The Black Path (39 page)

I got out in time, thinks Mikael Wiik. There are those who never manage to live a different kind of life. But I’ve got a partner, a real woman with a real job. And I’ve got an apartment and a good job. I can cope with everyday life, peace and quiet.

And if I hadn’t given Kallis the telephone number, he would have got it from somewhere else. And how should I know what he used it for? He probably didn’t use it at all. I mean, he got it at the beginning of December. Long before Inna was murdered. And she…it can’t have been a professional job. It was all so…messy.

Mauri Kallis pays fifty thousand euros into an account in Nassau in the Bahamas. He receives no communication, either to say that the money has been received, or that any assignment has been carried out according to his wishes. Nothing. He has said he wants Örjan Bylund’s hard drive wiped, but he doesn’t know what happened about that.

A week after he’s paid the money, he finds an item in the newspaper stating that Örjan Bylund has died. It sounds as if it were a result of illness.

It was all so easy, and he could simply move on, thought Mauri Kallis, smiling as his wife shared a toast with Gerhart Sneyers.

With Inna it hadn’t been easy. A hundred times over the last week he’s thought about his alternatives. And the whole time he comes back to the fact that there weren’t any. It had been a necessary step.

It’s Thursday March 13. In one day, Inna Wattrang will be dead. Mauri is at Diddi’s house. Diddi is upstairs in bed.

Ulrika came round to Mauri and Ebba and rang the doorbell. She was crying, she had no coat on, just a sweater. She was carrying the baby in her arms wrapped in a blanket, like a refugee.

“You have to talk to him. I can’t wake him up,” she said to Mauri.

Mauri didn’t want to go. After Quebec Invest and after what Diddi told him about Örjan Bylund, they prefer not to have anything to do with each other. And definitely not just the two of them, alone. No, since becoming partners in crime they’ve used all their skill to avoid each other. Their shared guilt hasn’t bound them together—quite the opposite.

Now he’s standing here in Diddi and Ulrika’s bedroom, looking at Diddi, who’s asleep. He makes no attempt to wake him up. Why should he? Diddi has curled up into the fetal position.

Mauri is filled with a grinding irritation when he looks at him.

He looks at the clock and wonders how long he has to stand there before he can go back. How long would it have taken if he’d tried to wake him? Not very long, surely?

And just at that moment, as he’s turning to leave, the telephone rings.

Thinking it’s Ulrika calling to see how things are going, he picks up the receiver and answers.

But it isn’t Ulrika. It’s Inna.

“What are you doing there?” she asks him.

He doesn’t notice how different she sounds; he only thinks about that afterwards. He’s so happy to hear her voice.

“Hi,” he says. “Where are you?”

“Who are you?” she asks in her strange voice.

And now he can hear it. That this is a different Inna. Perhaps he already knows at this point.

“What do you mean?” he asks, although he doesn’t want to know.

“What do I mean!”

She’s breathing heavily at the other end of the phone, and then it comes.

“A while ago there was a journalist, Örjan Bylund, asking questions about Quebec Invest quitting Northern Explore. And about a few other things. He died right after that.”

“Oh yes?”

“Don’t give me that! I thought at first it was Diddi, but he’s not smart enough. Just desperate enough for money to let himself be used, though. I’ve checked up on you, Mauri. It was easier for me than it was for the journalist. I’m part of the company, after all. You’ve emptied the company accounts, we’re talking huge amounts of money! A whole lot of the payment invoices taking the money out of the company are just so much thin air. The money’s disappearing into a protected account in Andorra. And guess what? At roughly the same time as you started emptying the company accounts, General Kadaga started to mobilize his forces. A number of gangs joined him, because suddenly there was financial support. Loyalty is just a matter of who’s paying. In newspaper articles that nobody outside Central Africa reads, it says that weapons are being smuggled across the borders to these groups! By plane! How can they afford that? And they’ve taken control of the mining complex in Kilembe. You paid them, Mauri. Paid Kadaga and the military leaders who’ve joined him. So they’ll protect your mine. So they won’t plunder it and destroy it. Who are you?”

“I don’t know where you’ve got these ideas…”

“Do you know what else I did? I met Gerhart Sneyers at the Indian Metal Conference in Mumbai. We had a few drinks one evening. And I asked him: ‘So, you and Mauri will soon be getting things going again in Uganda?’ Do you know what he said?”

“No,” replies Mauri.

He’s sat down on the bed next to the sleeping Diddi. The whole situation is unreal.

This isn’t happening,
he’s screaming inside.

“He said…nothing! He said: ‘What has Mauri said to you?’ I was actually frightened of him. And for the first time he didn’t keep on about the fact that Museveni is a new Mobutu, a new Mugabe. In fact, he didn’t say a word about Uganda. I’ll tell you what I think. I think you and Sneyers are providing Kadaga with money and weapons, and I think you’re planning to get rid of Museveni. Am I right? If you lie to me I swear I’ll spill everything I know to some really hungry media group, and they can sort out the truth.”

Fear sinks its teeth into Mauri as if it were an animal.

He swallows. Takes a deep breath.

“It’s company property,” he says. “I’m protecting it. You’re a lawyer, haven’t you heard of
jus necessitatis,
the right of necessity?”

