It took him half an eternity to get back on his feet again. Then he discovered another door across the room. He managed to drag himself to it and found himself in a kitchen. The steps came closer, stopping in the room behind him. He sank into the gap next to a cupboard and realized that he’d forgotten something—but he couldn’t remember what it was.
Katz stopped at the door where Mattson lay. The third victim. He had one room left on the ground floor, the only room he hadn’t checked. Mona was okay. She would make it.
He entered a room with veiled windows. He shuddered as he saw the noose hanging from the ceiling. A nail gun lay on the floor. He picked it up and shoved it into the band of his trousers.
Two people were still missing: Eva and the man she had arrived with. They couldn’t be far away. The cars in the driveway had been destroyed.
He looked across the room, where a door was ajar.
He opened it and found himself in a rustic kitchen. Through the window he discovered the dark-haired man on his way to the boathouse. He had a pistol in his hand. He was dragging Eva behind him.
She was exhausted. Otherwise she would have resisted. Hoffman was dragging her by the hair toward a red building at the water’s edge.
A wooden gate was open to the road. A man lay in a ditch, shot in the head.
There were burning cars in the driveway. The odor of melted plastic and explosives hung in the air.
Somehow the chronology had short-circuited. She could hardly remember the order in which the events had occurred, nor how Hoffman had managed to get her from his apartment into a car on Hornsgatan. Why hadn’t anyone reacted when a woman was bundled into a windowless van by an armed man?
It felt like he’d driven her around for several hours, and she’d heard him swearing on the other side of the thin metal that separated her from the cab. She realized that she had been given a grace period, but it wouldn’t make any difference because he would just get rid of her in a safer place.
Then he had stopped here, at a summer home surrounded by water and forest, and dragged her into a room with several other people inside. Mattson was one of them, and there was another man, a slightly younger one . . . She realized that this was where they had recorded the terrible movies. Hoffman exchanged a few words with the others before bringing her into an adjacent room. By that point she was absolutely paralyzed with fear. She knew it would all end there, and she hardly reacted when shooting suddenly erupted in the house. Hoffman had taken her out via a side door, and at the same time she heard two explosions, one right after the other.
“Get in the back!”
They were in a boathouse. He pointed his gun at the motorboat that was moored at the jetty.
“Get in, I said!”
She grabbed the railing and felt her legs give way. Tiny waves lapped at the jetty. The pilings the boathouse stood on were green with algae. Suddenly the door behind them opened.
“Lie down, dammit!”
Hoffman heaved her onto her back and pressed the muzzle of the gun to her face. She blinked at the figure in the doorway. She would have recognized it from a hundred meters away in a crowd: Katz.
He ran as fast as he could. He wasn’t thinking anymore. He was just doing what his instincts told him to; he opened the door and stood there.
Eva was lying on the dock. The dark-haired man was pressing a pistol to her temple.
“Hoffman,” she whimpered. “Don’t do it . . .”
So that was her boss. She’d mentioned his name once. It was all connected somehow, although he couldn’t discern the pattern yet.
“Put down your weapon.”
Katz placed the Glock on the floor.
“Kick it over or else she dies.”
He did as he was ordered.
“Who the fuck are you? Do you know each other?”
Katz just nodded. It was all he could manage to do. He still couldn’t believe that Eva was there.
“You lie down too, arms behind your back.”
The dark-haired man aimed the gun at him. Katz needed more time. He still had the nail gun tucked into the waistband of his trousers. But he had to get closer in order to use it. He needed to divert his attention so he could get it out before the man had time to react.
He lay down on his stomach, turning his head so he could see her. He felt so much love for her, for this grown woman who had fought so hard to be the person she was, or the young woman he’d met a lifetime ago when they were teenagers—all the feelings that had gathered over the years in a meaningless pile that he had never made use of, because of who he was. The door behind him was open. Light streamed in as if onto a stage.
Hoffman mumbled something inaudible, staring at them with the gaze of a desperate man. His finger squeezed the trigger. And Katz knew it was too late, that this was the end for both of them.
He turned his face away and closed his eyes. He heard the shot, the report rebounding against the boathouse wall, and felt the spray of warm blood hit his face.
PART 7
Time flew; before they knew it, winter would be here. Katz hated this time of year. The darkness threatened to smother him.
The Hanukkah celebration was advertised in a mailing from the Jewish congregation, the twenty-fifth day of the month of Kislev: “sufganiyot and warm beverages, crafts and presents for the children.”
Two thousand two hundred years earlier, when the Maccabees entered the ruins of the Temple in Jerusalem after their victory over the last in a long line of foreign oppressors, they had found a single tiny bottle of oil and used it in the menorah. Incredibly enough, it lasted for eight days . . . and that was why eight candles were lit in the candelabra, one for each day.
To his own surprise, he had dug out the old silver chanukiah with its Star of David; it had once belonged to Benjamin and, he guessed, Chaim and Sara before him.
