The Boy in the Shadows

by Carl-Johan Vallgren

  He got up again, shoving Katz backward with his foot so that Katz’s back was leaning against the board wall. The storm just kept going outside; a tree trunk rolled past on the path, more roof tiles, more metal sheeting. Katz felt the hatred growing, all the collected hate he had carried within him since his childhood. He had gotten a hand up to his face now; the man watched as he licked the salt out of his open palm but didn’t seem to understand what he was doing and used his foot to push Katz’s hand down until it was resting against his hip. Katz felt the bolt pistol in his pocket, groaned with pain as his muscles started to obey him, concentrated on his rage, and let it wake him from the dead.

  The man bent forward, raising his hand with the hammer. The salt, Katz thought: his body was reacting to it, the muscle cramps subsided, his body began to convulse and he fell over onto his side. He kept the bolt pistol hidden in his hand as the man bent over to lift him up. A little closer now. He had to grab Katz’s arms to lay him on his back. Katz saw his head moving closer; he could smell his breath and the scent of insect repellant on his skin.

  Twenty centimeters away now. He was surprised by the precision of his actions, as if he had always known what he would do in this very situation. The man looked at him in surprise as Katz suddenly lifted his hand and placed a cold object against the man’s temple. Katz pulled the trigger and felt the recoil go through his arm. The man tumbled onto him with the left portion of his frontal bone indented into his brain.

  He had no idea how long he lay there in the slaughterhouse with the body on top of him. An hour . . . a day? He had auditory hallucinations; he thought that the dead man was talking, and the language he spoke was Swedish. Kristoffer—was it him, after all?

  Finally, the high drew back, like the tide. He could move; the strength returned to his muscles.

  It was evening when he stood on the path outside the slaughterhouse. The storm had passed. The sugar-cane village looked like an abandoned battlefield. The windows in the manor house were broken; the roof had blown off. There was garbage and wreckage everywhere, heavy objects that had been carried a long distance. The feral dogs watched him from the edge of the forest as he staggered along the path toward the house. The Land Rover was gone. Klingberg had vanished in it without making sure Katz was dead.

  The cellphone and wallet were still on the bed in the room on the second floor. His phone rang at the same instant he found it. Klingberg, he thought. But instead he heard Jorma’s voice from far away:

  “Katz, are you there? We found Lisa . . . she’s okay . . .”

  The line was broken as the last percent of power left the battery.

  He rented a small room in Barrio Las Malvinas in northern Santo Domingo. The furnishings were meager: a bed, a lamp, a metal sink. The toilet and shower were in the hall.

  On the first night he bought a few grams of Jamaican grass from a street dealer. He rolled joints and smoked them while sitting at the open window as he absently watched the sunset. The darkness came quickly, like when a lamp is rapidly dimmed. The sea was dead calm. The storm had passed by the coast without causing any great damage.

  He’d hitched a ride on a truck that was carrying pottery from Port-au-Prince to Santo Domingo. He didn’t know where he got the strength. First, he’d limped along a jungle road for an hour before he came to a village on the Haitian side of the border. Helpful people had taken care of him: a doctor from Doctors Without Borders looked at his bullet wound, the people in the village let him sleep in a hammock in a mission hall overnight, gave him food and water, and stopped the truck as it came through the village streets early the next morning.

  “Erzulie Freda?” he’d asked, when he saw the child’s doll in a sequined dress hanging from the rearview mirror of the truck. The driver had given him the biggest smile he’d seen in several years.

  He didn’t know how long he would stay. Until the view had cleared. And he’d done what he demanded of himself.

  He was slowly recovering. The poison was still in his body, affecting his muscles, but the wound in his leg was healing surprisingly quickly. He tried not to think of the man he’d killed.

  He called Eva the day he arrived.

  “I miss you,” she said. “When are you coming back?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Do you regret us sleeping together?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  He’d listened to her calm breathing. Felt her relief that her little girl was unharmed. She’d tried to explain everything that had happened, but he hadn’t had the strength to absorb it or tell her what had happened to him. He’d just said that it was all under control.

  “Give me a call as soon as you’re back, Katz. There’s a lot we need to figure out.”

  He did what he had to; he scouted, thought, bought a map of the port district. One morning, he went to Avenida Sarasota some distance from the city center. The pink building was from the late ’50s. The relief above the entrance depicted a menorah, the seven-armed candelabra.

  It was Saturday and the morning services were already under way. Katz took a kippah and a prayer book from a shelf and opened it to the right spot in the Amidah. The right-hand page was in Spanish, the left-hand in Hebrew. The cantor was standing on the bema, reciting.

  About thirty men and women were on either side of the center aisle. Most of them had Sephardic roots—they were dark-skinned and short. There was a curtain as a mechitza, but it wasn’t being used. People didn’t seem to notice him; perhaps they were used to American tourists.

  The cantor’s voice was lulling and beautiful. He read the week’s parashah from the Torah in a deep bass tone. The verse was about revenge, about the revenge of God, which was righteous but almost always incomprehensible. The vengefulness of man, which was conceivable but futile.

