The White Lioness

by Henning Mankell

  “You’d better go straight there and calm the guy down,” said the operator at the emergency center.

  “What’s it called?” asked Norén, who was looking after the radio while Peters did the driving. “Disorderly conduct?”

  “There’s no such thing anymore,” said the operator. “But if the house belongs to his in-laws, you could say it’s taking the law into his own hands. Who cares what it’s called? Just calm the guy down. That’s the main thing.”

  They drove out toward Sandskogen without speeding up.

  “I guess I understand the guy,” said Peters. “Having a house of your own can be a pain in the ass. There’s always something that needs to be done. But you never have time, or it’s too expensive. Having to work on somebody else’s house in the same way can’t make things any better.”

  “Maybe we’d better help him pull the house down instead,” said Norén.

  They managed to find the right address. Quite a crowd had gathered on the road outside the fence. Norén and Peters got out of the car and watched the naked guy crawling around on the roof, prying off tiles with a crowbar. Just then his wife came running up. Norén could see she had been crying. They listened to her incoherent account of what had happened. The main thing was, he obviously did not have permission to do what he was doing.

  They went over to the house and yelled up at the guy sitting astride the roof ridge. He was concentrating so hard on the roof tiles, he hadn’t noticed the patrol car. When he saw Norén and Peters he was so surprised, he dropped the crowbar. It came sliding down the roof, and Norén had to leap to one side to avoid being hit.

  “Careful with that!” yelled Peters. “I guess you’d better come down. You have no right to be demolishing this house.”

  To their astonishment the guy obeyed them right away. He let down the ladder he had pulled up behind him, and climbed down. His wife came running up with a robe, which he put on.

  “You gonna arrest me?” asked the guy.

  “No,” said Peters. “But you’d better quit pulling that house down. To tell you the truth, I don’t really think they’ll be asking you to do any more repairs.”

  “All I want to do is to go fishing,” said the man.

  They drove back through Sandskogen. Norén reported back to headquarters.

  Just as they were about to turn into the Osterleden highway, it happened.

  “Here comes Wallander,” he said.

  Norén looked up from his notebook.

  As the car drove past, it looked like Wallander had not seen them. That would have been very strange if true, as they were in a marked patrol car painted blue and white. What attracted the attention of the two cops most of all, however, was not Wallander’s vacant stare.

  It was the guy in the passenger seat. He was black.

  Peters and Norén looked at each other.

  “Wasn’t that an African in the car?” wondered Norén.

  “Yeah,” said Peters. “He sure was black.”

  They were both thinking about the severed finger they had found a few weeks earlier, and the black man they’d been searching for all over the country.

  “Wallander must have caught him,” said Norén hesitantly.

  “Why is he traveling in that direction, then?” objected Peters. “And why didn’t he stop when he saw us?”

  “It was like he didn’t want to see us,” said Norén. “Like kids do. If they close their eyes, they think nobody can see them.”

  Peters nodded.

  “Do you think he’s in trouble?”

  “No,” said Norén. “But where did he manage to find the black guy?”

  Then they were interrupted by an emergency call about a suspected stolen motorcycle found abandoned in Bjäresjö. When they finished their shift they went back to the station. To their surprise, when they asked about Wallander in the coffee room they discovered he had not shown up. Peters was just going to tell everybody how they had seen him when he saw Norén quickly put his finger over his lips.

  “Why shouldn’t I say anything?” he asked when they were together in the locker room, getting ready to go home.

  “If Wallander hasn’t shown up, there must be some reason why,” said Norén. “Just what, is nothing to do with you or me. Besides, it could be some other African. Martinson once said Wallander’s daughter had something going with a black man. It could have been him, for all we know.”

  “I still think it’s weird,” Peters insisted.

  That was a feeling that stayed with him even after he got back home to his row house on the road to Kristianstad. When he had finished his dinner and played with his kids for a while, he went out with the dog. Martinson lived in the same neighborhood, so he decided to stop by and tell him what he and Norén had seen. The dog was a Labrador bitch and Martinson had inquired recently if he could join the waiting list for puppies.

  Martinson himself answered the door. He invited Peters to come in.

  “I must get back home in a minute,” said Peters. “But there is one thing I’d like to mention. Do you have time?”

  Martinson had some position or other in the Liberal Party and was hoping for a seat on the local council before long; he had been reading some boring political reports the party had sent him. He lost no time putting on a jacket, and came out to join Peters. The latter told him what had happened earlier that afternoon.

  “Are you sure about this?” asked Martinson when Peters had finished.

  “We can’t both have been seeing things,” said Peters.

  “Strange,” said Martinson thoughtfully. “I’d have heard right away if it was the African who’s missing a finger.”

  “Maybe it was his daughter’s boyfriend,” hazarded Peters.

  “Wallander said that was all over and done with,” said Martinson.

  They walked in silence for a while, watching the dog straining at its leash.

  “It was like he didn’t want to see us,” said Peters tentatively. “And that can only mean one thing. He didn’t want us to know what he was up to.”

