The Andalucian Friend: A Novel

by Alexander Soderberg

  The alcohol and lateness of the hour took their due. Jane went up to the guest bedroom and her very own Jesus. Sophie tucked Albert up in his guest bed, kissing him on his forehead and letting him sleep on.

  She asked the taxi driver to take a detour. She sat in the backseat, looking out at the villas gliding past, enjoying being alone and drunk. She liked the affluent suburb she had grown up in, and recognized most of the houses that went past, aware of who had lived there once, and who among them was still living there. This was her place, her fixed point. But even so, she couldn’t help feeling rather melancholy as she watched the world going by outside the taxi’s windows. It all looked the same, but the time she associated with it was long gone. Now it was something different, somewhere she didn’t feel any real sense of belonging.

  On the veranda Jane had told her that she and Jesus had met Jens Vall in Buenos Aires. She had been surprised when his name came up, hadn’t thought of him for years. Jens Vall … They had met one summer when they were still in high school, out in the archipelago, and hadn’t let go of each other until they had been forced to. She could half remember the way she felt back then. At the end of the summer vacation she had gone to visit him. He lived on Ekerö, way out on the other side of the city; his parents were away and Jens had the house to himself.

  She had spent most of the time lying with her head on his chest, that was her main memory of that week. They talked constantly, as if they had been saving up all those years. Occasionally they would go to the shops in his parents’ big, wallowing Citroën—loud music and no driver’s license, as if they were practicing being grown-up and free.… They used to hold hands when they were brushing their teeth in the bathroom. God, she’d forgotten all that. In spite of her age, she had realized that she loved him even though she knew that the end would hurt her. And it did. Over the years she had come to think that he had probably felt the same, acting with the same reluctance to avoid the punishment of love.

  The taxi driver dropped her off and she went inside her house, reluctant to let the intoxication fade. It was too good for that, too precious. She went down into the cellar and fetched a bottle of wine, opened it in the kitchen, poured a large glass, and sat down at the table. She drank a few sips, then found a couple of crumpled cigarettes tucked in a packet. She lit one without bothering to put the extractor fan on or open a window. The delicious intoxication faded with the last of the wine, the lightness of her thoughts started to take on a darker tone, and the cigarette began to taste bad.

  She ended her evening with a strong sense that the last part of it had been unnecessary, wrong. She took that feeling with her into the night, and into her empty dreams.

  She woke up the next morning feeling guilty.

  6

  The cargo ship had headed north from Rotterdam, moving slowly along the Dutch coast. The sea was calm, the sun blazing bright when it appeared between large cirrus clouds. Jens got up from his place in the shade and crossed the deck, letting the rhythm of his own body carry him forward, then went down the metal steps into the hold.

  He went through his goods belowdecks, unwilling to do anything but sit and stare, with the image of dead men still on his retinas. He heard steps behind him and Aron appeared. Jens made no attempt to conceal the contents of the boxes.

  Aron looked down at the weapons, then sat on a crate beside Jens. “We’re heading north for a bit, then east toward Bremerhaven. But before that we’ll meet up with a boat off Helgoland where we can unload. You and your goods can go on the other boat.”

  Jens looked at Aron. “Why?” he asked.

  “Because you won’t be able to unload any weapons in Bremerhaven. Customs would steal your shipment.”

  “You can do better than that.”

  “Yes, and so can you.…”

  They looked at each other.

  “Take the offer. You know how this works.”

  Yes, Jens knew how this worked, he understood the deal. By accepting the favor he would be tied to Aron. Jens had seen it all. It was an implicit threat. Jens would be stuck. That was how it worked.

  “And where will the boat we’re going to meet be going later on tonight?”

  “Denmark,” Aron said. “We’ll find some quiet stretch of Jutland and put ashore under cover of darkness.”

  “And then?”

  “I can help you get a car. That’s all.”

  Jens peered at Aron, then looked away and went back to his crates.

  Night came, and the ship’s engines shut off. Everything was quite still as it rocked in the darkness with all lights extinguished.

  He had spent the past few hours going through all his options in his head. Leaving the weapons in Denmark, trying to get them into Germany. Even calling the Russians and telling them that they’d have to pick the goods up themselves somewhere. But they wouldn’t go for that. He’d be obliged to do what they had agreed. The weapons were going to Poland. He could figure out how later. Now they had to avoid being boarded before they reached Denmark. They might even have the coast guard on to them already.

  Jens took out his cell phone and saw that it had a weak signal. He dug out a number from his address book and let it ring a few times. He brightened up when someone at the other end answered.

  “Grandma! It’s me, I can hardly hear you but I’m in Denmark, yes, Jutland … for work. I’ll call in and see you tomorrow or the day after.…”

  He had lugged his two crates up on deck. Aron and Leszek turned up. Leszek had his automatic rifle slung over his shoulder. The only difference was that this time he had a Hensoldt night sight mounted on the gun.

