The Tunnel

by Carl-Johan Vallgren

  Wallin shook his head.

  “They had some kind of gentlemen’s club. They called themselves the ‘Bathing Friends’ or something like that . . . I don’t know if it had anything to do with this. And he knows Ramón, or rather Jenny. They met in Switzerland, he said.”

  “How can I get hold of him?”

  “I never got his number. But like I said, he lives in Östermalm, near Karlaplan. I don’t remember the address . . . I swear, if I had it, I’d give it to you.”

  “What about Ramón’s phone number? Do you have that?”

  “It’s in my phone, I think, in my coat pocket in the hall. Why?”

  His voice had become thick.

  “I don’t understand what you’re doing here. I don’t understand your weird questions. I never tried to get back any goddamn address book. I don’t need an address book; I meet my clients at the bar. I let them know when I’ve rounded up a couple of girls who are willing to take part in a gangbang or a facial session. I just get paid for a service. Just like I get paid for the drugs. And it’s voluntary, all the girls get paid . . . it’s all voluntary.”

  Wallin had collapsed onto the sofa; he could no longer manage to hold himself up.

  “Please, for God’s sake . . . you’re not going to light me on fire, you’re not, right?”

  But no one answered. The person he’d been speaking to had already left.

  Judging by the first three digits of the mobile phone number, Ramón had a contract with Telia. The phone had probably been destroyed; it was probably lying in a stream somewhere, never to be found, but there was no way for the operator to know that. Katz called customer service early in the morning, gave the number, and pretended to be interested in switching to a plan with unlimited data; he asked if it was worth it, considering the model of phone he had.

  “I see on the computer you have an iPhone 5,” said the young woman who had taken his call, thus giving him the only piece of information he needed. “No problem. I’m guessing you want to stream video and listen to music? I’ll be honest with you, Ramón, our new plan is actually better and cheaper than the one you have now. If you’re interested, I can offer you a 10 percent rebate, but you’ll have to sign up for a two-year commitment.”

  Katz pretended to hesitate and asked to call back in a few days.

  A few minutes later he was sitting in front of the computer. The exploit program he’d downloaded from a Russian IRC channel broke through the log-in screen on the “Find my iPhone” app and tricked the automatic support service to send a temporary password.

  Katz typed in the randomly generated combination of letters and hit “Enter.” He waited for what seemed like an eternity.

  Then there was a ding. The phone’s whole iCloud was open to him.

  After confirming that the phone wasn’t broadcasting a GPS signal, just as he’d guessed, he went through the email without finding anything of great worth.

  He moved on to the call log, incoming and outgoing calls. The last one was from the same night Ramón died; he had been called by a blocked number at 20:13. The call had lasted exactly two seconds. Someone checking to see if he was home?

  Katz looked back through the logs, but the traffic information was only saved for a month. Ramón didn’t seem to have been very social. All the rest of the outgoing and incoming calls were to and from a contact called “J.” Jennifer Roslund, Katz assumed.

  He took out his phone and dialed her number, but didn’t get through. He tried to imagine where she might be, what had happened to her . . . but he couldn’t picture anything.

  Only Ramón’s most recent activity was saved on his browser. He had googled wholesale heroin prices and clicked his way to a few obscure sites where people discussed drugs and guns, but the older history was deleted and impossible to restore.

  He looked at the photo folder. The pictures had been taken within the last year. Jenny was in most of them. Photos from their apartment in Husby, snapshots reminiscent of crime-scene photographs: bags of heroin, syringes. Photos of them injecting each other, pictures of her playing with the snake. And pictures that had been taken out in the country: Jenny standing next to John Sjöholm on a dock by a frozen lake.

  Further up the hill was a large villa in Italianate style. The house in the drawing he’d found in the storage locker? Katz was almost sure it was.

  He checked the date. The photo had been taken in March.

