The Andalucian Friend: A Novel

by Alexander Soderberg

“His name’s Mikhail, a Russian. Works for Ralph Hanke.”

  Jens went on scrubbing everything in sight.

  “Who’s Hanke?” he asked.

  Thierry was emptying a bucket into a grate on the floor, then went and refilled it.

  “A German businessman who’s picked a fight with us …”

  “Why?”

  “Good question.”

  He turned the tap off.

  “Who are you, Jens?”

  Jens didn’t need long to think about his answer.

  “I’m just someone who’s got caught up in something that has nothing to do with me.…”

  He got out of the driver’s seat.

  “What’s your view of that?” Thierry asked.

  “I want to see it as coincidence … but right now it looks more like fate.”

  Thierry nodded at his words. There was a knock on the door. Jens looked at Thierry.

  “Don’t worry.”

  He opened the garage door. A young man in a hood smiled broadly and handed over a rolled-up rubber mat.

  “Land Cruiser, as ordered.”

  Thierry took it and the young man closed the door. Jens heard a souped-up car engine start outside and disappear.

  Thierry went over to Sophie’s car and pulled out the blood-smeared rubber mat from the baggage compartment. It was glued down and took a while to come out. He put it down on the garage floor, then held the new one up and compared them.

  “It’s a bit smaller, but it’ll have to do.”

  Sophie could hear noises from the garage as she drank from the cup of tea Daphne had put in front of her. The tea tasted different, and after another sip it tasted repulsive. She put the cup on the table.

  Daphne took Sophie’s hand in hers and Sophie jerked, feeling uncomfortable, the woman was quite invasive. But Daphne didn’t let go and after a while it felt better.

  “How did you get caught up in this?” she asked.

  Sophie had no answer; she shrugged lightly and tried to smile, but failed. Daphne squeezed her hand tighter.

  “Hector’s a good man,” she said. “He’s a good man,” she said again, her eyes fixed on Sophie.

  Then she let go of Sophie’s hand, leaned back in her chair, put her hands in her lap, and said in a low voice, almost a whisper, “You’ve seen something that wasn’t meant for your eyes. If you want to talk about what you’ve been through, come to me, no one else.”

  Sophie suddenly saw a different side to Daphne, the tone was different, more serious, firmer, almost as if she were issuing a warning.

  The door opened and Jens and Thierry came into the kitchen in full regalia. If things had been different she would have laughed.

  The Land Cruiser felt like new, smelled new when she got into the passenger seat. Jens climbed in behind the wheel. They drove out of the suburbs and onto the main road back into Stockholm.

  He looked at her. She was staring at the world going past outside.

  “We have to talk sometime,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  They sat in silence, neither of them wanted to start, neither of them wanted to get into small talk.

  Jens found a scrap of paper, wrote down his phone number leaning on the wheel, and handed the note to Sophie.

  “Thanks,” she whispered.

  He got out at Karlaplan and Sophie moved into the driver’s seat. Their good-bye was short and impersonal.

  Albert was fast asleep in his room. She looked at him for a while. Then she went downstairs and turned on the lights, then looked at her hands as she stood there in the kitchen. They weren’t trembling, they were still. She was calm on the inside as well. She was amazed, thought it felt wrong. She ought to have been wound up about what had happened, frightened and upset. She looked at her hands again, soft, smooth, and still. Her pulse was beating steadily inside her. She put on a pan of water and got out her English tea, then went to stand by the window as she waited for it to boil. The view was the same as always, the streetlamp lighting up the road, the nightlights in her neighbors’ windows. Everything was the way it had always been, but she didn’t recognize it; none of what she could see looked familiar anymore.

  10

  Jens had gotten home to his apartment, packed a bag, got changed. He had walked off to a twenty-four-hour gas station, rented a car under a false name, and set off on his journey down to Munich.

  He was sweating in the warm evening, drinking sports drinks to stay awake, smoking cigarettes.

