“About what?”
“What you want to do this summer, for example; just do it. Now!”
She must have understood the urgency of Eva’s request, because she launched into a long, complicated story about what she was going to do on her summer vacation.
“Good, Lisa, just keep talking, and while you do that I’m going to ask questions that you just have to answer yes or no to, as if it were part of the story.”
She seemed to grasp what Eva was doing, because she continued to babble on about the puppy Ola was going to give her and what she would do when she took it out to the country.
“Are there any windows where you are, that you can see out of? Only answer yes or no; that’s important.”
“No . . . the puppy won’t have its own kennel, it’s going to sleep in a basket next to my bed.”
“So there are no windows in the room. Is it a basement, do you think, yes or no?”
“No . . . its name is going to be Charlie, because that was Dad’s dog’s name, the one he had when he was little.”
“Good. Did it take a long time to get to where you are?”
“No . . . not long, except Dad thinks the puppy should be named Gruffen, but I don’t think so.”
“I understand . . . could you see anything on the way there, where you were going or anything?”
“No . . . just a little water that the dog could drink . . . and then there were thorns that got stuck in its fur . . . Mom, I’m tired of talking.”
She was playing with fire. If there was a speakerphone function, he had heard everything she’d said. But it wasn’t on; if it had been, Lisa’s voice would have sounded different: brighter, more high-frequency.
Water, she had seen or heard water when they took her out of the car. And thorns . . . something with thorns.
“I want to go home now, Mom . . . I don’t want to stay here.”
“I know, darling. And you will get to come home soon, I promise.”
She heard a sudden rumbling in the background. She recognized the sound and tried desperately to define it. Blasting; they were blasting nearby!
“Tell me how many toys you want to get when you come home. And it should be the same as the number of people you’ve seen since all this happened.”
“Three toys. But now there’s only one toy. The other toys are gone. I don’t know where they went. Mom, I have to stop now, but I think . . .”
Lisa’s voice disappeared midsentence. It took several seconds for her to realize that they’d hung up.
The Lufthansa flight to Madrid went according to plan; he slept for a while and woke up shortly before they landed at Barajas. He looked for the terminal for transatlantic flights—his bags were checked all the way to Santo Domingo—and he waited for a few hours in a bar next to the gate and was among the first to board the Iberia plane to Santo Domingo.
He had a nine-hour flight ahead of him; he would land well before the time was up.
An flight attendant was walking around with blankets and inflatable neck cushions. Katz’s closest neighbor was an older Spanish woman with blue hair and a cat in a carrier between her feet. To his relief, she seemed uninterested in conversing with him.
As the plane taxied to the runway, he had the sensation of being observed. Paranoia, he thought, as he looked around. Mostly white Spaniards, most of them old. People who had been visiting relatives in Spain and were on their way home now. A black flight attendant with incredibly beautiful facial features smiled at him from the door of the nearest galley.
After the light meal that was served when they reached cruising altitude, he started to think about Joel Klingberg again.
What had sparked the chain of events? Klingberg had learned that his wife had had an affair with his uncle, so he had gone underground to get revenge.
But where had he hidden for the first few weeks? In the hunting cabin in Sörmland? That didn’t seem likely; it was too close to the manor, and Pontus or Angela could have shown up at any time.
Katz ate some of the dessert that was still on the tray in front of him—a chile-spiced Caribbean fruit salad. It was too hot, he noticed; he pushed it away.
Joel had returned to his home several weeks after he disappeared; Angela hadn’t opened the door to the perpetrator as Katz had first thought, because Joel had his own set of keys.
What had she thought when she saw him? Had she been relieved that he was back, unharmed, that he hadn’t been the victim of an accident or a crime as she had suspected? After all, she had broken it off with Pontus when her husband had vanished; she regretted her actions and wanted her husband back.
Had he said anything to her? That he knew that she had cheated on him? Or had he attacked her straight away?
Julin had been involved from the start. Julin was the one who had broken into Katz’s place and stolen things that were later planted in the apartment. And he had been paid an absurd amount of money. Fifty million kronor had been put in a secret account in the Virgin Islands.
Julin and Klingberg had known each other for a long time. They had met for the first time in the ’70s, when Joel was still a child and Julin had been hired to find out what had happened to his brother. Julin had started to spend time with the family, going on trips to the Caribbean with them, becoming interested in Joel—in his gift for studies, his ear for languages, and his bursts of rage. And he had become interested in voodoo.
Through the Klingberg family, Julin had come into contact with Caribbean folk beliefs—that one could drug people with certain medicinal herbs, influence their free will, and get them to do the most bizarre things. At the same time, he had managed a secret program within the armed forces. Katz was still uncertain about exactly what it had entailed, but it involved personality-changing drugs.
Katz stopped a flight attendant who was walking by and asked her for a refill of coffee. Then he leaned back again and continued his train of thought.
Julin had made sure that both Katz and Joel Klingberg were accepted into the interpreter academy. Katz because he had been convicted of an extremely brutal violent crime. But what Julin hadn’t known was that it was actually Klingberg who was behind the attack at Grubbholmen. What made Julin become interested in Katz was his belief that Katz was capable of such bestial violence. As for Joel, he must have suspected or known about his attacks on the maid, Sandra Dahlström.
