The Demon of Dakar

by Kjell Eriksson

  “I don’t trust anyone,” he said with vehemence. “All they want to do is put one over on you. You’re lucky you only have to worry about the dishes.”

  Manuel smiled and started putting wineglasses in a rack, happy to have something to do with his hands.

  “I have a friend who was murdered, you have probably heard about it. We had known each other for twenty years, at least … twenty long, fucking years … and then the bastard goes and gets himself murdered. Is that right? We were like brothers…. Do you have a brother?”

  Manuel nodded.

  “Then you know. A brother is everything. Brothers don’t let each other down.”

  “He let you down?”

  Slobodan Andersson trained his glassy eyes on Manuel and for several seconds the latter forgot himself, felt sorry for the man before him. In his pitiable eyes he could read the man’s great sorrow and all the human misery he knew so well.

  He picked up a knife from the container of silverware. A piece of meat still clung to it. He would be able to drive this knife into that fat body and then leave Dakar. Then all accounts would be paid and settled.

  “I don’t know,” Slobodan said, his gaze on the knife.

  Manuel tossed the knife back in the basket, turned his back on Slobodan, and opened the dishwasher, which disgorged a cloud of steam.

  “The uncertainty is the worst thing,” he said and lifted out a tray of glasses.

  “I started with nothing,” Slobodan resumed and held up his palms as if to illustrate his starting point. “Just like you. I slaved like an animal, so afraid I almost wet myself. I have struggled, built something, and I don’t want some bastard to come and take everything. Do you know what I mean? There has to be some justice. I have received nothing for free! Work, work, work, all day long, all year. And what is the thanks? The authorities chase you, they want taxes to fatten themselves up, so they can sit on their big behinds and pick their nails. It has to be clean as a laboratory, otherwise they close you down. The union hounds you, as if you were made of money. And regulations for everything, damn it! I sure as hell didn’t get overtime or vacation compensation. I was happy I had a job.”

  Slobodan steadied himself by putting his arm on the counter and rising to his feet before he went on.

  “I’m creating jobs, damn it! Do you know how many people I have trained, given a life? Yes, that’s how it is, I’ve provided them with a life, all the people who don’t have the balls to fix something for themselves.”

  He slapped the counter with his hand as if to underscore his words.

  “I make people happy. They come here to eat and drink and forget for a moment that we live in a society of thieves. I am a generous person, but now there is no place for this. Everyone wants a piece, without making an effort.”

  He fell silent as suddenly as he had started his outburst and sank down on the stool. He studied his hands, the cuticles and knuckles.

  “Ungrateful,” he whispered in Swedish.

  Manuel was not sure if he should take this opportunity to reveal his identity and the fact that he was here to claim Patricio’s money, but he decided to wait. A new idea had formed in his mind, one that had the potential to yield considerably more.

  He did not want to kill Slobodan, only take his money and then crush him. The pathetic man on the stool could very well be allowed to suffer in torment several more days.

  “I am done now,” Manuel said and pushed in the final tray.

  He wanted to speak to Feo before he left Dakar. He longed for the peace and quiet of his tent, but perhaps there was something else he should do before he left. He peered out into the bar. Feo sat at the counter, leaning over a beer. Måns said something that made Feo smile and look around the dining room.

  Manuel felt a pang of envy at the Portuguese. His smile was genuine. His tender talk of his wife and child was without artifice. He was happy in his work, prepared his food in laughter and with an economy of movement as if he were allied with fortune.

  Slobodan coughed behind his back and Manuel turned around. The fat one was staring into space. His head drooped and there was a glint of saliva at the corner of his mouth.

  Manuel again felt a kind of sympathy for the man and for a moment, forgetful of the context, he had the impulse to help Slobodan Andersson to his feet, to console him and see to it that he made it home.

  Then the door to the dining room was thrown open and Tessie entered, glancing at Slobodan who had slumped on the stool. She laughed.

  “Are you the babysitter?” she asked with an American accent that took Manuel back to California.

