Zack

by Mons Kallentoft

  That’s long enough.

  Zack kicks Ösgür Thrakya in the face and hears his nose crunch.

  The Uzi fires off a hail of bullets, hitting a wooden beam in the roof and showering the loft with splinters.

  Another kick, and Ösgür Thrakya falls, with the girl still clinging onto him. The Uzi slips from his grasp and Zack grabs it just as Thrakya manages to shove the girl aside. He gets to his feet, shakily, with blood running from his nose and mouth.

  Zack takes a deep breath, relieved at having the situation under control at last.

  The girl with the baby smiles, as does the girl in the red undershirt, but then their smiles fade as Zack is forced down by an immense weight on his back and shoulders.

  Tuncay. How the hell could I forget him?

  Somehow he manages to stay on his feet, and keep hold of the Uzi.

  He uses the momentum of Tuncay’s body and leans forward, crouches down, then pushes up with his legs. They turn a somersault together and Tuncay ends up on his back with Zack on top of him, just three feet from the edge of the loft.

  Ösgür Thrakya has pulled a knife and is coming toward them.

  The long curved blade shimmers faintly, but Zack still has the Uzi in his hands and fires a hail of bullets that tears off Ösgür Thrakya’s entire left arm.

  The skinny man stops.

  Stares at the blood pumping from the stump.

  Zack tries to get to his feet, but Tuncay’s strong arms are holding him tight and he is slowly being dragged toward the edge. Then he hears a sharp metallic clang and feels Tuncay’s body go limp.

  Zack looks up and sees the girl in the red undershirt holding the rusty shovel in her hands.

  Tuncay is lying motionless on the floor.

  Ösgür Thrakya staggers toward Zack with the knife.

  Zack has been longing for this moment.

  He could disarm Ösgür Thrakya and then hold him until backup arrives, but he’s not going to do that.

  He has no intention of listening to his lies in an interview room.

  He’s not going to let him fly in a team of expensive lawyers who will make sure his sentence gets reduced.

  The judicial system doesn’t apply here.

  Divine justice will be served.

  Here and now.

  Ösgür Thrakya stabs at him several times with the knife, but Zack is ready for him. He kicks him on his bleeding stump and Thrakya’s legs give way in agony, and Zack follows through with another kick, this time to the arm holding the knife.

  The knife falls down toward the wolves.

  Zack twists the stump of Ösgür Thrakya’s arm behind his back.

  He knows the pain must be unbearable, but the man doesn’t scream.

  Zack leads him toward the edge of the loft.

  You’re going to die now.

  “You’d never do it. You’re a Swedish policeman. I know how you work,” Ösgür Thrakya gasps.

  Zack looks down into the wolf pit.

  Body parts and entrails are strewn about the floor.

  A sea of blood.

  Four wolves chewing on human flesh.

  “I’m doing it now.”

  Zack gives Ösgür Thrakya a shove in the back and watches him land on the remains of the man in the camouflage jacket.

  Two of the wolves look up from their lumps of meat and growl, their jaws dripping with blood.

  Ösgür Thrakya is on his feet, limping toward the wall, reaching his remaining arm up toward Zack.

  At last he looks scared.

  “Please, help me up. I’ll give you all the money you want.”

  Money.

  He was going to throw a baby to the wolves.

  He was going to throw the girls down there.

  Girls the same age as Ester.

  “Please. I’m begging you.”

  The open hand.

  But Zack turns and walks away from the edge.

  Then comes the howl.

  Tuncay is lying motionless on the floor. The girl in the red undershirt is still standing over him with the shovel, and the others are huddled behind her. The baby is still crying.

  Zack turns Tuncay over, sits on top of him, gets out his cuffs, and fastens his hands behind his back. He looks up at the girl with the shovel.

  “What’s your name?”

  She looks at him uncomprehendingly. He repeats the question in English.

  “Sanda Moe,” she says.

  “Are there any more men in the house, Sanda Moe?”

