Caroline Åberg: Stockholm Noir

“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.

Translated by Kerri Pierce

Kallhäll

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.