The White Lioness

Chapter Thirty-two

That day in Kalmar, Kurt Wallander began to realize how bad he actually felt. Later, when the murder of Louise Akerblom and the sheer nightmare that followed in its wake had become a series of unreal events, a desolate charade in a distant landscape, he would insist stubbornly that it was not until Konovalenko was lying on the Oland bridge with staring eyes and blazing hair that it really struck him how rotten he felt deep down inside. That was the moment of insight, and he would not budge from that view, even though the memories and all the painful experiences came and went like changing patterns in a kaleidoscope. It was in Kalmar that he lost his grip on himself! He told his daughter it was like a countdown had started, a countdown leading to nothing but a vacuum. The doctor in Ystad, who started treating him in mid-June and tried to sort out his increasing gloom, wrote in his journal that according to the patient the depression started over a cup of coffee at the police station in Kalmar while a man was being burned up in a car on a bridge.

There he sat in the police station in Kalmar, drinking coffee, feeling very tired and low. Everybody who saw him hunched over his cup that half hour had the impression he was preoccupied and completely aloof. Or was he just thoughtful? In any case, nobody went to keep him company or to ask him how he was doing. The strange cop from Ystad was surrounded by a mixture of respect and hesitation. He was simply left in peace while they all dealt with the chaos on the bridge and the endless flow of telephone calls from newspapers, radio, and television. After half an hour he suddenly jumped to his feet and demanded to be taken to the yellow house on Hemmansvagen. When they passed the place on the bridge where Konovalenko’s car had become a smoking, burned-out shell, he stared straight ahead. When he got to the house he immediately took over command, forgetting completely that the investigation was actually being led by a Kalmar detective called Blomstrand. But they deferred to him, and he worked up an enormous level of energy over the next few hours. He seemed to have put Konovalenko right out of his mind already. There were two things that interested him above all others. He wanted to know who owned the house. He also kept going on about Konovalenko not being alone. He ordered an immediate door-to-door survey of the other houses in the street, and he wanted cab drivers and bus conductors to be contacted. Konovalenko was not alone, he kept repeating, over and over again. Who was the man or woman he had with him, who had now disappeared without trace? None of his questions could be answered immediately. The local property register and the neighbors who were questioned gave completely contradictory answers about who actually owned the yellow house. About ten years previously, the owner, a widower called Hjalmarson who worked at the provincial records office, had died. His son lived in Brazil. According to some neighbors he was a representative for some Swedish firm and an arms dealer according to others. He returned home for the funeral. It had all amounted to a worrying time for Hemmansvagen, according to a retired department head at the local council offices in Kronoberg, who emerged as a spokesman for the neighbors. And so there was an invisible sigh of relief when the “For Sale” sign was taken down and a moving van drove up filled with all the belongings of a retired reserve officer. He used to be something as antiquated as a major in the Scanian hussars, an amazing relic from a former age. He was named Gustav Jernberg, and he announced his presence to the surrounding world by means of friendly bellowing. The worries returned, however, when it became apparent that Jernberg spent most of his time in Spain, on account of his rheumatism. When he was away, the house was occupied by his grandson, who was in his mid-thirties, arrogant, rude, and paid no attention to normal conventions. His name was Hans Jernberg, and all anybody knew was that he was some kind of businessman who occasionally paid fleeting visits, often accompanied by strange companions nobody recognized.

The police immediately started looking for Hans Jernberg. He was traced at about two in the afternoon to an office in Goteborg. Wallander spoke with him over the telephone. At first he claimed to have no idea what they were talking about. But Wallander was in no mood to wheedle and coax people into telling the truth that day, and threatened to hand him over to the Goteborg police besides hinting it would be impossible to keep the press out of it. Halfway through the call one of the Kalmar cops stuck a note under Wallander’s nose. They had run a search on Hans Jernberg through various files and found he had strong connections with neo-nazi movements in Sweden. Wallander stared at the note before the obvious question to ask the guy at the other end of the line struck him.

“Can you tell me your views on South Africa?” he asked.

“I can’t see what that has to do with it,” said Hans Jernberg.

“Answer the question,” Wallander demanded impatiently. “Or else I’ll have to call my colleagues in Goteborg.”

The reply came after a short silence.

“I consider South Africa to be one of the best organized countries in the world,” said Hans Jernberg. “I regard it as my duty to do all I can to support the whites living there.”

“And you do that by renting out your house to Russian bandits who run errands for the South Africans, do you?” asked Wallander.

