The Tunnel

by Carl-Johan Vallgren

  “There they are,” the boy said softly.

  He held up the photo of Jennifer and Ramón.

  “Who?”

  “The people who wanted to rent me from the gang in Husby. I was supposed to pick up drugs for them, in a different city.”

  “But you said no?”

  The boy rubbed at a spot of dirt on his trousers.

  “Your sister knew them too?”

  The boy nodded.

  “And their friend . . . John,” he continued, “the guy with the spots on his face. They got drugs for her. Drove her to see clients.”

  “Then what happened?”

  “She disappeared. One day she was just gone. Because she and Mum fought all the time.”

  The boy stopped speaking, biting his lip gently.

  “Were they fighting because she walked the streets?”

  “And about the drugs. But how else was she supposed to afford it? Returnable bottles?”

  The boy flipped through the photos. He stopped at the picture with the villa in the background.

  “We were there once,” he said. “At that house. John took us there. He wanted us to sleep over. It belongs to a police officer, he said.”

  Katz was confused.

  “They were going to pay my sister if she slept with him and his friends, but she panicked when we turned off the road. She forced John to turn around. She put a knife to his throat.”

  Katz’s mind was whirling. So that place was owned by a cop, one who knew Wiksten. The boy’s sister had got away that time, he thought. But they captured her again later. She had been chosen because she didn’t exist . . . because no one would report her missing.

  “Do you know where the house is?”

  “Not far from here. Maybe an hour by car.”

  “Could you find your way there?”

  “No.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I wasn’t watching . . . I was scared.”

  “Why did you go along with her?”

  “I was supposed to get money too. That was when my sister refused to do it, once she realized what was going to happen.”

  Katz swallowed hard.

  “I need to find that place. Is there anything else you remember about it, anything special?”

  “There were flowers growing in the lake. Big white ones. Do you know what they’re called?”

  “Water lilies. Do you remember anything else? Anything special about that place?”

  The boy was quiet, thinking back.

  “John said you could take a boat all the way there. And there was some place nearby with paintings. He’d been there to see them once, along with the girl, Jennifer. There were weird paintings there, he said. I didn’t really understand . . . but he said that there were people made of plants.”

  Jorma was on the floor, bound to a metal pole behind his back. Steel wire was wound around his neck and arms. A jute sack had been pulled over his head. He could breathe through his nose, but he couldn’t speak. Otherwise he would have done so, would have spoken to himself . . . to poke holes in the silence. But it was impossible. They had stuffed a rag in his mouth and covered it with electrical tape.

  The air was starting to get thin and warm, as if he were warming it up with his own body heat.

  He had trouble swallowing; his mouth was dry as a bone. Don’t hyperventilate, he thought. Breathe calmly.

  The cop had knocked him unconscious. The last thing he remembered was the barrel of the handgun on the back of his neck. When he came to again, he was lying in the back of the Land Rover with his hands and feet tied together. They had driven for an hour, maybe a bit longer, out of the city—the sound of traffic had grown fainter. The last part of the trip had been on gravel roads; he had heard the small rocks hitting the undercarriage.

  Then they had stopped, opened the doors, and pressed a rag to his face. They knocked him out and carried him in here.

  He was falling inside, dreaming of sounds . . . of notes bracing up the darkness, drawing lines through the silence. He dreamed that he was playing the piano in Midsommarkransen, going more and more slowly until every note lasted an eternity. That was why he’d never got hooked on drugs. Whenever he wanted to escape, he did it with music, playing and playing, sometimes for days on end, without eating or sleeping, stepping into a world of his own where nothing could hurt him.

  There was such a thing as non-sonic music, he thought. Reading sheet music was enough for the notes to occur in the mind. Beethoven had been deaf as a post when he composed his Ninth Symphony. He had created the chromatics in String Quartet No. 14 in total silence. Music existed as ideas, in a sphere outside people themselves.

