Fatal gambit, p.3
Fatal Gambit, page 3
part #2 of Rekke & Vargas Series
Lucas was constantly popping up in her thoughts nowadays, and sometimes – like now – she would feel unexpectedly frightened. She remembered when she’d seen him press a pistol against a young guy’s Adam’s apple in the woods by Järvafältet. It had been such a shock that she had begun to see her whole life in a new way. Since then, she had been feeding her colleagues in Narcotics with information on him, and she knew Lucas had found out. There was something ominous about the whole situation, but the strength of her fear still astounded her.
It was as if she had been transported out of the room she was in. And so she didn’t notice that Kaj Lindroos had frozen as if he had seen a ghost. In fact, she thought he was just annoyed at their non-existent date, since when he raised his gaze again, he looked self-conscious and then he pulled out his phone.
“Something’s come up, I take it?” she said.
“What . . . no, no, just got a proper job I need to do too.”
He began to type something on his phone and indicated she should remain silent, allowing him to concentrate.
“As I said,” he said at last, “Samuel’s barking up the wrong tree again. And by the way . . .”
“Yes?”
He held the photo close to his eyes. A bitter, yet slightly self-righteous smile spread across his lips.
“What’s that in the woman’s hand?”
“A book,” Micaela said.
“It says something on it, doesn’t it?”
“We think it says Love. There appears to be a line above it too, but it’s not visible.”
“Some kind of romance novel then?”
“Probably – judging by the colour. But it’s not a particularly common book. I haven’t been able to find it.”
Kaj Lindroos smiled with relief, as if he had discovered something that liberated him from a burden.
“Claire Lidman would never read chick lit.”
“No?” she said.
“Never. She had an agenda, and she would never lose herself in something imaginary or sentimental.”
“That’s not exactly what I’ve heard.”
“Of course it isn’t,” he said with a snort.
“Then what makes you say that?”
“Because it took us a long time to understand her. But that woman didn’t waste any time on fiction or other shit like that. She was always two steps ahead, and that’s why she was able to lean on a financier like Axel Larsson. There was always a plan ticking away inside her.”
“She might have changed.”
“She’s dead,” he said, looking back at his mobile and seemingly rereading what he had just written.
“Yet here you are with me.”
He looked at her with an injured expression. “I suppose I’m like any other ambitious son of a bitch out there. I don’t close any doors.”
“Even though you’ve seen the body.”
“The body was burned to a crisp – you know that – and I’m not so blind that I can’t see the oddities in this case, but that doesn’t mean I’ll buy any old rubbish.”
Micaela reached out to take back the holiday snap, but Lindroos stopped her with a gesture.
“I heard you’re working with some professor Stanford sacked.”
“I think Stanford would have liked to keep him.”
“Well, who was it who kicked him out then?”
The CIA, she thought to herself.
“It’s complicated. But he’s got an incredible eye for detail.”
“A little too good, from what I hear,” Lindroos said, pointedly tucking the photograph into his top desk drawer.
“Can I have the picture back?” she said.
“I’ll be hanging on to it,” he said.
“You can’t do that.”
“This is where we keep all the crap Samuel Lidman brings in. One of these days we’ll have to put a stop to it. He’s upsetting the family and . . .”
He didn’t have time to finish his sentence. There was a knock at the door and an older, balding man in a polo-neck with small, critical eyes stepped in. The man seemed stressed and worried as he apologised for interrupting. Micaela knew she ought to have put up more of a fight about the photograph. But she was sick of it, and if she was honest, had she ever really been convinced herself? Hadn’t she engaged with it mainly because she’d dreamed of working with Rekke again? But that had been in May, when he’d still had his dizzying eye for detail.
Now he couldn’t even make out the chair legs and other obstacles in his way whenever he happened to get out of bed and stumble to the bathroom. She was being drained by him, dragged down into the maw of his depression. I need to be far away from him, she told herself as she nodded to Lindroos and the man in the polo-neck before leaving the room. She was determined to forget Claire Lidman and take charge of her own life instead.
SEVEN
Julia departed and Rekke wondered what kind of embrace awaited her.
He dismissed his concerns. He needed to lie down. He wasn’t up to doing anything these days. He lay or sat slumped, not even making it into the stairwell outside his front door. But right now, he had stopped by the grand piano. Was he going to play? No, the keys sneered at him and he murmured: “Cartaphilus.” Cartaphilus. That was the word that had set it all in motion.
He had picked it up by chance while Micaela had been on the phone around a week ago talking about the woman who had gone missing and been declared dead in Spain. The case did not particularly interest him. He regarded the entire business as tainted by deluded wishful thinking, and he was ashamed of his own semi-psychotic analysis of the holiday snapshot. But as he had made to leave, Micaela had said that word.
It turned out that the woman, Claire, had been dealing with Cartaphilus just before she vanished into thin air, and that was worrying in itself.
Cartaphilus was a Hungarian investment company that had formerly been allied with the KGB and organised crime in the Soviet Union. But that hadn’t been the thing that had made him stiffen. The word had taken him back to those snowy days in Vienna. He had gone out and walked restlessly for hours.
