The Andalucian Friend: A Novel

by Alexander Soderberg

  Lars got home to the apartment and doped himself up with drink and all the drugs he could find. His brain got sluggish and he crept around the floor looking for ants and other insects to have a chat with. He threw up in the sink, it was a nice, cleansing feeling. Then he swallowed loads of Hibernal. He knew what it was, chemical lobotomy. The pills worked just as they should. Lars sat on the floor staring out at nothing for ages, without even a hint of any feeling. He just sat there, Lars Vinge, feeling nothing, thinking nothing, expecting nothing. A great big nothing that didn’t contain anything at all. Then everything went black, as usual.

  The next morning he woke up on the kitchen floor with a cold feeling between his legs. He felt with his hand; his jeans were wet and cold, yes, he had pissed himself.

  His cell phone rang on the floor beside him, he reached out for it.

  “Hello, boy.”

  Tommy’s voice. Lars wiped the saliva from the corner of his mouth.

  “Hello,” he said in a rough voice.

  “Have you checked out?”

  Lars tried to get his head straight.

  “How did you know?”

  “I keep an eye on my people, you should have said something, Lars. We take care of each other.… You’re not alone, if that’s what you think. How are you feeling?”

  Lars rubbed under his nose with his forefinger.

  “I don’t know, OK, I think.”

  “I’m coming ’round,” Tommy said.

  Lars didn’t have time to object.

  Tommy arrived half an hour later. He had food and drink with him, in the form of a piece of sweet pastry and two cans of orangeade. They sat in the living room and talked candidly with each other, Lars in an armchair, Tommy on the sofa. Tommy said he thought Lars should try again, that the job wasn’t going to disappear, that as his boss he was in a position to pay for Lars’s treatment. Lars listened carefully. Tommy asked questions about Lars’s drug use, about which drugs he took, how he got hold of them, which ones were strongest. Lars replied as best he could. Told the story of how he got addicted as a child, and how he lost all sense of direction when he started again with relatively harmless stuff. Tommy listened and shook his head.

  “Sounds like hell,” he said quietly.

  Lars almost agreed.

  “But we’ll get this sorted out,” Tommy said, and slapped his thigh with the palm of his hand, blinked, stood up, and went out to use the toilet.

  Lars sat there alone, yawned, and stretched.

  When Tommy returned he passed behind Lars. Lars was taken by surprise when the heavy blow hit him on the back of the neck. He was even more taken aback when Tommy caught both his hands, bent them back, and pushed him down off the chair. Lars hit his face hard on the floor, with Tommy’s body on top of him. He tried to struggle but Tommy had the upper hand. Tommy was tough and strong, Lars hungover from the drugs. It was an uneven fight. Lars protested, bewildered, but Tommy told him to shut up, then took a pair of handcuffs from his belt and put them around Lars’s wrists.

  “What are you doing, what the hell have I done? Tommy?”

  Tommy disappeared from the living room again. Lars was left lying flat on his stomach.

  “Tommy!” he called. No answer. Lars listened, heard Tommy open the front door, heard it close again out in the hall. Had he left?

  “Tommy? Don’t go!”

  Lars lay there with his arms fastened behind his back, and tried to think. He rested his cheek against the cold floor.

  “Tommy!” he called again after a while, and felt his own breath as it rebounded off the wooden floor.

  Lars could hear little noises from the kitchen, it sounded like two people whispering.…

  “Tommy, please! Can’t we talk?” Lars’s voice was weak. He lay there with his face on the floor. Time passed, he didn’t know how long, but suddenly he thought he could see the shape of someone out in the hall. It wasn’t Tommy, it was the shape of a woman. He screwed up his eyes and recognized her, Gunilla.… She was standing in the doorway of the living room, leaning against the frame with her handbag over her shoulder.

  It began to dawn on him, something that his mind was hardly capable of daring to think. His breathing became labored and heavy. He sighed loudly several times, and coughed when the anxiety made his heart snag in his chest.

  “What are you doing here?” he managed to say.

