by Asa Larsson
“Sorry,” he said. “Sorry, sorry. I’ll…I can’t…”
He couldn’t breathe. It felt as if his throat had closed up, it was like breathing inside a suction pipe.
He dropped the cough medicine bottle on the floor. It smashed to pieces. He tugged at his tie in desperation.
The nanny pulled away. He slumped down onto a kitchen chair, trying to catch his breath.
Frightened? Was that what she said? She knows nothing. Absolutely nothing about being afraid.
He remembers when he told Mauri about Quebec Invest. That Sven Israelsson had told him they had a leak at SGAB.
“This guy is telling them about the test results in advance,” he’d said to Mauri.
Mauri had gone white. He was furious. You could see that, even though he didn’t say anything.
Everything’s personal, thought Diddi. Mauri prides himself on being one of those guys who can say “It’s just business.” But just below the surface is that sense of inferiority that turns everything into a personal insult.
Mauri had said they could turn this to their advantage. If the test drilling gave a positive result, then they’d give the leak false information and buy shares when Quebec Invest sold and the value went down.
Diddi was to take care of it all, and keep Mauri’s name out of it.
But it was idiot-proof, Mauri had said. Who was going to talk? Hardly Quebec Invest.
Diddi had hesitated. If it was that idiot-proof, why did he have to set it up, and not Mauri?
Then Mauri had smiled at him.
“Because you’re so much better at persuading people,” he’d said. “We’ve got to have Sven Israelsson with us.”
Then he’d mentioned how much money could be involved for Diddi. Half a million at least, he thought. Straight into Diddi’s pocket.
That had settled it. Diddi needed money.
Two weeks ago Inna had confronted him. It had been the last time she was at Regla. They were sitting on a bench on the south side of her house, leaning against the wall. Drowsy from the spring sunshine.
“It was Mauri, wasn’t it?” she’d asked him. “Who sorted the Quebec Invest stuff?”
“Don’t start poking about in all that,” Diddi had said.
“I’m just checking up on him,” Inna had persevered. “I think he and Gerhart Sneyers are supporting Kadaga. I think they’re going to try and bring Museveni down. Or have him murdered.”
“For my sake, Inna,” he’d said, “just leave it alone.”
Mauri Kallis and his guests were taking a stroll before dessert. Viktor Innitzer asked General Helmuth Stieff about Kadaga’s chances of retaining control of the mining district in northern Uganda.
“The president can’t allow it,” said the general. “These are important resources for the country, and he regards Kadaga as a personal enemy. As soon as the election is over, he’ll send his troops up there. So will the other commanders-in-chief. They’ve only withdrawn temporarily.”
“And as far as we’re concerned,” added Gerhart Sneyers, “we need a calmer situation in the country if we’re to run our businesses. A reliable power supply, a functioning infrastructure. Museveni won’t let us back in; it would be naive to expect it. Nobody has been able to work the mines over there for months and months. How long can you keep your investors sweet and convince them that it’s only a temporary hitch? That it’s ‘care and maintenance,’ just for a little while? The problems in northern Uganda aren’t going to be solved if we just sit and wait. Museveni is crazy. He puts his political opponents in jail. If he succeeds in taking over the mines, don’t be under any illusions that he’ll give them back to us. He’ll claim that they’ve been abandoned, and therefore revert to state ownership. The UN and the World Bank won’t lift a finger.”
Heinrich Koch went white. He had shareholders breathing down his neck, just like Mauri. Besides which, he had so much of his own capital tied up in Gems and Minerals Ltd. that he’d be finished if they lost the mine.
Tomorrow there would be open discussion about the alternatives facing them. And Gerhart Sneyers had stated clearly that they were no diplomats. They trusted each other, and spoke freely. For example, they would discuss who they thought might take over from the president if he were removed from power. And what possibilities they might have in the coming election if the current president didn’t stand.
Mauri looked at Heinrich Koch, Paul Lasker and Viktor Innitzer. They were standing in an admiring little circle around Gerhart Sneyers. Schoolboys surrounding the toughest guy in the schoolyard.
Mauri Kallis didn’t trust Sneyers. He had to watch his own back. Koch and Innitzer in particular were in Sneyers’s pocket. Mauri had no intention of joining them.
Turning to Mikael Wiik when all that business with the journalist, Örjan Bylund, cropped up had been the right thing to do. Mikael Wiik had proved himself to be the man Mauri had hoped for when he employed him.
At the time when Diddi became crazy and threatening.
Diddi Wattrang is wandering back and forth in Mauri’s study. It’s the ninth of December. Mauri and Inna have just got back from Kampala. Mauri is a different man from the one who left Sweden. He was furious after the meeting with the Minister for Industry, but now he’s completely calm.
He’s perching on the edge of his desk, almost smiling at Diddi.
“Do you understand what I’m saying?” says Diddi. “This Örjan Bylund has been asking questions about Kallis Mining and the business with Quebec Invest. I’m toast.”
He presses his clenched fist against his abdomen; he seems to be in pain.
Mauri tries to calm him down.
