“Yes, once.”
“And he told you a lot of nonsense, of course?”
“He talked about money,” Manuel said and cursed himself. As if money was what was important.
“So he is still hungry for money,” Armas said with a smile, and now he suddenly switched to English.
“I think you should be happy he is alive,” he said cryptically.
“What do you mean?”
“Many unpleasant things happen in prison, people are stressed.”
Manuel stared at him, tried to understand.
“Some are racists and don’t like Latinos coming here with AIDS and drugs.”
“AIDS? Is Patricio sick?”
Armas laughed.
“I think you should go home to the mountains,” he said. “Today.”
Suddenly Manuel understood. He was a threat. Patricio was a threat. As long as they lived they could squeal. He drew back from Armas, who followed.
“I’m staying,” Manuel said. “I will look after my brother.”
Armas leaned over him.
“If I tell you to go home, then that is what you should do. That will be best for you and your brother.”
“And for you and the fat one?”
“For everyone,” Armas said and smiled.
“I want justice,” Manuel said.
Armas stuck his hand into his pocket and pulled out a gun. It looked like a toy in his hand.
“Are you going to kill me?”
In a way, Manuel was not surprised. In his mind, he saw Miguel lying in front of his house. Miguel’s death smelled of herbs. In his fall he had crushed a plant, a rue bitterwort. It helped a headache, but no plant in the world would get Miguel back on his feet again.
Manuel turned around.
“Then you will have to shoot me in the back,” he said, while he put his hand in his pocket and took out the stiletto that clicked open with a metallic sound. Manuel threw himself forward and to the side, raised his arm and slashed. The cut was perfect. Armas fired his pistol at the same time. The whole thing was over in seconds.
Later, as he was pulling the heavy body down to the river, Armas’s shirt ripped and revealed a bare shoulder and upper arm. Manuel immediately recognized the tattoo and an intense rage grew. How could this murderer and drug smuggler have gotten the idea of having a feathered snake tattooed on his white skin? It was an insult, and in his rage Manuel kicked the lifeless body. Quetzalcóatl meant something that neither Armas nor any other gringo could understand. He took out the stiletto again and with a quick flick of his knife sliced the tattoo away.
Manuel went through the events again and again and discovered to his surprise that there was a bizarre feeling of distance in the deadly conflict by the river. He had never been to a theater, only had a performance described to him, but it was in this way that he imagined a drama, that he and Armas were actors in a play.
The beautiful nature around him, the clearing framed with the green of the trees, roses with pale red rosehips, brush at whose feet there were dark green leaves and in the distance the cackling of sea birds from the reeds, this is what the scene had looked like for a drama of life and death.
The roles had been simple, likewise the dramaturgy: one man prepared to kill and the other forced to do so. They needed no directions, life itself provided the dialogue and action.
It was a drama that Manuel could see from the outside, as if he was no longer an actor but forced to be a passive viewer, one in the audience. And from that position he could see the archetypal in what had happened, frightening and full of anguish, as a drama without artifice.
The feeling of unreality, that he had cut the throat of another human being and dumped him into the water as if he was a bag of trash, had grown stronger afterward. Armas was no longer real. His death had nothing to do with Manuel.
Fifteen
It sometimes happened that Ann Lindell woke up beautiful. It happened at varying intervals, more often in spring and summer, so that she was both surprised, as if someone had unexpectedly complimented her, and also struck by a familiar happiness, as on a fine summer morning when one goes outside and steps into the sun.
She stretched out in bed as if to identify her limbs, and really feel that all the parts of her body belonged together. That it was she, Ann, who lay there, half awake., half lingering in sleep, still brushing the dream that was perhaps the source of her well-being.
The warmth under the covers did her good. She almost always slept nude, in contact with her body. Sometimes she kept her panties on, with a mixed feeling of intimacy and need for protection. She did not know how she should describe the feeling, but didn’t care. That was simply how it was, and that was enough.
She stroked her stomach and breasts in a weightless state of rest.
Erik would wake up soon, probably in a good mood, as he usually was in the mornings.
Ottosson laughed when he caught sight of Lindell, she on her way in, he on his way out of the elevator.
“Look at you,” he said.
“If you like,” she replied, and smiled.
He turned and before the elevator doors slid shut he explained that he would be back in five minutes.
It took ten minutes before Ottosson joined them. The others who were investigating the murder of “Jack” were already in place.
“I’m sorry,” Ottosson said, “but the elevator was on strike.”
What little in the way of reports was available was quickly processed.
The murder victim was still unidentified. His fingerprints were not registered. Investigators from the drug, surveillance, and economic crimes units had checked the photographs without recognizing him.
“Jack” had been dead when he hit the water, there had been no difficulty in determining this. Despite the cut left by the removal of the tattoo, there were no wounds on the body other than the slit throat.
“But that’s enough,” Haver added.
