“I was born with a manual gear shift in my hand,” Brand replied.
“Really?”
“Well, no, not really, Hammar. But I learned to drive a John Deere on my grandparents’ farm.”
“A tractor is not the same,” Hammar said mildly. But he allowed Brand to have her way.
The ancient Saab sedan had rolled off the assembly line way back in 1970. Brand thought the fifty-year-old Model 96 looked comical. It was bulbous in all the wrong places, like a car designed by clowns for use in a circus routine. But inside and out the vehicle had the appearance of being lovingly maintained.
Hammar had updated it with all the latest bells and whistles. When Brand opened the door, the key was already in the ignition. An alarm dinged just as it would in a modern vehicle. With the engine already running, the car was warm inside.
Brand immediately stalled out on her first two tries at getting the vehicle moving. On the journey back to the highway, she rode the clutch mercilessly. The Saab’s owner wore a pained expression for the entire trip.
They headed southeast, toward Stockholm and the coast. A dense cloud cover settled in.
8.
A half hour after departing the Dalgren homestead, Brand glided onto the empty E45. Thick stands of Scots pine and Norway spruce braced both sides of the roadway. The trees looked scrawny and struggling. The asphalt ran arrow straight. Ugly, dirty brownish-gray snow lay packed hard on both sides of the road.
The Saab proved woefully underpowered. Hammar informed her it was the rare production vehicle that boasted three cylinders—not four, not six, not eight. Such limited capacity did not allow Brand to drive at her usual breakneck pace. The car did not sail. It chugged.
They drove in silence for a few kilometers. Then out of nowhere Hammar asked, “What is the retirement age for the NYPD?”
She gave him a sideways look. “You want to know why I left the force.”
“It’s strange,” Hammar said. “In America you say ‘police force’ and here we say ‘police service’.”
“Allt är bättre här,” Brand pronounced in halting Swedish. “‘Everything is better here.’ That’s your national motto, isn’t it?”
Hammar smiled dutifully. “And yes, I would like to know,” he said after a pause. “Why did you quit your job with the New York City police? You are in your late thirties? That’s young to retire.”
“Twenty and out, as they say,” Brand answered the question. “Full pension after twenty years.”
“Oh.” Hammar looked not entirely convinced. The idea that Brand had already logged twenty years of experience in the NYPD would have meant she would have had to join out of high school. So her reference to twenty years rang false. She saw Hammar doing the math in his head.
“The decision to part ways was something of a mutual thing between me and the department, okay?” Brand said. “Are we done with me? Can we change the subject now?”
Traffic slowly increased as they proceeded toward Stockholm and the coast. Double tractor-trailers roared by the little car. A few of them were emblazoned with the word “VOSS.” The red letters were outlined in black.
The shadowy figure in the photo that Elin had left for her loomed in her mind. Brand tried to summon up a comment that Lukas Dalgren had made on the drive to the reunion, which was now not even twenty-four hours in the past. There had been semis on the road then, too.
Lukas had briefly pointed out a Voss truck. “Voss Transport is the largest trucking company in Sweden, third largest in the EU. They are Dalgren neighbors. Our family does not enjoy good relations with the Voss clan. It is a long feud even from back to the war.”
Brand assumed that the war Lukas had referred to was WWII. Now, as Voss trucks rumbled past the Saab, she questioned Hammar.
“They are a very big company,” he told her. “Trucking, yes, transportation, even shipping, but now they are in construction and finance, too.”
“Lukas mentioned something about the Voss family living right next door. I guess he meant near the homestead in Härjedalen. Have you ever run into any of them?”
“Oh, I know the Vosses.”
Brand glanced over at him. “You do?”
“Not in the sense we are friends. But it is a big, spreading clan, active in the local area and in Sweden as a whole.”
“And you are familiar with them how?”
“In my capacity as an attorney, I have several times faced Vosses in court,” he added. “Some in the family, perhaps the majority, like to operate in the gray area between legal and criminal.”
“There’s a gray area?” Brand asked. “I’ve always tried to keep the line pretty clear.”
“You know, in Sweden, twenty families rule the whole country. We turn our face to the world as a socialist democracy, but if we look in the mirror we see Wallenberg, Kamprad, Olsson and Lumberg, big names of hereditary dynasties that hold all the wealth.”
He indicated one of the big Voss trucks. “The Vosses are most definitely not in the very top tier. Not in the upper one percent, as they say in America. But they are up there. They make their money in transport, though in the past decade they have diversified aggressively. The phrase in English is ‘fingers in a lot of pies’, isn’t it?”
“And politics, is that one of the pies?” Brand asked.
“Oh, yes. Politics, finance, power. Certain Vosses are involved in shadow operations on the extreme far right. Down through the years a few radicals in the clan have fallen into trouble with more cautious family members. This is usually because of association with these extremists. Often wealth and right-wing views go together.”
She had now transferred the old snapshot to the pocket of her vest. Her grandmother used to spit out the name as though it were a curse. “Loke Voss!” she would exclaim. Her vituperation stood out because Klara Dalgren was not normally a demonstrative person. She rarely had a cruel word for anyone.
“Lukas told you right,” Hammar said. “The
