After the Monsoon

by Robert Karjel

  “What does that have to do with anything?”

  “Answer the question. Is it an unusual amount?”

  “It depends on the value of the buyout.”

  “Of course, the value. How many shares does the person own, and what liabilities would the shareholder bring to the new operation? Here, where we sit, in this deal, you need to be ransomed out. Also, you have killed a man.”

  “This . . . Where . . . ?” Carl-Adam was breathing heavily.

  “Yes, you are tired. It is hell being here, and the wound in your hand does not make it any easier. But if you and your family want to have the slightest chance of surviving, you must try to grasp why you should never even think about defying Darwiish. The money that can solve this is not here, it is far away. And this is not where the negotiations take place. You and I cannot negotiate. You and Darwiish cannot negotiate. In this place, the very best outcome is that nothing happens, because anyone at any moment could decide to take out his frustrations. I can perhaps get someone to look at your wounds, but I cannot do anything about Darwiish’s temper. Someone has translated online articles for him, and he has been told that those at Scandinavian Capital, which is your business, earn hundreds of millions each.”

  “That . . .”

  “Well, what, then? That . . . ? Say something.”

  “I resigned. I quit my job at Scandinavian Capital. The deals people wrote about . . . the profits, that was for the partners. Not me, I never came near that kind of money.”

  “What do you think is easier, explaining that to Darwiish, or asking Scandinavian Capital to make an exception to its profit-sharing policy? Facebook and Instagram are full of pictures of you and your colleagues—parties, dinners, ski trips. Darwiish belongs to a clan, one that stands at the center of his life and that will protect him, if necessary. As he sees it, your clan is Scandinavian Capital.”

  “But I . . .”

  There was the sound of a hand slapping the table. “Be a man!” A chair scraped. Jenny sensed his movement through the crack, imagining the smooth white of his shirt as he jumped to his feet. “A man! And let us hope that your Swedes stop thinking that their silence sends a message.”

  24

  Djibouti was so damn full of eyes and ears. Every time Grip walked through a crowd and turned around, someone was watching him. The note under the door, Judy Drexler’s card at the reception desk, the spilled sauce at La Mer Rouge. And now this waiter at the hotel, hovering over Grip’s table every time he took out a scrap of paper.

  He sat there now in the late-afternoon quiet, at a cool table inside the Kempinski by a window overlooking the pool, with a pile of printouts in front of him. “No, thanks. I told you, I’m fine!” That same waiter again. The man looked as if he’d failed at something.

  Beyond dealing with all the eyes and ears, Grip feared he was back at square one. Earlier in the day, the old surgeon, somewhere out at sea on the Sveaborg, finally sent his report about Slunga. Grip forwarded the email to Stark (who was once again pulling a day shift at the Mirage), and then started reading. The doctor at the French hospital had found no trace of suspicious substances in the blood samples he’d received. The trouble was the shot itself—its geometry.

  Grip was just getting into it when Simon Stark called his cell.

  “Who’s going to say it first?” he said.

  “Okay, you start.”

  “Our problem isn’t dealing with a suicidal shooter. Our problem is that Radovanović simply didn’t do it.”

  Grip was quiet for a moment, enough to show that he agreed. Then he asked: “Where are you right now?”

  “Standing on the balcony, looking at him through the window,” Stark said. “Don’t worry, he can’t hear me.”

  “He still thinks he did it?”

  “Totally convinced. And I agree with you, normally you can’t dismiss a confession. Only now we can, on technical grounds. Or, well, I don’t understand the entire page that the doctor covered with math. But I do know right from left. It’s impossible.”

  “No, it’s not impossible . . .” Grip began, but got interrupted.

  Stark sounded judgmental. “Didn’t you see the body in the ship’s morgue?” The doctor had sent some pictures along with his file. “Couldn’t you see that Slunga was shot from the left?”

