The other sister, p.1
The Other Sister, page 1
This edition first published in hardcover in 2022 by
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Copyright © Peter Mohlin & Peter Nyström
First published in Sweden by Norstedts as Den Andra Sistern
Translation copyright © 2022 Ian Giles
Cover © 2022 Abrams
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2022933988
ISBN: 978-1-4197-5299-5
eISBN: 978-1-64700-228-2
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PART 1
WEDNESDAY
1
The girls had finally managed to synchronize. They held hands, whooping with laughter as the swings on their metal frame swung to ever-greater heights. Their mother missed the performance, her eyes glued to her cell phone, but sitting on a bench around twenty meters away, Alicia could see the joy on their snotty faces. Two sisters, in time with each other and the world in a perfect pendular movement—as if they were the same body.
It was cold out—a couple of degrees below zero. Alicia’s legs were more or less numb by now. Nevertheless, she surprised herself by lingering. It really wasn’t like her to watch kids playing in the park.
Ordinarily, Alicia took a taxi home from work—a luxury she afforded herself to avoid stares on the bus. But today she had walked the three kilometers from Raw’s office in the Karlstad town center to the house in the Norrstrand neighborhood.
The afternoon sunshine had been so pleasantly warm on her skin that she had stopped a block from her destination and taken a seat on a bench. And there she had remained—drawing stick figures in the snow with her feet and reflecting that today had actually been totally okay. And if it was okay then the next one could be too. And the one after that.
She smiled to herself and shook her head. Here she was, Alicia Bjelke, sounding like a self-help book.
“I need to go pee pee.”
The younger girl’s voice made the mother with her cell phone react. Alicia had no children of her own, but she could imagine that it took a while to remove the beaver nylon overalls the kid was wearing. Seeking to avoid an accident, the mother dragged the child toward the white wooden building adjacent to the playground. The older sister was left behind with the exhortation not to go anywhere. She kicked off the ground with her feet, although not with the same vigor as before. Being on the swings alone wasn’t as much fun.
Alicia thought about the conversation she’d had with her own sister about a month earlier. It had been the third Sunday in Advent and before the first snow had fallen. She had put her cards on the table and told Stella that Raw’s launch in Germany had to be pushed back.
The dating platform co-founded by the sisters was no longer a side-hustle run out of a student dorm. As the Chief Technology Officer, Alicia needed the time and resources to have a fair shot at succeeding in her job. At the moment, the situation had become untenable. She was working fourteen hours a day and dreaming about coding at night. Stella had put an arm around her and listened. She was good at that. Her sis always knew when to talk and when to be quiet. She promised to delay the date by six months.
Alicia remembered the relief afterward. For the first time in ages, she had slept a whole night. Christmas had come and gone almost unnoticed by her as she huddled under her duvet in bed.
She looked toward the solitary girl on the swing. She had picked up speed now. The rubber tire she was sitting on was oscillating at increasingly diagonal angles, and eventually it struck the metal frame. The small body took flight through the air before landing in the snow. Alicia ran toward her and crouched. Carefully, she helped the girl to her feet.
“Are you okay?” she said.
The girl’s flushed face showed her struggling to hold back tears. At the same moment, Alicia heard footsteps behind her. When she turned around, she saw the mother. She must have seen what had happened from the building and hurried back. Their eyes met and Alicia noticed the woman recoil.
“Come on, let’s go inside,” she said to her daughter.
“It was quite a tumble, but she had a soft landing. I think she’s probably just scared,” said Alicia, standing up.
The woman didn’t reply. She merely continued to stare.
“I just wanted to help her.”
“Thank you, we can manage.”
The mother’s eyes wouldn’t let go. Alicia recognized the reaction. A blend of fascination and disgust. She could usually take it. It was hardly the first time someone had stared at her face. But this woman was just too much. Alicia had comforted her daughter and now she was being treated like a pariah.
“If you’re going to keep looking at the freak then you’ll have to pay,” she said, holding out her hand.
2
The candlelight flickered in the draft as the waitress went by. John saw her hurrying between the tables toward the party at the back of the restaurant. Three men and a woman, all wearing business attire. He had dismissed them as colleagues having drinks after work, but he couldn’t be certain. That was the whole problem. He couldn’t be certain about anything at all.
Some easy-listening salsa was pulsing from the speakers. The same playlist that was always on. The music in the restaurant Rederiet was just as predictable as the menu: Spanish tapas and Rioja wines. John usually felt at home here among the rustic wooden tables and ceiling chandeliers. The joint was just a stone’s throw from his own apartment, and he visited several times a week. But tonight, he knew better than to relax. The scene could change at any moment—and when it did, he had to be ready.
