The Leopard(209)

She felt it now. The fear. More as a physical pain than a fit of panic that would cause her rational brain to implode. She saw clearly, heard clearly, reasoned clearly. Yes, clearer than ever before, she thought.

‘You started killing to hide that you had been unfaithful,’ she said, her voice hoarser now. ‘To safeguard the Galtung millions. But what about the millions you have tricked Lene out of here, are they enough to save your project?’

‘I don’t know,’ Tony smiled, grasping the butt of the pistol. ‘We’ll have to see. Out.’

‘Is it worth it, Tony? Is this really worth all these lives?’

Kaja gasped as the gun barrel was jabbed into her ribs. Tony’s voice hissed in her ear.

‘Look around you, Kaja. This is the cradle of humanity. See what a human life is worth. Some die and even more are born in one unending feverish race, round and round, and one life gives no more sense than any other. But the game makes sense. The passion, the fervour. The gambling addiction, as some idiots call it. It’s everything. It’s like Nyiragongo. It’s all-consuming, all-destroying, but it is a prerequisite of all life. No passion, no meaning, no boiling lava within and everything out here would be stone dead, frozen stiff. Passion, Kaja – have you got any? Or are you a dead volcano, a speck of human dust, summed up in three sentences in a funeral speech?’

Kaja jerked away from the barrel, and Tony cackled with amusement.

‘Are you ready for the wedding, Kaja? Ready to thaw?’

She smelt the stench of sulphur. The driver had opened the door, watched Kaja with indifference, pointed a short-barrelled gun at her. Even here in the car, ten metres from the edge of the crater, she could feel the overwhelming heat. She didn’t move. The black man leaned in and grasped her arm. She let him pull her without offering any resistance, just made sure she was heavy enough for him to be off balance, so that when she suddenly bounded out he would be caught by surprise. The man was amazingly slight and probably a bit shorter than she was. She struck with her elbow. Knowing it was much more powerful than a fist. Knowing that the neck, the temple, the nose were good targets. The elbow hit something with a crunch, the man fell and dropped his weapon. Kaja lifted her foot. She had learned that the most effective way to neutralise a person on the ground was to trample on the thigh. The combination of a full-bodied stamp from the top and the pressure from the ground underneath will immediately cause such widespread bleeding to the thigh muscles that the person will be rendered incapable of pursuit. The alternative is to stamp on the chest and neck with potentially fatal consequences. She had her eyes fixed on the exposed neck when the moonlight fell on the man’s face. She hesitated for a fraction of a second. He couldn’t have been older than Even.

Then she felt arms enclosing her from behind, her own arms forced into her sides and the air from her lungs expelled as she was lifted off the ground with her legs kicking helplessly. Tony’s voice close to her ear sounded cheerful. ‘Good, Kaja. Passion. You want to live. I’ll make sure his wages are docked, I promise you.’

The boy on the ground in front of her got to his feet and grabbed his weapon. The indifference was gone now; a white fury shone in his eyes.

Tony pressed her hands together behind her back and she felt thin plastic ties being tightened around her wrists.

‘So,’ said Tony. ‘May I ask you to be Lene’s maid of honour, frøken Solness?’

And now – at last – it came. The panic. It emptied her brain of all else, rendered everything blank, clean, cruel. Easy. She screamed.





89


The Wedding


KAJA STOOD AT THE EDGE LOOKING DOWN. THE SCORCHING air rose, hit her face like a hot breeze. The poisonous smoke had already made her dizzy, but perhaps that was just the tremulous air blurring her vision, making the lava quiver, down there in the abyss where it shone with tinges of yellow and red. A strand of hair fell into her face, but her hands were bound behind her back with the plastic ties. She stood shoulder to shoulder with Lene Galtung who, Kaja assumed, must have been drugged from the way she stood staring in front of her like a sleepwalker. A white-clad, living corpse with only frost and wasteland within. A shop dummy dressed as a bride in the window of a ropery.

Tony was right behind them. She felt his hand on the small of her back.

‘Do you take the man at your side and promise to love, honour and respect him for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness or in health . . .’ he whispered.

This wasn’t out of cruelty, he had explained. It was just so practical. There wouldn’t be a trace left of them. Barely a question. People in the Congo go missing every day.