Katz went up to the room that had been prepared for him, lit the candles in the candelabra next to the bed, and closed the windows and shutters. The rain was like an endless drum roll on the room. He looked at the phone. Hardly any battery power left, and he wouldn’t be able to charge it. If Klingberg wanted to call him again, he’d have to do it soon. But maybe that wasn’t his intention.
He lay down on the mattress and looked up at the tattered canopy.
He suddenly remembered everything.
Klingberg’s girlfriend in Uppsala. What was her name, Ingrid?
That was what the drugs had done to him—perforated his memory, poked holes in it, picking out important bits of information and destroying them.
They had been together during their last term in Uppsala. Klingberg’s old girlfriend from Sigtuna, teenage love that had lasted for a few months before she went to France to attend a language school and, as far as Katz knew, they broke up.
She had visited them in their shared dorm. Klingberg had discreetly asked Katz to stay away for a few hours. He’d gone to Ofvandahls Hovkonditori to study Russian over half a dozen cups of black coffee before he returned to the dorm, where Klingberg and Ingrid met him with a mix of shame and satisfaction in their eyes.
She was from the upper class, just like Joel. She’d driven a red Porsche 911, which she’d received as a graduation present from her parents.
At one point, in May, he remembered, she had come to a party in the dorm; Katz had ended up alone with her on the balcony. He’d offered her a Gauloise, joked with her in French—he’d studied the language at gymnasiet, done six terms’ worth in less than a year—and lent her his leather jacket when she said she was cold. They had a few drinks, he remembered, vintage whiskey she’d brought from home. These were drinking habits he’d never come across before meeting Klingberg. Their whole lives were so foreign to his own, with their language courses abroad, their family fortunes, their sports cars, private chauffeurs, and a never-ending supply of money.
He’d put his hand under her skirt, run his finger along the edge of her panties; she was already wet. Then he’d groped further, under the fabric, touching her slippery labia as he continued to make jokes in French. He stood with his back to the balcony door so that none of the others could see what was going on.
Had he been high? He didn’t remember. It was definitely possible that he had taken something. He still had relapses sometimes. But he had no memory of regret. In any case, he hadn’t been hampered by moral imperatives. Not back then. He had thought of it as a form of tax refund: taking from the rich and giving to the poor.
The contempt he felt for Klingberg, deep down . . . that weakling, that nerd . . . wasn’t it the case that he very well might have done it to ruin things between them?
She’d come back two days later, on a Saturday, when Klingberg was at his grandfather’s home in Djursholm. They’d slept together in Klingberg’s bed. Katz recalled that her feelings of guilt had made her cry afterward.
Klingberg came back on Sunday night. Katz hadn’t even bothered to get rid of the evidence. The condom wrapper was still in Klingberg’s unmade bed. The shawl she’d left behind was on the floor. Klingberg asked if it was true, if he’d slept with her, and Katz had only laughed in reply. I don’t understand, Klingberg mumbled before he left the room. The only person I ever trusted.
They were discharged not long after that. Katz had been sure they’d never meet again.
He woke up in the middle of the night to the sound of drums. The photo in the cemetery—was it really Kristoffer in that grave, and if it was, how had he come to be there? He remembered Ingrid again. It hadn’t been important back then, just something he’d done without a guilty conscience, because that was who he was at the time—and that was why, with the help of the drugs he’d stuffed himself with in the decade that followed, he had forgotten everything.
The storm seemed to have let up, or perhaps it was only temporary. Katz lay in bed, listening to the drums, a quick, pattering rhythm far away. He looked at the phone on the bedside table; there was still a little bit of battery left. But Klingberg wouldn’t call.
He got up and put on his clothes. He heard the rustle of cockroaches running across the floor. He didn’t think anything in particular; he was just drawn farther into the surreal feeling. How had he ended up here . . . how had it all started?
