The Boy in the Shadows

by Carl-Johan Vallgren

  “Can’t you see his face?”

  “No. And it sure as hell wasn’t raining that day either. I checked on the camera at the entrance. It was fucking cold. It was below freezing, even though it was April, but it wasn’t raining. The sun was out full force!”

  The man was aware that he was on camera. He pulled up his hood so it covered his whole face. Then he looked at the ground and started walking quickly toward the exit. He opened the door to the stairwell and disappeared.

  “Not much action, huh?” said the guard, and he nodded at the screen, where the tape was still rolling but nothing else was moving. “Not so much as a pigeon or a rat. We usually have lots of those. And gangs from the suburbs. Junkies. It’s like a fucking zoo here at night. What’s all of this about, anyway? Is there something important about that guy? This is the second time I’ve shown someone that tape.”

  “Who else did you show it to?”

  “The cops.”

  Katz was mystified. Angela Klingberg didn’t think the police had looked at the surveillance video. Julin hadn’t mentioned it either.

  “When?”

  “Just a few days ago. A chick. She was actually pretty cute. In good shape. In her forties. Probably a dyke. She showed ID, but I don’t remember her name. Actually, maybe she was a DA.”

  The guard reached for a can of Coke on the shelf, took a sip, and gave a nasty sneer.

  “Speaking of zoos, check out this clip.”

  He had clicked on another frame: a gang of teenagers walking in the stairwell. They stopped right under the camera. As if in response to an inaudible command, they took out cans of spray paint and started tagging the walls. It was over in less than a minute. Four walls, full of graffiti. One of them, a young boy with dreadlocks, turned to the camera and smiled before taking out a bottle of beer and throwing it at the lens, missing. Then they vanished down the stairs, and all that was left in the shot were the tagged walls and the shards of glass from the beer bottle on the ground.

  “Fucking scum. Did you see the monkey who threw the bottle? Know what I’ve started to think recently? That that Norwegian guy, Breivik, is right. All this multi-culti shit is going to hell. But people don’t have the guts to speak up. Even Åkesson and the Swedish Democrats have gone all PC. So what would you say if I told you that Breivik did the only right thing? We have to get to the root of the problem, dig it all up before it’s too late . . .”

  The guard stopped talking and scratched his scalp.

  “So, there’s one more camera,” Katz said calmly.

  “What?”

  “In the stairwell. Are you the one who rigged it up? The company doesn’t have permission to use cameras outside the parking area.”

  “Like I said, nothing happens here. Eight hours in a glass cage every night. You have to do something for fun. Anyway, I took it down. My boss complained.”

  “Was the camera in the stairwell on April twenty-second?”

  “Maybe . . .”

  “And you didn’t say anything to the police.”

  “Like I said . . . she was a dyke.”

  “I’d like you to find the video from when the guy in the Lexus was here. He did go into the stairwell, after all. You have him on tape somewhere. A close-up.”

  The guard sighed.

  “I think he’s here somewhere, but it’ll cost you another five hundred.”

  Katz placed another bill on the table, and two minutes later he was looking at another shot of the man. He was going down the same stairs the teenagers had vandalized, with his back to the camera. He still had his hood up. The man was of average height, just like Klingberg or Katz himself or another one of a million men in the country. There was nothing particularly striking about the way he walked or held his body. Then he was out of shot, without having shown his face.

  “That guy isn’t taking any risks. He doesn’t want to be recognized. Can I turn it off now? I have a job to do.”

  “Wait a minute!”

  The camera was still rolling. Katz saw the light shift in the picture as a door was opened one floor down. Two shadows appeared against the wall; two people meeting, stopping, and exchanging a few words, until one of them—the man in the raincoat—disappeared through the door and the other came up the stairs.

  Katz recognized him when he entered the shot: a young guy, maybe seventeen years old. He stopped on the landing, directly under the camera. His clothes were dirty; he was wearing a backpack over one shoulder. Homeless, Katz thought, and a junkie. But clean for the time being. He looked scared stiff.

