The Boy in the Shadows

by Carl-Johan Vallgren

  This surprised Eva, but she just took it in; she’d have to work through it later if she were to concentrate on the woman’s story.

  “What was it that Russian author wrote, that all happy families are alike but those that are unhappy are unhappy in their own ways? I used to think of that during the twelve years I was employed there. About all the tragedies that happened to them, and how their fortune didn’t help a bit.”

  “What sort of relationship did the brothers have?”

  “Not much of one. And it didn’t help that Gustav played favorites with his younger son. I think he went so far as to change his will and make Jan the primary heir in order to humiliate his other son. Pontus hated his brother after that.”

  Maybe to the point that he wanted to destroy his life? Eva thought, as she let her eyes wander back to the living room, the bookshelf, the knickknacks, and a portrait of a young boy she hadn’t noticed earlier.

  “You worked for the family when Kristoffer Klingberg was kidnapped?” she said.

  “That’s right. I had been there for about eight months when it happened. I’d never seen such wealth in my entire life. Servants, chauffeurs, a thirty-room mansion; parties, often organized by Pontus, where people scarfed down Iranian caviar and drank vintage champagne like it was juice. I’m from a working-class home . . . it was like finding yourself in a strange waking dream that suddenly transformed into a nightmare. He was so lovely, that little boy, Kristoffer. Biracial. The black heritage showed up in him, strangely enough, not in his father or his little brother. And plus, he was Gustav’s favorite grandchild; maybe he reminded him of his lost love. Gustav would play with him for hours when he visited. And then it happened . . .”

  She stopped talking and looked out of the window at the parking lot below. She was sweating in her cardigan; dark spots as large as the palms of her hands had formed under her arms. “Gustav thought it was all because of a curse. Because he had left Marie and taken Jan with him. He was a superstitious one. He’d grown up in the Caribbean . . . believed in the evil eye and all that. That people could harm you and get revenge from a distance. He blamed his migraines on it. And the nosebleeds that the whole family suffered from, even though that was probably something hereditary. He considered losing blood to be the worst thing of all. And it added fuel to the fire when someone sent him strange objects in connection with the abduction.”

  “What were they?”

  “Some things that came by mail a few days before Kristoffer disappeared. A doll, among other things; I remember it upset Gustav terribly. Marie Bennoit came from a family where people were involved with things like that. I never found out any details; these are just things I picked up in passing. But Gustav was terrified; I could see that for myself. He was absolutely stricken. He feared for his life. It wasn’t rational, but that’s how it was. When Kristoffer disappeared, he gave up all hope of getting him back. He considered him lost . . . and thought that this was their fate, a punishment they just had to submit to.”

  “Did he ever show those objects to the police?”

  “No. He thought that would just give the curse even more power. I know it sounds strange, but it didn’t seem that way when you were in the middle of it. It was like I just got used to all these peculiar things, for better or for worse.”

  “So you stayed with the family?”

  “Yes. I just had to avoid Pontus. He was always coming on to the girls who worked in the house. I lived in the house year-round and never even got time off. I didn’t think I needed it, because I got to go along on the family’s holidays.”

  “Sailing trips?”

  “Luxury cruises. Spa vacations. Once, they rented an entire ski resort in Switzerland, just for themselves. And we spent a lot of time in the Caribbean, in the Bahamas, Jamaica, the Dominican Republic. Gustav still had business interests there. Sugar-cane plantations. Bauxite mines. Hundreds of employees who slaved away like animals. Only black men. There was that contrast again; it defined the family . . . the contrasts in their lives. Their wealth, and the poverty of their workers. Jan refused to come along. But Pontus was usually there, with various girlfriends or new wives. And Joel, whom his grandfather always wanted to bring along; he had taken Kristoffer’s place. They would sail around down there in a luxury yacht with a hired crew that brought her over from Sweden.”

  “St. Rochus?”

  Sandra Dahlström looked at her in surprise.

  “Yes.”

