The Demon of Dakar

by Kjell Eriksson

  Fredriksson turned a page in his notebook before he went on.

  “Regarding videotapes: there were about a hundred. Schönell is checking them out right now. It’s conceivable that there is a private tape among them. He will probably be done by tonight. Unfortunately he broke a tooth last night and had to go to the dentist. He was probably dreaming—”

  “Okay,” Ottosson said, “the gay thread is the only aspect of interest we have from the apartment, if I understood you correctly, Allan?”

  Fredriksson nodded.

  “Berglund?”

  “We have conducted initial sessions of questioning with most of the staff at Dakar and Alhambra, altogether seventeen people. Half a dozen are missing. Someone is traveling, another at a funeral, a third we have been unable to reach, and a fourth is actually in the midst of another investigation, but I think it’s a coincidence. Her name is Eva Willman and her teenage son may be involved in the stabbing of an old client of ours. It happened in Sävja recently. Barbro Liljendahl is leading that one.”

  “Look into it,” Ottosson said, and Berglund gave him a long look before resuming.

  “It’s the usual crowd, some who have worked in the restaurant business for a long time, others are more temporary, especially among the waitstaff. If we increase this to look at employees from the past few years that adds another ten, fifteen people. If we can rely on the medical examiner’s report and assume that Armas died early or late afternoon, then most of these people have alibis. They were working. The rest are being checked on.”

  Berglund accounted for the additional information that the questioning had yielded. Everyone was naturally shocked. None of the staff could provide a self-evident motive for the slaying.

  “What did they say about his character, the kind of person he was?” Lindell asked.

  “Quiet. Did not make a lot of noise, but from what I gathered he wielded a lot of power. One of the bartenders at Alhambra said he always got nervous when Armas was around. He kept an eye on things, but rarely said anything. It was Slobodan Andersson who stood for the talking.”

  “Did he drink?”

  “He was basically a teetotaler,” Berglund said.

  “Anything about his sexual preferences?” Haver asked.

  Berglund shook his head.

  “No one could give the name of any girlfriend. But if he was known to be gay that would probably have come out.”

  “Can you watch gay porn without being gay?” Beatrice tossed out. The rest of them look at each other and Haver burst out laughing.

  “Out with it, boys,” Beatrice said.

  “No,” Haver decided, “I have trouble believing that. What do you say, Allan?”

  “You would know better than I,” Fredriksson said, making a face.

  “A quiet man, ‘hard as a rock,’ as one of the chefs put it, rarely had a drink, ‘dutiful’ said another, not friends with anyone except Slobodan,” Berglund recited.

  “Closet homosexual,” Haver added.

  “You like that gay stuff, don’t you?” Allan Fredriksson said.

  “That’s my thing,” Haver smiled broadly at his colleague.

  “There is a guy,” Berglund picked up again, “his name is Olaf González, but apparently goes by Gonzo.”

  “What the hell kind of name is that?” Fredriksson asked.

  “Norwegian mother, Spanish father,” said Berglund, who hated to be interrupted. “He has worked at Dakar for a couple of years, but was apparently fired a couple of weeks ago. According to the others there was a conflict between him and Armas that led to his termination. No one knew what it was about. According to González himself, he quit saying he was sick of the fascist Slobodan, but had nothing negative to say about Armas.”

  “We’ll have to check with Slobodan,” Ottosson said, “but it seems a bit much to slit someone’s throat because they gave you the boot.”“We don’t know what was behind it,” Berglund said.

  “Black earnings?” Beatrice suggested.

  “I’ve checked with the restaurant unit and according to them Slobodan has been an exemplary citizen the past few years.”

  “The tattoo,” Lindell prompted.

  “There was actually only one person who had seen it and he could not describe it exactly. He thought it was some kind of animal.”

  “Had Armas made any comment about it?”

  “The guy didn’t asked him, just saw it by accident when Armas changed his T-shirt once.”

