“Do you know who’s in charge here? Who rents this place out?”
“That musclehead at the door. Ronny . . . Oh, hey, there she is.”
The door had opened. The Thai woman came out, wearing a G-string and a transparent bra, the bruise on her cheek passably covered in make-up.
It took a while for filming to start. A younger girl whom Katz hadn’t noticed before was sitting on a stool, cleaning her genitals with wet wipes.
Someone had turned on house music in the background. The Thai woman removed her last few articles of clothing. Katz couldn’t help staring at her. Her pointed breasts with their nearly black nipples. Her pubic hair, which was trimmed in a heart shape; one of her labia was larger than the other and hung down pathetically.
“Are you interested?” said the man with the cornrows. “You can have my number. You just have to call. I deliver straight to your doorstep, all over town.”
“I don’t think so.”
“You won’t regret it. That girl’ll ride your cock like a porn star. Or else you can get a massage with a happy ending. Here . . . take my number.”
He shoved a crumpled business card into Katz’s jacket pocket.
“Look! They’re starting.”
A short man whose upper body was covered in tattoos came out of a door across the room. He approached an older man who was standing at the nearest camera, and they had a discussion.
Katz’s eyes roved here and there, looking for the bodybuilder, but he couldn’t find him.
The spotlights came on. Someone signaled for him to go and stand by the wall. The scent of lube and sweat. Laughter and heavy breathing from excited men who stood along the wall, watching.
Katz had seen enough. He left the room, walking into the corridor.
He heard faint music from another room in the distance. He headed toward it.
The bodybuilder was sitting in an office chair at a desk; he looked up as he discovered Katz. The dog lay on the floor between his legs.
“Are you lost, man?”
“I’m looking for someone . . . a porn producer.” Katz dug in his jacket pocket and placed the DVD on the desk, face up. “Someone told me he sometimes rents this place for filming. I need to get hold of him. Or, actually, the girl on the cover.”
The man cast a hasty look at the DVD before he shoved it back to Katz with a grunt.
“Sorry, but we don’t do work with that sort of product here.”
“I know. But this guy does straight porn too. Does it mean anything to you?”
The musclehead sighed.
“What are you really after? Are you a journalist? An anti-porn activist? We have problems with that type sometimes. Last week our front door was graffitied.”
“I’m just looking for this girl. That’s all.”
The man looked out the window, where a truck was reversing into a tarmacked area behind the building. The Rottweiler had stood up and was tentatively nosing Katz’s trouser leg.
“She’s a junkie chick, right? They knock on our door sometimes to ask if there’s any work. Mostly people say no. They’re too unreliable; not the kind of girls you can hire long term.”
“But do you know who she is?”
“I don’t know her name or how to get hold of her. And I don’t remember which production she was part of. Don’t take it personally, man, but people appreciate me for my lousy memory, and I’ve already said too much. Go back out and watch instead; after all, you’ve paid for it. And a piece of advice, with best intentions: it’s a bad idea to ask after people in this branch. Some of them can be awfully touchy.”
The door of the filming room was ajar as Katz walked toward the exit. The music was louder now. The Thai woman was on all fours on the carpet, under a plastic palm tree. The cameraman had placed his foot on her back and was filming her from above. She looked at Katz as he went by. She seemed to be trying to communicate something with her gaze, but he didn’t understand what it was.
Katz got off at T-Centralen, went through the turnstiles, and followed the stream of people through the pedestrian tunnel to Central Station. A woman was selling Situation Sthlm, the homeless paper, next to one of the pillars. Further on, a man was begging for money from his electric wheelchair. Katz had the feeling that someone was watching him. He looked around but didn’t see anyone.
He found the locker in the storage area in the upper hall of the station. Speed Services 0021. He punched in the six-digit code at the bottom of the receipt and heard the lock spring open.
There was a brown envelope on the bottom of the locker.
