The Black Path

by Asa Larsson

  It wasn’t difficult to get through. The Kallis Mining company name could still open doors. And Diddi told her Mauri was financing Kadaga’s operation.

  She hadn’t believed him.

  “These are bizarre claims,” she’d said. “We have complete faith in Kallis Mining. We have good relationships with all the investors in our country.”

  He remembers his voice becoming shrill. Agitated because she didn’t believe him. Desperate for her to take him seriously, he started babbling, and everything he knew just came pouring out.

  “They want to bring about a coup. Or they want President Museveni murdered. They’re making payments into a protected bank account. The money is paid out from there. I know this for a fact. He killed my sister. He’s capable of anything.”

  “A coup? Who are ‘they,’ these people who want to bring about a coup? This is all just loose talk.”

  “I don’t know who they are. Gerhart Sneyers! He and Kallis and some others. They’re going to have a meeting. They’re going to discuss the problems in northern Uganda.”

  “Who else is there besides Sneyers? I don’t believe a word you’re saying! Where’s this meeting supposed to be taking place? In which country? Which city? You’re just making it up to blacken the name of Kallis Mining. How can you expect me to take you seriously! And when? When is this alleged meeting supposed to be taking place?”

  Diddi Wattrang pressed his fingertips against his closed eyelids. The nanny took his arm tentatively.

  “Shall I help you upstairs?” she asked.

  He jerked his arm away impatiently.

  Oh God, he thought. Did I tell her the meeting was here? Did I say it was tonight? What did I tell her?

  Uganda’s Minister for Industry, Mrs. Florence Kwesiga, President Museveni and General Joseph Muinde are sitting in a meeting which has been called at a moment’s notice.

  The minister has reported on her conversation with Diddi Wattrang.

  She’s pouring tea with lots of milk and sugar from a fine porcelain teapot. The president holds up his hand to refuse. General Muinde accepts a second cup. It amuses her to see her delicate little cups in his huge hands. He can’t get his finger through the handle, but balances the cup on the palm of his hand instead.

  “What was your impression of Wattrang?” asks the president.

  “That he was desperate and confused,” says Mrs. Kwesiga.

  “Crazy?”

  “No, not crazy.”

  “I’ve managed to confirm two things,” says General Muinde. “One: Mr. Wattrang’s sister has been murdered. It’s been in the Swedish press. Two: Gerhart Sneyers’s plane has permission to land at Schiphol and Arlanda tomorrow.”

  “Less than twenty-four hours left,” says Mrs. Kwesiga. “What can we do?”

  “We’ll do what’s absolutely necessary,” says the president. “We don’t know who’s involved in this, apart from Sneyers and Kallis. This might be our only chance. In order to defend oneself, one must sometimes conduct a war on the other person’s territory. If we’ve learned anything from the Israelis, that’s it. Or the Americans.”

  “Different rules apply to them,” says Mrs. Kwesiga.

  “Not this time.”

  “I made Mr. Wattrang think I didn’t believe him,” Mrs. Kwesiga says to the general. “I even laughed. He felt he wasn’t being taken seriously. So he can’t possibly be expecting us to take any kind of action. I thought if he regrets what he’s done and tells somebody he’s contacted us, they won’t change their plans if he says I didn’t believe him.”

  “You did absolutely the right thing,” says General Muinde. “Well done.”

  He puts his teacup down carefully.

  “Less than twenty-four hours,” he says. “It’s not much time. There will be a group of five. Not my own men. It’s for the best, just in case of complications. We have guns at the embassy in Copenhagen. They can land there and travel to Sweden by car. That particular border crossing is completely risk-free.”

  He gets up with a slight bow.

  “I have a number of things to organize, so if you’ll excuse me…”

  He salutes. The president nods thoughtfully.

  And the general leaves the room.

  Diddi comes into dinner at Regla right in the middle of dessert. Suddenly he’s standing there in the doorway of the dining room. His tie like a loose piece of rag around his neck, his shirt half hanging out of his trousers, his jacket dangling from his index finger; perhaps he was intending to put it on but he forgot, and now he’s dragging it along behind him like an injured tail. The whole room falls silent, and everybody looks at him.

