They turned around and walked onto the street. They thought he was afraid, that he had shit his pants in fear. They slowly disappeared back toward the city center. He heard Miro laughing at something. He heard the word “Jew” again—Jew fag . . . Jew druggie . . .
Katz followed Edvard Griegsgången to the square. Sani Pizzeria, Riadh Gold & Watchmaker, Salam’s Asian Food. He passed a barbershop and a sign that read “Daytime care for Iranian elders.”
At the corner store, he bought a U-lock for a bike, using two crumpled hundred-kronor bills that were left in his pocket.
Then back to the street again. He looked over toward the doorway he’d seen Miro and the men disappear into. The pepper spray was still in his pocket; he had gone back to the apartment to get it. The door had been unlocked and Ramón had been asleep on the sofa next to Jenny.
A woman with a pram opened the door on her way out. Katz let her go by before he slipped inside.
He checked the list of occupants. Twenty names. Could be any one of them.
Fifteen minutes passed, and nothing happened. No movement in the house. He peered out at the corner shop across the street through the glass of the door. The billboards were all about the robbery of an armored truck in Skärholmen. The woman with the pram came back carrying a bag of shopping. She nodded at him before vanishing into the lift.
One story up, a door opened. Two boys of around ten came down the stairs, carrying a bike. They stopped when they saw him.
“Who are you waiting for?”
“Miro.”
“There’s no Miro here.”
“His friend has a tattoo on his neck. Of a dragon.”
“I know who you mean. Ivan. He lives on four.”
The boys disappeared. Katz checked the names on the board again. Ivanović. Fourth floor.
This ought to be the one, he thought a few minutes later as he stood outside the door. He could hear loud hip-hop music coming through the letter box. The sweet smell of marijuana. Stickers of the Serbian double-headed eagle on the door. The apartment was at the end of the hall. It was dark. Katz had unscrewed the lightbulb in the stairwell.
He rang the bell. The door opened. The man with the tattoo didn’t have time to react before Katz had yanked him into the hallway and sprayed him in the eyes. The man yowled like a cat and held his hands to his face as Katz closed the door with his foot and dragged him toward the stairs by the hair. He slammed the spray bottle into his skull, three quick jabs at his temple, and kneed him in the face.
Where did that come from? he thought as he watched the man lying on the floor, blood pumping from a deep gash in his head; that rage he had carried around for as long as he could remember, the fury he tried to keep under control, just as Benjamin had tried to do for all those years.
The man was groggy, almost unconscious. Katz hauled him over to the stairwell and closed the U-lock around his neck, fastening him to the railing. In the man’s pockets he found a bunch of keys, his wallet, and a pistol—a Glock.
Heavy beats were coming from the apartment. The others hadn’t realized anything was up so far. So he opened the door and walked in.
Miro and the fat man were sitting on a leather sofa in the living room. They stared at him as if he were a ghost. Katz yanked the plug to the stereo out of the wall. The silence sounded like a rumble in reverse.
“Take it easy, mate! Just tell us what you want!”
He heard Miro’s voice as if from a great distance. He noticed that Miro was staring at the gun in his bloody hand, his finger on the trigger. He had been a millimeter from firing it.
“Put your hand on your knee!” he said to the fat man.
“What the fuck for?”
“Just do it!”
The man did as he was told. Katz took the syringe from his pocket, peeling off the plastic with his teeth.
“Sit still!”
The man obeyed him like a robot. Maybe they thought their friend was dead. The guy’s fresh blood was all over Katz’s clothes. He drove the needle full-force through the back of the man’s hand and into his thigh. He heard him squeal like a stuck pig.
“What the fuck are you doing? Are you insane?”
He shoved the barrel of the gun into his mouth and turned to Miro.
“I want you to leave that boy alone. Alexandru. You’re not going to get anywhere near him. You don’t recognize him if you see him on the street. Take a damn long detour if you catch sight of him. The same goes for your buddies. And no one gets close to Ramón.”
“Okay, okay . . . they can go.”
