Grip didn’t go for the arm; instead, he used all his strength to get ahold of the man’s head. In a fraction of a second, faster than instinct, or even the idea of pulling the trigger, he forced the man’s head back, exposing his neck, and cut. The knife sliced through everything that sustains life, just below the larynx. So that the air coming out of his lungs could form no more than a gurgling sigh, while a few last heartbeats sent up fountains of blood before the heart too surrendered. The man sank to his knees and then fell forward headfirst as Grip let go. With the heavy thud of a lifeless body, hitting the floor.
Grip had the metallic taste of fear in his mouth. He tore at an empty burlap bag to wipe the blood from his hands, then thought of the suitcases and keeping them unstained. Ayanna had gotten splashed only on one foot and a sandal, but his shirt and pants were covered. “We have to go,” he said, taking an anxious look toward the house, through the wide-open doorway. But there seemed to be nothing beyond the banana trees and their leaves. As Grip walked up to the bags, he sent the gun spinning on the floor. It was a Glock—the man on the floor must have been some kind of cop or agent. The gun left there, in the midst of all the blood, would suggest that the one who’d killed him had acted out of self-defense.
But now Grip realized he had to deal with the money in a whole new way. He’d been quite sure about its being there, but he’d never imagined he’d take more than what they needed to get away from Lamu Island. The rest would be left to the men who’d been following her, so that when they came to their senses, they’d be happy to disappear, never to be heard from again. A way to buy silence. But now—one alive, and one dead. Cash in suitcases at a murder scene would serve as evidence, and Grip realized that the bags had to go.
“You’ll have to take one of them.” The bags were heavier than he’d imagined. They only had a few minutes to get out of there, he was convinced of it.
A gust swept like an invisible hand through the treetops, and the first heavy drops of rain hit the leaves. The thunder was still in the distance. Grip had carried the bags the last half mile by himself, going back and forth a few times to get all three, while Ayanna had set off with the key to the extra hotel room. She was presentable, her usual self, despite a few drops of blood on one of her leather sandals. Grip had heard loud shouts and what sounded like some kind of siren. He couldn’t be seen after the fight, not with his torn pants covered with deep red blotches. Moreover, he was drenched in sweat. Against his bare body, the bloody clothes made him feel unclean.
A little north of the hotel complex, a half-eroded concrete pier stood on a narrow, deserted beach. Just above it was a glade that had once been cleared for a building, but where the trees and bushes had grown back again. There, Grip had made a hiding place. He’d found an old plastic trash bag that he’d cut up and wrapped carefully around the suitcases, to protect them from the storm. He heard that distant sound again—a siren? It soon faded away, in the growing murmur from somewhere behind him, and then the real rain hit, like a wall from the sea. His hair, his shoulders—he was soaking wet in just a few seconds. He didn’t even try to run and find shelter in the trees a short distance away but just stood there. Tearing off his shirt, he turned his face to the sky. There was a sharp bang, and a flash as lightning struck the island. The storm was close by. He figured there’d no longer be a risk of finding anyone outside. His cell phone and the knife had been ditched long before, and his soiled shirt lay like a shed skin on the ground. The water flowed over his chest and back, rinsing away the blood. He still felt repulsive and longed to get rid of the other garments too. He took off not just his pants, but everything. He stood naked in the downpour and let the rain flow over his body. He got goose bumps, but still he was too hot and amped-up. Soon they’d be after him—Mr. Bolzano or whoever they thought he was. He was breathing hard, his mouth exhaling vapor in the rain. He started walking.
He came in through the unlocked hotel room door that opened directly onto the sea. Even inside, he could hear the rain drumming on the roof tiles. The water poured off him, and he stood just the way he’d left the clearing, buck naked, and looked around the room as if it were new or something he’d never seen before. The dim lights, the earthy colors of the floor tiles and ceramic tables, the enormous bed with its mosquito-netting canopy. Above and outside, the sound of the rain. Wouldn’t she . . . ? Then the gap of light widened from the bathroom door, and she came out. She had showered; she wore one towel wrapped around her body and another around her hair. Her step was cautious, tentative, not because of his nakedness but because of their wordlessness as they met again. That extra hotel room, her going there ahead of him—yet nobody had even given it a thought, until he stood completely naked with water dripping all over the floor in front of her.
She pulled the towel from her hair and handed it to him; he dried off his face and then dropped it on the floor. His nipples were stiff from the rain. He took a last step forward and pulled the towel where it was held in place between her breasts, so that she was completely nude. All his wetness met her heat. Putting his hands around her back, he held her tight, and she took hold of his arms in his embrace and pressed herself against him. Then he took her and lifted her onto the bed. He was already hard. Relentless, unstoppable, the certainty that something had to be completed. They both moaned from tense throats when he penetrated her, thrusting from his muscular ass. Tendons taut as cords under the skin, his knuckles whitening as he held her. He couldn’t wait to feel the tremors that lay in the borderland between life and death.
