There was nothing attractive about the courtyard behind Dakar. There was a rusted Opel in one corner, three green garbage containers in the other, and a worn old bicycle in a deteriorating bike rack.
The asphalt was uneven and cracked and had undergone various rounds of repair. Even the weeds that stuck out of the cracks looked miserable and wilted in the still air. There was a strong smell of garbage, but this did not affect Manuel. He hardly noticed it. His whole attention was fixed on the red-painted door that bore the restaurant’s name in white.
He had been standing there for half an hour. Initially he had approached the door purposefully but then stopped himself, his finger poised on the doorbell. He had lowered his arm, drawn back, and sat down on the bike rack. In this state of indecision, he experienced peace for the first time in this foreign land. Maybe it was precisely the smell of garbage and the baking sun that made him lean up against the wall and smile. He could easily recall and identify the smell as well as the warmth from his earlier life. There was comfort in this passive state of waiting. How many times had he not experienced this in California? The waiting for work, for someone to drive up in their pickup, roll down the window, and size him up without a word, along with the other men, evaluating their physical strength and stamina.
He wished that he could roll himself a cigarette and maybe share a beer with someone. When he closed his eyes he thought he could hear the quiet talk of the other men. Brief stories of villages and families that he had never heard of, but that nonetheless appeared as vivid as old acquaintances, about bosses you had to watch out for, slave drivers and racists, and about women, living and imagined. The men were never as bold, and at the same time as bare, in their longing and grief as when they were waiting for work.
And the hope that these men kept alive as they spoke. It was as if the silence threatened to burst their already frozen hearts.
Even then Manuel knew that it was all in vain. None of their dreams were going to come true, yet he allowed himself to be influenced by their delusionary hopes and plans for the future. He rarely participated in the discussions but he allowed the muffled voices to keep even his hope alive. Maybe it was the same for them? Manuel believed that even behind the most innocent and naive compatriot, there was a realist. They all took part in an enormous game of pretend that included millions of impoverished job seekers. They allowed themselves to be duped in the same way that they, for a few moments, let themselves be tempted by the tricks of the jesters and verbose fantasies of the fiesta.
Was it this that Angel and Patricio had no longer been able to bear? Manuel wanted to think so, that it was not pure foolishness that drove them to associate with drug smugglers, that they were not deluded but fully conscious of what they were doing. They did not let the quiet chatter soothe them any longer. They knew that there was no future for a miserable and poor campesino who was waiting for work and happiness. They could not stand this farce, and decided instead to snatch a part of the fortune that the fat man’s drug trade created.
Angel used to ask why the white men were rich and why the Indians lived worse than dogs. Manuel’s talk about five hundred years of oppression and extortion did not impress him.
“But there are more of us,” he would object. “Why do we accept the white man taking the best for himself?”
Manuel knew that all Angel dreamed of was a woman to share his life. Where and under what circumstances did not matter. His brother had an uncomplicated attitude to life; he wanted to love and be loved. Manuel had always imagined Angel as the father of countless offspring, small chubby Zapotec children in a village like all the others.
Why should he talk politics when he couldn’t understand it? Why ponder the injustices of life when all he wanted was a woman’s embrace?
Almost an hour had gone by when a man suddenly appeared in the courtyard. It was only as he approached the red door that he noticed Manuel. He jumped but then smiled and said something that Manuel did not understand.
Manuel nodded and asked in English if he worked at Dakar.
“Are you Spanish?” the man asked.
“Venezuela,” Manuel answered.
“A friend of Chávez,” the man said, in a strange kind of Spanish.
“No,” Manuel replied.
“Your president, I mean. Forget it,” he added, when he saw Manuel’s look of incomprehension. “My name is Feo and sure, I work here.”
“Are you from Spain?”
“Portugal,” Feo said.
Manuel stared at him. Feo took out a set of keys.
“Are you waiting for someone?”