  “I know this sounds like a strange question, but the summer of 1984—do you know if the boat was in Lake Mälaren then, and if it was ever moored at Hässelby?”

  By now the sweat was running down Sandra’s face. Eva didn’t understand why she was wearing long sleeves.

  “I wouldn’t venture to answer that. I no longer worked for them then, but it’s definitely possible. It would have been on Pontus’s orders. He was the only one who used the boat when it was in Sweden.”

  She stood up and wiped the sweat from her brow with the sleeve of her cardigan.

  “Do you have anything against going outside for a bit?” she said. “I think I need some fresh air.”

  They walked to a nearby park. There were immigrant families on picnics, with blankets and disposable grills. Women in veils and ankle-length dresses. They followed a path toward a wooded area.

  “You were there at the time of the second tragedy, too, when Jan and Joanna were found.”

  She noticed that Sandra stiffened and slowed down.

  “Yes, that was dreadful. All the pain it caused. And for Joel to be the one to find them. I hadn’t gotten to know Kristoffer very well before he disappeared, but it was different with Joel. I had watched him grow up. I’d seen the torture he went through, being the one who was left. Kristoffer lived on in the family like a ghost . . . invisible, but terribly present. I think Joel suffered from survivor’s guilt.”

  She picked up a small rock from the ground; she let it slide between her fingers to calm herself down.

  “When it happened, at Ormnäs Manor . . . it was like the ground was pulled out from under him; the last bit of security was taken from him.”

  “How did he react?”

  “With apathy, at first. Then with rage. I was the one who took care of him in the year after his parents’ death. He moved in with us in Djursholm. Gustav didn’t have the strength to raise him; he was too broken. So I did instead . . . maybe not like another mother, but like an older sister.”

  “How did it go?”

  “Good, sometimes . . . worse, on other occasions. He didn’t know how to work through the catastrophe. He hurt himself . . . attacked objects too. He destroyed things. But I could handle it. I was the only one who could get him to calm down, and then his attacks of rage would turn into unfathomable despair. It was unbearable to see so much pain in such a little boy.”

  Eva noticed that she was starting to have trouble steering the conversation. So she told the story of her meeting with Ragnar Hirsch, about how he suspected that things hadn’t been handled correctly.

  “The morning when Joel found his parents,” she said. “You were there, of course . . . did you notice anything that might have been of interest to the police?”

  She stared into Sandra’s face, which was turned toward her as they stood on the path; it was relaxed, and there was no sign that she was trying to conceal anything.

  “You wanted to tell something to a man in the ambulance crew that was first on the scene. That’s how he understood it, anyway.”

  “Yes . . . but it seemed so stupid at the time, so silly, the fantasy of a little boy. A few nights before they killed themselves, I was with Joel out in the country. Jan and Joanna were off somewhere, maybe in the hunting cabin; they would sit out there and drink . . . both of them had drinking problems. Joel suddenly started telling me about how his older brother had disappeared nine years earlier, and how he remembered a number of details from that day.”

  “He was just a little boy when it happened.�
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  “I know, and that’s why I had trouble believing him.”

  “So what did he say?”

  “That they had been followed that day. That a man had gotten on the same bus and got off at the same stop. That he’d had a companion who’d acted like a drunk, and that the driver of a car, a Volvo, had acted strangely as they crossed the street to the metro station where Kristoffer would later disappear. And there had been strange objects at the place where Kristoffer was taken. Chicken feathers in the shape of a cross, among other things.”

  “Did he tell anyone else about it?”

  “No. He had kept quiet about it all those years, but he told his dad about it the same week they killed themselves. And when he found them in the garage, he came to the conclusion that it was his fault, that they had died because he gave them a dangerous clue.”

  “So Joel didn’t believe that they had killed themselves?”

  “He thought they were murdered. But then he got over it. I convinced him otherwise.”

  They had walked around the wooded area in a circle and were back at the grassy area outside the high-rises.

  “And that was what you wanted to tell the ambulance driver?”