  “A druggie,” said the guard. “This place is crawling with them. I found a dead junkie here just last week, in a car. I thought he was sleeping at first . . . he was in the backseat of a Toyota Corolla. Look at him, he looks like he’s fucking dying of AIDS.”

  Katz had seen him at an NA meeting in the city the previous winter. Katz had been the one to open the meeting, “sharing,” as it was called. He had listened to the others’ stories, noticing how far behind they were in their personal development, how they were just scraping the surface of their problems, and then he had noticed the guy who was sitting by himself at the very back of the room. He looked vacant, as if he didn’t really understand what was going on around him. Dirty. Flecks of blood on his jeans. With the same backpack at his feet.

  “Is it possible to print out pictures?” he asked.

  “Individual frames? Sure.”

  “I need one of the man in the raincoat and one of this guy.”

  The guard did as he asked.

  “You’re lucky,” he said, as he handed them over. “The pictures are included in the final price.”

  Katz stared at the photo of the junkie. He’s terrified, he thought, but of what? Of the man he met in the stairwell? And he’s far too young to be an addict. Just as he himself had been once upon a time.

  Katz had gone to six different schools in the first ten years of his life. His parents, Benjamin and Anne, had been teachers, but Benjamin had a terrible disposition so he had never been able to keep a job for very long. At the last school Benjamin worked at he broke the collarbone of a janitor after an argument about the ventilation in the teachers’ room. He couldn’t control his outbursts; they were in his blood. Katz had inherited the tendency too; he’d spent his life trying to keep it under control, but hadn’t always succeeded.

  Benjamin had died of lung cancer just after Katz’s fourteenth birthday. His mother had died shortly thereafter; she stopped eating and withered away at a nursing home in Sollentuna. The family had no other relatives, and Katz was placed in a youth home. Actually, it was amazing he hadn’t ended up there earlier. He had begun to go astray several years before—he was caught shoplifting at the age of only eleven and had his first case come up in the social welfare office at twelve.

  After his parents’ death, there was not even a shred of superego left to control him. After being sent to the youth home in Hässelby, he got to know other troubled kids from western Stockholm: gangs from Blackeberg and Rissne, young thugs who couldn’t see a future, no matter where they looked. Katz quickly blended in. They committed burglaries at the request of older criminals, waded through the water at the yacht clubs along Lake Mälaren with bolt cutters in hand to cut the locks on boat engines, dabbled in stolen goods and hold-ups, assaulted people they didn’t like the look of, and functioned as drug mules between dealers and distributors across half of Greater Stockholm. The heroin was everywhere. Katz saw what the drug did to people, how it broke them down, but he was a teenager and could see no reason to resist. His first love story with the drug lasted only a few months, and he never had time to develop a total addiction. Strangely enough, it was the catastrophe with Eva Dahlman that saved him. He had met Eva the summer he turned sixteen. His best friend from the youth home, Jorma Hedlund, had introduced them. Eva was tall, shy, and preferred not to speak because she was ashamed of her mild stutter. At first, Katz took her silence as arrogance; later on, he thought it was inscrutab
ility. She was two years younger than him and came from a troubled home, just like he did; she had lived on the street when things were at their worst, and sometimes she spent the night in Katz’s room at the youth home if he managed to smuggle her in without the staff noticing. She was with him when he took his very first shot in the basement of a high-rise on Astrakangatan, and his hands shook so hard that she finally had to inject it for him.

  They had been together all summer long, doing drugs, having sex outdoors, shoplifting from department stores together, hanging out with the same crowd. In August they had burgled a luxury yacht that was anchored outside the marina at Hässelby Strand. Katz and Jorma Hedlund had seen the crew leave the boat and vanish in a taxi, and they had waited a few hours for it to get dark before swimming out to the vessel. Eva had stood guard on the beach. Except for a thousand kronor in cash, they hadn’t found anything of value. They had vandalized the boat before they left—trashing the interior, tossing food out of the refrigerator, pouring a can of paint they found onto the clothes in the closet. Later that same evening, Eva and Katz had gotten high together in a bike-storage room not far from there. The horse was hardly diluted and Katz felt how strong it was as soon as he injected it, felt his limbs go numb in an alarming way, and then it had all gone black.

