Clinch (9 page)

‘You don’t?’

‘I have an honest job and I was paid today.’

Judging by the stench, he’s emptying latrines. I put away my wallet. Free information is difficult to evaluate: either it’s the most reliable of all, or there’s something shady in the offering.
Maybe he just wants to lure me away from the lit-up street into some dark alley.

‘I’m cycling. You don’t have to come with me.’

‘I’d be quite happy to do that but unfortunately I don’t have time.’

I nod at him. ‘So,’ I say. ‘What did you say his name was?’

About a half-hour later I am almost back in Sibirien. I hop off the bicycle on the corner of Tulegatan and Rehnsgatan. To my left, Norra Real rests its head between the mighty paws of its gable buildings.

I park outside the bookshop, Nationen. A pair of enamelled cufflinks with black swastikas cost one krona and thirty öre. The cold feels like a flame against my skin. I walk around the grammar school, slapping myself to get my circulation going, and knocking snow off my shoulders as I do so.

‘Damned cold. Worse than the North Sea.’

The coffee has run right through me – I need to piss. The clock on the façade has gone eight. At the edge of the slum on the other side of the street the digging machines have already helped themselves to some land, and new houses have sprouted, but there’s still a host of people living and working among a welter of planks and corrugated iron. The shacks proliferate in any old way, as if tossed from a bucket of swill.

Where the mud that constitutes the main thoroughfare of the slum starts, the Salvation Army has two mobile kitchens. Two slum sisters in blue uniforms with gleaming buttons serve up soup to a colourful line of ragamuffins. A stooped woman wearing a shawl holds hands with a little girl, who hangs her head. A bloke in a floppy hat is staggering about and falling out of the line, only to
barge his way back in with oaths and curses. The distinctive smell of fusel oil indicates that the Salvation folk are not the only ones to keep a pot on the boil.

I limp across Roslagsgatan, convinced that I am on my way into an ambush. First the man with the signet ring, and now this. It might be because I’m wearing my best suit and pocket watch, or it could be down to the afternoon trail of scattered five-kronor notes. I’m bait for all kinds of sharks in this swampy water.

‘Do they think Kvisten was born yesterday?’

But apart from Sonja’s parents, this is, after all, the only lead I have. I take off my tie and fold it up in my coat pocket. I look around. The line of sick, silent faces shines palely like a pearl necklace dropped in the gutter.

At the front of the line, a young woman raises the soup bowl to her mouth with bony fingers. She slurps. Shaking with cold or ague, she wipes her pointed chin with her sleeve. The underskirt that sticks out from her coat once had a blue border. Her eyes, shiny with fever or schnapps, are oddly vacant. She is bareheaded, her thin blonde hair hanging down dead straight, as if someone had emptied a saucepan of melted butter over her head. I tip my hat slightly and let a couple of coins jingle in my other hand. She looks around.

‘Sir will have to come with me, then.’ Her voice is husky, marked by sickness and misery. She nods at me to follow her to the unpainted wooden shacks.

We squelch into a corner between two grey fences, a short distance away from the Salvation Army soldiers. The liquefied mud almost goes over the edge of my shoes. She gives me a brown-toothed smile. Before I know it, she’s unbuttoned her coat. She wears a shapeless, beige jumper underneath. Her slip is held up by a safety pin. She lifts the fabric and moves my
hand up her naked thighs. Her skin is chapped with malnutrition and cold.

It’s icy between her legs. She wears no knickers. I feel the edges of her pubic bone through her skin. Her pubic hair frazzles against my hand when she rubs hard, up and down. The smell of dried-in urine is released from the rough bush, mixed with the reeking alcohol fumes from her mouth.

‘Now give it a good squeeze, sir.’

I’ve been given my orders, and I obey. The fingers of my left hand dig about in her most sensitive parts and tighten. Her eyes change; she starts whimpering. I let the coins rattle in my trouser pocket and fish out one krona. She grabs my wrist with both hands, skewered between my thumb and forefinger. I pinch even harder. She whines and doubles over. I support her with my shoulder. I hold the one-krona coin in front of her eyes.

‘Lill-Johan?’

She closes her feverish eyes and nods quickly.

‘Where?’

‘Almost at the far end. By Götgatan.’

