After the Monsoon

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After the Monsoon Page 20

by Robert Karjel


  He’d lost all credibility on the gangway. Not because Stark was stumbling and bleeding, or even because he hadn’t caught the assailant who had stabbed him, but because everyone had heard Grip’s denial. It played like a movie in his head, over and over again: getting out of the car, going up the gangway, step by step; how they’d brought Stark in and attended to him, and then Grip couldn’t stop himself from exposing his underbelly: “Just a robbery.” He obsessed over it.

  And now he and Simon Stark were afraid. They stayed inside the Kempinski, in their rooms. Stark mostly lay in bed, but it wasn’t just his injury that was dragging him down. Only once had he asked Grip: “Why the fuck did you say it was a robbery?”

  “To buy us time,” Grip had answered. He had no idea what that meant, but Stark hadn’t asked again, just glared at him. Grip clearly saw that Stark was engaged in a battle between anger and fear.

  Stark took all his meals in his room, and once as Grip was walking by, he found himself right behind the room-service attendant as he knocked on the door. Stark opened up, wearing only his underwear and clutching the knife that had stabbed him. More exposed than ready to charge. He looked troubled when he saw Grip and fumbled with money for the tip while the cart rolled in. A tragic figure. Making a futile attempt to fight back.

  Meanwhile, Fredrik Hansson appeared to be more than just a phantom. He could shoot his boss and keep on happily doing his job, sending and receiving through MovCon in Djibouti. Fifty thousand dollars in a package labeled spare parts. That required an organization, not just a single ax. The money was made somehow, then received, and forwarded once it reached Sweden. In dollars, nothing else.

  So Hansson did whatever he wanted, while a half-naked security police officer stood in his hotel room holding the knife that was supposed to stop him. Surrendering to fear, that’s what leads to defeat. Grip had seen it just as much in himself as in Stark, as he stood there in his underwear—the fear of fear, the kind that breeds self-hatred.

  “Mr. Grip,” said one of those overly helpful women at the front desk, as he passed by on his way up to his room. She got his attention. “Now you have stayed with us so long that we would like to invite you to receive a free massage.” She handed him a card with squiggly writing. The hotel had a huge spa on-site. White buildings with glass, like an ascetic temple. “If it is convenient for you, perhaps this afternoon at two o’clock?” Grip looked thoughtfully at the card without actually reading it. “If not, we can arrange another time that would be suitable.”

  His hesitation wasn’t about the time but some kind of lingering fear. “A one-hour massage?”

  “Yes, we thought . . .”

  Would he avoid even this?

  “Thank you, that will be fine.”

  Open and spacious, with few people around and everything echoing off the stone, the Kempinski’s spa felt like a medical facility. She introduced herself as Sarah, and he guessed she was from Malaysia. The entire facility seemed to be staffed by Asians dressed like nurses in sober gray. While he undressed and lay down on the massage table, she read over the health form he’d had to fill out. The room was larger than he’d expected, with a couple of comfortable chairs and a table holding snacks—as if people came to sit and watch someone get a massage. There were niches for candles in the wall, which was tiled in Moorish mosaics. Ambient music was playing, mostly the sound of waves and rippling water. It wasn’t the gentle sounds, the warm light, and the scent of essential oils that made him feel calm, as much as the comfort of being within four close walls. She touched and then gently squeezed the long surgical scar on his shoulder, asking him about it. No, nothing that hurt or limited him, not anymore.

  With the oil, skin against skin, soon her hands grew warm. Under the steady, familiar movements, his own muscles at first resisted but then let go. He rocked as she dug into them, and then his conscious thoughts drifted away, as her kneading turned gentler. Even when she walked around to change sides, she always kept a couple of fingers touching him. Never breaking contact.

  Grip regained his conscious thoughts again, hearing the sounds of the water, but wasn’t aware of her presence. He moved his head slightly, feeling the towel covering the headrest against his face. The body’s pleasant weight. Had it been an hour already? He opened his eyes and squinted. Saw only the floor.

