The three stood in silence for a moment or two.
“My feet are freezing, Michel,” Alexandra moaned.
“Right, right. Let’s go now,” he replied, putting an arm around her to share some of the warmth he felt inside.
They took a step toward the grass slope where you could take a shortcut straight to one of the foot tunnels.
“Through the roof?” Sami repeated, nodding to himself. “OK. See you later, Michel. Nice to meet you, Alexandra.”
Maloof and his new girlfriend disappeared into the darkness.
11
Her water broke at home on Högbergsgatan on the second of April.
It wasn’t anything like the first time.
Karin and Sami had gone to the hospital too early then. There hadn’t been any free rooms, and they’d had to wait in the corridor of the maternity ward for six hours, from two in the morning until eight. When things finally got going, it took another twelve hours. Sami had fallen asleep in the bed in their room that afternoon, while Karin paced around him trying to manage her pain.
He knew that sleep was the body’s way of managing a situation that couldn’t be managed, but he had still felt ashamed when he woke up. Being so physically close to the person you loved and still being shut out and helpless was awful. He couldn’t lessen or share Karin’s pain, so his only escape had been to shut down.
The tension in the delivery room had grown the longer her labor went on, the nurses’ eyes had started to wander, and by dinnertime, he’d heard them whispering about a cesarean. But then the time suddenly came, and John had been born that evening.
The second time was different.
When they arrived at the maternity ward, her contractions were so close together that the nurses and midwife immediately took them into a delivery room. Just under an hour later, John’s little brother was born, and two hours after that, Sami was back home on Högbergsgatan.
During the month that followed, the Farhan family—Sami, Karin, John and the baby—lived life as though in a cocoon. They and the rest of Stockholm were trapped beneath a gray blanket of incessant rain. There were days when they didn’t even get out of bed, days they never got dressed, with a newborn baby and his one-year-old brother both needing closeness, warmth, food and care. It didn’t feel right to leave either of the kids with a babysitter, not even with their grandmothers.
It was only as April was suddenly on the verge of May that the new parents felt their isolation start to grate. They took turns leaving the apartment, striking up contact with family and friends and regaining their respective identities outside of being a parent.
Awaiting Karin was early spring, blue skies and mild winds, loyal friends and a longing grandmother. Awaiting Sami were debts that hadn’t paid themselves during his monthlong paternity leave.
And on top of that, a large number of missed calls from Michel Maloof.
The planning for different jobs went in phases, and you kept doors open because you never knew what would happen. Things were leaning more and more toward the Västberga job, though Sami still didn’t want to rule out the Täby Racecourse plan.
The last thing he had done before he entered the new-baby haze was to promise that he would try to verify Alexandra Svensson’s story. The idea of going straight through the roof into the room where they counted money on the sixth floor sounded almost too good to be true. Had she made it up because she wanted to impress them? Sami thought he knew a way to check. And so, one day in early May, he walked up to Pro Gym on Högbergsgatan to meet Ezra Ray.
“Here!”
Ezra shouted across the entire gym. It was just after ten on Saturday morning, but despite the relatively early hour, the place was full. As ever, interest in working out always peaked once spring was on its way; the thought of swimming trunks and bikinis terrified people back onto exercise bikes and StairMasters.
Sami waved and made his way over to the corner with the free weights, where Ezra was busy. He recognized that familiar gym scent: sweat and metal, deodorant and cleaning products.
“Jesus!” Ezra Ray shouted across the room. “You look like shit!”
Everyone within hearing distance automatically turned to see exactly who it was who looked like shit. Sami Farhan felt their eyes mercilessly boring through his thin sweater, revealing the excess fat he had gained around his stomach over the winter.
He’d had trouble getting back into working out for the past few years; he associated that sort of discipline with the routine in prison, and ever since he’d gotten out, lifting weights was the last thing he wanted to be doing.
“What about you, then?” he said to his friend. “You’re so weedy you look like a stickleback. You need to be able to put some weight behind those punches.”
Ezra had been using the dumbbells, but he dropped them onto the mat with a rattling thud. With his shaved head, high cheekbones, sunken cheeks, broken nose and wiry, overly muscular frame, Ezra Ray didn’t have trouble looking intimidating.
“You what?!” he shouted. “You what?”
The entire room fell silent.
Ezra clenched his fists and got into the classic boxing position. All around them, people’s mouths were open, they were staring. Sami lost no time in mirroring his friend’s pose.
“Right, you bastard,” said Ezra, “I’ll show you how weedy I am!”
A second later, he burst into laughter. Disappointed, the drama-thirsty gym rats had no choice but to turn their attention back to themselves.
“Seriously though, Sami,” Ezra said once he picked up the dumbbells to finish his last few repetitions, “you look like you’ve lost some of your edge.”
Sami nodded. There was no denying it.
The two men had first met during their teens. They had worked out together from time to time, but for Ezra Ray, boxing had been too traditional, too regulated. He had started with karate and jiujitsu, but he’d had trouble taking all the bowing and meditating seriously. When Ultimate Fighting broke through, it was as though the sport had been made for him. He was probably too old for it now, but so long as he won matches, his age wasn’t a problem. During the last ten years, Ezra Ray had constantly been in training for one championship or another, and that Saturday in May was no exception.
These days, he rarely ended up on the podium, but he never came last either.
“I’m just going to finish up,” he said, “then we can have a delicious protein drink and talk seriously.”
“I spoke to my sis,” Ezra Ray said a few minutes later when he joined Sami at the makeshift bar on the other side of the room. A strawberry white-chocolate protein shake was waiting for him. “I didn’t tell her exactly what it was about, but I asked how you could get hold of the plans for different buildings, if she could sort that kind of thing out. She said you just have to go to the town planning office.”
Ezra Ray’s sister Katinka worked for an architecture firm. She was the one Sami had been thinking of when he promised Maloof to double-check Alexandra Svensson’s story.
“The town planning office?”
“I checked. Anyone can go there. You don’t even have to be an architect. It’s on Fleminggatan. That’s your patch, Sami.” Ezra laughed. “Next to the police station and the jail.”
“Cool,” Sami said, though he didn’t smile.
“That’s that anyway.”
Ezra sipped his shake and was left with a pale pink protein mustache. Somehow, it suited his wild appearance. “Shit, that’s good!”
“I don’t know,” Sami replied. “Just going into the town planning office and asking for the drawings for the city’s biggest cash depot doesn’t exactly seem smart. You know what I mean?”