“There are anti-Semites everywhere, and they don’t have to be wearing brown for me to know who they are. What’s the best way to downplay the Holocaust? To insinuate that Jews haven’t learned anything from history, so they behave like their own old tormentors and oppressors in the West Bank. How best to demonize them? By plastering them with fantasies of complete power, claiming that their lobbying groups are so influential that they control American foreign policy, that they have such a grip on the media that they control the news, that they are greedy, that they own the banks and live by the Old Testament morality of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, which Jesus distanced himself from two thousand years ago. I thought I wouldn’t have to listen to this sort of shit anymore after the war . . .”
Epstein stopped talking and gave Katz a look of rage as he fingered the hearing aid behind his ear.
“But that’s not why you’re here,” he said. “You’re not here to listen to an old man’s fears about the direction the world is heading in. I understand you have questions about your father and grandparents?”
Katz nodded.
“Your father and grandfather didn’t get along particularly well. They had different views of the world. And of what resistance was. Chaim was one of the people who were forced to scrub the streets with a toothbrush when the Nazis took power in Austria. I’m sure you’ve seen the pictures . . . It happened everywhere, and worse things too. But Benji, as young as he was, realized that this was just a taste of things to come.”
“He was the one who convinced the family to flee?”
Epstein gazed emptily at the air.
“He more or less forced the decision by putting himself in danger. He distributed anti-Nazi flyers, risking his own life at only fifteen. He resisted the Brownshirts, along with some other brave boys. He was a fighter even then, a large boy, almost like me, and he looked older than he actually was. Chaim and Sara realized that the situation was untenable, that they had to leave the country. But it was difficult to get an exit permit. The noose was starting to tighten. In the end, Benji managed to obtain the correct papers. He had a chokehold on someone. I don’t know what happened—he never said—but someone helped them with false visas. People said that your father was forced to kill a man so they could escape.”
So that memory of his was accurate after all. That his father had killed someone for a passport.
“But Dad never told you about it himself?”
“Only by way of insinuation. A formal request for extradition to Das Reich was issued, but by then they had taken control of the situation and had been granted asylum, as it would be called today, for political and humanitarian reasons. They made it through the eye of the needle, and, as you know, there weren’t all that many circumcised men who managed that. This country sided with the Germans much longer than anyone cares to admit.”
Epstein closed his eyes and gave a heavy sigh. Katz peered down at the street. More mysteries, he thought, just like his whole childhood, the reason for their constant moves and his father’s irrational sorrow and rage.
“Terrible things happened in their lives,” Epstein continued. “I knew your grandfather too, you know. He treated me almost like a son. We would play chess on Saturday evenings after Havdalah . . . before Benji and I took off for Narva to go to boxing lessons. Their memories caused them to leave this country as soon as the war was over, to move to Israel and start a new life. But loss caught up with them, and they died young . . .”
“What kind of loss?”
“They had a daughter, too, didn’t you know that? A little older than your father. Hannah. They couldn’t get her out of the country.”
Epstein shrugged in resignation. “‘She rests in a grave in the sky, where it’s roomy to lie,’ as Celan famously wrote. No one knows what happened to her. She was four years older than your father, and she was the apple of her parents’ eyes.”
Epstein poured a glass of mineral water for himself and drained it in three loud gulps. He gave a start when the front door opened and a male voice called, “Hello.”
“Age takes its toll,” he said as he watched Katz with an endlessly distant gaze. “Or maybe it’s the weight of memories. My doctor is here. I’ll have to ask you to leave. But it would be great to see you again. Promise you’ll visit me again sometime.”
Katz spent the next few days finishing up his job for the telecoms firm. He checked the results of the phishing program, tightened the firewalls in the servers, and collated his observations in a new document. Kaspersky Lab couldn’t have done a better job, he thought as he emailed it off. He received a quick answer from the security division and sent an invoice right back.
When he was done, he pulled up the info for his next assignment. A dozen articles from Russian military magazines that he was to translate into Swedish for the Ministry of Defence. He gave them a quick glance and realized that the job would be easier than expected. It would only take a few days, and the deadline was almost a month away.
He called Eva Westin instead and was surprised when she picked up.
“Sorry I haven’t called, Katz,” she said. “I’ve been busy, but I haven’t forgotten you. In any case, it’s just as I suspected with your friend. Respiratory arrest with resultant heart failure due to an overdose. Plus pulmonary edema. I suspect you saw pink foam around his mouth . . . In short, a natural death for a junkie.”
Katz stared emptily into the air.
“It seems unlikely that he would overdose on stuff he was cutting himself.”
“But he did. They checked for traces of the typical by-products of heroin breakdown. Monoacetylmorphine, for example . . . and it was there. So were traces of amphetamines and alcohol.”
“What happened to the syringe itself . . . or, more accurately, its contents?”
“There’s nothing about a syringe in the report. It was probably thrown out at intake. The pathologist made a formal report to the police, as is customary, and it was accepted just as formally—that is, with no follow-up. The official cause of death is cardiac arrest.”
