CELL 8 (35 page)

But this.

These were presumably people who were healthy in body and mind, doing their job, carrying out a task as ordered by the authority that paid their salaries.

Humiliate.

As much as possible.

When we’ve got him again, he’s to be undressed outside, his bare penis seen by everyone who’s watching, make him bend over so we can shove a suppository up his ass and then put a diaper on him, let him know that we’re watching, let him know that the state can violate you if it wants to.

Ewert Grens looked out of the window at the white fluffy clouds as they passed through them.

He had never experienced a humiliation that was so impossible to understand, an abuser who was so elusive. A state. An authority. This time it wasn’t possible to explain it away with one-off, psychologically sick; this was a pact with the electorate, the people.

None of them said a word on the flight home.

They listened to music on their earphones and flicked through the morning papers that had been lying on the tables even before they left Sweden. Grens, Sundkvist, Hermansson—they tried not to look at each other, scared that they might then be expected to strike up a conversation.

They parted at Bromma Airport. Ewert Grens asked Sven and Hermansson to go directly home and take the rest of the day off, then use the weekend to forget, and to spend time with people they liked being with. Sven had muttered that with Grens as his boss, he knew how things usually turned out when he tried to take time off, and they had managed to muster a laugh before he got into a taxi, paid for by the City Police, that would take him all the way from the airport to his home in Gustavsberg.

It was a long time since he’d seen the terraced house in daylight on a weekday.

He’d phoned Anita and asked her to come home early, and Jonas to stay at home instead of just dumping his backpack and disappearing off with his skates to one of the local ice rinks. He wanted them to be a family this Friday. Together. The only one he had, the only people he needed.

It didn’t go as planned.

He hugged them before taking off his coat. They were sitting at the kitchen table drinking orange soda and eating cinnamon buns, they looked at the class photographs that Jonas had brought home with him from school for approval, and laughed loudly when Sven went and got his old photos and compared. Jonas rolled around on the floor howling with laughter when he understood that the short boy with long blond hair on the far left was his dad when he was the same age as Jonas was now.

It didn’t help.

Sven had felt the way things were going since the morning. When they’d finished laughing at the boy who refused to cut his hair, he couldn’t hold it back any longer. He wept. Tears streaming down his cheeks and he didn’t want to pretend.

“Why are you crying, Daddy?”

Anita looked at him. Jonas looked at him.

“I don’t know.”

“Why?”

“I can’t explain.”

“Why, Daddy?”

He looked at Anita. How can you explain something to a child that you don’t understand as an adult? She shrugged. She didn’t know. But didn’t try to stop him.

“There’s a little boy. That’s why I’m sad. It’s like that sometimes, when bad things happen, especially if you’ve got a little boy too.”

“What boy?”

“A boy you don’t know. His daddy might die soon.”

“Do you know for certain?”

“No.”

“I don’t understand.”

“He lives in a different country. The United States, you know. There are lots of people there who think that he killed another person. And there . . .

they kill people who kill people.”

Jonas sat down on the chair again. He drank what was left of his sweet, orange soda. He looked at his father, as children do when they’re far from satisfied.

“I don’t understand.”

“Nor do I.”

“I don’t understand who kills someone.”

Sven Sundkvist was proud of the questions he asked, to have a child who had learned to think for himself, but he was desperate for want of a reasonable answer.

“The state. The country. I can’t explain it any better.”

“Who decides that he’s going to be killed? There must be someone who decides, isn’t there?”

“A jury. And a judge. You know, in court, like you’ve seen on TV.”

“A jury?”

“Yes.”

“And a judge?”

“Yes.”

“Are they people?”

“Yes, they’re people. Ordinary people.”

“Who’s going to kill them, then?”

“They’re not going to die.”

“But if they decide that someone’s going to die, then they’re killing them. And then they have to die too. And who’s going to do that, Dad? I don’t understand.”

