Katz found the redhead on the street outside the shelter. It was the same woman he’d seen talking to herself in the common room. She was standing on the steps and smoking. She seemed calmer now, but appearances could be deceiving.
“What do you want?” she asked when Katz stopped next to her.
“I’m looking for Jenny.”
“So?”
“She’s dating a friend of mine. I need to get hold of her.”
The woman stubbed out her cigarette against the wall and rubbed off the ash spot with her elbow. She glared furiously at him.
“Why would I even talk to you in the first place?”
“Maybe it would be worth it?”
“Go to hell!”
She took out another cigarette, lit it, and blew a smoke ring, then another that passed right through the first one. She seemed pleased with her achievement.
“What would you say if I gave you five hundred kronor if you help me?”
“Stick it up your ass. I’m not going to tell you shit. I don’t even know who that chick is. Hel-lo, who the fuck are you even talking about? Jenny-fucking-who? Go away before I die of boredom.”
She sank down, her back against the door, hugging herself. She looked at Katz, fixing her eyes on his face and then his hands, and his wrists with the pale scars left by old needle sticks.
“Old junkie, huh? Jesus, my radar is shit. I thought you were a cop at first. Or a trick. Or both . . . that’s not unusual these days. Do you have anything? I’m starting to feel bad . . .”
“Tell me a little about Jenny first. How do you know her?”
The woman gave him a skeptical look. She took a dirty cotton bud from her pocket and frantically dug it into one ear, which was covered in a rash; the earring fell out but she left it on the ground.
“What do you want to know? We worked Malmskillnadsgatan together for a while. We shot the shit while we waited for customers. We took turns buying coffee and bumming cigarettes off each other. But it must have been a year since I saw her. And I don’t even know if Jenny is her real name. She calls herself something different every time. Amanda, Jessica, Jennifer, Therese . . . like she can’t decide who the fuck she is, or she really doesn’t know. I met her for the first time on Vasagatan, about two years ago. Outside the hotels. Tons of tricks there. I talked to her a little because she was so young . . . asked why she was doing it, wouldn’t it be better for her to go home to mummy and daddy. But it was like talking to a wall.”
The woman gave Katz a reproachful look.
“You don’t have anything, do you? Forget it, I’m not telling you any more.”
Katz dug in his inner pocket and took out one of the packs Ramón had given him.
“It’s yours,” he said. “Now keep talking.”
“What can I say? We each kept an eye on the cars the other got into. You have no idea the kinds of things that can happen if you’re not careful. But then we lost touch. She and her guy came into a ton of drugs, and why would she have to work the streets after that? If she’s whoring now, she’s doing it in nicer places.”
The woman stopped talking, picked something up off the ground—the earring she’d dropped—and put it in her pocket. She scratched her ear with the cotton bud again.
“Lucky enough for her, I guess. She’d started doing some sick shit for drug money. Pervy stuff. And she wanted me to join her, but I still have some honor left, dammit. Better to hang out on Malmis and meet up with plain old square johns. Fuck you very much!”
“Her boyfriend is dead,” Katz said. “Ramón. I have to get hold of her and ask her how it happened. It’s personal.”
He offered her the drugs.
“Try checking at the porn place around the corner,” she said. “They might know something. The last time I saw her she was hanging around there. Trying to get customers outside the booths . . . following dudes in if they wanted company. The supervisor usually looks the other way. But like I said, that must have been a year ago.”
She grabbed the drugs and stuffed them into her underwear, then disappeared back into the shelter.
Blue Dreams was on Alströmergatan, not far from the City Mission, between a musical instrument shop and a chess club. Katz heard lift music mixed with exaggerated moans as he came through the door, turned a corner, and found himself in a dark corridor with video booths on either side.
A broken emergency exit sign blinked a dull green light. The walls were painted black; water pipes and electric cables ran along the ceiling.
He peered into the closest booth. A television screen, a vinyl-clad chair, a roll of paper towel on a holder, and a waste-paper basket on the floor. Coin slot and credit card machine next to the screen. The booth smelled faintly of air freshener.
A man slid past him and disappeared down an adjacent corridor—the guy with spots on his face. The same one who’d been begging for money at the shelter.
Katz rounded a corner and came to an unmanned cash register in front of a set of double doors; the doors were open. On the other side of them was a cinema. He didn’t see any people, but he did see a couple of smaller rooms at the back of the stage. A cramped opening seemed to lead to a narrow passage behind them.
He peered into one of the spaces. A big-screen TV, a sofa, and an easy chair. There were holes drilled in one wall; they opened out onto the corridor beyond the rooms. Glory holes. For men to stick their cocks in so that someone on the other side could suck them off.
On the movie screen, a haggard woman with silicone breasts was taking a faceless man into her mouth. She gagged as he shoved his cock too far down her throat. Katz closed his eyes, feeling disgusted and slightly turned on at the same time. When he looked up again, he realized that the guy with the spots was in the passage behind the theater. The man stared at him in fear and then disappeared further into the darkness.
