After the Monsoon

by Robert Karjel

  But then another partner made the mistake of agreeing to a lengthy interview on a morning TV show, and, too tanned but unprepared, got blasted on social media for lying about his art collection. Soon the tabloids started sniping again. Grip grew annoyed reading about it, feeling he was lost in a storm of details and impressions whose real meaning he couldn’t gauge. Judy had touched base: “Hansson didn’t use his cell phone when he got off the plane in Mombasa, so we can’t follow him. We’ve lost him.” The satellites at the top of the food chain were useless. Grip had sent a picture of Hansson to Ayanna, but she hadn’t seen him on the flight.

  It was like a wound that wouldn’t heal. Couldn’t heal? Where the hell had he gone? Grip was surprised himself that he couldn’t stop thinking about Hansson.

  “You have to stay longer in Mombasa,” he texted Ayanna.

  “Then I will need more clothes.” She’d only packed for a quick trip back and forth. “How much can I spend?”

  “Don’t disappoint me,” Grip had replied, just to say something, but a few hours later, she began sending photos taken in front of fitting-room mirrors.

  “Satisfied?” Grip didn’t know at first if she was being vain or just teasing him.

  “Aren’t you the one who’s going to wear this, not me?” And soon the game was on. A few minutes of images and comments sent back and forth, then a break of an hour or so before the next store.

  Meanwhile, Grip went through the gym bag he’d taken from Hansson’s room. He flipped through the sports and car magazines, and found a dog-eared page about diving in Mozambique. His pocket calendar had a spread for every week without a single note, only dots in blue and red ink, obviously a code. There were business cards from foreign militaries and African firms around the continent, often marked with only a company name, a phone number, and a vague note saying “Services” or “Transportation.”

  Judy texted again. “Hansson paid someone named Zaruba more than $1,500 using a credit card a few hours ago.”

  “Zaruba, who would that be?”

  “I don’t know. That’s all we got in the transmission we intercepted. I thought . . .”

  “Thank you.”

  While Grip picked through Hansson’s meaningless papers, he started thinking about something the ship captain had said that first night, at the dinner for diplomats aboard the Sveaborg. He’d described how ransom payments were actually delivered to the pirates, for their hijacked vessels.

  “The money is dropped from the air by parachute . . . There’s a legitimate airline in Kenya that does the job using small planes.” And soon, Grip sat with the stack of business cards in his hand again. He laid them out on the hotel-room carpet in a fan—there. What he noticed was the stylized drawing of the plane, with the spinning circles of propellers viewed head-on, more artistic than the other cards. Zar Air. TRANSPORT IS OUR BUSINESS, THE CARGO IS OUR CUSTOMERS’ BUSINESS. And in one corner, above the phone number and the web address in small print: ZARUBA AIRLINES INCORPORATED.

  An air taxi company in Mombasa with twin-engine propeller planes. On the website you could book tours, safari flights, trips down to Zanzibar, and other more specialized excursions. A short video showed them delivering money by parachute to a merchant. They were proud of what they did—We Go the Extra Mile. They could arrange everything from taking tourists to see the lions in Mkomazi National Park, to packing and moving perishable goods.

  Fifteen hundred dollars, that was the last sign that blinked on the Americans’ screens from Fredrik Hansson, who’d begun to fade out and soon would disappear altogether from the radar.

  “Now that’s enough,” Grip texted back to Ayanna when the image of a hand lifting a designer suitcase appeared, “whether it’s a cheap fake or not.”

  “That is out of the question. Everything that I bought must be packed in something.” It was after eight in the evening. He called her. Not to discuss the suitcase, or any of her other purchases, but only to ask: “So where are you staying?”

  She told him the name of the hotel; it was on the beach. Grip searched on his computer and looked at the pictures.

  “I have played here, entertained in the bar a few times.”

  “Is it better, being there as a guest?”

  “You can avoid the rooms next to the parking lot when someone else is paying.”

