This Land is no Stranger

by Sarah Hollister

  “Are we in trouble?” The words came out almost before she thought of them. They hung in the air. Then both she and Hammar started to laugh, struck by the ridiculousness of the question, the answer to which seemed so blindingly obvious. Their laughter had an edge of crazy to it.

  She drove up the hill to where the Västvall road met the highway. As she turned off and began to speed away, a pair of snowmobilers roared out of the blizzard. Both riders wore all-white snowsuits. They had goggles and balaclavas covering their faces. On both their machines, hunting rifles rested in gun scabbards of chocolate brown leather.

  In the rear-view, Brand kept her eyes on the two. They raced briefly after the Saab. One of the riders actually unslung a rifle. He (or she, Brand was careful to qualify, since the snowsuits made the riders appear unisex) didn’t manage to aim it. The other appeared to hold up a cell phone camera to take a shot of the fast-disappearing car.

  With the swirling snow and the distance, Brand doubted if the picture would turn out. But her laughter over the “are we in trouble?” question died in her mouth.

  25.

  The family gathered at Vilgot Voss’s imposing residence, tucked away deep in a forest glade outside of Västvall village. Vilgot, a prim and well-groomed accountant, had modeled the place on El Tovar, the log cabin-style lodge at the Grand Canyon in the American West. He once stayed at the inn as a youth and the elaborate Western style of the architecture impressed him almost as much as the magnificent Arizona landscape.

  The storm of the previous day piled snow on the branches of the big jackpines and flocked the timbers used to construct the house. Masses of ice and clumps of snow slid from the roof of the house, forming brief shadows as they thudded past the windows.

  A virtual pope’s conclave gathered inside the big main room of the lodge, cardinals, bishops and minor clerics from the holy order of the Vosses. The host was Vilgot Voss himself, the designated cooker of the family books. In attendance were Gabriel Voss, the military man Frans Voss, Lovisa Voss Klint, and Karl Voss. All were from what was known in the family (in spite of Lovisa) as the “brother’s generation.” Also present were a few of the brothers’ children from the so-called “cousin’s generation”: Elias, Hans, Ylva, and Malte.

  Not visibly present but there in overbearing spirit was the ninety-eight year old pope of the family, Loke Voss, senior.

  His son, Loke Voss II, chief among the brothers, steered the conversation. Even at age seventy-nine he was usually referred to as “Junior.” He despised the nickname. Abundantly supplied with coffee and brandy, the assembled Vosses sat around a wood fire, massive logs blazing in a hearth that was large enough for a person to stand upright.

  “What do we know about our visitors?” Frans asked, addressing Junior.

  One of Junior’s children answered. “I tried for a cell phone shot of the car, but the snow was coming so hard that I failed,” twenty-seven-year-old Ylva said. She was a sturdy outdoors-woman. Her wind-burned cheeks came from being exposed in the blizzard the afternoon before.

  “Malte was with Ylva, and he tells me the vehicle was an old Saab,” Gabriel said.

  “Yes, from the Sixties, I think, really ancient, if I know my classic cars,” Malte said.

  “You are speaking to some people from the Sixties, so be careful what you call ancient,” Lovisa said, laughing.

  “I saw it too, although from far away,” Hans said.

  “Was it blue, the Saab?” Karl Voss asked. “An old sedan?”

  “Yes,” answered Ylva. “Quite a stupid-looking car.”

  “I think I know who that could be,” Karl said quietly. “If I’m right, we may be in trouble.”

  “Who?” demanded Junior.

  “You know the Sami lawyer we faced in the Västerbotten County landrättighet case a few years ago?”

  “Yes!” Gabriel exclaimed. “Sami land rights, somewhere north of Umeå. Name of Hall, or Hansson, or something. A real ‘pain in the ass.’”

  He employed the English expression.

  “Krister Hammar,” Karl said, nodding. “He drives an old blue Saab. A troublemaker through and through. During the trial I learned to wish the man dead many times over.”

  “We lost that case, didn’t we?” Junior asked.

  Malte spoke up: “We’re pretty sure the Saab was driven by a woman.”

  “A male sat as a passenger, but there was definitely a female driving,” Ylva said.

