Life Deluxe (51 page)

“What the fuck is this?”

Hägerström took the phone. How stupid could he have been, leaving it on like that?

Javier had obviously been snooping around while Hägerström was showering.

There was a new text. The sender was one of the numbers that Torsfjäll used.

It said,
Bring home as many as possible
.

Natalie was sitting across from Louise at Brasserie Godot on Grev Turegatan. Adam was waiting outside. She couldn’t handle having the bodyguard with her when she hung out with Louise.

The place: creative wall paintings, designer lamps suspended from the ceilings, even more designy candelabras on the tables. The lighting set to perfection—strong enough to see everyone, soft enough to be flattering. The background music was chill: something jazzy, something with swing to it, something very of the moment. The price of the drinks: 150 kronor and up. The entrées averaged half a grand. Natalie didn’t even want to think about the price of a bottle of Moët.

To put it simply:
very
flashy feel.

The crowd: accrued Aryan A-team. Crème de la crème, people who looked fresh and sun-kissed even though the autumn wind was whipping outside. People who summered in Saint-Tropez, on Gotland, or in Torekov. Natalie knew some and recognized even more. Jet Set Carl, Hermine, and so on. Definitely not anyone named anything like Natalie or close to Daniella or Danja. No one with parents born in the former Yugoslavia. Simple: ethnic wasn’t welcome here.

A dude two tables over saw that she had raised her eyes. He flirted wildly with her.

Natalie turned back to Louise again. She was wearing a short-short skirt and a pair of Louboutins with heels like needles. Her top was covered in a cherry pattern. Natalie knew it had cost a fortune. Still: it revealed too much. As usual, Louise’d pushed up her already unreal tits so they were almost touching her chin.

Natalie looked down at her appetizer: duck liver terrine with pomegranate, port wine jelly, duck leg rillette, and toasted brioche. She yearned for regular cabbage salad.

Everything around her felt foreign. Silly. Almost repulsive. She felt like a tourist in this place. This wasn’t her world anymore. In a way, it
was as if she’d come home—she felt more comfortable sitting with the men in the library than she’d ever felt with Louise, Tove, and the others, even though they talked about much stranger things.

“Was yours good?” Louise asked.

Natalie picked at her food. “Mmm. It’s fine.”

“Did you see? Jet Set Carl is here.”

The same old obsession with B-list celebs and Stureplan brats.

“Mmm.”

“Did you see Fredrika over there?” Louise said. “She can’t even walk in her shoes. Girls who walk in heels like they’re doing lunges or something—that’s the worst, right?”

Natalie glanced over at the girl Louise’d pointed out. She couldn’t see anything strange about the way she was walking. The dude two tables over was trying to get her attention again. Natalie ignored him.

She thought about JW—wondered how he would’ve done it. The guy over there was so crude and unsophisticated.

JW’d been in her thoughts often, ever since they saw each other last. Okay, he was important for business. He might know something about the politician. But there were others who were more important. Still: she couldn’t let JW go. She wanted to see him again. She got the feeling that he was there, in the background, all the time. Seemed to know more than anyone else. Seemed to be holding even more strings than Stefanovic. But it wasn’t just that—she was tempted by who he was too. He exuded a kind of self-confidence that attracted her, very strongly. And what’s more, he was a double player in so many ways—just like her.

Louise droned on. About new creams from Dior. A new nightclub in Paris. A new blog online. Natalie was only half-listening.

She floated away again.

Goran’d called yesterday. Thomas and he’d gone to the Black & White Inn a few days ago. Goran: was normally short, straightforward, and simple in a military way. But he’d provided a vivid description of what’d happened.

He’d walked straight up to the woman in the bar—everyone knew she was the gatekeeper for the side business at this place—and said, in Russian, “I wanna talk to you after closing. We’ll wait.”

At one o’clock, the place closed its doors. The bartender put the chairs on top of the table, started mopping the floor. The woman led Thomas and Goran behind the bar. Through the kitchen and out on
the other side. The hallway smelled of disinfectant and garlic. A man emerged from a room. Delivered a quick pat-down. Then he went back inside. The woman opened another door. She, Goran, and Thomas sat down in dirty chairs in a small office. No frills. Got right down to it.

She asked them what they wanted to buy.

Goran responded in Swedish, “We want information.”

The woman locked eyes with him. “I don’t sell that.”

“Do you know who we represent?”

The woman kept staring at him.

“We don’t want trouble,” he said. “You don’t want trouble. But you know what happened to Kum Rado. We have to investigate it. Even your people must understand that. Right?”

The woman didn’t respond.

He continued explaining. They knew from a certain secure source that Radovan’d been murdered with weapons and explosives purchased at the Black & White Inn. He wanted to know who’d bought the gear.

The woman’d still not dropped his gaze. “I have no idea. You know that. Who do you think I am? Someone who checks passport numbers and fingerprints on the people we do business with?”

Goran didn’t cave. “Maybe not, but we have our own ways of checking that kind of thing. I want you to inform your people that we want to see all the objects he touched.”

“What do you mean? You’ll have to come back tomorrow.”

“What we mean is that you’re going to take out all the objects that he touched. And you can go ahead and call your people now.”

That’s how it’d gone down. Magically, the Black & White Inn agreed to Goran’s demands, in exchange for ten grand in cash.

He’d walked back out to his car. Picked up the person who was waiting in the backseat: Ulf Bergström. Chemist formerly employed at the national forensic lab—these days partner in his own lab, Forensic Rapid Research AB. A private alternative to the government’s forensic authority.

Ulf sat in that office all night. Brushed, taped, swabbed. According to the woman: the person who’d bought the weapons’d also handled a bag, two guns, and four grenades. It was almost six months ago. The chances of finding anything were less than getting a parking spot on Östermalm after ten o’clock on a Sunday night.

