Never Fuck Up: A Novel (66 page)

“Why?” Ballénius asked. The guy’d been around the block—knew: regulation interrogations were never conducted in a car.

“Because we don’t have time to mess around, John,” Thomas responded.

Ballénius groaned. His exhalation created a cloud of steam—it still wasn’t all that warm in the car.

“You know the drill. You’re an old hand at this, John. We can goof around and play nice. Laugh at your jokes to pretend to be pleasant. Coddle you, cajole you into talking.”

Theatrical pause.

“Or else we can just be straight with you. This is not an ordinary investigation. You know that, too. This is the fucking Palme murder.”

Ballénius nodded.

“You’ve laid low. You know something and you know that someone wants to know what you know. Me and Hägerström here, we also want to know. But there are others, too. Understood?”

Ballénius kept nodding.

“I understand that you don’t want to talk. You might get in trouble. But let me put it this way: you’ve probably read in the papers that they’ve arrested a man for the murder of Rantzell. Do you know who it is? The media isn’t printing his name. He’s Marie Brogren’s son.”

Thomas tried to see if Ballénius reacted to the news. The guy lowered his gaze. Maybe, maybe a reaction.

Thomas briefly went over the suspicions against Niklas Brogren. Hägerström sat with his gaze fixed on Ballénius. Five minutes passed.

“You know what this means. Niklas Brogren is probably going to be convicted of the murder of Claes. But he isn’t the one who did it, is he? Niklas Brogren is innocent. And the ones who are really behind all this, and who were behind Palme, will go free. But you can change that, John. This is your chance. The chance of a lifetime. And that’s because Hägerström and I are not part of an official investigation. We’re doing this privately, on the side. So everything you tell us will stay between us, it’ll never go public. Never.”

Ballénius looked down again. Near silence in the car. It was warm now. Too warm. Thomas was still sitting with his jacket on. Saw his own reflection in the window across from him. He felt tired. This had to end now.

Hägerström broke the silence.

“John, we’re as deep in the shit as you are. Ask any cop. Andrén’s been transferred because of his investigation and I’ve been cut off. We’re not desirable anymore, we’re outside the system. And we’ve gone rogue on this. If that comes out, we’re done as cops. Do you understand what I’m saying? If you want, you can call one of your police contacts and ask.”

“That’s not necessary,” Ballénius said. “I’ve already heard about you.” A vein was pulsing in Ballénius’s neck. “I’ll talk, on two conditions.”

“What?”

“That you release me right afterward and that you don’t tell anyone how you got ahold of me or what you know about me.”

Thomas stared at Hägerström. Then he said, “That’s fine, granted you give us useful information.”

“That’s not enough. If it is as you say, you really don’t have any right to sit here and interrogate me. I want something to hold over you as security. I want to take a picture of us together on my cell phone. If things get bad, I’ll give it to some appropriate inspector who can draw his own conclusions about you.”

Dangerous horse trading. They’d be taking a huge chance. A massive risk. Thomas could feel Hägerström glancing at him again. The decision was his. He was the one most personally affected by this whole thing. He was burning the most. Was pushing the hardest.

Thomas said, “Okay, we’ll buy that. You talk, you take a picture, then you can go.”

Hägerström turned off the heat. The silence sounded like a scream in the car.

The old guy opened his mouth as if to say something. Then he closed it again.

Thomas stared.

Ballénius leaned back. “Okay. I’ll tell you what I know.”

Thomas could feel himself tense up.

“Claes and I weren’t close for long. We spent a lot of time together in the eighties and nineties. Especially in the middle and end of the eighties—you know, there was quite the time being had at Oxen, the bar, and then there were all the companies we were on the boards of. Between us, we made some hefty dough. But neither me nor Classe have ever been any good at holding on to money. Ask my daughter, you know about her, I gather. Claes’s money mostly went to booze and you can guess where mine went. I’ve always loved horses.”

John Ballénius continued to describe his and Claes Rantzell’s lives twenty years earlier. Hash parties, gambling winnings, goalie jobs, alcohol problems, fights, all that crap. Early business structuring in the beginning of the nineties, before the police’d understood how big the front-business bubble was. Names went flying by. Thomas recognized a bunch of them from the tales the old cops’d told from earlier days. Places were mentioned, apartment brothels, underground clubs, drug hideouts. It was a rundown of the rabble of the past.

“I didn’t see Claes more than once or twice a year over the past few years. He was worn down, I was worn down. We didn’t have the energy, you know? But this spring, I heard rumors about him. Apparently he was living it up like he’d won big-time at the track. And then he started calling me. We spoke a few times, then we got together at a bar in Södermalm.”

Thomas couldn’t hold back. “What did he say?”

“I don’t always remember things too good, but I remember that night clearly. He looked like a real suave player. Newly pressed suit, gold watch on his arm, new cell phone. And damn, was he ever in a good mood; ordered bottle after bottle for us to split. I wondered what was up, and when I asked he wanted to go somewhere private. We sat down in a booth. I remember that Classe acted as if every guest was a civvy on the lookout. It was obvious that he’d made a little too much cash for it all to be clean. But that’s how we’d lived all our lives, so. Then he told me how he’d thought it over, turned it over every which way, been racked with angst, shilly-shallied, but finally—
they’d
paid him. After all these years he’d finally dared make demands and that’s when they folded. He was fucking ecstatic.”

“Who were
they
?”

Ballénius looked at Thomas.

“Don’t you know that already?”

Niklas still hadn’t been in touch and it was the day before New Year’s Eve—the attack wouldn’t happen. Fuck, this was some gay shit. Mahmud didn’t want to let Jorge down, lose the promised cash, let the Yugos win. But without the commando guy, nothing would work.