“Haven’t you heard of child soldiers? You’re giving those fucked-up lunatics money for drugs and guns. These people who are protecting your property for money, they kidnap children. Kill their parents in cold blood.”

“If the civil war in the North never ends,” ventures Mauri, “if the unrest is just allowed to continue, then the population will never have peace. Generation after generation will end up as child soldiers. But now, at this precise moment, there’s the chance to bring it to an end. The president isn’t getting any aid, the World Bank has frozen everything. He’s in a weakened position. The army’s short of money. And the army is fragmented. Museveni’s brother is busy plundering mines in the Congo. With a different regime, perhaps the children of tomorrow can be farmers. Or miners.”

Inna remains silent for a long time. When she does speak, she doesn’t sound angry anymore. Her voice is almost tender. It’s as if a couple, after all the arguments, finally decide to go their separate ways, and their thoughts turn from the current situation to the way things used to be. And it hasn’t all been bad.

“Do you remember Pastor Kindu?” she asks.

Mauri remembers. He was the pastor in the mining community near Kilembe. When the government started making life difficult, one of the first things that happened was that garbage collections stopped. They said it was a strike, but in fact it was because the military were threatening the garbage collectors. After only a week or so the whole place seemed to be lying beneath a blanket of the sickly stench of rotting garbage. They started to have problems with rats. Mauri, Diddi and Inna went over there. They didn’t realize this was only the beginning.

“You and the pastor sorted out a fleet of trucks and took the garbage out of the town,” said Mauri, a sorrowful smile in his voice. “You stank when you got back. Diddi and I put you up against a wall and sluiced you down with a hosepipe. The cleaning women stood at the windows laughing.”

“He’s dead. Those men you’re paying, they murdered him. Then they set fire to his body and dragged it along behind a car.”

“Yes, but that kind of stuff has gone on all along! Don’t be so naive.”

“Oh, Mauri…I really respected you.”

He tries. To the very last, he tries to save her.

“Come home,” he begs. “So we can talk.”

“Home? Is that Regla? I have no intention of ever coming back there. Don’t you understand?”

“What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know who you are. That journalist, Örjan Bylund…”

“You don’t seriously think I had anything to do with that?”

“You’re lying,” she says tiredly. “I did tell you not to lie.”

He hears a distinct click as she puts the phone down. It sounded like…it sounded like an old-fashioned public telephone. Where the hell was she?

He needs to think clearly. This could go really badly. If the truth comes out, then…

A series of pictures in his head. He becomes persona non grata in the Western world. No investors want to be associated with him. Even worse pictures: investigations involving Interpol. He ends up facing an international tribunal accused of crimes against human rights.

There’s no point in regretting things you’ve done in the past. The question is, what has to be done now?

Where is she? A public telephone?

When he thinks back to the conversation, he could actually hear something in the background…

Dogs! A chorus of howling, singing, barking dogs. Sled dogs. A team of dogs, just before they set off.

And then he knows exactly where she is. She’s gone to the company’s house in Abisko.

He puts the telephone down carefully. He doesn’t want to wake Diddi. Then he picks it up again and wipes it with the sheet from Diddi’s bed.

Ester pushed the empty macaroni pan under the bed. It could stay there. She put on the black clothes she wore for her mother’s funeral, a polo-neck sweater and a pair of trousers from Lindex.

Her aunt would probably have preferred it if she’d worn a skirt, but couldn’t quite bring herself to mention it. Ester had been quieter than usual. And it wasn’t just grief. It was anger too. Her aunt had tried to explain:

“She didn’t want us to say anything to you. She wanted you to paint for your exhibition. Not to be worrying about her. She wouldn’t let us say anything.”

So they said nothing. Not until it was absolutely necessary.

It is the private viewing of Ester’s exhibition. Lots of people drinking mulled wine and eating ginger biscuits. Ester doesn’t understand how they can actually see anything of the pictures, but perhaps that’s not the idea. She’s interviewed by two newspapers, and has her photograph taken.

Gunilla Petrini introduces her to various important people. Ester is wearing a dress and feels odd. When her aunt turns up, she’s really pleased to see her.

“This is amazing,” whispers her aunt, impressed by what she sees.

She pulls a face when she discovers the mulled wine is alcohol-free.

“Have you spoken to Mother?” asks Ester.

And something shifts in her aunt’s face. A hesitation, or perhaps it’s the fact that she’s avoiding Ester’s eyes, that makes Ester ask:

“What? What is it?”

And she wants her aunt to say: nothing.

But her aunt says:

“We need to talk.”

And they go off to a corner of the room which is now full of people exchanging air kisses and handshakes and taking a quick glance at Ester’s pictures in between and it’s getting very loud and very warm and Ester is able to pick up only parts of what her aunt is saying.

“You must have noticed that she’s started dropping things…and that she can’t manage to hold the brush…was letting you paint the backgrounds…didn’t want you to know, what with the exhibition and everything…a muscular disease…finally reached her lungs…won’t be able to breathe anymore.”

And Ester wants to ask why, why nobody said anything. The exhibition! How can anybody think she cares about the damned exhibition?

Mother dies the day after Christmas Day.

Ester has said goodbye. She and her aunt have cleaned the house in Rensjön like mad things, visiting the hospital in Kiruna in between. Ester tries to find
eatn
an
behind the stiff mask into which the illness has transformed her face. The muscles beneath the skin have stopped functioning.