  He was thinking about Sophie Lantz … Brinkmann.

  Carlos Fuentes was two teeth worse off. His eyes were swollen shut and when he tried to talk, nothing but a gurgling sound emerged because of all the blood in his mouth.

  He was sitting on a chair in the office of the Trasten restaurant, a chair that he had fallen off numerous times in the past half hour. He had sobbed, begged, and offered to do anything in the world.

  Neither Hector nor Aron was in the mood to listen to that sort of thing. They had picked him up at home. He knew what it was about the moment the doorbell rang, and confessed his involvement with Roland Gentz in the car on the way to the restaurant. Hector and Aron had sat in silence.

  Carlos wiped the blood from his mouth with one hand.

  “You’re confessing too quickly, Carlos.”

  Carlos was breathing heavily, his body racing with adrenaline. “Maybe I am, but it’s the truth, Hector!”

  The panic that Carlos was radiating was impossible to miss. Aron gave Carlos a towel to wipe himself with. Carlos thanked his tormentor. Aron didn’t acknowledge it.

  “Why, Carlos?” Hector wondered.

  Carlos wiped the blood with the towel. “Because he threatened to kill me.”

  “And that was enough for you?”

  Carlos said nothing, just stared straight ahead.

  Hector wiped something invisible from his eye. He went on in a low voice.

  “Carlos, you betray me and lure me into a trap, the trap is sprung, but I get out of it. You confess the moment I ring at your door.… What else have you said, what else have you done, who else have you spoken to about me?”

  The tears came, Carlos’s heavy body shaking in time with his sobs.

  “No one, I swear to you, Hector.… He paid me as well.”

  “Gentz?”

  Carlos nodded without looking at Hector, wiping his nose on his sleeve.

  “How much?”

  “A hundred thousand.”

  Hector started. “One hundred thousand? Kronor?”

  Carlos looked down at the floor.

  “But you could have had that from me! Twice, three times as much if you wanted it!”

  Carlos cleared his throat.

  “I was scared, he was as cold as fucking ice and he meant what he said! It wasn’t the money, of course it wasn’t.… I had no choice, he left the hundred thousand in a plastic bag.… I didn’t ask for the money, you have to believe me!”

  Hector and Aron were staring curiously at Carlos.

  “Why didn’t you warn us?”

  Carlos looked up at Aron, he had no answer.

  Hector leaned back in his chair. “What are we going to do with you, Carlos?”

  The big man, usually so confident and loud, was now a shadow of his former self, his mouth and face in tatters. Hector almost felt sorry for him.

  “Carlos?”

  Carlos shook his head.

  “I don’t know. Do whatever you like,” he muttered.

  Hector thought for a moment.

  “We’ll carry on as usual. If you have anything else to tell us, say it now,” he said.

  Carlos shook his head.

  Hector asked himself if he was being too kind, if he’d live to regret this one day. He stood up and walked out. Aron followed him.

  “Thank you,” Carlos said.

  Hector didn’t stop, didn’t look back.

  “Don’t thank me.”

  Aron was driving, with Hector in the passenger seat, the Stockholm ni
ght outside. The city passed by before Hector’s eyes. The car headed down Hamngatan, the neon lights shining even though dawn was approaching. They wove through to Gustav Adolfs torg and crossed Norrbro. Hector was still deep in thought.

  “Carlos …” He sighed to himself.

  Aron parked the car on the quayside along Skeppsbron.

  “I’m thinking of getting drunk, do you want to join me?”

  Aron shook his head. “No, but I’ll come to the door with you.”

  They walked up between the buildings of Brunnsgränd, then turned right into Ôsterlånggatan. Laughter, chatter, and music could be heard from up above.

  “Hector,” Aron said in a low voice.

  “Yes?”

  “The nurse.”

  They walked a few steps.

  “What about her?”

  Aron glanced quickly at Hector, a glance that said something like Look, just stop that.

