He smiled a stiff, academic smile and looked at them searchingly. Katz wondered if he recognized him. He didn’t think so; the photographs that had been published in the papers were old and he didn’t look the same these days. He’d also allowed his beard and his hair to grow out.
“Oh, goodness, I’m standing here giving a lecture as if you were two of my students. I understand you had some specific questions?”
Katz handed the first embroidered cloth to Hammarberg.
“A ceremonial flag,” he said, after studying it closely. “Drapo sèvis. Most voodoo societies own a few. They’re used during certain rituals, and when one is invoking the gods. The swordmaster is in charge of them. They’re arranged in pairs, or triads, just like in military parades.”
“What do the letters mean . . . MK? And the kneeling man?”
“This is the flag of Maître Carrefour. Or Met Kalfou, as he’s called in Creole. The master of the crossroads. He belongs to the petro spirits, the hot spirits. You might know him from American blues. The devil at the crossroads. One can invoke him to cause injury or to kill an enemy. Every loa has its own flag. And Met Kalfou’s flag depicts a man kneeling before two crossed arrows, or a fork in the road.”
Katz handed him the other piece of cloth.
“Legba!” said Hammarberg. “The first spirit invoked in any ceremony. He opens the passage for all the other spirits. He’s usually depicted like this, as St. Rochus, tortured by boils that are being licked by dogs . . . not unlike the condition the slaves found themselves in when they reached the coast of Hispaniola. And the colors . . . red and black . . . it’s a Bizango flag.”
The man carefully folded the pieces of cloth and handed them back to Katz.
“Bizango?” he said.
“Voodoo of the night. The Bizango society’s secret voodoo goes hand in hand with Haiti’s violent history. Pride in being the first black nation to win its independence from a colonial power. The society was formed in the eighteenth century during the great slave uprisings. Runaway slaves—maroons—waged guerilla warfare against the French along with the few Taino Indians who had survived the ravages and diseases of the Europeans. But they had a severe shortage of weapons, so the spiritual battle was at least as important. They got power from the voodoo, from the Indians’ cool healing spirits, and from the dangerous petro spirits from Africa, and they used the magic in their warfare.”
Hammarberg grew silent and walked over to his gigantic bookcase, where he retrieved a thick volume from the shelves and showed them a page of it. Pictures of people-size dolls. All of them made of red-and-black cloth. They looked grotesque, with open wounds and fabric intestines hanging out. Some were in chains; others had crutches. Some had amputated limbs.
“Textile sculptures from a temple in the Artibonite district. They bear witness to the military history of the movement. They’re mutilated because they were once slaves.”
He turned the pages to another part of the book.
“A Bizango captain with rank insignia and a bottle of rum in his hand. A Bizango grandmother with enormous, sagging breasts. The general of the three swamps. And here’s a Bizango executioner.”
A cloth figure with a black hood was holding a sharp machete out toward the photographer.
“When the usual social institutions didn’t come through, the Bizango functioned as a court. They could even sentence people to death, but most of the time it ended in a symbolic execution.”
Hammarberg looked at his watch, gave a quick smile, and then opened a bottle of rum.
“Time for offerings,” he said self-consciously. “I have a Petit Papa Bossou Trois Cornes who’s angry because I didn’t manage to acquire his wife during my last trip to Port-au-Prince. And to be appeased, he needs double servings of rum.”
He went over to a small, horned wooden sculpture that stood on the windowsill, poured a splash of rum on its head, and then placed the glass with the rest of its contents on a plate at its feet.
“Do you have any idea what this means?”
Katz had taken the fabric-wrapped souvenir bottle from his jacket pocket. Hammarberg inspected the object with interest.
“A paké,” he said at last. “A sort of talisman. We call this particular kind a Congo paké, because they have their origins in Congo. They’re carried under the shirt, directly against the skin as protection against ounga-mort, or bewitchment. I like to compare them to batteries, magical batteries with concentrated power. Where did you get it?”
