“The old woman,” Hammar explained. He stood poised at the top of the stairs. “They told you that Elin said you’re here to catch the bad guys. But she didn’t say exactly that.”
He wanted Brand to ask him what Elin Dalgren had really meant. She remained standing in place. She felt unsteady on her feet, as though the room was swaying slightly.
“She said you were here to kill the devil.”
Brand didn’t understand. In the far corner of the room stood a children’s bed, more of a divan really, piled with pillows and a stuffed toy gorilla. She crossed to it and impulsively laid down. Her mind shut off as she listened to Hammar’s footsteps receding down the stairs.
5.
Varzha Luna remained motionless and expressionless, as if she were still standing poised on the cold tarmac of Drottninggatan. She listened to her captors talk and tried to identify who they were. The bearded one went off on a rant about money.
Their plan was to auction Varzha as a virgin. The men who kidnapped her seemed to believe she would bring in an astronomical sum. The bearded one, Liam, groused about their paltry cut of the proceeds. He pronounced himself ready to have Varzha immediately.
The one called Mattias responded. “This gypsy girl, I don’t feel one way or another about her. But JV has placed her in my care, and told me that anyone who messes with her will answer to him.”
“This is a lousy business,” Liam stated, his tone bloated with self-importance. “We could sell her now, five or ten times a day! Add up the numbers!”
Varzha thought of the other victims, the ones who had disappeared. Her friend, Lel. Another kidnapped girl had been cut badly on the face when she spat at a man trying to force her. Afterward dead by her own hand.
The shades were drawn on all the windows in the room where Varzha sat. It was the first stopover after the journey out of Stockholm. The fading sun threw snow-reflected silhouettes against the blinds, making eerie, troll-like shadow figures.
“She looks pretty enough,” Liam said, “even with the white face.”
“Yes,” Mattias said,” turning to look at Varzha. “Pretty now—but later, no. She is the best age. Untouched. Soon she’ll get old and dry up like all women. Then I wouldn’t touch her with your dick, much less mine.”
Varzha knew the face that stared back at her when she looked in the mirror, the dark eyes of a kalderás Romani, the thick braided jet black hair. She had long understood that most gadje barely recognized brown-skinned Romani as fellow humans. We are “others,” she thought, something apart, not deserving of respect.
Exceptions existed, a few gadje who had shown kindness to Varzha and her brother. The fashionable woman who befriended them, with the palest white skin, so thin she looked like a boy. She brought gifts with her, candy, warm sweaters, blankets. The gifts were really small bribes, Varzha recognized, in exchange for the numberless photographs the woman took.
Even so, kind as the woman was, Varzha fell back on the ancient Romani attitudes toward gentiles. How far could she trust them? What might they want in return?
Varzha held herself apart, showing herself only when she sang.
In her youth the villagers called Varzha “chirola chei,” bird girl. She flew like lightning through the muddy lanes of her Romanian village, commandeered horses, and rode on the back of goats. From early on she was able to whisper the language of animals, gathering them around and coaxing their love.
Family and clan wrapped her in a protective cocoon. Her stern father, a well-respected musician, her beautiful mother—they were always there, shielding her from harm. No cousin, no uncle, no neighbor had ever dared to bother or molest Varzha as she grew up. Plus there was Vago by her side, happy-go-lucky Vago. They were inseparable.
Always, Varzha sang. For the family, for the clan, for herself. From the earliest days of childhood she sang the mirologi, the graveside laments of her people.
Then came the horrific attack when Varzha was ten, the murders, the catastrophe that changed everything forever. Her parents dead, Vago beaten senseless, the cocoon stripped away. She learned the terrors of life all too well. In the aftermath, a man wearing small spectacles and a long brown overcoat arrived, a kindly man, who had taken them on the long journey to Sweden.
These other men who held her captive now, or thought they held her, who would seek to sell her as if she were a cow, they were simply stupid believers in their own lies. They didn’t know her, didn’t realize what Varzha was capable of. Not a bird girl anymore, but more an eagle intent on vengeance.
