Stockholm Noir

by Nathan Larson

  —Hello?

  At first a long silence, then a weak voice; I couldn’t decide if it belonged to an adult or a child, or of which sex.

  —Hello? Who is this?

  —Who are you trying to call?

  —Don’t know. You.

  And with a tone that sounded weaker but simultaneously more piercing, more chilling than any I’d ever heard, the voice hissed: Help me! Please, you’re my only chance.

  —How can I help?

  —I’m locked up. Only you can help me.

  —You don’t even know who I am.

  —He said I should call you. Only you can help me.

  —Who told you to call me? Where are you?

  —Nearby. Here: in Old Town.

  —Tell me where.

  —I’m not allowed. You have to find me yourself.

  —I don’t have time for games like this.

  —It’s not a game. If you don’t find me . . . He’s coming. Answer the next time I call.

  —But . . .

  —Promise!

  —Okay, okay. I’ll answer.

  I put the phone back in my pocket, anxious and irritated—not knowing if I should take this anonymous call seriously or not. People always allege that they can hear if a voice is telling the truth or a lie, just as they declare they’re able to see if someone is good or evil, clever or stupid. But the truth is probably that in most cases wisdom comes only after the fact. Even old Nazis looked avuncular, and each time a genuine murderer is unmasked, a serial killer who’s buried a dozen women in his garden, family and friends always say they had no idea, that he was so nice and polite, but maybe spent a little too much time by himself . . .

  The book I’d been reading was no longer a temptation. I opened it, but my eyes couldn’t focus on the pages. So I just sat there a little while in solitude and felt the phone in my hand, uncertain if I should leave or sit there waiting for more calls. Maybe this was all an elaborate joke being played on me, or maybe just a prank.

  The phone rang again, so I took the call and listened without replying. Someone was breathing at the other end. And then a man’s voice could be heard this time, utterly distinct: I know you’re there.

  —. . .

  —I know that it called you. How did it get your number?

  —Who is this?

  —It doesn’t matter. How did Kim get your number?

  This was more an order than a question, and the tone provoked me more than a little.

  —Damned if I know how that child got my number! Who the hell are you?

  —Who I am is unimportant. Now it’s your responsibility. That’s all you need to know.

  —Hello? What kind of . . . ?

  Evidently the man had turned the phone over to the person he called Kim.

  —Sorry . . . I heard the weak androgyne say, while s/he breathed heavily into the receiver.

  There was something in the tone of voice and the wheezing that made me take it seriously. Yes, a helplessness, maybe outright pain, which I’d never heard so clearly, so distinctly in a voice, and I couldn’t, as reason urged me, end the conversation.

  —You have to find me.

  —Where are you? I’ll call the police!

  —NO! If you call the cops he’ll kill me.

  —Who’ll kill you?

  —I don’t know.

  —What am I supposed to do? How can I help you? Don’t you have any idea where you are?

  —All I know is that you can help me. Maybe. You have to trust me. He says you must rely on me.

  The voice sobbed with exceptional vehemence. Someone was subjecting Kim to something.

  —What does he do to you?

  —You have to do it.

  —Do what?

  —What he does. It’s the only way.

  —No. I don’t want to. What does he do?

  —He owns me. Buy my freedom. That’s the only way you can help.

  —Have you been kidnapped?

  —You don’t understand. Wait.

  The man snatched the receiver again. His voice was firm and determined.

  —Do you want to own it?

  —It?

  —This worthless slave.

  —Kim?

  —Are you simpleminded? Do you want it?

  —No.

  —Then it will die tonight.

  —Then yes! I want it!

  —Then you’ll be able to handle it?

  —Yes, yes! Just tell me what to do!

  —Instructions will come. Keep your phone turned on and the line open.

  There was a click on the other end and the conversation was over.

