The Tunnel Read online

  Carl-Johan Vallgren is one of Sweden’s best-loved writers. He has been awarded the Swedish August Prize for Best Novel of the Year, and his books have been translated into twenty-five languages. He’s also a talented musician with Warner Music.

  Rachel Willson-Broyles is a translator based in Minnesota, USA. She received her BA in Scandinavian Studies from Gustavus Adolphus College and her PhD in Scandinavian Studies from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Her other translations include Jonas Hassen Khemiri’s novel Montecore and Jonas Jonasson’s The Girl Who Saved the King of Sweden, among many others.

  Also by Carl-Johan Vallgren

  The Boy in the Shadows

  New York • London

  © 2016 by Carl-Johan Vallgren

  © 2016 Translation by Rachel Willson-Broyles

  Cover design © Ghost

  Cover photographs © Shutterstock

  First published in the United States by Quercus in 2017

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by reviewers, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of the same without the permission of the publisher is prohibited.

  Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use or anthology should send inquiries to [email protected].

  ISBN 978-1-68144-185-6

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Lucifer, 1964– author. | Willson-Broyles, Rachel, translator.

  Title: The tunnel / Carl-Johan Vallgren; translated from the Swedish by Rachel Willson-Broyles.

  Other titles: Svinen. English

  Description: New York : Quercus, 2017. | Series: A Danny Katz thriller ; 2 | Original Swedish edition (2015) has author’s pseudonym on title page: Lucifer.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016045279 (print) | LCCN 2017002526 (ebook) | ISBN 9781681441870 (hardback) | ISBN 9781681441863 (paperback) | ISBN 9781681441856 (open ebook) | ISBN 9781681441849 (library ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Drug dealers—Sweden—Stockholm—Fiction. | Private investigators—Sweden—Stockholm—Fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Mystery & Detective / General. | GSAFD: Suspense fiction. | Mystery fiction.

  Classification: LCC PT9876.32.A38 S9513 2017 (print) | LCC PT9876.32.A38 (ebook) | DDC 839.73/74—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016045279

  Distributed in the United States and Canada by

  Hachette Book Group

  1290 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10104

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, institutions, places, and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons—living or dead—events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  www.quercus.com

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Carl-Johan Vallgren

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Part 1 Stockholm, September 2013

  Part 2

  Part 3

  Part 4

  Part 5

  Part 6

  Part 7 Epilogue: Christmas, 2013

  Guide

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

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  PART 1

  Stockholm, September 2013

  He was sitting on a bench in Midsommarparken, hyper-aware of every movement around him. Nothing suspicious since he’d left the apartment half an hour earlier. A few nursery school children in yellow reflective vests were making a racket in the playground. He shifted position, moving into the shadow of a tree. He rubbed at a stain on his trousers. No idea where that came from. Lunch, when he fried two eggs in oil?

  On the corner of Svandammsvägen was the pub he liked to go to. Tre Vänner, it was called—Three Friends. The chairs inside were upside down on the tables. The pub wouldn’t open until evening; he could go there later and think through the middleman’s information. He liked the place. He had a glass of Murphy’s Irish Stout there on occasion, but his visits were irregular and he never went more than once a month. He didn’t want people to recognize him.

  That was one of the difficult things about his job, he thought. You could never tell anyone what you were working on. The fewer people who knew, the less risk of trouble. That was why he’d only had to pay for a fraction of all the stuff he’d done.

  His eyes roamed toward the metro entrance. A woman walked out of the doors: the Thai girl who’d moved in with his upstairs neighbor a few months earlier. She was black and blue and her right eye was swollen shut. He ought to do something about it. Their fights had escalated in recent weeks. The other neighbors were afraid of the guy. And his girlfriend seemed so helpless—she didn’t speak a word of Swedish and hardly seemed to know which country she was in.

  He looked at the clock. One hour and ten minutes left. Time to take off, if he wanted to be on the safe side.

  He bought a sandwich at the kiosk before heading down to the tracks. He swiped his SL card across the reader and passed through the turnstile as he ate. The green tile walls around the escalator reminded him of prison . . . Zoran would be executing a similar maneuver, but up in Tensta, on the other side of the city. Zoran had been out of the business for nearly a decade. He had taken classes to become a massage therapist, married a woman who didn’t take any shit, and settled down on the straight and narrow. Two little kids at home. Six and three. Crime was no longer his thing—he changed diapers. Fried up falukorv for dinner. Had a real life.

  Jorma had known him for over twenty years, since his days as a bouncer at the underground nightclubs in Hammarbyhamnen. They had done break-ins together, dealt in stolen vehicles, robbed four armored trucks. But that was a long time ago. Zoran had vanished suddenly, and he hadn’t heard from him again until three weeks ago. Zoran had called to pass along the middleman’s idea.

  He had reached the tracks. He took a right, heading toward the platform for northbound trains.

