The Boy in the Shadows

by Carl-Johan Vallgren

  That’s where it had started: Julin had given him a business card and asked him to call, even if it was only to chat for a while. That’s just who he was—a man who fixed things for other people. One month later, Katz found himself at an Anthroposophical Society treatment home in Ytterjärna.

  Katz opened the door to his apartment just after midnight. He immediately sensed that someone had been there. He felt the keyhole with his thumb. No trace of lock lubricant. If someone had picked the lock, it had been cleaned afterward. He walked into the hall and closed the door behind him. Faint light from the streetlamps shone through the windows. He stood still and tried to listen for any sound: an intake of breath, the soft rustle of clothes against a body. But he couldn’t hear anything.

  He went into the bedroom. The light from the clock radio was reflecting dimly off the walls. His bed was untouched, but the door to the closet was ajar. He opened it carefully. Everything seemed normal, except for the strange feeling that someone had moved his clothes around and put them back in the right place.

  In the kitchen, the fan was making its usual gentle buzz. The dishes were in the rack; a dry cleaning rag was hung across the tap. The floor and the wall tiles were sparkling clean. Everything looked just as he had left it.

  He moved on, into the living room. The sofa looked like a sleeping animal in its spot against the wall. The digital receiver blinked under the TV. A folded newspaper lay on the coffee table. The objects in the bookcase and on the windowsill . . . they were all in the very spots he remembered them being in.

  He looked through the rooms once more, systematically, finding no traces of a break-in. He knew from experience where a person would look for valuables. He had done the same thing himself in his darker years. But nothing had been stolen. And nothing was out of place.

  The feeling slowly dissipated as he made a sandwich and ate it in the kitchen.

  He noticed on his cell that Angela Klingberg had sent a message. He looked at it: she had booked a meeting for him at Klingberg Aluminum headquarters at ten o’clock the next morning. Pontus Klingberg would be expecting him.

  Katz thought of the young junkie in the multistory parking garage. He ought to try to get hold of him, ask after him at shelters, check with the NA group downtown. He had seen the person who was driving Klingberg’s car; he’d exchanged a few words with him and had somehow been frightened by him.

  Then there was the female police officer who’d asked to look at the surveillance tapes just a few days earlier. According to Julin’s contacts, the investigation had been dropped after one day. But, apparently, someone had opened it again.

  Something wasn’t right, he thought: something about the whole Klingberg story was fundamentally wrong.

  He walked into the living room, started up the desktop computer he used when he didn’t want to go down to the office, and put the USB stick into the port.

  The file he’d copied from Klingberg’s computer seemed to be corrupt. He downloaded a zip-fix program from the Internet, and a few minutes later the file was restored and opened. It contained a write-protected folder named “MK.” The same initials as on the cloth he had received from Angela Klingberg.

  The folder contained a few scanned black-and-white photographs. Family portraits taken more than half a century earlier in what appeared to be a tropical country. A man and a woman posing for a photographer, along with two boys. Another few pictures of the same family in a city somewhere. Signs in Spanish in the background. The family patriarch, Gustav, with his wife and children. The youngest boy was presumably Joel’s father.

  There were a few notes farther down in the document; key points that, according to the file date, had been written the day before Klingberg’s disappearance:

  Kristoffer abducted June 1970.

  Mom and Dad found in September 1979. Why in the country?

  Marie Bennoit died in 1978. How?

  Klingberg seemed to believe that there was a connection between the events—between the abduction of his brother and the deaths of three people. The photographs in the file depicted his father, uncle, and paternal grandparents. They had been taken decades earlier, probably in the Dominican Republic. Who was Marie Bennoit? A relative? Why else would Klingberg mention her along with his brother and parents?

