After the Monsoon Read online

  “I saw what I saw. The rest of you were up by the targets.”

  “That sounds about right, Fredrik Hansson,” said Grip. “Something you saw for sure.”

  Grip put down the half-empty bottle on the edge of the desk. “Thanks for the water.” And then he left.

  Their reactions inside that barracks were worth more than Radovanović’s confession. He stood by the car for a moment and looked out over the airport. A big four-engine transport plane had just started up, and on the far side, on the American half of the field, an unmanned drone taxied out slowly, like a huge sinister insect.

  Grip slept away the rest of the afternoon in his room. He woke up after sunset, checked the phone. No missed calls, no texts, no emails. The silence amplified the feeling that time was slipping through his fingers, and he waited impatiently. After dinner, he put on a freshly ironed shirt, got it sweaty just walking to the beach and back, and then headed to the piano bar.

  Grip had been thirsty, his mouth almost sticky, the whole day. “Rum with lime, and don’t skimp on the juice,” he said to the bartender, and then sat down on a bar stool facing the grand piano.

  He sat near, watching her hands and the keys. Her ponytail was a little lower today, and she was dressed in cool blue. As night fell, she played distracted classical passages between the bar standards. His eyes stared at a small mole on her shoulder, a black pinprick on the dark skin. Something to hold on to while his other thoughts drifted. He was surprised to find that his shirt felt dry again. His drink had been replaced with a new one and half emptied again. An hour or so must have gone by. A drunk Chinese man came up to her with a request. The man wrestled with English, tried to say something that sounded like Gershwin. Holding a drink, he switched hands, she nodded, he patted her on the shoulder with his hand wet from the steamed-up glass. Only when the Chinese man turned away did she dry herself off discreetly with a napkin. Grip didn’t know much Gershwin, but the song that followed definitely wasn’t that. It was Piaf. She sang in French.

  A tingle in his pocket, as his cell phone rang on mute. Grip got up and walked out to the lobby.

  The call was from Frères, the French colonel.

  “Good evening. I know it’s late, but I think this may be of interest. Your country’s foreign ministry has been involved, and we have of course done what we could. Abdoul Ghermat was released by the Djiboutian authorities an hour ago. Cleared of all charges.”

  “How is he?”

  “Let’s just say that he’s alive. His family came and picked him up, and my guess is that he’ll be fine.” Grip was quiet. Frères continued: “My men . . .”

  “Only a few more days.”

  “I was going to say that they’re yours for as long as you need them.”

  Grip returned to his bar stool, putting his cell phone back in his pants pocket as he sat down.

  “Good news?” she asked, running her fingers over the keys before the next song.

  “For a worried family, I’m sure it was,” he said.

  “Someone born?”

  “No, someone permitted to stay alive.”

  “What do you want to hear?”

  “More of that,” he replied, with a gesture toward her hands.

  “Debussy, no, not here. But Gershwin is a possibility.”

  “I don’t know any Gershwin.”

  “Of course you do.” She started playing, the notes immediately familiar.

  “‘Rhapsody in Blue,’” she said, without looking up at him.

  When Grip finally got up, he glanced at a framed photo hanging outside the piano bar. The nighttime pianist, a portrait in black and white. With the small dot on her shoulder. Ayanna was her name, that was all the information it gave.

  Grip walked through the lobby, then, on a whim, went out for some fresh air by the entrance. He stood there for a moment, seeing the lights of the city between the palm trees, the drivers hanging out by their taxis, and a few smaller groups farther away. He turned around, leaving the night sounds and the quiet behind him, and felt, for an instant, someone’s eyes following him up the steps and back inside.

  When he opened the door to his room, he found an envelope on the mat.

  Inside was a handwritten note in English: Mr. Lieutenant Slunga’s death was not an unfortunate accident. Too many people liked the money.

  18

  “They still want ten million,” said Carl-Adam, when he got back to the room.

  “What does it matter, whether it’s twenty, fifty, or a hundred million?” said Jenny. “What matters, Carl, is who Darwiish is communicating with. About us being missing. Who is he talking to, back home?”

