The Tunnel

by Carl-Johan Vallgren

  PART 5

  Hoffman lived in a cozy apartment near Hornstull. A man who lived for his children, she thought as she followed him through the rooms and back to the kitchen. The apartment was like a miniature play land, with a small trampoline in the living room, gymnastic rings suspended from the hall ceiling, and mattresses on the floor so small people could tumble around without hurting themselves.

  She was sitting on a kitchen chair as he made mojitos at the counter. Jazz came from the stereo. Coltrane, he informed her. She could smell the faint odor of foot sweat from her own socks. She’d gone straight to his place from the office at 8 p.m. after having tried to digest all the new information.

  “Strong or half-strength?” he asked as he muddled the mint leaves in the glasses.

  “Strong.”

  There were activity books on the kitchen table. Crayons and watercolor paints. A couple of playdough figures were drying beside the dishwasher.

  “How old are your kids?” she asked.

  “Five and seven.” He smiled discreetly over the blender. “And yours?”

  “About the same age—six and nine.”

  She had the urge to show him pictures from her phone, present herself as a normal mother, even though she knew she wasn’t—she had embarrassingly few photos of them; she would never measure up to people like Hoffman, who had their lives in order.

  “But this week is your off week?” she said instead.

  “Yes. Emelie, my ex, only lives a few blocks away. Very practical. In a couple of years, the kids can come and go freely between our two apartments. The only downside is that it will be the end of this kind of spontaneous date.”

  Her smelly feet—she ought to do something about them.

  “Or am I reading too much into this? I was a little surprised when you rang my doorbell. I just expected we would chat on the phone and then see each other at work next week.”

  She had gone to his house on a whim because she needed someone to talk to . . . or did she have an ulterior motive?

  She snuck a look at the handbag at her feet and the black plastic folder sticking out of it. In under twenty-four hours the situation had changed drastically. Her Bosnian colleagues had faxed over new material. Transcripts of phone taps, conversations between members of organized crime syndicates. Several calls were between Sweden and Bosnia, and it seemed as if that part of the investigation had been done without authorization. She hadn’t had them translated yet, but her contact had given a description of the contents in English in a separate document. Abramović was mentioned a number of times. Apparently he had owed money to the mob and had somehow sabotaged some sort of transport, possibly containing narcotics. But there was something else that made this matter a potential bombshell: they had emailed over some pictures taken last summer in a tourist resort near Split. Albanian and Bosnian criminals having a meeting with a high-up Swedish police commissioner inside a brothel.

  It was Hoffman’s old superior at the criminal police and the vice squad: Karl Mattson, currently assistant head of the county police—the man who was in charge of the task force in the hunt for the robbers—plus a man with blond, woolly hair.

  And what’s more, while she was sitting in her office, staring at the photos, which had been taken in secret—pictures from a meeting that, according to her colleagues in Bosnia, dealt with human trafficking—she had finally realized what she’d missed, what that bell ringing in her head was trying to tell her: Jorma.

  He had known Abramović for over twenty years. She would bet a thousand kronor that he was the unknown robber who had managed to escape. He was somewhere out there, and it was not up to her to report him. Loyalty, she thought. Apparently being loyal to Jorma was more important to her than the ethics of her job; she had grown up with him. And that was stopping her from moving forward on the case. At least for the time being.

  “Did you talk to anyone higher up about what I told you?” she asked.

  “Haven’t had time. I tried to get hold of Mattson, but he’s out of town. Has anything new come up?”

  New things were coming up all the time. But what concrete evidence did she have? Just a couple of phone taps in Serbo-Croatian and a few photos of Balkan mafiosos in the company of Mattson and his white-blond underling. And two phone numbers from Katz’s list that kept showing up in the material from Bosnia. The ones listed under “M” and “Å” in the address book. M as in Mattson, she thought. And Å for the phone answered by the little boy.

  “Earth to Eva! Are you with me?”