  “Sorry,” he says. “Forgive me.”

  Mauri gets up. He’s furious, but controlled.

  “I want you out of here right now,” he says in Swedish, but in an extremely friendly tone of voice.

  And Diddi stands there in the doorway like a child who’s woken from a bad dream and comes to disturb his parents in the middle of dinner. He’s quite touching as he asks, in careful English, if he might speak to his wife for a moment.

  Then he adds in Swedish, in the same soft tone:

  “Otherwise I’ll make a scene, Mauri. And Inna’s name will be mentioned, do you understand?”

  With a brief nod Mauri indicates that Ulrika should go to her husband. She excuses herself and leaves the table. Ebba gives her a quick sympathetic smile.

  “Domestic problems,” says Mauri by way of apology to his guests around the table.

  The men smile. This sort of thing happens everywhere, after all.

  “At least let me change my shoes,” Ulrika complains as Diddi sets off across the yard with her.

  She can feel the dampness striking up through her sparkly strappy Jimmy Choo sandals.

  Then she starts to cry. She doesn’t care about the fact that Mikael Wiik is sitting on the veranda in front of her house, and can hear her. Diddi drags her away from the yard, away from the illumination from the outside light.

  She’s crying because Diddi is in the process of destroying their lives. But she doesn’t say anything. There’s no point, she’s stopped trying. Mauri will kick him out of the company. Then they won’t have anything to live on, or anywhere to live.

  I have to leave him, she thinks. And that makes her cry even more. Because she still loves him, but this can’t carry on, it’s just impossible. And what’s he saying now?

  “We’ve got to get out of here,” Diddi says to her when they’re a little way from the house.

  “Please, Diddi,” Ulrika begs him, trying to pull herself together. “We’ll talk about all this tomorrow. I’m going to go back and have my dessert and—”

  “No, you don’t understand,” he says, grabbing her wrists. “I don’t mean we’ve got to move house. I mean we’ve got to get out of here. Now!”

  Ulrika has seen Diddi stressed before, but now he’s frightening her.

  “I can’t explain,” he says with such despair in his voice that she starts crying again.

  Their life was so perfect. She loves Regla. She loves their beautiful house. She and Ebba have become good friends. They know lots of nice people and do lots of fun things together. Ulrika was the one who landed Diddi Wattrang; God knows lots of girls had tried before her. It was like winning a gold medal at the Olympics.

  And he’s just letting it all go, destroying everything.

  He’s mumbling in her hair now. Holding her in his arms.

  “Please, please,” he says. “Just trust me. We’ll leave now, we’ll check into a hotel. You can ask me why tomorrow.”

  He looks around. Everywhere dark and silent. But a sense of unease is crawling inside his body.

  “You need to get some help,” she sobs.

  And he promises that he will, if only she’ll come with him now. Quickly. They’ll collect the boy and then they’ll take the car and get the hell out of here.

  And Ulrika doesn’t have the strength to resist him. She’ll do as he says now
, and perhaps it will be possible to talk to him tomorrow. Dinner is ruined as far as she’s concerned anyway. Just as well to avoid the look on Mauri’s face when she comes back mumbling her apologies.

  Ten minutes later they’re sitting in the new Hummer on the way to the gates. Ulrika’s driving. The little prince is sleeping in his child seat beside her. It takes two minutes to drive down to the gate, but when Ulrika presses the remote control to open the outer gates, nothing happens.

  “They’re playing up again,” she says to Diddi, stopping the car a few meters away.

  Diddi gets out. He walks toward the gate. He’s in the beam of the headlights. Ulrika can see his back. And then he simply falls forward.

  Ulrika groans to herself. She’s so tired of this. She’s tired of his drinking and getting high, his hangovers and his fears. Of his regrets, of how pathetic he is, of his diarrhea and his constipation. Of the fact that he’s oversexed and the fact that he’s impotent. She’s tired of him falling over and not being able to get up. She’s tired of taking off his clothes and his shoes. And she’s tired of all those times when he can’t go to bed, the periods of manic wakefulness.

