The Demon of Dakar - Kjell Eriksson [109]
Manuel calculated feverishly in his mind but there were too many numbers.
“My family has suffered a great deal,” he said.
They negotiated a little longer and finally agreed that Manuel would get forty thousand. Manuel was sweating, while Slobodan appeared to be enjoying himself. He got to his feet with some effort, walked over to Manuel, and stretched out his hands as a sign that they were in agreement. Manuel hesitated for a second before shaking the hand of the man of the mountain.
Have I sold my soul now, he asked himself.
As Manuel stepped out onto the street below Slobodan Andersson’s apartment, he stumbled momentarily as if he had been struck, steadied himself by pressing his back up against the wall and brought his hands over his face. A woman who was walking by stared at his with undisguised curiosity and distaste.
“Filthy scum!” she hissed.
It was a little after nine o’clock. Manuel walked in the direction of Dakar where his car was parked, completely wrung out and empty inside.
Forty-Five
Detective Inspector Erik Schönell was deathly tired of American action films. Luckily, he only needed to watch a few seconds of the start of each film, fast-forwarding to check out a couple scenes further on, before he could eject the videotape from the player. The problem was that there were one hundred and twenty-two movies in Armas’s video library.
Now he was done and he had found nothing notable in the collection. There was definitely no Mexican connection, if you didn’t count the murder of a Mexican family that occurred in one of the films.
The porn flick that had been found on the top of Armas’s television was the only jarring element. Schönell had earlier watched several minutes of it and thought it was most likely shot somewhere in the Mediterranean region, perhaps Spain. The plot was very simple: a party of four golf players with athletic builds suddenly realized they were gay and devoted several days to traditional swinging and putting, with intermittent bouts of intense copulation in the sand traps and on the fairways. The dialogue was thin and scanty. The sex scenes were mechanical and without finesse. It was, in other words, a traditional porn flick.
“A hole by any other word,” Schönell, who was an avid golfer himself, muttered, and inserted the tape into the player.
He leaned back in his chair but then stood up and closed the door, adjusted the volume and sat back down again. On his initial viewing he had seen something that in a vague way awakened his interest. There was something in the film that nagged at him but he was unable to put his finger on it. Given that Lindell believed the videotapes could have an implication for the investigation—she had not elaborated on her interest in the Mexico angle—Schönell was determined to do a thorough job. No one would be able to claim that he had been sloppy. Most of all he did not want this Lindell at violent crimes to be able to find fault with him.
The movie went on. Schönell checked the time and wished he had gotten himself a cup of coffee and a sweet. When one of the golf players inserted a club handle into the backside of his opponent, Schönell sighed heavily.
The camera focused on the penetrated man. Sweat ran down his face and several fine pieces of gravel had stuck to his forehead. He rolled his eyes and pretended to be enjoying himself, though surely no one found pleasure in a five iron back there, Schönell thought. Then Schönell stiffened, fumbled for the remote control, played back the same scene and paused the picture at the moment when the man in the bunker turned his upper body and looked back at his partner.
Schönell reached for the phone and dialed Lindell’s number. She promised to come by at once. Erik Schönell whistled smugly. I should have asked her to bring me a cup of coffee, he thought, and studied the picture on the screen.
There was a knock on the door several minutes later. Schönell opened and pointed at the television without a word. The satisfaction in seeing Lindell’s chin fall, and her hand rise up at the frozen image