A Treacherous Paradise
CONTENTS
COVER
ABOUT THE BOOK
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ALSO BY HENNING MANKELL
TITLE PAGE
EPIGRAPH
PROLOGUE: Africa Hotel, Beira, 2002
PART ONE: The Missionaries Leave the Ship
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
PART TWO: The Lagoon of Good Death
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
PART THREE: The Tapeworm in the Chimpanzee’s Mouth
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
PART FOUR: The Butterfly’s Behaviour When Faced With a Superior Power
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
EPILOGUE: Africa Hotel, Beira, 1905
AFTERWORD
GLOSSARY
COPYRIGHT
About the Book
A Treacherous Paradise sees Henning Mankell turn his talents for writing gripping thrillers to a world where power and powerlessness meet and passion is a dangerous commodity.
In 1904, Hanna Lundmark escapes the brutal poverty of rural Sweden for a job as a cook onboard a steamship headed for Australia. To her surprise, she finds love in the form of the ship’s mate, whom she marries, but disaster strikes when her husband is struck down almost immediately by a fatal illness. Jumping ship at the African port of Lourenço Marques, Hanna decides to begin her life afresh.
Stumbling across what she believes to be a down-at-heel hotel, Hanna becomes embroiled in a sequence of events that lead to her inheriting the most successful brothel in town. Uncomfortable with the attitudes of the white settlers, Hanna is determined to befriend the prostitutes working for her, and change life in the town for the better, but the distrust between blacks and whites, and the shadow of colonialism, lead to tragedy and murder.
About the Book
Henning Mankell has become a worldwide phenomenon with his crime writing, gripping thrillers and atmospheric novels set in Africa. His prizewinning and critically acclaimed Inspector Wallander Mysteries are currently dominating bestseller lists all over the globe. His books have been translated into forty-five languages and made into numerous international film and television adaptations: most recently the BAFTA-award-winning BBC television series Wallander, starring Kenneth Branagh. Mankell devotes much of his free time to working with Aids charities in Africa, where he is also director of the Teatro Avenida in Maputo. In 2008, the University of St Andrews conferred Henning Mankell with an honorary degree of Doctor of Letters in recognition of his major contribution to literature and to the practical exercise of conscience.
www.henningmankell.co.uk
ALSO BY HENNING MANKELL
Kurt Wallander Series
Faceless Killers
The Dogs of Riga
The White Lioness
The Man Who Smiled
Sidetracked
The Fifth Woman
One Step Behind
Firewall
Before the Frost
The Pyramid
The Troubled Man
Fiction
The Return of the Dancing Master
Chronicler of the Winds
Depths
Kennedy’s Brain
The Eye of the Leopard
Italian Shoes
The Man from Beijing
Daniel
The Shadow Girls
Non-fiction
I Die, but the Memory Lives On
Young Adult Fiction
A Bridge to the Stars
Shadows in the Twilight
When the Snow Fell
The Journey to the End of the World
Children’s Fiction
The Cat Who Liked Rain
A Treacherous Paradise
Henning Mankell
Translated from the Swedish by
Laurie Thompson
‘There are three kinds of people: those who are dead, those who are alive, and those who sail the seas.’
PLATO
PROLOGUE
Africa Hotel, Beira, 2002
ONE DAY IN the cold month of July, 2002, a man by the name of José Paulo opened up a hole in a rotten floor. He was not trying to make an escape route nor was he looking for a hiding place, but he intended to use the damaged parquet flooring as firewood since the cold of the African winter was harsher than it had been for many years.
José Paulo was unmarried, but he had taken over responsibility for his sister and her five children after his brother-in-law, Emilio, had suddenly disappeared one morning, leaving behind nothing but a pair of worn-out shoes and a number of unpaid bills. His debts were owed almost exclusively to Donna Samima, who ran an unlicensed bar close to the harbour where she served tontonto and home-brewed beer with an astonishingly high alcohol content.
Emilio used to spend his time drinking and talking about the time in the distant past when he had worked in the South African gold mines. But many people maintained that he had never set foot in South Africa, and had certainly never held down a steady job in his life.
His disappearance was neither something expected, nor something unexpected. He had simply slunk away during the silent hours just before dawn, when everybody was asleep.
Nobody knew where he had gone to. Nor would anybody miss him all that much, not even his own family. It is doubtful whether Donna Samima missed him, but she did insist that his bills should be paid.
Emilio, the talker and drinker, made virtually no impression on anybody even when he was in the vicinity. The fact that he had now disappeared made no real difference.