  “You could tell it was a woman because of the way she was swerving all over the road,” Vilgot said, making a weak joke about female drivers.

  “That’s from a man who has totaled two Mercedes in his life,” Lovisa countered mildly.

  “Okay, okay, both of you,” Junior said. “Frans, perhaps some of your former Karlsborg people can find out what the Lapp lawyer is up to these days.”

  “Karlsborg” was a shorthand term for a member of the Särskilda operationsgruppen, the special forces unit of the Swedish army, which was based in Karlsborg Fortress, on Lake Vättern in south central Sweden.

  Frans Voss held the rank of colonel in the armed forces. “I’ll put a man on it,” he said.

  “Two or three men,” Junior suggested crisply. “Since we may find ourselves in a bind on this one. Now, moving on, the dead man.”

  “Yes,” said Gabriel. “Mattias Rapp. One of Jarl’s people, I’m afraid.”

  The whole room turned to Jarl Voss’s father, Elias.

  “Don’t ask me,” Elias said hastily. “I have no idea where my son is at the moment.”

  “God damn it!” Junior cried. “Doesn’t he answer his damned phone?”

  “When I call, he sees my number on the cell and doesn’t pick up,” Elias said. He tried to defend Jarl. “Please, pappa, please, Gabe, we don’t know enough to judge.”

  “Well, things are not looking good, Elias,” Gabriel said. “We hear about the Ljusdal manor house. We know Jarl has been using it. Now comes urgent news of this Hammar fellow being on the scene. Something has happened. For Jarl’s sake, I hope he was not involved. I’m still trying to get information on it.”

  “Wherever that child goes, there’s some kind of mess to clean up,” Junior said.

  “Pappa, really, no,” Elias objected. “My Jarl is a good kid.”

  “A good kid who we’ve had to extricate from jams several times already,” Karl said.

  “He styles himself an old-style Voss smuggler from the past,” Gabriel said.

  “No, no, no,” Elias said weakly.

  “I understand we’ve retrieved two bullets from Mattias Rapp’s corpse,” Junior said. “I wonder if a ballistics analysis would yield anything of interest.”

  Gabriel nodded. “Yes, perhaps, but so far we’ve handled this whole business through back channels. A ballistics test means increased police involvement.”

  “I think we have sufficient pull with SÄPO to ask for a sub rosa forensics test of some sort, nothing public,” Junior responded. “Don’t you know someone at the SÄPO lab, Karl?”

  “Yes, I do,” Karl said.

  “Malte, please pass along the spent slugs you retrieved to Karl.”

  Ylva raised her hand. “The body was ravaged quite badly. Has anyone encountered wolves in the area lately?”

  No one answered. “I have photographs, if you wish to see them,” Ylva said.

  No one volunteered.

  “Something went on,” Ylva insisted. “We don’t even know if it was the bullet wounds that killed him. Do we have a pathologist who could do a private autopsy?”

  “Oh, I don’t know if that’s necessary,” Junior said quickly. “The man is dead, after all. What would a postmortem accomplish?”

  “I’d like to know what kind of thing gnawed at him that way,” Ylva said.

  “Wolves sometimes like to venture out under the cover of a storm,” Karl suggested. “But the bear population has been active lately, or maybe it was some local dogs.”

  “How about you and I head out on a bea
r hunt if the weather stays clear?” Gabriel said to his brother. “Open their stomachs, see what we’d turn up.”

  “You wouldn’t say ‘bear’ if you’d seen the body,” Malte said. “Only Ylva and I have actually laid eyes on it, is that right?”

  “And we thank you for taking care of things so discreetly,” Junior said. “The corpse is in the deep freeze, now, no? The game locker in the other residence? So it will keep, with no immediate action required.”

  Ylva nodded her assent, a little too sullenly for Junior’s taste. He chose not to rebuke her.

  “So, summing up,” he said, “no autopsy on the body for the present. We must find out from Jarl—if we can ever locate Jarl—if this man Mattias Rapp has a family. There might be some sort of payment necessary. Karl will handle the request for a secret ballistics test. And Frans will instigate a thorough probe of the Lapp lawyer’s activities. I don’t care for interference from his type, not at all. ”

  “I’ve got some operatives who’ll crawl so far up the man’s behind he’ll feel a scratching in his throat,” Frans said.