Ewert Grens had gone straight from Bromma Airport to the police headquarters at Kronoberg, with Hermansson sitting beside him in the backseat of the waiting police van. He had had no idea what he was going to do there. He had eaten a vending machine lunch in his office, two Danishes and a square carton of orange juice, from one of the machines in one of the corridors that he passed on his way up. He had phoned the nursing home and spoken to a woman in reception who said that Anni was sleeping, that she had been tired after lunch and fallen asleep in her wheelchair. There was nothing wrong with her, she was well and looked peaceful with her head on her shoulder, gentle snores that could be heard through the door. He had then sat down behind a pile of ongoing investigations that had been pushed to one side for the past week, leafed through a couple of them: aggravated assault of a driver who had made an offensive hand gesture at another driver on Hamngatan in the middle of rush hour and then driven off; a murder in Vårberg with a Colombian necktie, witnesses who hadn’t seen anything and a series of interviews using interpreters who hardly dared to translate. Cases that had been left too long and now smelled as bad as their chances of actually catching the perpetrator.

He should go home. There was only a gnawing unrest here. He did a circuit of the room, listened to his music. He wasn’t going to go back.

Someone knocked on the door.

“I thought I sent you home.”

Hermansson smiled at his angry voice, asked if she could come in and then did, without waiting for an answer.

“Yes, but there wasn’t any point. I can’t go home after all this. How would I deal with it at home? You can’t just dump something like this in a tiny rented apartment.”

She sat down where she normally sat, in the middle of his big but worn sofa. She looked tired, her young eyes had aged since the morning.

“What is it?”

She swallowed, looked at the floor, then up at her boss.

“You remember Ågestam’s theory that two percent of everyone in prison is innocent or has been wrongly convicted?”

The young prat of a prosecutor. He was glad he hadn’t had to deal with him today.

“Old truths.”

“I checked with something called the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction. Just there, in the state of Ohio alone, there are one hundred and fifty-five people sitting on Death Row, awaiting execution. One hundred and fifty-four men and one woman. If the two percent theory applies there too, and why shouldn’t it, that means that three of them will be executed without even being guilty. Ewert, look at me, do you realize what I’m saying? If it should ever be proven that someone who is innocent has been executed, then nothing can be done to right that wrong. Don’t you understand?”

Grens looked at her, as she had asked him to do. She was upset, more sad than angry, a young person who had just started out, who still had so much crap to see and wade through. He was holding a newspaper in his hand, waved it at her.

“Do you want to go out for something to eat this evening? There’s a show at Hamburger Börs. Siw Malmkvist. She sings while you eat. I haven’t seen her live for thirty years.”

“Ewert, what are you saying? I’m talking about people who are going to be executed.”

He stopped waving the paper around and sat down, suddenly deflated; it was hard to look her in the eye.

“And I’m talking about the fact that you forced me to go out the other day when I wasn’t aware that I needed it. Now I’m going to force you. I want you to think about something else.”

“I don’t know.”

Again. He was going to bring himself to say it again, and look at her while she listened.

“I haven’t asked a woman out . . . I don’t know . . . it’s so long ago. And I don’t want you to think this is . . . well, you know . . . it would just be nice to return the invitation. No more than that.”

The smell of grilled meat, flowery perfume, and sweat hit you as soon as you went in; the cloakroom was in the foyer and it cost twenty kronor to hang up your coat. Ewert Grens was wearing the same gray suit as a couple of nights ago. He smiled and tried to feel light, almost happy, a bubbling up from his belly through his body and out through his eyes that should shine. For a few hours he would force all the crap down where it couldn’t be seen, he would forget the madmen and the humiliation, with a smart young woman by his side and Siw Malmkvist on the stage, good things in a crappy life that never ceased to amaze him.

Hermansson was wearing a beige dress with a sparkly top. She was beautiful and he bashfully told her so. She thanked him, put her arm through his and he felt proud as they walked side by side into the large venue with white tablecloths and shiny porcelain. He estimated there were about four hundred people, perhaps a few more, all there to eat and drink and chat and then drink a couple of glasses more while they waited for Siw.