  “Damn mysterious,” Ottosson said.

  The discussion continued for another half an hour. Was Slobodan a possible suspect or coconspirator to the murder? Lindell did not think so. His reaction when she and Ola Haver delivered the news spoke against this. She had had the impression that Slobodan and Armas really were good friends and that Slobodan’s shock and grief was genuine.

  Could it be as simple as a robbery-assault? Lindell wondered. According to Slobodan, Armas always wore a gold watch and a gold band on the ring finger of his left hand. He could have been observed when he changed his money, followed, and then killed. She presented this theory but dismissed it herself the next moment. The removal of the tattoo spoke against this.

  “Do we have any leads from Forex?” Ottosson asked.

  “He has been recorded on the security tape. The time is sixteen fifty-six,” Lindell said, “and we know that he changed five thousand kronor to euros.”

  “Men have been killed for less,” Fredriksson said.

  “How do we proceed?” Ottosson asked, and sighed hugely.

  “I’ll take on Slobodan,” Lindell said. “Berglund continues talking to the staff. Ola, follow up on this gay lead and if you have time, help Berglund produce a summary report for the interviews. Allan can continue his digging with Lugn from the restaurant unit. I spoke with him this morning and we have a green light.”

  “What about me?” Beatrice said.

  “You can reconstruct Armas’s life,” Lindell said.

  “Okay, but I can’t give him his life back.”

  “Write his biography,” Lindell said and smiled. “That’s enough.”

  As if on a given signal, the brain squad stood up from the table and left the room. All that remained were six coffee mugs, six plates, and the crumbled remains of a few mazarin cakes.

  Twenty-Five

  Manuel Alavez studied the people who walked by. Some of them hurried, walking with deliberate steps, looking around hastily as they passed the parking lot, speeding by like projectiles with shoulders pulled up and their gazes directed far into the distance, as if they were target-seeking missiles, programmed for a single purpose.

  Others sauntered, conversed with their partners, slowed down, uttered exclamations and laughed, perhaps put a hand on the partner’s arm, only to continue aimlessly on their way. They paused, cheerfully allowed cars to pass, as if they had all the time in the world.

  It is like the zócolon, the square in Oaxaca, he thought, this mixture of people. The expressions are the same, but do the Swedes feel in the same way? Do they get happy about the same things. Does love strike them with equal force, and what does their pain look like?

  Sometimes they imagined, the villagers on their benches, that the white men were a foreign race, that, although they were equipped with arms and legs, they had eyes that perceived without seeing and mouths that talked constantly but with words that did not touch the reality that the villagers knew.

  From the parking lot Manuel had an unobstructed view of Slobodan Andersson’s building. Manuel was not sure exactly why he was sitting here spying on him. Ten thousand dollars could be a good enough reason, even though Patricio did not seem particularly interested. His indifference at his fate had surprised and perplexed Manuel. He couldn’t take seriously the comment that money would not be able to alter his conditions in prison. Surely money had the same power here as in the rest of the world?

  And if Patricio was not personally invested then there was Maria, but Manuel assumed that it was his b
rother’s guilty conscience that was bothering him. He did not want any blood money.

  They had sent them eleven thousand as compensation for Angel’s death. Eleven thousand pesos. That was worth half a coffee harvest for the Alavez family. Half a year’s work was what Angel’s life was worth in the fat man’s eyes.

  Did Manuel want to see the fat man dead? He searched his soul during the idle hours in the car. Armas had died by his hand, but would he be able to slay Slobodan Andersson in cold blood?

  No, he did not think so. That would not give him Angel back and it would not help Patricio. The only thing that could improve his situation was money and that was what Manuel wanted to lay his hands on. But what if the fat man refused?

  In order to clear his head, he turned on the car radio, but then turned it off immediately. He didn’t like the music, and he didn’t understand the language.

  Will the world be a better place if Slobodan dies? This was a question he had asked himself many times but had not been able to bring himself to answer.

