He managed to turn his head as the man who had shouted came bounding down the stairs and headed for the utility room.
“What the hell…?” cried the man a second later.
What’s happening? was all René could think, as cries and thuds merged into one. For a brief moment all seemed quiet, and then the clamor erupted again.
Just as he was thinking that despite everything this wasn’t the fate he had wished upon his wife, the door of the utility room slammed hard.
Now René felt the floor beneath his feet again, the cushions of the sofa against his back. He stretched his neck and felt for blood. Then, seeing only a thin smear on his fingertips, he pushed himself upright until he stood, the room swimming around him.
All he could think of was to get away.
“Where do you think you’re going?” came a severe, penetrating voice from behind as he staggered across the shards toward the patio doors.
He turned to see a pair of eyes flashing with rage in a face white as chalk.
“Why didn’t you come and help me?” his wife snarled, her apron spattered red and still clutching her beloved steam iron, blood dripping from its point.
“But you can relax now, you coward, they won’t be coming back,” she said, her voice trembling as she scanned the chaos around them. “I slammed the first one right on the chin before he even saw me and the other one’s not going to be a pretty sight in the morning either. And what were you doing while I was chasing them away?” she spat, taking a step toward him.
René shook his head instinctively. Nothing was going to help anyway.
“Nothing, that’s what! But who were they, René?” she asked coldly. “I know you know, because they knew my name.”
“I can assure you I’ve no idea. I’m as shocked as you are. All of a sudden they were just there.”
“I think you do know. If the second one hadn’t been such a hard case and managed to drag his friend away with him even though his face was still burning from the iron, I’d have gotten to the bottom of this, believe me.”
She tiptoed over the shards of glass in her slippers and picked up the phone.
“I can describe them, I pulled their hoods off.” She cackled. “Ugly little Gyppos, I’ll make sure they get what’s coming to them.”
But René was having none of it. No way was he going to risk being brought down by his wife’s big mouth and poorly supported assumptions while the police were here, so he forbade her, simple as that. He couldn’t have the authorities poking their noses in, a mere twenty-four hours before his voluntary and permanent exile. If she was going to phone anyone, she could phone a glazier, and then a powerful dose of sedatives would be needed for this bitch who was already complaining again, now he’d put the phone back down, as well as heaping scorn on him for his laxity, his cowardice, his ugly dentures, and his bad breath.
After she’d finished spewing the better part of her glossary of foul-mouthed invective he went up the stairs to the spare room. Not to sleep, because he couldn’t, though this would be his second night without, but in order to call Snap in private and confront him with what had happened.
He looked at his watch. As far as he could work out it was just about three in the afternoon in Willemstad. Still half an hour before Curaçao’s banks closed for the day.
He accessed the phone’s call log and quickly found the number of the hotel.
“I’m afraid Mr. and Mrs. Snap checked out a couple of hours ago,” the front desk informed him. “They needed to catch a flight back to Denmark.”
“A flight?”
“Yes, the KLM flight via Amsterdam leaves at three thirty.”
He thanked the man, rubbed his face for a moment, and then phoned the bank in Willemstad to inquire about his shares.
“Goedemiddag, Mr. Eriksen. Yes, everything proceeded according to plan. We received your power of attorney after which the contents of your safe-deposit box were transferred to Mr. Snap.”
So everything was in order, said the bank manager.
Only that wasn’t how Eriksen saw it.
26
Boy had been hiding in the dug-out tree trunk for more than sixty hours before Mammy’s boys found him.
They gave him a choice. It was simple. Either they chopped off his arms and split him open, or else he joined them and became one of Mammy’s boys.
Some choice. The corpses of his entire family lay bloated in the underbrush. Everything he knew had been razed to the ground.
Within four weeks Boy was a child soldier like the others. Primitive and callous, afraid of nothing apart from being stabbed in the back by one of their own.
Their own! Boys like the ones who had murdered his beloved family, cut the throat of his dog, and deprived him of all his humanity.
And while Hutus and Tutsis, Mobuto, Kabila, and sundry bloodsuckers from half the continent did their utmost to wipe out national boundaries and one another, Boy learned to sleep with a Kalashnikov in his arms and dream about all the blood he had unhesitatingly drained from his so-called enemies.
Had it not been for Mammy and her personal project, the day would undoubtedly have come when the knife would have been used against him as well.
She selected her elite with great care, the boys who formed a ring around her and protected her from the outside world. No one could turn a situation to their own advantage like Mammy, and once she had the advantage, so did her bodyguards. It was how she kept them on her side.
When what was supposed to resemble peace finally came to Congo in 1999, Mammy had more than thirty full-fledged killers in her service, and with that kind of raw material, peace was not exactly what she wished for most. What on earth could she use these wanton boys for if killing were no longer part of the agenda?
But Mammy was not easily discouraged. In the wake of Africa’s conflicts, interesting people always appeared who believed peace had not given them what they’d been expecting. People who’d once enjoyed considerable incomes they had now lost. It was in relations with people like these that she saw a future for herself and her boys.
So Mammy was the one to approach when someone had to be killed, and that was how Boy came to meet Brage-Schmidt.
No one had told Boy why Brage-Schmidt wanted to be rid of five French businessmen from Bois de Boqueteau, but he didn’t need to know. Without asking questions he tracked the Frenchmen to the border of Namibia, where he cut off their heads one by one as they slept.
Brage-Schmidt was satisfied and paid Mammy a bonus of a hundred thousand dollars, then asked if he could take on Boy as his permanent problem solver for a further hundred thousand. Mammy hesitated, for Boy was her favorite. But when the man promised to treat him as his own son, make sure he received dental treatment to replace the teeth he’d had knocked out in combat, and furthermore provide him with an education and make sure he learned new languages, plus all kinds of other benefits, she eventually acceded after yet another round of negotiations.
For that, Boy was forever grateful to the both of them, and since then he had not taken a single life.
At least, not personally.
–
Boy had torn Zola apart on the phone after the failed break-in at Eriksen’s home. Now he sat for a moment, considering the entire situation.
Mammy and two of her best boys were on their way. She would be phoning within minutes, provided their flight had landed on time in Copenhagen. Mammy always kept her appointments.
He’d only just looked at his watch when his mobile rang.
“Brief me, honey,” she said, her voice husky and deep.
“How much time can you and your boys spend here, have you decided?” he asked.
“Around fifty-eight hours. We need to be in Brussels by Saturday morning at the latest for another job.”
“OK. I know how good you and the boys are, so that ought to be time enough. I should warn you, though, that the kid we’re looking for is a cunning one. Finding him won’t be easy.”