Zack

by Mons Kallentoft

  Work soon dried up, and by the time Anna died he was not only unemployed, but also visibly marked by illness.

  Deniz puts the photograph back again. Poor Roy, she thinks.

  And poor Zack too.

  She asked him once if he had any memories of his father while he was healthy, and she could still remember the sadness in his eyes when he said he didn’t.

  There’s a thick, black leather folder on the bureau next to the photograph. She saw it once before on his desk back at the station, and recognizes it even before she reads his mother’s name on the front.

  Are the contents of this folder what’s tormenting you, Zack? she wonders. Is this where your demons come from, all the things you have to resort to chemicals to deal with?

  She’s tempted to look inside, but she leaves it where it is. If he wants to show her, he will.

  She goes into the tiny kitchen, manages to find the coffee, and switches the machine on. Then she calls and requests a Thai interpreter for their interview at the acute psychiatric department at St. Göran’s Hospital.

  She pours herself a cup of coffee and sits down on the sofa to read the news on her cell. The article about “Karate Cop” has disappeared from the main page of Aftonbladet’s website, and it doesn’t look like any of the other papers have picked up the story.

  She takes out her notebook and writes down a few questions they need to ask Paw Htoo. Then she leans back and shuts her eyes. Thinks about the way life always seems to come full circle. The Grey Wolves took Grandfather, and now they’ve turned up here in another guise. She thinks about her brother, and wonders where he might be. After fifteen minutes she wakes Zack up by splashing cold water on his face and offering him a fresh cup of strong coffee.

  He sits up slowly and scratches his messy hair. Then he staggers into the kitchen, turns on the cold tap, and dunks his head under it. He stands there so long that Deniz thinks he’s fallen asleep again. Eventually he turns the tap off, attempts to dry his hair on a dish towel, then drinks the coffee.

  Five minutes later they’re in the car, on their way to the hospital.

  * * *

  PAW HTOO is in a single room in the acute psychiatric unit. Karin Åkerstig and her partner are sitting on guard outside the door.

  A gray-haired doctor with hexagonal glasses leads Zack, Deniz, and their interpreter, Erica Sörensson, to the room.

  “I must warn you that the patient is currently strapped to the bed. To anyone not used to it, it can look unpleasant.”

  “Why is she strapped down?” Zack asks.

  “She had a fit when she arrived, screaming and scratching at the eyes of my staff. She’s been given a sedative now.”

  “Can we talk to her?”

  “You can try. Do you want me to be there?”

  “No, I think it’s best if we’re on our own.”

  “As you like. Press the red button by the bed if you need us.”

  Zack and Deniz say hello to their colleagues, then go into the room, followed by Erica Sörensson. They sit down on chairs on either side of the bed. The narrow tunnel of Zack’s reality has expanded again, thanks to the nap and coffee. His eyes have stopped aching, his brain is engaged, and his heartbeat has resumed its usual rhythm.

  Paw Htoo looks at them through half-open eyes. Her face doesn’t show the slightest trace of emotion. They explain who they are, and show her their ID. Erica Sörensson translates into Thai, but Paw Htoo just looks at her as if she doesn’t understand a single word.

  Erica Sörensson tries again, but Paw Htoo looks equally uncomprehending. In the end she does say something back, and Erica Sörensson turns to Zack and Deniz.

  “What did you have in mind here?”

  “How do you mean?” Zack says.

  “This woman doesn’t speak Thai. It sounds more like Burmese to me.”

  Burma, Zack thinks. The Golden Triangle. Wasn’t that where Ösgür Thrakya’s organization had one of its outposts?

  Heroin isn’t the only thing that comes from there.

  Women do too.

  What was it Sonny Järvinen had said about the Sawatdii massage parlor? They can’t even be bothered to provide the real thing.

  That was why the murdered women in Hallonbergen had fake passports. Because they weren’t from Thailand. They were from Burma.

  And that was why the members of the Brotherhood had their fingers on the trigger when we arrived. They were expecting a visit from the Turkish mafia, led by a battle-hardened torturer.

