“If I knew where he was I would kill him. With my bare hands, if I had to.”
He started to cry very quietly.
“He murdered her, that fucking Jew bastard.”
His voice was faint, almost a whisper. His stubble glistened with moisture.
“We would meet here sometimes, when Joel was away. We took risks, but I was so in love I didn’t even have a guilty conscience. Their relationship was coming to an end. She wanted kids . . . I could have given them to her.”
He nodded to himself as if to lend weight to the words. He picked up a glass of water from the floor, drank from it, and put it back down.
“We were going to tell him; we’d picked a day and everything. Even though we knew the chaos it would unleash. Poor Joel. I can picture his despair. His wife, leaving him for his uncle. But we didn’t have time. He disappeared before we could tell him. That psychopath Jew kidnapped him. And murdered him, I suppose. Just like he murdered Angela.”
Pontus Klingberg was deep inside his own mind. He didn’t care that she was there, didn’t care who she was or what she wanted; he was just talking to himself, trying to put his pain into words.
“She changed her mind when Joel vanished. As if he weren’t important until then, when she was worried about him. She didn’t want to see me anymore . . . she came out to Djursholm one night just to tell me that nothing more would happen between us, and then she contacted Katz, who pretended to want to help her.”
Blood suddenly streamed out of both of his nostrils, dripping onto the front of his shirt. He picked up a tissue and held it over his face as he pinched the bridge of his nose until it stopped bleeding.
“A family curse,” he said. “The attacks pass as quickly as they begin.”
When he stirred, she took a step backward on reflex. But he remained seated, staring emptily into the fire.
“Nineteen-seventy,” she said. “You had Kristoffer taken.”
“Are you out of your mind?”
“Joel said something about a man dressed as a drunk who was posted near the site of the abduction. And he said they’d been followed that day.”
“Joel has always had an active imagination.”
He looked at her in confusion, shaking his head quietly.
“Some objects were sent to Gustav in connection with Kristoffer’s abduction.”
“That happened all the time. Jan’s mother had put a curse on the family . . . part of that is sending that sort of message, to keep the fear alive. You’ve never been over there; you don’t know anything about it, how strong the beliefs in fukú and voodoo can be . . . the things a person can imagine, how self-fulfilling they can be.”
The blood was flowing again; he swore under his breath as he leaned back with the tissue over his face.
“Those dolls that came by mail . . . Marassa, Erzulie Freda, and all of those . . . they had nothing to do with Kristoffer’s kidnapping, even if Dad was convinced they did. A woman took him. On her own initiative, because she could. Maybe she was a pedophile. We received indications to suggest she was. Jan and I had never been great friends, but that changed after Kristoffer vanished. We hired people to look for him privately. Security experts . . . private investigators . . . military people who wanted to earn some extra money on the side. The police got nowhere, of course—or, more accurately, Dad made sure they didn’t get anywhere because he was terrified of Caribbean superstitions. Shortly before my brother died we got news from Holland. That the woman supposedly sold Kristoffer to a ring of pedophiles shortly after his abduction. They abused him . . . and after about a year they had him killed. We received that information in June 1979, nine years after he’d disappeared, and that was the death blow for my brother and his wife. If it was true, there was no hope. A few weeks later, they killed themselves.”
Pontus Klingberg stopped speaking, stared into the fire, and pinched himself hard on the arm.
She had been wrong, she thought. She had misunderstood everything. And Sandra Dahlström hadn’t understood what had happened either.
“Fifty million kronor was recently transferred from one of Klingberg Aluminum’s subsidiaries to an account in the Virgin Islands. Can you tell me what that was about?”
Pontus Klingberg gave her an icy look.
“I don’t believe you’ve identified yourself yet. You’re a police officer, I presume?”
There was a sound from the front door. She turned around and saw a person walking across the hallway by the staircase. It was Katz, with a pistol in his hand. A man she hadn’t seen since she was a teenager.
What if nothing was as she believed it to be, she thought, as a thousand contradictory thoughts washed through her. What if it was him, both times?
She turned to Klingberg. His nose was bleeding again, violently this time.
“Who are you?” he asked again. “I want to know what this is about.”
But she didn’t answer. She had made her choice. She backed out of the room with one thought in her head. Get Katz out of there before he did something they would both regret.
PART 3
She sat down on a bench fifty meters from the playground and watched them through the trees, watched them playing by the trampolines. She found him immediately by the way he moved, as if she were equipped with a particular sort of radar. He was wearing his Lightning McQueen cap. And expensive brand-name sneakers Ola had bought. And the denim jacket he’d inherited from Lisa. He was standing apart from the others, holding a teacher by the hand. The small, huddled figure seemed so fragile in the sunlight.
Then he said something and looked up at his teacher. She wondered how it felt to stand with your neck bent so far back, talking to someone who was twice your height.
It was incredible that they’d been a family once upon a time, that she’d loved Ola and couldn’t have imagined a life with the children without him.
She looked down at the letter in her lap. It was a militarily short message to say that he had contacted a family lawyer and applied for sole custody of the children.
