Stockholm Noir Read online

  In retrospect, I’m amazed that I ever met a woman like her. She was way out of my league, even back then, or should have been. She was always the center of attention. The kind of person people say could be a model and who later actually becomes one, moving up and away from their lives and toward other parties in other cities. (I assume you’ve seen a photo of her somewhere. By then, I was already out of the picture.) And what did I have? Besides a reasonable face and a reasonable fashion sense?

  So if I was going to go out and see her again, I wouldn’t hurt my reputation to have our acquaintances see us together again.

  But that’s not how it turned out. She interpreted my text message more literally than I’d intended. Or perhaps she was hit by childish inspiration. She wrote: Playing hard to get! Still, I have an errand close by. Let’s meet at the swimming dock, 6 p.m., okay? I’ll bring wine! J

  She meant the little floating dock down by the lake so quaintly named the Triangle. You can find it between Liljeholmen and Gröndal. Just a few hundred meters from my tiny office. I thought it would be embarrassing—we’d skinny-dipped there one late, drunken evening, shortly after we first met—but I couldn’t see how to get out of it. So I agreed. I didn’t believe her about that errand in the vicinity. Either she wanted to relive her teenage years (I knew she’d attended a Waldorf school not too far from there) or she was working on her image of being spontaneous and crazy.

  I sighed and started a new crime scene, one a bit less far-fetched. They found her naked body, cut to pieces, in the water . . .

  The hum of a sewing machine came from the office next door. It was three hours until six. I had time to think about the details.

  Details matter to losers. I really wanted to see myself as a careful, rational, and methodical person that year—sitting, as I was, in a tiny office between Liljeholmen and Gröndal, wanting to become a crime writer. I had read interviews with successful crime writers. According to them, all it took was a bit of discipline. The only thing that mattered was regular work hours and a strict schedule. Don’t deviate from the conventional narrative arc, follow it without sentimentality, and you will reach the pot of gold at the other end. I had also read countless articles on “How to Write a Best Seller.” The pathways to achieving this miracle differed only slightly. A story that worked always began with presenting the protagonist, preferably in a different situation from what he finds himself in at the end. Step two is introducing a conflict that forces the protagonist to act. And so on, until all seems lost before it eventually reaches a perfect conclusion—neatly tying up all loose ends.

  That was the plan. And how hard could it be if you had enough pens and Post-its, a computer and a sick imagination, and a tiny office in an old rundown building?

  Wanting to become a crime writer was not the most original or even greatest of ambitions. In Sweden, there are police officers and lawyers and criminals and psychologists all writing crime novels; poets and intellectuals all writing crime novels; hundreds of journalists and doctors and teachers and housewives all writing crime novels. This was a country where even the minister of justice wrote crime novels!

  So the general impression was that anybody could write a good mystery, and once you’d written one, you’d become an international success. Who gives a shit that there are fewer homicides in all of Sweden in a year than in any large American city in one or two months? That’s exactly what makes Swedish murders so tantalizingly exotic and symbolically loaded. And if your prose is a bit lacking, your foreign editors would improve it. Yep, you didn’t even have to write well to write crime novels. An equitable business worthy of the world’s most equitable society: the Swedish Model!

  Even I wanted to write a detective novel, of course. Then I’d make some money and gain some status and—not the least important thing—I’d be able to revel in macabre scenes of violence in a socially acceptable way. Which, when you get down to it, is exactly why so many people read these books.

  Perhaps it’s not surprising that I soon got tired of my pathetic plots and wound up in a never-ending cycle of creating new descriptions of crime scenes and murders. Not being all that rational of a person, I seldom came up with a good method.

  Oh, I forgot to mention how I supported myself. Inspired by my own drug use I had set up a modest and discrete mail order business. It was based on the ability to receive mail under a false name at this old rundown office building, where nobody kept track of who was renting which space. The same dynamic also got in the way at times. It meant a lot of running up and down the stairs and new faces all the time, who were, as Stockholm people are in general, often hard to tell apart. But I thought of this business as just something temporary until I achieved my dream of being a real writer, and, of course, that’s why I had this tiny office in the first place.

  A common piece of advice to aspiring authors is to write about what you know. It was just about six when, reinforced by a few well-chosen pills, I left my office and walked into the heart of what I knew best. In front of me, the street with the streetcar tracks. To the left, the tracks went past the barracks-like building of the City Mission, and then on past the new, very sterile Liljeholmen—the shopping mall had just been completed and the square was decorated with benches designed to keep people from sleeping on them. To the right, the tracks swung past Gröndal’s small fifties-style center and past the marina with its derelict boathouse—a special place, where you can still find some of the last old eccentrics side by side with the well-off newcomers, polishing their old mahogany boats as if they were sarcophagi getting ready for their last trip down the river to the ruler of the underworld . . .

