The Andalucian Friend: A Novel

by Alexander Soderberg

  A few minutes later she hung up and turned toward him.

  “I don’t appreciate getting that sort of e-mail or phone message from you, Lars.”

  “Surely I have to be able to express the way I feel?” His reply sounded feeble.

  “Why?” she asked.

  He had no answer to that and wove his fingers together, dropping her gaze.

  “What do you want, Lars?” she asked.

  He looked down at his hands. “What I wrote in the e-mail, what I said in my message.” He looked up. “What we talked about when you gave me the job. That I can do other things. I can help Eva with analysis, possible scenarios, and approaches, I can work on profiling.… Well, anything.”

  He was stressed and nervous. She was calm and observant.

  “If that were the case I would have contacted you.”

  Lars nodded reluctantly. Gunilla adjusted her position on her chair. A heavy silence filled the room.

  “Can I ask you something, Lars?”

  Lars waited.

  “Why did you join the police?”

  “Because I wanted to.”

  His answer came out far too quickly. She showed that she thought the same and gave him a second chance.

  “Because … Well, it was a long time ago. I wanted to help.”

  “Help with what?”

  “What?”

  “What did you want to help to do?”

  He rubbed the corner of his mouth. A telephone started to ring on a desk some distance away. He looked over at it. She didn’t move a muscle, the look in her eyes was waiting for his answer.

  “Well, society, helping the weak,” he said, and regretted it again. Gunilla looked at him critically. Lars could feel he was splashing about in deep water.

  “Helping the weak?” she asked quietly, almost with distaste.

  He took the chance to repair the mess he’d just made. “I wanted to be part of something bigger.”

  His voice sounded more honest now.

  She nodded almost imperceptibly for him to go on.

  Lars thought. “And because I wanted to make a difference. It might sound silly, but that was what it felt like.”

  “It doesn’t sound silly. And you do, anyway.”

  He looked up.

  “You are part of something bigger … and you do make a difference, I just wish that you could see that yourself.”

  He waited.

  “We’re a group. We work the way people do in a group, everyone does their best to contribute. I’m not always happy with my role in it, I’d change places with you several times each week if I could. But this is the way it is. We do the jobs we have, Lars.”

  She let a few moments pass.

  “If you want to carry on working here with us, then you have to be clear about that. I’m being honest with you, and I expect you to be honest in return.”

  “I want to work here,” he said, and swallowed.

  “I can help you to move on, if you like?”

  He didn’t understand.

  “If you stop working here, that doesn’t mean that you have to go back to Husby or the Western District, I could try to help you to get somewhere else, something better?”

  He shook his head. “No, no … I want to carry on here.”

  She looked at him hard. “So carry on.”

  Gunilla didn’t smile that little smile the way she usually did at the end of a meeting, instead she just looked at him, letting him understand that this was something else. Lars gathered his thoughts, stood up, and began to walk toward the door.

  “Lars.”

  He turned around in the doorway. She was reading a sheet of paper.

  “Don’t do this again.”

  Her voice was low.

  “Sorry,” he said hoarsely.

  She was still looking at the document.

  “Stop apologizing.”

  He was on his way out the door.

  “Wait a moment,” she said.

  She opened a drawer, pulled out a car key, and held it out to him.

  “Erik said you need to switch cars, back to the Volvo, it’s parked out in the street.”

  Lars went over to her, took the key to the Volvo from her hand, and left the office.

  He was driving the car through the city at random, feeling that he had been emotionally raped. Lars tried to think, tried to feel, tried to see where he was going … nada.

  He needed to talk to someone, he knew exactly who: the woman who never listened. He turned the car around over the median.

  Rosie was sitting in the corner of the sofa watching television in her dressing gown. She always sat there. Lars had brought a bunch of flowers that he’d pinched outside the old-people’s home. The nurses in Lyckoslanten used to leave the senile patients’ flowers in the same place, because otherwise they’d eat them.

  Rosie didn’t belong to the Alzheimer’s gang, she was one of the younger residents in the home with her seventy-two years, part of the group that had just given up.

  “Hello, Mom.”

  Rosie looked at Lars, then turned back to the television again.

  The room was warm, Rosie had a window open slightly. He looked at his mom and noticed that her collarbone was damp with sweat. The volume on the television was turned up loud. That wasn’t because her hearing was bad, it was because she couldn’t understand what they were saying. She was anxious by nature, Rosie Vinge. As was Lars, he guessed she must have infected him early in life. Her anxiety had always been there, but when Lennart died it shifted into a complete terror of life. She had kept herself shut away in the apartment, scared of the immigrants moving in, afraid of the noises coming from the fridge, afraid that there’d be a fire if she left the lights on for too long, afraid of the dark if you turned the lights out.

  He hadn’t known what to do with her, for a while he contemplated just forgetting all about her, letting her rot away inside the apartment, but his conscience got the better of him and he put her in the old-people’s home eight years ago. The staff stuffed her full of tranquilizers and she had been there ever since, in her bubble, watching afternoon television.

  “How are you?”