She knew Mattias would never touch her—he had too much to lose—but she was unsure of the bearded one. His gaze rested hungrily on her, then always darted guiltily away.
Since she couldn’t do anything about it until the time came, Varzha sat motionless.
The two men who had approached Varzha while she sang for coins outside of Åhléns believed they were taking control of the situation. Varzha didn’t resist. She played her role well. This was the whole idea, this was the plan. She intended for the gadje traffickers to take her. She made no protest. Leaving her brother Vago behind was the difficult part.
After Mattias and Liam made off with Varzha, a third man had been waiting a few blocks away, in a van with the engine running. He drove, maneuvering them out of the congested city center. Varzha had tried to keep an exact track of the route they took, but became disoriented almost immediately. She was lost.
The van had no windows and no seats in the back. She was shielded from the front driver’s compartment by a curtain of heavy plastic. They had driven through halting traffic to the highway, then out of town by either the E4 or the E18, Varzha thought—to the north, anyway. She feared the coast the most, afraid that they would leave Sweden on a ferry in Kapellskär and her life would become immediately much more difficult.
“Nobody touches her,” Varzha had heard Mattias tell the other two more than once. She learned their names. Liam, the bearded one, and Nils, the young driver.
The repetitive scrape of the plastic curtain against the van’s interior wore on Varzha’s nerves. After what she estimated was a half hour’s drive, the van passed through a short period of start and stop traffic and then halted altogether.
Mattias opened the back doors of the vehicle and gestured her out. Varzha discovered that they had pulled into a darkened garage. She didn’t have much time to survey the surroundings. They hustled her inside, up a flight of stairs, and into a long narrow room. A child’s bike rested against a wall of white brick, next to a rickety dining table. An improvised couch made out of a collection of throw pillows sat opposite.
Liam sat her down on the couch. He left the room, then returned and provided her with a can of warm Coke and a chocolate bar.
A country house of some kind, or at least somewhere suburban. Varzha didn’t know why she thought this, perhaps from the faint sound of wind passing through trees outside. Two small chairs sat upended in a corner of the long room, their fabric seats covered in a kid-friendly pattern of ducks and frogs. Could there be children here? Varzha wondered. Did the gadje import evil into their own homes?
She had always been impressed with stories of gadje greed. They accused the Romani of stealing, while their own thefts were comprised not of pennies but of nations, of petroleum, of whole swaths of the earth. Compared to her own people with their pathetic paper cups lifted for alms, members of the master race displayed a bottomless thirst, for gold, for power, for blood.
And sex.
Most people consider money to be the most powerful factor in life. But Varzha’s motivation was purer still.
Revenge.
She would take revenge on the traffickers, for Lel and every other girl stolen from the Romani community in Stockholm. She would immerse herself in the filth of the world and drown that filth with blood. She would then seal her fate by her own doing, a choice brutally taken away from her eleven lost sisters.
Her captors didn’t notice there was anything different about
Varzha. Here was just one more piece of human flesh to use and discard, to bleed dry, to sacrifice. She had long kept a blank, passive expression when dealing with gadje. No one saw through her mask. If they had, they would know her fierceness.
Varzha let her hand trail down beneath the couch cushions. She turned up nothing useful, although she did retrieve a colorful candy wrapper, the same brand as the chocolate she was eating, Marabou, Sweden’s favorite and hers as well. She took her own wrapper and snuck it back under the cushion along with the other, thinking of it as a sign of solidarity with the girls who had been here before her. I am here just like you.
An image of Lel hovered in her mind. Her dear sweet best friend Lel Pankov, alternately raped and beaten, raped and beaten, until she was no more than a bloody rag of a human, then discarded as if she were garbage. Had Lel come through this same room on the way to her death?
“Let’s get the girl out of that damned wedding dress, at least,” Liam suggested to Mattias. He spoke directly to Varzha. “Strip it off, darling, let’s have a look at you.”