  “Or at least about the African in the passenger seat,” said Martinson, lost in thought.

  “I guess there’ll be some natural explanation,” said Peters. “I mean, I don’t want to suggest Wallander is up to something he shouldn’t be.”

  “Of course not,” said Martinson. “But it was good you told me about it.”

  “I mean, I don’t want to go spreading gossip,” Peters insisted.

  “This isn’t gossip,” said Martinson.

  “Norén will be mad,” said peters.

  “He doesn’t need to know,” said Martinson.

  They separated outside Martinson’s house. Peters promised Martinson he could buy a puppy when the time came.

  Martinson wondered if he ought to call Wallander. Then he decided to wait and talk to him the next day. With a sigh, he returned to his endless political documents.

  When Wallander showed up at the police station the next morning shortly before eight, he had an answer ready for the question he knew would come. The previous day when, after much hesitation, he had decided to take Victor Mabasha out with him in the car, he thought the risk of bumping into a police colleague or anybody he knew was small. He had taken roads he knew patrol cars seldom used. But needless to say, he ran into Peters and Norén. He noticed them so late there was no time to tell Victor Mabasha to crouch down and make himself invisible. Nor had he managed to turn off in some other direction. He could see in the corner of his eye that Peters and Norén had noticed the man in the seat beside him. They would ask for an explanation the next day, that was clear to him right away. At the same time he cursed his luck, and wished he had never set out.

  Was there no end to it, he asked himself.

  Then, when he had calmed down, he turned to his daughter for help once more.

  “Herman Mboya will have to be resurrected as your boyfriend,” he said. “If anybody should ask. Which is pretty unlikely.”

  Sh
e stared at him, then burst out laughing in resignation.

  “Don’t you remember what you told me when I was a kid?” she asked. “That one lie leads to another? And eventually you get into such a mess, nobody knows what’s true any more.”

  “I dislike this just as much as you do,” said Wallander. “But it’ll soon be over. He’ll soon be out of the country. Then we can forget he was ever here.”

  “Sure I’ll say Herman Mboya has come back,” she said. “To tell you the truth, I sometimes wish he had.”

  When Wallander got to the police station on Monday morning, then, he had an explanation ready for why there was an African sitting beside him in the car on Sunday afternoon. In a situation where most things were complicated and threatening to slide out of control, that seemed to him the least of his problems. When he noticed Victor Mabasha on the street that morning, shrouded in fog and looking like nothing more than a mirage, his first instinct was to rush back to the apartment and summon his colleagues for assistance. But something held him back, something at odds with all his usual police logic. Even when they were together in the cemetery that night in Stockholm, he had the distinct impression the black man was telling the truth. He was not the killer of Louise Åkerblom. He might have been there, but he was innocent. It was another guy, a guy called Konovalenko, and later he’d tried to kill Victor Mabasha as well. There was a possibility the black man missing a finger had tried to prevent what happened at the deserted house. Wallander had been thinking non-stop about what was behind it all. That was the spirit in which he took him back to the apartment, well aware that he might be making a mistake. On several occasions Wallander had used unconventional methods, to say the least, when dealing with suspects or convicted criminals. More than once Björk had felt obliged to remind Wallander of the regulations regarding correct police procedures. Even so, he required the black man to surrender any weapon he was carrying while they were still on the street. He accepted the pistol, and then frisked him. The black man had seemed strangely unaffected, as if he expected nothing less of Wallander than an invitation to join him in his home. Just to prove he was not completely naive, Wallander asked how he had managed to track down his address.

  “On the way to the cemetery,” said the man, “I looked through your wallet. I memorized your address.”

  “You attacked me,” he said. “And now you’ve traced me to my home, many miles away from Stockholm. You’d better have some good answers to the questions I’m going to ask you.”

  They sat down in the kitchen, and Wallander closed the kitchen door so they wouldn’t wake Linda. Afterwards, he would remember those hours they sat opposite each other at the table as the most remarkable conversation he had ever taken part in. It was not just that Wallander received his first real insight into the strange world from which Victor Mabasha originated and to which he would soon return. He was also forced to ask himself how it was possible for a human being to be made up of so many incompatible parts. How could a man be a cold-blooded killer who approached his contracts as if they were part of an accountable day’s work, and at the same time be a rational, sensitive human being with well-thought-out political views? He did not realize the conversation was part of a confidence trick that had him fooled. Victor Mabasha had seen how the wind was blowing. His ability to give the impression of reliability could give him the freedom to return to South Africa. The spirits had whispered in his ear that he should seek out the cop who was hunting Konovalenko and obtain his help to flee the country.

  What Wallander remembered most vividly in retrospect was what Victor Mabasha said about a plant that grew exclusively in the Namibian desert. It could live as long as two thousand years. It grew long leaves like protective shadows to shield its flowers and its complicated root system. Victor Mabasha regarded this unusual plant as a symbol of the opposing forces in his homeland, and also struggling for supremacy in his own being.

