“A cold? Really? You never said anything about that yesterday?”
Alexandra had called early on Monday morning. By then he had already decided that his strategy of staying locked up in his apartment in Fittja wasn’t sustainable. Maloof wasn’t really the giving up type, and setbacks tended to make him more determined to prove the opposite. But he did admit that it felt tough.
“Sometimes,” she said as they continued up the hill on the other side of the bridge, “things can feel, like, hopeless.”
“Yeah, yeah, that’s true.”
“So let’s say something’s happened,” she continued.
“I think it’s just the start of a cold,” Maloof insisted.
“But say it’s not that,” she said firmly. “Say it’s like I said, something tough’s happened, and that’s why you look like you want to hang yourself or something?”
Maloof didn’t reply. He was staring straight ahead and continued to plod up the hill toward the museum building that the original Spanish architect, after all the political modifications, no longer wanted to be associated with.
“That’s when you’ve got to find that extra bit of strength, Michel,” Alexandra continued. “That power we’ve got, the thing that’s made us come this far. You know?”
He couldn’t help but smile and run his hand over his beard. Every time things felt too much, she was there to support him. But as nice as it was to have her support, he also felt a pang of guilt.
Maloof was used to living a double life. During all the years he’d worked at the youth center in Fittja, his family and friends had thought that was how he earned his money. As a youth leader. No one knew that at night, he pulled a balaclava over his head, or that in parallel with his law-abiding life, he’d also found himself another career, a profitable kind of moonlighting. But that was how he had wanted it, and it wasn’t something that had bothered him.
But now, with Alexandra, things felt different.
He felt less and less comfortable lying to her.
They had reached the open space by the museum entrance, and Maloof stopped.
“Right, right,” he agreed. “You’ve got to be strong. But you’ve gotta be a realist too. Being an optimist can’t mean that… you’re a dreamer?”
“Find a new solution,” Alexandra said firmly. “That’s why I like you, Michel. You’re like, the happiest person I’ve ever met. It’s like there are no barriers for you, you know? Like, you fix them.”
“No,” said Maloof. “Well…”
“Come on, Mickey,” she said, laughing, using the nickname he hated.
“Yeah, yeah,” he said with a smile. “I’ll sort it out.”
He looked at her big, pale pink lips, shiny with gloss; lips that never wanted to stop talking. He raised his gaze and met her blue eyes.
“Cheer up now,” she said. “Is there anything I can do to help?”
He laughed again. At how easy he was to read, and at how right she was.
“Yeah, yeah,” he said. “You can help.”
“So tell me how?”
“You can let me off going to the museum today.”
“I can help in any way. Other than that, I guess,” she replied with a laugh, pulling him toward the entrance.
38
Jack Kluger parked his Jeep in the Royal Swedish Yacht Club parking lot and crossed the bridge onto Restaurantholmen on foot. Tucked into the cove behind him was Saltsjöbaden’s magnificent Grand Hotel Stora. Not that big, white houses impressed a man from Texas. To him, the natural world of Stockholm’s inner archipelago was far more exotic. The moss-covered rocks, the trails lined with last year’s needles and fallen leaves, the pines and spruce trees whose dense foliage created a green grotto all around him. The smell of the brackish water of Baggensfjärden blowing in over the islet.
Kluger had never been there before, but he immediately knew that the tall wooden building that rose up by the rocks at the water’s edge was the place he was looking for. Stockholm’s only open-air baths, hidden away and grand in their decay. When building work had started on the baths over a century earlier, there had been plans for an amphitheater on the slope down to the water; it would be somewhere people could sit in high galleries, watching the swimmers jump from the protruding jetties below. But the money ran out before the building was finished, meaning the jetties and high wooden walls with their narrow balconies looked less Grecian and more archipelago.
By September, the tired old outdoor baths, with their three sections for men, women and communal bathing, were abandoned for the season. Kluger found a way in and immediately spotted his contact, who was on his phone up in one of the balconies. The American climbed the narrow spiral staircase, his colorful boots echoing in the stairwell.
“Jesus, you make a lot of noise,” Zoran Petrovic shouted from a distance.
Kluger worked his way forward along the balcony. Fifty or so feet below, the waves from the bay rolled in onto the rocks. The sky was gray, and the day cold, but the closer the American got, the clearer it became that the tall, slim Yugoslavian waiting for him on the balcony was wearing a white bathrobe.
“Where the hell are your swimming trunks?” Petrovic asked when Kluger was only a few steps away. “This place is for swimming.”
Jack Kluger stared at the Yugoslavian, not knowing whether he was joking. The two men had never met before. In fact, just three days earlier, Jack Kluger had never even heard of Petrovic.
“Go and get changed first,” Petrovic now said in English. “I brought an extra bathrobe. It’s hanging in the changing room.”
“Are you kidding?” The American was genuinely shocked.
“You don’t know me, I don’t know you. What better way to build friendship than a little shared nudity?” Petrovic smiled.
Kluger stared at him, red in the face. They were the only two people there, and the weather wasn’t exactly made for bathing.
“You think I’m bugged?” he eventually asked.
“I don’t think anything,” Petrovic replied. “Just go and get changed.”
Kluger shrugged in irritation, but he went back down the spiral staircase and found the changing room. Sure enough, there was a white bathrobe hanging up inside. He took off everything but his underwear, pulled on the bathrobe and went back up the stairs. He demonstratively opened the robe to show the Yugoslavian that he had neither a weapon nor any listening devices on his nearly naked body.
“Sit, sit,” said Petrovic said, and Kluger sat down on the bench diagonally above. “You sure you’re alone?”
“Do you think I’m some fucking amateur?” the American asked.
Petrovic didn’t answer. Jason, who had helped him with the motorbike just a few hours earlier, had found five bugs in his apartment on Upplandsgatan the day before yesterday. Later that day, they also found a further two beneath the table in Petrovic’s usual booth at Café Stolen. For some reason, the police were suddenly obsessed with listening to his every word and following his every movement. He couldn’t be careful enough.
Petrovic had left all the bugs where they were. Better to let the police think he had no idea they were listening to him. There was a challenge in doing so that he couldn’t help but enjoy.
“OK,” he said with a nod. “OK. I’m Zoran Petrovic, nice to meet you.”
In the American’s eyes, Zoran Petrovic looked like a typical European. There was, Kluger thought, a certain kind of appearance that looked neither Scandinavian nor French, not English or Italian, just European. Maybe it had something to do with their heads being so small.