Joel had started whimpering again. He unstrapped him and put him down on the floor. Then he turned in the other direction, toward the platform. That was empty too. Just the rear lights of the train as it disappeared toward Alvik. He turned toward the stairs again and the ticket hall below. A lone senior citizen with a cane was reading something on a bulletin board.
He called the boy’s name:
“Kristoffer!”
He was nearly whispering at first, as if he had lost his voice. Then, loudly, in a full panic:
“Kristoffer! KRISTOOFFEER!”
His voice echoed off the walls, and then, as far off as if it were coming from another world, another time, he heard Joel, who had started to cry again.
PART 1
Stockholm, May 2012
For Katz, it all started with a melody. Six notes in each phrase, floating between major and minor:
I hurt myself today / To see if I still feel . . . Dull and distant, as if the music, or he himself, were underwater. I focus on the pain / The only thing that’s real.
To his surprise, there was a strange woman squatting next to him, holding a spoon. She didn’t seem to hear the music, or else she didn’t care. Too desperate, Katz thought; the brain had an incredible ability to shut out anything that wasn’t essential.
She handed him a ten-pack of five-milliliter syringes from a handbag. The standard orange-topped kind, which matched the veins in most people’s arms. She had separate implements for herself. Tuberculin syringes with detachable needles. To draw blood from the feet or hands, where the veins were smaller. He sneaked a look at her arms. Long-sleeved blouse. The same trick he used. Always long-sleeved shirts with cuffs, to hide the scars.
The needle tears a hole / The old familiar sting / Try to kill it all away / But I remember everything . . .
He thought he saw his parents at a distance, under the bridge abutment. Anne and Benjamin, arm in arm, always so bound up in their love, always keeping everyone else out—not least him. He hated them for it, his Norrlander mother and his Jewish father. Wasn’t it true, even though he never wanted to admit it? Then they disappeared, dead as they were, behind a pillar marred with graffiti.
He looked around. Was this where he lived now, was he back at square one, on the street? On a dirty mattress next to a ventilation grate under a bridge in northwestern Stockholm?
Someone had used stones to mark a sort of property line around the sleeping place, or maybe it was meant to depict a symbolic bedroom wall. A pair of boots stood nearby on a piece of tarp. His own?
He looked down at the water, toward the swimming area and the marina on the other side of the sound. Traneberg Bridge, once the world’s longest concrete-arched bridge, rose above him; it had been built at a time when a belief in the future ruled the country, but nowadays it was a refuge for addicts and the homeless.
“Dol Fool,” “Drag,” and “Sork,” he read on the pillars. The taggers had thrown their spray cans on the ground afterward. Farther off, there was a scattering of small cotton balls; one might mistake them for flowers in the May warmth—daisies, he thought.
Katz remembered the desperate addicts at Kottbusser Tor in Berlin fifteen years earlier, toothless Kotti junkies who crouched by the canal, boiling old cotton balls to squeeze out the last bit of junk, collecting enough for half a shot of brown horse to mix with citric acid. People who took water from puddles on the street, or from toilet tanks in public lavatories. He’d done it, too, he had to admit, when he was at his worst. He’d been lucky to survive.
You could have it all / My empire of dirt . . .
The melody went on, mechanically somehow, from far away. A kingdom of shit, he thought; he wanted to give it away—he thought he’d already gotten rid of it.
“The tar is plugging up the syringe, fucking crap heroin.”
The woman was desperate. And he was too, he realized. That terrible bodily longing for the kick, to kill everything with the buzz. The longing for emptiness. Timelessness. The bodily homecoming. The woman swore . . . goddamn fucking shit . . . as she fumbled with the equipment. Where had he met her? He recognized her, but he didn’t remember where from.
A newspaper lay open on the ground. And on it was a soup spoon with a bent handle, to lessen the risk of losing the dose. He could see the fear in her eyes now, and he suggested that she snort a little of it to calm down.
“Shut up, don’t mess me up . . .”
“Fuck it, then.”
