“Turn off your flashlight, damn it!”
He sat up again and glared angrily at Katz. There was a moving box with a black garbage bag in it farther up the stairs.
“When was the last time you saw him?”
“A few weeks ago. He usually sleeps in the first part of the tunnel, but the lightbulb’s been on for several weeks, so I guess he found somewhere else.”
“Where?”
“He stays in the metro sometimes, I know that. Between Hötorget and Rådmansgatan, a friend told me; there are small spots there. God, you should have seen him when he was detoxing. He lay over there whining for two days, wrapped up in some old blankets, and he shit himself so bad I could smell it all the way over here. And there wasn’t a single person there to help him. He’s just a kid. But now he’s clean. I saw him at Centralen a few days ago. He looked really good. Someone must have helped him.”
The man lay down again.
“The kid’s nuts,” he said. “He was abused so much when he was growing up that he lost his hearing. That’s what they say, anyway. Now leave me alone.”
Katz suddenly noticed the stench. And all at once he realized what it was from, what the moving box on the stairs was used for. He turned off his flashlight and left the tunnel the same way he’d come.
He had to hurry now; he could feel it. The noose was about to be tightened. He crossed the highway by the Sheraton garage and took a left onto Herkulesgatan. The neighborhood was totally dead; there were only office buildings and a small deli that sold Polish and Hungarian food. He realized he was hungry, but it would have to wait.
He walked across Drottninggatan to Brunkebergstorg, passed the black granite façade of Riksbanken, and walked north along Malmskillnadsgatan. Two whores were patrolling their respective sidewalks. So at least there were no cops nearby.
These blocks were dark, as if they had something to hide. And there were side streets to slip into if one didn’t want to be seen, stairs leading down to streets below the ridge.
He passed Oxtorget and the bridge over Kungsgatan. He was tramping around in a sludge of memories that belonged to his old life: buying drugs up here, unscrewing the service panels of streetlights and hiding stamp bags of powder among the cables, getting in a fight outside Nalen, being arrested for possession under the bridge over Kungsgatan, being driven in the ambulance to Karolinska Hospital when someone thought he had overdosed in the bathroom of US Video.
He had robbed people farther down Birger Jarlsgatan. But that had been earlier, when he and Jorma Hedlund had been no more than sixteen. They had taken the train in from the suburbs for the sole purpose of stealing money and watches from drunk upper-class creeps on their way to or from the bar. People like Klingberg. They had loathed them and envied them at the same time. Their terrified faces as Jorma waved his Mora knife around two centimeters from their throats. One guy had, to their great joy, shit himself.
At Restaurant KGB he took a left and walked down the stairs to Olof Palmes Gata. Then he walked along Luntmakargatan, parallel to Sveavägen, until he had come to the metro station at Rådmansgatan.
Katz looked at the clock. Five minutes to one. The last train would soon enter the station. He got his ticket strip stamped by a sleepy turnstile guard and took the stairs down to the platform. Aside from a young couple intertwined on a bench, he was alone.
Katz called the elevator down and waited until it had stopped. Then he held the door open a bit so that no one could call it up again.
Then he waited for the train to come in.
Only one single passenger got off and went toward the exit at the opposite end. The young couple got into the middle compartment. Katz opened the elevator door and crouched down as the train driver looked around the empty platform. Then came the sucking sound of the closing doors and the screech of the wheels as the train started moving again and vanished in the direction of Odenplan.
He waited for a few minutes. Up in the ticket hall he heard the turnstile guard close the ticket booth. When the platform lights went dark he stepped out again.
Silence.
Katz stood still until his eyes had adjusted to the darkness. Then he hopped down onto the tracks.
The gravel crunched under his boots as he walked, the beam of the flashlight dancing before him. At a distance he could see a shaft illuminated by lights on the wall. It was narrow and just over a meter tall. It was some sort of connecting passage that ran between the concrete walls across to the opposite track. He peered in. No sign of life.
He saw movement out of the corner of his eye and reflexively turned his head to see a rat dart off between the tracks. Then it was calm again, that strange silence of an empty metro, of the guts of a city. The ceiling glistened with condensation. Small drops of water fell silently on to the tracks.
He crawled into the shaft. He felt something soft hit the back of his neck and turned around.
A backpack. He hadn’t noticed it earlier. It must have fallen down from a partition above him.
Katz rose to his knees and peered in. A passageway for hot-water pipes, just large enough for a person to get in. He turned on his flashlight and shone it in. The boy’s terrified eyes blinked in the sudden light.
The boy had climbed down from the alcove and was squatting in front of him.
He was short for his age. His hair was greasy and it hung in front of his eyes in chunks. His clothes were dirty, and he smelled like sweat and something else, undeniably sour.
“You’re Jonas, aren’t you?” said Katz.
The boy’s eyes darted back and forth before fixing on Katz’s lips.
“Don’t be afraid, I’m not going to hurt you. Do you understand what I’m saying? Should I speak more clearly?”
The emptiness in his eyes. But it wasn’t from drugs. He was clean.
“Can you hear what I’m saying?”