This time Hans Jernberg was genuinely surprised.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Oh yes you do,” said Wallander. “But you can answer another question instead. Which of your friends has had access to the house during this last week? Think carefully before you answer. If there’s the slightest sign of evasion I’ll ask one of the Goteborg prosecutors to issue a warrant for your arrest. And that’s what will happen, believe you me.”

“Ove Westerberg,” said Hans Jernberg. “He’s an old friend of mine who runs a construction firm here in town.”

“Address?” demanded Wallander, and received it.

It was all very confusing. But some effective work on the part of the CID in Goteborg threw some light on what had happened at the yellow house over the last few days. Ove Westerberg proved to be as good a friend of South Africa as Hans Jernberg. Through a series of contacts whose identities seemed shrouded in mist, he had received a query some weeks previously as to whether the house could be placed at the disposal of some South African guests, who would pay good money. As Hans Jernberg was abroad at the time, Ove Westerberg had not told him about it. Wallander also suspected the money had gone no further than Westerberg’s pocket. But Westerberg had no idea who these guests from South Africa were. He did not even know they had been there. That was as far as Wallander got that day. It would be the job of the Kalmar police to delve further into contacts between Swedish neo-nazis and the representatives of apartheid in South Africa. It was still not clear who had been in the yellow house with Konovalenko. While neighbors, cab drivers, and bus conductors were being interrogated, Wallander made a thorough search of the house. He could see that two of the bedrooms had been used recently, and that the house had been vacated in a great hurry. It seemed to him Konovalenko must have left something behind this time. He had left the house, never to return. It was possible, of course, that the other visitor had taken Konovalenko’s belongings with him. It was also possible that there was no limit to Konovalenko’s caution. Maybe he anticipated the possibility of a burglary every night, and hid all his belongings before going to bed? Wallander summoned Blomstrand, who was busy searching the toolshed. Wallander wanted every available cop to search the house looking for a bag. He couldn’t say what it looked like or how big it was.

“A bag with something in it,” he said. “There must be one somewhere.”

“What kind of things in it?” wondered Blomstrand.

“I don’t know,” said Wallander. “Papers, money, clothes. Maybe a gun. I just don’t know.”

The search began. Various bags and cases were carried down to where Wallander was waiting on the ground floor. He blew the dust off a leather briefcase containing old photos and letters, most of them starting with phrases like Dearest Gunvor or My dear Herbert. Another, just as dusty and unearthed in the attic, was crammed with exotic starfish and seashells. But Wallander waited patiently. He knew there would be traces of Konovalenko somewhere, and hence also perhaps his unknown companion. While he was waiting, he spoke with his daughter and Bjork. News of what had happened that morning had spread all over the country. Wallander told his daughter he felt OK, and it was all over now. He would return home that night, and they could take the car and spend a few days in Copenhagen. He could tell by her voice she was not convinced he was well, or that it was all over. He thought afterward he had a daughter who could read him like a book. The conversation with Bjork came to an end when Wallander lost his temper and slammed down the receiver. That had never happened in all the years he had worked with Bjork. But Bjork had begun to question Wallander’s judgment because, without telling anybody, he had set out after Konovalenko on his own. Of course, Wallander could see there was a lot to be said for Bjork’s point of view. But what upset him was the fact that Bjork started going on about that now, when he was in the middle of a critical stage of the investigation. As far as Bjork was concerned, he regarded Wallander’s furious outburst as an unfortunate sign that he was still mentally disturbed. “We’ll have to keep an eye on Kurt,” Bjork told Martinson and Svedberg.

It was Blomstrand himself who finally found the right bag. Konovalenko had hidden it behind a stack of boots in a closet in the corridor between the kitchen and the dining room. It was a leather suitcase with a combination lock. Wallander wondered whether the lock might be booby-trapped. What would happen if they forced open the case? Blomstrand drove to Kalmar airport at high speed with it, and had it put through the x-ray machine. There was no indication it might blow up if anybody opened it. Wallander took a screwdriver and forced the lock. There was a number of papers in the case, tickets, several passports, and a large sum of money. There was also a small pistol, a Beretta. All the passports belonged to Konovalenko, and were issued in Sweden, Finland, and Poland. He had a different name in each passport. As a Finn he was called Konovalenko Makela, and as a Pole he had the German-sounding name of Hausmann. There were forty-seven thousand Swedish kronor and eleven thousand U.S. dollars in the case. But what interested Wallander most was whether the other documents could indicate who the unknown traveling companion might be. To his great disappointment and annoyance, most of the notes were written in a foreign language, which he thought must be Russian. He could not understand a word. They seemed to be consecutive memos since there were dates in the margin.

Wallander turned to Blomstrand.

“We need somebody who speaks Russian,” he said. “Somebody who can translate this on the spot.”

