This Land is no Stranger

by Sarah Hollister

  The valley of the Hede served in former days as a haven for cross-border smuggling. Before that, in the medieval era, it was an avenue of invasion. The kind of violence he saw was more suited to those periods than to the relatively quiet times to which Engmark had become accustomed. A few domestic disturbances were the worst the district of Härjedalen could offer its law enforcement officers.

  Engmark only dimly recalled the last homicide in the area, over two years ago, a stir crazy wife shooting her husband during a stretch of unrelenting winter storms. The dead man had not been careful enough where he spat his tobacco, Engmark remembered.

  His trainee, Polisaspirant Lovisa Svärd, insisted on donning the full Tyvek hazmat suit and booties. She stepped through the charred, collapsed interior of the house. What she hoped to find that Engmark might have missed in his own inspection was a mystery. He stood in the driveway and looked on. Perhaps it was a good idea for the young trainee to get her feet wet.

  “Two deceased here,” she called out, which Engmark had already established. “Adult male and adult female.”

  Yes, yes.

  He watched Svärd crouch over the bodies, only partially visible to Engmark because so much building debris stood in the way. The trainee wielded a pen or a probe of some sort and poked at the corpses. He was about to warn her off and say they must wait for forensic specialists when she called out.

  “Looks as if mortality preceded the fire,” Svärd said.

  How could she know that? Engmark thought.

  “How could you know that?” he shouted.

  “Because she bothered to examine the oral cavity of the deceased,” said a voice behind him.

  Engmark turned to see the celebrated Stockholm Detective Inspector Vincent Hult on the scene. The overwhelmed Engmark felt the earth shift beneath his feet. The new arrival represented such an influx of political weight that the local constable experienced an impulse to grovel.

  “Detective Inspector Vincent Hult!” he barked out. “I am polisinspektör Oliver of the Hede substation! Thank you for responding so quickly to my call!”

  The response time was indeed remarkable. The cottage fire had been called in almost simultaneously at 2312, first by a passing motorist and then minutes later by the owner of a residence across the river. Engmark marked his arrival on the scene at 0207, behind the fire crew. He put a request out for aid at 0420 or thereabouts.

  Now here it was a little after 0800, and Hult had made the trip from Stockholm in record time. Unless…a police helicopter?

  “If our two DOA’s had still been alive when the fire hit,” Hult explained, “their respiratory tracts would display evidence of smoke inhalation. But I would bet Miss HazMat over there found the nasopharyngeal epidermis to be pink as cotton candy, though perhaps a little fried by ambient heat.”

  “Yes,” said the constable.

  The man informed Engmark that a simple “Hult” would do when addressing him. He took charge of the scene with breathless efficiency. Shooing Trainee Svärd out of the burned house, Hult ordered her to walk the driveway for evidence. He seemed most interested in the relatively intact corpus lying sprawled near the chalet, dead from either smoke inhalation or as a result of a smashed skull.

  Engmark stuck to Hult, kneeling with him beside the corpse. Taking the initiative, the constable introduced a pen into the mouth of the deceased, hoping to find whether any fire effect was pre- or post-mortem. Hult gently batted the forensic attempt away.

  “I’d say the head injury alone was enough, wouldn’t you agree?” The wound gaped, brain matter clearly visible, but now collecting a light frosting of snow from the persistent flurries in the air.

  “The Mercedes sedan?” Hult asked. “Any intel on that?”

  “Norwegian plates, registered to an Oslo import-export concern.” Engmark said, glad he could at least demonstrate his investigative prowess by offering this bit of information.

  “Has anyone checked with the border control station at Västra Malmagen, to see when the car might have come across?”

  Brilliant! Engmark thought. Hult deserved all his awards and accolades. A true genius of a police detective!

  “I was just doing that when you arrived,” Engmark lied. He wondered why the Stockholm detective had not inquired about the other burned out hulk, the Volvo SUV.

  Hult took a last look at the victim, closely examining the head wound, then rose to his feet.

  “Your forensic team,” Engmark asked, rising with him, “is it by any chance coming to examine the torched vehicles?”