  “Of course . . . I was just thinking you might as well not bother for now.”

  “Talking to people higher up?”

  “Abramović is a dead end. I’m planning to cross him off the list. The guy is dead, so he’s not much use. I have to find another way in.”

  He gave her a brief smile.

  “Just say the word if there’s anything else I can help you with.”

  She hesitated. Should she say it after all, just pour it all out? No, it was better to wait, at least until the phone tap logs were translated.

  “It’s fine,” she said. “By the way, where’s your bathroom?”

  “Straight ahead and to the right.”

  She walked through a hallway where the children had been allowed to draw on the walls with crayon. There was a bulletin board with a collage of holiday photos in which Hoffman was posing along with his ex-wife and kids. Rational people, she thought. They took trips together even though they were divorced. They met for coffee and responsible conversations about their kids’ futures.

  She walked by the boy’s room. The door was open. It was cozily furnished. Posters of Ronaldo and Messi on the walls. Chima Lego figures in a glass cabinet. A Kapla construction reminiscent of the Leaning Tower of Pisa. A lone Skylander stood on the desk, a figure she thought was called Crusher; he was the hero of an adventure Wii game that Arvid loved, a being who could kill everything in his path with a magic hammer. She felt another pang of guilt; she hadn’t talked to the kids all week and had gone so far as to reject their calls when they’d tried to reach her on her mobile . . .

  The next room belonged to the girl. She had her own TV and computer, and a pink canopy on her bed. Dress-up clothes on a coatrack. An easel, and real oil paints. A vanity table, of course, full of Body Shop products.

  She realized she had taken a wrong turn, because she suddenly found herself in Hoffman’s little home office. She walked in the opposite direction instead, until she found the toilet. She peed, and as she wiped she saw a little bit of blood on the paper. She had noticed she had been in a mood the past few days; she was about to get her period.

  “Eva . . . did you get lost?”

  Her boss’s voice was far away. She took off her socks and flushed them away with her urine.

  By the time she returned, he had moved into the living room. He had pulled out a beanbag for each of them. Two drinks stood on a Marimekko tray on the floor.

  “Here,” he said, handing one to her. “What are we toasting to?”

  “Success—what else? Putting away all the bad guys.”

  He had dimmed the lights. She could glimpse the lights of the southern suburbs through the window.

  “What did you really come over here for? Excuse me for asking, but this certainly seems to be turning into a date.”

  “I don’t really know. I just needed company.”

  Her drink was almost gone. She must have drained half of it in one gulp. They were sitting so close their knees touched . . . What if I start a relationship with him, she thought, what would happen?

  She pictured them together, in a house outside the city, a big old house they had renovated, Hoffman with flecks of paint on his face, the children playing in the yard, all four of them. But she would manage to bring everything crashing down before they even had time to blink.

  “It’s getting late,” she said in a half-hearted attempt to avoid whatever was about to happen, what she had promised herself must not
happen. “Maybe we can see each other some other evening . . . tomorrow, maybe?”

  “Tomorrow won’t work. And you have to tell me why you’re really here. To tell me that you’re planning to reprioritize your cases? You could have waited until Monday for that.”

  To sleep with you, she thought. To cut the cord to Katz.

  He took her hand, massaging it gently, and looked her straight in the eye without blinking.

  Not with your boss, she thought, don’t do it.

  One second later, she leaned forward and kissed him, experiencing the taste of his tongue, the taste of saliva mixed with rum and mint, finding that he tasted nice, that he was a good kisser.

  She unbuttoned his fly, hesitantly circling his cock with her hand. Then she took him deep into her mouth, milking him with her cheeks and tongue. She was wet herself, she noticed as she pulled off her trousers and underwear. The music from the radio faded as she straddled him, letting him slide back and forth between her labia, without entering her, as the pebbles of Styrofoam in the beanbag squeaked. She observed him as if through a magnifying glass. He was in a whole different world; his eyes were glassy, happy, as he stroked her clitoris with one finger he’d somehow worked in between their bodies.

