Ask No Mercy

by Martin Österdahl

  She walked up Skottgränd to Österlånggatan, turned left, and continued up toward Köpmantorget. She glanced at the statue of Saint George and the dragon and then walked on onto Köpmangatan, to the corner at Själagårdsgatan.

  There on the corner, on the ground floor of the house the Borgenstierna family owned, was the shop that sold nautical objects and antiques. Sarah looked in the window. The shop was closed, as it had been every time she had walked past it. In the window hung old posters from the Stockholm of the thirties and forties. A musical at Oscarsteatern called Show Boat: a black woman carrying a basket on her head, a dark-blue representation of the Mississippi River, and a paddle-wheel steamboat puffing white clouds from its smokestack. The premiere of an operetta called Zorina at the Royal Swedish Opera.

  On the ceiling, purple lilies had been hand-painted on a nougat-colored background. At the back of the room, a man in blue handyman overalls was standing on a ladder and working on a fuse box. She knocked on the door. The man turned toward her and shook his head. She knocked again and waved him over. He stepped down from the ladder and opened the door.

  “The shop’s closed,” he said.

  “I understand that. But I promised a friend I’d check on an object he’s been looking for for many years. Is it okay if I come in and take a quick look? It’ll only take five minutes.”

  The man shrugged.

  “I’ll be done in five minutes, and then I’ll leave.”

  The man went back to the fuse box, and Sarah walked into the shop. Past paintings by Harald Lindberg and Roland Svensson. Archipelago scenes and portraits. She paused next to a large brass telescope on a tripod and drew a finger through the dust that had accumulated on it. It had been a long time since anyone had been here.

  In one corner, a door was ajar. A yellowish light shone from the room beyond. The electrician had his back to her, and Sarah took a few quick steps toward the door, pulled it open, and went in. The weak yellow light was coming from an old table lamp. On the desk stood four framed photographs. They were photographs of the same woman.

  At first Sarah thought she looked like an actress from one of the productions advertised by the posters in the display window. But when she came closer, she saw that these were private pictures. Borgenstierna had never married, never had children. Who was the woman? On the wall next to the table was a light switch. When Sarah pressed it, the room lit up, and what was revealed made her shiver.

  The entire wall behind the table was covered with pictures of the same woman. Her dark, curly hair was shoulder length. The pictures on the wall were arranged as if in a collage; what was strange was that the collage was made of hundreds of copies of the same photograph. The woman was curtsying gracefully, with her chin held high and a radiant smile on her lips, her arms along her sides, the billowing fabric of her dress held firmly, in a well-practiced position of greeting, as though she were welcoming everyone to her performance.

  Sarah tore her eyes away from the woman. Newspaper posters and cut-out headlines had been put up on the wall to the left. All of them were from the forties. She looked them over.

  “Helsinki Bombed.” “Attack on Stockholm.” “Government in Crisis Meeting After Soviet Ambassador Recalled to Moscow.” “Prime Minister Confirms Existence of Intelligence Office.” “American Intelligence Service Prepares Swedish Resistance Movement in Anticipation of Soviet Occupation.” “Navigation Error by Russian Northern Fleet. No Deaths.”

  When she turned toward the door she saw a photo album that lay open on a chair. Against her will, she walked over to it. It contained pictures taken in the Stockholm archipelago. One showed a man pulling a boat up onto a beach. Another showed the same tall man dressed in hunting clothes, holding up a seabird he had shot.

  Sarah turned the page. And froze.

  The picture showed a young boy she knew as a grown man.

  “You shouldn’t be in here, should you?”

  Sarah jumped and turned around.

  The electrician was glaring at her.

  “It’s been five minutes. You’ll have to leave now.”

  “Of course,” said Sarah. “Excuse me.”

  She hurried past the man, felt his gaze following her to the street door. She yanked the door open and drew a deep breath when the wind struck her.

  Sarah was still feeling shaky when she got home and closed the front door behind her. Who was the woman whose image had covered the walls in the antique shop? Sarah felt disgusted by the experience, by her own behavior, by the fact that she had invaded a room she had no business being in.

  The room had breathed such sorrow.

  Thinking of the other pictures shook her even more. She tried to create some kind of order in everything that was churning inside her.

  It was possible to explain the fact that Carl Borgenstierna had provided all the funding needed to hire Max. Borgenstierna had been one of the institution’s sponsors, and Vektor’s activities dovetailed well with the Baltic Foundation’s purpose. Recruiting Max had been an important step in developing the organization.

  But that he had photographs of Max as a child? And the grown man in the pictures—surely that must have been Max’s father, Jakob Anger?

  These questions resounded like bells ringing in her head.

  She went into the kitchen. Stopped.

  Suddenly it all made sense. The pictures of the woman, the newspaper posters from the forties, and the pictures of Jakob and Max Anger.

  Could it be?

  Sarah went to the phone, dialed the number for Max’s new Russian cell phone. Answer the phone, Max. She was connected to a voice mail system. Sarah hung up, tried again. Answer! Again the call went to voice mail.

