The Demon of Dakar - Kjell Eriksson [64]
Shortly after a curve, Manuel found a small road that he turned onto, parking the car in a copse of trees and bushes. It was not ideal, but he did not want to go too far away and lose contact with the two men. It was possible they were only stopping briefly at the cottage.
The wheat growing on the other side of the clump of trees was at its peak. Manuel tore off a stalk and chewed on the kernels while he followed the edge of the field toward the forest. He was partly hidden by the bushes and boulders on his way to the cottage, but tried as best he could to keep an eye on the Mercedes. He arrived at a road that consisted of two wheel tracks with grass in the middle. To the right there was a field and to the left a row of houses. He walked to the left in order to circle past the row of houses and approach the cottage from the forest. Then, after a hundred meters or so, he left the trail and plunged into the woods.
Concealed by the vegetation, he broke into a run. After several minutes he ended up thirty or so meters behind the cottage. The car was visible between the branches. Manuel hid behind a tree and the scent of the sticky sap transported him to the path to his family’s cafetal, their coffee plantation.
He exhaled and scouted out the road up to the cottage: a shed, a couple of big trees surrounded by a thicket of flowering bushes, and thereafter an open area of about five meters that he had to cross unseen. There was a window behind the house but he could not detect any movement inside it.
Manuel ran up to the shed, waited a couple of seconds, rushed doubled over toward the thicket, and then continued, half-crawling, half-running toward the cottage.
He pressed himself against the wall and his sweating body deposited a few drops on the sticky paneling. He listened and thought he heard the men talking.
He carefully peered in through the window. Slobodan sat with his back toward the window. The other man leaned against the opposite side of the wall and stared intently at Slobodan, who was talking and gesturing with both hands. Manuel recognized the gestures. He was in the process of convincing the man of something. The short man made an objection, his waving something away, but immediately received a rebuttal.
This went on for several minutes. Why did they come here? Manuel asked himself. If they were just going to talk surely they could have done so in town.
The answer came after a little while. The short man bent over, lifted the lid of a storage bench, and took out a sport bag that he placed on the table in front of Slobodan. The latter unzipped the bag and put his hand in. The short man looked displeased.
Manuel sensed what the bag must contain. He decided to leave his vulnerable position immediately. He looked up at the neighboring house that could be glimpsed between the trees. He could be discovered at any moment. All that had to happen was for the neighbor to step out on his terrace.
But he had uncovered another piece of the puzzle. He knew about the cottage, what the short man looked like and where he lived. Everything had gone better than planned. He retreated into the concealing curtain of the forest, sat down with his back against a tree, and waited.
Like his people, he was good at this. It felt as if they had been waiting for five hundred years. Zapotecos, mixes, mixtes, triguis, and all the other people in Oaxaca, Chiapas, Guerrero, yes, everywhere in the land that was called Mexico. They all waited. Standing like severed trees, captured by the storm and cracked, whittled away by the weather and wind, seasoned and hardened. Nothing to be reckoned with, without value, without an ability to reproduce itself. But in the stony barrenness of the terrain, in the green valleys and on the wind-whipped plains of the high country there were seeds, in whose center all the old ways were preserved in code.
That was his conviction. His hope.
Then he heard a car start