“Say it again!”
He pressed the gun deeper into the fat man’s mouth and saw the gag reflex as the barrel reached his throat.
“We’ll leave Alexandru alone, and Ramón too, I swear on my family!”
“Good. To be on the safe side, I’ll be calling them to make sure. Or else I’ll come out here myself to check. And that’s not a threat; it’s a promise.”
A little while later he was down in the metro station. He pulled up the sleeve of his jacket, looking at the scars left by old injection sites, running all the way from his wrist to his armpit. He thought of the fat man still sitting on the sofa as he left, his hand drilled through by a syringe needle that was lodged in his thigh muscles, like the toothpick in a club sandwich.
The train for Kungsträdgården rolled into the platform. Katz tossed the keys to the U-lock into a dustbin before he got on. He wondered how long that guy would have to sit there, stuck to the railing, before someone sawed him loose.
The Glock was chafing in his inner pocket. He would get rid of it as soon as possible.
He felt disgusted with himself, disgusted at the blood spatter on his jacket and hands. He thought about the New Year—it was the year 5774 according to the calendar—and he thought about how it was almost Yom Kippur, the festival when you were to ask your fellow humans for forgiveness.
The synagogue was on Sankt Paulsgatan. A couple of Hebrew letters in the window above the door were the only giveaway that this was an old Jewish shul.
Once upon a time this place had been a neighborhood cinema. The women sat by themselves in the gallery; the men sat on the ground floor.
The service had just begun when Katz arrived. The cantor was singing from the bimah. Men in shawls, tefillin fastened to their foreheads and around their arms, were standing at their benches in prayer. A blue-painted Star of David shimmered near the ceiling. A golden menorah as tall as a man presided from the center of the space.
Katz hung up his jacket, took a yarmulke from the box, and sat down at his father’s old reserved seat in the very back of the temple.
Benjamin had kept his prayer books in the compartment in front of him: the Siddur, Chumash, and Haftarah. His prayer shawl had lain there too. Paradoxically, Benjamin had not been particularly religious in his everyday life. He didn’t bother to keep kosher. He had a civil marriage, with a shiksa. And yet he had attended the Orthodox synagogue on Sankt Paulsgatan every Friday since the late thirties, when he came from Austria with his parents, Chaim and Sara. They disappeared shortly after the end of the war; they had emigrated to Israel and were never heard from again, at least not as far as Katz was aware.
Benjamin stayed behind. The son of a cobbler from Vienna who spoke four languages fluently when he arrived in Sweden, just sixteen years old. He had studied philology at Uppsala University, earned a degree in classical languages, did a few years of research before he married Katz’s Norrlandic mother, had a son in his late forties, and started teaching French and Latin in schools in the Stockholm area. But his positions never lasted very long. They changed addresses a dozen times before Katz even turned ten. Benjamin always managed to make enemies of people. In the last school he worked at, he was fired for beating up a caretaker so badly that he ended up in hospital.
Katz had been fourteen when his father died of lung cancer. Benjamin had smoked like a chimney his whole life; he even smoked on his deathbed. Katz remembered visitin
g him at the hospice center at Ersta Hospital a few weeks before his death. The incredibly depressing gray weather outside the windows. Benjamin, who could only breathe with the aid of oxygen. A pack of red Commerce cigarettes had been on the nightstand. He was holding one in his hand; it had a long snake of ash at the tip. All that was left of him was skin and bones. And his temper: Katz remembered the way he bawled out the nurses.
He couldn’t remember ever having been afraid of him, not even when he smashed up their home and then broke down, sobbing, in his wife’s arms.
Anne, Katz’s mother, was from a village in Jämtland, up north. She broke off contact with her family to marry Benjamin. Her father had been pro-German during the war. Katz had never met his relatives on his mother’s side. He didn’t even know their names.
Anne died shortly after his father. She stopped eating and wasted away at a nursing home, leaving Katz alone in the world because her sorrow at losing Benjamin was stronger than her love for her son. At least, that was what he had believed at the time.