  When he woke up, he was in a forest. He later learned he was on Grubbholmen, an uninhabited island across from Hässelby Strand. A flashlight was shining in his eyes, and he heard dogs barking and saw police everywhere. His pants had been pulled down to his knees. He was holding a pair of panties in his hand. Someone grabbed him by the hair and turned him over on his stomach. He saw Eva Dahlman, naked, blood all over her body, being carried off on a stretcher; he heard people yelling at him, felt someone yank him up into a sitting position and slap handcuffs on him.

  At the youth detention center he was sent to, he met a psychologist who tried to help him remember what had happened. According to the police report, he had beaten Eva until she was unconscious and had then bitten her neck severely. But Katz’s memory was blank. Eva didn’t remember anything either. She had been placed in a treatment home for young drug abusers in Norrland and refused to believe that Katz was guilty.

  The incident had haunted him for several years. The uncertainty was the worst part. Was he really the sort of person who could do something like that? He had tortured himself with doubt. But, in the end, the idea that he was guilty was unbearable. He wanted to move on, make a break with his old life.

  Katz’s salvation turned out to be his academic abilities. At the detention center he was granted permission to study at a school in Huddinge, where he completed a course in natural sciences. He achieved top grades, not least in foreign languages and math, and his teacher allowed him to work at his own pace, outside the curriculum. In his final year he studied computer programming and even stepped in as an instructor when the regular lecturer was ill.

  At eighteen years old he underwent the examinations for his compulsory military service. The military psychologist suggested he take the extra tests that were required for special training. Katz had tested sky-high on the Stanford-Binet and other intelligence tests. One month later, he received a call from a major at the recruiting office, who asked if he would like to do his military service at the interpreter academy; they had reserved a space for him in case he was interested.

  Katz became one of three military interpreters from the school to be offered employment at an embassy immediately after finishing his education. In autumn 1988 he was placed in Helsinki as a defense assistant. For two years he translated Russian documents for the military attaché: newspapers, military communications, transcripts from Finnish radio intelligence across the border. Apparently, he did a good job, because after this appointment he was sent to the Consulate General in Leningrad, or St. Petersburg, as it would soon be called.

  That was where he met Rickard Julin for the first time.

  Officially, Julin was employed by the Swedish Ministry for Foreign Affairs as a consul in the bureau of visas, but in reality his employer was the armed forces. The old Soviet empire was about to collapse, and the consulate was still responsible for official contacts with northwestern Russia: the oblasts of Arkhangelsk, Murmansk, Novgorod, and Pskov, the republics of Karelia and Komi, Nenets Autonomous Okrug, and the Kaliningrad region. Julin’s task was to gather information about munitions that had gone astray, what was going on with the arms industry, and who was taking responsibility for weapons stockpiles and missile facilities.

  Katz only saw him once a week or so, since Julin spent most of his time traveling. But Katz liked him because of his calm demeanor and his natural warmth—he was light years from how one would imagine a career officer. As he understood it, Julin had once had on-the-job protection, a number and an alias in order to stave off attempts by foreign powers to recruit him, and all of this made an impression on Katz.

  Julin was sixteen years older than he was, and it wasn’t until a year later, when Julin vanished to take a job as a peace observer in the Balkans, that Katz realized what Julin had meant to him, that he had looked up to him like an older brother.

  Katz’s tour of duty as a military interpreter ended in the spring of 1992, as suddenly as it had begun. He returned to Stockholm to job search in the midst of the impending recession. When he landed at Arlanda airport, he realized that he had nowhere to go. By then he hadn’t seen Julin in over a year, and it was a long shot that he would be able to reach him at an old work number. But Julin answered, and not only that—he acted as a guardian angel. In under a week he arranged a job for Katz as a civilian translator at the FRA, the National Defense Radio Establishment.

