She didn’t understand how things had gone so wrong. Most divorced parents did the handover on Fridays. It had to do with her old work schedule, she realized; as the prosecutor on call, she had been relieved of duty early Monday morning, and then the routine had just stuck—even though now, several years later, she kept normal working hours at the Swedish Economic Crime Authority, or EBM. She had tried to change the schedule, but Ola thought things were fine the way they were.
She could hear the children through the door of the apartment. Arvid, bawling something about a missing Bakugan toy, those odd little figures that could be folded into a ball and fulfilled some mysterious but crucial function in the life of a five-year-old boy. Lisa, who had a children’s song on repeat in her head and couldn’t stop singing.
Ola yelled at them from the hall. He was presumably trying to get their things on so they would be ready the instant their mother showed up. So he wouldn’t have to see her, just hand them over as quickly as possible and close the door behind her with an aggressive bang.
Fucking asshole, she thought. But the children loved him, and they needed their father; she couldn’t take that away from them.
The smell of fried food filled the stairwell. The building had been jerry-built in the early ’80s, slapped together among the turn-of-the-century buildings on Ringvägen. Naturally, when Ola moved in with Erika two months after the divorce, he had chosen to live on the other side of the city, as far from their old home on Sankt Eriksplan as possible. He was a master of messing with her. He even messed with her in her sleep, in her dreams.
She stared at the name on the mail slot: Westin. The last name she still went by, because her maiden name bothered her even more, if that was possible. It was amazing that they had tolerated each other for so long. Because she had hidden who she really was, because she had so wanted to be part of his bourgeois life. Until it all fell apart, until he had started to glimpse the darkness behind the façade, the weaknesses he couldn’t deal with.
She hesitated, her hand at the doorbell. Erika’s voice inside, shrilly yelling something at Lisa—that she had to stop singing because the baby needed to sleep. Why didn’t she shut up, that fucking slut? A lawyer, just like Ola. They had met at work, likely on the sly, for quite a while before things ended between Ola and her.
She tilted her head to the left and looked at herself in the stairwell mirror. She was more underdressed than casual. Sneakers, jeans, a gray hoodie. She was forty-two, but sometimes she still turned the heads of young men out on the town. She didn’t know why. She had never considered herself pretty, and it wasn’t a manifestation of feminine self-contempt; it just didn’t fit into her idea of the world.
The light fixture on the ceiling flickered, and she ran her hand under her scarf. Leftovers of an old indulgence of vanity, from back when the scars were still visible on her neck, before the plastic surgery had erased them. Like a reminder of her youth, the time and place she had come from. She had never told anyone what had happened to her, not even Ola.
She took a deep breath and rang the bell. She heard the children shouting for her before the door opened and they tumbled out like two happy calves. Lisa first, dressed in the red leather jacket she had gotten for Christmas the year before, which she refused to give up even though it was too small. And then Arvid, the little actor who pretended to be grumpy even though she knew how happy he was to see her.
“Hi, sweethearts.”
“Mom, you’re super late, it’s past eight o’clock!”
“I know, I’m sorry, there was a lot going on at work.”
“You could have called earlier, damn it.”
Ola’s aggressive voice cut through all that love, cut in among the children’s arms around her neck, their wet kisses, the warmth of their small bodies. But she wouldn’t let him provoke her.
“I’m sorry, but I tried. It was busy every time. Didn’t you get my texts?”
He handed her the backpack full of their things.
“Lisa’s soccer practice has changed,” he said acidly. “It’s on Thursdays from now on.”
“You know Thursdays aren’t good for me. Isn’t there any way we could change it? Maybe she could be in a different group or something?”
“It’s not my job to keep track of your work hours, and Lisa wants to stay with her friends, so either you change your schedule or you’ll disappoint your daughter.”
Don’t fall into the trap, now; don’t start arguing.
“Okay, I’ll work it out somehow. Are you ready, kids? Shall we go? The car’s outside the door.”
“Did you park illegally again, Mom? You got a ticket last time, don’t you remember?”
“We won’t get one if we hurry.”
“But Mom, if a policeman comes and gives you a ticket, you can just say that you work for the police . . . then they won’t do anything.”
“It doesn’t work like that, sweetheart.”
“No, because they aren’t called that, Arvid . . . they’re not real police . . . they’re ‘parking police.’”
Farther down the hall, she saw Erika walk by, holding the baby, without even looking in her direction. Ten years younger than she was. She came from the countryside somewhere, Värmland, and was making a career for herself at the same law firm as Ola.
“Mom, it’s toy day at school tomorrow, and I want to bring my green Bakugan, but Dad can’t find it.”
“It’s at home, on your bed; you didn’t bring it here.”
The relief in her boy’s eyes, his serene joy at still having his toy—she realized she had tears in her eyes.
“Was that all, Ola? Is there anything else I should know? Homework?”
“There’s a note in Lisa’s backpack. They’re having a field trip on Tuesday.”
“So, tomorrow. You could have let me know earlier.”
