The same day that Sandra Kovac finished at the Police Academy, a well-trained man in his forties had knocked on the door of her student room out in Bergshamra. A fellow officer, Sandra thought. A soon-to-be fellow officer, she thought, since such distinctions were important. Even though she was only wearing her dressing gown and was starting to get ready for that evening’s party with the other graduates, she had opened the door.
‘What can I do for you?’ Sandra Kovac said, tightening the belt of the gown a bit just in case she had missed something.
‘Quite a lot, I hope,’ the well-trained man said, smiling amiably at her and showing his ID. ‘My name’s Wiklander,’ he said. ‘I work for the Security Police. A superintendent, actually.’
‘Surprise, surprise,’ Sandra Kovac said.
A week later she had started work there. Five years later she had gone with her boss to National Crime, seeing as their mutual boss had moved up the chain and been given responsibility for the National Crime Squad, the National Rapid-Response Unit, helicopters, foreign activity, and everything ranging from all the secret stuff that belonged to the Security Police to all the stuff that was still public.
‘You’re coming with me, Wiklander,’ Lars Martin Johansson said the day before his promotion was made public. Hadn’t even pointed with his whole hand.
‘Can I bring Sandra?’ Wiklander asked.
‘Janko’s daughter,’ Johansson said.
‘Yes.’
‘Couldn’t be better,’ Johansson said, because he could see around corners.
Magdalena Hernandez, twenty-five, was the daughter of immigrants from Chile. Her parents had fled the night that Pinochet seized power and ordered the dictatorship’s lackeys to kill the country’s elected president, Salvador Allende. A long journey that had begun on foot over the border to Argentina had finally come to an end when they had got as far north as it was possible to get if you come from Valparaíso in Chile.
Magda was born and raised in Sweden. After her twelfth birthday all the men she met stopped looking her in the eye and started staring at her chest instead. All the men between seven and seventy, she thought, as her seven-years-older brother bloodied his hands for her sake on a daily basis for the same reason.
The day of her fifteenth birthday, she had spoken to him.
‘I’ll get rid of them, Chico,’ she said. ‘I promise.’
‘I want you to keep them,’ Chico said, nodding seriously. ‘You have to understand something, Magda,’ he added. ‘You’re God’s gift to us men and it isn’t up to any of us to change what He has given us.’
‘Okay, then,’ Magda said.
Ten years later she met Frank Motoele, thirty. She had finished her shift at six o’clock in the morning and, even though she needed to sleep in her own bed, she had gone home with him.
‘Would Miss Magda like to make a baby with me?’ he asked, turning his gaze outward as he lifted her up on his bed so that he could look her right in the eye without having to bend his neck.
‘I’d love to,’ Magda said. ‘Just promise to be careful.’
‘I promise,’ Frank Motoele said. ‘I’ll never leave you,’ he added. Because my fire burns brightest in the North, he thought.
Frank Motoele came from a children’s home in Kenya. He had met his parents twenty-five years ago. His dad, Gunnar, a carpenter from Borlänge, had got a job on a hotel project run by Skanska in Kenya, and he had taken his wife, Ulla, and stayed for two years. They picked Frank up from the children’s home the week before they were due to go back to Sweden.
‘What about all the paperwork?’ Ulla wondered. ‘Don’t we have to get all that sorted out first?’
‘It’ll be all right,’ Gunnar Andersson the carpenter said. Then he shrugged and took his wife and son home.
At Arlanda they had to spend twenty-four hours waiting, but eventually it had been sorted out and they were allowed to go home to Borlänge.
‘That white stuff out there is snow,’ Gunnar Andersson explained, pointing through the windshield of the rental car. ‘Snow,’ he explained in English.
‘Snow,’ Frank repeated, nodding. Like on the slopes of Kilimanjaro, he thought, because the nice lady in the children’s home had already told him. She had also shown him pictures, so it was easy to recognize even though he was only five years old. Like white ice cream, tons and tons of it, he thought.
The day of his eighteenth birthday Frank Andersson had spoken to his dad, Gunnar. He had explained that he wanted to adopt his original name. Change Andersson to Motoele.
‘If you don’t mind,’ Frank said.
‘Not at all,’ Gunnar said. ‘The day you deny your roots is the day you deny yourself.’
‘So it’s okay?’ Frank asked. Just to be sure, he thought.
‘As long as you don’t forget that I’m your dad,’ Gunnar said.
‘You fucked Frank, didn’t you?’ Sandra Kovac said the next day when they were standing down in the garage and waiting for a former children’s home child from Kenya who was already a quarter of an hour late for his shift.
‘Yes,’ Magda said, nodding.
‘Impressive,’ Sandra Kovac said with a sigh. ‘But don’t worry, once doesn’t count,’ she said, because she was still Janko Kovac’s daughter and probably lived on a different planet to someone like Magda Hernandez.
‘He wants us to have a child,’ Magda said.
‘I thought you were going to transfer to us here at surveillance?’ Janko’s daughter said. ‘At least that’s what Linda said when I spoke to her.’
‘Well, that’s what he said,’ Magda said. ‘To me,’ she said.
‘If he said it, then he must mean it,’ Sandra said. He didn’t want to have a fucking kid with me, she thought.
‘I told him, all in good time,’ Magda said.
‘How did he take that?’
‘Like all romantics,’ Magda said with a smile. ‘And sexists,’ she added, smiling even more.
‘Oh, well, then,’ Sandra said.
55.
On Saturday morning Grislund, thirty-six, had opened his heart to Superintendent Jorma Honkamäki, forty-two, head of Toivonen’s surveillance unit and usually the acting head of the Stockholm Police riot squad.
A heart that was already wide-open, since he had opened it three days earlier to his old friend Fredrik Åkare, fifty-one, who was sergeant-at-arms for the Hells Angels out in Solna. The same Åkare who was absolutely livid when he stepped into his workshop — and what real choice had he had, a simple car mechanic and father of two? Grislund thought.
‘Okay, Grislund, unless you fancy drinking the oil from your own drip tray, I suggest you tell me where I can find little Nasir,’ Åkare said, kicking the contents of the tray across Grislund’s well-scrubbed concrete floor to underline the seriousness of what he had just said.
Grislund had revealed everything. He was a simple man but even he realized it was time to choose a side. Naturally, Grislund was not his real name: No one would really be called Pigpen. He actually came from a noble family. He was called Stig after his father and Svinhufvud after his mother, a fetchingly old-fashioned name meaning ‘pigheaded,’ because she refused to become a Nilsson upon her marriage to Grislund’s father. Her happiness meant her son’s unhappiness, and sadly, in spite of her fine background, she didn’t possess a single krona that could have softened the blows her son had to endure.
Back in nursery school his friends had nicknamed him Grislund, and the only advantage was that he had been able to eat like an ordinary person all his life, and fairly soon he was living up to his own nickname. As a lad his dad had called him Stiglet. Then, when Grislund told his mom that he and a friend were going to open a car repair shop out in North Järva she had stopped talking to him. Dad still called him Little Stiglet. Either because he didn’t know any better or because he wanted to wind up his wife. It’s probably more to do with Mom, Grislund thought — he had just turned seventeen and had just completed his mechanics course out in Solna.