Also by Kjell Eriksson
The Princess of Burundi
The Cruel Stars of the Night
The DEMON of DAKAR
Kjell Eriksson
Translated from the Swedish
by Ebba Segerberg
THOMAS DUNNE BOOKS
ST. MARTIN’S MINOTAUR NEW YORK
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
THOMAS DUNNE BOOKS.
An imprint of St. Martin’s Press.
THE DEMON OF DAKAR. Copyright © 2005 by Kjell Eriksson. Translation © 2008 by Ebba Segerberg. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
www.thomasdunnebooks.com
www.minotaurbooks.com
ISBN-13: 978-0-312-36669-8
ISBN-10: 0-312-36669-8
First published in Sweden under the title Mannen från bergen by Ordfront
First U.S. Edition: May 2008
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One
The clouds slid lazily down behind the mountain on the other side of the valley. The slender, bone-white streaks of mist that crept through the pass in the east, often during the late afternoon or early evening, ran together and formed white veils, sometimes intensely silver-colored, that were illuminated by the sun sinking behind the mountain peaks. The trees along the ridge stood out like soldiers in a shiny column that stretched farther than Manuel Alavez could imagine.
The clouds had been out in the world, down to the coast of Oaxaca to gather nourishment and moisture. Sometimes, for a change, they went north, to taste the zsaltiness of the Caribbean.
When they returned, the sides of the mountains were still damp and steaming, a hot breath exuding from the thick vegetation. The people and the mules that were only marginally larger than their loads inched their way down the paths toward the village, where the dogs greeted them with tired barks and the smoke rose from the brick-shingled rooftops burnished by the sun, shimmering in warm red tones.
The clouds shifted indolently closer to the mountain. Manuel imagined that they and the mountain exchanged fluids and then told each other what had happened during the day. Not that the mountains had more to report than some idle gossip from the village, but the clouds let themselves be satisfied with that. They craved a little everyday chatter after having sailed forth across a restless continent, marked by despair and hard work.
La vida es un ratito, life is a brief moment, his mother would say and display an almost toothless mouth in a little grin that both underscored and diminished her words.
Later he reformulated her expression to La vida es una ratita, life is a little rat, a little rodent.
Manuel, his mother, and his two brothers would look at the mountains from the terrace where they dried the coffee beans. From this vantage point they could look out over the sixty houses in the village.
A village among many, remote from everyone except themselves, about an hour away from the nearest larger road that would bring them to Talea and from there, after a five-hour bus trip, to Oaxaca.
The coffee was packed in some harbor, no one knew which one, and shipped to el norte or Europe. When the buyers loaded the sacks and shipped them away, the villagers lost control. They knew their coffee tasted good, and that the price would increase tenfold, perhaps twenty-fold, before they found their consumer.
Manuel leaned against the cool airplane window, staring out into the crystal-clear Atlantic night, exhausted by the long trip from the mountains to Oaxaca and another seven-hour bus trip to the capital and then a half-day of waiting at the airport. It was the first time he was flying. The worry that he had felt had transformed into an amazement that he was now at eleven thousand meters.
A cabin attendant came by and offered coffee, but he said no. The coffee he had received earlier did not taste good. He watched the attendant as she served the passengers on the other side of the aisle. She reminded him of Gabriella, the woman he was going to marry. It was high time, his mother said. In her eyes he was old. It felt as if he had to marry her now. They had met several years ago, during his time in California, and they had kept in touch through letters. He had called a couple of times. She had waited for him, and this now felt to Manuel like a millstone. He did not have the heart to deny her what she had expected and been waiting for for so long: marriage. He loved her of course, at least he told himself he did, but he felt a growing anxiety about binding himself forever.
He fell asleep between two continents and immediately Angel appeared to him. They were out on a milpa where they were growing corn, beans, and squash. It was just before the corn harvest. His brother had stretched himself out in the shadow of a tree. He was in good spirits and laughing in that way that only he could, a clucking sound that appeared to come from his rounded belly. Angel was chubby and had been called el Gordito in his childhood.
Angel was telling him about Alfreda from Santa Maria de Yaviche, the neighboring village. They had met in February, during the fiesta, and Angel was describing her face and hair in great detail. He always took great care with the details.
Manuel stood up, unsettled by Angel’s frivolous tone. The young woman was only seventeen.
“Make sure you don’t lead her astray,” Manuel said.
“She’s the one leading me astray,” Angel chuckled. “She is the one who makes me tremble.”
“We have to get back,” Manuel said.
“Soon,” Angel said. “I’m not done yet.”
Manuel couldn’t help but smile. Angel could be a writer, he is so good at storytelling, he thought, and sat down again.
A couple of wild rabbits were tumbling about on the other side of the field. They jumped around carefree, curious, and playful, unaware of the hawk sailing in the sky.
“You are also a conéju, but life is not all play,” Manuel said, regretting the words as he said them.
