The Demon of Dakar (31 page)

The tent flapped in the
wind. Home, Manuel thought, and sat down in his favorite spot on the riverbank with a stone shaped like a back rest. From there he had a view of the river and the opposite bank where the well-fed cattle grazed. But now he shut his eyes and tried to squeeze everything to do with Sweden out his mind. He sat like this for several minutes before getting up and scouring the landscape. The sun was in the southwest and its light was reflected in quick-moving glints in the river water. Downstream some birds chattered anxiously. Manuel lifted his gaze. A hawk was circling up in the sky.

He made his way up the riverbank on stiff legs, but neither the billowing fields nor the pencil-straight lines of the strawberry plants could give him peace. He only felt bewildered by the fact that there were so many realities. All over the world, people were standing at the edges of fields, by deserts and lakes, in front of homes and graves. Or else they were resting in bed or on a sleep mat, alone, or with their beloved by their side. Many were on their way somewhere, restless or full of anticipation.

Everywhere there were people with dreams and beating hearts. Manuel looked down at his hands as if they could tell him who he was and where his rightful place was.

Miguel’s death, the violent force of the bullets that struck his body, his children at the window. Angel’s sprint across the railway tracks in Frankfurt, his mother’s sad eyes and her body worn and aching from a lifetime of work, the scent and beauty of the fields and crops, words of love exchanged in the dark with Gabriella—everything was mixed together in a burning anguish.

Give us a land to live in, he thought, a land where we can toil and love in peace. Why do you have to come to us with your manipulated seeds,
your pesticides that give us panting lungs and burning wounds, your agreements that no one can understand until it is too late, fierce police dogs, armed thugs in souped-up jeeps, your drugs and your newspapers and radio stations that only lie? Why can we not till the earth in peace? Is that too much to ask?

Manuel did not understand the world. Everything was racing, as if life were a flock of horses stung by a gadfly, setting off at a furious pace.

“Patricio!” he shouted across the Uppsala plains, overcome with terror.

He looked around as if looking for his brother, but the only person he saw was a lone worker with a pesticide applicator who walked between the rows of plants and gave them their dose of poison.

The man, who may have heard his cry, looked up and waved his free hand in greeting. Manuel waved back.

A thunderclap from the sky interrupted his thoughts. A fighter jet appeared as if from nowhere, zoomed over at low altitude, banked, and disappeared. It was over in a couple of seconds. The man with the pesticide applicator and Manuel stared at the horizon and thereafter at each other. Manuel thought he could see the man laugh and how he made a gesture with his hand before he returned to his work. Maybe he’s happy that something broke the monotony, Manuel thought, even if it was a war machine that created the diversion.

He stumbled down the slope to his tent, pulled over his bag of clothes, undressed, and carefully stepped into the river. Last time he had slipped in the slick mud and fallen headlong into the reeds and cut his arm. The water was cool and the stiff and cold stems of the lily pads brushed against his limbs.

The water did him good. He swam several strokes, turned onto his back and let his head sink, and saw the sky above the water line as if in a kaleidoscopic shimmer. For a moment he had the sudden impulse to allow his body to sink to the muddy bottom. A burst of anxiety made him shoot up out of the water and quickly swim back to the edge.

He combed and shaved with care, pulled on clean pants and a T-shirt with a design by José Guadalupe Posada on the chest: a man on a horse riding across a field of grinning skulls.

From his hiding place under a low bushy juniper growing in the middle of a hawthorne thicket, he pulled out the sports bag he had stolen from the summer house, unzipped it, and checked to make sure the cocaine was still there.

At the sight of the packets wrapped up in plastic and tape, he felt a pang of grief at his brothers’ ignorant greed, but also triumph at having been able to cheat Slobodan Andersson.

As he left his tent he carefully looked around, as if it was his last time by the river. He let his gaze wander back and forth. A gray heron made a low, swooping dive over the water, some small fish rippled the surface of the water, perhaps chased by something bigger. He watched how the cattle on the other side lazily helped themselves to grass and shook their heads in order to ward off their buzzing tormentors. The cows looked dully at Manuel before resuming their chewing.

