“Wait, wait,” said someone on land. There was commotion and smoke around the cannon, amid the Henri Lloyd jackets and Dockside shoes.
“Kabooom!” Everyone jumped. Then they laughed. She let go of the rope, and smiled, still her smug Djursholm smile. Ten seconds after the cannon was fired, most on the land were already glued to their phones. Jenny Bergenskjöld had liberated herself from that hateful life.
And Carl-Adam didn’t even turn around.
Starting out, Jenny Bergenskjöld was Jenny Stensson, a windsurfer girl from the west coast. Even a professional for a few years. She cruised between races and photo shoots, with her sun-bleached hair and peeling lips. Although she was sponsored by board and sail companies, she made only enough for a roof over her head, living on noodles and chicken. In the end, it got boring, and she began crewing on luxury yachts, mostly in the Caribbean and the Mediterranean, usually on large sailboats. This paid better, but it also meant Internet millionaires who expected some adventure between the sheets in addition to the salary they paid. It was good training for all sorts of balancing acts, and smiles. She turned twenty-six. And suddenly her friends back home had finished grad school, begun careers, wore engagement rings, and no longer came alone when they visited her in the sun. They were less and less interested in her stories. It hit Jenny hard. She didn’t want to get stuck speaking sailors’ English for the rest of her life; she didn’t want another twenty years of celebrating Christmas wearing sunscreen. She began to look anxiously toward home. For the first time, she longed for the north.
When she went to a party in London that fall, she broke loose. Sigmund Freud would have had a lot to say about random behavior versus unconscious desire. Her life had always moved in distinct phases. Now she found herself at a party in a circle of attractive acquaintances. It was time to move on: to spin the wheel and bet everything on red. She could read the force fields in a room—the power—in an instant. It took her only a few minutes to scan twenty, thirty, sixty new people at such a feast. From among the suits, the bling, the men, the dresses, and the hand gestures, she could see who was real and who was only playacting. Picking out the alpha females, and the males, was easy enough. She was introduced to many but felt the burning energy in only a few. Jenny needed only a few words to know exactly what she was dealing with, after all the years of men trying to impress her, and her trying to impress them back. She’d always been the one who broke things off, when, after a few nights together, the energy fizzled. In that vast apartment in London, it soon became clear which was the one. They bumped and slid apart a few times in the crowd, before they naturally found themselves standing together, and then other interested people, and even their friends, sensed nothing but their complete exclusion of the outside world. The evening ended at the Four Seasons at Hamilton Place in a room that cost 428 pounds a night.
She wore a sweater of the thinnest imaginable cotton under her jacket. When everything else was off, and he lifted it up, she said: “No—touch!” And then his hands were all over her softness, the silky fabric enhancing every sensation as it ran under and between his fingers. Before his attentive gaze, she felt playful, and her undisguised pleasure aroused him. He drew his face along the length of her, capturing the essence of her, inhaling her through the thin fabric, as if he were smelling the scent of a woman’s body for the first time. They were already on the floor, and she clasped her legs around him, so the caresses could continue, the intensity mounting with him inside her.
For her, desire made her turn inward, and she made love almost unconsciously, with her eyes closed. With him on top, she felt the full weight of him, not fat, not then, but overwhelming in his embrace. He didn’t try to hold her tight or force himself on her in any way, yet that was the effect, by virtue of his sheer physical presence, his strong thrusts, and his firm grip. He had an almost childlike unawareness of his own power, and she liked that. She could tease him, give herself up to him, and still get what she needed. She held back, as they braced against each other, and he thrust even harder. Just before he came, she opened her eyes and looked straight at him.