He was the oldest of the three brothers and all too often adopted the role of the responsible one, the one who had to scold and set them straight. Angel and their middle brother, Patricio, were always ready to laugh and dream up childish pranks. They fell in love as often and as quickly as frogs. They feared nothing and Manuel envied their optimism and frivolity.
Angel followed his brother’s gaze, sighted the predatory bird that was slowly plummeting through the layers of air, raised his arms as if he were holding a rifle, aimed, and shot.
“Bang,” he said, and looked laughingly at Manuel.
The latter smiled and lowered his head toward the ground. He knew the hawk would soon drop into a steep dive and he did not want to see if it was successful in its hunt.
“I missed, but the hawk has to live too,” Angel said, as if he had read his brother’s thoughts. “There are plenty of rabbits.”
Manuel was suddenly irritated that Angel was speaking Spanish, but did not have time to correct him before he suddenly awakened, straightened, and glanced at the woman in the seat next to him. She was sleeping. Apparently he had not disturbed her when he startled.
Patricio was down there somewhere. Ever since Manuel had been informed of Patricio’s fate he had alternated between anger, sorrow, and grief. The first letter consisted of three sentences: I live. I have been caught. I have been sentenced to eight years in prison.
The next letter was somewhat more detailed, factual and dry, but behind the words Manuel sensed hopelessness and desperation, feelings that came
to dominate the subsequent letters.
Manuel could not imagine Patricio behind bars. He who had loved the open fields and always fixed his gaze as far away in the distance as possible. There was a stamina in Patricio that had always amazed Manuel and Angel. He was always prepared to take several more steps to see what was concealed behind the next curve, hill, or street corner.
Physically, he was the strongest of the brothers, roughly one hundred and eighty centimeters and therefore taller than most of the villagers. His height and posture, coupled with his eyes, had given him the reputation as a sensible man worth listening a little extra to. If Angel was the chatterbox who did not like to expend extra effort, then Patricio could be described as agile and taciturn, thoughtful in his speech, and restrained in his actions. Their laughter was really the only thing they shared.
Manuel had gleaned from his brother’s letter that prisons in Sweden were completely different from those in Mexico, and he tried to make a great deal of the fact that they were allowed TVs in their cells, and that they could study. But what would he study? Patricio had never liked books. He was a person who had lived his life studying others and nature. He went about his work reluctantly, regardless of whether it was sowing, weeding, or harvesting. He wielded the machete as if it were an enemy in his hands. Despite his strength, his blows were often weak and without concentration.
“If you think I am going to remain a pathetic campesino, then you are mistaken,” he repeated when Manuel reminded him that they had a tradition to uphold.
“I do not want to sit in the mountains like a ranchero, eating beans and tortillas, come down to the village once a week and drink myself silly on aguardiente and just get poorer and poorer. Can’t you see that we are being cheated?”
Could he handle eight years of jail? Manuel feared for his brother’s life and health. To Patricio, being locked up was essentially a death sentence. When Manuel wrote to say that he was coming to Sweden, his brother had immediately replied that he did not want any visitors. But Manuel did not care. He had to find out what had happened, how everything had evolved, how and why Angel had died, and how Patricio could have been stupid enough to get involved in something as dirty as drug smuggling.
As the plane descended through the clouds, banked, and went in for the landing, Manuel’s thoughts returned to the mountains, his mother, and the coffee beans. How beautiful the beans were! When they had dried and lay in open, bulging jute sacks, wedged into every nook and cranny in the house, even next to their sleeping quarters, they invited his caress, and Manuel would slip his hand down into the strangely unscented beans and feel pure happiness filter through his fingers.
La vida es una ratita, he mumbled, making the sign of the cross and watching the foreign country spread out below him.
Two
Slobodan Andersson laughed heartily. His face split into a wide grin that revealed his tobacco-stained teeth. They resembled wooden pegs that had been filed down into needle-sharp weapons.
Slobodan Andersson laughed often and as yappily as a little dog, yet he was not what one would call a happy sort.
His enemies, and they had grown in number over the years, would talk disparagingly of “the lying poodle.” Slobodan did not appear to take offense. He would lift one leg and yap a little extra whenever someone reminded him of this nickname.
“The poodle,” he would say, “is related to the wolf.”
It was not only his face that was wide. All of him had swelled up over the past two decades, and he had an increasingly difficult task of maintaining the pace that had brought him both admiration and fear as a pub owner. What he had lost over the years in physical mobility he made up for in experience and a growing ruthlessness. He left people behind often perplexed and at times crushed, and he did this with an indifference that was not mitigated by any amount of laughter or backslapping.
His life’s story, which barflies in the city loved to tell and embroider with amazing additions, was full of obscurities, and Slobodan liked to support this with a mixture of unusually detailed and drastic anecdotes from roughly thirty years in the business, alternated with vague statements that were left open to interpretation.
