Annika gulped. So if she was standing by the door leading to this earthly life and was asked if she wanted to give it a try, what would she say? ‘No, I think it looks a bit too hard’? Would she, for the first and only time, refrain from doing something unfamiliar and possibly difficult just because it seemed a bit uncomfortable?
She let her head fall back and gazed up at the rainclouds.
So, she had made her decision.
She had chosen to come. Perhaps that was what made the difference. Perhaps you didn’t come if you didn’t sign up voluntarily. Charles and Lucy had also wanted to come.
She peered towards Langata Road, and her eyes fell on a grave that was still brown, a beloved wife, mother and grandmother. ‘Sunrise: 1960. Sunset: 2011. May the Lord rest her in peace.’
Sunrise. Sunset. So beautiful.
Her photograph was still very clear. She had curly hair and was wearing a big white hat.
‘Annika!’
She froze to ice and looked back towards the gate. Halenius had got out of the car and was waving at her.
The funeral was still going on, but the crackling loudspeaker had fallen silent.
Another plane flew past at low altitude.
She ran towards the gate. ‘What?’ she said breathlessly.
‘Not here,’ Halenius said. ‘We need to get going.’
She was gasping for breath as adrenalin surged inside her. ‘What’s happened?’
‘New orders, by text. We have to go past the Life Spring Chapel and leave the money on the plateau above Kibera. Jump in.’
The atmosphere in the car was electric. Frida was chewing her bottom lip, and her eyes were darting about behind her sunglasses. She was talking about places and possible roads as she fiddled with the gear-stick: ‘There’s a Life Spring Chapel by the airport, but that’s on the other side of the city. They might mean the turning circle above Mashimoni, behind the Ngong Forest road, right by the river …’
Annika turned to look back towards the cemetery. The vegetation had taken over the fence next to where they were parked, wrapping the rust and barbed wire with green leaves and tendrils, but through the foliage she could see the mourners closing their umbrellas and moving towards the far exit.
Why had they got new orders? Had she done something wrong? Did the kidnapper have an observer among the mourners?
Frida put the car in gear and it shot forward. The people in the cemetery disappeared behind the greenery.
They turned into a smaller road and the tarmac came to an end. Frida slowed down. Soon they were rattling forward at five kilometres an hour, moving at the same speed as donkey-carts and men on heavily laden bicycles.
Annika was sitting in the middle of the seat, as far away from the doors as possible.
Buildings close to the car, cracked clay and tin, rubbish trampled into the ground alongside the unpaved road, a goat eating on top of a mountain of garbage.
They had one point one million dollars in the car, on the floor by her feet: was it obvious from the outside? What would happen if the people on the other side of the windows knew?
A man selling waxed cloths slid past, women with children on their backs. Eyes following them along the pitted mud road.
Then the car was shaken by a sudden bang. Annika jerked, grabbed the seat and Frida braked.
‘What happened?’ Annika said. ‘What was that?’
Frida pulled the handbrake on, took off her sunglasses and looked at Halenius, wide-eyed.
‘Do exactly what you would have done if we weren’t in the car,’ he said quietly.
Frida took a few quick breaths, opened the door, got out and shouted, ‘Acha! Msipige mawe!’
Faces moved in the dust and Annika leaned instinctively towards Halenius. ‘What’s she doing?’
‘Telling them not to throw stones at the car.’
Frida got back in, took the handbrake off and put the car in gear. Her top lip was glowing with sweat. Annika checked that the back doors were locked.
To their left a valley opened up and she followed the greenery with her eyes. On the horizon she could see how it changed and turned brown: a stone landscape? A moon crater? An endless plain of mud?
She heard herself gasp. Kibera, one of the most densely populated places on the planet, one of the continent’s largest slums, shacks made of tin and mud as far as she could see, open sewers and garbage, a carpet of different shades of brown from here to eternity. She tried to say something but found no words.
‘Mashimoni is down there,’ Frida said, driving into a turning circle a couple of dozen metres above a dried-up riverbed. She stopped, switched off the engine and pulled the handbrake on again.
They sat in silence for a minute or so.
‘Did they say where I had to leave the money?’
Halenius shook his head.
The monotonous landscape stretched as far as she could see on both sides. Washing hanging on lines. Smoke rising between the roofs. There were people everywhere. On the other side of the valley, mobile-phone masts reached towards the clouds.
‘I’m not going to have to go down there, am I?’ she said, nodding towards the warren of tin shacks.
‘I don’t know,’ Halenius said.
Minutes passed.
She picked up the video-camera and filmed through the window. People walked past them on their way down to the slum.
‘Can I open my window?’
‘I think we can probably get out now,’ Halenius said, opening his door and stepping out.
Annika and Frida followed suit.
They were standing on something resembling the Lion King’s cliff, a plateau high above the savannah. They could hear voices as a faint rumble.
‘There aren’t as many people living here as everyone used to think,’ Halenius said. ‘They used to say two million, but now they think it’s more like a few hundred thousand.’
She’d read about it and seen it on television and in films. The Constant Gardener had been set here, although she hadn’t known it at the time.
Halenius’s mobile buzzed.