Where was he, anyway? Mahmud’d continued, today even, to send texts like a maniac. His note under Niklas’s door hadn’t had any effect. But he was gonna wait another few hours.

They’d been over at his place again this morning. Prepped the weapons. Tried not to snort or smoke. They weren’t exactly experts—even if they were always talking about gats and Glocks. They needed to concentrate. They inserted and removed the cartridges from the magazines. Secured them on the weapons. Flipped the safeties, changed between semiautomatic and single-shot settings.

Above all: he’d seen Babak yesterday. First a short phone call. His former homeboy kept his style clipped.

“What do you want?”

“Ey, man. Come on, can’t we start hangin’ again?”

“Why?”

“Can’t we meet up? I promise to explain.
Jalla, si.
”

Babak agreed. They met up in the afternoon, in the Alby mall. Mahmud drove his Benz even though it was just half a mile. Wanted to show Babak: things’re going good now.

It was snowing like the North Pole outside. Big, fluffy flakes that whirled around. Mahmud remembered the first time he’d seen snow: he’d been six years old, at the refugee camp in Västerås. He’d run outside. First stepped carefully on the thin layer of snow. Then dragged his hand over the picnic tables, gathered enough to make a snowball. And finally, while giggling—attacked Jamila. Beshar didn’t get mad that time. The opposite—he laughed. Made a snowball too that he threw at Mahmud. It missed him. Mahmud knew already then, as a six-year-old, that it was on purpose.

Inside McDonald’s, in Alby: Babak was sitting way in the back, as usual. Hadn’t even bought any food—according to Babak, this meeting wasn’t going to be long. His boy was munching on something from a green bag.

Mahmud greeted him.

Babak remained seated at the table. Didn’t get up. No handshake, no hug.

“Shit, Babak, it’s been a long time, man.”

Babak nodded. “Yeah, long time.” He fished out some green balls from the bag.

Mahmud sat down. “What’re you eating?”

“Wasabi peas.” Babak leaned his head back. Opened his mouth wide. Dropped the wasabi peas in one by one.

“Wasabi? Like in sushi? You gay now?”

Babak popped a few more peas. Didn’t say anything.

Mahmud tried to grin. His joke’d bombed. Said, “I’m really sorry, man.”

Babak continued to eat his peas.

“I made a mistake. You were right,
habibi
. But if you listen to me, you’ll understand. Big things’re happening. Real big.
Ahtaj musaa’ada lau simacht.
”

Mahmud pushed the bag of wasabi peas to the side. Leaned forward. Mahmud spoke in a low voice. About how he’d been working more and more as a whore guard, then gotten in touch with Jorge, that he’d talked to his sister’s ex-neighbor, who was a crazy fucking raider or something. He told him about the planning, the photos, the maps, the bolt cutters. And above all, he told him about the weapons: two assault rifles and one Glock. The illest arsenal since the CIT heist in Hallunda. All the talking probably took twenty minutes. Mahmud didn’t usually talk that much in one go. The last time was probably when he’d told Babak how the Yugo cunts’d picked up Wisam Jibril. That time, he felt angst. This time, he felt pride.

“You follow? We’re gonna storm that Sven party. We’re gonna lay out the Yugos. We’re gonna jizz in their skulls.”

Finally. After that last thing he’d said: a smile on Babak’s lips.

While Mahmud was driving home from Alby, he thought about the dream he’d had the other night. He was back with Mom. Back in Baghdad. They were sitting together under a tree. The sky was blue.
Mom was telling him how you knew when the spring’d come because that’s when the almond tree bloomed. She stood up, picked a small pink flower. Showed Mahmud. Said something in her soft Arabic that Mahmud didn’t completely understand: “When the soul is happy, it has the same color as the almond tree.” Then it looked like the flowers were falling off the tree. Mahmud looked up. Saw the sky. Saw the tree. It wasn’t flowers falling, he realized. It was snow.

He was in a good mood. Homies again—he and Babak. His boy dug what he’d heard. Had held Mahmud by the shoulders—looked him in the eyes. They’d embraced. Like two brothers reuniting after many years. That’s how it was: Babak was his brother, his
akh
. A pact that couldn’t be broken.

After he’d explained everything, Mahmud finally asked the question: Did Babak want in?

Babak thought it over for a while. Then he said, “I’m in. But not for the cash. I’m in for the honor.”

Now there was just one thing that seemed like it would kill everything. Niklas was a no-show.

The cell was situated fifty feet above the ground, not a chance. If Niklas managed to break into a hallway, the doors had armored Plexiglas that he could probably smash in a minute or so, but that wouldn’t be enough. Even if he made his way through them, he’d need to take the elevator to get down, and it didn’t go further than to the sixth floor. After that, you had to pass through several more doors equipped with surveillance cameras before switching to a new elevator. The hallway route was a no-go too. Other alternatives: getting ahold of a weapon—taking a hostage. The crux: the jail staff only carried batons. The cops that came to conduct interrogations checked their weapons somewhere downstairs. If only he hadn’t had these vile restrictions—someone, maybe Mahmud or Benjamin, could possibly’ve smuggled in a firearm. But probably not: the metal detectors sniffed every fucking thing that moved. Another possibility was taking apart the ventilation duct in the ceiling—somehow crawling and slithering his way out. But he wasn’t thin enough for that. He could try to start a fire—split during the fake-fire chaos. Start an uprising—escape while the jail was in riot mode. Niklas crossed out the alternatives quickly from his inner list. You couldn’t escape from the Kronoberg jail—not without massive aid from the outside.