By the time he returned, Micaela had left and he hadn’t seen her since. He really should have called and told her what he knew, but he simply couldn’t bear to dig into it. Good God . . . why wouldn’t the past release its grip on him?
His childhood was such a dreary stream of uniform days. In the mornings he would be at home with his mother playing his scales, arpeggios and études. Only in the afternoon did the other tutors – like Dr Brandt – arrive, and occasionally pupils brought to show off – like Gabor with his whistling F-sharp exhalation and that grasp that had hurled him to the ground. Rekke could still recall the blood on his fingers and the stains on his pillow the next morning.
He remembered getting up with the feeling that the world had been recast in a new, sharper light and that all the movements in his orbit were more threatening and angular. Somehow, it had seemed he was in two places at once – both the present and the past, when the attack had taken place in the snow.
Gabor’s throw had kept on running through his head, over and over. At first, he thought it was just his brain’s way of tormenting him or preparing him for the fact that he might be attacked again at any moment, but gradually he realised that his memories also served another purpose, and the next day he went to the library.
“I want all the books you have on martial arts,” he had said, and afterwards he had sat in a corner at the back of the reading room, over-encumbered with books and turning their pages feverishly.
By a quarter past five that day he had found it. The throw was known as osotagari, and it was one of the forty original moves of judo as set down by Jigoro Kano. It was described in a number of books. Rekke was able to follow it step-by-step through the illustrations, grasping with even greater clarity how he had been thrown to the ground. He was able to freeze each second of the attack, and afterwards a sense of how long it was possible to stay in the transient moment had lingered in him. It was possible to remain in a second for hours. But it wasn’t just an understanding of the course of events that he had sought. He wanted to develop a defence – a way to respond to the throw. He sat there for a long time as if in a trance. In the end it came to him as a revelation.
He realised he should have moved his left leg back, braced himself and reversed the grip. He saw an immediate beauty in his solution – a symmetry akin to a dance – and he stayed there for a long time as he performed it in theory, fighting in his thoughts. Then he stood up with a new posture, and on the walk home the grip had entered his body. He had begun to walk in a new way, and he would practise in his room with every spare moment he had – and not just his own throw. He imagined other lunges and attacks, and came to understand with ever greater clarity the very heart of the philosophy he was mastering – it was possible to defeat one who was stronger.
It was all just a matter of following the movement being directed at one until its inevitable breaking point, and there – at exactly that moment – finding one’s own foundation to strike back. Fortitudo hostium amicus est. Your enemy’s strength is your friend. Hour after hour, he kept going, and in the end he could no longer contain himself. He needed to get it out of his system, so he asked his mother:
“Could Gabor come round again?”
“Dr Brandt said you didn’t seem to much care for each other,” she said with a look of concern.
“But he stimulated me,” he said – these were always the magic words.
As soon as something stimulated him, his mother was in favour of it, and one afternoon when it was once again snowing – or at least it was in his memory – Gabor showed up. On that day, the family cat, Ahasuerus, was rubbing itself against their shins. The cat stayed close, jumping onto the table when they did their mathematics, as if he sensed something in the air. Afterwards, they went out into the garden just like they had the time before, and Rekke made an effort to seem as lost as he had then. He wanted to strike as the underdog, and almost submissively asked:
“Can you show me that grip again?”
Gabor didn’t seem prepared for those words. It was as if he couldn’t understand how Rekke could be so stupid. Still, he agreed within a second and smiled scornfully as the faint whistle of his exhalation came down a semitone to F sharp. Then he set about Rekke, but using an entirely different throw, and for the first few seconds Hans was convinced that he was going to be humiliated just like the last time. But then his synapses connected more quickly, and he took a step back and followed Gabor’s movements intently.
He saw them as if illuminated by a surgical lamp, and when he sensed a moment of instability he stepped forward and grabbed Gabor, forcing them into the same position as the time before. He then bent backwards, and Gabor might have thought he had regained the upper hand. But that was precisely the illusion that Rekke sought to foster.
He used Gabor’s own strength like a lever to cast him to the ground with numbing force, surprised by his own absence of emotion. Without having planned it, he pulled him back up and repeated the throw, and this time, when Gabor’s head struck the ground, Rekke experienced a rush in his chest. Then something happened that he would never forget.
He saw Gabor’s face and gasped. The face was suddenly naked, as if all the regal self-confidence had been swept away and replaced by something helpless, and Rekke realised instinctively that he would pay for what he had seen. Gabor was not a boy who tolerated being humiliated. He was someone who always had to get his own back and win, though at that time Rekke was incapable of imagining how ruthlessly Gabor would take revenge.
He simply stood there in the snow, watching Gabor retreat like a threat of things to come, as Dr Brandt rushed out of the house, waving his hands.
EIGHT
Micaela was walking towards Rådhusparken, lost in her thoughts. Why had Lindroos kept the photograph if he had completely dismissed it? She didn’t understand. Although perhaps it wasn’t that strange after all, she reflected. The whole business was messed up . . . Well, she didn’t care.
