The Tunnel

by Carl-Johan Vallgren

  A religious text written in Hebrew lay on the nightstand.

  “My daughter is trying to lead me onto the right path before it’s too late,” Epstein slurred as he noticed Katz’s gaze. “That girl is the exact opposite of her father. She lives by the rules. She keeps kosher. She goes to the synagogue more often than the rabbi does. And to the mikvah, the bathhouse, once a month.” He gave an ironic wink. “I heard her on the phone with the Chevra Kadisha, the funeral organization, this morning. You’ll have to start practicing the Kaddish, Danny . . . Not long left now.”

  With difficulty, he reached for the text on the nightstand and lifted it up. Underneath it was a photo album.

  “I dug this out of my cabinet after you were here last time. I took a walk down memory lane.”

  About two dozen photographs were glued onto black paper. They depicted Benjamin and Epstein sixty years earlier. In one of them, they were standing outside the Nalen restaurant next to a poster of the Benny Goodman Orchestra. Several photos were from the boxing club in Narva; they were posing with their gloves on, in a fighting stance. Two of the pictures were a little older; they had been taken outside Central Station. Benjamin was holding a suitcase; he was dressed in a pale felt hat and a tweed suit. Taxis outfitted with wartime wood-gas units could be seen in the background. Next to Benjamin was a gray-haired man twice his age but just like him in looks. Chaim. Katz’s grandfather. He had never seen a picture of him before.

  “Taken in February, 1944,” Epstein said. “Benji was on his way to Berlin and then to Vichy in France, all the way down to the Spanish border, to try to find out what happened to his sister. Europe was under German occupation, and your father was a Jew. But nothing was impossible for Benjamin Katz. He had some sort of congenital deficiency—he didn’t understand fear . . . I suppose you could say he had contempt for death, or maybe a death wish. Berlin was Judenrein, as they called it. Goebbels had ordered as much the year before as a gift to his beloved Führer. And Benji walked around that city with a fake passport, looking for Hannah.”

  “Someone must have helped him.”

  “He didn’t say much about that either. But the Swedish armed forces were involved somehow.”

  Katz was struck dumb as he tried to digest this information.

  “After the war he made some further attempts behind the Iron Curtain. He went to the Baltic states and the DDR, among others.”

  “Did Dad tell you anything else about those trips? If he received official help, it must be documented somewhere.”

  “You’ll have to visit the archives. But I’m afraid the most important documents are classified.”

  “What about Chaim? You knew him too. Didn’t he ever say anything?”

  “Only by insinuation. He believed that they found out what happened to his daughter in the end—that she wound up in a so-called Freudenabteilung in a concentration camp.”

  “A brothel?”

  “That might be putting it too kindly, since those poor women were gassed after a certain number of months. But there was a persistent rumor that said someone in Vienna had reported her to the Gestapo, and that this same person had something to do with those establishments. Benjamin made a promise to Chaim that he would track him down and avenge her. But the rumor was false. It turned out to concern an entirely different woman.”

  Katz considered the photographs. He only owned four pictures of Benjamin, and just as few of his mother. Those photos, a few books, and the decorations in the moving box were all that was left of them.

  “There may be some people who can help you,” Epstein said in a voice that was growing weaker and weaker. “A historian at the Swedish Army Museum, among others. Mikael Stern. I wrote a letter to him after you visited me last time. He has access to certain archives that aren’t meant for the eyes of mere mortals. Call him. He’s expecting you.”

  There was a knock at the open door. Miriam was standing in the doorway with a tray of medicine in her hands.

  “Sorry to interrupt,” she said. “But it’s time for Dad to follow doctor’s orders.”

  She placed the tray on the nightstand, then walked to the window and cracked it, letting in the raw December air. Katz noticed the syringe that lay next to the packet of sterile gauze.

  “My daughter is a nurse,” Epstein said, eyes closed. “It’s very practical. After all, the doctor can’t be here all the time.”

