“Who are you . . . aina or something? A cop? Get out of here or you’ll have major problems.”
The guy had a tattoo on the knuckles of his right hand, three Gothic-style letters: FTL—Fuck The Law. He probably belonged to an older gang. This was just something he did on the side, training up little kids, steering them into a network of criminals.
“Does the boy owe you something?” Katz asked calmly.
“He’s our hossen, our slave.”
“Okay. What do you want for him? A thousand?”
“Like we’re gonna pawn off our slave? Fuck off. Final warning.”
The guy fumbled for something in his jacket pocket—in the worst case, a knife. Katz wondered if he should deck him before it was too late. Not a kid, he thought. I can’t hit a child. Then he saw what the guy had been after: a pack of gum.
He felt the draw of heroin again. The longing for that warmth, that indescribable sense of homecoming as the drug entered his bloodstream. Like meeting God, he had thought thirty years earlier when he took his virgin hit, when he was even younger than the boy in front of him.
“Here.” He fished two five-hundred-kronor bills from his wallet. “I’m buying him.”
The leader started to laugh, but stopped when he saw the Star of David around Katz’s neck.
Bad plan. He might as well have been wearing a yarmulke and blowing a shofar for Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year.
“Okay, Jew-man,” said the leader guy as he took a step forward and grabbed the bills. “You can borrow him. Pound him in the ass. Sell him to the Israeli army if you want. They like that shit, you know . . . torturing kids. We’ll take him back soon anyway.”
The gang vanished off toward the city center. Cracking voices shouted something incomprehensible in immigrant Swedish. The boy was still standing there in front of him, hands over his eyes.
This was all just an evasive maneuver so he wouldn’t feel the pull of heroin, Katz thought as he walked down toward Järvafältet with the boy. He had stopped crying and was just sniffling a bit, looking uncertainly at the grown man by his side.
“Are you from around here?” Katz asked. “From Husby?”
“Nearby.”
“What about the others?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know them.”
“What’s your name?”
“Alexandru.”
“Tell me, Alexandru, what was that all about?”
It was a type of kidnapping. The gang had bought the boy from a different gang a few weeks earlier, and had used him to buy goods on skimmed credit cards. They had promised him money, a certain percentage, but he hadn’t received any so far. He lived with his mother and two younger siblings in a tent camp outside Akalla. They were Roma, and had come to Sweden from Romania one year earlier. The boy’s mother had contacted a relative in Stockholm who’d said he could line up jobs. But there weren’t any. She and a girlfriend supported the family by begging and collecting empty cans.
“What about your dad?” Katz asked.
“He took off to Italy when I was little. I hardly remember him.”
They turned onto a different street. Oslogatan—every street out here had a Norwegian name. Katz remembered that from the news reports about the uprisings last spring. This suburb had exploded into violence. Young people who had no great prospects for the future had burned cars and gone on the attack against riot police. Katz understood them better than he wanted to admit . . . the feeling of having been sentenced to a life on the fringe. And yet there was always someone further down the ladder.
“Don’t you go to school?” he asked in Romany. “Pirés ande e scoala?”
Alexandru smiled at him. “Where’d you learn that?”
“In the place where I grew up. There was a Roma boy there, and he taught me Romany. Pen mange akaná. Now answer me . . . do you go to school?”
“Sometimes. A couple of teachers hold lessons in an apartment on the weekends. Swedish Roma. They do it for free. But it’s not a real school; you have to have a residency permit to be allowed to go there.”
“Well, you’ve learned Swedish quickly, anyway.”
“I had to. Mum only speaks Romanian and Romany . . . but she’s sick. Something to do with her stomach. I have to help her and interpret when we visit the doctor. She’s always afraid—that the police will tear down our camp again, or that they’ll send us back.”
The boy was dirty; it had probably been a long time since he’d had a shower. Cheap sneakers. A threadbare down jacket, ill-fitting jeans . . . charity clothes. His front teeth were crooked; he needed braces.