At the back of the building was a sex shop. A young girl in a tracksuit was sitting behind the register and reading a gossip rag; she took no notice of Katz.
Various types of sex toys were arranged on a sale table: whips, dildos, ball gags. Lacy underclothes hung from a rack.
One whole wall was covered in DVDs, sorted by category. One cover, in the bondage section, depicted an Asian woman on all fours with a muzzle covering her face. A young man had her on a lead. Another few movies were facing out on a shelf marked “bukkake.” One of them caught Katz’s eye: a group of masked men formed a half-circle around a bound, naked woman. It was impossible to see what she looked like, because her face was covered in semen. It took a moment for him to realize what his attention had been drawn to: the tattoo on her calf, a swallowtail butterfly . . .
He took the DVD to the till.
“Rent or buy?” the woman asked without looking up from her magazine.
“Buy.”
“Two hundred.”
Katz paid cash but didn’t walk away.
“Will there be anything else?”
“Are you in charge here?”
“No. And unfortunately my supervisor is busy right now.”
“Tell him I’ll wait here until he shows up.”
The woman looked at him uncertainly. Then she got up and vanished behind a curtain. She was back less than thirty seconds later.
“My boss will be out soon,” she said. “Who can I say is here?”
“That’s not important. Say that it’s about a mutual acquaintance.”
A woman of around thirty-five came out of the back room. She was wearing jeans and a T-shirt, with her hair up in a ponytail. Attractive, Katz thought, if it weren’t for her chilly gaze.
“What can I do for you?” she said in a businesslike manner.
“I’m looking for a girl who hangs out here. Jenny.”
She looked at him indifferently.
“That name doesn’t mean anything to me.”
“She sells sex. Or at least she did, a while ago. In the video booths or the private rooms.”
The woman laughed.
Katz nodded, making an effort to keep up a friendly tone of voice.
“I’m not here to create problems for you. I just want to talk to her. It’s about a private matter.”
He took out the pencil drawing and showed it to her.
“Nice portrait,” said the woman. “But unfortunately I’ve never seen that person. If you’ll excuse me, I have work to do.”
“She’s in the movies you sell.” Katz moved the DVD so she could see its cover.
“We sell hundreds of movies here. Are you saying I’m supposed to keep track of everyone in them?”
The girl at the register had moved away from them. She was paging through a binder beside the coffee maker. She peered nervously at her boss.
“It’s important that I get hold of her.”
“You don’t seem to understand what I’m saying. I want you to get out of here. As I see it, you’re disrupting my place of business. You have one minute to leave before I call the police. They’re usually quite helpful when we have trouble with a customer.”
Katz took the movie and stuck it in his jacket pocket, giving a short nod before he headed for the exit. He ran into someone in the dark outside the wanking booths; it was the guy with the spots. He heard him mumble something that might have been an apology. But it was impossible to make out the words among all the moans from the porn videos.
There were no pre-credits on the DVD—no title or production information. The action began abruptly. About fifteen naked men standing in a room—the parlor of a luxury turn-of-the-century flat.
The men were looking at a door that was ajar. Some of them were gray-haired, with flabby bodies; others were younger and fit. All of them were wearing black masks on their faces.
Judging by the light falling in from the bay window, it seemed to be early evening. A crystal chandelier with prisms the size of hen’s eggs hung from the ceiling.
The door opened. Through it Katz could see the back of a person who was speaking to someone; the person bent down, took something from the floor, and stepped aside, out of the frame. The camera continued to film the door. A few seconds passed before a woman revealed herself.
Jenny.
She was naked. She kept her hands behind her back, or perhaps they were bound. Her gaze was perfectly vacant. She slowly walked to the center of the room. She stopped under the chandelier and looked around. She seemed aware of the camera by this point. She looked over at the men who were standing with their backs to the wall, some with erect cocks.
There was the sound of a camera shutter—someone was taking still shots in the background. The room was bare; the only piece of furniture was the easy chair that stood on the parquet floor in the middle of the room. She sat down in it, turning her face upward. Katz looked into her eyes again as he sat there before the computer in his office. She was high . . . in another world.
He heard heavy breathing, perhaps from the person holding the camera. The image zoomed out. The group of masked men formed a circle around her and began to masturbate. Katz didn’t know how long this went on, maybe five minutes, maybe less. They weren’t doing anything else, just masturbating, and they seemed to be waiting for each other. Then they moved closer to her face, still with their cocks in their hands. Someone cried out in excitement, and then they suddenly came, almost on command, all over her face and upper body.
Four variations on the same theme followed. Joint ejaculation. But it was more painful to watch each time. At one point she was bound with zip ties and had a dildo driven up inside her as the men formed a ring around her—this was the photo on the cover. At another point, they collected their ejaculate in a drinking glass, which she drained, gagging. Once she had a noose around her neck.
He stopped the disc when he couldn’t stand to watch any more. There was no information about where it had been filmed. Homemade, he thought—the cover seemed to have been made on a plain old copy machine.