  Carl-Adam collapsed on the cot, in what had become his corner. Every second or third day, they pulled him into the outer room, where Darwiish threatened and yelled. Darwiish was obviously frustrated. Carl-Adam had been beaten a few times, but that scared Jenny and the children more than it did him. To Carl-Adam, the waiting before they came for him was the worst part. Then, he was like a frightened animal. Carl-Adam would fall fast asleep after a beating from Darwiish, even when Darwiish was at his worst. As if the rifle butting came as a relief. And he was a changed man. He rarely spoke and found it hard to relax around the children. The only topic he ever raised with Jenny was the ransom, as he tried over and over again to find a strategy for dealing with Darwiish. He seemed unable to care about anything else—as if his survival instinct came down to a single hope: that a clever idea could transform their house on the sand into a place where they could bargain on equal terms.

  “He’s negotiating with the Foreign Ministry,” said Carl-Adam, glancing toward the bucket of water.

  “Did he say that?”

  “It makes sense.”

  “Does Sweden ever negotiate with kidnappers and pirates?”

  Carl-Adam took a while to answer. “We’re not just anyone. Our family, our friends, of course they’re pushing. Obviously they’ll try to save our goddamn lives.”

  “Our friends, you say. What do you usually do, if you haven’t heard from people in a few weeks? Call the police? And your parents . . . ,” Jenny silenced herself; she was tired. “Sorry.”

  “Darwiish is under pressure,” he said in an attempt to smooth things over. “We need to pressure him back.”

  Jenny got the feeling that he’d started to see his beatings as little victories. That he scored points, that Darwiish lost, and that he himself emerged stronger. But no one was getting stronger, and Carl-Adams’s imaginary victories only shielded him from thinking about their real needs. Jenny closed her eyes and said, “Water, Carl-Adam. That’s what we need.” She took a deep breath.

  “And Sebastian has to get his meds.”

  Something had always been a little off about Carl-Adams’s son. Late to talk, late to walk, upset by tiny problems. “You know, at six months, Milla could already . . .”—Jenny’s mother-in-law made statistical comparisons to all the cousins, knowing exactly how to turn the knife. At birthday parties in the Scandinavian Capital circle, he was always the one who smashed his cake, or screamed. No one really understood when Sebastian spoke. Faced with Aryan imperfection, they brought in doctors and second opinions in private clinics. He had educators and special programs in talking and playing, an eight-hundred-kronor-an-hour this, and a thousand-kronor-an-hour that. The Filipina nanny was quickly exchanged for a Swedish one with a degree.

  Sebastian did catch up, almost, enough for it to work. They no longer needed to make lame excuses for avoiding parties.

  Until he was almost five. Sometimes, when he was really tired, he’d be almost unreachable for a while. “Hey, Sebastian!” Someone would put a loving hand on his shoulder but still get no reaction. Blank, for long seconds, and then release. Jenny didn’t think much about it. There was no yelling or screaming, and now they always understood what he said. But sometimes he just sat quietly.

  A certain kind of silence can be telling.

  One afternoon, they heard a little crash, while Seb
astian was playing with Legos on a coffee table upstairs. Something he’d built had fallen on the floor. It happened all the time. The sound of Lego pieces falling was always followed by a reaction, some kind of movement. One floor below, Jenny unconsciously noticed something missing.

  She was absorbed in a newspaper, but on autopilot she said: “Sebastian.” She went back to her article. Then, a little louder, “Sebastian?” She wasn’t even thinking that something was wrong. There was just a vague feeling, hardly even ominous.

  “Do you want something? Mommy’s getting hungry.” She put down the paper, stood up. “Sebastian.” Still, she was calm. Thick soft carpet on the stairs all the way up. Down the hallway, past the paintings. Into the TV room.

