After the bloody horrors at the Sofieborg Manor House, Brand felt the need to go to ground. She isolated herself in the guest house of Lukas Dalgren. Her cousin lived east of Stockholm in the suburb of Lidingö. She didn’t see much of him or his family. He carefully located his prized Tesla elsewhere. He didn’t inform Brand where the vehicle was, lest she think to borrow it. Brand concluded the man was somewhat afraid of her.
Lukas and Isabella endured a strained home life. They still lived together even though, as Isabella told her—giving the words a frosty air of permanence—“We’re apart.”
Leaving the guest house, Brand took the Lidingöbanan light-rail to reach Ropsten and changed to the commuter tunnelbana. The train immediately dove underground. The gleaming car glided along in almost ghostly silence. Its rubber-treaded wheels made all the difference in comparison with the screeching steel of the New York City subway.
In the reflection of the heavy plate glass of the car’s window, Brand saw a woman still youthful, startling gray-blue eyes still prominent, her Scandinavian bone structure a legacy of her grandparents. Gray also appeared in her hair, just a few streaks here and there. She’d always remembered the scene in Moonstruck, when Cher went from plain to dazzling via the magic of hair coloring. She knew she was expected to aspire to the enduring lure of youthful beauty, but it was redemption that Brand was contemplating, not transformation. She must change her life. Past failures confronted her in the shadow image flashing in the tunnelbana window. She saw forty approaching. The smoky stench of all her burned bridges at the NYPD still hung about her person. Unsure if she could ever return to the department, she found herself a stranger on two turfs, both in the States and in Sweden.
She felt a gust of nausea, and smiled to herself, at herself. Perhaps she would feel less sick if they allowed her to steer the train. Never a passenger, always a driver. Her motto. She had left the Glock behind at the guest house, hidden in her duffel. Naked and vulnerable, she took herself and her bundle of nerves into central Stockholm.
Krister Hammar had returned again and again to the multiple disappearances that plagued the gypsy community in Stockholm. Work at the Klara kyrka in central Stockholm immersed him in the chaotic, unsettled plight of recent refugees, immigrants from Africa, the multiple diasporas and the displaced, and the Romani community in particular. The church fed a hundred people every day and gave shelter at night, a bed to those in need.
Hammar evidently considered Brand as some sort of investigative resource who might help untangle the mystery of the stolen girls. Her first reaction had been to put him off. As a result of the manor house experience, she changed her mind.
“Listen,” Hammar had told her. “I have a friend in Stockholm who might be of use to you. Aino Lehtonen, a photographer. She used to work with my wife. And she has been shooting the Romani in Sweden for years. Lately her photos begin to reveal the missing.”
“And this woman would help me how?” Brand asked.
“Let’s call it for identification purposes,” Hammar said. “Lehtonen’s a visual detective. You will like her—she is part-American.”
Brand smiled inwardly at the assumption she would like someone because they have American pedigree. She agreed to meet Hammar and Aino Lehtonen at the Gamla Stan tunnelbanestation in the heart of Stockholm.
She was headed there now. At a stop the train doors opened to a fresh glut of passengers. They were suited up for winter yet still elegant, many on cell phones. Pushing in with the crowd came a weather-beaten man. He carried a blue Ikea bag of reinforced polypropylene slung over his shoulder, bulging with plastic bottles.
The tunnelbana car lurched forward. It’d been years since Brand worked the New York subways, a rookie transit cop on the night shift, jittered up, a sweaty hand on her sidearm, scanning the cars and station platforms for anything that blipped the radar. Those were definitely not the days. The bright Swedish metro car, with its colorful fabric-covered seats and gleaming interior of ungraffitied steel, was miles away from the rank and unreliable subways she used to patrol.
Music moved toward her up the train’s central aisle, from an accordionist who played with one hand and panhandled with the other. Suitably, but annoyingly, the song was “New York, New York.” Brand searched her pockets and found a mass of mostly American coins, sorting among them for something in Swedish crowns while the busker waited on her.