  She waits for him to get back on his feet. But he doesn’t. A violent rage floods her body. This is the fucking limit. She thinks she ought to just drive over him. Back and forth, several times.

  Then she sighs and gets out of the car. A guilty conscience over her recent unkind thoughts makes her voice gentle and considerate.

  “Hey there! What happened?”

  But he doesn’t reply. Now Ulrika is getting worried. She takes a few rapid steps toward him.

  “Diddi, Diddi, what happened?”

  She bends over him, places her hand between his shoulder blades and shudders. And her hand feels wet.

  She doesn’t understand. She never will understand.

  A sound. A sound or something makes her look up and turn her head. A silhouette in the beam of the headlights. Before she has time to put her hand over her eyes to avoid being dazzled, she’s dead.

  The man who shot her whispers into his headset:

  “Male and female out. Car. Engine running.”

  He points a flashlight into the car.

  “There’s an infant in the car.”

  On the other end, the group leader says:

  “Mission as before. Everybody. Turn off the engine and advance.”

  Ulrika is lying dead on the track. She doesn’t have to experience it.

  And up in the darkness of her room, Ester is standing by the window and thinking:

  Not yet. Not yet. Not yet. Now!

  Rebecka is lying in the snow outside her grandmother’s house in Kurravaara. She’s wearing her grandmother’s old blue quilted nylon jacket, but it isn’t fastened. It’s good to feel cold, it makes her feel better inside. The sky is black and studded with stars. The moon up above her is a sickly yellow. Like a swollen face with pitted skin. Rebecka has read somewhere that moon dust stinks, that it smells of old gunpowder.

  How can you feel this way about another person? she thinks.

  How can you feel as if you want to die, just because he doesn’t love you? He’s just a human being, after all.

  Listen, she says to her god. I don’t mean to moan and complain, but soon I won’t want to be a part of all this anymore. Nobody loves me, and that’s really difficult to cope with. If the worst comes to the worst, I could live for another sixty years. What’s going to become of me if I’m alone for sixty years?

  I made it a little bit along the way, you saw that. I’m working. I get up in the mornings. I like porridge with lingonberry jam. But at the moment I don’t know if I want all that anymore.

  Then she hears the sound of paws in the snow. The next moment Bella is at her side, galloping around her in a circle, then over the top of her, trampling all over her stomach so that it hurts, giving her a quick push with her nose, checking that she’s okay.

  Then she starts barking. Reporting to her master, of course.

  Rebecka hurries to get to her feet, but Sivving has already seen her. He rushes over to her.

  Bella has already moved on. She’s racing joyfully over the old meadow, the fresh snow spraying up around her paws.

  “Rebecka,” he shouts, failing to hide the concern in his voice. “What are you doing?”

  She opens her mouth to lie. To joke and say she’s looking at the stars, but nothing comes out.

  Her face just can’t pretend. Her body makes no attempt to hide her feelings. She simply shakes her head.

  He wants to make everything all right again. She can understand that he’s worried about her. And who can he talk to, now his Maj-Lis isn’t around anymore?

  She just can’t cope with it. Doesn’t want to see the longing in his face, wanting her to be cheerful and happy, for things to go well.

  I haven’t the strength to be happy, she wants to say. I can hardly even manage to be unhappy. Standing on my own two feet is my biggest project.

  He’s about to ask her to go for a walk with him. Or invite her in for coffee. In a few seconds he’s going to say it. And she’ll have to say no, because it’s just impossible. And he’ll hang his head, and then she’ll have made him unhappy too.

  “I’ve got to go,” she says. “I’ve got to call on a woman in Lombolo and give her a summons.”

  It’s such an extraordinarily far-fetched and terrible lie that she almost has an out-of-body experience. Another Rebecka is standing by her side and saying:

  “Where the hell did you get that from?”

  But Sivving seems to buy it. After all, he has no real idea of what she does at work.

