The police officer squatted down.
“Abdoul told me about your interest in the black market, concerning liquor and more. That is illegal, both here and where you come from. But most likely, we can live with it. We are more concerned about the other things that Abdoul talked about, all the packages of money that appear and disappear in planes that fly out of the base. That interests us.” The officer leaned so close that they were cheek to cheek. He whispered in Hansson’s ear.
“I will say that the way we posed questions to Abdoul Ghermat, and the way he answered them, makes us confident that he had nothing to do with it. The money being flown out from Djibouti on Swedish planes, that involves you and you alone.” The officer pulled one of the chains, making Hansson tilt sharply toward the ring in the floor. “Such an important activity must be protected, and we here at the police have few resources but many expenses. Think about that for a while. You have plenty of time.”
Hansson just sat quietly, rocking. So the hood went back on.
Grip put the USB stick he’d been given, the one with the video on it, in his hotel-room safe. A little while later, he called Mickels. He sounded distracted and said he’d launched a full-scale manhunt. Fredrik Hansson seemed to have disappeared that Friday evening.
A few days later, it was just past midnight. Grip drove his car slowly into the zone by the port where livestock were transported outside the city. He passed the big pens packed with goats and camels. There were a few scattered houses and structures for shunting the animals. The building was hard to find, given the darkness, the few lights, and all the fences and nervous herds obscuring his view. On the second lap around, he saw what he’d been told to look for—a policeman standing guard at a house. Grip stopped the car, got out, and was instantly hit by the noise and stink of livestock packed close together. And in that same moment, despite the darkness, he sensed the swarms of flies and other biting insects. He thought: thousands here were suffering. The house he approached seemed to serve some practical purpose; from its porches, long chains and ropes hung from hooks. Grip went inside, and the roar was muted. Another man in uniform got up from his chair, nodded, and started walking toward him. Grip recognized him as the police officer from the video. They didn’t exchange a word but simply followed the agreement that had been negotiated in several stages.
They came into a room where a large lamp shone on the figure who sat chained to the floor. The lamp was low, holding the man and the insects circling him in a bubble of white light that didn’t reach either the walls or the ceiling. The sounds from outside could barely be heard, but the stench was intense, more from human excretions than from animal ones. Grip heard the man’s slow, strained gasps.
The policeman crouched down in front of Hansson and pulled off his hood. He let a few seconds go by, until he became fully conscious again, before he said: “You are winning, but you have misunderstood the game. We do not have much time left. Keeping your mouth shut—that we know you can do.”
Grip was standing behind Hansson’s back, but he could see that the police officer had Hansson’s full attention. He shifted one of the chains uneasily.
“Who is with you?” he asked. The voice was hoarse.
“Who?” the officer said impassively.
“There’s someone behind me.” Hansson leaned over, tried to turn around, but his body didn’t obey and the chains stopped him. He was more worried about what would happen next than about who was standing there. Even if he could turn around, the light shining on him and the darkness beyond made it impossible to see.
“Now listen to me,” the officer said, “your time is up. Your options are running out. Abdoul Ghermat knew what you were doing—and surely others at the airport did—and we know too, from the gossip on all the bases in Djibouti, that you have been running big operations. Such a person easily can become a victim of circumstance, or disappear altogether . . .”
After the days on the stone floor, the chains, the exhaustion, the insects, now his thoughts followed their own logic. “Are you going to sell me?” Something about the stiffness of his neck told Grip everything. Terror had begun to course through Hansson’s veins. Memories from when he’d been taken hostage in Sudan were playing tricks on him. He felt the terror of someone who truly believed he was going to die.
A throat cleared, and then: “A call. I need to make a phone call.” Hansson’s hair lay like ooze over one ear and his neck.
The police officer picked up the loose hood, glanced at Grip, who made a sign, and then looked at the figure on the floor again. “There will be no phone call. A phone call, that is what foreigners who have been officially arrested can make. But you have not been charged with anything.”
The hood was put back on, and Hansson shouted something unintelligible. Grip headed for the door, and heard that it didn’t stop.
37
It had been two days and two nights since Grip heard the screams from under the hood. Two days and two nights that he’d mostly spent in his hotel room. He slept late and woke up under the lingering fog of a sleeping pill. All that time. A grinding eternity. He was too anxious to do anything, other than wait and read the Swedish news online.
“Zorn Painting Worth More Than Friends’ Lives.” The evening papers kept hounding the partners of Scandinavian Capital. Aftonbladet had gotten ahold of pictures inside the home of one of them, and an expert calculated that if he’d sold four paintings hanging on the walls, it would be enough to pay the Bergenskjöld family’s ransom.
While the Djibouti police let Fredrik Hansson stew a little longer in his pen, Grip tried to find out as much as he could about the Bergenskjölds. He found their blog about their trip around the world, whose last entry was posted from just past the mouth of the Gulf of Aden. He looked at their photographs of dolphins, got to know the children’s faces, saw Jenny’s clear gaze, and noted the posturing of Carl-Adam, always posing as the one at the helm.
