“Confront. What does that mean?”
“I will expose him as the one who lit the match.”
“Yes, yes, a worthy pursuit. But I wonder if all this confronting and exposing goes far enough. I was in the middle of telling you a story.”
“Yes, forgive me,” Brand said sarcastically. “I must have been distracted by the enthralling nature of the tale. Please continue.”
Moro nodded, taking her words at face value. “In the spring of 1940, two women climb a hillside above Västvall village. The first of May. Snow still lies on the ground. As they hike they dream back over their childhoods, warmer days and better times. The village children all played up here together, racing through the forests and fields, at times lying lazily atop the cows chewing cud, the hot animal scent filling their nostrils.”
How could Moro possibly know all this? Brand wondered. Snow still lies thick on the ground? It was all pure fantasy and embellishment.
“The day I speak about, the women are older and they have put aside their childish things. Two sisters on the threshold of adulthood, one 21, on 19. They go in secret, telling no one, especially not Gustav Dalgren.”
“Wait,” Brand said. Two sisters? This was a story of her grandmother Klara and her great-aunt Alice?
“Wait,” she said again. Wait.
But the man would not stop.
55.
“Loke Voss has set himself up in an old fäbod on top of the mountain. He is a brownshirt, a rising figure among the Swedish fascists. He makes his collection of mountain shacks over into the local Nazi headquarters. The sisters take their lives in their hands venturing up to Loke’s fäbod hideout.”
All right, Brand wanted to say. Okay. Please stop now.
“The two women approach, wearing their modest home-sewn linen dresses and clumsy farm boots, an unflattering look overall, but practical. They walk the length of the fäbod to the farthest building, a cabin built of peeled logs. A flag with a swastika cross inside a black circle hangs from an outstretched pole above the door. The banner snaps in the breeze, flinging its fabric upwards and reminding the women of the Heil Hitler salute.
“They stand for a moment, unwilling to knock on the door, afraid to open it. They hear voices raised in song. A band of Loke’s boys come marching up the mountain from the other direction, swinging their arms in unison. Their chorus is enough to make the stomach turn.”
Here Moro softly sang the Nazi marching song.
Raise the flag! The ranks tightly closed!
Brownshirts march with calm, steady step!
Clear the streets for the brown battalions!
Clear the streets for the storm division!”
“Then comes a shrill whistle, as a sentry at the opposite end of the compound wakes to women’s presence.
“‘Reds!’ he yells. ‘Vänsterfolk! Kommunister!’”
“The marchers break ranks and charge toward the interlopers, pushing and shoving, screaming into their faces. The women find themselves trapped in a gauntlet of Nazi bullyboys, many of whom are youths they recognize from the neighborhood. The older woman especially is roughed up. The marchers tear her dress. She grips her sister’s hand so tightly that she draws blood, thinking if she let go they would both die.”
No, please. Stop. I don’t want to know.
“Out from the cabin door steps an unlikely savior. Loke Voss appears and immediately calls off his young dogs. Obeying his commands, the tormentors back down. The older sister straightens herself and walks calmly toward Loke. The younger one tries to match her courage but trembles like a leaf.”
Brand stared fixedly at Moro. She felt pinned to her chair. Her breath came with difficulty.
“Can you picture it, Veronika?” Moro asked. “Loke is courtly, smiling, inviting the older sister into his cabin lair. He wears calf-high black boots and the familiar brown uniform. He sports a captain’s insignia. Even though he is still a boy, he believes he has come into his own. With his slick yellow hair and spooky pale eyes, he looks every centimeter an Aryan. Nietzsche’s blond beast personified.
“From childhood the older sister always had Loke in the palm of her hand. He loved her and hated her all at once.
“‘Gustav,’ Klara Dalgren now says to Loke, simply and quietly.
“‘Yes, yes, always Gustav,’ Loke says. ‘Always something with Gustav.’ He laughs. But it is not a real laugh. It is more like something has gotten stuck in his throat and he is trying to get it out.
“‘Come, Klara,’ he says.