  At precisely ten o’clock the next morning, Katz stepped through the door of Klingberg Aluminum’s main office in Vasastan. A secretary asked him to take a seat in the foyer and wait. The room was sober, almost sterile. Gray walls; black, wall-to-wall carpeting. A faint buzzing sound came from the air conditioning. A few weekly magazines lay on a coffee table. The view was magnificent: it looked over Vanadislunden and the Wenner-Gren Center and the waters of Brunnsviken just beyond them.

  Katz helped himself to coffee from a machine next to the reception desk. As he let it cool, he called Angela Klingberg. She didn’t answer either her cell or on her home number. He hung up and called Julin instead, and he gave him a summary of the information he’d learned from the guard at the garage: that the police had looked at the security tapes although the investigation was officially suspended. Julin promised to check up on this and call back as soon as he knew more.

  There was a Klingberg Aluminum brochure among the magazines. Katz paged through it listlessly until he came to a portrait of the founder, Gustav Klingberg. The company’s history was given under the picture: Gustav had been born in the Dominican Republic in 1914, the eldest son of the missionary couple Einar and Astrid Klingberg. After graduating from grammar school in Santo Domingo he received a scholarship to study mining engineering at a technical college in Havana. Three years later he returned to the island to start his own business.

  In a short time he had made a fortune in the sugar industry and in bauxite mining. Along with an American mining company, he refined bauxite for the production of aluminum and the manufacturing of highly refractory clays.

  In the early ’40s, the text went on, he had married the daughter of a Swedish missionary; her name was Lisbet and their families were acquaintances. Their sons, Pontus and Jan, had been born in 1941 and 1942.

  In the early ’50s, Gustav and his family returned to Sweden as the result of a strategic business decision. He founded Klingberg Aluminum and established its headquarters in Stockholm. The company imported bauxite from Africa and the West Indies for the manufacture of aluminum for car rims, ball bearings, aircraft hulls, façades, and roofing. After just a few years, the Klingberg Group controlled a conglomerate of companies in the metal industry.

  On the last page of the brochure was a family portrait taken in the late ’60s; Katz assumed it was meant to symbolize continuity in the company. It showed Gustav Klingberg, his wife, Lisbet, and their two children and four grandchildren standing on the veranda of their family home in Djursholm. Joel was second to the left, standing, according to the caption, next to his big brother, Kristoffer.

  Katz looked straight into the eyes of the boy with the sad smile. Kristoffer was black.

  Joel had never mentioned anything about his brother being adopted. And yet they looked alike, as if one’s environment really could influence one’s looks, as if there was something chameleon-like about children.

  Katz put down the brochure. A female receptionist smiled at him from the other side of the desk. Shortly afterward, he was shown in to the CEO of the company.

  Pontus Klingberg didn’t seem to think it was odd to get a visit from a stranger who asked questions about his nephew’s disappearance. He received Katz while sitting on a leather sofa in the boardroom. The view was just as magnificent from here.

  “My dad was a great admirer of Axel Wenner-Gren,” he said, when he noticed where Katz was looking. “That’s why he absolutely wanted the company’s offices to be adjacent to the old man’s showpiece. Axel was a lover of the Caribbean, too, just like Dad. He had a house in Barbados; he actually lived there during the war, until ’42, when the Brits blacklisted him for selling Bofors guns to the Germans. I remember him from
when I was a kid. Gustav and Axel used to eat at the Stallmästaregården hotel together; they always had the gubbröra as an appetizer and fried herring as the main course, and they would discuss commodity prices, the future of Electrolux or the Wallenberg family’s rampages through the main branches of Swedish industry.”

  He reached for a bottle of mineral water that stood on a serving trolley behind him; he opened it and poured a glass, which he handed to Katz.

  “What’s on your mind, young man? Is it Angela—is she worried about my nephew?”

  Katz took the glass and sat down in the chair across from him.

  “She doesn’t believe that Joel vanished willingly.”

  “It’s natural for people to be nervous when someone disappears without warning like that. I don’t know what kind of problem Joel has with Angela, and I’m not sure I want to know. Money, maybe? That can happen when a girl marries rich . . . or richer than what she’s used to. It creates a certain amount of inequality. But Joel has a great deal of loyalty to the company. He’ll be home again soon.”

