Two Soldiers (38 page)

“Since you’re still here.”

A coffee pot in one hand and three cups in the other. Ewert Grens pulled out one of the kitchen chairs and sat down by the table.

“Thank you.”

She filled them to the brim and then asked her curious daughter to go to her room.

Grens tasted the warm liquid that was so much better than what he’d tried to drink earlier in Pereira’s office, then he nodded to her.

“Ewert Grens, the old man. And I’d like to ask you some questions.”

It looked like he was smiling. So she smiled back.

“OK.”

He finished the coffee and this time took the coffee pot and filled the cup himself.

“I’m sure you understand why we’re here.”

She didn’t answer. It hadn’t been a question.

“We want to know whether your son has been in contact—
and really, any kind of contact
—with the wanted men?”

“You know he has.”

Grens looked at one of all the women who had given birth and loved and probably still loved, but lacked the strength to counter the
other love that called them, the one out there, that saw and heard and acknowledged and led them astray.

“I mean now. Within the past twenty-four hours?”

She took her first sip of coffee. It was still night, a long time until morning. But she wouldn’t get any more sleep.

“I don’t know.”

José Pereira held up a piece of white paper with a young face on it beside a list of documented crimes, put it down on the table between them, as if to justify their visit. The first time, he wondered if she remembered, he had been sitting in one of the cars watching someone who was nine and hung around with members of a gang who then called themselves Råby Warriors, he’d taken him into the car, driven him home to a mother and little sister, and realized that something that would never end had just begun.

“You don’t know?”

Two weeks later he’d driven him home again and in the months that followed, she herself had called the police and social services several times and asked for help to take him into care, relocate him, put him somewhere, anywhere but here; she’d explained that he was slipping away, and that no matter how hard she tried to hold on, it was happening more and more often, longer. Slowly her efforts had ebbed away, and now they only met when her son was arrested for a crime or called in for questioning that required the presence of a parent.

“I don’t know. And I don’t want to know.”

Her eyes, as if they’d given up, the knowledge deep down that her son who was twelve today would be eighteen tomorrow.

“Has he been home over the past couple of days?”

“He’s my son.”

“Have you heard him talking on the phone over the past couple of days?”

“I love my son.”

“Has he had any visitors?”

“I miss my son.”

They weren’t going to get any answers. As she had no answers to give.

“I . . . everything. I’ve tried everything, I’ve . . .”

She shook her head, but didn’t cry, she had already done that.

“I’d like to have a little look around his room. Do you have any objections?”

She shrugged.

“Over there. On the other side of the hall.”

Ewert Grens really only knew one child, Sven’s son, Jonas, and they sometimes chatted when he visited the terraced house and the boy would stay in the kitchen for a while between soccer games and hockey matches. No one else.

So he didn’t have much to go on. But it seemed like a fairly ordinary boy’s room.

A bed, a desk. A mirror, posters. A tin of hair wax on the shelf, he opened it and sniffed, remembered the picture of a boy with greased-back hair, an open collar, and a shiny chain. He lifted up the mattress, leafed through magazines, and turned on the computer, some games he didn’t understand. He went down on his knees, a sports bag under the bed, he pulled it out and opened it and one of the pockets smelled distinctly of acetone, not long since some form of central nervous system stimulant had been in there.

He sat down on the edge of the bed, stretched out his legs, unfolded Pereira’s unofficial documentation. Serious drugs crimes. Arson. Serious firearms offenses. If he’d been of age when he was arrested for just one of the crimes, he would have been sentenced to anything from fourteen years to life.

In a few years. You’re him. And it’s
you
we’ll be looking for when
you
have succeeded. And no matter what I do, no matter how much your mother in the kitchen does, it won’t make any difference, you’ve already been discovered, you will never be anything, the only thing you’ll do is serve time.

He leaned back and lay down on the bed, head on a pillow with a picture of Bambi, it was soft, like the sofa in Homicide.

———

Leon stood by the angled blinds, cell phone in hand, a number on a kitchen counter already saved. He would stand there until the lights in the office were switched on again, until they sat down on the sofa and the chairs and looked at the wall.

The very first time.

They’d been selling Gabriel’s morphine for nearly a year and expanded into amphetamines. Pereira had arrested him and he’d sat in the big office with the desk and the policemen and the files, and he’d been so proud,
arrested, for real
, until he’d seen the wall and all the names and faces that he admired and
they hadn’t been there
. He’d sat in front of it, waiting, he’d been nothing, then the social worker came and Pereira was given permission to ask his questions. His mom. The social worker had been his mom and they’d gone home together afterwards and he hadn’t been on the fucking wall and he’d stabbed a short knife in the table four times.

Five arrests later and they were there. Right at the bottom of the second wall.

Is that me, in the picture? And that one, that photo, is that Gabriel
?

He’d really liked the pictures, and every time he came back and was waiting to be questioned, he would look up at the wall, and every so often they’d been moved higher up and someone who had got to the top couldn’t get any farther, and someone who eight years later was at the top when the wall disappeared, would stay there.

———

Ewert Grens rolled over onto his right side, left arm pressed against a small shelf as he slid over the edge of a boy’s bed and onto the floor. It was considerably harder getting up from a piece of furniture designed for a body that was one meter five and weighed forty-five kilos, than it had been lying down.

There was a book under the bedside table. A notepad, European geography. He looked through the texts, which were illegible, not one single word was spelled correctly, not one sentence made sense, the same hand that sold drugs with authority, hid weapons, and threatened people to death—a high achiever in crime. Hand on the shelf
as he stood up, he went back out into the hall, thanked the woman who’d made up the bed with colorful Bambi and Mickey Mouse bedsheets and fought against a force she could neither see nor understand. He left through the door that still bore witness to forced entry and out into a neighborhood that was still asleep, on his way back to the police station and new faces for the next visit.