  Tommy pushed past Gunilla and came back into the room. In his hands he had an automatic pistol with a long silencer attached to the barrel. Lars tried to cough out his fear of dying, pissed himself again, and tried to sit upright but couldn’t with his arms cuffed behind his back. Instead he made jerking movements over the hard, slippery floor, like a seal on dry land. He tried to reason with Tommy, but his terror made the words weak and incomprehensible. He tried to say something to Gunilla, tried to explain that this was going too far … that he wasn’t supposed to die now, that this was out of all proportion to what he had done. But she didn’t seem to hear or understand what he was trying to say.

  Tommy stopped behind Lars, pulled him up into a sitting position, put the silencer a half inch from his right temple, and looked at Gunilla. She nodded. Lars tried to say something else. It came out as a shrill sound of air that smelled of dark anxiety and heartrending terror.

  Tommy fired, pop, bang—the same sound as a loud puff of air. The bullet went right through Lars’s head and hit the living-room wall some distance away. A short stream of blood from Lars’s left temple, thin but with heavy pressure. Gunilla stared. Lars collapsed on the floor. Tommy backed away carefully, then went quickly to work. He crouched down, undid the handcuffs, wiped the floor where he had been standing.

  Gunilla felt the opposite from what she had expected. She thought she would feel some sort of pleasure at watching him die, some sort of relief, a liberating feeling after what he had done to Erik. But it didn’t feel like that. It just felt empty and sad. She had asked Tommy to finish Lars off in just this way, so that the last thing he saw was her, to make him realize that he could never beat her, that it was predetermined. Maybe he had realized that, maybe not, but either way she felt different from what she had expected. There was something tragic about the fact that Lars’s wretched and pathetic life should end so miserably. She was tired of everything to do with death.

  “Thank you, Tommy,” she said in a low voice.

  He looked at her.

  “How does it feel?”

  She didn’t answer. Tommy stood up, the cuffs in one hand, the pistol in the other, and met her gaze.

  “I miss Erik,” she said quietly.

  Tommy sighed. Their eyes stayed on each other’s. He raised the pistol. Didn’t need to aim, just squeezed the trigger. And again, the same hard, short puffing sound from the gun, the recoil that jolted the silencer up about fifteen degrees. The bullet hit the right side of Gunilla’s forehead.

  She stood motionless for a few moments. As if she had been so shocked that the force of her surprise kept her alive for a short while before her legs buckled beneath her. She fell where she had been standing, like a puppet whose strings had been cut. Her eyes stared crookedly up at the ceiling as blood seeped from the hole in her forehead.

  Tommy was breathing heavily, his heart beating hard, his mouth was dry and he struggled against feelings that were trying to get out. He tried to compose himself and suppress everything. He was muttering quietly to himself about what he was going to do, what he had memorized that he needed to do, nothing could be left to chance. Tommy looked at Gunilla, then at Lars. Just two dead objects, he told himself.

  Tommy unscrewed the silencer and put it in his pocket, then put the gun on the floor, took a Q-tip out of a plastic bag in his pocket and rubbed it gently above the trigger where there were invisible traces of powder. He dabbed the powdered Q-tip on Lars’s right hand, between the thumb and forefinger. Tommy planted the pistol in Lars’s hand, checking how it ought to be positioned in light of Lars Vinge’s suicide shot. He left the handcu
ffs in Lars’s bedroom. The forensics team would find tiny, almost invisible chafe marks on his wrists, so a pair of handcuffs in the bedroom would lead them to the conclusion that everyone leaps to when they see handcuffs in a bedroom.

  He crouched beside Gunilla’s body and went through her handbag, searching for the slightest sign of anything to do with the case or the investigation. He was fairly certain she wouldn’t have anything like that on her, she was just as careful as he was, but he felt obliged to check anyway.

  He had contacted her after going through all the material he had been given by Lars in Mariatorget. He hadn’t made any big deal out of it, just said he knew what she and Erik had been up to, and that he wanted a piece of the cake. And because she knew him, she had merely asked how much. Erik’s half would be enough, wouldn’t it? OK, he had replied.

