The roar of the approaching hurricane had increased by the time they came out into the yard. The feral dogs had stopped barking. Klingberg pressed the barrel of the revolver to Katz’s back and pushed him ahead. They walked slowly along the gravel path through the village as Joel continued to tell him everything that had happened, filling in the holes, tightening up the story as if he wanted to make sure that Katz understood every detail.
He talked about the hatred he’d felt for his parents and missing older brother, the hatred for being the one left alone, because, despite his absence, Kristoffer had been the center of their world, the loss his parents had always come back to, since they had no idea that he was alive and on a sugar-cane plantation in the borderlands between Haiti and the Dominican Republic; the hatred from having lived in the shadow of a missing older brother.
He talked about the murder of his parents at the manor house in Sörmland, how he’d found them falling-down drunk one evening, each sleeping on a sofa in the big parlor, and realized that it was the opportunity he’d been waiting for. How he’d managed to drag them out to the garage, then got them into the car, placed bottles of alcohol in their laps, laced their fingers together, attached the garden hose to the exhaust pipe and the interior of the car . . . bent in and gave them each a farewell kiss, a suck mark on the neck, without really understanding why . . . before starting the engine, almost in shock—not about what he’d done but because he’d dared to do it. How Gustav had suspected it had been him but chose to keep quiet anyway.
He talked about how Julin had become interested in him when he was a teenager, in his outbursts of rage and his gift for languages. He told Katz what he knew about Julin’s secret military program, about how he had become inspired by what he’d seen during his trips to the Dominican Republic, about the money that had come from Gustav thanks to the hold Julin had on the old man. He explained that Julin had helped him with the murder of Angela Klingberg and everything that happened after that, and he was saying all of this in the certainty that Katz would not survive.
By the time he had finished, they were a kilometer down the road. They were standing outside the cement building with St. Rochus painted on the door. The lid was missing from the salt barrel outside. The door was open.
“Go in! You can’t scare him anymore. Not when you don’t have this.”
In one hand Klingberg held the cloth doll, the paké, and with the other he pointed the revolver at Katz. Katz did as he was told.
A person was sitting motionlessly on a chair by the far wall, covered by a dirty sheet. A pair of white sneakers stuck out under the hem. The roar of the hurricane was still growing stronger. Klingberg had to raise his voice to make himself heard.
“Take some salt from the barrel and throw it at him.”
Katz did as he asked. The person gave a start as the salt hit the sheet.
“Once more! That’s how you wake them, the seemingly dead.”
He threw another fistful. Convulsions went through the body. Its feet scraped nervously at the floor. Then the sheet fell off him.
It was a man in his fifties, a half-black man. He was dressed in ragged jeans and a dirty T-shirt. His eyes were empty, lifeless, like those of a junkie. He could see the Nordic features in the face. The green eyes, the blond hair that was interrupted by the brown skin.
“He thinks he’s dead,” said Klingberg. “Because he wants to be dead . . . because he has nothing to live for.”
Katz saw the wound on the man’s cheek where he’d stabbed him with the neck of the broken bottle in the hunting cabin. The man’s face drew into a grimace as he showed his teeth and gave a low growl.
“My brother died of a tropical illness shortly after Julin found him, and just a few months after Marie Bennoit’s death. She had taken care of him like a mother, doing her best, given the limited circumstances.”
Klingberg stopped talking and looked contemptuously at him.
“This man claims that he’s Kristoffer, that he was taken out of the earth shortly after he was buried. Our grandmother could no longer protect him from all the hate that Gustav had created here.”
Klingberg was still aiming the revolver at him; he, too, took a handful of salt from the barrel and threw it at the man, who convulsed again.
“What do you think, Katz, is this Kristoffer?”
He didn’t answer; he just waited for something to happen.
“He was one of the ones Julin studied . . . along with a number of others with similar symptoms. There’s a hospital on the other side of the border, a psychiatric clinic where they try to treat people like him. Julin went there too. And to Port-au-Prince. Look at him. He has no will of his own. You can make him do anything at all; he thinks he has to obey.”
That was the last thing Katz knew; he just heard the crack of the gunshot and noticed a burning sensation in his right thigh. He fell down head first. His cheek struck the floor and he passed out.
She woke up on the floor in a space that stank of mold. Her hands were bound to a warm-water pipe with plastic ties. Her body still ached from the electric shocks.
“Mom . . . are you there?”
Lisa’s voice came from another part of the house. She wanted to shout back, that she was there, that everything would be fine, but she didn’t have the strength.
“Mom . . . answer me!”
She started crying. She couldn’t believe she had risked everything by going in alone.
“Mom, please . . .”
The voice was suddenly cut off as someone closed the door to the room Lisa was in. She made every effort not to panic.
A few minutes went by. Her body seemed to be recovering; her brain was starting to work again. She heard steps approaching, a door opened, and Sandra Dahlström stood before her.
“Does anyone know you were coming here?” she asked.
“No.”
“You’re lying, you cunt.”
“I came alone.”
She aimed the Taser at her again and fired it. The pain was indescribable, as if someone were igniting her from the inside.
“Tell the truth!”