“My God, it’s hot in here. I thought it was the Finns who loved their saunas.”
The laughter from across the table drowned out the music. That rumbling, chuckling sound was Trevor’s most distinctive feature. John would be able to pick him out from an ocean of chuckling people even if he were blindfolded.
His friend tugged the zipper down on his quilted jacket. When John saw one hand disappear inside Trevor’s padded coat, John grasped the weapon he was concealing under the table even tighter. He slowly put his index finger on the trigger. The shot—if he fired—would hit in the lower abdomen.
“But then again, what do I know? Maybe saunas are hot in Sweden too?” Trevor said.
He wriggled out of his coat and hung it on the back of his chair. Both of his hands were again visible and John could breathe easy. As recently as the night before, he had been convinced that his friend was dead. Sitting opposite him at Rederiet seemed unreal.
John offered an indistinct, murmured reply and continued to seek out unknown enemies in the restaurant. The proprietor knew he was a cop and had allowed him to examine the reservations book before the restaurant opened. The couple by the window and the family with the stroller had booked long ago, so he could rule them out. The broad-shouldered man at the table to the left of the entrance, however, needed to remain under scrutiny. He had booked earlier in the day and the same was true for the group of co-workers being served by the waitress.
John shifted his gaze toward the bar. There were two regulars he was on nodding terms with, but there was also an unfamiliar face. Well, a neck. A man with his silver hair in a bun had his back to him and was drinking beer straight from the bottle.
“Fuck, it’s good to see you again. You have no idea what this means to me,” Trevor said, looking genuinely grateful.
John forced a smile and tried to work out whether his friend had lost weight. Wasn’t his jacket a little baggier around the shoulders? And his shirt no longer seemed to strain across his chest in the same way. Either Trevor had gotten thinner, or his clothes were deliberately one size too large to give that impression.
His friend mopped the sweat from his brow with a napkin and in the same movement removed his woolly hat. John recoiled when he saw the bare head underneath. Four months earlier when they had last met, that head had been covered in thick, curly hair.
“Don’t look so surprised,” said Trevor. “What were you expecting?”
John looked down at the table.
“I don’t actually know,” he mumbled.
His friend’s appearance was familiar and alien all at once. His deep bass, the laugh, and the sweeping gestures were all as he remembered them. But at the same time there was something affected in Trevor’s manner. The way he’d taken his hat off—it had been theatrical. As if he was looking to achieve the greatest possible impact with his bald head.
John reminded himself that all it took to fake the side effects of cancer treatment was some lather and a razor. He had to keep acting as if Trevor were bait and the reunion a trap. If his hunters were hiding inside the restaurant, then at least he had the home advantage. The swinging
“How you doing?” Trevor asked.
His friend smiled in the candlelight.
When John didn’t reply, he added:
“Come on, tell me what’s up. And if that’s a gun you’re holding under the table, you can put it away.”
3
Alicia wanted to order another drink. She looked around the pizzeria. This was where she’d come—Palermo—after the ruckus in the park. She liked the place—it was close to home while being a reassuring distance from Raw’s over-designed offices in town.
The décor here was ugly for real, without any hint of kitsch irony. Hanging on the white-painted brick walls were movie posters from the eighties and nineties. The dark varnished tables had sheets of glass screwed onto the tabletops, with the menus tucked underneath.
Ratko was in his usual position behind the bar, kneading lumps of dough. When he looked up from the counter, Alicia raised her empty glass and pointed at it. He confirmed her order with a nod.
The owner of Palermo was almost as out of place at the restaurant as she was. He owned the most popular nightclub in town, Safir, and a string of trendy coffee shops where the patrons drank Frappuccinos and soy lattes instead of the acrid filter coffee on offer here. But Palermo had been his first business, and Ratko stubbornly continued to insist on baking pizzas and serving customers several nights a week, even though the place surely contributed little to the bottom line of his expanding empire.
“You still don’t want to say why you’re so angry?” he said, setting her beer down on the table.
Her fourth in a row.
Alicia thought about the woman in the park again. How by now she would be sitting in front of the TV with a glass of red wine, telling her husband about the unpleasant incident. Not that their eldest daughter had fallen off the swing—but about the monster who had picked the girl out of the snow and scared the life out of her.
“Stop nagging,” said Alicia. “Can’t you see how calm I am now? Down-right Buddhist monk.”
She closed her eyes and feigned meditation. What she actually wanted was a shot of vodka on the side, but she didn’t bother to order it. She didn’t feel up to dealing with Ratko’s anxious expression as he poured the liquor for her.
They’d briefly had a thing a couple of years back. They’d been Karlstad’s most unlikely couple. He was a second-generation immigrant from war-torn Yugoslavia, always wearing the priciest shirts. So eager to fit in, to be accepted by the people who counted. She was the outsider, the freak with the face. The girl who was into computers and wore black jeans and a hoodie to match.
