Unfortunately the big male, Fenrir, had already been loaded into the truck for his trip south. Hyenas were the rare species where the females were normally bigger than the males. Fenrir was the exception. He was large beyond measure. As the baron and the Brand woman had emerged from the barn, the noble made it a point to flip back a corner of the tarpaulin covering the Scania’s cargo bed. The chained animal lay crouched in the dim interior of the truck, its eyes twin pinpoints of glowing amber.
“You know, despite appearances, they’re more closely related to cats than to dogs.” The baron had thoroughly enjoyed seeing the creature’s effect on his guest from New York. The blood drained from Veronika Brand’s face. The baron moved forward, wanting the pleasure of catching the detective as she fainted from fear. But he was forced to conclude that the streets of New York City had trained the woman well, because she stood her ground.
“He’s named Fenrir,” the baron said. “That’s the great wolf of our mythology, son of the trickster devil god Loki. He’s often quite docile, but today the poor thing is scheduled for dental surgery. I would not advise climbing in there with him.”
A minor incident at the truck had marred the baron’s equanimity. He caught his man Dollar Boy exchanging words with Krister Hammar. The two of them spoke in what sounded like Romani, a language Baron Kron had never bothered to learn.
As the old man passed by with his swagger of privilege, he gave the kid a stinging whack across the shoulders with the leather switch he carried. “Prata svenska!” he barked, telling Dollar Boy to speak only Swedish. Kron had an impulse to strike the Sami lawyer, too, but pinched it back before walking on.
Now he watched Brand and Hammar drive away from Gammelhem in their preposterous Saab. The woman drove, the baron noticed disgustedly. He had a momentary thought that he should not have allowed them such unfettered access to his lodge and grounds. A disturbing picture formed in his mind. Brand and Hammar might meet with his man Dollar Boy down the road. They would exchange intel and hatch plans. A tiny eruption of rage bubbled up within the baron.
Veronika Brand was the kind of woman whose looks you didn’t notice, until suddenly you did. She hid her sexual appeal under a bushel. Commonplace minds couldn’t see it, the baron thought. Sun-colored hair, yes, and piercing gray eyes, but a certain hardness to her face prevented most people from considering her pretty. His visceral recognition of the woman’s beauty only added to his irritation. His own feeling of attraction offended him.
The woman Cynny, the non-twin of the threesome, approached from behind him just then, wrapping her arms around his shoulders. The scent of sandalwood perfume enveloped the baron like the breath of heaven.
“Come inside.” Cynny made the simple words sparkle with multiple meanings.
The baron’s upset vanished in anticipation of coming pleasure. He was never much given to second-guessing himself. He would discipline Dollar Boy upon his return. Let the Vosses take care of the two meddlers.
38.
Once they dropped off Mattias Rapp in the small village of Västvall, Varzha was alone in the car with “JV,” Jarl Voss. They drove toward the Norwegian border in Jarl’s super-expensive cocoon of an automobile, a Volvo SUV that Varzha thought he probably prized more than his own mother.
Considering the circumstances, she had an easy time of it. He threatened no violence and Varzha felt no fear. The two of them weren’t all that far apart in age. On the rare moments he wasn’t talking on the phone, they listened to his idiot black metal music full blast. He acted like the king of Sweden, and forgot the real king, Karl Gustav. Technology kept his royal highness well-connected to the rest of the world. Jarl seemed childishly proud of the three newest-iteration iPhones he kept in his car.
“Cold, warm, and hot,” he explained. “One for family, one for business, and one for social.”
Varzha returned a blank response to whatever nonsense Jarl might spout, carefully maintaining the pretense that she did not understand Swedish. She noticed he never used the family phone and would ignore it whenever it buzzed. He did, however, answer the “warm” phone, the one for business, frequently leaving it on speakerphone so Varzha could hear both sides of the rapid-fire conversation. Mostly he described where they were and how much longer it would take to reach their destination, which he referred to as “the chalet.”