  My whole body was shaking. This was like nothing I’d ever been involved in before. It felt like a secret I didn’t want to keep had been thrust upon me. And now there was something that connected me with this Kim, and with the man who evidently held her captive. When I looked up and observed the solitary wanderers in Old Town, the tourists with their maps and the natives who knew which side streets to take so they could be alone, I saw them all together from the outside, as if through some kind of thin glass, as if they and I no longer lived in the same world.

  Where could Kim be hidden? What was it that had happened? And why was I selected to be the one capable of freeing her? It distressed me deeply that the man on the phone had called Kim it. It? Like a slave? Though I probably should have been grateful that he didn’t say that thing.

  Should I go home now and wait for the call? Stay in Old Town? The two conversations had forced me to assume a responsibility that burst my frames of reference and created an uncertainty within me that intensified the feeling of solitude that even earlier on this tediously beautiful summer afternoon threatened to eat into my soul. An emptiness that was deep inside of me, and when my desire for solitude had been so completely satisfied I wanted nothing more than for someone to contact me, meet, get a bite to eat, talk, have a beer with me in peace and quiet. Now I’d been given an opportunity that seemed to preclude all others until further notice.

  I toyed with the idea of going to the police. They could certainly trace the call and solve this whole riddle without my involvement. But what would I say to them? Even if they took me seriously they’d scarcely begin to make a move before it was too late. I felt in my bones that it could already be too late. It was serious, I was convinced of that. Both the male voice’s firm matter-of-factness and Kim’s pitiful despair, the entreaty in her tone when s/he said that I alone could free her, were clear and distinct proof, all the proof I needed, that this was serious.

  The bench was hard. It chafed and I was sore; I took a little walk through the nearest alleys. Round and round, making little turns. How small Old Town still is. It felt as if I were moving in a little labyrinth, a simple path with no way out, but also with no end, as if the inner space were greater than the outer, with infinite possibilities. Old Town was like a brain, the city’s brain, and I was a lone obsession, a song stuck on replay in the head, going around, up and down and back and forth between the small squares and alleys, searching for some way either to get out of this damned part of the city or really get into it.

  Evening came, the long, light summer evening, and the sidewalk restaurants filled up with tourists drinking beer and wine and gorging themselves while they believed they were experiencing Stockholm, the Venice of the North. Bitterly I thought that they knew nothing. They saw nothing of ordinary city life, but only this Skansen, this outdoor museum-city redesigned for tourists, which slowly grew out of Old Town and little by little conquered the neighborhoods close by, the area around the King’s Garden, known as Kungsträdgården, northern Södermalm, places which once had been shabby, dark, with nothing of interest but isolated ice-cream kiosks and dank cafés, now resplendent with green magnificence, well-raked footpaths, special paths with views along the cliff side of Södermalm, Italian-style cafés, and everyone pretending that this was the natural, the normal, the real Stockholm which, in some peculiar way, I’d been reminded
of by Kim’s conversation. I knew that beneath this smiling city lay a scornful, hateful city deformed by drink, like a cirrhosis of the liver, with its outcasts, prostitutes, drug addicts, all that which must be swept aside at any price so that the illusion of the shiny-clean city could be maintained for all the tourists and, for that matter, all the hicks who’d moved in, who wanted Stockholm only as backdrop for their lifestyle choices.

  Who could it be? Had I ever met Kim or the man? Had they called me at random? Fear and anxiety coexisted in my breast with a feeling, not entirely unpleasant, of being chosen. And as the hours passed, the evening became as dark as it could; sometime around midnight, without having received another call, I reluctantly decided to set off homeward and retire for the night. On the one hand, of course I was worried about Kim, whom I thought was my responsibility to save, to take care of. But on the other, I worried that my chance to be somewhat important wouldn’t come.

  I settled myself in bed. Unfortunately I no longer lived in Old Town, it had become too expensive. Years before I had sublet an apartment, a little studio, on Norra Dryckesgränd, but now I lived way off in western Kungsholmen—a part of town that wasn’t exactly thought of as the city but was on its way up to luxury. Gentrification, I suppose. But the process was not so far advanced, and there was still the occasional drunken bum found sleeping in the nearby parks.

