Life Deluxe (53 page)

“
Sho bre
, good to see you man!”

Peppe in camouflage-colored carpenter pants, black Harley-Davidson hat, and a hoodie with writing across the chest:
SUPPORT YOUR LOCAL BANDIDOS
. The same silhouette as the last time they’d seen each other, at Babak’s twenty-fifth-birthday bash: like a monkey. Overly broad shoulders and arms so long he could, like, scratch his heels without bending down.

They pounded each other on the back. Jorge couldn’t help but like Peppe. They sat down at the table: McDonald’s in Kungens Kurva.

Jorge ate two Quarter Pounders with cheese. Relished every bite of nongook grub.

An important meeting for Jorge. He wanted to borrow tools from Peppe to dig up the rest of the cash. With some
suerte:
he could have six hundred Gs in his hand tonight already. He just needed a chill Peppe and a few hours at the hiding spot.

Peppe let his mouth run, the usual. He worked as a carpenter. Jorge read him: it was mostly a facade, but there was nothing wrong with that—everyone needed a facade.

Peppe told him he was gonna be a father. “I usually jizz on her tits, so it’s totally crazy man—how could that make a junior me?”

Peppe’s sense of humor. Jorge congratulated him and grinned.

Peppe was wondering about Babak, Tom, and the others. Jorge ducked the subject as much as he could. Apparently Peppe didn’t know that Babak’d been brought to Sweden. Though the newspapers’d been trumpeting it out for several days now:
TWENTY-FIVE-YEAR-OLD SUSPECTED OF THE TOMTEBODA ROBBERY ARRESTED IN THAILAND
.

Peppe buzzed about his usual smart plans. The fake invoices in the construction business, the tax man’s latest check-up methods, employment agencies providing hard workers from Latin America who shoveled snow from the roofs for four euros an hour.

“Winter’s just around the corner, you know. And every single coop board in this city is terrified that snow and ice is gonna go falling down on some poor sucker. They’ll pay anything for some shoveling. We set up companies for the workers, then we hire them into the company where we have all the gear. The worker company pays the guys every single euro under the table. Our company’ll never get hit if the tax man starts complaining.”

“Sounds awesome,” Jorge said. “So I’m guessing you’ve got a bunch of shovels and shit, right?”

It was dark out when Jorge parked the pickup. He’d borrowed it from Peppe. There was pro shit in the back. Big shovels, a stake, chains, tension straps, gloves, and coveralls.

He could sleep in the truck for a few days too. Peppe didn’t need it right away.

Maybe everything would work out after all.

Being cautious was his highest
mandamiento
right now. He’d moved around like a homeless person during his days in Sweden. Stayed at Paola’s place, with Mom, with Mahmud’s sister, even with Rolando who’d turned Sven. He looked up the license plate number of every single car that acted funny—texted the road administration. Some citizen service shit: they responded with a text within three minutes. The registered owner of the car. You could tell right away if it was the police trying to scout in an undercover ride. He avoided his home hoods, not just at night. He didn’t give anyone his prepaid phone number. He bought a pair of shades and added a hip-hop twist to his stride. Nailed the rhythm. Swung his arms. His right leg took a little extra turn with each step. Nigga with attitude. Feeling like he’d moved this way his whole life. Hopefully, it’d make him appear a little bit less like himself.

Everything reminded him of when he’d been on the lam last, from prison—except that time he’d maxed out: smeared himself with self-tanner too. “Shawshank.” Babak could
chinga
his own fucking
madre. Concha
. Now he was the one in jail.

He climbed out of the car. The Sätra Forest. Firs and pines and leafy trees. The gravel crunched. He opened the back doors. The water tower was visible a hundred yards farther off—like a fat magic mushroom. He lit the headlamp. Tried to orient himself.

He let the glow from the lamp sweep across the leaves. The moss. The yellowed grass.

It was cold in the air. Maybe forty degrees. He shivered.

Branches from fir trees were hanging down low and obscuring the view. He walked back and forth. Kicked aside pinecones and tufts of grass.

He was looking for the place. The place where they’d hidden the gold that they’d never shown the other boys or the Finn.

He walked back to the road. Peered into the woods. Left, right. Right, left. The beam of light was like a tiny speck in a dark mass of fir trees.

Then he saw them. Three large stones in a row. Two inches between every stone. He remembered how they’d labored to get them in place. More than three hundred pounds per stone, for sure.

He approached them. Knew there was no point in trying to play World’s Strongest Man. He bent down. Wound a tension strap twice around the largest stone, the one in the middle. Secured the chain in the strap. Dragged the chain to the car, thirteen feet away. Attached it to the trailer hitch.

Started the engine. Drove forward sloooowly.

It was too dark to see anything in the rearview mirror.

He opened the car door, leaned out, illuminated the spot with his headlamp. Followed the chain through the darkness. The stone’d moved. It was enough.

He jumped out. Got the stake and the shovel. Put the heavy work gloves on.

The stone’d been dragged a foot and a half. A round, flat indentation in the grass and earth where it’d been. He hacked with the stake.

He wasn’t thinking about anything. Just shoveled and hacked. The only thing that mattered now: dig up the dough and head back to Thailand. He was planning on screwing the Iranian. Who gave a fuck if that idiot ratted him out? Who gave a fuck if the feds reported him more wanted than a suicide bomber? He had a working passport.
Un hermano
down there who’d been checked out of the hospital.

It all felt so easy.