“A friend.”
“Are you interested in selling it? I’ll pay handsomely. No? I understand, a strong paké is better than life insurance.”
Hammarberg handed the object back with a smile. Then he sat down in an easy chair with his hands behind his head.
“You said something about the administration of justice earlier,” said Katz. “Something about symbolically sentencing people to death.”
“Yes. N’zambi. To turn the convicted person into a zombie. I don’t usually talk about that side of voodoo, because it results in a lot of misunderstandings.”
Hammarberg looked at them seriously.
“In popular belief, a zombie is a body without a soul, a dead body endowed with mechanical life by way of bewitching. The conjurer steals a recently buried body before it has had time to rot, gives the dead person new life, shows it how to move and work, enslaves it, and forces it into hard labor. It’s said that the night shift on the sugar-cane plantations used to be made up of zombies. They could work twelve hours at a time, seven days a week, without eating or drinking. In Haiti, people often guard graves until it’s absolutely certain that the corpse has begun to rot. But if you’re unlucky, the conjurer will get there first.”
“Bewitched by some sort of autosuggestion, you mean?”
“It’s a complex issue. It might be a state of mental illness that is interpreted as a display of magic, or be about social shunning of someone who has violated the collective or the community. A sort of ritual punishment or—how should I put it?—vicarious suicide. There are rumors about medicinal herbs that can chemically lobotomize a person. And it does take a certain amount of suggestion or autosuggestion . . . or witchcraft, if you choose to believe in it.”
Hammarberg bent down and pulled on a pair of jogging shoes.
“Please excuse me, gentlemen,” he said, “but I think I’ve given you as much information as I can. I have to go out and get some exercise before my lectures begin.”
They took the scenic route back to Stockholm; Jorma drove and Katz sat in the backseat, to be safe. He thought of Hammarberg’s bizarre claims about people in suspended animation, but he put these thoughts aside for the time being because he didn’t know what he should think.
He felt a chill inside; he’d become so closed off.
Someone was toying with him, and that was why there was no logic to what had happened. Julin had wanted to kill him in the hunting cabin, but something had prevented him. Shots had been fired and, shortly afterward, the building had been emptied. Someone had set him free so that his nightmare could continue. The pistol had been left on the gravel outside the house. They wanted him to feel hunted. Or had they hoped that he would shoot Pontus Klingberg in the manor house, so that he would be accused of yet another murder? But Eva had gotten him out of there in time.
Eva. He wondered if she had gotten back to the apartment by now, and if she had been anxious when he wasn’t there. The strange feeling of seeing her again after all these years. It had unleashed an avalanche of memories inside him, the sensation of falling backward in time to places and events he didn’t know if he wanted to revisit. It was the sensation of having met a total stranger who was also a close friend.
Near Vallentuna, Jorma slowed down as they encountered squad cars: two of them, heading north.
Katz sank down, but Jorma smiled at him in the rearview mirror. “The amulet will protect you,” he said. “The Congo packet, or whatever it was called.”
“Hamm
arberg seemed to believe in it.”
“Or else he’s playing it safe.”
“Do you think he recognized me?”
“From the papers? No. But he must have wondered who we were.”
They drove through the northern suburbs. Katz wished things could feel the way they used to. He and Jorma, together again. And Eva, waiting for him. As if no time had passed at all. But it wasn’t real. They were no longer the same people.
She decided to take the stairs up to the eighth floor. She needed to think, to buy time.
According to Ola, Sandra Dahlström and Linnie Holm had been living together for nearly twenty years when they decided to apply for adoption. The child in question was a seven-year-old boy they’d gotten to know during a holiday in the Philippines. They had completed all the paperwork at the adoption center, followed all the rules, arranged things with the authorities in Manila and the institution where the orphaned boy lived, but they were rejected by the social services in Stockholm.