  “What else?” Junior asked. “I think I’ll place a call to the baron, just to apprise him of developments.”

  “I’d like to find out who was with this Krister Hammar yesterday,” young Ylva said. “The woman driver. It’s very possible that these two were the killers of Mattias Rapp, and if so they both need to be schooled. This happened in our own backyard.”

  “Frans’s people will check for known associates, specifically females,” Junior said.

  “You know, let me make a call on that,” Karl said, getting up and leaving the room, phone in hand. As he went out, an attendant brought a man in a wheelchair into the room.

  “Look who’s here,” Lovisa Voss said, rising to her feet.

  In the chair sat an elderly individual, a slack-jawed and fumbling figure whose body had totally broken down with age. Only the eyes of the senior Loke Voss, sharp and burning, showed the man he had been in youth.

  “Hello, pappa,” Junior called out.

  The rest of the clan rose to their feet along with Junior, welcoming the old man to the gathering.

  “We were just settling some business,” Junior said. “But we’re finished now. Would you like to join us here by the fire?”

  His children and grandchildren gathered in a line, dutifully shaking the hand the Voss clan patriarch kept extended. Junior ordered up a cup of hot water brought to his father, then fussed with his blankets. Someone moved him closer to the warmth of the fire.

  “Business,” the elder Loke mumbled, his voice reduced to a hoarse whisper. “What business?”

  Karl came back into the room and topped the old man’s bony head with a kiss. Then he turned to the others.

  “I have some bad news,” he said. “Krister Hammar has lately been seen in the company of a woman named Veronika Brand, in the country from America, from New York City. They were both on the scene at the Ljusdal manor house. I’m afraid she’s a detective in the NYPD.”

  “So?” Vilgot commented. “Could mean nothing. I doubt if she’s here in an official capacity, or we would have heard something.”

  “Well, now we have heard something,” Junior said. “I’d say their presence here in Västvall was a message.”

  “Whatever could the woman want?” Lovisa asked.

  The old man in the wheelchair struggled to rise. He shrugged off his attendant and ignored Karl’s efforts to stop him. There was a fire in his pale eyes that impressed everyone in the room.

  “They come to our village?” Loke Voss exclaimed. “Here? To our home?”

  “Settle down, settle down,” Karl said.

  “I won’t settle down! You allow them to trespass on our turf?”

  “Pappa…” Junior said, trying to soothe him.

  “Don’t ‘pappa’ me!” The old man’s spittle flew. “I want them stopped! Stopped! Stopped dead if you have to!”

  “Please, pappa,” Junior said. “This woman may be a policewoman from America, a detective.”

  Loke swept his arm wide as if clearing away all arguments. “I don’t care! Did I raise you for nothing? Are you a Voss? Are you a man?”

  As if his own words had choked him, he stopped, haggard and breathing hard.

  “Here’s the real kicker, and pappa, you’ll want to hear this,” Karl said, laying his hand on the elder Loke Voss’s shoulder. “I’m not certain, but I believe that Veronika Brand is the granddaughter of your old Nordic Light nemesis, Gustav Dalgren.”

  “What? What?” Karl’s words immediately deflated the old man’s anger. He appeared confused and elderly again.

  As suddenly as he had risen out of it, Loke slumped back into his wheelchair, drained and helpless. It was one of the younger generation who spoke up, and a female one at that, the fierce grandchild whose name meant “wolf.”

  “We’ll take care of her, farfar,” Ylva assured her grandfather. “Please don’t trouble yourself any further.”

  26.

  “So here’s what I imagine police detective work is like,” began a woman named Rakel, one of a dozen people gathered at Aino Lehtonen’s home in Stockholm. The dinner party supposedly honored the presence of Veronika Brand in Sweden.

  “The detective resembles a person in a room with one of the most complicated Ikea projects ever…” Rakel continued.

  “The Hemnes day bed!” called out her companion, Arvid. “Our man put one of those together, and it took him three days.”

  “No, the Besta!” someone else put in. “That’s wall mounted storage, famously fiendish.”

