The Andalucian Friend: A Novel

by Alexander Soderberg

  Sophie looked at Hector, then at Aron, trying to detect any sign. She could see nothing but impatience and an urge to get going.

  She leaned over Jens, kissed him on the head, wishing for a moment that he would wake up, get to his feet, take her by the hand, and run off. But he wasn’t going to. He wasn’t going to do anything, he was severely beaten and unconscious, scarcely capable of even breathing by himself. Sophie stood up, grabbed her handbag, and followed Hector as he hurried out of the restaurant.

  The smell of powder and death lingered in the room.

  Carlos looked out across his restaurant. He had been in the kitchen pushing the pieces of Leffe Rydbäck through the mincer when the first shots were fired. He had stopped and hidden inside one of the kitchen cupboards. But when Hector and the Colombian dragged the Russian in and killed him, Carlos backed out and hid in the office. He had heard Hector’s phone conversation with his father, how Hector had asked him to send the G5 up to Bromma Airport. Carlos had made his way back into the restaurant and hid on the floor behind the bar counter.

  He couldn’t figure out who was who, but he recognized the policemen, Cling and Clang. He had prayed to God while he was lying with his nose against the cold floor, prayed to Him to spare his miserable life. And God had done so. Carlos had made his way into the kitchen again, and found that woman, Sophie, eavesdropping on Hector. Then he had found another hiding place until Hector and the woman disappeared. Aron had come into the restaurant and picked up the wounded man, Jens. He had put him over his back and disappeared.

  Now everything was silent, there was no one there, except the dead bodies and the policemen tied up in the office.

  He looked around the inferno of blood and dead bodies, weighing things up, then, with shaking fingers, tapped a number into his cell phone.

  “Gentz,” Roland answered at the other end.

  “This is Carlos … with the restaurant in Stockholm.”

  “Yes?”

  “There are dead bodies here.”

  “Oh?”

  “I need your help. I can give something in return.”

  “What?”

  “Hector’s location.”

  “We know that already.”

  “Where?”

  “Stockholm.”

  “No.”

  “Where?”

  Will you help me?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Málaga, in a few hours.”

  “What do you want help with, Carlos?”

  “Protection.”

  “From whom?”

  “From everyone.”

  “Where are you now?”

  “Stockholm.”

  “Get out, lie low, then call me again and I’ll see what I can do.… You said people had been killed? Who’s dead?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Gentz hung up. He could hear police sirens in the distance. Carlos left the restaurant.

  24

  The house was by itself. Looked more like a little summer cottage than the home of a detective superintendent. He had just spoken to her on the phone, she was at Brahegatan. He said he had been trying to find Sophie everywhere. She told him to come in. He said he couldn’t. There had been a short silence, then she had asked what he wanted.

  “Just checking in,” he had replied.

  Lars parked the car a few blocks away. Now he stepped inside her garden, walking under the apple trees and through the grass on the narrow gravel path that led up to the veranda.

  The lock on the front door was modern, impossible to pick. He went around the house and checked the windows. All closed and locked. Lars found some steps that led down to a cellar door under the house, solid but out of the way, it had an old window with bubble-patterned glass, and possibly a latch on the inside. He pulled the sleeve of his sweater down over his arm and broke the glass, stuck his hand through, and felt. There, an old latch. He unlocked the door and went into the cellar.