  Then Grip heard a movement. It sounded impatient; maybe it was a sigh. He raised his head and was going to say something, but Sarah was gone. Instead, there was another woman in one of the two chairs, sitting with crossed legs, and a gaze that awaited his reaction to the surprising situation.

  “Ayanna,” she said, reminding him, after he looked at her for a moment. As if she knew that he’d looked for her name on the poster outside the piano bar. Grip propped himself up on his elbow, glancing at the towel over his hips and then toward the door.

  “Sarah is not coming back. She has finished, even if there are thirty minutes remaining.”

  Grip was trying to decide something.

  “Take a bathrobe, by all means,” she continued. There were several in a neat pile on a low table by the head end. She was wearing makeup but didn’t wear that “available” face she always did at the piano bar. Nor was she wearing any of the dresses he’d seen her in, but instead a more everyday cotton. She gave the impression of being herself.

  “You arranged this so we could be alone for a while,” said Grip, and stood up.

  “That was my plan,” she replied.

  Grip stood with his back to her as he reached for the robe. “So actually, the Kempinski didn’t treat me to a massage?”

  “Many amenities can be arranged for guests at this hotel, but no, Sarah’s hour was in fact on me.”

  Grip let the towel around his hips fall to the floor. He was in no hurry to cover himself up like a schoolboy getting caught, but quietly put on his robe before he turned around. She sat quietly, her legs still crossed, her hands folded. A wide golden bangle on her wrist.

  “Is this based on me wanting to meet you, or you me?” He poured himself a glass of water from a transparent pitcher containing slices of orange and lemon.

  “It is a strange way to meet, I understand if you feel that way. Perhaps the wrong kind of questions might arise, so let me answer some. My father was Somali, my mother Russian, from Ukraine.”

  “Should I interview you?”

  “No, but if you are a light-skinned black person, as I am, white people are always wondering, and they get no rest until I explain the details of my mixed-race background.”

  “I wasn’t really thinking about it.”

  “Soon enough, you would have, trust me.”

  “Fair enough. More questions then. Are there Somalis in Ukraine?”

  “In Kiev. In the eighties, the Soviets paid for some Somalis to be educated at the university there. I have seen pictures of my father, he was very handsome. He and my mother were drawn to each other, there were some sparks, and I came into the world.”

  “You have no contact anymore?”

  “Not with my father.”

  “And your mother?”

  “She is still color blind. She does not understand why I left Kiev.”

  “For Djibouti?”

  “Not so much for, as away from.”

  “I thought Russians and Ukrainians liked colored women.”

  “One could summarize the problem exactly that way.”

  “And the piano?”

  “Mama is a music teacher, I got it from her.” Her fingers trilled a moment on invisible keys in her lap. “In Moscow and Saint Petersburg, no one would buy a ticket to hear someone they considered a nightclub girl interpret Rachmaninoff. But on a grand piano in a hotel somewhere in Africa, they cannot get enough of Bacharach and Gershwin.”

  “That bitterness doesn’t come through, when you’re sitting there.”

  “There used to be a lot, below the surface, but now . . . I have no trouble finding work, and that helps.”

  “Well,” said Gri
p, and thought for a moment. “I am Swedish.”

  “I know.”

  “What else do you know?”

  “That you seem lost,” she replied.

  “I’m sorry, but was it Colonel Frères who sent you?” She seemed indifferent to the question.

  “Colonel Frères prefers men but will do anything to keep that a secret. When he stayed here at the Kempinski, he was careless enough to ask for the same room several times. What he was doing was captured on film. With his uniform on, he is an influential person here in Djibouti, but those images make him weak. No, Frères did not send me.”

  “Is it true that in Djibouti, as they say, it is the French who maintain order but Americans who make the decisions?”