  “Oh, I’m here ‘all by my lonesome,’” Hult said, pronouncing the phrase in English. “I happened to be in the area and heard the call go out.”

  Engmark marveled. Masterful! What a man! A real bloodhound—not in from Stockholm at all—happened to be in the area!

  From her position halfway up the drive, Lovisa Svärd whistled, the type of loud piercing sound for which Engmark had never developed the knack. She gestured off into the dense forest on the far side of the burned-out chalet.

  “Something happening over there,” she called.

  They skirted the trees at the edge of the property. A faint track in broken snow ran off to the west. Svärd had a head start. Engmark followed behind Hult as they forced their way through thigh-high drifts.

  “Trainee!” the constable shouted ahead. “Halt your progress!”

  Odd that Engmark hadn’t discovered the strange, bloody scene before, in the woods only a hundred meters from the cottage. The sound of it was certainly loud enough. When they got closer the sight proved garish.

  “Oh, lord,” the atheist Engmark murmured. “Another body.”

  Crows and ravens several dozen strong picked at something half covered in the snow, something blood-streaked and large. A pair of pine martens, perched comically on their back haunches, watched from a safe distance, but skedaddled on the approach of the humans.

  The birds, however, had to be scared off by Trainee Svärd. Several swooped at their harasser before retreating. They settled on branches of the surrounding birches and pines, looking on with their blank, dark eyes.

  “An animal,” Svärd reported. “Dead.”

  “We can see that, Lovisa,” Engmark said.

  Hult gazed down silently at the crow-ravaged form.

  “That’s the biggest damned wolf I’ve ever seen,” Engmark said.

  “It’s not a wolf,” Hult returned. Then he did an odd thing. Hult physically and roughly herded the constable and his trainee backward, away from the scene.

  He addressed Engmark and Svärd in the dry, domineering manner of a military man commanding subordinates. “Listen to me very carefully.”

  The two nodded, caught by his tone.

  “I want an absolute embargo on this,” he said. “No one, I mean nobody outside the three of us, hears about it. You keep your damned mouths shut, do you understand?”

  “Yes, Detective Hult,” the two uniformed cops mumbled.

  After that, the mood at the crime scene changed. Hult instructed Svärd to cordon off the area where the dead animal lay. By the time an elite team of investigators showed up, Hult had already sent the constable and his trainee back to Hede village. He made them swear, as they departed, to total silence about what they had seen in the woods.

  44.

  So many came from so far. Varzha had never seen such a gathering of travelers, hundreds of men, women, and children who appeared as if summoned to Dollar Boy’s funeral by a higher authority. They crowded into the big rented dance hall in Spånga, a suburb on the far edges of Stockholm.

  She was proud of her people. Some of the cars pulled up in front of the hall were beautiful and expensive, including late model Volvos, Mercedes, a Lexus, even a Rolls Royce. Sure there were battered old wrecks that blew smoke, too, and mud-splattered pickup trucks. Many of the attendees traveled by public transport, but everyone turned out in their best finery. Tradition called for white symbolizing purity, or red, which represe
nted vitality. Some now chose to wear black, the universal color of mourning.

  The beauty of the Roma was on display. In keeping with the deceased boy’s nickname, American dollar bills covered Lash Mirga’s casket. How had people found so many? Varzha wondered. She herself had trouble coming up with a single bill, until her brother Vago reminded her that he had kept a cache of useless foreign currency collected during their stints of street begging.

  The bloody scene at the Hede River kept intruding in her mind, the shock of seeing dead bodies while Moro’s strong arms lifted her above it all. The images would not relent.

  She remembered something Moro Part had told her when she was barely eleven years old, recently removed from the violence she had witnessed in her village in Romania. The attack on her parents had been ugly. Vago raged forward to stop it, and he, too, was beaten savagely. She still heard the angry bellows of the crowd, still felt the heat of the fire incinerating those she loved. Since then there was a stone where her heart had been.

  “We must take our destiny in our own hands, Varzha,” Moro Part had told her. “The icke-romer will never give it up to us. We must seize it.”