Again the image of Miguel’s death rose up in his mind. It was the thought of the children who from the window became witnesses to the execution of their father that plagued Manuel the most. One of them was also physically marked for life as she had been hit by a ricocheting bullet and received an ugly scar on one cheek.

Had the villagers actually done anything to protect their neighbor and friend? They observed passively as the murderers came to the village and asked for directions to Miguel’s house. Surely no one could have been unaware of their intentions? The villagers made their way up through the alleys to Miguel’s house without speaking, and arrived in time to see him being dragged out. He who had started the association and unselfishly had made himself a target for threats and harassment was shot in front of their eyes without anyone lifting a finger. In fact, they betrayed him even in death by giving in to idle chatter and leaving the association in dribs and drabs.

Why did no one offer any resistance? Why did I do nothing? Their shared indecision and cowardice had haunted him ever since Miguel’s murder, but now his self-contempt grew so intense he started to shake.

There was only one cure: do the right thing. Standing there before the foreign field, he made the sign of the cross and promised himself that if
he ever returned to his village he would honor Miguel’s memory. What form this would take, he was not sure.

Manuel drove in the direction
of Uppsala in order to meet Slobodan Andersson. The latter had described how to get there: take a left at the roundabout where the freeway to Stockholm began. It was the same road as when he had followed Slobodan and the short one. After a hundred meters he should turn right onto a parking lot.

He had left in plenty of time, found the roundabout without any difficulty, but drove straight on the road without turning into the parking lot. After a couple of hundred meters he reached the turnoff to a golf course. There he turned and stepped out of the car. He wanted to reach the agreed-upon meeting place from behind so that Slobodan would not see his car and in that way be able to track him down.

He sat down behind some bushes and waited. Twenty minutes left.

He felt a niggling unease. Not because of the transaction with the fat one—it was open area and Slobodan could not do anything—but because he doubted the very reasoning behind his plan.

At exactly two o’clock Slobodan
Andersson pulled into the parking lot. Like Armas, he drove a BMW. He turned off the engine but did not get out of the car. He looked around. He took a call on his cell phone that he terminated almost immediately. Manuel waited behind the bushes. Slobodan writhed uncomfortably in the car and Manuel watched as he strained to look back toward town and check out all the cars heading east from the roundabout.

Manuel stood up from the ditch. Slobodan had his attention aimed in the opposite direction and did not observe him. Manuel snuck over and tapped on the window. Slobodan threw open the car door.

“Hell, you scared me!”

“Do you have the money?” Manuel asked.

Slobododan glared at him.

“Where do you have the goods?”

“I want the money in my hands first, then you will—”

“Where is your car?”

“I walked here,” Manuel said. “We have to hurry now.”

“Walked? Give me the goods.”

“I want to see the money first.”

Slobodan looked around, then picked up a dark plastic bag from the passenger seat and held it out. Manuel opened the bag and there were the bills. One-hundred-dollar notes. Four hundred of them.

“Forty thousand?”

“Of course,” Slobodan snapped, his brow wet with perspiration.

Manuel left the bag and went to get the sports bag with the cocaine. When he returned to the car, Slobodan was talking on the phone.

“Stop talking!” Manuel said.

Slobodan smiled tauntingly, but turned off the phone. Manuel handed him the bag, Slobodan checked the contents and held out the plastic bag with the money, shut the car door without a word, and drove away. Manuel ran back, jumped into his car, and quickly drove onto the highway. He caught sight of Slobodan’s car on the E-4. As Manuel approached the roundabout he saw Slobodan’s brake lights come on. He had hit a red light. Manuel chuckled smugly.

Slobodan drove at great speed north on the E-4 until he suddenly turned off toward town. Manuel was afraid of losing him, but he did not want to stay too close. Luck smiled on him again and he was just able to pass the intersection before the lights turned red.