José Paulo lived with his sister’s family in the Africa Hotel in Beira. There had been a time, which now seemed both distant and incomprehensible, when this establishment had been considered one of the grandest hotels in colonial Africa. It was ranked as comparable with the Victoria Falls Hotel, on the border betw
een Southern Rhodesia and Northern Rhodesia before those countries achieved independence and became known as Zimbabwe and Zambia.
White people came to the Africa Hotel from far and wide in order to get married, celebrate anniversaries, or simply demonstrate the fact that they belonged to an aristocracy that could never imagine that their colonial paradise would one day collapse. The hotel had been the venue for tea dances on Sunday afternoons, swing and tango competitions, and no end of people had been photographed standing outside its imposing entrance.
But the colonial dream of paradise was doomed. One day the Portuguese abandoned their last fortresses. The Africa Hotel started to crumble the moment the former owners had left. The deserted rooms and suites were occupied by poverty-stricken Africans. They deposited their few belongings in the carcasses of what used to be upright pianos and Steinway grands, in dilapidated boudoirs and bathtubs. The beautiful parquet floors were chopped up and used as firewood when winter was at its coldest.
Eventually there were several thousand people living in what had once been the Africa Hotel.
Anyway, one day in July, José Paulo made a hole in the floor and chopped up the parquet. It was freezing cold in the room. The only source of heat was an iron cauldron in which they cooked their food over an open fire. The smoke was channelled out through a smashed and badly repaired windowpane by means of an improvised chimney.
The half-rotten flooring had already begun to smell thanks to its neglect. José thought there must be a dead rat underneath it spreading the stench of decomposition. But when he investigated, all he could find was a little notebook with a calf-leather binding.
He managed to spell out a strange name written on the black cover.
Hanna Lundmark.
Underneath the name was a year: 1905.
But he was unable to make head or tail of what was written inside it. It was in a language he didn’t recognize. He turned to old Afanastasio who lived further down the corridor, in room 212, and was regarded by all those packed inside the hotel as a wise man, because in his youth he had survived a confrontation with two hungry lions on a deserted road outside Chimoio.
But not even Afanastasio could read the text. He approached old Lucinda, who lived in what used to be reception, for assistance, but she didn’t know what language it was either.
Afanastasio suggested that José Paulo should throw the book away.
‘It’s been lying there under the floorboards for ages,’ said Afanastasio. ‘Somebody hid it there in the days when the likes of us were only allowed to enter this building in the role of waiters, cleaners or porters. No doubt this forgotten book tells an unpleasant story. Burn it. Use it as fuel when it gets really cold.’
José Paulo took the book back to his room. But he didn’t burn it, without quite knowing why. Instead he found a new hiding place for it. There was a cavity underneath the window ledge where he used to stash away any money he occasionally managed to earn. Now the few filthy banknotes could share the space with the black notebook.
He never took it out again. But he didn’t forget about it.
PART ONE
The Missionaries Leave the Ship
1
IT IS 1904. June. A scorching hot tropical dawn.
In this far distant here and now, a Swedish steamship lies motionless in the gentle swell. On board are thirty-one crew members, one of them a woman. Her name is Hanna Lundmark, née Renström, and she is working on board as a cook.
In all, thirty-two people were due to make the voyage to Australia with a cargo of Swedish heartwood, and planks for saloon floors and the living rooms of rich sheep farmers.
One of the crew has just died. He was a mate, and married to Hanna.
He was young, and keen to go on living. But despite being warned by Captain Svartman, he went ashore one day while they were topping up their supplies of coal in one of the desert harbours to the south of Suez. He was infected with one of the deadly fevers that are always a threat on the African coast.
When it dawned on him that he was going to die, he started howling in fear.
Neither of the men present at his deathbed – Captain Svartman and Halvorsen, the Ship’s Carpenter – could make out any last words that he uttered. He didn’t even say anything to Hanna, who was about to be widowed after a marriage lasting only one month. He died screaming and – eventually, just before the end – roaring in terror.
His name was Lars Johan Jakob Antonius Lundmark. Hanna is still mourning his death, having been devastated by what happened.
It is now dawn the day after his death. The ship is not moving. It has heaved to because there will shortly be a burial at sea. Captain Svartman does not want to delay matters. There is no ice on board to keep the corpse cold.
Hanna is standing aft with a slop pail in her hand. She is short in stature, high-breasted, with friendly eyes. Her hair is brown and gathered in a tight bun at the back of her head.
