Borderline (38 page)

‘Maybe we should save those,’ Halenius said. ‘God knows how long this is going to take. Can we stop and get something on the way?’

Annika sat up straight in the back seat. ‘I’m in charge of logistics,’ she said. ‘I can run out and get something.’

They drove for another ten minutes through the sluggish traffic, then Frida indicated right and turned into a car park at a large shopping centre. Nakumatt, Annika read, under a logo of an elephant.

Frida took a ticket from the security guard and parked between two Range Rovers. She pointed left, towards a row of pizza parlours and shiny chrome coffee bars, Tex-Mex joints and sushi restaurants.

‘What would you like?’ Annika asked.

‘Something that won’t get cold. Salad,’ Frida said.

Annika walked over to the terrace of one of the trendy coffee bars, laid-back funk music from the speakers, red sunshades, brown metal furniture. As she waited for a member of staff, she consulted the menu: a salad cost 520 shillings. They also served French onion soup. This wasn’t Africa, it was Marbella. How many people here were dependent on UN food aid?

A waitress appeared, half Annika’s age and twice as beautiful. Annika ordered three Caesar salads with chicken and six mineral waters to go. The waitress disappeared towards the kitchen and Annika shuffled her feet restlessly.

Four young white men in their mid-twenties were sitting at the table next to her, eating hamburgers with ketchup and fries. Her stomach turned and she hurried to the Ladies.

The toilet had a changing mat and a black granite floor. She hadn’t expected that. The water in the toilet was blue. Thomas might have remarked that the paper dispenser was loose, but the décor and cleanliness would have met with his approval. ‘If the toilets are dirty, what do you think the kitchen looks like?’ he usually said.

Once she had replied: ‘Like parents who hit their children in public. What happens at home when no one’s watching?’

Thomas had looked at her blankly. ‘What have toilets got to do with child abuse?’

She flushed, washed her hands and went back out into the sunshine.

The salads were ready. She paid and went back to the car.

*

Frida pulled out on to Ngong Road, towards the city centre.

It made Annika think of
Out of Africa
.

She could see the famous mountains through the back window and picked up the video-camera to film them. It didn’t work very well. They looked like the wooded hills they were.

It was hot and extremely muggy.

The roads got worse but the traffic improved. The sun disappeared. The car was moving at a decent speed. Out of restlessness, Annika was filming things at random, a young girl grilling corncobs at the side of the road, men pulling carts. She could feel the bags of money by her feet. Soon she would have to deliver them, pick them up with both hands and heave them into a container full of rubbish or a hole in the ground or maybe a ditch, because why else was the heavy-duty plastic so important?

The barbed wire gleamed, the oil-drums sang.

‘Whereabouts in Eastleigh?’ Frida asked.

‘Al-Habib Shopping Mall, Sixth Street, First Avenue. Does that mean anything to you?’

‘They make it sound so lovely,’ Frida said. ‘Streets, avenues, shopping centres … Little Mogadishu got its name for a reason.’

‘What do you mean?’ Halenius said.

‘You’ll see.’

The traces of tarmac on the road vanished altogether. Large water-filled puddles covered the carriageway. The wheels threw up mud. Annika filmed carts, mattresses, carpets, plastic tubs full of spices, rubbish, paper, plastic, women wearing the hijab – vast, organized chaos. This wasn’t Kibera but the level of decay was the same. People brushed past close to the car windows, Annika caught their eyes through the windscreen.

There was a heavy blow on the window beside her, then another on the car roof, and suddenly the car was surrounded by men with their faces pressed against the windows, shouting and waving their fists.

Frida turned round. ‘Are you filming? Here? Are you mad? These people are Muslims! They can’t be filmed.’

Annika dropped the camera as if she’d been burned. The noise got louder as the blows continued to rain down.

‘Oh, dear Lord,’ Frida said. ‘As long as they don’t roll the car over …’

The car was shaking, and Annika was clinging to the seat with both hands. The video-camera hit the floor as someone pulled at the car door and the wheels slid sideways through the mud.

‘Put it in first gear,’ Halenius said. ‘Drive forward very slowly.’

‘I can’t,’ Frida cried. ‘I’ll run them over!’

‘They’ll get out of the way,’ Halenius said. ‘Just take it slowly.’