  It was Fredrik Hansson’s bundles of hundreds, which Ayanna knew nothing about, that were bankrolling her ocean view. Grip sat on the floor of his room at the Kempinski. Ayanna knew Hansson’s name from playing the go-between with the police in Djibouti, but no more. So when, earlier in the day, Grip had sent her the picture of him, he told her that Hansson killed a Swedish officer and now had fled.

  “Tomorrow morning, I need you to go out to the airport,” he said now. “Zar Air, an air taxi company there, they have a few planes. Hansson seems to have sent something through them.”

  “Zar Air, tomorrow. I will do it. Have you eaten dinner?”

  “Didn’t have time.”

  “Order room service. I will.”

  “If you say so.”

  There was silence for a moment.

  “Good night,” she said then.

  Zar Air, epilepsy medicine, Mombasa. Almost exactly one day ago, Grip had been standing face-to-face with Hansson at the hangar. He’d had his knife hidden, ready in his hand, and yet the world had seemed so much simpler. Twenty-four hours ago: no Zaruba, no politician’s inflated pride about a few pills. And now he faced the possibility that a few bad decisions would have infinite repercussions.

  Grip called and ordered up two hamburgers. He ate only the meat and fried onions, and then, obsessively, went back online. A hotel baron had donated $1 million to the fund, while his staff smiled and applauded. Now they were just $8.5 million short. Grip watched his auction site, the one with Edward Hopper’s works in London. There were links to some articles, and the Night Shadows drawing was mentioned but not the main feature. The focus was on a major oil painting of a classic Hopper house that, according to the amped-up writer, would go for the annual budget of a small country. Grip figured the sketch—the one he couldn’t get enough of—would go for somewhere around the starting price. A little more than the fund collected so far for the Bergenskjölds. They’d been held hostage for sixty-five days now. The auction would be in about three weeks.

  It was well after midnight, and Grip was still awake. He hadn’t taken a sleeping pill, afraid of getting addicted. He wrestled with unruly thoughts and a nightlong pain in his stomach: he was homesick, missing Ben.

  Longing for meaning, and longing for someone.

  44

  On the mattress in the stone house, they’d lost track of time. But their fear of Darwiish, and the party he threw every Friday night, gave them a reference point for the days of the week.

  In this way, they knew for certain that Sebastian died very early on a Tuesday. Jenny would always listen for his breath when she woke up in the middle of the night, but in her exhaustion, she often slept straight through the last hours before dawn. It must have been then that the life flowed out of him.

  There were no scenes; she didn’t even wake up Carl-Adam. Instead, she cried softly to herself, for a long time, filled with sadness that at first felt like a confusing kind of relief. Her frustration had given way a long time ago, at about the same time as she lost hope that something would save Sebastian. She had no idea how many seizures he’d had. The last time she’d looked at him, she’d been searching for warning signs of more seizures—a twitch of his mouth or an involuntary movement of his eyes. Only now could she see what he looked like, actually see her son, not just his illness. She saw Sebastian as he lay there peacefully—the child who was no longer part of the dirt, or the soiled mattress—saw the serenity in his face, and how thin he’d gotten.

  Alexandra had heard something and woken up earlier than usual. She’d crept over without a word, sitting down to lay a hand on her brother’s feet. So they sat, mother and daughter, and though
the tears came in waves, it was the silence that let them shut out the world.

  Carl-Adam sobbed and coughed for a moment when he woke up and realized what had happened. Then he sat as usual, unresponsive and apparently weak.

  Two guards appeared in the doorway, whispered and pointed, and then disappeared. After that, everything continued as usual. Even the water bucket arrived without a single comment.

  A day later came the changes: the swollen body, too many flies. Alexandra sat facing her novel, with her back toward Sebastian. Jenny saw that she wasn’t reading.

  “They have shovels,” she said.

  “Here?” Jenny asked.

  “That night.” Alexandra meant the Friday night she’d been pulled away by the guards. “They have shovels in the other house.”

  She was the only one in the family who’d been there.

  They had to dig the grave themselves. The ground was baked hard by the sun, so they mostly used loose stones. Carl-Adam broke into sobs, and only calmed himself by swearing, as Jenny put the last stone over the sheet that covered Sebastian’s face. They kept adding stones until they’d built a knee-high mound.

