Caroline Åberg - Stockholm Noir

When I take the elevator at Götgatan down to the lower level, five o’clock is approaching. The 19 appears in the tunnel again and I board the train. When it shoots out on the bridge between Skanstull and Gullmarsplan a few boats float by in the bay, these are their last trips before winter and I can see straight through the glassy walls of Eriksdal’s indoor bath thirty meters below; the small solitary figures in the swimming pools, dark unprotected silhouettes against the light blue water. We pass Gullmarsplan, Globen, the rest of the stretch I’ve never traveled. Sockenplan, Svedmyra, Stureby. I check my phone, send a text message to Leila, telling her not to expect me for dinner, then look at the display for a few minutes, but she doesn’t reply. She’s busy, I know she’s picking up Mia. I wonder what they’ll eat, think about all the things Mia wants to bring home: the pacifier with the octopus cartoon, the big brown-and-black dog she carries around everywhere, the drawings she’s made. How they cross the little courtyard with the baby carriage. I feel the straps of the holster around my body, as if they’re holding it together. Högdalen comes up on the left, a sign above the housetops reads, Högdalen Center, and a few fathers with small children and two drunks get on before the train starts again. We glide past a park with ramps, teenagers skateboard on them in the autumn sun, and then I can see Rågsved in the distance. My eyes search for two places among the houses, although I know it’s just a coincidence. Hers and mine. Hers must be somewhere among the clusters of apartment buildings on the right side of the tracks, mine on the left. I suddenly realize that maybe she’s not at home or won’t open the door; I haven’t anticipated such a situation, have prepared nothing in advance. But deep inside I know she won’t disappoint me.

I go through the turnstile, to the left are some wide stairs with narrow iron banisters. Behind them trees in brilliant colors, and above them towering houses, but I don’t recognize them, they could be any houses. I walk in the other direction, away from the past, down through the tunnel under the road, and emerge on a small square. It’s surrounded by two semicircular buildings with shops — Ammouris Livs, Dina’s Pirogues and Sweets, Medihead Home Care, Rågsved Games and Tobacco, an ICA supermarket. In the middle there’s a fountain and a few men sitting on benches, each one by himself. I check the address again on my phone, it must be somewhere on the other side of the square, one of the buildings on the hill visible from the subway. Nervously I check the time, wonder if Erik is stuck in traffic somewhere on the highway. I calculate how long it would take from Norsborg, he should be here already.

In the beginning I didn’t know she was a female — I assumed she was a man, about my age, just under thirty and completely outside the usual networks, number unlisted but known in other ways. I’d heard her nicknames, Kimsha, Kimmie, Kimo , heard them so many times. Something in the way the junkies pronounced it, it got into me and began to do its slow work. Kimsha, Kimmie, Kimo. At first she was just a series of question marks in a few investigations, investigations that weren’t even related to her, brief notations, before we understood that she was big, that she was the spider in a heroin flowchart, a heart shy of light which at the same constant rate, minute by minute, supplied the central arteries with a substance, a substance that sought out thinner and thinner blood vessels, shot itself into users and made their jerky excited movements subside, their eyes fill with a glassy tranquility. I’d imagined an older man, lean, wiry, and for some reason wearing a black leather jacket, his face radiating a special, peculiar intelligence. Someone who worked alone, who didn’t rely on others, who never revealed to his customers who he was, but who’d succeeded in earning enough respect in the bigger networks to be left alone. Someone who saw it all as a job, any job, and brought in a lot of money, but in some remarkable way without upsetting organized crime, as if it weren’t worth the effort it would take to do something about him.

Someone who was his own boss.

Their faces often come to me, their bodies and character, vague but still with distinct features. Sometimes they coincide with reality, sometimes their real features surface later like a shock that tears down everything I’ve built and strengthens my desire to find them. Avenging the scene that made me who I am. Again and again, as if I live in a frozen time, encapsulated in sheer mechanics.

I sit down on one of the benches, restless. Just opposite from where I sit — within the body of semicircular buildings that extends around the square and ends just in front of Capio’s health center — there’s a pub. The Oasis Restaurant. Three men and one woman sit outside in their jackets, it must be one of the last days for outdoor table service; they sit in the shade with their beer and cigarettes, freezing, they look worn out and are deep in loud conversation. But out here on the square it’s surprisingly warm, maybe the semicircular row of buildings provides protection from the wind. I try to figure out when they were built. It’s a lovely square, you get the idea, the benches, the fountain. I get up and check the time again. The Oasis Restaurant. Abruptly I cross the square — I need to get something.

The men in the sidewalk café call something out when I go in, as if they immediately see that I’m a stranger, that I don’t fit in, but I don’t catch what they say. More people are sitting inside, some men who look like alcoholics are drinking at the bar, two or three guys stand by themselves at the slot machines, a larger group sits at one of the tables. I stand at the bar, without making any eye contact, but I can feel their eyes on me. I never drink on the job, I’m surprised at myself. The bartender comes over, says nothing, just gives me a questioning look. There’s something guarded about him, as if he doesn’t understand what I’m doing here. He takes my order. There are no other single women here, absolutely no one my age. He dries off the glass with a towel in his pocket, sets the beer down in front of me on the counter. I hand him my credit card. My phone says it’s almost quarter to six, Leila hasn’t texted back and I take a few deep gulps of the ice-cold liquid.

Then I get a look at her — she must have been sitting there the whole time on the other side of the bar, looking at me without me seeing her. She’s wearing a red T-shirt, I try to read the faded gray words printed on her chest, something with Plugged . She’s thin and sinewy, has two tattoos on one of her upper arms, two bands in the same black, stylized tribal design, which run around her biceps, separated by a few centimeters. She doesn’t look much like the photo, and she’s not the enigmatic figure she ought to be, given the circumstances, and yet I know this is right, this is her, it can’t be anyone else. Suddenly I wonder what she’s doing when she’s not taking care of business. I see her in an apartment, alone, how she sits there during the day and plays video games. She studies me calmly, almost curiously. Shame and eagerness stun me for a few moments, and I wonder if she can see this, when one of the drunks staggers toward the bar, close to me.

“You’re cute,” he whispers, and I remove his fat hands from my body, take a swig of my beer without looking at him.

After a while she gets up and comes toward us, shoves him aside with her arm and a hard, weary expression on her face. When he goes, she puts her beer down on the bar: I can’t figure out whether she’s amused or contemptuous.

“You don’t live around here,” she says, and I don’t know how to reply, as if nothing I can say would be right.