The Tunnel

by Carl-Johan Vallgren

  “You check upstairs,” she said to Jorma. “I’ll keep looking down here.”

  She moved on to a narrow passageway that led to a basement door. She suddenly heard sounds from downstairs—glass breaking as something fell to the floor. She couldn’t keep herself in check any longer; she opened the door and called Katz’s name, but there was no answer.

  Jorma’s footsteps on the first floor. Hadn’t he heard it? She ought to go and get him, but her instincts told her there wasn’t time.

  A damp odor struck her as she walked down the stairs. The basement was faintly lit by the street lamps outside.

  She was in a hobby room. She turned on her phone’s flashlight function and shone it around. There was a set of furniture around a glass table. A television stood on the sideboard, and under it was an open shelf: an old VCR. This was where they had watched porn together, Tell and his stepson. Orgies, ones Tell had filmed himself.

  There was a draft in the room; a door was open. She felt dizzy, as if the world had shrunk down to a narrow hallway with darkness on both sides.

  It felt like she was moving through a wind tunnel, like the air was pushing against her at ten times its usual strength. She turned off her phone, followed a hallway toward an open sliding door, and glimpsed a hospital stretcher and an overturned cabinet. Plastic-sealed syringes lay among the shards of glass on the floor.

  She peered in through the open door but could barely interpret what she saw. She only perceived movements and strange shadows, like a person about to go blind . . . A man, she thought, straddling another man. Pulling a sharp object out of his body. Raising his arm, taking aim.

  Katz had no time to react before the man’s foot struck the back of his neck. He was flung forward and saw a palette of exploding color as he tumbled about and landed with his back to the wall.

  The light from the flashlight bobbed on the ceiling. At first he wasn’t sure where he was. Then the room arranged itself again, according to its particular grammar. Jenny shouted something incomprehensible as her brother yanked her out of the room. He was bigger than Katz remembered. Nasty scars from the wounds on his face where Katz had bitten him . . .

  “What did you do to her?”

  Katz tried to get up, but his legs wouldn’t obey. Eric had something in his hand. And Katz knew what it would feel like when the object slid into his body, the blade of a fillet knife, like a thin slice of concentrated heat.

  “Let him be, Eric!”

  “Shut up. Get out of here. Mum will be home any minute.”

  The blade flashed in the beam of the flashlight. Katz managed to twist to the side; the first slash missed his face by a millimeter.

  He managed to throw a punch, striking as hard as he could, but he missed. The hand and the knife rose up again. Katz took purchase against the wall and heaved himself up. He fell through the hatch and landed on the floor in the sick room, then got to his feet again.

  Jennifer was gone; he felt the draft from the basement door. Eric slashed at him again, slicing a hole in his jacket.

  The medicine cabinet crashed to the floor as he backed into it, in full panic mode. Shards of glass crunched under his feet. Katz managed to wriggle out of his jacket and wind it around his forearm for protection. Eric was stabbing at him wildly; the tip of the knife pierced the layers of fabric and cut open his skin just below the elbow.

  Katz’s back was to the wall. He heard the other man’s heavy breathing. The knife came at him so fast he had no time to react. The blade sank into his shoulder, just below his collarbone, and was pulled back out again.

  The pain was otherworldly. Blood filled his armpit and soaked into his shirt. He heard the cry of a terrified animal and realized that the sound had come from him. Urine ran down his thighs; his bladder must have released.

  His arm would no longer obey him. The sinews were torn. He tried to kick, but the signals from his brain couldn’t reach his body. Saliva flooded his mouth; he swallowed and swallowed and had the sensation of drowning in his own spit. His vision went black and he fell to the side.

  When he came to again, Eric was straddling him and aiming for his neck. Time slowed down, moving like thick glue.

  The flashlight was on the floor across the room. Its light had grown fainter; the batteries were dying. Time started back up again. He reflexively twisted to the side as the knife sliced down. The blade missed his throat but slid into his armpit instead, entering his body at an angle and wedging itself between two ribs.

