Knock Knock

by Anders Roslund

  He hoped he wasn’t too late.

  He hoped she was still alive.

  Birger Jarls Street was asleep. Just like the rest of Stockholm’s inner city. Even though it was a weekday and almost time for lunch. The buses were just as empty as the sidewalks, the shop staff moving less than the mannequins, the restaurants without the smell of frying but with butter dishes slowly melting away. Over thirty-three degrees and windless—warm had turned to hot had turned to panic.

  Piet Hoffmann didn’t even notice it. However, after a couple of hours of peering into a window on the fifth floor of an office building, he was sure the two men who worked there were on site. When he leaned forward toward his windshield, he could just make out one of them through his binoculars, the man who early yesterday evening sat in a parked car watching Hoffmann’s house while Zofia, Hugo, Rasmus, and Luiza slept. Piet Hoffmann had asked him for a light and the security guard had told him to go to hell without recognizing him at all. Even though they’d worked together a few times. His disguise had held. At least in the dark, with his hair covered and his face partially obscured by an oversized baseball cap.

  The people threatening me think I’m out somewhere preparing to start a gang war. They don’t know I’m working on getting closer to the people they hired to follow me.

  He climbed out of the car, crossed the street, went over to the entrance to 32B, and rang the buzzer.

  “Yeah?”

  A loudspeaker that swallowed words.

  “Hi, my name is Peter Haraldsson.”

  He’d used that name before. But he’d used so many, lived so many different lives. Piet Hoffmann at home in Enskede became Piet Koslow to the human smugglers in Libya, Paula to the Swedish police became El Sueco to the South American drug cartels and Peter Haraldsson to his neighbors in the Colombian town of Cali. He didn’t need any more variations of himself.

  “Yeah?”

  “I’m a small business owner. I’m here to look into your services.”

  “Like what?”

  “Am I at the wrong place? Aren’t you a security company? Someone recommended you to me. Don’t you sell security services?”

  The terrible loudspeaker buzzed exhaustedly as the door unlocked. Hoffmann took the stairs and stopped for a moment on the fourth floor. It was there, behind the shade of a wall-mounted light, that he taped his package with the jammer and timer. In a few minutes, as he was admitted to the premises of the security company on the next floor, the transmitter would be activated and the cameras tasked with recording his movements would go black.

  “Come in.”

  The man who had been watching their house opened the door.

  Tall. In good shape. Spoke Swedish with a slight accent. He didn’t recognize his frumpy, overweight visitor this time either.

  “Small business owner, you said?”

  “Yes, exactly.”

  “What do you work with?”

  “Consulting.”

  Hoffmann smiled. In a way he thought an overworked numbers guy might.

  “Finance, accounting really, but that sounds so boring.”

  He had already noticed three surveillance cameras. One in the hall, at ceiling height. Then another one in the room he’d guess was the heart of the security company—the setup wasn’t so different from his own office, just a few kilometers west of here as the crow flies. And then, a third camera staring at him from the doorframe to the kitchen. All of them useless from this point on.

  “So what’s this about?”

  Piet Hoffmann turned around; the voice had come from the only room he couldn’t see. The other security guard. Just as tall and fit with eyes that looked like they were used to being obeyed.

  “What services were you intending in buying from us?”

  Blend in. Be normal. Probably the most important concept for an infiltrator. Never stick out, be a person with no smell to them. That was how he’d always worked. When you rent a car get the most common—which in Sweden these days was a silver Volvo V70. Peter Haraldsson’s shirts should be blue, his shoes black, and when it was cold outside, his scarves should be tied in a plastron knot—a simple knot that skipped the last step and just hung freely instead of sliding through the final loop.

  “I need to hire someone to take care of my company’s general security needs.”

  Normal. Especially when trying to fake a meeting in order to get closer, like now. As the owner of his own security company, he was very familiar with the usual questions. A) I’m feeling threatened—can you look into them? B) Goods are going missing from my company—can you help me find out who’s stealing? C) I need to review my company’s security setup—can you do that? He had chosen C. Even though he’d learned it was never about external security, always about internal insecurity.

  “And I want to know how much it will cost. I need a quote.”

  He looked back and forth between the two men. They weren’t paying much attention. They cared about him as little as he did about them. Stressed. Worried. Hoffmann thought he knew why. This morning no one had turned on the lights in the house they were guarding. No boys had headed off to school with their backpacks, no mother had gone for a walk with a stroller. Probably just a couple of hours ago they snuck out of their cars and into the Hoffmanns’ garden, peeping through the windows, listening, maybe they even rang the doorbell, which no one answered. They knew now that the family that made their blackmailing possible had disappeared. That their mission was about to go to hell.

  “A quote?”

  “Yes.”

  “Um—where is your office located?”

  “Västertorp.”

  “So in the suburbs. And how big is it? In square meters.”

  “A hundred, maybe a little more.”

  “With just one entrance?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s hard to give exact numbers before we . . .”