There was a hearing aid behind one of the boy’s ears; it looked as if a flesh-colored insect had attached itself to his skin. A bandage with dried blood hung loosely around the tip of his index finger. Katz wondered if the woman at T-Centralen was right, if he had HIV.
“I need your help . . . identifying a man.”
The boy followed his lips as they moved. His gaze sharpened. Then he answered. Tonelessly, like a deaf person who can’t hear his own voice.
“How did you find me?”
“That’s not important. I just want to identify someone. Then I’ll leave you alone.”
Katz took out the photos from the garage. One of the boy. The other of the man in the raincoat, seen from the back.
“Do you remember him? You spoke to him in the stairwell of a parking garage. That was three weeks ago. You were afraid of him.”
The boy mumbled something incomprehensible to himself as he looked at the pictures.
“I’m clean,” he said. “I quit H.”
“I know.”
“I couldn’t do it anymore. I want to go home. Home.”
That toneless voice. And yet there was a hint of an accent, from the south, maybe Skåne. He stopped talking in the middle of a sentence and looked glassily at Katz.
“Was this the man you spoke to?”
He held out the portrait of Klingberg that Julin had printed from the Internet. The boy gave a start, as if he understood everything but with a slight delay.
“No.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’m sure.”
“What did he look like, the person you talked to?”
The boy’s eyes roamed again.
“Or do you know him?”
“No.”
“So what did you talk about?”
“Don’t remember.”
“I think you met someone by the door; you happened to run right into him. And you apologized . . . was that what happened? Because he was annoyed, because he scared you?”
“Maybe.”
“Did you see his face?”
The boy fingered the zipper of his backpack. His hand
s were covered in scars from old track marks. No fresh ones, as far as Katz could see. Then he became more lucid somehow, more focused.
“I have to go now,” he whispered.
“Try to think. Was there anything else about the man?”
“No!”
“I need to know more. About how he looked—was he old, young?”
A metallic noise came from the tunnel; a service train was approaching with its lights on, and there were panicked movements alongside the tracks—rats. There must be a nest somewhere nearby, Katz thought as the train roared by, very close.
When he once more looked at the boy, he realized he was holding a syringe.
“You . . . you . . . you stay here. I have to go.”
Katz didn’t move, just looked at the boy’s face, noticing how close to his neck he was holding the needle, a centimeter from his artery.
The boy crouched, stood up, the needle still aimed at Katz; he took his backpack, backed out, and disappeared into the darkness.
For two days Katz hid in a community garden in Tantolunden. It was secluded and didn’t seem to have been used for a long time. He had no trouble breaking the lock. He was careful; he didn’t let anyone notice that he was there. He left only at night, after it had gotten dark. He walked through the park over to Hornstull, bought provisions at 7-Eleven with his hood pulled up, didn’t look anyone in the eye, and bought a SIM card for the phone he’d brought along.
It was impossible to miss the headlines. They were about him, but somehow about someone else: a doppelgänger who had stolen his identity.
When he linked his laptop to the phone and went online, he saw himself everywhere. Danny Katz, forty-four years old, resides in Bromma. Wanted for murder and kidnapping. For abducting Joel Klingberg and killing Klingberg’s wife.
It was incredible how much they’d managed to grub up on him: his background as a criminal, as a military interpreter, as a homeless junkie.
One of the evening papers had published a photo of the business card he’d given Angela, with the doodle of a heart and a flower. “The killer’s declaration of love,” the caption said.
Another paper had dug up the money-begging letter he’d written to Klingberg fifteen years earlier. Apparently, the family had kept it. Klingberg had been afraid of him even then, the reporter wrote, and had filed a complaint with the police.
This surprised him, because neither Angela nor Pontus Klingberg had mentioned anything about it.
The papers wrote that he had been best friends with Klingberg in the military, but that they had gone their separate ways after a fight. Katz was said to have followed Klingberg’s career in the business world from a distance, calling him and writing threatening letters in which he demanded money. Finally—this was the police’s theory—he had kidnapped Klingberg and then contacted his wife under the pretense of wishing to help her find her missing husband. And then he had murdered them both.
According to an anonymous source, Angela had told a friend that she suspected Katz had kidnapped her husband.
That couldn’t be right. Or was it? Had she suddenly started to suspect him?
There were no pictures of the body, but the murder was described in detail: the kitchen knife that had been driven straight into her heart; the fact that she’d been strangled first, so violently that her hyoid bone had broken. And the bites, the insane bites around her neck, the wounds that she had suffered after she was already dead.
The incident on Grubbholmen twenty-eight years before had been unearthed. They were making him out to be a serial offender.
The fingerprints in the apartment and Klingberg’s car. His kitchen knife. Strands of his hair in the bedroom, the kitchen, the pools of blood on the floor. Planted by the person who had broken into his apartment.
The raincoat had been found, too, after a tip-off—it was in a construction dumpster near Central Station. One of the evening papers ran a picture of a detective holding it up to the camera. His raincoat, the one the unknown man in the parking garage had been wearing.
