Copenhagen Noir (23 page)
Every evening and morning security guards patrol the area. Along the back of supermarket parking lots and construction sites found all over the area, the streets are filthy with construction dust and refuse. Everything with any kind of scrap value has already been stolen or carted away. The copper thieves come out at night, digging and drilling like moles for anything that can be melted down and transformed. Even here in the underground, everything is a constant hunt for money.
“It looks like a warzone …” the security guard Jan Brandberg thinks when he walks his nightly round, shining a beam behind the scaffolding with his powerful flashlight. The dog pulls at the leash, searching and straining—but no one’s out there, all is empty, the world is on standby. As usual, Brandberg turns at the end of Hermansgatan and walks back toward the park again. He usually stops by the tent camp to make sure no one’s about to freeze to death. He was taught to show this consideration by an older colleague: “It has to do with finding a balance …” He couldn’t help asking: “Which balance?” “You must try to be careful with human life.” And since then he’s made sure to check in on the rag piles—made sure there was life, that they moved when he poked them with the tip of his foot. “Even they are human beings, in a way …”
During the last few days the water in the canals has risen. Cans, twigs, and plastic float about on the surface. The water slowly rises toward the edges of the canal. Everything’s in movement. The public shelter has just opened its doors, and the first guests take off, always junkies first, the mentally ill last. It’s all driven by hunger, by need. The mornings are always chaotic, and everything’s again pushed to the extreme.
To live. To survive.
Rörsjöparken is empty. The pond in the middle of the park is filled with rainwater and garbage. The benches were moved inside the municipal storage buildings at the beginning of September. A siren cuts through the morning as the fog comes rolling in from Öresund. In the last few years the population has grown more and more quickly. At the same time, organized violent crime has become rampant in the city. We cluster together. Everything’s about ownership. The alternative being: to be owned. Between these poles we are tossed about, like balls in a pinball game, more or less out of control, at the mercy of the times we live in, of our desires.
Morning arrives. Pale gray, it comes like a swollen wave, at first silently, then with all its violent power. So much happens when a town wakes up, so much it’s not possible to catch, to describe, no matter how hard you try. Birds take off into the sky, light flickers on the water in the canal, traffic becomes heavier. All these sounds, all the sudden feelings. Life is suddenly in the balance: to jump or not, shoot up or not, sleep in or not. The big and the small, it’s all caught in a whirl of hope and despair.
There’s light and there’s darkness, the dry and that which is still damp. On this day, Christian Westin sits in the basement storage room belonging to his mother’s apartment at Allhemsgatan number 7. Westin has now been awake for seven days straight and the demons are getting closer and closer. They breathe and hiss in the dark basement. Westin’s mother usually comes down to check on him at some point during the day. There’s very little left of what was once the man Christian Westin. He’s quickly transforming into a chemical monster. Today he’s going to collapse in epileptic spasms and repeatedly beat his head against the cold basement floor. That’s to be expected, nothing out of the ordinary. At the edge of one of the larger and more spectacular investigations in Sweden, his name is going to appear momentarily in public when one of his knives is found near a crime scene and it is thought, or rather hoped, that Westin might be involved. It would have been the easiest explanation. But this is not to be. Nothing is as simple as you hope. The morning is like an arrow, shot into space at random.
And death, too, might seem this way.
On this early morning, while the sky slowly deepens and brightens, the gray growing slightly grayer, a woman will be murdered. She will be thrown into the backseat of a large sedan and transported to a place she hasn’t visited for quite a while—the outer edges of the housing ghetto Västra Hamnen. The last time here, she was in a professional capacity. And one might say that now she’s also here acting that role. She plays her part, even in death. She died somewhere else and the murderer has brought her to a one-way street out here in Kirseberg where he parks next to Sven-Olle’s car service. Alongside the construction sites, there are trailers where the company houses their employees: Poles, Latvians, Germans. The illegal workforce imported from surrounding countries is big business, worth millions. But as with everything else—it’s within the pyramid where power figurings and transformation take place, where undeclared, almost invisible money is laundered.
It was all about time.
Fragments of time, dark oceans of time. Time by the drop, time like water-filled underground cavities. Time that curses and time that liberates, that heals and tears apart. All that must be changed, all that holds the eternal.
There’s a time to love. A time to die.
Everything existed side by side, shoulder to shoulder.
The housing areas in and near the center of the city were being pushed further and further out toward the suburbs, while the inner core of the city was becoming populated by the wealthy and the homeless, all those who were free to move across boundaries. Everything was a question of time. He who owned his time, also owned his life—Gisela Eriksson often thought that what she really had to offer the anonymous police authorities in Malmø was her pound of flesh. She gave them her time, a part of her life, the only thing she could never get back. Within her, like rings in a tree, was all the time she’d experienced in her childhood, her youth, her early middle age. All time was in motion, sloshing back and forth. Whatever she’d experienced, whatever she’d thought or done, could all be used. There was a creative element to the job that she could not deny, and it was probably what made her stay. She was able to come up with solutions, not merely formulate problems.
Eriksson stood in the stairwell and watched as the aging mother slowly shut the door to her apartment, to “the crypt in which she would mummify herself.” The civilian car she was driving was parked halfway on top of the sidewalk downstairs, and traffic was increasing as the day went on. Exercisgatan functioned as a kind of thoroughfare, connecting various streets of the city, and when Eriksson stood outside the apartment house gate, she could glimpse the square by the Jewish synagogue, surrounded by tall walls.