It took nearly a minute for her to be able to answer:
“I swear . . . I came by myself.”
“How did you find it?”
“There was blasting nearby . . . I recognized the sound on the phone. I managed to get the times from the firm that did the job.”
She wanted to say something more, but her stutter showed up and blocked her whole body.
Sandra Dahlström just nodded, bent forward, and checked to make sure that the plastic ties were still where they should be. Then she straightened up again, walked over to a metal cabinet, and took out a roll of electrical tape.
Eva realized that she had to buy time, at any price. Time was the only thing that could give her the possibility of finding a way to escape. But pain from the electric shock was still running through her body; her muscles were numb.
Talk to her, she thought, stall her . . . without stuttering.
“I don’t understand,” she said quietly. “You knew that Julin was doing experiments on Jonas and you didn’t do anything to help him.”
Sandra ignored her, searching for something else in the cabinet: a kitchen towel that she rolled into a ball.
“You knew that Klingberg and Julin had him killed because Katz was on their trail. In this house, with an overdose of heroin.”
Her voice hardly carried. She watched as Sandra peeled off a piece of electrical tape, held it between her teeth, and ripped it from the roll. The scars from the bite marks on her arm were shiny in the light from the doorway.
“Why does he have such power over you . . . Joel?”
“Love,” she said. “It’s as simple as that.”
They’d had a relationship since Klingberg was a teenager, thought Eva, as she cautiously tugged at the ties to test how firmly she was bound. They both had needs, and they found an outlet for them. Sandra had hoped that she would be able to tra
nsfer her love for him to Linnie, but it had never succeeded; she’d continued to see him even though he abused her.
“You still haven’t told me the truth. Does anyone else know that you’re here?”
“No.”
Sandra turned a knob on the Taser and checked the settings.
“Now it’s on the highest voltage. I think I’ll visit your daughter and see how it works.”
The hate that rose in her was even stronger than her fear and pain.
“I’ll kill you if you touch her.”
Sandra Dahlström looked at her expressionlessly, bent down and pressed the kitchen towel into her mouth, and wound the electrical tape around her head several times to keep it in place. Then she nodded and left the room.
Ten seconds went by, a period of time completely taken up with the thought that her little girl was going to die, and that she herself was going to die—that only Arvid would be left when it was all over. She heard Lisa calling for her again, faintly, far away. The kitchen towel made her feel like she was suffocating; she breathed wildly through her nose.
Then she heard two quick shots from a handgun in the next room; someone screamed and ran off.
She must have passed out, because when she came to again Jorma was bending over her and loosening the ties from the warm-water pipe.
“Lisa?” she said. “Where is she?”
“In another room. She’s okay.”
“And Sandra?”
“I don’t know. She disappeared.”
She saw the pistol he was holding in his hand.
“You shot her?”
“I don’t know if I hit her. I didn’t even know if I was in the right place. I saw your scarf; it was caught on a rosebush . . . that’s how I found the entrance. I went in, saw a woman with a Taser, and shot at her without asking any questions.”
He led her along a hall, over to a windowless room on the other side of the house. All the pain and despair flowed through her as she saw her little girl bound to a hospital bed. But she was alive; that was all that mattered right now.
She didn’t remember what order things happened in after that. She only knew that she sat with Lisa in her arms for a long time as Jorma searched the house, mother and child crying with fear and relief. At some point Jorma had called for her to come, and she found him in the laboratory in the cellar along with the lifeless body of Sandra Dahlström. She had swallowed some poison, she guessed, because her face was blackish blue and she was already dead. She wasn’t sure if Lisa was there with her or if she’d left her in the room, or if she had perhaps already gotten her out, had called Ola to tell him, crying, that the nightmare was over.
He was in the slaughterhouse, on his knees in the pen. He was groggy, drugged. It was the same sort of intoxication as in the hunting cabin, but stronger. Klingberg didn’t need to tie him up; his muscles didn’t work.
Something was fastened around his head, some sort of metal band that chafed his forehead. A slaughtering mask.
Klingberg was standing in front of him with a plastic bottle in hand. He sniffed the contents.
“Tetrodotoxin,” he said. “And a hallucinogenic ingredient, bufotenin. In olden times, the poison was placed in the victim’s shoes or poured onto his back. When the person showed all the symptoms of death and had been buried, the witch doctor who had performed the poisoning went to the grave and dug up the body.”
Blood was streaming from a wound on the front of Katz’s thigh. The bullet seemed to have gone through the muscle tissue without harming the bone or hitting an artery.
Klingberg bent forward, pouring another couple of drops from the bottle into the wound. Then he turned around and said a few words in Spanish to the man in the sneakers.
The door was open. Katz saw the feral dogs on the road. They could smell the blood. They would come once his body had been left; the door would be open, his body would be covered in blood from the entry wound in his forehead where the bolt would strike him. The ravenous dogs would lick the blood off him first, and then they would try to find the soft bits . . . perhaps his throat . . . which Klingberg would have already bitten to shreds, just as he had seen a bloodhound do to a farm worker long ago on his grandfather’s plantation.
