Caroline Åberg - Stockholm Noir

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.