After the meeting, Lindell went into Ottosson’s office and told him about Viola. She could have run out without telling him, but after last year’s mistake of setting off on an individual investigation, an adventure that almost cost her life, she was eager to keep Ottosson informed, even if a visit to the hospital was not normally associated with any danger.
“Of course you have to go see her,” Ottosson said.
To find a parking space close to entrance 70 at the Akademiska Hospital turned out to be a challenge. Ann lost patience in the end, parked her car at the corner of a construction site, tossed her police identification on the dashboard, and walked away, ignoring the protests from a couple of carpenters.
Viola had a private room. Her face was turned to the window and she had apparently not heard Ann open the door. Ann was unable to determine if she was sleeping or not.
The old woman looked more frail than usual. Her slender arms rested on the blanket. Her hair, which Viola mostly kept under a cap when she was on the island, was chalk white and in need of combing. She was completely still, but then Ann saw her bony fingers moving, pulling threads on the blanket. The thin tendons on the back of her hand, which was covered in brown age spots, tensed and relaxed with a regularity that convinced Ann that Viola was awake.
What was the old woman thinking about? Ann turned on her heels and left the room, the door shut with a sigh and she hurried along the corridor toward the exit.
A nurse was standing outside the nurses’ station. Ann walked over to her and introduced herself.
“I know who you are,” the nurse said. “I worked in the intensive care unit last year.”
“Oh, I see,” Ann replied sheepishly, suddenly ashamed as she always was when she was reminded of that event. “I wanted to visit Viola but I think she’s sleeping and I don’t want to disturb her. Can you tell her I was here?”
The nurse looked at her before nodding.
“Of course I can, but I’m sure Viola would appreciate it if you—”
“I don’t want to wake he
r,” Ann repeated more forcefully. “I’m in a hurry,” she added in a gentler voice and felt even more embarrassed.
“Are you related?”
“No, not at all. How is she?”
“She is …” the nurse searched for the right word, “a real bitch. No, I was only joking! She is quite brusque, if you know what I mean, but a wonderful old lady. There’s no screw loose in her head. She was telling me how the first thing she will do when she goes home is slaughter the hens.”
“Viola has said that for as long as I’ve known her. But wish her all the best,” Ann said.
The nurse looked as if she was going to say something, but only nodded, gave a professional smile, and then walked into the office area.
Ann started walking toward the elevators, but turned almost immediately.
“One more thing, does she have any visitors?”
“Yes, her son has been here a few times, I think he is her son. And an older man.”
“I’ll come back another time,” Ann said.
“You do that. She rarely sleeps during the day, so you were unlucky.”
Lindell returned to the police station, poured herself a cup of coffee in the lunchroom, and leafed through an issue of Upsala Nya Tidning. The murder was a large item on the front page. There was a picture of the river that, if it weren’t for its connection to a murder, could have been lifted from a county tourist publication. The picture had been snapped in the evening. The sun had disappeared behind the Sunnersta ridge and the remaining light cast a dreamy glow onto the meadow, the lead-gray water and the light golden brown stalks of the reeds.
Lindell had experienced this so many times before, how the apparent idyll concealed a streak of unexpected eruptions of violence and grief. The landscape itself was innocent, it was only a stage for human failings, a backdrop against which people acted in all their foulness.
From her professional perspective, Lindell felt that it was worse to investigate a crime in the countryside where nature, in its inconceivable diversity, concealed man. She often thought about the last homicide case when two farmers had been murdered in their homes. It was as if nature was tripping up her thoughts. How could something so horrible happen here? There was not only a crime victim to contend with, it was as if the whole area had been raped. The crime, to deprive someone of his life, appeared even more monstrous against the backdrop of a peaceful forest.
A murder in an apartment, by contrast, appeared more natural. No one was surprised that someone killed someone else in a kitchen filled with the items that people accumulated. It was rather the opposite: how could it be that more people didn’t fall victim to violence? A pool of blood in the street surprised no one. A pool of blood on a mossy bed in the woods seemed to fly in the face of reason.
“The philosopher Lindell in action!”
She turned around. Ottosson was standing there with a coffee mug in his hand. She had not heard him enter. She smiled but did not like being interrupted in her thoughts. If it had been anyone other than Ottosson she would have registered her dissatisfaction.
As it was, she told him what she had been thinking. Ottosson refilled his mug and sat down.
“You are right,” he said when she had finished, “but you’re also wrong. A kitchen, a little refuge, even if it is dingy and small, stands for security. Or it should. To have a roof over your head, warmth, and food on the table are the preconditions for becoming someone else, if you know what I mean. We are always striving for …”
He trailed off, as if he couldn’t manage to finish his train of thought, or as if he did not himself fully understand, or was unable to formulate, what he meant.
“Man is a strange creature,” Ottosson resumed, and employed a worn cliché that only expressed their usual frustration.
“Hasn’t anyone called in?” Lindell asked.
Normally the phone at the station would ring off the hook after a murder had been committed. Spontaneous tips that in most cases did not lead to anything.