  “Oh yes” is all he says.

  “Listen,” she says. “I’ve got a cat at home. Could you look after her for me?”

  “Well, yes,” says Sivving, “but are you going to be away for long?”

  And as she’s walking toward the car, he calls after her:

  “Aren’t you going to change your jacket?”

  She pulls out onto the road to Kiruna. And she takes note of the fact that she isn’t wondering where she’s going. Because she knows. She’s going up to the Riksgränsen resort.

  “What’s that?” asks Anna-Maria Mella.

  Sven-Erik Stålnacke is sitting in the passenger seat, and he peers up toward the first set of gates to the Regla estate. In the beam of the headlights of their Passat he sees a Hummer facing in their direction, parked just inside the gates.

  “Could be those security guys?” he suggests.

  They stop outside the gate. Anna-Maria puts the car into neutral and gets out of the car, leaving the engine running.

  “Hello!” she shouts.

  Sven-Erik gets out of the car as well.

  “Jesus,” says Anna-Maria. “Jesus Christ!”

  Two bodies, lying facedown. She reaches under her jacket for her gun.

  “What the fuck has happened here?” she says.

  Then she steps rapidly out of the beam of the headlights.

  “Keep out of the light,” she says to Sven-Erik. “And turn the engine off.”

  “No,” says Sven-Erik. “Get back in the car and we’ll get out of here and call for backup.”

  “Yes, you do that,” says Anna-Maria. “I’m just going to take a look.”

  The outer gate blocks only the road. It’s the inner gates farther up the avenue that are set in a wall. Anna-Maria walks around the gatepost, but stops a short distance from the bodies. She doesn’t want to go right up to them while they’re still bathed in the light from their car.

  “Move the car back,” she says to Sven-Erik. “I just want to take a look.”

  “Get in the car,” growls Sven-Erik, “and we’ll call for backup.”

  So they end up quarreling. Suddenly they’re standing there bickering, like an old married couple.

  “I’m just going to take a look, either get out of here or switch off the bloody engine,” snaps Anna-Maria.

  “There are procedures! Get
in the bloody car!” barks Sven-Erik.

  Unprofessional. They’ll think about that in the future. About the fact that they could have got each other shot. Every time a conversation turns to how cleverly you can react in a critical situation, their thoughts will come back to this moment.

  And in the end Anna-Maria walks straight into the beam of the headlights. With her Sig Sauer in one hand, she feels for a pulse at the side of the neck in each of the bodies lying on the ground. No pulse.

  Crouching down, she takes a few steps over to the Hummer and looks inside. A child seat. A child. A little dead child. Shot through its little face.

  Sven-Erik sees her lean against the windshield, supporting herself with one hand. Her face is chalk-white in the Passat’s headlights. She looks straight into his eyes with an expression so full of despair that his heart contracts.

  “What is it?” he asks.

  But the next moment he realizes he hasn’t uttered a sound.

  She bends forward. It’s as if her whole body is gripped by agonizing cramps. And she’s looking at him. Accusingly. It’s as if something is his fault.

  The next minute, she’s gone. She’s bolted like a fox, and he doesn’t know where she’s gone. It’s so bloody dark out there. Dense clouds are shutting out the moonlight.

  Sven-Erik leaps into the car and turns off the engine. Everything is black and silent.

  He straightens up, and hears footsteps running toward the estate.

  “Anna-Maria, for God’s sake!” he shouts after her.

  But he daren’t shout too loudly.

  He’s about to run after her. But then he comes to his senses.

  He rings for backup. Fuck her. The conversation takes two minutes. He’s terrified as he’s speaking on the phone. Afraid that someone will hear him. Someone who’ll come and shoot him in the head. He’s crouched down beside the car throughout the entire conversation. Trying to listen. Trying to see something in the darkness. He takes the safety catch off his gun.

  When he’s finished, he runs after Anna-Maria. He tries to look inside the Hummer to see what made her react like that, but it’s too dark now the headlights have been switched off. He can’t see a thing.