  “I’ve wanted this so bad,” he whispered. “Eva, you have no idea how much I’ve wanted to do this . . .”

  According to the Swedish Companies Registration Office, the owner of Blue Dreams AB was Maria Leonora Alsén, born in Solna in 1979. Katz guessed that Peter Wallin lived at the same address in lower Kungsholmen. The gray BMW parked on Pontonjärgatan indicated that he did. He had clicked his way to the Swedish Transport Agency’s website on his phone to search for its license plate. The vehicle was owned by Wallin’s video distribution company, Sin City.

  Katz checked the tools that lay beside him on the car seat one last time. The adjustable spanner, the Glock, the full plastic bottle . . .

  The lights were on in the windows when he walked to the pavement across the street and climbed up on an electrical box so he could look straight into the apartment.

  The lower floor was made up of three rooms and the kitchen in a line. A person was walking between two of the rooms, a wine glass in hand. Wallin. The flickering light of a TV in the background. It was 11 p.m. There was no one else on the street.

  Katz walked over to the BMW, stopped near the front of it, took out the spanner he’d concealed under his jacket, and used it to break the window. The car alarm sounded immediately. He calmly kept walking until he reached the blind spot next to the front door of the building.

  Not thirty seconds had passed before Wallin rushed onto the street, swearing, wearing a pair of flip-flops. Katz slid through the front door. The door to the apartment was wide open.

  He quickly glanced through the room. Leona didn’t seem to be home. There was a credit card and a few untouched lines of cocaine on the coffee table in the den. An open bottle of champagne stood next to them, but there was only one glass.

  Katz turned off the TV. When Wallin came back, he was sitting in an easy chair, aiming the handgun at him. He watched the man go pale. No bite marks on his face. Nor had Katz expected there to be.

  “What the fuck is going on?”

  Katz didn’t respond, he just pointed the barrel of the gun at the leather sofa on the other side of the table. Wallin took the hint and sat down.

  “I don’t want to look at you. Turn around . . . hands on your head!”

  Wallin did as he was told. He kneeled on the sofa cushion, his back to Katz.

  Katz didn’t speak for a long time, letting the seconds tick away. He studied the wall with its signed posters of American porn stars.

  “Tell me about Ramón and Jennifer,” he said at last.

  “Tell you what?”

  “You had them killed, didn’t you? And John Sjöholm, too.”

  “Are you totally nuts?”

  “Because they knew too much about your network . . . because they tried to blackmail your clients.”

  “My girlfriend will be here in a little while. This is her apartment and I don’t want to scare her. If you take the wallet from my back pocket, you’ll find five thousand in cash . . . and there’s another ten thousand in the inner pocket of my coat, in an envelope . . . Take it and let’s forget about all this.”

  Katz stood up, walked over to the man, and bent toward his ear.

  “You sent someone to my home. To get hold of a couple of things. An address book . . . and a DVD. You know I have them. Sjöholm told you.”

  “What the fuck kind of address book? I don’t even know who you are, I’ve never seen you before.”

  Katz placed the barrel of the gun to his temple with one hand, used the other to take out the plastic bottle full of petrol, and unscrewed the lid with his teeth.

  “What the fuck are you doing?”

  He poured the petrol all over the man, all over his hair, his T-shirt, and his trousers. He heard Wallin choke as some got into his mouth. He placed the gangbang DVD on the back of the sofa so he could see the cover. He walked back to the easy chair as he trickled a thin line of petrol across the carpet. He sat down. Took out a lighter.

  “Let’s start from the beginning. You made that film, didn’t you?”

  “It’s not illegal to make movies.”

  “You arrange orgies where people pay money to degrade prostitutes.”

  “Oh, God. It’s no worse than what people do elsewhere. And that girl on the cover, she likes it. It turns her on. Call it self-destructive if you want, but she does it for symbolic payment. You’re not going to fucking light me on fire, you’re not that sick.”