She ignored him, staring straight ahead, stone faced. Varzha concluded that Mattias and the others believed she could not understand Swedish.
“The word on the street,” Mattias said, excitement in his voice, “is that a virgin, a true virgin, could bring over eighty thousand kronor, ten thousand U.S. dollars, maybe more.”
Street? Varzha wondered. What street was that? And what did it mean, this phrase “true virgin?” She’d been watched closely all her life, first by her parents, then by her caretaker. She was, she supposed, what they meant by true virgin, and they were going to sell her. Varzha could not understand how any woman or man could be sold. What if the plan devised by Moro Part, the Romani godfather, didn’t work? What if her captors took her far away, like Lel—beyond help, beyond hope? She would suffer the same fate as her friend.
She steeled herself, thrusting the bad thoughts away. The plan would work because…it had to.
They waited for what felt to Varzha a very long time. Then the third member of the trio, the young one they called Nils, stuck his head into the room and announced that someone called “JV” had arrived.
Mattias, who had been slouched at the rickety dining table, rose to his feet. “Toaletă,” he said to her in Romanian. Toilet. He directed her to a little powder-room lavatory along a hallway that dead-ended at a locked door.
“Someone should watch her,” Liam said, getting to his feet also.
“Leave the girl be,” Mattias said. “She’s not going anywhere.”
He stationed himself in the corridor, allowing Varzha to use the facilities and change into the clothing he had provided.
Closing the door behind her, Varzha worked quickly to remove the wedding gown. She searched in the waistband for the small sewn pocket. She ripped it open. Hidden inside was a tiny device made of plastic and metal. She examined herself in the mirror, white makeup still covering her face.
A shiver suddenly passed through her, a memory of being a child. Her mother gently folded and wove her thick hair into long braids. Oh mother, where are you now? Can you see me? Hear my prayer. Watch over me in my darkness.
Varzha undid her dark tortoiseshell barrette. She concealed the small plastic device within the shell of the hair clip, then locked it with a snap. She drew up the braids and fastened them to the crown of her head.
Mattias banged on the door. Varzha ignored him. Her dress, her whiteface mask, her whole outfit was her shield, her defense, a barrier created against an alien and heartless world. Now she wiped off her makeup roughly, letting the tissues fall where they would. The new clothing disgusted her: a low-necked white blouse, a miniskirt, and a pair of black leather boots. A gentile’s idea of sexy. She saw that the skirt was not something she could possibly wear and discarded it.
Another pounding on the door. “What? Come along!”
Varzha understood who she was, a Kalderaš Romani. The long flower-print skirts, loose tunic tops, multiple scarves in colored patterns that contrasted with the pattern of the skirt—these were the uniform of her people. Breasts were not emphasized because they were considered unimportant, mere tools for feeding children. But below the waist, between the legs—there both men and women had to observe cleanliness and modesty at all times.
A quick minute passed before Mattias again pounded on the door. “Women,” Varzha heard him comment. “I never understand why they need so bloody long to get ready.”
Varzha separated the top layer of the skirt of the wedding dress. She pulled on the longer satin underskirt, tying it at the waist with a piece of torn lace. The leather of the boots they gave her was soft. They fit well. Varzha emerged from the bathroom ready to face Mattias’ anger that she had refused the skirt he had given her.
“Va fan,” Liam exclaimed when she emerged. What the hell?
He moved automatically to embrace her. Varzha reacted quickly. Forming her right hand into a flat blade, she gave a quick chop at the man’s windpipe. Gagging, Liam staggered backward. He recovered and charged at Varzha. Mattias grabbed him by the jacket collar and wrenched him backward.
“Liam!” Mattias snapped.
“What the hell is going on?” said another voice.
Coming in with Nils, a fourth man stood at the head of the hallway, a tall, modern-looking guy in a black leather jacket, his short-cropped hair gelled up. Young, in his twenties.
Mattias and Liam instantly became deferential. “She hit me!” Liam cried.