  This was how he would avoid going crazy, avoid the thoughts of what might happen to him. Play Evergreens by Hoagy Carmichael in his head. Theater music by Weill. Sonatas by Schubert and Beethoven. Separate the individual notes in the chords. Put them back together again . . .

  In his imagination, he placed his right hand on the keys and played a G#maj7. He heard the notes very clearly—G#, C, D#, G—and he took them apart and glued them back together again. Silent music. He changed his finger position and played a 7sus4 in the same key, all fingers on the black keys, but he couldn’t hear anything anymore; he was falling deeper into unconsciousness. He felt thirsty although he wasn’t awake; he felt hunger in the form of stomach cramps. He thought he heard a sound—a woman screaming in the background—and then steps as someone approached.

  When he awoke, the room was bright. He could make out the silhouette of a person through the jute. The person was standing perfectly still in front of him. The cop? But he wasn’t sure.

  He heard someone whimpering elsewhere in the room.

  The room smelled vaguely of human waste. Was it coming from him? Had he soiled himself?

  The person walked around and stood behind his back, lifting off the jute sack.

  Jorma blinked in the fluorescent light. He was in some sort of cellar. The ceiling was low; there was just enough space for a grown man to stand upright. No windows. If there was a door, it must be behind him. Concrete walls to the right, whitewashed bedrock straight ahead. A dugout shelter . . . or the foundation under a building?

  The floor was made of earth and stone slabs. There was a sheen of condensation on the ceiling.

  He looked to the left, in the direction of the whimpering. A woman was squatting in a cage. At first he couldn’t comprehend the sight. It reminded him of something he’d seen in a movie. A medieval torture chamber, he thought. Or a scene from an evil fairy tale: Hansel and Gretel.

  She was young. Twenty, tops. Black hair, dark skin. Emaciated, nearly skeletal. The cage was barely large enough for her. She was grasping one of the bars, and her other hand was shielding her eyes, as if the light were painful. Naked. Track marks on her arms and legs. Bruises and contusions from being beaten; poorly healed wounds on her face. Dark spots on the bottom of the cage. From urine, he thought, or blood from her genitals.

  He suddenly realized how cold it was and that he was shivering; his body was stiff.

  The person behind him cleared his throat. A man. He was breathing calmly. Then he suddenly became aware once again of the tape over his mouth and he felt the panic well up, because he was going to suffocate, because he couldn’t see the person behind him, because he couldn’t predict what would happen.

  He panted through his nose and felt like he was asphyxiating; he was afraid he would swallow the rag they’d stuffed in his mouth.

  Calm down. Go inside yourself . . . into the music.

  The jute sack fell down over his face again as he struck a seventh chord in his head. A male voice said something, and the woman started wailing.

  The rattle of a lock opening. The woman shouted something in a foreign language as she was yanked out of the cage; it sounded like a prayer. She screamed in sheer panic as a door opened and closed behind him.

  Pitch dark again. Silence.

  He didn’t know how much time had pas
sed, but the man was back in the room again. He had lit a candle and placed it on the floor in front of Jorma. He pulled off the jute sack and the tape that had covered Jorma’s mouth.

  Now he could see who it was. The fat police commissioner he’d seen in the newspaper clippings. Just below average height. Thinning hair. Porous skin, as if someone had rubbed coarse salt into his face. He was wearing pale gray trousers, a checked shirt, and a dark cardigan. He held a revolver in his hand—Jorma’s own Colt. He opened it, inserted a bullet, and spun the cylinder before putting it back in place.

  “What are we going to do with you?”

  The voice was mild, almost friendly. He moved to stand next to Jorma, then pressed the muzzle of the gun to his temple and cocked the hammer.

  This is not happening, was all he could think. It’s not possible. I can’t die this way.

  The man’s finger hugged the trigger. He breathed calmly and began to hum a melody.

  Then the man pulled the trigger and the sudden click sounded like an explosion.

