The Tunnel

by Carl-Johan Vallgren

  “Bet you’d never have guessed that.”

  “That you go to church or that you try to stay sober?”

  “Church. People care about each other. Some of the ladies come over to check on me sometimes. It’s nice to have company . . . and no one judges me.”

  She went to the kitchen to make them some coffee and returned with cookies she must have bought for the occasion.

  “I have to say, I was surprised to hear from you. I didn’t expect it. And I don’t deserve it.”

  “How insightful of you.”

  “At least I’m not blaming anyone but myself.”

  She poured the coffee into mugs, putting two sugar cubes into her own and stirring it. Her hand trembled as she put down the spoon.

  “So you don’t know why you’re visiting?”

  She didn’t say anything, because she truly didn’t know. Or was there something she wanted? To be reminded of where she came from, so she could finally start to appreciate all she had? The children. Jorma and Katz. Her colleagues. Maybe even Ola.

  When she looked up again, her mother had dozed off in the chair. She had suffered from a form of narcolepsy since her teen years. When Eva was a child, Rita would fall asleep just like that, sometimes in the middle of a conversation.

  She walked into her mother’s bedroom. She observed the view of Vällingbyvägen and the Grimsta Forest. The silhouette of Hässelby further to the northwest. The neighborhood where she’d become a young woman, fallen in love with Katz, and lived the most destructive and perhaps also the most beautiful years of her life.

  She picked up the stuffed animal from the bed. “Eva,” read the label on its back, but the marker was so faded that the letters were hardly legible. The bear had been hers once upon a time. Her brother had given it to her for Christmas.

  She had only been three when he disappeared. A skinny blond boy who had been born with birth defects because Rita mixed Thalidomide and barbiturates during her pregnancy. She had panicked after a few days on speed and vodka and tried to fall asleep on the sedative the doctor had prescribed. After her delivery, her addiction got even worse.

  She had looked up to her brother, eight years her elder; she still remembered how he tried to play with her on the kitchen floor in Blackeberg, and that he took care of her when Rita and Jonas were gone, which was sometimes several days at a time. A boy without arms with parents without feelings, as she’d once tried to explain it to a befuddled friend in law school. But it had seemed normal to her at the time. All the bizarreness that made up her everyday life. She hadn’t thought it was strange at all back then.

  She walked over to the nightstand and read the prescription labels. Codapane. Diazepam. Stilnoct. A whole buffet of painkillers and anti-anxiety medications.

  On one red bottle was the word “Temodol.” Chemotherapy. She ought to have guessed by the bald spots where her mother’s hair hadn’t yet grown back.

  Rita was still sleeping when she returned to the room. Her abdomen was swollen under the cardigan, Eva realized. Maybe it was her liver? She looked at her bare feet in the Dr. Scholl’s. Her toenails were well manicured; they were the only part of her appearance she had always taken pains with. The nail polish was a shade of pale pink, the same as her fingernails. And she remembered other moments with her, when she had been sober and Jonas was in prison. At those times she had been happy, laughing; she’d tried to play with Eva and take care of her. She would place Eva on the bathroom stool and paint her little girl’s nails, toes and fingers both, and she would let Eva pick the color, but she always chose the same one as her mother had.

  She felt lighter as she opened the front door and walked along the asphalt path toward the car park, as if she had been relieved of a burden. It was a sunny day. The snow that had fallen during the week had melted.

  She got behind the wheel and took out her phone. Katz had called. She hadn’t seen him since the incidents at the house. She had only spoken with him briefly, on the phone, about the situation with their alibis. She closed her eyes and pictured him as he was back when they were teenagers. The handsome, dark-haired Jewish boy with the inscrutable eyes and strange last name. She remembered the joy she had felt, the butterflies in her stomach each time she saw him.

  Then she dialed into her voicemail and listened to his message. The puzzle began to take shape before her eyes, and it contained new pieces she hadn’t known existed.