  He looks at Deniz. She certainly looks Turkish.

  “We’re very sorry,” he says to the interpreter. “We thought she was from Thailand.”

  Erica Sörensson ignores him and says:

  “I’ll be invoicing for two hours. That’s my minimum.”

  “Of course, by all means. Do you happen to know of an interpreter who speaks Burmese?”

  She stands up and adjusts her blouse.

  “No—you might have trouble finding one.”

  “So what do we do now?” Zack says once she’s left the room.

  Deniz has already pulled out her cell and is searching Google.

  “There are a few amateurs, at least—people who organize tours and lectures about Burma,” she says, scrolling through the results. “Here’s one in Stockholm. I’ll give him a call.”

  Zack looks at Paw Htoo. She’s twisting in bed, trying halfheartedly to get free.

  Imagine being strapped to a bed in a hospital room in a strange country, unable to make yourself understood. How would he react to that?

  He desperately wants to explain to her why she’s lying there, but he can’t, and when she looks at him with her big, pleading eyes, all he can do is hope she sees goodwill in his own.

  “Is that Svante Stahre? Hello, my name’s Deniz Akin, I’m calling from Stockholm Police,” he hears Deniz say over the phone. “We’ve got something of an urgent problem . . .”

  * * *

  A BIT of luck, at last.

  Twenty-five minutes later a man with an Einstein haircut, a full, bushy beard, and a Hawaiian shirt is sitting on a stool next to Paw Htoo’s bed, talking quietly to her in Burmese.

  Svante Stahre and Paw Htoo speak for a long time before he finally turns to Zack and Deniz.

  “She’s a member of the Karen tribe, if you’re aware of them?”

  Zack and Deniz both shake their heads.

  “They’re an ethnic minority who have been persecuted by the ruling military junta for years. Their villages have been burned down, women raped, men assaulted and murdered. Several thousand of them have fled to vast refugee camps in the border region between Burma and northern Thailand. One of the biggest is called Mae La, and that’s where Paw Htoo has spent almost all her life. I’m having a bit of trouble understanding everything she says, because Burmese is only her second language, and she speaks it rather unclearly, possibly because she’s sedated, but she says that one day some well-dressed foreigners came to the camp and promised her a job with a good salary abroad. That was how she ended up here. Sadly her fate isn’t all that unusual. A lot of the women and girls in brothels in Thailand come from Burma. And evidently that trade has now reached here as well.”

  Zack turns to Paw Htoo.

  “My name is Zack Herry, I’m a police officer. I was the man who helped you up when you fell earlier.”

  Svante Stahre translates.

  “I didn’t fall,” she says.

  “Do you remember what happened when you arrived at work this morning?”

  “I worked. I give massages.”

  She’s suppressing the memory of what happened, Zack thinks. Perhaps that’s the only way for her to bear it.

  “Can you tell in a little more detail about how you came to Sweden?” Deniz asks, and Zack realizes that she’s trying to approach that morning’s events from another direction.

  More words in Burmese. Sad eyes, revealing that this woman will never trust anyone ever again.

  “The men who came
to Mae La were foreign businessmen. They looked European, but they weren’t blond, and they looked like they had a lot of money. They spoke a little Burmese. They said they worked in both Burma and Europe, and that they were looking for workers on behalf of different businesses.”

  Slowly but surely a tragic story unfolds, with all the typical ingredients. The men showed her a beautiful brochure full of colorful pictures of Stockholm, and told her how the Swedes love Burmese massage, and how easy it was for hardworking women to get jobs as masseuses at fancy hotels and health spas. They promised to pay for her flight, and would make sure she was trained in massage in Sweden, and told her about the high wages in Sweden and helped her to work out how much money she would be able to send home to her impoverished family each month.

  She ended up having to borrow the money for her flight, and she never received any training. That wasn’t the sort of massage she was expected to give. She never saw the men again. Others took over in Sweden.