“Nobody can prove anything. Quebec Invest can’t talk, because they’re just as guilty as we are. They’d be finished if this came out. And they know that! Same applies to Sven Israelsson, besides which he’s had a big juicy bone from his master. You need to chill. Don’t rock the boat.”
“Don’t you tell me to chill,” snaps Diddi.
Mauri raises his eyebrows in surprise. An outburst of rage from Diddi. He hasn’t seen that since the time Diddi came to his student room demanding money. When that Spanish woman had dumped him. God, that was a whole lifetime ago.
“Don’t think I’m going to take the blame if all this comes out,” growls Diddi. “I’m going to point the finger at you, make no mistake.”
“You do that,” says Mauri Kallis icily. “But now I’d like you to leave.”
He thinks for a while after Diddi has slammed the door behind him. Diddi has frightened him a little. But he isn’t going to panic. He knows he is acting rationally, thinking things through.
The last thing he needs right now is a journalist sniffing around the company’s affairs. A little bit of searching will lead to the discovery that Mauri Kallis was one of those who bought shares in Northern Explore after Quebec Invest sold out, and sold them again after the report that gold had been found. If anyone follows the trail of payments from a number of transactions within the parent company and sees that they’ve gone to a bank in Andorra, they’ll be dangerously close. If they get hold of an arms dealer who lets slip that the payments for weapons for Kadaga have come from Andorra…
So the next time Mauri Kallis is talking to his head of security, he says:
“I have a problem. And I could use someone discreet, a man of your capabilities, who could take care of my problem.”
Mikael Wiik nods. He doesn’t say anything, he merely nods. The following day he hands Mauri a telephone number.
“A problem solver,” he says tersely. “Tell him you got the number from a close friend.”
There’s no name on the piece of paper. Just a number. The international code is Holland.
Mauri feels as if he’s in some silly film when he calls the number the next day. It’s a woman who answers; she says “Hello.” Mauri listens tensely to her voice, the intonation, trying to make out background noises. He thinks she has a bit of an accent. And her voice is a bit gravelly
. A woman in her forties from the Czech Republic who smokes?
“I was given your number by a friend,” he says. “A close friend.”
“A consultation costs two thousand euros,” says the woman. “After that you’ll get a quote for the job.”
Mauri doesn’t haggle over the price.
Mikael Wiik allows the security guys to eat in shifts. There’s no criticism of the arrangements surrounding the meeting. The Swedish guys he’d recruited himself looked up to him. They envied him the job with Mauri Kallis, this was a peach of a job. He thought he noticed a difference in Sneyers’s guys too. More respect.
“Nice place,” said one of them, jerking his head to encompass the whole estate.
“Better than a medal from the French Minister of Defense,” said the other.
So they knew about that. Hence the increased respect. It was also a sign that Gerhart Sneyers was keeping his eye on the ball, with regard to both Kallis and those around him.
And they were right. It was better working for Kallis than for the Special Protection Unit.
“It must have been pretty tough down there, then? It takes a lot for the French to give a foreigner a medal.”
“It was the boss who got the medal,” Mikael Wiik said, attempting to brush the matter aside.
He didn’t want to talk about it. His partner sometimes woke him up at night, shaking him. “You’re screaming,” she’d say. “You’ll wake the whole house up.”
Then he’d have to get up. Drenched in sweat.
The memories came crowding in. Taking the opportunity when he was asleep. They hadn’t faded with time. Rather the reverse. The sounds become clearer, the colors and odors sharper.
There were sounds that could drive him mad. The sound of a fly, for example. Sometimes he could spend a whole morning trying to get them out of his partner’s summer cottage. He’d really have preferred to stay in the city in the summer.
Clouds of flies. Congo, Kinshasa. A village near Bunia. Mikael Wiik’s group has arrived too late. The villagers are lying outside their houses, hacked to pieces, mutilated. Naked bodies. Children with their stomachs slit open. Three members of the militia group responsible are sitting leaning against the wall of one of the houses. They haven’t left with the rest of them. Completely out of it on drugs. They hardly seem to be aware that they’re being spoken to. They’re not bothered at all by the cloying smell of death or the clouds of buzzing flies around the bodies.
Mikael Wiik’s commanding officer tries different languages, English, German, French. “On your feet! Who are you?” They remain sitting there, leaning against the wall. Their eyes misty. In the end one of them grabs his gun, it’s been lying on the ground beside him. He’s perhaps twelve years old. He grabs his weapon and they shoot him on the spot.
Then they shoot his two companions. They bury them. Report back that all the militia forces had left the area when they arrived.
Sometimes it could be the rain against the window. If it started raining during the night, while he was asleep, that was the worst thing. Then he started to dream about the rainy season.
It pours down for weeks. The water gushes down the mountainsides, carrying mud along with it. The slopes disintegrate. The roads are transformed into red rivers.
Mikael Wiik and his colleagues joke with each other, saying they daren’t take off their boots in case their toes get left behind inside. Every blister turns into a tropic sore. The skin loosens, turns white, comes away in great lumps.
The GPS and two-way radios stop working. The technical equipment wasn’t made for this kind of rain; it’s impossible to protect it.