The street was blocked by donkeys, men and carts, but Frida did as she was told and rolled forwards slowly, blowing the horn and revving the engine. The men followed them, tugging at the doors and shouting, but Frida drove on.

‘Al-Habib is up ahead on the right,’ she said. ‘That’s where we’re supposed to go.’

‘Keep driving,’ Halenius said.

Annika hid her face in her hands. This was her fault.

Suddenly the noise stopped. The men had been left behind and there was tarmac beneath them again. Frida put the car in second gear. Annika could see her hands shaking and tears in her eyelashes.

‘What do we do now?’ Frida said quietly.

Halenius scratched his head. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I really don’t know.’

‘Where should I be heading?’

‘I don’t know. I’ve only been on a course. This wasn’t in the manual.’

Suddenly the rubbish around them disappeared and was replaced by tropical vegetation. The road was faultless; trees stretched up to the sky. High walls surrounded large villas.

‘Has the kidnapper got an ordinary mobile phone?’ Annika asked.

‘How do you mean?’ Halenius said.

‘Can you reply to his text?’

He looked at her in surprise. ‘I haven’t actually tried.’

‘Try to explain the situation,’ she said. ‘Tell him it went to hell, and blame me.’

‘I’ll pull into Muthaiga Golf Club,’ Frida said, turning left past a pair of tall gates with armed guards on either side.

Halenius took out his mobile and wrote a long text message. Frida parked next to a wall of bougainvillaea and switched the engine off. Halenius pressed ‘send’, then waited intently. The mobile bleeped plaintively.

‘Shit,’ he said.

‘Maybe you wrote too much,’ Annika said. ‘If a text is too long it gets turned into a multimedia message. Try shortening it.’

Halenius groaned and deleted the message. The car was heating up. Frida wound down her window. A cascade of birdsong rolled in.

‘What is this place?’ Annika asked.

‘My golf club,’ Frida said.

‘Do you live near here?’ Annika asked.

‘Most diplomats and United Nations staff live in Muthaiga,’ she said.

Annika could just make out a bright green golf course through the palm trees. They were less than a couple of kilometres from Eastleigh, but the contrast couldn’t have been greater.

The mobile bleeped again. ‘No good,’ Halenius said.

‘Try calling,’ Annika said.

Halenius pressed a button and put the mobile to his ear, then lowered it again. ‘The number you are calling cannot be reached,’ he said.

Annika bit her lip. It wasn’t her fault. Taking responsibility for the situation was a way of diminishing it and making herself more important than she was.

Frida opened the car door. ‘We may as well go inside,’ she said, gesturing to the club-house, which was also a bar and restaurant.

‘I’ve still got some salad left,’ Annika said quickly.

Frida didn’t look at her. ‘There’s air-conditioning.’

The sun was going down. The air was heavy with thunder. Annika was sitting on the steps outside the smart golf club, which just happened to be the one to which Karen Blixen had been denied entry because she was a woman (if the film
Out of Africa
, starring Meryl Streep, was to be believed).

She looked out across the car park, and watched as several women went past carrying heavy bags of rubbish while a number of male guards relaxed in the shade.

‘Woman Is The Nigger Of The World’, she thought. Schyman and his serial killer were just one example. She recalled sitting in one of the paper’s cars early one Saturday morning in June, on her way to cover a mass murder in Dalarna, and how the photographer, Bertil Strand, had described the situation: ‘A sub-lieutenant who went mad, and shot and killed seven people. One of them was his girlfriend, but the others were innocent.’

The air really was very humid.

How guilty was a lover? How guilty was she?

Halenius came out on to the steps. His lips had that bloodless look again, and his eyes were sharp. She stood up instinctively.

‘Have they texted?’

‘Called. He was furious.’

‘Because I was filming?’

‘Because we didn’t stop outside al-Habib as we were told. He said we’d broken the terms of the deal and wanted to start negotiations all over again. I told him his Somali brothers had tried to tip the car over, and that we’d had to drive off to save his money. That calmed him down a bit.’

He was sweaty and edgy. She hadn’t seen him like that before.

‘Sorry,’ she said.

He threw out his hands. ‘What the fuck were you filming for?’ he yelled. ‘Have you no sense at all? Don’t you understand what could have happened?’

