And then Manuel. Why had she been so excited about him? Was it because he looked at her with both appreciation and a kind of respect behind the controlled desire? For surely his gazes and gestures indicated lust. When they had been talking and laughing in the dishwashing area she had surprised herself in thinking: touch me! And it was as if her thoughts had unconsciously influenced Manuel. He became both shy and eager at the same time. The heat of the dishwasher made his dark skin bloom and the sweat that gleamed at his hairline made her want to brush his wild bangs aside and cool his brow with her hand.
Shame on me, she thought. I wanted him. Not enough that I worked for a drug lord, I desired a drug pusher who may have been involved in smuggling and who has a felon for a brother.
A brother who had been featured in the headlines of every newspaper. Eva was surprised that no one else at Dakar had reacted to the pictures of Manuel’s brother. Maybe they had been too upset about Slobodan’s arrest to reflect on the obvious resemblance between the Alavez brothers.
Eva stood up and walked to the bedroom to make her bed but ended up standing with the bedspread in her hand. Now she was back to her earlier life, with passivity and anxiety for the future. Feo’s words that she could always find other waitressing gigs, if Dakar did end up closing, did not comfort her. That brief period of time at Dakar that was all she had to show for herself, how impressive was that?
A butterfly fluttered outside the window but disappeared as quickly as it had appeared. Eva dropped the bedspread and sank down on the bed.
The dream was over so fast, she thought.
Sixty-One
The Alavez brothers had been holed up in the shed for three days. They had not seen a single person. Sometimes they heard the muted roar of traffic and the cracking sound that they believed came from a weapon, a series of rhythmic salvos, and which they later realized must come from military training exercises.
In the evening of the first day, Manuel had walked back to the arts and crafts village. He had watched the parking lot for several hours before he had dared venture out. Now the car was parked in a tumbledown garage on the property.
On the morning of the second day, Manuel had raised a ladder against the side of the main house, climbed up and managed to open a window. In the kitchen they had found crackers, a box of canned food, and a packet of raisins. They brought up water from the well, and in an earth cellar they found some dusty jars of jam with the year 1998 written on the label.
They were used to meager diets and did not really want for anything. The lack of anything to do was worse. Patricio became anxious and irritable. Manuel had joked with him that he should be used to lying around on a cot, but Patricio had just muttered in reply.
Manuel had wondered if he should tell him about Armas’s death. It was only on the second day, when they were talking about the fat one and the tall one, that Manuel was struck by the fact that his brother knew nothing. In an unconscious way Manuel had simply assumed that Patricio knew what had happened by the river. He decided to say nothing.
Manuel had sawed the apple tree and piled the wood against the wall of the shed. Patricio had helped gather up the sticks that were left over.
The rest of the time was filled with passive waiting.
Now it was one day before Manuel’s flight to Mexico was due to leave. They talked about how they should proceed and decided to go together to Arlanda. Patricio would use Manuel’s passport and ticket in order to leave the country. Patricio had increasingly started to doubt the plan and raised objections.
“How are you going to get home?”
“We’ve already talked about that,” Manuel said grumpily. “I’m not wanted for anything. They can’t charge me with anything. I’ll go to the Mexican embassy and get a new passport. I can say that I was drunk and lost both the passport and the ticket and that I missed going to the airport. They can’t punish me for that.”
“But if-”
“Stop it! Don’t you want to go home?”
Manuel had grown tired of Patricio’s nagging pessimism and got up from the bench outside the shed.
“I’m going into town tonight,” he said abruptly.
Patricio looked up.
“Is that why you are so worried?”
“I’m not worried,” Manuel snapped.
“What are you going to do there? We have everything.”
“I have to…”
Manuel left his brother without listening to the rest and walked up toward the edge of the woods, then he stopped halfway, returned to the shed and walked in. Patricio heard him bustle about inside.
A little while later Manuel emerged with a bag and a towel over his shoulder, walked over to the clothesline where his change of clothes were hanging, and pulled down a pair of pants and a T-shirt.
When Manuel started pumping up water and filling the washbasin, Patricio laughed.
“You want to look clean and nice,” he observed.
Manuel looked up angrily, but when he saw Patricio’s expression he couldn’t help let out a chuckle.
May this go well, he thought. I want to see him happy in Mexico. He took off his clothes and soaped up his whole body. The sun sank behind the trees and he shivered. Patricio came over, filled a bucket of water, and poured it over Manuel.
“Now you will do,” he said.
While the Alavez brothers were hiding in the forest outside Uppsala, the police continued their efforts to locate them as well as the other fugitive from Norrtälje, José Franco, who was still at large.
The questioning of the two failed bank robbers, Brügger and Björnsson, had not yielded anything. They claimed they had no idea where the other two had gone. Björnsson had maintained that the Mexican, whose name he could not even remember, or so he said, had not been involved in planning the escape.
The police in Norrtälje, and the National Crime Division, who had immediately become involved, were working with the theory that Franco and Alavez had joined forces and were perhaps still together. They had systematically worked through the Spaniard’s network of contacts and most recent known addresses and haunts, without results. José Franco appeared to have been swallowed up by the earth.
A tip from a Tierp resident who claimed to have seen Patricio Alavez get on the train to Uppsala was deemed to be not very credible. In part because the witness was clearly intoxicated, not only when he called the police, but he had also, as he himself put it, been somewhat “in his cups” at the time he claimed to have noticed the Mexican on the platform in Tierp.
This tip never reached the Uppsala police.
The sessions with Slobodan Andersson stalled. He kept stubbornly to the story that he had received the bag from a stranger who had asked him to look after it for a day. The stranger was then going to pick it up from the restaurant.
More difficult for the restauranteur was the fact that the police had found Konrad Rosenberg’s fingerprints on the plastic surrounding the cocaine packets. When Slobodan Andersson was asked to explain how this happened, he stopped talking for good.
Even his haughty lawyer looked stricken. Sammy Nilsson noted with satisfaction how impossible the situation was for Slobodan Andersson and how the lawyer gradually abandoned her somewhat intimate attitude toward him. When he subsequently held his tongue throughout the next attempted round of questioning she openly showed her irritation.