  “People don’t surrender their privileges voluntarily,” he said. “These privileges have become a habit with roots so deep, they’ve become a sort of extra limb. It’s a mistake to believe it’s all down to a racial defect. Where I come from it’s the whites who reap the benefits of this habit. But if things had been different it could just as easily have been me and my brothers. You can never fight racism with racism. What has to happen in my country, so battered and bruised for so many hundreds of years, is that the habits of submission have to be broken. The whites must be made to understand that if they’re to survive the immediate future, they must step down. They have to hand over land to the deprived blacks who have been robbed of their land for centuries. They have to transfer most of their riches to those who have nothing, they have to learn how to treat the blacks as human beings. Barbarism has always had a human face. That’s precisely what makes barbarism so inhuman. The blacks, who are so used to being submissive, to regarding themselves as nobodies in a community of nobodies, have to change their habits. Could it be that submissiveness is the most difficult of all human failings to shake off? It’s a habit so deeply ingrained, it deforms one’s whole being and leaves no part of the body untouched. Progressing from being a nobody to being a somebody is the longest journey a human being can undertake. Once you’ve learned to put up with your inferiority, it becomes a habit which dominates your whole life. And I believe a peaceful solution is an illusion. The apartheid system in my country has gone so far, it’s already begun to flounder because it’s become impossible. New generations of blacks have grown up and refused to submit. They’re impatient, they can see the imminent collapse. But everything is progressing so slowly. Besides, there are too many whites who think the same way. They refuse to accept privileges requiring them to live as if all the blacks in their country were invisible, as if they only existed as servants or some strange sort of animals confined to remote shanty towns. In my country we have large nature reserves where wild animals can rove unhindered. At the same time, we have large human reserves where people are constantly hindered. Where I come from, wild animals are better off than humans.”

  Victor Mabasha fell silent, and looked at Wallander as if expecting him to ask questions or make objections. It seemed to Wallander that all whites were the same to Victor Mabasha, whether they lived in South Africa or anywhere else.

  “A lot of my black brothers and sisters think this feeling of inferiority can be overcome by its opposite, superiority,” Victor Mabasha went on. “But that’s wrong, of course. That just leads to antipathy, and tensions between various groups where there should be cooperation. For instance, it can split a family in two. And you should know, Inspector Wallander, that where I come from if you don’t have a family, you are nothing. For an African, the family is the be-all and end-all.”

  “I thought your spirits fulfilled that role,” said Wallander.

  “Spirits are part of our families,” said Victor Mabasha. “The spirits are our ancestors, keeping watch over us. They are invisible members of our family. We never forget their existence. That’s why the whites have committed such an incomprehensible crime in driving us out of the land where we have lived for so many generations. Spirits don’t like being forced to quit the land that was once theirs. The spirits hate the shanty towns the whites have forced us to live in even more than we do.”

  He stopped abruptly, as if the words he had just spoken had given him such terrible insight he had trouble in believing what he just said.

  “I grew up in a family that was split from the very start,” he said after a long pause. “The whites knew they could break down our resistance by splitting up our families. I could see how my brothers and sisters started reacting more and more like blind rabbits. They just ran around in circles, around and around, and no longer knew where they came from or where they were headed. I saw all that, and chose a different route. I learned how to hate. I drank of the dark waters that arouse the desire for revenge. But I also realized that despite their superiority, their arrogant assumption that their supremacy was God-given, t
hey also had their weak points. They were scared. They talked about making South Africa a perfect work of art, a white palace in Paradise.

  “But they could never see how impossible that dream of theirs really was. And those who did refused to admit as much. So the very foundation on which everything was built became a lie, and fear came to them in the night. They filled their houses with weapons. But fear found its way inside even so. Violence became a part of the everyday program of fear. I could see all that, and I resolved to keep my friends close by me, but my enemies even closer. I would play the role of the black man who knew what white men wanted. I would feed my contempt by running errands for them. I would work in their kitchens, and spit into the soup before carrying it in to their tables. I would continue to be a nobody who, in secret, had become a somebody.”

  He fell silent. Wallander thought he had said all he wanted to say. But how much had Wallander really understood? How could all this help him to understand what brought Victor Mabasha to Sweden? What did it all mean? He had always had a vague understanding that South Africa was a country in the process of being destroyed by an awful political system based on racial discrimination, and he now had a clearer understanding of what it was all about. But the assassination? Who was it aimed at? Who was behind it all? An organization?

  “I have to know more,” he said. “You still haven’t said who’s behind all this. Who paid for your ticket to Sweden?”

  “Those ruthless people are mere shadows,” said Victor Mabasha. “Their ancestors abandoned them long ago. They meet in secrecy to plan the downfall of our country.”

  “And you run their errands?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “Why not?”

  “You kill people.”

  “Sooner or later others will kill me.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “I know it will happen.”

  “But you didn’t kill Louise Åkerblom?”