The decision had come as a shock. They were desperate and decided to bring in a lawyer. This was in the mid-2000s. Ola had taken the case:
I did what I could, but they were rejected again because they were considered too old. Sandra Dahlström was over fifty and, in addition, her partner, Linnie Holm, had been diagnosed with an aggressive form of breast cancer that the doctors said would kill her within a few years.
So there was yet another reason for the authorities to throw a wrench into the works for the childless lesbian couple. More bitterness. Both had been convinced they were being discriminated against on the basis of their sexual orientation. People in the Philippines had already said yes, and the boy was just waiting to travel to Sweden. They had begged Ola to appeal the case in a higher court. He had advised against it. They were outraged; they threatened to sue him for breach of faith and sent threatening letters to the solicitors’ office.
Eva remembered the case because Ola had been so troubled by it, because there was nothing to their claims that they were discriminated against and because, in the midst of it all, he felt sorry for them.
At the same time, the couple had been there for vulnerable children, and they wanted Ola to use this as an argument when he appealed. She had a faint memory of him telling her about this, saying that, among others, they had taken in a deaf boy because Linnie Holm was fluent in sign language.
The boy’s name was Jonas Åkesson; he lived with them on and off for a few years.
Jonas . . . the boy in the photograph on Sandra’s bookshelf. The guy from the security tapes in the parking garage who had been found dead of an overdose.
The fourth floor. The scent of Middle Eastern food in the stairwell, clattering and shouting from the apartments.
Sandra had gotten her to suspect Pontus Klingberg, and maybe she’d done that on purpose. Her thoughts whirled as she moved on, almost running now. The person who had killed Angela Klingberg wasn’t trying to imitate Katz, or what he thought Katz had done. It was no copycat case. Because it was the same person: the same perpetrator as on Grubbholmen.
She wanted to tell Katz, but he didn’t answer when she called the number to Torsgatan.
The same person both times. The biting madman.
The door was unlocked. Eva saw Sandra Dahlström through the hall. She was sitting on the glassed-in balcony in front of the same game of solitaire as last time. She raised her eyes as she discovered Eva there, and pulled on her cardigan, which was hanging over the back of her chair. There was a lit candle in front of the picture of the boy.
Eva walked up to her, took her left arm, and rolled up the sleeve. Old scars, from bites, several dozen of them. Ugly edges. Others looked better—scars from actual operations.
The woman looked down at her arm as if she didn’t really understand that it was her own.
“There are more,” she said quietly, “on my stomach and my breasts, worse than the ones on my arms. Once, he almost bit off my nose. He bit so hard that the cartilage snapped and the tip of my nose came off. They were barely able to save it. Gustav paid for the plastic surgery.”
The tiny neat scars under the wings of her nose were hardly visible in the bright sunlight.
“Who knew about it?”
“Only Gustav, and he did everything he could to keep it quiet.”
“Not Pontus?”
“No.”
“What about the police . . . didn’t you ever report him?”
“Gustav gave me plenty to make up for it. Like an allowance, almost, up until he died. After all, I was the only one who could manage him when he had his rages; no one else could handle it. I know it sounds sick, but I really loved him . . . he was just a little boy.”
She was in mourning, Eva thought; she was taking antianxiety medication, but she didn’t know that the deaf boy’s death had any connection to this.
Joel had had the boy killed because he had seen the person who parked Joel’s car in the garage—whether it was Joel himself, or someone else.
And shortly before Jonas’s death, he had murdered Angela, out of jealousy. He must have learned about the affair she was having with his uncle, and that had set him off. He was sick, pathologically obsessed with thoughts of revenge. He had hired Julin, transferred money to an account in the Virgin Islands so that Julin would take part in a conspiracy to frame Katz. That is, the person who had been convicted for Joel’s first attack, on Grubbholmen. But, first, he had faked his own disappearance.