Manuel shook his head. “I’m looking for work,” he said.
Feo put a key in the lock but did not turn it. Manuel felt the tense feeling from California, and got to his feet.
“At Dakar? Do you have any experience?”
“I can work,” Manuel said hastily. “I am used to everything. I can work hard and long.”
Feo studied him. Manuel stood with hanging arms, met his gaze, and thought of Angel. He decided to go to Frankfurt to see where his brother had met his death. Perhaps there were some stones on the railway tracks with dried blood? Perhaps someone had seen him run?
“You’ll have to speak to the owner,” the Portuguese man said. “He isn’t here, but come in and wait. You look like you could use a Coke.”
He unlocked the door and let Manuel go in first, locked the door behind him and Manuel was struck by how cool everything was. There was a faint smell of cleaning solution and food.
Feo put a hand on his shoulder.
“You look like you could use a Coke,” he repeated.
Manuel looked around him as if he were expecting to be ambushed at any second. Feo brought him out to the bar, took out a Coca-Cola, and held it out with a smile.
There was a clatter of pots from the kitchen and a radio playing Bruce Springsteen. Manuel was thirsty but did not manage to swallow more than a mouthful.
“Come along and meet the chef,” Feo said.
Manuel accompanied Feo to the kitchen. As Feo was introducing him, Manuel wondered why he was being treated so kindly. He watched the Portuguese and heard him explain in Swedish why the stranger was here. Donald gave him a cursory glance and nod but then immediately turned back to his work. In front of him lay herb-stuffed lamb roulade that he was slicing into portions, then weighing and stacking them in a plastic container. Manuel drew in the smell.
“You speak English?” Donald asked.
Manuel nodded.
“Damn, you speak English with an Indian accent,” Feo said and thumped Donald in the back.
“Do you have a work permit?”
“No,” said Manuel.
“Then it will be difficult. Slobban, the guy who owns this place, is pretty particular about things like that.”
“No problems,” Feo said.
“You are from Venezuela?” Donald continued. “Where did you learn English?”
“I have worked in California.”
“Grapes of Wrath,” Donald said in Swedish, and smiled unexpectedly.
He finished slicing the lamb.
“A novel” was his reply to Feo’s quizzical look, and then switched back to English again. “I’ll talk to Slobban because we do need a dishwasher. If you have worked in the States then it will be like a vacation to wash dishes at Dakar.”
Manuel listened in fascination to the chef. His English really was funny.
“But I think we can arrange a couple of hours every evening,” Donald explained. “Do you think it smells good?”
“Yes, very,” Manuel said.
Thirty-Nine
“We’ve found something,” Allan Fredriksson said, but was not overwhelmingly enthusiastic as he stepped into Ann Lindell’s office.
She waited for an elaboration that did not come. Allan looks worn out, she thought, as he sat down in the visitor’s chair. The gray hairs were more numerous and the circles under his eyes were more marked.
&nbs
p; “What is it?”
“The tattoo,” Fredriksson said. “Armas went to a place that is on Salagatan. There are four tattoo salons in town. I checked three of them earlier, but this guy was closed and on vacation.”
“And he remembered Armas?”
“Very much so. He remembered the tattoo and the scar on his back as well.”
“What scar?”
Fredriksson gave Lindell a look of surprise.
“Then you haven’t read up on it well enough. Armas had a scar below one of the shoulder blades, perhaps from a knife.”
Lindell felt her cheeks grow hot. She had missed that.
“Right,” she said. “Now I remember. He went there to get the tattoo?”
“He wanted to get a second tattoo, on his other arm. The one that we found the remains of was already there.”
“But he never got another one,” Lindell observed. “Did Armas say anything about the one he already had?”
“Not more than that he thought it was fitting. The tattoo artist looked it up online. It was a depiction of a Mexican god with a name with too many letters.”
Fredriksson laid a paper on her desk. It was a copy of the tattoo. It represented an animal—or was it a person?—who appeared to be dancing. Feathers hung from its back.