He read the text with bloodshot eyes, and Annika stopped breathing.
It didn’t matter where, as long as it was over soon. She could carry the bags over the riverbed and among the shacks, passing women in colourful clothes and boys in grey school uniforms. She could throw them into a container full of rubbish or leave them in a grocery shop. She was ready.
‘The ransom is to be dropped at the entrance to Langata Women’s Prison.’
Annika blinked. She didn’t understand.
‘That’s not far from the cemetery,’ Frida said.
‘So we’re heading back the way we came?’ Halenius said.
They got back into the car and Frida started the engine. Annika hardly managed to get the door shut before Frida reversed and hit a pothole. Annika’s head hit the roof.
‘Sorry,’ Frida said, glancing back.
She doesn’t like me, Annika found herself thinking. She doesn’t want me here. She’d rather be alone with Halenius.
Could that be right? Was that why she had agreed to help with this crazy task? If it was true, how long had she felt like that? Since she used to share a room with Angela Sisulu? Had she lain awake in the next bed, listening?
And what about now? Did she understand? Did she know? Could she see through them?
They were driving down dusty streets with shops the size of cupboards. A glazier’s, a mosque, a slaughterhouse. The car bounced and lurched. Annika used her hands to keep herself upright and protect her head from the worst of it.
Frida slowed when they reached an area of gravel at the end of the road in front of something that looked a bit like a carport, and an iron gate painted in the gaudy colours of Kenya, green, black, yellow and red, with a sign above it. Langata Women’s Maximum Security Prison. The sun was reluctant to show itself. It was very quiet.
Annika glanced around her. Was she really supposed to leave the money here? Or w
as this just another false lead?
She wound the window down. The complex didn’t seem terrifying, just tragic. Barbed wire to the right, a residential area of new four-storey blocks to the left.
Frida nodded towards the visitors’ entrance. ‘I’ve got a friend in there,’ she said. ‘She had a good job, flight assistant, but a dodgy way of earning a bit extra, smuggling heroin. She had half a kilo on her when they caught her. She’s served ten years of a fourteen-year sentence.’
Halenius was staring at his mobile.
‘Do you think this is the place?’ Annika asked.
Frida got out of the car and went to the security booth to say hello.
‘Are you going to stay here?’ Halenius asked.
Annika nodded.
He got out of the car and shut the door. A young woman with two small children was sitting beside a tin shack with three walls. A hand-painted sign saying Visitors’ Waiting Lodge revealed that they were there to see someone. Annika raised the camera and filmed them. They were dressed in colourful clothes – how did they manage to look so neatly pressed? A woman in red jeans and a white top walked over the gravel and in through the entrance, pulling a large suitcase behind her. Was she moving in? What had she done? Annika followed her through the lens.
A gust of wind blew into the car, bringing with it a smell of rubber and sour milk. She lowered the camera and shut her eyes against the wind. A man was talking through a loudspeaker somewhere, but she couldn’t make out the words or even the language. A car went past. The sun came out and hit her eyelids, and her vision became warm and red.
Thomas had been staying in that hotel. He had eaten breakfast in the Traveller’s Restaurant, flirted with the British woman in the bar, she was sure. He had been on a bus tour of Nairobi, he’d told her, when he called the evening after the second day of the conference, but she doubted he would have seen either Kibera or Langata Women’s Maximum Security Prison. Thomas inhabited a world where getting red wine on your tie was a disaster. Women in red jeans and white tops were regarded in terms of cost and integration issues. In the USA Annika had seen injustice and exclusion on grounds of race and class; Thomas had seen individual freedom and economic opportunity. She knew perfectly well that neither of them was right, or perhaps that they were both right. But Thomas was in no doubt. A person who was strong and free and shouldered their responsibilities always managed okay. If he came back, would his worldview remain the same?
She opened her eyes. Several people had sat down on the gravel around the car. She raised the camera and filmed them eating bread they had brought with them, rocking children in their arms. A man and a woman were sitting on a tree stump a bit further away. She was wearing a lilac turban, he had a mobile in his hand. Annika zoomed in on the man through the camera. Was he one of them? Was he sending Halenius a text, specifying where the money was to be left?
The man with the loudspeaker started to sing.
Frida yanked her door open.
‘Put the camera down,’ she hissed. ‘This is a state institution. They’ll arrest us if they see you filming.’
Halenius opened his door and held up his mobile, his mouth a thin line. ‘It’s not here either,’ he said. ‘They’re sending us to Eastleigh.’
The sudden draught made her eyes water. Frida slammed the door and Annika closed her window. She felt like bursting into tears.
‘This time it’s probably right,’ Halenius said. ‘Eastleigh is known as Little Mogadishu. That’s where most of the Somalis live.’
Frida started the car.
The woman in the lilac turban had vanished.
The man with the mobile was still there. He didn’t look at them as they drove away.
* * *
‘Three million? Three million!’
Chairman of the board Herman Wennergren’s cheeks were flushed with anger.
‘The decision wasn’t only based upon sales figures,’ Anders Schyman said. ‘In this instance it was also about saving lives, taking humanitarian responsibility.’