They’re operating under French NATO command; they’re supposed to be securing a road, and now they’re stuck at a bridge. But where the hell are the French? There are only ten of them in the group, and they’re waiting for support. The French are meant to be securing the road from the other side, but they have no idea who’s over there now. Earlier in the day they saw three figures in camouflage gear disappearing into the jungle.
They are beginning to get a horrible feeling that a militia group is mobilizing around them.
Mikael Wiik pulled out a packet of cigarettes and offered them to Sneyers’s guys.
It had ended in gunfire that time. He doesn’t know how many he killed. He just remembers the fear as the ammunition was running out, old stories about what these madmen did to their enemies, that was what woke him up at night. It was after that occasion they’d been awarded medals.
It was a strange way to live. Staying in the towns between assignments, hanging out in bars with his colleagues. Knowing they were all drinking too much, but they’d never had to handle this much reality before. The little black girls, only kids, trying to sidle up to them, “mister, mister.” You could fuck them for nothing. But you wanted a drink in peace with your mates first. So you chased them away like dogs, told the bartender you’d go somewhere else if you weren’t left in peace. Then he’d throw them out.
If you were interested, there were always several of them out in the street. Even if it was pouring with rain they would be standing there pressed against the walls of the houses, all you had to do was take them back to the hotel.
In one of the bars he met a retired major from the German Wehrmacht. He was around fifty, and owned a company that worked in the field of protection, both of people and property. Mikael Wiik knew him.
“When you’ve had enough of crawling around in the mud,” the major had said, giving him a card with just a number on it. Nothing else.
Mikael Wiik had smiled and shaken his head.
“Take it,” the major insisted. “You never know what can happen in the future. We only deal with short, separate assignments. Very well paid. And a hell of a lot easier than what you did the other week.”
Mikael Wiik had stuffed the card in his pocket, mostly to put an end to the discussion.
“But hardly approved by the UN, I imagine?” he’d said.
The major had laughed politely, just to show he wasn’t offended. He’d slapped Mikael on the back and left.
Three years later, when Mauri Kallis came to Mikael Wiik and said he had a problem he wanted taken care of for good, Mikael had contacted the German major and said he had a friend who wanted to make use of their services. The major had given him a number for Mauri to ring.
It had been such a strange feeling, knowing that world still existed. Unrest, military commanders, drugs, malaria, kids with empty eyes. It was all going on over there without him.
I got out in time, thinks Mikael Wiik. There are those who never manage to live a different kind of life. But I’ve got a partner, a real woman with a real job. And I’ve got an apartment and a good job. I can cope with everyday life, peace and quiet.
And if I hadn’t given Kallis the telephone number, he would have got it from somewhere else. And how should I know what he used it for? He probably didn’t use it at all. I mean, he got it at the beginning of December. Long before Inna was murdered. And she…it can’t have been a professional job. It was all so…messy.
Mauri Kallis pays fifty thousand euros into an account in Nassau in the Bahamas. He receives no communication, either to say that the money has been received, or that any assignment has been carried out according to his wishes. Nothing. He has said he wants Örjan Bylund’s hard drive wiped, but he doesn’t know what happened about that.
A week after he’s paid the money, he finds an item in the newspaper stating that Örjan Bylund has died. It sounds as if it were a result of illness.
It was all so easy, and he could simply move on, thought Mauri Kallis, smiling as his wife shared a toast with Gerhart Sneyers.
With Inna it hadn’t been easy. A hundred times over the last week he’s thought about his alternatives. And the whole time he comes back to the fact that there weren’t any. It had been a necessary step.
It’s Thursday March 13. In one day, Inna Wattrang will be dead. Mauri is at Diddi’s house. Diddi is upstairs in
bed.
Ulrika came round to Mauri and Ebba and rang the doorbell. She was crying, she had no coat on, just a sweater. She was carrying the baby in her arms wrapped in a blanket, like a refugee.
“You have to talk to him. I can’t wake him up,” she said to Mauri.
Mauri didn’t want to go. After Quebec Invest and after what Diddi told him about Örjan Bylund, they prefer not to have anything to do with each other. And definitely not just the two of them, alone. No, since becoming partners in crime they’ve used all their skill to avoid each other. Their shared guilt hasn’t bound them together—quite the opposite.
Now he’s standing here in Diddi and Ulrika’s bedroom, looking at Diddi, who’s asleep. He makes no attempt to wake him up. Why should he? Diddi has curled up into the fetal position.
Mauri is filled with a grinding irritation when he looks at him.
He looks at the clock and wonders how long he has to stand there before he can go back. How long would it have taken if he’d tried to wake him? Not very long, surely?
And just at that moment, as he’s turning to leave, the telephone rings.
Thinking it’s Ulrika calling to see how things are going, he picks up the receiver and answers.
But it isn’t Ulrika. It’s Inna.
“What are you doing there?” she asks him.
He doesn’t notice how different she sounds; he only thinks about that afterwards. He’s so happy to hear her voice.
“Hi,” he says. “Where are you?”
“Who are you?” she asks in her strange voice.
And now he can hear it. That this is a different Inna. Perhaps he already knows at this point.
“What do you mean?” he asks, although he doesn’t want to know.
“What do I mean!”