She didn’t know exactly how, but it made sense. Joel Klingberg must have been on board the boat that night. He’d managed to hide when Jorma and Katz broke in, but then he followed them, decided to get revenge, to hurt one of them, and had struck when he found her and Katz in the bike room, knocked out on heroin.
“You continued to see Joel, didn’t you? And he’d met Jonas, too?”
“Yes . . . he couldn’t seem to let me go. I left my job, but he kept visiting me. I know it’s difficult to understand, but I watched Joel grow up, and he had become like family to me.”
She grew quiet, as if something had come into her head.
“When was the last time you saw him?”
“A few years ago. When Jonas lived here. Linnie was still alive. But I asked him to leave. Jonas was afraid of him.”
She stood up and gathered her playing cards.
“And Rickard Julin? What did he have to do with it all?”
Sandra looked at her in surprise. “Why?”
“Just tell me!”
Warning bells were ringing inside her, but she ignored them. She looked up at the milky eye of the camera lens, waiting for someone to let her in.
She had called the office and asked for Pontus Klingberg. A younger man had said he was working from home this week. Unfortunately, he couldn’t give out the phone number.
She rang the bell again. Felt the button vibrate against her fingertip. Looked up at the camera, which was at the very top of the wall outside the house in Djursholm. She felt exposed to the gaze of an invisible person.
Pontus Klingberg didn’t know that his nephew had murdered Angela, and that Julin had helped him. He didn’t even know what had happened in the hunting cabin at Ormnäs Manor. If it was a case of revenge, he might reasonably be next in line. She had to warn him.
She had tried to call Katz again, but with no luck. She’d left a message on the answering machine to say that she was coming here. Why hadn’t he answered? If the police had found him, she ought to have known by now; Danielsson would have called.
She heard the dull buzz of an electric lock and a click as a bolt lifted in the metal gates and they folded back like the wings of a mechanical butterfly.
She walked up the gravel apron to the house. She’d never seen anything like it. At least thirty rooms. Views of the water from two verandas. A 25-meter pool on the lawn behind the house. Two tennis courts beyond that. A private beach with a pavilion on a dock. A boathouse as big as an average home.
The gate slid shut behi
nd her. She went up the stairs to the door, which had been left open.
Once inside the house, she called out but didn’t receive an answer. The curtains in the foyer were drawn closed. She opened a pair of French doors and found herself in the largest private dining room she’d ever seen. A table with room for thirty guests. A marble floor. Expensive art. One Carl Larsson painting covered almost an entire wall.
She called out again, but no one revealed himself.
She went on through various lounges until she got to a smaller parlor. She thought of what Sandra Dahlström had said about Julin, but she didn’t know how it was connected. In the mid-’70s, as a young officer in counterintelligence, he had been contracted to try to find out what had happened to Kristoffer. Pontus Klingberg had mentioned that he and his brother, Jan, had contacted people in the military to try to get help. So Julin was one of them, maybe even the one who had brought the terrible news from Holland.
She was back in the foyer again, having gone through the entire first floor without seeing anyone. She smelled a strange odor; it was sweet and sickly at the same time, but she couldn’t figure out where it was coming from. She thought Pontus must be in the house somewhere; after all, the gate had opened.
She went up the stairs to the second floor, starting to sweat even though the house was air-conditioned. The odor was stronger now; it smelled like something was rotting, something old and putrid. More art on the walls; she was in the modern section. She recognized the grotesque style of one of the paintings—an Irishman, what was his name? . . . Francis Bacon?
She called out again, but there was no answer. Could he be in one of the other buildings on the property?
She had to warn him. And work things out. Pontus Klingberg was the one who could give her answers. So, Julin had become friends with him. Started spending time with the family. And, according to Sandra Dahlström, he had started to take an interest in Joel. This was before Joel had been sent to Sigtuna. He had gone to a private school in Danderyd back then and was extremely gifted. Julin was fascinated by his intelligence . . . and, according to Sandra, by his attacks of rage.
The Boy in the Shadows Page 19