  108 people die every minute on earth, Jorma thought. Every hour—6,480. Every day—155,520. What did one more matter? Especially if it was a total pig.

  It was a thought experiment. But the fact remained: if the worst happened, he needn’t have a guilty conscience.

  He looked around as he waited. The flat consisted of two separate apartments that had been joined. That was why there were two kitchens and two bathrooms, and mirror-imaged floor plans. He was in some sort of waiting room. All that was missing was a queue number.

  A guard was zapping from program to program on a TV in the front kitchen. Or maybe “guard” wasn’t the right word. Someone who kept an eye on the operation, made sure that money changed hands smoothly, that no fights broke out. A Russian, he thought. Or a Serb. The prison tattoos on the man’s arm were full of Cyrillic letters.

  An Asian girl was sitting on a sofa, rubbing skin cream into her calves. She looked like she hadn’t slept—or, for that matter, left the flat—in a week. There were two more women in the flat, two rail-thin blondes; he had the idea they were Poles. The whole concept was thoroughly organized. You could make an appointment online or over the phone.

  He wondered if the other tenants in the building realized what went on here. The guy had presented him with a whole menu of options when he called, complete with a price list and everything, before he took off to fetch the girl. Berne. That was how the man introduced himself. His letter box in Kransen only listed a last name: Lindberg.

  Berne was the one who had opened the door when he rang with the prearranged signal. He had tossed his dreadlocks and said that Jorma should wait there until he returned. The guy was high as a kite and didn’t seem to recognize him. His girl was on a home visit to a john, he’d explained . . .

  Jorma’s gaze slid on across the room. It was an incredibly pathetic place. Depressing wasn’t the half of it. Bare walls. Cheap IKEA furniture. One of the rooms he peeked into didn’t even have a bed. Just a mattress with a fitted sheet and an Oriental rug hanging on the wall.

  He heard a key in the front door. He saw his neighbor girl as if through a tunnel. Her empty eyes. Berne was standing behind her; he took off his black North Face jacket and hung it on a hook. He nodded at the guard type guy, who had stuck his head out of the kitchen. He took hold of the girl’s arm and shoved her into the bathroom.

  “Wash yourself,” he said in English.

  They were alone in the room now, he and Berne. It was astounding that he didn’t recognize Jorma. It was also astounding that he had let him in on the basis of a single phone call.

  “So what does it cost again?” he said.

  “That depends on what you want to do. Regular fucking?”

  Jorma nodded neutrally. He guessed he might as well do what he’d planned right away. Solve the problems in the correct order.

  “Give me two thousand kronor and you do anything you can think of with her. But I don’t want to have to take her to the hospital.”

  The girl walked out of the bathroom. She was wearing only panties and a bra. She made some sort of thrusting motion that was probably supposed to be sexy. He wanted to cry.

  He fished two thousand-kronor bills out of his inner pocket and handed them to Berne. He received a spliff-yellowed smile in response.

  “Okay. You can use the room at the end of the hall. Have fun . . .”

  He followed the Thai woman down the hall. Someone had punched a hole through the plaster wall—traces of a fight that had got out of control.

  A twin bed stood along one wall. At least the sheets were clean. The
girl sat down on the edge of the bed, took off her panties, and dropped them on the floor.

  “You want massage first?” she asked in English.

  Her voice was childlike. How old was she? Eighteen? Twenty? He wondered if she recognized him.

  He shook his head. Thought of the Roma girl in the cage at Mattson’s country home. Of the porn filming session Katz had told him about. The shipment from Poland Leyla had described . . . the women in the truck, the ones Zoran had rescued. He thought of all the pigs in the world.

  He took out his wallet again. He took out another wad of cash, another ten thousand kronor from the safe deposit box in Huddinge.

  “Where is your passport?” he asked in English.

  “No understand.”

  “Thai passport?”

  “Berne took it away.”