  The security guard fell abruptly silent, started to examine his potential customer. It was as if he were looking past the pasted-on bags beneath his eyes and through his brown contact lenses. Into a person who was someone else.

  “. . . visit you. But you can expect installations to be . . .”

  Then he fell silent again, just as abruptly, and sought out his colleague’s eyes. It was clear that they were communicating. Hoffmann could feel the two weapons holstered against his shoulder blades, gun on the left, knife on the right, and prepared to act.

  “. . . well, I’m guessing somewhere around seventy-five thousand kronor. Plus a monthly service fee of eight hundred.”

  One stood in front of him, the other behind him and to the side.

  Piet Hoffmann waited.

  But the attack never came.

  His disguise worked.

  “Could I use your bathroom? The heat really does me in.”

  Hoffmann looked around, and the man who seemed to be in charge pointed to a blue door just before the entrance to the kitchen.

  “There. Use the small button to flush.”

  After Piet Hoffmann locked the toilet door behind him, he examined the floor, walls, ceiling until he was sure there were no cameras. Then he opened the brown leather briefcase he’d picked up at a Salvation Army and took out two things. A centimeter-sized microphone, the interpreter that only weighed a few grams, which he attached in the gap between the door and the floor. Then he took out the somewhat heavier hand grenade, which had been left in the Koslow Hoffmann family’s mailbox—he’d even put the colorful hands and arms and hat back on again—and he put it on the sink. Then he flushed the toilet and let the tap run long enough to wash his hands. He left the bathroom door cracked open so that one of the men would discover what he’d left behind not long after he was gone.

  “Great. Thanks. That felt good. Sometimes it runs straight through you.”

  The stress, wor
ry he’d perceived when he stepped into this office returned. Just the few minutes he’d been away was enough to bring them back to last night and this morning and the mysteriously absent family that was their responsibility. It was clear they wanted him to leave as much as he did.

  “Seventy-five thousand, is that right?”

  “Yes. That’s our price.”

  “If so, I’m afraid, well . . . I think that sounds like a bit much for us. My company is quite small. But let me think about it and get back to you. Okay?”

  He said goodbye to them and gave them a handshake that was as weak as he looked. He didn’t turn around, not in the hall, not when he walked by the elevator, and not when he got to the stairs. At the next floor he stopped by the lamp and pulled out the jammer and timer. Then on to the entrance and the oppressive heat and his car, where he would wait until the interpreter conveyed what he hoped to hear.

  White brick wall. A lawn that was a little greener than their neighbors’. Dancing garden gnomes next to colorful mushrooms next to a sneaking little garden troll. Blooming flower beds surrounded perfectly groomed fruit trees and flourishing berry bushes. The people who lived here liked their home so much that Ewert Grens—who found it hard to keep plastic plants alive—didn’t even really know where to place his feet in order not to destroy anything on his way from the car to the front door. He’d dropped the cadets off at the small police station downtown to hunt down any information they could about a girl they now knew was named Hannah Ohlsson—they were supposed to chat with their local colleagues and maybe find out anything that might not have made it into the official records. He’d felt they’d do more good there than here for two reasons: local police took in a lot more information about their beats than most might assume, and knocking on the door that now stood in front of him flanked by a whole delegation from Stockholm police headquarters seemed like the worst possible way to begin a conversation that required delicacy and trust.

  But no one heard him knocking. So he tried the flower-shaped doorbell with a button surrounded by golden petals. Even that was so cozy and well cared for, and it rang a friendly little tune that reminded him of birdsong late at night.

  “Yes?”

  A woman in her fifties—her hair a shiny silver, her face with a deep tan, her eyes cautious but friendly. A bit farther down the long hall stood a tall, slender man who was wearing glasses like an old-fashioned schoolteacher.

  “Detective Superintendent Ewert Grens. I’m here from the City Police in Stockholm.”

  “We know—a former social worker from the child welfare department called and warned us you were on your way.”

  The retired department head had claimed to not have had any contact with this family for years. Apparently that was no longer the case.

  “Maybe she also warned about why I’m here?”

  “Yes. And neither me nor my husband feel very good about it.”

  The woman didn’t sound unfriendly as she pointed to her husband. A little fragile. A little tired. But her voice was calm and collected.

  “So we’d rather that you leave.”

  “I’m not leaving. Not until you’ve answered my questions.”

  “We have no obligation to talk to you about our daughter. Not with you or anyone else.”

  “Not legally, perhaps. But morally. I was the one who long ago stepped into her former world and literally carried her away from it. I took care of her in a safe house for several weeks. I was a temporary parent, you might say. So I think you owe it to me to do exactly that—tell me about her.”

  Ewert Grens felt a bit ashamed. He hadn’t planned to play that card until it was absolutely necessary. The guilt card. He really hated that one. But it seemed like the only thing that could drown out that little doorbell’s song. And it had the intended effect. The woman with the silver hair looked both surprised and curious. And somewhat confused.

