‘Who’s the “we” in this context?’ Sabine enquired.
‘The Maasai.’
‘But didn’t you say you’re peaceful?’
‘Sure. Until someone is nasty to us.’
‘Like a buffalo, for example?’
‘Yes. Or a charlatan.’
Tanzania, Kenya
Sabine still couldn’t come to grips with what had gone wrong. Olekorinko was a witch doctor. And she had passed herself off as a witch.
‘Well, it’s more complicated than you seem to think, Miss Sabine,’ said Meitkini. ‘Would you like me to explain?’
‘Very much.’
So Meitkini did.
Being a witch was considered a bad thing all over Africa. The best way to deal with witches was to beat them to death. Or, even better, pour petrol all over them and set it alight. Which, incidentally, was what Olekorinko’s men had been about to do to Sabine. Hence their hasty departure.
Sabine shuddered. ‘But I read about the Queen in Nairobi. A witch with a luxury home and fifteen cars. A proud career woman, it seemed.’
Meitkini looked at her appreciatively. Oh, so Miss Sabine had heard of the Queen? But she wasn’t a witch, she was a mganga. The word was mistranslated in some languages. Witches specialize in messing with people. If lightning strikes in a village, as a rule it means a witch is on the move. Then a fortune-telling man would be called in to study mirrors and animal entrails and maybe have a peep into a crystal ball before reporting where the suspected witch lived, the one who had sent down the bolt in question. Then they would set fire to her and her house, to be on the safe side.
‘Without proof?’ said Sabine.
‘No, no. With proof. The fortune-teller.’
Although the witches were pretty crafty. Or, at least, they were if they felt they were in the danger zone for being identified as witches.
‘The danger zone?’
‘Yes. Well-off late-middle-aged ladies. Preferably widows. Someone for the rest of the village to envy.’
‘A successful woman,’ said Allan. ‘They’ve plagued men in every age, on every continent.’
‘You’re awfully enlightened, these days,’ said Julius. He longed for the friend Allan had been before he’d got infected with whatever this was.
Allan nodded thoughtfully. ‘The downside of the black tablet,’ he said. ‘I wholeheartedly apologize.’
Meitkini didn’t know much about how things worked elsewhere, but in Africa it was strikingly often that widows with money turned up in the fortune-teller’s crystal ball.
‘Crafty, you said,’ said Sabine. ‘How do you mean?’
Meitkini enjoyed playing the role of teacher. Miss Sabine and the others knew shockingly little about what life was like in his corner of the world.
‘Sales of lightning rods are higher on this continent than all other continents combined. It doesn’t cost many shillings to install a lightning rod on a hill. And then the lightning will strike there instead. And the suspected witch can continue being suspected for a while longer.’
‘But the Queen in Nairobi doesn’t need lightning rods?’
‘That’s right. Because, as I said, she’s not a witch, she’s a mganga. Let me guess, Miss Sabine, you would like me to explain what a mganga is?’
He didn’t wait for the obvious answer.
Well, for one thing, a mganga believed in God – nothing else would do. But that faith in God was mixed up with a little bit of everything else. Like herbs, rituals and roots with magical powers. A true mganga understands that every affliction humans face has physical or divine causes. An infected appendix is pointless to operate on if the underlying cause is beyond our understanding. The same goes for HIV and AIDS. In those cases, intangible power is much more effective.
‘Intangible power?’
‘Magic. Exorcism. Or why not a cup of Olekorinko’s blessed miracle medicine? Always with the purpose of doing good, otherwise … warning, witchcraft.’
Julius had listened to this conversation without getting involved. But now he was curious about something. ‘Listen, Meitkini. Green asparagus. Could there be something magical in it?’ He was picturing a business opportunity beyond anything he’d ever come up with before. Gustav Svensson’s miracle asparagus! Cures all! Buy some today!
‘It’s possible,’ said Meitkini. ‘But when it comes to my appendix, I’d prefer the operation.’