He had polished it, placed it on the kitchen table, and purchased candles at the Jewish Center on Nybrogatan. He had to go through two security queues with metal detectors to enter the shop and perform his errand. He took note of the guards patrolling the puny asphalt playground of the Jewish School; they were paid by the congregation since the public viewed them as unnecessary. Security had been increased because the Israel–Palestine conflict had reached a new fever pitch, and you had to answer for it even if you were a schoolkid who lived in another part of the world.
Perhaps this was just an attempt to find his way back to an everyday routine, though it manifested itself in the form of a diversionary tactic.
Shortly after his visit to the Jewish Center, in any case, he finished the translations of the Russian military publications and began a long-awaited consulting job for Viral Tech, a British antivirus firm that appreciated his talent for analyzing malicious code. Katz mapped out the idiosyncrasies of a new Trojan faster than anyone had expected and received a fee large enough for him to take a few months’ holiday.
For a while he toyed with the thought of traveling out of the country, of leaving the darkness and the battlefield behind, but the enthusiasm he had initially felt for this idea soon died out.
The only trip he ought to take was to Skogskyrkogården, the cemetery, to grieve. But he couldn’t even bring himself to do that. Instead he sank deeper and deeper into his depressing Katzness. He isolated himself, hardly ever leaving his apartment.
The newspapers were still writing about the incidents in the house in a surprisingly sober fashion; perhaps it was too macabre, far beyond what the general public might be interested in. An affront to good taste, even for the press.
The police had dug up the entire estate around Mattson’s house, plus parts of the surrounding woodland, in their search for corpses. But they had only found one: the remains of a woman of around twenty-five, lying in the only spot the cadaver dogs had pointed out, in a ravine some distance into the woods. According to the medical examiner, she had been strangled with a strip of plastic and buried three years earlier. Her identity was still a mystery. M
attson’s ring hadn’t taken any risks. They had chosen their victims with care.
There were still a great number of questions hanging in the air: the masked person who had calmly walked into the house and shot four people to death—what had that been all about?
No one else had shown up at the country home that evening; an alarm must have gone out to all the members of the network. The forum had been shut down the same night. Maybe it would pop up again somewhere else, but in a safer place, on a darknet somewhere.
The “tunnel” that Wallin had mentioned . . . did it exist?
Perhaps Mattson’s house had been just one of many stations.
In the nineties, in the infancy of the internet, Katz had followed the development of the dark web on behalf of the armed forces. The hidden cyberworlds that lay far beyond the horizons of the regular web. The embryo of what would become a dump for all the crap that existed in their wired world. Anonymous online criminals who logged in behind walls of proxies, selling drugs and weapons, protected by the Tor servers’ centrifuge, where IP addresses dissolved into thin air. Digital marketplaces where people ran wholesale trade using cloned credit cards and dumps. Cyber-activists who confused their battle for freedom with net anarchy and furnished impenetrable web hotels for pedophile rings. Online laboratories where people wrote custom malicious code. Foreign intelligence services, the Mafia, terrorists. Katz knew he would never find the answer there. It was too big, too vast, full of hidey-holes where people vanished without a trace.
But during his sleepless nights after the incidents in the house, he clicked his way there anyway, down into the darkness, to places that weren’t indexed by the search engines. A person could find anything there, he thought, the “tunnel,” networks where humans were bought and sold like livestock by people just like Wiksten and Mattson, spread all over the world. He could only see the tip of the iceberg. He could only hear the digital echoes, the screams of women and children.
One afternoon he got himself together and tracked down Alexandru. The boy had moved to a caravan camp in Nacka along with his mother and two newly arrived relatives. Mariella and his younger siblings were back in their home village in Romania.
Katz was welcomed with tea and cookies in the caravan they had been able to take over from a previous inhabitant. The boy asked him a little about what had happened in the house, and Katz answered as best he could.
“How is Mariella?” he asked when the boy seemed satisfied.
“Some friends helped her travel home. She’s living with my grandma now. She says she’s going to quit the drugs. Until then she’s marimé.”
“Unclean? For how long?”
“I don’t know . . . maybe a few months. And she also needs to rest after everything that happened.”
Katz didn’t want to imagine what the girl had been subjected to during her months of imprisonment, but he knew one thing with certainty: she had been lucky. They had found her just in the nick of time.
Mona. She had been lucky as well. And she had turned her luck into an even greater conviction to make a break with her old life. She had left Stockholm a few weeks earlier. She was given a spot at a treatment home in Dalarna, not far from the town where her son lived. She had called him one evening to tell him about it, sounding shockingly unaffected by everything she had gone through. She was a survivor, just like him. It would take more to break her.
“The police were here again before she left,” the boy went on. “But she couldn’t tell them any more than she had already. That Jennifer and Ramón sold her to those men. She didn’t mention you either, just as you asked. Thanks for finding her . . . and thanks for helping me with Miro. You had a chat with him, right? Because I never saw him again after that.”
Outside the caravan windows, two haggard men were sorting returnable bottles, large ones here, small ones there. They appeared to be in their fifties, but they were probably only half that old. It was difficult to imagine that they preferred this life over going back to their homes. But so it was, and in the end that explained everything.
“What happened at the last place you lived?” Katz asked. “In the forest?”