  He turned the radio back on again. Now an American melody that he recognized from California was playing and he let it stay on.

  He had become a murderer but he regretted nothing. It was only in his dreams that he felt anguish.

  Then he saw the fat man step out his front door and walk with short, hurried footsteps to a taxi, and get into it. Manuel started the car and followed.

  He spread out the map in the passenger seat in order to follow the taxi’s route. It was driving north. Manuel was impressed and amazed at how disciplined the Swedes conducted themselves in traffic. The most remarkable thing was that they stopped for pedestrians. Manuel had been close to running over a couple of teenagers crossing the street right as he was driving by. He honked aggressively, scared and angry, but soon realized that this was the way traffic functioned. The slow ones had the right of way.

  It was a short ride. Slobodan stepped out of the taxi in front of a three-story building. Manuel parked behind a van. Slobodan walked to the nearest door. As soon as he had walked in, Manuel ran up to it, stopped the door before it closed, and slid inside. He heard Slobodan panting in the stairwell and Manuel ran up to a landing with quiet steps, stopped, listened, and continued.

  Suddenly the fat man stopped. Manuel heard his heavy breaths. He peered up the stairs and saw Slobodan’s hand on the railing. He was almost at the top now. Then he walked on. Manuel followed. Within himself he felt the hatred grow, how the muscles in his body tensed and how the sweat started to bead on his face. Despite his resolution not to hurt Slobodan Andersson, his bitterness rose up at the man who had devastated his family. Why should he be allowed to live when Angel had been forced to die for his greed?

  Manuel knew he was the more supple and quick. He had lost the knife but could, if he wanted, kill Slobodan with his bare hands. He had the strength and the fury of the righteous. He made the sign of the cross and tiptoed on without a sound.

  Slobodan came to a stop on the highest landing. Manuel counted the steps, six, plus as many again in the next section. Perhaps six, seven rapid steps in all. The whole thing could be over in a couple of seconds.

  Suddenly there was the sound of a doorbell. Manuel instinctively crouched down. It was the door on the right. After ten, fifteen seconds a door opened and a man said something, then fell silent. A brief, whispered conversation in the foreign language ensued before the door closed and Slobodan and the other started to walk down the stairs. By then Manuel was already down at the front door. He continued down into the basement, where a door blocked his passage. The men came closer. Manuel pressed himself up against the door, and hoped for dear life that they did not have a reason to go to the basement. He counted the steps. Slobodan’s breaths and the other man’s high-pitched voice were now very close.

  Manuel caught sight of them as they opened the front door and left.

  He is a small man, Manuel thought and smiled to himself, short like a Mexican. They stepped into a Mercedes, with the short man behind the wheel.

  The trip went beyond the city limits. Manuel had trouble orienting himself at first but recognized the roundabout at the southern edge of the city where he had come in on his way from Arlanda.

  Slobodan and the “Swedish Mexican” went three-quarters of the way around the roundabout and Manuel followed the distance of a car’s length.

  A great calm descended over him. How simple everything was.

  Then the Mercedes turned onto a gravel road, crossed some railway tracks, and continued up to a small cottage at the edge of the forest. The car pulled up to it and stopped, the men stepped out, while Manuel continued on for a while longer before he braked.

  Shortly after a curve, Manuel found a small road that he turned onto, parking the car in a copse of trees and bushes. It was not ideal, but he did not want to go too far away and lose contact with the two men. It was possible they were only stopping briefly at the cottage.

  The wheat growing on the other side of the clump of trees was at its peak. Manuel tore off a stalk and chewed on the kernels while he followed the edge of the field toward the forest. He was partly hidden by the bushes and boulders on his way to the cottage, but tried as best he could to keep an eye on the Mercedes. He arrived at a road that consisted of two wheel tracks with grass in the middle. To the right there was a field and to the left a row of houses. He walked to the left in order to circle past the row of houses and approach the cottage from the forest. Then, after a hundred meters or so, he left the trail and plunged into the woods.

