What would it accomplish now if Luri shouted out the alarm? Chainicabada! Who apart from the heavenly angels would hear him?
Suddenly out of the crowd of shoppers the second cop appeared, the smaller, younger-looking one. It happened in an instant. Luri found himself shoved roughly off the sidewalk. The thug cracked him on the temple with a sharp chop of an elbow. Luri fell to his knees, stunned.
“Fuck off!” the man hissed in accented English, kicking Luri in the face for good measure. A nasty gout of blood spurted from Luri’s nose. He sprawled backward in the gutter slush.
Left behind, the clown-faced Vago had turned frantic and fell apart. He rushed up to Luri now, emitting unintelligible moans. The boy’s white greasepaint makeup was streaked with tears.
Luri pulled himself upright with a blood-stained hand. “Where is she?” he demanded in Romani. “Where have they taken her?”
The brain-damaged boy couldn’t speak, only mewl. His breath came in deep heaving shudders.
“Tell me!” Luri shouted.
3.
During the six-hour drive north from Stockholm to the reunion, Brand was startled to see a sign for a turn-off that read “Oslo.” Could that be Oslo, Norway? She realized she had no real grasp of the geography.
The seemingly endless journey wore on. The Tesla did not motor—it purred along soundlessly. Brand felt herself losing the battle against sleep. Next to her Lukas leaned his head against the passenger side window. His eyes were closed but she couldn’t tell if he was awake or asleep. She quickly slipped a tablet of Adderall into her mouth. She had come to like the bitter taste of the drug.
The sun hovered no more than a finger’s width above the horizon. The oblique angle beamed its feeble rays directly into Brand’s tired eyes. But by two-thirty dear old Sol appeared ready to give up the ghost. Sunset came with a spectacular slash of orange, set off by a purple belt of cumulus cloud.
Pretty, yes, but disconcerting. It was still the middle of the day! She had the whole night to look forward to. Her panicked interior clock struggled to adjust. She looked at her watch. Eight-thirty in New York City, time to start the day. Brand had been awake for twenty-two hours. And quite literally, miles to go before she slept.
Darkness rose to engulf the countryside. The lakes lost the light last. Brand still caught indistinct glimmers of their icy surfaces, dull silver coins scattered over the landscape. The air became black and impenetrable. Everyone spoke of the Land of the Midnight Sun. They failed to mention the other side of the equation, the midnight dark that arrived too early in the afternoon.
Four hours in, the terrain changed. The highway climbed into a range of foothills. Occasionally they passed through a village. She saw houses but no people.
“In America we have ghost towns,” Brand commented. “Here you have a ghost district.” Lukas didn’t answer. He was asleep. She had spoken to no one.
A heavy snow began to fall. Visibility narrowed to the twin tunnels of the Tesla’s headlights. There was no longer traffic. The sense of an all-encompassing stillness made Brand slow the car, pull over, and stop. She powered down the driver’s side window. An out-of-time feel took over the moment. She wondered if the Swedes had a word for the sound that falling snow makes during a blizzard.
The storm dropped a veil over the whole scene. They seemed to be nowhere. It was peaceful, death-like. Snow-laden branches drooped over the roadway. She switched off the headlights. The white-out of the blizzard instantly turned black. The surrounding darkness was as complete as any Brand had ever experienced. She hurriedly turned the headlights back on.
Attempting to raise her window again, Brand mistakenly gave a short blip to the one on the passenger side. The glass moved against Lukas’s resting head. He was rocked awake.
“Sorry,” Brand said.
Sleepily the man peered out at the blizzard and smiled.
“Welcome to Härjedalen, Veronika,” he said. “Do you want me to take over the driving?”
“No,” she replied quickly.
“Just keep a watch for any stray moose that might come our way.”
“Moose…?”
“The big creatures will be out in this. They look to avoid deep snow with those long wobbly legs. That’s what brings them out of the woods. They look for paths, plowed roads. You don’t want to meet one head on. In Sweden, all vehicle models are road-tested to see if they will withstand a direct collision with a moose.”
“Are you serious?”
“Yes, it’s true.”
“They don’t use a real moose in these tests, do they?”
Lukas looked at her. Brand wondered if he could read drug use in the clench of her jaw. “No, Veronika, no live animals are harmed. This is Sweden, after all. Though rare, such collisions do happen. They say if you don’t die from the impact, then the harsh acids exploding from the stomach of the moose will kill you all the same.”
Now it was Brand’s turn to stare over at Lukas. She put the Tesla in gear. The car sped up as one ghost moose after another emerged from the surrounding forests.
Gradually they drove out of the storm. Lukas directed her off the highway onto smaller secondary roads.
A half hour later he pointed out the driveway to the Dalgren homestead. As she turned into the lane, an unexpected wave of emotion crashed down on Brand. She almost let out a sob.
The ancestral home of her Swedish grandfather. Brand had never been there before, but somehow the house and its surrounding outbuildings felt disturbingly familiar. Could she be nostalgic for a place she never visited?
Memory drew her back to her childhood. She knelt on a plush green sofa in the New York farmhouse parlor of her grandparents, gazing at the black and white photograph that hung on the wall above. The scene in the photo, at once homey and foreign, exerted a power on her young self that Brand had wholly forgotten. Eight-year-old Veronika Brand imagined an entire fantasy world around