  “There was a big goddamn hole in his skull. I didn’t really understand about the angle of the shot.” Grip had begun to sketch on paper. He drew a picture, and then compared the surgeon’s calculations with the witness statements from Mickels’s report. He saw who’d stood where at the shooting range. In the sketch, Slunga was at the front, with Ghermat and Radovanović behind him, and Hansson alone, a little to the left.

  “Sure,” Stark said. “Of course, Slunga might have turned his head and looked backward when the shot was fired, but that doesn’t match the statements from the witnesses standing up by the targets. The shot came from the left.”

  “Yeah, that makes sense. I can see it.”

  “Makes sense . . . Damn it, Grip, Hansson fired the shot! The laser pointer, the note under the door, this isn’t Radovanović’s world, it reeks of Hansson. We’ll confront him. We’ll contact the prosecutor and do this right.”

  “No, we won’t. We still have to deal with Radovanović’s confession. What we have is an email with a lot of math we barely understand, the word left, and an angle pointing to Hansson. If Hansson doesn’t talk, all we can do is implicate him in an accidental discharge. We need more on him. And we need to find a way in, because obviously he didn’t act alone.”

  “And Radovanović?”

  Grip was quiet. Frères called every day now, so often that Grip didn’t even answer when his phone buzzed with the colonel’s name. Meanwhile in Stockholm, the generals’ lawyers were hitting the law books, underlining all the relevant rules. Could he and Stark hold out, without help from the French? But Grip didn’t want to set foot in the Mirage again.

  “You’re scared of what you’ve done,” Stark said calmly. He still hadn’t gotten a reply to his original question. “And you’re scared of what he’ll do.”

  Grip kept silent, breathing a few times. “We’ll release him,” he said then.

  “Now?”

  “No, tomorrow, when the Sveaborg is back in port.”

  The conversation with Stark had been hours ago. Grip gazed at the pool and returned to his stack of printouts. He’d requested help from Stockholm earlier, getting some background information on Fredrik Hansson. There were mostly military files, but other things as well. Grip turned the pages. First came Hansson’s service record. Not even thirty-three years old, he’d already been on nine foreign missions. Hansson was what Stark had called an ax. He led a kind of double life, alternating odd jobs in Sweden with international military missions. Hansson often worked as a guard, and he preferred nights at any hour, it seemed. Grip also asked them to check on Hansson’s spending habits, triggered by something else Stark had said.

  The first evening when Stark was at the Sheraton looking for Philippa Ekman, he’d caught a glimpse of Hansson at the bar, or rather, of his watch. Black and masculine, like that worn by so many others in uniform, so it mostly went unnoticed. But it was a Hublot Black Magic. A few days later, when Stark realized that it was actually Hansson he’d seen wearing it, he brought up the matter with Grip. He explained how international forces soldiers often blew their money on expensive watches. If they couldn’t find it at the duty-free shop of Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo, or in Kabul, they turned to a few retailers in Sweden, who’d even delete the VAT tax if they were shipping to an international forces address. They sent Tag Heuer and Breitling by bulk mail. But a Hublot Black Magic—that cost far more than a soldier could save up from six months as a turret gunner in Sheberghan or Mali.

  Grip flipped through the pages.

  Hansson lived in Stockholm in a two-bedroom condo on Kungsholmen, so obviously he had money. Had he bought it himself, or inherited it? There was no way to be sure, but
in any case Hansson had no mortgage to speak of. He rented three parking spaces in the basement but had only one registered car, a sporty little Mazda. Why did someone need three parking spaces for one car? Grip read over the list of his foreign missions. Congo, Sudan, Kenya, Djibouti, some of them more than once. But never to the Balkans, and only once to Afghanistan. Most axes were hooked on Afghanistan missions, Stark had said. Not Hansson. For him, it was all Africa.