  “It’ll be fine, she’s not a problem.”

  “How do you know?”

  Hector didn’t answer.

  “She’s intelligent,” Aron said.

  “Yes, she is.”

  Aron tried to find the right words.

  “And she’s a nurse.… Presumably a woman with her own values and morals, she seems pretty independent. What she’s seen and experienced tonight will have stirred everything up for her. When the dust settles she’ll start asking herself questions, weighing right against wrong … looking for answers, moral answers. That’s when she might do something hasty, without thinking it through properly.”

  Hector kept on walking, unwilling to discuss the subject.

  They reached Brända Tomten, the little square surrounded by tall houses. They stopped and Hector looked at Aron, at the injuries the beating had left on his face.

  “You look pretty terrible.”

  Aron looked at Hector.

  “You seem to have come out of it OK.”

  Aron glanced down at Hector’s dirty clothes, then his leg and the cracked cast.

  “But you need to get that fixed.”

  Hector didn’t reply. He patted Aron on the shoulder and walked toward his door.

  Aron waited down in the square until he saw the lights go on in the window of the third floor, then he went back the way they had come.

  In the apartment Hector turned on the lights in every room, pulled the curtains, and put on some quiet music. He opened a bottle of wine and drank half of it in just a few minutes. The stress of the evening subsided slightly.

  He called his father and they talked about what had happened. Adalberto calmed his son as best he could.

  Hector fell asleep on the sofa with an old revolver on his stomach.

  She read the report in the Stockholm section of the morning paper—one of the small items at the bottom of the page, down among the ads.

  In the early hours of Sunday morning a man suffering from a gunshot wound was left at the emergency room at Karolinska Hospital by unidentified men who fled the scene in a car. He was operated on during the night and his condition is reported as stable. The man, who is in his forties, has not yet been questioned by the police.

  She sat back, relieved. The man was alive.

  She heard Albert’s steps on the stairs and turned the page.

  “Morning,” he said.

  “Morning,” she said back.

  “Were you home late last night?” he asked.

  She nodded in reply. He reached for the tub of muesli in the cupboard above the stove.

  “Did you have a good time?”

  “Yes, it was nice,” Sophie muttered, her eyes on the paper.

  Sophie spent the morning in the garden, weeding and removing suckers from the roses. The birds were singing, people walking past greeted her with a nod or a dignified wave. Everything was lovely, but she didn’t find the idyllic scene calming or even appealing, she just felt restless.

  She finished up by pruning the roses but let the shears hang limply in her hand as she realized that she couldn’t be bothered.

  Sophie sat down on a sun lounger, letting the warmth embrace her, letting tiredness take its due, lulling her into a calmer world. She closed her eyes.

  She dreamed that her dad was still alive, and that he was helping her with all the things she needed help with.

  “Did you have a good trip?”

  Leszek met Sonya Alizadeh as she emerged from the gate at Málaga Airport, taking her bags as they headed for the exit.

  He had parked outside by the taxi stand. Someone yelled at him that he shouldn’t be there. He paid no attention and opened the door for Sonya. They headed out onto the highway toward Marbella.

  Adalberto received her in a shirt and beige linen trousers. He was barefoot and suntanned. His thin white hair was swept back, the gold watch on his wrist sparkling ostentatiously.

  “Welcome.”

  He kissed her on both cheeks, as usual, and showed her into the villa.

  A large table in the middle of a room filled with light covering the whole inner part of the building had been set for lunch, and the panoramic window showed a view of the endless sea. They sat down.

  “How was it?” he asked as he unfolded his napkin.

  She drank from her water glass.

  “I think it’s fine. It’s all sorted out, the apartment has been cleaned, I never lived there.”

  Adalberto ate a mouthful, then looked up at Sonya.

  “Is it OK for you to live here?”

  She nodded.

  “It’s wise of you to let us look after you, you never know what men like him might get into their heads, they’re the most dangerous, the ones who try to pass themselves off as the right sort.”

