“That’s near where you live. I checked the local directory. Strange, isn’t it?”
Katz felt a sudden unease at the thought that Klingberg had stopped his car at that particular spot. If he’d looked out the window that morning, he probably would have been able to see him between the trees on the other side of the park.
“Where did he drive after that?” he asked.
“Over to the industrial area by Ulvsundasjön, then he turned around and drove back to the city and wrote his so-called farewell email.”
According to Angela, Joel Klingberg had parked the car in a garage near Central Station, and his trail ended there. It seemed that he had taken a train south. There was a ticket to Copenhagen in his name for that day; he’d bought it himself online, but the Swedish Railways system couldn’t tell if it had been used.
She grew quiet and Katz’s gaze was caught up in her eyes, which radiated sadness and anxiety. His type, more than Klingberg’s.
“And why did you contact me?” he asked.
“I know it sounds strange. But it’s what Joel would have wanted.”
“You’re going to have to explain that.”
Angela Klingberg had never heard of Katz until one evening a few months earlier. Joel had mentioned him out of the blue as they ate dinner: Danny Katz, his old friend from his time in the army.
“He said that you were the only person he’d ever trusted.”
“He said that?”
“Yes: ‘The only person I’ve ever trusted in my whole life.’ I happened to think of it after he disappeared.”
Where had Klingberg gotten that idea from? It was true they had spent time together during their military service, but they came from two different worlds—Katz was from the gang world of the suburbs, and Klingberg was from a sheltered upper-class environment. On the weekends, after the weekly vocabulary exam, he was picked up by a private chauffeur and vanished back to his rich man’s life with his grandfather, behind tall garden walls in Djursholm. Katz had never gotten to know him on a personal level.
“I defended him in a fistfight one time,” he said. “Maybe that’s what he was referring to?”
“He never mentioned that. I think he meant something else.”
She took a package from the chair next to her.
“Also, not long before he disappeared, he received this. I found it a few days later, by chance. It was at the very back of his closet.”
It was a padded envelope with no return address, postmarked in Stockholm one month earlier. She opened it and placed the objects on the table in front of him.
“I don’t know what these are all about. But Joel ought to have said something. It seems so . . . strange.”
A square piece of cloth, about eighty by eighty centimeters, ocher-red and black, unfolded before Katz’s eyes. Embroidered in the middle was a naïve motif depicting two crossed arrows. And, to the right of the arrows, enclosed by a sequined frame made of rounded mirror fragments, was a genuflecting man sewn in coarse cross-stitching. Two fabric letters were glued under the motif: M.K.
“Initials?” said Katz.
“Don’t ask me. And there’s this . . .”
She touched the other object, a similar piece of cloth, but a bit smaller; the embroidered motif depicted a man surrounded by dogs that were licking his legs.
“I don’t even know if this has anything to do with anything,” she said. “It’s just so mysterious.”
“Did you show them to the police?”
“No. Like I said, there’s no indication of a crime. If you’ll excuse me a moment . . .”
She stood up and vanished in the direction of the restrooms. And Katz thought about that time again, in 1987, when he’d gone to the interpreter academy. Verba arma nostra: “Words are our weapon”—that had been their motto. And it was words they would be armed with—Russian ones: they were tested on a daunting amount of vocabulary each week. They completed six semesters’ worth of university-level Russian in ten months. Katz remembered the endless hours in the language lab, his studies in behavioral science and psychology, topics they were expected to have some knowledge of as interpreters in a war situation. He remembered his interrogator training—PBI, people-based intelligence, as it was called in military language—and a live drill on Gotland, when they’d practiced their skills on coastal commandos. He remembered that they’d watched a training film on skendränkning, which they would later call by its English name: waterboarding.
It was incredible, he thought now, that they hadn’t reacted to what seemed to be a lesson in torture. In the film, a Swedish ensign had tied a towel over the airways of an anonymous man, who was bound to a hospital gurney with his head tilted backward. The ensign had poured water over the towel. The reaction was immediate: convulsions, violent retching. The subject, the ensign explained, while facing the camera and continuing to pour water over the man’s face, experiences drowning because he can’t breathe and he inhales water: “This method doesn’t cause any physical harm, but the experience is extremely unpleasant. Waterboarding is not expressly forbidden in Sweden, though it might be comparable to unlawful coercion.”
For his part, Katz had been most astounded at finding himself where he was—the only one who didn’t come from a high-class family—and he was confused by the fact that he’d been selected at all, much less handpicked.
He looked over to the bathrooms, but Angela Klingberg still hadn’t come out.
And Joel . . . he, too, had been an outsider, but for different reasons, still dazed by family tragedy. His parents, like Katz’s, had died when he was young; they’d gassed themselves to death in the garage of their manor-like country home in Sörmland. After that, Joel had lived with his grandfather, Gustav Klingberg, founder of Klingberg Aluminum, who was at that time a graying patriarch who ruled the family empire with an iron fist. He had died a year or two after they’d been discharged; Katz had seen an obituary in the newspaper.