Of course, Ratko had been keen to keep it all a secret. Being seen in public with her would nudge him several rungs down the social ladder that he was so obsessed with climbing. Not even the regulars at Palermo knew they’d slept together.
Alicia was about to raise the glass of beer to her lips when there was a guffaw from the other end of the room. The soccer fans were, as usual, occupying the long table in front of the big-screen TV. They represented a subgroup at Palermo and rarely mixed with the other regulars, of which there were in fact very few. In practice, it was just a handful of lost souls like her and the zombies addicted to gambling glued to the fruit machines at the back of the restaurant.
“Don’t they ever shut up? The game’s over,” she said.
“Yes, but it’s Wednesday. Quiz night.”
Alicia put a hand to her forehead.
“The battle of the intellectual titans—I’d forgotten.”
“Try to be nice. It’s good for business if they stick around awhile,” Ratko said, returning to the bar just as one of the men raised his voice.
“Over which years was Fredrik Reinfeldt prime minister of Sweden?”
There was silence at the long table as the competitors conferred in whispers with their teams.
“2006 to 2014,” Alicia called out, taking a big gulp of her beer.
The soccer fans turned their heads and looked at her in irritation. It wasn’t the first time she had jumped uninvited into their quiz.
The man who had asked the question stood up and came over to her table. He was of slender build with thin arms and small shoulders, but with a swelling potbelly under his red soccer jersey. Alicia had heard the others calling him “the Professor.” When she had asked Ratko whether there was any truth to it, he’d laughed so hard he teared up. The man was a high school social studies teacher, which was apparently enough to gain the epithet.
“I know you know the answers to all the questions I’ve prepared for tonight,” he said, waving a sheet of paper in the air. “But it’s a real bummer for the guys if you yell the answers like that.”
His voice was friendly and Alicia lost all desire to pester him.
“You can buy my silence in return for three fingers of Smirnoff,” she said.
He chortled and proffered a hand.
“I’ll shake on that.”
On the way back to the long table, the man passed the bar, paid for the vodka, and nodded in her direction. Just as Alicia had expected, Ratko didn’t look quite as amused. But who was he to judge her drinking habits? They’d not slept together in a long time and they never met outside of Palermo.
She pulled her cell phone out and scrolled through the unread emails in her inbox without opening a single one. Reading and replying to emails when intoxicated was a bad idea—she’d learned that in the past. She put her cell down on the table and thought about Stella. The taping of the TV interview in Stockholm surely ought to be over by now. The show was called In Depth, and it was going to be broadcast the next day.
Alicia had mocked the pompous subheading: Encounters with People Who Have Left Their Mark on Our Time. At the same time, she had to admit that the description was apt. The dating service she and Stella had created was in many respects groundbreaking and had changed the way people met online.
If Alicia knew her sister, she would stay on in the capital after the interview and allow herself to be courted in the bars around Stureplan. Unlike her, Stella didn’t need to beg for her drinks.
Ratko said nothing as he served the vodka. He merely set down the glass on the table and headed back toward the bar.
“Come on, it’s just one drink,” she shouted to his receding shoulders.
He turned around to say something, but lost his train of thought when two men in black leather jackets opened the door to Palermo. Alicia thought she recognized one of them. He had a gray beard and tattoos on both his face and his shaven head. Given his height and the breadth of his shoulders, he looked like a giant next to his companion. The embroidered badge with the word President on his jacket was superfluous. Everyone in the place knew who it was who gave the orders.
Ratko’s usually self-assured gaze wavered. He fingered the gold chain visible at the open neck of his white shirt. The President uttered a couple of words to his subordinate, who sat down at a table in the corner closest to the fruit machines. Then the big man disappeared into the kitchen together with Ratko.
Alicia didn’t know why she began to laugh, but once she’d started she couldn’t stop. It was probably the fault of the alcohol. And the bitch in the playground who’d awakened the troublemaker within her. Not that it was ever far below the surface, but still . . .
Was this seriously still how it played out? Biker gangs scaring the shit out of business owners like Ratko and digging deep into their daily takings?
Alicia downed the vodka and went to the bar to serve herself another. The social studies teacher refrained from asking his next question as she reached across the counter and grabbed the bottle. The goon in the corner glowered at her but remained in his seat as she filled her glass and raised it toward him in a toast.
Alicia was onto her third by the time Ratko and the President returned from the kitchen. Her head was spinning and she had to clutch the bar to avoid falling off the tall barstool she’d sat down on.
“How much is he paying?” she said.
The man in the leather jacket looked at her in surprise.
