Jens Lapidus - Never Fuck Up

He waited. Thought about Claes. Those nights down in the basement. With the table-hockey game, with Mom’s old clothes and suitcases. Those nights when Rantzell’d beaten. Repressed. Humiliated.

His lawyer began to speak. Went on and on about what Niklas’d been doing that night, the movie he’d watched at Benjamin Berg’s house, the pizzas they’d bought at the local pizzeria. Burtig argued, attacked the prosecutor’s purported evidence. Burtig kept flipping his ballpoint pen back and forth the entire time. Soon they would turn to Niklas and ask him questions. He wasn’t listening.

Niklas was breathing in through his nose. Out through his mouth. Slowly. Was filling his lungs with oxygen. Focusing on Burtig’s pen.

Tanto dori feel. The pen. As if he were holding it in his own hand.

Weighed it.

Breathed in.

Relaxed.

Breathed out.

He stood up. Tore the pen from Burtig’s hand.

Ran toward the railing. The judge stood up. Yelled something. A guard reached for Niklas. Missed. Rushed after him.

Niklas leaped up onto the raised platform. The clerk looked scared out of his mind. The judge backed up. The detention officer grabbed hold of Niklas. That was to be expected.

He breathed quickly. Pen in hand. The detention officers weren’t evil, but Niklas’s mission was more important.

He made a perfect straight-motion jab. Out and back.

The pen stuck out of the guard’s gut like an arrow. The man realized what’d happened. Started howling. Staggered backward.

Niklas lifted the judge’s chair. Threw it at the window. The sound of the window breaking reminded him of Claes’s bottles, which he used to throw straight down the garbage chute on Gösta Ekman Road.

Niklas picked up the law book. Used it to break off the sharp edges of jagged glass that were still sticking up. They shattered. Would give him fewer wounds. He stepped up onto the windowsill. Markko ran toward him, yelling something. Niklas actually didn’t want to hurt him. But this was war. He kicked. Saw Markko fall backward.

It was over now.

He jumped out the window. Not more than ten feet. Easy fall in the soft snow.

Pulsed forward.

His breath steamed.

Up on the sidewalk. He was panting. Could feel the cold against his feet. He was wearing only socks. The jail slippers were left behind in the snow.

He concentrated. Knew where he was going.

Toward the subway station.

The cold filling his lungs.

Focus on his mission objective.

On his steps.

He saw the entrance to the subway station. No cops’d showed up yet.

Tomorrow was New Year’s Eve.

The snow continued to fall. The precipitation lay like a four-inch layer of cotton on the windowpanes. The greenhouse effect could go to hell, all the fuss about the end of winter was seriously exaggerated.

They were sitting at Thomas’s house again. Documents in piles everywhere. Searching. Looking for signs, leads, information about what Ballénius’d told them—payments to Rantzell. They worked feverishly. Like during a preliminary investigation. No mistakes allowed. Time was running out—they’d gotten hold of Ballénius, but the guy might sing, whoever’d attacked Thomas in the parking garage might understand that they were onto something, the Palme Group might get wind of their private little parallel investigation. And tonight was the night of Bolinder’s party. Thomas still hadn’t said anything about it to Hägerström. Really: if there was no reason to go to the party, there was no reason to tell him about it, either. And so far, Thomas couldn’t see that there was anything to gain from going.

The hours passed. At six at the latest, Thomas was going with Åsa to the New Year’s Eve party their friends were having. What he really wanted to do was work through the night with Hägerström, but a man has to have his limits.

On the floor, they lined up all the documents that they’d designated with the highest priority according to their point system, as well as those that had to do with finances. The total amount’d shrunk, but it was still more than five hundred documents. They crawled around like two toddlers. The crux: How would they know what was shady and what wasn’t? There were verifications for payments made to suppliers and payments made by customers, bank statements that listed transfers, price quotas, tax returns, balance sheets, ledgers. They were looking for large sums. Preferably during the spring. Hägerström decided on a minimum figure: anything over 100,000 was of interest. They checked cash withdrawals and amounts that were moved to strange accounts.

Four o’clock rolled around. They scrutinized thirty or so documents more carefully. A few concerned the more than three million kronor that’d been paid by a company named Revdraget in Upplands Väsby AB to a private account at the Nordea Bank. But the private account number didn’t correspond with Rantzell’s information. Still—the sum’d been transferred straight from the company to a private person. It could be a salary, but there was nothing noted in the accounts to suggest that this was so.

Several sums were only recorded as withdrawals in four different companies’ account statements—for example, Roaming GI AB: one million kronor. No receipts, verifications, or other documents indicated what the sum was intended for. Suspicious. But there was nothing that pointed directly to the payments having been made to Rantzell. And nothing connected the payments to any other person, either. But it was Rantzell, together with a few other front men, who’d formally run the companies.

Even more information: sums that were paid into company accounts without any indication of the identity of the recipient, sums that were paid out as loan repayment without any documents supporting the existence of a loan, dividends made out to unidentified stockholders without records of such a decision in the minutes from the shareholders’ meeting. The document piles contained a lot of oddities. Hägerström saw things that Thomas didn’t understand, even after Hägerström’d tried to explain.

Time was running out. Should he say something about Bolinder’s party? Maybe Hägerström would think of a reason to go there that he hadn’t thought of. But no, that was just too much. They’d have to continue tomorrow instead. Åsa wouldn’t be happy, but that’s just how it had to be.

Thomas went to the kitchen to put on some coffee. When he came back out, Hägerström was sitting down on the couch again. Was staring into space with an empty gaze.

“How’s it going, H.? You getting tired? I made coffee.”

“Aren’t you leaving in half an hour?”

“Yup. And what about you? You going to Half Way Inn again tonight?”

“Not impossible.”

Thomas looked at him. Weird, if you thought about it—it was five-thirty on New Year’s Eve and they hadn’t even talked about how Hägerström would be spending the evening until now.

Hägerström smiled. Slowly—the corners of his mouth slid up like on a cartoon character. He remained sitting like that for a few seconds.

“What is it?”

“I just found a very strange payment.”

Thomas looked at the piece of paper Hägerström was holding in his hand. “What? Where?”

Hägerström remained sitting calmly. “It’s a payment from a foreign account to Dolphin Leasing AB for over two million kronor, made in April of this year. And that wouldn’t be strange in and of itself, but I checked the IBAN number on the account from which the payment was made.”

Thomas interrupted him, “What’s i-ban?”

Hägerström spoke slowly, almost as if he wanted to keep the suspense going. “It’s the international bank account number, abbreviated to IBAN. It’s used to identify a bank account for a transaction between different countries.” Hägerström played with the piece of paper he was holding. “And the first thing I noticed was that the IBAN number for this payment denoted an account on the Isle of Man. What do you know about the Isle of Man?”