  “On the surface, or just below, that is so. But there are Russians and Chinese here too, and they do not care much about which flag is flying.”

  “Maybe they’re more interested in money.”

  “In Djibouti, that is all anyone is interested in.” She nodded. “The money is the reason why the whites and Asians come here, and the Africans need their money in order to get out of here.”

  “Personally, I came here to investigate an accident.”

  “Then I understand those who say that you are lost. Whose toes have you stepped on?”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “I heard about your colleague, the one who was cut across his back.” She paused a second. “Was it a robbery?”

  He smiled.

  “No.”

  “Do you know how hot it is today? One hundred fifteen degrees in the shade—one hundred fifteen! No one in Djibouti bothers with principles of justice. If you are injured, it is because you have gotten in the way of someone else’s happiness. Principles weigh lightly, but money represents the chance for a different life.”

  “Now we’re getting somewhere, to what I want to talk about.” Grip took a sip of lemon water, then pointed with a slightly exaggerated gesture around him. “First, I want to know whose charity I am benefiting from here, without deserving it.”

  “Someone who is worried about you.”

  “Well, I hadn’t even been here for a week, when Judy Drexler at the US embassy said she could help me out. Among other things, Colonel Frères owed her a favor. Now I’m starting to believe that this involves her knowing about his male lover.”

  “Judy even has a copy of one of the videos,” Ayanna said, without a moment’s hesitation.

  “And she received it from you.”

  “I ordered a copy from the hotel.”

  “You work for Drexler.”

  She shook her head. “I provide her with information. For payment.”

  “And why do you think she wanted to get Frères’s people to help me?”

  “She could stay informed about what you were doing, while keeping her distance.”

  “And now this?”

  “She suggested that I contact you. She thinks you need help.”

  “And you will help by providing information?”

  “All that I can give you, about life in Djibouti, both inside and outside the walls of the Kempinski.”

  “And you know people?”

  “Yes, that is why Judy occasionally comes to me. I have access to different people from the ones she has in her court.”

  She got a shrug in response. Grip was thinking.

  “You have ten minutes remaining,” Ayanna said.

  He leaned against the table. “Tell me three ways that people earn dirty money in Djibouti.”

  “It is hard to say if any clean money can be earned here, but I will give you two ways that are dirtier than others: refugees and weapons. That truth applies to the entire Horn of Africa, but it is here in Djibouti that many of the deals are made.”

  “And if people have taken to using a knife against a . . .” he began but then stopped.

  “Then how do you make them think twice before doing it again?” she said, completing his thought. It sounded sympathetic when she added: “It is not very easy.”

  But there still was a reason why she had sought him out. She knew something about how one plus one could add up to something immense. “I have a morality tale,” she began. “Here at the Kempinski. No matter what anyone says, it is owned by Saudis, with a select staff of Swiss running it—they have an eye for detail and discretion like no others—but where they need an especially firm hand, in the casino, they use Russians. No sane person behaves badly inside such a place, not when facing that type of Russian. Right?”

  “Their reputation is pretty well established.”

  “And they care very much about their reputation. There must be order, it must appear spotless. They get enormous sums of money from the Saudis to keep it that way. But this casino is located in Djibouti. You’ve seen the Legionnaires?”

  “The French ones?”

  “Yes. A large base, thousands of people. Imagine the people needed to enforce discipline on the soldiers recruited from South America, Eastern Europe, and Africa. Not to mention the assignments they do for France . . . The officers, of course, are exclusively French. They are often here, the officers. One of them, a lieutenant, came to the Kempinski to spend an evening. He drank a little too much, and he gambled away even more. The roulette ball took a bad bounce, it landed not on black but on red. It has happened before, it happens every night. But this fellow started to make a big scene, he shouted that the roulette wheel was rigged and grabbed a croupier so that the shirt buttons popped. He was thrown out. Very gently, but out.