  Wallin was panting, breathing through his mouth. The whole room smelled like petrol.

  “Where did you film it?”

  “At the home of a guy who let us use his flat in return for being allowed to watch. And then I happened to forget a copy at Blue Dreams. It ended up with the rentals by accident. No big deal, everyone has a mask on.”

  “Who are the men?”

  “All kinds of people. One is an actor. Several lawyers. A former soccer star. Different people . . . All they have in common is that bukkake turns them on.”

  “Tell me about Jennifer. What sort of contact did you have with her?”

  “What do you want to know? Like I said, she was there for some of the get-togethers. And she helped me find new chicks sometimes.”

  “What about Ramón. How do you know him?”

  Wallin was silent for a moment and appeared to be thinking.

  “I bought drugs off him.”

  “What kind of drugs?”

  “Heroin. He and Jenny got hold of almost a kilo—don’t ask me how they managed that. I put an offer on half of it. I got it damn cheap because they were starting to panic. They had no idea how they were going to distribute such a large amount.”

  Wallin swallowed hard.

  “That was why we tried to find out who you are. It had nothing to do with the DVD or some fucking address book. I bought drugs from some unreliable junkies and then you—at least I assume it was you—suddenly show up at Blue Dreams asking about them. It stands to reason I would get paranoid.”

  “So what are you doing with the horse?”

  “What do you think? I’m selling it. To friends, people I meet out. All kinds of people use heroin in this country. Celebrities. Businessmen. And you’ve gotta have style to make any money at the end of the line. Can you imagine Ramón at Café Opera? What the fuck was that dude thinking . . . that he was gonna sell it off, gram by gram, out on Plattan?”

  “What about John Sjöholm. What does he have to do with all this?”

  “He hid the goods for them. In his car. Which was a stupid fucking place to keep it.”

  They didn’t say anything for a moment. Katz was trying to process the information. Wallin didn’t know anything about the address book and the phone numbers.

  “Does the abbreviation H.o.P. mean anything to you?”

&n
bsp; Wallin stiffened.

  “I have nothing to do with that stuff.”

  “With what?”

  “House of Pain. That’s other people, doing that.”

  “Like who?”

  “I don’t know, and I don’t want to find out. Rumor has it there’s a cop involved.”

  “What do they do?”

  “Disgusting stuff . . .”

  “Do they kidnap women?”

  Wallin was silent; apparently he’d decided not to say any more. Katz stood up, flicking the lighter.

  “Okay, take it easy . . . I get it . . . Word is, it’s foreign women. No one goes looking for them. Chicks who are here without proper papers, girls who walk the streets. And whores whose biggest problem isn’t that they’re whores, it’s that they’ll do anything for a fix. They just disappear. And then they’re never heard from again. There are these rumors about some sort of fucking tunnel . . . That they send them on after a while, to other people, with the same tastes . . .”

  “Did Jennifer have anything to do with House of Pain?”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised. That girl is crazy. I heard she tried to kill her dad when she was sixteen.”

  Katz flicked the lighter again, lighting the scented candles that were on the coffee table next to the lines of cocaine. He could smell the vanilla scent.

  “Do any of your so-called clients know any more about House of Pain?”

  “Maybe . . . The guy whose flat we used, he’s the only one I can imagine might know.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Wiksten or something like that. A young, rich bohemian type. He lives in a luxury apartment he inherited in Östermalm. He was only watching, like I said. Through a hole in the wall. I sure as hell never thought those things were real, but it turns out they do exist in some old Östermalm flats. Secret peepholes.”

  Katz picked up the scented candle and put it down on the petrol-soaked carpet.

  “I swear, that’s the only tip I have. This guy is pretty goddamn extreme in his tastes. He thought that time was too tame. He showed me a film he had made with some guys he knew. But I couldn’t even watch it, it was too fucking much.”