They saw each other in the days after, but she thought she’d pushed things too far and sensed that he held back when she tried to see if she was more than the thinnest of sweaters on a fit body. Soon enough, she’d be heading back to the Caribbean, where a new mahogany deck awaited. But, and this was crucial, he’d become persistent and kept in touch during the weeks that followed. It was as if insight came with distance, and most of all, he didn’t want to lose her. He wanted to meet again, but once she was free, she gave evasive answers and lame excuses. He wanted to spend a long weekend with her in Scotland. When she hesitated, he emailed her plane tickets and a picture of some friend’s family estate. Who could say no to that? It drew her in. There had been something between them, and it had stung when she’d left him in London the last time, not least the feeling that she was just a sailor girl and he, after all, something else. She traveled with only a carry-on bag, so typical of her, and the weekend was everything one could hope for. Beautiful views and some kind of hunt she didn’t understand, dinners amid silly pranks of men who’d spent too many years at boys’ schools, and what they’d both really come for—three nights in the same bed. There was his slight awkwardness, but also those unhesitant games with his tongue, the savoring of every smell, and the tasting of each other’s saltiness, and there was the falling asleep and waking up and falling asleep again. And hanging over it all, an unmistakable sense of sadness.
On the last day, they went for a walk in awkward silence. “And now?” she finally said, turning to him. He cleared his throat. She didn’t know it then, but he too needed to take the next step.
Carl-Adam Bergenskjöld was doing his time in the financial coal mine: paying his dues, putting in the late nights, flaunting his ambitions for a few years at the flashy banks in London. He was far from the noodle-eating-windsurfer-in-a-studio-apartment, more Östra Real prep school, MBA at Handels, and summerhouse on the water in Smådalarö. He was walking the narrow path his father laid out for him. Not without resistance, but it was indulgently swept aside by his wealthy family. Of course he had other plans, the kind that always began with: “You know, actually . . . ,” spoken eye to eye late at night, after a few drinks. Dreams of long trips, and of writing a book. But that was just steam released by the valve from time to time. A thousand passionate ideas and longing in his eyes when he was drunk, and a one-way track forward when he was sober. He made his dad proud, did well—London—built his own stock portfolio, and his own accounts started to fill up. And he learned some other tricks too, how it wasn’t hard to get a pair of tanned shoulders to join him at Nobu. He shopped around.
But when he walked along that gravel path in a park in Scotland, what he’d felt after the first night at the Four Seasons in London burned even more intensely. Now what? Soon she would slip out of his hands a second time. He had enough self-awareness to realize that the woman he needed didn’t belong to the usual crowd. He’d joked about it a lot since then—at parties, with the others—that he’d found himself a commoner. But that didn’t hurt Jenny in the least. “You might as well move in, then” was all he’d said on that walkway, after a few seconds of silence.
And that was all he needed to say. Never a word about being a gold digger, although her own demons rose up sometimes to remind her. She was a sort of trophy wife, that was true, and she’d brought along nothing besides her carry-on bag. But so what? It meant no more living hand to mouth, the end of the noodles and guys running their hands between her legs while she made the beds in their cabins. On his side, he admired her independence and wished the same for himself. To choose her was a rebellion against his father, not on the outside as much as on the inside. It gave him the satisfaction of having obtained something different, and she put him at peace. And soon enough the magical change—family. Alexandra was born first, and then the friend who’d hooked up with an engineer from Ericsson in Kista had a reason to
come visit again.
Although it continued for a few years, London was just a phase. That, they already knew. Real life would begin when they moved back to Stockholm. Then Scandinavian Capital came into their lives. Direct recruitment. Private equity, hedge funds, no limits. Quick moves. First the apartment on Karlavägen, but soon Carl-Adam became King Carl—and with the annual bonuses a year later, it was time to start building his very own temple. He came home one evening with paperwork for something she’d only heard mentioned in passing, already signed.
“But . . . ?”
