She had hewed as closely to the truth as possible when explaining Hammar’s injuries to the hospital staff. He had broken through on the frozen river, she said. His nasty head wound occurred in the rough and tumble journey under the ice. As though there were sharpened battle axes submerged in the current, and the poor guy had bumped up against one of them.
Soon enough, the local cops would link what happened at the chalet near the Norway border with the comatose hospital patient and his hypothermic caretaker. The hospital staff would take a closer look at the slice in Hammar’s scalp. Questions would arise that would be difficult to evade.
It was inevitable. Brand should depart before it all came tumbling down on top of her. “Go where?” was the natural question, with “anywhere but here” being the natural response. She had to maintain her liberty. Her Dalgren relatives would be of no use. They would be the first to be contacted by any authorities searching for her.
Brand thought of Aino Lehtonen. Then of Moro Part, the Romani godfather. Her only possible allies. At the same time she feared their involvement. It was clear that Moro was not only a man of immense power in the Romani community, but also the mastermind of the revenge plot. The godfather’s tireless campaign against the traffickers felt Biblical. But we live in a world of rule of law, she reminded herself, not an Old Testament realm of eye-for-an-eye.
During the day, Brand had become something of a ghost in the medical center at Sveg. She wandered the deserted halls at all hours, slept in the lounges, ducked out for food at the village’s few restaurants. The weather remained bitter and she could not stay outside for long.
Still she hesitated to leave. Perhaps immersion in the stingingly frigid waters of the river had dazed her mind more than she knew.
The sight of a police uniform in the lobby of the hospital jolted her into action. The police woman was only checking on a victim of a car accident, but Brand took the hint. She threaded her way back up through the maze of medical center hallways to the room where Hammar had lain for over twenty-four hours now, dead to the world. The staff was well familiar with the coma victim’s helpmate, his assumed girlfriend, his guardian angel.
Entering Hammar’s room, she saw a slim, unfamiliar doctor or nurse bent over his motionless form. A female, anyway, in the midst of administering some kind of strange treatment, pressing a pillow down onto the face of the figure lying in bed.
At Brand’s entry, the woman turned her head, and despite the surgical mask Brand recognized her immediately. She had taken time to familiarize herself with as many members of the Voss family as she could. Ylva Voss was a biathlon hero who had been pictured many times in the press.
The woman reacted more quickly than Brand. She snarled what appeared to be an oddly happy greeting, as if delighted to see the American, then took up a steel bowl resting next to the patient’s bed and spun it across the room like a Frisbee. The thing clocked Brand directly in the middle of her forehead, stunning her. But she staggered forward, tackling the younger, fitter and more ferocious woman in a desperate bid to save her friend.
The battle was one-sided. Ylva pummeled Brand with repeated blows, flinging her around the hospital room. They crashed against a utility column, an IV stand, and a computer monitor suspended on a heavy steel boom. Pieces of equipment fell atop the unconscious patient, ripping his IV tubes away and displacing the bed a few feet toward the wall.
And of course a blade came out. Ylva pulled a full-size Ka-Bar from her belt, the kind of seven-inch clip-pointed fighting knife employed by the US Marine Corps. The monstrous weapon seemed to grow longer the closer it came, until it filled Brand’s vision.
Only by an extremely lucky kick did she manage to deny her attacker the immediate advantage of the knife. As Ylva scrambled backward to retrieve it, Brand managed to reach over and trip the room’s emergency alarm.
Lights flashed and a claxon sounded. Ylva came at her again. Brand dodged. Then the biathlete turned the knife on Hammar, stabbing down at his motionless form. A terrified Brand grabbed at her, making the woman miss. She managed only a deep strike into the mattress.
The blade stuck. Ylva struggled to extract it. Brand got in her only good hit of the battle, cracking her attacker with a fist to the side of the throat.
Then the first of many hospital staffers crashed into the room, filling it with shouts and warnings. Cornered, Ylva lifted up a stainless steel supply cart that must have easily weighed eighty kilos, hurled it through a closed window, and followed it out through the shattered glass.