He didn’t care anymore. He prepared his own dose instead, taking the bottle of water out of his jacket pocket, filling the syringe, and emptying it into the bottom half of a Coke can, where the heroin was already waiting. Cooking, waiting. He tore a piece of cotton from the tampon she’d taken out of her bag, he rolled it into a ball for a filter, and pulled the dose into the syringe. He was surprised at how sure his hand was after all these years; it was like swimming or cycling—once you’d learned how, you could do it for the rest of your life.
He rolled up his sleeve, took the nylon stocking she’d laid out and knotted it just above his elbow. He tapped the last few air bubbles out of the syringe and pressed the plunger down until it touched the solution.
It had been ten years, and every motion was still there. And he was just as good at injecting with his left hand as with his right; he’d practiced it because it had been a matter of life and death back then, because he took so much junk that he constantly had to rotate injection sites and he had to be able to shoot up into his right arm if the left one didn’t respond, and to do it quickly and painlessly before withdrawal made it impossible.
Sunlight filtered in between the pillars of the bridge. A metro train rushed past thirty meters above his head, slowing down as it approached the station in Alvik. It was a sunny afternoon; the warm May weather had arrived suddenly after a period of cold and snow that had lasted late into April.
Did he live here now? Was he homeless again? No, his office was only a few hundred meters away in Traneberg—he’d just been there, bent over his computer . . . or had someone changed the timeline, placing the end at the beginning, or the other way around?
That wasn’t right. He knew who he was: Danny Katz, forty-four years old, only child of two parents who died young. Former interpreter at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Former civilian translator and computer programmer with the armed forces. Former homeless drug addict. But he was on his feet again. Self-employed. Nothing remarkable—he ran a small translation firm and received freelance assignments from private firms and, sometimes, the military. It didn’t bring in that much money, but it was enough for him to break even, to pay for the two-room apartment in the same building as his office, for his modest life with no excesses, because excesses would inevitably lead him back here, to a life on the street.
Farther down by the water, where his parents had just disappeared, there was now a man. Naked, it seemed. It was as if he had built-in binoculars and could zoom in on him. Yes, a naked man, wounds on his legs, leaking blood. He didn’t understand it. The vision. A sign of some sort. But when he blinked and looked again, the man was gone.
He fixed his gaze on the inside of his forearm instead, tapping it a little with his fingertips, pulling a bit at the tie, and found the vein he needed. He aimed the needle at his arm at a twenty-degree angle, toward his heart; always in the direction of his heart. A good angle, he thought, not too steep; otherwise, he risked going through the vein.
He didn’t understand. Why was he doing this? Ten years after he finally managed to get clean. Ten years of NA meetings, ten years of daily struggle. The short time on methadone, the first treatment program down in Ytterjärna, paid for by his former military colleague Rickard Julin, who had dedicated so much power and prestige to getting him into the system again, giving him a job, managing the old network, smoothing the way for him, putting him in contact with clients. That would all be in vain now. He was throwing it all away.
This couldn’t be right. What had his last assignm
ent been? An IT firm had requested information about a Belarussian telephone company; he had translated a couple of balance sheets for them, as well as some articles from a business journal in Minsk.
He hesitated, the needle one centimeter deep in his arm, mechanically pulling back the plunger to see if he’d hit his mark. Dark-red blood, never bright red, then you’ve missed the vein. He didn’t want to inject the dose into tissue by mistake, then it would just swell up and hurt terribly, and it would take forever for the kick to hit him.
Now!
He had found it; the blood was dark red, trickling into the syringe. He pulled off the tie with his teeth and injected. The rush came immediately. He collapsed around his own skeleton, let his flesh rest on the scaffolding of bones and cartilage, and his eyelids came down like blinds. The feeling was divine; he realized how much he had missed it. He pulled the needle out slowly; the blood squirted up on the front of his shirt, but he didn’t care anymore—he just took a handkerchief out of his jacket pocket and pressed it against the site of the injection.