The fat one crisscrossed through town and finally ended up by the river, where he parked the car and got out. Manuel, who was forced to stop several times for pedestrians saw him cross the street with the bag in his hand. Manuel took a empty parking space.

Slobodan disappeared down an alley and Manuel hurried to keep up. If he was going to have a chance to punish the fat one he could not lose him now. Slobodan walked quickly at first but then slowed the pace and Manuel sensed that the rapid clip had worn him down.

After several minutes he entered a restaurant. The sign said Alhambra. Manuel recognized the name as being the same restaurant that Feo had mentioned.

After ten minutes Slonodan was back on the street again, minus the bag. How dumb can a
gringo
be? Manuel thought and watched Slobodan blend into the crowd.

Manuel breathed freely. He felt how hungry he was. The tension surrounding the delivering of the drugs and following the fat one had suppressed all needs.

A little way down the pedestrian zone there was a group of musicians and Manuel walked over to them. He thought about the men he and his brothers had joined forces with in crossing the border, and how after their successful crossing they had sung a few songs and shown them the typical dance steps of their region. It would probably be a long time before he would have the pleasure of a
huapango
, he thought, and left the musicians in order not to be overwhelmed with longing for his country.

He walked toward Dakar.
It was the irony of fate that the only stable point he had in Uppsala belonged to Slobodan Andersson. At Dakar there was the Portuguese, and above all Eva, the waitress who was so curious about his country and culture. She listened and asked him a never-ending stream of questions, everything in an astonishingly strange English, in which her limited vocabulary forced her to take long pauses before she managed to communicate what she wanted.

She had also not cared about his lie. For her it didn’t matter if he came from Mexico or Venezuela. It made him even more willing to talk to her. She gave him the freedom to be himself.

On top of all this, she was the first white woman who had spoken to him as an equal. He had met many
gringas
in the United States, but they had seen him as a dirty
chicano
whom they could exploit for underpaid labor but never treat as a human.

She is also beautiful, he thought, not without a pang of guilt, because ever since the message of Angel’s death and Patricio’s incarceration had reached him he had had increasing difficulties caring about Gabriella in the village. Love and future plans faded away. He became irritable and listless. How could he talk of personal happiness as his family was breaking apart? Did he love her? He no longer knew.

He walked to Dakar in a rare mixture of depression and excitement. This time he banged on the back door. The chef who smoked in the dishwashing area and looked like a bulldog opened the door.

“Well, well, look who’s back,” he said and looked at him with a smile that Manuel could not evaluate.

“I need to work,” he muttered. “Is there anything for me to do?”

Unconsciously he adopted the subordinate tone he had learned in California.

“There are no dishes, but it’s been a while since the dressing room was cleaned.

Manuel was supplied with cleaning solution, rags, a bucket, and a mop. He decided to do a thorough job. Not in order to please anyone but because he needed to do something well, something that made a difference, for quite egotistical reasons. He needed to disappear into work. The past week had shaken him. He would never again be the Manuel Alavez he had been. Everything that he said in the future would contain a measure of untruth, or so he felt. Only work was honest.

He kept polishing, wiping down lockers and benches, scrubbing the floors frenetically, and taking the light fixtures down in order to pick all the dead flies out of the glass globes.

He had just finished and sat down on a bench when Eva walked in.

“What a difference!” she exclaimed. “And how good it smells.”

Manuel stood up at once. Eva pulled off her coat and hung it in her locker. He could not help looking at her breasts. Her look of amusement confirmed that he had been caught.

“I’ll go,” he said.

She smiled even more broadly and patted him on his blushing cheek. His confusion only increased before this fearless woman. Why was she laughing? Was she offering herself to him?

“Are you married?”

Manuel shook his head. Eva took her black work skirt from the locker, brushed away some dust, and reached for the white blouse on its hanger. Manuel forced himself not to look at her clothes.