What one knew for certain was that he had a Serbian mother and a Swedish father, but no one knew if they still lived, and if so, where. Slobodan Andersson was silent on this point. He would talk about his childhood in Skåne, how, as a fifteen-year-old, he began working at a well-known restaurant in central Malmö. He refused to utter its name, simply referring to it as “the joint.” He had spent his first three months there scrubbing and scouring. According to Slobodan, the head chef—”the German swine”—was a sadist. Others said that Slobodan, who advanced to sous chef, had stuck a fish knife in the head chef’s stomach. When asked about this, he laughed his poodle laugh and held his stomach. Opinion was divided on how this was supposed to be interpreted.
After various excursions to Copenhagen and Spain, Slobodan sailed into Uppsala’s culinary world and surprised everyone by opening two restaurants at the same time: Lido and Pigalle. Tasteless names, many thought, and the food received a similar evaluation. What the two watering holes also had in common was their expensive interiors. Lido was outfitted with a zinc bar counter eleven meters long, into which the customers were encouraged to engrave their orders with specially supplied screwdrivers. The screwdrivers were subsequently removed in connection with a brawl.
Pigalle was a dark hole of a place with an unsuccessful mixture of orientalism, incense, and dark drapes—and Mediterranean flair with fishing nets in the ceiling, shells, and a stuffed swordfish that brought to mind vacations in Majorca in the late sixties.
Both restaurants folded after barely a year. Slobodan Andersson salvaged the interiors, driving some things to the Hovgården dump but retaining that which might be worth something, and opened Genghis Khan, a restaurant with more potential from the outset. Genghis Khan did not gain a reputation for any culinary sensations. Instead it developed into a popular hangout, and now one started to perceive Slobodan’s talent for uniting a hip bar feel with an atmosphere that bordered on chummy. He often tended the bar himself, was generous and ruthless at the same time, knew how to choose favorites among his customers, those who were loyal and drew others in.
Genghis Khan went to its grave with a bang, or rather with fire and smoke, for in the end there was a fire in the kitchen. New kitchen equipment was purchased, but then there were three burglaries in a row and failed payments.
Slobodan left Uppsala. There were rumors that he had gone to Southeast Asia, others said the Caribbean or Africa. There was a rumor that he had sent a postcard to the federal tax enforcement agency. After a year, he returned, suntanned, with a somewhat reduced circumference and his head buzzing with new projects.
Suddenly there was money again, a lot of money. He tossed a couple hundred thousand in the direction of his creditors and shortly thereafter Alhambra opened its doors. It was the end of the nineties, and since then his restaurant empire had only grown.
Alhambra was located in an older building in the middle of town, a stone’s throw from the main square, Stortorget. The entrance was extravagantly appointed with custom marble on the stairs and hand-hammered copper doors engraved with the owner’s initials and the restaurant’s name in silver-colored looping letters.
Once inside, the impression became more muted. The suggestions for the interior from the chef, Oskar Hammer, were dismissed with a poodle laugh.
“Too cool,” Slobodan said, and stroked his emerging bald spot as he evaluated the sketches that Hammer had commissioned.
“There should be razzle-dazzle, bling, lots of gold.”
And so it was. Many decided that the effect was so consistently pursued that it achieved a measure of style. The gold and magenta walls were profusely covered in sconces and blurry prints in wide, white frames. The prints all displayed motifs from Greek mythology.
“The name of the restaurant is, after all, Alhambra,” Slobodan sa
id, when Hammer raised objections.
The tables in the dining room were set in a rococo style with heavy silver-plated dinnerware and candelabras, procured by Armas, who had been Slobodan’s trusted assistant through the years.
Now Slobodan’s empire stood at the threshold of yet another venture. This time he turned to a new continent for inspiration. The restaurant was christened Dakar, and from the start, it worked. The walls were decorated with photographs from West Africa, some of them enlarged to nearly a square meter, depicting images from markets, daily life in the village, and sporting events.
The photographer was a Senegalese man from the southern regions of the country who had traveled around taking pictures for many years.
Slobodan wanted to lay it on thick. He was going to invest in the “gilded package,” as he put it. The goal was to convince diners to overlook the restaurants Svensson’s Guldkant and Wermlandskällaren in favor of Dakar.
“That old bolshevik,” he said disdainfully about the owner of the fish restaurant where the bourgeois Uppsala establishment liked to lunch. “I’m going to make sure the ladies sashay on over here. I’m going to get so many stars that the world press will line up outside. My menus will be printed in schoolbooks as examples of the complete kitchen.”
There was no limit to Slobodan’s visions and conviction that he would take Uppsala and the world by storm.
“I need chefs!” he exclaimed at the first meeting with Hammer and Armas.
“What you need is money,” Hammer said.
Slobodan turned sharply to him and the chef awaited the invectives that usually followed objections of this sort, but the restauranteur’s steely gaze was this time replaced with a grin.
“That’s been taken care of,” he said.
Three
The Demon of Dakar Page 1