The Marco Effect: A Department Q Novel (27 page)

It was an ugly feeling, as repulsive as dog mess on the sole of his shoe. At that moment he was a nobody. Just a simple lowdown thief like the rest of them, and though nine thousand kroner was a lot of money and would get him by for a long time, the day would inevitably come when it all ran out and he would have to become a thief again.

Who was he kidding?

Only then did he realize how impossible his life had become.

The hatred that had been latent within him from the first day Zola forced him to steal on the streets now flared up inside, kindling a thirst for vengeance that felt stronger than ever before.

He was a thief and would always be as long as the clan existed. Zola would still have his hooks in him wherever he went.

Marco clenched his fists and stared up at the concrete above his head as he imagined Stark’s corpse with its empty eye sockets, Tilde and her gentle voice, and the policeman called Carl who no doubt wanted to get in touch with him. All these shadows lingering above him and all the nasty ones lurking behind his back could vanish at once if he now did the right thing.

There was no longer any doubt. Zola and his clan had to be eliminated.

“I suppose the two
of you were expecting to be received with a fanfare,” said Rose, skewering Assad in the gut with a rolled-up sheet of paper. “With Carl you never know what he’ll do, but I’d never have thought it of you, Assad. You knew perfectly well Malene was mine, and now here she is phoning me up while I’m at the ministry, telling me how you came barging in and put the screws on the two of them. What do you think you’re playing at?”

“That’s not quite how it happened, Rose,” Assad ventured, clearly poised to get the hell out with his prayer mat before her next sentence detonated.

Carl caught himself smirking, regardless of how unfair it was. “I’m the one you should be giving a tongue-lashing,” he pointed out. “Assad said we ought to have taken you with us, but it just didn’t turn out.”

Rose snorted. “What good’s a tongue-lashing ever done you, Carl Mørck? You’ve got skin thick as a rhinoceros.” She took hold of his hand and slapped her sheet of paper into his palm. “But if you can do without me there, you can do without me here, too, because that’s me, off. Then you can sit and have a think about what I’ve dug up in the meantime.”

“Ha, ha, that’s it, Rosie, you give ’em what for,” came a voice from the other end of the corridor.

Rose’s hands dropped to her sides as Gordon appeared. It was clear as day she didn’t need his assistance just now, but he carried on anyway.

“I’d say it borders on harassment when your superior doesn’t allow you to interview your own contact.”

A crease appeared on Rose’s brow. Not the kind that expressed
perplexity, rather a line of demarcation, and woe betide any man who overstepped it.

“Stop, Gordon,” she snapped authoritatively, but the idiot was seemingly only capable of grasping a message in extremely small portions.

“But I suppose it’s typical of the older generation of criminal investigators,” he went on, undaunted. “A bit pubescently chauvinistic, the two of them, wouldn’t you agree?”

“Ooh, you’re a bunch of imbeciles, the lot of you!” Rose burst out, not waiting for their protests before disappearing into her office and slamming the door behind her. A bomb-proof postlude to her symphony of self-righteousness.

Carl turned to the culprit. “I’ve got broad shoulders, so this time I’m going to ignore that you’re audacious enough to call me pubescent and a male chauvinist, not to mention lumping me in with the older generation, but you don’t want to be talking to me like that again, do you hear me?”

The moron stared blankly at Carl. Was he brain-dead or just looking for trouble?

“I think perhaps you ought nod at this point, Gordon,” Assad suggested drily.

So he nodded, though barely perceptibly.

“Next, let me ask you to think back to yesterday. Didn’t you understand you were not only way out of line in someone else’s domain but also that we’d rather have a pack of ravenous hyenas on the loose than have you running around down here?”

Gordon didn’t answer. He probably had his own recollections of what had occurred, and they were undoubtedly rather more pleasant.

“OK, in that case I suggest that after Assad and I have knocked you about a bit, you get your ass upstairs to Lars Bjørn and tell him how unreasonable we are down here.”

Carl tapped a cigarette from his pack and lit up in one seamless movement. Seeing the kid abruptly shy away, his gormless mug momentarily obliterated by smoke, was almost enough to save the day.