The boy lowered his eyes.
“They came in the night, poured petrol on our tents, and set fire to them.”
“Who did?”
“Gadjé . . . foreigners, Swedes. Luckily, we weren’t there. It was too cold to sleep outside that night. The imam in Husby let us stay in the mosque. In the morning, when we went back, everything had burned and they had carved swastikas into the trees.”
Katz accepted a fresh cup of tea, which the boy’s mother poured out of a thermos. He marveled at how clean the inside of the caravan was, and that it was even possible to keep it so clean considering there was no running water.
“What happens now?” he said. “How long will you stay?”
“Si te dikása maj anglé.”
“‘He who lives shall see . . .’”
The boy smiled at him.
“Your Romany just gets better and better. And you know what? I’m going to start at a real school after Christmas.”
He slept poorly, without dreaming. Dreamless sleep: he hated it; it reminded him of his junkie days. A dreamless sleep was an imitation of death; it disavowed memory.
He could have been dead too. He had expected to die in the boathouse, as he lay on the floor and felt the spray of blood hit his face. Or when he was under attack in the apartment. That hadn’t been Wallin, as he’d first thought, nor was it Wiksten. He had seen Wiksten’s corpse as he walked through the house; there hadn’t been any bite marks on his face.
Had he sent someone else? But who would it have been?
The cemetery. When he closed his eyes, he pictured the chapel, heard the cantor singing, the prayers, and someone crying in despair. He knew he had to start the process, knew he couldn’t put it off any longer. He ought to visit. He should have done it long ago.
The days grew shorter. The first Advent lights were lit in the windows of homes. The address book was still in the locker along with the bukkake DVD and the remaining packs of heroin. Katz’s plan was to get rid of all of it, but for some reason it never happened.
Jorma Hedlund called a few times and wanted to get together. They had only seen each other once since the events in the house, to make sure their stories matched in case they were called in for questioning. But Katz kept finding more excuses to avoid seeing Jorma.
He just tried to get time to pass. To kill it.
Time and again, his thoughts went to Skogskyrkogården. The ice-cold wind blowing outside the chapel. The black-clad funeral-goers. The crunch of the wet gravel under his feet as they walked toward the gravesite. The rows of stones whose inscriptions meant nothing to him. And the image of the boy at the very front—an orphan at far too young an age—leaning over the rectangular hole, bordered by piles of earth, dropping a flower onto the coffin. What had he been thinking? He didn’t know . . .
He went down to his cellar storage unit again, taking out the moving box from which he had rescued the Hanukkah candelabra. A box of decorations was all he had left of them. Somehow, during his years on the street, he had managed to keep it safe. It had spent time in the attics of various acquaintances, at Jorma’s place, among others, at storage facilities, and for a while, in a rock shelter that belonged to MUST, the military intelligence and security service . . . the safest place a homeless junkie’s valuables could be.
Skogskyrkogården. The small Jewish section, he thought as he stood with their wedding rings in his hand . . . He really ought to visit. Go to their graves. Try to grieve for them for the first time in his life. Maybe he should bring Eva? He didn’t want to go alone.
During the first week of December, something happened to rouse him from his lethargy. He got a call from Boris Epstein’s youngest daughter, Miriam. Her father had something he wanted to give Katz; it would be best if he could visit.
It was eleven in the morning when Katz arrived at the apa
rtment in Sundbyberg. The woman who answered the door was about his own age. She was wearing a checked skirt and a modest white blouse that was buttoned up to the throat. She looked like her father—the same high forehead, the same lovely brownish-gray eyes.
“How nice that you could come. Dad is getting worse by the hour. Please, come in. I’m Miriam.”
Katz followed her into the kitchen. She put aside a planner that was lying on the table, full of notes written in neat script.
A doctor came out of a room further on and removed a pair of disposable gloves before walking over to greet Katz.
“I’ve given him more insulin,” he said, turning to Miriam. “He’s beginning to perk up a little. Don’t give him any whisky, no matter how much he begs for it.”
“I promise I won’t.”
“Dad is a walking list of geriatric diagnoses,” she went on once the doctor had left. “You should see his medicine cabinet—he could open a pharmacy.”
She gave him a curious look.
“He’s told me about you, or rather about Benjamin. He wanted to give you something, he said, a memory, before it’s too late.”
A bell rang from inside the bedroom. And then a faint voice called her name.
“To everyone’s surprise, it’s not cancer or his heart that’s getting him,” she sighed as she stood up. “Instead it’s the most recent addition: ALS. The tests came back a week ago. He can hardly swallow anymore. It’s a dreadful disease. People starve to death, or they suffocate when their lungs stop working. Hold on for a second, please. I’ll tell him you’re here.”
When Katz entered the room, Epstein was lying in a hospital bed with an electronically adjustable backrest. An IV bag hung from a metal stand; two different tubes ran to the port on his wrist.
“Benji’s boy,” he said with a trace of a smile. “You look like him, you know . . . your troublesome father. You have the same demeanor, like an undertaker with a toothache.”
The Tunnel Page 22