“‘Alice, wait outside,’ Klara Dalgren says.
“Alice tries to stop it. ‘Sister, no—’”
“Loke silences her. ‘Yes, dear sister Alice, wait here.’”
“The two of them, Loke and Klara, disappear into the cabin.”
Moro leaned forward and placed the heavy meat of his hand upon Brand’s. “We don’t need to go inside to know what went on within, do we?”
Brand found herself unable to respond. She wanted to challenge him. You can’t know! How could you possibly know? The words caught in her throat.
“The older sister appeals to Loke inside the cabin that afternoon. Spare Gustav’s life, she begs. She knows the Nazis will kill Gustav if he keeps on speaking and writing against them. Loke is the man who will order the assassination done.”
The picture Moro drew drilled its way into Brand’s mind. Fury and disgust rose in her. Her mind buzzed with the words from Elin’s letter. The older man’s hypnotic voice droned on.
“We don’t have to see to know what happened. We witness the older sister plead for the life of Gustav, the man she loved. We can see Loke Voss’s smile crease his face. We hear their dull footsteps as the two of them climb the stairs to the cabin loft. Klara’s ripped dress, torn by his bullyboys, enflames Loke’s mind.”
Brand had heard enough. “Stop!” she shouted. Other customers in the café turned to look. Moro lowered his voice and continued.
“Gustav never finds out. His baby daughter comes along the next November, when he and his wife have already fled America after the arson. Gustav is overjoyed to have a daughter.”
“Marta…” The whisper emerged unbidden from Brand’s lips. Her mother. Which meant…
“All babies are born with blue eyes. But as Marta Dalgren grows into toddlerhood, an awful understanding dawns on Gustav. Before that, he is industrious around the farm in his newly adopted country, still active in worker’s rights, the same old Gustav we know and admire in Sweden. Then the truth settles on him. He changes. He breaks down. The bottle comes along and destroys everything.
“Because the darling daughter that his wife had given birth to now shows those oddly colored eyes, gray with a hint of heliotrope. A very rare color, very distinctive. Your same inherited eyes, Veronika. Poor Gustav knows exactly where he has seen them before. Staring back at him from his daughter’s face are the remarkable and instantly recognizable gray eyes of Loke Voss.”
Brand rose to her feet. “You’re lying!” she shouted. But she knew it was the truth. Loke Voss was her mother’s biological father. Which made Veronika, at least in blood, a member of the Voss clan.
She had knocked over her chair. Other people in the cafe looked over at them.
“Sit,” Moro said. “I told you I have another gift for you, one you have yearned for and felt incomplete without.”
He righted Brand’s toppled chair. “Sit,” he commanded again. “And I will tell you exactly where to go to find your missing pistol.”
56.
Brand stared at Moro.
“You have the Glock?”
“I don’t,” Moro said. “But I can tell you where it is.”
“Where?”
“Take up your sword again, Veronika,” Moro whispered. “Take it and use it. You know what you have to do.”
“Goddammit, Moro!”
“Klara’s rapist is right here,” Moro said. “Loke Voss is nearby, at the cathedral for his big anniversary celebration.
It will be quite easily done. Avenge Klara. See to it that poor Gustav did not kill himself in vain. An eye for an eye. A death for a death. You must murder the devil or you will never be free.”
Moro’s voice was insistent, almost teasing. It felt like it came from another world, another time. The strange thing was, the very strange thing, was that Moro’s words seemed eminently logical. Of course Veronika Brand should assassinate Loke Voss. There was a symmetry to the act that could not be denied.
Amphetamine continued to disrupt Brand’s thinking. Her thoughts stuttered and skipped. She found herself suddenly out on the street. The hordes of sun-happy citizens appeared wolfish and gross to her. She pushed along among them, shouldering happy, sun-struck Swedes out of the way.
Her mind fell into a muddle. She was having a panic attack. She was not having a panic attack. She would finally be reunited with the missing pistol. She would kill her grandfather and then shoot herself. She would do nothing of the kind.
Faces loomed up and fell away. Someone shouted. She was having a psychotic break. She was not having a psychotic break.
