The Andalucian Friend: A Novel

by Alexander Soderberg

  “Because you like me,” he said.

  She looked at him, not liking those words, not liking his manner or even the smile on his face.

  He must have seen her reaction. The smile faded. She went on cutting.

  “I’m not a bad person,” he suddenly said.

  She didn’t answer, did her job, noting a sort of desperation in him for the first time. It wasn’t much, but it was there, like an atmosphere in the room. A hint of panic that he was trying to hold in check.

  “Your husband?” he asked. He was trying to sound normal. Like they were back in the hospital and playing twenty questions with each other.

  The pliers were chewing their way slowly through the cast.

  “You never talk about him,” he went on.

  “Yes, I do. You’ve asked me about him before.”

  “Maybe, but you never say anything.”

  “He’s dead,” she whispered, concentrating on wielding the pliers correctly.

  “Yes, but something?”

  “That’s none of your business.”

  “But I’d still like to know.”

  She stopped cutting and looked up at him.

  “What for?”

  “What are you so frightened of?”

  Anger flashed through her.

  “Yes, what am I so frightened of, Hector?”

  He didn’t catch the sarcasm.

  “Were you happy together, you and David?”

  What was he after? She put the pliers down.

  “I don’t understand, Hector.”

  “What don’t you understand?”

  “This. What do you want?”

  “I want to know who you are, what you’re all about. Where we’re going …”

  She felt suddenly uneasy.

  “Where we’re going? I don’t know.… Don’t you think the situation has changed?”

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  She realized she was staring at him. Maybe he was emotionally damaged. Incapable of understanding her fear at what had happened, at Aron’s threat. Maybe he lived in a completely different world. Maybe Gunilla’s warnings were true.

  The thought scared her. She felt suddenly uncomfortable being there with him. Felt an impulse to get up and walk out, a strong urge to flee, leave him there. But she couldn’t. Instead she pulled herself together and tried to keep the conversation going to mask her anxiety. She carried on cutting the cast.

  “No, we weren’t particularly happy,” she said quietly.

  Sophie tried to get a grip on her memories.

  “David was self-absorbed,” she began. “He was that sort of person, an egotist. It took me a few years to realize. Then it turned out that he’d been unfaithful. I wanted to get divorced, but then, while I was busy making plans, he was diagnosed. He begged and pleaded with me to stay. I suppose he must have known I’d look after him. The illness got worse and he was terrified of dying and demanded vast amounts of understanding and attention. It hit Albert worst of all, because he didn’t understand.”

  She looked up at Hector.

  “David behaved badly …,” she went on. “That’s how I remember him.”

  She went on cutting the cast. Hector said nothing, didn’t nod.

  “And Albert?”

  “He cried.”

  Hector waited for more, but nothing came. Sophie twisted the cast open and lifted it off, covering his bare leg with a blanket.

  “There, Hector, you’re free again.” She tried to smile when she noticed how impersonal she sounded, and went to get up.

  “Wait a moment,” he said, putting his hand on her arm.

  His expression had changed, he seemed to revert to his old self again, was more relaxed, and there was something that could have been sadness in his eyes.

  “I want to apologize,” he said.

  Yes, she could see a tension in him, something like regret. He sounded genuine. She recognized him again.

  “What for?” She sat down.

  “For my manner, and for my behavior.”

  Sophie said nothing.

  “I could tell from the way you looked just now. You backed down and tried to stay calm, but you were wondering who I was. I think you might even have been scared. And I’d truly like to apologize for that.”

  Sophie listened, both horrified and fascinated that he could read her like that.

  His transformation seemed to have made him tired. He ran a hand through his hair.

  “From the moment Aron and I were dropped off, that night when it all happened, I’ve had a strong feeling that something was broken, something I couldn’t mend. Maybe your faith in me, your hopes, your trust. I don’t know … That’s why I’ve been behaving so strangely today. I was scared of losing you, basically. I don’t want that to happen, I want things to be the way they were before.”

  She said nothing.

  “You never have to be scared of me,” he said.

  14

  Svante Carlgren usually left home at about seven o’clock each morning. If he wasn’t going away on a trip he usually got back home at the same time twelve hours later. His life was hectic, at least that was the impression he hoped to give, with business trips, meetings, a lot of responsibility, a lot of work to be done. But really the exact opposite was the case. He was surprised that he seldom felt stressed, that he actually did so little. He lived for his work, for his career, for his triumphs. But it was easy, almost too easy. The responsibility didn’t lie in actually driving anything forward, just in trying to maintain order in what was actually going on in the great Ericsson behemoth. He couldn’t honestly say he knew what was going on there, but it didn’t seem to matter much. He had reached a level he was content with, and he wanted to stay there, that was the only thing that interested him.

  When he was about to turn in toward his house a car appeared from the opposite direction and followed him up the drive. Svante looked in the rearview mirror. He didn’t recognize the car, there was no one in it but the man driving.

  Svante parked, got out of his car, and frowned toward the visitor who had pulled up a few yards behind him. The door opened and a man in a suit got out, slim, black hair, prominent features, no tie.…

  “Can I help you?”

