The Demon of Dakar

by Kjell Eriksson

  He sat down behind some bushes and waited. Twenty minutes left.

  He felt a niggling unease. Not because of the transaction with the fat one—it was open area and Slobodan could not do anything—but because he doubted the very reasoning behind his plan.

  At exactly two o’clock Slobodan Andersson pulled into the parking lot. Like Armas, he drove a BMW. He turned off the engine but did not get out of the car. He looked around. He took a call on his cell phone that he terminated almost immediately. Manuel waited behind the bushes. Slobodan writhed uncomfortably in the car and Manuel watched as he strained to look back toward town and check out all the cars heading east from the roundabout.

  Manuel stood up from the ditch. Slobodan had his attention aimed in the opposite direction and did not observe him. Manuel snuck over and tapped on the window. Slobodan threw open the car door.

  “Hell, you scared me!”

  “Do you have the money?” Manuel asked.

  Slobododan glared at him.

  “Where do you have the goods?”

  “I want the money in my hands first, then you will—”

  “Where is your car?”

  “I walked here,” Manuel said. “We have to hurry now.”

  “Walked? Give me the goods.”

  “I want to see the money first.”

  Slobodan looked around, then picked up a dark plastic bag from the passenger seat and held it out. Manuel opened the bag and there were the bills. One-hundred-dollar notes. Four hundred of them.

  “Forty thousand?”

  “Of course,” Slobodan snapped, his brow wet with perspiration.

  Manuel left the bag and went to get the sports bag with the cocaine. When he returned to the car, Slobodan was talking on the phone.

  “Stop talking!” Manuel said.

  Slobodan smiled tauntingly, but turned off the phone. Manuel handed him the bag, Slobodan checked the contents and held out the plastic bag with the money, shut the car door without a word, and drove away. Manuel ran back, jumped into his car, and quickly drove onto the highway. He caught sight of Slobodan’s car on the E-4. As Manuel approached the roundabout he saw Slobodan’s brake lights come on. He had hit a red light. Manuel chuckled smugly.

  Slobodan drove at great speed north on the E-4 until he suddenly turned off toward town. Manuel was afraid of losing him, but he did not want to stay too close. Luck smiled on him again and he was just able to pass the intersection before the lights turned red.

  The fat one crisscrossed through town and finally ended up by the river, where he parked the car and got out. Manuel, who was forced to stop several times for pedestrians saw him cross the street with the bag in his hand. Manuel took a empty parking space.

  Slobodan disappeared down an alley and Manuel hurried to keep up. If he was going to have a chance to punish the fat one he could not lose him now. Slobodan walked quickly at first but then slowed the pace and Manuel sensed that the rapid clip had worn him down.

  After several minutes he entered a restaurant. The sign said Alhambra. Manuel recognized the name as being the same restaurant that Feo had mentioned.

  After ten minutes Slonodan was back on the street again, minus the bag. How dumb can a gringo be? Manuel thought and watched Slobodan blend into the crowd.

  Manuel breathed freely. He felt how hungry he was. The tension surrounding the delivering of the drugs and following the fat one had suppressed all needs.

  A little way down the pedestrian zone there was a group of musicians and Manuel walked over to them. He thought about the men he and his brothers had joined forces with in crossing the border, and how after their successful crossing they had sung a few songs and shown them the typical dance steps of their region. It would probably be a long time before he would have the pleasure of a huapango, he thought, and left the musicians in order not to be overwhelmed with longing for his country.

  He walked toward Dakar. It was the irony of fate that the only stable point he had in Uppsala belonged to Slobodan Andersson. At Dakar there was the Portuguese, and above all Eva, the waitress who was so curious about his country and culture. She listened and asked him a never-ending stream of questions, everything in an astonishingly strange English, in which her limited vocabulary forced her to take long pauses before she managed to communicate what she wanted.

  She had also not cared about his lie. For her it didn’t matter if he came from Mexico or Venezuela. It made him even more willing to talk to her. She gave him the freedom to be himself.

  On top of all this, she was the first white woman who had spoken to him as an equal. He had met many gringas in the United States, but they had seen him as a dirty chicano whom they could exploit for underpaid labor but never treat as a human.

  She is also beautiful, he thought, not without a pang of guilt, because ever since the message of Angel’s death and Patricio’s incarceration had reached him he had had increasing difficulties caring about Gabriella in the village. Love and future plans faded away. He became irritable and listless. How could he talk of personal happiness as his family was breaking apart? Did he love her? He no longer knew.

  He walked to Dakar in a rare mixture of depression and excitement. This time he banged on the back door. The chef who smoked in the dishwashing area and looked like a bulldog opened the door.

  “Well, well, look who’s back,” he said and looked at him with a smile that Manuel could not evaluate.

  “I need to work,” he muttered. “Is there anything for me to do?”

  Unconsciously he adopted the subordinate tone he had learned in California.

  “There are no dishes, but it’s been a while since the dressing room was cleaned.

  Manuel was supplied with cleaning solution, rags, a bucket, and a mop. He decided to do a thorough job. Not in order to please anyone but because he needed to do something well, something that made a difference, for quite egotistical reasons. He needed to disappear into work. The past week had shaken him. He would never again be the Manuel Alavez he had been. Everything that he said in the future would contain a measure of untruth, or so he felt. Only work was honest.