“How about taking some responsibility yourself? Have you heard of the school website? You just have to check there.”
He gave her a look of unadulterated spite before turning to the children with a smile.
“Can I get a hug, kids, before you go with Mom?”
Don’t punch him now, don’t give him a fist straight to the face, don’t split that beautifully shaped lower lip, don’t break his revolting fucking nose. The kids are the important thing right now—getting them home to peace and quiet, starting the week off on the best possible foot.
She forced the images away and tried to think of something else as he hugged them for an excessively long time.
Joel Klingberg.
She had received the tip-off about the businessman’s disappearance from a young detective who had been at the Economic Crime offices earlier and who knew that she was working on something about Klingberg Aluminum. A few months before, the firm had popped up in connection with a complaint from an employee who had had his contract terminated. It was about an alleged transaction in which one of the firm’s subsidiaries had been involved. The claim was that fifty million kronor had secretly been transferred to an account in the Virgin Islands. Moreover, there was no recipient name attached to the account. She had barely started sniffing around before other assignments got in the way. When she had heard that Klingberg’s wife had reported him missing she had become curious again.
The investigation into his disappearance had quickly been dropped because all signs indicated that he had left of his own volition. But something had made her dig deeper on her own initiative. And so she had worked overtime when it was Ola’s week—she just stayed at the office, going through material from the fired man’s complaint, searching records, wondering at all the tragedies the Klingberg family had experienced throughout the years, going down to the garage where Klingberg had parked his car before he disappeared and asking to see the surveillance tapes.
Not that she had gotten anywhere. But that didn’t matter. What else would she have done during those lonely nights?
Her work phone rang just as Ola waved the children into the stairwell. Lisa
made it to the elevator first; Arvid yelled that it was his turn to press the button. She dug the phone out of her pocket.
What an odd coincidence, she had time to think: Danielsson, the detective from the violent crimes division who had given her the tip-off about Klingberg. He certainly seemed to be hooked on her, but he would never call if it wasn’t important.
“I’m sorry, but I have to get this,” she said, when she noticed Ola’s skeptical glance.
She held the phone tight to her ear and listened to the voice on the other end of the line, nodding as she looked over at the kids, who were waiting for her attentively, who wanted to go home, to their room and toys on Torsgatan, to their beds, to the apartment where they didn’t have to compete with a baby and a girlfriend for the attention of a father who, at best, ignored their needs.
“Okay,” she said. “Klingberg’s wife. Tell me again . . . so, a nationwide alert has gone out, and there’s a suspect. Someone close to her?”
“No. An unrelated person.”
“Do you have a name?”
“Yes . . .”
“Well, tell me!”
“Danny Katz.”
“Can you repeat that?”
“Danny Katz. Translator. Lives in Traneberg.”
The children were already getting into the elevator, still arguing about who got to push the Down button. The door to the apartment was closed. Ola hadn’t even looked at her, much less said good-bye. She hung up on Danielsson, walked over and crouched in front of them.
“Something has come up,” she said. “I’m sorry, but you’ll have to stay with Dad tonight.”
“Why? I want to go home to my Bakugan!”
“You can’t . . . I have to go and do something. I’ll pick you up early tomorrow morning. You can stay home from school if you want to.”
The fried-food smell was gone; instead, she smelled freshly brewed coffee.
Shitty building, she thought. Shady landlord. She would bet a thousand kronor that Ola and Erika had signed an illegal lease for it.
But she would give anything for a cup of coffee right now, something warm to take away the icy cold she felt inside.
The kids walked dejectedly back to the door. It hurt to watch them; she loved them so terribly much. Lisa, her girl—she would never have to live the life she had lived herself, never have to be scared or fear death. It would break her.
Katz. Jorma Hedlund. All of that strange, faraway time when she had been at rock bottom, although she had only been a child. She had worked so hard to get away from there; she had never looked over her shoulder, but now it was all coming back.
The T-Centralen metro station was the eye of the storm. People everywhere, on their way home from late shifts at the office and working overtime, gangs of teens using the ticket hall at Sergels Torg as a gathering place, revelers on their way to or from the bars in the town. It calmed him; he could move around relatively unnoticed.
He had left the stolen car in an industrial parking garage in Alviks Strand. It was too risky to use it right now. Perhaps it would come in handy later.
He had a window of time, he thought, but it was slowly narrowing.
He couldn’t remember the last time he had been here. In any case, it had been renovated since then. The public restrooms looked like the men’s room in a hotel foyer with their patterned glass doors and oak-paneled walls. The mushroom-shaped columns had been fitted with digital advertising screens.
He stood in the middle of the traffic of passengers, on the alert for suspicious movements. The streams of people subsided like water, flowing off downstairs and escalators, being refilled from endless reservoirs of humans. No plain-clothes cops that he could see.
He went through the turnstiles and scanned the area. A group of tourists was standing by the ticket machines, trying to figure out how they worked. Two junkies, men of about twenty-five, were waiting for Godot outside the Åhléns display window; their movements, their posture, their gazes were universal: withdrawal. Just like him, once upon a time, waiting at that very spot for a chronically late dealer.