  She glanced nervously at the wad of bills . . . and then she accepted it and stuck it under the mattress.

  Berne. What kind of fucking awful person was he? Who the hell did he think he was? God? Did he think he owned people? There was nothing worse than a pimp; he hated them. He pictured Leena as she looked when she was twenty; if this sort of thing had ever happened to her, he would have killed the bastard.

  “What you want from me?”

  “Nothing. Just wait here. The money is for your plane ticket . . . I’ll be back soon.”

  His neighbor looked at him in surprise as he stepped into the waiting room.

  “Did you forget something?”

  “Oh, no. Just need to take a piss.”

  The guard was sitting with his back to him as he entered the kitchen. He hadn’t seen or heard a thing.

  He fished the adjustable spanner from the shaft of his boot. He took two steps forward and brought it down right on the back of the guy’s skull. Someone must have turned down the volume on reality. He didn’t hear a sound, not even when the man tumbled to the floor with blood pouring down his bull-neck, knocking the TV over as he went.

  The pool of blood on the floor was spreading. It caught up with a crumpled receipt, which floated on top of the viscous fluid. The man wasn’t moving; his feet were just twitching slightly. He was wearing tattered sneakers. His socks were the same shade as his blood. A cigarette was smoking in an ashtray on the table where the TV had been.

  He walked back to the waiting room. One of the Polish women appeared suddenly, and she screamed at the top of her lungs when she saw him. His hands and shirt were spattered with blood. But his reality was still on mute; he just saw her mouth moving, like that of a fish in an aquarium.

  Berne had stood up. He backed up against the wall, palms out, talking, shaping his mouth into words . . . but they just fell to the floor, popping silently against the linoleum.

  Jorma opened the window, let in some air, and breathed deeply.

  “What the hell is going on? Are you fucking crazy?”

  The sound was back. He socked the man in the face, then added two or three blows of the spanner. Berne crawled into the corner. He kicked him in the gut and watched him fall over sideways.

  The man was white as a ghost. His whole body was trembling. A vein was throbbing hysterically at one temple. It looked like a larva, or like there was a parasite writhing under his skin. He kicked him in the face. The man’s nose smeared across his cheek. He no longer looked human. He was like a painting by Picasso; his facial features had become crooked and strange, an experiment in Cubism.

  “Get up!” he said. “Out!”

  He pointed at the open window.

  “What the fuck? What’s wrong with you? We’re three stories up!”

  His voice was thick; Jorma could see shards of broken teeth between his torn lips.

  “You’ll break both your legs or your back and be in a wheelchair for the rest of your life. It’s either that, or this.”

  He had taken the Colt from the shaft of his other boot. There were no bullets in the cylinder. He had used the last one on Hoffman. But the man in front of him didn’t know that. He hit him in the face with the spanner again and heard something crunch.

  “Out, I said . . . You have five seconds.”

  His dreadlocked neighbor’s face was streaked with blood. Trembling, he crawled over to the window and managed to stand up. He sat down on the sill and swung his legs out. He turned around, tossing a quick glance at the muzzle of the revolver. And then he jumped.

  Some late hollyhocks were blooming along a south-facing wall. Dormant grapevines draped the pergola. The garage was freshly painted. A can of paint stood on an electrical box.

  There was a greenhouse in one corner of the garden. Katz remembered the summer cottage his parents had rented on the island of Värmdö for a few years in the late seventies. His mother had spent all her time in the greenhouse there. She had grown tomatoes, kept citrus trees in pots, and had a large olive bush that she harvested in late autumn. Katz had loved to spend time with her there. He would sit for hours on a flower box and watch as she cared for the plants, watering them with the enamel watering can, genuinely happy for the moment, calm in a way he wasn’t used to seeing . . . happy because she could spend time there with just him. Benjamin never visited the greenhouse; it was her sanctuary.

  He walked by the empty pool and over to the terrace, peering into a drawing room through the glass partition. It was dark. An alarm box connected to a security company was mounted by the door.