  He kept polishing, wiping down lockers and benches, scrubbing the floors frenetically, and taking the light fixtures down in order to pick all the dead flies out of the glass globes.

  He had just finished and sat down on a bench when Eva walked in.

  “What a difference!” she exclaimed. “And how good it smells.”

  Manuel stood up at once. Eva pulled off her coat and hung it in her locker. He could not help looking at her breasts. Her look of amusement confirmed that he had been caught.

  “I’ll go,” he said.

  She smiled even more broadly and patted him on his blushing cheek. His confusion only increased before this fearless woman. Why was she laughing? Was she offering herself to him?

  “Are you married?”

  Manuel shook his head. Eva took her black work skirt from the locker, brushed away some dust, and reached for the white blouse on its hanger. Manuel forced himself not to look at her clothes.

  “It should be …” she started, but couldn’t find the right word in English, and simply made a gesture with her hand. He understood that she meant the blouse was wrinkled.

  “See you soon,” he said and left the dressing room. He wished he could iron her blouse, simply to touch it. He wanted to do something for her, more than just scrub the dressing room. He wanted to make her happy.

  He walked over to the dishwashing area. A man in a white hat had just put down a load of pots, dishes, and utensils, nodded to Manuel, but did not say anything. Manuel guessed it was Johnny, the one who had started recently and that Feo had told him about. Manuel took on the dishes, happy that there was something to do.

  Eva emerged from the dressing room in her work clothes. She looked in on him, running her hand along her blouse and laughing, before she continued out to the dining room.

  Whore, Manuel thought, but took it back immediately. Eva was not a wh
ore. She was a fine woman. The fact that she was divorced was not her fault, he was sure of it. She lived for her children and for her dreams, so much he had understood. Behind her interest in Mexico there was a longing, a desire to experience something new, if only in her thoughts. It occurred to him that perhaps she was interested in him. The day before she had asked him about his village and daily life there, and today she had asked if he was married. Why would a woman ask that?

  He scraped an oval dish clean but his movements became slower and slower until his hands grew completely still. He stared unseeing into the tiled wall in front of him and tried to imagine Eva in Mexico. It both worked, and it didn’t. A white woman was changed when she came to Mexico and his village, just as a Zapotec became another when he left the mountains and encountered white society. Would she speak to him there as she did here in Sweden? Would she retain her laughter and curiosity or become frightened by all the poverty?

  It was only when he heard Feo’s voice from the bar that he started scrubbing again.

  Feo must have entered through the street entrance and Manuel knew it had to be past five o’clock. Perhaps Feo was off today and only dropping by for a visit? Just as he had looked forward to speaking with Eva, he wanted to talk a little with Feo.

  The dishes were done and he arranged all the pots along the counter so they could air dry, but then grabbed a dish towel and dried them. No one would be able to say he did not do his job.

  Despite the clatter from the dishwasher and the pots, Feo’s voice could be heard clearly. Manuel went out into the kitchen and gently cracked the door to the dining room, an area he had only caught sight of before.

  Now he worked up the courage to go out there. The dining room was considerably larger than he had thought. Eva was in the process of setting tables at the far end of the room. She smiled and waved with a napkin. He walked on. Feo was standing at the bar. He was talking to someone behind the counter whom Manuel was unable to see.

  It struck him that he liked it at Dakar. Imagine if … Yes, he could work here, become good friends with Feo and get to know Eva properly, perhaps visit her home and meet her two children. They could travel to Mexico together and then he could show her everything beautiful and satisfy her curiosity.

  But it was a dream, Manuel realized this the moment a couple of customers entered the restaurant and he quickly retreated to the kitchen.

  Everything was a dream. Angel was dead, Patricio was in jail, and he himself had buried thousands of dollars under a bush by a river. The fat one was smuggling drugs and new brothers would be lured into his trap if Manuel did not do something about it.

  He could not remain a dishwasher at Dakar. He would never become friends with the others. Eva would be only a memory. He must see his brother and punish Slobodan Andersson. Everything else was only dreams.

  Manuel heard thundering laugher from the kitchen. He peered over the shelves and saw Feo, dressed in a suit and tie, with a pleased but also embarrassed expression.

  The person laughing was Donald, and the reason, Manuel gathered as soon as he came out into the kitchen, was the suit. Feo took a turn around the room as if on a catwalk.

  “Where are you going?” Manuel asked.

  “Dinner with my wife and her parents,” Feo said, and now he looked purely embarrassed.

  “You look elegant,” Manuel said.

  Feo nodded, but did not appear convinced. Donald walked over to him and pinched his cheek. When he removed his hand, there was a red mark.

  Donald said something in Swedish and it sounded neither superior nor mean-spirited—Manuel identified an almost tender tone, and Feo assumed something of his usual carefree manner.

  “Yes, he looks good as a gentleman,” Manuel added.

  Donald glanced at Manuel.

  “We are all gentlemen here,” he said harshly, and then directed all his attention at the stove.

