Stockholm Noir Read online

  “Who’s there?” the silhouette asked. I recognized the voice.

  “Kempinsky,” I said.

  “What are you doing out here this late?”

  “And what are you doing, Arne?”

  “Just waiting to go to bed.”

  I walked closer. Arne was one of the homeless guys in our neighborhood. He was visible now, under the light of the streetlamp, the skin of his face already showing the tightness that makes alcoholics in the last stage of the disease start to appear Asian.

  “If things ever calm down around here,” Arne said. “No privacy.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I’m staying up here,” he said.

  “What do you mean by if things ever calm down?” I asked.

  “People coming and going,” he said. “Damned traffic.”

  “Under the bridge?” I asked.

  “Where else?”

  * * *

  When I got back to Degiulio’s, Maria had already placed the chairs on top of the tables. She was alone in the restaurant.

  “Was there a woman here?” I asked. “She was supposed to wait for me.”

  “Nobody’s come in since you left,” she replied. “Since you left the last time, I mean.”

  “Yeah, I come and go.” I called Rebecka’s number. No answer. I didn’t leave a message either. I stepped outside again.

  The arches beneath the Sankt Eriksgatan Bridge are a popular spot for the homeless to sleep. Walking twenty yards in, I was overwhelmed by the stench of urine and shit and filth, dust and damp cement, illness, death. I saw not a single person; only God and the devil knew what was hiding in the shadows. Nothing moved. The place was lit by naked bulbs from a few fixtures built into the walls; the cast was blue like a dead iris. A toilet of broken porcelain—Rörstrand—stood in the middle of the shitty cement floor. Yet another incomprehensible tableau that spoke to me. In the distance, I could see discarded gym equipment twisted in awkward positions.

  Graffiti covered the bare walls. Rough pictures, rough words, messages from a world beneath the underworld. There’s a sign on the wall but she wants to be sure, ’cause you know sometimes words have two meanings.

  A word can have more than two meanings, I thought, words are just the surface layer. I walked over to read something resembling a headline: EXTRA! EXTRA! Entire Cat Family Missing! Has the Collector Struck Again? It meant nothing to me. It was a joke or maybe it wasn’t a joke. It was a headline that fit this environment. The Collector existed in the real reality’s unreality. Everything smelled like paranoia here, fear, desperate words, desperate situations, but the answers were not there, just the insane questions. Ozzy Osbourne had searched his entire life and what did he find? I can’t see the things that make true happiness, I must be blind. He was singing my song too, one of the blind seers.

  I thought I heard something to my left. I turned. Could be a cat, could be the Collector. Hundreds of painted faces covered the walls over there, like a Warhol work, all black-and-white, men and women. It was as if I had stepped into an art gallery, and perhaps I had, as it had been months since I was down here last, and everything around me might have been classified as art while I was aboveground. They all seemed to watch me, their eyes following me, the old optical trick painters have played with for thousands of years. I walked closer. One of the faces farthest to the right was a little bit smaller than the others; it had a different black-and-white nuance. It was still, but not as still as a painting. I saw the outline of a body and a pair of shoes on the ground.

  “John?” I said.

  No answer. The eyes stared at me. They seemed less real now, as if they were part of the collage. I blinked, and the face was still there when I glanced again. I felt the weight of my Colt Peacemaker in my holster, as I always did when my senses were on full alert, when things were reaching their end. Perhaps this was not the best weapon for my purposes, but it was the fourth version of the SAA, adapted to a new world.

  “Peter Kempinsky here,” I said. “You can come out.”

  “Who the hell are you?” the face asked. It flowed out from the shadows. “Why are you persecuting me?”

  He was a few yards away. A man my age, about my height, wearing a suit like mine, nice features, we could have been friends if it weren’t for Rebecka.

  “Why are you persecuting me?” he repeated.

  “Why are you running away?” I asked.

  “I’m not running anywhere. I have the right to be anywhere I want to be in this city.”

  “So you chose this place,” I said.