“You have to understand, you only get one chance.” A turn-of-the-century villa, of course. Djursholm, obviously. Huge rooms, almost like halls. It needed work. Not that the house was in bad condition, but the people who’d lived there before were old money. Creaking wooden floors, ancient stucco. King Oscar II might have felt at home there, but now it would be different. The dark wood paneling would be torn out and the French tapestries taken down. There was no limit to how many rooms would eventually be furnished, once the swarm of Polish carpenters was done ripping out the old. It became a full-time job: the catalogs of gas stoves, a Pompeii of marble and travertine samples, coordinating shipments, firing the incompetent plumber and finding his replacement. Jenny had probably imagined that they’d make these decisions together. She had the painfully naive idea that all of Carl-Adam’s overtime and late nights would be done after the years in London.
“We need to decide on . . .”
“Can it wait until tomorrow? Oh, and by the way, tomorrow I’ll be . . .”
In London, Carl-Adam wasn’t really a player, but now at Scandinavian Capital, he was somebody. And somehow, there was always a final negotiation he alone was responsible for. Always some acquisition or divestment that needed a final push. Decisions hung in the balance, a little nudge needed over dinner to convince some investors, or a trip to close the deal. He came home after midnight when she was already asleep, with the last whiskey hanging in the air around him; when it was Zurich, London, or Frankfurt, that meant at least one night away, and always the last flight home. No planning, everything on short notice. But what had she expected?
And for Carl-Adam himself? King Carl, he shut down as soon as he stepped out of the taxi in front of his house. Slow steps in the gravel. He’d stopped doing his “You know, actually . . . ,” as if trying to confide. He merely gave Jenny mumbled versions of no longer being able to distinguish between what he wanted and what he ought to do. But what did it matter to her? It was all empty air. At the next dinner party, he sat back and rambled on with a colleague about grand cru wines and some damned car, as if that really were his greatest wish, while Jenny stood in the kitchen, cleaning up, talking with some wife about the usual drivel.
Guilt spread like a weed, into every niche.
When they’d first met, Jenny had worn a silver bracelet set with a few gemstones, a beautiful piece that cost considerably more than what she could afford. It was a gift from a skipper who hadn’t expected anything in return. For Jenny, the bracelet was the only thing she’d saved from those years. It was a fond memento that Carl-Adam had mistaken for an interest in jewelry. He thought he’d figured out her one weakness. And so he’d gotten in the habit—when he disappeared without warning, or when the last flight home had been pushed to “tomorrow” too many times—of standing there, when the front door finally closed behind him, with a small oblong package and that expression of knowing exactly what she wanted. Chopard, Tiffany, Cartier. How could she object? She wore a smile that she too had rehearsed. There was a whole bathroom cabinet full of necklaces and bracelets in boxes. She had to remind herself to wear them.
Jenny became obsessed with the thought that she couldn’t feel gratitude. Truly obsessed. She tried therapy, and the therapist obsessed instead over the word meaningfulness. She quit, and started working out without anyone else around. No gym, no personal trainer. She ran in the dark, after Alexandra had fallen asleep for the night, and that worked better, as a painkiller. At any rate, she could deal with the status quo.
Until Sebastian was born.
15
Milan Radovanović hadn’t slept well that night, mostly going back and forth to the toilet, then tossing and turning in bed. That’s what the French had said, when Grip called the next morning. One of the MPs watched Radovanović while the other slept in the room next door. Taking a couple of shifts, they’d gotten through the night. At the small hotel Grip had booked for them, they brought breakfast up to the room, but Radovanović had only sipped at his orange juice. It could very well go on like this for a while. Radovanović spoke no French, and the military police only broken English. Nothing valuable would be said, no steam let out; the atmosphere would simply grow heavier with guilt and uncertainty.
Grip had checked his in-box, and sure enough, Fredrik Hansson had emailed photos from the shooting range. He’d sent them at just before ten o’clock the night before, with a short note saying he’d chosen pics that showed everyone. Grip scrolled through them, and although they’d obviously been carefully selected, still the screwing around came through—in the poses and khat-glazed eyes. One image said it all, a group shot, probably taken with the self-timer, since all the players were there. You could see the Swedish desert uniforms mixed in with the Djiboutians, and the weapons, and all the faces. They were close together, some on their knees. One tried to look serious, another couldn’t hide his skepticism. In this cauldron of simmering feelings, the only Swede smiling was Fredrik Hansson himself. His superior, Per-Erik Slunga, who twenty minutes later would leave this earthly life, gazed absently at something far out in the sand.