  Then he clicked on through the album. Suddenly there was a picture of a woman in the back seat of a car. John Sjöholm was sitting beside her. The woman had dark skin and was in her twenties. Her clothes were ill-fitting and threadbare. There was something vaguely Indian about her features. She was laughing, as if the photographer had just said something funny. And the photographer was Jenny, Katz thought, because the next picture was of Ramón sitting behind the wheel of the same car.

  Katz scrolled on and was soon startled. It was the woman again, but this time she was in a cramped room with bare concrete walls, and she was terrified. The picture had been taken in the dark, with a flash. A steel cage was visible in the background; it was perhaps a meter high and equally wide. Someone had clearly struck her in the face; it was bruised.

  The next picture was a close-up of the woman crying in despair.

  The photos had been taken in June, before they came into all the heroin. Was this how they’d gathered the money they needed? Delivering women to an organized ring of sex offenders? House of Pain, as Wallin had called it.

  Katz couldn’t stomach any more. A sense of approaching death hung over the entire scene.

  After copying the photos to his computer and logging out of the iCloud, he looked up the name Wiksten in an online directory. There were fifty Wikstens in Stockholm, but none of them lived near Karlaplan. He did a Google search for “the bathing friends” but the only hits were for a volunteer association that had once founded the botanical gardens in Visby.

  On Ziz.com, which was a small social network a bit like Facebook, there was a forum with a similar name—“Bathing Friends,” without the “the”—but it was closed to non-members. The photo on its front page depicted a dock on a frozen lake. The same one as in Jennifer’s drawing?

  He added the name “Wiksten” to the search and found a hit for an obscure chat site about prostitution where “Bathing Friends” was mentioned. One member of the discussion, who called himself “Wik Sten,” had uploaded a photo of himself posing with a towel around his hips on a swimming dock. Katz recognized him, though his eyes were hidden by a black rectangle: the young man with a hipster beard who worked at the City Mission’s day shelter.

  “Had fun with Bathing Friends,” he had written, in response to another member’s question about what he had done over the weekend. “An unforgettable day in the company of nine guys and one girl.”

  Magnus, Mona had called him.

  He looked up the name online. The first hit was a year-old article from the street magazine Faktum: an interview about his work with the city’s homeless. Magnus Wiksten-Kylenstråhle stared gravely into the camera. His paternal grandparents were the founders of a well-respected print media company. According to the article, he lived on the interest from his inheritance and spent his time volunteering for social causes. Helping others who were less well-off gave him a sense of purpose, he explained.

  Katz minimized the window. He reached for the phone and dialed Eva Westin’s number, but she didn’t pick up. He opened his email instead. He wrote her a brief message explaining what sort of help he needed.

  She woke to a ringing phone. She looked around, unsure, for a moment, where she was. Then the pieces fell into place. Hoffman’s bedroom. His side of the bed was empty. Just a tangled blanket that looked like a trailing vine.

  The phone was still ringing. She stood up, still tipsy. They had drunk an entire bottle of rum in the course of the evening, and, if she knew herself, the better part of it had ended up in her own belly.

  There was a vase of flowers
on the nightstand. The crime novels he read lay in a perfect stack on a trendy metal footstool. The wardrobe was open. She could see the row of white shirts and dark work suits, like shed skins.

  There was a note on his pillow: “Had to run an errand. I made breakfast.”

  He had drawn a heart at the bottom.

  She walked into the living room. The phone had stopped ringing, but something told her the call was important.

  Her clothes were in a pile next to one of the beanbags. Her phone was on the floor next to a half-empty mojito.

  One missed call from Katz, but she could live with that.

  The other missed calls were worse, and there were five angry texts. All were from Ola, and the first one was from the day before. Had she been so smashed that she hadn’t heard her phone?

  She already knew what the matter was. Her week had started. She was supposed to have picked up the kids from Söder yesterday after school, but she’d fucked up as usual.

  She reached for the drink. She took a sip of the room-temperature contents, then put the glass down in disgust. She read the last text, in which he threatened to keep the children away from her until she started therapy and got her shit together.

