They waited for five minutes before they started searching again. Faint music came from the neighboring apartment.
When she was finished in the bedroom, she went out to join Jorma. He was sitting in an easy chair under the Shiva poster, smoking. He had an address book and a small photo album in his lap.
“It was in the laundry basket,” he said, picking up the photo album. “Lots of people hide their valuables there. And in the freezer.” He held up the address book, and she could see that there was frost on it. “For some reason, people think that burglars won’t look there, but of course it’s the first thing they do. Otherwise, there are no valuables in this apartment, unless you found something in the bedroom. No computer or tablet, no jewelry or cash. I’m disappointed.”
He gave a crooked smile and put out his cigarette in a flowerpot.
“But for some reason she thinks a photo album and an address book are valuable.”
She started leafing through them. The address book first. The phone numbers for her doctor and dentist, an administrator at the social insurance office, a few more numbers for a nurse hotline, an insurance company, and an electric company. A lonely person, she thought, as she flipped to the last page.
Åkesson, Jonas. No address, just a crossed-out cellphone number. The homeless boy she had taken care of. Next to the phone number she had written down six numbers, organized in pairs: 05 16 12. The day he had been found dead in a car in Märsta.
She leafed backward, and the names of a few acquaintances fluttered by—a certain Anki Rågklint, another woman by the name of Myriam Pettersson, who lived a few streets away.
She stopped at the letter K. There were several numbers there, to cellphones, but there weren’t any names. The numbers had been written with different pens, in chronological order. Old numbers had been crossed out as new ones appeared. To Joel Klingberg, she guessed.
The last one had been written there recently; the pencil lead was fresh. It was a long number—a foreign number.
She put down the address book and opened the photo album to the first page. Photos of Jonas Åkesson as a child; the pictures had been taken in this apartment. He was sitting on the floor, playing with Lego, maybe ten years old.
More photos of the boy as she browsed on; he was a bit older here. In one of them he was standing on a Djurgården ferry with Linnie Holm, and in another he was in front of the entrance to Gröna Lund, the amusement park. After that he was photographed in front of a car, with a well-dressed couple—maybe his biological parents; there was a certain similarity to their features.
She leafed through a bit further. Jonas on vacation with Sandra Dahlström and Linnie Holm. In the Greek archipelago, it looked like. Someone else was holding the camera. He was older now; maybe thirteen. He looked worn out—had he started taking drugs already?
Then there were a few pages of empty plastic sleeves, but he showed up again on the last page. With Rickard Julin.
It took a minute for Eva’s surprise to subside.
She guessed that the picture had been taken a few years earlier. Who was the photographer? Sandra Dahlström, one could assume. The two men were standing next to each other in front of something that looked like an abandoned house. Neither of them was looking at the camera; the picture seemed to have been taken by mistake, as if someone had slipped and hit the button. Julin was mid-step, moving away from the camera.
She was bewildered. How were these two connected?
She looked at the photo again. It had been taken in the autumn; the leaves in the yard in front of the house had turned yellow. The windows were broken, and part of the roof had caved in. It had been a beautiful house once upon a time, designed by an architect. From the ’50s, she would guess. Behind the house was a glimpse of an overgrown garden.
The sky above them was lofty and deep blue. Her intuition told her that they were near the water.
The approach over the Caribbean Sea was bumpy. For a moment, Katz thought they were about to have an emergency landing in the turquoise water before the runway showed up on the coast at the last second. The sky was cloudy, almost black at the horizon; hurricane season was only a few weeks away.
He caught a glimpse of the man he had assaulted as they got off the plane. He was leaning on his wife and limping down the ramp. The man pretended not to recognize him, but Katz saw the fear of death in his eyes and he knew it would remain there for a long time.
It was seven a.m. local time and the heat was already oppressive. A faint scent of decay hung in the air. The humidity was nearly 100 percent.
After he’d retrieved his luggage from the conveyor belt, he went through customs and walked into the arrivals hall. Merengue music streamed out of the taxis outside the building. A mixed bag of European tourists, Dominicans with Spanish and African roots, and every shade in between went in and out of the automatic doors.
At the other end of the arrivals hall he saw the sign for car rentals.
He introduced himself as Señor Katz to a woman in her twenties and received a professional smile in response before she found an envelope with a car key in a cupboard behind the desk.
“Your car is in parking slot 91A,” she said, pointing at an outlined map of the airport. “Welcome to the Dominican Republic, Señor Katz, I hope you have a pleasant stay here.”
He found the car in its assigned spot: a white Land Rover with a detachable top. When he’d closed the door behind him, a cellphone started ringing in the glove compartment.
It was under the car manual. He pressed the answer button and heard Klingberg’s voice.
“I’ll make this quick: there’s a hotel room reserved under your name in Zona Colonial, the old part of Santo Domingo. You’ll like it. It’s first class. Pool on the roof. Parking in the basement; you can leave the car there until I contact you again. It’s all paid for, so don’t worry. The address of the hotel is in an envelope in the glove compartment. Understood?”