  “Max, this is Sarah. I was in Borgenstierna’s house in Gamla Stan. There’s a room there with a wall covered with copies of a portrait photograph of a woman from the forties. I think this is the woman you saw in the photo at the hospital. There were also pictures of your father. And . . . of you. I think you’re right. I think the woman and Borgenstierna are connected to your family.”

  A beep interrupted her. Had she covered everything? She hadn’t said straight out what she believed herself. But maybe it was just as well? Better for Max to draw his own conclusions.

  73

  The men came out. Max counted them—fourteen. The two motorcycles left first. The ZiL limousine and the black Mercedes that had arrived at the end of the convoy remained.

  “What was that?” asked Ilya. “A board meeting?”

  Max shook his head. Nestor Lazarev had arrived like a czar, with personal bodyguards. It had hardly been a meeting with old, close friends, either—they wouldn’t have needed those kinds of security measures in such a situation. If the area had once been a top-secret GRU facility, then this was presumably Lazarev’s own turf.

  But who were his guests? Max assumed they were connected to the mysterious foundation that controlled St. Petersburg GSM.

  Ivanovich.

  “Why would you call a foundation Ivanovich?” asked Max.

  “Why would you call a telecom company Ericsson?”

  “Because the inventor who founded the company happened to have that name.”

  Ilya smiled.

  “Maybe there’s an inventor called Ivanovich, or Ivan?”

  “Come off it,” said Max. “What do these men want?”

  “They were definitely military. Hawks, no doubt, high-ranking officers. Retired or on active duty.”

  “Fanatical renegades?” said Max. “Who are creating their own militia?”

  “They came here at dusk,” said Ilya. “So they’re obviously secretive types. But why exactly now? Why tonight?”

  Max looked at his watch.

  “The fifth of March,” he said.

  Then it struck him. Of course.

  “It’s the anniversary of Stalin’s death.”

  Everything led back to the same man: Stalin. All the details, like Lazarev’s arrival in a ZiL, were symbolic.

 
“A Stalin sect.”

  “Gathering to plan a brighter future for us all,” said Ilya.

  Ivanovich meant “Ivan’s son.” Ivanovich, like Koba, was one of many nicknames Stalin had used during his revolutionary years.

  In recent opinion polls asking Russians who had been the country’s greatest leader of all time, 20 percent had voted for Stalin, despite their knowledge of his terror regime and the millions who were murdered. During Stalin’s time, a feudal backwater had been transformed into a global industrial leader and military superpower. Under Stalin, the Russians had won a victory over fascism in the Second World War, which the Russians called the Great Patriotic War. A cult of personality had grown up around him. Stalin had not just been the head of the government and the father of the nation; he had nearly become a god.

  He had been called “the sun” because nothing could live without him. And because anyone who got too close could be burned to death.

  There were Stalin cults all over the world. In Great Britain alone, two large groups were well known to the authorities and the press.

  In contrast to many other fanatical groups, Ivanovich appeared to have a close connection to the man himself and all his crimes. If Pashie had found out the truth about these men, she would not have remained at a safe distance from them. There was nothing she would rather do than expose such people. She would like to see them brought before the war crimes tribunal in The Hague as the Nazis had been in Nuremberg.

  The tall building behind the hangar had previously been called the Government Research Center for Marine Biology and Development. Max couldn’t help wondering what kind of experiments had been carried out there.

  Thinking of the crimes against humanity committed by these men and others like them filled him with new rage. His pulse raced.

  He couldn’t allow his thoughts to drift any further now.

  He couldn’t start thinking of what they’d done to Pashie.

  “I have to get in there, Ilya. Now. When we looked at the maps with Mishin, you said something about the hospital that used to be here. About the fact that a hospital and a research center had been in the same area. What was it you were thinking about?”

  “I’m not sure it’s a good idea,” said Ilya, furrowing his brow. “Are you claustrophobic?”

  “No, I’m not.”

  In his amphibious platoon, Max had led courses that involved diving into underwater tunnels.

  Ilya walked toward the stairwell and stood at a window that faced in the opposite direction, away from the hangar.

  “The hospital must have been over there somewhere. And the Government Research Center for Marine Biology and Development was there.”

  He pointed in the direction of the hangar.

  “All large Soviet buildings, such as hospitals—and no doubt the research center—were heated via systems of underground steam tunnels. When the hospitals were torn down, the tunnels were left in place underground. We have to find a tunnel that runs from the hospital to the Government Research Center for Marine Biology Development. That’s your way in.”

  There were a number of questions Max would normally ask at this point in planning a mission, but he realized he couldn’t get information in advance now. Are the tunnels active or inactive? What is the temperature? Visibility? Humidity? There were various kinds of steam tunnels. Some were broad and high enough for a full-grown man to walk through. Others were built with the intention that only steam would pass through them. To get somewhere using such a tunnel, you had to crawl on all fours, make yourself as small as possible, and be prepared to wriggle along like a snake. Sometimes there were living things in the tunnels. Criminals hiding from justice. Homeless people. Drug addicts. Rats.