The medical personnel rushed to check on the patient. Brand stepped over to the broken window. In the evening darkness she saw a figure scramble across a lower-story rooftop immediately below her. Ylva Voss turned to look back once, then slipped from the edge of the roof to the ground.
The female cop who Brand had encountered in the lobby charged into the room and joined her at the window, breathing hard and half-panicked. She worked a shoulder-mounted comm unit but seemed to struggle to operate it in her fluster.
Brand left the police woman standing amid the trashed-out hospital room. She maneuvered her way through the maze of empty corridors and left the medical center without anyone stopping her.
Two minutes later she was in Hammar’s Saab. Spatters of dried and frozen blood still marked the interior from its owner’s grievous head wound, as well as from his previous nosebleed.
Even with the cold, the Saab started on the first try. Brand headed east, leaving Sveg via the main highway. She drove not knowing exactly where she was headed.
48.
After a few hours of chugging along deserted back roads, Brand broke into an empty fäbod. It wasn’t one of the made-over modern ones. The small, slope-roofed hut, one of several grouped together, displayed gray weathered siding of uneven timber. Bracken lay tangled in the snow piled up outside.
Inside, the place smelled of mouse shit, mildew and something vaguely familiar, human or animal rot, she couldn’t tell. Stained, flower-print curtains hung limply in the downstairs windows.
She chose the place from the lack of footprints or car tracks in evidence. Abandoned, she concluded, or at least unvisited. The Saab she managed to hide behind a half-collapsed outbuilding. The car was another problem.
“Oh, there are plenty of old Saabs on the roads here in northern Sweden,” Hammar had responded, when Brand complained that the vehicle stuck out like a sore thumb.
“Krister, the whole damned Saab automobile company just went tits up,” she pointed out. “They’re not making them anymore.”
“I saw a 1969 Model 96 in tan just recently, a few months back,” Hammar had responded, breezily ignoring her main point. “We always salute each other with honks of the horn.”
Recalling the conversation now, Brand felt a blast of sentiment for the owner of the Saab. She knew the car could nail her. There were any number of law enforcement entities in the hunt. The American interloper was now linked to many crimes, a chalet burning, various and sundry disruptions of the peace at a medical center—not to mention a string of murders. A BOLO or APB would have likely been issued, if Swedish police had such a system as a be-on-the-lookout or an all-points bulletin.
The Vosses, too, would pounce if they encountered an ancient blue Saab anywhere on the road. Perhaps, in the immediate area, the family and the police were much the same thing.
So she was marooned, lost during winter in the fjäll, the fell, the marches, the Swedish uplands. Alone in one of the least populated area of Europe. The Fell could just as well be Antarctica for the frozen wilderness expanse of it.
“You’ve thoroughly screwed yourself now,” Brand whispered, the words spelled out in cloudy vapor as they were swallowed by silence.
Exhausted, cold, and hungry, guilty of breaking and entering, she did what she could. Half-blind in the darkness, she made a thorough search of the shack, looking for food and weapons. She found neither, not even a stale cracker or a household hammer. Debris lay scattered on the floo
r. A discarded plank featured an array of evil-looking rusty nails, ready to impale Brand’s foot. She laid it carefully aside.
A woodstove stood in the corner. After a few tries she got a fire going. She worried about the smoke giving her away. But a grove of trees shielded the place from the road. Besides, the flue didn’t draw well enough to send more than a puff or two up the crumbling chimney. The major part of the smoke merely seeped into the interior.
The bed was only a wood-framed cot. The ragged foam mattress pad looked as if it would disintegrate in a cloud of toxic dust, should she lie down on it. Brand tried to make it serviceable by sweeping clean the rodent droppings as best she could. Items of clothing salvaged from the Saab served as bed linen. She left her parka on. Hunger she would have to endure.
Better to light a candle than curse the darkness, and there was a stub of one on a windowsill. Brand lit it and placed the wavering flame near the head of the bed. She climbed aboard, covering herself with Hammar’s bloody parka.