  The terror must have caused him to pass out. When he woke up again, he was lying on the floor on his stomach, still with his hands and feet tied together. The fat man was sitting on a chair in front of him. He aimed a flashlight at him. The cage was empty. The woman wasn’t there . . . or maybe she never had been. Maybe he had only imagined her.

  “You could be dead now. You got lucky. Chance was on your side. What were you thinking? That someone who has spent his career in surveillance won’t notice when someone is tailing him? You’re the guy who managed to escape after the robbery, aren’t you?”

  The fat man took a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his forehead thoroughly.

  “You don’t have to say anything right now. We’ll get all the information we need out of you.”

  “Where are we?”

  “Out in the country. Can’t you smell the forest?”

  Jorma turned his head so he had a better view of the room. He saw the cage again, along the far wall. A plastic bucket where the woman had done her business. He smelled human waste again. He hadn’t dreamed it. This all had to do with what Leyla had told him, what Zoran had been dragged into.

  “Who’s the girl?”

  “Just a whore . . . Why do you care?”

  The cop had risen from the chair. He poked Jorma’s chest with the toe of his shoe. He took out the Colt again, spun the cylinder, and pressed the muzzle into Jorma’s ear canal. The steel was cold; it felt like an icicle in his ear.

  “You’re ahead right now, but you could lose at any moment . . .”

  He didn’t understand what the man wanted from him. Why didn’t he just shoot him?

  “Honestly, what are your odds of survival? Five out of six is 83.3 percent. But your odds get worse each time; first 67 percent, then 50 percent.”

  The muzzle moved to the back of his head. He was playing the grand piano this time, a Sibelius melody Harri had taught him during a period of sobriety when Jorma was nine. He floated away on the music as he’d always done when life became unbearable. If he was going to die today, it would be with piano music in his head.

  Another click.

  “Two–zero in your favor. You really must give me the chance for a revenge match.”

  She never would have imagined that so much violence could be concealed in one person, so much ruthlessness, once the catatonia had loosened its grasp on him.

  Hoffman had kicked her in the back and rained blows across her face so hard that her lip had split and one of her front teeth had loosened. She resisted, screaming, tearing at his hands, trying to bite him as he dragged her by the hair across the floor like a ragdoll; he dragged her into the office, where he handcuffed her to the radiator and turned on loud music. He had just turned it down again, as if to test her. His eyes were those of a completely different person. They were unrecognizable, ice-cold behind his dark irises. Unadulterated hatred.

  “You don’t have to do this,” she managed to say. “Hoffman . . . it doesn’t have to end like this!”

  He just shook his head.

  “People know I’m at your place. I just talked to my ex. I’m supposed to pick the kids up today, right now, actually . . . I was supposed to be there already; it’s my week. Ola’s going to wonder where I am.”

  He was holding a service weapon; he must have brought it home from the office. He removed the magazine and checked to make sure it was full, then replaced it. His expression didn’t change.

  “A few more minutes and he’s going to start calling my phone. He’ll be worried. I told him I—I was here.”

  Her stutter was back, the lock in her mind that linked to her ability to speak. She rarely stuttered these days. She’d hardly had a problem since she was a teenager, living in junkie hell. But then again, she had done it almost constantly back then. Now it only happened when she was under too much stress.

  “D-don’t do it, Hoffman. Let’s talk about this. There has to be sss-sss—”

  The words died somewhere along the path from her speech center and her tongue.

  The computer was still on, displaying the terrible images. She could see one of their victims, a skeletal girl hanging from the ceiling by her arms. Hoffman turned it off. She yanked at the handcuffs and heard the metal chain clicking against the pipes of the radiator.

  “Shit . . . shit . . . SHIIIIIT!”

  The situation was slowly sinking in for him. He was about to panic, and she couldn’t let that happen. Panicking was what made people do desperate things.

  Win some time, she thought. Try to speak calmly to him.

  “The DVDs, the pictures—those are from old investigations, right?”