But the underlying family tragedy had happened even earlier: his brother had vanished in the early ’70s, and that was the incident that had driven his parents to suicide just short of a decade later. The pain and guilt seemed to be carved into Klingberg’s being; they defined who he was. He was only a bit older than Katz, but he had the posture of an old man, always running away from the pain, from the guilt of being the one who survived, the one who was left behind, escaping into theory, his studies, the Russian vocabulary.
Only once had Klingberg told him about the incident, a very brief description of how his brother had been carried off by a strange woman at a metro station in Stockholm and had never been found. There wasn’t a day since that he hadn’t asked himself what had really happened, who or what was behind it, whether it was the work of a lone madwoman or whether several people were involved. Had it been an extortion scheme gone awry—although as far as Klingberg knew, his family had never received a demand for money—or were there perverts involved, maybe pedophiles?
It was as if his brother had left his shadow behind, he’d said. Imagine, Katz, his body is gone but his shadow is still here.
When Angela Klingberg came back from the restroom, Katz could tell she’d been crying. She sat down at the table again but avoided his eyes.
“I want you to try to find out what happened to him,” she said resolutely. “I’ll pay well. If there’s anything Joel and I have a lot of, it’s money.”
She was fiddling with something inside her handbag—a pen, he saw. And then he remembered the muddled letter he had sent to Klingberg fifteen years earlier, when he was at his very worst, the letter asking for money, the begging letter that Klingberg had never answered, or that perhaps had never arrived.
“It’s not easy to trace missing people,” he said. “Especially if they don’t want to be found.”
“I just want you to give it a try.”
“I don’t even know where to start. It’s not my area of expertise.”
“Your background is in intelligence, isn’t it
?”
“Is that what Joel said?”
“He said that the army arranged embassy jobs for you after your military service.”
“That was a long time ago. I was a military interpreter, translator, and computer programmer. Nothing special. I’m still a translator. That’s what I do—I translate documents and articles for people who are willing to pay for them. I’m not a secret agent. Or a private investigator.”
But she already knew what he knew: that he needed the money.
“Joel would have wanted it to be you. I need your information. Bank account. Mailing address. Home phone number, so we can communicate as effectively as possible.”
Katz took a business card from the inner pocket of his jacket. It contained all the information she needed. As he handed it over, he realized he had doodled on the back. A heart and a flower. For some reason, he found this embarrassing.
Katz made a living from his way with languages. On translating and transcribing documents into understandable Swedish for clients who had greater purposes for that information. Military and external analysts, businesses that wanted to keep an eye on competitors or be at the cutting edge of their business. Sometimes purely technical translations that demanded perfect rendering in order to be useful to the client. It was not a glamorous job. Hour after hour in front of the computer. Hour after hour of reading, writing, note taking, looking things up in dictionaries.
Katz’s most recent position had been at Capitol Security Group in Solna. The founder of the firm, Rickard Julin, had enticed him to come to the company just as he’d started to get his head above water ten years earlier. But they had met each other long before that, in the early ’90s, when Katz had been working as a military interpreter and Julin had been serving at the same consulate.
Later that decade, as the cuts in the military reached their peak, Julin had resigned and started the firm with a group of risk capitalists. At that point, Julin and Katz hadn’t been in contact in several years. Katz had been destitute, living on the streets, occupying himself with a painfully protracted suicide, until, incredibly enough, Julin had chanced upon him, managed to get him into a treatment center, and then offered him employment. But Katz had never felt at home there. After a few months in an office cubicle in Solna, where he translated articles from Russian military journals for Capitol’s clients in the defense industry, still bewildered at how life had taken such a strange turn, he had resigned and started his own business. Generously enough, Julin hadn’t been angry; instead, he made sure that Katz received assignments he couldn’t take on himself, jobs that were outside his own field of expertise.
Capitol was one of a handful of companies in Sweden that had special authorization to work with personal security details. They also dealt with travel escorts, camera surveillance of property, the tracing of funds, background checks on people—so-called due diligence—and also what Angela Klingberg was looking for: searching for missing persons. So Katz wondered if he had been right to accept the job. He ought to have sent her to Julin, who had the resources Katz lacked. On the other hand, he needed the money.
This thought was still occupying him as he returned to his office, sat down at his desk, and looked out across his little world: the two computers, the visitor’s chair that never received visitors, the bookshelf with its binders and technical dictionaries, the safe on the wall where he kept sensitive material. One of his assignments in the spring had been for a pharmaceutical company. The company had ordered an investigation into illegal sales of their medications on Eastern European Internet sites. Katz’s task had been to find material that could potentially be used in a trial. The information he gleaned from following transactions between virtual wallets was enough for the company to start legal proceedings. But this was hardly the sort of information—about Slavic languages, Russian pirate sites, and how the Internet worked on the other side of the Baltic Sea, about hidden information-gathering, advanced rootkits, cloud computing, VPN tunnels, and how to sneak past firewalls—he needed to search for a vanished businessman.
