Knock Knock

by Anders Roslund

  Grens fished a used envelope out of a trash can, grabbed the pen hanging from the counter on a string, jotted down the archive number on the back, and pushed it in through the gap.

  “Hmm.”

  “Is there a problem?”

  “Your handwriting. Not exactly easy to read.”

  “It says . . .”

  “I can see what it says, Grens.”

  The archivist typed something on his keyboard and peered at his computer screen.

  “Yes . . .”

  A few more clicks.

  “. . . it seems to be here.”

  “Good. Well then . . .”

  “But I’ll need your ID. You know the rules.”

  Grens knew. Same thing every time.

  Usually around this time Grens would start to raise his voice, his neck and face would flush an angry red, a vein would start to pulsate near his temple. But not today. Ewert Grens took a deep breath and pushed his ID up to the glass for the eyes of the archivist who’d known him for thirty-five years. And it seemed as if the man on the other side of the glass lingered a moment too long—disappointed by this break in routine and this lack of conflict. Then he readjusted his glasses and with an electric beep he opened a secure door and disappeared into the windowless room behind him, then returned quickly with a blue and a green folder that he pushed through the gap.

  “You know the rules, Grens.”

  “I know the rules.”

  “Then you know . . .”

  “I know that, just like the last time I checked out classified documents—I can only take them if I promise to copy everything and send it straight to the tabloids.”

  He started to leave.

  “I won’t disappoint you, I promise.”

  * * *

  • • •

  Hallway, elevator, hallway.

  And with every step that he took the blue and the green folders in his hands grew heavier, almost like a tiny head resting against his shoulder.

  The coffee machine. A third cup. Then his office and a Siw Malmkvist song and the folders on his desk.

  He stared at them for a long time, first from the vantage of his open window, then the closet, then his corduroy sofa, and finally from the door of his office.

  There they lay.

  Returning his stare.

  He took a step closer.

  Put a trembling hand on the top folder. He’d never wanted to return to those tiny hopping feet and that stench unlike any other.

  He opened it and met the first page.

  A blue folder. Fairly thick. The archive number written in pencil. Rubber-stamped in the top right corner in faded black:

  WITNESS PROTECTION PROGRAM

  Ewert Grens leaned back on his sagging sofa, took a swig from his plastic coffee mug, then grabbed four stapled stacks of paper.

  REPORT:

  Seven pages from the Stockholm Police Commission.

  INVESTIGATION PROTOCOLS:

  Four pages from the Tech Squad.

  AUTOPSY FINDINGS:

  Twenty-two pages from Solna Forensic Medicine.

  PRELIMINARY INVESTIGATION:

  Fifty-four pages of his own investigation.

  He looked around the room. She’d slept right here. On the very sofa where he was sitting now.

  Back then the corduroy was in much better shape, stripes still basically intact, and the little girl slept with his balled-up jacket as a pillow. Deep sleep. Snoring even. Probably for the first time in days.

  On Monday, October 23, at 16:51, Det. Grens proceeded to Dala Street 74.

  He’d sat beside her, trying to make out what she was saying in her sleep. Several times he almost patted her cheek, but always stopped himself, and readjusted the raincoat draped over her. He knew what he had to do, what he’d learned to do when he trained at FLETC, a U.S. military base in southern Georgia. He and Erik Wilson went there to learn everything there was to know about the FBI witness protection program. Basically it was the opposite of how the Swedish police operated, their clumsy attempts at hiding former gang members from Stockholm’s concrete suburbs in isolated and deserted summer camps deep in the Swedish forests. Two days. That’s how long these potential witnesses usually lasted. Out there they had nothing to do with their time besides panic. The darkness and silence combined with their fear of death at the hands of their former gang broke them down.

  The sign on the apartment door indicated that it belongs to the Lilaj family. The apartment, which consists of five rooms and a kitchen, was searched. The lights were turned on in every room.

  The American Witness Protection Program. Grens had copied it. Even before the crime scene investigation was completed, he moved the girl from his office to a safe house that was actually worthy of the name.

  The man was found in the hall, in a sitting position in a chair located between the hat and shoe racks. The woman was in a chair in the kitchen, near the kitchen table. The older sister was found lying on her side on a bed in bedroom A. The brother was sitting in a desk chair in bedroom B.

  A girl who couldn’t yet understand that her family was gone and would never come back, and she wasn’t even allowed to bring a single personal item from her former life, the life that had been her entire universe. Nothing. He decided she was going to keep living.

  Survive.

  So her past would never become her future.

  Mirza Lilaj, Diellza Lilaj, Eliot Lilaj, and Julia Lilaj were taken to Söder Hospital. Resuscitation attempts yielded no results. Declared dead at 18:23.

  The child in his arms again, he headed out to go shopping in the neighborhood he lived in but never had visited. Children’s clothing stores. Toy shops. The homicide department suddenly approved the expenses though they had neither been budgeted nor given formal cost centers. New dresses. New shoes. New hairband. And it made her so happy. Especially the two new dolls and the red baby carriage. As if they were presents.