‘But three million? Out of the newspaper’s profits? For that unstable individual?’
Herman Wennergren was (with good reason) no great supporter of Annika Bengtzon. Schyman wouldn’t have described her in that way. He was just grateful that his chairman hadn’t picked up the most controversial argument, that the Evening Post was sponsoring international terrorism.
‘She’s in Nairobi now to hand over the ransom,’ Schyman said. ‘It’s actually far more than three million, and she’s put up most of the total herself. I think this money will turn out to be a profitable investment.’
Herman Wennergren muttered something inaudible. ‘Have you rearranged everything down here again?’ he asked, sitting down on the visitor’s chair in Schyman’s glass box. He put his briefcase beside it, and draped his coat over the arm.
There hadn’t been any budget for rebuilding or renovating the newsroom for years, which the chairman was well aware of. ‘How do you mean?’ Schyman said, leaning back in his new chair.
‘Your office feels … smaller.’
‘It’s always been this size,’ Schyman said. There’s something seriously wrong with his sense of perspective, he thought. Wennergren was like a grown man returning to a place where he had played as a child and feeling that everything had shrunk. His way of thinking about all the companies he ran (four in total, plus a number of external committee responsibilities) was much the same, far more grandiose than the size of the companies warranted. In Wennergren’s world, any expenses were always bad. He had once said, admittedly after a committee dinner with plenty of vintage wine, that ‘The Evening Post would have been a well-run little business, if it weren’t for its editors.’
The chairman of the board cleared his throat. ‘Your resignation didn’t exactly come as a surprise,’ he said. ‘We realized some time ago that you were on your way out of here.’
Anders Schyman studied him and concentrated on maintaining a strictly neutral expression. The statement surprised him immensely. The board hadn’t had any idea that he was about to leave the paper: he hadn’t breathed a word of it. On the contrary, there had been whispers from various board members about giving him greater responsibility within the empire of the family that owned the paper, hints that he had humbly acknowledged and graciously pretended to appreciate. ‘That’s good to hear,’ he said. ‘It ought to make the process of finding my successor easier.’
Wennergren raised an eyebrow.
‘If you already have a list, I mean,’ Schyman said, touching the compress taped to the back of his head.
‘We were thinking you might be able to help us with that,’ Wennergren said. ‘One last task before you disappear.’
Anders Schyman folded his hands on his desk, making sure they weren’t shaking. He hadn’t been expecting this. Not this utter disregard for all the work he had put in over the years, or the man’s failure to make any attempt to persuade him to stay. He couldn’t think of anything to say.
Herman Wennergren ran a hand over his bald head. ‘You’re good at this sort of thing,’ he said, with a degree of embarrassment. ‘Your position here at the paper has given you an extensive network of contacts and a degree of insight into the industry.’
Really? Schyman thought. And I’d thought my position was the result of my own efforts and hard work. ‘So what criteria should I be looking for in my successor?’ he asked mildly.
The chairman made a sweeping gesture with his hand. ‘You probably know that.’
The outgoing (dismissed?) editor-in-chief leaned back in his chair and noted that the back creaked in an entirely new, unthreatening way. ‘Give me a few pointers,’ he said.
Wennergren shuffled in his chair. ‘He needs to be credible, obviously. Representative. Able to defend the paper in television debates. Financially responsible. Innovative and loyal, which go without saying. A good negotiator, with the ability to find new distribution and sales partners. And someone who can identify and kick
-start complementary new projects.’
Kick-start. What a horrible expression. But presumably the Swedish Academy would soon give it its blessing, if it hadn’t already done so. And the fact that his successor would be a man was obviously taken as read.
They don’t deserve me, he thought. ‘And in terms of journalism?’ Schyman said. ‘What sort of publisher should I be looking for?’
The chairman leaned across the desk. ‘Someone like you,’ he said. ‘Someone who knows all the buzz words about democracy and freedom of expression, but is basically prepared to publish anything—’ He broke off, possibly aware that he had gone too far.
Schyman put his hands into his lap, unable to hold them still any longer. He wondered if the old bastard was consciously trying to antagonize him, or if he thought it was perfectly normal and unremarkable to humiliate him in this way. Not a word about his successes, the sacrifices he had made for the paper, his indisputable competence with regard to steering a ship of this magnitude.
Ever since Schyman had been appointed editor-in-chief fourteen years ago, Wennergren had been the proprietors’ right-hand man on the board of the paper, the paper that made the most profit for its owners but which was always treated with the least respect. The Evening Post was something the cat had dragged in, but it managed to keep all the rats fed.
But the board clearly thought he was a puppet who could talk about responsibilities and freedom of the press while at the same time printing crap in the paper and, as a parting shot, he was being made to find his own successor. That would save the board a job, but leave them to bask in the glory.
‘I’d suggest promoting someone internally,’ he said. ‘There aren’t many outsiders who combine the necessary competence in tabloid thinking with presenting a credible attitude about the press to the outside world.’
‘We’d rather bring in someone external,’ Wennergren said.
‘From television, like me?’
‘Perhaps someone from the competition.’
Of course. Buy the other team’s best player. Classic tactic in sport.
Borderline Page 29