In one exchange, an accented male voice asked Jarl Voss about Varzha herself. She picked out the word agn, bait. The idea made her sick. She imagined herself dangling from a fishing line over the heads of faceless men with money in their hands, shouting out numbers. A supposed virgin, sold to the highest bidder.
In truth, Varzha suspected that Jarl saw himself more as Sweden’s queen rather than its king. She saw him as what she knew him to be, a gay boy. He liked to chatter and boast about his clothes, but would probably be horrified if forced to remove hers, the kind of man who might beat a woman but would never sleep with one. Several times on the drive he snorted white powder, either cocaine or crystal, she didn’t know. The drug revved him up. He talked whether anyone was listening or not. He was constantly on the phone, speaking fast, saying nothing.
A single question burned in Varzha’s mind. Had Moro Part and Dollar Boy managed to wreak vengeance on those who would prey on young Romani girls? They had vowed to do so, but the scheme was risky and open to mistakes. No word had come on the fate of her abductors, Liam and Nils. She tried to ready herself for an explosion of wrath when the news came to JV.
They followed a river valley west into the mountains. The land they drove through was like an abandoned bird’s nest, where only a litter of cracked eggshells showed that any creature had ever lived there at all. They had passed long stretches of nothing but empty pine woods, full of kasali, forest spirits. Varzha didn’t like the Swedish countryside, especially not in winter. Stockholm was better, crowded with life and opportunities.
Anxious and jittery as she was, Varzha managed to fall into an exhausted sleep. She woke abruptly to hear Jarl screaming and pounding on the steering wheel. Blocking the road ahead was a herd of snowy white animals with brown spots, nubby horns, and sly sweet eyes. Several of the reindeer stood mid-pavement, lazily gazing at the SUV with what seemed like mild interest. Some still clung to the side of the hillside slope, while others had already crossed the road and were continuing downward toward the river.
Jarl reached across Varzha to the glove box and pulled out a small pistol. A child-sized weapon, Varzha thought with disdain, a little palm-sized .22 automatic. Against a hundred-and-fifty kilo reindeer, a pea-shooter like that would do nothing. The creatures were famously thick-skulled.
It didn’t matter to Jarl. Her madman captor leaped out of the SUV waving the weapon. Varzha opened the door on the opposite side of the vehicle and stepped out, too.
She had to do something. The fool was going to open fire.
She began to sing in her high, clear voice. A manele, a Romani folk song of love and loss.
The sound echoed eerily off the surrounding hills. Both Jarl and the beasts went stock still. The man stopped brandishing his stupid lady’s gun. Moving slowly, gracefully, dreamily, as if under a spell, the herd gradually moved off the roadway. Evidently, love was a universal concept, and reindeer understood loss.
They drove on. Varzha saw Jarl occasionally turn to glance over at her, a quizzical look on his face. He had heard something in her singing that had touched his cold Voss heart. When he had tossed the pistol back into its hiding place, though, he had made sure to lock the glove box.
The revenge scheme Varzha had embarked upon depended on a frighteningly small piece of electronics, which she kept concealed in a wooden barrette clasping the thick braids of her hair. Dollar Boy found the device for them. It was supposedly the world’s tiniest cell phone, designed, he said, to be smuggled into prisons. “Beat the Man,” the model was called. Compared side by side, tiny keypad and all, it was only a little larger than Varzha’s thumb.
It gave her peo
ple pinpoint accuracy to Varzha's physical location, her life-line. If the tiny device were ever discovered, her captors might kill her.
All of Varzha’s modesty had been burned away by her anger over the kidnappings. She retained her maidenhead but lost her innocence. Varzha Luna was like no Romani girl who ever existed, proud, fierce, and without shame. When this was all over, she swore secretly, she would see Vago safe and then hang herself. Perhaps she would pour gasoline over her body and burn alive at her old post on Drottninggatan, in front of Åhlens department store.
So far no one had thought to search Varzha. The easy way she had gone with the men when they came for her on Drottninggatan should have betrayed her secret motives. She had displayed passive willingness, not fear. That alone might have alerted the men that something was off, that she did not resemble their other victims. But Mattias and the others noticed nothing. They were clearly very stupid and careless. The idea that roles could be reversed, that the predator could become the prey, never occurred to them.
