‘So what are you thinking, then?’
‘That I want to unbutton your blouse,’ Jan Lewin said.
53.
At eleven o’clock that evening, Farshad and his brother Afsan had left the large detached house in Sollentuna where they lived with their parents, their three sisters, and their youngest brother, Nasir, twenty-five. Right now, though, the youngster seemed to have gone off somewhere. Not a trace of him for the past week, and Toivonen already had a few ideas of why this might be.
They had driven off in Farshad’s black Lexus, and things couldn’t have been better, since it was already plugged in and ready. Earlier that evening Farshad had been sloppy and left it in the carpark of the NK department store while he and Talib had gone down to the delicatessen in the basement. Just five minutes, to get something nice for his beloved mother, no big deal.
Linda Martinez’s colleagues had needed only a minute to attach a GPS transmitter to the car, so now they could follow Alpha 1 — a red electronic arrow with the number one — on a computer screen from the peace and quiet of their surveillance vehicle.
Afsan was driving, while Farshad spent most of the time on the phone. Outside a Lebanese restaurant on Regeringsgatan they had stopped to pick up Hassan Talib, who had also been sloppy. Before he got into the backseat of the Lexus he had opened the trunk of a silver-gray Mercedes that was parked in the street to take out a cell phone, which he put in the breast pocket of his jacket.
The automatic cameras in the surveillance car following the Lexus clicked rapidly, keeping an eye on what was going on from behind.
‘Bingo,’ Linda Martinez exclaimed, since they had just discovered a previously unknown car, and when she personally attached the transmitter five minutes later she was a happy woman. Alfa 3, Martinez decided, marking it off on her digital notepad.
This is the life, she thought. What could the office offer compared to the street? Although that was probably where she should have been. Why the hell did I become a superintendent? she wondered. If her boss, Lars Martin Johansson, hadn’t already retired, she would have given him the finger, since it had been his idea.
Her colleagues in the second car had followed the target. They ended up down at Café Opera in Kungsträdgården and watched Afsan double-park twenty meters from the entrance. Then saw the hearty slaps on the back that the three of them exchanged with the bouncers before they vanished inside the nightclub.
Proper little ayatollahs. I’m going to hang those camel jockeys by their own balls, thought Frank Motoele, thirty, as he let his camera whirr.
‘Frank has a problem with Muslims,’ Sandra Kovac, twenty-seven, explained to Magda Hernandez, twenty-five, who had nagged her way to a place in the passenger seat once she had obtained the instant approval of Linda Martinez and been transferred from patrol duty to the surveillance team.
‘Frank’s a proper little racist nigger,’ Kovac said, nodding to Magda. ‘Big black man, hates everyone else — if you’re wondering why he looks so cross, I mean.’
‘Not you, Magda,’ Frank said with a smile. ‘If you take off that red top I’ll show you just how much I like you.’
‘He’s sexist as well,’ Kovac said. ‘Did I mention that? And he’s got a really tiny one. Africa’s smallest.’
‘If you stay in the car, Sandra, and stop talking shit, Magda and I will follow them,’ Motoele decided. He really didn’t need to listen to that sort of crap, since his colleague Kovac had found out how things stood on that score after a work Christmas party some seventeen months before.
In the world that Linda Martinez inhabited there weren’t any officers who could get into a celebrity nightclub just by flashing their badges to the bouncers. She had already dealt with that by other means, but Magda Hernandez hadn’t even had to make use of her assistance. She merely smiled her dazzling white smile and swept past the queue in her red top and short skirt.
Frank Motoele, on the other hand, was stopped at the door, and everything went the way it usually did.
‘Sorry,’ the bouncer said, shaking his head. ‘At this time of the evening we can only admit members.’ One hundred and ninety centimeters, one hundred kilos of muscle, and eyes that he had fortunately never seen before. And it was all too likely to end up the way it all too often ended up when he was just trying to do his job, the bouncer thought. I’d give a million to have that nigger’s girl. She could stand here in slippers and pajamas while the rabble just stood round bowing, he thought.
‘Guest list,’ Motoele said, nodding to the sheet of paper in the other bouncer’s hand. ‘Motoele,’ Frank Motoele said. On some really cold, miserable day with the rain lashing the windows of Kronoberg jail, we’ll doubtless meet again, he thought, since — belying his outward appearance — he spent most of his free time writing poetry.
‘He’s on here,’ the other bouncer said after a quick glance at the list.
‘I thought I recognized you,’ the first bouncer said, attempting a smile and stepping aside.
‘Once doesn’t count,’ Motoele said, giving him a look as he turned his gaze inward and looked at himself. One day you and I will meet, he thought. Until that day, I will meet many more that are like you.
God, what a creepy fucker, the bouncer thought, watching him as he disappeared into the club.
‘Did you see that nigger’s girl?’
‘I bet you she’s one of those ones who eat their prey alive,’ his colleague declared, shaking his head.
It wasn’t particularly difficult to locate the Ibrahim brothers and their cousin. The huge Talib’s shaved head shone like a beacon across the packed club.
‘Let’s split up,’ Frank said, smiling as if he had said something completely different.
Magda Hernandez smiled back. She tilted her head to one side. Showed the tip of her tongue to tease him.
I could eat you alive, Motoele thought, as he watched her go. Would little Miss Magda like to make a baby with me? he thought.
Five minutes later she was back. She had also put on a large pair of sunglasses even though the club was dimly lit.
‘Hi, Frank,’ Magda said, stroking his arm, as every male gaze in the vicinity wandered over her red top, her red mouth, and her white teeth.
‘I think we’ve got a problem,’ Magda said, putting her arm round his neck and whispering in his ear.
‘Okay,’ Frank said. ‘Switch with Sandra. Tell Linda, and see if we can get a decent photographer here.’
‘See you later, then, darling,’ Magda said, stretching up on her slender ankles and kissing him lightly on the cheek.
54.
Sandra Kovac, twenty-seven, was the daughter of immigrants, raised in Tensta. Her dad was Serbian, with far too much hair on his chest for his own good, and he left her mom when Sandra was two years old, only to cause problems for his daughter seventeen years later when she applied to the Police Academy in Solna.
‘I presume you’re aware that Sandra Kovac is the daughter of Janko Kovac,’ the assistant commissioner for submissions said with a nervous smile toward the application committee’s female chair.
‘I’ve never believed in inherited sin,’ the female chair had said. ‘What did your dad do, by the way?’ she added, looking curiously at the assistant commissioner.
‘He was a rural priest,’ the assistant commissioner said.
‘Really?’ the chair said.