He answered in the affirmative.
“Good. You just have to do as I tell you. And have this phone available twenty-four hours a day so you can receive further instructions. Outgoing calls are blocked. It’s important for you to follow my instructions to the letter. Otherwise, the girl will not survive.”
“I realize that.”
“Good, Katz. Did you sleep with her, by the way?”
“Who?”
“Angela.”
He didn’t answer, because he didn’t know what to say. He just looked across the parking lot, where steam was rising from the heated asphalt, over to the northern horizon, where the coastal landscape turned into soft hills.
“More your type than mine, right? But you didn’t get a chance before everything got out of hand. Oh God, I knew it . . . from the very start I knew it would be like this. Now drive to the hotel. You need to rest after your trip.”
He peered in the rearview mirror as he turned out of the lot and aimed for the highway. Buses and taxis came and went from the terminals; there were people everywhere, and tropical greenery, air shimmering with heat. Apparently, Klingberg had hired people to keep him under surveillance. He looked around for cars that might be tailing him, but he didn’t see any that seemed suspicious.
The hotel was on the other side of the Ozama River in the southern part of Santo Domingo’s old city center. Katz checked in and took the elevator up to his room, a suite with a view of the harbor and the old Spanish fort at the mouth of the river. He put the phone on the bedside table and connected it to a charger he’d found in the car. He went through the call log and realized that it had been used only once, when Klingberg called him at the airport from a blocked number.
The phone couldn’t make outgoing calls. The SIM card inside it was from the Dominican state telecom company.
He left the phone there as he unpacked his bags, putting his clothes in the closet, his razor and toothbrush in the bathroom; he put the amulet on the desk without really knowing why, and he started up his laptop and connected to the hot
el Wi-Fi. He thought about calling Eva from the satellite phone to tell her he had arrived, but he changed his mind and sent an email instead.
A miniature bottle of three-star rum and a good cigar stood on the coffee table like a welcome present from the hotel. Katz took ice and cola from the refrigerator, mixed a weak Cuba Libre, and went out to the balcony. He sat down in a rattan chair under the awning and left the balcony door open.
The hotel faced a small street that was beyond the tourist district. A fruit seller was standing on a corner, cooling himself with a fan. A one-armed man in a straw hat rode by on a mule. Two children were begging outside the hotel entrance. Katz sat there for an hour, waiting for a call. In the end, he gave up and left the hotel.
He devoted the rest of the morning to walking around the city with the phone in his breast pocket. He visited Santa Maria, the oldest cathedral in the New World, built by the Spanish colonists. He walked past Alcázar de Colón, the viceroy’s palace, and through Parque Colón, the city park, where dusty palms and hibiscus shrubs drooped in the heat.
He navigated through the old grid of streets that had once set the standard for Spanish cities in the New World. The throngs of people were incredible: American tourists, destitute beggars—extreme poverty alongside equally extreme luxury.
At regular intervals he looked at the phone, worried that he had missed Klingberg. But it was quiet, and there was nothing he could do but wait.
After he’d eaten lunch on the oceanfront promenade, Malecón, he took out the guidebook and read about the island’s history as he drank two cups of coffee.
Hispaniola had been discovered by Christopher Columbus during his first expedition to the New World in 1492. The island sat under the Spanish crown for two hundred years, until the western part was ceded to France and given the name Haiti. In practice, both of the countries were controlled by rich plantation owners, and they built their fortunes on exporting sugar.
Slave uprisings broke out on the French part of the island in conjunction with the Napoleonic Wars. The black rebel leader Toussaint Louverture succeeded in throwing out the Frenchmen and then proclaimed himself emperor. A bloody civil war ensued, but slavery came to an end and there was land reform at the plantation owners’ expense.
On the Spanish side of Hispaniola, however, slavery continued—a bone of contention that led to fifty years of border conflicts and war with Haiti, conflicts that revolved around race and language, around hatred between blacks and whites, around freedom versus slavery.
In the ’30s, the United States-friendly General Trujillo seized power in the Dominican Republic. “The Benefactor,” as the people called him, renamed the capital city after himself—Ciudad Trujillo—and pursued racist policies against ethnic Haitians in the country. This led to more tension between the governments in Santo Domingo and Port-au-Prince. The so-called Parsley Massacre that Angela Klingberg had told him about took place in 1937. Using machetes, the army slaughtered thirty thousand Haitians in the border regions between the two countries.
Trujillo was murdered in the early ’60s in a conspiracy led by younger officers. Eventually, a fragile democracy was established, the tourist industry grew, agriculture was modernized, and, today, the country was one of the richest in the Caribbean. Haiti, on the other hand, remained impoverished.
Katz put down the book and looked out at the palm-edged promenade. Two white women at the table next to him were complaining about the service. They preferred not to be served by africanos. On the other side of the quay was a marina with luxury boats. The sky grew darker and darker, and he saw flashes of lightning above the mountains to the north. He decided to go back to the hotel.