  She opened the plastic packaging of the syringe, and drew clear fluid into it from a medicine bottle.

  A thought was about to come loose inside Katz. At first it was so faint that he barely sensed its presence, but then it became clearer, as if some sort of logical formula were slowly detaching itself from the room.

  Jorma waved at the three people standing in the glass entryway. Leena had her arm around Kevin—a grown man now, with his own place in Rågsved. And there was Aino, in the wheelchair, with the vacant stare of a person on her way into the fog. Kevin jokingly gave him the finger. The guy was not unlike Jorma himself as a young man. He was a cocktail of fragility and explosiveness. He only hoped that Kevin wouldn’t make the same mistakes Jorma had. Leena had hinted that he was starting to hang out with the wrong crowd.

  The kid was his second-highest priority now that the worst of the danger had passed. He was planning to take him out to the movies one evening, but there were a couple of other things he had to deal with first.

  The trio in the entryway of the Finnish retirement home in Fisksätra was the closest he would ever get to a nuclear family, he thought as he backed out into the driveway and nearly sideswiped the sliding door of a delivery van, from which a young woman was unloading cartons of Karelian pierogies. Aino’s wrinkled hand waved back, then slowly sank onto the armrest of the wheelchair. The question was, did she even know who she was saying goodbye to? She was more and more forgetful with each visit. The most recent relapse had affected her language. She was forgetting words in a way she never had before—mostly Finnish ones, strangely enough.

  Happily, there was no unfinished business between them, he thought as he watched them disappear in the rearview mirror. He had no reason to blame her; she had done the best she could, trying to survive with a psychopath for a husband, protecting her children to the best of her ability, getting a divorce when she realized there was no other way out, just as Leena had done ten years ago when she realized things had gone too far with Kevin’s dad . . . His anger flared up at the mere thought of his sister’s ex. Apparently he’d contacted Leena again, in a threatening sort of way. Perhaps he would have to rearrange his list of priorities and put that idiot closer to the top, like maybe in third place, or even higher if he kept up the harassment. The thought of Kevin’s dad made his adrenaline jolt twice as high as it already was.

  As he drove through the roundabout before the motorway, he fished the business card from his back pocket. He’d got it from Katz when they met a few weeks ago. On the afternoon they had gone through what had happened and updated each other on what they had experienced.

  He dialed the number as he drove onto Värmdövägen, squeezing the phone hard when the voice came on the other end.

  “Yes?”

  “It’s me again. Hedlund. I have a six o’clock appointment . . . Is it okay if I come right now?”

  “I’ll have to check the calendar . . . hell yes. You’re welcome anytime. Until four o’clock. After that it gets pretty busy.”

  He followed the early-afternoon traffic back to the city. The first snow had started to fall, heavy and wet. When he discovered a cop car sitting at a service road, he reflexively slowed down. But they had nothing on him; he would make it through this time too.

  He had finally dared to move back to his apartment in Kransen and was slowly starting to let down his guard, return to his regular life. The investigation into the missing armored-truck robber had been shelved. The criminal police had other matters to attend to. Like trying to figure out what had really happened at Mattson’s house.

  He had
played the piano like a madman for the first couple of weeks. He had even gone down to Aulos to buy new sheet music. Some complicated pieces by Prokofiev as well as the piano part of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony. He drummed the first measure of the melody against the wheel as he passed Sickla and drove into the dark mouth of the Söderled Tunnel.

  As long as no new evidence was unearthed at the crime scene, he was safe. He hadn’t even told Leena about the robbery. He didn’t want anything to leak further to Kevin. The kid needed good role models. And he would be one of them—not the man he had been, but the one he would become. He had made up his mind. He had half a million kronor left in the safe deposit box in Huddinge. Funds on which to build a new life. Since last week, the other half of the money was in an account in Cyprus, in Leyla’s name. To help Zoran’s kids in the future. She would soon receive a letter from a lawyer in Nicosia, written in such a way that she would believe it was Zoran’s money, something he had arranged for her behind her back.