“We can’t be sure that they are still alive.” So said another expert, in an interview. Six weeks before, a dotted line had stopped short in the middle of the Indian Ocean. A voice with an accent had shouted over the phone that they’d been hijacked, and no one had heard from the family members themselves. How reliable was that information? The government and the Foreign Ministry seemed strangely silent.
Ten million dollars, that was what the pirates wanted. Grip thought about it, asking himself what he’d do if he were on the receiving end. He’d often thought this was a crucial way of defining yourself: what you’d do if you suddenly had a vast sum of money. The thoughts you’d think, and the choices you’d make. But with ten million dollars, everything would be within reach—there wouldn’t even be a game. What about just one million dollars, then? You couldn’t get everything, you’d actually have to make choices. Just for the hell of it, Grip surfed the auction sites; he knew exactly what he wanted. He wasn’t the type to buy a fancy car or a boat, or who’d retire and live frugally off the interest. It would be one thing, one that most people would walk past, without even noticing. Just a few streaks of charcoal, on paper that had turned yellow with age. It would be up for auction in a month in London, with a starting price of just over $200,000. Edward Hopper’s Night Shadows.
The last time Grip had walked past Ben’s gallery, the windows had been whitewashed, making it impossible to see in. Life with Ben had been a life of art. Now that was gone. Everything that came with the gallery, the people they’d surrounded themselves with, the talks, the exhibitions—gone. At home in his apartment in Stockholm, Grip had hung up some paintings, but they were mostly reproductions. They had come to life before, when Grip went to New York’s major museums to see the originals. He’d stood for half an hour in front of an oil of a brutal boxing match by George Bellows at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The boxers were so powerful and realistic that you felt you were there in the ring. You felt the pulse, the sweat, and the impact of the opponent’s incoming fist. Standing there, Grip experienced it: two men in a
fight to the death.
Another time, Grip had wandered through an exhibition of preparatory studies for some of Edward Hopper’s most famous works. There were several drawings of the couple at the bar in Nighthawks, and some quickly sketched lighthouses on Cape Cod. Some were of places he’d visited. He was fascinated by the way ink could so precisely capture the atmosphere of a deserted yard, or a couple who’d become strangers to one another. Moods that Grip himself knew so well. And being there left Grip with a sweet craving to feel that, again and again. But with Ben’s death came the end of museum visits and trips together along the New England coast, and then what hung on his wall at home were just posters that had no meaning.
The sketch being sold at the London auction was a study in light and dark. From a bird’s-eye view, you saw a solitary man hurrying down a deserted road. It was so late at night that even the bar he passed by had closed. There was no life, except for the man. But from a few floors up, the observer became more than just an observer—he turned into a witness, although to what remained unclear. From outside the scene, just beyond it to the left, a single streetlight cast a long, ominous shadow across the picture. It was an evil deed the man had committed, or one just about to befall him.
The scene was better known as an etching, one of the few Hoppers that existed in an edition of several hundred. You could snap one up for around thirty thousand dollars; they showed up regularly at auctions. But Grip didn’t want one of these, he wanted Hopper’s preparatory study. The page where the idea had been created in charcoal, before the needle ever scratched the plate. Charcoal on paper, this was still the essence of everything that was Hopper: melancholy and loneliness tinged with hope. Grip wouldn’t hesitate for a second, if he had the cash.
As Grip passed the reception desk, a porter stopped him and handed him an envelope. While it looked completely anonymous, he assumed it was from Judy Drexler. But he was wrong.
Inside was a color printout of a photograph. A man and a woman held up a newspaper between them, while in the background, a girl sat on the floor, and another child’s legs stuck out on the mattress. Only the faces of the man and woman were shown, and they looked miserable. There was something familiar about the pose of the girl on the floor, and then it clicked. The Bergenskjölds. Carl-Adam looked so defeated and Jenny so exhausted that at first he didn’t even recognize them. Between them, they held the Daily Nation, Kenya’s largest daily newspaper. Four days old—to show that the family was still alive. On the back of the printout, someone had written: “If you want more, buy a new mobile phone with a prepaid card, and give the number to the taxi waiting outside the entrance at Kempinski at 15:00.”
That gave Grip four hours. He went into town and did what he needed to do, then came back with two hours to spare. He debated whether he should inform Didricksen, but decided to skip it, and instead sat and Googled for a while, without finding anything he hadn’t already seen on the Bergenskjölds. He got an email from Simon Stark, saying he’d sorted out the surgeon’s report and everything looked good. But now Stark was wondering what the hell he should do with the rest of his time aboard the Sveaborg. At three o’clock, Grip went down to the lobby and out the door. There were two taxis parked there.
“Yes?” said one of the drivers, taking a few steps toward him. “I am supposed to pick up something for delivery,” he added, when he saw Grip hesitate.
“Where are you taking it?” Grip asked.
Still smiling, the driver shrugged his shoulders, tucked the folded piece of paper with the number into his breast pocket, and left. Grip stayed to watch the taxi disappear behind the bushes by the Kempinski entrance.
