The Demon of Dakar - Kjell Eriksson [125]
Feo smiled uncertainly, Pirjo looked down at the floor, and Johnny stared at the chef’s broad back.
Then Pirjo did something that filled the entire kitchen with a feeling no one could quite identify. She walked up to Donald and put her arm around his shoulders, stretched on tiptoe, leaned forward, and gave him a kiss on the cheek.
Forty-Nine
Lorenzo Wader did not own a cell phone. In his assessment, only amateurs spent their time constantly chattering into their telephones. How many had been felled by the charting, by police and prosecutors, of their incoming and outgoing cell phone calls? Why make it so easy?
So when Konrad Rosenberg asked him for his telephone number, he laughed heartily.
“If you want to reach me, you will have to look me up,” he said.
“But if Zero wants to call?”
“Zero is not to call me, nor is anyone else for that matter.”
Konrad Rosenberg nodded.
“But if you don’t have a telephone, then you can—”
“You will speak to Zero,” Lorenzo interrupted. “I would like to speak to him at half past eight tonight. Tell him to go to the Fyris movie theater on Saint Olofsgatan, stand and look at the movie posters there, and then walk up the hill and into the graveyard.”
“And then?”
“That is all he needs to know,” Lorenzo Wader pronounced.
He was starting to tire of the nervous Konrad, who was also overly curious. But he could nonetheless be of use. Lorenzo had a strategy to never let anyone else in on the whole picture. It had been his tactic for many years, and it worked beautifully. Thanks to his caution, Lorenzo had never been prosecuted in court, had never even had charges filed against him.
Konrad’s task was to create contacts with useful idiots who could be put to work in the field. Lorenzo needed street runners and he had no qualms about helping himself to some of Slobodan Andersson’s “staff.”
Konrad had dismissed Lorenzo’s theory that it was Slobodan who was behind Armas’s murder, but Lorenzo did not consider it impossible. Armas had been a tough nut and had not cracked, despite his obvious fear that the world would find out about his unknown son’s sexual orientation and activities. Lorenzo had approached Armas through shared acquaintances, but in the absence of any reaction Lorenzo simply got in direct contact with him himself in order to suggest working together, something that Armas had appeared to consider but ultimately rejected.
The following day he had had Gonzo deliver a package to Armas with a videotape. There was no accompanying letter, no greeting or anything that could be traced back to the original sender, but Lorenzo was convinced that Armas was intelligent enough to connect Lorenzo’s offer of cooperation with the indirect threat that the videotape signified.
Gonzo was completely ignorant of what he had delivered but was the one who had to take the blow. Armas had reacted vehemently and fired the waiter on the spot.
This did not trouble Lorenzo in the least, and moreover capitalized on the lust for revenge that the waiter expressed. Lorenzo had lost a source close to Slobodan and Armas. On the other hand he had won a messenger and foot soldier who was not held back by any false loyalties.
Fifty
The police had distributed an advisory to the public after Armas’s murder, asking the public to notify them if anyone had seen a blue BMW. It was a relatively exclusive car, and an uncommon model, so Lindell was surprised that no one had called in.
But after a week, Algot Andersson, a retired hardware store owner, called the police and was put through to Ann Lindell.
All summer he had been busy renovating an old schooner that he had hauled up out of the water off the Fyris river, and he had seen something that might “be of interest to the police.”
A little way down from his work area, something had suddenly turned up. A blue tarp, pulled over something that he at first believed to be a boat. He knew the family that used that space, knew they were on a long sail trip and that they would not be back until the end of September.
Therefore, the tarp had caused him some