“No, nothing that gives us an identity,” Ottosson said. “I thought for a while that he did not come from Uppsala, that someone transported him here in order to dump him in the river.”
“But why there?” Lindell asked and then realized the ridiculousness of her question. Many times there was no rationality to a killer’s actions.
Ottosson shrugged.
“Perhaps our rounds in the city will give us something,” he said.
They had made copies of the murder victim’s photograph and detectives from the violence and intelligence units were looking up individuals who would perhaps recognize him. It was the usual roundup of drug users and petty thieves. Sometimes they were willing to drop a little information in the hopes that it made them look good or for the simple reason that a murder was a disturbance to their own business and they wanted a quick resolution.
The investigative team in the violent crimes division had discussed possible motives as a matter of routine. These were freewheeling speculations that perhaps did not yield much, especially since they did not know the victim’s identity, but that nonetheless set the machinery of their brains in motion. One tossed-out idea gave way to another that was rejected that led to a third possible explanation that was taken seriously. Everything mixed, became layered, was judged more or less believable. Together this resulted in a concoction of loose assumptions, out of which one could finally perhaps distill a motive and a perpetrator.
“It is the tattoo, or rather, its removal, that is the key,” Lindell said.
Ottosson agreed.
“Why does one get a tattoo?”
“To show one’s affiliation,” Lindell said. “A brotherhood.”
“It used to be a mark of class,” Ottosson said. “Only workers used to get tattoos. Now little girls have tattoos everywhere.”
“It functions as a kind of marking. You choose a design that says something about yourself or the life you lead, or with the direction you feel life should take.”
“Or it’s just a fun thing you do when you’re drunk,” Ottosson added.
“He doesn’t look the type.”
“Perhaps in his youth?”
Lindell shook her head.
“I can’t say why, but this guy is no common … alcoholic who likes to get loaded in Nyhavn.”
“But in his youth,” Ottosson insisted. “Perhaps he went to sea?”
“He did end up in the water finally,” Lindell said.
“And almost naked to boot.”
“I think that was done in order to humiliate him,” Lindell said. “Why would you otherwise take the trouble to remove his clothes?”
“Two possibilities,” Ottosson said, “either the clothes say something about the victim or else he was only wearing his underpants when he was killed.”
“A betrayed man who finds them naked in the bedroom and kills the lover?”
“Or a homosexual.”
Ottosson had trouble with the word bög, which was slang for “gay.” Lindell already knew this. He claimed it was denigrating, even though many homosexuals used the word themselves.
Lindell looked at the picture in the paper. She didn’t bother with the text. She had enough of an idea what it said.
“Going door to door in the area may still give us something. There were some houses in the area where no one answered yesterday.”
“Fredriksson and Riis are out there right now, but the victim may just as well have been thrown in from the other side of the river and floated across,” Ottosson said. “It’s not very wide. Or else he was dumped farther upstream.”“It would be strange if no one had seen anything. After all, it takes awhile to carry a body from the road across the meadow and into the river.”
“I think he was thrown in higher up,” Ottosson said.
They continued to speculate before Lindell got up from the table.
“I went to the hospital,” she said suddenly.
“How was she?”
“She was sleeping.”
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Ottosson nodded.
“Have you talked to—”
“No,” Lindell said.
Sixteen
She was riding her bike into the wind. Eva regretted not having taken the bus, even though this way she was saving money and improving her fitness, maybe even losing a few pounds.
Her thoughts kept coming back to last night. Patrik would end up in trouble if he kept associating with Zero. She had not managed to get more out of him except that they had had a fight.
“Some idiots from Gränby,” he had said, but denied knowing them and he would not tell her what the fight had been about, more than that it was about “stuff.” Stuff could apparently refer to just about anything and it frightened Eva. Boys have always had fights, she told herself, but given what had happened in recent years, stuff could lead to a bad end, even to death. She remembered a shooting in Gränby several years earlier all too well. The accused, a teenager, was freed after the main witness had changed his story.
Patrik had denied that anyone from that gang had been involved in last night’s skirmish.
“It was some other idiots,” he said.
“Friends of Zero?”
“No, they were Swedes.”
“But you are a Swede and apparently friends with him.”
“That’s not the same thing.”
Eva couldn’t quite imagine what these adolescents’ lives looked like, how their loyalties worked, or even what the words they used meant. And now her main task, along with the work at Dakar, was to raise two teenagers, and that in an environment she had trouble understanding.
Patrik had promised to stay out of trouble and try to reduce his interactions with Zero, without causing the latter to feel betrayed.
“He would go crazy in that case,” Patrik said.
He had given her two promises, and Eva knew that both of them would be hard to keep.
The county was constructing little areas with park benches and flower beds up and down East Ågatan. It was being spiffed up and made more accessible. Perhaps they were hoping to achieve a more continental look in the inner city, where Uppsala residents and tourists alike could stroll under the chestnut trees and where lindens grew right next to the river.
The Demon of Dakar Page 10