  Zack searches Tuncay methodically, and he groans weakly.

  “I don’t know. We’ve never been there, only in the dark place.”

  Zack finds nothing but a pack of cigarettes.

  “The dark place?” he asks.

  “It’s like a small hole, dug in the forest.”

  “How long have you been in Sweden?”

  She thinks.

  “Three weeks.”

  “Have you been here in the forest all that time?”

  She doesn’t answer.

  Zack can see the girls shivering in the cool night air of the loft and decides to take them to the house.

  “Sanda Moe, can you handle a pistol?”

  “No, but Tin Khaing can.”

  She points to the girl in the large T-shirt, the one Zack saved from the wolves. Her lips are covered in sores and she has a livid black eye.

  Then Sanda points to the girl with the baby.

  “And that’s Than Than Oo and her son. He’s only one day old and doesn’t have a name yet.”

  The little boy’s crying has stopped, but Zack’s ears are still ringing.

  “Well, his lungs certainly work,” he says, attempting a smile, but it just feels stiff and unnatural.

  Zack hands the Sig Sauer to Tin Khaing.

  “In case anyone else shows up,” he says.

  “Okay,” she says.

  Tuncay lifts his head and looks around in confusion. Zack drags him to his feet, presses the barrel of the Uzi hard in his back, and leads him away toward the steps.

  Sanda puts the shovel back against the wooden crate and follows them.

  The crate.

  Zack stops and stares at it.

  It’s almost as big as a coffin. Fully covered by a lid, with two holes in one of the ends.

  He turns to Tuncay.

  “Lie down on your stomach!”

  Tuncay doesn’t move.

  Zack sighs and kicks his legs out from under him.

  Tuncay lands heavily on his front and the breath goes out of him.

  “Tin Khaing, shoot him if he moves.”

  He goes over to the wooden crate and lifts the lid. At one end, around the two holes, are patches of dried blood.

  At the other end is a colorful scrap of fabric. He picks it up.

  A plaited wristband.

  The sort Sukayana Prikon was wearing when we questioned her, he thinks.

  They must have shut her in the crate, with her legs sticking out of the holes.

  And then lowered her down to the wolves.

  How could anyone do that?

  He goes back to the girls. Tin Khaing is pointing the pistol at Tuncay’s head.

  Zack pulls him up onto his feet again and says to them:

  “Come on. We’re leaving.”

  Out into the light summer evening. The midges are buzzing, and a smell of pine forest replaces the animal excrement and blood.

  The kitchen window is still lit up, but there’s no sign of life.

  “Sanda Moe, is it far to that dark place you mentioned?”

  “No, it’s just over there.”

  “Show me. I was thinking we could put Tuncay in there for a while.”

  For the first time Zack sees her smile.

  “Fine by me.”

  Zack knows he ought to question Tuncay about Yildizyeli, about Sten Westberg, and how many women in total they’ve smuggled into the country. But he hasn’t got the energy. Not right now. Someone else can do it.r />
  But he does have one question that can’t wait.

  “Mehmet Drakan. Where’s he?”

  The man in the garage out in Farsta, the one with the tattoo on his neck. He ought to be here.

  “Mehmet . . . I don’t know a Mehmet.” Tuncay smirks in response.

  Zack shoves him into the cellar and locks the door. Then he creeps into the house and checks that it really is empty before beckoning the others inside.

  * * *

  THEY’RE SITTING around the kitchen table, drinking steaming hot cups of tea. Zack has found some blankets that he’s draped around their shoulders, and Than Than Oo is nursing her son.

  Tin Khaing is sitting on the kitchen sofa with Sanda Moe, sobbing in her arms. Zack assumes they’re mourning the loss of their friend. The one he didn’t arrive in time to save.

  He doesn’t even know her name.

  Sanda Moe strokes Tin’s cheek and looks at Zack.

  “You’re a good person,” she says.

  Am I? Zack wonders. I fight and kill without reflection. I have no respect for my own life. Can a man like that be a good person? I may well have rescued you for my own sake.