  The victims were placed in cold storage awaiting transport to Forensic Medicine in Solna.

  Leave nothing that can be traced back.

  The very last thing he pulled out of the suitcase, which a young police officer had thoughtfully packed in her apartment, was a photograph, taken in a studio.

  A light blue background.

  A mother and a father and their three children smiling at the camera.

  Mirza Lilaj, Diellza Lilaj, Eliot Lilaj, and Julia Lilaj have been assigned storage numbers 2003-369380, 2003-369381, 2003-369382, 2003-369383. Only those numbers exist for identification.

  A bunker. That’s probably the best description of the basement in Östermalm. During the years he’d been in charge of the witness protection program, they’d allowed him to build the very first American-style safe house. It ended up being the only one, when the funds were re-directed to other, trendier activities. A bunker furnished like a small hotel with kitchenette, beds, TV, and well-stocked bookshelves. He’d never imagined its first guest would be someone too young to have learned to ride a bike, a child with no family.

  A SUMMARY OF OUR FINDINGS:

  A. The bodies of Mirza Lilaj, Diellza Lilaj, Eliot Lilaj and Julia Lilaj, shortly before death occurred, received gunshot wounds on the head that correspond to entrance 1, entrance 2, entrance 3, entrance 4, entrance 5, entrance 6, entrance 7, entrance 8 on our diagram.

  That’s why his carefully designed program didn’t at first work out as he’d planned. He’d imagined a place for adult witnesses where they would be hidden and guarded until giving testimony at a trial, after which they’d be escorted to a new town and given a new name, new social security number, new background.

  B. These entrance wounds most likely occurred two days before the examination date.

  He’d also developed procedures with the help of various bureaucratic agencies to produce new school transcripts and new work reference
s and set up a cash allowance to be paid every fourteen days—never leave a trail, every transaction is seen by someone and information can be bought anytime, anywhere. These routines had to be urgently adjusted to create new birth records, issue certificates for swimming lessons, and credibly document attendance at a preschool.

  C. The combined number of wounds strongly indicates homicide.

  Ewert Grens closed the blue folder and pushed it to the side. Information that belonged to one living girl. He grabbed the next folder, a green one—which contained what happened to her afterward. After the crime. After ballistic wound paths and cold storage.

  After their deaths.

  He stood up, held the folder tightly while he paced back and forth across his office.

  A five-year-old who was alive. Who survived. Because someone let her? Or because someone hid her? Or because she hid on her own? Did she curl up somewhere and listen as the only people she trusted were executed one by one, holding her breath without even knowing why. She must have understood that discovery meant death?

  He’d asked her, but she had no capacity to tell him how or why.

  And now, so many years later, he knew even less.

  Grens looked out onto Kronoberg’s courtyard as he often did. The sun had moved—some of the sidewalk and a few park benches now lay in the shadows—but the heat lingered. He popped his head out through the wide-open window, leaning forward with his elbows against the frame. Thirty degrees. No air conditioning. He didn’t look forward to trying to sleep tonight with a low of twenty-two degrees, a so-called tropical night.

  The green folder, her life, what happened afterward.

  He held it. It wasn’t very thick, it wouldn’t be.

  Registry extract with her new name. Her new social security number. Her new personal history. Photo documentation of her adjusted appearance. Her new town, address, contact person, guardians. Her new life.

  Ewert Grens left the window, where no cool could be found, and returned to his corduroy sofa. On the front of the green folder there it stood in black, with a black rectangle around it.

  WITNESS PROTECTION PROGRAM

  He opened it. And then froze.

  A blank piece of paper.

  And then another.

  And another.

  An entire stack of blank paper.

  A folder from the most restricted archive in the police station that was as thick as it was supposed to be.

  But whatever was once inside was gone. Replaced. By nothing.

  Her new life.

  Someone had taken it.

  Blank.

  Just like parts of his memory.

  Ewert Grens remembered the stench, the weight of her body, what she looked like as she slept in a newly purchased bed in the safe house—a beautiful little flower with tangled hair. But he couldn’t recall her name.

  His memories now were as blank as her memories were then.

  “Who else came?”

  “Came where?”

  “To your birthday party.”

  He had interrogated her cautiously. Trying to get a little closer to the truth every day. She never mentioned the assault, the shooting, the murder. She didn’t even understand that her family was gone. She’d repressed it all. She’d handled extreme trauma by pretending her way forward.

  “It was your birthday. You turned five. And you had a very nice cake. So who sang for you?”

  “Mom. Dad. Julia. And Eliot.”

  “And after that?”

  “No one.”

  “I think somebody else came.”

  “No.”

  “One or two or three people who weren’t invited?”

  “No one else.”

  “But if you . . .”

  “The dolly. With shiny red jacket and white shoes. Give it to me, Ewert. You can take the one with the blue boots. Let’s go sit by the dollhouse. You can have the upstairs this time, and I’ll take the downstairs.”

