The White Lioness kw-3

by Henning Mankell

  There was somebody outside the vault. And it was not an animal. The movements were too meticulously cautious.

  He leaned rapidly over the cop and grabbed him by the throat.

  “For the last time,” he hissed, “was there anybody tailing you?”

  “No. Nobody. I swear.”

  Victor Mabasha let go. Konovalenko, he thought in a fury. I don’t know how you do it, but I do know now why Jan Kleyn wants you working for him in South Africa.

  They could not stay in the vault. He eyed the hurricane lamp. That was their chance.

  “When I open the door, throw the lamp to the left,” he said to the cop, untying his hands at the same time. He turned up the flame as far as it would go, and handed it over.

  “Jump to the right,” he whispered. “Crouch down. Don’t get in my line of fire.”

  He could see the cop wanted to protest. But he raised his hand and Wallander said nothing. Then he cocked the pistol and they got ready for action.

  “I’ll count to three,” he said.

  He flung open the iron door and the cop hurled the lamp to the left. Victor Mabasha fired at the same moment. The cop came stumbling behind him and he almost overbalanced. Just then he heard shots from at least two different weapons. He threw himself to one side and crawled behind a gravestone. The cop crawled off in some other direction. The hurricane lamp lit up the burial vault. Victor Mabasha detected a movement in one corner and fired. The bullet hit the iron door and disappeared whining into the vault. Another shot shattered the hurricane lamp and everything went black. Somebody scampered away along one of the gravel paths. Then all was quiet once more.

  Kurt Wallander could feel his heart pounding like a piston against his ribs. He did not seem able to breathe properly, and thought he’d been hit. But there was no blood, and he couldn’t feel any pain apart from his tongue, which he had bitten some time ago. With great care he crawled behind a tall gravestone. He lay there absolutely still. His heart was still pounding away. Victor Mabasha was nowhere to be seen. Once he was sure he was alone, he started running. He stumbled his way forward along the gravel paths, running towards the lights on the main road, and the noise from what cars were still out. He kept running until he was outside the boundary fence of the cemetery. He stopped at a bus stop and managed to wave down a cab on its way back to the city from Arlanda airport.

  “Central Hotel,” he gasped.

  The driver eyed him up and down in suspicion.

  “I don’t know if I want you in my cab,” he said. “You’ll make everything filthy.”

  “I’m a cop, dammit,” Wallander roared. “Just drive!”

  The driver pulled away from the bus stop. When they got to the hotel he paid for the taxi without waiting for either a receipt or his change, and collected his key from the receptionist, who stared at his clothes in astonishment. It was midnight when he closed the door behind him and collapsed onto the bed.

  When he had calmed down, he called Linda.

  “Why are you calling as late as this?” she wondered.

  “I’ve been busy until now,” he said. “I didn’t have a chance to call you earlier.”

  “Why do you sound so funny? Is something the matter?”

  Wallander had a lump in his throat and was on the point of bursting into tears. But he managed to control himself.

  “It’s nothing,” he said.

  “Are you sure everything’s all right?”

  “Everything’s fine. Why shouldn’t it be?”

  “You know better than I do.”

  “Don’t you remember from when you used to live at home that I was always out working at strange hours?”

  “I guess so,” she said. “I’d forgotten.”

  He made up his mind on the spur of the moment.

  “I’m coming over to your place in Bromma,” he said. “Don’t ask me why. I’ll explain later.”

  He left the hotel and took a cab to where she lived in Bromma. Then they sat at the kitchen table with a beer each, and he told her what had happened.

  “They say it’s good for kids to get some idea of what their parents do at work,” she said, shaking her head. “Weren’t you scared?”

  “Of course I was scared. These people have no respect at all for human life.”

  “Why don’t you send the cops after them?”

  “I’m a cop myself. And I need to think.”

  “Meanwhile they might kill a few more people.”

  He nodded.

  “You’re right,” he said. “I’ll go to the station at Kungsholmen. But I felt I needed to talk to you first.”

  “I’m glad you came.”

  She went out into the hall with him.

  “Why did you ask if I was at home?” she asked suddenly, as he was about to leave. “Why didn’t you say you stopped by yesterday?”

  Wallander did not know what she meant.

  “What are you talking about?” he asked.

  “I met Mrs. Nilson when I got home, she lives next door,” she said. “She told me you’d been here asking if I was in. You have a key, don’t you?”

  “I haven’t spoken with any Mrs. Nilson,” said Wallander.

  “Maybe I got her wrong, then,” she said.

  A shiver suddenly ran down Wallander’s spine.

  “What did she say?”

  “One more time,” he said. “You came home. You met Mrs. Nilson. She said I’d been asking after you?”

  “Yep.”

  “Repeat what she said, word for word.”

  “Your dad’s been asking after you. That’s all.”

  Wallander felt scared.

  “I’ve never met Mrs. Nilson,” he said. “How can she know what I look like? How can she know I’m me?”

  It was a while before she caught on.

  “You mean it could have been somebody else? But who? Why? Who would want to pretend they were you?”

  Wallander looked at her in all seriousness. Then he switched off the light and went cautiously over to one of the living room windows.