  He asked the same question each time he went. She smiled in reply, as if he would understand what the smile meant, which he didn’t. He looked at the sorry scene for a while before going out into the little kitchen, boiling some water, and making himself a cup of instant coffee.

  “Do you want coffee, Mom?”

  She didn’t answer, she never did.

  He took the cup into the living room and sat down on the sofa beside her. The television was showing a quiz program where you had to call in with the answer, and the host was young and awkward. They sat there in silence, mother and son.

  He took a sip of the coffee and burned his tongue. The youthful host was trying to talk fast, but kept stumbling over his words.

  Lars got up and went into her bedroom.

  It was dark, the bed wasn’t made, and there was a musty smell. He began hunting through her drawers, sometimes he found money that he pocketed for himself. He’d been taking money from her for as long as he could remember, as if he harbored a constant feeling that she owed him something. But this time he didn’t find any money, just a load of prescriptions among her revolting underwear. He grabbed three of them, one of them looked different; he folded them up and put them in his pocket. Did he know? Did he know they would be there?

  He left the old-people’s home and got back in the car, then headed off through the lunchtime traffic. He got stuck in traffic on Karlbergsvägen and felt the prescriptions in his pocket, they were damp with the sweat from his hands. The radio was playing hard rock from the ’80s, and the singer sounded like a total wimp. A few raindrops hit the windshield, a sudden shower—light, easy rain, warm and damp without any of the cooling effect everyone expected. He leaned forward and peered up at the sky, thick black clouds gliding slowly in across the city. The colors around him shifted into a sort of orangey t
urquoise tint. The air pressure became heavy and thick. Lars started to get a headache and massaged the tip of his nose, letting the car roll forward a few feet. Suddenly the thunder broke, not rumbling the way it usually did but exploding in short, violent bursts above his head. It scared him and he crouched instinctively, then the skies opened properly and the rain poured down on the people dashing for cover outside the car. The windshield wipers were working as fast as they could and the windows were fogging up, turning the world outside hazy.

  He put the key in the door. The top lock was unlocked, Sara was home. Lars stepped into the hall and closed the door quietly behind him, crept into the office, opened one of the desk drawers, and hid the prescriptions.

  Sara was sitting in the living room writing an article about the precarious finances of female artists who didn’t have partners. Something with the heading “The Socioeconomic Stranglehold.” She had been working on it for ages. He didn’t understand why she persisted with it. Who wanted to read that sort of thing?

  Lars looked at Sara, trying to remember what he had ever seen in her, what he had found attractive. He couldn’t remember anything, maybe he had never seen anything, maybe they’d only ended up as a couple because there weren’t that many left to choose from. Maybe they became a couple because neither of them wanted children. Or because they were so enamored with feeling guilty; he thought he was beginning to understand that now, that most of his life he had been driven by guilt, and that this had been reflected in her sitting there writing something that no one wanted to read. Lars hated anything to do with guilt, mainly because he had no idea where it came from.

  “What are you doing?” he said, leaning against the doorframe.

  She looked up from her computer. “Guess.”

  Why did she have to answer like that? He looked at her with disgust, struck by how ugly she was. So vacuous, so empty, so unattractive—so unlike Sophie. Her way of sitting with her back hunched, curled up, her legs all tangled. That revolting teacup that she kept using without ever washing it properly. Her reluctance to make an effort with her appearance if there wasn’t a good reason, the whole fucking tawdriness that she tried to hide behind a sort of intellectual drivel—the personification of the opposite of everything he wanted.

  “Who’s going to move out, you or me?” he asked.

  “You.”

  Her answer came too quickly.

  “No, you move out, it’s my apartment. I’ll move into the office for now.”

  He left the doorframe and went into the office, picking up a bag and his camera.

  As he walked past the living room he saw Sara standing with her arms wrapped around herself, looking out the window.

  “What’s happened?” she asked, far too loudly.

  He didn’t answer, and left the apartment.

  When Jens got up to his apartment on Wittstocksgatan he slumped down on the sofa. He had hoped to be able to take a breather for a while. Instead he found he could scarcely breathe at all.

  He stared at the ceiling, listening to the muffled sound of the distant traffic on Valhallavägen. His body ached with restlessness and he got up and opened a window, then went out to the cleaning cupboard in the kitchen and fetched his bow and a quiver of arrows.

  The apartment was 1,400 square feet, and he’d had most of the internal walls removed, to let more air through and to give him space to use his bow.

  At the far end of what had once been the living room stood the target, a big round thing made of reeds. He shot several rounds of five arrows from his position in the old dining room. The music center was playing ’70s salsa—two tough guys in white bell-bottoms singing in Spanish about male loneliness and girls with big breasts. He was drinking beer in between the rounds, then tired of the beer and switched to whiskey, went on shooting, then got fed up with the salsa lads, fed up with music in general, fed up with the whiskey, and switched to cognac. He went on shooting, then tired of the whole thing and ended up doing pull-ups until his arms ached.

  He recognized the pattern, never feeling happy no matter how much he tried to fill himself up with music, drink, or whatever else was at hand. Always wanting to feel something more. Spoiled, his mom would call him. Addict, his dad would say, and maybe they were both right.

