Maloof slept in intervals of fifteen minutes, the floor was too hard and the mat too thin for any longer than that. When he eventually got up at four thirty in the morning, he was stiff and in a bad mood.
He opened the door to the disabled restroom and found Råsunda Stadium quiet and deserted.
Maloof walked slowly down its dark corridors, past the shutters on all the food stalls. It was impossible to think that just last night, tens of thousands of people had been shouting, cheering, drinking and laughing on the now-empty terraces; right then, it felt more like the day after a nuclear holocaust.
There were turnstiles at the exits. They turned only one way, so there were no locks. Maloof left Råsunda in the early-morning darkness, taking the train out to Kårsta. From there, he would take a bus to Norrtälje.
The likelihood of him bumping into anyone he knew in any of those places was tiny.
48
Sami Farhan waited another day, until Saturday, September 19. If Michel Maloof had found it easy to disappear and Niklas Nordgren slightly harder, the task was by far the most difficult for Sami.
He did what he usually did. He booked a flight leaving late in the afternoon. This time, he had chosen Hamburg as his destination. The return journey was booked for a month’s time, but the seat back to Arlanda would be empty. When he landed, there would be a car waiting for him at the airport, and he would drive it back to Stockholm that evening and night.
He was doing someone a service, the car had been bought in Germany and would later have to pay duty in Sweden. But that wasn’t his problem. He would leave it in a parking garage in Östermalm and then make his way through the city unnoticed, heading for an apartment in Södermalm where no one would either think to look for or be able to trace him.
Abracadabra, and Sami Farhan would have disappeared.
No, that wasn’t the problem.
It was the farewells that were impossible.
That Saturday morning had followed its usual, chaotic pattern. The baby had woken and started screaming at four, and before he had been fed and gone back to sleep, he had managed to wake his older brother. Sami had walked around and around the kitchen table with John in his arms, loop after loop after loop, listening to his sniffles eventually grow quieter and cross over into sleep.
But the minute he put the boy down in his bed, a mattress on the floor in the room Karin had previously used as her office, Sami himself had felt wide awake. He had sat down on the sofa in the living room and tried to work out what he was going to say. It was impossible.
By five, he had dozed off again, and he slept through until seven. He woke to the sound of Karin trying to make coffee as she prepared the gruel for the one-year-old. She had been up since six, and she handed Sami a bottle and pointed to the baby, who was sleeping in the stroller in the hallway. After that, she staggered into the bedroom, pulled the door shut and slumped onto the bed with the hope that a few hours’ uninterrupted sleep would allow her milk to thicken enough for the next feed.
This isn’t right, he thought.
I can’t leave her like this.
Not now, not for a week, not even for a day.
But he had no choice.
Going underground and disappearing from the system was his way of protecting Karin and the kids. Both in the long and the short term.
Sami wasn’t planning to be sent away again. He couldn’t, not now that he had created all of this. A home. A family.
His plan was to stay away for almost three weeks, but he was doing that to avoid being sent away for three years.
Or even longer.
It wasn’t that prison scared him. If you got into the game, you had to accept the rules. But for his family, things were different.
Sami made lunch and gently woke Karin by taking her a tray of food, a ham-and-cheese omelet and a large glass of milk. For once, both boys were sleeping.
He put the tray on the bed and sat down by her feet. He watched as she wearily sat up. She was so incredibly beautiful. Like always when he watched her without her knowledge, he knew that he could never be with anyone else.
“I have to go away,” he said.
The words came suddenly, and he surprised himself. However he had been imagining their conversation would start, it wasn’t like this.
She had just picked up the cutlery to start eating, but she put it back down.
“No,” she said firmly.
Her eyes were serious.
“Honestly, love, it’s got to wait. Whatever it is. I need all the help I can get right now.”
“I know,” he said. “I know.”
He sat perfectly still. Karin could count on one hand the times she had seen him sit motionless like he was right now. She allowed the silence to grow before she asked the question.
“Where are you going?”
“I have to go away,” he repeated.
“Where?”
He couldn’t meet her eye. He turned to look out of the window. He pulled at his sweater, which suddenly felt tight.
“I can’t say.”
“Don’t do it,” she said. “You promised.”
She spoke quietly, so as not to wake the boys. There was no anger in her voice, just sadness. That made everything worse.
“I know,” he said. “I’ll keep my promise.”
He meant it. He wasn’t going to live a criminal life. He truly believed that.
“So you can tell me where you’re going then,” she said. “Is it overnight?”
“It’s for a few weeks,” he said.
That made her explode.
“You can’t!” she shouted.
The tray tipped. Milk sloshed out of the glass.
“You can’t just go away for a few weeks! Not without telling me where you’re going. Not when we’ve just had a baby!”
And at that very moment, the baby started crying in the hallway. Sami took it as an excuse to get up.
“Did you hear what I said!” she shouted after him.
SEPTEMBER 22–23
49
4:54 p.m.
It’s a few minutes before five. His shift ends then, when the evening and night staff take over. But it’s been quiet all afternoon, so he goes out to get changed a couple of minutes early.
He has been working at the Statoil gas station on Magelungsvägen in Bandhagen for almost two years now, and he likes his job. There’s a small gang of them that usually work shifts together, three guys and two girls, and they’ve also started hanging out after work. When he first arrived from the north five years earlier, he had trouble finding a job and making new friends. He got by, lived in sublet sublets like everyone else, and the days passed. He heard about the job at the Statoil station by chance while he was working overtime for a pizzeria in Högdalen, delivering pizzas on a moped he’d stolen from outside the Globe Arena. He had happened to stop there for gas and heard the manager complaining about how they were one man short that night.
He started immediately, eating the pizza he had been carrying rather than delivering it.
They gave him more and more night shifts, and after a year or so he started working during the day.
That was what everyone there wanted; no one feels like sabotaging their circadian rhythms.
Like always, they pause outside the gas station for a while, chatting before they head home. His gym bag is on the floor between his feet. It’s pretty big, an overnight bag, but he often has it with him, so no one thinks anything of it.
It’s Tuesday evening and nothing much is going on, there’s nothing worth watching on TV. Someone invites the others over to watch a film; The Girl Who Played with Fire came out in theaters on Friday, but it’s already up on Pirate Bay.