  As he waited, he discreetly studied the other travelers. He was being paranoid for no reason. An old woman with a cane was reading the timetables on the wall. Further along, a teenage couple were kissing. On the bench closest to him, a Finnish man in a pinstriped suit was talking on the phone. He could hear fragments of the conversation, something about a meeting with an IT firm and a business lunch later that day.

  He shuddered as he suddenly thought of his father, Harri. How he had spent his time boozing on park benches throughout the last few years of his life, before dying of a heart attack at barely fifty. A stereotypical Finn. Jorma had run into him now and then in Vällingby city center, with his sheet music and a bottle of dessert wine next to him on the bench, so smashed that he didn’t even recognize his own son.

  The train toward T-Centralen thundered onto the platform. He walked up to the first car, looking over his shoulder even though he knew everything was fine. No one was tailing him. The doors opened and he stepped into the half-empty car. One minute later, the train had passed through the tunnel to Liljeholmen.

  He was the only passenger to get off. The train from Norsborg came in on the opposite platform. It was crammed full of people from the outer suburbs. A babel, he thought as he crowded his way onto the train: people were speaking a dozen languages. There were young guys with African roots, two women in niqabs, an older Arab man with a hookah in a plastic bag on his lap. Poor people. Like the Finns back in the day, at the bottom of the social hierarchy.

  The journey went faster now. Hornstull, Zinkensdamm. Inner-city kids filled up the train, gymnasium students in super expensive brand-name clothing, or deliberately dressed down. There was hardly another city in the world where the class differences were as obvious as in Stockholm.

  A man in a yarmulke was standing next to the escalators at the exit toward Mariatorget; he seemed to be waiting for something. The guy looked like Katz, Jorma thought, the few times he’d seen his oldest friend wearing a skullcap. Katz had left half a dozen messages on his voicemail in the last week, as if he sensed what was up and wanted to convince Jorma to bail out.

  In the past year, Jorma had seen his friend more often than usual. Last summer’s incidents had brought them closer together again. The Klingberg Affair. Katz had been falsely accused of murder; Jorma had tried to help him. Eva Westin, their mutual friend from their days in Hässelby, had been dragge
d into it as well, as had her daughter. Everything had worked out in the end; everyone made it through and Katz’s name was cleared. But it seemed they had all felt a greater need to see one another since.

  He changed trains at Östermalmstorg, peeking back over his shoulder again before he continued toward Ropsten. He made a note of the deserted platforms; no one was boarding. The only people who used public transport around here were the people who worked in the neighborhood, the servants.

  He had a bad feeling again as he rode the escalator up to the Gärdet exit. He looked around cautiously. Two men in tracksuits were following ten meters behind him. The guy closest to him had a pair of headphones around his neck. Looked like a cop. He felt his heart beat faster.

  He started to walk to see how they would react. He pretended to be looking at the advertisements on the walls, and out of the corner of his eye he found that they were keeping pace with him. Police, he thought, or just a coincidence . . .

  As he approached the ticket hall, he thought about calling the whole thing off, going back home and telling Zoran that someone was tailing him and it would be best to lie low.

  He could see the turnstiles now, and the Pressbyrån shop on the other side. The escalator stairs flattened out; a few pigeons that had lost their way in the pedestrian tunnel were flapping up around the ceiling in fear. He took a left toward the lift and bumped into an old man with a Rollator; he mumbled an apology.

  The lift door was open. Without turning around, he stepped in and pressed the “down” button. As the door slid shut behind him, he turned his head. False alarm: the men in the tracksuits had passed through the turnstiles; they were laughing at something, conversing loudly, then they jogged off through the pedestrian tunnel. On their way to Gärdet, he thought, just as he was, but not to plan a robbery—to go for a run.

  They had set the meeting for three o’clock. Jorma arrived half an hour early. The sports fields at Gärdet were the perfect spot. There was a good view in all directions. Nowhere for cops to hide.

  He followed the pedestrian path above the fields. He was sweating when he sat down on a park bench. The enormous green below him was nearly deserted.

  A few joggers ran past, young upper-class girls with anorexic role models. A bald man with a dachshund on a lead disappeared into a grove of trees. He gazed out at the brick buildings of the Swedish Defence Materiel Administration on the other side of the fields. No suspicious movements. From a distance, the cars on Lindarängsvägen looked like toys.

  What was he doing here? Was he even sure that this was what he wanted?

  One year earlier, he had decided to quit. He had money saved up from old jobs. He’d been thinking of going back to work in construction again, maybe starting his own company. His third talent, alongside committing crimes and playing the piano: he was a skilled craftsman. I already made my decision, he thought. No more robberies.

  He had made himself unavailable: he changed addresses and no one knew where he lived. He had no home phone and could only be reached by email. He had slowly started to phase out his old life and the very thought of a continued criminal existence. And then suddenly Zoran contacted him.