  He had contacted the Russians to say that the goods had been delayed, and the Russians had replied that that was his problem, and that they wanted their purchases at the time they had agreed. They gave Jens one week, after which they would demand a refund and Jens would be left needing hospital treatment.

  He lay on his back on the rug with one thought in his head: how to find Aron or Leszek, who, with a bit of luck, might be able to tell him how to find Mikhail.

  He got up and put some coffee on, then got to work. Finding Aron turned out to be easier said than done. Jens tried all the ways he could think of. First he checked through all the Arons in Stockholm, then the whole country, using directory inquiries and various search engines. The next morning he contacted the police, the tax office, the county council, and everyone else he could think of. But he only had a first name to go on. Aron, around forty, sharp features, black hair … something of the gentleman about him. That didn’t get you very far.

  Aron had mentioned Stockholm when they parted, but there was nothing to say that he was necessarily still in the city. Maybe he lived somewhere else, maybe not even in Sweden. The walls started to creep in. He moved on to Leszek instead, had he said anything? No … what about Thierry? The stone statue, could that be something? What had he said? Something about being able to sell him similar items.

  Jens tried to find stone statues online. Hopeless. He called the Museum of Ethnography and tried to describe the statuette, although it had really just looked like a lump of rock. The woman at the other end tried to be helpful, but it was useless. He printed out the addresses for all the antique shops, art galleries, and ethnic shops in the whole city. It ran to several pages.

  Jens left the apartment, bought cigarettes instead of chewing tobacco, and set off into the city to look for Aron, Leszek, Thierry, and stone statues. He cruised about the various districts, walking, catching the bus and subway, visiting shops and asking the same vague questions everywhere, always getting the same vague no in response, searching without getting any result. He hadn’t expected anything else, and tried to convince himself that this was a sort of vacation, a way of winding down after everything that had happened lately, but it didn’t work. The clock was counting down, and he was getting more and more stressed.

  “Sophie, are you having fun out in your comfortable suburb?” he had asked over the phone.

  She had tried to work on her nerves in the car on the way out to the marina at Biskopsudden. Her anxiety kept climbing up into her throat. She didn’t want to. That was pretty much all she felt: I don’t want to.… But that wasn’t entirely true. Part of her wanted to, and another part of her felt obliged to do it. Not forced, exactly, just that the meeting was somehow obligatory and she would have to go through with it.

  So she had met him. He had been standing on the jetty. And in spite of everything she now knew about him, his presence made her feel calm. And as usual he took charge of the moment in his own way, making it simple, relaxed, and that made her feel safe. As if he knew that this was just what she needed.

  The boat was big and open, with a blue awning. It said BERTRAM 25 on the side.

  They cast off, the boat’s engine hummed, and Hector steered out through the channel. Sophie looked back to shore, the way she had come, and saw a Volvo in the garage with a man sitting inside it.

  When they got out into open water Hector accelerated to top speed as the sun shone down on them.

  They had been going for a quarter of an hour when he lowered the speed and steered the boat into a deserted inlet, reading the depth from his echo sounder, then dropped anchor and switched the motor off. Water was lapping against the hull and a yacht passed their stern, the people in the cockpit waved to them and Soph
ie waved back. Hector looked critically at the waving people, then turned to her.

  “Why do people do that?”

  She glimpsed an irritation in his eyes, as if he thought the people waving were making fools of themselves, and she smiled at his reaction.

  “You said you wanted to show me something. This?” she said, gesturing at the archipelago surrounding them.

  He seemed to consider, then shook his head, got up, and opened one of the seats. He pulled out a bag, opened it, and took out two old, leather-bound photograph albums, one dark green and the other dark brown with gilded edges. He sat down beside her.

  “You said you wanted to know more about me.”

  He opened the first page of the dark-green album, and the pictures, apparently from the ’60s, showed a smartly dressed couple standing in front of the Spanish Steps in Rome.

  “This is my dad, Adalberto, you’ve met him of course. And that’s my mom, Pia, standing next to him.”

  Sophie looked closer. Pia seemed happy, not just her face but also her posture. Relaxed and upright at the same time, and obviously very beautiful. Adalberto had thick black hair and appeared proud, proud and happy. Sophie looked back to Pia again. She was blond, she was pretty, skin tanned by the Mediterranean sun. She was the Swedish ideal of the time.

  Hector went on, showing pictures of his siblings and himself when he was little. He talked about those early years, about growing up in the south of Spain, about his loneliness when his mother died, about his relationship with his father, about friends, enemies, feelings, hidden and otherwise, about relationships. She listened attentively.

  He pointed to a picture of himself as a ten-year-old together with his brother and sister, the three of them in a row, laughing, wearing Indian headdresses.

  “They made the best of life, my brother and sister. They’ve got children, they’re married, they’ve found their own peace. I haven’t quite managed that.”

  He seemed to get caught up on that thought, as if the words he had just said became a reality that he had never wanted to put his finger on before. Sophie looked at him, she liked this side of him, the reflective, hidden side, with a depth that he didn’t want to admit to himself, that he didn’t feel he had access to.