Exhausted, battered by the beating she had just taken at the hands of the Voss madwoman, she still could not sleep.
The musty smell that had engulfed her now summoned up memories of another hovel, a wreck of a place in the woods of upstate New York that the family always referred to as “the deer shack,” since it was only used in the fall hunting season. As a child she abhorred everything about it, the filth, the air of abandonment and disuse, the carcasses of white tails strung up on poplar trees outside.
She much preferred the farm. In memory, her childhood was forever sunlit. She spent winter holidays as well as summers there, while her mother took the opportunity for serious solitary drinking back in Queens. But in Brand’s mind Jamestown was never snowy, always green and golden. She was allowed to roam free, an incredible blessing unavailable to a small child in New York City.
Brand pictured herself in a sea of waist-high grasses, harvesting daisies, black-eyed Susans, and Indian paintbrushes to bring home to the farmhouse of her grandparents. Somewhere in the background, a crew baled hay in the fields, black-and-white Holsteins lowed in the meadow, and all was right in the world.
The image was a lie. She picked flowers not out of childhood innocence but in a desperate attempt to salve the emotional wounds that afflicted Klara and Gustav Dalgren and her great-aunt Alice. Her painstakingly gathered bouquets did no good.
Even as a young child, Brand recognized that something was not right with the household. Dark currents ran under the surface. Gustav drank. There were nights when she heard him rage in the downstairs kitchen, crashing and yelling until Brand found herself sobbing with fear.
Now lying awake in a Swedish fäbod halfway around the world in Härjedalen, a word she could barely pronounce, she tried to sweep those memories away and replace them with more pleasant ones. She recalled a late summer day when oppressive heat lured Klara, Alice and her into the farm’s woodlot. A spring pooled amid a stand of sugar maples. The older women stripped down to their linens and sank down as far as they could in the cool water. Only their heads remained visible, floating disembodied. They both wore looks of contentment.
Brand, twelve years old and shamefully shy of her body, crouched on the bank. The voices of Klara and Alice drifted on the hot summer breeze, going from Swedish to English to a confusing combination of both.
The two women never entirely got the hang of America or the English language—they would have reacted with puzzlement about what “got the hang of” meant. They used a characteristic mmm and awww to show they were paying attention, the sound like a murmur. Walter was ‘Valter’, win was ‘vin’, wine was ‘vine’, and no z sound existed at all, only s.
Why had her aunt and grandparents come to America, Brand asked her mother, if they loved Sweden so much? Marta Brand never answered directly, simply passed on to other subjects. She had put a firm distance between herself and the old country ways of her mother and aunt. Marta was a good-time American girl, too busy living it up in the present to bother with the past.
The Jamestown farm was cursed. Even an idyllic memory like that of the afternoon at the spring could turn sour. The two sisters emerged from the water and walked slowly back toward the farmhouse. Their underclothes dried only gradually in the humid August air. Their hair remained damp. They carried their dresses bundled in their arms. Twelve-year-old Brand wanted the two adults to get dressed already. She worried about them being seen.
Alice began chattering about swimming as kids in a lake in Sweden, frigid even in summer. She spoke about Gustav being with her and Klara, as well as a person called by a name that sounded to Veronika like “Low-keh.”
“How handsome he was, wasn’t he, Klara? And what an eye Loke had for the ladies!”
Brand remembered her grandmother reacting not at all, remaining stone-faced.
“And a special eye he had for you,” Alice added teasingly.
Klara turned and slapped her sister hard. Brand had seen Klara chasten Alice before, sometimes with words, sometimes with a gentle cuff, but never anything as sharp as that slap.
The candle flickered in the tiny shack where Brand was squatting. She reached into the inner pocket of her parka for the photograph she had retrieved from Elin’s deserted room. The group of four happy teenagers and one younger child stared out at her from Sweden at the dawn of the 1930s.
Flipping the fragile photograph over, she could barely see, in the flickering candlelight of the mildewed fäbod, the neat, spidery writing. The hand was not of her grandmother Klara, but of Alice.
