The Boy in the Shadows

by Carl-Johan Vallgren

  Was Julin the one who had seen to it that he eventually ended up at the interpreter academy along with Katz?

  Had he run some sort of program, with what he thought were psychopaths who were gifted at languages?

  It was speculation, but maybe Pontus Klingberg knew.

  She gave a start when she heard steps nearby. She stood still, but she couldn’t hear anything more.

  Again according to Sandra Dahlström, Julin had also become interested in everything to do with voodoo. In the curse Marie Bennoit was alleged to have placed on the family. He had come along on several of the family’s trips to the Dominican Republic; he’d visited Gustav’s sugar-cane plantation.

  She entered a room containing Caribbean antiques. Wooden masks and statues. Two machetes in a cross on the wall. Paintings depicting black people working in a field of sugar cane. It was racist, but it was hard to put her finger on just why. A slave-trade feeling. Gustav’s old office, she realized.

  She went on through a corridor which had a suite of rooms that faced the water. She felt her heart beating as if it wanted to pound its way out of her chest. The sickly smell was stronger. She opened one of the doors to a bedroom and peered in. She absorbed what she didn’t want to see . . . a scene that looked staged. Pontus Klingberg’s body, sitting with its back against the wall. The swollen male body that lay with its head in Pontus’s lap had gunshot wounds on the forehead. Pontus Klingberg’s fingers had been laced with Julin’s, as if they were praying together. She saw Klingberg’s eyes bulging out like someone with a goiter, and his tongue, which had been pulled out of his mouth, was grotesquely long because the bone had been broken as he was strangled. The bites around his neck, like jewelry made of wounds.

  There was an entrance into Eva’s apartment from the rear courtyard. They used it to be on the safe side. Katz called out for her, but there was no answer.

  The apartment looked as he had left it that morning. Messy, and somehow makeshift. Furniture that didn’t really match, a home she didn’t really care about, as if she were only a temporary guest in her own life.

  He opened the refrigerator and took out two light beers, handed one to Jorma, and sat down with the other on the living room sofa. There was an empty bottle of Jack Daniel’s on the table. She drank too much. Other than that, he didn’t know very much about her, except that she had been married, had two kids, and was fighting with her ex about custody. And she had lived alone for the past few years. She had told him things, starting to stutter at one point—just like when they were young—about casual love affairs, men who came and went, how she kept them at a distance, uninterested in more serious relationships.

  What would their lives have been like if the incident on Grubbholmen had never happened? Maybe better, but probably worse. At least the incident had gotten her on a different track; she’d stopped doing drugs and taken control of her life. If they had stayed together, the downward slope would have become steeper; they would have gone downhill faster and faster, until they crashed at the bottom.

  “Where is she?” said Jorma.

  “I don’t know. She had plans to visit her son at preschool.”

  Jorma had emptied the beer; he looked around as if for a piano to play, and was disappointed when he didn’t see one.

  It struck Katz that he was longing to see Eva step through the door with her sad smile, and he was surprised at how strong the feeling was.

  “I think I’ll go out to Kransen,” said Jorma. “The doctor wants me to take it easy.”

  “And the police . . . don’t they want more information?”

  “I’ve been called in for questioning by the criminal police next week. The county police’s expert on gang-related crime wants to have a chat with me. I’ll have to see which story I tell.”

  Katz nodded and took a drink of his beer.

  “We have to find the people who are behind all this.”

  “I know. But not tonight.”

  The answering machine was blinking amid the mess on the table. Her children might have called and left a message. He shouldn’t be there, in her life. There was no reason for her to be dragged deeper into what was going on.

  “Do you think Emir’s apartment is still safe?” he asked.

  “It’d be better for you to stay here . . . in the eye of the storm. Don’t you trust her?”

  “Yeah, I do.”

  Jorma nodded at the answering machine.

  “I think you should listen to that,” he said. “She must have been worried if she called here and you didn’t answer.”

  She had backed out of the room and was standing in the hall again. She listened for steps but didn’t hear any. There was opera music coming from the first floor. He was somewhere in the house: Joel Klingberg.

  Her hand was shaking so hard she could hardly use it to get her phone out of her purse. Dead. How could that be? She never forgot to charge it. She looked around for some sort of weapon but didn’t see anything. The opera music was louder now, and it was coming from the second floor, too, from remote-controlled speakers.

  She kept going down the hall, turned a corner, and stood before a glass door. There was a sunporch on the other side. But it was eight meters down to the ground from it, and she would break her legs if she jumped.

  Her heart was beating more calmly now. Gustav’s office, she thought: there had been knives hanging there, machetes from the Dominican Republic.

  The corridor felt endlessly long as she retraced her steps. All the doors were closed, except for the one to the room the bodies were in.

  She didn’t want to look in, but her eyes had a will of their own. Pontus Klingberg’s head had fallen forward, as if he were about to kiss the man who lay in his lap.

  The opera music stopped, but only for a few seconds, until the next movement began—an aria sung by a tenor.

  How the hell could she have been so fucking stupid as to come out here alone?