Full-out war, she thought.
It was the first real week of summer, and the whole city was bursting with green. The parks smelled of lilacs. An atmosphere of excitement.
She thought about calling home to see how Katz was doing, to listen to his voice and try to say something hopeful.
He was hiding at her house now. It was insane, but what could they do?
The police were still looking for him, but at least the media had started writing about other things. The upcoming European Championship, for example.
Jorma was the only one who knew where Katz was hiding. He had come home from the hospital now, completely recovered.
She herself had called her family doctor and said that she felt burnt out. Generously enough, he had written her a certificate for a week’s sick leave.
She wondered if that would be enough to make any progress. After all, they didn’t even know where to start.
She would never forget the sight of Katz at the manor. Exhausted and confused by what he’d been through: drugged, bound, and tortured. She hadn’t seen him in nearly three decades, and yet she would have been able to pick him out of a crowd from a hundred meters away. He was a different person, and yet he was also the same. Without a doubt, he would have tried to hurt Pontus Klingberg if she hadn’t managed to get him out of there; Pontus Klingberg, who was innocent . . .
A truck carrying students celebrating their graduation drove by on its way to the city. A bare-chested jogger passed the bench she was sitting on. There were more people in the park now; another preschool group was on its way to the playground.
Two women stood at the ice-cream stand, speaking to each other in sign language. She had always admired that spatial syntax, the beauty and the drama of the movements, hands as tools for language. But not right now; it only bothered her.
She looked at her phone. Four missed calls from Danielsson—or, rather, they had been rejected with a push of a button
. She wondered if her former identity had been revealed at last. But she didn’t think so.
The deaf women had each bought an ice cream, and they sat down on a park bench.
She looked over at the playground again, at Arvid, who had started playing with the other children. Her little boy.
She gave a start as a man approached the playground from the opposite direction. He was wearing a jacket with the hood pulled up. He walked purposefully toward the kids, holding something in his hand.
Another man came from the other direction, by the sandpits. He was wearing a brown leather jacket, with a cap and black gloves. He turned so he was walking diagonally up to the bouncy house.
Her heart beat violently. Yet she remained seated, as if she were frozen.
The sunlight seemed to curdle in the air. A few pigeons picked at the ground two meters from her feet.
The man in the hooded jacket was walking faster now; he was only thirty meters from the children. Arvid was talking to his teacher again, laughing at what she said, taking something from his trouser pocket to show her.
She looked in the other direction. The other man was no longer visible; he had vanished behind a storage building. The pigeons took off and flew away as she moved her head suddenly.
The man was ten meters from Arvid.
She felt like she was going to die. She watched him lift his hand and bellow something that made the children jump. Then she realized what he was holding—a dog’s leash. And then she saw the runaway Border collie running off between the trees. He started jogging after it, past the preschool children, off through the park, where the man in the leather coat had shown up again, on his way to a café.
She stood up and walked back to the car, aware of how her hand shook as she put the key in the ignition. She fished her phone out of her purse. She dialed her home number and let it ring four times before she hung up and called again—the code they’d agreed on. But Katz didn’t answer.
For some reason she pictured Sandra Dahlström’s face. The photograph of the boy on the bookshelf. The portrait of the woman on the bedside table. The strange sense of déjà vu she’d had when she visited the woman.
The lawyer’s office was on Narvavägen, not far from Karlaplan. A receptionist was sitting behind a marble desk, talking on the phone via a headset, when she came through the door.
“Do you have an appointment with someone?” the receptionist asked.
“Ola Westin.”
“And your name is?”
“Eva Westin.”
Tinted picture windows looked out onto the street. Behind the reception desk was a glass wall that looked into the office landscape. Ola was inside, leaning over a stroller. Erika was visiting. He looked at the clock, said something to her, and disappeared toward a door.
A few minutes later she was shown into his office.
“What are you doing here?” he asked.
“We have to talk.”
“About what? You don’t care about anything. Lisa has tried to call every night and you won’t even answer your cell.”
“I’m sorry about that.”
She looked at his hand, which was resting on the desk. The Breitling watch with its thick steel links, the pale hairs on the back of his hand; she had the absurd thought that this very hand had cupped her breasts and slid along her thighs late at night when the kids had gone to bed. Or had stroked her cheek when she was tired or sad.
“It’s not the first time,” he said. “And nothing happens to fix it. You just act like an addict . . . and don’t blame your upbringing and your parents. Everyone has to take responsibility for their own life.”
“Once a junkie, always a junkie, is that what you think?”
“No. I just want our kids to be happy.”
She turned her head and discovered that Erika was on the other side of the glass wall. She had taken the baby out of the stroller and was rocking it in her arms. She glanced nervously in their direction.
“And the kids have started talking about that one time again, about what happened at Easter. Lisa is a big girl now. I’ve started dropping her off at the bus stop outside the school, and she’s allowed to walk the last hundred meters by herself. She understands everything that goes on around her.”
She didn’t like the idea that he let her little girl walk by herself. But she didn’t say so.