Still, it was worth a try.

Ulf Bergström’d promised to get back to them as soon as he had the test results.

They’d finished eating. Natalie suggested they have a cigarette in the outdoor seating area.

They walked out. Each lit a Marlboro Menthol. The air was cool. Infraheat billowed from suspended heaters.

A waiter came over with a tray with two glasses of champagne and said, “Courtesy of the man over there.”

Natalie saw the flirt-dude wink at her.

“Do you know who that is?” Louise said.

“No.”

“Me neither. But he doesn’t seem too shabby, huh?”

Natalie just shook her head.

Louise asked how things were going with Viktor.

“We don’t see each other too much, and he’s kind of a pain.”

“Oh no. Like, how?”

“I don’t know. It’s been so long. He annoys me. He doesn’t understand that I’m sad sometimes and that I think about Dad. Either he just wants to go do stuff all the time, or else he’s working like crazy. I don’t have time for that. You know, I think he’s a real loser.”

“But maybe you should go away somewhere together, get some quality time.”

Louise had bad suggestions. Natalie definitely didn’t have time to go away right now.

“No, I don’t want to do that. I can’t right now. And besides, I’d just get even more annoyed at him. We argued yesterday.”

“Oh, sweetie. About what?”

“He’s jealous. Started going off about me seeing someone else and stuff. But that’s just bullshit. I have an assistant sometimes, that’s all. But Viktor doesn’t get that. He thinks I screen his calls. That I can’t explain what I’ve been doing. But that’s bullshit too. It’s just that I don’t want to tell him everything.”

“But can’t you see where he’s coming from, at least a little bit?”

“No, not after everything with Dad. And then he’s got the balls to ask me if I could lend him money. Can you believe it?”

“Wow, what nerve!”

Louise checked herself. Her eyes flitted around. “That guy over there,” she said. “He’s waving to us again. He wants us to come over to his table. Wanna go?”

She pointed at the flirt guy. The dude: dark blazer, striped shirt unbuttoned at the neck, a pink tie with a loosened knot.

Natalie wasn’t interested one iota.

“No, I think I’m gonna go home now,” she said.

Louise looked disappointed. “Come on, sweetie. I think you should have some fun.”

Natalie set her glass down. “Are you kidding me?”

Adam was keeping a safe distance, around four yards. They were walking toward his car, which was parked down on the short end of the Humlegården Park. The night was dark. Maybe forty degrees out. One of Natalie’s contacts was bothering her.

She didn’t regret having blown Louise off. Since Dad’s murder, she didn’t feel close to those girls anymore. Let them busy themselves with their little lives until they matured, in a few years.

Her thoughts were dancing through her head like the leaves in the park. Maybe she was drunk. Maybe she was just drained after all that’d been going on during the past few weeks. Maybe she needed to sit down in front of a computer and try to make some order out of everything that was happening.

The war was raging out there. Stefanovic’s reaction after the meeting in the Tower’d been immediate. The lawyer that was dealing with Dad’s estate’d received some nightly phone calls from an unknown man with some kind of Eastern accent. The person promised to gut the lawyer and his wife belly-up if he didn’t give Stefanovic’s front men back signatory rights for several of the companies. The day after: Marko and two other guys with baseball bats’d stepped into Dad’s gym, Fitnesse Club, had really worked the place over. When the people working the front desk tried to stop the shit, they were jumped. Two were still in the hospital, one with life-threatening skull fractures. Two days after the assault: an amphetamine dealer found his dog’s head in the trunk of his car with a Post-it note on the floor next to it:
Last warning. Don’t
sell to Kranjic
. The same week: several bars downtown received letters in the mail that smelled of gasoline. The message was clear enough:
No
more business with Kranjic
.

Natalie thought:
Come on, Stefanovic, you’re not Don Vito fucking Corleone. You’re a goddamn loser
.

Goran told Natalie that they had to strike back. Of course they were going to strike back.

“But how?”

“We’ll do what we usually do.”

She let Goran command the details of the war. They tried to torch the Tower. Unfortunately the place survived with only minor damages. They hijacked a truckload of cigarettes that Stefanovic’s people’d ordered. They slaughtered Stefanovic’s best racehorse, Tima Efes. Put the horse head in a giant cooler and messengered it to him. They brought a bouncer who was connected with Stefanovic to a warehouse in Huddinge and cracked his kneecap with a hammer. That was a first revenge for the assault at Fitnesse Club.

Personally, Natalie was working like a maniac. She spoke to and e-mailed the banks every single day. She talked to Goran and Thomas. She gave orders to Bogdan and others. Planned excursions on the town with one of her bodyguards. She got in touch with people on the inside who were about to gate out, donated money to their wives. She donated money to the National Serbian Association in Stockholm. She donated money to the Näsbypark sporting club. Soon she wouldn’t have a cent left—Bogdan had to go to Switzerland soon, very soon. She just had to sort everything out with JW first.

She took another step: she contacted Melissa Cherkasova.

Rang the doorbell at her apartment on Råsundavägen. Adam and Sascha in the background. It was three o’clock in the afternoon.

She knew Melissa was home. Sascha’d been sitting in a car, watching the apartment for ten hours. The girl’d entered the building but not come out.

The peephole grew dark. She heard a voice. Strong accent, yet still correct Swedish.

“What do you want?”

“I just want to talk. My name is Natalie Kranjic.”

The voice on the other side sounded weak. “I know. You’ve already talked to me when you talked to Martina.”

“Yes, but I want to talk to you directly. I promise nothing will happen to you.”

There was a rustling with the door chain on the inside.

Melissa was standing there barefoot, wearing tight jeans and a loosely fitting T-shirt. Un-made-up, unstyled, uncertain.