He turned the radio back on again. Now an American melody that he recognized from California was playing and he let it stay on.
He had become a murderer but he regretted nothing. It was only in his dreams that he felt anguish.
Then he saw the fat man step out his front door and walk with short, hurried footsteps to a taxi, and get into it. Manuel started the car and followed.
He spread out the map in the passenger seat in order to follow the taxi’s route. It was driving north. Manuel was impressed and amazed at how disciplined the Swedes conducted themselves in traffic. The most remarkable thing was that they stopped for pedestrians. Manuel had been close to running over a couple of teenagers crossing the street right as he was driving by. He honked aggressively, scared and angry, but soon realized that this was the way traffic functioned. The slow ones had the right of way.
It was a short ride. Slobodan stepped out of the taxi in front of a three-story building. Manuel parked behind a van. Slobodan walked to the nearest door. As soon as he had walked in, Manuel ran up to it, stopped the door before it closed, and slid inside. He heard Slobodan panting in the stairwell and Manuel ran up to a landing with quiet steps, stopped, listened, and continued.
Suddenly the fat man stopped. Manuel heard his heavy breaths. He peered up the stairs and saw Slobodan’s hand on the railing. He was almost at the top now. Then he walked on. Manuel followed. Within himself he felt the hatred grow, how the muscles in his body tensed and how the sweat started to bead on his face. Despite his resolution not to hurt Slobodan Andersson, his bitterness rose up at the man who had devastated his family. Why should he be allowed to live when Angel had been forced to die for his greed?
Manuel knew he was the more supple and quick. He had lost the knife but could, if he wanted, kill Slobodan with his bare hands. He had the strength and the fury of the righteous. He made the sign of the cross and tiptoed on without a sound.
Slobodan came to a stop on the highest landing. Manuel counted the steps, six, plus as many again in the next section. Perhaps six, seven rapid steps in all. The whole thing could be over in a couple of seconds.
Suddenly there was the sound of a doorbell. Manuel instinctively crouched down. It was the door on the right. After ten, fifteen seconds a door opened and a man said something, then fell silent. A brief, whispered conversation in the foreign language ensued before the door closed and Slobodan and the other started to walk down the stairs. By then Manuel was already down at the front door. He continued down into the basement, where a door blocked his passage. The men came closer. Manuel pressed himself up against the door, and hoped for dear life that they did not have a reason to go to the basement. He counted the steps. Slobodan’s breaths and the other man’s high-pitched voice were now very close.
Manuel caught sight of them as they opened the front door and left.
He is a small man, Manuel thought and smiled to himself, short like a Mexican. They stepped into a Mercedes, with the short man behind the wheel.
The trip went beyond the city limits. Manuel had trouble orienting himself at first but recognized the roundabout at the southern edge of the city where he had come in on his way from Arlanda.
Slobodan and the “Swedish Mexican” went three-quarters of the way around the roundabout and Manuel followed the distance of a car’s length.
A great calm descended over him. How simple everything was.
Then the Mercedes turned onto a gravel road, crossed some railway tracks, and continued up to a small cottage at the edge of the forest. The car pulled up to it and stopped, the men stepped out, while Manuel continued on for a while longer before he braked.
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 and through the trees he saw the Mercedes with the two men bouncing along the dirt road with a cloud of dust whirling up behind them.
Once again, Manuel made his way up to the cottage. He could hear nothing from the neighbor, perhaps they were not home. He felt more secure now and sneaked over to the shed, unhooking the door that was not locked. In the dim light within he could make out a lawn mower, a few old garden chairs, and a work counter with various tools. He picked up a crowbar and a container of gasoline and left the shed with a newfound feeling of power.