Gordon was about to protest, until he saw Assad begin to roll up his shirtsleeves. Though he seemed to get the message and immediately retreated out the door like a cowed dog, he didn’t abstain from turning
around at a safe distance farther up the corridor to hurl back a string of six-syllable words of Latin origin.

If that boy didn’t start toeing the line soon, it wouldn’t be long before he got hurt.

Carl unrolled the sheet of paper Rose had shoved at him.
THE BAKA PROJECT
it read at the top in ultra-bold thirty-point Times New Roman. In case anyone should fail to notice.

“Sit down and listen to what she’s written here, Assad, and put another expression on your face while you’re at it. Rose’ll come round, just you wait and see. She knows perfectly well we can’t all charge in like the Light Brigade every time we’re out interviewing people.”

“What is this Light Brigade, Carl?”

Carl jabbed a finger at the sheet in front of him. “Never you mind. It says here that Rose was encouraged to phone this civil servant in Yaoundé. That’s the capital of Cameroon, for your information.” He hadn’t known himself until two minutes ago.

“The gentleman in question is one Mbomo Ziem, and according to our people down there he was in charge of liaising with the Danish international development office in connection with this Baka project and a couple of other aid initiatives in the area. However, he seems to have left the project, so Rose got hold of one Fabrice Pouka instead, who was able to tell her that the Baka project is still running, though it’s now in its final year. According to him it had all proceeded according to plan, apart from someone called Louis Fon coming close to sabotaging the whole effort at one point. Rose writes that the project was set up to help an endangered tribe of pygmies in the Dja jungle in southern Cameroon to sow banana plantations and cultivate the soil with the aim of growing new kinds of crops. Apparently all this had become necessary because poaching and things generally going to pot over the years had ruined their traditional ways of supporting themselves.”

Carl put the paper down on the desk in front of him.

“Is that all, then?” Assad asked. Carl knew what he meant. It sure wasn’t much she’d dug up during all that time she’d been away.

“Oh, hang on a minute. There’s something on the back here that she’s written by hand.
LFon9876
. I wonder what that means?”

“It looks like a Skype address.”

“Go in and ask her, will you?”

“Who? Me?”

Carl didn’t answer, which was reply enough in itself.

Five minutes later Assad stood before him once more, sweating.

“Ouch, Carl. She dipped me right in the acid bath again. But yes, she said it was a Skype address. Finding it out is what took her most of that time, but I won’t bother you with telling you how. She says she assumes the call will be answered at Louis Fon’s home address in the north of Cameroon. She has tried, but there was no one who answered.”

“So maybe it’s not in use anymore.”

“One can hear then that this is not your strong point, Carl. You can only call up a Skype number if the person you are calling has switched on their computer. And not only that, they have to be on hand to answer the call.”

“Yes, yes, I knew that. What I meant was . . .”

Assad beamed. “That’s a good one, Carl, but you can’t fool me. Let me show you. Come into my office and we’ll call from my computer. It’s all set up.”

In the cubbyhole, on top of the desk amid tea urns, glazed green incense stick holders, stacks of files, and a whole lot of other rubbish stood police HQ’s biggest computer screen, showing an image of the kind of gray-brown mud-built abode of which there were millions in the Middle East. Definitely not a place Carl would like spending his retirement. Nothing colorful, no plants, no veranda where a man could throw his feet up on the rail. Just a window and a door, and everything the color of shit.

“That your place, Assad?” he asked, pointing.

Assad smiled, shook his head and pressed a key. The image was gone.

“First we turn on the speakers, Carl. You sit down in front of the screen, then we open our Skype account. I’ll show you how. If they have a camera at the other end like we have, we should also be able to see each other.”

Half a minute passed and then they heard the blooping ringtone, an infuriating sound if ever there was one, Carl thought.

Assad just managed to say, “Give it a little time,” before sounds indicated something was happening at the other end.

Carl adjusted his headset, Assad gesticulating frantically to make sure he was ready. How ready did you have to be, for Chrissake?

