Box 21

by Anders Roslund

  Ĺgestam pressed Play on the tape recorder on his desk and the two men listened to the end of an exchange they had both heard before.

  ‘Stena Baltica? That’s a bloody boat! This is something personal! Bengt, over! Fuck’s sake, Bengt. Stop it! Squad, move in! All clear. Repeat, move in!’

  No decision about choosing loyalty or truth. Not a word. Not yet.

  ‘Sven!’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I want you to go to Klaipeda. You are not to mention this to anyone, nor that you are going to interrogate Alena Sljusareva. You will report the results of the interrogation directly to me. I want to know what she really has to say.’

  SATURDAY 8 JUNE

  A strong smell hung in the air at Palanga Airport. The moment he passed the gate on his way to the luggage carousels, the smell of perfumed disinfectant hit his nose. The floor was still wet from washing and the smell told him that he was abroad, in a foreign place where they used chemicals and scents long since banned in Sweden. One hour and twenty minutes, he thought, one bleeding hour and they even clean the floors differently.

  This was his second visit to Lithuania. He couldn’t remember much from his first trip, not even which airport they had flown into. It had been a big thing for him, a new recruit to the force, to be asked to escort a high-profile criminal on a journey outside Swedish borders. Now that prison was probably all that was left of his memory. It had felt like travelling back in time, with barking dogs, damp corridors, stale air that weighed on his lungs, tuberculosis warnings posted everywhere and pale, silent prisoners with shaved heads sitting in their small, overcrowded cells. A strange experience, one he had never really spoken about, not even with Anita.

  He left the terminal building and summoned one of the waiting yellow cabs. Klaipeda was twenty-six kilometres south of Palanga. He was going to see Alena Sljusareva and hear things he didn’t want to know.

  He had phoned home from Arlanda to say good morning to Jonas and promised him a present, something secret, a surprise. Sweets, no doubt, bought in a hurry in the airport shop. He didn’t have much time in Lithuana; he was due back in Stockholm early the next morning, and he knew that what he had to do here would take up every waking hour.

  The driver took his time on the road from Palanga to Klaipeda. Sven Sundkvist considered telling him to speed up, but refrained. Settling into his seat, he told himself that the few minutes gained wouldn’t make up for the time it would take him to explain to the driver what he wanted.

  It looked pretty, the landscape lit by the sun. He knew that it was a poor country, with eight out of ten of its people living precariously close to the poverty line, but he felt that there was a kind of dignity in what he saw this time, something likeable. Nothing to remind him of that prison. The news reports at home showed clichés every time, so like everyone else he believed what he was shown, because it looked like what he had been fed before: all these grey people living in permanently grey weather. This was different. It was summer in a place full of real people, real lives, real colours.

  He told the driver to take him straight to the hotel. He was too early to check in, but Hotel Aribň was far from full and he was given a room at once.

  He wanted a little rest and tried the bed, the narrowest he had ever seen. Only a few minutes while he tried to visualise the woman he was about to meet, to remember what she looked and sounded like.

  The scene in the flat had been chaotic. Alena Sljusareva had been upset, screaming about her friend who was lying unconscious on the floor, and about the man in a shiny suit, whom she called Dimitri-Bastard-Pimp, who was standing nearby next to a hole in the apartment door. Sven Sundkvist didn’t have a chance to take a proper look at her and of course had had no idea that later the same week he would watch her in a video and meet her in a strange city on the other side of the Baltic.

  Alena Sljusareva had been standing in the room next door, just as naked as her unconscious friend.

  She was dark, darker than most of the Baltic prostitutes who had ended up as items in the documents on his desk.

  While they took care of the injured woman and confronted the pimp, who was making a fuss about his Lithuanian passport and diplomatic status, she had disappeared. That is, until she was arrested at the Baltic ferry terminal, about to board a boat that was ready to depart.

  Ewert had interrogated her and, a few hours later, decided that she could go home to Lithuania after all.