  Although my body lay in bed, my consciousness was still in Old Town. My disappointment slowly increased, so much so that I played with the idea of saying to hell with all these odd conversations—pretending that I’d never heard of Kim, turning my face to the peach-colored wallpaper from the eighties, and falling asleep—when the plink of a text message sounded from my phone. Instantly I was wide awake and completely present, in the now again, and I read the message hoping to find a new clue. But it was only a text from Krister, who wondered where I’d been. We’d planned to meet up and have a beer with his colleagues in their office which was also in Old Town. Funnily, as long as I’d wandered around there I’d never once walked by their office on Baggensgatan.

  Now I was awake and far too uneasy, my body far too restless to return to sleep. So I sat up in bed with my laptop over the covers on my lap and surfed the Internet, just to pass the time until I got tired enough to drop off to sleep again. Everyone knows that you can’t sleep if you’re sitting with a computer in bed at night, and it was already close to two o’clock in the morning, the sun rising again, so in every way it was a stupid choice. But truly, I had no desire to sleep.

  I’d received ten e-mails from an address I didn’t recognize. But I instantly understood where they came from. The address was yourslavekim@xxx.com, so there wasn’t any doubt as to what they were about. All the e-mails had large attachments. I was cold throughout my body, alone in the universe, full of remorse for having felt so important earlier, and again I thought of going to the police with all of it.

  None of the attachments had names, just long combinations of numbers and letters. I opened the first one, which was a zipped file with twenty photos. No, I didn’t want to see them, my forearms were heavy as lead and I really didn’t want to look. And yet I looked. A naked body lay on its stomach on something I couldn’t identify. Its arms and legs were stretched out and tied up. My telephone number was written on its back. Seeing this image was like having a dagger plunged into my chest. As if I were guilty. Although I didn’t yet know of what. Nobody seemed to be harmed, and in any case games like this aren’t illegal.

  The body looked extremely young. A girlish boy or a boyish girl. I tried to find something by which I could recognize it. Medium-length blond hair. No body hair. Maybe I’d get to see more in the next picture if I looked. I opened the file. Same body position. A rather large man, between forty and fifty, wearing a dark suit and shoes polished to a high shine, dragging Kim—for I assumed that the naked body could belong to nobody else—by the hair so that its head was bent backward. I sensed resistance in the body, which my own reacted to with the uncontrollable tensing of my muscles. The pictures continued with little variation. The body was tied up, the man in the suit drew it taut, pulled it by the hair, pressed his polished shoes against it. And on the body was my telephone number. It was as if I were there. I felt the body’s pains in my own, like a weak reverberation. But uglier than that, despite the fact that I pushed the thought away, I also felt, yes, I actually identified with the corporal grip of the man in the suit, the feeling of the cloth against the naked body, my own hand striking the body while I wore leather gloves.

  The next e-mail contained a GIF. It depicted Kim’s completely hairless backside, with an anal plug stuck in its asshole. The genitals were carefully covered with something that made it impossible to identify the gender. The body writhed in discomfort and resistance and I quickly closed the file. I then opened the remaining e-mails to verify that they too contained attachments of various sizes, but I didn’t want to see them. I shut down the computer and lay down on my bed. First I pulled up the covers, then I kicked them off, now it was too cold, now too warm. It wasn’t that I was aroused. I don’t get aroused by BDSM or violent porn. But at this point I really had to get some sleep, so I jerked off mechanically in bed, while trying not to think of anything, even though the pictures floated before my mind’s eye the whole time. After coming, I turned to the wall and, eventually, drifted off.

  After a few hours of uneasy sleep I was awakened by the telephone ringing. I didn’t reach it in time and the ringing stopped. Three missed calls. I’d barely slept at all; I’d floated feverishly within different dream scenarios, all of which circled around Kim in myriad ways, somehow not being woken up by the repeated phone calls.