  That same evening, a guard came in with the four boxes of pills. He held them out toward Alexandra, as if she were the one who needed the medications, and he stood for a moment before Jenny took them out of his hands. She sat the rest of the evening with the boxes in her lap.

  Someone must have said something to the negotiator, because he showed up the very next day.

  They’d seen the jeep coming; Darwiish was one of the passengers. They heard loud voices and arguing, and it was impossible to tell who was accusing whom. A shot rang out.

  Then steps in the outer room, and the fluttering of the negotiator’s neatly ironed white shirt. He sent the guard away with angry gestures, as if he never wanted to see his face again, and then called for Carl-Adam, who dragged himself out. The door between the two rooms was closed; Jenny sat as usual by the gap.

  The negotiator bit his lower lip, hard. “Enough is enough,” he said, drumming on the table, as if searching for what to say next. He didn’t mention a word about Sebastian—Jenny had seen through the little window that he’d been to the grave—but instead he went off about Scandinavian Capital. Although Jenny could hear his every word, she realized she didn’t understand what he wanted next. Carl-Adam got hung up on the details, trying to counter with his usual agenda: the ransom money, whether it could be reduced, and what he imagined the MaryAnn was worth. The negotiator didn’t bother with him, and continued his monologue about partners and sales. He got up and paced the floor a few times before he went up to the front door, opened it with a jerk, and looked out.

  Jenny realized then that it hadn’t been about anything; his only purpose had been to fill the air with words, until he could be sure that he really was alone with Carl-Adam.

  “Maybe we can cut it to seven,” said Carl-Adam, when he sat down at the table again.

  The negotiator met his submissive gaze.

  “Don’t you understand?”

  “Seven million might be possible.”

  “Nothing is possible.” He reached down for something in his bag on the floor, and when he sat up again, there was a gun on the table. A small thud on the dry wood of the table, and it lay there, like something totally unfamiliar. “Six bullets, that’s all you get,” he said.

  Carl-Adam looked as if he’d just been ordered to kill himself.

  “But it doesn’t matter,” the negotiator continued, “because you’ll never get the opportunity to reload.”

  Jenny felt nauseous. Being held hostage was itself a curse, and now she faced a violent end. Did what lay on the table represent hope, or was it the ultimate symbol of impotence?

  “How . . . ?” Carl-Adam couldn’t find the words to formulate his question.

  “Do you know how to use it?” said the negotiator, with a look that said this wasn’t the time to hesitate. “You shot and killed one of them.”

  Carl-Adam nodded awkwardly. “And when . . . ?” he managed to say.

  “When is something that you must decide. But not tonight, and not tomorrow.”

  Alexandra had patiently managed to make a hiding place in the back room. Sitting on her mattress, she’d removed a stone from the corner of the wall using the handle of her spoon. Loosening the stone wasn’t hard, as the mortar was barely more than dried mud.

  But carving out the space behind it took time. Jenny and Carl-Adam had seen her working on it in the evenings, and often in the middle of the day, when the guard in the outer room mostly slept in his chair. They’d let her have her way, seeing it as a way for her to kill time. It was harmless enough, as they didn’t have anything that needed to be hidden. For a while, she kept the candy that she’d brought from the MaryAnn there. Once in a while, she’d wiggle out the stone and take a couple of pieces for herself and Sebastian, before returning the bag and gently putting the stone back in place. It was a kind of ritual, a tiny gesture of victory before the day’s last light disappeared. But time had run its course, both for the zoo candies and for her brother.

  The loose rock meant nothing, until suddenly there was something that needed to be hidden.

  “Don’t touch it!” Carl-Adam said, after Alexandra had shown him how to remove the stone, and stashed the gun behind it.

  45

  Judy Drexler called him again: “The cell phone that your negotiator uses has been active in Mogadishu. The people who do my monitoring say that he’s in contact with some very interesting numbers. They followed up, but now it seems the phone has been dead for a couple of days.”

  “You mean, something happened?”