Or did he suspect that Joel had murdered his own parents?
It was impossible to know what had happened in the years that followed, but the two men must have kept in contact. And a few months ago, Klingberg had shown up with his offer.
Julin had become involved in conspiracy to murder. It was part of the plan for Angela to contact Katz to ask for help in finding her missing husband; they had purposely set her in motion against him, made sure that she hired him, all to create a personal connection between him and the murder victim. But why had they chosen Katz in particular? So that Klingberg could live out his violent fantasies again? Or had he wanted to get revenge . . . but for what?
Katz stopped his thoughts the same way one might press Pause on a music player.
Two rows behind him, an argument had broken out between a father and his son, a five-year-old boy who apparently refused to finish his food. The man was in his thirties and was incredibly drunk. Katz watched as he grabbed the boy by the back of the neck and forced his face into the tray. The boy was crying. Those around them looked troubled, but no one intervened. Katz could understand why not. The man was a bodybuilder and had gang tattoos on his neck and arms. His eyes looked spaced-out.
“Pide disculpas!” he said. “Say you’re sorry!”
“Perdoneme, papa.” . . . “I’m sorry, Dad.”
“No te oigo,” said the man as he cuffed the boy’s ear. “I can’t hear you!”
A woman in the next seat, probably the boy’s mother, looked down at her lap, clearly terrified of her husband.
“Stay out of it,” the man said, when he noticed Katz looking
. Then he tousled his son’s hair before opening a miniature bottle of brandy and pouring it into a glass.
Katz pressed Play again.
Klingberg and Julin had ended up on a collision course after Angela’s murder. Julin had tried to murder Katz on his own. Julin had been the one to send an assassin to Jorma’s apartment in Kransen. Because he had gotten cold feet. Not only had Katz managed to evade the police against all odds, Julin thought Katz was on his trail. The military secrets. That was what he’d wanted to keep hidden, and it had been more important than the murder plot he was involved in.
But Klingberg had opposed the idea of silencing Katz and had instead had Julin killed outside the hunting cabin in Sörmland. And let Katz go so the game could continue?
The only reason they had been there at all was because they were going to murder Pontus Klingberg, who’d been on his way to the manor. But then Katz showed up and created confusion.
He closed his eyes and pictured a kidnapped seven-year-old girl before him. Nothing must happen to her; he would never forgive himself.
The man behind him had started arguing again, but not with his son—with the black flight attendant. He tried to grab her as she walked by. When she didn’t seem amused, he became furious. “Puta negra!” he yelled. “Black whore!”
Katz got out of his seat, stretched his legs, and sat down on the armrest, looking toward the man. The flight attendant walked by again, and the man stuck his foot into the aisle. When she stepped over it, he put his hand up under her skirt. She gave a shout, backed up, tripped, and ended up on the floor. The cabin manager showed up to help her to her feet.
Katz looked at the man and received a scornful smile in return. An experienced fighter, he thought. His eyes suggested as much—their hardness, the disdain, the way he sought out confrontation. A swastika was tattooed on his lower arm.
Half an hour later, Katz saw the man get up and walk to the lavatory in the rear of the Airbus. The cabin lights had been dimmed. The passengers were sleeping. The flight attendant who had been molested had switched areas and was now behind the curtains of business class. The crew hadn’t known how to deal with the man; he was too unpredictable and they didn’t want to risk him becoming violent. The cabin manager had been serving him since the flight attendant had vanished: three large rums. Katz had kept count.
His wife and son were sleeping, each under a blanket. The boy’s face was still red from crying.
Katz waited until the “occupied” light lit up outside the lavatory, and then he stood up, used the parallel aisle, to be on the safe side, crossed at the connecting aisle, and stood beside the lavatory door.
There was no queue. The people in the seats nearby were sleeping. He discovered a curtain that the crew used when they were preparing trays of food in the rear galley and carefully pulled it closed.
No one from the cabin could see in now; he was standing in the dark, and the only light was from the red lamp above the lavatory.
When the man opened the door, Katz pressed his left thumb into the man’s right eye and saw him double in pain. He met the movement with full power, kneeing him in the face. The man fell backward and struck the back of his head on the toilet. A bloody front tooth was sticking out between his lips. Katz kicked him in the crotch. Then he grabbed hold—one hand in the hair at the back of his neck and the other around his throat—and turned him around, shoving his head into the toilet as he used his foot to close the accordion door behind him. The man’s throat was pressing hard against the edge of the seat; he fought to breathe.
“Señor, quiero que me escuche con mucho cuidado. Si le veo a Usted golpear a un niño o hostigar a una mujer, le mato. Me entiende?”
Katz hadn’t spoken Spanish for twenty-five years, since he had been a student at the interpreter academy, where he took an intensive course in the language because he had some extra time, and he was surprised at how easy it was to formulate the words, as if they were born in his mouth just as he spoke them.