Katz had been sent to a youth home in Hässelby. He met Jorma Hedlund and Eva Westin—or Dahlman, as she had been called then—and wound up involved with gang crime and addiction but was saved by his gift for languages and computers. He was hand-picked for military interpreter training, worked as an interpreter and eventually an intelligence officer, served as a data analyst in the National Defence Radio Establishment, and was stationed in St. Petersburg and Berlin. He returned to Stockholm, but fell back into the mire of drugs. He spent nearly a decade homeless before managing to rise to the surface again. He had been clean for just over ten years. He ran a small IT and translation firm in Traneberg and lived in a one-bedroom apartment above the office. He didn’t bring in all that much money, but it was enough for a simple life without luxuries.
Recently, he had been thinking more and more about his dark years. People had tried to help him. Jorma Hedlund had let him sleep at his apartment when he wanted to, and had overlooked it when Katz stole his money to buy drugs. Rickard Julin, his old boss from the military, who later betrayed him and died as a result of the Klingberg Affair, had also extended a helping hand. But Katz hadn’t wanted help. He had wanted to sink away.
His thoughts hopped here and there throughout his memory as he sat on his father’s old bench. His bar mitzvah had culminated in that pulpit as he read from the Torah, the year before Benjamin died. His father had stood next to him, beaming with pride. Anne had been with the women in the gallery, throwing sweets at Katz just as tradition dictated. Dumle lollies, he recalled. And raspberry fudge.
In another memory, his father was sitting at the kitchen table and crying, in only his underwear. It was night, and the sound had awoken Katz. He heard his father saying that he had been forced to kill a man for the sake of a passport. Katz was only eight or nine at the time, and he didn’t completely trust his memory. But he realized it had something to do with his family history, with their escape from Austria.
The rabbi took the Torah scroll from the cabinet and made a counter-clockwise round through the hall. The men kissed the case; Katz too. Since he’d started coming here six months earlier, he had been met by curiosity and questions about who he was. He had met people who remembered Benjamin. They were old now. Leo Silberstein. Abraham Josefsson. He had tried to angle for what had really happened to his paternal grandparents but hadn’t got much in the way of answers.
A little while later, the service was over. The women came down the stairs from the gallery, and he heard people speaking Yiddish and Swedish in turns. Men in yarmulkes and prayer shawls sent friendly nods his way. Katz saw a few boys with sidelocks; they came from a deeply religious family. They looked like his father in the old black-and-white photographs, when he was attending yeshiva in Vienna.
He put on his jacket in the hallway, patting his pocket to check the packs of heroin. The craving had left him, as if it were tired of his hesitation and had decided to go and track down an easier target. He would return to Husby and give the drugs back to Ramón. Forget it all and move on. It was important. He wouldn’t throw the drugs away, he would put them back where he found them. Prove to himself he was in control, that his drug abuse was history.
He was just about to leave when someone tapped him on the back.
“Shana tova, Danny! Happy New Year!”
It was an older man whom he didn’t recognize.
“L’shana tova tikatevu,” he replied.
“Not bad. Your Hebrew is better than mine. I don’t believe you remember me, but I remember you. David Frydman.”
The man put out his hand and Katz shook it.
“Silberstein told me you’d started coming here. We certainly are happy about that. Soon us old guys will be gone. And as you know, we need at least ten men to hold a service . . . It’s important to have replacements, and not just in the big synagogue in the city center. Last time I talked to you, you were thirteen, at your mitzvah.”
The man supported himself with a cane. Katz studied his wrinkled face. He was older than he’d first thought.
“Can you guess how old I am?” he asked, as if he had read Katz’s mind.
“I wouldn’t dare.”
“I was born in 1923, the year after your father.”
The man gave a sad smile.
“You knew my dad?”
“Benji Katz? Did I ever. Your father was an honorable man. He didn’t take shit from anybody. He stood up for who he was.”
“I’m glad you remember him that way.”
The man had placed a hand on his forearm, squeezing it gently as if to reassure himself that Katz wasn’t planning to slip away.