  She had entered Gustav’s office. The room lay half in shadow and it took a few seconds for her eyes to adjust. She took the heavy knife from the wall, weighed it in her hand—it was as much an ax as it was a weapon for stabbing. Then she froze, an icy feeling in her body. One knife. There had been two the first time she walked past the room . . .

  She slowly turned 180 degrees and looked into a strange mirror with a baroque frame, adorned with a skull at the very top. Voodoo crap . . . the old man had really believed in such things.

  She noticed a movement in the mirror, behind her, but when she turned around there was no one there.

  Fear—this was how it manifested itself.

  There was a telephone on the desk. Her fingers felt like clay as she lifted it. Silence. He had cut the line dead.

  She went over to the window. This one was just as high up; she had to get out some other way.

  She kept going, to the top of the stairs. The elegant turn of the marble, the sleek cast-iron banister, the imitation-rococo form. The opera music suddenly sounded louder; it was coming from the first floor now, but she couldn’t see anyone there. Her legs started to shake, and the tremors spread up her whole body until she lost all her strength and sank down onto the top step.

  The music stopped. She realized she was crying. She didn’t know how long she had been sitting there, before the image of Lisa and Arvid forced her to get up again and walk cautiously to the first floor.

  She stopped in the hall past the stairs. She jumped when she heard the sound of the electric motor that opened the curtains in the dining room. Cascades of sunshine were flung in. The terrace doors were closed and locked. She could see the water down there, and the islands of the inner archipelago. Somehow, she knew that the first floor was burglar-proof, that the glass in the windows was unbreakable.

  The curtains closed again, like a theater curtain.

  The door that led to the foyer was wide open. She saw the front door she had entered through, the one that led out to the courtyard and the drive, but there were dark recesses on eit
her side of it.

  She held the machete up over her right shoulder as she approached. Her lower body was shaking; it felt as if she weren’t getting enough air.

  The recesses were empty. She placed her hand on the heavy bronze handle of the door, pulled it down, and let go again. The upper security lock was engaged.

  She knew she was going to die, that he was standing right behind her, weapon in hand. She slowly turned around so that she would at least see his face. But it was her imagination again. There was no one there. She went back toward the inner parts of the house. There must be an exit somewhere, she thought; he was playing with her.

  They drove through Solna, past Järva Krog and Bergshamra.

  They went over the bridge to Stocksund and took a right on Vendevägen. The wealthy neighborhood came up suddenly, as if they had traveled into another dimension at the speed of light. Gigantic mansions with gardens as large as parks. Luxury cars in the drives. They kept going until they arrived in Djursholm.

  The Palme family’s old neighborhood, built in competition with the Wallenbergs’ Saltsjöbaden. Each street ended in a cul-de-sac. The waterfront properties were at a comfortable distance from one another. An archipelago feel. You could see the yachts on Stora Värtan.

  They parked the car in a public lot and started walking purposefully so as not to arouse any suspicions. The area was guarded by private security companies.

  They walked by the wall outside Klingberg’s home, ignored the cameras, and walked down toward the water. Katz had tried to call Eva, but she hadn’t answered. It went straight to voicemail. He couldn’t explain it, but he knew something was wrong.

  The street ended at the water. An inlet curved into the property.

  Katz didn’t think as he climbed down from the dock and waded over to a stony beach. He heard Jorma swearing just behind him.

  Thick bushes grew along the closest part of the shoreline. Twenty meters away, a cement block with barbed wire on top stuck out of the water. Katz took the Glock out of his pocket and held it above water as he swam around. Jorma followed him.

  By now they were on the property. The house was a hundred meters up the hillside. When they reached the front lawn, they split up.

  Katz walked toward the nearest terrace; Jorma went in the other direction.

  The feeling that Eva was in danger was so strong that it settled in Katz’s body, like aching muscles. Katz turned toward a more wooded part of the property, continuing on past the tennis courts and a six-car garage and turning up in the direction of the house again.

  Remote-controlled curtains were closing and opening behind a pane of glass. He heard music, opera, someone turning the volume up and down.

  He took a shortcut across the garden. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Jorma approaching from the other direction, as if he’d read his mind.

  He ran the last few meters over to the entrance. He felt the door handle. Locked. A camera moved back and forth three meters up on the façade. Apparently, it was motion-activated. The camera’s aperture adjusted, and it zoomed in on him.

  “It’s locked on the other side too,” said Jorma.

  The opera music vacillated between loud and soft inside, like a parody of Morse code—a tenor singing at an insane volume and then fading away again, rising and falling, rising and falling. Pontus Klingberg, Katz thought—was he behind everything, after all?

  He looked up at the façade. A downpipe ran from the roof straight down to where he was standing. There was a trellis of climbing roses attached to the wall next to the second-floor terrace, seven meters up.

  Katz started climbing, but his hands slipped and he slid back to the ground. He took off his shoes and socks and tried again. It was easier this time; his feet had a better grip.

  Thirty seconds later he had made it. He felt dizzy when he looked down. He tugged at the trellis to see if it would bear his weight. It seemed to hold.

  He hung straight up and down, his legs dangling, and carefully made his way to the left, one hand at a time, climbing like a monkey.