It contained a pocket calendar. There were no entries, except in the address section in the back. Twenty or so mobile phone numbers were written in sprawling penmanship, each followed by a letter. Initials of names, he presumed. First or last.
A folded sheet of A4 paper was tucked inside the plastic pocket on the inside cover. An ink drawing of a woman crouching in what he first thought was a cramped prison cell; he realized after a moment what it was: a cage. In the background of the drawing was a dock on a lake. Three letters were scribbled in the margin. Jenny’s signature? he wondered in the instant before his brain deciphered them: “H.o.P.”
A movement caused him to turn his head. A school group was passing by and a person in a gray hoodie vanished behind them. Katz recognized the gait. The guy with the spots on his face, the guy he’d seen at the shelter and the porno cinema.
He stayed put for a moment and pretended to be reading the billboards outside Pressbyrån. The man was watching him from a distance. Katz walked to the escalators and went down to the lower hall. He peered in the window of Pocketshop as he went by. The person was following him.
He increased his speed as he walked through the pedestrian tunnel, pushing his way through the stream of commuters, taking a sudden right turn behind one of the pillars and sinking down into a crouch. The man with the spots hurried past him.
Thirty meters on, the man stopped short and looked around. He took out a phone and made a very brief call, then hung up and kept moving toward the metro platforms.
The man got off the train at Alvik. Katz followed him, always hidden by other passengers. He followed him down the stairs to the ticket hall and then to the exit onto the square.
A tram bound for Solna was waiting on the Tvärbana platform; it was scheduled to depart in two minutes.
The man got on, took a seat, and began to page through a newspaper someone had left behind. The other passengers seemed alarmed by his junkie appearance.
Katz moved to the last car, stood in a disabled spot, and kept an eye on the man through the window between the cars. A sleepy conductor walked around, checking tickets.
The tram started to move, passing through the kilometer-long rock tunnel and coming out into daylight at Margretelundsvarvet. An airplane was thundering in to land at Bromma in the distance, licking the roofs of the old factory buildings as the tram made its way through the industrial area.
The man got off at Norra Ulvsunda and followed the tracks. Katz slid in behind a tram shelter to hide, pretending to read the timetable and letting thirty seconds pass . . . The man had reached the warehouses on the other side of the railway. Katz waited until he was out of sight.
He caught his trail again on Ranhammarsvägen. The streets were lined by neo-Gothic brick buildings from the last century. Further on there were asbestos-sided buildings from the fifties, a period in which this area had undergone lots of renewal. Heavy industry was gone now. The neighborhood was dominated by car repair shops, tire warehouses, and food wholesalers.
The man passed the bunker-like headquarters of the Hell’s Angels with its no-trespassing signs. Katz had been there once with Jorma Hedlund, back when he had been a member; they’d attended a surprisingly tranquil party where the juiciest incident was a performance put on by a few strippers.
The man walked by a fireworks outlet and then through a back area that contained one surviving Aeronautical Research Institute wind
tunnel: a giant L-shaped building made of copper and concrete reminiscent of the set of a dystopic science fiction movie. Then he squeezed through an opening in a wall and came out onto a deserted gravel plot with about ten scrapped cars parked in it.
He crouched down by one of the cars. He took a key from under the wheel rim, opened the door, and got in. A minute later he came back out. He was holding a can of beer in one hand, and he took a few sips. He had changed into a pair of clean trousers, but he had kept his hoodie on. He lived there, Katz realized; the junked car was his home.
The man was waiting for someone; he kept looking at the other end of the gravel plot, which was bordered by another street, narrower and darker. From Katz’s spot along the wall, he could see a few warehouses and a dark yard where bushes grew between rusty oil drums.
Then a Vespa came from the opposite direction. The driver stopped, removed her helmet, and shook out her hair—a woman, but she was too far away for Katz to make out any details.
He took out his phone, selected the camera, and zoomed in on her. It was the woman from Blue Dreams. She asked the man a question and shook her head, irritated at his response.