“We could try my wife,” said Blomstrand.

Wallander stared at him in surprise.

“She studied Russian,” Blomstrand went on. “She’s very interested in Russian culture. Especially nineteenth-century writers.”

Wallander closed the suitcase and tucked it under his arm.

“Let’s go see her,” he said. “She’d only get nervous if we brought her to this circus.”

Blomstrand lived in a row house north of Kalmar. His wife was an intelligent, straightforward woman, and Wallander took an immediate liking to her. While they were drinking coffee and eating sandwiches in the kitchen, she took the papers into her study and looked up a few words in the dictionary. It took her nearly an hour to translate the text and write it down. But then it was ready, and Wallander could read Konovalenko’s memos. It was like reading about his own experiences from a different point of view, he thought. Many details of what had happened now became clear. The main thing was that the answer to the question of who had been Konovalenko’s final and unknown companion, who had moreover managed to leave the yellow house without being seen, was quite different from what he had expected. South Africa had sent a substitute for Victor Mabasha. An African called Sikosi Tsiki. He had entered the country from Denmark. “His training is not perfect,” Konovalenko wrote, “but sufficient. And his ruthlessness and mental resilience are greater than those of Victor Mabasha.” Then Konovalenko referred to a man in South Africa by the name of Jan Kleyn. Wallander assumed he was an important go-between. There was no clue about the organization Wallander was now certain must be behind it all, and hence at the center of everything. He told Blomstrand what he had discovered.

“An African is in the process of leaving Sweden,” said Wallander. “He was in the yellow house this morning. Somebody must have seen him, somebody must have driven him someplace. He can’t have walked over the bridge. We can rule out the possibility he’s still on Oland. There is a possibility that he might have had his own car. But more important is the fact that he’s trying to leave Sweden. Where, we don’t know; just that he is. We have to stop him.”

“That won’t be easy,” said Blomstrand.

“Difficult, but not impossible,” said Wallander. “After all, there must be only a limited number of black men passing through Swedish border controls every day.”

Wallander thanked Blomstrand’s wife. They returned to the police station. An hour later an APB went out on the unknown African. At about the same time the police found a cab driver who had picked up an African that morning from a parking lot at the end of Hemmansvagen. It was after the car burned up and the bridge was blocked. Wallander assumed the African had first hidden outside the house somewhere for an hour or two. The cab driver took him to the center of Kalmar. Then he paid, got out, and disappeared. The cab driver could not give a description. The guy was tall, muscular, dressed in light-colored pants, white shirt, and dark jacket. That was about all he could say. He spoke English with the cab driver.

It was late afternoon by now. There was no more Wallander could do in Kalmar. Once they picked up the fleeing African, the last piece of the puzzle could be fitted in with all the others.

They offered to drive him to Ystad, but he declined. He wanted to be on his own. Shortly after five in the afternoon he said goodbye to Blomstrand, apologized for shamelessly taking over command for a few hours in the middle of the day, and left Kalmar.

He had studied a map and come to the conclusion that the shortest way home was via Vaxjo. The forest seemed eternal. Everywhere was the same mood of silent detachment he had experienced inside himself. He stopped in Nybro for a meal. Although he would have preferred to forget all that had happened to him, he forced himself to call Kalmar and find out if the African had been traced yet. The reply was negative. He got back in the car and kept on driving through the endless forest. He got as far as Vaxjo and hesitated for a moment whether to take the Almhult route or to go via Tingsryd. In the end he chose Tingsryd so that he could start driving southward right away.

It was when he had passed through Tingsryd and turned off toward Ronneby that a moose loomed up on the road. He had not noticed it in the gathering dusk. For one desperate moment, with the brakes screeching in his ears, he was convinced he had reacted too late. He would run straight into the enormous bull moose, and his safety belt was not even fastened. But all of a sudden the moose turned away, and without knowing how it happened, Wallander shot past and did not even touch it.

He stopped at the side of the road and sat there without moving. His heart was beating madly, his breath coming in pants, and he felt ill. When he had calmed down he got out of the car and stood motionless in the silent forest. A hair’s breadth away from death yet again, he thought. I can’t have any get-out-of jail-free cards left. He wondered why he did not feel jubilant at having been miraculously saved from being crushed by the bull moose. What he did feel was more like a vague guilty conscience. The bottomless depression that had taken possession of him that morning as he sat drinking coffee returned. What he wanted most was to leave the car where it was, walk off into the forest and disappear without trace. Not to disappear for ever, but for long enough to recover his equilibrium, to combat the feeling of dizziness that had taken hold of him as a result of the previous week’s events. But he got back into the car and kept on driving southward, now with his safety belt fastened. He came to the main road to Kristianstad, and turned off toward the west. At about nine he stopped at an all-night cafe and had a cup of coffee. Some long-distance truck drivers were sitting in silence at a table, and a group of youths were whooping it up around an electronic games machine. Wallander did not touch his coffee until it was cold. But he did drink it in the end, and went back to his car.