When the man didn’t answer, he lifted his head by the hair. He was about to pound the man’s face against the steel edge of the toilet, but he managed to stop himself at the last second. He looked at his bloody hands with disgust. He looked at the man, who was lying on the floor in shock.
“No me mate!” he whispered. “Don’t kill me!”
Katz rinsed himself off in the sink, avoiding his reflection in the mirror—the empty eyes that stared hatefully out into nothingness. He heard the man whimper on the floor at his feet.
That is the language you have mastered best of all, he thought as he went back to his seat, the language of violence. What kind of person are you . . . what is wrong with you?
Two out of three toys are gone; which one is left and which is it?
Like a riddle, she thought, and if she could find it, she would find Lisa.
So she was alone somewhere, with one person, but she couldn’t imagine where and with whom.
In Stockholm, because the car trip hadn’t taken long. Near the water. And there were thorns that had gotten stuck in her clothes.
The light went out with a faint click, and the stairwell grew dark. She was in Mörby Centrum with Jorma, half a floor below Sandra Dahlström’s apartment. It was two a.m.
Jorma . . . she hadn’t spent time with him since they were teenagers. And yet she trusted him. Because they were made of the same frayed material, because they were from the same time and place, from the same circumstances, where no one cared.
He signaled for her to follow him. They could hear the sound of a TV somewhere. It sounded like an action film.
They were standing in front of her door now. No light from the neighbors’ peepholes. Jorma felt for something along the top hinge—a match. And she remembered it from the days when she had been involved in break-ins, the old trick to check if someone had come back home after you’d been there scouting it out. The match would have broken if someone had opened the door.
He took a feeler gauge out of his pocket—from Biltema, best in the business—selected one of the blades, bent the top with his thumb and stuck it in at the edge of the door, just below the lock.
It was an ASSA cylinder lock. She’d had a hard time believing him when he said it would take thirty seconds max to get it open. But it didn’t even take ten. Two or three turns, some plain old flat-nosed pliers to help push it up, and she heard the bolt roll back into the lock.
They stood still for a moment, listening for sounds in the building. All they could hear was the TV from the neighbor who was awake two floors down.
Jorma quickly walked through the room, lowering the blinds and pulling the curtains across all the windows before he turned on his torch.
As he looked through the closets in the bedroom, she thought again of what Lisa had said: A small, windowless room near the water. Thorns that got stuck in her clothes.
And it was near a place where they were blasting.
She had called the Transport Administration to try to find out about large blasting projects that were currently under way in the Stockholm area. An administrator had reluctantly given her the information. Excavation at Norra Länken near Roslagstull. Blasting in Vasastan for the new City Line. The rats are running amok; the explosions scare them up out of the sewers, monsters bigger than one kilo are running around in Vasaparken . . . Blasting for the new commuter rail station under Odenplan. Farther away—at Arlanda—new underground garages were being built, old buildings were being torn down to build new ones by Söder Hospital, and there was blasting for a new electricity connection through the rock from the Danderyd transformer station over to Järva, where planning was under way for a new part of the city. The administrator had continued to rattle off municipal projects until Eva realized she would never find Lisa that way. Furthermore, there were a number of private contractors who did blasting for pools, single-family homes and excavation, and for the stone industry.
Was there a protocol for blasting times? she had asked.
; Possibly, but she’d have to ask the contractors about that.
She’d called the Stockholm Blasting Center and a few other, larger firms to find out. After all, she knew the time of the explosions she’d heard on the phone. A friendly man at the center promised to try to check with the blasters themselves. But it might take some time; she’d have to be patient.
There were four closets in the bedroom, and she went through them one by one. Nothing valuable, just clothing.
She kept searching—in the bedside table, in a chest of drawers, in the drawers of a dressing table.
The scent of another person’s life: Sandra Dahlström’s. She might not have anything to do with this; she might be traveling, on holiday, visiting a relative or another part of the country. But that didn’t make sense. How else would Klingberg have known who she was? Sandra was the one who had told him about her, that she had been there asking questions.
Had she been murdered? Had Klingberg gotten her out of the way, just as he had done with Julin? It was a distinct possibility.
Eva peered over toward the living room. The beam of light from Jorma’s flashlight danced across the floor as he walked between the bookcases. She heard him humming a tune and was amazed at how calm he was.
She checked under the bed; there was a box on wheels, which she rolled out and inspected. More clothes, but in larger sizes. They had belonged to Linnie Holm, she thought. Sandra had saved them.
The elevator stopped in the hallway. There were footsteps on the stone floor, the elevator doors closed, someone’s keys jingled.
She saw Jorma in the hall, cautiously working a pistol out of his jacket pocket. An Israeli Desert Eagle. She remembered what it was called because it was so absurd. Because Jorma had shown it to her, explaining how to use it in case it became necessary. As if this were the most natural information in the world.
Jorma crouched down, aiming his pistol at the door to the flat. He carefully blew a stray lock of hair out of his eyes, not nervous at all.
Two more steps out there, more jingling of keys; the person was drunk. Then she heard the lock of the apartment next door being turned. The door was opened, closed, and locked.
The Boy in the Shadows Page 23