Sabine needed time to think. Had all her mother Gertrud’s stories been based on a linguistic misunderstanding? Was it time to relegate her mother’s principles and accept that it wasn’t possible to make use of them? Or was there a third way?
* * *
It took three hours to get to the border between Tanzania and Kenya. It was marked with a largish rock at the edge of the road, and none of the Swedes would have noticed it if their driver hadn’t slowed down to point.
‘Welcome to my homeland,’ he said, as they passed the rock.
‘Look, that rental car has been behind us ever since we left Olekorinko and his bodyguards,’ said Sabine, who was still bewildered and shaken by what they had experienced.
She had no desire to be set on fire, with or without the petrol.
Allan turned around to glance backwards. He asked to borrow Meitkini’s binoculars.
It was a bit far off, but it looked like there was only a driver. A woman. In a blazer. On the African savannah? The same blazer, even, as …
‘If you stop over there, Meitkini, I’ll talk to the woman behind us. I think she may be an old acquaintance.’
Dusk was starting to fall and the Maasai scanned their surroundings. A calm herd of zebras were walking on a rise to their right. Calm! To the left, a group of baboons were preparing for the night. They were calm too. And there was no bird activity in the air. Thus there were no lions or buffalo nearby. Meitkini said it was safe to stop, but whatever Karlsson was planning to do must not take long. It would be dark within fifteen minutes, and then none of them would be allowed to set foot outside the car.
Stop? Here? What did he mean, ‘acquaintance’? Who could have any acquaintances in the middle of nowhere? Julius had been infected by Sabine’s anxiety. Trusting the hundred-and-one-year-old’s uneven good sense out in the wildest wilds had little to recommend it. Why not just keep going?
‘Take a deep breath, dear asparagus farmer. And back out again. It’s going to be okay, you’ll see,’ said Allan.
When Meitkini parked alongside the road, the rental car did the same, a hundred and fifty metres away. Allan crawled out of the Land Cruiser and down to the ground. He took a few steps towards the car behind them, raised the binoculars again, and realized he had been right. He lowered them and called to the blazer-clad woman, ‘Come here, Madame Real Estate Broker! Don’t be shy!’
Tanzania, Kenya
Agent B had finally managed a few hours’ sleep, shivering in her back seat. And a few more in the morning, once the sun had warmed the air. After that, she’d got absolutely nothing out of the day. It was easy not to run into Karlsson among the ten thousand other people. On the other hand, it would have been impossible to find him. All B could do was stake out the Swedes’ car and follow them at a safe distance when they left. Or half safe, as it turned out, because they didn’t take the same way back. Instead they turned north onto even worse roads than the ones that had brought them to Olekorinko.
Any agent understood the imprudence of tailing someone by car unless you had at least two helpers. One was supposed to be ahead, the other behind. Keeping in constant contact via walkie-talkie.
But the agent was, once and for all, alone on this pointless assignment. And the road was not a road: it was more of a livestock path. The risk of being discovered was considerable.
B kept as great a distance as possible. She drove with the headlights off to avoid beaming them into the rear-view mirror of the target car. But she couldn’t let the Swedes and their driver out of her sight. At any moment they might make a turn and she woul
d lose them for ever.
It was a tough balancing act. B was also plagued by thoughts from the previous night. How had it all turned out like this? She was alone on a rocky unpaved road heading through the African savannah. Alone in every imaginable way. Undercover. Feeling she was working full-time on ruining her already sufficiently ruined life.
At that moment, things went from bad to worse: the target was now sitting in the middle of the road calling to her as if they were old friends.
Agent B considered putting the car into reverse and disappearing. But the situation was too complicated. The hundred-and-one-year-old enemy might just as easily be a friend. And, anyway, now that B had been discovered, she would never know which it was unless she changed tack.
And what did she have to lose? When she got home, she would give her notice. Become a beat cop in Rödelheim? That might be nice. But what would happen if she got toothache and had to visit the local clinic?