  He looks out through the kitchen window. He wonders how long it took Deniz to see through his bluff, and he considers what to say to her when she arrives.

  And to Douglas.

  The baby finishes nursing. Than Than Oo stands up and goes over to Zack. She holds the boy out to him.

  Zack takes him.

  So small, so light.

  He holds the baby stiffly, cautiously, as if he were made of the most fragile glass. Looks at the tiny hands, feels the warm little body against his. Smiles at the child’s happy burbling.

  Than Than Oo looks at Zack.

  “What’s your name?” she asks. “I’m going to name him after you.”

  61

  Aftonbladet, June 18:

  Here, in a ramshackle barn in the forest, wolves were fed with human flesh.

  “The victims included children,” a police source has told Aftonbladet.

  The truth behind one of the most shocking waves of murders in modern history is gradually becoming clearer.

  A criminal network with links to Turkey and Burma has been smuggling women into Sweden for prostitution. The police now suspect that several of the women were murdered and thrown to the wolves, which were kept locked in a barn in the forests outside Vittinge, west of Uppsala.

  A number of people fell victim to the wolves, and Aftonbladet can today reveal that . . .

  Svenska Dagbladet, June 19:

  The remains of another victim have been found in the so-called “wolf barn” outside Vittinge.

  A total of six people are now feared to have died.

  “But that number could rise. Our forensics officers are still busy at the scene, and we have sent bones and other remains to the National Forensics Laboratory for analysis,” says Torbjörn Berg of the Stockholm Police’s Information Department.

  The discovery of the wolf barn is the result of intense detective work led by the Special Crimes Unit, the department of Stockholm Police that focuses on particularly complex crimes.

  Zack Herry, a detective inspector with the unit, is being praised as a hero by the survivors.

  “He was the one who found us and rescued us. Otherwise we would have been thrown to the wolves as well,” says Sanda Moe, one of the Burmese girls who were being held captive in the forest.

  An extensive trafficking network which brought Asian women into Sweden to work as prostitutes has been broken up.

  A 37-year-old Turkish citizen has been remanded in custody on suspicion of involvement in the network. He was arrested by Zack Herry at the barn.

  Several other members of the group are believed to be at large.

  “We can’t rule out the possibility that they may have left the country,” says Douglas Juste, operational head of the Special Crimes Unit.

  The four wolves, believed to be an alpha pair and their adult offspring, have been taken to the wildlife park at Kolmården. Their origins are as yet unknown, and tests will be taken in an attempt to determine if they were captured illegally or smuggled into the country.

  The wolves’ fate has not yet been decided.

  Expressen, June 19:

  Expressen’s crime reporter, Fredrik Bylund, was among the victims of the Wolf Gang.

  His remains have been identified in the torture barn outside Vittinge.

  “This is an extremely tragic day for Expressen, but our thoughts are primarily with his family,” says the paper’s editor-in-chief, Thomas Mattsson.

  Bylund, crime reporter for Expressen, had devoted days of hard work to investigating the convoluted wave of murders being committed in Stockholm.

  He left the newsroom late on Thursday evening, and was never seen again.

  “We were supposed to meet at nine o’clock the following morning, but he never showed up,” says an anonymous source.

  The police suspect that Bylund was kidnapped sometime that night, in all likelihood because he knew too much.

  “Fredrik Bylund was an extremely dedicated reporter, he never backed down until . . .”

  Avpixlat, nationalist website, June 22:

  Ingvar Stefansson, the Swedish patriot who was murdered by the Swedish police on Thursday, was innocent.

  While the police devoted a vast amount of resources to hunting him down, a gang of Turkish criminals was able to continue committing appalling crimes on Swedish soil.

  Stefansson was a knowledgeable and popular contributor, who wrote incisively about new research into migration and ethnology—important information which the established media persist in ignoring.