  Sven Sundkvist got up and had a shower. He put on lighter clothes; he hadn’t realised it would be so warm. The grey cliché must have stuck in his mind. He opened his briefcase, looked thoughtfully at the small tape recorder and then closed the case again. He would interrogate her, but the old-fashioned way, taking notes. He didn’t know why, maybe he was afraid of what she would tell him, afraid of her voice explaining what he didn’t want to record.

  He walked through the centre of the town, the buildings beautiful but breathing from another time, the people he met, traces of Lydia Grajauskas in their faces, over and over again.

  She had instructed him to walk to the lakeside and take the small ferry across Lake Curonia to Smilty Island. The heat that had struck him first in Palanga, then in Klaipeda, was now more intense. The sun scorched the back of his neck during the short boat trip and he realised he should have brought some sunscreen. He would turn brick red before the evening.

  Once he stepped off the ferry he was to turn right and walk along the beach to an old fort housing an aquarium, a big one, the posters told him, with one hundred species of Baltic fish and a dolphinarium. She had explained that she wanted to be among people, and at lunchtime this place was full of schoolchildren and other visitors who came along to watch the fish. The two of them could stroll about among the tanks and talk for as long as they liked without anyone taking notice.

  He stopped at the main entrance, where she had told him to wait for her, and checked the time. He was early, with almost twenty minutes to spare. It wasn’t easy to estimate how long it would take from the centre to this aquarium-cum-museum of Baltic fish on the island of Smilty.

  He picked a seat with a good view of the aquarium entrance. The sun played over his skin, and he leaned back and narrowed his eyes to watch the comings and goings, searching among the strangers for somebody like himself, as he always did. Somewhere, in this flow of people he would never know, was someone who was him, or at least like him; a man his age, with a woman he loved at his side and, walking a little ahead of them both, their beloved child. A man, who wanted to be at home but who spent most of his time elsewhere, and who might be a policeman or something else that required a strong sense of duty and long evenings at work. Someone in this crowd who lacked Ewert’s aggressiveness, Lang’s stubborn self-belief, Grajauskas’s capacity to resist, stay upright and take her revenge on those who had humiliated her. Perhaps the man who was Sven would be a little dull, ordinary, lacking in all the qualities you needed to be anything other than predictable.

  He did see himself. Several versions. Had he been born here, he might have been any one of them. He studied them and smiled when he spotted a man in a short-sleeved shirt and light slacks on his way into the aquarium.

  Then she tapped his shoulder.

  He hadn’t seen her arrive, nor heard her call him, so preoccupied had he been with his little game. She stood in front of him, hidden behind sunglasses, wearing a thin sweater and jeans that were a little too big. She fitted his image of her quite well. Not tall, lovely face and long dark hair. Traded for three years, humiliated countless times a day. It didn’t show, not on the outside. She looked like women do in their twenties, life just starting. Inside, he knew, she was old inside. That’s where she kept her scars. It was that woman who would never be whole again.

  ‘Sundkvist?’

  He nodded and stood up.

  ‘Yes. I am DI Sundkvist.’

  They had no trouble speaking to each other. His English was a little rusty, hers had been polished during three years abroad and she seemed to prefer
it to Swedish.

  ‘You recognise me?’

  ‘I saw you in the flat.’

  ‘It was very chaotic.’

  ‘I would know you were Swedish anyway, even if I’d never met you. I’ve got to know what Swedish men look like.’

  She made a gesture towards the entrance and they walked side by side. He paid for their tickets, and once in, tried to sense when would be the right time to start questioning her. She helped him.

  ‘I’m not sure what you want to know. I will tell you everything. I would like to begin now, please. I trust you. I saw you at work in the flat. But I would like to get this over with. I want to go home. Forget. Do you understand?’

  She looked pleadingly at him. Behind her, a wall of glass, and fish slipping through the water. He tried to appear calm, calmer than he was, now that he was going to hear the answers he had been anticipating.

  ‘I’m afraid I can’t tell you how long this will take. It depends. But of course I understand. I’ll do my best to keep it as brief as possible.’