Finally, she did what she would do in any foreign country where she didn’t know how to read the coinage, simply holding out her hand with the money displayed, thinking the busker would choose one. Brand realized too late that a twenty dollar bill lay folded up amongst the quarters, nickels, and gold ten-kronor coins. The accordionist, who kept up his one-handed playing, deftly swept up the coins along with the bill, pocketed it all, and fled down the car before he could be confronted.
“American,” another passenger now said, slurring the word dismissively. Mur-ken. Brand glanced up at him. The guy stood swaying over her, sporting a nearly clean-shaven scalp, looking as unpleasant as any skinhead she’d ever encountered in the bowels of New York City transit.
Brand averted her gaze, not wanting to get into it with the guy. She wondered about how quickly the Swedes typed her as an American. Her background must be written on her face.
“Du,” the skinhead said, then continued on in English. “You people come here on a seven-day tour and think you know. But you know nothing.”
What have I done to deserve this? Brand wondered. She looked up. White flecks of saliva frothed in the side creases of the beefy man’s mouth.
“Jävla bitch,” he said under his breath.
“How about you back off?” Brand said.
“Back the fuck off!” Brand demanded. The anger that had grown in her lately, usually kept at a simmer, now rose to a boil. She didn’t like the guy crowding her, so she rose up, her own Swedish tall gene on full display. Her intimidating six feet had always served her well as a cop.
The skinhead tried to block her back down into the seat. She dodged the move. He and Brand wound up nose to nose. The train slowed for a station.
“What are you doing here, bitch?” the guy snarled, chest-bumping her again. “Go home!”
The New York nut lock was a move Willie Urrico had originally taught her, when she first moved out of transit and joined patrol. Skells of every flavor saw a blue uniform as something of a challenge. The savvy street cop’s response to actual physical contact was to place a lateral forearm across the subject’s upper chest, for stabilization purposes, then make a quick clutch at the groin.
With a deft movement, Brand did exactly that. Urrico’s New York nut lock avoided whatever plumbing got in the way and aimed directly for the more vulnerable tea bags.
The skinhead wheezed out a cough of pain, his foul, fish-scented breath hitting Brand full on. She pushed the guy away. Brand was not afraid of him, but more fearful of herself, of her furious desire to inflict real damage. She turned and crossed to the exit doors.
Brand’s fellow riders remained buried in cell phones, books, or whatever distraction they carried with them. She read their reaction not as indifference but as a careful observance of privacy, a sort of studied, collective froideur. Not that there was much to see. The guy stood swaying, his body cocked at half mast, still wheezing when the doors slid open.
Brand stepped off the train. She tried to quiet her inner trembling, standing on the platform as the train pulled out. She mentally pictured her actions being caught by a cell phone camera.
“Shit.” She was now glad that she had left her sidearm behind that day. A weapon would have surely complicated matters, had authorities entered into the picture.
The twisted face of the skinhead on the train moved past Brand in slow motion. He slammed his fist against the window glass and glared, throwing her the horned fuck-you hand gesture.
She aimed a kick at his face and connected with the train as it gained speed. It continued on, and he was gone.
“Shit,” Brand said again. She tried to summon up one of the calming techniques learned from her NYPD-ordained anger management training. But such measures seemed to be in lock-up somewhere, while the blond beast had been allowed to roam free.
16.
T-centralen, the Central Station of Stockholm. Brand emerged from the underground platform on an escalator, joining the steady stream of workaday subway riders. She passed through an exit barrier and became part of the random flow of foot traffic, everyone busy getting somewhere, swarming out of an anthill.
Temporarily disoriented by numerous options to reach street level, she encountered a bizarre tableau. A community of homeless set up a crude encampment against a concrete wall that curved backward into a dark tunnel. Brand realized she was staring blankly at a young girl-child of eight or nine, her braids being fussed over by a trio of older women stood out from the group. Bulging, tarp-covered bundles were heaped high around them. The camp spilled over to an underground tunnel that led back toward the t-bana entrance.