  Lars hurried through the rooms, scanning with his eyes as he went. A storeroom, a pantry, a recently installed geothermal system with a generator, a staircase leading to the floor above. He took it in a couple of strides, opened the door, and found himself in a kitchen that could have been taken from an English interior-design magazine. A new stove, but an old-fashioned design, a wooden floor with wide floorboards, oiled and varnished. Old-fashioned cupboards, beautiful. He kept going through the kitchen, turned into a living room, and went into an office. A desk, a lamp with a green glass shade, a filing cabinet, locked. He broke it open using a screwdriver he found in the bottom kitchen drawer. It made a noise, tin bending and twisting, but eventually it opened. A mass of documents hanging in a row. He worked through them with his fingers, looking for Sophie Brinkmann, but she wasn’t there. His fingers went to G, Hector Guzman, nothing.… Just the names of tons of police officers he didn’t recognize. Everything was in alphabetical order.… He went on. Wait, that was something—Berglund. Hasse Berglund. A passport photograph of the pig, Hasse, and some service reports. A note in pencil in the top right corner. Violent, it said. Lars looked on through the files. Found Eva Castroneves, no pencil note … instead a roughly drawn star. Like a teacher might put in a pupil’s schoolbook. He checked the letter V, and found himself. He pulled the file out, opened it. The photograph was old, the same one he had on his police ID. At first the word that was written in pencil in the top right corner didn’t want to sink in, as if he didn’t understand it. Unstable, it said.

  Lars closed the file and put it back. He experienced a moment of complete silence within himself as his eyes failed to register anything. Then he came back to life again.

  He sat down on the chair by the desk, opened drawers: paper, pens, reading glasses, paper clips, a ruler … a few notes and coins. The bottom drawer was locked and he broke that open as well. Papers, notes, letters, he put them all in his pockets. He glanced around the room one last time before heading back down to the cellar. There he checked in every nook and cranny. He needed to pee, and sped up the search. Into the boiler room, his flashlight dancing over the walls, ceiling, floor. A cleaning cupboard under the stairs, an old Nil-fisk vacuum cleaner with the hose looped over a semicircular metal hanger. Mop and bucket, cloths and disinfectant—a smell of old, un-scented Ajax, hazy and fleeting childhood memories that he hurriedly shrugged off.

  Into the pantry, full of tins and preserves. She could survive a nuclear war down here. The flashlight playing over the ceiling. Lars sat down and searched the floor. Got up and searched behind the tins … something shimmered. Right at the back of the shelf, behind the beans, the sweet corn, different varieties of Campbell’s soup … He swept them aside with his arm and the tins went flying. There it was in front of him, the treasure he’d just uncovered. A dial, numbers around it, solid steel—an old safe, fifteen inches square, set back into the wall. But his joy was short-lived.… How the hell was he going to open it? A quick glance at the time; he might have an hour, maybe less. What could he do in that time? Spin the dial at random? He tried to think … the notes in his pockets! Lars sat down, spread the notes out on the floor in front of him, the flashlight in his mouth. He read, tons of words and questions, he went on looking, no numbers anywhere.

  He ran upstairs again, into the office, and grabbed as many of the folders from the filing cabinet as he could carry, down into the cellar again, and spread them out on the floor. The same trip three times. On the fourth he picked up all the old bills and papers that had been on top of the desk, and in the living room he grabbed a floor lamp.

  He was on his knees, the floor lamp shining at the safe. He searched through the bills, found her ID number, stood up, and tried it, splitting it into two-digit segments. The first two counterclockwise, the following two clockwise. Locked. He repeated the process, starting with clockwise. Locked. He tried her phone number, locked. He tried her phone number and date of birth … locked. Time was passing. He still wanted to pee. And now he was sweaty, cold, and tired as well. His withdrawal was
slowly worsening, his teeth were grinding the whole time.

  Lars kneeled down on the floor again, opened the first file, leafed through it—information about a police officer named Sven. Sven had gotten the pencil annotation Reactionary. He put it aside. Opened more files—more police officers, trainees, inspectors, detectives … Small passport photos of faces he didn’t recognize. Gunilla’s notes in the corner in pencil. Solitary, Dependent on company, Passive-aggressive … All the files were set out the same, photograph in one corner, a personnel office record, notes, and a service report. He read through ten or so, trying to find anything that stood out. Nothing. He went back to Gunilla’s notes again … nothing of interest. This isn’t working, he thought. Lars stood up, stepped back, and looked at the folders. He turned the light from the floor lamp on them. The light made them look different from one another. In the filing cabinet they had all looked brown. They still did, but the different shades indicated that they were different ages. He shone the light around and picked up the file that looked palest—palest equaled oldest. He opened it, it was thicker than the others. The file contained a mass of old newspaper clippings, typewritten notes, washed-out photographs. He read a date … August 1968. He read names, Siv and Carl-Adam Strandberg, murdered on a camping trip in Värmland on August 19, 1968. Strandberg? Her parents? He tried the safe again, 68 08 19, locked. He tried clockwise and counterclockwise, he tried backward, counterclockwise, and clockwise. Locked. He read her parents’ dates of birth, tried those the same way. Time was flying now, he’d been there almost forty minutes, Gunilla could show up anytime. Locked, locked, locked.