  He didn’t know how but, suddenly, he was up on the terrace. There were large tears in his jacket, he discovered, and his fingers had thorns stuck in them. Jorma climbed up after him.

  The music in the house had stopped. Waves lapped the beach and the dock a hundred meters away.

  He put out a hand and helped Jorma over the railing; he could hear him panting with exertion. Katz took the Glock from his pocket. The door was ajar.

  They came into a second-floor foyer and followed a hall toward the interior parts of the house. The smell of decay, a nauseating odor of rotten meat. Katz shouted Eva’s name, but there was no answer. He looked to the right, where a door stood open. There were two bodies on the floor. Julin’s and Pontus Klingberg’s.

  He pushed aside his disgust and started running. He shouted her name again and heard it fall to the floor like a brittle object.

  The hall ended in a staircase. As he walked down, his pistol aimed ahead of him, he realized that Pontus Klingberg and Julin had been murdered by a person who was still in the house.

  The opera music had begun again, but this time it was at normal volume.

  They passed a dining room and came to a servants’ passage, following the sound of the music to an alcove in a lounge. A CD player was built into the wall; Katz turned it off. The silence sounded somehow like an explosion in reverse.

  “I’ll check the other way,” said Jorma. “There has to be another exit.”

  Katz nodded and went on, into the next room. He gave a start when he saw her. She was crouched next to a radiator, with a large knife in her hands.

  “Are you okay?”

  She didn’t answer; her head was buried in her knees. She tried to say something when he touched her, but all she could do was stutter; all that came out was a pile of consonants.

  He heard Jorma call to him from the other side of the house.

  He tried to say something comforting to her, to tell her that she was out of danger, that they had got there in time; he felt a sharp stab of pain, as if she were his child and he hadn’t been able to protect her when she needed it most. Then he helped her to her feet, took her by the arm, supporting her as they walked toward Jorma’s voice.

  Jorma was waiting for them at a door just inside the back entrance to the house. A spiral staircase led down to what appeared to be a cellar.

  “He went this way . . . I heard sounds.”

  Lamps shaped like torches were set into recesses in the walls. They walked down cautiously, with Katz in the lead.

  The stairs ended ten meters below ground. The remote control to the CD player lay on the last step. Right next to it was a machete.

  This was no cellar. Instead, it was some sort of underground passage. It probably led to the garage—a warm, dry shortcut when it was snowing or pouring rain. They heard the sound of footsteps at a distance; the sound of someone jogging or walking very quickly.

  They kept going, keeping close to the wall. Eva walked on her own, no longer needing support. There were dim spotlights on the ceiling. Katz suddenly remembered that he was barefoot.

  The tunnel bent away in a curve and, after thirty meters, it split in two. They could no longer hear the footsteps. They stood there for a few seconds, at a loss, discussing what to do.

  “I think this way leads to the garage,” said Jorma, “but he didn’t go there. He kept going straight ahead.”

  There was another sound from the other direction, a sucking, electrical noise as something was set in motion.

  They moved on, toward the source of the noise, until the tunnel ended.

  They were in the boathouse, or rather in some sort of anteroom one story below ground. An elevator went straight up to the quay berth. Through a thick pane of glass they could see the water, as if they were looking at an aquarium.

  Katz ran up the stairs beside the elevator. He heard the roar of an accelerating motor. Through a sheet of Plexiglas, he watched a covered
boat glide past the stone pier and disappear into the bay.

  There was a bloody jacket on a bench on the edge of the quay: Julin’s. This was where his corpse had been unloaded and then carried through the underground passage up to the house.

  Her phone was ringing somewhere in the living room. Katz woke up just as the last ring died away. He looked at her, lying there next to him, naked, one hand entangled in her hair. It took a microsecond for him to remember why she was there. They had slept together. Because it was unavoidable, and even though both of them knew that it would get complicated. There was always the risk that one would push the wrong buttons.

  He let her stay in bed, sleeping; he went into the hall and picked up the morning paper from the mail slot. He went to the kitchen and browsed through the headlines in the news section.

  There was nothing about a double murder in Djursholm. So the bodies were still there, thirty-six hours after they’d left. It didn’t matter that they’d deleted the files from the security cameras. It was only a matter of time before the bodies would be found and suspicion would be hurled at him once again.

  He opened the refrigerator and peered into the empty space. A jar of Dijon mustard. Cheese that had seen better days. The only thing that differentiated this fridge from his own was the nail polish in the top rack on the door.

  He went back to the bedroom and stood in the doorway. From the twitching of her face he could tell that she was dreaming. About her kids, maybe. She missed them, and the intensity of her yearning was something he would never be able to understand.

  The blanket was about to slide down to the floor; he picked it up, tucked her back in, and went out to the living room.

  He sat down in front of the computer on her desk and checked his emails. Trotsky’s new program had arrived. Apparently, he’d worked on it during the night, writing code and debugging. Now it was ready, an exploit kit designed to make its way into encrypted servers. Trotsky was a genius. He didn’t even want to be paid; he did it for the challenge.