Clinch (22 page)

‘I was here the day before yesterday. I got offered a job by the kid in the bar,’ I say when the spy hatch in the door on Kommendörsgatan slides open.

The lock rattles and I am let into the warmth. The short gangster on the other side of the door has changed suit to a black thing with wide lapels.

‘I have to search you.’

‘I have a pistol.’

I open my blazer. The gangster nods. He puts on a pair of leather gloves before he pulls it out.

‘Pretty holster.’ He grins at my home-made effort with the braces. I hold out my arms and he starts patting me down. It’s quite a drawn-out process, given the amount of clothes I’m wearing.

‘Why don’t you use that if you can’t reach?’ I point at the little three-legged stool behind the door. He doesn’t seem to find it very amusing, but nonetheless he nods down the passage.

‘I’ll give you the shooter back when you’re coming out.’

The smoky premises are darker than before, and there are considerably more people both on the dance floor and in the bar. I step inside just as the jazz orchestra finishes a number to a round of applause.

‘What an entrance!’ The same hostess is here as when Doris and I visited. She smiles.

I remove a couple of layers of clothes and hang them up on one of many hangers by the entrance, then draw a comb through my hair. The hostess tucks her arm into mine and leads me across the dance floor. A trumpet player has been added to the jazz quartet. He takes the microphone and says a few words in English. He speaks a little too fast for me to keep up.

The drummer counts them in and quickly starts whisking up the beat. One by one the instruments fall in, people on the dance floor start moving their hips. Finally the trumpet player breaks in with a long, plaintive note, and some of the dancers hold their hands in the air and start shaking them.

A bloke in a dinner jacket and spiked hair dances onto the floor. He’s pretending to play the trumpet with an empty bottle of champagne. The hostess’s smile intensifies, and she takes a few sharp Charleston steps back and forth. I hang in there as she dances.

At the bar is a gang of young men in dinner jackets and girls with red-painted lips and evening dresses in various colours and styles. They all have glittering paper hats on their heads. The trumpet player sings a few lines.

‘And so we’re here!’ The hostess makes a little twirling pirouette under my arm, fires off a last smile and leaves me at the bar. I hop up on the high stool and put my boots on the foot rail. The lady next to me is wearing a pair of gentleman’s tails and smoking through a long cigarette holder. Under her veiled hat is a blonde, short-cropped head of hair. In her earlobes are round green stones.

With his white cotton gloves, the short bartender looks like the cartoon mouse in
Stockholms Dagblad
. I make a sweeping gesture at the shelves of drinks, and he nods. I can smell perfume, sweat and dope, a treacherous smoking blend that I once tried in French Morocco.

A young, spindly man with his dark hair in an unimpeachable, slicked-back hairstyle stands at the bar looking lonely. I get my fruit squash. This time it’s red and it costs ten kronor. I can’t stay here for long.

‘Hey, kid,’ I say to the bartender. ‘I didn’t get a parasol.’

‘We’ve run out.’

‘Okay. Do you know someone called Zetterberg?’

‘Sure, if you stay he’ll be along later.’ The kid smiles.

‘Young man, well dressed, one eye a different colour from the other?’

‘Exactly.’

‘Gold tooth and a signet ring?’

‘That I don’t know.’

‘Hasn’t been here for a while?’

‘Now you say it, yeah that’s true, but sooner or later he’ll turn up, you’ll see.’

The bartender makes eye contact with someone and seems about to walk off. I grab his wrist.

‘Does he socialise with anyone who’s here tonight?’

‘Don’t you cause any trouble now.’

‘There’s not going to be any trouble.’

‘We don’t gossip about our guests and they don’t gossip about us.’

I let go of him and follow him with my eyes. I wonder how much he knows. I can’t afford to sit here all night, and if I’m going to beat the truth out of him I’ll have to wait outside in the cold. The youth at the bar finally gives me the eye. I raise my glass and smile at him. The squash tastes a little less of squash than when I last sipped it.

This must have been Zetterberg’s home pitch. For once my intuition seems to be right. I spin round on the bar stool. In a corner sits a young man with black mascara round his eyes, a white shirt, bow-tie, and a red silk smoking jacket over his clothes. Sure enough he’s smoking, also biting his nails. On the dance floors, one of the stripling transvestites is hysterically waving his arms above his head while spinning round on his high heels.