And then the image of a young African woman’s face appeared in front of him, far too close, issuing a stream of words, none of which he understood. He said hello with the kind of British accent only an English teacher like the one he had up in his native north-Jutland peat bog near Brønderslev thirty years ago could imagine was grand.

“Allo?” the woman said in reply. Hardly much progress.

“Do they speak French in Cameroon?” he whispered to Assad.

Assad nodded.

“Do you?”

Assad shook his head.

Carl hung up.

—

It took half an hour before they managed to coax Rose into admitting that she actually spoke the language quite well. Moreover, she accepted their apologies in return for a certain amount of as yet unspecified favors.

In less than twenty seconds she had introduced herself. The woman at the other end drew back from the screen, revealing a room into which the sun poured from every angle.

“I’ll translate as we go along,” Rose explained, both to the woman and the two standing behind her.

It was clear that Louis Fon’s wife bore grief. She explained how difficult her situation had become during the five months since her husband disappeared, how she broke down in tears at the slightest thing.

“Everything was going so well for us. Louis had plenty of work, we wanted for nothing, and he was happy in his job. Beside me and our children, there was nothing he wanted more dearly than for the Baka to thrive and be prosperous.”

“What do you think happened?” Rose asked.

“I don’t know.” She shrugged all the way up to her ears as a pair of near-hairless dogs stuck their pointed snouts through the doorway
behind her. “I thought at first the poachers had killed him, but now I think maybe it was someone else.”

“What makes you think he was killed, and who exactly do you suspect?”

“It is not something I think. Our Nganga says so. The birds’ claws have spoken. Louis is no longer with us.”

“I’m sorry to hear that. Who is Nganga? A medicine man? A witch doctor?”

“He is the guardian of our bodies and souls.”

The three of them exchanged glances. It was something that was unlikely to stand up in court.

“But then Louis’s parents gave me some money so I could travel to Dja and Somolomo and look for whatever might be left of him. It made Nganga very angry.”

“So you never found out what happened?”

She shook her head, at once indignant and distressed, yet still able to deliver a swift kick to one of the dogs as it ventured too close.

“A lot of strange things were going on down there. That was all I discovered. The pygmies were dissatisfied because the Baka project had come to a standstill. First they were promised crops and new plantations, then they were given money to wait, and then finally they ended up getting almost nothing at all. That was what they all told me. They were so angry at Louis and the Danes, and I guess I was, too. But after a while I received a little money from Denmark, which helped a bit.”

She leaned back, looking pensive.

“Ask her what she’s thinking now, Rose,” said Assad.

Rose nodded. She’d noticed it, too.

“You look like something’s on your mind. Did something occur to you that we should know?”

“
Je ne sais pas
. Maybe it is nothing, but it was strange, all the same.” She sat silent for a moment while Carl and the others marveled at how small the world had become. It was almost as if one could smell her cooking on the stove beside her, or reach out and touch her hair and lips. Carl half expected the floor of Assad’s cubbyhole to begin sprouting grass mats.

“I was thinking about how strange it was that the man who signed the papers saying I was entitled to compensation, now that Louis was gone, was in Somolomo the same day Louis disappeared. Some of the locals in Somolomo told me this.”

“The exact same day? A Dane?”

“
Oui, oui
. He must have been a Dane.”

“Can you remember his name?”

Another long pause during which the soul of Africa attempted to take possession of Assad’s ersatz Middle Eastern den. A pause where the woman seemed almost to have fallen into a trance from which she was unable to return.

“William Stark?” Carl suggested.

She looked up and shook her head.

“No, that wasn’t it. I don’t recall the name. The only thing I remember is there were a lot of e’s in it.”

Carl caught Assad’s more-than-alert glance. Then Carl’s mobile thrummed in his pocket.

Great fucking timing.

“Yeah?” he answered with annoyance without first glancing at the display. “Listen, it’s not a good time right now. Call back in half an hour.”

“Hi, Carl. Sorry. It’s Lisbeth. You know, the one you spoke with at the library in Brønshøj.”

“Oops,” he groaned lamely. What was it about a woman’s voice that could knock him sideways?

“This might not be the best time for you at the moment, but the boy’s here again, at the branch on Dag Hammarskjölds Allé.”