“Are you staying for coffee? We have kreplach and sandwiches. You like kreplach, don’t you, Danny?”
“I don’t know if I have time.”
“I can tell you about your father . . .”
A few moments later, Katz was sitting at a table in the big hall, drinking tea and eating chicken pierogies as Frydman told him about Benjamin.
“We came to Sweden the same year, Benji and I, 1938. He came from Vienna and I came from Salzburg. One year later, when the war broke out, the escape route was closed. We met here at the synagogue; our seats were next to each other. I looked up to him like a big brother.”
“Why was that?”
“He was like no one I’d ever met before. Charisma, I would call it today.” Frydman smiled sadly before he went on. “Benji had everything the rest of us Jewish boys could only dream of: a good physique, self-confidence, no respect for goyim. He was fearless. He broke the noses of more Nazis in this city than you could count. By the way, did you know that he lived with his parents up in the Jewish house on Klippgatan those first few years?”
“I don’t even know what that is.”
Frydman chuckled gently.
“It was a collective for people who had fled pogroms and other horrors. It was founded by Mr. and Mrs. Heckscher at the turn of the last century . . . they were Jewish patrons who had been established in Stockholm for generations. Not like us poor Jews who came to Sweden perfectly destitute with one suitcase in hand. It was like a little shtetl up there, with a view of Vitaberg Park. People spoke half a dozen different languages together, but mostly it was Yiddish. Jews from Germany, Poland, Romania, Austria, Czechoslovakia. You could get clothes, food, and a roof over your head. People would be placed out into society as they began to learn how it functioned. Today’s politicians would have loved it, except maybe for the Sweden Democrats.”
The old man grew silent and looked at the air, as if something invisible were going on there.
“Benji learned Swedish as soon as he got here. And he caught up with and surpassed his Swedish schoolmates before anyone knew what was happening. He had a true gift for study, but he wasn’t just some Jewish bookworm with Coke-bottle glasses and flat feet.”
“Sounds like stereotypes to my ears.”
“And they are. But I’m too old to get rid of them, even if I want
ed to.” Frydman looked at him with a serious expression. “The problem was that there weren’t enough men like your father in those years, prepared to defend themselves and their people. Benji took boxing lessons at Narva, down on Frejgatan. He had a commanding presence. He flirted with shiksas. He smoked like a chimney, but you know that already. He defended us in fights. The Söder gangs liked to harass us. Hooligans from Katarina Real who supported the Germans. They didn’t stand a chance against your father, he took them down in no time. And the goyim would run off, noses bleeding, to our delight. Benji took care of his parents, too, your grandparents. He helped them contact the authorities . . . It wasn’t a given that they would be allowed to stay here.”
“Why not?”
“They had come here on fake exit permits. The documents your father arranged in Austria, all on his own, at sixteen. He didn’t like to talk about that, and I didn’t want to pressure him. But I understood enough to know that he was the one who organized the family’s escape and that it cost him a great deal . . . which made me look up to him even more.”
Frydman chuckled again and placed a hand on Katz’s shoulder.
“What happened with my grandparents? They went to Israel after the war.”
“Yes. Your father was angry with Chaim and Sara, but I don’t know why. He claimed that Chaim was a typical ghetto Jew and a shlimazl.”
“Like a bad-luck magnet.”
“Verter zol men vegn un nit tseyln, as we say in Yiddish. Words should be weighed, not counted. And Benji always meant what he said.”
“But he didn’t tell you any more than that?”
“No. Your grandparents emigrated right after the war and after that I didn’t spend time with him anymore. We would only see each other very briefly, at Shabbat and around the holidays, here at Adat Jisrael. If you’re curious, I think you should ask Boris Epstein.”
“Who?”
“Your father’s best friend during those years. A staunch atheist. He would never set foot in temple, not even if the Messiah sent a personal invitation. He lives in a retirement home in Sumpan, in his own apartment. He’s in the phone book.”
The Tunnel Page 6