Grip’s cell buzzed; it had been going off the whole morning. The first officer and Mickels were both trying to get ahold of him. Grip didn’t answer. He’d let temperatures rise. It was easy to imagine: officers asking each other why Radovanović had been taken in, and everyone in MovCon wondering what their colleague would spill. There’d be gut reactions and accusations and what-the-hell-do-we-do’s and why won’t that fucking Grip answer his phone.
Grip had his own to-do list. After a breakfast of eggs Benedict and fresh fruit at the Kempinski, he drove his rental car to the city jail. “Could I ask a few questions?” After showing his ID, he got a shrug in reply and a guard to accompany him. If the jail in Djibouti looked exactly the way he had imagined a jail in the Horn of Africa, at least Abdoul Ghermat got his own cell. Maybe that was what they did with suspected murderers.
Ghermat was lying on his bunk, but he rose slowly as the cell door opened and Grip was shown in. Other than the bunk and a floor drain, there was nothing. Their eyes didn’t meet, but the Djiboutian sat up, with his elbows on his knees and his hands clasped around his neck, as if for protection. Grip said a few words to introduce himself.
Silence. Yet Grip felt sure the man understood. Abdoul Ghermat was wearing his own clothes, which were covered with fresh stains. They looked like blood.
“Can you tell me what happened on the shooting range?”
The same silence as before. The guard who’d accompanied him had also entered the cell. Abdoul moved his leg slightly, with a pained expression.
Grip turned to the guard. “Could you wait outside?” He pointed to his identity card, as if it showed obvious authority. The guard left, and they heard a wooden chair scraping on the concrete floor in the hallway.
“The shooting range?” repeated Grip.
The man moved his leg again. “I did not shoot anyone,” he said.
Grip searched in vain for a feeling, an impression, something to grab onto. Who was the man he faced? What was his background, and how could he get him to talk? Would he need to get rough? In the echo of the long narrow space, he got no answers.
“Can you tell me what happened? Where were you standing?”
“I did not shoot anyone.” Looking straight ahead, in quiet defiance. One eyebrow swollen, the opposite corner of his mouth skewed. What damage was hidden by his clothing, Grip c
ouldn’t know.
“You say that,” Grip replied. “But a group of Swedes say that is exactly what you did—you shot someone. And an officer, at that.”
The man took a few deep breaths, keeping his hands on his neck. “I did not even have a gun. It was my turn to shoot, I was waiting for my turn. I had no gun.” Then Abdoul turned around to face Grip with a look that said the rest. That what he said didn’t matter, and that he and the whole world knew it. Then he turned his eyes back to the wall, moving in his slow, tense way.
“The Swedes say,” he repeated. “I have a daughter, and the Swedes say.”
Grip saw how he touched his bracelet. A moment of clinging to something real, in a cell where nothing was respected. Was it his daughter who’d braided the thin leather strap they hadn’t yet taken from him?
Djibouti lived off the Europeans and Americans, who paid large sums to keep their soldiers, warplanes, and ships there. A thumbnail of apparent calm on the world map. Everyone there feared extremists and, most of all, the jihadists with their gaze fixed on the kingdom of heaven. The few Djiboutians who built fantasy palaces for dollars and euros gritted their teeth, seeing the crap that every country surrounding them had to deal with—and worried that their own people would start blowing things up, and then start killing foreign soldiers. So when a Swedish lieutenant fell dead on a shooting range, it was like an amen in church. The incident would lead to feet being beaten with cudgels, and then to car batteries attached to the nipples of the man they all accused. At best, maybe they’d come out with some names, but, more likely, they’d simply sow fear and unbridled hatred.
After the Monsoon Page 10