The morning had slipped through her fingers. Her thoughts came and went, rattling like train cars on a rusty track. She didn’t know what to think, what she believed. Josman was still being processed. Her body, Eriksson had been informed, had been taken to the forensic department in Lund. There was always a rush, even with the dead. She reminded herself to call Hofman and Nordgren later today—always easier to pose the questions directly to them.
On the morning of the fourth of January rain was moving across Öresund, and you could see heavy clouds passing back and forth across the open expanse. Wind tore at the sea, throwing up water along the rock walls protecting walkways and lawns around the swimming area. Nature, yet again victorious. It was not possible to imagine nature’s power. It conquered all obstacles. The sea will still be around when we’re no more than a memory.
Time.
The time to leave, the time to come back.
Time to open one door, time to close another.
The wind increased in strength. There were places in Malmø that were in constant movement, where the wind always got in. The entire town was one big construction error from the beginning. There were no natural breaks, no given boundaries. Everything had been made by man. Time had changed the town, its inhabitants, its language. It was neither good nor bad, it was just the way it was.
Cruelty alongside consideration, life alongside death, love alongside hate. One thing depended on the other. In another part of town, on Fågelvägen, just a few hundred meters from Exercisgatan, was where Nils Forsberg stayed, more or less busy scrutinizing himself—always arriving at the same dreary conclusion.
That it was too late, that he had already lost, that now he had to listen completely to the inner voice telling him that the only thing he needed to do right now was to remain sufficiently drunk around the clock, then everything would take care of itself. If he’d counted right, then this was day sixteen. He had trouble in between rounds, telling where one day ended and the next began—so, for simplicity’s sake, he’d drawn a thick line on the refrigerator door with a black marker. He counted sixteen lines now. And he knew that Mats Granberg had been dead longer than that. Those days, the ones without Granberg when he was still sober, were white, frozen, inhuman.
We’re not created to lose, nor for defeat—we’re made to win!
he thought, and at that moment it seemed obvious to him that he’d committed his whole life to failures, to losses. He was his own loss, had created his own degradation. He knew that he was beyond human help, that he was like a stone, sinking deeper and deeper down into the water. “Oh, damn it all!” he wailed his mantra, over and over again.
Nils Forsberg had lived very close to his own edges. In one moment everything could be changed. He shifted his inner positions as regularly as the tides. A more psychologically astute staff manager might have demanded an explanation about him from the social insurance office a long time ago. It was not difficult to discover that Nils Forsberg was a bipolar personality type with autistic traits, a diagnosis he could be proud of, by the way, not least because Robert Johnson gave Einstein the same diagnosis in a biography of him.
It was all a question of circumstances and chance. In truth he was really just odd. That’s where his thoughts mostly went, deep down, to a feeling of embarrassment, about who he was—who he’d become. The difference between what played out in his mind and what took place in the real world was enormous. His main purpose, at least that’s how he saw it himself, was to create as much trouble as he possibly could. He’d made a final decision when he first met the personnel consultant, a woman who it appeared didn’t have all her marbles, but who made decisions about the world around her in the way she herself saw fit—if the shoe didn’t fit, then the world around her would just have to change. He’d almost succeeded in driving Annelie Bertilsson out of police headquarters. But in the end he’d had to admit defeat. Bertilsson was the new order and Forsberg was the time that had passed. Like blowing out a candle—right now. And then everything goes quiet and dark.
H
e wasn’t the only one waiting for the author. Hannah, busy serving the other customers, had set the glasses and Sebastian Søholm’s favorite whiskey, a Laphroaig, on the bar. The speakers spewed out Nick Cave’s “There Is a Kingdom.” People were already packed in around the small wooden tables. The room was buzzing, and all the cigarette smoke lay like a heavy blanket due to the bad ventilation. Andreas, sitting at the end of the bar, held a hand over his mouth and coughed. Though he tried to be as discrete as possible, it still caught Hannah’s attention. She smiled and waved him over to three men sitting and talking together at the other end of the bar. Andreas knew very well who two of them were, a poet and a critically acclaimed novelist. He’d read them both but had never managed to get into a conversation with either of them. The third, a heavyset man in a checkered shirt, he’d never seen before. He walked hesitantly over to them. Hannah poured him a glass of whiskey. She said that it was Sebastian’s birthday. They were going to celebrate when he arrived. Andreas said hello to the men, and immediately they returned to their conversation.
He looked up at the clock above the espresso machine. It hung amongst postcards and snapshots of bar employees and some of the regulars. His eyes nearly always lingered on the photo of Hannah and Sebastian. They held their heads close to each other. Hannah wore a cowboy hat. Her tongue was sticking out. Sebastian was just smiling that smile of his. The photo had been taken at the summer party. The employees had dressed as cowboys, and a country band played. If he remembered right, the band was lousy. It was the night he’d talked to Sebastian for the first time. Since then they had spoken often. Sebastian had told him about his mother, who was so ill that he’d had to move in with her. They played chess now and then, and one evening, at Sebastian’s request, Andreas had brought along his writing. That had been over a month ago.