  She turned off. Closed down. Her calendar had started over. When she disappeared from his world a month later, she hugged him and whispered that now she was thirty-two days and five years old. As if those five years were something completely different.

  Grens also remembered his fury.

  One of the few cases he’d been forced to abandon, even though he was sure he’d found the murderer.

  A piece of shit he’d picked up and thrown into a prison cell at Kronoberg. He kept him there for seventy-two hours, as long as he could legally. And that guilty piece of shit alternated between laughing scornfully or lying or staring down at the floor or hissing no comment during his interrogation, while Grens and his colleagues turned over every investigatory stone they could find. In the end, they lost the race against the ticking clock. A guilty fucking piece of shit, feared by everyone, who called himself King Zoltan. When his three days were up he laughed even harder at their lack of witnesses and technical evidence. The moment he was released he headed straight for the airport, took a flight out of the country, and never came back again.

  The little girl, whose name Grens forgot, had seen the killer. He was sure of it. A witness in shock who one day just might understand what she had witnessed. The forensic technicians had found traces of hair and urine in one of the wardrobes at the apartment—traces that matched her DNA. That’s where she hid. Pissing herself. And from that angle, with the wardrobe door open just a crack, she would have had a good overview of at least two of the murders.

  Ewert Grens went over to the window.

  He leaned out.

  And screamed in fury.

  He knew what this meant.

  Someone had taken those documents out of the guarded archive, read through the first folder of the preliminary investigation, and realized that there was a witness, then read the second folder and found out what happened to the little girl after she left the safe house and Grens. Someone knew what she looked like, what her new name was, which new town she ended up in, what new family she was placed with. Someone had taken the documents and replaced them with blank paper so nobody else would ever know. And now they could complete their murder of an entire family and erase all of their tracks.

  Grens screamed again, straight into the heat of the courtyard.

  The life of that now-grown girl was in danger.

  In fact she might already be dead.

  PART

  2

  It was the perfect location. A cul-de-sac in a southern suburb of Stockholm, lined by sleepy three-story apartment buildings whose tenants had average incomes, average life expectancies, average educations, a good mix of young and old, those born in Sweden and those who arrived later. This afternoon Piet Hoffmann was walking counter-clockwise in a two-hundred-meter radius, which constituted the outer rim of their defenses. He checked the eighteen surveillance cameras along that route, which were placed in stairwells and garages, on lampposts and rooftops—each one activated by motion sensors. He checked the license plate numbers on vehicles he’d never seen before to see if their owners lived in the area or if they had any police records. He compared yesterday’s mental map—which no one else had access to, his memorized map of formal roads and informal escape routes, who was moving where and why—with how things looked today. Nothing seemed suspicious, no warning of any oncoming threat. On his way into the front door of the only high-rise, he stopped by the camera labeled number 14, turning it slightly to the left to bring a dead angle back to life. His base was just an elevator ride up to the eighth floor, a studio apartment with a kitchenette, but it was enough.

  “I’m headed out for the day. Everything okay?”

  He stood in the tiny hallway, looking at a security officer surrounded by a sea of screens, glancing back and forth from one live stream to another, sometimes rewinding one to make sure nothing was out of the ordinary.

  “Everything’
s good, boss.”

  Piet Hoffmann went over to the window and lifted the blinds a little, made one last inspection of the cul-de-sac. First he checked the apartment on the second floor, white curtains and a bulky table lamp sitting between two potted plants on the windowsill. The temporary home of a woman in her forties who needed a level two safe house, who had been given a new social security number, which is the only name he had for her. If he pushed the blinds up just a little more he saw the third-floor apartment with red curtains and exuberant decorative lights. Refuge for a man in his thirties, level three, shot once, and his life threatened by his own brothers. And two doors down—now he pushed the blinds up completely—behind white curtains that were just a little too lacy, an older couple who had been hiding out for the last few months as witnesses in a trial against an incredibly violent gang of loosely associated teenagers. They were all here waiting for new identities and a more permanent housing solution, and he was paid sixteen thousand kronor each every day he offered them his professional protection. Of course experienced security guards, advanced technical equipment, and weapons weren’t cheap, but by choosing to place them together so that just one guard was able to keep watch over them all, and by renting and equipping their homes himself, he’d figured out a very profitable business structure for Hoffmann Security Inc.

  “Hello, my darling wife.”

  He wasn’t far from home, but as soon as he stepped out of the elevator and headed toward his car, almost without thinking about it, he’d called her.

  “Hello, my beloved husband.”

  Things were going so well. Maybe better than ever. He didn’t even remember it feeling like this when they were newly in love. Back in Sweden, back to something like the life they’d once had. With one big exception—he no longer lied to Zofia, no longer infiltrated organized crime on behalf of the Swedish police, didn’t risk his life or his family’s every day, every hour for the sake of others. He was even working with his old security firm—but now it was no longer just a facade for his infiltration. Now it was a real company, and he used the skills he’d acquired in his old life to make a good and honest living.