  The street down below was deserted.

  He went back to the hall.

  “I don’t know who it was,” he said. “But you’re going back with me to Ystad tomorrow. I don’t want you around here on your own right now.”

  She could tell he was deadly serious.

  “OK,” she said simply. “Do I need to be scared tonight?”

  “You don’t need to be scared at all,” he said. “It’s just that you shouldn’t be here on your own for the next few days.”

  “Don’t say any more,” she begged. “Right now I want to know as little as possible.”

  She made up a bed for him on a mattress.

  Then he lay there in the dark, listening to her breathing. Konovalenko, he thought.

  When he was certain she was asleep, he got up and went over to the window.

  The street down below was just as deserted as before.

  Wallander had called a prerecorded information service and established there was a train to Malmo at three minutes past seven, and they left the apartment in Bromma soon after six.

  He had slept restlessly, dozing off then waking up with a start. He wanted to spend a few hours in a train. Flying would mean he got to Malmo too quickly. He needed to rest, and he needed to think.

  They came to a standstill just outside Mjolby with an engine failure, and waited there nearly an hour. But Wallander was just grateful for the extra time. They occasionally exchanged a few words. But just as often she was buried in a book, and he was lost in thought.

  Fourteen days, he thought as he watched a lonely tractor plowing what looked like a never-ending field. He tried counting the seagulls following the plow, but could not manage it.

  Fourteen days since Louise Akerblom had disappeared. The image of her was already beginning to melt away from the two small children’s consciousness. He wondered if Robert Akerblom would be able to cling to his God. What sort of answers could Pastor Tureso
n give him?

  He looked at his daughter, who had fallen asleep with her cheek resting against the window. What did her mostly solitary fear look like? Was there a landscape where their abandoned and deserted thoughts could arrange to meet, without their knowing about it? We don’t really know anybody, he thought. Least of all ourselves.

  Had Robert Akerblom known his wife?

  The tractor disappeared into a dip in the field. Wallander imagined it sinking slowly into a bottomless pit of mud.

  The train suddenly jerked into motion. Linda woke up and looked at him.

  “Are we there?” she asked, drowsily. “How long have I been asleep?”

  “A quarter of an hour, maybe,” he said with a smile. “We haven’t reached Nassjo yet.”

  “I could use a cup of coffee,” she said, yawning. “How about you?”

  They sat in the buffet car as far as Hassleholm. For the first time he told her the full story of his two trips to Riga the previous year. She listened in fascination.

  “It doesn’t sound like you at all,” she said when he had finished.

  “That’s how I feel as well,” he said.

  “You could have died,” she said. “Did you never think about me and Mom?”

  “I thought about you,” he said. “But I didn’t think about your mother.”

  When they got to Malmo, they only had to wait half an hour for a train to Ystad. They were back in his apartment shortly before four. He made up a bed for her in the guest room, and when he went to look for some clean sheets it struck him that he had forgotten all about the time he had booked in the laundry room. At about seven they went out to one of the pizzerias on Hamngatan and had dinner. They were both tired, and were back home again before nine.

  She called her grandfather, and Wallander stood by her side, listening. She promised to go and see him the next day.

  He was surprised at how his father could sound so different when he talked to her.

  He thought he had better call Loven. But he put it off, since he was not yet sure how he was going to explain why he did not contact the police immediately after the incident in the cemetery. He could not understand that himself. It was a breach of duty, no doubt about it. Had he started to lose control over his own judgment? Or had he been so scared that he lost the ability to act?

  Long after she fell asleep he stood in the window, looking down at the deserted street.

  The images in his mind’s eye were alternating between Victor Mabasha and the man known as Konovalenko.

  While Wallander was standing in his window in Ystad, Vladimir Rykoff was noting that the police were still interested in his apartment. He was two floors higher up in the same building. It was Konovalenko who once suggested they should have an escape route in case the usual apartment could not or ought not to be used. It was also Konovalenko who explained how the safest haven was not always the one furthest away. The best plan is to do the unexpected. And so Rykoff rented an identical apartment in Tania’s name, two floors higher up. That made it easier to move the necessary clothes and other baggage.

  The previous day Konovalenko had told them to leave the apartment. He questioned Vladimir and Tania, and realized the cop from Ystad was evidently no fool. He should not be underestimated. Nor could they exclude the possibility that the cops might search the place. But most of all, Konovalenko was afraid Vladimir and Tania might be subjected to more serious interrogation. He was not convinced they were always capable of distinguishing between what they could say, and what not.

  Konovalenko had also wondered whether the best solution might be to shoot them. But he decided that was unnecessary. He still needed Vladimir’s legwork. Besides, the cops would only get more excited than they already were.

  They moved to the other apartment that same night. Konovalenko had given Vladimir and Tania strict instructions to stay at home the next few days.

  Among the first things Konovalenko learned as a young KGB officer was that there were deadly sins in the shadowy world of the intelligence service. Being a servant of secrecy meant joining a brotherhood where the most important rules were written in invisible ink. The worst sin of all, of course, was being a double agent. Betraying one’s own organization, but at the same time doing it in the service of an enemy power. In the mystical hell of the intelligence service, the moles were closest to the center of the inferno.

