Two Soldiers (48 page)

Ewert Grens opened the folder he’d had with him three times without showing the only pictures that were important.

“This.”

He held up the first one. Someone sitting on a chair in an interview room, who had been arrested on the first day he was criminally responsible, who would be locked up shortly, the three fixed angles, from the right and the left and face on.

“This is your dad.”

Leon Jensen turned slowly back, looked over to the hatch, across the distance, at someone who might be familiar.

“That? Fuck, that’s just a kid!”

“He’s fifteen in this picture. But in this one . . . he’s eighteen. Just like you are now.”

The photograph of the red house outside Nässjö and someone who looked a little more familiar. Leon sat up and leaned forward, only a few meters away.

“Him?”

“Eighteen years younger than he is now. Before the amphetamines and heroin ravaged him.”

Leon came over to the hatch, so close that he could touch the picture in the middle of a white sheet of paper.

“Steen.”

Ewert Grens loosened the corners of the photograph, took it off completely, turned it around, and showed the full name, written in pencil, on the back.

“He’s Sonny Steen now. And if I’ve understood correctly . . . he finances his drug habit by making tattoo machines in Unit D1 Left in Aspsås prison.”

Leon didn’t spit, didn’t hit. But he was shaking.

“Piss off.”

His hand was shaking furiously when it pointed at him through the hatch.

“Just piss off, pig.”

Lennart Oscarsson stretched and, through the large window in his governor’s office at Aspsås prison, tried to follow the steps of the young man across the asphalt square between the prison gate and central security. Handcuffs, body cuff, leg cuffs. Oscarsson had earlier that morning received information from Kronoberg remand prison that Leon Jensen had run amok in his cell the night before, been violent and aggressive, had threatened to kill the staff, broken everything in the cell that could be broken, bed, chair, basin, how he’d banged his head off the concrete wall, and then with a bloody forehead and cheeks been pressed back against that very same wall by the remand wardens armed with mattresses, had been sedated by a doctor armed with a syringe of Thorazine, and then when he was unconscious, had been carried to a padded cell with restraints.

The young man was closer now, in front of the central security window and exactly two stories down from Oscarsson’s window. It was obvious from the way he dragged his feet and tossed his head when he tried to avoid getting light in his eyes that the Thorazine was still working.

The prison governor stood very still.

His hands gripped the windowsill; he pressed his forehead to the glass. He had never previously felt this way about a prisoner.

Fury.

Sharp, messy, insistent, peculiar, absolute fury.

He who had been so careful day to day. Never personal. Always professional. Always, always, with every individual inmate, don’t see someone bad, see someone who has done something bad.

He couldn’t.

He ran to the door and down the stairs and to the reception area and Leon Jensen, who was standing in the middle of the concrete
floor with his arms out to either side and a prison warden’s latex-clad finger looking in every bodily orifice.

“You . . .”

The naked body dropped its arms and turned around. The face almost relaxed, eyes distant.

The drug would do its work for a few hours yet.

“We’re not finished here.”

The prison warden with a latex glove in one of Jensen’s armpits looked at his boss, and Oscarsson took a step back, nodded, he would wait, the mouth, the anus, and the scalp, it never took long.

The fury.

He couldn’t shake it off.

Lennart Oscarsson waited between the lockers and the barred window behind a teenager who held his arms out like this and bent over like this, like so many times before. He focused largely on his legs, a huge new tattoo on the right thigh and something smaller on the left thigh that the owner obviously wanted to be rid of, an infected wound and a hard scab that would soon be picked off again.

“You killed one of us.”

She had sat on the sofa in his office, looked at him, a voice that was easy to like, calm and matter-of-fact and more mature than her twenty-one years.

“Yes.”

The relaxed face looked at him, the naked body stretched, Oscarsson was sure of it, he was . . . proud.

“I did.”

“Then . . . then you killed a policeman in Råby, whom I liked a lot.”

“Yeah. First her. Then him.”

The relaxed face looked at the prison governor,
proud
, then at the two prison wardens who were standing so close.

She had been their colleague. It could have been one of them.

It hadn’t been her in particular, they knew that, it had been her in her capacity as someone who happened to be there and could be used and then thrown to one side.

And they found it hard to stand still, in uniform and under the supervision of their boss, they couldn’t help but throw his new clothes at him a little too hard, hold him a little too roughly, perhaps even push him in front of them in such a way that his head hit the doorframe, that some blood trickled down his teeth and lip when he looked at Oscarsson.

“She was lying down, the bitch. On her left side, I think. But the pig man, he was sitting, so I heard, leaned up against the wall.”