Everything depended on the loyalty and fortitude of Moro and Dollar Boy. Dollar Boy had lost his true love, Lel, to a rape hotel in Norway and eventually to suicide. He had repeatedly sworn blood vengeance. But Varzha understood that the human heart was susceptible to change. Perhaps Dollar Boy had distracted himself with another girl. Perhaps the fire in his heart flared only for a little while and then had been snuffed by the passage of time.
Moro she trusted more. He was protecting the lives not only of a few girls but of his entire clan. He was also as fierce as a mongoose. Varzha had never actually seen a mongoose, but it was an animal from far back in the history of her people that killed snakes and that everyone always said was unstoppable. She herself had once witnessed Moro and two other chache Roma boys take on a whole gang of Schwedo Nazis and bloody them all, putting more than a few of the skinheads in the hospital.
The three of them had sworn an alliance, a wortacha, Moro and Dollar Boy and Varzha. The two males, who were not accustomed to see females as equals, were forced to treat her as one. Varzha’s fury rendered her powerful. The others in the wortacha were at first dismissive, then reluctantly accepting, and finally awed.
All she could do was to follow the scheme that they had laid down—to allow herself to be taken, and to be followed by Moro and Dollar Boy, who would eliminate her abductors one by one in the most painful way possible. Varzha refused to be a victim, preferring instead the role of an avenging angel.
Lel had been her sworn sister as well as being Dollar Boy’s intended. Varzha knew a few of the other stolen girls, also. She had volunteered for the dangerous duty, insisting on the path forward. Now she would pursue the plan through to the very end, adhering to the scheme even if it meant her death. It was not a prospect she relished—she especially feared for Vago if she was gone—but she would do it for Lel. She would do it for the others who had been fed into the trafficking pipeline. She would do it so future perpetrators would know that they, too, would pay for their evil with their lives.
For the high crime of driving in a car with JV now, Varzha would be disgraced in the eyes of her people. The community would turn against her simply for being alone with men, gadje men. They would never respect the purity of her intentions. None of that mattered.
Back in Romania, her mother had often recounted the story of Papusza, a legendary singer and poet who violated the fundamental rules of Romani society. Papusza made a foolish move, trusting a gadjo with her exquisite written poetry. Of course the gentile betrayed her, translating the texts into Polish and selling her words for all the world to read. Such public exposure rendered her invisible within the Romani community. She died ostracized from family, from friends, from her people. The message of her mother’s story was clear to Varzha. Any dealings with gadje were bound to result in catastrophe.
“Tonight we see the Turkish woman doctor,” Jarl said into the phone, startling Varzha out of her thoughts. He used the phrase on the warm phone, the business one.
As far as she was concerned, Turks were the villains of the world. In the hierarchy of immigrants, where every immigrant shit on the immigrant below, Turks might be among the lowest of the low, but they could always look to the Roma to slag off and beat down. A Turkish doctor? Female or male, the prospect struck fear into her heart. She realized she was in greater danger than ever.
They followed the river valley deeper into the mountains.
◆◆◆
An hour later Jarl pulled the SUV into the driveway of a chalet of weathered wood. The A-frame structure sat on a small rise a kilometer off the road, within a pine forest, overlooking the white, snow-covered expanse of a frozen river.
A black Mercedes sedan blocked the driveway. It turned out the Turks had already arrived. Two males climbed out of the car, an older one, a heavyset bear of a man with a woolen hat pulled down over his ears, and another younger, more handsome one, evidently the driver.
A few seconds later a stylish woman emerged. She looked like no doctor Varzha had ever seen. She more resembled an actress in a Turkish video melodrama, not the star but the star’s girlfriend, maybe, the one who never left his side but always got killed halfway through the movie.
Jarl played the big man, the host. Herding Varzha before him, he led the others into the chalet. The place smelled musty and unused, with a simple vacation home layout. A towering stone fireplace, its hearth cold and filled with old ashes, dominated the living space. Above was a balcony. A kitchen opened to one side, a hallway to the other. Outside, expansive wooden decks surrounded the structure.