He liked her a lot. The daughter he’d never had. She made him feel happy, needed, alive. He let it show and she registered it and he hoped that it didn’t frighten her.

People everywhere were laughing loudly and ordering more wine, the background music was some smooth American sixties number, even the elderly man to Hermansson’s right was excited and put down his cane and flirted wildly with her. She tried to laugh, he was sweet, probably in his eighties, but it didn’t work after a while.

They were there to forget. That’s what they had to do this evening.

“Do you know when Sweden abolished the death penalty?”

Hermansson had moved her plate and leaned over the table. Grens wasn’t sure whether he’d heard her right.

“I’m sorry, Ewert. I can’t do it. It won’t go away. And you’ve got all dressed up and the food is good and Siw is about to sing. It doesn’t help. I can’t get away from this morning and Sheremetyevo.”

Sometimes you can’t push the crap down as far as you’d like.

The old man to her right tapped her on the shoulder, whispered something to her and expected her to laugh. She didn’t.

“I’m sorry, but I’m talking to my companion here.”

She turned back to Grens.

“Do you know, Ewert?”

“Hermansson.”

“When Sweden abolished the death penalty?”

He sighed, emptied his glass of full-bodied red wine.

“No. I’m here for different reasons.”

“Nineteen seventy-four.”

He had decided not to listen but looked as astonished as he was.

“What did you just say?”

“The nineteen seventy-four amendment. Until then, we still had the death penalty. Even though the last execution was long before that.”

A waiter hurried past behind him with some bottles on a silver tray.

Grens called over and asked him to fill their empty glasses.

“Three years later, the first execution was carried out in the United States following the reintroduction of the death penalty. A firing squad in Salt Lake City that caused an international outcry in the media. The state of Utah shot the person, up and down, several times. And they’re still doing it. The last one was only a year or so ago.”

Grens lifted his glass and took a drink without tasting it.

“You’ve been reading up.”

“When we got back from Bromma. I couldn’t concentrate on anything useful.”

When Siw Malmkvist came onto the stage ten rather quiet minutes later, only a few yards away from him, Grens felt how life can sometimes stop, a frozen moment, no yesterday, no tomorrow, just now, Siw in front of him and every lyric that was stored in his heart now made him fizz over as he sang along as loud as he dared to.

He remembered the first times he’d seen her onstage. Folkets Park in Kristianstad, he had even been able to get up close and take some black-and-white photos that he still sometimes took out and looked at. She had been so bold, so powerful, and he had fallen in love with the singer from a distance, despite Anni. He still felt the same. She was up there burning brightly, she wasn’t young anymore, moved more slowly and had a deeper voice, but she was there for him and he was just as infatuated with her as back then.

It was in the middle of the chorus of the fifth song that his mobile phone interrupted the music with a shrill electric ring. “California, Here I Come,” he remembered the cover, Siw’s EP from Metronome, with the bright red scarf on her head and the same shade of lipstick, as she smiled at whoever was buying the record.

It rang three times before he managed to get it out of his trouser pocket, and a good many people turned around in irritation to see where the noise was coming from.

Helena Schwarz.

He couldn’t hear what she was saying, as her voice was so high.

He was trying to get her to calm down when the music suddenly stopped at the end of the third verse. One of Stockholm’s largest venues held its breath, four hundred stunned people, first looking up at the stage and the female artist who was standing there holding a microphone without making a sound, then at the large man in his fifties who was sitting at one of the front tables with a phone to his mouth whispering slightly too loud.

“Am I disturbing you?”

Siw Malmkvist had turned toward the table where they were sitting, toward him, her voice was friendly but the message clear.

“Please, don’t mind me. Of course I’ll wait. Until you’ve finished talking, that is.”

The audience laughed. Jolly from the wine and full of good food, they admired the legend who tackled the embarrassing situation so well. Hermansson kept her eyes on the table while Ewert Grens stood up and mumbled something inaudible about being a policeman, then hurried out through the same door he had come in two hours earlier.