  Stefansson was wrongly accused of involvement in a crime which had nothing to do with him, and was shot and killed by police officer Zack Herry, a man who, according to information received by Avpixlat, had his ideas of right and wrong shaped by growing up in a suburb with a high immigrant population.

  Ingvar Stefansson died a warrior’s death, murdered by the Swedish authorities because of his beliefs.

  We shall never forget him.

  62

  ANOTHER AREA of high pressure has swept in, and the twenty-five-year-old laborer is sweating in his blue T-shirt as he kneels down to screw a new lock onto the door of a massage parlor in Vasastan.

  The lobby smells of cleaning products, and in among the massage tables two men in leather vests are talking to three young women in identical turquoise T-shirts.

  “No, nothing’s going to change,” one of them says, a slim, intelligent-looking man. “The only difference is that we’ll be organizing things instead of the Turks. Okay?”

  A short-haired woman in a tight top and gray tracksuit bottoms says:

  “We’re happy to go on working here and give massages, but there were other things we had to do before, and we don’t want to do those anymore.”

  The man’s smile vanishes.

  “Like I said, nothing’s going to change. You’re going to carry on offering clients exactly the same services you offered them before.”

  63

  ZACK IS standing next to the hospital bed, looking at Abdula’s face. His eyes are closed, and there’s a plastic tube sticking out of his neck.

  He’s just spoken to one of the doctors in the intensive care unit. Abdula can’t breathe on his own, and he’s not responding to pain or light. It’s unclear if he’s ever going to regain consciousness, or what state he’ll be in if he does.

  Zack stands by the bed for a long time. Listening to the rhythmic hiss of the respirator.

  “Sorry,” he whispers. “I’m sorry.”

  He sees Abdula come running with the metal rod in his hands. Sees him dancing through the night in the flashing light of the stroboscope.

  Their hands meeting high in the air, over and over again, through the months and years, throughout the whole of their lives.

  Is all that over now?

  It can’t be over. The thoug
ht makes him utterly black inside.

  He squeezes his friend’s hand.

  Then he walks out into the bright sunlight, over to the parking lot where he left his motorbike.

  He weaves his way out through the Karolinska University Hospital’s maze of buildings and temporary cabins and heads south.

  From death’s waiting room to death’s final stop.

  A journey of a quarter of an hour.

  He turns off the Nynäshamn road at Tallskogen and rides into the lush greenery of the Woodland Cemetery. He parks on Minneslundsvägen, drapes his leather jacket over his shoulder, and heads down the gravel paths to his mother’s grave.

  Doesn’t look back over his shoulder,

  Doesn’t see the car pulling up behind him, or the man who gets out.

  The green grass looks radiant in the hot sun, and in his mind’s eye he sees his colleagues’ blood in the neon light of the massage parlor in Skärholmen.

  He can smell it, as well as the scent of the flowers.

  A mixture of the two.

  And then he’s back in that meadow again.

  Isn’t it ever going to end?

  The grit on the path crunches beneath the soles of his shoes as he wanders through the neatly kept cemetery toward the grave. There are fresh flowers in front of many of the gravestones. Three roses, a colorful summer bouquet, a teddy bear, and some drooping bluebells in a child’s mug with big yellow ears for handles.

  There are no flowers on Anna Herry’s grave. The headstone is partly covered by a thin layer of green moss, and the lettering has lost its luster.

  Zack stops in front of it, puts his hands in his jeans pockets, but takes them out again.

  Anna Herry.

  The name is carved in ornate, gilded lettering at the top of the stone. The plan was that there would be space for Dad’s name underneath, but Zack didn’t want that. He wanted to be able to visit them separately.

  Sometimes he regrets his decision. Now he has two graves that he doesn’t look after instead of one.

  Anna Herry.

  What happened to you, Mom?

  Who were you?

  He conjures up an image of himself sitting in her lap.

  He can still feel her soft knitted sweater against his cheek. Hear her soothing voice as she patiently replies to his questions, feel her breathing through the sweater. But he can’t see her face in front of him anymore.