  “Where do you think he is?”

  “What do I know? In Denmark, maybe, like the police think. Or maybe he’s still here in Stockholm. It shouldn’t be too hard to find him. One could start by calling around to the hotels. But that’s not my job. You have to respect people’s integrity. I’m sure my nephew has good reasons for going away for a while.”

  Pontus Klingberg laced his fingers together behind his neck, leaned back on the sofa, and looked up at the ceiling. Katz studied his silver hair, his double-breasted suit, and the well-manicured hand that suddenly moved down and rested on his knee. He’s not used to being contradicted, he thought. He’s a man who is used to getting his own way.

  “You didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary about him before he disappeared?”

  “No, everything was normal. Business as usual. We were working on a deal in England, a company we’ve had our eye on for a while. Aluminum structures for furniture. The majority shareholder is prepared to sell to us for a reasonable price. I’m actually on my way to London tonight for the final arrangements. Joel was supposed to come with me; that’s the only thing that bothers me.”

  A woman of about twenty-five stepped into the room to say that his younger daughter had called. Pontus Klingberg nodded and gave her a fatherly smile before she disappeared again.

  “Joel used to do things like this when he was younger,” he went on. “At that time, he still lived with his grandfather. He would vanish and stay away for a few weeks. He would sit and read in a rented apartment somewhere. And then he’d suddenly show up again, as if nothing had happened. He hasn’t had an easy time of it, as you may know. It’s been a lot for him to process. First, his big brother’s abduction. And then he was orphaned nine years later, when my brother and his wife . . .”

  He stopped talking in the middle of his sentence and a streak of sadness darkened his gaze. He looked down at his lap before continuing: “He must have left a message for Angela, right?”

  “They had fought that morning.”

  “About children, I’m guessing? Always their big problem; that discussion has been going on for ten years. Her financial lifeline, should their relationship go to pot. But I think Joel will end up giving in. I have two daughters myself. And four grandchildren. Children are the spice of life, or whatever the expression is.”

  Pontus Klingberg looked out the window, down at Brunnsviken, where the trees were in their late-spring bloom. Faint opera music emanated from hidden speakers in the room; Klingberg swayed gently in time to it. There was something fragile about him, Katz thought, which one didn’t notice at first glance. As if he didn’t really fit into himself, into his own body.

  “The police contacted you about Joel’s disappearance.”

  “Very briefly, by phone. I told them what I knew, and that was about it. Who are you, anyway? Angela said something about you and Joel doing your military service together?”

  Katz told him how he had got to know Joel. A few words about the interpreter academy, his memory of Joel being picked up by a private driver on Fridays.

  “Katz?” Pontus Klingberg said, when he was finished. “Jewish background. Don’t worry, I’m not prejudiced; I have several Jewish business associates. A gifted people. They know how to make money.”

  Which was a typical prejudice, Katz thought, as he watched Pontus Klingberg stand up and walk over to a bookcase; his own father had been a teacher, and his grandfather, if he understood correctly, had been a shoemaker in Vienna before he moved to Sweden with his wife and fifteen-year-old son just before the war broke out, and he had vanished to Israel after the war—they were hardly rich Jews. But Katz was used to this, and he had heard worse, ranging from harmless stereotypes about the business acumen Jews were assumed to have to how they controlled world politics in secret. Maybe this was what it meant to be Jewish: that there were always comments about you being a Jew.

  When he turned around, Pontus Klingberg had picked up a framed photo from the bookcase. Two smiling young girls on a yacht. There was a second portrait on the bookcase: Pontus Klingberg with the same girls—now grown up—on a smaller sailboat.

  “My daughters,” he said. “Ebba and Julia. From a cruise in the Caribbean when they were little. The other one is from Sandhamn, a few years ago. We usually compete in the Gotland Runt race every summer. Soon their children will come along, too, my grandchildren . . . I have pictures of them, too, if you’re interested. The Klingbergs always do well.”