They lay, still panting in the aftermath, without a word having been spoken, when they heard a sudden noise outside and then the sound of people running. The direction was perfectly clear to him—it was from the main building, where he’d been staying. He was still holding her, but he stood up, noticing how she was listening, most of all waiting for his reaction. Another hotel room being stormed by police who’d picked up their trail. They were close now, and there was no other way out, so now he sat with his last card: the hope that the one person at the hotel who actually knew where he was had left for the day and was now huddling in the rain on some faraway part of the island.
The noise continued—shouting, boots stomping closer on a concrete path and then fading away again. The commotion outside grew uncertain. They wouldn’t start banging on doors and breaking into one room after another. Maybe they had no sense of how close they were, or maybe they lacked the courage to upset so many white honeymooners.
The final order could be heard for miles. Without a doubt, someone was cursing the elusive ghost of Vincenzo Bolzano, while Ernst Grip for the first time in many years had found release with someone other than a man.
54
At four in the morning, Ayanna and Grip left their room, heading out into the total stillness surrounding the hotel. Above them, the stars were coming out again. They made their way up to the abandoned concrete pier and soon heard the sound of an outboard motor shutting off and a boat gliding in, guided only by a flashlight. There they both stood, as if being picked up for an extravagant safari or a cruise: a man, a woman, and three fancy matching fabric suitcases. But there was also something shameful in the silence, and Abdu’s uncle, who was driving the boat, didn’t say a word, only returning to full throttle once he’d made his way out again, and then he navigated in complete darkness past the few lights that shone on the other side of the channel.
Their agreement, negotiated in only basic terms with their young messenger, reached the next phase when the uncle once again shut off the engine, seemingly without anything in front of them except the dark shoreline. But when the bow dipped and the water grew less choppy, some thin pilings, as tall as a man, appeared in the predawn light. These supported a narrow footbridge, and the man threw a rope over one piling and ran, without a word or a sign, alone over the creaking planks.
They heard low voices and then a lamp was switched on, lighting up a window like a square in the darkness. The agreement involved transport
ation in several stages, with the uncle getting help from a friend for the final leg. Once the bags, Grip, and Ayanna were ashore, they got into a car that wasn’t exactly roomy, but it was a car. The motor was running, and there was more of the same silence between those helping and those being helped. Grip had taken out a few bundles of notes from one of the bags, and when the loaded car headed out, he made the first installment. The uncle counted the bills without embarrassment and then went back down to his boat, without a thank-you or even a backward glance.
The same thing happened out at the small airfield. Grip paid up, and then the car disappeared immediately. Nothing seen, nothing heard, no name given in the early dawn.
Zar Air had said they could do pretty much anything, but on the airstrip not far from Lamu Island, they requested some daylight, if the customer wanted the time between landing and takeoff to be kept as short as possible. They’d agreed on an amount and on payment in cash, but when Grip had laid out all the conditions over the phone the day before, the price had very quickly doubled. It was the law of supply and demand, and he had the smell of someone with very few options. When Grip had first spoken to them, he hadn’t even had enough cash to buy a regular ticket back down to Mombasa. And now he’d scheduled not one but two planes, landing with only fifteen minutes between them. It wasn’t just the cash payment that pushed up the price, but the fact that he would decide the pilots’ destinations at the last minute. This wasn’t just a safety measure; Grip simply didn’t know what or who should go where, and he didn’t want to limit his options before he knew exactly how things would unfold.
When he and Ayanna had been standing with the bags, waiting for the boat at the concrete pier, she’d said out of nowhere, “You know, a Russian running a casino can convert cash into numbers in a nice, clean account.” Maybe it was really about trust, that she hadn’t quite dared to believe that Grip would get her and the bags out of there, but then things had changed during the night.
“Who?” Grip had asked.
“Timur can.”
Grip remembered the story of the Senegalese soldiers who’d gotten their hands crushed, in order to teach a Foreign Legion officer a lesson.
Ayanna had continued, as if to reassure him that this was carefully considered and not just an idle thought. “We can call him. He answers, he always does.”
The first plane landed just after the sun had half-risen above the trees, and it taxied in. Grip looked at the bags again. This was money he shouldn’t be bringing with him, and yet it was money that didn’t exist. The time for deciding had already run out. He had to move forward now; looking back would get him nowhere. When the cabin door opened and the stairs came down, Grip made a decision: “Call Timur.” Ayanna was already getting out the remaining phone, with an unused prepaid card.
Maybe the man she called was in the habit of getting up extremely early, or maybe he slept very lightly, but Ayanna started speaking Russian after just a few seconds. No strong emotions, no long explanations, just a tone of sober objectivity and even a short laugh. She put down the phone and held her hand over it. “He says he wants a third.” Obviously, more than just the owners of Zar Air lived off of people with few options. Grip shrugged. Behind his back, he heard Ayanna answer yes and hang up.
A pilot stuck his head out the door with an uncertain look.
“You’ll fly to Djibouti,” Grip said, “but only the three bags are going with you.” The pilot started climbing down to help carry the bags.
When he’d gotten paid and closed the plane door, Grip and Ayanna heard the next shuttle approaching.
“Timur knows that he has to pick up the bags himself at the airport?” Grip asked, when the front propeller of the plane carrying the money starting spinning again.