She is not beautiful. But in a strange way she radiates an aura suggesting that she is a totally genuine human being.
The here and now. She is here. On the sea, on board a steamship with two funnels. A cargo of timber, on its way to Australia. Home port: Sundsvall.
The ship is called Lovisa. She was built at the Finnboda shipyard in Stockholm. But her home port has always been on the northern Swedish coast.
She was first owned by a shipping company in Gävle, but it went bankrupt after a series of failed speculative deals. And she was then bought by a company based in Sundsvall. In Gävle she was called Matilda, after the shipowner’s wife, who played Chopin with clumsy fingers. Now she is called Lovisa, after the new owner’s youngest daughter.
One of the part-owners is called Forsman. He is the one who arranged for Hanna Lundmark to be given a job on board. Although Forsman has a piano in his house, there is nobody who can play it. Nevertheless, when the piano tuner comes on one of his regular visits, Forsman makes a point of being there to listen.
But now the mate Lars Johan Jakob Antonius Lundmark has died, killed by a raging fever.
It is as if the swell of the sea has become paralysed. The ship is lying there motionless, as if it were holding its breath.
That’s exactly what I imagine death to be like, Hanna Lundmark thought. A sudden stillness, unexpected, coming from nowhere. Death is like the wind. A sudden shift into the lee.
The lee of death. And then nothing else.
2
AT THAT VERY moment Hanna is possessed by a memory. It comes from nowhere.
She recalls her father, his voice, which had become no more than a whisper by the end of his life. It was as if he were asking her to preserve and cherish what he said as a valuable secret.
A mucky angel. That’s what you are.
He said that to her just before he died. It was as if he were trying to present her with a gift, despite the fact – or maybe because of the fact – that he owned next to nothing.
Hanna Renström, my beloved daughter, you are an angel – a right mucky one, but an angel even so.
What exactly is this memory that she has? What were his exact words? Did he say she was stony, or mucky? Did he leave it up to her to choose, to decide for herself? Stony broke, or mucky? Now as she recalls that moment, she thinks he called her a mucky angel.
It is a distant memory, faded. She is so far distant from her father and his death. From there, and from then: a remote house on a bank of the cold, brown waters of the River Ljungan in the silent forests of northern Sweden. He passed away hunched up and contorted by pain on a sofa bed in a kitchen they had barely been able to keep warm.
He died surrounded by cold, she thinks. It was extremely cold in January, 1899, when he stopped breathing.
That was over five years ago.
The memory of her father and his words about an angel disappear just as quickly as they came. It takes her only a few seconds to return to the present from the past.
She knows that we always make the most remarkable journe
ys deep down inside ourselves, where there is no time or space.
Perhaps that memory was designed to help her? To throw her the rope she needs in order to climb over the walls confining her within an atmosphere of unremitting sorrow?
But she can’t run away. The ship has been transformed into an impregnable fortress.
There is no escape. Her husband really is dead.
Death is a talon that refuses to release its grip.
3
THE PRESSURE IN the boilers has been reduced. The pistons are motionless, the engines ticking over. Hanna is standing by the rail with her slop pail in her hand. She is going to empty it over the stern. The mess-room boy had wanted to take it from her when she was on her way out of the galley, but she had clung on to it, protected it. Even if this is the day she is going to watch her husband’s body being tipped into the depths of the ocean, sewn into a canvas sailcloth, she does not want to neglect her duties.
When she looks up from the pail, which is filled with eggshells, it feels as if the heat is scratching at her face. Somewhere in the mist to starboard is Africa. Although she cannot see the faintest trace of land, she thinks she can smell it.
He who is now dead has told her about it. About the steaming, almost corrosive stench of decay which you find everywhere in the tropics.
He had already made several voyages to various destinations. He had managed to learn a few things. But not the most important thing: how to survive.
He would never complete this voyage. He died at the age of twenty-four.
It’s as if he was trying to warn her, Hanna thinks. But she doesn’t know what he was warning her about. And now he’s dead.
A dead man can never answer questions.
Somebody materializes silently by her side. It’s her husband’s closest friend on board, the Norwegian carpenter Halvorsen. She doesn’t know if he has a first name, despite the fact that they have been together on the same ship for more than two months. He is never called anything but Halvorsen, a serious man who is said to go down on his knees to be readmitted into the Church every time he comes home to Brønnøysund after a few years at sea, and then signs on again when his faith can no longer sustain him.