Shortly before midnight he turned into the courtyard outside his father’s house. His daughter came out onto the steps to greet him. He smiled wearily and said everything was fine. Then he asked if there had been a telephone call from Kalmar. She shook her head. The only calls had been from journalists who had found out her father’s telephone number.

“Your apartment has been repaired already,” she said. “You can move back in.”

“That’s great,” he said.

He wondered if he ought to call Kalmar. But he was too tired. He left it until the next day.

They sat up late that night, talking. But Wallander said nothing about the feeling of melancholy weighing down on him. For the moment, that was something he wanted to keep to himself.

Sikosi Tsiki took the express bus from Kalmar to Stockholm. He followed Konovalenko’s emergency instructions, and got to Stockholm just after four in the afternoon. His flight to London would leave at seven o’clock. He got lost and could not find the airport bus, so he took a cab to Arlanda. The driver was suspicious of foreigners and demanded the fare in advance. He had handed over a thousand-kronor bill, then settled down in a corner of the back seat. Sikosi Tsiki had no idea every passport officer in Sweden was on the lookout for him. All he knew was that he should leave the country as a Swedish citizen, Leif Larson, a name he had very quickly learned to pronounce. He was completely calm, as he trusted Konovalenko. His cab had taken him over the bridge, and he could see something had happened. But he had no doubt Konovalenko would have disposed of the unknown man who had shown up in the yard that morning.

Sikosi Tsiki took his change when they got to Arlanda, shaking his head when asked if he wanted a receipt. He went into the departure hall, checked in, and stopped by a newspaper stand on the way to passport control to buy some English newspapers.

If he had not stopped by the newspaper stand, he would have been arrested at passport control. But during those very minutes he took choosing and paying for his newspapers, the passport officers changed shifts. One of the new ones went to the rest room. The other, a girl named Kerstin Anderson, happened to have arrived for work at Arlanda very late. There was something wrong with her car, and she turned up at the last moment. She was conscientious and ambitious and would normally have been early enough to read through all the notices that had arrived that day with lists of people to look out for, as well as the lists still current from previous days. As it was, she had no time to do so, and Sikosi Tsiki went through passport control with his Swedish passport and smiling face, no problem. The door closed behind him just as Kerstin Anderson’s colleague came back from the rest room.

“Is there anything special to look out for this evening?” asked Kerstin Anderson.

“A black South African,” replied her colleague.

She remembered the African who had just gone through. But he was Swedish. It was ten o’clock before the supervising officer came to check that all was in order.

“Don’t forget that African,” he said. “We have no idea what he’s called, or what passport he’ll be traveling on.”

Kerstin Anderson could feel a sudden tightening of her stomach.

“He was a South African, surely?” she said to her colleague.

“Presumably,” said the supervisor. “But that needn’t indicate what nationality he’ll claim when he leaves Sweden.”

She told him immediately what had happened a few hours earlier. After some hectic activity, they established that the man with the Swedish passport had taken a British Airways flight to London at seven o’clock.

The airplane had taken off on time. It had already landed in London, and the passengers had been through customs. Sikosi Tsiki had used his time in London to tear up his Swedish passport and flush it down a toilet. From now on he was a Zambian citizen, Richard Motombwane. Since he was in transit, he had not been through passport control with either his Swedish or his Zambian passport. Moreover, he had two separate tickets. As he had no check-in baggage, the girl at the desk in Sweden had only seen his ticket to London. At the transit desk in Heathrow he showed his other ticket, the one to Lusaka. He had flushed away the first ticket together with the remains of his Swedish passport.

At half past eleven the Zambia Airways DC-10 Nkowazi took off for Lusaka. Tsiki arrived there at half past six on Saturday morning. He took a cab into town and paid for a South African Airways ticket for the afternoon flight to Johannesburg. It had been booked some time ago. This time he used his own name. He returned to Lusaka Airport, checked in, and had lunch in the departure hall restaurant. He boarded at three, and shortly before five his plane landed at Jan Smuts Airport outside Johannesburg. He was met by Malan, who drove him straight to Hammanskraal. He showed Sikosi Tsiki the deposit receipt for the half-million rand constituting the next to last part of the payout. Then he left him on his own, saying he would be back the next day. Meanwhile, Tsiki was not to leave the house and walled-in yard. When Sikosi Tsiki was alone, he took a bath. He was tired, but contented. The journey had passed without any problems. The only thing worrying him was what had happened to Konovalenko. On the other hand, he was not especially curious about the fact that he would soon know who he was being paid so much to shoot. Could any individual person be worth so much money, he asked himself. But he did not bother to answer. Before midnight struck he had settled down between cool sheets and fallen asleep.