“Someone will get them,” Ayanna said, “but they probably won’t go through customs as usual, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
Grip took out the phone’s SIM card and pushed it down into the dirt next to the tarmac where they were standing.
The second plane taxied in, shutting down only the engine on the cabin side. It was all done in a minute, and then Grip and Ayanna were inside the plane and heading back to the runway. As if they were in a taxi, Grip said “Nairobi” to the copilot, who took the neat bankroll Grip held out and went back into the cockpit. The destination was news even to Ayanna, but after thinking for a moment, she didn’t have anything to say. When Grip turned to sit down, she gave him a puzzled and slightly hopeful gaze.
They were in the air when Grip asked her, “Did Hansson ever tell you how much money was in that shed?”
“No, never,” Ayanna said with half-closed eyes.
There was no use pretending. He had a couple of wads of cash on him, but beyond those and what he’d taken from one bag to pay for the boat, the car, and the two airplanes, he had no idea how much was in them.
Maybe half an hour later, between sleep and wakefulness, she added, “Timur will count the money when he gets it. That’s how you’ll know.” There were new layers of trust and dependence. Ayanna would be the one who’d handle the Russian casino operator.
The three suitcases of money that he’d sent off kept bothering him. Grip was tired but found it impossible to sleep. Finally, before landing, not wanting to leave things unsettled that he knew would come back to haunt him, he said, “Timur, you, and I—that’s a third each.”
Ayanna leaned forward, as if she’d expected it. “Do you mean, you seriously thought there was another option?”
In the international terminal at Nairobi, she’d bought a brush, a little makeup, a blouse, and a shawl as soon as they had gotten their boarding passes. Grip waited a few minutes outside the bathroom, and when Ayanna came out, no one would ever think she’d done anything but spend a carefree night in a hotel, and that she’d just arrived at the airport in a taxi.
“They might pull you aside when you get there,” he said to her at the gate. “After passport control, it might take an hour or so, I don’t know. They might make a phone call to check things out. But the permits are there, they’ll come back to you again and apologize, and then you’ll be able to travel freely.”
She kissed him on the cheek and boarded. British Airways, direct to London.
Grip stood and waited until the plane slowly taxied out.
He had an hour to kill, and he regretted that he’d only allowed himself to book a domestic hopper to Mombasa.
Not until he reached the Mombasa airport did he finally try to relax. He sat down with a coffee and the boarding pass he’d just been handed for the flight up to Djibouti. A few minutes of peace, and he still hadn’t turned on his regular phone. He’d seen himself in a mirror in the bathroom, red-eyed—anyone could see that he’d been working hard. When he’d finished his coffee, Grip finally turned on his phone and was surprised that he had only one missed call. It was from Didricksen, who’d called just a few hours before. On the answering machine was the familiar voice, as concise as it was impatient: “Ernst, make sure you’re the one who does the debriefing.” In other words, the hostages were free, and now there were nervous expectations and versions that needed polishing up.
When he turned on the negotiator’s phone, it pinged as the messages stacked up, one after another. Five total, and a voice mail, but that was no more than a breath, and then the recording stopped. Grip immediately called back, but he got no answer. The hostages were free—what else had happened?
55
Grip behaved as if he’d never been away from Djibouti. No one asked where he’d been; no one missed him. The room was just as he’d left it at the Kempinski, and the HMS Sveaborg was somewhere out at sea. He’d tried to call the negotiator a couple of times but got no answer, and then he realized that the Bergenskjölds had landed in Djibouti that morning and were now being treated at the French hospital. A physician he got ahold of said they needed rest, at least one night’s sleep before anyone started questioning them. The doctor was expecting pushback, but when Grip
spoke to him on the phone, it was after ten at night, and he’d started his day before dawn on a crumbling pier with Ayanna and three bags by his side—so getting a night off was more than he could have hoped for. He just said thank you and hung up.
All he had the energy for was heading to his Thousand-and-One-Nights bathroom to shower and shave, but he ended up sitting on the shower’s mosaic floor, letting the hot water pour down. As he sat there, in a haze, thoughts of Ben came to him. He felt the guilt that, up until now, he’d managed to fend off. What he’d done with Ayanna wasn’t about love, it was about regaining control—about him being alive and Ben being dead. He was alive, and all he could do was set aside the past and try to move forward.
Not until morning did Grip shave off his two-week beard, and then he headed to the hospital. Apparently, Colonel Frères was involved, because the same two military police officers who’d helped with Radovanović were now in the hallway outside the hospital room. They looked down at a list and nodded. Grip had made an appointment, and they pointed to the door.
The Bergenskjölds. They looked freshly washed as they sat in their beds, and their hair was clean, but their faces were marked by another place. Grip felt it as soon as he stepped into the room, beyond the exhaustion and the IVs; there was electricity in the air from an ongoing drama. Jenny Bergenskjöld was tucked into one bed, and her daughter, Alexandra, lay on top of another, with just a blanket over her legs. The father, Carl-Adam, looked out the window.
“Is the boy very bad?” asked Grip, thinking that this was the mood he was reading.
After the Monsoon Page 33