  “Yes . . . but then I decided not to. It was only a child’s fantasies. A few years later, I met someone special and put in my notice. We lived together until very recently, when she got breast cancer and died.”

  The woman in the photographs, she thought; a childless lesbian couple.

  “And Joel. Have you seen him since then?”

  “No. And I haven’t seen anyone else in the family either. I’ve just read about them. I feel sorry for them. Money is certainly no guarantee of happiness.”

  In the car back to the city, Eva felt strangely absent. She scanned through the radio stations until she found the most boring one, Easy Favorites. She listened to cheesy hard-rock ballads as she watched downtown Stockholm grow closer.

  The traffic became heavier and nearly stopped at the bottleneck by Norrtull. She picked up her phone from the passenger seat. She had one new message. She called her voicemail as the traffic crept slowly into the city.

  Marianne Lindblom’s voice. She had news about Jorma. He was in the ICU at Söder Hospital.

  Darkness, slowly filling with sounds. Voices speaking in another room, someone swearing. Visions detaching from a wall of ashes, stepping out like 3-D figures on an internal movie screen. Julin, pale and sweaty, with Emir’s Glock in his hand. The other man, the one in the white tennis shoes, the one who had wanted to murder him but attacked Jorma by mistake . . . he didn’t have a face; he kept it hidden inside his hood. He didn’t speak. He was mute, as if someone had cut out his vocal cords. So there had to be a third person in the background, the one Julin had been talking to.

  He heard sentences in Russian, but he realized that they weren’t coming from the real world; instead, they were somehow part of the drug haze they’d put him in, the narcotic state he didn’t recognize. Katz had tried most things, but this was like nothing else. The apathy . . . a sense of no longer wanting to be alive.

  Kak delya, Danya, said a voice. How are you, Danny?

  He answered with a colloquial Russian word: Normalno!

  The person vanished through a door in his consciousness as suddenly as he had appeared, mumbling a lofty verse.

  Then came the darkness again . . . his brain being chloroformed, his body lying dormant. He saw Julin through a narrow gap in his consciousness. Julin was bending over him as he lay there, bound to a cot; he was breathing so close that he could feel the warmth of his skin.

  “Who else knows that you’re here, Katz?”

  Don’t answer, don’t give him anything. That was what had been drummed into him in the military. If you give them information, you are no longer of use, they’ll have what they want and you are spent and soon dead.

  “We found the car. Did you come here with someone?”

  He pretended to whisper something.

  “What did you say? Speak louder!”

  He whispered even more quietly. Julin bent down to hear.

  He couldn’t miss, no matter how much they had drugged him.

  He spat in Julin’s face. “Fuck you, asshole.”

  The fist came up; Julin was about to hit him when someone whistled from a part of the room he couldn’t see.

  Julin disappeared and, instead, the man in the hood was standing before him. From his skin came the scent of insect repellant. And the scent of burning birchwood; there was a fire in a stove somewhere.

  Katz tried to spit again but didn’t have the strength; his head rolled back, into unconsciousness.

  He was in a server now; he was a sort of electrical impulse traveling at the speed of light through semiconductors, deeper into the operating system; he saw a gap in the source code and he installed a back door, disguised as a system file. In case I need to come back, he thought triumphantly: in case I need to run away from here!

  Glämsta. Suddenly he was there . . . at the Jewish summer camp. He walked past the Falu red cabins, the kiosk, the Secret Cave, Lake Klappis, the football field where they held their Junior Maccabi games every year. He had only gone there for two summers, and he had hated it. He’d always felt like an outsider . . . he didn’t even fit in as a Jew.

  The man in the hood bent over him, as if he didn’t know what to do. His breathing was abnormally slow; he only took a breath every thirty seconds.