Lennart Oscarsson clenched one hand around the bars across the window, the other balled deep in his right pants pocket. He looked at the two wardens who were shaking for a long time, then at the young, proud face.

And then he lowered his voice.

He knew that when someone doesn’t hear even when a mouth shouts out loud, then the only thing to do is whisper.

“You are not going to have it easy here.”

The door was shut, but not locked.

He sat down on a mattress on the stone floor of a cell that had been cleared and cleaned, but still lacked a sink, wardrobe, table, chair, lamp, bed. He could scream. Maybe even threaten them. They were expecting that. The thin mattress was the only thing that resembled furniture, and both guards had looked smug when they said that. Cell 2. One of the ones they hadn’t managed to repair yet after the riot a few days ago.

Leon didn’t scream.

He got up, looked at the metal door and the barred window and the prison yard and the wall.

A fucking cell with a fucking mattress in the fucking corner.

And he felt nothing.

———

Over the past few hours he’d heard the others coming back, one by one. Some from the classroom, most from the workshop. He’d stayed on the mattress and listened to the sounds he knew so well and was part of, someone playing cards, someone taking a shower, someone laughing too loud, someone going out to the kitchen to get some food. But he didn’t participate. Not yet. Leon opened the door and went out into a corridor with both half-open and closed cell doors. He passed them one after the other and stopped in front of Cell 10, right at the end of the row of even numbers.

He’d heard him. He knew he was there.

———

Leon didn’t knock.

The skinny shoulders and dirty, straggly hair, Smackhead was sitting with his back to the door but turned toward the sound of steps coming into his cell.

The ravaged face that twitched from the eye down the cheek.

He looked scared when he smiled.

“Don’t fucking smile at me. You know that.”

Smackhead looked down, away.

“Stop fucking smiling!”

Leon went closer; he could have hit him if he wanted, but he didn’t do it.

He tested his voice, first quietly inside; he wanted to be absolutely sure that it would carry, then out loud.

“I want you to make something for me.”

———

The man who was sitting there and was now Sonny Steen and had, a few weeks earlier, built first a tattoo machine from a Braun shaver and then a cutting torch from empty bottles, felt-tip pens, and a vacuum cleaner cord, looked at him and shook his head and smiled like he always did.

———

“A zip gun.”

That fucking smile.

“I want you to make a zip gun for me.”

“No.”

“No?”

The smile, it was still there.

“No.”

———

He hit him.

He’d thought about it all night and morning, how it would feel.

He didn’t feel anything.

———

“
You’re going to make me a fucking zip gun
.”

There was blood on Smackhead’s forehead, and cheek, and neck. And he smiled. Because he didn’t know how not to.

“Who?”

Leon looked at him, didn’t reply.

“Who are you going to use it on?”

He still felt nothing when he left the cell and passed the three intervening doors, when he opened the door to Cell 2 and sank down onto the thin mattress that filled the void in one corner.

He couldn’t get any farther away.

The closed metal door was cool against his back when he leaned against it. He had never stood like this before, not in someone else’s cell, and if he was to guess, it was two, maybe two and a half meters to the barred window.

Leon tried to feel something.

Anything.

The thin shoulders in front of him, arms, hand that carefully placed one part at a time on the unmade bed, slow, exaggerated movements. Breathing with deep sighs, that fucking fucking smile, eyes and cheeks caught in irregular spasms.

He tried to hate.

“You, Smackhead . . .
make it
.”

It had taken the fucking junkie barely twenty-four hours to get all the parts. Now he was squatting down with them in his hands, moving them around on the bed, shaking his smiling head.

“Don’t think so. Don’t think so at all. Two hundred and fifty g. Remember the cutting torch?”

“If you do, if you remember, then you’ll maybe remember that you owe me something?”

“And . . . if you remember the cutting torch, and you remember your small debt, then maybe you’ll also remember things didn’t happen quite the way we’d agreed. You escaped—and I stayed here.”

Leon pressed harder against the metal door that was already closed, he couldn’t get any further away from a smile that had frozen.

He tried to hate again. He wanted to hate again.

But he still felt nothing.

Vile-smelling Smackhead, who was just sitting there on his knees and putting all the parts in the right order on his bed, not even hate.

“So . . . you owe me two hundred and fifty grams from before the escape that wasn’t like I thought it would be. And for this, a zip gun . . . I want two kilos.”

He held out a metal pipe, some screws.

“I’ve made nine of these before now. Different prisons and the same result. They work, boy. Most recently, Kumla, a few years ago, the guards, the whole fucking prison service, the journalists . . . they were running around thinking that the gun that was used had been smuggled in. You know . . . from outside. And every time . . . two kilos.”