  She dialed his number. Waited stoically to be chewed out. But Lisa was the one who answered.

  “Hi, Mum, where are you?”

  “Hi, darling. I’m at work.”

  “But it’s Saturday. You don’t work on Saturdays. You promised we would go to Junibacken today, remember?”

  “I’m so sorry, Lisa, I forgot again. Did you have to wait a long time for Dad to pick you up yesterday?”

  “Erika picked us up in the car as soon as she could. I called from my teacher’s phone to say you hadn’t come. I tried to call you too, but you didn’t answer. I want to go to your house now. Did you clean our room?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did my new Kamratposten come yet?”

  Her little girl’s innocent voice. She trusted her, would never dream that her mother would lie to her or sleep with her boss instead of spending time with her children.

  “I think so,” she said, biting her lip hard. “I haven’t checked the post.”

  “Dad wants to say something . . .”

  She listened to his scolding, which was surprisingly restrained, probably because Lisa was nearby.

  “Okay,” she said when he was finished. “What should we do now? I can pick them up in twenty minutes. I’m not far away.”

  “Come over here as fast as you can.”

  “I promise to hurry. I’m really sorry, Ola. I have to improve matters on my end.”

  But he only sighed and hung up.

  She sat there with the phone in her hand. Katz had sent an email too, she noticed. She called it up. He had briefly explained that he needed help accessing reports about missing prostitutes.

  She gathered up her clothes and went back to the bedroom. Still no sign of Hoffman.

  She put on her underwear, which had black spots of blood in the crotch. She wondered if she should take a quick shower, but there was no time. A used condom lay on the floor, sending messages about the day before.

  She reached for the note he’d left. She wanted to write something back, to say that she had to pick up her kids but really wanted to see him again. She looked around in vain for a pen.

  She put on her clothes and walked over to the small office, where she pulled out the top desk drawer. One compartment contained an old mobile phone, a pad of Post-its, and a ballpoint pen with the logo of the Police Authority. She tested it on a scrap of paper, but the ink was gone. She happened to jostle the phone by mistake as she went to close the drawer. The screen lit up and displayed the most recent incoming call.

  Her heart was pounding at her chest like a hammer as she went back to the hallway and into the boy’s room.

  Here comes Maxi! I’ll show you some real speed! said a recorded voice from a toy car she happened to nudge with her foot. All those hundreds of toy sounds she’d heard throughout the years since she had kids, at the strangest times, in the weirdest places . . . Once a faint bleating had plagued her for a whole week before she found a stuffed animal—a bedraggled lamb; an impulse buy from Skansen—caught at the very back of Lisa’s wardrobe.

  Katz’s number was the last one to call the phone. The closest mobile tower was in Liljeholmen.

  Å was the initial listed before the phone number in Ramón’s address book. Åke Hoffman.

  She looked at the bulletin board that hung above the plastic bins of Lego. Soccer posters stuck to the wall with blu tack, a euro bill someone had drawn on, postcards, and a kid’s drawing of a snowman. The boy’s childish signature was at the very bottom: LINUS H, AGE 5.

  Wiksten lived in a luxury building on Karlaplan, just as Wallin had said, but he was listed under his second last name, Kylenstråhle. Through the panes of glass in the entryway, Katz could see a carpeted marble staircase, Doric columns along the walls, gilded plaster accents on the ceiling, and a reception desk where a uniformed doorman had once received visitors.

  The front door was locked. He rang the neighbors’ buzzers until someone took mercy on him and let him in.

  He ignored the lift and took the stairs to the fourth floor. Three doors led into the apartment. Katz peered through the letter box on the middle door. There was post on the floor. The apartment was dark.