  “Are you Svante Carlgren?”

  Svante nodded. Aron walked purposefully up to him, pulled a photograph out of his inside pocket, stopped and looked at it, then handed it to Svante. He took it and looked at the picture. He found himself staring, wide-eyed, at a picture of himself.

  All the energy drained out of Svante Carlgren, he wanted to say something, to react—anything. But it was as if he had frozen solid, incapable of doing anything at all. Maybe it was the paralyzing effect of realizing he’d been tricked, maybe it was the sense of complete impotence, or possibly the sheer humiliation.

  Aron held up another picture. Svante in a pair of briefs that were far too small for him, snorting cocaine into his brain through a silver tube from a glass table. Svante didn’t take the picture, just looked at it, then he turned away and walked toward the house. Aron followed him.

  Svante stopped at the drain board, his back to Aron, and poured himself a glass of wine without offering any to his visitor. Aron sat down on a kitchen chair, crossed his legs, and rested one arm on his thigh.

  “It’s fairly straightforward, really,” he began. “We’re a special-interest group who’d like you to give us information about how things look in the company before each quarterly statement, and before any occasion when you might be thinking of going to the capital markets … and any time anything significant is about to happen.… We want to know if things are going well or badly, we want to know every major piece of news before it’s made public. We want to know what you hear, what you see, what the internal talk is.” Aron was speaking quietly but clearly.

  Svante tried to laugh but couldn’t pull it off.

  “You’re blackmailing me to make money out of Ericsson?”

  Svante took a sip f
rom his glass of wine.

  “I’m sorry, you’ve picked the wrong man, I don’t have access to that sort of information.” Svante took another gulp and went on. “You have a rather simplistic view of things. I don’t know how you came up with it, but I’m afraid that isn’t how the real world works.”

  Aron didn’t say anything.

  “In real life, that’s not how it works,” he repeated, taking another sip of wine; he was now halfway through the glass. “Besides, every big company has an entire department devoted to protecting bosses from this sort of thing. You’re going to get a serious telling off, my friend.”

  Svante allowed himself a smile.

  Aron looked around the kitchen, which was pretty cheap in comparison to the exterior of the villa. The plates and glasses on the spotlit shelves were recent reproductions made to look like antiques. The pictures on the walls were prints of a vase of flowers and huntsmen in red jackets riding through an English landscape at dawn. There were dried flowers in the window, and the kitchen table and matching chairs were poor reproductions of something Victorian. He wondered if it was Svante Carlgren or his poor wife who possessed such startlingly bad taste.

  “You can choose who we send the pictures to first. Your wife, your children, or your colleagues.”

  Aron kept looking through the photographs. He stopped at one, looking at it from various angles, as if to imply that he couldn’t quite make out the subject. Aron showed it to Svante, who glanced quickly at it.

  “This is all on film as well, with sound.”

  Svante’s feigned confidence crumbled and he took on a resigned and beaten look.

  “Who do you think?” Aron asked.

  Svante looked at him uncomprehendingly.

  Aron waved the pictures.

  “Your wife? Your children? The people you work with? Who gets to see these first?”

  “I can pay you for the pictures, but I can’t do what you’re asking. I simply don’t have the access to do that.”

  Svante’s tone of voice was different, softer.

  “Just answer the question.”

  Svante patted his hair.

  “Which question?”

  He was off balance.

  “Who’s your choice?”

  “No one … I’m not choosing anyone! I want to resolve this somehow, there must be a way.”

  “I didn’t come here to bargain with you. Answer the question, then I’ll leave.”

  Svante was shaken, his brain was working feverishly; who could help him out of this?

  “Why did you pick me, I haven’t done anything. I’m an honest man.…”

  Aron leafed through the pictures.

  “If you want to show you’re playing nicely, contact me when you get details of the next report or anything at all that will affect the standing of the company. If I don’t hear from you, I’ll send the pictures to your workmates, starting with the people you’re in charge of.”

  Aron stood up and put the bundle of photographs on the kitchen table, turned the top one over, and pointed at a cell-phone number written on the back. Then he left the kitchen, and the house.

  Svante emptied his glass and watched through the kitchen window as Aron got into his car and drove away. He picked up the phone and started to dial a number that he knew by heart, a number that was to be used if anything like this happened. The company’s own security department had procedures in place for all manner of possible and impossible situations, from theft and espionage to blackmail and kidnapping, and they kicked into gear the moment anyone called the number.

  He never dialed the final digit.

  Anders was sitting in his car, a Honda Civic, with his cell to his ear.

  “His name’s Svante Carlgren. Some lower-management type at Ericsson, married, son and daughter no longer living at home, that’s all I could get.”

  There was silence on the line.

  “Stick with Carlgren, find out what Aron was doing there,” Gunilla said.

  Jens called Risto from his hotel room. Naturally, the Russians wanted to jerk him around. He knew it.

  “They aren’t coming … and they want medium antitank guns,” Risto said.

  “Sorry?”

  “They want an antitank gun each because you’re late.”

  “Antitank guns?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  Risto didn’t answer.