The agent rolled up to the old man and his car. She stepped out and walked over to Allan without a word.
‘Good day, good day,’ said Allan. ‘Find any exciting properties to broker since we last spoke?’
They were in the one place on earth a professional real-estate broker was least likely to visit on the job.
Agent B had spent the last seven years of her life being beyond secret. She was suffering from exhaustion. She was hungry. And thirsty. And tired of herself and her life. And she was standing across from a man who might be the enemy but might be a friend.
Enough was enough. Agent B made up her mind.
‘No, I haven’t. My name is Fredrika Langer and I am employed by the Federal Republic of Germany to try to prevent the spread of enriched uranium from Africa to – as one example – North Korea.’
‘I was starting to suspect something along those lines,’ said Allan. ‘You were behind us in the queue at the airport in Dar es Salaam. Then we ended up next to each other on the plane and it turned out you had no idea where you were going. When I surmised there wasn’t any real estate to broker in Musoma you agreed. We were so ridiculously mistaken. A little while ago I recognized you – you haven’t changed your blazer since yesterday. And out here on the savannah, you couldn’t be after anything other than me and my friends, could you?’
‘That’s correct,’ said the agent. She had never felt so unprofessional in all her life.
‘What’s going on?’ asked Meitkini.
‘Quite a bit,’ said Allan. ‘May I introduce you to one another?’
Up to this point, Meitkini had had club and knife at the ready, but he understood from Allan’s tone that he wouldn’t need them. The miserable agent had already acknowledged that she had approached four potential enemies on the savannah with no weapon whatsoever. Look, another failure to stack up with the rest.
When the formalities had been dealt with, Allan suggested that the new addition to their group could also be invited to Meitkini’s camp. They had a lot to talk about. ‘Don’t you agree, Mrs Langer?’
Yes, she did.
‘And we certainly can’t stand around here. Don’t you agree with that as well, Mrs Langer?’
Yes, she did.
‘Then let’s go,’ said Meitkini. ‘Follow me, Mrs Langer.’
Allan chose to ride in the German agent’s car, so they could begin chatting at once. This put Agent Langer in a better mood. If Karlsson was playing with her, he would soon talk himself into a corner. In which case it would still be true that she was in the wrong place – unarmed and having said too much – but at least she would know it.
During the rest of their journey, as it grew dark around them, Allan gave her the short version of events from the hot-air balloon onwards, with some choice flashbacks to earlier points in his life. Agent Langer believed every word. There were too many verifiable items to Karlsson’s advantage. If he were a major uranium smuggler, running errands for North Korea, why would they have fled the country instead of staying put? And how could any uranium smuggler in his right mind come up with the bright idea to bring four kilos to the United States, only to have it dumped at the German embassy in Washington with a love letter to Angela Merkel?
‘The director of the laboratory in Pyongyang mentioned a shipment many times larger than the first one,’ said Allan. ‘Does the uranium in question come from around here, given your presence and interest?’
Yes, that was what the agents suspected. There wasn’t much reason to deny it. From Congo, to be more precise. And the same ship that had picked up Karlsson and Jonsson a few months earlier was out at sea again. ‘We’re reasonably sure that the handover will take place just south of Madagascar.’
‘Then what are you doing here?’
Agent Langer became annoyed. ‘If it weren’t for you, Mr Karlsson, I would have been somewhere else.’
‘Oh, I see,’ said Allan.
* * *
With each passing moment, the road seemed to get worse. At some points it had been rerouted, thanks to African downpours that created torrents of water that ate up parts or the entirety of the road that once had been.
Here and there, stretches went straight through a stream. Sometimes the road was divided in the middle by a boulder or log that wasn’t where it should have been. This made it too narrow to pass oncoming traffic on one of the sides so there were certain brief single-lane stretches. Traffic signs of any sort are a rare sight on the Kenyan savannah. In instances where the road splits, common sense must rule when it comes to choosing right or left. Meitkini chose left, born and raised as he was in a country with left-hand traffic.