Three hours later, the phone rang.
“Is this Ernst Grip?” asked a voice in good English.
“Yes. And I assume I will not get your name, but you represent the pirates?”
“I am trying to find a solution to this terrible situation. That is my role, only that.”
“It’s easy, then. Simply let the Bergenskjöld family go. They have suffered enough.”
“I do not think your government understands . . .”
“My government does not negotiate with terrorists.”
“If you are going to interrupt me with platitudes, we might as well end this right here.”
“I’m sorry,” Grip said, after a moment’s hesitation. “Can we go back a couple of steps?”
“I can probably agree to a couple.”
“Where did you get my name, and why are you contacting me?”
“Someone told me that you were sent to the Horn of Africa by the Swedish government.”
“By the security police, and for a different case, but all right. And you have been in contact with my government?”
“All the lowest officials, and their receptionists. My calls are only getting transferred from one to the next. No one wants to listen.”
“It’s more of a policy, as I mentioned before, against terrorists.”
“These are pirates, not terrorists. They simply want to make money. I am in touch with their leader, called Darwiish, several times a week, and I have been to see the family a handful of times.”
“So what do you want from me?”
“You’ve seen the pictures, how bad they look.”
“Let them go.”
“Let’s accept the fact that I cannot make decisions for Darwiish.” There was silence.
Grip waited.
“Neither you nor your government seems to understand how time passes here,” continued the voice at the other end. “The conditions of their captivity are destroying them. The boy is ill, and the last of his medicine is running out.”
“I have nothing to do with that.”
“I did not call to tell you that Darwiish wants ten million. Everyone already knows that. I am calling you in search of an entirely different solution.”
“One that means the family will go free?”
“Yes.”
“Without paying the money?”
“Yes.”
If Grip had expected anything from the conversation, it wasn’t that. “Let’s hear it.”
“Not over the phone. I will get back to you.” The background noise disappeared.
“Shit,” said Grip aloud, into the silence of the phone.
The timing was bad. Not this, not now. Grip postponed the inevitable, but finally, a few hours later, he called Didricksen.
It was late at night in Stockholm. The Boss listened, without a single question or comment, to Grip’s description of the connection made and the phone call. Finally, he gave only one instruction: “Set up a meeting as soon as possible, and establish a personal relationship. But don’t go yourself. You should save that move for a while. Send Simon Stark.”
Apparently, Stark had kept his promise and not gone behind his back to tell Didricksen that he’d been sent out to sea. Keeping some distance was a good idea, but Grip figured he’d go to the meeting and then keep his mouth shut about it to the Boss.
The next morning, when Grip read the Swedish newspapers online, they all led with the same story: “Pirates Send Pics!” It was the same photo Grip had seen the day before, plus a couple inside the house where the family was being held. There were also details about their condition, that the father had been shot and that the boy had epilepsy. Apparently, Grip’s caller had also been in contact with Swedish newsrooms. In fact, the pictures were worth a thousand words: dirty bandages and haggard faces, the filthy mattress the boy lay on in an unnatural position. In response came a constant stream of articles, comments, and posts. The old contempt for the partners at Scandinavian Capital was still there, and now everyone from bloggers to editorial writers began questioning the government’s lack of action. The prime minister offered yet another “No comment at this time” outside the entrance to Rosenbad, but he looked uneasy. The foreign minister was as usual shown with a government plane in the background of an international airport, but he had little to offer in response to the aggressive
questioning, and his usual banter was softened. “We are looking into the situation,” he tried. When a reporter said back, “But the pirates’ representative claims that you are not looking into anything at all,” he had nothing to say.
So smart, thought Grip, so damn smart. If you want to open the valve, first you must build pressure in the boiler. At ten, he got a text message on his regular phone: “When is the meeting?” It was from Didricksen, who’d never done that before. No doubt under pressure from the government.
At lunch, the other phone rang, the one Grip now took with him everywhere. It was the negotiator.
“When can we meet?” Grip opened, to get to the point.
“Tomorrow, late afternoon.”
“Obviously, you know that I’m staying at the Kempinski. Do you want to meet here, or would you prefer somewhere in town?”
“No, no, not in Djibouti.”
“What do you mean?”
“We are not meeting in Djibouti, we are meeting in Mombasa. Kenya.” Grip was quiet.
“There is a flight that leaves tonight,” said the voice.
Grip was battling with his anger, feeling he was being taken for a ride. He held back when he said, “Is that necessary? That takes a lot of time . . .” He couldn’t find the words. It would mean at least three days away, and that was impossible, not now, not with Fredrik Hansson chained to the floor of the police dungeon by the port.
“I need to rearrange my schedule,” Grip said at last. “I will confirm this evening.”
He didn’t even get an answer, the noise just disappeared. It disturbed Grip that this player could end a call so casually. For a player he was.
38
Grip didn’t have to go through spa booking anymore, as he and Ayanna had established a faster system. They still met in a massage room, but without Sarah working on his back first.
After the Monsoon Page 23