He sighed and took out the padded envelope Angela had given him, fished out the pieces of cloth, and laid them in front of him on the desk.
The motifs were mysterious: a man genuflecting in front of two crossed arrows. Another man, his legs apparently being licked by dogs. A religious thing, or just decorative objects, crafts of some sort? It wasn’t even certain they had anything to do with Klingberg’s disappearance.
He took the first one and held it up to the desk lamp. The fabric looked old. It was worn. The stitches had started to come loose on the back. Antique? Klingberg could afford to collect precious objects if he wanted to, after all. The men on the canvases were embroidered in black thread, and something about their stylized physiognomy carried his thoughts to Africa. Slaves, Katz thought, without really understanding the association; black people, imprisoned.
He put them in the desk drawer, pushing away the memory of Angela Klingberg’s endlessly sad eyes as she introduced herself to him at Ritorno. Instead, he started up his computer to do an image search on his old army comrade.
An instant later he had Klingberg before him in full-screen format. It was a photograph taken in connection with a shareholders’ meeting about a year earlier. Joel was standing beside his uncle, Pontus Klingberg, the CEO of Klingberg Aluminum. Behind them was a group of suit-clad men with champagne glasses in their hands. Pontus Klingberg was holding a bound volume of papers under his arm: the company’s annual accounts, according to the caption. And then Joel, in the dark uniform of the business world, with a tie, handmade shoes, his hair thinner than when Katz had met him and without the glasses he’d worn back then, but with the same aura of being lost.
Why had he started to talk about Katz a few months after the photo was taken? “The only person he had ever trusted”?
Perhaps it did have something to do with the incident Katz had mentioned to his wife, after all: that Katz had once defended him in a fistfight.
It was during their basic training in Karlsborg. Another conscript, a paratrooper recruit, had attacked Klingberg at a fast-food stand. Compared to those types, people like Klingberg were nothing more than bookworms, know-it-alls, four-eyes, and former student-council members—which, surprisingly enough, was often accurate. Katz had hesitated at first. He had decided to make a break with his old life as a fighter. But, on that night, something had made him forget it: Klingberg’s defenselessness.
Klingberg had been terrified, unable even to run away. And it had woken a primitive protective instinct in Katz. He knew he had nothing to be afraid of. Not because he was faster or better trained than the large elite soldier in front of him, but because he had learned to ignore all rules. At the same instant the guy in front of him had started to shove the frightened Klingberg, Katz had taken a step up and head-butted him in the face. In the next, he had broken one of the guy’s kneecaps by kicking it full force and had thrown him to the ground and smashed the Coke bottle in his hand against the back of his opponent’s head. It had all been over in less than ten seconds.
Incredibly enough, he had got away with it. No charges. There wasn’t even a report filed. Perhaps his victim’s shame had been too great.
Afterward, Klingberg had been fascinated. Where had his coldness and ruthlessness come from? Where had he learned to fight? And Katz had told him about his years in foster care, the gang crime, his school problems, about the little “Jew boy” who hadn’t allowed anyone to mess with him, about a life that had been the exact opposite of Klingberg’s.
It was somewhere around this point that their friendship had begun. The incident had taken place just a few weeks after they’d joined up. Klingberg had clung to him after that.
He minimized the photo and reached for his phone. He dialed Julin’s direct number. Three rings later, he had him on the line.
“It’s Katz,” he said. “I wonder if you could check out a few things with the police.”
He briefly described Jo
el Klingberg’s disappearance and the assignment he’d received from his wife, and he heard Julin’s hearty laughter when he heard that a language and computer nerd like Katz was on Julin’s turf; then he heard his characteristic hemming and hawing, the expected objections that he didn’t want to use his contacts without cause but that he would see what he could do.
“I want to know what sort of investigation they started. It seems that they looked at his GPS, for example, before they decided to stop investigating. It’s possible that his wife is on a wild goose chase. But I want to know if there was something else that caused them to shelve the case. And if I can’t get anywhere with this in a few days, I promise to send her on to you or someone else who knows what they’re doing.”
“Don’t underestimate yourself, Katz. Look at it as a chance to broaden your horizons.”
“If you promise to help me.”
“I’ll see what I can find out. Just have some patience.”
It’s for the best, Katz thought. Julin had contacts he didn’t.
It took only a few hours for Julin to obtain the police material on Klingberg’s disappearance. The investigation had been dropped after twenty-four hours, and no description of Klingberg had been issued. There was nothing to suggest that a crime had been committed. There was no information stating that anyone in the Klingberg family had been contacted by a kidnapper. An investigator had dutifully called the hospitals to see if Klingberg happened to have been involved in an accident, but he didn’t get any leads. It looked undeniably like a voluntary disappearance, and the police had no reason to investigate further. Joel had sent an email to his uncle Pontus Klingberg, the CEO, saying that he would be traveling for an unspecified amount of time. According to the police report, this had made company management more angry than worried. Several important contracts were about to be brought to a close, and Joel, as the chief counsel, should have attended the signings.
The Boy in the Shadows Page 3