Drenched in sweat. Messed-up feeling in his fingers. How could so many roots’ve had to time to grow in just one summer? He didn’t
remember all the small rocks, either. Where had they come from? Did rocks sprout in dirt holes or what?

He looked at his work. A pile of dirt beside a hole.

Three feet deep.

His back hurt.

He kept on digging.

Hacked with the stake to soften the earth. Crush the roots. Roll the stones away.

After about an hour: a plastic bag.

There’d been eight hundred in the security bags, but he’d given two hundred to that Iranian cunt. Where was the thanks for that now? What an idiot he’d been. He should’ve ended Babak right then and there.

He bent down.

His pulse: BPM in
prestissimo
. Sweat was running into his eyes. He felt that usual tight feeling in his belly. Dammit, he was so fucking tired of his stomach acting up.

He needed to climb down into the hole. He grabbed hold of the top of the bag. It needed to be dug up carefully.

He grabbed a smaller shovel in his other hand. Tried to dig with small, small movements. Didn’t want to tear the bag.

He was at it for ten minutes.

Then: the bag was completely dirt-free. He picked it up.

Couldn’t contain himself.

He felt the weight of six hundred large in five-hundred- and one-hundred-kronor bills.

He began to untie the bag.

It was dark.

Hägerström was thinking about the mistake he had made. He had left his cell phone out and forgotten to slide it closed. Normally, you needed a four-digit passcode to access his phone. But the phone apparently didn’t lock when it was flipped open.

Javier was sitting with it in his hand. Curious, sticky-fingered, and gratuitously interested in Hägerström’s life. You couldn’t tell who had sent the message, but it was weird enough as it was.

Bring home as many as possible
—that’s what Torsfjäll had written. It was an order. Hägerström understood the reasoning. It was easier to arrest suspects in Sweden than to plow through tons of bureaucracy in order to get an international arrest warrant and then double the amount of bureaucracy again in order to get the Thai police to act.

He laughed and took the phone from Javier. “It’s my sister. She wants me to bring home as many of those Thai emeralds as possible. You know they’re insanely cheap here, right?”

Javier looked at him for a long time.

Then he stood up. He was also naked. Sinewy build and tattoos with an obvious gang theme covering half his body.
ALBY FOREVER
on one shoulder. A crucifix and a Mini-Uzi over his heart. And on his back:
MAMÁ TRATÓ
, Mom tried. That’s the one Javier was proudest of. He loved his mother more than anything else in all of Alby. He didn’t want to blame her for who he had become. A professional criminal, a concrete gangster. Bisexual.

Javier put his boxers on. He still hadn’t said anything. Hägerström remained standing where he was, playing with his cell phone. Deleted the text. Double-checked that he hadn’t forgotten to delete any others.

“Why haven’t you said anything about the emeralds?” Javier asked.

“I didn’t think about it.”

“But all we’ve done is talk and talk. You told me about your sister. Why didn’t you say anything?”

“What, you expect me to tell you about everything on my mind?”

Javier was silent again. He put his T-shirt on.

Finally he said, “ ’Cause I’ve got an
amigo
, Tom, and he’s in the know about that kind of shit. He’s been here in Bangkok a lot, gambled. Want me to call him?”

Inside, Hägerström breathed a sigh of relief.

That was the closest he had come to blowing his cover. He had to get it together.

An ad for HTC’s new Androids were rolling on the big screen. Hägerström was sitting comfortably. There were only two other people in the theater.

When he was a teenager, he used to love the ads at the movies. It was almost like he and his friends could go to the movies just for the ads. But that was in the old Sweden, before the state allowed commercials on TV. Now it was just annoying. A trailer for some Swedish thriller started rolling.
Easy Money 2
. The actors seemed believable, for once—normally, Swedish thrillers didn’t exactly tend to feel rooted in reality.

Hägerström was back in Stockholm. And now he was sitting in a movie theater, waiting for Torsfjäll.

He had decided to go back. The whole thing with Javier was crazy. Torsfjäll had ordered him to try to bring home as many of the others as possible. Babak was in custody and had been brought to Sweden. Jorge was already home, probably to scrounge up cash for the café deal. Hägerström didn’t know anything about Mahmud, and it would take time to gain his trust since they had never met. There were other guys in Thailand too, he knew that. Tom Lehtimäki and Jimmy, but he had never met them. The only one he had managed to bring home was Javier.

Ten minutes later Torsfjäll lowered himself into the seat next to him. Hägerström didn’t turn his head, but he sensed that the inspector was wearing his usual smile. Wide, blindingly white, and half-phony.

He leaned over and hissed into Hägerström’s ear: “Is this really necessary?
Couldn’t we have met up in one of the apartments, like we usually do?”

Hägerström whispered back, “There’s a leak somewhere. JW’s gotten hold of tons of information that he sent down to Jorge. He could only’ve gotten it from someone with high rank in the feds. All kinds of database stuff.”

“Sure, but that doesn’t mean one of my people did it. You can trust the people who work for me.”

Hägerström shook his head slowly. “You’re not the one taking the risks.”

Torsfjäll smiled again. He accepted.

“Have you had time to see JW yet?”

“No, I came home two days ago. But we’ve texted. We’re getting together soon.”

“How’d you manage to get Javier to come home?”

“It wasn’t hard. He was pretty fed up with Thailand and thought that since Jorge’d been allowed to go home, he should be too. So it wasn’t particularly hard to persuade him, especially when I covered his ticket.”