several inmates’ escape attempts. Skipped C: plan in case of riot. Walter’s knowledge was golden.
Jorge, eternally grateful. Promised to get Walter his five grand within a few weeks.
The screws waved.
Time to go back.
J-boy to himself: Rubber’s rolled on and I’m ready to dip.
5
No one in the posh parts of Stockholm knew the following about Johan Westlund, alias JW, the brats’ brattiest brat: He was an ordinary citizen, a loser, a tragic Sven. He was a bluff, a fake who was playing a high- stakes double game. He lived the high life with the boyz two to three nights a week and scraped by the rest of the time to make ends meet.
JW pretended to be an ultrabrat. Really he was the world’s biggest penny-pinching pauper.
He ate pasta with ketchup five days a week, never went to the movies, jumped turnstiles, stole toilet paper from the university bathrooms, lifted food from the grocery store and Burlington socks from high-end department stores, cut his own hair, bought his designer clothes secondhand, and sneaked in for free at the gym when the receptionist wasn’t looking. He rented a room from a certain Mrs. Reuterskiold-well, Putte, Fredrik, Nippe, and the other guys did know about that. Being a boarder was the only thing about his real situation that he hadn’t been able to hide. It was accepted somehow.
JW became a pro at being cheap. He wore contacts only on the days he had to and used the one-month disposable kind much longer than recommended, until his eyes itched like hell. He always brought his own bags when he went grocery shopping to avoid the tiny bag fee, bought Euroshopper-brand food, poured budget vodka from Germany into Absolut bottles-miraculously, no one ever seemed to notice.
JW lived like a rat when no one was watching. Big-time.
He just barely earned enough to make it work. He got money courtesy of the welfare state: a student allowance, student loans, and housing assistance. But that didn’t go far with his habits. He found salvation in a part-time job-as a gypsy cabbie.
Balancing the checkbook was hard. He easily dropped two thousand kronor on a night out with the boyz. With luck, he could pull in the same amount on a good night in the cab. His strengths as a driver: He was young, looked nice, and wasn’t an immigrant. Everybody would brave a ride with JW.
The challenge of the game was becoming one of them, truly. He read etiquette books, learned the jargon, the rules, and the unwritten codes. Listened to the way they talked, the nasal sound of it, worked hard to eliminate his northern accent. He learned what slang to use and in which contexts, understood what clothes were correct, what ski resorts in the Alps were in, which vacation destinations in Sweden were it. The list wasn’t long: Torekov, Falsterbo, Smadalaro, et cetera. He knew the trick was always to spend with class. Buy a Rolex watch, buy a pair of Tod’s shoes, buy a Prada jacket, buy a Gucci folder in alligator skin for your lecture notes. He looked forward to the next step, buying a BMW cab in order to realize the last of the three b ’s: backslick, beach tan, BMW.
JW was good; it worked. High society took him in. He counted. He was considered fun, hot, and generous. But he knew they still noticed something. There were gaps in his story; they weren’t familiar with his parents, hadn’t heard of the place he went to school. And it was hard to keep the lies straight. Sometimes they wondered if he’d really been on a spring break trip to Saint Moritz. No one who’d been there at the time remembered having seen him. Had he really lived in Paris, pretty close to the Marais? His French wasn’t exactly super. They could feel it: Something was off, but they didn’t know what. JW recognized what his challenges were: to create effective camouflage, to fit in and seem genuine to the core. To be accepted.
And why? He didn’t even know the answer. Not because he didn’t think about it-he knew he was driven by a desire for validation, to feel special. But he didn’t get why he’d chosen this particular way of doing it, which was the easiest route to humiliation. If he was found out, he might as well leave the city. Sometimes he thought maybe that’s exactly why he kept pushing it, because of some self-destructive desire to see how far he could take it. To be forced to deal with the shame of being found out. Deep down, he probably couldn’t have cared less about Stockholm. He wasn’t from there. Didn’t feel as though the city had anything profound to offer-other than attention, parties, chicks, the glamorous life, and money. Superficialities. It could be any city, really. But right now, the capital was where it was at.
