Jens Lapidus - Never Fuck Up

It remained still. As big as a cat, he thought.

The panic started creeping up on him.

Someone moved inside the entrance to the building.

The rat reacted. Jumped off the electrical cabinet.

Disappeared along the side of the building.

Niklas opened the door and stepped into the entranceway. Inside, a girl was throwing out trash. Maybe twenty-five years old, long, dark hair, coal-black eyebrows, brown eyes. Pretty. Maybe she was a haji, what the Americans called the civilians down there.

He started walking up the stairs. Sweaty. But it didn’t feel like it was from the run. More from the rat shock.

The girl followed. He fumbled with his keys.

She stood outside her door, on the same landing. Checked him out. Opened the door.

Dressed in sweat pants, a big sweatshirt, and flip-flops.

Then he realized—she was his neighbor. He should say hi, even if he didn’t know how long he’d be living here.

“Hi, maybe I should introduce myself,” he said.

Without really having the time to realize it himself, he heard his own voice say, “Salaam alaikum. Keif halek?”

Her face broke into a completely different expression—a broad, surprised smile. At the same time, she looked down at the floor. He recognized the behavior. Over there, a woman never looked a man in the eye, except the whores.

“Do you speak Arabic?” she asked.

“Yeah, a little. I can be neighborly, anyway.”

They laughed.

“Nice to meet you. My name is Jamila. I guess I’ll see you around. In the laundry room or something.”

Niklas introduced himself. Said, “See you later.” Then she disappeared into her place.

Niklas kept standing outside his door.

Happy, somehow. Despite the rat he’d seen down there.

In the kitchen, four hours later: him and Mom. Niklas was drinking Coca-Cola. She’d brought a bottle of wine. On the table: a bag with almond cookies that she’d picked up too. She knew Niklas loved those particular cookies. The dry, sweet taste when the cookie got stuck in the roof of your mouth. Nursing-home cookies, Mom called them. He laughed.

The apartment was sparely furnished. There was a worn wooden table in the kitchen. Covered with round stains from warm mugs. Four wooden chairs—extremely uncomfortable. Niklas’d hung a T-shirt over the back of Mom’s chair to make it a little softer.

“So, tell me. What really happened?”

It was like pushing a button. Mom leaned over the table as if she wanted him to hear better. It poured out of her. Disjointed and emotional. Hazy and horrified.

She told him how a neighbor’d woken her up. The neighbor said something’d happened in the basement. Then the police showed up. Told everyone, “No need to worry.” They asked strange questions. The neighbors were standing outside, on the street. Talking in low, frightened voices. The police cordoned off the area. Sirens on the street. Armed policemen in motion. They took pictures of the stairwell, the basement, outside. Asked her to produce identification. Wrote down her telephone number. Later, she saw a wrapped human body being rolled out from the basement on a stretcher.

She slurped wine between words. Her head hung over the glass. Her poor posture was apparent even when she sat down.

And then, today, they’d brought her in for questioning. They’d asked all kinds of things. If she had any idea who the dead person could be. Why a murdered man was found in her apartment building. If she’d heard anything, seen anything. If any of the neighbors’d been acting strange lately.

“Was it scary?”

“Very. Just imagine. Being interrogated by the police as if you were involved in a murder, or something. They asked over and over again if I knew who it could be. Why would I know that?”

“So they don’t know who it is?”

“I have no idea, but I don’t think so. If they did, they wouldn’t have asked so many times, right? It’s so terrible. How can they not know? The police don’t do any good these days.”

“Did you see the dead guy?”

“Yes. Or, no, actually. I saw something that could have been a face, but it’d been covered up so much. I don’t know. I think it was a man.”

“Mom, there’s something I need to ask of you. It might sound strange, but I really want you to think about this. You know, considering my background it would be best if—”

He interrupted himself. Poured more Coke. It clucked out from the can.

“…I don’t want you to tell the police about me. Don’t mention that I’m home again. Don’t mention that I was living with you. Can you promise me that?” Niklas looked up at Marie.

She was sitting in silence. Staring at him.

They stopped for coffee—Thomas and Ljunggren, as usual. Even though it was only four o’clock in the afternoon, Ljunggren was already on his eighth cup of the day. Thomas wondered: Was Ljunggren’s stomach made of steel, or what?

The café: a taxi joint by Liljeholmen. A TV in one corner playing an Italian league soccer game on high volume. Uncomfortable metal chairs and tables with checked tablecloths. Spread out on the tables: newspapers and housewares catalogs. Perfect place for cops to chill—they were waiting for an assignment worthy of the name.

Ljunggren’s radio handset was on the table. The calls from dispatch could hardly be heard over the soccer announcer’s excited commentary. Fiorentina was proving that it wanted to join the top of the Italian league and was mopping the floor with Cagliari. The Dane Martin Jørgensen’d just made the 2–1 goal. Well placed. Beautiful.

They were each reading a newspaper. As always, not much conversation. They nurtured their peaceful rapport.

But Thomas had trouble focusing. The articles in the newspaper just floated on past. He flipped through it, distracted. Couldn’t stomach the Fiorentina buzz either. He couldn’t drop that basement thing. Normally, he’d forget as soon as he was back at the station. Showered, dried himself off, put on his civilian clothes. Assault, murder, rape—whatever it was—it ran off with the soap. But this was eating away at him. The image of the busted face kept coming back. With every page he turned of the newspaper, he’d see the tatters of flesh; the sunken, broken nose; the swollen eyes. The track marks on the arm. The bloody, peeled fingertips. The empty mouth.

Thomas thought it was a strange routine for real cops—as soon as things got exciting, the crap was turned over to the house mice. Desk cops—the criminal detectives—dudes who’d crawled off the street and into paper shuffling. They were often older officers with bad backs or knee problems—as if sitting still at a desk all day was going to help your back. Or else they came with other baggage, they’d “burned out,” as they say. Everyone knew that was just baloney. But sometimes: young jokers fresh out of the Police Academy who were too feeble to do the real job. Thought they could be Kurt Wallander. Thomas knew—90 percent of the investigations they dealt with were shoplifting and bike thefts. Yeah, high drama. Sure.

Dispatch announced, “We’ve got a drunk driver who thinks he’s Ayrton Senna on the E4, southbound. Anyone near Liljeholmen? Over.”

There was a break in the soccer game. Thomas heard the radio loud and clear.

Saw on Ljunggren’s face that he’d heard it too.

They grinned their usual grins.

Responded, “We can’t take it. We’re near Älvsjö. Over.”

A little white lie to get off scot-free. Dispatch had no idea how close to the place they really were.

Thomas thought, You could call their work ethic shitty. Call it lazy. Call it cheating. But the ones in charge deserved what they got—if you don’t invest in the police, don’t expect to get anything back. And some drunkard who thought the highway was a racetrack would never get more than a month anyway—so what was the point?