  He blinked in the daylight as he drove onto Huddingevägen. Deep-rooted exhaustion, he thought as he continued toward his destination. He wasn’t sleeping well at night. He had dreams about the incidents at the house.

  He had been hiding in a space in the kitchen, still in shock over everything that had happened, when a person suddenly entered . . . and walked past him and vanished into the garden. Katz, he realized with a thirty second delay. He had watched as Katz ran down to the boathouse. And in the midst of his confusion over finding his best friend there, he must have realized that Katz was in danger.

  He returned to the room where the corpses lay, took the Colt that was still in the handler’s grip, and rushed down to the boathouse.

  The door was open. He heard people talking inside—a voice ordering Katz onto the floor—and he realized that something terrible was about to happen and that there was no room for error.

  In his dream, he opened the cylinder of the revolver again and again to check the ammunition. The handler and Mattson really had been playing Russian roulette with him. There was a single bullet in the cylinder. It was aligned with the bore.

  Connected to the boathouse was a jetty. He cautiously approached the window and peered in. He saw what he needed to see and didn’t hesitate as he lifted the weapon. He had one chance, and he had no intention of squandering it.

  Eva had stayed behind to meet the first squad car. They would sync up their stories later, they decided; the main thing was that he was never there, or that at least, officially, she hadn’t seen him. He and Katz left the house together; they walked through the woods and left in the car.

  He had arrived at his destination. He parked the car across the street and peered up at the third floor. Drawn curtains. No one could see in. There was nothing to suggest what was really going on. The man was waiting for him. He was looking forward to it. He would just park in a safer spot.

  The view from the roof of the apartment building had to be wonderful. She could have seen the neighborhoods of her youth from up there.

  Their last stop had been Hässelby Gård on the other side of the motorway—the white high-rise in the city center where she lived with Rita and Jonas during her teenage years. But she had been born a bit further south, in Blackeberg. Their flat in the complex on Drachmannsgatan, which had been paid for by social services, was only a stone’s throw from the luxury buildings of Södra Ängby, but the line between the two areas had been as sharply drawn then as it was now.

  That had also been her older brother’s last address in Stockholm. Roger had been given away when he was ten; he ended up with a new family and never came back. He was in Skåne, Rita said, one of the few times the topic arose, but that was an unsubstantiated rumor; they had never heard from him after his move.

  Geographically speaking, her mother hadn’t gone very far in life. Råcksta was one of the few parts of Stockholm where you could still get an apartment via the housing authority, and the rent was likely half what it cost in the city proper.

  The antennae sticking out from balconies made her think of a spaceship that had been forced to make an emergency landing.

  At least she didn’t have to worry about the time. She had been on leave for over a month while her colleagues in homicide and the human-trafficking unit tried to make sense out of the chaos.

  She couldn’t count the number of hours she’d spent in questioning. She was one of the key witnesses in a mess she was starting to suspect would never be untangled. She had told them everything she knew about Hoffman and her own investigation, minus certain details that could compromise Jorma and Katz; she had handed over the material she had received from her colleagues in Sarajevo; she had made sure that the criminal police got in touch with the Bosnian police; she had done what she could to help with the huge puzzle. But what more did they have to go on than witness accounts? The only information they could get from Mona, the Roma girl Mariella, and Eva herself had to do with people who were dead, who could no longer be interrogated. The evidence from Mattson’s house led nowhere. Hoffman’s CD-R discs and the backup she had loaded onto her USB drive had been destroyed. He had got rid of them on the way to the house.

  She followed the investigation out of the corner of her eye, via her contacts at the police station. Two kidnapping investigations and five for murder—for the five people in the house in Håbo—had been launched. They did know that Mattson was involved in human trafficking and that his connections led all the way down to the Balkans, but that was where the trail ended.

