This Land is no Stranger

by Sarah Hollister

  Brand caught the case by chance, interviewing young Bristol Chambers at the Six-Oh precinct house in Coney Island. The duty sergeant tossed her the complainant who had come in the night before. Brand sat across from the teenage victim, just the two of them in the windowless interview room.

  She recited the date, time, and place. “On camera is Bristol Chambers,” Brand intoned for the record. “Am I correct, Bristol, in saying that you are eighteen years old?”

  “I’m nineteen next month,” said the kid.

  “You told Patrol Officer Padilla that last night two men assaulted you in Vaux Park.”

  “They took me out of Tina’s car and put me in their van,” the girl said.

  Bristol wore an extravagant fade haircut shaved down almost to the skin on both temples. Not for the first time, Brand thought the style didn’t work. However much teenagers tarted themselves up to look like gangstas, their kid innocence usually shone through.

  “Did anyone use force or intimidation to get you into the other vehicle?” Brand asked.

  “I was with my girlfriend Tina, sitting in her Toyota. We were in the park and we wasn’t doing anything wrong. They drove up on us in a white van, all of a sudden like.”

  “I see,” Brand said.

  “I got the license plate number,” the girl added.

  Brand concluded that Bristol Chambers was not as stupid as her haircut made her look. She had the girl write down the information. Leaving the room briefly, she requested a plate search from a police clerk. Brand returned with the cop’s traditional interview offering, a can of soda and a bag of potato chips.

  “Could you tell me what happened?” she asked Bristol, pushing the snack across the table to the girl. “Take your time and put it into your own words.”

  “They made a lot of comments about why I was with a girl that night and was I a lesbian. They were going to show me the right path, not the gay path, and all that. They told me they were ‘freaks,’ like real sex freaks, is what they said.”

  According to Bristol, the male in the driver’s seat addressed the one in the front passenger seat as “Richie,” and suggested he join “our little rug-muncher friend,” in the back of the van.

  “So this Richie climbed over from the front and made me do oral on him,” she continued. “I was crying all the time and telling him to stop, but he didn’t. Then he turned me over and raped me.”

  Bristol Chambers remained dry-eyed throughout her account, though Brand judged the young woman to be just on the edge of losing it.

  In Veronika’s mind the incident sounded like a prostitution encounter gone wrong. In her early years on the force, she had been enlisted as a decoy in prostitution busts. She knew the scene well.

  “Bristol, why would you get into a vehicle with a couple of strange men?”

  “Well, they flashed their headlights at us, and came up to the window and said they were po-po.”

  Brand felt a jolt pass through her. The fact of alleged police involvement had somehow previously been left unmentioned in the girl’s account. “The men told you they were police officers?”

  “Yeah, but I didn’t think so,” Bristol answered. “They were nasty looking, didn’t have no badges or nothing. I smelled, like, alcohol on their breaths. I mean, around the block and everything, there’s always some chud or another trying to pass himself off as undercover, you know? I thought these guys were fake. They chased Tina off, saying she was too fat, and just took me into their van.”

  Brand interrupted the proceedings to answer a knock on the door of the interview room.

  A clerk handed a piece of paper to her, whispering, “one of ours.” The registration of the white 2013 Dodge van turned out to be linked to a police confiscation case. The vehicle had recently been transferred to the anti-crime motor pool for use by plainclothes. The previous night, undercover officers Richie Miles and Devane Berline signed it out for a narcotics operation in the Coney Island neighborhood of Brooklyn.

  Then came a series of decisions that Brand might have wanted to take back later, knowing beforehand what she was getting herself into. Even while she was caught up in her actions, she understood there were formal procedures that she ought to have been abiding by, boxes to check off, a chain of command to follow.

  Brand didn’t know Berline, but Richie Miles was a very familiar name to her, a living embodiment of everything she hated about the NYPD’s bro culture. They had been in the same Police Academy class together. Early on in Brand’s career, Miles had hit on her, coarsely, and in front of others. Outrageous stories of misbehavior, cut corners, and multiple citizen complaints had dogged Richie Miles every step of his career, but he had always turned up Teflon.