Yes, the homeless, an immediately familiar sight from Brand’s time on transit patrol, yet subtly different from the residents living on the streets of New York City. The same pathetic collections of possessions, sure, desperately held fragments of a disordered life, and always the jury-rigged sections of cloud-colored plastic and stuffed-full shopping bags. These common elements were probably similar all over the world, from Rio, Mumbai, and Cape Town to the shifting jungles below the Queensboro Bridge.
But the differences became clear as Brand passed among them. She saw colorfully dressed women in long skirts and scarves folding up bedding. Men in dark clothing, loose pants and shabby jackets stood by, speaking on cell phones. Other women moved aside the plastic-covered bundles of possessions, sorting, re-packing. The sense of a community hiding in plain sight was uncanny. A scattering of early morning commuters hustled past in one lane of the walkway, while the homeless encampment held the other. The twain didn’t seem to meet.
Gypsies. These were the folks Krister Hammar obsessed over. The word conjured images of colorfully dressed women in skirts and scarves and men who wore small fedora-style hats. The Brits called them “travelers,” or, a more loaded term, “pikeys.” Brand had a vague sense that they moved communally in horse drawn carts and sang folk songs. But she recognized she possessed only a general, second-hand and undoubtedly stereotyped idea of gypsy identity.
There were a few gypsy communities in New York City, Brand recalled, mostly centered in the borough of Queens. But as a group gypsies didn’t have that much of a visible presence in the States, nor the long history of being shat upon that they enjoyed in Europe. Their low profile in the US proved a blessing. Had there been a greater percentage on the streets, Brand was confident her fellow Americans would be able to summon up proper levels of prejudice, fear, and distrust.
She watched them now, fascinated. Like birds leaving the nest, a few of the younger members of the encampment floated lazily away, male and female both, dispersing into the general population. They all held the same kind of paper cup, the emblem of their trade.
◆◆◆
Brand trailed after a stylish woman she had just met a few minutes before. The two of them entered into a maze of cobblestone alleys in central Stockholm. She immediately lost all sense of where she was.
A thin layer of ice glazed the narrow streets. Footing turned treacherous. Brand’s smooth-soled black leather boots proved all wrong for the conditions. Meanwhile her young female guide, Aino Lehtonen, bounded ahead. She wore sleek, high-heeled, over-the-knee Loboutins, stilt-like, impossible boots that probably cost more than Brand’s whole wardrobe.
She tried to keep up, but Lehtonen moved as nimbly as a reindeer, powering on despite the ice and despite the heels. They had entered Gamla Stan, Stockholm’s old town. The thirteenth century collided into the twenty-first to spectacular effect, but with a decided lack of logic. Tiny lanes that seemed to dead end suddenly revealed escape routes. One crinkum-crankum alleyway twisted into another.
Earlier, when Brand arrived at the agreed upon meeting-place, there had been no Hammar, only Lehtonen.
“Krister called to say he’ll meet up with us soon,” Lehtonen had said, explaining the man’s absence. “Come along.”
Then it was off to the races, the leaping reindeer leading the stumbling sheep through the maze. The twenty-eight year old native had no pity on the older American newcomer.
“Keep up,” Lehtonen called over her shoulder, after Brand slid around a blind corner.
They broke out of the labyrinth into an open space.
“Stortorget, the Great Square,” Lehtonen explained hurriedly. “Terrible massacre here back when, one beheading after another, blood ankle deep.”
As a guide, Lehtonen wasn’t exactly a Virgil. But Brand’s idea of herself as a commonplace tourist, present in the country to meet relatives and take in the sights, no longer had any meaning for her. Two dead men in a room where a blood bomb had gone off had blown away all sense of a casual visit.
“The Nobel Museum, the former Bourse.” Pronouncing the clipped travelogue, Lehtonen sounded bored. “Beyond is Storkyrkan, Saint Nicholas Cathedral, where all the royals and nobles get baptized and married.”
Brand took in the ancient, flat-fronted buildings rising up around the square. Many of them were richly colored in hues that seemed to defy the Swedish preference for somber earth tones. A deep red raspberry building rose next to another of Marrakesh ocher, while a façade of dusty moss stood next door to one of burnt orange.