———

Grens stood for a while on the steps in the warm air before going in. All these windows that seemed to be watching each other.

You’re here
.

He wanted to wave, to shout out loud, anything that was more than nothing.

And maybe it’s you that’s watching me right now
.

Twenty-four hours. He was no closer.

———

José Pereira was standing in front of the wall in the Section Against Gang Crime when Grens came in, folder in his hand, studying clipping after clipping.

“And now . . . who?”

“I don’t know yet.”

One of the pictures from a school yearbook, one of the ones sitting in the middle of a row arranged by height in a photograph that strived for symmetry, another face with only a few signs of puberty.

“Perhaps him. Just as involved in criminal activities, just as young. The same prognosis.”

Ewert Grens looked at yet another twelve-year-old—as if it were the same face and the same body, over and over again.

“Råby Backe 23. A mother and a younger brother. Give me five minutes, Grens. You start to walk, I’ll catch up with you.”

There were three large windows in the room. Ewert Grens looked out through the one in the middle, he still had the urge to wave and shout out for a sign, just one.

You’re there. I know it
.

You phoned yourself. Twice and a damn busy signal. You gave yourself away. You
wanted
to give yourself away! You wanted us to come here and to strike and to fail.

And I can’t grasp why.

He looked at Pereira, who held up a hand showing all five fingers, I’ll be there soon, and he started to make his way out into the warm air again, slow steps while he waited for company and this time the light wind carried a smell, he was sure, something he knew but couldn’t put his finger on.

———

Now.

He pulled the blinds up the whole way.

The lights were on again in the room on the first floor of the police station, glaring ceiling lights, and someone was moving around in there.

They were there.

They’d escaped, broken out, and been brought together, they’d climbed to the top and now were going to do what no one else had done.

Leon gripped the cell phone hard in his hand, index finger on the green ring button. He pressed it. And the signal made its way to a telephone hidden in a toilet only a few hundred meters away.

Now
.

———

The smell.

It came with the wind. It was inside. It was in his head and chest, chasing around and wanting out, it smelled stronger, more.

Ewert Grens stopped.

You’re here. You wanted us to come here. You
knew
that we were listening to you when you murdered her and you
knew
when you called yourself a while ago, and you
know
now, and you’re using us.

The smell.

It’s in my head, inside. I can smell it again now.

The one that’s like marzipan
.

———

He ran. He wasn’t particularly far away.

He ran toward the police station and Pereira, who was inside. And he thought about a motorcycle officer who had run toward a car and hammered a screwdriver with a wrench and opened a car trunk, and afterward said that he did it all wrapped in a peculiar silence.

The silence that Grens was running in now.

Not even the sound of his own footsteps.

He had got halfway when he saw the first windows being blown out, shattering, falling to the ground.

And still no sound, as if there was no explosion at all.

She looked at the cloth in the middle of the table, arranged
to cover the four holes from four stabs of a knife. He’d been nine years old and forced the sharp edges into the soft wood.

It was lying on the edge of the white cloth, her tooth.

Ana had played with it for a while, pulled at it, it was loose, one of her upper front teeth. His fist had hit her cheek, mouth, and jaw. She left it on the kitchen table when she went over to the sink, a glass of cold water, one more, then out into the hall the pain stabbing with every step, her hip, her thigh, he had kicked her twice, the third time between the legs.

He’d never hit her before. It had always been there on the few occasions that they’d run into each other in recent years, the hate, the aggression, but Gabriel had always been beside him and she’d never been frightened, he had never exploded in the same way when Gabriel was there to balance, to neutralize.

She stopped. Her hand on the brown wallpaper.

She had decided so long ago. She just hadn’t understood it then. She had waited for them in a room in the social services office and gradually become a part of the sickness. The long lines of young boys—children—who instead of coming closer, only got more distant. They had just started out on their journey and would never change direction. They had sat on the chair in front of her desk and she had sat on the chair next to them in front of the police desks and the only thing the two authorities could agree on was that it was too late.

Hand against the wall, the pain eased a bit and she hobbled over to the window, opened it, breathed in the darkness that was still warm.

A disease. Outside her body. That was what it felt like at first. Until the afternoon when José Pereira had phoned and asked her to come down to the police station to be present at yet another interview with yet another minor, which turned out to be an interview with a minor who this time was her own son.

The gentle breeze on her cheeks, Råby dawn, she needed air, the kind of air that was to be found on the other side of these concrete walls.

The symptoms of the disease had also worked their way into her body. Gang formation, criminality, alienation. Leon. Her son. And she had screamed and cried and watched and embraced, but the ones who gave the diagnosis, who had the authority and power, hadn’t recognized the disease, understood how it developed, it was still happening outside
their
bodies and what cannot be seen does not exist and symptoms that are not stopped and continue to spread, slowly become death.

Another controlled intake of the warm dark.

She had decided then. And again when the policeman who had once forced her onto the kitchen floor had stood at her door and asked her to listen to a murder. And again only a couple of hours ago with the first punch.

She almost laughed.

How many times can a woman make a decision?

She knew that what had slowly died had to be buried in order to make way for what would grow and renew; she had decided that that was the case and now she had to get the fireman to decide the same.

She leaned out of the window. Over there, the empty square and the empty shopping center, the snorting metro.

And the other noise. That sounded like a big bang.

The strange thing was, she was certain that it was somehow also connected to Leon and the disease that they had driven past on the E4 without seeing.