The landscape looked like it had been plated with chrome when he stepped into the yard. He could see scattered clusters of stars through the high, thin clouds. The sound of the drums had taken on a different character.
He walked past the barracks and down to the cane fields. Bats were performing acrobatic acts in the air in front of him; the full moon hung from an invisible thread at the horizon. He kept walking toward the sound of the drums, or toward where he thought they were coming from. He passed the sugar mills and arrived in an open field. On the other side of it was the jungle, a black wall. Faint lights flickered between the tree trunks.
He followed an irrigation ditch toward the glow of the lights. The smell of mud and rotting plants rose from the stagnant water. Frogs hopped out of the way of his feet, croaking. Then he had come to the edge of the forest. He found a sort of portal, cut by machetes, in the wall of vegetation, and he entered the jungle along a cleared path.
He walked for five minutes before a clearing opened before him. A fire was burning in a pit that had been dug in the middle. Katz took twenty steps into the forest so that he was hidden among the trees.
A party, ecstatically dancing people. He saw a drunk man swig from a bottle of rum, wipe off the neck, and hand it to a young boy. There were more people farther off; some were crouching and playing drums, and an older woman was shaking some sort of rattle. They were all poor, dressed in rags.
On a chair next to the drummers was a man covered in a white sheet. There was a human skull in his lap. A cigar had been stuck between its teeth, and a pair of aviator sunglasses covered its empty eye sockets. The person under the sheet was sitting perfectly still.
A man took a glowing coal from the fire and started eating it as a woman brushed his back with a live chicken and chanted in Creole. Some of the people were white . . . but he was mistaken, he realized then; they were naked and covered in pale mud.
The dancing and singing continued. He watched people falling into trances and writhing on the ground like snakes. He heard people screaming in ecstasy and bestial sorrow. He saw a piglet carried to an altar, squealing furiously, and he saw a woman cut its throat with a dagger in one slice. She released it on the ground and let it run into the forest with its neck spouting blood. A pig, sacrificed and sent to the spirit world.
His eyes kept returning to the man under the sheet: the white sneakers sticking out from under the fabric, the skull in his lap, with its sunglasses and the cigar in its jaws.
There could be no doubt that it was Sandra Dahlström. Eva could see her clearly through the binoculars. She had parked her car fifty meters from the abandoned house.
Her graying hair was in a ponytail. She looked around suspiciously, walked away from the house, took a right on to a path that led up to the hill behind the property, and disappeared from sight.
Eva felt it instinctively—she couldn’t wait any longer, she had to act immediately.
She stepped out of the car and started running. She saw her own shadow darting in front of her as her mind spooled out memories of Lisa, and she promised to herself that she would be a better mother, a better role model, a less self-destructive person, if only her daughter were unharmed.
She slowed down as she approached the path. She looked up warily and saw movement—a person vanishing around a bend. She cautiously followed. Her yearning for Lisa brought tears to her eyes.
She went another hundred meters before she found herself on a rise above the property.
There was no movement down there. She could see the garden and the house more clearly from the hill where she stood. The windows and d
oors were covered with boards and sheet metal. Even the second-floor windows had been boarded up. Like a fort, she thought.
There was a hidden entrance somewhere, but she couldn’t see it. Sandra Dahlström could have led her to it. She had missed her by a few seconds.
There was a dilapidated shed to the right of the building. To the left was a garage without a door, full of old building materials.
She let her eyes wander on. Overgrown apple trees, a lawn that had been transformed into a meadow; the poppies glowed bright red against the yellow grass.
She moved on, stooping, shuffling down the slope toward the short side of the garage.
She was twenty meters from the house now, but she still couldn’t hear anything. The grass was trampled where Sandra Dahlström had just walked; it led to a gravel path that went around the house in both directions.
Somewhere inside, Lisa was alone with her. There was one person left, she had said on the phone; the others were gone. The room she was in wasn’t soundproofed, otherwise she wouldn’t have been able to hear the blasting.