  There were other deadly sins. One was to arrive too late.

  Not just to a meeting, emptying a secret letter box, a kidnapping, or even nothing more complicated than a journey. Just as bad was being too late with regard to oneself, one’s own plans, one’s own decisions.

  Nevertheless, that is what had happened to Konovalenko early in the morning of May 7. The mistake he made was to put too much faith in his BMW. As a young KGB officer, his superiors had always taught him to plan a journey on the basis of two parallel possibilities. If one vehicle proved to be unserviceable, there should always be time to resort to a planned alternative. But that Friday morning, when his BMW suddenly stopped on St. Erik’s Bridge and refused to start again, he had no alternative. Of course, he could take a cab or the subway. Besides, since he did not know if and when the cop or his daughter would leave the apartment in Bromma, it was not even certain he would be too late, anyway. Nevertheless, it seemed to him like the mistake, all the guilt, was his, not the car’s. He spent nearly twenty minutes trying to restart it, and it seemed like he was trying to bring about a resurrection. But the engine was dead as far as he was concerned.

  In the end he gave up, and flagged down a cab. He had planned to be outside the red-brick apartment block by seven at the latest. As it was, he did not get there until nearly a quarter to eight.

  It had not been difficult to find out that Wallander had a daughter and that she was the one living in Bromma. He called the police station in Ystad and was told that Wallander was staying at the Central Hotel in Stockholm. He claimed to be a cop himself. Then he went to the hotel and pretended to be discussing a block booking for a sizable group of tourists a couple of months later. When he was not being observed, he stole a look at a message left for Wallander and quickly memorized the name Linda and a telephone number. He left the hotel, and then traced the number to an address in Bromma. He chatted to a woman on the stairs there, and soon figured out how things stood.

  That morning he waited on the street outside the apartment until half past eight. Just then, an elderly woman emerged from the building. He went over to her and wished her good morning; she recognized the pleasant guy who had spoken to her previously.

  “They left early this morning,” she said in reply to his question.

  “Both of them?”

  “Both of them.”

  “Are they going to be away long?”

  “She promised to call.”

  “She told you where they were going, no doubt?”

  “They were going abroad on vacation. I didn’t quite catch where.”

  Konovalenko could see she was trying hard to remember. He waited.

  “France, I think it was,” she said eventually. “I’m not absolutely sure, mind you.”

  Konovalenko thanked her for her assistance, and left. He would send Rykoff later to go over the apartment.

  As he needed time to think and was in no special hurry, he walked to Brommaplan where he could no doubt find a cab. The BMW had served its purpose, and he would give Rykoff the job of finding him another car before the day was out.

  Konovalenko immediately rejected the possibility that they had gone abroad. The cop from Ystad was a cold, calculating sort of guy. He had discovered that somebody had been asking the old lady questions the day before. Somebody who would doubtless come back and ask some more questions. And so he left a false trail, pointing to France.

  Where can they have gone, Konovalenko wondered. In all probability he has taken his daughter back with him to Ystad. But he might have chosen some other place I couldn’t possibly track down.

  A tem
porary retreat, thought Konovalenko. I’ll give him a start that I can recover later.

  He drew one more conclusion. The cop from Ystad was worried. Why else would he take his daughter with him?

  Konovalenko gave a little smile at the thought that they were thinking along the same lines, he and the insignificant little cop called Wallander. He recalled something a KGB colonel said to his new recruits shortly after they started their long period of training. A high level of education, a long line of ancestors, or even a high level of intelligence is no guarantee of becoming an outstanding chess player.

  The main thing just now was to find Victor Mabasha, he thought. Kill him. Finish off what he had failed to do in the disco and the cemetery.

  With a vague feeling of unease, he recalled the previous evening.

  Shortly before midnight he called South Africa and spoke with Jan Kleyn on his special emergency number. He had rehearsed what he was going to say very carefully. There were no more excuses to explain away Victor Mabasha’s continued existence. And so he lied. He said Victor Mabasha had been killed the previous day. A hand grenade in the gas tank. When the rubber band holding back the firing pin had been eaten away, the car exploded. Victor Mabasha had perished instantaneously.

  All the same, Konovalenko sensed a degree of dissatisfaction in Jan Kleyn. A crisis of confidence between himself and the South African intelligence service that he could not afford. That could put his whole future at risk.

  Konovalenko resolved to step on the gas. There was no longer any time to spare. Victor Mabasha had to be tracked down and killed within the next few days.

  This unfathomable dusk slowly set in. But Victor Mabasha barely noticed it.

  Now and again he thought about the man he was to kill. Jan Kleyn would understand. He would allow him to retain his assignment. One of these days, he would have the South African president in his sights. He would not hesitate, he would carry out the assignment he had taken on.

  He wondered if the president was aware that he would soon be dead. Did white people have their own songomas who came to them in their dreams?

  In the end he concluded they must have. How could any man survive without being in contact with the spirit world that controlled our lives, that had power over life and death?