Boy
.

The metal door was still as cold, but he looked at the pipe and screws in Smackhead’s hands, and then at the other things on the sheet and maybe he wasn’t exactly warm, maybe it wasn’t that, but he wasn’t freezing anymore.

“You see . . . I won’t do it otherwise, boy. You can hit me as much as you like.”

Out there, through the cell window, the creeping dark, his second evening back at Aspsås already.

Leon took a step closer.

More than a meter between them, but as if they were on top of each other.

“I’ve emptied Block D, Smackhead. Block G. Block H. Three hundred and fifty grams. There isn’t any more.”

“You owe two hundred and fifty. And two kilos for this.”

“
There isn’t any more
. Three hundred and fifty now. The rest when you get out.”

The spasms in his face.

The smile.

“How about we say—this has thirteen parts. But I’ll make it in seven stages, so it’ll be easier for you to calculate.”

Smackhead nodded at the unmade bed and a fifteen-centimeter-long hollow metal pipe, two sawed-off pieces of solid iron piping, a steel spring, a .22 caliber bullet, a bolt, a nut, a washer, a concrete nail, four small screws.

“You give me fifty g, and I’ll put together one part. You give me another fifty g, and I’ll put together the next part. When it’s done, I’ll have gotten three hundred and fifty Gs. And I’ll get the rest when I’m out. How’s that sound?”

Leon took another step forward.

So close.

He could punch the shit out of him. Maybe even kick the shit.

He didn’t do it.

He put ten yellow-and-white capsules down on one of the pillows on the other end of the unmade bed.

“Ten capsules. Fifty grams.”

Smackhead’s arm was shaking when he reached out and his fingers clawed them in and held hard. Then he giggled, not particularly loud, but enough to cut a great hole in Leon’s brain.

He could beat him to shit. He could.

———

The skinny hand held up the fifteen-centimeter-long hollow pipe that until this morning had been one of four legs on one of the regular iron chairs in the dining hall, and that he’d drilled two holes in this morning at his workplace in the prison workshop, one at each end, then drilled another three closer to the middle, and then finally, where his finger was resting now, he had sawed a two-centimeter channel.

A pipe with a total of six holes and he ran his fingers up and down between them, a constant grin on his lips that were as tight as the white, clutching fingers and looked at his visitor, expectantly.

He could hit him. Beat the shit out of him.

Leon followed the thin hand, the sawed-off chair leg, met the smile. And put ten yellow-and-white capsules in the same place he had previously, and when the giggle that cut through his brain was on the way out he’d already decided that it couldn’t be heard.

———

Smackhead now lifted up one of the bolts and screwed it into one of the predrilled holes on the metal pipe, the one at the very end that would take the force of the whole bolt mechanism, the steel spring.

Ten capsules.

———

One of the pieces of short, solid iron piping, the one that was three centimeters long and a few hours earlier had been part of one of the forklift trucks in the laundry and was now lying close to the head of the bed with a new drill hole from one end to the other, thin fingers holding it, pressing in a concrete nail from the hand towel holder in the shower room and a metal circuit board that had been on the TV cable, a pungent smell of glue between each part.

Ten capsules.

Thin fingers threading the nine-centimeter steel spring from the unit’s hair clippers around the nut.

Ten capsules.

Thin fingers holding up the metal piping with the bolt and cement nail and steel spring and nut, the gun’s bolt mechanism, feeding it into the long, hollow pipe.

Ten capsules.

Thin fingers picking the last piece of lead piping from the sheet, the one from the laundry’s other forklift, four and a half centimeters long, and the gun’s barrel, with a drill hole to fit a .22 caliber bullet that he’d collected from Petrovic in Block F at lunch and now carefully inserted.

Ten capsules.

———

He giggled as he pushed the bolt mechanism into the chair leg until the spring was coiled, then pushed in the barrel, fixed the pieces of metal together with four small screws, giggled again and held out a finished zip gun.

———

“The Count, that was his name, it was a long fucking time ago, in Hall prison, I think, he was the one who taught me.”

He was holding three hundred and fifty grams of amphetamines in one hand, the pistol in the other.

“Nine. Made
inside
the walls.”

He was almost smiling for real.

“Three unsolved murders. Two escapes from maximum security prisons. One escape from a young offenders’ institution. Two for . . . well, debt collection. And one that . . . that I can’t say what the fuck it was used for.”

He held the pistol out a bit farther.

“The tenth. Who?”

Leon leaned against the metal door that wouldn’t go any farther back.

“Who are you going to use this on?”

He looked at the piece of metal, at the fucking bastard smile.

“My dad.”