Brand didn’t know how long she wandered, down one impossibly narrow cobblestone street in the old town and up another, buffeted by other pedestrians. She found herself in the Stortorget, the great square, busy with people. Ahead was the stock exchange and the Nobel museum, and to the north of that Brand could see the copper-green tower of the church, a brick Gothic rockpile with a stone obelisk poking up to one side of it.
“You must go to the cathedral,” she heard a voice say. She stared wildly around. Was Moro Part here? No, it was just a tourist urging on another tourist. Brand’s mind would not stay on track. What time was it? A thought winged in from nowhere. Moro wore an expensive watch, a Rolex. Was it a knock-off? Her thinking skittered this way and that.
Brand entered a dream. A great deal of time seemed to pass. She threaded her way through the square toward the big church. St. Nicholas Cathedral, she knew—or thought she knew—was Lutheran, once the official state religion of Sweden. The Roma were, if they were anything, Catholic, Orthodox Christian or Muslim, their beliefs mixed with folklore, stretching back as far as their Hindu origins.
What was a Romani girl like Varzha Luna doing having an engagement ceremony at a Lutheran church? Given her disordered mind, the thought was strangely cogent.
“Find the engagement party,” Moro had told her. “Varzha Luna will give you your lost pistol.”
Thirty meters away, she saw a small group of Romani celebrants gathered around Varzha Luna. Beside her stood her brother Vago and a man wearing a black suit, standing stiff and awkward in a way that Brand read as “groom.”
As Brand moved forward her attention shifted from the engagement party. Another large group emerged from the direction of the cathedral. Specters in her nightmare, a whole clutch of Vosses posed for a group photograph with Stortorget as a backdrop. Most of the figures were recognizable from Brand’s research.
Jarl Voss. Elias Voss, his father. Vilgot Voss, his father. “Junior” Voss.
And there, in the midst of them all, held up at his elbows by a pair of younger family members, stood the shuffling old man whom Brand would murder.
Loke Voss. Family patriarch. Right-wing instigator of the fire that had broken her family. Rapist. Devil.
Grandfather.
At that moment a screaming howl descended upon the whole city of Stockholm, obliterating any other noise beneath its hollow roar. Every truck in the Voss Transport fleet sounded their air horns at the same time. The awful bleating and honking, in honor of the prestigious company and its founder, echoed through the Old Town like an orchestra of air raid sirens.
Veronika Brand might have been the only creature in the whole city who didn’t hear the cacophony for what it was. She thought it might be the tinnitus roar of her own blood through her veins. The screaming urged her onward. She dream-walked toward the old man posed among his children in the square.
57.
Through the scope on her 1875F, Ylva tracked Veronika Brand’s progress. She saw the American detective move in the direction of the church, and understood that almost every member of the Voss family would be gathered there.
Ylva had difficulty getting a clear shot in the crowded square, filled with sun-worshipers and ordinary citizens enjoying the day. But she held up for another reason, which she didn’t even fully admit to herself. She wanted to drop the woman right in front of her family, at the feet of her father and uncles and nephew.
Pow! Take that, my dear idiot relations, who walk around in a daze half the time. Maybe then they would begin to take Ylva seriously. They had ignored her warnings. Now she would show them the truth.
Her target vanished briefly, obscured by a gaggle of Japanese tourists. Ylva decided as soon as she had a clear shot she would take it. She was hanging half out the window now, concentrating, the greatest short-range sniper rifle in the world held tight against her right shoulder, its scope locked in on the woman who had brought about Malte Voss’s death.
The noise of the Voss Transport air horns exploded, but Ylva was in total Zen mode, centered, impossible to distract. With the sound echoing over the square, she did not hear the door of the tower apartment open behind her.
Veronika Brand came into view again. The cortex of Ylva’s brain initiated a message that reached her right forefinger, directing it to squeeze-not-pull the trigger.
◆◆◆
An old man came alive during the dual celebration, marking both his company’s anniversary and final birthday of his ninetieth decade at St. Nicholas Cathedral in the heart of Stockholm. As he stood in the great square, surrounded by family, he saw a woman moving toward him.