  The cantor came up and introduced himself after the service; he was surprised when Katz said he was from Sweden, and he told Katz about the congregation, which was the oldest in the New World. The first Sephardim had come with the Spanish colonists and had kept their faith a secret. Later, more Jews had arrived from the Dutch Antilles, and Jewish refugees came from Europe during the war. Trujillo had allowed their immigration, generously enough; they’d received their own territory on the northern part of the island, in the enclave of Sosúa. The Jewish World Congress had bought land and livestock for them.

  The cantor laughed as he talked about German-speaking academics who became farmers and stockbreeders.

  “Do you need help with anything?” he asked, as Katz was about to leave.

  “Yes . . .”

  “Just name it.”

  “I don’t mean to alarm you, but I need to buy a pistol.”

  The cantor looked at him earnestly.

  “Are you in trouble?”

  “I need it for self-defense. Hopefully, I won’t have to use it.”

  Hesitation. The cantor didn’t know him, after all, and his request must have sounded absurd. And yet he must have seen something in Katz’s eyes, the honesty of his seriousness.

  “All I can give you is a phone number,” he said. “You’ll have to take care of the rest yourself. It’s Shabbat for another eight hours. Come back after Havdalah.”

  The boat was in the marina, at the farthest pier, among the luxury yachts. He could see it through the binoculars: St. Rochus. It was sailing under the Panamanian flag these days.

  “I’ll give you a thousand pesos if you take me out there.”

  The man who ran sightseeing boats up the Ozama River gave him a skeptical look.

  “Now? It’s going to be dark soon.”

  “Yes, now.”

  “What are you going to do? I don’t want to get dragged into anything.”

  “I just want to look around.”

  Katz took a wad of bills from his pocket, peeled off a few, and handed the money to the man. He felt the rage inside him again as he climbed down into the motorboat; he had to find an outlet for it so as not to suffocate.

  He t
ook off his waterproof backpack and placed it on the floor of the boat. It didn’t weigh much. All it contained was a flashlight, a can of pepper spray, and a tiny Colt revolver.

  The darkness fell quickly as they left the mouth of the river. Lanterns were being lit on the boats in the marina.

  St. Rochus was at the farthest dock—the boat he had broken into in another life.

  They rounded the outer pier and continued toward the docks. Katz looked at his watch: 6:30. The warmth still hung in the air like a warm, wet wrapper.

  “I’m not going any closer,” said the man driving the motorboat. “The docks are patrolled by guards. Do you want to turn around, or should I take you over to the seafront?”

  But when he turned around, his passenger was gone.

  The dock was illuminated by lanterns. A guard was standing at the gate that blocked the area off from the land side. Katz aimed for the stern of the nearest boat, swimming silently. There was a party under way farther off, on something that looked like a floating three-story house.

  He was out of sight, in the shadows behind the stern of the nearest boat. A man in a tuxedo was pissing from the railing ten meters away. Katz held still in the water, no pain in his injured leg, holding on to an anchor chain, inhaling the scents of waste oil and grilled food. When the man vanished, he kept going.

  The St. Rochus was dark. Klingberg wasn’t there, but sooner or later he would come back. Katz wasn’t in any rush. He could wait.

  He swam around the craft, close to the hull. He listened for sounds but didn’t hear any. The cabins were dark. The deck was empty.

  There was a ladder next to the water trampoline. Katz climbed up and dropped down behind the nearest cabin wall. Sighing sounds came as waves surged against the hull. He had a flashback to the slaughterhouse at the sugar-cane plantation. He hadn’t had any choice, and yet he would have to live the rest of his life with the knowledge that he’d killed a man. He felt the hatred again, aimed at Klingberg. He felt the blackness coming behind his eyes.

  He took off his backpack and his soaking-wet shirt. He waited until the guard was at the other end of the dock and crawled across the deck up to the door that led down to the cabins and the lounge. Unlocked.

  He went down the stairs just as he had that time with Jorma in Hässelby. He held the revolver in one hand and the flashlight in the other. One cabin door was open. He shone the light into the room. A dirty bunk bed, scraps of food in a cellophane package, a strong scent of insect repellant—the same kind he’d smelled on the man he’d killed.

  He entered the lounge. The room looked just as he remembered it, with furniture bolted to the floor: a dining table and a teak bar counter.

  “Have a seat, Katz!”

  The voice came from the dark corner astern. A Swedish voice, but it didn’t belong to Klingberg. Two men were sitting on a sofa, reclining comfortably. A third was crouching by a safe that was set into the wall. The one who was speaking aimed a pistol with a silencer at him.

  “Put the revolver on the table. I don’t want there to be an accident.”

  Katz did as he said.

  “Empty your pockets, please.”

  The pepper spray, his last lifeline . . . he put it on the table.

  “Great, now have a seat. Don’t worry, nothing’s going to happen to you. We’re just going to have a little chat.”

  The man followed his movements with the barrel of the pistol. A professional—his hand was unbelievably steady; it didn’t tremble in the least.

  “Where’s Klingberg?” Katz asked, as he sat down.

  “You don’t need to worry about him anymore. In a few years he’ll be declared dead. His body won’t be found. He quite simply doesn’t exist any longer.”