  Even with snapping on her lights at every intersection, it still took Brand forty-five minutes in midday traffic to slog across the entire borough of Brooklyn and arrive in Williamsburg. She showed up at the Nine-Four precinct house to arrest Richie Miles on suspicion of rape, kidnapping and official misconduct.

  ◆◆◆

  A cop arresting another cop is always problematic. No matter that Brand was just doing her duty. The tribe interpreted any challenge as a betrayal. But at first it looked as if things might go her way. Nothing of any serious weight fell on her. Miles and Berline were suspended. The NYPD brass convened a departmental hearing.

  Slowly, though, the tables turned. Bad things started to happen. Her cell phone would go off in the middle of the night. The caller would hang up when she answered. An incident with a dead rat served as a sign the situation was escalating. She swung open her locker one morning to find the stiffened fat rodent staring all blank-eyed at her.

  Her standing in the department slid headlong downhill from there. A chill settled in among her fellow cops. Her duty log shrank. She felt herself marked as a traitor to the department. She called her original partner in the NYPD, Willie Urrico. He had retired to New Jersey, working security for Teeterboro Airport.

  “How’d you think they were going to react?” Urrico asked. “You came after a couple of their own.”

  “Pointing out the obvious, Miles and Berline were bad cops.”

  “I don’t know about Berline, but I do know Richie Miles is seriously connected. You know how it is. There’s the department, then there’s the cliques and factions within the department. It’s like a shadow government. And he’s the pope of that church.”

  Over the next weeks Brand watched the case against Miles and Berline fall apart. Cell tower pings turned up discrepancies in the testimony of Bristol Chambers. The phone records indicated the victim wasn’t where she said she was at the time of the assault.

  Ever since she had been promoted to anti-crime, Brand had worked solo. She drove a seven-year old Chrysler sedan, a motor pool reject. The vehicle was dinged and dented from its years on the mean streets. Despite that, Brand had a great deal of affection for it. The car was her refuge, her sanctuary, her private office.

  In heavy traffic on the Bruckner Expressway, Brand felt her brakes go mushy. She pumped them frantically. The pedal went to the floor. All stopping power totally vanished. The situation was brutal, with cars and trucks racing past on both sides. In panic she considered jamming the transmission into reverse.

  Careening wildly at top speed, she managed to steer the runaway vehicle across two lanes and onto a grassy slope at the side of the highway. The Chrysler ploughed straight up the hillside. It rumbled and bucked and finally stalled to a stop.

  Brand sat stunned in the driver’s seat. They’re trying to kill me, she thought. Tears of frustration threatened to pour out. She fought back her emotions.

  The next day the prosecutor’s office dropped all charges against Miles and Berline. The victim’s testimony was judged unreliable.

  Brand, the cop who initiated the arrest, felt herself exposed, vulnerable. She knew that victims simply did not manufacture claims of sexual assault. It didn’t happen. No one in their right mind would voluntarily enter into such a shitstorm unless th
e accusation had the weight of truth behind it.

  Bristol Chambers might have stumbled when recounting the details. She was a young woman caught in a nightmare. The charge itself, Brand believed, was warranted.

  None of that mattered in how the case shook out. Miles was free. Brand remained in the cross-hairs. She was guilty, not Richie Miles.

  ◆◆◆

  You are not a police detective, are you? Was that how Hammar said it? Not anymore.

  Ah, but my dear counselor Hammar, attorney at law, advocate for the weak and helpless against the strong and powerful, I’ve got news for you. The Catholics say that once a priest always a priest. The same is true for cops. Veronika Brand knew she could be suspended, retired, shot in a rocket to the moon—or show up halfway around the world, in Sweden—and she would still remain what she was.

  She’d still bleed blue.

  14.

  Dollar Boy worked mostly at the Härjedalen faux hunting lodge, but occasionally elsewhere. He was allowed use of an old Scania-Vabis truck to transport farm animals to the veterinarian, though usually the vets traveled to the lodge and not the other way around.