“Thought it was fitting,” Lindell mused, studying the figure. “And this is a Mexican god? We’ll have to check with Slobodan Andersson. We know they both went overseas a couple of years ago. Didn’t the tax authorities say something about that? Maybe they were in Mexico.”
Fredriksson stood up with a sigh.
“How is it, Allan?”
“I must have caught Berglund’s bug,” he sighed. “Can you take Mexico?”
Lindell nodded.
“Thanks for your help,” she yelled after Fredriksson as he walked back down the corridor.
What was it that he had found so fitting? A dancing figure from Mexico. “Quetzalcóatl,” Fredriksson had written on the piece of paper. What did it mean to Armas and what could it tell them now? It meant something to the killer, that much was clear. Lindell knew absolutely nothing about Mexico, except for the fact that its capital city was a disaster for asthmatics—here she was dealing with a mythological figure that she could not pronounce the name of and that did not tell her anything.
Why, she kept asking herself as she scrutinized the copy of the tattoo design. Why remove a tattoo depicting a Mexican god?
She reached for the phone to call Slobodan Andersson, but changed her mind. Better to go down to Dakar, she thought, and instead she called Görel, her friend who often babysat Erik.
“You want to go out for dinner?”
“What do you think?” Görel replied.
“We’re going sleuthing,” Lindell said.
“It’s about time.”
“Do you think Margot can watch Erik?”
“My sister is always up for that sort of thing,” Görel said. “I’ll call her right away.”
They decided to meet at the main square at seven o’clock.
“Sleuthing” was the last thing Görel said as she put the phone down.
A series of calls followed. The first went to Schönell, who had gone through Armas’s video collection. He had scanned around one hundred films but had not discovered anything particularly noteworthy. They were mostly action and war movies.
“Was there anything about Mexico?” Lindell asked.
“A Mexican film, you mean?”
“I don’t actually know what I mean.”
“Something in that vein, I think, I was mostly checking for porn, but I can look through the covers and see if there is anything related to Mexico,” Schönell said.
“I’d appreciate it,” Lindell said and hung up.
Her next call went to Barbro Liljendahl. She was in Järlåsa tracking down a suspected fence but had only found chantarelles.
“Loads of them, right next to the road. There are patches of yellow. I’ll have to get Janne and come back here tonight. He loves mushrooms.”
“Great,” Lindell said, but she was irritated by her colleague’s enthusiasm and the information that there was a Janne. She found her out-of-breath and agitated voice disconcerting, almost repellant.
“I just wanted to hear about Rosenberg,” she resumed.
“He was furious about his Mercedes. Someone has amused himself by scraping the paint job. He claimed that it was gambling wins that had paid for the car.”
“And the contact with Sidström?”
“They were just friends he said, but he was clearly shaken when I told him that his friend had been stabbed and admitted to Akademiska.”
“What’s your hunch?” Lindell asked.
“Drugs,” Liljendahl said. “There is something here. I think it would pay to put Rosenberg under surveillance.”
“Good luck,” Lindell said, convinced that there would not be enough resources for that and happy that her colleague did not appear to want to draw her further into the stabbing incident in Sävja.
“One more thing,” Liljendahl said. “Rosenberg smoked like a chimney and the matchbox he used was from Dakar. Isn’t that the restaurant where Armas worked?”
“Yes,” Lindell said.
“I was wondering if you should circulate a snapshot of Rosenberg among the restaurant staff.”
Lindell heard how pleased Liljendahl sounded and realized she had held back the information in order to drop it in like this as if in passing.
“Maybe,” Lindell said.
She was on the verge of saying something laudatory, but refrained.
They ended the conversation and Lindell took out her pad of paper and started to draw circles and arrows.
In the large circle she wrote “Dakar” and lines extended from it in all directions with names of places and people who had figured in the investigation thus far. She stared at her attempt to create an oversight before adding “Mexico?” in the left-hand corner and drawing a line to “Armas.”