  He sat alone in a room on Lovön, producing basic data for the military’s external analysts. He dealt with small fragments of information that other people put together to create an intelligible whole. He saw Julin now and again. He had moved up through the defense establishment, as a traveling attaché at NATO headquarters. They got together sometimes when Julin was home—meeting at a café in the town, speaking Russian together for fun or exchanging gossip about old colleagues from the Ministry for Foreign Affairs.

  Katz started using heroin again during his second year in Stockholm. He could hardly explain to himself how it happened. Maybe it was just because of loneliness. The loneliness that closed ever tighter around him, isolating him more and more, encapsulating all his other feelings: his sorrow at the loss of his parents, his frustration over his lost teenage years and over what had happened to Eva Dahlman, his sadness at the way they had been separated and had never seen each other again, the nameless rage he had carried inside him for as long as he could remember.

  He bought the drugs from a distant acquaintance from his time at Hässelby, a South American by the name of Jorge who had the porous, chalky skin of the old IV junkies. But he did his job—he never took drugs during working hours, he made sure his sleeves covered his track marks, and he delivered what he was supposed to deliver on time.

  In the summer of 1993, Katz was suddenly sent to the Consulate General in Berlin on behalf of the FRA. The old Berlin Agreement had expired when Germany was reunited. The Russians packed up their last weapons stores and sent the goods from the East Berlin suburb of Erkner to Moscow by train. Katz gathered information about how this was organized—how long the Russians took, how the decampment was administered, which branches of the military were involved, and how it was reported in the Russian and German media. He went to Berlin on a diplomatic passport, with ten grams of Dutch heroin in a bag in the inner pocket of his jacket. At the time, his doses were three times stronger than what he’d started with.

  The consulate had arranged an apartment for him on Wiener Strasse in Kreuzberg, just a stone’s throw from Kottbusser Tor. So he had no problem getting his hands on drugs. Kottbusser Tor was the headquarters for the heroin trade in south-central Berlin. Toothless junkies sold Turkish horse in three-gram envelopes for a fraction of the Stockholm price. You could buy ten-packs
of syringes outside any pharmacy.

  After a few months in the city, he needed the poison round the clock in order to function. He started taking risks, injecting small doses at the office, taking time off more and more often, starting to hang out with other junkies. And then came the first periods of calling in sick, weeks of being in a fog; afterward, he could hardly remember what had happened.

  He found temporary salvation when he was called back to Stockholm to go through computer training at KTH, the Royal Institute of Technology. The armed forces knew of his programming abilities and his general gift for languages and information gathering, but a new day was about to dawn with the Internet and ever-faster personal computers. They were looking into the future and realizing that they needed people like Katz.

  He managed to detox and control himself until he finished the course. But, immediately after it, he once again found himself going steeply downhill.

  It happened very quickly. In less than a year, he had lost his job and become homeless.

  He got money by committing burglaries and by selling drugs himself. Jorma Hedlund was the only one of his old friends he was still in contact with. Jorma was still a criminal, but he had tried to help Katz. The only problem was that Katz didn’t want help.

  He stayed in shelters, temporary lodgings where you could get a bed for the night but were kicked out again as soon as the sun came up. Later, he stayed in dope dens or, as he became sicker and sicker and cared less and less about himself, outside: in doorways, in parks.

  He fell and fell through that darkness, toward a bottom that didn’t exist, until his salvation was finally standing before him in the form of Rickard Julin.

  Katz still remembered that day as if it were yesterday. Julin had discovered him at the Gullmarsplan metro station. Katz had been on his way somewhere, but he could no longer remember where. He had been standing on the platform, barely noticing how people kept their distance as they walked past him because his clothes were dirty, his hands were covered in track marks, and he was talking to himself out loud. At least, that’s what Julin had said later, that he had heard him before he saw him, and recognized his voice.