  “Wake up,” she said and shook Slobodan’s shoulder, without taking any further notice of the dishwasher. “It is time to go home. I’m calling a cab.”

  The proprietor shook his head.

  “I can’t …”

  “Of course you can,” Tessie said, and Manuel understood, even though she was speaking Swedish.

  “There’s someone out there,” Slobodan slurred.

  “What are you talking about? Are you supposed to meet someone?”

  Slobodan tried to stand up but fell back onto the stool. Tessie sighed.

  “Damn, I’m tired,” she muttered in English. “It’s bad enough that I have to wait on the customers, let alone play mom to this lump.”

  “He thinks you should be grateful that you have a job,” Manuel said.

  Tessie stared at him.

  “Grateful! I should be grateful? Are you on drugs?”

  She flounced out of the kitchen, exasperated and disgusted. Slobodan looked up.

  “They’re out to get me,” he groaned, before the heavy body jerked and the vomit projected straight out from his mouth. He stared at the floor in astonishment, with the slack jaw of a drunkard.

  Manuel walked out into the bar and gave Feo a sign that he should come out into the kitchen. The Portuguese smiled at him, slid off the bar stool, and rounded the counter.

  “What is it?”

  “It’s the fat one.”

  The stench was indescribable. Slobodan had fallen asleep with his head against the wall. They cleaned it up together. Feo sprayed water onto the floor while Manuel mopped it up with rags.

  “I have never seen him so drunk,” Feo said, and for once he looked worried.

  “He talked about someone being after him,” Manuel said.

  “I have heard him talk about that,” Feo said, turning the water off and looking at the sleeping man. “He thinks the person who killed Armas is after him.”

  “Who would want to kill both of them?”

  Manuel’s tension was like a cramp in his stomach.

  “Armas should have been here,” Feo said, as if he hadn’t heard the question. “He would have picked him up by his arms and carried him home. Can you help me? He can’t stay here.”

  One hour later they had lugged Slobodan into his apartment. The first cab had refused to take them, and they had to call for a bigger cab that was able to fit Slobodan in the luggage area.

  Manuel and Feo then dragged the half unconscious proprietor up to his apartment and onto his bed.

  They stood for a while and watched the shapeless body that flinched from time to time as if from a cramp. His breathing was heavy and wheezy and Slobodan muttered something in his sleep.

  “Can you stay with him for a while?” Feo asked.

  Manuel nodded and looked around the bedroom.

  After Feo had left, Manuel walked from room to room in amazement. It was the largest residence he had ever set foot in. Five rooms and a kitchen for one person. Everything was so light. The furniture, textiles, wallpaper, and polished wood floors virtually lit up the dark August night.

  “Maria,” he mumbled, pulling his hand across the beautiful surface of the dining room table.

  He took out a can of beer from the refrigerator, but only had one sip before he set it down. He opened cupboard after cupboard and viewed the multitude of glass and china. Who can afford this, he thought.
And who can use it all? In the drawers, there were knives and gleaming utensils that had, for him, an unknown purpose. He picked up a knife whose extremely slender blade appeared to exclude it from all normal use, and weighed it in his hand but then tossed it back and closed the drawer with a bang.

  He returned to the bedroom. One of Slobodan’s hands hung over the edge of the bed and Manuel picked it up and laid it across his stomach. Slobodan muttered something in his sleep.

  The feeling of being an intruder grew stronger. What was he doing in the apartment? He looked at the man who now appeared to have settled in and was snoring heavily.

  A freight train went by outside the window and Manuel walked over to the window. The coupled sections jerked and squeaked, and the mild thumping of the wheels against the track was soothing. He counted the cars, container after container, tank after tank; it seemed they were never going to end.

  Once he had read a book about a man who was traveling through the United States on a freight train. Occasionally he worked temporarily on a farm or at a gas station, but mostly he wandered restlessly from state to state, looking for a woman he had once known and loved. Manuel did not remembered how the book ended—if the man reached his goal—but something of the anxiety and feeling of being an outsider that had plagued the rambler now gripped Manuel.