  After escaping the harrowing events in the blizzard at Västvall, Brand and Hammar still felt shell-shocked. It was as if they had been abruptly transported light years away from the urskog and its terrors. The table of polished birch at which they sat was almost as long as a bowling alley. The guests were gregarious and well-spoken. Lehtonen and her wife Ebba hosted the evening. The young photographer’s spouse appeared a little older and even more chillingly fashionable than Lehtonen was.

  There was general chatter. The guests spoke over each other, laughing and slapping the table in enthusiasm. Their Swedish mixed easily with English, which was impeccable. The wine had been flowing generously all evening, mostly red, which turned everyone’s teeth purple.

  Brand’s post-traumatic stress, a hangover from the visit to Västvall, rendered the elegant evening more than a little unreal. It was hard for her to read the tone of people’s talk. Were those present serious or poking fun at themselves?

  Rakel spoke again. She was a formidable woman who wore over-large eyeglass frames, orange to match the color of her lipstick. “Detective work must be like assembling an Ikea project, but the parts are all mixed up together. There’s no instruction sheet and no tools provided.”

  “And the room is totally dark,” someone else at the table put in.

  “Then, when you are finished,” Rakel said, “you must present your work to be judged by a jury, with a defense lawyer standing by all the while trying to kick apart your pieces.”

  Some laughter from the assembled guests, and a smattering of half-hearted applause.

  “Perhaps Detective Brand sees her job as not quite so frivolous as furniture assembly,” Hammar suggested gently.

  “No, no,” Brand said. “The comparison is very clever.”

  Arvid produced yet another bottle of French Bordeaux. “I’ve heard it said that the prevalence of Ikea products has increased the worldwide average IQ by a few fractional percentage points, as when the Rubik’s Cube came out.”

  “Chimpanzees in captivity must be given puzzles to solve in order to stay mentally healthy,” Rakel said.

  The conversation became languid and less focused. After the dinner of magnificent wild salmon poached in Riesling wine, fresh haricot verts with sliced almonds, and some sort of couscous-apricot dish, the guests adjourned to the living room. The well-windowed space ran the whole length of the house. Crossbeams o
f naked wood sectioned off the ceiling, alternating with skylights. The interior accents were all off white, cream white, or some other variation of white. Outside a stone terrace gave out to a generous yard. A thick border of junipers shielded the house and grounds from prying eyes.

  Aino Lehtonen appeared subdued that evening. Or perhaps, Brand thought, it was the absence of the covering mask of make-up that gave her a more thoughtful look, truer to herself. Brand imagined that the whole gathering could be airlifted over the Atlantic and dropped down into a loft in New York City’s Soho neighborhood. No one would bat an eye.

  “Sophisticated, wealthy, socially bulletproof,” Hammar murmured to Brand. “‘Hipsters,’ might be the English word, or ‘yuppies.’ To make a pun on your surname I’d tell you they are very ‘brand-conscious.’”

  “Please never say that kind of thing again,” Brand responded with mock seriousness. She wandered about the room to observe the fashionable group. Seated on a couch nearby, a man named Boris held forth to several guests.

  “Mauritania,” Lehtonen said in a low voice, moving close to Brand and following her gaze. “A refugee success story. Boris has become a rather well-known male model in Scandinavia. We like to think Ebba had something to do with that, since she first put him on the cover of her store’s magazine.”

  “I’m ashamed to say I have only a weak grasp of where Mauritania is,” Brand said.

  “You know, you’re a good candidate for an article in my magazine,” Ebba said, breaking into their conversation. “People would be very interested in you.”

  “I doubt that,” Brand said.

  “There’s a buzz about the New York City detective in our midst. About you and Krister Hammar. We all think you are up to something. Are you?”

  Brand gave what she hoped was a noncommittal smile. “America is finished,” she heard someone say, the phrase cutting through the general conversation. She didn’t see who spoke.

  She tried to make herself relax and slip into the evening’s warm bath of wealth and good company. Aperitifs came out, cognac, and more champagne. Glazed as she was with Adderall, the alcohol didn’t immediately appeal to her. That would come later, when she wanted to wind down. Espresso appeared, served black and strong in tiny cups, with lemon peels. The cultured atmosphere was almost enough to make her believe that life should be no more than this, breaking bread with such smooth, well-presented people.