  Moro embarked on a campaign of education and indoctrination. He instructed Varzha in the ways of the world, which in his view existed entirely in black and white. Romani or gentile. Varzha’s people on one side, and on the other the “icke-romer,” as Moro sometimes called them, the non-Romani.

  Vengeance figured prominently in Moro’s world-view. An eye for an eye. Accept no blow without responding two-fold, four-fold, a hundred-fold. For a long time, Varzha trusted Moro. He was a rock to which she clung. Now, feeling the sadness of Dollar Boy’s passing, gazing at his coffin only a few steps away, Varzha questioned everything she heard. Was vengeance the only way forward?

  Moro did all the organizing of mourners, she knew. The gathering was as much to honor Moro’s reach and power as it was to mark Dollar Boy’s death. The influence of Moro Part as a Kalderaš godfather could be measured not only by the number of mourners, but also in the speed with which they came together. A mere two days after the violent “Battle of Hede River”—as Moro was calling it, half in jest—here they all were.

  Varzha wore black. No more the white-faced wedding dress girl—she was through with begging—she wore a modest silk dress for the funeral. Gold coins draped around her neck, strung on a black ribbon. Considering her presence at Dollar Boy’s death, Varzha thought she might be treated as an honored guest at the funeral. It was not so. She felt shunted aside and ignored. Lash Mirga’s family sat beside the casket and greeted guests. She knew not one of them.

  Varzha recalled the only image she had seen of the great poet and singer, Papuszka. In the photograph, her wise face showed its age. She still wore her hair in long braids. To Varzha, Papuszka was a vision of the past. To be honored, yes, but not imitated slavishly.

  Times changed. Varzha was not the same person she had been only a few days before. The supposed changeless realities of the Romani had become transformed, whether her people admitted it or not. The rules for a Kalderaš “maiden” were changing—even that word sounded old-fashioned now. Varzha imagined the world opening for her like the petals of a rose. She wondered what possibilities might exist for her, beyond the lockstep inevitability of marriage and family.

  Mooning around Varzha at the funeral, Luri Kováč represented another figure stubbornly holding onto the past. The tongue-tied street mendicant had often taken up a post on Drottninggatan near to where Vago and Varzha usually stood. He had cleaned himself up for the occasion of the funeral, wearing a bright red felt vest. Shaved, trimmed, and well groomed, he now less resembled a bear than a bull.

  Wherever Varzha went at the gathering, there was Luri. When she approached the casket to lay down her dollar offering, just as she most wished to be most alone with her thoughts, Luri approached and hovered beside her like a bodyguard. Though she was fond of him, she did not need the protections he offered up. In particular she did not believe that Dollar Boy’s muló, his ghost, might haunt her in the future. She was through with such superstitions.

  Romani caskets were always extra large, in order to fit the possessions of the dead. For the journey into the afterlife, Dollar Boy’s body was adorned with clothes, photographs, his beloved iPhone, a collection of knives, tufts of hair from the animals he took care of at the Baron’s estate.

  All the items had been smuggled out of the barracks at Gammelhem without the Baron knowing anything. In fact, none of the non-Romani knew the true circumstances of Dollar Boy’s death, not the Baron or Magnusson, not the police, no one beyond Moro’s inner circle. He merely failed to appear at the estate, failed to return from his vet run to Uppsala, failed to bring back Fenrir. Such was the absolute separateness of the Romani world from the gadje that a huge funeral like this could go off unremarked and unnoticed by the Swedish community at large.

  Varzha meditated bitterly on the injustice that no elaborate funeral arrangements had been mounted for Lel. Her sworn sister, and Dollar Boy’s intended, had perished by her own hand after enduring the physical limits of brutality at the hands of foreign beasts. Through no fault of her own, the girl had died in disgrace. The Romani community turned its back on her. Such was the way of the world, Varzha thought. Perhaps her bitterness was itself gadje, influenced by their ideas of equality and social justice.