He turned off the computer, walked over to the window, and peered out through the curtains. Dark cottages and the light from the southern suburbs on the other side of the canal. The falling rain. He felt exhaustion come over him, the weight of everything that had happened; he saw the image of the body on the floor in the apartment on Skeppargatan. He blinked when he noticed that tears were welling in his eyes.
What if he was the one?
Was it truly impossible? Had things backfired on him? Had the same thing happened that time with Eva Dahlman? The world going black. Not remembering anything afterward.
Angela had opened the door to someone she knew. And she had been waiting for Katz; she’d arranged to meet him.
But it didn’t make sense. He trusted his memory. It wasn’t him.
He heard a distant siren; he felt his pulse increase even though he knew it was an ambulance on its way to Söder Hospital.
Cats meowed in the dark; he heard drunken hooting from a gang of teenagers on their way through the community gardens.
He felt instinctively that he couldn’t stay in the cottage much longer. Sooner or later, his hiding place would be exposed.
Jorma, he thought. It had been several years since he had last heard from him. He had to get hold of him.
Katz hadn’t seen Jorma Hedlund since the late 2000s. It had been in a café in Gallerian, shortly after Jorma had been released from prison for aiding and abetting in an armed robbery. They had been as happy as little kids to see each other again. Years could go by in between, but each time they got together it felt like it was the day before that they had last seen each other. Brothers from before, Katz had thought as he looked at Jorma’s jet-black crew cut and the rough fists he could use to renovate buildings, defend his pride or, to everyone’s surprise, play piano. A deep friendship had always existed between them, like the love between siblings.
Katz had known Jorma for more than half his life. When Katz was placed in the youth home after his parents’ death, Jorma already lived there, forcibly taken into custody according to paragraph three of the Child Welfare Law. In the eyes of the authorities, he was a hopeless case. But the Jewish boy had seen himself in Jorma. Both had black hair and darker skin than the peers they were surrounded by. And then there was the fact that Jorma played the piano; it seemed to run counter to some unknown order—it was like seeing beautiful flowers growing out of a garbage dump.
At the café, Jorma had told him about his plans to move to Thailand. An old acquaintance had started his own construction business in Rayong, which was a two-hour drive from Bangkok. Jorma had been offered the chance to be a partner. They were going to build vacation apartments down there, with condos for rich Thais. Jorma would keep an eye on the workforce of locals, play in the piano bar, and pitch in when needed. He had saved enough money to invest in it. Money from the robberies, Katz assumed.
So he was surprised when he found Jorma in the local directory, at a new address in Midsommarkransen. No phone number was given. But Katz had no intention of calling anyway.
It was evening when he opened the door to the building on Tellusborgsvägen. He had been waiting outside for half an hour, sizing up the neighborhood. It was quiet. No one seemed to have made the connection between them.
He heard piano music when he stopped outside the door on the first floor. “Georgia on My Mind.” Jorma loved old Hoagy Carmichael songs. The music stopped in the middle of a chord when Katz rang the bell.
An instant later Jorma was standing in front of him, big and muscular, with prison tattoos on his arms and a bundle of sheet music in his hand. He let him in without a word.
It took several hours for Katz to explain everything that had happened since the moment he received the phone call from Angela Klingberg. He told Jorma about the boy he had found in the metro, the man in the raincoat who had driven Klingberg’s car, the document he had found on Klingberg’s computer in which Joel connected his brother’s di
sappearance with the death of his parents. He described his meeting with Pontus Klingberg and the burglary in his apartment, the coat that had been stolen from the basement storage area a few months earlier, the embroidered pieces of cloth that Klingberg had received shortly before he vanished into thin air, and the strange route Joel drove before he disappeared. But, as he spoke, Katz realized the puzzle wasn’t even half finished; he had only just started finding the pieces.
“They’re pros,” said Jorma, who was sitting before him on the piano stool. “Whoever is behind this . . . they know what they’re doing.”
“What do you mean?”
“This took resources, but you can see that for yourself.”
Katz looked around the room as he let his thoughts wander freely, trying to find a loose thread somewhere . . . the oil paintings on the walls, painted by Jorma himself during his time in prison, abstract, fantastic color combinations . . . the piano . . . the furniture . . . but he couldn’t think of anything.
“Anyway, someone knows that I was found guilty of a similar crime.”
“And now they’re making use of that knowledge. And making it look like you killed the Klingbergs.” Jorma looked at him for a long time. “Someone’s trying to frame you. Do we agree on that? And in order for it to work, there must be several people involved.”
“But why?”
“So the perpetrators themselves will go free, of course. And maybe there are other reasons. That’s what you have to ask yourself.”
Katz had never asked questions about Jorma’s enterprises; this was a silent agreement between them. They had lost contact with each other during Katz’s worst years. Jorma had tried to help him, but he hadn’t wanted to be helped. Yet they each kept up with the other, as if out of the corners of their eyes. Katz knew what Jorma was up to: he worked for various criminal groups, motorcycle gangs, Finns from his old neighborhood in western Stockholm. Debt collection, handling stolen money, stealing cash in transit. People in Jorma’s world had reason to hurt each other, but in his own world?
The Boy in the Shadows Page 10