He went to Wikipedia and found an article on “bukkake”: “Japanese for ‘splash,’ a sexual act commonly found in pornography. The act involves several men simultaneously ejaculating on the face or in the mouth of a woman.”
Then he googled Blue Dreams. The company had a website to advertise their space; it showed images of the interior of the booths and the cinema. There were private rooms and a common sauna. They also sold porn films and sex toys online.
There was a search field on the menu. Katz entered the word “bukkake.” A hundred titles popped up, but all of them were foreign. Then he searched “gangbang” and “group sex,” but found nothing of interest there either.
Then he rewound the film and paused just after the French doors into the parlor opened, shortly before Jenny appeared in the frame.
The bay windows with their hand-painted glass. The chandelier, the decorative stucco on the ceiling, the dark gray door that stood ajar. The masked men waiting in the background . . . He studied the back of the person who seemed to be speaking to Jenny just before she approached the men. The person who had bound her hands behind her back. It was difficult to make out details.
He enlarged the picture. The resolution became worse, but now he was certain he knew who he was looking at.
He pressed play again and noticed how she bent down, took something from the floor, and moved off camera.
Katz pressed “eject” and put the DVD back in its case. He pictured the sequence in his mind. The same movements as two days earlier. The dirty cotton bud. The earring that had fallen off and landed on the ground.
A whole new part of the city had emerged between Bällstaviken and Sundbyberg city center. Since the last time Katz had visited the area, on an errand he could no longer recall, the industrial buildings from the previous century had been renovated and turned into flats. Fancy apartments with private docks had been built at the water’s edge. The old Signal factory had been turned into a shopping center.
He parked his car on a street close to the Grand Garbo nightclub and walked to the building he was looking for. The window in the stairwell offered a view of the train tracks and Esplanaden. An armada of graphite-colored clouds had sailed in from Lake Mälaren.
A solidly built man in a wheelchair answered his knock at the door. His steel-gray hair was in a crew cut; his eyes were nut brown and his face was lined with deep furrows. He had cauliflower ears, and his nose was flattened like an old boxer’s. He resembled Benjamin, but this was more thanks to his aura than his appearance.
“Come in,” he said brusquely. “I just put in my hearing aid. If you’d shown up fifteen minutes ago, I wouldn’t have heard you.”
Katz had called the night before, so he was expected. The old man rolled into the apartment ahead of him. Katz looked around as they passed a kitchen and a spartan living room. A bottle of whisky stood on a table next to a chessboard that was ready for play. A collection of sports trophies shone down from a bookcase.
They made their way to a glassed-in balcony, where Epstein parked his chair with a certain amount of difficulty.
“Benji’s boy,” he said with a small smile. “I have to admit, I was surprised to hear from you. I lost touch with your father when you were a little boy. My job took me to Skåne and my whole family came along. I saw the obituary when he died, but I didn’t make it up in time. You and Anne were the only people mentioned. Do you have any siblings?”
“No, unfortunately I don’t.”
Epstein took an asthma inhaler from his pocket and placed it on the table.
“I don’t smoke anymore,” he said with a grimace. “My doctor has forbidden it. This is the closest I get.”
He poured a glass of mineral water and handed it to Katz. An IV port was taped to the back of his wrinkled hand.
“Drink up,” he said. “It’s as hot as the Negev desert on my balcony . . . and don’t worry about my port-a-cath. It’s for the chemo. A tumor the size of a peanut
in my left lung.”
The old man eyed him intently, as if he were looking for traces of Benjamin.
“Where in Skåne did you live?” Katz asked, for lack of anything better to say.
“Malmö. I liked living there for twenty-five years, until the anti-Semites started making too much noise. Young Muslim guys on the outskirts of town have got the idea that Jews are the root of all evil. Some fanatics even believe in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Most of them have never met a Jew in their whole life, and yet they know everything about us. It’s like with Shakespeare. Three hundred years had gone by since the Jews were driven out of England when he wrote about Shylock, and yet that guy knew exactly how greedy and shameless they were . . . I’m not a religious sort. I haven’t worn a yarmulke since I was a child. But in my opinion, everyone has the right to dress as they like without suffering threats or abuse. That goes for Jews as much as it does for Christians and Muslims.”
“I didn’t know things were that bad.”
“They’re worse. The former government commissioner down there, whose name I refuse to utter, really stirred the pot. He claimed that the congregation had been infiltrated by Sweden Democrats and suggested boycotting Sweden’s match against Israel in the Davis Cup for political reasons. This same person had no problem receiving business delegations from one-party state China, occupier of Tibet for sixty years. And when the extremists tried to vandalize the synagogue, he encouraged the congregation to distance itself from Israel’s occupation of Palestinian lands in order to put a stop to the persecution. Have you ever heard the like? People whose families have been Swedish citizens for generations are supposed to apologize for what is going on in a country three thousand kilometers away to make their persecutors leave them alone?!”
Epstein picked up his inhaler and took three deep puffs to calm himself down.
The Tunnel Page 8