  The trafficking had been a separate matter, she thought as two young women with pushchairs passed her car, and the sex ring was yet another. Mattson, Hoffman, and Wiksten had used some of the smuggled women for their own private purposes. They had brought others in on their own, some with the help of Ramón and Jennifer Roslund and another man, now dead, by the name of John Sjöholm.

  But who else had been involved? They would likely never know.

  In any case, someone, or several people, had cleaned up after themselves with a vengeance. The police still had no clues about the person who had done the shooting in the house, and something told her it would stay that way.

  At least she had managed to keep Katz and Jorma out of the investigation. The weapon with which the latter had saved her life was untraceable. Jorma had promised to get rid of it as soon as possible.

  She sighed as she dug her phone out of her bag. She was planning to call and say she had arrived, but instead she pulled up the few photos she had of the children. She hadn’t seen them in a month. She hadn’t had the energy.

  Arvid smiled at her with his missing teeth. Lisa seemed skeptical in a blurry photo taken the previous summer in the archipelago. Children of a hopeless mother, she thought. Just like her.

  Her first thought was that the woman who opened the door couldn’t be her mother. Rita was sixty-seven, but the person who stood in the doorway, watching her through a pair of blue eyeglasses, looked at least fifteen years older than that. She was wearing black leggings and a knee-length gray wool cardigan. A pair of Dr. Scholl’s sandals and no socks. Her hair was thin and white, though some patches of her scalp were bald.

  She made a gesture that Eva interpreted as a signal to come in.

  The apartment was small, maybe forty square meters: two rooms and a tiny kitchen. She caught a glimpse of a bedroom through an open door. A pink teddy bear sat on the crocheted bedspread; the bear seemed familiar. There were prescription bottles on the nightstand.

  The living room smelled like old cigarette smoke. A nearly completed puzzle of Stockholm City Hall covered the coffee table. A Sweden Democrats election poster was tacked to the wall.

  “What are you doing here, anyway?” Rita asked as she sat down in an easy chair near the balcony door. “I thought it was a joke at first, when you called.”

  She offered her a cigarette from the pack, then lit one herself after Eva shook her head, but she let it rest in the ashtray.

  “It’s been a long time since I sa
w you,” she said.

  Her eyes seemed far away, just as they had when Eva was little. Rita had always kept a filter between herself and the world—so she could tolerate it, Eva assumed.

  “Twenty-four years. When I turned eighteen. At the treatment home in Vilhelmina. You came to visit with a probation officer. They let us take a walk by ourselves. You were in bad shape. I remember you asked if I had any drugs.”

  Her mother seemed to search her memory, but came up empty.

  “That was the last time, on my birthday. I stayed up there until I finished gymnasium. Then I started studying at Uppsala. I never got back in touch. You didn’t either.”

  Her mother picked up the cigarette again but let it burn down.

  “So how are you?”

  “Good.”

  “And you have kids, you said on the phone.”

  She couldn’t remember mentioning anything about Arvid and Lisa, but apparently she had.

  “Yes, one girl and one boy. They don’t even know you exist.”

  Her mother gave an awkward laugh.

  “I understand you work as a lawyer.”

  “A prosecutor. How did you know that?”

  “Dad told me . . . You saw him.”

  “I didn’t see him. He called. And that was more than ten years ago. I don’t know how he got my number. We spoke for five minutes before I hung up on him. I think he was in prison. Do you have contact with him?”

  Her mother smiled a Rita smile, just the corner of her mouth. Eva was slowly beginning to see her mother clearly. But she felt nothing, not even disdain.

  “It’s been just as long since I saw him.”

  “Were you the one who left, or was it him?”

  “Both of us. It just wasn’t working anymore. The way we were living, we were about to kill each other.”

  She seemed to relax. She changed the subject and began chatting about her life on disability. She had started attending church, the Pentecostal one in Vällingby, not because she was a believer, but to meet new people. And she didn’t drink as much anymore because she had liver trouble.