She swallowed hard. She wasn’t going to cry. ‘I didn’t mean it.’

‘You’ve dumped us right in the shit. Now we have to head north.’

He made for the car. Frida came out, holding a copy of the bill. ‘The traffic’s terrible,’ she said. ‘This is going to take a while.’

‘Where are we going?’ Annika said.

‘Wilson airport,’ Frida said, behind her.

Halenius turned towards Annika. The sun made his face glow. ‘We’re going to Liboi,’ he said. ‘The kidnapper demanded that we fly there tonight, but I managed to get him to see sense. We need to arrange a flight for tomorrow morning.’

‘Liboi?’ Annika whispered. She saw Google Earth in front of her, that vast barren area, the scorched soil.

‘There are no scheduled flights up there,’ Frida said. ‘You’ll have to hire a private plane.’

‘But I haven’t any money left,’ Annika said.

‘You’ve still got some in my account,’ Frida said, getting into the car.

The traffic was completely stationary. There were lines of people in the gloom along the sides of the road, quivering shadows flitting past in the headlights. Annika tried to fix them with her eyes, hold on to them for more than a fleeting moment.

Darkness settled round the car, like a blanket. Occasionally a light would shine somewhere in the distance. Warm air rushed in through the open side-window.

She curled up in the seat and fell asleep.

She opened her eyes and found herself staring at a leopard. It was several seconds before she realized it was a sculpture.

‘Hello,’ Halenius said, stroking her sweaty hair. ‘We’re here.’

She sat up and looked around in the darkness. Lights were shining through tropical plants. Warm light was streaming from an old house with a glazed veranda.

‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘It was wrong of me to take it out on you.’

‘Where are we?’

‘The Karen Blixen Coffee Garden. Her old farm – it’s a hotel now. I know Bonnie, the owner. Can you carry my bag, and I’ll take those?’ He pointed at the bags of dollars.

‘Where’s Frida?’

‘She’s sorting out rooms for us, then going home.’

Annika got out of the car. ‘The airport!’ she said. ‘We need to hire a plane!’

‘All done,’ Halenius said, putting the bags on the ground. The handles creaked. ‘We’ve made arrangements with someone Frida knows.’

She picked up Halenius’s bag. It weighed practically nothing.

They stepped inside the old house, which could have been in Södermanland or Skåne: dark fishbone parquet floors, white wooden panels on the walls, a glazed veranda with stained glass.

‘And Karen Blixen lived here?’ Annika murmured.

‘This is really the foreman’s house, but she lived here for long periods as well,’ Halenius said, then disappeared to the left.

The darkness outside the windows was damp and solid. She remained where she was, in the middle of the floor, and found herself staring at an old harmonium standing against one wall. The keys were brown with age and she reached out a hand to hear what it sounded like, but stopped with her fingers just centimetres from the instrument. Did she really want to know? Could she even imagine what tunes were hiding behind those bellows, those keys? Or was there nothing but screaming and poverty?

Halenius appeared from the innards of the house with an old-fashioned key in his hand. ‘It doesn’t work,’ he said, nodding towards the organ. ‘And it wasn’t Karen’s. It was given to Bonnie.’

He picked up the bags of money – their weight made him sway – then set off out into the night. She bent down, picked up their bags and followed him through the darkness. Low lanterns lit some of the winding slate path with circles of fire-coloured light. They were surrounded by nocturnal noises she’d only ever heard in films: croaking, rustling, scratching, singing sounds that she could neither identify nor locate. The darkness pressed around them.

‘Where’s the hotel?’ she asked, into the shadows.

Halenius pointed to the left. She could just make out white stone walls behind a jungle of tropical plants.

‘Our own house? Each room is a separate building?’

She stepped inside a room with white walls and black roof-beams that hung high above under the ridge of the roof. White linen curtains on black metal poles, a crackling fire in an open hearth, to the right a living room. She looked at the four-poster bed that stood like a galleon in the middle of the floor, with a wrought-iron hull and sails made of mosquito nets. Carefully she walked across the highly polished floor.

She put their bags on the floor and opened a door. The bathroom, brown slate from floor to ceiling, bigger than the living room at home.

‘Will there be anything left of the ransom after we’ve paid for this?’ she asked Halenius, when she came out.