  Concealed by the vegetation, he broke into a run. After several minutes he ended up thirty or so meters behind the cottage. The car was visible between the branches. Manuel hid behind a tree and the scent of the sticky sap transported him to the path to his family’s cafetal, their coffee plantation.

  He exhaled and scouted out the road up to the cottage: a shed, a couple of big trees surrounded by a thicket of flowering bushes, and thereafter an open area of about five meters that he had to cross unseen. There was a window behind the house but he could not detect any movement inside it.

  Manuel ran up to the shed, waited a couple of seconds, rushed doubled over toward the thicket, and then continued, half-crawling, half-running toward the cottage.

  He pressed himself against the wall and his sweating body deposited a few drops on the sticky paneling. He listened and thought he heard the men talking.

  He carefully peered in through the window. Slobodan sat with his back toward the window. The other man leaned against the opposite side of the wall and stared intently at Slobodan, who was talking and gesturing with both hands. Manuel recognized the gestures. He was in the process of convincing the man of something. The short man made an objection, his waving something away, but immediately received a rebuttal.

  This went on for several minutes. Why did they come here? Manuel asked himself. If they were just going to talk surely they could have done so in town.

  The answer came after a little while. The short man bent over, lifted the lid of a storage bench, and took out a sport bag that he placed on the table in front of Slobodan. The latter unzipped the bag and put his hand in. The short man looked displeased.

  Manuel sensed what the bag must contain. He decided to leave his vulnerable position immediately. He looked up at the neighboring house that could be glimpsed between the trees. He could be discovered at any moment. All that had to happen was for the neighbor to step out on his terrace.

  But he had uncovered another piece of the puzzle. He knew about the cottage, what the short man looked like and where he lived. Everything had gone better than planned. He retreated into the concealing curtain of the forest, sat down with his back against a tree, and waited.

  Like his people, he was good at this. It felt as if they had been waiting for five hundred years. Zapotecos, mixes, mixtes, triguis, and all the other people in Oaxaca, Chiapas, Guerrero, yes, everywhere in the land that was called Mexico. They all waited. Standing like severed tree
s, captured by the storm and cracked, whittled away by the weather and wind, seasoned and hardened. Nothing to be reckoned with, without value, without an ability to reproduce itself. But in the stony barrenness of the terrain, in the green valleys and on the wind-whipped plains of the high country there were seeds, in whose center all the old ways were preserved in code.

  That was his conviction. His hope.

  Then he heard a car start and through the trees he saw the Mercedes with the two men bouncing along the dirt road with a cloud of dust whirling up behind them.

  Once again, Manuel made his way up to the cottage. He could hear nothing from the neighbor, perhaps they were not home. He felt more secure now and sneaked over to the shed, unhooking the door that was not locked. In the dim light within he could make out a lawn mower, a few old garden chairs, and a work counter with various tools. He picked up a crowbar and a container of gasoline and left the shed with a newfound feeling of power.

  He chose the window on the corner that was out of the neighbor’s line of sight. After about a minute he had it open, and he crawled into the cottage.

  A faint smell of sweat still lingered in the main room. A few dirty rag rugs were rolled into sausages on the floor, as if ashamed of their pale fronds. The furniture was simple and worn. A single painting hung on the wall. It depicted an alpine landscape. The exaggeratedly pointed mountaintops were dusted with a grayish cap that was supposed to represent snow, and in the valley below there was a log cabin that was supposed to function as the romantic center of the composition, but only looked like a deserted ghost house whose inhabitants had long ago abandoned the area.

  The dusty isolation depressed Manuel but he also found it natural.

  They were isolated men, Slobodan, Armas, and the short one. Men who came down from the mountains with a single purpose: to make money. It struck him that they were doing violence to the very idea of a human being. They lived alone, loved no one but themselves, and hardly that. No, they were unable to love, perverted by greed, surrounded only by betrayal and joyless successes.