JW had a real story. He came from Robertsfors, a small town above Umea, in the rural north, and moved to Stockholm when he was a junior in high school. He took the train down without his parents, with only two suitcases and the address to his dad’s cousin in hand. He stayed there three days, then found the room with Mrs. Reuterskiold. Flung himself out into the world he now inhabited. Changed style, clothes, and haircut. Enrolled in Ostra Real, a premier brat high school. Hung out with the right crowd. His mom and dad were worried at first, but there wasn’t much they could do once he’d made up his mind. After a while they calmed down-they were happy if he was happy.
JW rarely thought about his parents. For long stretches of time, it was like they didn’t even exist. His old man was a foreman at a lumber factory, pretty much as far from JW’s life plan as you could get. His mom worked at a job-placement agency. She was so proud that he was going to college.
What he did think about, a lot, was the family’s own tale. An unusual, unsolved tragedy. An incident that all of Robertsfors knew about but never mentioned.
JW’s sister, Camilla, had been missing for four years and no one knew what’d happened to her. It took weeks before anyone even knew she was missing. Her apartment in Stockholm revealed no leads. Her phone conversations with Mom and Dad didn’t give any clues, either. No one knew anything. Maybe it was just a mistake. Maybe she’s grown tired of it all and moved abroad. Maybe she was a movie star in Bollywood, living it up. JW couldn’t deal with home after it happened. His dad, Bengt, had buried himself in drink, self-pity, and silence. His mom, Margareta, had tried to keep it all together. Believed it was an accident. Thought it would help to get involved in the local Amnesty chapter, work longer hours, go to a therapist and talk about her nightmares, so that she, since she was reminded of them twice a week by the damn shrink, dreamed them over and over again. But JW knew what he believed: no fucking way Camilla would just up and leave somewhere without being in touch for four years. She was really gone. And deep down, everyone probably knew it.
It kept eating at him. Someone was responsible and hadn’t paid the price.
The mood at home risked crushing him. He had to move. At the same time, he was forced to retrace his sister’s footsteps. Camilla, who was three years older, had also left Robertsfors early, when she was seventeen. She wanted bigger things than to waste her life away behind some painted picket fence. Mom claimed that when they were little, Camilla and JW’d fought more than other kids. They had zero positive connection. But after she’d been in the city for two years, a relationship began to develop. He started getting texts, sometimes short phone calls, occasional e-mails. They reached a kind of understanding, that the two of them wanted the same thing. JW could see it now, they’d been a lot alike. Camilla in JW’s imagination: the queen of Stureplan. The party’s hottest it girl. Elevated. Well known. Exactly where he wanted to be.
The gypsy cab gig was easy. He borrowed a car from Abdulkarim Haij, an Arab he’d met at a bar over a year ago. He picked it up with a full tank and returned it with a full tank. The other city drivers accepted him-they knew he was driving for the Arab. The price was set ad hoc at each pickup. JW would write the info down on a pad: time of pickup, destination, price. Forty percent went straight to Abdulkarim.
The Arab would occasionally do tests. Like, one of his men would pretend to be a customer and take a ride with JW. Afterward, the Arab would compare what his controller’d paid with what JW wrote in his log. JW was honest. He didn’t want to lose the extra cash he made on the job. It was his lifeline, his salvation in the race to score points with the boyz. JW only had one road rule. He didn’t do any pickups at Stureplan. The risk of exposure was too evident on his own turf.
JW was driving off the books tonight. He picked the car up in Huddinge with Abdulkarim, a Ford Escort from 1994 that’d once been painted a pure white. The interior was crappy. There was no CD player and the seats were frayed. He smiled at the Arab’s attempts to spruce it up-Abdul’d hung three Wunder-Baum air fresheners in the rearview mirror.
JW drove home. A cool August night-perfect for the taxi business. As usual, finding a parking spot in O-malm