Five names: Elin, Alice, Klara, Gustav Dalgren, Loke. Loke Voss.
Yes, here was the Voss family elder, Brand thought, the boy with the troubled expression in his face. He remained in the shadows to the right of the others, looking longingly over at Klara.
Loke. Accused of igniting the Nordic Light fire, he had never been held publicly accountable for the arson or deaths. Smoke from those flames drifted across the Atlantic and hung over the Jamestown farmhouse like a pall.
Brand realized she had been destined to come to Sweden all along. Her whole life fed into this moment. She was somehow meant to confront Loke Voss for the crimes of the past. But her target seemed to recede each day she spent in the country. Her ancestors loomed accusingly in her mind. What are you doing here? they demanded, the question echoing that of the skinhead on the train.
She slipped the old photo back into the chest pocket of her parka. When sleep finally settled on her, a wolf-faced nattmara came and sat on her chest. The evil hag whispered death and despair into Brand’s dreams, until a stolen pistol materialized and scared the nightmare away.
49.
The mountains and forests that rose around her were blank. She was the sole human left alive in the dead world of the Fell. That morning in the fäbod, she bit into her last Adderall. Fifteen minutes later, as she strode out to meet the day, the speed kicked in. She started feeling like an All-American girl.
To Brand’s eyes, the fabled Nordic light—the real, actual Nordic light, not her grandfather’s doomed newspaper—always had a strange feel. Now the sun, visible behind a scrim of polarizing clouds, somehow morphed and doubled itself, as if she were living on a planet illuminated by twin stars. It was a trick of atmosphere, sure, and Brand had heard of it happening, but that didn’t make it any less unsettling.
A network of small, snow-covered lanes ran off the main highway, the north-south artery located a dozen kilometers to the east. She tramped on. The amphetamine salts coursing through her blood forced her jaw to tighten, which helped suppress an urge to sing a hey-ho song of the open road. Plentiful animal signs showed in the snow, both scat and tracks. But no people were around anywhere.
The whole area proved eerily empty. She passed an ancient abandoned rail locomotive, decayed and crumbling in the middle of the woods. It looked as though the operators had hopped off and left the big machine there, legging it to more promising environs. Whatever steel rails there were lay buried in snow.
&
nbsp; At every crossroads (“if you see a fork in the road, take it” echoed the voice of Willie Uricco), Brand flipped her last ten kronor coin to decide which way to go. Her bad luck held. She lost her grip on the coin and dropped it into a snowbank. She spent a fruitless few minutes searching for it.
Her mind never stayed on any single track for long. Forks in the road led her to think of spoons, which made her think of food. Forks also made her think of knives, a lethal seven-inch blade in particular. Ylva Voss had left her monster knife embedded in the mattress of Brand’s comatose partner in crime, Krister Hammar.
The police would have been all over the incident in the hospital room, just like they had to be all over the business along the Hede River. They would interview Hammar, but of course the man had the right to remain silent, notwithstanding his total inability to speak. Hee-hee, ha-ha, went Brand’s mind. The Adderall failed to focus her as it usually did. She felt dizzy and dumbstruck, as though several IQ points were draining out on the road behind her.
With the morning, the sky had turned sickly blue-white, the color of skim milk. After a quarter hour there appeared what passed for a metropolis in the Fell. Three houses stood jumbled together in a row, with a barn facing them across the road. One of the houses featured a thin finger of smoke coming from its chimney. Human habitation was both a threat and opportunity for her. Houses made her think of food.
A well used black Ford truck sat parked in the driveway of the barn. Brand held back, surveilling the scene for a full fifteen minutes before deciding that there was indeed no one home at any of the houses. The smoke from the chimney merely indicated a heating system at work. She could move forward without much possibility of surprise.
Hot wiring a vehicle always looked so simple on TV crime shows. She had once been on a stakeout where she and Uricco watched a degenerate junkie try for what seemed like forever to hijack a Toyota sedan. After about ten minutes, the bungled attempt began to strike them as funny.
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