“Do you know the names of the guys in that gang?”
“Yeah, some of them.”
“The leader, for example, the one I gave the money to?”
“Miro.”
“Do you know how I can get hold of him?”
“I don’t know where he lives. They took charge over me from some guys in Akalla, so he could be from there. Or from here. I’ve seen him on the square a few times, with older guys. Ones with tattoos.”
Career criminals, Katz thought. It had worked the same way in his day. Young guys from the suburbs ran errands for the older ones, handling stolen goods, holding on to weapons and drugs because they weren’t of age and couldn’t be convicted. They learned to skip school picture day so they would be harder to identify. He and Jorma Hedlund had done the very same thing once upon a time . . .
Jorma. He could have used his friend now, someone to tell him it was a bad idea to visit Ramón. But he hadn’t answered his phone for the past week.
They had reached Järvafältet. The high-rises of Hjulsta looked like a mountain range far off to the west. To the south, Tensta and Rinkeby were visible. The old northern-suburb ghettoes.
“Have you seen your mother since they took you?” Katz asked.
“They let me go at night once I’ve collected their stuff. Then they pick me up in the morning, where we live. Usually someone is standing there waiting. I told Mum we were friends.”
He looked down at the ground, as if in shame.
“What else is it, besides telephones?”
“Clothes. Sunglasses . . . Sometimes they rent me out to other people. Once it was to a couple of junkies who wanted me to do something for them.”
“What was that?”
“It doesn’t matter, because it never happened.”
The boy gave him a resigned look.
“Mum wants to go home again, it’s not anything like we thought it would be here. But we can’t. My older sister is gone. She ran away after they had a fight. It’s been five months, and we have to find her first.”
Katz took a business card from his wallet and handed it to him.
“Call me if you need help. With those guys, for example. I get that you don’t want to go to the police. But what would happen if you got caught?”
The boy nodded as if he hadn’t realized what was on the line until just now: his family would unavoidably be dragged in, his mum, his sisters.
“So I can trust you?”
“I’ll have a chat with that Miro, and after that he’ll leave you alone.”
Katz stayed where he was as the boy vanished through a pedestrian tunnel. He seemed so fragile as he walked. His back was bent under his troubles; his steps were heavy and uncertain.
The blinds were pulled and the windows on one side were covered in cardboard. The apartment was on the ground floor of a five-story building.
Katz punched in the door code and walked into the stairwell. Ten years since he had got clean. He didn’t know what he was doing there.
I ought to be at home, he thought as he listened to the television sounds from inside the apartment, immersing myself in my work. For the past month he had been working as a security consultant for a Norwegian telecoms company that was expanding into Russia. They had their own sysops, but none had sufficient command of Slavic languages, so Katz had got the job. He had translated manuals that could now be read
in Russian, Polish, and Czech. He had inspected the programs’ source code and checked the servers for traces of unauthorized access, backdoors installed by hackers, or strange activity in the firewall log files. He had phished the employees to check out how easy it was to open a port. He had run into Ramón outside a lunch place in the city center during a break from work and it had been like a trip back in time.
The volume on the TV was turned down when he rang the doorbell. Someone shuffled across the room and peered at him through the peephole.
“Who is it?”
It was a hoarse, drawling junkie voice.
“Katz . . . a friend of Ramón’s.”
The rattle of a security chain being unlatched. The woman who opened the door was in her mid-twenties. She had nicely chiseled facial features. Long brown hair. Blue almond-shaped eyes. She was beautiful, if you ignored her chalky junkie skin.
“Come in,” she said. “Ramón said you would be coming by.”
He followed her into something resembling a living room. She plopped down on a stained sofa. Her paraphernalia was on the table in front of her: spoon, syringes, a bottle of water. A suitcase stood nearby. A can of pepper spray was poking out of its outer pocket.