  The rattle-trap vehicle dated from the 1970s. Dollar Boy’s boss, the owner of the lodge, kept the thing alive out of pure stubbornness. Gösta Kron often avowed reverence for Sweden’s manufacturing past. From trucks to human beings, everything had been superior way back when.

  Gösta Kron. More formally, Friherre Gösta Benedict Leijonhufvud Kron. Known familiarly as Gösta, though Dollar Boy could expect a stinging rebuke if he ever ventured to be in any way familiar. With the help, the boss was always “Baron,” capital “B,” an attempt to create superiority and prestige in the absence of any royal lineage. Years ago, in his early days at the estate, Dollar Boy endured a routine of willow stick canings. The punishment came for small mistakes and youthful misbehavior. Baron Kron himself, or his steward, Hugo Magnusson, conducted the whippings.

  Although they stung like the scourging of Jesus, Dollar Boy counted the punishments as minor annoyances. He dismissed flogging of staff as another of the baron’s conservative idiosyncrasies. The man had great allegiance to tradition and bygone days and ways. After a few months, as Dollar Boy gained his employer’s trust, the practice tapered off and ended altogether.

  Now eighteen years old, the young boy was a hard worker. He fit in well at the lodge, to the degree he could indulge in personal quirks such as dying his hair bright pink. Hugo Magnusson had snarled at the outlandish ‘do, but the baron had merely laughed. Dollar Boy suspected that Baron Kron actually liked him. The man was a local worthy, powerful and god-like, an absolute ruler in his world. His good opinion mattered a great deal. Which was why Dollar Boy was astonished that morning in the barn. Baron Kron came up from behind and gave him a good stroke with a leather riding crop. The blow came out of nowhere.

  “Nej!” Dollar Boy managed to shout. He staggered backward. He was offended more than injured.

  “You took the truck out while I was gone.” Baron Kron made the fact sound like an accusation.

  “Yes, yes! To the vet in Uppsala! I’m sorry!”

  “All the way to Uppsala, boy? And without consulting Hugo?” Baron Kron again raised the crop. Dollar Boy rushed to answer before the whip fell once more.

  “The specialist! Dr. Ek!”

  When Baron Kron held his hand, Dollar Boy went on, a little more calmly. “Fenrir needed the specialist. And Hugo was gone, to Västvall, I think, to the neighbors, the Vosses, maybe.”

  As sometimes happened with the baron, the storm blew over quickly. The labor situation at the lodge struck some outsiders as odd. Members of the Kron family had always been vocal defenders of what they thought of as national purity. The current baron remembered the days in the 1940s. His father had followed right-wing firebrand Per Engdahl and Nysvenska rörelsen, the New Swedish Movement.

  The names of the rightist groups might have changed over the intervening years, but the slant of the rhetoric remained pretty much the same. Of late a ferocious anti-immigrant feeling had reinvigorated the right, making the WWII-era fury of Per Engdahl appear remote and quaint. But anyone paying attention recognized the connection.

  So a visit to the Härjedalen lodge sometimes upset the political allies of Baron Kron. For a supposed supporter of radical xenophobia, the baron seemed to employ an awful lot of foreign faces around the farm, even a few Africans.

  Dollar Boy’s real name was Lash Mirga. He was pure Romani, chache Roma, as they said. He looked outlandish, his pink hair shaved into an American-style mohawk. He was a mild and tender soul, but the mohawk gave him an intimidating look. Such was Dollar Boy’s wish, to frighten away anyone who sought to hurt him or anyone close to him. He loved to witness the reaction of the baron’s stiff-necked acquaintances when they beheld him in all his glory.

  The estate employed several Romani “travelers.” Their presence had more than once bothered the political extremists who visited. The contradiction seemed to bother the baron not at all. In fact, he appeared to enjoy the discomfort of his purist friends. He possessed an absolute faith that anything he did was correct. If he wanted to bring in Martians, robots or gangs of pink-haired warlocks to do his work for him, by his lights that would be just fine, too.

