Zack

by Mons Kallentoft

“Do you know that six women from Burma have been murdered in Stockholm in the past week? They all worked in massage parlors, just like you,” Zack says.

  He purposefully doesn’t mention any names, doesn’t want the women to get scared and clam up.

  Nang Mon and Ah Noh stare at him as if they misheard him.

  “We believe Sten Westberg may have killed them,” Zack goes on, “but we’re not sure. The more you can tell us about him, the easier it will be for us to solve this.”

  Nang Mon runs her hand down her ponytail and seems to be thinking. Then she says:

  “If I tell you, will you have to tell my family?”

  “No,” Deniz says. “But the newspapers will probably write about the case, and we have no control over that information.”

  Nang Mon looks at Ah Noh, and they seem to communicate wordlessly about what to do.

  Then Nang Mon turns back to Deniz, nods, and says:

  “Okay, I’ll tell you. Mr. Westberg wasn’t like other clients. He liked to beat us too. Spit in our faces. And then . . .”

  She falls silent and takes a deep breath before going on:

  “. . . then he would use shit, and tell us we were his filthy whores. That he was going to fill us with shit. He smeared it on my lips. Refused to pay. Said he owned me . . .”

  The words catch in her throat.

  She wipes a tear from her cheek and Deniz reaches backward and puts a hand on her knee.

  “You don’t have to say any more about that. That’s enough.”

  Deniz turns to Zack with a black look in her eyes, and he can see how hard she’s having to try not to throw the door open and go and stamp on Westberg’s dead body.

  Nang Mon continues:

  “No other client was allowed to hit us. It was forbidden. But he was allowed to. He paid Tuncay for it.”

  “Who’s Tuncay?” Zack asks.

  “One of the men who came to pick up the money. He has a big scar on his face,” she says, running one finger down her cheek, past the corner of her mouth to her neck.

  Someone else we don’t know about, Zack thinks.

  Ah Noh whispers something in Nang Mon’s ear.

  “She wants me to tell you what happened when we refused.”

  “What happened?” Deniz asks.

  “Tuncay got out a laptop computer and made us watch a recording someone had filmed in a barn on their cell. We could see Tuncay and some other men.

  “And then we saw Sanpai, a girl who came to Sweden at the same time as us. She was so young, just twelve or thirteen. They held her down and she cried and screamed.”

  Ah Noh starts sobbing helplessly. She hides her face in her hands to stifle the weeping, but she can’t stop shaking.

  “I’m sorry,” she says. “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay,” Deniz says, and turns to Nang Mon. “Go on.”

  “There was a hole in the floor, and they dragged her over to the edge and pushed her in, and then we saw . . .”

  Nang Mon can’t go on.

  She puts her hands to her mouth as if to stop herself throwing up, and starts to rock back and forth, whimpering.

  “Nang Mon,” Deniz says. “What did you see? You have to help us.”

  Nang Mon takes long, wheezing breaths as she looks at Deniz.

  “We saw . . . we saw the wolves eat her. They tore her apart while she was still alive. They were mad with hunger, and trained to eat human flesh.”

  Utter silence descends inside the car.

  Zack and Deniz can’t think of anything else to ask.

  It’s as if they’ve just caught a fleeting glimpse of pure evil. As if everything that could be said has been said.

  But Nang Mon isn’t finished.

  “Then Tuncay shut the laptop and said: ‘That girl also refused.’ ”

  Zack can barely remain in the car. He wants to find this Tuncay and tear him to pieces with his bare hands.

  They threw a twelve-year-old to the wolves.

  What if someone had shown him a film showing grown men throwing Ester to starving wolves?

  He can’t even imagine how that would feel, or what he would do to someone like that.

  “Is Tuncay the only one who comes to pick up the money, or are there others?” Deniz says, once she’s composed herself.

  “There’s one more, but I don’t know his name,” Nang Mon says. “I just remember his eyes. You get scared when he looks at you. He came with Tuncay a few times, always wearing a black suit, but he stays in the background and never says anything. He’s death. He devours spirits.”