There was a different man standing where the naked man had stood, and he was wearing a black suit and a wide-brimmed hat. He blinked until the man disappeared like the dream-vision he likely was. Another train rumbled above his head.
He looked at the woman again. Her dose was ready now, and she held the syringe up to the light and emptied it of bubbles. Her raven-black hair framed a symmetrical face with vaguely Asian features. Blue-green eyes, beautifully formed mouth. White skin. Like Snow White.
“I recognize you,” he said. “Where have we met?”
“We don’t know each other . . . you just think we do.”
Strange answer, he thought, as she searched for a vein, first at her hip; she pulled her pants and burgundy underwear down a bit, but then she changed her mind and her broken nails felt around up by her jugular. Too close to the carotid artery, he thought, please don’t inject it there!
To his relief, she found a vein in her right upper arm instead and injected the dose with a resolute expression. Right away she started booting—pulling the plunger back and forth, drawing out blood which she then reinjected, to rinse out every microgram of the dose.
“So we just met right here?” he slurred, gesturing at the mattress.
“I just happened by. But you live here.”
“Under the bridge?”
“Yes—shit, you’re in bad shape. And people are looking for you. Someone wants to set you up.”
He nodded as if accepting what she’d said, as if he had already submitted to his new reality.
“So who are you?”
“Me? I’m no one . . .”
Her pupils were so small he could hardly see them. She had collapsed and was half lying against him; her underpants stuck up above her waistband at the back. Lifeless. He wondered if she’d overdosed, if he should call an ambulance, ask them to bring Narcan, which they could inject straight into her chest to bring her back to life.
Then he saw the bite marks. A line of bloody wounds around her neck made by teeth, bites that had ripped through the skin. Like that time with Eva Dahlman, his first girlfriend, whom he had been accused of beating unconscious and biting like a wild animal. He had been convicted for it. Sixteen years old. He’d been sent to yet another reform school, where things had finally turned around for him: he had decided to make a break with his old life, get away from crime. But it hadn’t been him! He hadn’t been in a condition to do anything like that, no matter what the technical evidence had shown.
I wear this crown of shit / Upon my liar’s chair / Full of broken thoughts / I cannot repair . . .
Where was the music coming from? He looked around, but he couldn’t find the source.
And the woman who seemed to have fallen asleep on his lap—who was she? He stroked the black hair away from her face, laid her on the mattress and got up.
Five notes in each phrase now, the shifts between major and minor, just a melody, no words anymore; he had added those in his head. He recognized it. Nine Inch Nails’ “Hurt.”
The notes . . . getting stronger and stronger, seeming to reach him from the bottom of his consciousness, erasing his surroundings, the bridge, the woman, the dirty mattress, the syringes, the junk. It was the ringtone on his mobile, he remembered triumphantly as he climbed ever faster toward the surface of consciousness, but just as a melody, without Trent Reznor’s bitter voice. And the melody kept playing until he managed to grab the phone, which lay next to him on the floor of his apartment.
He sat up and answered the call. He saw the gray light filtering in through the blinds of his bedroom window; he listened to the voice on the other end of the phone.
She sounded like the woman under the bridge, like Eva Dahlman, except at the same time she didn’t. As if the timeline were out of order.
Angela Klingberg was a strikingly beautiful woman. Beautiful in a way that must cause her problems, Katz thought as he sat down across from her in one corner of Ritorno, the old café on Odengatan where they’d arranged to meet. Considering to whom she was married, it was natural that she was dressed so elegantly. He made note of the Hermès handbag at her feet, the expensive gloves on the table, her angora sweater, her discreet makeup, and the almost as discreet diamond bracelet around her left wrist. She was about thirty-five, blond, lanky, with an aura that was simultaneously sad and attentive. He felt a stab of pain at the thought that she was taken, and he was surprised by that feeling, by how low it was—but also how honest.
Until her phone call that morning, he hadn’t even known she existed. Actually, despite the wedding ring on her left hand, he had a hard time picturing her married to Joel Klingberg—or maybe it was just difficult to picture Klingberg being married at all.