“She hit me,” the newcomer mimicked. “What are you, a child? Get the fuck away from her.”
He summoned them back into the main room. Varzha knew who the man was, or at least had been expecting to meet him at some point in her journey as a captive. She recognized him from a photo she had studied. One of the big bosses. She was a little surprised that he had shown himself so early. The others yielded to him, addressing the man as “JV.”
“This is the one?” he said, assessing Varzha. JV addressed her directly, talking loudly the way stupid people do to someone who might not know their language. “Are you okay? Have they treated you well?”
“She don’t talk,” Mattias said briskly. “Let’s go.”
JV stood Nils and Liam up in front of him, side by side like a pair of soldiers. “Stay here,” he commanded, using a crisp, no-nonsense tone. “No communication whatsoever, do you hear? You don’t call us, we call you.”
“Yes, JV,” Nils said.
“Shut up!” JV screamed. “Don’t say my name!”
The flunkies stared at the floor. “Stay here,” JV ordered. “You don’t speak to anyone, you don’t go outside, no phone, no calls, stay put until we contact you, capiche?”
“Right, Ja—I mean, right, Boss.”
Such was the first rule of the stolen-girl pipeline. JV always insisted that the principle was unchallengeable and fundamental. Each step along the trail had to be severed as soon as it was taken. The path for smuggling young women to service the North Sea oil towns of Norway changed often. With this protective strategy it always became instantly untraceable.
“They going to be all right?” JV questioned Mattias, referring to Liam and Nils.
“They’ll do what they’re told,” Mattias said. “Come on, we’ve got a long drive ahead of us.”
He handed Varzha a pair of mittens and a down coat with a hood, which she dutifully put on. She was grateful for the warmth. She tried not to let the words “a long drive ahead” bother her. The idea of spending time with JV filled her with distaste. He resembled the ads she had seen for bodybuilding, an idiot fad so popular with Swedes. These were the type of men who collected guns and kept big-jawed dogs. For hunting, they always said. But the thought of dogs threw her sideways. Perhaps they could be used against humans.
Mattias led Varzha out of the room behind the big boss. A great sadness rose in her when she thought of Vago, abandoned and alone. She wondered if the guardian angel Luri was protecting him. She asked her
self how long it would be before she saw her brother again. Or if she would ever see him again.
6.
Brand woke to a silent house. She felt a queasy sense of dislocation. The washed-out quality of the light made her unsure of the time. She had a headache. Her mouth tasted vile. In the night some unknown person had covered her with a goose-down quilt. They had removed her footwear. The knitted slippers presented to her now sat on the floor next to the narrow bed.
She sat up. The deadness of the Dalgren residence puzzled her. The evening before it had been lively and crammed with people. Not for the first time, Brand cursed the evils of amphetamine. The drug was a godsend, until it wasn’t. She paid for the energy its alkaloids gave her. The crash of the aftermath left her feeling ugly and hopeless.
Speed sleep was rarely restful. The dreaming mind drew a blank, but half-remembered waking dreams surfaced in her mind like breaching sea creatures. Had she really stirred in her sleep to hear voices, thuds and commotion in the night? Had she gotten up, gone to the stairwell and witnessed a shadowy form at the bottom of the stairs, something that appeared to be half human, half animal?
Brand also felt certain—almost certain—that at some point during the night she had stood at the door to the balcony. Through its small glass windowpane she witnessed a ghost-like figure cross the snowy yard toward one of the barns. Krister Hammar. He startled her by turning to look back at the house. His gaze seemed to bore directly into Brand. He disappeared through a door into the barn.
Real or imagined? At any rate the Dalgren household had appeared to be very lively through the wee hours. Now it was quiet as a tomb.
The world—reality as it presented itself—struck her as distant and false. She also felt an urgent need to pee. She stood up and pulled on the slippers. They were still damp. An attack of nausea and dizziness gripped her. She allowed it to pass. Brand took the narrow steps of the old staircase one at a time, holding onto a polished wooden rail.
This Land is no Stranger Page 4