On the morning of Saturday, May 23, two things happened more or less simultaneously. Jan Kleyn was set free in Johannesburg. Nevertheless, Scheepers informed him he could expect to be called in for further questioning.

He stood by a window, watching Jan Kleyn and his lawyer, Kritzinger, making their way to their cars. Scheepers had asked for him to be watched around the clock. He took it for granted Jan Kleyn was expecting that, but thought it would at least force him to be passive.

He had not managed to extract any information at all from Jan Kleyn to clarify the circumstances surrounding the Committee. On the other hand, Scheepers now felt certain the real scene of the intended assassination was to be Durban on July 3, and not Cape Town on June 12. Every time he had come back to the notebook Jan Kleyn displayed signs of nervousness, and Scheepers thought it was impossible for anybody to fake reactions such as sweating and shaking hands.

He yawned. He would be glad when it was all over. At the same time he could see the chances of Wervey being pleased about his efforts had now increased.

He suddenly thought about the white lioness lying by the river in the moonlight.

He would soon have time to visit her again.

At about the same time as Jan Kleyn was being released in the southern hemisphere, Kurt Wallander was back at his desk in the Ystad police station. He had received the congratulations and good wishes of those colleagues who were at work early that Saturday morning. He smiled his lopsided smile and mumbled something inaudible in response. When he got to his office he closed the door behind him and took the telephone off the hook. His whole body felt like he had been raving drunk the night before, even though he had not touched a drop of alcohol. He had feelings of remorse. His hands were shaking. He was also sweating. It took him nearly ten minutes to gather sufficient strength to call the Kalmar police station. Blomstrand answered the phone, and passed on the disappointing news that the African they were looking for had probably slipped out of the country the night before, at Arlanda.

“How is that possible?” asked Wallander indignantly.

“Carelessness and bad luck,” said Blomstrand, explaining what had happened.

“Why the hell do we bother?” asked Wallander when Blomstrand had finished.

Wallander ended the conversation, but left the receiver off the hook. He opened the window and stood listening to a bird singing in a tree outside. It was going to be a hot day. It would soon be June 1. The whole month of May had passed by without him really noticing that the trees were now in leaf, flowers were starting to grow, and the scents of early summer were in the air.

He went back to his desk. There was something he could not postpone until the following week. He fed a sheet of paper into his typewriter, took down his English dictionary, and started slowly to write a brief report for his unknown colleagues in South Africa. He put down what he knew about the planned assassination and described in detail what had happened to Victor Mabasha. When he got to the end of Victor Mabasha’s life, he inserted another sheet of paper into the typewriter. He continued typing for an hour, and finished with the most important information: that a man by the name of Sikosi Tsiki was Mabasha’s replacement. Unfortunately he had managed to slip out of Sweden. It could be assumed he was on his way back to South Africa. He said who he was, found the telex number to the Swedish section of Interpol, and invited them to get back to him if they needed any more information. He gave the secretary instructions to send it urgently to South Africa that same day.

Then he went home. He crossed the threshold again for the first time since the explosion.

He felt like a stranger in his own apartment. The furniture that had been damaged by the smoke was stacked in a heap, covered by a plastic sheet. He pulled out a chair, and sat down.

The atmosphere was stifling.

He wondered how he was going to get over everything that had happened.

About then his telex message arrived in Stockholm. A stand-in not fully familiar with procedures was instructed to send the message to South Africa. Because of technical problems and careless checking, page two of Wallander’s report was never sent. And so the South African police were informed that night, May 23, that a gunman by the name of Victor Mabasha was on his way to South Africa. The police in the Johannesburg section of Interpol were puzzled by this strange message. It was unsigned, and ended very abruptly. Nevertheless, they had been requested by Inspector Borstlap to send all telex messages from Sweden to his office immediately. As the telex arrived in Johannesburg late on Saturday evening, Borstlap did not receive it until the following Monday. He contacted Scheepers right away.

They now had confirmation of what was in the letter signed by the secretive Steve.

The man they were looking for was called Victor Mabasha.

Scheepers also thought the telex was strangely abrupt and was concerned that it was unsigned. But since it was merely a confirmation of something he already knew about, he let the matter rest.

From now on all resources were concentrated on the hunt for Victor Mabasha. Every border post was put on standby. They were ready.