As he took off his jacket and hung it over the back of the chair, he wondered why he’d agreed to meet her. Curiosity had to be one reason. Twenty-five years earlier, when he’d just managed to break away from his life as a juvenile delinquent, he and Joel Klingberg had both been students at the Armed Forces Interpreter Academy. They had been in the same barracks during their basic training in Karlsborg, and after that they shared a room for two intensive semesters of Russian studies in Uppsala. What little he knew about Klingberg’s life since then was only what he’d read in the papers—gossipy reports about the upper-class circles he moved in; pictures of parties where Klingberg, with his somber looks, didn’t seem to fit in; items about a real-estate firm he and a few friends from his boarding school in Sigtuna ran on the Riviera for a short time, just to get some business experience. After that, he’d studied law and done a year at the London School of Economics, before he was brought into the family company, Klingberg Aluminum AB, and disappeared into the anonymity of the business world.
“Thanks for taking the time to meet me,” said the woman in front of him, aiming an embarrassed smile across the table.
“No problem. How did you get my number?”
“It was on Joel’s computer, in his contacts.”
Which was strange too: Katz couldn’t picture Klingberg having any plans to contact him.
“Would you like something, by the way? Shall I order for you?”
“No, thanks. Just tell me why we’re here.”
So she told him.
Joel Klingberg had disappeared three weeks earlier, by all indications—according to the police—voluntarily. There was no reason to search for him actively, nor was there any evidence that a crime had been committed. He had left the couple’s home on Östermalm on the morning of Sunday April 22 to run a few errands, and he simply hadn’t returned. She had called his mobile every day since, she explained, but only got his voicemail. And there was something like a farewell letter.
She took it out of her bag: an email, printed out on A4 paper, originally sent from Klingberg’s phone. Katz quickly read through it—a few lines saying that he was going away for an unspecified amount of time to be alone and think. He apologized for not having the guts to say this
to her in person and wrote that she shouldn’t worry about him or try to find him.
“I got it four hours after he disappeared,” she said. “And it’s not like him. Joel’s not the type to run away from his problems.”
“So what do you think happened?”
“I honestly don’t know.”
She folded up the paper and put it back in her bag, and somehow Katz was reminded of Klingberg’s girlfriend from their time at the interpreter academy, a girl their age whose upper-class mannerisms had bothered him but whose name and appearance had been erased from his memory.
“The police think he left because of a fight we had that morning. About kids . . . or rather, a lack of kids. Joel wanted to wait. man in his forties, married ten years, and he still wants to wait! I’m sure you know about his baggage, what happened to his brother. I told him that his fear of responsibility is because of that—his fear that it might happen again. That’s what we were fighting about.”
Oh yeah, his brother, Katz thought, as he followed her gaze, which moved nervously from object to object on the table: the coffee cup she wasn’t drinking from, a forgotten newspaper that was open to the page of horse-racing results, her gloves—the same color as the nails on her beautiful hands. The brother who had disappeared, the center that everything circled around, the loss that Klingberg hauled around like invisible shackles.
“I know how it sounds,” she said. “A wounded man leaves his argumentative wife to get some peace and quiet for a while. But, as I said, it’s not like him. We had already made up by the time he left. He said he was going to do a few errands and would be back for lunch. We had even made a reservation at a restaurant. It seems that I’m the last person who saw him. And the only one who refuses to believe that he took off voluntarily. According to the police, he amused himself by driving around in his car for a few hours . . .”
Klingberg had taken the car after leaving the apartment. They had examined the GPS log, she explained. It seemed he had driven around at random, from their home to Skeppargatan, circling the city for a while, before he continued to Kungsholmen. He had stopped at a gas station on Thorildsplan, driven on through Stadshagen up to the Kristineberg metro station, and then on to Alvik and Tranebergsparken, where he stopped at the public tennis courts for a few minutes.
The Boy in the Shadows Page 2