  “I’m afraid,” he said.

  “Afraid of me?”

  “Of whoever is following me.”

  “Why would anybody follow you?”

  He ran his hand across his chin, a desperate gesture. His eyes darted, as if he’d just realized where he was. He looked at me.

  “She’s the one,” he said.

  “Who?” I asked.

  “Rebecka. She sent you. She can’t take no for an answer. So she’s sending you, whoever you are, a policeman, private detective, friend, or whatever the hell you are, to convince me to go back to her.”

  “You’re wrong, John,” I said as I drew my Colt. “She sent me to kill you.”

  * * *

  The fear in his eyes was as real as life and death, I’d seen that black light many times in the seconds before I killed someone. But this guy was not done with life. I don’t know what I was waiting for.

  “You’re making a mistake,” he cried.

  I’d heard that many times before too. A professional killer hears all kinds of excuses. But the mistakes were never mine; they were from the past lives of my clients or my victims.

  “It’s my job,” I said.

  “No, no! You don’t understand! She’s as dark and as dangerous as the water under the bridge down here! She wants revenge! Then she won’t let you get away.”

  “Interesting,” I said, lifting the revolver. The place was perfect, a ready-made cemetery for professional killers. In the best of all possible worlds, I would be back at Degiulio’s tomorrow evening, Rebecka would give me the rest of the money, I’d drink a well-earned grappa, and perhaps go home with Maria—it had happened before—or maybe with Rebecka; anything is possible in this city.

  “She’ll knock you off too!” John yelled.

  I didn’t reply. I’d heard that before as well, but I liked that old-fashioned expression, knock off.

  “She killed my wife!” John yelled. It sounded like the last lie of a drowning man.

  Try to show a little dignity, I thought. And as we wind down on the road, our shadows taller than our souls. I’d always liked that part, often wondering about what it meant. The soul for me is something like the back side of the moon, something everyone knows and talks about, but that nobody has ever seen. I try to see if the soul flies out of people when I kill them, but I’ve never succeeded. A tiny, flying shadow would have been enough for me. A tenth of a second of a breeze. But no.

  “Why’d you call her tonight?” I asked.

  “What?”

  “You called her from the Karlberg station and said someone was following you.”

  “Jesus Lord God,” he said. “She’s really fucking you blue.”

  “Watch your language, please,” I said.

  “Don’t you get it?” he screamed, his voice echoing as if it were the soundtrack accompanying the graffiti on the walls, perhaps Velvet Underground, music for the black-and-white scene we found ourselves in. “I ended it, but she can’t accept that. She’s crazy! She won’t accept it from you either.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “If you kill me, she’ll kill you.”

  He abruptly calmed down then, as if revealing this truth would comfort him on his way to heaven. I glanced back at the stairs behind a crooked apparatus for training on a trapeze. The stairway led up into the darkness and perhaps to the light of heaven. John would reach it, with my help. />
  “So what did she pay you?” he asked. “Half a million? She’ll just steal it back. Think! Think! Why would she tell you that I called her? Why’d she lie about it? Why don’t you ask about my wife? Why don’t you ask me about Maud?”

  “I didn’t have the chance,” I said.

  “So you know?”

  “Just like you do,” I said.

  “No, no, she did it!” he yelled. “I came home too late!”

  “She paid me a million, actually,” I said, caressing the trigger like a lover, my only friend, but before the explosion killed the silence forever in that disgusting place, I glimpsed a shadow up where the stairway disappeared into darkness.

  She moved down the stairway like a seraph. The gleam I’d seen was a pistol in her hand. Looked like a Glock 17, semiautomatic, dangerous in the wrong hands. The light from the walls made her shimmer like a blue angel. I still held my revolver, and it was still aimed at John’s head.

  “Shoot him,” she demanded. “Do your job, Peter Kempinsky.”

  “Not under orders,” I said. I let the barrel drop slowly so it now pointed at the broken porcelain toilet—the color as white as Rebecka’s face. Her mouth was a black wound, reminding me of Maud’s throat. She stood one step up from the ground.