She was on leave – not voluntarily, but nonetheless – and she had a hundred things to be getting on with. While she would have preferred to take a longer period of leave in July, they had said they needed her in high summer, so she had taken two weeks now at the beginning of June and would take the rest in September. She worked on juvenile crime in the suburbs around Järvafältet, which wasn’t exactly what she had dreamed of when she had finished sixth form and had been standing on her own lorry bed shouting for all she was worth. But it had the advantage that she could study the flow of drugs into the city neighbourhoods up close, which was yet another reason she had begun to see her brother in a different light.
She was now receiving her own information about the key figure he was in the drug trade out on the streets, but gathering evidence was tricky and, if she was honest, she had ended up becoming a little obsessed, which was probably not healthy. Tongues were wagging, she was on the receiving end of gibes and veiled threats, and – sometimes, like with Lindroos earlier – she felt downright uneasy. A white bus drove past, and at that moment her mobile rang. It was Vanessa, her best friend, more or less.
“Hi,” said Vanessa. “How are things?”
“Up and down. I’m thinking about buying some new shoes.”
“Just make sure they’re not white trainers.”
Micaela looked down at her feet – she effectively wore nothing but white trainers. One of these days she’d change that.
“I’d rather die,” she said.
“Right.”
“What are you doing?”
“I’ve just had my hair dyed by a bloke with barely any hair of his own – well, except in his ears. Now I’m out of here to get laid. I feel like I’m about to explode.”
“That’d be a pity.”
“Wouldn’t it just? By the way, Lucas is looking for you.”
Micaela’s reply was wry.
“Then why doesn’t he call me?”
“He says he’s tried a hundred times.”
Three times, she thought to herself. Tops. But she hadn’t felt like answering and it bothered her that Vanessa was running his errands. She supposed her friend was just like all the other suckers – attracted to and a little enchanted by Lucas.
“What’s he want?”
“He’s pretty cute if you ask me.”
“Sure.”
“Word is you’re trying to put him away.”
“He’s a crook.”
“It’s not like he’s the only one.”
But he’s the worst, Micaela thought to herself.
“That doesn’t make it any better,” she said.
“Who’s that screaming?”
“High-schoolers. Want to grab a beer?”
“I’m heading out with Malika. Is it to do with Jojje?”
It was partly to do with Jojje, but that wasn’t something she wanted to discuss with Vanessa, and she searched for something else to say. Anything. Further along the pavement a round-shouldered man lit a cigarette. In the light, he looked sallow and haggard.
“Have you heard they’re going to ban smoking in pubs?” she said.
“What you on about?”
“The Norwegians did it like yesterday.”
“So it’s like some religious thing?”
“Wouldn’t it be kinda nice?” she said.
“Do you think Lucas scared the shit out of Jojje and his mum?”
She thought so, but she had no proof either – just a feeling that had been getting stronger over the last few months.
“I think you’re being unfair on him,” Vanessa said. “He only wants the best for you.”
Micaela closed her eyes and once again sought new topics of conversation. “I’m going to move out,” she said.
Vanessa fell silent, apparently shocked.
“Wha–? Are you kidding? Why?”
“I just feel like it.”
“Has something happened?”
Micaela contemplated describing the situation at Grevgatan in further detail, explaining how Rekke was descending into his darkness again and how it was impossible to get a single sensible word out of him.
“Not exactly,” she said.
“But it’s not working out, huh?”
She heard a tone in Vanessa’s voice that she didn’t like – it wasn’t exactly delight, but it was some kind of restrained triumph. A what-did-I-tell-you.
“It’s no big deal,” she said defensively. “I just want some peace and quiet again.”
“Hun, I get it. I get it. Do you want to meet up? I can cancel on Malika. I’ll take care of you.”
Why had her voice suddenly become so smooth?
“It’s not that bad.”
“Of course it isn’t. But honestly, maybe it’s for the best that you figured this out now before . . . I dunno . . . you got hurt.”
“Why would I get hurt?”
“Maybe it wasn’t meant to be. You don’t belong there, not really,” Vanessa said, and that was admittedly true – she was so far removed from Rekke in many respects.
Still, she was annoyed and regretted mentioning the move. It wasn’t definite yet – it was just a thought that had been gnawing away at her for a while.
“What would you know about where I belong?” she snapped.
“My God, chill out. All I mean is . . . I’ve missed you,” Vanessa said, and it wasn’t altogether impossible that Micaela had missed Vanessa and their daily chats too. But not as much, it struck her, as she missed Rekke as he had been over those days in spring when the world had seemingly been transparent to him.
“Sorry,” she said.
“It’s OK.”
“If you bump into Lucas, tell him I’ll call.”
“You hanging up now?”
“Give my love to Malika,” she said before actually hanging up unnecessarily brusquely. She suddenly felt alone and decided to pay her mother a visit in Husby, just like she’d told Lindroos.