  “Two weeks later he was back again. In the casino run by my Russian friends, who do not take orders from anyone. Yet the Foreign Legion officers believe they answer only to God. And so he was admitted.

  “This time, he put his hands on the head croupier. Valeriya, you should see her. Men have all kinds of thoughts about her. But in there, thoughts do not turn into actions, not when she is the head croupier. The worst thing was that those who watched thought they were giving him a free pass. A hand touching where it should not, by someone who is drunk and thinks he owns the world. There was no scene, Valeriya finished whatever she was doing and disappeared. But he stayed, and it was a shift in power for everyone to see. You cannot have this, not at a casino in Djibouti. It could have been enough if one of the Russian bouncers had made a little stop on the road between the casino and the parking lot later that night, and the French lieutenant would never have been the same, and everyone would have known why. However, this presented a dilemma. No French captain, major, or colonel would say that their colleague’s behavior was acceptable. They probably despised him, but if someone had really roughed him up . . . it would make the entire officer corps vulnerable. That can never be tolerated. It was two thousand Foreign Legionnaires in Djibouti against twenty Russians at the Kempinski, so the lieutenant could drive off that night without incident.

  “But a few nights later, two Senegalese who had never before set foot in the Kempinski were assaulted, and their hands were crushed. They will never again be able to hold a gun, a terrible fate for a Legionnaire. They are, or were, the lieutenant’s soldiers. Not a hair was touched on the French officer’s head, but he could not protect his own soldiers from his actions. Four black hands, in exchange for his two white ones. Whenever an officer sacrifices his soldiers for his own sake, then his soldiers lose respect. The lieutenant’s leadership was weakened, and soon destroyed, and he was moved to a different post. He was never seen at the casino again. And now we never have problems with officers here, getting drunk and gambling away more than their entire salary.”

  Ayanna opened her hands as if to give him something and said, “So, it can be done.”

  The door opened and Sarah came in. She seemed completely at ease, as if neither Grip nor Ayanna were in the room.

  Ayanna continued. “You have stepped into a hornet’s nest, where there is money involved, correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you know any of the players?”

  �
��I think so.”

  “Well then, it is high time to decide on a plan.”

  Sarah pressed massage oil from the pump and rubbed her hands together, looking at him. “Legs?”

  “Sorry?”

  “We did not do your legs. Would you like me to . . . ?”

  He looked at the clock as Ayanna rose.

  “Will we meet again?” he asked her.

  “That is entirely up to you. But then you must reserve a time with Sarah.” The door swung shut behind her, and soon Grip heard only the gentle sound of lapping waves in the background. “Thank you, I’m all set,” he replied to the Malaysian. “But maybe I’ll be back.”

  32

  PIRATES KIDNAP MILLIONAIRE WITH KIDS

  Not until Ernst Grip saw the photo of the sailboat under the headline did he realize how big it was. The newspaper went for the money angle, showing the customized Hallberg-Rassy with all its add-ons, along with the mansion in Djursholm. The other evening paper went for heartbreak, that this was a family with children: a girl’s face circled from a school picture, and next to it, her brother looking puzzled in his passport photo. Both papers ran bland quotes from the government spokesperson at Rosenbad, and a flimsy statement from the Foreign Ministry saying its website had warned people not to sail those waters.

  The Bergenskjöld family. Poor bastards, thought Grip. But what did all this have to do with him? He hadn’t heard back from Didricksen, Simon Stark had a nasty slash across his back, and Grip was trying to avoid his coworker’s disgusted looks while deciding what to do next. Although the Boss was laying low, and Grip hadn’t left the Kempinski in several days, he hadn’t been completely idle. He’d gotten in touch with a security police analyst. An old acquaintance—one who had experience, paid attention to detail, and understood deadlines. He’d gotten her interested, and she’d sent out a few feelers. Grip had told her about the money hidden in the Hercules in Uppsala, and as much of the backstory as he knew.

 

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