  He had no idea what was going on; he just looked in amazement at the man who was speaking to him. It was difficult to make out his features in the darkness. He had a large build and he was bearded, but his head was shaved.

  “Unfortunately, I can’t introduce myself. And the same goes for my colleagues.”

  Lynx. Julin’s superior.

  The man who was crouching by the wall took something from the safe—it looked like a hard drive—put it in his bag and stood up.

  “I want you to forget everything about this meeting when we’re done. It simply never happened.”

  Katz nodded, waiting for some sort of explanation.

  “I think you’ve guessed who I am, or rather my alias. That’s going to disappear, too, and you will never mention it in the future. Not under any circumstances. You created a number of problems for us. There is no safe way to store information, except for here!” He tapped a finger lightly against his head. “And if, against all odds, you should trespass in our computers again, you won’t find anything. What you saw . . . let’s call it fragments of a larger whole . . . is no longer there. It’s all been erased.”

  The man crossed one leg over the other and looked intently at Katz from the corner, still pointing the pistol at him.

  “It wasn’t even supposed to be in the system anymore. That was carelessness on our part.”

  He leaned back so that his face almost disappeared in the darkness.

  “You must have lots of questions,” he said. “And I might consider answering some of them . . . because we owe you that.”

  “Who do you work for?” said Katz. “SSI?”

  “It’s more complicated than that. Project Legba was an international matter. And there are many of us who had to clean up traces of it years after it was discontinued. My two friends here, for example, speak only English. And Hebrew.”

  The man who had put the hard drive into a bag gave Katz a quick smile. A chai symbol was hanging around his neck on a gold chain. Mossad, he thought, or maybe Shin Bet.

  “It started a long time ago, at the end of the Cold War. We were faced with a worst-case scenario, that the Russians would do something rash out of pure desperation, urged on by an arms race they couldn’t afford . . . a strategic attack on a neutral country to show their strength. Certain information we received supported those suspicions. My task was rapidly to develop better methods of information gathering. Better interrogators, quite simply, who were prepared to go against the Geneva Convention in order to get information in an urgent situation, and preferably even before one came up.”

  “You wanted to train people in torture?”

  “If you ask my friends here, they see it from a completely different perspective. It’s a classic problem in practical philosophy: when is it okay to take one life to save others?”

  He was silent for a moment, before going on.

  “Julin was directly under me back then. I gave him free rein to create a training program for a new generation of military interpreters. The problem was that the recruits couldn’t be aware of it themselves. We had laws to think of, but we wanted it to be there if an urgent situation should come up. It was no mistake that you ended up in the program.”

  “I was falsely convicted of assaulting a woman.”

  “I know. And Julin knew it too. But, still, your list of strengths was quite solid. You were a known fighter, a criminal, with several cases of armed robbery and assault that no one could put you away for because you were a juvenile. And, beyond that, you had enormous talent for languages and computers. You were sent on through the system, like a weapon ready to be fired when the time was right.”

  “And what if it didn’t work—what if I had refused?”

  “I don’t think you would have, Katz.”

  He tried to see himself from the outside, the person he had been and the person he had become. But it didn’t match up; he was no torpedo, no psychopath.

  “And the drugs that Julin experimented with?”

  “Our joint project from the start. But when the funding was cut, he continued it on his own, with help from Gustav Klingberg. And, eventually, from Joel Klingberg.”

  “And the military looked the other way?”

  “Soldiers who don’t fee
l fear. Soldiers who kill without thinking. That’s very unusual. What army doesn’t dream about men like that? And, at the same time, we could wash our hands of it. One or two people on the defense staff were informed. Neither the Supreme Commander nor the department knew anything.”

  “But you were involved?”

  “Julin kept us informed. And also several other organizations, foreign ones, related to my own.” He threw a glance at the man sitting next to him on the sofa. “We never operate in a vacuum. We are on the right side, the winning side, and no matter how much we brag about our neutrality we do have certain allies. Many people were interested in Julin’s experiments. The Americans were working on something similar at the same time. So were the Russians. Siberian peoples have a lot of phytotoxins that can change a person’s personality. The problem was that Julin went too far in the end. There was a risk that heads would start to roll, that he would harm my organization. He used people in a manner that was incompatible with our principles of voluntary service. Junkies, for example, seldom have a choice, but, above all, they’re not trustworthy; sooner or later, they start to leak. But Klingberg solved that problem for us . . . Julin no longer exists.”

  “And the fifty million kronor?” said Katz. “Where did that come from?”

  “Some came from Joel Klingberg, and another portion came from international security firms that have started to take an interest in the project. The money was transferred through Klingberg Aluminum instead of Capitol Security in order to avoid a direct link to Julin. The money was meant to be laundered in the Virgin Islands before it was sent on to one of Julin’s foreign accounts. But then there was the thing with Klingberg’s wife—she cheated on him with his uncle, and the whole revenge machination was set into motion.”

  “How did he convince Julin to help murder his wife?”

  “He had a hold on him. They had been mixed up together for decades, Julin and the Klingberg family. Threats of cutting off the flow of money. We don’t know exactly, and now it’s too late to ask.”