  Leszek heard the boat first.

  “It’s coming,” he said, and disappeared up to the bridge, where he lay down on the roof and followed the approaching vessel through his telescopic sight.

  The sea was calm, the engines were now clearly audible whirring out there in the darkness. Jens could just make out a large fishing boat approaching.

  It pulled up alongside the ship. A voice from the trawler shouted for Aron, who shouted back something Jens couldn’t quite pick up. A man, mixed race, came up onto the ship and gave Aron a broad smile, throwing his arms out.

  “So what are we doing out here, Aron, in the middle of the sea?”

  Aron smiled back and pointed at Jens. “This gentleman’s going to be traveling with you for a bit. Along with a few boxes that belong to him.”

  The man turned to Jens and looked him quickly up and down. “Welcome aboard, I’m Thierry.”

  Jens said hello.

  “What have you got in your boxes?” the man asked.

  “He’s shipping automatic weapons,” Aron said.

  Leszek came over to them, rifle over his shoulder, exchanged nods with Thierry. Then Thierry inspected Jens as if he were trying to see something of the gunrunner in his face, then turned to Aron.

  “OK … Aron, have you got what I asked for?”

  Aron held up a bag, smiled, and passed it to Thierry, who weighed it in his hand for a moment before putting it down on deck and unzipping it. He pulled out an object that was wrapped in a piece of velvet cloth, carefully put it down, and opened it. Jens could almost hear the man gasp for breath as the little stone statue was revealed. It looked fairly unremarkable to Jens. Small, gray, and shapeless. Thierry held it up to the light from a lamp above him. He began to give an animated explanation of how old it was, that it was a cultural treasure from the Incan empire, that it was impossible to put a value on it, that it was probably priceless.

  “Thank you, Aron,” Thierry said.

  “Don’t thank me, thank Don Ignacio. He’s the one who managed to get it for you.”

  Leszek and Aron disappeared belowdecks.

  Thierry was gazing at the statue.

  “Are you going to sell it?” Jens asked.

  “No, you don’t sell something like this. I’m going to keep it at home, to look at.” He turned to Jens. “But I sell a lot of things rather like it, if you’re in
terested?”

  Jens smiled and shook his head.

  “Besides, it’ll be a good counterweight to your weapons and the cocaine on our journey once we land. This has good energies. It will help us.”

  Jens had gotten his answer to the question of what Aron and Leszek were doing on the ship.

  A Volkswagen LT35 was what Lars had bought with the money Gunilla had transferred into his account. A large white van without a single distinguishing feature. There was an internal wall dividing the driver’s cab from the large space at the rear, and a single window in one of the rear doors, with mirrored glass.

  The van was parked seventy-five yards from Sophie’s house on a small gravel track that overlooked the area. He had fitted out the back of the van with a shabby old armchair, and there he sat with a set of headphones attached to a receiver, which in turn was attached to a recording device, listening in stereo to the Brinkmann family eating dinner. Every word that was said, every inference, taught Lars a little more about Sophie and the world she lived in, how she thought, how she felt.…

  He had been watching her for two weeks, and it felt like an eternity. During this timeless stretch of days, evenings, and nights during which he had been following her, photographing her, wondering about her, and writing content-free reports for Gunilla, something had started to happen inside him. For some unfathomable reason he had started to feel a bit freer, a bit stronger, and a bit quieter in his otherwise constant internal questioning of himself.

  He didn’t know where this change had come from, maybe it was just coincidence, maybe it was his new job, maybe the fruit of his isolation during the day? He kept fretting about it—was it something to do with Sophie Brinkmann? Her appearance in his life had told him something, her femininity had somehow spoken to his masculinity. She had enlightened him about what he wanted, and how he wanted it. She had opened up something to him and he felt that if she was capable of doing something like that for him from a distance, without even knowing him, then he ought to be able to do something similar for her. He knew they were connected somehow. And he knew that she was somehow also aware of it.…

  Lars could hear an openhearted dialogue between Sophie and Albert through his headphones. A conversation between them that showed that their relationship was unforced and loving, and it amazed him; he had never heard anything so natural before.

  He spent the last few hours of his shift half lying in the armchair, clipping his fingernails with an imitation Leatherman, listening to Sophie lying in bed reading a book. All he could hear was her turning pages occasionally. He shut his eyes. He was lying in bed beside her, and she was smiling at him.

  He drove home through the night with the window open to the Swedish summer, which had suddenly taken the place of spring—the air warm and clear at the same time.

  At home in the apartment he wrote up his report on the old typewriter.

  “Why are you using a typewriter instead of the computer?”

  Sara was standing in the doorway, newly woken, wearing her hideous washed-out nightdress. He looked at her, got up, and slammed the door in her surprised face, locked it, and went back to the desk.

  “What the hell’s wrong with you?!” Her voice was muffled by the door.