  I felt an irrational loyalty to this place. But if I were going to impress the international audience I was dreaming of, I would certainly be forced to change this last remnant of an unexploited side of Stockholm to a darker, more derelict, and more dangerous place than it actually was. Isn’t that what they all do? Sure, somebody had been shot here a few years back. Sure, everybody heard that some pizzerias were really fronts for the cocaine trade. But not even the mafia from the Balkans could stand against the incoming tide of middle-class families. Soon the only poor people in this part of the city would be members of the so-called artistic class—my neighbors in the office building. Then, soon enough, they’d all disappear too. Real estate moguls were looking for locations like old factories and harbor areas for renovation. The building where I had my tiny office was doomed to be turned into luxury condos or offices. The reason none of this had happened yet was that it was very difficult to move the cement factory docks.

  I didn’t walk to the left or the right, but straight across the street past the assisted-living building. I’d worked there one summer when I was a teenager. There were old folks who remembered how things used to be: when both this side and the other side of the water were working-class neighborhoods that people looked down on. The jail on Långholmen had still been open, and there was an infamous workhouse for the poor somewhere in Tanto . . .

  I headed toward the Triangle past the pest control company Anticimex, to the swimming dock. They say the water still has large concentrations of heavy metals: one of the few reminders that this area once harbored an entire complex of workshops and small manufacturing plants. Bo Widerberg had used some of the decrepit factory buildings when he directed his film Joe Hill in the seventies. To find any traces of this activity these days, you have to know what to look for.

  It was that time of year when summer turns to fall. Not all that warm anymore. Still, the sky was clear and the sun had not yet set.

  She was perched on the edge of the dock and, at first, I didn’t recognize her. She had a new look, more mature. She wore a coffee-with-too-much-milk coat and her hair was done up in a retro-forties look. She greeted me with a huge smile, which I did not like one bit. I thought, She’s trying to be extra nice because she’s feeling sorry for me. She doesn’t know how, so she’s overdoing it. Then I thought, She’s still stunningly beautiful.

>   “You’re not mad at me anymore, right?” she asked.

  “Of course not,” I replied.

  “Good,” she said. She pulled two small bottles from her coat pocket. White wine with screw tops, the kind you get on airplanes or from a hotel minibar.

  The swimming dock was deserted and totally pointless if one didn’t want to go swimming. Neither of us said anything, we just started walking together, following the path counterclockwise around the lake.

  I held my bottle in my hand and tried to act nonchalant. I commanded my brain, Make small talk.

  When she asked me what I was up to these days, I told her I was writing a mystery novel.

  “How original,” she said. “So what is your mystery about?”

  “Well, murder . . .” I shrugged and continued: “It’s tougher than I thought. I want it to be really noir. But look around you! The sun is glittering on the water and we live in the world’s safest and most secure country. The worst crime is if a few immigrant kids get caught smoking pot and the police break a minor law or two hauling them in.”

  “I disagree,” she said.

  “Why?”

  She glanced around nervously. I followed the direction of her gaze: a dark-skinned guy in sweats leaned against a fence not far away. He was looking at us, and then he turned away. Nothing special about him.

  Then she seemed to calm down again and surprised me (in the way that still surprised me when she abruptly shifted from being childish to being highly articulate) by giving me a mini-lecture on Stockholm’s past. Its soul, as she put it. She reminded me that during her lifetime both the prime minister and foreign minister had been assassinated in this very city.

  “What? Were you even born when Olof Palme was killed?” I asked.

  Apparently she’d been conceived by then.

  I looked her over and tried to imagine how she’d appear dead in one of my crime novels, but it was hard. She was so alive right beside me. All I could imagine was fucking her. With a certain bitterness, actually a great deal of bitterness, all things considered, I remembered our last time together. She had been on top, and right after I’d come, she stood up in a no-nonsense way and walked to the bathroom to clean off the semen that was already coming out of her. She was beautiful right at that moment too. Efficient and beautiful at the same time, just like that damned midcentury modern furniture I’d let Commissioner Almqvist’s wife collect.

  “Are you in Stockholm for a reason?” I asked.

  “Every chance I get, I come back. I’ve been offered a part in a movie. It’s a small one in some kind of horror or fantasy film. What do you think about that?”

  I’d heard that fantasy was going to be the next big thing after crime but I thought it was just a temporary trend. I shrugged. “You could always play the dragon,” I said.

  “I wish! That would be a great part! But no . . . more like running around and showing skin . . .” She turned her head, and I could see her white neck.

  I asked why she’d even wanted to see me.

  She said there was something she needed to ask me. She’d remembered the photos I’d taken of her. Mostly innocent enough—photos from the parties we attended and the like, but there were a few nudes and a few more, well . . . unusual ones. Some taken in a cemetery, for example. I wished I had been able to forget about them. Not easy, when every single day I tortured myself by looking at them.

  “Oh, the photos,” I said, “I’d almost forgotten them.”

  “Anyway,” she said, “I just wanted to check in with you to make sure you weren’t still angry with me and that you had no intention of doing something stupid.”

  Stupid? I’d never do anything like that. I used them for myself, masturbating and crying and keeping them as inspiration for my artistic ambitions. “I’d never do that,” I said.

  “It’d be great if you just deleted them.”

  “Sure. Trust me,” I lied.

  We stopped by the fence. A jogger ran past us.

  “How’s it going with the drugs?” she asked.

  “Pretty much quit,” I said, but I noticed that even as I said it, my speech was slurred.