  Sweat was dripping from his brow, his heart was pounding, his throat was dry, he badly wanted to take something, get rid of the itchy feeling in his soul.… Lars went back to the file, looked through the newspaper clippings. A photograph of Siv and Carl-Adam Strandberg with their two children, Erik and Gunilla. They were standing in front of the entrance to Skansen, the open-air museum, sometime in the ’60s. Siv and Carl-Adam were smiling, strict clothes, Carl-Adam with a little hat on his head; a tight, checked, short-sleeved shirt, straight trousers, polished shoes. Siv in a dress, hair piled up high, white shoes; the children smiling as well. Lars could see Gunilla in the girl’s face. She looked happy. He looked at Erik, a fair-haired, laughing boy who was about to go into Skansen with his family. The boy was happy, he seemed to be glowing somehow. A terrible sense of guilt overwhelmed Lars. A feeling that it was this innocent little boy whom he had let die on the floor of Carlos’s apartment. Lars stared at the photograph, breathing deeply to dispel the unease that was starting to spread. He looked on. The investigation. Lars read: They had been shot through the canvas of the tent. Shotgun. The murderer’s name was Ivar Gamlin, he was thirty-one when it happened, seriously drunk, he’d beaten his wife then gone off in his car. The gun happened to be on the backseat by chance, he had claimed. He had been using it to hunt birds the day before. He just hadn’t bothered to take it indoors. Lars moved on to an interrogation: Gamlin claims he has no recollection. Farther down the page: Gamlin sentenced to life imprisonment in 1969 … November 23, 1969. Lars tried those numbers every way he could, locked. He looked at the time again, almost half past five. He listened to see if he could hear anything. Then kept looking through the file. Gamlin applies for clemency, 1975. Rejected. Gamlin’s sentence is fixed, 1979; he will be released in November 1982. Lars read quickly, skimming, leafing through.… There! Ivar Gamlin is murdered by another inmate, 1981. Lars went on, found a postmortem report. He scanned through the findings and got the impression that pretty much every bone in Gamlin’s body had been shattered. He found another police report, a typewritten sheet of A4. Someone had gotten into Gamlin’s cell at night. Cause of death was suffocation, with the help of an unknown object. The coroner’s report suggested that this might have been a plastic bag. Lars thought, read once more, scanning the text. He found what he was looking for. Date of death 1981 … 03 … 21 … Lars tried the numbers on the dial. There was the sound of a car outside the house, tires on gravel. He kept going: 19 counterclockwise, 81 clockwise, a car-door closing, 03 counterclockwise. Steps on the gravel, 21 clockwise, steps heading toward the door. He tried the handle. Locked.

  A key was inserted into the lock up above. He tried again, starting with 19 clockwise. The door upstairs opened and closed. Footsteps into the living room. He turned the dial slowly, sweat running from his brow—21 counterclockwise. He turned the handle slowly. Quick footsteps. He finished turning, click! The safe opened. Other people would have guessed it was God’s help. Not Lars, he didn’t guess anything.

  Gunilla’s voice through the floorboards above. She sounded upset, she was talking to someone on the phone. Lars stuck his hand inside the safe. Two plastic folders, a notebook, two bundles of thousand-kronor notes, a pistol, and a thick, official ledger with a dark-green felt spine. He took it all, tucked it inside his jacket, zipped it up silently, then made his way out of the pantry, past the stairs. He could hear Gunilla’s voice more clearly now. Her tone was curt and irritated, she was saying that her house had been broken into and demanded that a forensics expert be let off other duties to come out to her.