  “I refused to give that sort of massage. Then the big man hit me. Over and over again. Hard.”

  Paw Htoo tries to raise her hands, and looks surprised when she can’t, as if she were only now realizing that she was strapped down.

  Zack takes out his cell and shows her a picture of Ingvar Stefansson.

  “Is this what he looked like?”

  “No. I’ve never seen that man before.”

  She tugs at the straps a few times. Still with a look of surprise on her face.

  “Who’s the big man? Do you know his name?” Deniz asks, to distract her from the straps and keep her mind on her story.

  “No, they have strange names.”

  “They? There are more of them?”

  “Different men pick up the money from the massage parlor. But there’s only one who hits us.”

  “What does he look like?”

  “He’s really big. Dark hair. With one eye that looks all milky. He comes in several times a week.”

  Suliman Yel, Zack thinks.

  “Did he hit you inside the massage parlor?”

  Paw Htoo nods.

  “In front of clients?”

  “No, but in front of the others. Not in the face, because then the clients wouldn’t want you. In the stomach. Hard, so I couldn’t breathe. But I still refused. And then . . .”

  She starts to cry, but when she goes to wipe her tears the straps stop her. Deniz takes out a tissue and wipes her cheeks.

  “They held me down,” she says. “Then they put a big pan of boiling water on the floor. And they forced me to put my foot in it.”

  She cries again, harder this time, but it feels like she has to finish the story.

  “I screamed and screamed, and they asked if I was going to be nice to the clients, and I promised and then they took my foot out at last. And they said that next time they’d put my whole body in, the way they did with other disobedient girls. In boiling water.”

  That was why she limped, why she fell, Zack thinks.

  Because they practically boiled her foot.

  He’d like to take her sock off, look at her foot. But he doesn’t, because he realizes she doesn’t want anyone to see her injuries. Perhaps she thinks they’re a mark of shame.

  Svante Stahre turns toward Zack. He looks like he’s about to faint.

  “Look, I don’t know if I can handle any more of this.”

  “Try,” Zack says. “What she’s telling us might very well help us to catch these bastards.”

  Svante Stahre nods and swallows hard.

  “Okay. But promise to let me know when you get them.”

  Deniz puts her hand on Paw Htoo’s shoulder.

  “You’ve been very strong,” Deniz says. “You put up more of a fight than most other people would.”

  Paw Htoo smiles at them, and her eyes look clearer. Zack wonders if the sedative is starting to wear off.

  The smile fades, and she asks them:

  “They promised I be allowed to go home soon. How am I going to get home now?”

  “We can help you contact the right people. But first we need you to help us,” Deniz says. “Where do you live?”

  “In Husby.”

  “In an apartment?”

  “Yes, with other girls from Burma.”

  “Did you live with the women you worked with? The ones you found dead?”

  Paw Htoo shuts her eyes, as if to block out the image of the bodies in front of her. Tears begin to trickle from her closed eyelids again.

  “Have you lived there the whole time?”

  “No, not to start with. They drove us out into the forest, and . . .”

  She falls silent and turns her head away.

  “Paw Htoo,” Deniz says. “What happened in the forest?”

  But she just shakes her head and presses her lips together.

  “You’ve got to tell us. We want to stop the people who hurt you.”

  Paw Htoo’s whole body is shaking. Deniz strokes her shoulder.

  “Paw Htoo, where did you live to start with?”

  She’s shaking more and more violently, and the metal bed frame starts to creak.

  Deniz tries to get eye contact with her, but Paw Htoo stares straight through her with bulging eyes.

  “In a house. In the forest. There are still little girls out there.”

  “Where is the house?”

  “We couldn’t get out. And the dogs. The mad dogs. No, no!”

  Her body tenses and arches up, straining against the straps as she screams at the top of her voice. Her eyes swivel up into her head and her body starts to shake again, it looks like she’s trying to escape from herself, from the world.

  Zack presses the alarm button.