  There was no guarantee that Ilya’s plan would work. But it was the only plan they had.

  All the questions spinning in his head were waiting to be answered in the hangar.

  Where Pashie and the Goose were.

  He took out his phone, switched it on, and set it to silent mode. He had missed two calls from Sarah. He called his voice mail and listened to Sarah’s message.

  74

  Lazarev returned to the room alone after saying goodbye to the men out in the courtyard. The meeting had gone exactly as he’d hoped.

  The two vory came into the room without looking him in the eye. They placed two serving platters on the table, then walked over to a cupboard and took out plates and silverware.

  He looked at his watch. The timing was perfect. The vory had been given clear instructions. From slaughtering to cooking and serving. They had been instructed to enter the room when he was alone and ready for the moment he had been longing for.

  This is the day of death. Your spirit is my guide.

  The man with the tattoos and the man from Siberia began to serve the meat.

  Let the strength of youth grow in me from this sacrifice.

  Lazarev imagined the men from the organization still sitting there around him, like ghosts. Imagined how they watched him with open mouths and hollow eyes.

  Where were you in the thirties? When I was a young boy in Ukraine and extraordinary sacrifices were necessary to survive the day? When we endured Holodomor, the worst human conflict of them all, when the will and ideological commitment of human beings was really tested? When my mother cooked the meat from my dead sister so I would live?

  He lifted the fork to his mouth.

  The young meat was the best.

  They were your children, Margarita. And that fact was their death sentence.

  With every bite, his hunger increased. He ate so frenetically he had to wipe the saliva from the corners of his mouth with his napkin. Every time he swallowed, he felt the fibers in his body growing stronger.

  He had survived the greatest famine because his mother had made the greatest sacrifice. Only a year later, he had been discovered by Molotov and eventually presented to the inner circle in the Kremlin.

  If his mother hadn’t sacrificed her daughter, if he hadn’t been given that particular piece of meat to eat, he wouldn’t be here now. It was that memory he was honoring now.

  The men in the organization had said they were willing to make sacrifices. Soon he would know whether they were men enough to back up their words.

  75

  “Maybe you should take this?”

  Ilya held out a Makarov identical to the one Max had held a few days ago.

  The weight felt good in his hand. Max was looking forward to feeling the recoil in his shoulder when he used it. He had chosen not to tell Ilya what Sarah had said in the message she had left on his voice mail. He would let it sink in. It was something they would have to pursue later. Afterward.

  “We won’t be able to communicate when I’m inside the tunnel system,” he said. “My phone isn’t going to work. I’ll send you a text after I come out on the other side. You stay here and keep an eye out. When you get my message, drive the jeep down to the gates as fast and as quietly as you can.”

  Ilya nodded and saluted quickly.

  “If you see something, you’ll have to let me know. We’ll probably both be under pressure, so let’s agree on codes for the scenarios we’re most likely to encounter. We won’t have time to write each other letters.”

  Max wrote down codes for three possible situations at his end and three at Ilya’s. The rule of three—never more than three.

  They slipped outside, to the back of the building. Ilya looked toward the sea. Then toward the big highway entrance ramps.

  “It should be around here somewhere,” he said.

  They looked for signs on the ground, places where snow had been melted by heat from underground. Max saw a change in the color of the snow near a broken curb. In the middle of the road, the hard surface had been transformed into slush and meltwater.

  He nodded at Ilya, who came over to his side of the road. They kicked at the ground and dug away snow and gravel with their hands. Underneath was a cast-iron manhole cover.

  Ilya
stuck his fingers into a recess in the cover and tried to lift it.

  “It’s jammed in there too tight,” he said. “We need an iron pipe or something like that.”

  “There were reinforcing bars up on the roof,” said Max.

  He ran back into the building while Ilya continued to free as much of the manhole cover as possible from ice and snow. Max soon returned, and with the help of the rebar they succeeded in prying up the cover.

  “Do you remember the codes?” asked Max.

  “Of course. Good luck.”

  Max climbed down into the hole, feet first. The roof of the tunnel was lower than he had hoped, and he was forced to crouch. He looked up at Ilya one last time and nodded. Ilya replaced the cover.

  The sound of the heavy iron cover sent an echo along the tunnel. It was as if all the air had been removed. Max was alone in a cramped coal-black space. He switched on the flashlight, but it illuminated only five meters of tunnel ahead of him. He was able to orient himself only by using the sense of direction he had developed navigating among the islands of the Stockholm archipelago through nights without end. He chose his direction based on the feeling in his body and his memory of the maps.

  He lay down on his stomach. Ahead, the tunnel ceiling appeared to be even lower. That meant that if he were forced to go back, he would have to do so by crawling backward. He thought of his Norwegian friend Hein Espen, who had lost control down in the tunnels at the Haakonsvern naval station, how panic had gripped him and he had never been himself again.

  Max had conquered his own fear and learned to control the panic when a tunnel became so narrow that you had to fold your shoulders in toward your chin as far as possible and crack your own clavicles if need be in order, as an officer put it, to “come out as you once entered the world.”