  He wasn’t listening to her, and just kept on tapping at the machine. In his report to Gunilla he reproduced the majority of the conversation at the dinner table. The sheets slid through the fax machine and then into the shredder. He didn’t feel like going and lying down beside Sara. The cognac was finished, the bottles of wine empty. Lars had a go at the sherry on the bookshelf. He had no idea where it had come from, it had always been there. He drank straight from the bottle as he waited for the computer to boot up. Sherry, what a load of crap … insipid and disgusting at the same time, which was hardly worth making a fuss of, was it? He forced it down. The misery around him eased a fraction and his brain heated up to a vaguely tolerable temperature. The computer screen flickered into life, showing the desktop. He clicked to open a file, highlighted the contents, and selected “slideshow.” Then he opened the classical music folder and began watching pictures of Sophie to the sound of Puccini. He had several hundred photographs of her, playing in front of his eyes at five-second intervals, enlarged to cover the whole screen.

  Lars leaned back in his office chair and watched as Sophie cycled to work, as she put her key in her front door, as she appeared hazily through the kitchen window, as she fetched the newspaper from the mailbox, as she cut suckers from the roses along the side of the house. He knew where she was, how she felt, what she was thinking about, every nuance of her face. It was like a film, the film of Sophie Brinkmann’s inner life. He couldn’t help laughing at the miracle, amazed that he, who so rarely thought things like this, had happened by chance to encounter the woman he knew everything about. Or was it actually chance? No, it couldn’t be, maybe fate had finally dared show its face to him?

  Lars printed out his favorite pictures of her, put them in a folder, drew a flower on the front, and hid it in a drawer.

  She wasn’t thinking about anything in particular as she walked along the corridor looking at the floor, but looked up when she heard footsteps in front of her.

  A woman in her fifties was trying to get her attention. Sophie recognized her, she’d seen her before. She was related to someone on the ward, she didn’t know who.

  “Sophie?”

  Sophie was surprised that the woman used her name, that rarely happened in spite of the name badge on her chest.

  “My name’s Gunilla Strandberg, I’d like a few words with you.”

  Sophie nodded, smiling her best nurse’s smile. “Of course.”

  Gunilla looked around and Sophie realized that she didn’t want to talk in the corridor.

  “Follow me.”

  Sophie showed Gunilla into an empty room and let the door close behind them.

  Gunilla opened her handbag, took out a leather wallet, searched through an inside pocket, and found what she was looking for among some old cash register receipts and banknotes. She held her ID up toward Sophie.

  “I’m a police officer.”

  “Yes?”

  Sophie folded her arms.

  “I just want to talk to you,” Gunilla said calmly.

  Sophie realized that she was standing defensively.

  “Maybe you recognize me?” Gunilla asked.

  “Yes, I’ve seen you here before. You’re related to one of our patients.”

  Gunilla shook her head. “Can we sit down?”

  Sophie pulled a chair over for Gunilla, who sat down. Sophie settled on the edge of the hospital bed. Gunilla was silent, she seemed to be searching for words. Sophie waited. After a while Gunilla looked up.

  “I’m running an investigation.”

  Sophie waited. Gunilla Strandberg still seemed to be trying to find the right words.

  “You’re friends with Hector Guzman?” she said calmly.

  “Hector? No, I’m not sure I’d say that.”

  “But you do see each other?”

  It was more a statement of fact than a question.

  Sophie looked at Gunilla. “Why?”

  “Nothing much, I’d just like to ask a few questions.”

  “What for?”

  “How close are the two of you?”

  Sophie shook her head. “He was a patient, we talked. What do you want?”

  Gunilla took a deep breath, smiling at her own clumsiness.

  “Sorry, I don’t mean to be intrusive, I never learn.” She collected herself and looked Sophie in the eye. “I … I need your help.”

  7

  Mikhail had hit the water. He had escaped being hit by the shots being fired off at him by a hairbreadth. On his way down through the dark sea he heard the whirr and hiss of the projectiles as they slowed in the water. After a while he turned and swam back underwater toward the ship again, then lack of oxygen forced him to the surface. The wedge-shaped design of the ship saved his life. The men
up above couldn’t look both down and inward. Mikhail stayed there beside the hull, moving the whole time. When the engines started up he took a chance and swam toward the concrete quayside, aiming for its far end. The quay was high. If there weren’t any steps or something similar for him to climb up, he’d drown. His body was aching, he wouldn’t be able to manage much longer. But after the exhausting swim he rounded the end of the quay and found a rusty old cable that he clung to until the ship was on its way out to sea. With a fair amount of effort and a great deal of pain he managed to get himself up on the quayside, then clambered into the rental car, soaking wet, pulled the GPS and cell phone from the glove compartment, then called Roland Gentz. He said they had encountered armed resistance, that both his men were dead and that there had been three men on the ship—two he recognized as Aron and Leszek, and a third, unknown man, apparently Swedish.

  Roland thanked him for the information and said he’d get back to him within the next few hours. They ended the call.