I know where it is. I let go of her and jump out of the way when she falls sobbing into the mud, her legs beneath her. I sigh. The mud has spattered all the way up to her hair. I bend down, take her by the elbow and pull her to her feet.

‘There.’ I press the coin into her hand. She curtsies, by way of thanks.

I limp along one of the plank walkways that form bridges across the mire. The planks are stained with old mortar. They’re so narrow that I have to balance on them not to fall off. If I meet someone coming from the other direction, it certainly won’t be me who gives way.

The snow falls more and more heavily. A light wind brings a
fragrance from a tobacco-drying place further up the street. An open fire on a metal plate throws out long, tremulous shadows from the people surrounding it. A few of them are squatting, their palms held out towards the flames. They watch me in silence. I jump to the third plank. It sinks into the mud and I shiver when my low shoes fill up in the quagmire. One of the tramps works up the courage to laugh hoarsely.

By the time the Engelbrekt church on the hill announces that it’s gone a quarter past eight, I’ve managed to work my way half into the labyrinthine slum. My feet are numb with wet and cold.

The wall of the shack in front of me has been constructed from a big piece of hoarding.
The Metro Construction Project
, it says in large black letters. A map shows the three stations of Slussen, Södra Bantorget and Ringvägen, and underneath is a caption:
For the benefit of Götgatan’s merchants
. The hoardings have been temporarily erected all over the city and are easy to unscrew and take down.

I can hear a screeching, hacking cough inside.

I bang on the door.

The bloke who opens it is holding a rusty tin can in one hand. His eyes are deep-set and close together. A flap of skin on his throat hangs down like a washed-out blue collar. His tongue flicks across the snuff-daubed whiskers around his mouth. He wears a Horse Guards uniform, an older style; it looks as if it got in the way of a cluster of hungry rats. He hasn’t got long to go but at least he has a plank floor, a fire and a bed. On the hearth is a trivet, and there’s a smell of coffee granules.

‘Lill-Johan?’

He shakes his head, coughs and spits sooty phlegm into his tin. ‘Three houses down,’ he wheezes and points with his tin towards a cul-de-sac.

‘How little is he?’

‘Not little at all.’

I nod. As I approach Lill-Johan’s door I think about my limp. If he’s armed and in a bad mood, I could have problems. It’s not knives that gleam in the dark that I worry about. Glittering, sharp blades leave clean, fine cuts that any tailor’s apprentice can stitch up without the slightest problem. The knives I fear are the ones that do not gleam; dull Mora knives full of dirt. Even a small cut from one of those can be fatal. The poorer one’s enemy, the more dangerous.

The hinges of Lill-Johan’s plank door groan when he opens it. Straightaway, a big, filthy mitt gives me a shove in the chest. I slip and reel backwards while fighting to regain my balance. Lill-Johan follows, his belly oozing under his dirty blue shirt. His curly black hair is long and oily. At the top of his head, a large, pale bump erupts from his locks. The whites of his staring eyes shine in his dirty face. With a grunt, he pulls his knife at once. The blade is short and brown with rust. Slowly he moves towards me.

‘Now you listen…’

I retreat until I can’t go any further, cornered in a cul-de-sac with my back against a wooden fence. The mire reaches over my ankles, my toes are aching.

Lill-Johan approaches gingerly, holding his knife in his right hand, in front of his huge belly. Quickly I take off my overcoat and wrap it around my lower left arm. Maybe it would be easier to get away by smashing my way through one of the walls of the surrounding shacks.

‘Watch, wallet,’ he says monotonously and slightly laboriously, as if the words are strange to him.

There’s a squelch as he takes one more step. Less than two metres separate us. He changes his grip so that the knife points down at the mud, ready to hack rather than stab. My misgivings
yield to that strange sense of calm that always precedes violence. I feel as if I’m back in a corner of the ring. I look up and, for a moment, let the snowflakes fall over my face. I stretch out my arms as if inviting him to embrace.

I fought my first bout with my hands wrapped in sailcloth, against a mess dogsbody inside a ring of drunk, roaring sailors. I remember the fear in my opponent’s face when they pushed him towards me. I remember the way the sea breeze came wafting through a wall of bodies that had washed in salt water for too long. How they bellowed my name.

On that day I won and I’ve won ever since. I’ve never taken a count. I’m not about to start now. Knife or not: I’ll knock the swine over the ropes.