  John froze. His face was in shadow again, as if he’d stepped back, but he hadn’t moved an inch.

  “I paid you to do a job,” she said.

  It’s an expression I like very much, do a job, and I’m good at doing my job, but I’d made my decision, really made a decision: I didn’t like her.

  “Did you murder John’s wife?” I asked.

  Her laugh sounded like ice cubes hitting cement.

  “What’s it to you?” she asked.

  “I don’t work for murderers,” I replied.

  “You’ve been drinking too much,” she said. “You don’t know what you’re saying. You’re a murderer yourself.”

  “I’m a killer who takes jobs only from the innocent,” I said, and I shot her in the throat—just once since I’m a good shot.

  Her Glock slid to the ground, not breaking when it hit the cement—there are those who say a Glock is mostly plastic, but that’s a myth. Rebecka fell and became a part of the stairway that would lead her neither to the ground nor back to the darkness above.

  “You just lost half a million kronor,” John said.

  He still sounded calm, as if he were under the influence of something strong, perhaps the taste of death, its smell.

  “She didn’t have the money on her anyway,” I said. I slipped my revolver back into my holster and walked away. I felt nothing and it made me sad, a longing for something I’d never had.

  * * *

  The moon was huge and strong up over the Atlas wall. It was much brighter outside than from where I’d come. I turned onto Völundsgatan and stood next to the James Joyce International Literary Society, just a hole in the wall with one window. The room inside was lit up, a nightly séance.

  I pushed open the door and walked inside. It smelled like coffee and ink. Some people were sitting around a table. They looked at me, two men and two women, all middle-aged. I knew them. One of the men wore a plaid cardigan. I liked it. The room smelled like whiskey too; I breathed it in. I saw the bottle, a forty-two-year-old Glenfarclas.

  “How did it go?” the man asked me.

  “Relatively well,” I replied.

  “It did?”

  “I owe you a drink,” I said, nodding toward the bottle.

  “That’s why I brought it,” he said, and the others laughed. I laughed too. It felt good to laugh. There were books lying on the table. I lifted one of the volumes in my hand.

  “So this is the one we’re working with tonight?” I asked.

  “Dubliners. Have you read it?”

  “Just once,” I said, and turned to the last page.

  Still in Kallhäll

  BY JOHAN THEORIN

  Kallhäll

  Translated by Kerri Pierce

  The murder plan was perfect, Klas knew—after all, his intended victim was old and in a wheelchair.

  The plan was simple. The murder easy.

  The only problem was getting out of Kallhäll alive.

  * * *

  The thing was, a person could die a slow death in Kallhäll simply by living there, as Klas himself had done for the last six months.

  Still in Kallhäll, he thought every morning when he woke up in the suburb—in the one-room apartment on the fourth floor, in a large concrete building that doubtless had slumbered for fifty years like a giant on the bedrock, just waiting for something to happen, which never did this far out from downtown Stockholm. Kallhäll was located where once there had been forest and isolated cottages, until the capital really began to expand.

  The Ditz snored gently beside Klas, deciduous trees sighed outside the window, and birds sat in them and sang, undisturbed by roaring traffic—all of which reminded him that he wasn’t in the city’s center.

  He hated his girlfriend. He hated trees. He hated birds.

  Most of all Klas hated how the fuckers who called the shots in Kallhäll desperately tried to make him comfortable. Did they actually think they could simply build longer jogging trails, more residences, and new health centers and keep him here forever?

  Klas had no intention of staying in Kallhäll. He was resolute, and on Thursday he’d take his tight leather gloves and a wool cap with him to the city—that way, he wouldn’t leave any evidence behind.

  * * *

  Klas Svensson was good at covering up his tracks. He’d left Falun the year before, forced to break all ties with his hometown because of some stupid petty debts he owed to the wrong people, and a hysterical bitch who had threatened to report him for assault. It felt natural to head down to Stockholm; all the young men went there and there was plenty of work to be had.