A tropical storm broke out minutes after he was back in his room. The electricity was out when he sat down in front of his laptop. The Internet connection didn’t work, and the computer’s batteries had run out.
He took out the satellite phone Eva had given him before he left. Same thing there: the batteries were almost dead. He had the sense that she needed to get hold of him, that something important had happened since he’d been gone.
The social worker at the Maria Youth Agency was a short woman of about thirty with a birthmark just under her left eye. She had put the folder in front of Eva so she could look at its contents while she spoke.
“The confidentiality rules no longer apply to Jonas,” she said sadly, “not now that he’s dead. I just don’t understand it. I saw him less than three months ago and he had given up drugs. For good, I thought.”
“What made you think that?”
“Experience. He truly wanted to stop using, it was an existential decision, and that is better than all the compulsory care and treatment programs in the world. And then there was the fact that he had managed to get clean all on his own. That is a delicate mission indeed. One’s will must be greater than the addiction. Do you know how the body reacts when a person gives up heroin cold turkey?”
“Yes, I do, actually.”
“Pain. It creeps through your whole body, as if there were insects under your skin. Agony, of course, sleeplessness . . . more pain, stomach cramps, vomiting, diarrhea . . . your bones feel like plaster, and the slightest touch feels like a punch.”
“How did he manage to get clean?”
“He got hold of some tramadol and codeine to use as he detoxed, and that would have relieved the pain, of course, but it doesn’t explain how he did it. He really wanted to quit drugs and start a new life.”
“How did you communicate with him? I understand he was deaf.”
“My parents are deaf; I grew up in sign-language culture, and I’m actually the only person in the county who is dedicated to helping deaf junkies—there are more than you’d think. And also, Jonas could hear a little bit when he used his hearing aid.”
Eva leafed through the folder the social worker had put out for her. There was information about the boy’s mental health and previous treatment programs, and about caregivers—Sandra Dahlström and Linnie Holm seemed to be the most important ones. Old reports, decisions about foster-home placements, but nothing about his biological parents. They were probably protected by the confidentiality law. There were some documents that she would be allowed to see only if she applied for permission through the police authority.
“You said earlier that he wanted to see you shortly before he died?”
“Yes. He wanted to tell me something.”
“What was it?”
“I don’t know; it all seemed so muddled. He said he wanted to get out of something, a medical experiment he’d been involved in, which funded his drug abuse for several years. He wanted to give it up, he said, and the first step he had to take was to become drug-free. We had scheduled a meeting here two days before he was found dead. He was supposed to fill me in more then.”
“It sounds mysterious.”
“You have to take into consideration that Jonas wasn’t totally reliable. He mixed up fantasy and reality, because it made it easier to tolerate his existence. He’d had several emergency admissions to Sankt Göran’s Hospital for toxic psychosis in recent years. He heard voices that told him what to do, and he claimed they controlled his desires. And he also became extremely violent, more violent than usual.”
“Was he as a child, too? Violent?”
“He nearly beat his younger sister to death when he was ten. That was the last straw for his biological parents. They handed him over to social services.”
“Would you classify him as a psychopath? That’s what it says in the documents here.”
“That’s a doctor’s opinion, from several years ago. But I don’t actually think he was. He didn’t completely lack empathy; he could feel compassion for others.”
“And you never heard anything more about that medical experiment?”
“No. But I take it for granted that it was something he made up.”
Eva looked out the window, at the rain that had started to fall on the parking lot. She pictured Lisa, but she fo
rced the image away.
“Have you had any contact with a certain Sandra Dahlström or Linnie Holm—they’re mentioned in your documents?”
“I know who you’re talking about, but they were his caregivers long before my time, before I took over, so to speak, because no one else could handle Jonas. In the end there were essentially no authorities who were willing to help him, except for the staff at the emergency mental hospital, because they had to.”
“Do you know where he stayed those last few months, after he got clean?”
“He was homeless because he had burned all his bridges with the shelters. He lived in tunnels, among other places. Seventeen years old. It’s appalling.”
“Did he ever mention staying at an abandoned house?”
“Yes, actually, he did. I didn’t think there were any in Stockholm, given the property values.”
“Did he say where it was?”
“No. Just that he could be alone there. There was an entrance to the house that no one else knew about. And he was glad for it. Junkies tend to steal from one another, after all . . .”
On the way back to EBM she tried to call Katz, but no one answered the satellite phone. Actually, it didn’t ring at all. A vague sense of unease crept over her. She ought to have heard something more from him; there should have been a reaction to the photo she’d scanned and emailed, in which Julin and Jonas Åkesson were standing together in front of a ramshackle house. But the only sign of life she’d received was an email in which he briefly stated that he’d landed.
She dialed the number of the Stockholm Blasting Center and reached the same man she’d spoken to the day before.
“I’ve received some information from the blasters,” he said, “but none of it matches the time you’re looking for, 12:05 the day before yesterday.”
“How many are you still waiting on?”
The Boy in the Shadows Page 24