  Ösgür Thrakya, Zack thinks.

  “Is there anything else you think you should tell us?”

  Zack realizes that Deniz means the attempt to blackmail Sten Westberg.

  The young women sit in silence.

  Zack and Deniz wait.

  “One of the other women from Burma we’ve talked to mentioned a house in the forest outside Stockholm. Was that where Sanpai was? Have you been there?”

  Ah Noh hides her face in her hands again.

  “We were taken to the house in the forest when we first arrived in Sweden,” Nang Mon says.

  “Do you know where it is?”

  “No, but it seemed to take a long time to get there.”

  “How long?”

  “An hour, perhaps. First on a big road. Then winding roads in the forest. In the end it was just a rough track.”

  “What did the house look like?”

  “It was red. Two stories. That was where we met Sanpai. There were other girls there. Very young, just children.”

  “How many?”

  “Five, I think. Or six.”

  “And how many men?”

  “Three, from what I remember. They had guns, and they locked us up in a dark storeroom at night. That was when I realized something was wrong.”

  “Do you remember anything else? What did the countryside around the house look like?”

  “There was an old barn nearby. I think that’s where they kept the wolves. The house and barn were both painted red. And there were lots of strange, tall trees all around. I don’t know what they’re called. The branches went all the way to the ground, and they were covered with tiny green needles.”

  “I think you mean pine trees. Anything else?”

  “I can’t really remember. We were only there for one day. Then we were driven here and had to start . . . working.”

  “The girls you mentioned, the children, what do they do with them?”

  “They get sold to men. Then they get driven back out into the forest again. They don’t all come back.”

  “Do you think there are still girls there now?”

  “Yes, the ones who aren’t dead.”

  57

  THE NUMBER of heartbeats appears as blips in a regular green line on the monitor. Sixty-two beats per minute. Occasionally sixty-three. Zack stares at the screen, hoping to see a change, some sign of consciousness. But nothing.

  He’s sitting alone by Sukayana Prikon’s bed, on the same pale brown visitor’s chair as before. From the other side of the door he heard the low voices of the two police officers who are sitting on guard outside the intensive care room. One of them asked to come in, but Zack said no. He wants to be alone here.

  He’s holding Sukayana’s hand in his, massaging it gently with his thumb. She’s lying with her face toward him, and looks paler than he remembered. The doctor said she’d regained consciousness, but Zack can’t help thinking she looks a very long way away.

  In spite of the tube leading into her mouth, she looks peaceful.

  Zack doesn’t like it.

  It’s as if she knows she’s going to die, and has reconciled herself to it.

  Zack feels like finding that bearded doctor and asking about her condition, but resists. He already knows that Sukayana’s body is fighting a battle of life and death against alien bacteria.

  A violent fight on a bloody battlefield. Yet so calm on the surface.
<
br />   He leans closer and whispers in her ear:

  “You’ve got to help me, Sukayana. Where are they? Where are the girls?”

  He wonders if any part of her brain registers his words. He once read about a Belgian man who lay in a coma for twenty-three years, then woke up and said he had heard everything that had been going on around him.

  “We can’t find the house, Sukayana,” he says. “And the barn with the wolves. We know there are girls there, and we’ve got to try and rescue them. Please wake up. Tell me where the house is.”

  The monitor starts to bleep and Sukayana opens her eyes.

  Slowly comes around.

  She looks at him.

  “Do you remember who I am?” he asks.

  She nods, but the tube is in the way when she tries to talk.

  “I need to ask you a few questions. Can you write, if I give you a pen and paper?”

  She nods again.

  He digs out a spiral-bound notepad and ballpoint pen from his inside pocket and puts them in her hands. She raises the pad and starts writing before he has time to ask a question.

  The letters take shape slowly and unevenly, and he can see that the pulse monitor clipped to her index finger is getting in her way.