“I thought they were sleeping,” she said instead.
“But they weren’t.”
That casual hook-up. She didn’t even remember his name—he was just a man she’d met out one evening when the kids were at Ola’s, and she’d brought him home with her in her drunkenness. Then he’d shown up again spontaneously one night during Easter week. She couldn’t think of a good reason to explain why she’d let him come in. Because she felt like she owed him something?
The children had been sleeping in their room. That was what she had thought, anyway. It had been after eleven p.m.; incredibly enough, he had remembered the entrance code to her building, although he’d only been there once—a one-night stand, she’d thought.
“You got sloshed and fucked some guy until the kids woke up. That’s not okay, damn it.”
No, it wasn’t. She had offered him some JD, and she’d had some herself . . . too much. Ola was right, she’d lost her good judgment and, God knows how, ended up in bed with him. The image of the kids at the bedroom door. They must have been standing there for a long time before she realized they were there. Her moans had woken them. They had been scared, so they got up.
“And now you’re going to punish me for it?” she said.
“No. You need help. With this whole self-destructive thing, which you’ve had as long as I can remember.”
He had taken a pencil from the desk and was nervously twirling it between his fingers. His nails were neat, manicured. She looked at her own: blunt, short, unfeminine.
“Is the lawyer planning to take it to court?”
“Maybe, I don’t know. Listen, all I want is for the kids to be happy. Not least with you. But it’s not working. They aren’t doing well; Lisa’s teacher says she’s been having trouble concentrating all spring. No matter how much you love them, because I know you do, you don’t seem capable of taking care of them. Maybe you will be eventually . . . I really hope so. But until then, they’re going to live with me.”
Erika had put the baby back in the stroller. She seemed to be contemplating whether she should come into Ola’s office and ask if he needed help throwing her out.
“Okay,” she said. “I’ll back off. You can call your family lawyer and say we’ll work it out on our own. I’ll let the kids go if I can see them twice a week. You can be there if you want; that’s okay with me. Then we’ll see. I’ll try to shape up. I’ll go to a psychologist or something. You’re right on every count.”
He looked at her searchingly.
“But that’s not all, is it?”
She shook her head.
“It’s about a woman,” she said. “Sandra Dahlström. I think you had her as a client once.”
The room’s twenty square meters were filled with books and decorations, strangely painted toys, wooden masks, statuettes, children’s dolls, and figurines made of cloth. An open bottle of rum stood on a serving table. The strong scent of perfume hung in the air.
The man before them noticed their curious glances.
“It’s not all from the Caribbean,” he said. “I started out as an expert on West Africa, but my studies of the slave trade led me to Haiti. Voodoo is an incredibly interesting area of research, because it’s as much a philosophy of life and a cultural heritage as it is a religion . . . and it’s the history of the slave trade expressed in symbols.”
He went over to one of the dolls that was sitting on a small throne on the other side of the room; it was made of rigid plastic and looked like the average child’s doll, but it wore the makeup of a grown woman and was dressed in gaudy clothes.
“Erzulie Freda,” he said. “One of
the four hundred deities in the voodoo nation. The prima donna of the spirits. The Caribbean’s answer to Venus. She’s the goddess of love and a gay icon in the same being. Voodoo practitioners who become possessed by her become incredibly flirty, even with members of their own sex. Erzulie Freda loves jewels, French perfumes, and expensive champagne. If she doesn’t get a shower of perfume at night before I go to bed, she makes a big mess in here. Unless it’s pure coincidence that a whole section of folders happened to fall off the shelf during the night, or that the toilet suddenly won’t flush. So you’ll have to excuse the excessive scent of Calvin Klein perfume.”
Champagne, Katz thought, looking over at the serving table. Joel Klingberg had painted a champagne cork in the commemorative painting of what he’d seen when his brother was abducted. And a perfume bottle.
Jan Hammarberg, lecturer in cultural anthropology and the country’s leading expert in the field, had agreed to meet them in his home just outside Uppsala, without asking any questions. Perhaps he had been frightened by the sight of Jorma, his prison tattoos, the bandage around his neck, the look that wouldn’t take no for an answer. They were taking a risk by coming here, but they had to find a clue somewhere.
“Is that a voodoo doll?” he asked, nodding at Erzulie Freda.
“That depends on how you define the word. Voodoo just means to serve the loa, or the four hundred and one spirits that are part of the belief system. The dolls represent the spirits. Here’s another one of my favorites: Marassa!” Hammarberg had picked up two more dolls from the shelf; they had African features and were identically dressed in pink baby clothes. They were tied together at the waist with a string.
“Marassa is a pair of twins, but they’re one and the same loa. The problem is that she has to have two of every offering. And because Marassa is a child, she prefers sweet things: sweets, fruit, pastries, and ice cream. If you happen to become possessed by her, you yourself start acting like a child—begging for presents and complaining that you don’t get enough sweets or that you don’t get to be the boss of everyone and everything. She can be a bit trying, this little cutie.”
The Boy in the Shadows Page 18