  Let it be stuck there . . . No more stabbing . . .

  It had punctured his lung. There was a squeak every time he took a breath. Katz was no longer thinking, he was just fighting the pain. He locked onto Eric’s arm with both hands, pressing the man to his body, and felt the tip of the knife scrape between his ribs.

  The light of the flashlight was nearly gone, and they were fighting in darkness, silently, intently.

  Someone called his name as if through a kilometer-long tunnel. Sounds, other people in the house. He knew he was hallucinating, that his fear of dying was making him hear voices.

  He pulled harder at the hand that held the shaft of the knife. Eric was fighting to pry it loose. That squeaking from his ribcage—as if he had grown gills.

  Don’t let him stab again . . . Keep the blade in me . . .

  He tried to fight, one minute, maybe two, but his strength was petering out.

  He could hardly see anything anymore. Just the shape of Eric’s body, like a black shadow on top of him. And the knife as it came out of his armpit and flew up again.

  Then he suddenly heard a noise—the sound of footsteps walking on shards of glass. It was as if he had developed night vision out of the blue. He saw a person picking something up off the floor near the door, and rushing at them from the side. Single-mindedly, no fear. He watched as, all in a single motion, Eva tore the plastic from a syringe, took aim, and jabbed at Eric’s face from below.

  There was a second’s delay before the roar of pain. Blood dripped down into Katz’s face. The body on top of him relaxed. The needle had gone straight into the man’s eye.

  Epilogue

  Christmas, 2013

  Through the chapel windows he could see gray snips of the December sky. A cantor was singing in a powerful tenor. The coffin was in the center of the room, with mourners on either side of it. Epstein’s daughter, along with her closest family. Frydman, from the synagogue on Sankt Paulsgatan. Another couple of men Katz recognized from the Orthodox congregation.

  Was it time to say the Kaddish now? Or was that at the graveside?

  Katz glanced discreetly at Miriam, trying to see if she had a kerija—a tiny tear in her clothing; believers wore these as an expression of grief. The week of shiva would start as soon as the funeral was over. The mirrors in her home would be covered, and meals would be eaten on the floor. A candle would be kept burning around the clock.

  Epstein had died two days earlier and was handed over to the professionals at Chevra Kadisha, the Jewish funeral service. The body had been ritually washed, dressed in white trousers, a white shirt, a white coat, and a tallit—a prayer shawl—although Katz doubted that the old man had owned one.

  Earth from Jerusalem lay under the pillow where his head rested. The congregation read Tziduk Hadin, just like the last time Katz was here, three decades earlier. The prayers were the same. Frydman, he faintly recalled, had been present that time as well, wearing a black hat—could it be the same one he had on now?

  As the service continued, more memories flickered by. The terraced house they’d lived in when Katz was ten, in the Märsta area, for just one year because his father made enemies with the neighbors. He remembered the badminton net in the little patch of garden out the back . . . Benjamin, shirtless and with a cigarette in the corner of his mouth, as he explained in German how to serve. Yiddish was reserved for jokes and scoldings. Swedish was for everyday use. German was for instructions. His mother, in the hammock on the veranda with a glass of orange juice
in her hand, a sunhat shielding her face.

  Later that summer, they had sent him to Glämsta, the Jewish summer camp in the archipelago. “Dos ayntsike ort in Shvedn vu du vest kenen filn zich normal iz inem dush,” as Benjamin laconically put it in Yiddish. The only place in Sweden where you’ll feel normal in the shower! Apparently he had hoped that some time among other circumcised boys would give Katz’s own Jewish identity a boost. Lessons in religion and Jewish history, the yearly Maccabiah athletics competition, the flirting between teenagers who came from Jewish families all over the country, sneaking cigarettes at the “secret cave,” and the gossip around the kiosk where they gathered in the evenings. But Katz had felt like just as much of an outsider there as in every other situation. He didn’t even fit in as a Jew, he thought.