  “I don’t mean anything.”

  “He’d make sure the family received the drugs,” said Grip after a few seconds’ hesitation. “He probably turns off his phone when he goes out to where they’re being held.”

  “Maybe. Have you gotten anything more on Hansson?”

  “Nothing.”

  That wasn’t quite true. Ayanna had gotten in touch with Grip after her morning visit to the airport in Mombasa. They’d spoken for quite a while, and she’d described everything in detail. Grip could see the whole scene: how she’d headed out to the Zar Air offices, well-dressed and confident, entering the hut between two hangars. She’d slipped in as an important customer with many contacts, yet without supplying any full names. She talked nonstop, asked questions about everything, been both friendly and incoherent. She’d created uncertainty by trying to get the order for a goods transport confirmed, an order that naturally wasn’t registered anywhere. She played at being upset, and worried; she started talking about imaginary friends, dropping both made-up and real names. At some point, Fredrik Hansson entered the discussion, as a seemingly minor character. Yes, yes, she’d been told, they knew him well, a loyal customer over the years. Soon one thing led to another.

  Fredrik Hansson hadn’t used Zar Air to send a package—he’d sent himself. He’d left Mombasa and flown to Lamu Island. During peak periods, Zar Air flew there several times a week.

  “Lamu Island?”

  “Where the rich people go,” Ayanna explained.

  Grip had a vague idea; he’d heard the island described as a kind of East African Ibiza. When he Googled, he got images of a historic town with fancy villas owned by actors, along with fruit drinks, white sand beaches, and bars with views of the sea. The island was a fair distance north of Mombasa, but just an hour’s drive south of the Somali border. The wealth was provocative, so near to the lawlessness—Grip found a strange mixture of ads for two-story villas with custom pools and articles about Kenyan police engaged in shoot-outs while trying to stop gangs from reaching the island. Only a narrow channel separated Lamu’s northwest coast from the mainland.

  “I can go tonight,” Ayanna told him.

  He owed her, Grip knew it, and he was indebted for more than just money. But now he had a lead on Hansson, and he couldn’t go there himself. There on Lam
u Island, in Kenya, he couldn’t make a move. Hansson would recognize him and disappear again. He couldn’t let him get away, not now.

  “Do not be difficult,” she continued. “After all, you want nothing more than to get your hands on Hansson.”

  “How will you get there?”

  “With Zar Air, how else? And your money.”

  Wrong, Grip corrected her in his head—Fredrik Hansson’s money. And then he added, “Get on the first plane you can.”

  What would he really do if Ayanna found Hansson on Lamu Island? Grip tried to stop thinking about the problem by distracting himself with another. He texted the negotiator: “How’s it going with the medicine? And how is the family?” He got no answer.

  Already the next day, Ayanna was on the island. Her reports sounded like posts from a blogger on holiday. There were photos with short captions: a local woman buying fruit at a market, elaborately carved wooden gates, Ayanna’s lunch on a plate, the view down from the lush hillside to the sea. Grip deleted the silly messages as they arrived. It was like watching a fishing bob float hopelessly on the surface, for hours. Every time the phone pinged, it was another meaningless tug on the line. “I am talking to people.” . . . “They party everywhere, and some fear raids from across the channel.” Then a picture of military officers looking solemn down by the harbor. Ping. “Have met a broker.” . . . “The place is full of hustlers and plainclothes police officers.” The bob moved, but only because of the wind.

  Then suddenly, the bob dove. Ping. It was her second night on the island, and there he was, Fredrik Hansson, in a jerky video, secretly taken with a cell phone. Drunk, it appeared, in the crowd at a bar. Grip felt his anger mount, just seeing the man’s grin. He was yelling, toasting with his beer bottle toward the camera. Was Ayanna, with her phone, just a face in the crowd?

  A moment later, she sent a new video; now they were sitting down, just the two of them. Hansson was so drunk he didn’t even notice that she was filming. Snippets of video kept arriving, so Grip assumed Ayanna sent them when she held her phone under the table, or when she excused herself and went to the bathroom.