  He was moving slowly toward the exit when the cellar door above him opened and he heard steps on the stairs. Lars set off, ran through the darkness, found the door, and raced up the little flight of steps.

  Instead of running out onto the road the way he had come, he swerved immediately left, into the leafy undergrowth. Twigs on slender stems whipped at his face. He’d gotten quite a distance when he heard the door opening behind him. Lars kept up the same speed until he reached his car five minutes later. He started it the moment he was behind the wheel and drove off, away from her house, away from Gunilla. Away.

  It was a lounge, empty, cool, and private. They sat in separate armchairs, looking at each other. He was about to say something, changed his mind, looked away, and made eye contact with a woman behind a desk, waved her over, and asked for some water.

  They drank in silence. Outside, planes took off and landed in turn, in the end the sound of jet engines became just a part of everything.

  “How is your son?” he asked cautiously.

  She looked at him.

  “He’s not good.”

  “What do the doctors say?”

  “Nothing yet.”

  “Did you want to tell me anything in particular?” he asked quietly.

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  He looked at her.

  “Tell me.”

  Sophie leaned forward slightly. “I came to tell you that Mikhail and his sidekick had asked Jens for help, that they weren’t here to hurt you.”

  He looked at her critically.

  “Why would you tell me that?”

  “Because I was there when they arrived.”

  “Where?”

  “At Jens’s.”

  She realized how odd her lie sounded. But that didn’t seem to be what Hector got caught up on.

  “What were you doing there?”

  “We’ve known each other for a long time.”

  Hector raised an eyebrow.

  “How?”

  A turboprop plane passed above them.

  “I was waiting for you in the restaurant the first time Mikhail and his sidekick showed up; we were going to have dinner, you and me, and you never came back. I went into the office and found Jens unconscious on the floor. I hadn’t seen him in over twenty years, it was just a massive coincidence.”

  Hector was looking at her closely.

  “I let it go, we didn’t talk for a while, then we got in touch again.”

  His expression hadn’t changed.

  “Mikhail came to Sweden to collect his friend from the Karolinska,” she went on in a low voice. “The police were there, and shot his friend in the arm. Mikhail had Jens’s number and called to ask for help. They came ’round to Jens’s apartment, the friend with a gunshot wound in his arm. I helped him.”

&nb
sp; Hector let a few moments pass. “Then what?”

  “Then I went to the restaurant, to see you.”

  “To tell me this?”

  Now she was looking at him.

  “No, we needed help, the Russians were after us.… We didn’t know where to go.”

  The logical answer calmed Hector’s thoughts a little.

  “Who were they, the Russians?”

  “Jens’s customers.”

  He fell deep in thought, a darkness had come over him.

  “Are you having an affair with him? Are you in love?”

  Sophie shook her head. But it wouldn’t have made any difference if she had said yes or no at this point. He was jealous, and also terrifled of getting hurt. The weakest state for any man. The state that most of them hated in themselves, never wanted to see or experience. Hector was no exception. She realized that he was steering himself away from uncomfortable emotions by drifting further into thought. His act of avoidance seemed to fill the entire room.

  “I don’t trust him. There’s too much coincidence about him, has been since the moment he first showed up.”

  “He saved our lives in the restaurant.”

  Hector didn’t answer that, and seemed to be struggling instead to try to see her objectively.

  “Who are you really?”

  The question wasn’t framed as a question, and she remained silent. The woman who had served them came over to say that their flight would be arriving soon. Sophie and Hector sat quietly, looking into each other’s eyes. He was hoping to see something he could cling to; she remained still because anything else would have given too much away.

  Hector was the first to look away, and got up.

  They went and stood by a large window, watching as the Gulf-stream landed, braked hard, then taxied toward the building they were standing in.