  Wiksten had been listed as living at this address since he was twenty. His parents lived in Spain. Wiksten was an only child. He had spent his formative years at boarding schools. In Switzerland, among other places, at the famed Le Rosey. Was that how he’d met Jenny once upon a time? Katz had found a defunct blog among Google’s cache trash, written by an anonymous former student, which described various scandals throughout the years involving students from the country’s most venerable private school, including visits to brothels in Lausanne and Zurich. Wallin had intimated that this was how Jennifer and Wiksten had met.

  Katz jumped as he heard the lift start to move. He went up another half-flight of stairs to the attic. The cables creaked as someone ascended . . . but the lift stopped on the floor below Wiksten’s. The rider got off, fumbled with keys and vanished through a door.

  No response from Eva yet. Mona, he thought. The women who had disappeared from Malmskillnadsgatan, foreign prostitutes no one missed. He ought to contact her and ask if she had any further information.

  Through a window in the stairwell he could see a terrace on the facade, five meters to the left. Katz looked around. The attic door ahead was only secured with a padlock. The handle gave way when he kicked it.

  He entered a passageway with storage areas on either side. The doors and walls were made of chicken wire; they enclosed all sorts of junk. Light streamed in from a skylight further on. He grabbed a ladder from along the wall, unfolded it, and climbed up. He unhooked the latches and hoisted himself onto the roof.

  He was six stories above ground. Östermalm spread out before him like a toy land. He saw Norra Djurgården in the distance. The Swedish Radio building, the neighborhood of Gärdet, and the armed forces headquarters.

  A ladder was affixed to the roof. It was for use by the snow-clearers in the winter.

  Katz was afraid of heights and always had been. His heart attempted to pound its way out of his chest as he cautiously climbed down toward the snow guards.

  And then he had reached his goal. He grabbed the gutter and swung his legs over. He was hanging by his arms directly above the terrace. He saw people down on the ground, like little ants. The traffic looked like it was remote-controlled. He let go and dropped.

  Just as he’d hoped, the terrace door was unlocked. The apartment smelled stuffy. Wiksten hadn’t been there in several days.

  Katz recognized the drawing room from the bukkake film—the crystal chandelier, the ballroom-like space with such a high ceiling that you could play a game of badminton in there.

  There was hardly any furniture, and what little there was was covered
in sheets. He followed a hall to a bathroom with a gilded baroque mirror. He found the peephole in the wall where Wiksten had watched as ten men ejaculated all over Jennifer. Too tame, Wiksten had thought.

  Katz peered into rooms that seemed never to be used and passed a kitchen with empty cupboards. Wiksten’s bedroom was at the end of a corridor; it was the only space that seemed lived in. The bed was unmade. There was exercise gear on the floor, some dumbbells and barbells. Dirty clothes lay on a chair.

  A computer stood on a writing desk; it was in sleep mode. Katz woke it up.

  The hard drive was practically empty. It contained only the standard programs plus a dozen unnamed folders on the desktop. But nothing happened when he clicked on them.

  He searched for the cookies stored on the hard drive. He started the browser and went to Ziz.com, then used the information in the cookies to log in.

  There were no new photos, no information about their whereabouts. H.o.P. was never even mentioned; it just floated in the background like a creepy feeling . . . The members used aliases when they posted. Occasionally someone used the words “Fest” or “party” as euphemisms for what was going on.

  But what they wrote about the women was so horrible he could hardly read it. It was as if language had detached from its usual meaning. They aren’t writing about women, Katz thought, but livestock, animals to slaughter.

  The next “party” was now, he realized, that very weekend. The date and time were given in a digital calendar, but the address was missing.

  Katz logged out, turned off the computer, and stood up. His gaze fell upon a pile of old issues of Situation Sthlm on the desk. The top one was open to an article about homeless Roma in Stockholm.

  Katz had written something about missing women. It had to do with sex crimes, she thought. With perverted men.

  She had a brief flashback to the night before: Hoffman had suddenly grabbed her a little too hard, for a little too long, as if he wanted to test boundaries. She’d asked him to stop, and he had respected that.