The Turkish arrivals took their places in an arrangement of chairs and couches. Varzha noticed that Jarl and the handsome driver kept exchanging smiles and glances. The other two were all business. They spoke in accented Swedish. Jarl pulled his prize offering front and center.
“She is not completely ugly,” said the woman doctor, eyeing Varzha head to toe. The girl recognized the strategy. In the marketplace you must always denigrate the goods before you buy.
“She has not been touched?” asked the older man.
“Totally pure,” Jarl promised. “I’ve been with her the whole time, since she left the protection of her family in Romania. Top quality goods.”
The older man took Varzha’s chin in his meaty paw, turning her head this way and that. “All the same, she must be examined to see if she is intact.”
The doctor surprised Varzha by swatting the man’s hand aside. “Not for you, Fevzi,” she snapped. So she is the big boss, Varzha thought.
“Come,” the woman said to her. She picked up a large carrying bag she had brought with her.
“I need to witness, in order to be sure,” the man who was called Fevzi said.
“You stay right where you are,” the woman ordered. “I do the thing.” Then she added, glancing at Jarl, “Me alone.”
“Use the back bedroom,” Jarl said, uninterested in participating. This was part of the business that excited him least—both professionally and personally. The three men watched as the two females proceeded down the back hall.
“Time for a celebration,” Jarl said brightly. He laid out a half dozen rails of cocaine on the coffee table. Fevzi sent the driver out to the Mercedes to retrieve a bottle of Johnny Walker blue label.
The woman doctor led Varzha into a small room with a single bed. She shut the door behind them.
“Lie down on the bed,” she said, pantomiming her command with a gesture. “Do you speak Swedish?”
Varzha shook her head. “We will have to make do,” the doctor said.
She proceeded to speak Swedish anyway. “My name is Hira Nur. I am a medical doctor. You will do as I say.”
The woman retrieved a small pouch from her bag. The pouch contained some sort of metal instrument. The sight of the strange tool alarmed Varzha. She didn’t know what was happening. Was this it? The first rape among many? When the doctor attempted physically to place her on the bed, she pushed back.
Escap
e was not possible. Varzha knew that, but she attempted to flee anyway. Bursting out of the little room, she turned down the hallway, away from the open living space in front.
“Voss!” Hira Nur shouted. But Jarl was already on her, chasing down Varzha as she ran. Catching the girl by the hair, he slammed her against the wooden paneling. She called out in pain. Her thick braids unraveled, and the barrette holding them in place clattered across the floor.
They stood facing one another, Varzha cornered, breathing hard, the doctor Hira Nur framed in the doorway of the little bedroom. Fevzi and the driver loomed behind Jarl.
“I’ve been so nice to you, älskling,” her captor said. His voice had a nasty edge to it. “But I can be not so nice, too.”
As Jarl advanced, his foot crushed the wooden barrette. He ignored it, reaching out and gripping Varzha roughly by the neck.
“Are you going to behave?” he yelled.
“Voss,” Hira Nur said, staring down at the broken hair clasp.
“Are you?” Jarl shouted. A spray of his spittle landed on Varzha’s face. He shook her like a rag doll.
“Voss,” the doctor repeated. She knelt down and picked up the shattered barrette. With it came Beat the Man, the world’s tiniest cell phone.
“What the fuck is this?” Hira Nur demanded in English.
39.
Brand watched Dollar Boy and Moro through the binoculars Hammar provided. They had followed the boy as he left the baron’s estate in the big Scania truck, watching from a distance as he rendezvoused with Moro Part. The two then had driven on, Brand careful not to be noticed on their trail. In that way, Dollar Boy unwittingly led them to an isolated A-frame vacation home located on the banks of the frozen-over Hede River.
The highway continued west toward the Norway border, a few kilometers away. Dollar Boy and Moro parked the Scania truck in a turnout along the road. Brand pulled the Saab into a snowed-over lane nearer to the chalet. She and Hammar got out to wait and watch what was happening.
This Land is no Stranger Page 21