Whether it was sloppiness or disinterest, this bothered him.
“Maybe if the police had actually been in the apartment,” she went on, “the contents of the syringe would have been collected for testing. But the ambulance crew took him straight to the morgue, not the medical examiner.”
Katz took a pen from his desk and started to bite it, but put it back down again.
“Is there anything else in the report . . . what was he wearing when he was brought in?”
“The clothes you found him in. And there was a wallet in his pocket, with an ID and six thousand in cash.”
“No mobile phone?”
“No. Is that significant?”
“Maybe.”
“Like I said, there has to be a suspicion of crime for the police to investigate further, and in this case there isn’t. I think you can rest easy when it comes to the reason he died. Nothing strange, just awfully sad.”
“What about the woman, Jenny; have you found anything on her?”
“I checked for missing and wanted persons, and there are plenty in the database, but no one named Jenny. I would need more information to go any further. A last name, for example.”
“Has anyone contacted the police to ask about Ramón?”
“I checked on that too, but no one has as yet. His mother died within the last year or so. Juana Suárez, on disability, lived in Kärrtorp. His parents were divorced and his father returned to Chile once the military dictatorship fell, but there’s no address listed for him.”
Katz heard children’s laughter in the background, and then Eva mumbled something that wasn’t meant for him.
“Are you still there?” he asked.
“I’m picking Lisa up from school. It’s my week now.”
“I can call back later if that’s better for you.”
“No, it’s fine, go on.”
“What does it say about Ramón in the police database
?”
“I can’t find anything on him. Just ten-year-old cases for possession and petty theft. Nothing in the general crime information database. It seems he managed to stay under the radar in recent years.”
This surprised him. Ramón had been dealing; there should have been something on him fairly recently. A report of the police taking him into the interrogation room at Plattan, or something along those lines. But apparently there was nothing like that.
“The lease for the Husby apartment was in his name, at least; he got it through the housing authority. Ramón was the only one listed as living there, so there was no information about his girlfriend. And I also got hold of my contact in the drugs unit. No new or purer heroin in circulation as far as he was aware. But then again, the organized crime gangs are usually a step ahead.”
“Was that all?”
“I can keep digging if you want me to,” she said. “If you choose not to let this go.”
“Maybe you’re right,” Katz said. “Maybe I ought to focus on my own life instead. Get it under control, become happy.”
He heard her breathing close to the mouthpiece, about to say something, but then she changed her mind.
“Got to go now,” she said. “Lisa wants to stop by a cafe before we pick up her little brother. Mother–daughter time, you know. Sit around and gossip a little. Bond. Talk to you later . . . Take care of yourself in the meantime.”
The neighborhood somehow seemed to float all on its own, high up on Brunkebergsåsen. The area below it, Hamngatan and all its gallerias and fancy boutiques, was completely separate from the world up here.
Katz parked the car on Herkulesgatan and walked toward the rough-hewn granite palace that was Riksbanken. Ugly seventies buildings flanked this red-light district: banks and office buildings with dark windows. A Russian-looking woman in fake fur gave him a long look from where she was standing near Brunkebergsparken. In the distance there was a dry cleaner’s, a shoe-and-key shop, and the entrance to a multi-story carpark.
It was nine o’clock at night. He stopped along the bridge railing above Hamngatan. The “no loitering” signs hadn’t put a stop to prostitution any more than the sex-purchase laws had done fifteen years earlier. There had been just a short break, then everything returned to normal. Cars carrying johns cruised slowly by; a few young, high girls stood on the pavement and tried to look sexy.
It took fifteen minutes for him to catch sight of Mona. She was climbing out of a beat-up Toyota by the NK garage, and she immediately took up her post again to pick up another client. She took a compact mirror out of her bag, touched up her make-up, and then washed her hands with a wet wipe. Her jeans were dirty and one leg was ripped. He had just decided to approach her when another car stopped: a white SUV. The window rolled down, she bent forward and said something to the driver before climbing in, and then the door closed and the vehicle vanished in the direction of Gustav Adolfs Torg.
Half an hour later, she was back. She came up the stairs from Hamngatan by herself. She stopped by the shop window of the dry cleaner’s and gave her reflection a critical look. She went to stand at the edge of the pavement again.
“What do you want this time?” she said when she saw Katz.
“Just to talk a little.”
“Can’t you see I’m working?”
“You’re not going to get any customers in that condition.”
She glared at him, irritated. Her lip was split; it was bleeding again. She took the handkerchief from her bag and pressed it to her mouth. She followed him as he began to walk.
“Fucking psycho,” she said as they drove through the diplomat district out toward Djurgårdsbrunn. “I said I wouldn’t stand for any violent stuff and the first thing that guy does is punch me right in the face. The more worn down you are, the more the perverts are drawn to you; they take advantage of desperation.”
Katz didn’t say anything. He understood that she needed time to collect herself.