  One document concerned an investigation following a tour Hansson did in South Sudan. Apparently he’d been held hostage for a few days, seized by crazy militiamen, who’d beaten him up and threatened to kill him. The thing had ended peacefully, but Hansson came out in rough shape. Grip understood the fear that dogged people in uniform—that they’d be taken hostage and end up on their knees in an orange jumpsuit, their picture all over the Internet, while people holding swords shouted death sentences behind their back. Apparently, Hansson had been through it, and he was certain he was going to die. He got prescription meds afterward, Stilnoct and Oxazepam, and he’d been on tranquilizers for six months.

  Then he was back in Africa, not even a year later. Grip could picture it, the way someone would dutifully ask how he was feeling, then send him right back to work. “Good to go,” Hansson had said, repeating it a few times, and so the medical opinion was ignored. After all, the military didn’t exactly have hordes of applicants. Grip underlined the word hostage and moved on.

  He read for a good hour but found nothing more of interest, so he got up, walking past the empty tables to give his brain some oxygen. He gave the waiter a look to say he was still watching over his documents, and gazed into the piano bar. There she sat, with a shaft of late-afternoon light falling across the grand piano. In her first set of the evening, she played for only a handful of jet-lagged Chinese sitting at one of the tables. Ayanna, right, Ayanna was her name.

  “You’re here.”

  Grip turned around. It was Stark, back from the Hotel Mirage for the evening. He glanced into the piano bar, looked back, and nodded in a knowing way.

  Then he said: “I couldn’t resist. I stopped at the Sheraton on the way back and made sure to bump into Hansson. Played at being interested, then asked him bluntly where he’d bought a Black Magic and what he’d paid for it.”

  “He told you to fuck off?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Hey, that’s not how we’re going to get him.”

  “No, but now he knows we’re watching him.”

  “Who’s watching whom remains to be seen. Do you want to shower before we eat?”

  Stark was already walking away, a sign that he’d probably head to the gym first.

  Grip returned to the papers. He took out his little notebook and listed three basic points:

  Too many people liked the money—note under door

  Hublot Black Magic—around $15,000

  Three parking spots—why?

  Earlier that day, a Hercules from Sweden had landed, bringing supplies, mail, and spare parts. It would leave again some hours later, taking Per-Erik Slunga’s body back home. Then the HMS Sveaborg would dock in Djibouti the following day. Grip realized he had an opportunity, and he had to get organized before the Swedish authorities closed back home. He had an hour to himself. To start with, he’d need to get ahold of someone high up at Customs.

  25

  “At work, people say that you’re gay,” said Simon Stark. His eyes narrowed as he said it. Grip had stopped counting, but they’d each had at least three drinks and as many beers. They were sitting upstairs in the nightclub.

  After dinner, once they’d agreed that Radovanović was innocent and should be released, they stayed and hung out, instead of returning to their rooms as they had the night before. Letting down their guard, they’d both ordered a drink. They joked and made small talk as the restaurant emptied out, while the waiters started clearing tables and setting up for the next day.

  When the place felt too deserted, they decided to change scenery and head to the nightclub terrace under the stars. A beer, to start with. They kept drinking, and after they dismissed a few “Hi, I am . . .” approaches, the girls understood that the two men hadn’t come for them. They talked about sports, and then about why people moved to certain neighborhoods in Stockholm. They had another beer. When they started talking about Stockholm bars, Grip ordered an old-fashioned, and with that, they switched back to liquor again. That theme led to movies, which were really Stark’s thing. They had a White Russian and a screwdriver, while Stark did lines from The Big Lebowski and Jackie Brown. Their laughter made the people at the next table turn around. Grip stared back and ordered another round. They were both getting drunk.

  A comment about an event at work, and then that line. The statement was really a question, and Stark’s gaze said he wanted to test his power.

  Warily, Grip picked up the gauntlet. “What if I’m gay?” He said it so that nothing would be left unclear. And then: “How often do you jerk off?”

  “What does that have to do with anything?”

  “Only that it’s also a very personal question. So?”

  Stark leaned back without blinking. “I might not put a dot in my diary, but I’d say . . . every second or third day seems about right.” He tried to look mischievous about it, feeling confident from the alcohol.

