Box 21

by Anders Roslund

  BOX 21

  BOX 21

  Anders Roslund and

  Börge Hellström

  SARAH CRICHTON BOOKS

  Farrar, Straus and Giroux

  New York

  Sarah Crichton Books

  Farrar, Straus and Giroux

  18 West 18th Street, New York 10011

  Copyright Š 2008 by Anders Roslund and Börge Hellström

  All rights reserved

  Distributed in Canada by D&M Publishers, Inc.

  Printed in the United States of America

  Originally published in 2004 by Piratförlaget, Sweden

  English translation originally published in 2008 by Sphere,

  Great Britain, as The Vault

  Published in the United States by Sarah Crichton Books /

  Farrar, Straus and Giroux

  First American edition, 2009

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Roslund, Anders, 1961–

  [Box 21. English]

  Box 21 / Roslund / Hellström. — 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Translated from the Swedish.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-374-28295-0 (hardcover : alk. paper)

  ISBN-10: 0-374-28295-1 (hardcover : alk. paper)

  1. Prostitutes—Sweden—Fiction. 2. Revenge—Fiction. 3. Human trafficking victims—Fiction. 4. Human trafficking—Sweden—Fiction.

  5. Criminals—Sweden—Fiction. 6. Police—Sweden—Fiction.

  7. Stockholm (Sweden)—Fiction. I. Hellström, Börge, 1957– II. Title.

  PT9877.28.R67B6913 2009

  839.73’8—dc22

  2009004449

  [http://www.fsgbooks.com] www.fsgbooks.com

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  EXTRACT FROM AN ACCIDENT &

  EMERGENCY PRIMARY ASSESSMENT

  SÖDER HOSPITAL, STOCKHOLM

  . . . Unconscious female, unknown identity, brought in by ambulance 09:05. Neighbour called emergency services to flat at 3 Völund Street.

  ELEVEN YEARS EARLIER

  She clung to her mother’s hand.

  During the last year she had done this a lot, held on tight to her mother’s soft hand and felt it squeeze hers back.

  She didn’t really want to go to the big city.

  Her name was Lydia Grajauskas and she already had a sore tummy when they boarded the bus outside the ugly bus terminal in Klaipeda. The further away from home they went, the worse she felt.

  Lydia had never been to Vilnius before – she had only imagined it and looked at pictures and listened to people’s stories – but now she didn’t want to go there at all, because it wasn’t her kind of place; she had nothing to do there.

  It was more than a year since she had seen him.

  She was about to turn nine and she had thought a hand grenade was a kind of cool present.

  Dad hadn’t noticed that she was watching him. He had his back turned to her and Vladi, and he was excited about being with the other men; they all drank and shouted and hated the Russians. She was lying top to tail with Vladi in the sofa, a huge brown thing with a worn corduroy cover that smelt horrible; they used to lie there sometimes when school was closed and Dad was working. They listened. There was something special about the men’s loud voices and guns and boxes of ammunition that fascinated them, that made them hide on the sofa to listen and watch more often than was perhaps good for them. Dad’s cheeks had been so red, which they weren’t normally, only sometimes at home, when he had been drinking straight from the bottle and sneaked up behind Mum and pressed himself against her bum. Of course, they had no idea that Lydia noticed what they were up to and she didn’t let on. He’d always drink just a bit more and Mum would have a taste too, her mouth to the bottle and then they’d go into the small bedroom, chase everyone out and close the door.

  Lydia liked to see her dad’s flushed cheeks. At home or with the other men, polishing the weapons in front of them all. He seemed more alive then; he didn’t look as old as normal, after all he was twenty-nine.

  She peeped cautiously through the window.

  Her stomach hurt even more when the bus started and then hurtled along roads full of potholes, and every time one of the front wheels bumped over an especially rough bit, her seat shook and something sharp jabbed her insides, somewhere under her ribcage.

  So this was what the big world really looked like. The unexplored world, the whole stretch of land between Klaipeda and Vilnius. She had never been allowed to go before; it was expensive, and the important thing was that Mum went, as she had done every second Sunday for almost a year, with food and the money she had somehow managed to get from somewhere. It was hard to tell how Dad really was, what he would say. He probably missed Mum more than her.

  On the day with the hand grenade, he hadn’t even seen her.

  Leaning forward out of the sofa, she had rooted around in the boxes of plastic explosives and grenades, shushing Vladi with her finger against her lips; he had to be quiet because the men didn’t want to be disturbed. She had known by then how all these things worked, the explosives, the grenades and the small handguns. She always watched when they practised, and if she had to, she could handle the weapons at least as well as some of the men.

  She kept staring through the dirty window of the bus.

  It was raining hard, so the windows should have been clean, but instead of washing away the dust, the raindrops whipped up a spray of brown mud that made it more and more difficult to see anything. The road was better now: no potholes, no jolting and no more jabs under her ribs.

  She was actually holding the grenade when the police broke the door down and burst into the big room.

