Anders Roslund - Box 21: A Novel

BOX 21

Anders Roslund and
Brge Hellstrm

SARAH CRICHTON BOOKS
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
New York

Sarah Crichton Books

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

18 West 18th Street, New York 10011

Copyright 2008 by Anders Roslund and Brge Hellstrm

All rights reserved

Distributed in Canada by D&M Publishers, Inc.

Printed in the United States of America

Originally published in 2004 by Piratfrlaget, Sweden

English translation originally published in 2008 by Sphere,

Great Britain, as The Vault

Published in the United States by Sarah Crichton Books /

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

First American edition, 2009

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Roslund, Anders, 1961

[Box 21. English]

Box 21 / Roslund / Hellstrm. 1st ed.

p. cm.

Translated from the Swedish.

ISBN-13: 978-0-374-28295-0 (hardcover : alk. paper)

ISBN-10: 0-374-28295-1 (hardcover : alk. paper)

1. ProstitutesSwedenFiction. 2. RevengeFiction. 3. Human trafficking victimsFiction. 4. Human traffickingSwedenFiction.

5. CriminalsSwedenFiction. 6. PoliceSwedenFiction.

7. Stockholm (Sweden)Fiction. I. Hellstrm, Brge, 1957 II. Title.

PT9877.28.R67B6913 2009
839.738dc22

2009004449

www.fsgbooks.com

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

EXTRACT FROM AN ACCIDENT &
EMERGENCY PRIMARY ASSESSMENT
SDER HOSPITAL, STOCKHOLM

... Unconscious female, unknown identity, brought in by ambulance 09:05. Neighbour called emergency services to flat at 3 Vlund Street.

She clung to her mothers hand.

During the last year she had done this a lot, held on tight to her mothers soft hand and felt it squeeze hers back.

She didnt really want to go to the big city.

Her name was Lydia Grajauskas and she already had a sore tummy when they boarded the bus outside the ugly bus terminal in Klaipeda. The further away from home they went, the worse she felt.

Lydia had never been to Vilnius before she had only imagined it and looked at pictures and listened to peoples stories but now she didnt want to go there at all, because it wasnt her kind of place; she had nothing to do there.

It was more than a year since she had seen him.

She was about to turn nine and she had thought a hand grenade was a kind of cool present.

Dad hadnt noticed that she was watching him. He had his back turned to her and Vladi, and he was excited about being with the other men; they all drank and shouted and hated the Russians. She was lying top to tail with Vladi in the sofa, a huge brown thing with a worn corduroy cover that smelt horrible; they used to lie there sometimes when school was closed and Dad was working. They listened. There was something special about the mens loud voices and guns and boxes of ammunition that fascinated them, that made them hide on the sofa to listen and watch more often than was perhaps good for them. Dads cheeks had been so red, which they werent normally, only sometimes at home, when he had been drinking straight from the bottle and sneaked up behind Mum and pressed himself against her bum. Of course, they had no idea that Lydia noticed what they were up to and she didnt let on. Hed always drink just a bit more and Mum would have a taste too, her mouth to the bottle and then theyd go into the small bedroom, chase everyone out and close the door.

Lydia liked to see her dads flushed cheeks. At home or with the other men, polishing the weapons in front of them all. He seemed more alive then; he didnt look as old as normal, after all he was twenty-nine.

She peeped cautiously through the window.

Her stomach hurt even more when the bus started and then hurtled along roads full of potholes, and every time one of the front wheels bumped over an especially rough bit, her seat shook and something sharp jabbed her insides, somewhere under her ribcage.

So this was what the big world really looked like. The unexplored world, the whole stretch of land between Klaipeda and Vilnius. She had never been allowed to go before; it was expensive, and the important thing was that Mum went, as she had done every second Sunday for almost a year, with food and the money she had somehow managed to get from somewhere. It was hard to tell how Dad really was, what he would say. He probably missed Mum more than her.

On the day with the hand grenade, he hadnt even seen her.

Leaning forward out of the sofa, she had rooted around in the boxes of plastic explosives and grenades, shushing Vladi with her finger against her lips; he had to be quiet because the men didnt want to be disturbed. She had known by then how all these things worked, the explosives, the grenades and the small handguns. She always watched when they practised, and if she had to, she could handle the weapons at least as well as some of the men.

She kept staring through the dirty window of the bus.

It was raining hard, so the windows should have been clean, but instead of washing away the dust, the raindrops whipped up a spray of brown mud that made it more and more difficult to see anything. The road was better now: no potholes, no jolting and no more jabs under her ribs.

She was actually holding the grenade when the police broke the door down and burst into the big room.

Dad and the other men shouted to each other but they were too slow off the mark, and just a few minutes later theyd been pushed up against the walls, handcuffed and beaten. She couldnt remember how many police had come into the room, maybe ten or even twenty. All she remembered was that they kept screaming zatknis again and again and that they carried the same kind of gun that Dad sold, and that they won before they even started.

Their shouts had mixed with the sound of gunshots and breaking bottles.

All the noise had hurt her ears and then, suddenly, when Dad and his friends had been pinned to the floor, a strange silence fell.

Perhaps that silence had stayed in her memory more clearly than anything else; it had been a silence that had seemed to take over everything.

Mums hand. She grabbed it and pulled it closer, making it rest on the seat next to her, and she held on until the skin went white and she couldnt squeeze it any harder. She had clung to her Mums hand just as hard when they sat outside the courtroom in Klaipeda, during the trial against her dad and his friends. She and Mum had sat there holding hands, and Mum cried for a long time when the court official in a grey suit came and told them that all of the accused had been sentenced to twenty-one years in prison.

It was a year since Lydia had seen him. He mightnt recognise her now.

She prodded the cloth bag Mum had brought with her. It was bursting with food. Mum had told her about the porridge that they had to eat, almost always a nasty, mealy mess. Mum rattled on about vitamins, that youd get ill if you didnt get enough and how everyone in that place needed them and thats why people who came to visit tried to bring good food.