At exactly two o’clock Slobodan Andersson pulled into the parking lot. Like Armas, he drove a BMW. He turned off the engine but did not get out of the car. He looked around. He took a call on his cell phone that he terminated almost immediately. Manuel waited behind the bushes. Slobodan writhed uncomfortably in the car and Manuel watched as he strained to look back toward town and check out all the cars heading east from the roundabout.
Manuel stood up from the ditch. Slobodan had his attention aimed in the opposite direction and did not observe him. Manuel snuck over and tapped on the window. Slobodan threw open the car door.
“Hell, you scared me!”
“Do you have the money?” Manuel asked.
Slobododan glared at him.
“Where do you have the goods?”
“I want the money in my hands first, then you will-”
“Where is your car?”
“I walked here,” Manuel said. “We have to hurry now.”
“Walked? Give me the goods.”
“I want to see the money first.”
Slobodan looked around, then picked up a dark plastic bag from the passenger seat and held it out. Manuel opened the bag and there were the bills. One-hundred-dollar notes. Four hundred of them.
“Forty thousand?”
“Of course,” Slobodan snapped, his brow wet with perspiration.
Manuel left the bag and went to get the sports bag with the cocaine. When he returned to the car, Slobodan was talking on the phone.
“Stop talking!” Manuel said.
Slobodan smiled tauntingly, but turned off the phone. Manuel handed him the bag, Slobodan checked the contents and held out the plastic bag with the money, shut the car door without a word, and drove away. Manuel ran back, jumped into his car, and quickly drove onto the highway. He caught sight of Slobodan’s car on the E-4. As Manuel approached the roundabout he saw Slobodan’s brake lights come on. He had hit a red light. Manuel chuckled smugly.
Slobodan drove at great speed north on the E-4 until he suddenly turned off toward town. Manuel was afraid of losing him, but he did not want to stay too close. Luck smiled on him again and he was just able to pass the intersection before the lights turned red.
The fat one crisscrossed through town and finally ended up by the river, where he parked the car and got out. Manuel, who was forced to stop several times for pedestrians saw him cross the street with the bag in his hand. Manuel took a empty parking space.
Slobodan disappeared down an alley and Manuel hurried to keep up. If he was going to have a chance to punish the fat one he could not lose him now. Slobodan walked quickly at first but then slowed the pace and Manuel sensed that the rapid clip had worn him down.
After several minutes he entered a restaurant. The sign said Alhambra. Manuel recognized the name as being the same restaurant that Feo had mentioned.
After ten minutes Slonodan was back on the street again, minus the bag. How dumb can a gringo be? Manuel thought and watched Slobodan blend into the crowd.
Manuel breathed freely. He felt how hungry he was. The tension surrounding the delivering of the drugs and following the fat one had suppressed all needs.
A little way down the pedestrian zone there was a group of musicians and Manuel walked over to them. He thought about the men he and his brothers had joined forces with in crossing the border, and how after their successful crossing they had sung a few songs and shown them the typical dance steps of their region. It would probably be a long time before he would have the pleasure of a huapango, he thought, and left the musicians in order not to be overwhelmed with longing for his country.
He walked toward Dakar. It was the irony of fate that the only stable point he had in Uppsala belonged to Slobodan Andersson. At Dakar there was the Portuguese, and above all Eva, the waitress who was so curious about his country and culture. She listened and asked him a never-ending stream of questions, everything in an astonishingly strange English, in which her limited vocabulary forced her to take long pauses before she managed to communicate what she wanted.
She had also not cared about his lie. For her it didn’t matter if he came from Mexico or Venezuela. It made him even more willing to talk to her. She gave him the freedom to be himself.
On top of all this, she was the first white woman who had spoken to him as an equal. He had met many gringas in the United States, but they had seen him as a dirty chicano whom they could exploit for underpaid labor but never treat as a human.
She is also beautiful, he thought, not without a pang of guilt, because ever since the message of Angel’s death and Patricio’s incarceration had reached him he had had increasing difficulties caring about Gabriella in the village. Love and future plans faded away. He became irritable and listless. How could he talk of personal happiness as his family was breaking apart? Did he love her? He no longer knew.
He walked to Dakar in a rare mixture of depression and excitement. This time he banged on the back door. The chef who smoked in the dishwashing area and looked like a bulldog opened the door.
“Well, well, look who’s back,” he said and looked at him with a smile that Manuel could not evaluate.
“I need to work,” he muttered. “Is there anything for me to do?”
Unconsciously he adopted the subordinate tone he had learned in California.
“There are no dishes, but it’s been a while since the dressing room was cleaned.
Manuel was supplied with cleaning solution, rags, a bucket, and a mop. He decided to do a thorough job. Not in order to please anyone but because he needed to do something well, something that made a difference, for quite egotistical reasons. He needed to disappear into work. The past week had shaken him. He would never again be the Manuel Alavez he had been. Everything that he said in the future would contain a measure of untruth, or so he felt. Only work was honest.
He kept polishing, wiping down lockers and benches, scrubbing the floors frenetically, and taking the light fixtures down in order to pick all the dead flies out of the glass globes.
He had just finished and sat down on a bench when Eva walked in.
“What a difference!” she exclaimed. “And how good it smells.”
Manuel stood up at once. Eva pulled off her coat and hung it in her locker. He could not help looking at her breasts. Her look of amusement confirmed that he had been caught.
“I’ll go,” he said.
She smiled even more broadly and patted him on his blushing cheek. His confusion only increased before this fearless woman. Why was she laughing? Was she offering herself to him?
“Are you married?”
Manuel shook his head. Eva took her black work skirt from the locker, brushed away some dust, and reached for the white blouse on its hanger. Manuel forced himself not to look at her clothes.
“It should be…” she started, but couldn’t find the right word in English, and simply made a gesture with her hand. He understood that she meant the blouse was wrinkled.
“See you soon,” he said and left the dressing room. He wished he could iron her blouse, simply to touch it. He wanted to do something for her, more than just scrub the dressing room. He wanted to make her happy.
He walked over to the dishwashing area. A man in a white hat had just put down a load of pots, dishes, and utensils, nodded to Manuel, but did not say anything. Manuel guessed it was Johnny, the one who had started recently and that Feo had told him about. Manuel took on the dishes, happy that there was something to do.
Eva emerged from the dressing room in her work clothes. She looked in on him, running her hand along her blouse and laughing, before she continued out to the dining room.
Whore, Manuel thought, but took it back immediately. Eva was not a whore. She was a fine woman. The fact that she was divorced was not her fault, he was sure of it. She lived for her children and for her dreams, so much he had understood. Behind her interest in Mexico there was a longing, a desire to experience something new, if only in her thoughts. It occurred to him that perhaps she was interested in him. The day before she had asked him about his village and daily life there, and today she had asked if he was married. Why would a woman ask that?