  The clanging signals stopped, the bars at the nearby crossing were slowly raised, and Manuel stared at the disappearing lights of the last car until they were completely gone.

  Slobodan suddenly snuffled. His heavyset body twisted as if in pain and he let out a sob. A rivulet of vomit ran down his cheek. Slobodan pulled his hand across his mouth in his sleep and muttered something.

  It occurred to Manuel how easy it would be for him to end Slobodan’s life. The feeling had been in the back of his head ever since Feo had left him alone with the fat one. How easy it would be. Armas and Slobodan gone, their debts paid. But to what purpose? Would Angel come back to life or Patricio get out of prison because Slobodan died?

  He turned his head and looked at the man in the bed. The fat one had appeared like a bhni guí’a, a man from the mountain, filled with promises and green bills, thundering and powerful. Now he lay there like a helpless colossus. Manuel would easily be able to suffocate him with a pillow and then disappear for good. No one would suspect foul play, everyone would believe that Slobodan had suffered a drunkard’s violent but natural death.

  He recalled the story of Ehud. When Manuel and his brothers were small, their father would read aloud from the Bible in the evenings. He had reached all the way to the book of Daniel until his worsening sight put an end to all reading.

  It was perhaps the fact that Ehud, like Manuel, was left-handed that had fixed the story in his mind. Edud murdered a king in secret. Manuel tried in vain to think of the king’s name. The king, who came from the land of Moab, was enormously fat. Ehud had been assigned the task of murdering the king and had thrust his sword into him. The sword sank to its hilt in the voluminous belly. Ehud fled, and managed to escape. The people rose up and freed themselves from their oppressors.

  Am I Ehud, he asked himself. Is it right to kill another person?

  Manuel weighed Slobodan’s life. Carried on a silent dialogue with death or, rather, himself, the man he could be, the man he was in actuality. This was how he experienced those hours in Slobodan Andersson’s darkened apartment. It was as if he were reasoning with an inner being who spoke to him, advised and admonished him, sometimes querulously and somewhat snobbishly. But mostly reasonably and calmly, soothingly, like a good friend, the only true friend who loyally accompanied him through life.

  When this voice fell silent, so too did Manuel, and therefore he pursued the dialogue, even though it became increasingly disjointed due to his exhaustion and his longing for a life far from poverty and death.

  He sat down in an armchair, stared into the darkness, and allowed his thoughts to wander freely. He may have fallen asleep, dreamed about the village and his mother, Maria, his friends and the scent of rain. Slobodan snuffled occasionally, flailed his limbs, and shouted something with such desperation in his voice that for a moment he appeared quite human.

  He was like a shapeless mound of flesh and bones as he lay there, a shadow figure who dominated the room with his snoring and other sounds. There was a stench of sweat and vomit, but that did not bother Manuel. What he did find distracting, however, were the human sounds. Perhaps there were memories from another time stored in his unconscious that made him reflective and filled with melancholy? Was it memories of his father, as he turned in his sleep and muttered something inaudible? Perhaps it was memories from the barracks at McArthur’s farm in Idaho where he had worked one summer erecting fences and clearing fields? There, seven men were crowded into a few square meters. The odors emanating from their bodies and the pressing restlessness as they slept in heat and congestion forced Manuel to leave the barrack and sleep on the veranda, where he was safe from the rain but not the mosquitoes that flew in from the marshlands to the south. Even out there he could hear the sounds of the men who he both hated and loved as he lay close to the stars, with the bloodsucking fiends buzzing around his head.

  He is a person, Manuel thought, and felt acute consternation. He would have preferred not to admit there was any human aspects in Slobodan Andersson, the man of the mountain who sold and bought souls. A man whose only goal was to enrich himself, cost what it may. It had cost Angel his life and Patricio his freedom.

  But if? Then Manuel was back at the beginning: his brothers’ own responsibility.

  “If,” he said aloud.