Who did Zetterberg see socially? My eyes sweep across the room. What if he saw something or someone he should not have seen in a place like this, and demanded a lot of dough to keep his mouth shut? Maybe that was why he got an axe in the head? I spin towards the bar again and knock back my drink.

I’m halfway through my second glass when the boy with the slicked-back hair comes forwards. He moves languidly, a cigarette in his right hand and his other inserted into the left pocket of the buttoned-up jacket. I spin around. My legs are wide apart and my boots rest on the circular rail of the stool. One of my elbows
is leaning against the bar. I smile. I can’t afford another drink. Not for myself and even less for him.

‘Hello.’ He adjusts one of my dark locks with his forefinger. As he leans towards the bar, he brushes his crotch against my knee. I smile, spin back to the bar again, and run my hand down his lower back, over his muscular buttocks and the backs of his thighs.

‘Are you here with anyone?’ He smiles, showing his white teeth.

‘I’m waiting for a good friend. Zetterberg. Do you know him?’

The boy shakes his head. He rattles one of the empty glasses on the bar. I look up at the price list. My lone five-kronor note is burning the inside of my pocket. He follows my eyes.

‘Broke, right?’ He smiles and takes a sip of my drink before putting his hand on mine.

I shrug. The orchestra kicks in again. ‘I’m a good friend of the Steiner family.’

The boy chuckles. ‘That could have bought you the whole bar a couple of years ago. But now? Hardly!’

With another smile, he empties what’s left in my glass. Again he presses his crotch against my leg as he manoeuvres himself past.

‘Merry Christmas, anyway,’ he whispers in my ear, kissing my neck.

I close my eyes, and for a very short moment everything disappears: the sound of the music, laughter, clinking glasses. It’s rather like when you take a really hard blow on the jaw. The world around you slows down, reduces itself to a tiny, silent, black point, and then quickly expands, all while you’re falling back onto the ropes.

The best thing to do in a situation like that is to take your opponent in a clinch, but when I open my eyes, the boy has already disappeared onto the dance floor. With a sigh, I slip off the stool.

I’m back in Berzelii Park where the evening began a few hours ago. The cold air stings my face. I still feel that kiss lingering on my skin. The plain-clothes policemen are still in position by Nybroplan. They keep out of the way, but write diligently in their notebooks. It has started snowing again.

The drinks have changed my timidity into longing. Recruits of all regiments are reeling about in the park, now almost completely steeped in darkness. They’re doing their best to make an arse of the Swedish Armed Forces. Most have already sold some of their equipment for booze. A few of them are drinking straight from the bottle. Others have already vomited down their rough felt uniforms.

‘We have fire, we have meat, we have cups and we have schnapps to cheer us up,’ drawls a conscript whose moustache is encrusted with frost.

A couple of young girls who surely don’t even have hair between their legs stand by the drinking fountain taking shallow puffs on their cigarettes, ready to offer themselves to the first bloke who can buy them a drink or two. Gang boys, too young to be admitted into drinking establishments, have drunk themselves into a state of foolhardiness and are walking around looking for trouble. A couple of well-dressed elderly gentlemen are hovering about, trying to establish contact with the conscripts. There’s much laughter and toasting. I lock the bicycle with a chain and walk a few metres into the park.

‘Look over there! A boy for Kvisten.’

He’s one of the navy lads, seeming a bit lost standing there by himself, under a tree next to the waterfront. He’s already mislaid his hat. Pity, I like it when I can read the name of their ship as they balance on their knees looking up at me.

Our eyes meet. I smile. He smiles back. I raise my eyebrows. He loses his footing.

Between us, under a streetlight not far from me, a horse guard accidentally topples into a sailor.

‘Damn well watch yourself, you bastard!’

The Christmas peace is over. Curses sail neatly through the night. The sailor gets a shove and before long they’re tumbling about on the ground. The snow flies around them in a fine powder. The glow of the lamp puts a sparkle in the snow crystals, and the fighters are enveloped in bright cloud. The sailor gets the upper hand, straddling the chest of the other and snapping his nose. There’s a loud crunching sound. An elongated jet of blood gushes from the bridge of his nose, painting a perfect red line in the snow.