  “High testosterone, you have to work it off,” said Grip, looking at him as if he’d been watching Stark pleasure himself. And it worked. “Who says I’m gay?” he asked.

  “C’mon, when you’re the new guy, it doesn’t take long before people start telling you what’s really going on. Who stole whose wife, and who’s into what.”

  “And people say I’m gay?”

  “Well, that you have someone in New York. A lover.”

  Grip took a long look at Stark. No one had ever confronted him point-blank like that. Never. And yet Grip was sure that Simon Stark was 100 percent straight.

  “Do you know anyone who’s out?” he asked.

  “Of course I do, but that doesn’t mean I’m completely comfortable with it.”

  “So why are you asking me?”

  “People talk in our office, but no one seems to know for sure. It’s the elephant in the room, right?”

  “A homophobe who dares to ask.” Grip gave him a nod. “Benjamin Hayden, that’s the name of my lover in New York. But he’s Ben, to me.”

  “A colleague?”

  The question sounded funny, and Grip laughed. “No, no. Owned an art gallery in Manhattan, knew everything about Tom Friedman and Damien Hirst. To him, police officers have mustaches and direct traffic at intersections, or are the guys you’d dress up as, at a costume party.”

  “Damien who?”

  “That’s not important. What matters is that Ben was thin as hell.”

  “Was?”

  “He had the virus, the one gay men wore like a caste mark. It was pneumonia that finally took him, a year ago.”

  Stark got up some courage.

  “Did you love him?”

  “Shit, Simon, look at you. You’re so uncomfortable, even after all the alcohol.”

  “Yeah.” He tried to say something more but stopped short.

  “Oh fuck, it’s okay. Go ahead, ask me the question you really want to ask.”

  “Which?”

  “All right, when you ask if I loved Ben, I’ll tell you he was all I had, all right? And if you’re wondering whether I have to get my T cells counted and take antiretroviral drugs, the answer is no.”

  “Okay, I admit . . .”

  “I realize what you were thinking. But you know they test us every year for the job, and I wouldn’t have been allowed to stay for a single day if I’d been positive.”

  “Do von Hoffsten and the others know that your artist buddy is dead?”

  “Ben wasn’t my buddy, okay?”

  “Sorry.” Stark raised his glass in front of him.

  Grip brushed it off. “We don’t have to make a to
ast to Ben, but he wasn’t just some dude. For von Hoffsten and the gang, it’s enough that they imagined Ben existing, even if he was nameless—which he might as well remain. Why should I talk about it? Why should I make them uncomfortable when I step into the sauna next time: legs crossed, and that look of ‘what new thing will Grip want to get ahold of now?’” Grip raised his glass to take a drink.

  “Nothing but ice,” Stark said with a grin.

  Grip looked into the glass, feeling its effects. “Yes, I’ll have another one,” he said, “and you, you also need a refill.”

  They got another round of the same. A few sips and they were back on track. Stark hadn’t yet finished his interrogation.

  “Sure, I’ll sit with you in the sauna next time, clench my ass, and be terrified that I’ll get a hard-on. But regardless of my hang-ups—yeah, I get the urge to punch something in a feather boa when the Pride parade goes by—I won’t tell the boys about Benjamin. It’s just that . . .” Silence. “But,” he began again, “you haven’t totally convinced me.”

  “No?”

  “I stood and watched you for a little while in the lobby today. Before I said hello.”

  “Are you spying on me too?” Grip laughed.

  “It just happened.”

  “You could have asked the annoying waiter to tell you what I was reading.”

  “You weren’t reading. You were standing there, looking into the piano bar.”

  “I remember.”

  “Just that”—Stark waved his finger at Grip—“no man who likes men would look at a woman that way.”

  “Hey . . .”

  “Uh-uh, no ‘hey.’ Yeah, I get uncomfortable and don’t know where to look when I see men holding hands. But from where I stood, with her over there, I know it wasn’t the Chinese men in business suits you were watching.”