  Thirty seconds later the doctor and a nurse come in and give her an injection. Her body relaxes instantly and Paw Htoo falls asleep.

  The doctor looks at them.

  “I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to leave. She needs to rest.”

  * * *

  THE SHARP sunlight hits them as they walk back to the car. Zack’s headache is starting to come back, and he curses himself for not having his sunglasses with him.

  “Are you thinking the same thing as me, about that house she was talking about?” Deniz asks.

  “Yes,” Zack says. “And I’ve got a horrible feeling that we need to work out where it is as soon as possible.”

  He pauses. Hears the sound of Deniz breathing.

  “And maybe that’s where Stefansson is,” he adds.

  39

  THE CONFERENCE room is as warm as the inside of a car that’s been standing in the hot summer sun.

  Zack wonders if Douglas has switched off the air-conditioning on purpose, to make the meeting short and effective. No one will want to stay here and talk for a minute longer than necessary. Which is just as well. It’s already a quarter past four.

  He wants to get out of there. Go home. A cold shower, then close the blinds and go to bed.

  “God, it’s hot,” Niklas says, taking off his jacket.

  Zack looks at the sweat rings under the sleeves of Niklas’s shirt. His own T-shirt is sticking to his back, and his skin feels greasy.

  Deniz is wearing just her undershirt, Sirpa is fanning herself with a sheet of paper, and Rudolf has loosened his tie and rolled his shirtsleeves up. Douglas, who is still wearing his jacket, is the only one who seems untroubled. Zack guesses that he’s wearing a specially designed cooling suit that cost a fortune.

  The head of the unit clears his throat.

  “The identities of the two women found murdered in the massage parlor on Klara Norra Kyrkogata remain a mystery,” he says. “In all likelihood their passports are fake, and after the interview with . . . what’s her name . . . ?”

  “Paw Htoo,” Zack says.

  “That’s it . . . After the interview with her, we can assume for the time being that they too come from Burma. Getting their identities confirmed will be difficult. I’ve just spoken to our contact in Bangkok
, and he says we shouldn’t pin our hopes on the willingness of the Burmese police to help us track down people belonging to a minority that they’ve been persecuting for decades. Besides, the Burmese authorities are deeply involved in heroin production, and probably have business dealings with mafia organizations like Yildizyeli. We’ll have to try going through various aid organizations and see if there are any registers of people living in the refugee camps.”

  “Fucking hell,” Deniz says through gritted teeth. “First they have to flee their own country because of rape and murder and having their villages burned down. Then they end up in the hands of human traffickers from Europe, are forced into prostitution, and then shot. It makes you want to cry.”

  “Our examination of the accounts from Sawatdii is complete,” Douglas goes on. “There isn’t a single invoice from Recruitment Solutions Ltd in the files, or anything else that suggests the two businesses had anything to do with each other. Either she was lying about their collaboration, or it was being kept off the books.”

  “I think she was lying,” Deniz says. “She seemed terrified for her own safety, yet she still told us about Recruitment Solutions without us exerting any great pressure on her. She could have done that to make us focus out efforts elsewhere, away from Yildizyeli.”

  “In which case she was helping them,” Niklas says. “So why would they set the wolves on her?”

  “Maybe they thought the fact that she was talking to the police and letting us look at her accounts was enough of a reason?” Deniz says.

  “Maybe Sukayana was actually trying to help both us and Ösgür Thrakya by directing us toward the Brotherhood?” Zack says. “If all the murdered women were from Burma, we can probably assume that they were brought here with the help of Ösgür Thrakya’s gang. Which means that the Brotherhood would have had a motive to carry out the murders. Perhaps to torture Sukayana Prikon as well. Why would the Turks ruin one of their own sources of income?”

  “We don’t know if the murdered women in Hallonbergen were Burmese, do we?” Niklas says. “Just because they had fake passports doesn’t mean they weren’t from Thailand. Which means we might be dealing with two different murderers. First one who kills the Brotherhood’s women, then one taking revenge on Yildizyeli by shooting two of theirs.”