He was flooded with a powerful feeling of peace, not unlike the one from a heroin rush. His muscles were useless, but the endorphins were there. Was this how he would die, high on a Caribbean drug?
He was still on his knees in the slaughtering pen, unable to move. The wind roared outside. The door was open. Roof tiles flew by in the air, light as leaves. And every other conceivable sort of garbage: wood, branches, bushes that had been torn up by their roots. Large roofing sheets came loose from some building, rising and floating off twenty meters up in the air before they landed out of sight with a crash.
It was remarkably calm in the room he was in. The man in front of him was striking a hammer lightly against his own leg. He seemed totally absent, higher than Katz was. A penniless man in a shithole at the edge of the world. Who was he? Kristoffer Klingberg? His body was covered in the scars of abuse. There were welts on his back where he’d been whipped like an animal. Like a child? Like a slave on a white man’s sugar-cane plantation. Dead—a person who hadn’t lived for years. What sort of trauma was behind such incomprehensible autosuggestion, that a person could consider himself dead? And yet he knew, because hadn’t he himself lived that way for more than ten years, like a zombie?
Klingberg was standing next to him. Perhaps he wanted to witness his execution. He heard him speak as if from the other end of a kilometer-long corridor. Shouting to drown out the roar of the storm: “It’s logical, Katz, when you die I’ll let the girl go. Are you prepared to sacrifice yourself?”
He said yes with his eyes, because he couldn’t speak. He couldn’t even swallow. He still didn’t believe it. Why would Klingberg spare someone when everything had gone this far?
“I would have been able to come back . . . or maybe I still can. Everything points at you, after all. Nothing has changed on that front. Even the murder of Julin, the only one who, theoretically, could have testified against me. Do you know why I killed him?”
He looked intently at Katz.
“Because he wanted to kill you. You were on the trail of the deaf boy, and Julin didn’t want to take any chances. But I was opposed to it. I saved your life. Because I liked the thought that you would be pursued for something I had done . . .”
Joel yelled something more that he didn’t catch. His hearing was starting to give way; there were long pauses during which the background noise was transformed into a tinnitus-like buzz. As if someone was turning a relay on and off in his head.
“It was so easy to use you, Katz. You were doomed from the start, just like that time in Hässelby.”
He said something about how he hadn’t realized that Katz was the same person before the night he came back from Djursholm and realized that Katz had slept with Ingrid. He suddenly seemed to recognize the hard, cold facial expression from the time a few years earlier when Katz had broken into the St. Rochus. It was easy to confirm his suspicions. Katz, the person he had admired because he’d defended him against a paratrooper in Karlsborg. He said something about how much he hated Ingrid and Katz for what they’d done. How much he hated betrayal . . . ever since his brother had disappeared, since his parents had betrayed him with their sorrow. Ingrid had gone on a language trip to France the summer after they were discharged and had never returned. She disappeared during a mountain climb in the Pyrenees. Her body had never been found. But, naturally, he knew where it was, what was left of it.
The rage, Katz thought, that terrible rage they both carried. And he had to muster it in himself if he was going to survive this. Only with the help of his rage could he get free. He laughed internally at himself, at his foolishness.
“The pieces of cloth,” he managed to say. “Someone sent embroidered voodoo cloths to you shortly before you vanished.”
“Yes. Stran
ge, isn’t it?”
Klingberg laughed.
“A black killing a Jew. Isn’t it ironic? Soon he’s going to drive that bolt into your head, nine centimeters straight into your brain. As soon as I leave.”
Klingberg was an anti-Semite, always had been, a racist and an anti-Semite, just like his uncle and grandfather. He’d known this back when they were acquaintances at the interpreter academy, but had ignored it, just as he’d ignored everything else to do with Klingberg, because he felt contempt for him.
“You wouldn’t want to see yourself right now, Katz. With a slaughtering mask on your head . . . on your knees . . . covered in your own shit.”
It was true; he could smell the odor of his total degradation, but he didn’t care. He was high on the drug Joel had given him, which had transformed him into a lifeless person. Klingberg’s nose was bleeding, he noticed; it was running down his chin and neck, but he didn’t seem to be aware of it.
“I have to go now,” he said. “While the roads are still passable.”
Then he nodded at the man with the hammer and backed out of the room. He stood in the doorway for a moment as the wind tore at his clothes; then he turned around and disappeared down the path, hunched up.
Katz felt dizzy as the realization came to him that he had perhaps ten or twenty breaths left to live.
The man with the hammer took two steps toward him. He would have to bend down and sit across from Katz in order to drive the bolt into his brain. Unless he lifted him up first and propped him against something. Or laid him on his back.
The rage, he thought, it has to come out now, the hate, it has to come, because that was the only thing that had helped him survive all his years on the street.
His hands were clenched tight. He was still holding salt in one of them. He concentrated on Angela and Eva, on Lisa, whom Klingberg was holding captive somewhere and wouldn’t spare; he felt his high give way and the darkness and the hate came out.
The man had gotten on his knees in front of him. He slowly lifted the hammer, but he seemed to realize that he wouldn’t be able to strike the bolt at that angle, that it would go crooked.
The Boy in the Shadows Page 27