  Even she could tell how fake that sounded, how clear it was that she was lying. So she changed tactics.

  “I’m prepared to listen to your version of things, Hoffman, and I’ll accept it if it sounds plausible. Then we’ll work this out together, as best we can . . . They won’t come down on you as hard if you turn yourself in.”

  “Shut up, bitch! I can’t think!”

  Squeeze him, but not too hard. Make sure to give him a way out.

  “How would you get rid of my body . . . if you shot me . . . and all the blood . . . how would you get it out? My ex will tell the police that I called him from here. They’ll put two and two together. If you let me go, I promise to help you, I swear!”

  He had collapsed onto the office chair, as if someone had poked holes in him and his air was slowly leaking out.

  “Mattson is the one behind all of this, I know it. You only played a minor role. Sarajevo sent me the phone tap logs . . . Mattson helped smuggle women into the country, to brothels, to organized sex rings . . . Some were sent on to other cities, and maybe to Norway or Finland . . . Mattson deposited the money into foreign bank accounts, and he kept some of the women for himself, like some sort of commission . . . He kept them locked up and . . .”

  She could smell her own fear, a sour odor rising from her pores as he aimed the pistol at her.

  “Eva, you don’t know what you’ve got mixed up in here. You have no idea the kinds of people who are involved in this. Why the hell did you start snooping?”

  All she could see was the muzzle of the pistol, that tiny black pupil staring at her. And Hoffman’s shadow against the white walls of the office. A character out of an Indonesian shadow puppet theater. Like the ones she and Ola had seen in Bali . . . the long trip they’d made to Southeast Asia, the kind almost all young middle-class couples took back then, to have an adventure together before it was time to get married and have kids like everyone else.

  Perfect moments? she thought as she closed her eyes and waited for it all to end. Did they exist? She remembered two such moments in her life. One was on the ferry to Gotland with Ola, on the way to his parents’ place in the country. She had been seven months pregnant with Lisa. He had brought her coffee and a chocolate cookie from the cafe. The sea outside the windows perfectly calm. Coffee. Milk chocolate. T
he child moving inside her. Ola’s smile as he rested his hand on her belly. A sunbeam falling on her through the window. Perfection . . . The second time was with Katz in the basement bicycle area in Hässelby, where she used to spend the night when her home life was at its worst. Her virgin shot. Katz had readied the rig, found a vein for her, and injected. That indescribable rush . . . Katz removing the needle. The little trickle of blood that ran down her forearm. The kiss he gave her. The rush into bodily paradise. Perfection.

  When she looked up again, he was gone. She heard him in the girl’s room. He was searching for something, slamming drawers and wardrobe doors. He’d turned up the music again. So no one would hear her if she shouted.

  She yanked at the handcuffs, pulling with all her might, ignoring the pain as the metal cut into her wrists. She found the screwdriver she’d used to break open the desk drawer; it was on the floor, two meters away.

  She extended her legs to try to reach it . . . Ten centimeters beyond reach . . .

  She could feel its shaft against her foot; her toe slid across the plastic. Then she caught it and pulled it a centimeter closer.

  Hoffman was back in the room again. He realized what she was trying to do. He picked up the screwdriver and stuck it in his back pocket.

  He was holding a skipping rope. The same kind Lisa had at home, candy-striped with glow-in-the-dark hand grips.

  “Don’t do it!” she said. “Please, Hoffman . . .”

  But he didn’t respond. He just walked up to her and wound it around her neck.

  Her vision went black. The pain was unspeakable as her larynx was crushed into her windpipe; she heard the cartilage cracking.

  She wanted to scream but couldn’t make a sound.

  She pictured Lisa and Arvid running toward her in Vasaparken. This was her week, she knew. Ola had just dropped them off. They were tanned; it was spring or early summer, and somehow they were timeless; all their ages gathered in their bodies. She wanted to remember them that way, take them with her, the boundless love she felt for them . . . the last thing she would think of before she faded away.