“Pastels, really?” she commented to Lehtonen.
The woman either didn’t hear or wasn’t interested in Brand’s reaction. She was already leading them out of the square down yet another narrow, ice-strewn passageway. They arrived in front of a heavy, old-style double portal embedded in one of the flamboyantly colored old buildings. This one was done up in carmine, with the door painted a deep Mediterranean blue.
“Here,” Lehtonen said abruptly. She punched a code on a keypad set into a small, square metal box, heard a click, then pushed open the door. Clattering up a flight of stairs in her outlandish boots, she unlocked another heavy wooden door. The two of them entered an immense, loft-like space.
“My photography studio.” Lehtonen assumed an off-hand tone contradicted by the splendor of the surroundings.
Large ornate deep set windows took up one whole wall. Lehtonen’s studio was the real estate equivalent of her Loboutins, intimidatingly fashionable and triumphantly over the top. The view from the strategically placed windows encompassed the waterways of central Stockholm. Everything inside was white, even the floors and ceiling. The wide floorboards had been evenly sanded and painted a chalky white, same as the walls.
“White to reflect the light,” Lehtonen explained. “Crucial in winter.”
“You call this your studio?” Brand said. “I call it a penthouse. You could hold political rallies.”
“It belongs to my wife,” Lehtonen said. “Ebba’s got a bit of money, mostly from media and retail companies she operates. No one’s renting the place now, so it’s mine.”
As big as the studio was, Lehtonen had kept it fashionably spare, ascetic, and raw. There was something almost industrial about the atmosphere. Brand was reminded of the artist’s lofts of Soho in New York. Several areas displayed the common features of a working photography studio. Backdrops and screens cluttered one corner. A lighting setup had been left in place, looking expensive and ready for use. An unlit light table still had strips of photographic negatives splayed negligently across it.
Brand expected a bevy of assistants in black turtlenecks to come bustling up offering espresso, but there were none. She and Lehtonen were alone together.
Or, not quite alone. The wall facing the windows featured a collection of human portraits, unframed oversize prints the size of movie posters. The edges of the enormous photographs were left ragged and uncropped. The subjects were varied. There were bus
iness people posed in expensive suits, a trio of what looked like members of a farm family, an extravagantly dressed and accessorized young artist in front of a sculpture.
A few of the photographs portrayed the Romani mendicants of Stockholm. Brand abruptly came face to face with a teenage girl wearing white makeup and a wedding dress.
Varzha Luna. The vanished young soul whom Hammar was so worried about. A disturbing memory came back to Brand, a torn shred of wedding gown, discarded in the blood-soaked manor house of the Vosses. The same dress appeared in the photograph.
In the portrait, the girl displayed a fierce beauty, proud and unyielding behind her odd theatrical makeup. A slender boy of around the same age knelt beside her, sporting a neon green Statue of Liberty crown of foam rubber. His olive makeup rendered him into an emaciated version of the Incredible Hulk. In another of the big prints, the two were together again. This time they walked alongside a hapless bourgeois woman. She gripped her shopping bags and stared straight ahead. One foot was extended, the other lifted off the ground as if ready to bolt.
“Brother and sister,” Lehtonen commented. “Vago and Varzha.”
Lehtonen proceeded along the gallery of her startling, gigantic photographs. Brand followed a step behind, taking in the artist’s lean, straight body, more soft boy than woman. The whole package impressed her, the short spiky haircut, the tight jeans, the ivory blouse of wild silk that came off as expensively simple. Lehtonen’s violent red lipstick looked as though it had been tattooed on.
“Why gypsies?” Brand asked. “Why focus on them?”
“Oh, I’m interested in interesting people,” Lehtonen responded. “And by the way, the word is ‘Roma’ or ‘Romani’. ‘Gypsy’ is now heard here as an insult. There are a good number of legitimate names besides Roma, different groups in different parts of the world, like Dom, Sinti, Manus.
She moved on to another Romani portrait, the only one in color, showing a thickset male on the street. He wore a brown overcoat, wire-rimmed spectacles and a fur hat.
This Land is no Stranger Page 10