  Meanwhile Dollar Boy was playing a very dangerous game right under the baron’s nose. He had gained his nickname from a Yankee dollar bill he used to carry around when he was a kid, telling everyone that he would spend it in New York City one day. But Dollar Boy’s present scheme involved not money but love, real English romantic love, the type featured in plays and movies. And Dollar Boy’s was the most powerful kind of all, lost love.

  Lel was his betrothed. The two of them were from the same village in Romania. They had come to Sweden together under the guidance of Moro Part. Dollar Boy went to work for the baron. Lel began her life as a mendicant, occupying different street corners in Stockholm. At times she worked the commuter trains, shaking paper cups at seated passengers who more often than not turned away from her.

  At the end of each day Lel, Varzha Luna, and the rest of the rag-tag crew of beggars returned to Moro Part’s apartment, where a half dozen of them stayed. Dollar Boy sometimes visited them. The atmosphere at the apartment was warm and communal, part schoolyard, part sweatshop, part family. They created a simulacrum of Romania as best they could. They were Moro’s kids. He treated them with kindness. Mostly.

  Lel was not the first to disappear. That was a girl named Ariadne. Moro usually stationed her in front of one of the large grocery store near Medborgarplatsen, the Citizen’s Square. The area was known for social justice demonstrations. Dollar Boy and Lel had wandered among the demonstrators on the big day last May. Large groups of people marched through the city shouting and singing. He liked these new compatriots of his, so earnest and courageous, standing up for the rights of others, generous with their donations.

  Then, later in the summer, Lel was taken. Everything changed for Dollar Boy. He put away childish things. The peaceful ways of the Swedes no longer struck him so forcefully. He perceived dark undercurrents and secret dangers lurking beneath the surface of his adopted country. His old byword, “opportunity,” fell by the wayside. His new byword was also an old one, ancient as the mountains of Romania.

  Revenge.

  Leaving the barn with the red welt of the baron’s knout across the back of his neck, Dollar Boy crossed the yard to what workers called “the barracks.” The quarters for the help shared a building with a granary and thus with the granary’s rats. Some of the laborers kept slingshots around for entertainment.

  Dollar Boy went to his closet-sized room, closing and latching the flimsy plywood door. Reaching into a locker beneath his cot, he retrieved his treasured iPhone. He worked in secret, checking in with the location tracker app he had installed. Consulting a worn paper map of Sweden, he found the place where the phone displayed a pulsing icon of a pinging cell tower. Somehow distances seemed more real and managea
ble on his IRL map than on the cell phone screen. Only a finger’s breadth separated his own location from the pulsing icon.

  “I am only centimeters away from you, Varzha,” he whispered to the empty air. “I’m watching. I’ll keep you safe.”

  With the baron in residence, use of the truck would be out of the question. If he left the estate that night Dollar Boy would have to take the motocross.

  Actually, that wasn’t really a problem. He loved the Husqvarna TC 125 motocross more than life itself. Workers at the lodge jury-rigged the motorbike with a trailer. The unit would serve Dollar Boy’s purpose almost as well as the truck. Its use on a winter night would freeze a rider’s body solid, but such was the life of a lovelorn teenager.

  He settled in on his cot to wait, letting his mind play over the possibilities for the evening.

  He knew what the gadje always said. Roma were knife people. But Dollar Boy saw himself as cut from a different, more modern mold. He wasn’t drawn to the violence, or the weapons, but they offered him protection from his real fear. Dreams unfulfilled by a blow from a foreign hand. Some day he would step out from his people’s shadow. He would go to America, where dreams come true under the lights of the Hollywood stars. There he would arm himself the way all American citizens did, with a lethal pistol. Until that golden time in the impossible future, he would just have to protect himself with a blade.

  15.

  Brand boarded Stockholm’s tunnelbana at the Ropsten station. Each day she woke a bit later, remediating her jet lag, adjusting to the time difference. She’d heard it said that in crossing time zones, you leave your soul behind and it takes a while for it to catch up.