  She didn’t respond to his statement, but didn’t exactly disagree with it. She was the one who knew Svante Carlgren, she’d had him inside her numerous times. He was genuinely unpleasant. He possessed a sort of chill, an emptiness that she had never experienced in a man before. As if he lacked something other men had, as if he didn’t actually recognize that there were other people in the world. And on top of this, there was something stupid about him. Something talentless and moronic, as if he could only deal with one single thing in life—his warped view of himself.

  Sonya felt exhausted, and somewhere deep inside she was pleased not to have to be a whore for a while. Yet the choice had been her own. She was the one who put the idea to Hector a long time ago. He was like a brother to her. At least, he was the closest thing to one that she had. Her dad, Danush, had been a heroin importer, had fled Tehran when the Shah was toppled, and had gone into business with Adalberto. Their families became close and, as an only child, Sonya spent a lot of her school vacations in Marbella with the Guzmans. She was like the fourth child of the family. Her parents were murdered in Switzerland in the late ’80s. She fled to Asia and fell into severe and protracted cocaine addiction, which intermittently helped her to forget her boundless grief. Hector was the one who tracked her down and helped her get back home. Adalberto and Hector let her live with them in Marbella, helped her to recover. After a while Hector showed her a picture of three dead men. They were lying on a white tiled floor. A public toilet at a roadside café in the south of Germany. They had bullet wounds in their heads, chests, arms, legs. Riddled with holes. The men had belonged to the ’Ndrangheta and they were her parents’ killers. She took pleasure in the photograph. She kept it, looking at it whenever life felt tough and unfair. Sonya wanted to repay Hector and Adalberto for all they had done for her. When she suggested the idea to Hector he had tried to dissuade her, telling her that she didn’t owe them anything. But she didn’t agree, no matter what he said. So she held her ground and went ahead with her plan. Maybe Svante Carlgren would turn out to be the repayment that would help get rid of the sense of obligation that she was keen to escape.

  Sonya liked Hector and Adalberto, but she knew that when it came down to it the men in her life weren’t so very different, even if the man sitting opposite her now was
trying to prove that he was.

  Adalberto was looking at her, and almost seemed to be reading her mind.

  “I’ve made preparations for your arrival. A female psychiatrist is at your disposal if you feel like talking. She’s a good woman, she’ll come whenever we ask her to. You can have whatever you want from me, just say what you need to find your way back again.”

  He smiled, and she returned a smile that radiated the exact opposite of what she really felt—an accomplishment she had learned early in life.

  They ate lunch in silence, the sea sighed outside the open windows, the warm sea breeze caught the white linen curtains and made them move.

  Piño the dog came running in and sat down to beg for scraps. Adalberto ignored him, and after a while he settled down at his master’s feet.

  “I gave him something at the table a few years ago. It’s taking him a long time to realize there won’t be any more.”

  He looked at Piño.

  “But we’re still friends, aren’t we, you and me?”

  Sonya saw the happiness in Adalberto’s face when he looked at Piño. Then the smile faded, as if he suddenly realized how sad it was that the dog was merely a dog.

  11

  Gunilla looked quizzically at Anders.

  “Say that again.”

  “Two men went into the restaurant after Hector held the door open for the nurse. He never came out again, but the nurse did. Lars followed her.”

  “And the men?”

  Anders shrugged. “Gone, vanished. I went into the restaurant thirty minutes later. None of them was there. There’s a back door leading to a courtyard, so that must be how they got out. Through the yard and out onto the other side of the block.”

  “Then what?”

  Anders shook his head. “Nothing. I went home.”

  They were sitting on a bench in Humlegården. Most of the people around them appeared to be enjoying the summer heat. Anders Ask was the only man in the park wearing a jacket.

  “So Sophie and Hector arrived at the restaurant, they went in, two men followed them. How long did you say it was before Sophie came out?”