  Pallbearers loaded Lash Mirga’s casket into a station wagon to begin its long journey across the sea, finally to arrive at a cemetery in Romania. The women’s lamentations wound down and the vehicles began pulling away into the night. Varzha found Moro sitting alone in the dance hall. The man looked tired, dazed by alcohol, but supremely satisfied at the obvious success of the gathering. He did not remark upon her presence as she sat down next to him on one of the folding chairs set up for the funeral.

  Varzha stayed silent. Moro sighed. She sighed. There existed a bond between them. Moro had physically removed her from the clutches of the traffickers. He had carried her past the ravaged bodies, in a place where the sharp scent of death hung like a fog. He had set fire to the Hede River cottage as they left it.

  The big man had always been gentle and kind to her. She felt not a whiff of judgment from him. On the contrary, she suspected that the Romani godfather admired her. Yet Varzha had not been prepared for repercussions of that terrible, elemental, insistent word, vengeance. The two syllables could be spoken easily, tossed off, as if they meant no more than a blowing of the nose, or coughing—something done and quickly forgotten.

  She did not grieve over the deaths of the traffickers. But sitting there in full view of a boy cut down before he had much time to live, Varzha was no longer certain of her own righteousness. Or of Moro Part’s.

  Together she and Moro had brought back the body of poor Dollar Boy and disposed of the Baron’s old Scania truck. They watched the vehicle plunge into the icy waters of a lake somewhere in the fjäll. Varzha was unclear exactly where. The sight of the huge truck breaking through the ice was spectacular. Its destruction made the switch to the greater comfort in Moro’s well-heated Mercedes sedan all the more pleasurable.

  So it was over, Varzha thought. But on their drive back to Stockholm, Moro began to speak about loose ends left untied. He reminded her that Jarl Voss still walked the earth.

  “The Turkish traffickers, yes, they won’t bother us again,” Moro said. “But Jarl Voss escapes retribution. This is not a suitable outcome. This is not our way.”

  Varzha wondered if such a worm of a man as Jarl Voss was worth her anger and her effort. Moro often made reference to an ancient tradition among the Kalderaš Romani, to destroy enemies “unto the third or fourth generation,” as the Old Testament advised. He spoke about the Romans sowing the fields of Carthage with salt, in order that no phoenix would ever rise from those ashes.

  For the time being, she and Moro Part sat quietly together, experiencing a pleasant air of exhaustion, grief and camaraderie. They idly watched the work
ers cleaning up the remnants of the gathering at the big dance hall. Finally she broke the silence.

  “Why must it be unto the third or fourth generation?” she asked.

  Sleepy Moro did not want to be disturbed. “Tomorrow, we talk.”

  But Varzha felt the need to put her mind at ease. “Jarl Voss, well, he’s a gay boy, so he probably won’t have kids. How do we destroy him unto his children, much less his grandchildren and great-grandchildren?”

  “You are thinking wrong,” Moro told her. He sat upright and stretched, then recited the Biblical passage. “For I am the Lord thy God, a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon their children unto the third and fourth generation, to them that hate me.”

  “Third or fourth? Which is it?”

  “I’ve always thought to err on the side of making certain,” Moro responded.

  “So, okay, the fourth generation. But what does that mean in the case of Jarl Voss? I still don’t understand.”

  “You have to go the other way,” Moro instructed her, interrupting his lesson with an enormous yawn. “Jarl Voss, he represents the first generation. Who is his father?”

  “Elias Voss,” Varzha answered. Moro had schooled her in the Voss family’s genealogy.

  “Yes, so that is what?”

  “The second generation.” She marked the count on her fingers, careful to use the left hand in the way that her grandmother had taught her, then stopped—shaking her hands as if shaking off the old superstitions.

  “And who is Elias Voss’s father?”

  “Vilgot Voss,” she answered. “Vilgot Voss is the third generation.”

  Here was the other side of Moro Part. Not the kindly man who watched over her and Vago and petted them and brought them pizza. This was the Old Testament voice from the past. Varzha came to the sickening realization that Moro did not believe the job was done.

  “Yes, all right. And Vilgot Voss’s father?”

  “Loke Voss, the fourth generation.”