  “Tell them to go to hell,” Jens said.

  “That’s probably not such a good idea.”

  Jens was tired. Annoyed that everyone was fucking with him right now. He put his left hand over his eyes.

  “Yeah, but tell them to go to hell.”

  “Normally I would, but we’re talking about Dmitry here. He’s … how can I put it? Impulsive. They seem to be getting more and more worked up about you with every passing day. They’ve decided what they think, they say you’re arrogant, that you think you’re better than them.”

  “I am.”

  “Admittedly … They’re giving you one week. Then they want their antitank guns.”

  “But surely they can see that that’s impossible?! Antitank guns, what a joke! You know that, I know that, everyone knows that.”

  “I’m afraid that doesn’t make any difference.”

  His left hand was massaging his forehead now. “Forget it. I’ve got the weapons they ordered, they can come and get them.”

  “They won’t accept that.”

  “I don’t give a shit.”

  Risto was silent. Jens sighed.

  “What would you have done, Risto?”

  “Try to find a financial solution. Give them the weapons, give them their money back. You lose on the whole deal, but then you’re out of this.”

  “Why?”

  “Because these boys are a gang of crazy junkies who are capable of anything. It was wrong of me even to try to set this deal up, I’m sorry.”

  The very thought of Dmitry made him feel even more bitter.

  “No, tell them we had an agreement, that I was willing to lower the price for the final delivery because of the delay. But that’s all. I’m sticking to that, I’m not interested in anything else.”

  “OK,” Risto said, and hung up.

  Jens sat down on the bed. His eyes fell on a picture that was supposed to be modern art. It was a black triangle floating above a blue cube. Even the picture made him angry.

  He lay back on the bed, staring at the ceiling. Things hadn’t gone the way he’d expected them to recently, he was tired beyond imagining, and his willpower was starting to flag. Jens breathed out, closed his eyes. He woke up with a start a quarter of an hour later. That’s what it felt like anyway, but the fifteen minutes turned out to be many hours.

  He showered, had a quick breakfast, then set off for home. After what felt like a hazy eternity he drove across the Öresund Bridge. He was nervous, he had two boxes of automatic weapons in the back of the car. He did the only thing he could, and adopted perfectly ordinary Scandinavian eye contact with the bearded local in a cap at the border. That turned out to be enough, the beard raised a two-finger salute to the brim of his cap, as if to say You’re OK. Jens glided through with no problem and felt sick the whole way up to Stockholm. His nerves weren’t the way they usually felt. Was it the stress, his age, or just the realization that he’d been playing with fire his whole adult life and that he was about to get seriously burned?

  Several hours later he flew across the Essinge Highway around Stockholm, on some level glad just to be back in one piece. Instead of turning off toward the center of the city he kept going north, turned off at Danderyd Church, and drove past the high school. Just behind that, in among the pine trees, scrawny firs, and ugly office buildings was a storage unit he’d rented for years.

  He unloaded the weapons, and to his delight found a pocket flashlight he’d been trying to find for years. It was hanging from a hook right at the back. He loved that flashlight. Not too big, not too heavy, a good be
am of light, and it was neat—silvery, made of aluminum—damn near perfect. He spun it in the air, caught it by the handle, then locked up behind him, feeling a bit happier. Maybe because he was home again, maybe because he’d found his flashlight.

  She backed out between the gateposts. She drove around the block a couple of times to see if anything looked unusual, but there was no sign of anything. She headed in toward the city, car windows down, and drove all the way down Birger Jarlsgatan to the junction with Engelbrektsgatan, and pulled into the underground garage on David Bagares gata. She emerged and walked toward Engelbrektsplan, put her phone card into a public phone, and dialed a number.

  “Yes?”

  “It’s me again.”

  “Hello.”

  She waited to give him time to say something. He didn’t.

  “Are you home now?” she said.

  “Yes.”

  He was terrible on the phone, abrupt and impossible to gauge.

  “Can we meet?”

  Twenty minutes later they met up on Strandvägen, on the quayside. He was already sitting there on a bench when she walked up. He saw her, stood up, kept his distance, no hug or weird handshake. She found that a relief.

  They sat down on the bench. It was a warm evening. He was wearing jeans, a tennis shirt, and sneakers. She was in pretty much the same, but the women’s version. People were strolling past them, sober and drunk alike. The city was lively even though it was a week-night. She took out a newly bought pack of cigarettes from her pocket, pulled off the cellophane, and got one out.

  “Want one?”

  He took one, she lit hers and passed him the lighter. They took a few puffs, and she pointed toward the Strand Hotel, on the other side of the water.

  “I worked there once.”

  The hotel glowed luxuriously.

  “I’d been traveling in Asia. When I got home I got a job in reception.… I was twenty-two, twenty-three.”

  He sat with his legs apart, looking at the hotel, and smoked some more.

  “Tell me about the people who were in your house.”

  She thought. Trying to figure out what to say and what not to say.

  “Two men claiming to be policemen were in the house a few weeks ago. My cleaner caught them red-handed when she arrived. She’s got her own key. They threatened her, said she’d be in trouble if she told anyone.”