  The next summer he went to Glämsta for the second and last time in his life; his visit ended early. Not far off, on the same island, there was a city-run summer camp where less well-off Stockholm families sent their children. Incidents had occurred throughout the years: someone had spray-painted swastikas on the buildings that belonged to the Jewish organization, and there had been fights down by the beach.

  During the second week after Katz arrived, an older boy from the city camp messed with a religious boy from Skåne, Adam Lewinski. It was at night, at the grill site the two camps shared. The older boy, a large blond type with his hair in a ponytail, had torn the yarmulke from Lewinski’s head in order to impress a couple of girls, and he tossed it into a bush. Lewinski had been frightened, so he found his cap and left.

  Katz had lingered at the grill site as it grew dark. He heard the guy with the ponytail telling one of the era’s more common anti-Semitic jokes to his friends: “Know how you get six million Jews into a Volkswagen? Two in back, two in front, and the rest in the ashtray.”

  When the guy went to take a leak, Katz followed him. He found a fist-sized rock along the path. He waited until he had opened his fly and started pissing, then took five steps forward and tapped him on the shoulder. As the guy turned around, he smashed his teeth in.

  The boy was still standing. Katz struck again, this time hitting the side of his head. Blood sprayed from his temple, cascading onto Katz’s clothes. When the guy collapsed to the ground in front of him, Katz calmly dropped the rock and walked away.

  That same evening, he was questioned by the Norrtälje police. The guy he assaulted had barely survived the attack. But Katz didn’t say a word; he just vanished inside himself, staring blankly at the cops as they tried to get a confession out of him.

  Benjamin picked him up the next day; he slugged him in the ear in front of three horrified Jewish youth leaders, tossed him into the back seat of the car, and drove away. He didn’t say a word to Katz for the whole trip back to Stockholm, he just chain-smoked cigarettes and muttered curses to himself in Yiddish: Di alte nevayle . . . a goj hot majn zun opgenart . . . a shlak zol dir treffn, shtinkendiker shmok . . .

  When they parked outside the house, he turned around and gave Katz a look he had never seen before: chilly, distant, as if it belonged to a completely different person.

  “You have to be colder,” he said, and his voice had been that of a stranger too, of another man. “More clinical, Danny. You let someone see you . . . that was your mistake.”

  The first of many investigations into Katz’s psyche had been performed shortly thereafter. No one talked about all the alphabet-soup diagnoses back then, but he’d had them all. Violent tendencies with psychopathic traits, he had later read about himself in one of the social services documents. Just like Benjamin, he thought. That was where the darkness came from.

  The service was over. Strong men from Chevra Kadisha carried the coffin to the gravesite. Katz followed, last in the procession.

  The stately pines that shielded the southern Jewish graveyard from sunlight, the damp gravel paths, the rows of headstones with inscriptions in Hebrew. Names that sounded so familiar from his childhood: Gleichman, Kessler, Goldberg, Stern, Herz, Konig, Farber, Weiss, Gordon, Mosesson, Silberstein, Rubin, Blumenthal, Perski, Klein, Swartz, Fuchs, Lazar . . . and somewhere, further on, in a spot he no longer remembered: Anne and Benjamin Katz.

  The coffin was lowered into the ground with ropes. One by one, the mourners walked up to pour three shovelfuls of earth over the dead.

  Katz had left the procession to take a seat on a park bench nearby. He was observing everything from a distance when a man suddenly showed up and sat down beside him.

  “We’ve never met. My name is Mikael Stern.”

  The man was in his sixties. His face was ruddy; he had sideburns and pale blue eyes. He reminded Katz of someone, but he couldn’t figure out who it was.

  “Maybe this isn’t the right time . . . but here, in case you want to contact me. Boris told me you have questions about your father.” The man handed him a business card. “It’s easiest to reach me at my work. I’m the head of research at the Army Museum.”

  Katz looked out across the gravestones, the wall that separated this area from the Christian side, the funeral-goers in the distance. The nearly ninety-year-old David Frydman, supported by his grandchildren, or maybe great-grandchildren, was shoveling earth onto Epstein’s coffin.