  He smiled proudly, but then his face twisted into a grimace.

  “I used to think, What if Ebba or Julia had been kidnapped instead of Kristoffer? And it hurt so much just to think it. I don’t think you can imagine the pain it caused us when it happened. A seven-year-old boy disappeared, and his fate is still unknown. It completely broke his parents. Jan never recovered. I suffered so terribly alongside him. Our only comfort was that the incident brought him back to the family. He had tried to distance himself from Gustav all his life . . . and from me, too, but after that loss he came back. Not that we could do much to ease his pain. He never forgave himself. He’d had a few drinks before he and the children walked to that metro station from a children’s party in Stadshagen. He never stopped torturing himself with guilt. And he kept drinking. Ironically enough, the alcohol that had once caused him to use poor judgment became the thing that consoled him. That was what killed him and Joanna, his wife. The suicide was just an extension of their drinking.”

  Pontus Klingberg gazed out of the window, sighed, and swallowed hard.

  “None of us got over it. Gustav was a broken man. First he lost his grandson, and then his son.”

  He grew quiet. There was laughter from the hallway outside.

  “Wasn’t there anything to suggest that the kidnapping had been planned?”

  “No. It was a coincidence, the work of a lone madwoman. That woman, whoever she was, just took Kristoffer on impulse—God only knows where. That was more than forty years ago now. Kristoffer would have turned forty-nine this year. Hardly a week goes by that I don’t think of him. And when you see things in the paper . . . about what happened to that Austrian girl, Kampusch, or about devils incarnate like that Belgian, Dutroux, it makes your thoughts start whirling again, and that sick feeling comes. Or the hate comes.”

  Pontus Klingberg gave Katz a vacant look and shook his head quietly.

  “Was Kristoffer adopted?” Katz asked.

  “Why do you ask?”

  “Well, he was black.”

  “Didn’t Joel ever tell you about his brother?”

  “No, not in detail.”

  “His paternal grandmother was Creole. But the blood, or whatever the word is, skipped a generation. It was hardly visible at all in Jan, except for his curly hair . . . and in the summer . . . he would go browner than the rest of us. It was damned strange; Joel didn’t get it either—the blood, the inheritance—but it showed up in Kristoffer. It’s a long
story.”

  Pontus Klingberg didn’t look at Katz as he told the tale. It was as if he were deep inside himself, as if he were just a medium for the family’s story.

  He told Katz about his paternal grandfather, Einar, the missionary who had saved the life of a fifteen-year-old Haitian girl during the Parsley Massacre in 1937. He had adopted her and let her grow up as his own daughter: Marie Bennoit. But Gustav had fallen in love with her. Or maybe the two step-siblings had fallen in love with each other. Despite this, Gustav had married the daughter of a missionary, Lisbet, Pontus Klingberg’s mother. But soon after that he had an illegitimate child, Jan, with Marie, his mistress.

  “Dad was a businessman through and through. He did business with Ramfis Trujillo. Do you know who that is? He was the son of the dictator of the Dominican Republic, Rafael Trujillo, and he was just as crazy and just as much of an erotomaniac as his father. Dad would stop at nothing to get his way; he was ruthless, but there was never any question that Jan was a full member of the family. He was taken away from his mother shortly after he was born, and he only got to see her sporadically. Lisbet, my mother, never accepted Gustav’s relationship with Marie, but it was a matter of course that Jan was part of our family and would come with us to Sweden when we went back. It was a tough blow for Marie; she wanted to keep him. But, naturally, Gustav got his way. Marie wasn’t left empty-handed, though. Considerable sums of money were transferred over to her throughout the years. And she had more children to support. Dad wasn’t her only lover. She was very beautiful. Timeless, somehow.”

  Pontus Klingberg stopped talking and got up from the sofa.