  Feo smiled uncertainly, Pirjo looked down at the floor, and Johnny stared at the chef’s broad back.

  Then Pirjo did something that filled the entire kitchen with a feeling no one could quite identify. She walked up to Donald and put her arm around his shoulders, stretched on tiptoe, leaned forward, and gave him a kiss on the cheek.

  Forty-Nine

  Lorenzo Wader did not own a cell phone. In his assessment, only amateurs spent their time constantly chattering into their telephones. How many had been felled by the charting, by police and prosecutors, of their incoming and outgoing cell phone calls? Why make it so easy?

  So when Konrad Rosenberg asked him for his telephone number, he laughed heartily.

  “If you want to reach me, you will have to look me up,” he said.

  “But if Zero wants to call?”

  “Zero is not to call me, nor is anyone else for that matter.”

  Konrad Rosenberg nodded.

  “But if you don’t have a telephone, then you can—”

  “You will speak to Zero,” Lorenzo interrupted. “I would like to speak to him at half past eight tonight. Tell him to go to the Fyris movie theater on Saint Olofsgatan, stand and look at the movie posters there, and then walk up the hill and into the graveyard.”

  “And then?”

  “That is all he needs to know,” Lorenzo Wader pronounced.

  He was starting to tire of the nervous Konrad, who was also overly curious. But he could nonetheless be of use. Lorenzo had a strategy to never let anyone else in on the whole picture. It had been his tactic for many years, and it worked beautifully. Thanks to his caution, Lorenzo had never been prosecuted in court, had never even had charges filed against him.

  Konrad’s task was to create contacts with useful idiots who could be put to work in the field. Lorenzo needed street runners and he had no qualms about helping himself to some of Slobodan Andersson’s “staff.”

  Konrad had dismissed Lorenzo’s theory that it was Slobodan who was behind Armas’s murder, but Lorenzo did not consider it impossible. Armas had been a tough nut and had not cracked, despite his obvious fear that the world would find out about his unknown son’s sexual orientation and activities. Lorenzo had approached Armas through shared acquaintances, but in the absence of any reaction Lorenzo simply got in direct contact with him himself in order to suggest working together, something that Armas had appeared to consider but ultimately rejected.

  The following day he had had Gonzo deliver a package to Armas with a videotape. There was no accompanying letter, no greeting or anything that could be traced back to the original sender, but Lorenzo was convinced that Armas was intelligent enough to connect Lorenzo’s offer of cooperation with the indirect threat that the videotape signified.

  Gonzo was completely ignorant of what he had delivered but was the one who had to take the blow. Armas had reacted vehemently and fired the waiter on the spot.

  This did not trouble Lorenzo in the least, and moreover capitalized on the lust for revenge that the waiter expressed. Lorenzo had lost a source close to Slobodan and Armas. On the other hand he had won a messenger and foot soldier who was not held back by any false loyalties.

  Fifty

  The police had distributed an advisory to the public after Armas’s murder, asking the public to notify them if anyone had seen a blue BMW. It was a relatively exclusive car, and an uncommon model, so Lindell was surprised that no one had called in.

  But after a week, Algot Andersson, a retired hardware store owner, called the police and was put through to Ann Lindell.

  All summer he had been busy renovating an old schooner that he had hauled up out of the water off the Fyris river, and he had seen something that might “be of interest to the police.”

  A little way down from his work area, something had suddenly turned up. A blue tarp, pulled over something that he at first believed to be a boat. He knew the family that used that space, knew they were on a long sail trip and that they would not be back until the end of September.

  Therefore, the tarp had caused him some consternation from the outset,
and he had speculated about what the Gardenståhls had allowed to be erected in their space.

  After a week, his curiosity had won over his desire not to be nosy, and when he had checked under the tarp, he had found a car.

  “There’s something not right about it,” Algot Andersson said. “I thought I had better call in.”

  “You did the right thing,” Lindell said, convinced that they had finally located Armas’s car.

  Andersson had not made a note of the license plate number, but both the color and make corresponded.

  The boat club dock was on the Fyris river, close to the southern industrial area and the area upstream from it where Armas had been found bobbing among the reeds.

  “I’m still here and can check the license plate for you,” Algot Andersson offered. “Hang on!”

  Lindell heard static on the line and imagined the man approaching the car with agile steps. She imagined him looking like an older version of Berglund.

  “Hello,” he said, and quickly recited the number.

  “I could kiss you,” she said.

  She called Ryde at forensics, but it was Charles Morgansson who picked up.

  “Eskil had to go to a funeral today,” he explained.

  Lindell told him about the car find and the technician promised to go down to the Fyris river right away. Lindell, who had been planning to go down there herself but who definitely did not want to bump into her ex-lover, informed him that he would be working with Ola Haver.

  “How is everything?” Morgansson asked.

  She knew he didn’t mean work, but she still chose to tell him about the situation of the case. Morgansson took the hint and did not ask further questions.

  Lindell called Haver, who was pleased to have a reason to leave the building. Thereafter she read Beatrice’s summary of Armas’s life. It had been lying on her desk for a day or so, but now she pulled herself together and read through the brief report.