“How do you know Ramón?” she asked.
“From before.”
“I’ve never seen you, so it must have been a long time ago.”
“We hung out in the same circles for a while. Over a decade ago. How do you know him?”
“We met at a shelter. I was streetwalking, and Ramón sold junk. Romantic, huh? He’s somewhere nearby. You’ll have to look around.”
There were no windows at all in the next room. Katz fumbled for a light switch and turned on the ceiling light. In one corner was a shopping trolley full of stolen car stereos. Spatters of blood on the wallpaper, diluted with water, left by people cleaning out their syringes.
The woman was cooking horse in a soup spoon when he returned to the living room. A couple of pencil drawings lay on the floor next to her: self-portraits, surprisingly naturalistic. One of them included Ramón.
“I went to art school for a while,” she said as she sucked the solution into a syringe. “You can, like, see people better if you draw them—their posture, their facial expressions . . . their soul.”
She gently pressed down the plunger to get rid of the last few air bubbles, then inspected her arms for a good vein.
“Can you leave me alone?” she said. “I hate it when people watch me shoot up.”
Katz continued his search in the kitchen. Piles of ad circulars lay on the floor. There were dirty dishes everywhere. The image of the cooking drugs lingered in his mind.
He opened the door to a bathroom. Something long and thin moved on the floor behind the toilet. It took a second for him to realize what it was: a snake. Junkies and all their animals.
When he returned to his starting point, the woman had rolled up her trousers and was using the cord of the TV as a tourniquet. Katz remembered his own shamelessness, how he had been transformed into a receptacle for the drug, just a vessel for heroin. He felt the craving again. Tried to resist it.
“Fucking A, I can’t find a vein! I have to get this shit in me now.”
At last she got a flash, in her calf; she drew blood as a cold sweat dripped down her forehead, pressed the plunger all the way down, booting to get every last microgram. She had a butterfly tattoo right over the injection site. A yellow swallowtail. It looked like she had skewered it with the needle.
Then she put down the syringe and blinked at him sleepily. A thin rivulet of blood ran down her leg. He heard a sound from the other end of the hallway: someone was coughing. A door he hadn’t noticed before was ajar.
This room was neater than the others. Two easy chairs and a small desk stood by the covered window. Paperback books in a bookcase. A plastic crucifix and a Chilean flag hung over the door. Ramón was sitting on a mattress on the floor, looking like he’d just woken up. Fifteen years earlier they had done burglaries together, apartments and suburban homes, stealing food from shops when they were desperate, beef fillets that they sold to restaurants staffed by Chilean friends of Ramón’s. They had stayed in shelters or places like this one. Ramón, a Catholic, had worn a silver cross around his neck. Katz wore a Star of David. Ramón had jokingly called him “Christ-killer.” The guy had been a bit of a pathological liar, Katz recalled. He would lie about anything, big or small—not unusual in junkie circles; people felt the need to embellish their life stories. Later he had prostituted himself, but that was after they’d lost contact in the endless chaos of the junkie lifestyle. Katz had heard rumors that he had sold himself to rich gay men.
“Sorry, I didn’t hear you,” he said. “Have you been here long?”
“A while. I chatted a bit with your girl out there.”
“Jenny . . . Nice, right?” He took a sip of water from a glass on the floor. “And artistic. If she hadn’t doped her life away, I think she could have been something. I really fucking like her . . . Did you meet Harry too?”
“Who?”
“The snake. Haven’t seen him for a while. Shit, it was so great to run into you the other day. Didn’t think you were still alive.”
There were a dozen packs of heroin on a piece of glass on the desk. Next to those was a digital scale for weighing the powder. And substances for diluting it. Phenazone powder, finely crushed paracetamol. It seemed that Ramón cut the drugs himself.
“Got some business going,” he said when he realized what Katz was looking at. “I got lucky, for a change. None of that fucking brown shit you have to dissolve with citric acid. It’s up to me to decide how strong to make it.”