  If. If they had not followed the enticements of a bhni guí’a? If they had been men, if they had been true Mexicans?

  He stood up and walked over to the bed, leaned over the sleeper.

  “Are you a human being?”

  The pale cheeks in the fleshy face trembled as Slobodan turned over. His eyelids twitched and he whimpered like a dog.

  Exhaustion drove Manuel back to the armchair. It was starting to get light outside and the shadows of the room went from black to gray. Manuel closed his eyes and immediately fell asleep.

  He dreamed he was a happy man. The woman he loved, and to whom he had promised to return as soon as he could, was walking by his side. Sometimes the image changed and they were lying together somewhere outside, but not so far that they could not hear the barking dogs and the occasional shout of a villager. Manuel felt an unprecedented sense of strength, it was as if his physical powers had been amplified and he knew that they would soon meet. It filled him with a feeling of hope that he had not experienced for a long time.

  He reached for Gabriella and when she crept up into his lap he woke with a start, sat up, and did not know at first where he was.

  “Who the hell are you?”

  Slobodan Andersson’s voice had nothing of the authority or acerbity for which he was both feared and hated. In fact, he appeared frightened and confused.

  Manuel, who had not understood what he had said, got up out of the chair.

  “How are you feeling now?” he asked in English.

  Slobodan stared at Manuel, then looked around the room before he once again stared at the Mexican without comprehension. Then he seemed to recollect something from the previous day and night.

  “You are the dishwasher,” he observed.

  “I am the dishwasher.”

  “Have you made any coffee?”

  Manuel shook his head.

  “Then do it. I need to clear my head.”

  Slobodan Andersson swung his legs over the side of the bed, made a face, and rubbed his hands over his head. He muttered something and drew in the snot in his nose.

  Manuel sat down again. He took hold of the idea that had been slumbering and growing unexpressed since his visit to the summer-house.

  “I come bearing a message,” he said.

  Slobodan looked up.

  “I come bearing a message from my brother.”

>   “What the hell are you talking about. What brother?”

  “Angel.”

  The astonishment momentarily made Slobodan look human, until he realized who Manuel was.

  “You are the brother who was not so enthusiastic, is that right? The one who stayed behind? What kind of message?”

  “That which Angel was not able to deliver,” Manuel said and stood up again. Slobodan was five meters away.

  “The German cops didn’t take it?”

  Manuel shook his head, not sure if Slobodan would buy the lie. He did not know what had appeared in the papers or what Slobodan knew about where the drugs had gone.

  “But it will cost you,” he went on.

  “I have never received anything for free in my entire life,” Slobodan said, and smiled.

  He appeared unaffected. The hangover he most likely had felt as he woke up appeared to be gone.

  “But I don’t buy something that already belongs to me,” he added.

  “Well, then,” Manuel said. “There are other buyers.”

  “Did you try with Armas first?”

  “I don’t know who that is,” Manuel said and Slobodan stared at him for a long time before he spoke.

  “How is Patricio? Is he well?”

  “I am going to visit him tomorrow.”

  Manuel did not like the situation. There was a veiled threat behind Slobodan’s questions, the same tactic that Armas had used to try and shake him up.

  “How long have you been in Sweden?”

  “Not long.”

  “I can reimburse you for your costs.”

  “Fifty thousand dollars,” Manuel said and tried to keep his voice level.

  Slobodan chuckled. Manuel watched him without moving a muscle, hoping the fat one would not realize how nervous he was. He had been taking a chance when he threw out that figure, but now he saw in Slobodan’s reaction that fifty thousand dollars was in the ballpark.

  The thought of offering Slobodan the chance to buy back his own stash of drugs had come as an inspiration, and now seemed like sheer genius. He imagined the possibilities; now his brother could get a more comfortable life in prison.

  Slobodan stared thoughtfully at Manuel for a few seconds before he stood up and left the room. Manuel heard the sound of liquid pouring into the toilet bowl and how the fat one splashed water, snorted, and talked loudly to himself. Finally there was some rinsing and a short laugh.