He knew the woman, knew the way she held herself. In the careful but certain way she moved, Loke Voss saw the woman he loved more than any other, Klara Dalgren. She was Klara. She was his own blood and she was here to celebrate his life’s achievements.
Voss had been waiting. He longed for the granddaughter of his heart. Watching Brand move toward him, his face lit up. As he lurched out from among his children and his children’s children, he careened forward with the sure-footed movement of a man half his age.
He would finally be able to embrace his granddaughter, Veronika Brand—the child of the rape-spawn child, Marta, whom Loke had sired with the love of his life, Klara Dalgren.
“Veronika,” Loke now exclaimed with an old man’s desperate, sentimental despair, the last word he would utter in life.
His forward charge thrust him abruptly between Brand and a tower window eighty meters away.
When the old man’s head fell forward at an awkward angle and a red bloom appeared on his right temple, Brand snapped out of her dream. Adrenaline coursed through her body. She instantly grasped she was in the midst of some sort of firefight. She felt more than heard the hollow ping of the rifle shot echo across the square. She didn’t duck, but bent low to catch her grandfather’s body in her arms.
The two of them stared at each other for a quick, evaporating moment. Love struggled with hate and disgust in her eyes. A plea for forgiveness showed in his. She saw the light fade, the signature gray of Loke Voss’s eyes dying to a flat, lifeless transparency.
No one in the crowd or among the Voss family immediately understood what was happening. Brand had no time to process every thought that came at her, but jumped to the conclusion that somehow Moro Part had been the source of the fatal bullet. She half-turned toward the engagement party, expecting to see the Roma godfather.
Instead she saw the stolid, black-suited male standing beside Varzha step forward. The engaged husband, Luri Kováč. He raised a pistol, aiming it in the direction of the Voss family. Brand had an instant to recognize the weapon as her own Glock.
The sight of the handgun finally ignited panic among everyone standing nearby.
“Unto the third or fourth generation!” Luri Kováč yelled out, his thus-always-to-tyrants exclamation obscured by truck horns.
He fired off a reckless spray of shots—wild ones that harmed nobody but served to further panic the crowd. It turned out that human screams could cut through the sound of a thousand air horns. Bystanders flung themselves every which way, instinctively ducking as they ran.
Luri dropped the Glock and raised his arms in a gesture of surrender. The overheated pistol clattered to the cobblestone pavement of the square.
Trying for gentleness in an impossibly electrified moment, Brand laid the still form of Loke Voss on the ground, hoping it wouldn’t be trampled in the crush. All was chaos. The assembled members of the Voss family scattered.
Brand watched as Varhza Luna stepped forward. Time stuttered, a movie reel sprung loose from its sprockets. As one of the fleeing Vosses stumbled past her, Varzha reached out and struck the figure once. The blow came so quickly that Brand never saw the knife.
“For Lel!” Varzha called out, though no one but Veronika heard her.
Jarl Voss. His face showed a flash of hurt surprise. Momentum carried him a few steps forward. He clutched his side, where blood blossomed along a bloody slash just beneath his ribcage. The wounded man dropped to his knees.
Varzha showed herself to him, making sure her former captor understood that it was she who had given him a mortal wound.
With a brief look over her shoulder, the Romani girl locked eyes with Brand. Varzha gave a sober nod. She then joined the general rush of fleeing pedestrians, disappearing among the crowd. Luri Kováč just stood, dazed, as confusion erupted around him. He looked after Varzha with hurt in his eyes, as if offended that she had disarmed him, as if agonized she was leaving him behind.
A collection of impromptu heroes tackled Luri to the ground.
Brand ignored the tussle. Don’t do it, her mind commanded. Do not pick up that Glock. Your fingerprints will be all over it when the polis come. And they will come. There’s one running in your direction now. Perhaps seeing a weapon in your hand he will shoot you dead. At any rate your prints on the pistol will put you in a Swedish prison for years.
This Land is no Stranger Page 30