  By the time he returned to the front of the house, a man had appeared outside the very similar house next door and was watching him suspiciously over the fence.

  “Are you looking for someone?” he asked.

  “Beata. But she doesn’t seem to be home.”

  The man was in his forties. He was holding a tennis bag and glanced anxiously at his watch.

  “She’s at work, would be my guess. At Danderyd Hospital. And who are you?”

  There was a beep as the man aimed a key at the garage door, and then a metallic whine as the door opened.

  “Danny Katz. I know the family. It’s about her daughter, Jennifer.”

  The man shook his head as if the very name gave him the willies.

  “I haven’t seen her here in several years. Just Eric.”

  The person who had been walking toward them on the golf course, Katz thought. He looked like Beata, but Katz had drawn the conclusion that it was because they were together, because he was her lover. She couldn’t have been more than twenty when she had him. Eric Söderberg. Her son. Jennifer’s half-brother.

  “Was that all?” the neighbor asked.

  “Do you know what time she usually gets home?”

  “Well, if you know her, all you have to do is call and ask.”

  The neighbor didn’t move. Apparently he wasn’t planning to leave until Katz had gone on his way.

  “The house is connected to an alarm service,” he said. “Just so you know. And that’s true of all the houses in this neighborhood.”

  Katz walked around the neighborhood until he had arrived at the house with grounds that backed on to Beata’s. He had an hour before he was supposed to meet Eva Westin in town to see what information she had for him.

  How was it all connected? He had given Beata his business card when he met her at the golf course. He had told her he suspected Ramón had been murdered. Beata didn’t want to take any risks, so she’d sent her son to Katz’s place. That was the simplest explanation. Eric had been waiting for him while he took the detour to John Sjöholm’s car and discovered their second victim . . .

  The carport was empty. Katz opened the front gate and followed the gravel path around the house. He climbed over the fence just behind the greenhouse and looked around. The neighbor was nowhere to be seen.

  Then he opened the electrical box with the screwdriver he’d brought from his car. He turned off the main current and walked to the cellar door. The alarm box had gone dark. It was easy to pick the lock—it was an ASSA model from the early eighties.

  He started on the ground floor. The kitchen
. Beata’s bedroom with its double bed and cloistered atmosphere, the living room with a fireplace and New England-style furniture.

  The first floor was dominated by an office. Medical literature on the bookshelf. Most of it was about anesthesia and surgical assistance. Two shelves were taken up by books on addiction. All kinds of addiction—alcohol, drugs, gambling, and sex. There were several books about twelve-step programs and the Minnesota Model. Books about co-dependence and Family Anonymous, an approach Katz was familiar with from his own NA experience. The bottom shelf contained a row of books about the sexual abuse of children.

  He followed a hallway until he found himself at a door adorned with a Nirvana poster. Jennifer’s girlhood room. Stuffed animals and dolls were lined up along the head of the bed. An empty terrarium stood on a bureau.

  He cracked the wardrobe door. The suitcase he’d seen in Husby was on the floor inside. The clothes she had been wearing were arranged on hangers.

  A parent demanding a promise of revenge from a son, Katz thought as he glanced around the room, just as Chaim had demanded of Benjamin once upon a time. The pieces had fallen into place when he saw Miriam preparing a syringe to inject medicine into Epstein’s arm . . .

  Beata had brought Eric along to the apartment in Husby. Ramón—the man Beata assumed was the latest in a long line of her daughter’s pimps—had been doped up on heroin. She was an anesthesia nurse; she knew exactly what to do. First she sedated him, likely with something she’d brought from the hospital. Then she injected the overdose into his arm. She watched him die before they took Jennifer away with them.

  But where was Jennifer now?

  On the windowsill were photographs of her as a child, with Eric and Beata. A loving family, Katz thought; you could tell from their expressions, the way they were holding each other, the atmosphere around them—that elusive thing called devotion.