  She asked me if I had a few “test products” on me. I’d expected her to ask and I handed over—after checking behind my shoulder to see whether the dark-skinned guy was still hanging around and looking at us, but he was gone—an envelope. What she was interested in was a medical product not available to just anyone. A niche drug.

  “How much do I owe you?” she asked, reaching for her purse.

  I stopped her by grabbing her wrist.

  “Ow,” she said. I have strong hands. I’d grabbed harder than intended.

  “I’m not going to sell to you,” I said. “And if I ever sell to you, I won’t do it like this.” Then I let go of her wrist.

  * * *

  As I walked back, it was starting to get dark. The sun peeked though the pillars of the highway bridge, as it got ready to prepare another beautiful sunset over Vinterviken Bay. If things had been different, we could have walked back together to watch the sun set.

  They found her dead in the water the next day. She was right where I had left her. The scene did not match any of the ones I’d imagined: She was in the water with all her clothes on and no obvious wounds. Her hair was loose, the best fashion for drowned people. (A hundred years ago, someone would have written a poem about the scene, and it would have been just as perverse as anything crime novelists write today.)

  The cause of death was drowning—but not a typical suicide. In addition to the psychological improbability of the whole thing, it was just not possible to jump into the water and drown right there without rocks or weights in your pockets or a great deal of sleeping pills in your system. Neither of those was found. Yes, a small amount of alcohol, but nothing else, no foreign substances in her blood. How carefully did they check, though? Did they know what to look for? Her purse was missing, and with it, the small envelope I’d given her.

  The scene was suspicious—not just because of the missing purse, but also the bruises on her wrists and neck. This could indicate that her head had been held underwater. Or something else. But when the police traced the text messages between us, which they’d gotten from the phone company, and realized I was her overemotional and disappointed ex, it did not look good for me.

  I had no alibi, of course. When the police took me in, I pointed out she’d told me she had another errand to run nearby. I told them about the dark-skinned guy who’d been hanging around. What did he look like? “Dark-skinned” and “sweats” were not much to go on. I don’t think they worked very hard to track him down, either. Shortly after that, they confiscated my computer, which, stupidly enough, I hadn’t erased any documents from. The photos of Anette, the detailed descriptions of murder, the records of my side business—it certainly did not look good for me.

  So you can imagine how it went. First she appeared in the headlines: “Fashion Model Found Dead.” Then I came into the picture: “Model Murder: Police Suspect Ex-Boyfriend.” And on and on: investigation, arrest, jail, court case. Everything has been written in such detail that it makes me sick to write another word about it. I was no longer a nobody. I was either a killer or a man wrongfully accused. I got hate mail and letters of admiration. There are so many idiots out there.

  I was convicted, by a divided court, over my protestations of innocence. Yes, yes, I was guilty of trading in illegal substances, there’s no doubt about that. In Sweden, that’s just as bad as murder anyway. But as far as Anette’s death goes, there was hardly any real evidence—a disturbing lack of it—and my lawyer and many other people knew this. Perhaps I did too.

  So we’re in the midst of an appeal, a process that’s slowly moving forward. I’ve begun to serve my sentence. I’m a great prisoner. My cell reminds me of my tiny office, even if it lacks a view of the water.

  Prison is not a game, but it has done wonders for my work ethic. I’ve finished my crime novel, such as it is. I now have so
me new experiences I can use. It also helps that describing murder scenes is no longer an obsession of mine, and I’ve found that I no longer believe crime never happens in Stockholm.

  It was easy to find a publisher. I was infamous, hardly a disadvantage. The book is coming out next year. I’m already writing a second. That’s what crime writers do: they write one book and then the next.

  Still, my appeal is coming up. My lawyer is convinced I’ll be set free, if I don’t do something stupid (he’s not all that happy about my devotion to the written word). Whatever happens, the dead are still dead, and people will continue to believe whatever they want about the living. Whether the court decides I’m innocent or guilty is just a small detail in the bigger picture.

  Only losers care about details.

  Horse

  BY ANNA-KARIN SELBERG

  Rågsved

  Translated by Rika Lesser

  I’ve pursued her for months. Waited. Waited for tracks she must have left behind, signs. People think they can be invisible moving through the world, but they always leave something behind. Sooner or later, if you wait long enough. If there’s anything I’ve learned, this is it.

  At first, all I could do was sense her, a slender shadow in the investigation, she scarcely existed, but gradually she assumed a body, and finally all her names collapsed into one.

  I hold it in my hand. Kim. There’s something about her that almost arouses jealousy in me. Her face in the passport photo, the narrow marked jawline, the serious expression. And then something in the eyes that doesn’t go with the rest of her expression, a slight feminine nonchalance almost creating a touch of condescension around her. Natural, inborn contempt. I can see how she uses it, how with only a glance or gesture she dismisses anything in her surroundings that doesn’t suit her. She knows the art of disdain and I can sense the feeling of being its target. The resentment that would call for revenge. But I’m not someone she can dismiss. She chose me such a long time ago, she waits for me as patiently as I do her. As if our lives sought each other out from the first moment. In retrospect, everything we ever experienced will appear as inevitable steps, slowly closing the distance between us.