‘Modin’s in trouble again!’ four or five horse guards call out, and come to his aid.

The girls start screaming with excitement. One of the guardsmen puts his boot in the sailor’s face. He’s out of the game before he’s even hit the ground. They’re on him like a pack of famished dogs going at an injured rat. Within seconds, they’ve formed a kicking circle around him.

The assault picks up pace. One of the guardsmen stands on the sailor’s chest, then jumps on his face. I puff some life into a Meteor. The plain-clothes goons blow their shrill whistles but it’s too late – the fight takes hold, grows like a tumour through the rings of spectators, and before long some fifteen boys are involved, mostly because they’re drunk and simply can’t be bothered to move out of the way when someone bumps into them. Swear words and bottles fly through the air. Hatred issues from their mouths like smoke, and violence is no longer pretty this night, violence is nothing more than a blessed jumble of feet and fists and sobbing. The boys claw and hiss desperately at each other, like a litter of kittens in a jute sack on their way to the river.

Suddenly I can’t see my boy any more. I stand on my tiptoes, then jump up and down, in the hope that he has not been drawn in.

I find him on the other side of the bundle. He’s backed away and stands there peering over the top of the chaos of bodies. The fight starts moving in his direction, like a whirling tornado of snow with a hint of navy blue, uniform grey and blood red. It’ll suck him in before you know it. I flap my arms.

‘Hello!’ I holler and wave, cap in hand. A weeping guardsman with vomit and blood over his chin and chest comes stumbling towards me. I hold out my hand to stop him wiping himself against me, but he doesn’t pause. I put on my cap and give him a left hook. The force of the impact shoots up my shoulder. Body fluids splatter around him like a pulse of lava. I step over his body and take off my cap once again.

One conscript rams his head into someone’s stomach, and they both fall to the ground. For a second there’s a gap offering a view of the other side. The young man sees me. He waves back, looking relieved. I point towards Bern’s at the southern end of the park. He nods.

We meet outside the entrance. From Bern’s comes the sound of tinkling piano music, while, in the park, there’s only churning violence. The police are still blowing their whistles.

‘You can be my Virgil.’

The boy has green eyes. His cheek is soft to the touch. I run my hand over his hair. He smiles, slightly insecurely. His washed-out blue collar droops over his nautical blazer.

‘You’ll give me a bob or two, won’t you?’

‘Of course you can have a bob, my lad.’

I pull the elastic off my wallet and press the seaman’s fiver into his hand. On his wrist, the name
Linnea
is written in green-black
ink. It could be his girl, but when it comes to salty lads like these, it’s just as often the name of some old sea-going crate.

‘Is that it?’

‘It’s the going rate.’

‘But I thought…’

I hold my wallet open and show him. ‘It’s all I’ve got. In my time you were lucky if you got half that.’

He nods. I take the five-kronor note out of his hand and tuck it into his breast pocket.

‘Right, then.’

‘I’ll follow a bit behind.’

I nod and walk briskly towards the harbour on Södra Blasieholm. As I walk along, I slide off a handful of snow from a window ledge and press it against my left knuckles. If I’d had a few more kronor I could have bribed the guard at the royal stables to let me use one of the loose boxes, but now we have to stay outdoors. The Husqvarna thumps rhythmically against my ribs, but my heart beats even faster. I look around. My sailor is following five or six metres behind me. Grevsgränden opens up towards the water. It’s still clear and starry. The ice knocks against the quay.

We pass the Grand Hotel and the Automobil Club. I can hear the seaman stumbling along behind me. On the other side of the water, the houses of Old Town are lined up like a colourful band of reservists with dirty, ochre-coloured uniforms. The black, yellow and red banner sways over the German Legation. I stop and wait for him to catch up.

‘Behind here.’ My voice is gravelly as I gesture for him to follow me into the little park behind the National Museum.

The snow hasn’t been cleared, but, judging by the footprints, we are not the first to make use of the park this evening. The boy slips in the snow and starts swearing. We manage to make our way
to the back, and I point across the water towards Skeppsholmen and smile at him.