He winked as he stood up. There was a mobile phone on the rug next to him. He poked it under the mattress with his foot.
“My girl and I came into some money a while ago. More or less by chance. And if you’ve got money, you should invest it, right? Try to start up a business. We’ve even got a stockpile. Don’t want too much of it at home in case the cops show up. Maybe we could work together again?”
Katz remembered the incident in the bathroom at Burger King on Medborgarplatsen fifteen years earlier. The miserable state he’d found himself in. His filthy down jacket, baggy jeans, his body so emaciated he looked like a human skeleton. Ramón had loaned him the paraphernalia because he’d lost his own. He had cooked the junk over the sink, drawing the solution into the syringe through the filter of a cigarette. He had bought the stuff from a dealer he knew. Then he was suddenly hit by withdrawal. He had rushed himself, making the dose stronger than usual.
Ramón grew suspicious when he didn’t come out after fifteen minutes. He had managed to talk the staff into opening the door. They found him unconscious on the floor, bleeding from a wound on his forehead. Ramón told him later that they had been paralyzed, terrified of a junkie’s blood after years of propaganda about the risk of infection from HIV-positive drug addicts. Ramón had been the one to give him CPR until the ambulance finally showed up. Katz had been clinically dead for several minutes before they stuck him with a shot of adrenaline and his heart started beating again on the ambulance ride to Södra Hospital . . .
“You’re a smart guy, Danny. Weren’t you a military interpreter? You know a bunch of languages and all that. Seriously, you could get in on this, become a partner! Who knows how big it will become.”
Ramón walked over to the desk, grabbed a few packs and a plastic-sealed syringe, and handed them to Katz.
“See for yourself,” he said. “But it’s strong, so take it easy.”
Katz got another glimpse of Jenny through the door to the living room. She was lying on the sofa, numb. She looked like she was sleeping, though he knew she was wide awake behind her half-closed eyes, that the horse had transported her miles into her own body. She had changed into different clothes. An expensive-looking gray jumpsuit. He assumed she was going out to work.
He took the drugs and stuck them in his pocket.
> “First time’s free, Katz, you know the deal. We want satisfied customers.”
Ramón flashed him a businesslike smile, then bent down under the desk and fiddled with something. He stood up and gave him a few more packs.
“In case you want to share with friends,” he said. “Test it out and see if you want in on this train. Anyone who uses this will definitely be back to buy more.”
The guy named Miro and two men were waiting for him in the walkway outside the house. The men appeared to be around thirty. Wearing hoodies and camouflage trousers. One of them had a dragon tattooed on his neck. The other was morbidly obese.
“Got a problem?” said the man with the tattoo.
“Sorry?”
“I said, do you got a problem?”
Katz took a step back.
“Have you been shopping at the Chilean’s?” said the other. “Or were you just doing the junkie slut?”
“I know Ramón. Why do you ask?”
“Tragic dude. Horse junkie. Thinks he’s a drug kingpin.”
The man with the tattoo smiled.
“What about you? You went off with a young boy a little bit ago. Bought him for a thou. Are you a pedophile?”
Katz didn’t respond. He looked around for an escape route but there was none. He felt the draw again, the easy way out, because you didn’t give a shit about anything, could withstand anything.
“The old man’s a Jew,” said Miro. “And Alexandru is a gypsy.”
“Everyone’s welcome here. Even Jews and gypsies . . . if they have cash. What did you want with that kid, Alexandru? Did you screw him?”
Katz looked at the man. He was carrying a gun. He just knew it. His years on the street had taught him all about that sort of crap.
“Give me your wallet.”
The man put out his hand, and Katz did as he was asked.
“Now go home. And next time you come around here, leave your Jew star in the city, at the Jew bank where you work. I don’t give a shit about that sort of thing. But it bothers other people.”
The Tunnel Page 5