  Suddenly I found myself sitting on the edge of the bed. I felt sweaty, filthy, needed a shower before going out. But the restlessness in my body put me on autopilot; I pulled on my jeans and the same, no, a new T-shirt at least, and I went out into the cool Swedish summer-dawn light and began to walk toward Old Town again. The sense that I could be important and must be at hand was so strong that my legs automatically took me all the way back there, along Norr Mälarstrand, the tourist buses to city hall, past the hideous traffic interchange between city hall and the central train station, and over the Vasabron, past the old seats of power—Parliament, the Royal Palace, the House of the Nobility, and the Bonde Palace.

  In need of caffeine, I entered Café Tabac, sat down at the bar, and downed a cup of ordinary brewed coffee while I leafed through Dagens Nyheter, the morning paper, seeing neither the pictures nor the headlines. The images of Kim being sexually abused somewhere near here, maybe in a cellar just under the café where I sat, had burned themselves permanently into my retina so that they lay like a film over everything I saw.

  Something to eat? No. I had no appetite, even though my stomach was completely empty. I put a few sugar cubes into my coffee instead, took the phone out of my pocket, and looked at it, as if I should be able to conjure up a conversation telepathically. And then it actually rang. Quickly, fumbling, I put the phone to my ear, only to hear about a new electric company. I hung up without even saying anything nasty. When I lowered the phone again I saw that a text message had come in at the same time that the salesman delivered his spiel.

  Did you look? was the text.

  I tried to answer immediately with a simple Yes, but my phone wouldn’t send it.

  Another message came at once: Do you want to? What? Rescue Kim? Participate in Kim’s torture? It was maddening, being made a party to a conversation in which I couldn’t respond.

  There’s nothing you have to do, but if there’s something you want, you must come now. Come where? Once again I felt it would be best if I abandoned the whole business, forgot about Kim, pretended that I’d seen nothing, knew nothing. But how could I obliterate the memory of a body that was forced to assume a grotesque backbend while its anus was opened wide with a speculum and its mouth gagged, plugged with a ball to keep it shut. And there was my telephone number, written on the vi
ctim’s back.

  Like a sleepwalker I wandered back uphill toward Tyska Brunnsplan. The streams of tourists were now more intense on Västerlånggatan even though it was still early in the morning. I sat down on the same bench I’d sat on the previous afternoon. The phone burned hot in my hand. My head was entirely empty, and all my attention was directed at—nothing. Then it finally rang.

  This time it was Kim’s voice on the other end. It still sounded androgynous and awfully young, but now there was a new tone of despair, as after many hours of crying. And it seemed to lack focus. I wondered whether Kim was drugged, or just groggy from being subjected to sexual torture all night long, without respite. I shoved these thoughts aside, but I couldn’t keep fantasies about Kim’s treatment from surfacing in my own dazed consciousness, I couldn’t defend myself against them, they touched something, a cord inside me. I told myself it was my opportunity to save this creature who so affected me. Yes, this was my chance to be something of significance to another human being.

  —Where are you?

  —Don’t you know?

  —Why aren’t you here yet?

  —I don’t know where you are . . .

  —He says that . . . A scream of pain interrupted Kim in the middle of the sentence.

  —What? What’s that? What’s he saying?

  The connection was still there, but it was quiet on the other end. I listened hard for sounds. I could hear weak sobbing, something like a long whimper. It was awful, but it was more appalling to admit that the sound gave rise to a warmth that spread through my chest, as if the blood inside me were rushing violently.

  A reflex went through me, quick as lightning, when a window across the square was shut with a bang. Quickly I looked up and tried to get a glimpse of where it came from. Which window had been closed.

  —Hello? Hello? I shouted into phone while simultaneously scouting around the façades of the buildings, unable to determine where the window had been slammed shut.

  —If you want to free it, you have to own it. To own it you have to deserve it.

  —What kind of filthy swine are you? What kind of fucking game is this?