallunda Mall
. They’d created a logo for the mall that appeared on every sign: a red H followed by a period. Thomas thought about the way it’d been when he was growing up—early eighties, before the age of the malls—he and his buddies used to travel in to Södermalm and wander all the way downtown, to Sergels Torg, by cruising between shops. Records, clothes, stereo equipment, comics, and porn magazines. Maybe he saw a connection: that was the time before the malls and before the scum from the projects took over the city.

The P.O. box company didn’t have any windows facing out toward the actual mall. Instead, you entered through an anonymous glass door. They looked up the company’s name on a board, took an elevator up, above all the stores. It said,
P.O. BOX CENTER
in the same colors as the letters of the Hallunda Mall signs. The tagline was:
Do you need a P.O. box? Are you new in town and haven’t been able to secure a permanent residence?
What bullshit—everyone knew what type of people used P.O. boxes like this.

A door. A doorbell. A surveillance camera.

Thomas rang the doorbell.

“P.O. Box Center, how may I help you?”

“Hi, this is the police. May we come in?”

The voice on the other end fell silent. The speaker crackled like it was trying to speak on its own. A few too many seconds passed. Then the lock clicked. Thomas and Hägerström stepped inside.

The space: max 320 square feet. The walls: lined with two different sizes of metal-colored mailboxes with Assa Abloy keyholes. Along one short end: a small built-in booth covered with a sheet of Plexiglas. In the booth was an overweight man with a downy mustache.

Thomas walked up to him, flashed his badge. The guy looked scared out of his mind. He was probably trying frenetically to remember the instructions he’d been given in case a cop stopped by for a visit.

“Would you mind stepping out from behind there?”

The guy spoke in broken Swedish: “Do I have to?”

“You don’t have to, but I guess then we’ll have to drag you out.”

Thomas tried to smile—but he could sense that it wasn’t a very pleasant smile.

The guy disappeared for a few seconds. A door opened next to the booth.

“What do you want?”

“We want you to get in touch with one of your customers and tell him that he has to come here.”

The guy thought it over. “Is this a search?”

“You’d better fucking believe it, buddy. We have every right to get information about your customers. You know that. And if you don’t know that, I’ll make sure that every single box in here is broken into at your expense, and you’ll have to take full responsibility for the damage. Just so you know.”

The P.O. box guy started going through a binder with customer contracts. After a few minutes, he seemed to find Ballénius’s contract.

“Okay, so what are you going to do now?”

Thomas was growing impatient. “Call him and tell him a package arrived for him that is too big for you to take care of and that he has to pick it up today, or else you’ll send it back.”

“What did you say?”

“Quit it. Either you do what I just told you to do, or else we’ll make life really fucking sour for you.” Thomas walked into the booth. Pulled binders out. Started flipping through them. He found Ballénius’s contract. Actually: there was a number listed that he didn’t recognize.

Hägerström watched the situation unfold. The P.O. box guy seemed bewildered.

Thomas looked at him. “What, you want something?”

The P.O. box guy didn’t respond.

Thomas stepped back out from booth. “Maybe you didn’t understand what I just told you.” He walked over to a P.O. box. Rummaged around in his pocket. Fished out the electrical skeleton key. Started working on the lock.

The guy looked terrified. “Shit, man, you can’t do that.”

“Call John Ballénius right now and tell him that there’s a huge package here for him,” Thomas said. “Big as a bike or something like that. Just call.”

The postbox guy shook his head. Still picked up the phone. Dialed the number. Sandwiched the receiver between his chin and shoulder.

Thomas could hear his own breathing.

After fifteen seconds.

“Hi, this is Lahko Karavesan at P.O. Box Center in Hallunda.”

Thomas tried to hear the voice on the other end of the guy’s phone. He couldn’t.

“We’ve got a package for you that’s way too big for us to keep here.”

Something was said on the other end of the line.

“It’s big like a bike or something, but I don’t know what it is. Unfortunately, if you don’t pick it up today we’re gonna have to send the package back.”

Silence.

Thomas looked at the P.O. box guy. The guy looked at Hägerström. Hägerström looked at Thomas.

The guy hung up the phone. “He’s on his way, soon.”

Damn, that was some luck.

The buzzer in the office went off. Four customers’d passed through the P.O. Box Center while they’d been waiting. Said hi discreetly to the poor guy who worked there, exchanged a few words, emptied their boxes. Continued running their anonymous companies, their front-man operations, their porn stashes hidden from their wives.

The P.O. box guy signaled to Thomas and Hägerström. A man walked in. The same sad, gray face. Same thin hair. Same thin, rickety body. Ballénius.

The guy didn’t have time to react. Hägerström was positioned by the door and stepped up behind him. Thomas, in front, leaned in close. Ballénius didn’t even seem surprised; he looked despondent.

Hägerström cuffed him.

Ballénius didn’t resist. Didn’t say anything. Just stared at Thomas with tired eyes. They led him out. The P.O. box guy exhaled, as though he’d been holding his breath for the entire time that Thomas and Hägerström’d been in there.

Hägerström climbed into the front seat. Thomas in the back, next to John Ballénius. It was snowing so much outside that Thomas couldn’t even see the Hallunda Mall sign anymore. Warm air was pouring out of the car’s air vents.

Ballénius was sitting with his hands in his lap; the handcuffs weren’t pulled too tightly. Waiting for them to drive him to the interrogation.

Hägerström turned around. “We’re going to conduct the interrogation right here, just so you know.”