  The human eye is highly sensitive to detecting motion, perceived as a break in an expected pattern. The wide white sofa, the table behind it, only half visible to her, the Legos scattered everywhere. But that she barely noticed; it belonged to the familiar, the expected. It was the movement she saw. The tiny foot sticking out on the floor between the couch and the table. How it twitched. In uncontrolled spasms.

  She leapt and threw herself down, not even calling his name.

  Without the couch to shield her, now all she saw was blood and his seizures. In her desperate embrace, she felt his little body twitching in her arms, against her chest. They didn’t stop. She broke into sobs.

  An eternity.

  Then the ambulance arrived, with the soothing touch and big medical bags. Sebastian was breathing as they carried him out on a stretcher.

  “He bit his tongue, that’s all. It’s over now.”

  They went to the emergency room. Not until an hour after Jenny had called from the hospital did she hear back from Carl-Adam. “Miriam said you wanted something?”

  Then came two months in limbo. MRIs, EEGs, a lot of white coats at the Karolinska Institute. Carl-Adam annoyed them by trying to impose his own diagnoses. He was in an almost manic state of work. Scandinavian Capital was buying a health-care group, and he had to get the answers to everything; it all spilled over. Jenny tried to distract herself, waiting for the results: she cooked dinners and hired a landscape architect to draw up plans for the backyard. They would receive the results on a Thursday, they’d had the date set for two weeks. That same morning, Carl-Adam called from a taxi on the way to Arlanda: “Zurich. You’ll need to handle this one. I have to go.”

  She sat alone with the doctor for an hour. She didn’t raise her own concerns or ask any questions; she only listened. A woman physician who smiled the way they all do when trying but failing to find compassion within the harsh objectivity.

  The next day, the phone rang twice—Carl-Adam—but she didn’t answer. That evening, she tucked Alexandra and Sebastian in, and went back to their rooms a little later, to make sure they’d fallen asleep. She tried to watch a movie, then turned off the TV and listened to the house go quiet, without glancing at the clock. She sat in the kitchen, looked around, and felt like a stranger in her own home. All that extravagance—the cast-iron gas range with its brass fixtures, and the sink made from a single piece of Italian marble, transported across Europe as the only cargo on a flatbed truck. A carpenter in Värmland had carved flowers into all the cabinet doors, a different one on each. He’d identified every flower when he came to install them, and described what each one symbolized. She didn’t remember. Life was happening somewhere else.

  She waited.

  Then she heard a taxi roll across the gravel and stood up.

  The front door closed. He was fumbling with something. She was waiting for him. The single dimmed light left the kitchen in shadow. He still had his overcoat on when he came in and held out the little oblong package.

  She stretched out her hand. She tried but couldn’t do it. She brought her hand to her mouth, sat down on a chair, and couldn’t look at him.

  “I had to,” he said.

  She cleared her throat. “Yesterday, at the doctor’s.” Her voice broke, she took a deep breath. “Sebastian has severe epilepsy.”

  He stopped looking at her. “Well, we suspected as much.” Then there was the need to explain himself again. “It couldn’t wait, I had to get the endorsements. If this deal goes through, it means fifteen million kronor for me alone. For us.”

  She said nothing.

  “Jenny, I had to.”

  She shrugged. “The doctor says she’s a hundred percent certain. He’ll need to take powerful drugs for his entire life.”

  “You got the prescriptions, I guess.”

  “Of course. For all kinds of things, but nothing that will cost close to fifteen million.”

  “You don’t have to be mean,” he said.

  “I’m not being mean, just honest. There are a lot of people who need you, I know that. But Sebastian’s medications can only suppress the symptoms, and there’s no guarantee. No one knows now how effective they’ll be. Yesterday I was sitting opposite a doctor who calmly told me that at any moment, our son could have a seizure that’s too much for him. Yes, one that kills him. And when that happens, he’ll be in my arms, while you’ll be sitting at a meeting in London or Geneva.” Jenny was calmer now. “I won’t put up with this.” She glanced at the unopened package he put down on the bar, then turned back to him. “Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  Carl-Adam just stood quietly. He reached for the package and left the kitchen. The house was as quiet as before the taxi rolled across the gravel. You could barely hear the sound of his steps going up the stairs. She’d already decided to sleep downstairs in a guest room.

