The Demon of Dakar aka The Demon from Dakar

Thirty-Three

Since his childhood, Konrad Rosenberg always woke early. His inner clock started to ring as early as six. He didn’t like it, had never liked it, but it was the inheritance from Karl-Åke Rosenberg making itself felt. His father had gotten up at five every morning and started fussing, making coffee and rustling the newspapers. Since Konrad was the youngest, he slept in a pull-out sofa in the kitchen, so he had no choice but to be woken up.

The power of habit is great, and so even this morning he woke up early. It was half past five when he opened his eyes. He had to pee, and he had a pounding headache. He lay in bed a while longer and tried to fall back to sleep, then realized it was hopeless. At exactly six o’clock he got up and went to the bathroom.

The night before he had boozed it up, as thoroughly as in the good old days, but with the difference that this time he had drunk completely alone. This had perhaps contributed to the amount of alcohol he had managed to consume.

It was an unaccustomed feeling, almost solemn, to pour the first drink and raise his glass by himself. After the third one there was no solemnity left, only determined drinking. After the fourth one, Konrad started a long, embittered monolog about the “fat devil-chef” who believed he could lord it over Konrad Rosenberg.

Konrad had received a letter, not by ordinary mail but stuck in his mailbox. It was printed by machine and lacked a signature, but the content convinced Konrad of the identity of the writer. He assumed that Slobodan had hired someone to deliver the letter. He was simply too scared to show himself in Tunabackar.

Slobodan wrote that they could have absolutely no contact, no telephone calls, and could not allow themselves to be seen together. Slobodan instructed Konrad to stay at home: “only go to the store and then straight home,” he wrote, as if Konrad were a child. He was not to place himself in “risky situations,” not to spend his evenings out, not to “get in touch with any of our shared associates” or engage in anything that could awaken the interest of “persons unknown to us who we do not wish to know better,” which Konrad assumed meant the police.

At first he thought it felt ridiculous and was actually tempted to defy the instructions and call Slobodan, but realized it was wiser to keep a low profile until the whole thing had died down. The fire was a real blow, but not a complete catastrophe. Konrad trusted completely in the fact that his brother would not say a word about Konrad using the house. His brother simply wanted to get the insurance money.

He turned on the radio but turned it off immediately. Normally he would have gone down to the newsstand and checked the program for the week’s harness-racing results, maybe gone downtown and frittered away a few hours. He considered calling Åke to see if he had heard anything more about the fire, but then concluded it would only make him nervous.

It was a little after eleven when the doorbell rang. Konrad jumped as if he had been struck in the back with a whip. He tiptoed over to the door and listened, at a complete loss as to who it could be.

His old drinking buddies, who were liable to turn up at any hours, had not shown themselves for months and no one else ever came to see him.

He put his ear to the door and thought he heard panting but decided it was his imagination. No one could breathe so loudly, but when he opened the mail slot with extreme care he heard the hissing sound more clearly.

The doorbell rang again. Konrad felt the sweat start to trickle down his back. His curiosity won out and he straightened his back.

“Who is it?” he called out.

“Mr. Rosenberg, something has happened to your car,” he heard a high-pitched voice say from the other side of the door.

He opened the door and there was an older man who Konrad thought lived in the building next door.

“Excuse me for disturbing you, but I saw-”

“My car?”

“Yes, isn’t it your Mercedes on the street? Someone has vandalized it.”

“Vandalized?” Konrad echoed stupidly, before slipping his shoes on.

As he ran down the stairs, leaving the asthmatic man behind, it struck him that it could be a trap and so he slowed down. But concern for his Merc drove him to a run.

Someone had pulled a sharp object along the full length of the car, from the hood all the way to the brake lights. Konrad stared at the almost completely level scratch, and when he circled the car he saw that the other side had suffered identical damage.

The neighbor arrived out of breath and explained that he discovered the whole thing when he came back from the store.

Konrad stood as if paralyzed, could not even manage a curse. His car, his Mercedes, vandalized by a couple of young hooligans.

“It’s terrible what they get up to these days,” the neighbor said. “They can’t even leave a beautiful car alone.”

Suddenly it struck Konrad that perhaps it was not the work of hooligans. He looked around. “That bastard is laughing somewhere,” he thought, and asked the neighbor if he had noticed anything suspicious on his way to the store. Yet another neighbor came up to them and in some way Konrad felt honored by the attention. He recalled that the first neighbor had referred to him as “Mr. Rosenberg.” Also, it felt good to have company, even if their average combined age was high.

“Call the police,” the neighbor said. “Even if they don’t do anything, you have to report it. I remember when someone drove into my Amazon, it was parked in the lot of Lagerquist’s hardware store. What I went through. There were papers to fill out, reports to file.”

Konrad listened with half an ear. The word police made him nervous and then increasingly infuriated.

“I wonder what it costs to have it repainted,” one neighbor speculated and Konrad’s anger increased further.

“I’m going up to make a call,” he said and left the two men on the sidewalk.

He sensed that this was not a normal prank, but a calling card left by an unknown man who was apparently capable of anything. As he walked slowly up the stairs his anger diminished and instead his anxiety grew. What kind of forces were at work? That Armas was murdered could be explained. Konrad and Slobodan had discussed various possible motives, but to burn down a house and above all to damage a car… it was so illogical that it was frightening.