But where was the entrance?
Time was running out. She was having trouble thinking clearly; she just wanted to follow her instincts, which told her that she had to find Lisa right away. But wouldn’t it be better to go back to the car and wait for Jorma? She didn’t even have a weapon. Wouldn’t it be better to wait until Sandra showed up again, and then force her to lead them to Lisa? It would be crazy to try to catch her by surprise if she was in the same room as her daughter; Lisa might end up injured.
She slowly retreated to the garage, but she stumbled on a broken rain barrel, fell down, and found herself on the ground.
To her left was a tall rosebush. She never would have discovered what was behind it if she had been standing. But down by the ground, where the bush was thinner, it possible to see that it had grown around a well like a protective wall. A ladder was sticking out of the opening.
And then there were thorns that got stuck . . .
She stood up, bent the branches out of the way, and stepped into the clearing. Her shawl got stuck in the bush, but she didn’t have time to pull it loose. The well cover lay alongside the brick edge. She grabbed the ladder and climbed down.
The well was dry. When she came to the bottom she discovered a small passage that led in the direction of the house. She had to stoop as she walked, using her hand to feel the way ahead in the pitch black. After ten steps the passage bent sharply to the left. She could glimpse light up ahead.
A door was ajar. She opened it cautiously. The ceiling lights were on. She was standing in a laboratory. Julin’s, she thought, as she looked around. She just knew it—this was where he had experimented with psychotropic drugs. There were separators for examining plant toxins on a long counter. On the shelves were test tubes, jars, and containers of chemical compounds. An open cupboard contained syringes in plastic packaging.
She opened another door and stepped into a small bedroom. There was an unmade bed along the wall and an open closet in a recess opposite it. There were jeans and T-shirts on the shelves. A suit hung from a hanger. A container of food with silverware stood on a folding table. On the rolled-up bedspread was a leather strap and an insulin syringe. Jonas Åkesson had stayed there. He had been murdered in his bed, given an overdose when Julin realized that Katz was on his trail.
And Klingberg had stayed there after faking his disappearance. The suit was his.
She heard sounds now, coming from somewhere deeper in the house. Faint, sobbing cries. Lisa. So she was alive, at least.
She opened a sliding door and stepped into a hallway that led up to a staircase. Daylight shone down from above. She cautiously walked toward the stairs and was suddenly aware of how defenseless she was, that she had nothing to protect herself with.
Then she noticed movement out of the corner of her eye and turned around. She saw an electric arc just as the pain came and her muscles seemed to loosen from their attachments to her body. Sandra Dahlström was standing two meters away, aiming a Taser at her; she discharged it again and the world went black.
Katz couldn’t tell what time it was when he woke up. Early morning, he guessed. The light outside was gray.
The wind sounded like creaking metal. He heard the tiles on the roof moving. The thuds of trees falling, far away. Klingberg was sitting on a chair by the wall, watching him.
“Hear that? A hurricane,” he said. “That’s how they sound, creaking as they increase in strength. Soon you won’t be able to hear anything but a roar.”
He was taller than Katz remembered, or perhaps it was a trick of his thin body. He resembled his grandfather in the portrait on the floor below. His hair was still brown, with no hint of any gray strands. His eyes were inscrutable. He was wearing khaki pants, a thin jacket, and a pale shirt.
“Gustav told me a story once,” he said. “It was about a doctor who was going to help a Dominican man get rid of the black color of his skin. The only problem was that the man couldn’t decide which color he wanted instead. Whether he wanted to be moreno, dark; canelo, cinnamon-colored; blanco-oscuro, dark white . . . it’s actually called that . . . or wheat-colored, trigueño. But none of those colors are white, they’re just variations and euphemisms for black skin. I don’t remember how the story ended, but I know what it was about: African heritage is a curse.”
He looked at the legs of his trousers, finding a speck of dirt that he rubbed at with the nail of his thumb.
