The Demon of Dakar (24 page)

“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.

“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.

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.

Eva suddenly felt ill at ease. What was he doing at Dakar? Was he an old friend of Feo’s?

“If Slobban agrees, that is,” Feo added.

Donald came in from the bar at that moment, a bottle of mineral water in his hand.

“I can hire him,” he said, “and that lying poodle can go fuck himself. We need more people, damn it, we’re drowning.”

“You have the job,” Feo said in Spanish, gave a triumphant smile, winked at Eva and shrugged.

Manuel stood up.

“Where should I work?”

“There,” Donald suddenly said in Spanish, and pointed. “Feo will show you how it works. Learn it now and then come back at half past six. Understand?”

Manuel nodded.

“So you speak Spanish,” Feo said. “I didn’t know.”

“I’ve worked in Majorca,” Donald answered.

Feo and Manuel went over to the dishwashing station. Eva looked at them. It was clear that Feo liked his role as adviser. The newcomer received the information attentively but without a word, nodding and then repeating mechanically what Feo said.

“He’ll do fine,” Feo said when he returned to the kitchen area.

Slobodan Andersson wiped the sweat
from his forehead.

“Damn, it’s hot,” he breathed.

No one had seen or heard him come in. He had simply materialized in the kitchen. He had entered Dakar through the staff entrance, the same way Manuel had left the restaurant some moments earlier.

Donald informed him that he had hired a dishwasher who would be able to jump in for a couple of hours every evening.

“It won’t work, otherwise. Tessie and Eva can’t run around like
antelopes between the dining room and the dishes and the rest of us don’t have time, just so you know.”

Surprisingly, his boss had no objections.

“Yes, yes, I’m sure it will be fine,” he said, and fingered a stack of plates. “Have the cops been here?”

“They’re clean,” Donald said.

Slobodan looked up, opened his mouth to say something, but changed his mind and removed his hand from the china.

“If the cops return I want to be informed immediately,” he said.

“Have you heard anything new?” Feo asked.

“They make me damn nervous, those pigs,” Slobodan lashed out. “Why the hell can’t they leave me in peace!”

He stalked out of the kitchen and they heard him yell at Måns in the bar, who was often the one who bore the brunt of his temper.

Everyone was surprised at Slobodan’s lack of interest in the kitchen situation. Even if it had been Armas who made the final decision when it came to new hires, Slobodan had always wanted to have his say. But now it seemed that their boss did not have the curiosity or stamina to summon sufficient interest.