  After a self-confident Lars Vinge had told her at the funeral that he had let her brother die, she added an extra clause to the contract, saying she wanted to determine how Lars should die. That hadn’t been much of a problem. It was with great sadness that he had shot her. Sadness because he felt a kinship with Gunilla. But it couldn’t be helped. Tommy knew Gunilla, she’d demand his share back at some later point, that was just what she was like. He would have been looking over his shoulder the whole time. But the main reason was that he had seen the sums of money on the papers he had received from Lars. Then he realized something that he couldn’t ignore. His wife, Monica. Money saves lives.… With all this, maybe he’d be able to buy her some care, prolong her life, maybe cure her ALS. Then there was a third aspect, which was small but oh-so-important. A vague feeling that he traced back to two-weak-beers-in-the-fridge-for-when-you-want-to-get-drunk. A sense of deficit. Otherwise he might as well let it all go. All or nothing. And when he had gotten the sports bag from Lars in Mariatorget and went through the material at home that same evening, he saw a surplus. A surplus, safely at arm’s length. And it was at that moment that the path had become clear. Crystal clear.

  Eva Castroneves had been stationed in Liechtenstein, as a kind of sleeping resource charged with taking care of the money from Guzman. But she had been given another task when that had all gone to hell. After a conversation with Gunilla she had transferred money to a dummy account that Tommy could access as he pleased. Now Tommy was planning to contact Castroneves and tell her to transfer Gunilla’s share of the money to him as well, and to keep ten percent for herself. If she made a fuss, he’d contact Interpol, who would hunt her to the ends of the earth. He had an entire sports bag full of evidence in which her name cropped up on every other page. Eva Castroneves wouldn’t cause any trouble. He was sure of that.

  Tommy took a turn around Lars Vinge’s apartment, double-checking that there was nothing there that had anything to do with the case. There wasn’t, it was clean. He thought through everything that might be of interest to the forensics team. He knew how they worked, they were fuckers sometimes when it came to putting things together.

  When Tommy felt confident, he left Lars and Gunilla and went down to the street, jumped into his Buick Skylark GS, and started it up, letting the tuned V8 engine echo between the buildings. He put his right foot on the brake pedal, moved the gearshift to D. The trimmed engine made the whole car bounce as the gear settled.

  He drove away and headed home to Monica and the girls. They were planning to barbecue sausages on the terrace that night. He would nod over the fence of his row house to the neighbors, Krister and Agneta, say something amusing to Krister, who would laugh, he always did. Then Tommy would test Vanessa on the extra English homework that she had been given over summer vacation. She would tease him about his pronunciation, he would exaggerate his Swenglish, and they’d laugh. Emilie would get stuck in front of the computer. He would tell her to log off. She’d sulk for a while, but that would pass. After a bit of television Monica would suggest backgammon and coffee in the conservatory, with a slice of that Swiss roll that they were both addicted to. Monica would win the game. They would go to bed and read, a car magazine for him and something by Jean M. Auel for her. Before they turned out the lights he would pat her on the cheek and tell her he loved her, she’d say something nice back, strong in spite of the ever-present illness.… Something like that. Everything would carry on exactly as usual for a bit longer. Then he would set to work and save his wife from slow suffocation.

  Tommy forced his way through the Stockholm traffic in his Buick. He calculated in his head how rich he was, indirectly at least. He made it two digits, followed by six zeros. Two relatively high digits. That was a lot to digest for a boy who was born in Johanneshov in the ’50s, who had pinched Robin Hood cigarettes, listened to Jerry Williams, and thought the Phantom and Biggles were cool.

  She sang softly to him, washed him, combed his hair, and dressed him in clean clothes every day. She kept on reading him the book he had been reading before the accident. She had found it beside his bed with a bookmark in it.