Lill-Johan raises the knife above his head. Bellowing, he takes two squelching steps forwards, but he’s absurdly slow. My shoe is left behind when I move. I block the blade of the knife with my wrapped-up arm above my head. The edge shreds the thick fabric. Shielding myself behind my arm, I release a straight right at his midriff. In its quest to find the sensitive internal organs embedded somewhere in the blubber, my whole fist sinks into the distended gut.

Lill-Johan’s eyes threaten to pop out of their sockets when he finds that I am confronting him. A stale waft of pilsner left standing overnight hits me right in the face. Like the smelling salts my trainer forced on me between rounds, the stench makes me even more alert. I load my left fist, but when I twist my foot outwards to send it off, I slip in the mud and lose my balance. I roll my upper body to avoid any blows and retire a metre or so until once again I am against the fence.

Again the knife comes hurtling down at me. Like last time, I meet the blade with my coat. My hat falls off. There’s a prick in
my lower arm but it’s not much more than a scratch. Sometimes one has to take a few blows and bleed a few drops to learn how one’s opponent works and make him reckless.

If I am not wearing gloves in a fight I can only use my left fist two or three times, or it’ll turn to smithereens. I hold back, but the hook connects as it should. His jaw, not my fist, shatters with a sharp, distinctive sound. A couple of teeth lose themselves in the snow.

The dog collar, August Gabrielsson, once consolingly said to me that there are all sorts of people in the world and they all react to things in different ways. I’ve always liked observing how people behave when their lights go out. Some lose their sinews and crumble into a shapeless heap, like ‘The Mallet’ Sundström in the last round of our much-analysed match in 1922, while others stiffen their limbs and fall like overturned statues.

Lill-Johan belongs to the first category. First one, then the other leg wilts under his massive weight. His eyes are open but there’s no one at home. He falls forwards. My mouth waters. If he had the ropes of the boxing ring behind him I’d keep him on his feet with a couple more punches just for the sake of it, but now I step aside.

There’s a squelch when his bulk hits the ground. The mud spatters a long way up my leg.

‘I’ll be damned. Bloody hooligans, always making a mess, and never anyone to send the bill to.’

I look down at my best suit and wonder if Sailor-Beda can save it. My right fist is hurting. I unravel the overcoat from my arm and put it on. It has a couple of serious rents in it.

I bend over Lill-Johan and move the flame of the gold lighter close to his face. He’s fallen on his stomach with his face to the side, partially covered in streaks of that long, oily hair. His mouth is open and half filled with mud and blood. I begin to worry that
he has fallen on his own knife. I heave him onto his back. He coughs. A pulse of black-brown mess rises in his mouth and goes back down again.

My knees crack when I straighten. I stand with my legs on either side of his massive chest. He coughs again. It seems to be contagious. I cough as well and stand there doubled over for a minute or so before I catch my breath.

I put my lighter in my pocket and unbutton my fly. It’s abominably cold.

‘Unfortunately I left my smelling salts at home in Sibirien.’

I piss Lill-Johan clean of mud and blood. The dirt comes off in little chunks wherever the jet hits him, leaving cracks of pale white skin in his mask of grime.

‘Not bad, a hot drink for you, and a top-up too.’

The warm, wet sensation makes him slowly come to life. His eyelids tremble, he’s making some fairly odd sounds and shaking his head. His jawbone seems to have completely broken off.

I get rid of the last few drops and button up my fly. I take my necktie from my pocket and put it back on. Lill-Johan blinks maniacally. I step over him and locate my shoe by the plank a short distance away. Lill-Johan tries to crawl away from me on all fours. He whimpers like a tethered dog outside a government schnapps shop. I pick up his rusty knife from the deep mud. It has a home-carved hilt.

‘Stop!’

Lill-Johan freezes. With the shoe in one hand and the knife in the other, I squelch after him. I squat down in front of him. His chin hangs lopsidedly from its broken hinge.

‘Give me your paw!’

Lill-Johan’s eyes are still swimming after his knockout. He doesn’t understand what I mean. There’s no point being subtle
about it. Hard people need hard measures. I give him a belt on the jaw with the shoe. There’s a slap. His chin flies sideways and then snaps back. He bellows, bends down and buries his face in his hands.