  He couldn’t really see the point of aquariums. Or zoos, for that matter. Caged creatures didn’t appeal to him and he found it easy to block it all out of his mind: the strolling groups of people, the fish they were meant to be looking at. He would concentrate. On Alena Sljusareva, on her and her answers to his questions.

  On her story, the story he had been dreading.

  The tale of events he wished hadn’t taken place.

  It wasn’t a normal interview, but whatever it was went on for almost three hours. She spoke about her flight from the flat and her time spent alone in the city, how her body rejoiced at being free, how she was scared that she would be found, anxious about Lydia. The worry about her unconscious beaten friend never let up. They had sworn never to leave each other until they were both free together, but just then, the instant when Alena had decided to run away, she had been convinced that she would be of more use to Lydia well away from that fifth-floor flat.

  He interrupted her whenever she seemed to hesitate, and she would clarify, never try to change the story, at least not as far as he could make out.

  They walked slowly among the people watching fish. She told him about going to the harbour and Lydia calling from her hospital bed to ask for the weapons and the other things that she would later put to use in the mortuary.

  Her voice was a near-whisper when she begged him to believe that she had had no idea of what her friend had been planning to do.

  He stopped, looked into her eyes and explained that the purpose of his inquiry was not to establish whether she had been an accessory to kidnapping and murder.

  She asked what his reason was, in that case.

  ‘Nothing. And everything. Leave it like that.’

  A cluster of simple chairs and tables. He bought them each a cup of coffee and they sat down among the parents and children and the big fish on the blue plastic tablecloths.

  She told him about the locker in Central Station, how she had broken in to the cellar and the carrier bag, which she was to deposit in the hospital toilet.

  He decided to check the truth of what she was telling him.

  ‘What was the number?’

  ‘Number?’

  ‘The box at the station.’

  ‘Twenty-one.’

  ‘What was in it?’

  ‘Mostly my things. Lydia wanted only money for extras.’

  ‘Extras?’

  ‘Hitting. Spitting. Filming. Use your imagination.’

  Sven Sundkvist swallowed, sensing her discomfort.

  ‘And Lydia? What did she keep in your box?’

  ‘Her money. And her two videotapes.’

  ‘What tapes were they?’

  ‘The truth. That’s what she named them. My Truth.’

  ‘Which was . . .?’

  ‘She told it like it was. How we came to Sweden. Who was buying and selling us as products. And what the policeman she shot had done to make her hate him. I helped her translate.’

  ‘Nordwall?’

  ‘Bengt Nordwall.’

  Sven Sundkvist did not tell her that he had opened their box 21 and watched the tape, listening to them both. He did not mention that one of the tapes had gone missing because one policeman was protecting another and had decided to lose it, nor did he explain how ashamed he felt at his own inability to decide whether their humiliations were more or less important than his loyalty towards a colleague and a friend, and whether he ever would make official what only he knew now: there was another tape, a copy of the truth.

  ‘I saw him.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Bengt Nordwall. I saw him in the flat.’

  ‘You saw him?’

  ‘He saw me too. I know he recognised me. And I know he recognised Lydia.’

  After that he found it difficult to listen to her.

  She carried on talking and he asked her his questions, but his mind was elsewhere.

  He was furious. As furious as he had ever been. He wanted to scream.

  He didn’t, of course. He was after all one of the ordinary blokes, a little dull. He suppressed the scream, sensing the pressure inside his chest.

  Instead he carried on pretending to be calm, unafraid of what she had to tell him. He mustn’t frighten her. He understood how brave she was, how the memories gnawed at her.

  He cried out.

  Cried out, then apologised to her. He had a pain, he explained. It wasn’t her, he had a pain here, in his chest.

  By the time they had boarded the ferry back to the centre of town, he knew in detail what had happened during her hours of freedom, from her escape down the stairs at Völund Street to her arrest at the harbour. Fury was churning inside him, from chest to belly and back, but he felt their talk had not yet ended. He wanted to know more, about how it all worked: about those three years, the slave trade, how it was possible for a woman’s body to be sold so that someone else could top up his bank account or buy himself a new car.