But Agent Langer was only on an involuntary visit. What was more, she had spent the first thirty-three years of her life a stone’s throw from Autobahn 5 outside Frankfurt am Main. The crucial difference between the A5 and Kenya’s county highway C12 was not that the former functioned at 200 kilometres per hour and the latter at ten, max, but that in Kenya you don’t drive on the same side of the road as they do in Germany.
The long and the short of it was that the agent, unlike Meitkini, rounded a large boulder on the wrong side. The waiting stream had two separate fords, with ten metres between them. The western one functioned as it should, while the latest cloudburst had washed away great masses of earth from the eastern. An observant and conscientious Maasai had put up a warning sign to say that the upcoming ford was no longer three decimetres deep but more like a metre and a half. But since the Maasai, like Meitkini, always kept left, he hadn’t expended any effort on warning the other side, too – the side Agent Langer was coming from.
The agent drove cautiously down the slope as the depth went from three centimetres to five times that in just one second. The vehicle tipped violently forwards and got stuck with both its front tyres in the deep hole lurking beneath the surface. Parts of the engine ended up under water and, in a matter of seconds, it had stopped.
‘Oops,’ said Allan, who had to hold on to keep from falling in. ‘If I were to guess, I would guess that Madame Agent has got us into a mess.’
Agent Langer thought things just kept getting worse, and at an insane rate. It had become clear a few hours ago that she was in the wrong part of Africa. Now it appeared that, in addition, there was no way she would get out of there until someone managed to fish out and repair the car for her.
It turned out to be an adventure, getting Allan and the agent across to the other side. Meitkini used a branch to determine how far out in the water he could dare to drive his own car, and got close enough for the German and the Swede to climb from bonnet to bonnet, then on to safety, in the company of Julius and Sabine.
‘Your car will have to stay put,’ said Meitkini. ‘It will have to be pulled out from the other side, with a towrope, and that’s not the sort of thing you should do in the middle of the night, around all the animals. Also, I can’t imagine that the engine is in good enough shape to start, now that you’ve chosen to put it under water.’
‘I did not choose to put it under water,’ s
aid Agent Langer.
Kenya
The disillusioned agent sat on the porch of the tent she had been assigned at the camp where Meitkini was a guide. She was experiencing some inner turmoil, and she still couldn’t sleep. Instead she greeted the dawn in solitude. The tents were scattered across the hillsides of the verdant valley of savannah and bush that belonged to the camp. Just two hundred metres further down there was an expansive watering-hole. After sunrise, a pair of dik-diks came to slake their thirst, but had to slink away to make room for a herd of elephants. The silence in the valley was magnificent. Like in Germany, thought Agent Langer, and yet so different.
The peace was broken by Allan and Julius, who came plodding along the path from the camp lounge. With dawn, the wild animals stopped hunting for prey, so it was safe to go for a walk.
‘Good morning, Madame Agent. Sleep well?’ Allan enquired.
‘We brought breakfast, if you’d like some,’ Julius said, holding up the tray he was carrying.
Madame Agent? Well, okay, she had revealed herself. And Karlsson hadn’t been discreet about what he knew.
‘Yes, thanks,’ Agent Langer lied. ‘I slept well. And I wouldn’t mind some breakfast. Please, sit down.’
The woman and the two men shared coffee, fried eggs and papaya from the camp’s own garden as they sat down to talk about the future. All while the cool dawn turned into a decently warm day, there at an altitude of about two thousand metres, just south of the equator.
Allan had brought his black tablet and said he would be happy to share whatever he might discover on it. In which case he would skip how many people had drowned in the Mediterranean since last time because Julius was tired of hearing about that.
Julius asked Allan not to torment the agent as he had tormented Julius and Sabine for far too long already, but the agent nodded politely. It might be pleasant to hear what was going on beyond the savannah and bush. Had the Supreme Leader in the east come up with any new nonsense?
The Accidental Further Adventures of the Hundred-Year-Old Man Page 29