A gray BMW approached from the warehouses in the distance; the door opened and a man stepped out. He was young, his hair slicked back, and he wore khaki shorts, a pair of white sneakers, and no socks.
The woman seemed upset; she gesticulated at the man in the hoodie as the other man listened.
The faint smell of burned rubber drifted through the air. Another plane roared in, very low.
When Katz looked at the scrapped car again, the man and woman had climbed into the BMW. Half a minute later, they drove by him, just thirty meters away. Katz watched the woman lean up between the seats and teasingly kiss the man with the slicked-back hair on the neck.
The summer cottage belonged to an acquaintance who wouldn’t mind if he borrowed it. Jorma had been to a midsummer party there once. It was at the end of a forest road in northern Uppland. The nearest neighbors were several kilometers away. The key was in the outhouse. This place hadn’t been used for ages.
A musty smell hit him as he unlocked the door. Mouse shit everywhere. The curtains were drawn. Three small rooms, one of which had no windows. There was a woodstove with a brick chimney. Fishing rods on the walls. A pile of gun magazines lay on a table.
Hillerström gave him an enraged glare when he opened the trunk. Jorma didn’t say anything; he just tore up a T-shirt he’d found in the house. He used it to blindfold Hillerström.
He was in no rush. He took a little walk first, following a path around a lake before returning to the house. Hillerström was tied to the bed in the windowless room, alternately moaning and hyperventilating.
Jorma watched the news on TV. He drank a low-alcohol beer he found in the pantry. He chatted to himself, musing out loud about what he intended to do to the man.
It was dark when he dragged him outside, tore off the blindfold, and pressed the revolver to the back of his neck. Then he shoved him along in the moonlight, fifty meters into the woods, until they came to a clearing.
“Get on your knees, bend your head forward.”
He placed the barrel of the gun to his neck. Hillerström hung his head like a man condemned to death.
“Tell me everything, from start to finish: who came up with the idea, who you’ve been in contact with, and if I can tell you’re lying, I swear you will never see your daughters again.”
Six months earlier, Hillerström had been brought in for questioning about a job he hadn’t had anything to do with. It was just an excuse for the police to initiate contact with him. The interrogation had been held in a home outside the city, by an officer in civilian clothes, some sort of handler. After a while, the man played recordings of secret phone taps for Hillerström; Hillerström himself was on the tape. Work stuff, the sort of evidence that could put him away for a long time.
“I was terrified,” he said. “That guy could have thrown me in prison for ten years if I hadn’t cooperated . . .”
But there was one way to get out of his bind. He had to help the man arrange a robbery.
The man already knew that someone from a security company had contacted Hillerström. Now he wanted Zoran to hear about it. Hillerström was surprised he’d even heard of Zoran. But it wasn’t just that: the cop knew that Zoran needed money, and it was important to get him to do this particular job. He’d tried to ask questions about what was going on but wasn’t given an answer. All he knew was that the cop was having a hard time getting to Zoran.
“You didn’t get a name?”
“What the fuck do you think? This guy wasn’t exactly dropping business cards all over the place.”
“What did he look like? About how old was he?”
“Thick blond hair . . . almost like wool. Just over thirty. Tall, about six foot five.”
“And you were the only two at this meeting?”
“No. There was an older cop there as well. His boss, I think. A fat old man in his sixties. I thought I recognized him from somewhere.”
“How do you know it was his boss?”
“That’s just how it seemed. When he said something, it was like his word was law.”
“Keep going . . . Then what happened?”
“Things just moved forward. I kept in contact with the guy from the security firm. He had no idea the cops were keeping an eye on him. I called Zoran and asked if he was interested in doing an armored car. No suspicion on his end, either. He saw it as a happy coincidence that I contacted him right when he needed cash. We met up, I gave him some info, he told me you were in, we arranged another meeting in Gärdet, and the ball was rolling.”