“He tried to rape me. That’s how I look at it, anyway . . . and it doesn’t make any difference that he paid in advance. Five hundred kronor. What a fucking cheap-ass pig. The dude obviously had money—he had a big SUV and a huge Rolex. He tried to stick things up inside me, stuff he had in a bag . . . I was fucking terrified, so I screamed as loud as I could. Then he suddenly let me go and it was a damn good thing I managed to get a taxi.”
She cautiously touched her split lip with a nicotine-stained finger.
“Have you heard anything from Jenny?” Katz asked.
“Why would I have? Maybe she moved in with some old john. What do I know? She could be sitting around chilling somewhere with a new dude. Why is it so important for you to get hold of her?”
Katz didn’t answer. They had driven past Berwaldhallen and the National Museum of Science and Technology. The illuminated top of the Kaknäs Tower hovered in the air above them.
“Tell me about that movie.”
“What movie?”
“The bukkake movie. I saw you in it. You tied her hands behind her back before she joined a bunch of masked men in a ritzy apartment somewhere.”
She whipped around to face him, then looked away again, staring into the darkness, disgusted.
“How did you end up seeing that?”
“I bought it. And something tells me that it wasn’t actually for sale. That it ended up on a shelf of other pornos by mistake.”
She lit a cigarette but held it in her hand without smoking it.
“What is it you actually want from me? Are you a pervert?”
“I want to find out how her boyfriend died, because he saved my life once. And I’m pulling at what few threads I can find.”
She took a drag of her cigarette before tossing it out the cracked window.
“Okay. I went along to a get-together full of pervs because Jenny asked me to. She didn’t even want to go, but she needed the money. That was before she and Ramón got on the gravy train. The kind of people who do that stuff are such fucking sickos. They pay money to come all over women’s faces as a group.”
“Who organizes it?”
“I don’t know his name. A pretty young guy. He mostly does normal sex films; he’s a regular old porn producer. That’s how Jenny knew him. But he does that other stuff, too . . . more perverted things. I saw him in a magazine once, in a picture from some celebrity party. Jenny said he has a list of people he can contact.”
She snorted back some mucus, then coughed it up and swallowed it again.
“I was only there once, like I said, and I was high as a goddamn kite too. We were taken to a luxury apartment somewhere in Östermalm. They blindfolded us like it was some sort of fucking state secret. I was actually supposed to join in, but I couldn’t handle it. So all I did was tie her up and let her into the room of ten waiting perverts.”
Katz had turned the car around and was slowly driving back into the city.
“How can I find that porn producer?”
“Check out Kontiki Self Storage. That’s the best thing I can think of.”
“Kontiki?”
“It’s an old warehouse where they shoot movies. It’s in the business park in Johannelund, near Vällingby. It’s like an assembly line. The equipment is already there. The crew arrives in the morning, and that evening they leave with a finished product. Jenny told me about it once.”
“How do I get in?”
“Spectators are welcome for a fee.”
Katz nodded and made a note of the name and address in his memory.
“Just one last question. Do you know if Jenny was afraid of snakes?”
“That would be a weird fucking question if I didn’t happen to know the answer. She loves snakes; she raised them for a while. Corn snakes, I think they’re called, from Mexico. One time she had a baby snake with her while she was working Malmskillnadsgatan. In her bag.”
They passed Norrmalmstorg. The shapes of waiting women were visible on the bridge over Hamngatan.
“I shoul
d quit,” she said as she stared into the dark night. “Get out of this shit before something happens. Two girls have disappeared in the past few months. Just vanished without a trace. And not a single person cares. There’s nothing in the papers, the cops don’t give a shit. Magnus, the guy from the City Mission, says he can help me; he knows a place outside the city where they take hopeless cases. I have a son—he’s seven now. He lives with a foster family in Dalarna. I love that little guy . . . He would be crushed if anything happened to me.”
She took paper and a pen from her bag and scribbled down her mobile phone number.
“In case you have any more questions,” she said. “And this way you won’t have to bother me at work. Can I get yours too, in case I run into Jenny?”
Katz gave her a business card. She flashed him a quick smile before she opened the car door and got out. He had no idea how old she might be—anywhere between twenty-five and forty. Her eyes were empty, and yet he could see the child deep down inside her. Just a little girl, a prisoner at rock bottom, and she had no idea how to get out.
The windows of the apartment were dark, aside from a bluish light filtering through the blinds. Katz guessed it was from the terrarium. It was two in the morning. This residential neighborhood was asleep.
He wondered where the boy was, Alexandru, and how things were going for him. He ought to make sure everything was working as it should, he thought, that the boy had escaped his tormentors. But he would have called if there had been any problems, Katz was sure of it.
He took out his flashlight and walked up to the front door of the building. He opened it and walked in. He tried the door to the apartment. Locked. The landlord had been there.
The light in the stairwell was broken. Katz fished a feeler gauge out of his pocket and flipped out the one he thought would fit, then bent the top in two spots and inserted it into the gap. He had done this a few times a week during his dark years. It wasn’t something he was proud of; it had just been a necessary evil, to finance his drug abuse.
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