  The bottle wound with fabric was protecting him; the figure with the outstretched arms. Katz knew it, but he didn’t know how. He didn’t even know where this idea came from, but it was very strong. They hadn’t found it when they searched his clothes; the figure had fallen into the lining of his jacket through a hole in the inner pocket. He felt it against his hip, and he felt the power that radiated from it. The man in the hood felt it too. Only him. Not Julin. He felt it and was afraid of it.

  The third man’s voice: What the hell are we going to do with him?

  Who was it . . . Pontus Klingberg?

  He slipped away from the room again, deeper into unconsciousness. All of a sudden he was standing in a kitchen in his pajamas. Benjamin was at the table with a passport in his hand. There was a large J stamped on the front endpaper. Anne tried to calm him, tried to take the passport from him, but he wouldn’t let her. He raised his arm instead, striking her face with the back of his hand. The anguish he felt as he watched his mother fall to the floor was not of this world. Two rivulets of pinkish blood ran from her nose.

  “Ferdamte shikse,” his father said in Yiddish, in a strange voice, and he meant it as an insult—that she wasn’t a Jewish woman, that she was Swedish, from a village just south of Krokom in Jämtland.

  His mother got up without answering, walked over to Benjamin, and tried once again to take the passport from him. And this time she succeeded.

  Benjamin, in only his underwear, his circumcised cock peeking out of the gap. You are reminded of your identity every time you piss, he liked to say.

  His father cried, his face buried in his hands, as Anne stood at the sink and washed the blood away from her nose. No one noticed Katz; it was as if he had become invisible.

  His mother put the passport—an Austrian passport, he realized, with the Jewish stamp on the first page—back in the top drawer of the kitchen cupboard. His father said something about his parents, whom Katz had never met, Chaim and Sara, buried in a kibbutz between Jaffa and Tel Aviv; said something about the man he had to kill for the sake of the passport and his parents. Katz didn’t understand. Who had his father been forced to kill?

  He had asked the question as he stood in the doorway: “Who did you kill, Dad?”

  He remembered the silence and realized that they hadn’t noticed he was there until that moment.

  “A swine,” his mother said, without looking at him. “It was a long time ago. The man deserved it.”

  Darkness again, but it was weaker this time, as if it were washed out. He climbed up t
hrough thin layers of consciousness. He opened his eyes. It was day; stripes of sunshine trickled in at the edges of the lowered blinds.

  The man with the hood was standing next to him. He caught a glimpse of his face. Dark. Squinting eyes.

  He couldn’t explain it. He’s dead, he thought. The man wasn’t alive. Pseudo-life.

  His body ached. He tried to move but nothing happened. He was still bound—but not to a cot, he realized, to a wide board that stood on sawhorses.

  He wasn’t afraid. He had no feelings at all. He was paralyzed somehow. He couldn’t even move his fingers, couldn’t move his feet; only his breathing worked. And his eyelids. He could blink. He could see.

  He still had his clothes on. They had taken off his shoes and socks. As if from a great distance, he felt the power from the bottle in the lining of his jacket. He didn’t understand how it worked, but it was protecting him. The man in the hood couldn’t hurt him as long as the power was emanating from it.

  The dead man. He did only what others ordered him to, because he lacked his own will, because he lacked true life.

  All imagination, he thought; they had drugged him, and he was suffering from hallucinations.

  He saw something moving across the room. The third man stood with his back to him, dressed in a thin, dark coat, speaking softly with Julin. He couldn’t make out what they were saying; there was just a dull mumbling when his name popped up. The man with the hood stroked his hand lightly. His hand was ice-cold . . . he had never felt anything like it; it was not only cool but chilled from the inside, as if the blood that ran under his skin were freezing.

  He felt the draw of heroin; it suddenly came out of nowhere.

  It’s been a long time since I went to NA, but when I get out of here I’ll go to a meeting, that’s a promise.

  Then Julin was standing before him. “Can you hear me, Katz?”

  He wanted to spit at him again, but again he didn’t have the strength. He just blinked.

  “You should be able to talk. The stuff we gave you doesn’t affect your ability to speak. I want you to use your voice. Say something, anything at all.”