  “There are about thirty reports on your father in our archive. All of them were written by the C-Bureau, one of the armed forces’ intelligence services during World War II. It was run by Carl Petersén, if that name means anything to you. They’re incredibly interesting.”

  The man had lowered his voice. And Katz suddenly knew who he reminded him of. Lynx. The intelligence officer he’d met a single time in Santo Domingo, the man who’d tried to recruit him into his organization. He’d been impressed by Katz’s knowledge of languages, by what he knew about computer programming and the dark parts of the internet, by what he’d managed to learn about Lynx’s group by hijacking the administrator account for one of the armed forces’ servers . . . But for Katz, that had just been another aspect of the hunt for Joel Klingberg, the businessman who’d tried to frame him for a murder Joel himself had committed.

  “I don’t know what Boris had time to tell you, but your father’s life was like no other. Especially what he got up to during the last years of the war. The material is classified. If you want to move forward with this, both of us will be breaking the law.”

  The man straightened his kippah, which had gone askew, and fastened it on one side with a kirby grip.

  “Why would you do that?” Katz asked.

  “Break the law? I have my reasons.”

  The man stood up with a friendly smile.

  “Do you know where they are laid to rest, by the way, your parents? In the other direction, past the chapel, in the glade.”

  He took leave of Katz with a slight nod and retreated back to the graveside.

  The stone was small, as if it didn’t want to attract attention. It was in a glade, just as Stern had said. Katz had never seen it before. It had been erected a few months after their deaths. It was made of polished black granite. A Star of David. Their names, and birth and death years. That was all.

  To the left there was another spot, an empty one. Had they purchased it for him? Jewish burial plots are eternal.

  Katz placed the silicate stone he’d taken from the gravel path on the grave. Never flowers at a Jewish gravesite. No living things with the dead.

  The sky was as inconceivably gray today as it had been that time three decades earlier. He had been first in the funeral procession, supported by people he could no longer remember, watching the coffins lowered into the ground, before he disappeared into that merciless period, into the institutions, the youth homes, a different life.

  A stab of pain coursed through his right armpit where the bandage pressed against the sutured stab wound. He had survived against all odds, thanks to Eva.

  What about Hannah? he thought as he stood before the headstone. His father’s sister, who rested in a grave in the sky. What had happened to her?


  He pictured Eric Söderberg and Beata Roslund at the Kronoberg jail. The preliminary investigation was well underway; in a few months they would appear in court on charges of homicide and attempted homicide, and he himself would be called as a witness. Eric had lost the sight in his eye, but, amazingly enough, the needle hadn’t caused any other damage.

  Jennifer’s whereabouts were still a mystery. Maybe she had left the country.

  What about his grandparents . . . what had happened to them in Israel?

  He had never got to know them; he hadn’t even got to know Anne and Benjamin. The people he tried to conjure up were strangers.

  On his way back to his car, he stopped at a storm drain, took out the business card Stern had given him, and let it drop between the bars.

  Why dig up the past? Why look for the dead when he was there among the living?

  And it struck him that this thought was very Jewish.

  Katz spent the last few days before Christmas working out. He got up early, ate breakfast, walked to the gym at Alviks Torg, and methodically went through the various muscle groups, station by station.

  The soulless hit parade streaming from the loudspeakers, the TV screens with their morning soaps and talk shows on mute, the women half his age on the treadmills—it all reinforced the sensation of living in a void—the same void he was trying to kill.

  He ate lunch in the tennis restaurant around the corner and had two cups of coffee to top it off before going back to the gym and doing a final round with free weights. In the afternoon, as the last daylight faded away—these were the darkest days of the year—he was back in his apartment, where he ate an early dinner and watched TV for a while before turning out the lights and going to bed.

  The nights were full of dreams, but he couldn’t remember what they were about. Just their general mood. The sensation of falling, of dropping through a pitch-black shaft.