Then she called Ola Haver and told him about the tattoo and the matchbox at Rosenberg’s and asked him to retrieve all the files on the old drug user, as well as print out a photo.
She leaned back, slipped her shoes off, put her feet up on the desk, and whistled several bars of a song by Simon and Garfunkel off-key.
Forty
Eva Willman spotted him from a distance. He was unmistakable: the broad back, the swollen neck, and the bald spot on the back of his head. Slobodan proceeded along the sidewalk like a bull, with head lowered and shoulders hunched, forcing the pedestrians he encountered to step aside.
He’s going to die of a heart attack, Eva thought, and rested her feet on the pedals, slowly rolling forward, passing the restaurant owner who did not notice her, and then speeding up again. She cycled up to the Old Square at high speed, then took a rest.
The ride from Sävja had done her good. She checked her watch and saw that she had beat her personal best. Slobodan approached on the other side of the street and Eva turned to the river, leaned over the railing, and stared down into the water where she could see the outline of a bicycle among the stones at the bottom.
Watching the current made her dizzy and she lifted her head, looked up at the sky, and smiled to herself. Despite the problems with Patrik she felt happy. I am worth it, she thought. Just biking the eight or nine kilometers into town imbued her with a feeling of strength. She usually looked down at her thighs as she pedaled across the Ultunagärdet, registering how her muscles tensed under the fabric of her pants, count to twenty pushes on the pedals before she looked up.
Sometimes she closed her eyes for a few moments, allowed the wind to caress her face, and listen to the high-pitched whine of the tires on the asphalt.
She had discovered that it was the same people who biked to the city every day. She had already started to nod in recognition to some. An older man in a helmet and bicycle bags had even shouted something to her when they met at Little Ultuna. She did not hear what he
said but noted his friendly gaze.
The restaurant owner was past her now, continuing along the sidewalk, past the bathhouse and the old library. She wondered where he was headed. Despite his large frame he managed to maintain a fast pace.
Eva stared after him and thought she saw him turn to the right, up Linnégatan. She was still a little afraid of him. He was nothing like anyone she had ever encountered before.
In general the people in the restaurant business were foreign to her, tougher and more outspoken than she was used to. She knew she would get used to it but missed the intimacy of her last workplace. Feo was the only one she had connected with at all. She couldn’t really get a handle on Johnny, with his rapid shifts in mood and sad expression. Feo had told her that he had just ended a relationship with a woman and had more or less fled his hometown of Jönköping.
“He needs to cook,” Feo had said. “He needs us, he needs a little warmth from the stove, then it will pass.”
Everything passes with time, she thought, and got back on her bike. Already the minimal downward slope from the bridge to East Ågatan made her forget about Johnny’s long face. She had the impulse to stick her legs out to either side as she had done as a young girl in the steep parts of the gravel roads outside Flatåsen, and coast the whole way to Dakar, even though it was five hundred meters away, and partly uphill.
A stranger was sitting in the kitchen. Eva did not like the look of him. He reminded her of a gangster she had seen in an American movie that she and Helen had rented on videocassette. He looked up and glanced at her briefly. There was nothing to focus on in his expressionless eyes.
“Hello,” she said, and gave Feo a little shove.
“This is Manuel, but I call him Mano,” Feo said. “La mano, the hand, who will help us with the dishes.”
“Okay,” Eva said and nodded to the newcomer.
“You’ll have to speak Spanish or English. He’s from Venezuela.”
“Venezuela,” she said.
She thought of the article about sailing in the Caribbean and took a closer look at him. He also emanated a sense of sorrow. Not an outwardly lamented sorrow but a tightly compacted, almost cramplike, grief. The clenched hands resting in his lap and the watchful eyes gave the impression of a man who, at the least sign of concern or danger, would jump up and run out of the kitchen.
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