  Dad and the other men shouted to each other but they were too slow off the mark, and just a few minutes later they’d been pushed up against the walls, handcuffed and beaten. She couldn’t remember how many police had come into the room, maybe ten or even twenty. All she remembered was that they kept screaming zatknis again and again and that they carried the same kind of gun that Dad sold, and that they won before they even started.

  Their shouts had mixed with the sound of gunshots and breaking bottles.

  All the noise had hurt her ears and then, suddenly, when Dad and his friends had been pinned to the floor, a strange silence fell.

  Perhaps that silence had stayed in her memory more clearly than anything else; it had been a silence that had seemed to take over everything.

  Mum’s hand. She grabbed it and pulled it closer, making it rest on the seat next to her, and she held on until the skin went white and she couldn’t squeeze it any harder. She had clung to her Mum’s hand just as hard when they sat outside the courtroom in Klaipeda, during the trial against her dad and his friends. She and Mum had sat there holding hands, and Mum cried for a long time when the court official in a grey suit came and told them that all of the accused had been sentenced to twenty-one years in prison.

  It was a year since Lydia had seen him. He mightn’t recognise her now.

  She prodded the cloth bag Mum had brought with her. It was bursting with food. Mum had told her about the porridge that they had to eat, almost always a nasty, mealy mess. Mum rattled on about vitamins, that you’d get ill if you didn’t get enough and how everyone in that place needed them and that’s why people who came to visit tried to bring good food.

  The bus was driving quite fast now. The road was wider and there was more traffic than before, and the houses beyond the muddy window were larger as well and seemed to grow bigger the closer to Vilnius they got. The first houses she had seen along the bumpy road had looked old and poor. Now it was mostly blocks of flats, all grey walls and tin roofs, but sort of modern-looking. Then came some more expensive houses and then all the petrol stations, all in the same place. She smiled and point
ed, she had never seen so many garages together before.

  The rain had almost stopped, which was a good thing. She didn’t want her hair to get wet, not today.

  The bus stop was near the Lukuskele prison, only a few hundred metres away. It was a great big place, taking up almost a whole city block, with a high wall going all the way round it. It had originally been a Russian church, but it had been converted and new buildings had been added. Now more than a thousand prisoners lived there.

  Other mothers and children were already queuing outside a massive iron door set into the middle of the concrete wall. One family was let in at a time to face the uniformed and armed guards who were waiting in the room behind the door. Everyone had to answer questions. Show their identity papers. Show what they had with them. One of the guards smiled at her, but she didn’t dare to smile back.

  ‘When we’re in there, if anyone coughs, leave the room.’

  Mum turned to her while she said this and she looked stern, as she always did when she was serious. Lydia wanted to ask why, but held back, as it was clear that her mum didn’t want to say any more.

  They were led out of the main building and on to a path running alongside a high fence with barbed wire on top. Behind it white dogs were barking and throwing themselves against the wire mesh. She saw two faces watching them from a barred window and they waved and called out to her.

  ‘Hey, sweetie! Up here, darling!’

  She marched on, looking straight ahead. It wasn’t far to the next building.

  Mum was carrying the bag in her arms and Lydia reached out for her hand. It wasn’t there. Another jab in her tummy, like on the bus when it bumped over the edges of potholes. They went up a staircase with harsh green walls; the colour almost hurt her eyes, so she kept looking at Mum’s back instead, putting her hand on it as they walked upstairs.

  They stopped on the third-floor landing, followed the guard who pointed down a long, dark corridor that smelt stale and of bleach at the same time. Every door they passed had a bin with TBC written on it. She looked in one that wasn’t properly closed and saw tissues with blood clots.

  This place was called the hospital wing, and the room they entered had eight beds in a row along one wall. The men’s heads had been shaved, and they all looked pale and tired. Some were lying down. Some were wrapped in a sheet and had been propped up in a chair and a few were standing talking by a window. Dad was sitting on the bed at the far end.

  Lydia stole a look at him and thought that he looked smaller than before.

  He hadn’t spotted her. Not yet.

  She had to wait for quite a long time.

  Mum went to him first. And they spoke to each other, argued about something, not that she could hear what they said. Lydia kept watching him, and after a while she realised that she didn’t feel ashamed, not any more. She thought about the last year, about her schoolmates’ taunts that didn’t hurt any more, not when she stood here, so close to him. That sick feeling inside her and the pain in her tummy had gone away too.

  Later, when she hugged him, he coughed, but she didn’t leave the room like she had promised her mum. She just held him tighter and wouldn’t let go.

  She hated him; he should be coming home with them.

  NOW

  PART ONE

  MONDAY 3 JUNE

  The flat was silent.

  She hadn’t thought of him for a long time, or indeed of anything that belonged to that time back then. And now she was sitting there thinking about it. She thought about that last hug in the Lukuskele prison ward when she was ten years old and he had looked so small and coughed so his whole body rattled and Mum had given him a tissue, which filled with blood clots before he scrunched it up and put it in one of the big bins in the corridor.