“You saw a ceremony tonight,” he said. “In the forest. After you’d been to the cemetery. Desperate people, looking for comfort in the only thing they have left: their faith. My grandmother was involved in that sort of thing. Marie Bennoit. She was a priest in a perestil, a voodoo church on the other side of the border. She was from a family that used black magic. Or superstition, if you prefer.”
On the table in front of him was the cloth doll from the hotel room and the satellite phone Katz had hidden in the car engine.
“I brought a few things with me,” he said, when he noticed where Katz was looking. “You won’t be going home, so . . .”
“Where’s the girl?” said Katz. “You were going to let her go.”
Klingberg didn’t answer. He went over to a window and opened the shutters. The palms were bending in the wind. From far away came a rumble Katz had never before experienced, a sort of howl that slowly increased in strength.
“I think this was where he told me the story . . . Gustav’s heaven on earth. A classic batey, a sugar workers’ town, the first one he had built and the only one he kept until his death. Two hundred Haitians worked here during the heyday, in the late ’40s. Gustav would organize parties in the house. He invited Ramfis Trujillo and his entourage, people like Porfirio Rubirosa. Have you heard of him? He was one of the international jet-setters at the time, a playboy and ladies’ man. Gustav hired whores for his guests. They were sent here on mules from the bordellos in Port-au-Prince. Rich white men and penniless black women had poolside orgies. The whores were paid in as much food as they could carry home with them afterward. Blacks were just a sort of human livestock to do with as one pleased. That went for Marie Bennoit too . . . and, eventually, Kristoffer.”
The butt of a revolver was sticking out of his jacket pocket. Klingberg nodded when he realized Katz had seen it.
“Grandfather became nostalgic as soon as we got here. Once . . . I was twelve at the time . . . I saw him set the dogs on one of the employees. It was the summer before Mom and Dad died. Gustav and I were here on our own. A Haitian foreman had stolen money from the office. Gustav thought it would be good for me to watch, educational. He was bitten in the throat, like a bloody necklace . . . I’ll never forget it.”
He stopped talking and looked sadly at Katz. Far away, the feral dogs started howling.
“It was the summer of 1978. Kristoffer must have been here then, although he was kept hidden from me. Julin found him in the end, here at the plantation, but with only fain
t memories of who he was. Julin realized that Grandfather was the one behind it all. Gustav had organized the abduction, sent him back to Marie Bennoit, who had placed a curse on the family. Gustav hoped it would appease her. He was terrified of her—business deals that failed just before they went through; his wife, Lisbet, who was suddenly struck by inexplicable fainting spells—and his fear of sorcery was greater than his love for his own grandchild. Julin found proof of everything. He had a hold on Gustav after that, for the rest of his life.”
He grew quiet, looking at Katz glassily.
“Is there anything else you’re wondering about?” he said. “What happened on the boat that time in Hässelby?”
Katz nodded as he touched his trouser pocket carefully. He had fallen asleep with his clothes on. The bolt pistol was still there.
“I woke up to someone breaking in. I was terrified and hid under a berth. The adults had gone into town. Pontus and his friends were going to the pub. I could see out through the crack under the top of the cot. I witnessed two guys my age vandalizing the furnishings. And I decided that I wouldn’t let it go unpunished.”
“So you followed us?”
“You and the other guy went separate ways; you went off with a girl. Eva, Lisa’s mother. You went to a bike room, took too many drugs . . . you were completely knocked out.”
“But you weren’t alone.”
Klingberg looked at him sadly, as if he wanted to ask forgiveness.
“No. I called my old nanny. Sandra Dahlström. She came and helped me, gave you more drugs while you were unconscious. We took you to a nearby islet. Then I was able to do as I wished. I think I inherited my desire for revenge from my grandfather.”
Klingberg stopped talking and looked at the clock.
“Get up,” he said. “We have to finish this before the storm comes.”
The Boy in the Shadows Page 26