  The next morning, it was as if nothing had happened. All four of them ate breakfast together. It was a regular Saturday: a little playing outside, a bit of don’t-bother-Daddy-in-his-study, then driving Alexandra to a birthday party. That evening, Jenny and Carl-Adam were invited to a dinner party. They hadn’t said much to each other during the day, and when Jenny brought it up casually and somewhat late, he said that he’d already called to cancel.

  The children fell asleep.

  She came to him in his study. He had two things to say. That he no longer felt anything, and that he wanted out.

  But he wasn’t talking about the marriage. He was talking about the path that his father, himself, and all the others had mapped out for him. It was over.

  Getting Carl-Adam to say what he wanted to do instead was like trying to get a blind person to describe his favorite color. He simply couldn’t. Finally, Jenny started talking about happiness. She herself didn’t believe in it, not as an eternal state—it was a fiction, like God. Something that drove your hopes and desires. Maybe you could find a little along the way, little glimpses of both happiness and God. When Carl-Adam couldn’t come up with anything he wanted to do, she asked what made him happy. He said that he still loved her. She believed him, but it was a cheap evasion, a shot that missed the goal. Because love clearly wasn’t enough. He had to be pushed off his safe and narrow path. So she got angry and made it clear that love couldn’t be the only thing that mattered, and also confessed her true feelings about the bracelets from Zurich. Once the air was cleared, she asked when he’d last felt happy. He managed to look beyond the clichés and say that it was two summers ago. When they’d gone out sailing not just for a few days, but stayed out for two full weeks. Jenny remembered it well.

  It had begun there. The path that had led them to the ocean.

  That evening in the study ended with the easy decision that he’d resign from Scandinavian Capital—the decision made even before she came into the room. The rest unfolded over the next evenings. While the children were asleep, they flipped through Yachting World, and she showed him the most traveled routes. If Carl-Adam were to leave, it would be easiest to do something grandiose. He—King Carl—would still get to amaze. Circumnavigation. Sure, she was sneaky, sure she was conspiring against an easy target, but what did it matter? If Jenny had her dramatic side, she wasn’t foolhardy about money.

  “Sure, you’ll still be
gone a lot, but on the trip we can all be together, all the time.” There was no reason to cut ties with Scandinavian Capital until the deal with the medical group had gone through.

  Jenny knew exactly what a real boat would cost, if you wanted to sail around the world in style. She was from the west coast of Sweden, and there were only two choices: Najad or Hallberg-Rassy. With Carl-Adams’s bonus, the choice was simple. But ordering a boat and waiting for it to be built would take too long; the die was cast, and they wanted to leave as soon as possible. Through an old contact, Jenny found a German willing to sell them his sixty-two-foot Hallberg-Rassy. A couple of months in dry dock, and the MaryAnn wasn’t just like new, she was state-of-the-art. She let Carl-Adam have the limelight, standing at the helm in a few sailing magazines.

  They kept the house but sold and spent everything else. They had no safety net. Parents swore: “Are you really . . . ?” unable to keep from making comments. Sebastian had some minor seizures at the beginning, but they’d fine-tuned his medication. For Alexandra, there’d be home schooling on board via the Internet, and eventually the same for Sebastian. Two and a half years at sea—so they’d told the newspapers and their friends. People could follow along through their blog.

  Finally that weekend in Sandhamn, with pink champagne, chin chin, and kaboom—first the Baltic Sea, then Kiel Canal to the North Sea. There they met their first gale.

  As the MaryAnn’s bow hit a wave, and the wind sent the salty foam arcing over the deck, it splashed over her face like rain. There was nothing more refreshing, and she found herself laughing straight into the wind. She wore her old silver bracelet on the boat; all her other jewelry had been sold.

  Now she sat with the desert around them, and what had happened to the bracelet was far from her mind. Under the strain, the weakest link started to break: their son had started to have seizures again.