  Within a week he’d snagged a job at Sailor Store in Östermalm. With its wide glass windows, it was only a few blocks from Stockholm’s most exclusive street, Strandvägen, where imposing stone buildings towered over the Nybroviken Bay. Plenty of boaters lived there; they waltzed into Sailor Store with sunburned faces and dazzling white teeth and shamelessly fished out their fat wallets. Klas thrived in Sailor Store.

  A place to live was another matter. In the beginning he stayed in a hostel on Fridhemsplan and hunted for a rental flat in the city’s center, but there was nothing—no available apartments in Stockholm. A number of his Sailor Store colleagues still lived at home with their parents despite the fact that most were at least thirty years old. Others subletted apartments, or lived in some hole-in-the-wall for which they shelled out at least five thousand kronor. Some had taken out several million in loans to buy a studio apartment.

  Without any money, Klas was forced to look for an apartment farther and farther away from downtown—all the way out in Kallhäll. There he found a furnished studio and moved in.

  In the beginning, he was overjoyed that he’d actually managed to find a place. After all, Kallhäll was close to the water, maybe he could buy himself a sailboat. At work and in bars in the city he told chicks about his new place, but all he got were empty stares.

  “Where do you live?”

  “Kallhäll.”

  “Kallhäll? Where the hell is that?”

  “Northwest,” said Klas, “past Jakobsberg. It’s not too far, you just hop on the commuter train and . . .”

  But as soon as he began to explain, the woman he was talking to had already stopped listening. No one pays attention once they realize you live in the suburbs.

  In the center, your life matters. Outside the center, you’re just a loser.

  * * *

  During his second week in Kallhäll someone slipped a brochure through the mail slot. He read it before ripping it up.

  Welcome to Kallhäll! Located right on Lake Mälaren, Kallhäll is a thrilling place to be, with plenty to offer to both inhabitants and visitors. Fresh air, new housing oppor
tunities, and a fast and smooth commuter train ride into Stockholm . . .

  The commuter train into the city—it quickly became the only thing Klas liked about Kallhäll.

  Though it wasn’t on the train that he’d met the Ditz, it was in Stockholm. On a break from Sailor Store, he’d gone, as usual, down to Strandvägen to wander along the dock and take in the boats and stone buildings. Wishing and dreaming.

  Out of one of the wide doors, number 13B, came a young woman in white jeans and a black quilted jacket with a large suitcase in her hand. The suitcase was a horrible color, hot pink, and seemed heavy. She carefully closed the door and left.

  Klas wouldn’t have given her another thought if he hadn’t seen her again that same evening after work. It was the hot pink suitcase he recognized, only this time he saw it in Kallhäll. The chick from Strandvägen was carrying it, only now she also had a paper bag of groceries. She schlepped everything over the bridge from the station toward Kallhäll’s small center, past the shops on Gjutarplan, before continuing along the rows of apartment buildings.

  What was she doing out here?

  Her ass wiggled nicely as the struggled with the suitcase. Klas smoothed his bangs, put on his best sailor grin, and approached her.

  “Do you need help?”

  She turned around, smiled, and nodded, just like a grateful ditzy girl. Her ass was more attractive than her long, pale face, but the face would do.

  The suitcase was heavy; Klas struggled with it up the stairs.

  “It’s filled with books,” the Ditz explained, laughing nervously. “Just some heirlooms.”

  “Heirlooms?”

  “From my grandfather. He lives in the city, on Strandvägen. He gives me things in advance, before I can inherit them. He’s alone, the poor guy . . .”

  Klas nodded and thought about the wide doorway: 13B. He helped her home and accepted a coffee in her small kitchen. The rest of the evening he listened to her sob story: how her grandfather, an old major general, was the only one she had left. No parents, no siblings. She’d been two years old and strapped in a car seat when her father had tried to pass a truck outside of Varberg. The family was killed—her father, mother, and older brother—but she’d remained firmly stuck within the protective casing and had survived without a scratch.