  The door of Albert’s hospital room was ajar. Jens stopped, looked in. The sight of the mother beside her unconscious son was just as sad each time. He had a pack of cards in his hand, bought from the shop downstairs, he had imagined that he and Sophie might play cards to pass the time. But now that he was standing there, it was as if a wall had grown up in front of him, an invisible wall that made it impossible for him to enter the room. That made it impossible for him to be part of her and Albert’s lives. That made it impossible for him to confront his fears, once and for all, and take the step into the warmth.

  She sat and read, tucked a stray strand of hair from her face. She was so beautiful when she didn’t know she was being watched.…

  Jens turned and walked away down the corridor.

  The atmosphere was subdued and tense. The men were thinking. They were sitting in the same room as always, the conference room that was Björn Gunnarsson’s very own smoking room. Björn Gunnarsson was Tommy’s boss, and he sucked at his pipe before breaking the deadlock.

  “What do we know, Tommy?”

  Tommy had been sitting there staring at the table, leaning back in his chair. He kept his eyes focused on an invisible point for a few seconds before looking up.

  “Lars Vinge was unstable. Gunilla was worried about him. She mentioned it to me once in passing. I didn’t pay it much attention at the time. But he was evidently very pushy, thought he deserved better than the jobs he was given. He called her, sent e-mails, was aggressive and threatening. And apparently his mother and girlfriend both died recently, one after the other. That seems to have knocked him even further off balance.…”

  Gunnarsson listened and smoked. Tommy went on.

  “Vinge had checked into a rehab center, but bolted just a few days later. We have a call from him to Gunilla registered the same evening he came home. Maybe he called to ask for her help, I don’t know. Either way, evidently she went to his apartment the following morning. He shot her and then killed himself. The indications are that he did so while he was under the influence of very strong medication.…”

  “What sort of medication?”

  “Prescription Ketogan … He was high, he was addicted to it. Apparently he had a history of trouble. I don’t know much about it, but according to Gunilla it was escalating out of control again. It might have had something to do with his mother and girlfriend.”

  “And their investigations?” Gunnarsson puffed at his pipe.

  Tommy wiped some invisible grit from his eye.

  “This is where it gets a bit strange. The office on Brahegatan contained practically nothing. It was empty, apart from a few surveillance reports, some photographs, and a few other case notes.”

  “Why?”

  Tommy left a dramatic pause, then looked up.

  “I don’t know.”

  “What do you think?”

  Tommy’s face took on a slightly pained look, as though he were about to say something that was actually physically painful.

  “What?” Gunnarsson asked, with the pip
e still between his teeth.

  “Maybe Gunilla and Erik didn’t have anything, maybe they hadn’t gotten anywhere.… At least not as far as she wanted to make out.”

  He said these last words in an almost apologetic tone, as if it hurt him to speak ill of the dead.

  “What makes you think that?” Gunnarsson’s voice was gruff.

  “Remember that she managed to sell this way of working to us. We bought it, lock, stock, and barrel, and gave her carte blanche. Maybe she was ashamed that it wasn’t turning out the way she’d hoped. Or else she wanted to keep on getting financial support, and knew that would stop if she couldn’t show any sign of progress.”

  Tommy shrugged his shoulders. “But I don’t really know,” he said.

  Gunnarsson let out a deep sigh. Tapped the exhausted tobacco into the palm of his hand and tossed it into the wastepaper basket beside him.

  “And the murders at Trasten?” he asked.

  “Antonia Miller’s running that. I’ve let her have everything I had from Gunilla, the little that did exist, I mean. We’ll have to hope that forensics can help us there.”

  “And Guzman, he’s gotten away?”

  “Yes. We’ve got warrants out for him through all the usual channels. His father was murdered in his home in Marbella at roughly the same time as those shots were fired in Trasten. It looks like this settling of accounts stretches much further than we thought.”

  Björn Gunnarsson frowned.

  “Hasse Berglund?”

  “Vanished,” Tommy said.

  “Why?”

  Tommy shook his head.

  “Don’t know. He already had plenty of crap in his record before he was employed by Gunilla. He’s probably just fled the field.”

  A moment’s silence.

  “So, where is he then?”

  Tommy shook his head. “No idea.”