  Zack leans over and reads.

  A pole.

  “What sort of pole?”

  She goes on writing.

  Spinning at the top. Like a sun.

  Is she hallucinating? Zack wonders, or is she remembering something from her childhood?

  In his mind’s eye he can see a bucket of children’s windmills, the sort they used to sell at markets when he was little. They were on short sticks, and when you blew them they spun around and made colorful patterns.

  She puts her hands down on the covers again and he sees her eyelids close. He gently takes hold of her shoulder to try to keep her awake.

  The monitor carries on bleeping. The door swings open and the bearded doctor hurries over to Sukayana.

  “She was awake a few moments ago,” Zack says.

  The doctor studies the graphs and numbers on the monitor and pulse oximeter.

  “She’s still weak,” he says. “Very weak. You can have a little while longer with her, five minutes maximum, no more. Then she needs to rest. Okay? I’m afraid it looks as if the infection is getting the better of her.”

  Sukayana opens her eyes again, picks up the pad, and carries on writing.

  Incredibly slowly now.

  It’s close to the house.

  “You mean the house in the forest?” Zack asks. “What’s close to the house?”

  She looks at Zack and he can detect a weak smile at one corner of her mouth. She looks down at the pad again. The monitor is still bleeping. Zack feels like smashing it.

  Tricked them. Was awake in the car afterward.

  Saw it through window.

  Don’t remember more.

  She puts the pad down and looks like she’s gathering her strength. The doctor is standing on the other side of the bed. He looks impatient and Zack is worried he’s going to break off the interview at any moment.

  She picks up the pad again. Her hand is trembling with the effort.

  It was tall, you’ll be able to see it.

  “What will I be able to see?”

  Five mins from house.

  I think.

  He tries to understand. Something spinning on a pole that she saw from the car. Is that what she means? But she was lying down in the car, so must have been looking up. So it must have been very tall. Something tall. A pole, she wrote. A flagpole? No, nothing ever spins at the top of a flagpole.

  Then an image appears in his mind, a scene from a black-and-white Western movie.

  “Do you mean a wind-powered water pump? Sixty-five feet high, maybe, with a load of windmill blades at the top?”

  He thinks he can see a trace of a nod, but he’s not sure.

  The pen falls to the floor. Zack picks it up and tries to put it back in her hand, but she hasn’t got the strength to hold it.

  Her eyes are closed again. She’s lying completely still.

  Zack wants to ask so much more, but she’s no longer with him.

  The bleeping changes pitch. It cuts through Zack’s ears.

  “Damm it,” the doctor says. “Out of the way!”

  Zack gets up.

  He looks at the monitor.

  The line on Sukayana’s EKG is flat.

  58

  ZACK RUNS into the Special Crimes Unit and sees that Deniz has moved her chair to Sirpa’s desk and has her laptop in front of her. Behind them stand Niklas and Douglas, staring at one of Sirpa’s screens.

  Deniz waves him over.

  “Look at this. I think we’ve found it.”

  She looks extremely focused. It’s as if the events in the massage parlor just a few hours before never happened.

  Zack hurries over. Tries to forget about Sukayana Prikon and the fact that he has just seen her die.

  On the screen is an article from a daily paper.

  Above the headline “New Hope for Old Technology” is a large picture that could have been a hundred years old if the colors weren’t so sharp.

  There it is. Exactly like he imagined.

  The water pump consists of a wooden tower made up of four legs, getting narrower toward the top, held together by a number of diagonal crossbeams. At the top twenty small rotor blades are fixed to a large wheel, and out of the back sticks a tail that makes sure the rotor blades are always facing the wind.

  Zack didn’t even know there were such things in Sweden.

  “The article was published in Sala Allehanda in September 2007,” Sirpa says. “Now we just need to locate it on the map.”

  On a different screen Deniz is looking at Google Earth. She’s zoomed in on Vittinge, a small village between Sala and Uppsala, where the article says the water pump is located. She zooms closer in an attempt to find it.