Kicks was still there, anyway—the store where the prostitutes from Malmskillnadsgatan would buy cheap lipstick before the night shift started.
Katz saw more junkies: a couple of Kosovo Albanians with gaunt faces, a woman with bad skin taking a mirror from her bag and studying her makeup over by the glass doors.
He took the photo from the inner pocket of his jacket, the picture of the boy from the parking garage. Katz was sure that this was his territory.
The junkies by the display window looked at him expressionlessly as he approached. One turned his head a bit to the left, seemed to realize something, turned back to Katz, and gave him a nearly imperceptible signal. He stopped. A gang of teens came down the stairs from Drottninggatan, and behind them were two plainclothes cops.
Katz backed up a few meters, taking cover in the stream of passengers on their way down to the metro platforms. There were more people now, another bunch being spewed up from the escalators; he felt the mass pressing into him from behind and pushing him in the direction of the exit.
Had the alert already gone out? Was he wanted; was there a picture and everything?
The junkies by the display window were suddenly gone. He couldn’t see them anywhere. They had sensed that there was about to be a raid. He looked in the other direction, toward the stairs that led down from Åhléns. More scouts, impossible to miss: two men and a woman in tracksuits.
Katz backed up, heard people swearing at him; someone shoved him and he nearly lost his balance. But when he looked up again, the police were gone. He saw one of their backs vanishing out on to Plattan. He wasn’t the one they were searching for, at least not right now.
Five minutes later, in the passageway outside the urinals, he found what he was after. T-Centralen was like an anthill, impossible to flush out. The police could try to destroy it, smoke it out, stomp it, and kick it to pieces, but it would only work for a little while. As soon as they were gone, everything went back to the way it was.
The woman with the pocket mirror was back. A prostitute, Katz thought, as he approached her. She walked the streets a few blocks away, but she took care of her hygiene at the public bathrooms in T-Centralen. Once he was standing in front of her, he realized she was younger than he’d first thought.
She recognized the boy in the photograph, but she hadn’t seen him in more than a month. The boy had lived at a shelter during the winter, she explained, the same one she stayed at, KarismaCare at Fridhemsplan. But he had been thrown out for hiding drugs in his room. He had a hard time dealing with other people and preferred to keep to himself.
She looked at the picture again.
“Jonas,” she said in her drawling junkie voice. “That’s what he’s called, but I don’t know if it’s his real name. He’s mentally ill and more or less deaf. Not even social services can deal with him. He’s violent. And he has HIV, I heard.”
“Where does he buy his drugs?”
“I don’t know.”
“And where does he usually stay when he’s not at the shelter?”
The woman shrugged.
“Here, around Plattan. And in an abandoned building somewhere outside the city. And he sleeps in car tunnels. Like I said, he can’t handle people.”
“Which tunnels?”
“Klara tunnel. Like a fucking rat.”
She took out her mirror again, putting more rouge on her deathly pale cheeks. Katz could see her pores as if through a magnifying glass—deep pits, as if she had been hit by a blast of shot; the wrinkles around her mouth and eyes made her look twenty years older than she was.
It was past midnight when Katz entered the tunnel near Vattugatan. The traffic was lighter now. He had taken a short cut across Klara cemetery, past the small church where the diocese handed out food to the homeless during the day, through the iron gates, until he arrived at the artery that led to Central Bridge.
The lights in the tunn
el cast a cold glow on the walls. There was a sort of pavement on the right side, running against the traffic; it was used by the streets division when they needed to make repairs.
A car appeared over in the curve, and it dimmed its lights and changed lanes when the driver saw him.
Fifty meters on, he saw the first emergency-phone sign. He hurried on, hearing the fans hum in the ceiling ten meters above his head.
Angela, he thought suddenly. So incomprehensible that she had just been there, just met him, and then she was gone. There was no clear boundary, and that was what made it so surreal.
He had come to the recess in the wall. It was about one by two meters. No one was there. The lightbulb was still in its ceiling socket. The homeless usually unscrewed them when they wanted to sleep. A bloody tampon and a crumpled beer can lay next to the emergency phone.
The traffic had increased as Katz made his way through the tunnel. Thirty meters on, he came to the next recess, which appeared to be dark.
He turned on the torch he had brought from his flat. An older man lay on the ground in a sleeping bag, on a mattress made of cardboard. A plastic bag of his belongings stood at his feet. Farther up, on some stairs, was a spirit stove. A few canned goods, plastic glasses, and some silverware lay in a box, like in a pantry.
The man sat up and looked at him, bewildered.
“What do you want?” he said wearily.
Katz showed him the photo.
“The deaf boy. Why are you looking for him?”
“I just need to get hold of him.”
“Are you a cop?”
“No.”
“Then fuck off.”
The man lay down again, fumbling around on the floor above his head until he found something—a scarf, which he put over his face. Katz pulled it back off.
The Boy in the Shadows Page 9