  He asked if she would have dinner with him.

  She smiled.

  ‘I don’t think I can cope with any more now. Home. I want to go home. I haven’t been at home for three years.’

  ‘The Swedish police will not trouble you again in this matter. You have my word on that.’

  ‘I don’t understand. What more do you want to know?’

  ‘I spoke to the Lithuanian ambassador to Sweden just a couple of days ago. He had gone to the airport to see off the man you call Dimitri-Bastard-Pimp, and spoke to us afterwards about the extent of the world you’ve just escaped from. He was despairing. I want to learn more about it. Tell me.’

  ‘I’m so tired. Too tired.’

  ‘Just one evening? Just talking. Then never again.’

  He blushed suddenly when he saw himself demanding her attention like the Swedish men she had learnt to hate.

  ‘Please forgive me. I didn’t intend this as some kind of come-on. You mustn’t take it that way. I truly want to know more. And I’m a married man and a father.’

  ‘They always are.’

  He marched back to the hotel quickly. Another shower to wash away the heat and another change of clothes, the second in the eight hours since his arrival.

  She had asked two older women coming to board the ferry about a good place for a meal and they had suggested a Chinese restaurant called Taravos Aniko, saying that the portions were nice and big, and if you were lucky enough to get one of the right tables you could watch the food being prepared.

  She was already there when he arrived, wearing the same jeans and sweater. She smiled, he smiled. They ordered bottles of mineral water and a set menu that someone else had worked out, starter, main course, dessert for two, all suitably put together and priced.

  She searched for words and he waited quietly. He didn’t want to push her.

  Then she started speaking, beginning somewhere in the middle, with a remembered impression, and afterwards unravelling their story. She took him on a journey to a world that he thought he knew something about and made him realise he knew nothing. She cr
ied and whispered for a while, but she couldn’t stop talking and he didn’t interrupt. This was the first time she had described to someone else what her adult life so far had been; it was the first time she had listened to herself. He listened too and was increasingly amazed at her strength and her integrity. Despite everything, she had stayed whole.

  He waited until she had finished or maybe couldn’t bear to say any more. Until she fell silent, her unseeing eyes empty. Now it was over, she was done and would never again tell her story on demand.

  Sven reached down for his briefcase and put it on the table.

  ‘I’ve brought a few things which don’t belong to me.’

  He took out a small brown box and two neatly folded dresses.

  ‘I believe these things are Lydia’s.’

  She stared at the box, at the dresses. She knew where they had been. There was still a question in her eyes when she met Sven’s. He nodded, confirming that she was right.

  ‘Your locker is empty now. Let to someone else. I wanted to give you these. I suppose the dresses are hers. And the box too. It contains forty thousand Swedish kronor, in smallish notes.’

  Alena didn’t move, said nothing. ‘Do what you like. Keep the money. Or give it to her family, if there is anyone left.’

  She leaned forward and caressed the smooth, black material of one of the dresses.

  All that was left.

  ‘I went to her home yesterday. I wanted to see her mother. Lydia often talked about her.’ She lowered her eyes. ‘She is dead. She died two months ago.’

  Sven waited. Then he gently pushed Lydia’s belongings towards Alena.

  ‘I would like to know more about Lydia. Who she was. All I have seen is a badly beaten human being who stood up again and took hostages.’

  Alena shook her head. ‘It’s enough now.’

  ‘I think some part of me understands why she acted as she did.’

  ‘No more, not today. Not ever.’

  They stayed for a while longer, without talking much. The waiter finally asked them to please leave, the restaurant was closing. They got up and were just about to go when the front door opened and a man in his early twenties came in. Sven gave him a quick once-over. He was tall, blond and suntanned, easy-going, not confrontational. Alena walked over to him, kissed his cheek and put her arm through his.