  “What the hell,” she says. “Why couldn’t the reporter have been a bit more specific about the location? North of Vittinge, that could be anywhere.”

  “Isn’t that a bit too far from Stockholm?” Zack asks.

  Deniz types Kungsholmen and Vittinge into Google Earth to get a route description.

  “No,” Deniz says. “It takes about an hour and a quarter from here, so something like fifty minutes from Arlanda. That fits fairly well with what Nang Mon and Ah Noh said about how long they were in the car after arriving in Sweden. Anyway, there doesn’t seem to be another pump like this closer to Stockholm.”

  “Look at this,” Sirpa says. “I’ve found a better map.”

  Zack and Deniz lean in front of the screen. It’s an article about the water pump, published on the Forestry and Agriculture website.

  “Can you enlarge the map?” Deniz says, as she adjusts her own search on Google Earth.

  Sirpa clicks and the map fills the screen, and in less than a minute Deniz has found what she’s looking for.

  “Look, it must be the thing sticking up from this meadow. That matches the picture in Sala Allehanda as well, doesn’t it? Fields and meadows in the foreground, forest, and those two buildings in the background.”

  Zack examines the satellite image on Deniz’s screen. If Yildizyeli wanted a base where they would be left undisturbed, they’d certainly found it. There aren’t many houses in the border district between Västmanland and Uppland.

  The farm with the water pump is relatively close to a main road. A series of four smaller roads lead from there to the house, probably narrow gravel tracks. The drive ought to take between five and ten minutes, matching what Sukayana Prikon said. One of the roads carries on quite some distance, but the other three all seem to stop at separate little cottages in the forest.

  Zack thinks he’s seen something, and points at the screen.

  “Can you zoom in where that road ends?”

  That makes it easier to see the house. And, even better, the barn next to it.

  �
��It must be that one. A farmhouse and a barn. Just like Ah Noh and Nang Mon said.”

  There’s no time to lose.

  The Turks must know that Westberg’s car exploded in Skärholmen, and not on the way to their meeting. They might also be aware of what happened at Eastern Massage, and that the police will have spoken to the Burmese women.

  So what would they do then?

  “Sirpa, have you got a list of the phone numbers of the massage parlors controlled by Yildizyeli?” he asks.

  She points to a sheet of paper on the desk.

  “I want each of us to dial one of the numbers, right now. Okay?”

  He allocates numbers to Deniz, Sirpa, Niklas, and Douglas.

  Douglas says nothing. Just nods and follows orders as if he were at the bottom of the hierarchy.

  He killed his own friend.

  If anyone ever needed debriefing, he does.

  But Zack hasn’t got time to think about that now. There are more lives at risk.

  “Isn’t Rudolf here?” Zack says.

  “Right behind you, lad,” Rudolf says, heading toward them with a mug of coffee in his hand.

  “Great. Rudolf, can you call this number?”

  He reels off seven digits.

  “What do you want us to find out?” Deniz asks.

  “If any of them are open.”

  They each call a number. Total silence descends on the office as they wait for the calls to be answered.

  “Mine’s gone straight to the answering machine,” Deniz says.

  “Same here,” Niklas says.

  Douglas, Zack, Rudolf, and Sirpa are still holding their phones to their ears. Five rings. Ten. They hang up.

  “Let’s check the last three numbers as well,” Zack says.

  Two more answering machines, and no answer from the third.

  “They’re shutting down,” Zack says. “No doubt about it.”

  The others look at him quizzically.

  “Yildizyeli. They’re shutting down their operation in Sweden. Getting rid of the evidence and leaving. What do you think they’ll do with the girls in the forest?”

  He looks at the map on Sirpa’s screen.

  “Sirpa, can you print that out, please?”

  He walks over to the printer and waits. Deniz goes with him.

  “We’re going to need backup,” Deniz says. “And this time there’s no question of the rapid response unit not coming.”