  It was the last time, but she hadn’t realised it then. Perhaps she still hadn’t taken it in.

  Lydia took a deep breath.

  She shook off the feeling of sadness, smiled at the large mirror in the hall. It was still early in the morning.

  A knock on the door. She still had the hairbrush in her hand. How long had she been standing there? She glanced in the mirror again, her head a little to the side. Another smile, she wanted to look good. She was wearing the black dress; the dark material contrasted with her pale skin. She looked at her body. It was still a young woman’s. She hadn’t changed much since she came here, not on the outside.

  She waited.

  Another knock, harder this time. She should answer it. She put the hairbrush on the shelf by the mirror and took a few steps towards the door.

  Her name was Lydia Grajauskas and she used to sing her name; she sang it now to the tune of a children’s song she remembered from school in Klaipeda. The chorus had three repeated lines and she sang Lydia Grajauskas for each line. She had always done this when she felt nervous.

  Lydia Grajauskas

  Lydia Grajauskas

  Lydia Grajauskas

  She stopped singing when she reached the door. He was there on the other side. If she put her ear to the door, she could quickly pick up the sound of his breathing. She knew its rhythm so well. It was him. They had met often, was it eight or maybe nine times? His smell was special. She could sense it already, the smell of him, like one of her dad’s workmates from that filthy room with the big sofa where she had hidden when she was a girl. Almost like them, a mixture of tobacco and aftershave and sweat that seeped through the closely woven material of his jacket.

  He knocked for the third time.

  She let the door swing open. There he was. Dark suit, light blue shirt, gold tiepin. His fair hair was short and he was suntanned. It had been raining steadily since the middle of May, but he still had a late-summer glow, as he always did. She smiled at him, the same smile as at the mirror a moment earlier; she knew he liked her to smile.

  They didn’t touch each other.

  Not yet.

  He came in from the stairs, into the flat. She looked quickly at the hallstand and nodded at one of the coat hangers, as if to say let me take your jacket and hang it up for you. He shook his head. She guessed he was about ten years older than herself, maybe thirty-something, but it was only a guess.

  She felt like singing again.

  Lydia Grajauskas. Lydia Grajauskas. Lydia Grajauskas.

  He raised his hand, as he always did, touched her black dress lightly, slowly sliding his fingers along the shoulder straps, across her breasts, always on top of the material.

  She kept very still.

  His hand traced a wide circle over one breast, then towards the other. She hardly breathed. Her chest had to be still, she must smile, must stay still and smile.

  She kept smiling when he spat.

  They were standing close together then; it was more like he let it go rather than spat. He didn’t usually spit in her face, instead the spittle landed in front of her feet in their high-heeled black shoes.

  He thought that she was too slow.

  He pointed.

  One straight finger, pointing down.

  Lydia knelt, still smiling – she knew he liked that. Sometimes he smiled as well. Her knees clicked a little as she pressed her legs together and went down on all fours, her face looking ahead. She asked him to forgive her. That was what he wanted. He had learnt how to say it in Russian and insisted on her getting it right, making sure she used the right words. She lowered herself in stages by bending her arms until she was almost folded double and her nose touched the floor. It was cold against her tongue as she licked the gob into her mouth, swallowed it.

  Then she got up, like he wanted her to, closed her eyes and, as usual, tried to guess which cheek.

  Right, probably the right one this time.

  Left.

  He hit her with the flat of his hand, which covered her whole cheek. It didn’t hurt that much. His arm came right round and the slap left a pink mark, but mostly it just burned. It stung only if you wanted it to sting.

  He pointed again.

  Lydia knew what she had to do, so the
pointing wasn’t necessary, but he did it anyway, just waved his finger in her direction, wanted her to walk into the bedroom, to stand in front of the red bedspread. She went in front of him. Her movements had to be slow, and as she walked she had to absently stroke her bottom and breathe heavily. That was what he wanted. She could feel his eyes on her back, burning, his eyes already abusing her body.

  She stopped by the bed.

  She undid the dress, three buttons at the back, rolled it down over her hips and let it fall to the floor.

  Her bra and panties were black lace, just as he wanted and he had brought them personally, making her promise to use them only for him. Only him.

  The moment he lay down on top of her, she no longer had a body.

  That was what she did. It was what she always did.

  She thought of home, about the past and all the things she missed and had missed every single day since she came here.

  She was not there, she had absented herself. Here she was just a face with no body. She had no neck, no breasts, no crotch, no legs.

  So when he was rough, when he forced himself into her from behind, when her anus was bleeding, it wasn’t happening to her. She was elsewhere, having left only her head there, singing Lydia Grajauskas to a tune she had learnt long ago.

  It was raining as he drove into the empty car park.

  It was the kind of summer when people held their breath when they woke up and crept over to the bedroom window, hoping that today, today the sun would be beating against the slats of the venetian blinds. It was the kind of summer when instead the rain played freely outside. Every morning weary eyes would give up hope as they scanned the greyness, while the mind registered the tapping on the window pane.