“And the handler was in contact with you the whole time?”
“Yeah. He wanted to know what was up, he said.”
“How many times did you meet with him?”
“Three. And you have to believe me, I had no idea they were going to shoot Zoran.”
“But you knew we would get caught.”
Hillerström didn’t respond.
“Where did you meet him the other times?”
“At the Kungshallen market, in town. At an Indian restaurant on the ground floor.”
“Was he in contact with the security guy too?”
“I don’t know . . . Why?”
“That guy is dead.”
Hillerström stared at him vacantly.
“Zoran was killed by a cop. And now the insider is dead too. Suicide. How likely is it that they’re connected?”
Hillerström tried to open and close his swollen eye.
“I can give you something if you let me go, Jorma. There is a way to reach that cop. I happened to find out about it . . . by chance, you could say. After the robbery, when everything was going to shit.”
“Well?”
“Like I said, you have to let me go first. Let’s defuse this whole situation. I want you to know I’m damn sorry for what happened to Zoran. I’ll give you money, too; try to make up for all of this. We’ll meet again in a few days, you can decide where. For God’s sake, Jorma, we can fix this. I’m as pissed off as you are about what happened.”
Perhaps the address book was a backup for Ramón’s phone, Katz thought as he sat in his office, gazing out the window at Tranebergsparken—phone numbers of clients, or maybe dealers? The first number was followed by the initial Å.
He looked up the first ten on the Swedish phone directory website, Eniro. No hits. He did a bit more digging around, trying to see if he could find matches for any of the other numbers, but got the same discouraging results. They all went to unregistered prepaid cards.
He took out the drawing instead. A woman, caged up in a house somewhere. H.o.P.
That abbreviation could mean anything. But the drawing had been in the address book, as if they belonged together.
He took out his mobile phone and dialed a random number from the book. No answer. He called another, but all he heard was the endless dial to
ne; no voicemail picked up.
He flipped to the last page. Two numbers. He called the top one, which was listed under the letter Å. Three rings, and then, to his surprise, an answer: a child, a boy.
“Hi . . . this is Linus.”
For a moment, Katz was at a loss for words.
“Hi, Linus. What are you doing?”
“Nothing. Are you a friend of Dad’s?”
“Yes, I am.”
Silence on the line. The boy was rustling something; it sounded like a piece of paper.
“Are you looking for something?” Katz asked.
“Yeah, sweets.”
“Did you find any?”
“No, just this phone, it was buzzing in a drawer.”
“Where are you, Linus?”
“At home . . . in Dad’s office.”
The boy pronounced the word as if he didn’t quite understand the meaning of an office.
“Promise you won’t tell Dad . . . that I’m looking in his stuff for sweets.”
“I promise, but only if you can answer a few questions.”
“Okay.”
He could tell the boy was nervous. Katz made an effort to sound calm.
“How old are you, Linus?”
“Five. Almost five and a half.”
“Do you know the name of the street you live on?”
“No . . .”
“Do you live in Stockholm?”
“Yes.”
“In the city?”
“Yes.”
The boy was breathing close to the receiver. He was stuffed up; Katz could hear him sniffling.
“What’s the rest of your name, Linus?”
“That’s it.”
“Don’t you have a last name too?”
“Same as Dad’s.”
“What is that?”
“Don’t you know? You’re his friend, right?”
“Yes, but I’m just wondering if you know it too.”
The boy laughed. He pressed a button on the phone and there was a beep.
“There are no games on this phone,” he said, disappointed. “There are tons on Mum’s phone, and I can play them as much as I want. Bamba Pizza and Toca Boca Hair Salon. And Minecraft, even though I’m not very good at it. My big sister is better, but she goes to school. You can’t tell that I was looking for sweets in Dad’s room, because if I don’t eat sweets for a whole year I get a new bike.”
The Tunnel Page 12