  “I don’t understand—it was you? So long ago? What are you . . . Has something happened?”

  The surprise, the curiosity, even the confusion was gone.

  “Do you know something about Hannah we don’t?”

  And was immediately replaced by fear.

  “After such a long time, after you’ve stopped hoping, you realize as a parent that the worst has happened. And if the worst has happened, you just want it to stop. Do you understand, Superintendent?”

  Then finally she invited him in. Through a hall that was as narrow as it was tidy, past a kitchen that looked like it always smelled of freshly baked buns, then a bedroom with a double bed and another with a twin, which still bore traces of having belonged to a young person.

  “Hannah’s room. And I see what you’re thinking. That all her girly things are still on the walls and on her desk. Although she should be so much older now. But we haven’t changed anything. Since she disappeared.”

  The girl’s adoptive mother showed him into the living room, to a lovely armchair, and her husband came in with a tray carrying three coffee cups. Grens didn’t really know how or where to start. They seemed to assume that his knowledge was greater than it was. He had no idea what she was talking about.

  “Since she disappeared?”

  “Yes?”

  “You said that?”

  “Yes.”

  “When did she disappear? Where did she go?”

  The woman leaned forward, looked at him. Examining him. As if she thought he might be joking and needed to find the answer on his face.

  “Isn’t that why you’re here? Because you found out something new?”

  She was right—without understanding why. Ewert Grens was certainly here in her living room because he knew something new. But he wasn’t here to share it with her adoptive parents. Not until he understood how to use it to get close to the girl who had once lived here.

  “I’ll need you to explain what you mean by disappeared. I came here because I need to find her before she disappears for good. But if I understand what you’re saying, the little girl whose room is still intact, has already disappeared?”

  The man and woman exchanged a glance. In that way people who have known each other for a lifetime do. A language without words. And they both seemed to have realized why the superintendent poked his head into every room looking for something that just wasn’t there.

  “Pictures, right? That’s what you’re looking for. And you’re not finding any?”

  The father spoke for the first time. The kind of trustworthy voice Grens wished he had. Pleasant but not submissive, dignified without needing to try. This was a man who probably never needed to raise his voice.

  “Not even one photo of her. Alone or with us. Not even here in the room where we usually sit. We had pictures—tons of them. But she destroyed them.”

  Grens looked around at what he’d already seen. Paintings, tapestries, figurines. But no pictures of the one they loved most.

  “Hannah started asking us questions after just a couple of years. We don’t know why. Maybe someone said something. On the playground or at the school. Or maybe the memories she couldn’t reach started to reach her. ‘Who am I?’ It popped out at almost any time, and always in just those words. It broke my heart every time. ‘You’re our little girl. Our daughter.’ That’s how it felt. To us. ‘Who was I before? Whose daughter was I back then?’ When she got older, eight or nine, she started asking even more often, we told her what we knew. Nothing was left. That her past had disappeared, which was why she had to come live with us. That was around the time she stopped calling us Mom and Dad. Just Thomas and Anette. It never felt like she was trying to be cruel. It wasn’t a punishment. That’s just how she saw us.”

  Grens had lost a baby before it was even born. He remembered how much it hurt, even though he’d never met his child. He could only imagine the pain of these parents, who nurtured and raised someone, and now spent their lives fearing
the worst.

  “She knew her name hadn’t always been Hannah Ohlsson. But it took us a long time to convince her that we didn’t know what her name was before. That we didn’t know anything at all about her past. Just that she came to us after experiencing a profound trauma. That was why she had no parents. Her old life and any record of it had been erased, and only her new life existed. One night while we were sleeping—after another evening of a thousand questions we couldn’t answer—she destroyed every single picture of herself. Cut some of them up and flushed them down the toilet. Others she burned outside in a barrel we use to burn up old leaves. ‘Those weren’t me,’ she told us calmly over breakfast the next morning. She’d even found all of the negatives that we kept in a cupboard in the basement. ‘I don’t exist. So no pictures should exist either.’ Of course we wanted to take new pictures. But she wouldn’t allow it. And there’s no joy in looking at pictures of someone who you’ve forced in front of a camera. Only one photograph survived the purge. This one.”

  The adoptive father grabbed his wallet out of his back pocket. Fished a folded photograph from a compartment. A little girl. Who looked exactly as she did the day Grens waved goodbye to her.

  “It was in here. So she missed it. The first picture I took of her on the day she arrived.”

  A little girl smiling at the camera. With no clue that the front steps she was standing on led to the home where she’d spend the rest of her childhood. Or maybe she did know, understood it even then. Because the smile seemed genuine. Like someone who’d been tense for a long time who suddenly allowed themselves to relax.

  “Zana.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Her name. Before. Zana Lilaj.”

  The two adoptive parents exchanged a glance in that wordless language of theirs. Grens wondered if their daughter had just become someone else to them. More whole. Or if the opposite was true—if she felt just a little less like theirs. Or maybe that didn’t matter. At least they had one answer to give the next time someone asked.