The Andalucian Friend

by Alexander Soderberg

  She was walking down the corridor carrying a tray, heading for Hector Guzman in Room 11. He had come in three days earlier after being knocked down on a pedestrian crossing in the city center. His right leg was broken below the knee. The doctors thought they’d discovered something wrong with his spleen, so he was being kept in for observation. Hector was in his mid-forties, good-looking without being handsome, large without being fat. He was Spanish, but she thought she could see hints of something Nordic in his features. His hair was fairly dark, with a few lighter hints. His nose, cheekbones, and chin were sharp and his skin verged on the sandy brown. He spoke fluent Swedish and he was imposing—perhaps because of the observant eyes that lit up his face, possibly because of the lightness of his movements even though he was a large man. Or possibly because of the natural indifference that made him smile every time she went in to him—as if he knew that she knew, which she did, and that made her smile back at him.

  He pretended to be absorbed in a book as he sat up in bed with his reading glasses on his nose. He was always doing things like that when she was with him, pretending not to see her, pretending to be busy.

  She sorted out the pills and put them in little plastic cups, then handed him one. He took it without looking up from his book, tipped the pills into his mouth, accepted a glass of water, and swallowed them, all without taking his eyes from the book. She gave him the second dose and he did the same with that.

  “Always just as tasty,” he said quietly, then looked up. “You’re wearing different earrings today, Sophie.”

  She caught herself about to raise one hand to her ear.

  “I might be,” she said.

  “No, not might be, you are. They suit you.”

  She headed for the door and pulled it open.

  “Can I have some juice? If that’s OK?”

  “It’s OK,” Sophie said.

  In the doorway she bumped into the man who had introduced himself as Hector’s cousin. He wasn’t like Hector—thin but muscular, black-haired, taller than average, with alert blue eyes that seemed to notice everything going on around him. The cousin nodded to her curtly. He said something to Hector in Spanish, Hector said something back, and they both started to laugh. Sophie got the feeling that she was part of the joke, and forgot about the juice.

  Gunilla Strandberg was sitting in the corridor holding a bunch of flowers, watching the nurse come out of Hector Guzman’s room. Gunilla studied her as she came toward her. Was that happiness she could see? The sort of happiness that a person doesn’t themselves know about? The woman went past her. On her left breast pocket was the little pin that showed that she was a “Sophia Sister”—a graduate of Sophiahemmet University College. Beside the pin was a name badge. Gunilla had time to make out the name Sophie.

  She watched Sophie go. The woman’s face was beautiful. Beautiful in the way that privilege bestowed: narrow, discreet … and fresh. The nurse moved easily, as if she let each foot merely graze the floor before taking the next step. It was an attractive way of walking, Gunilla thought. She watched until Sophie disappeared into another patient’s room.

  Gunilla was left thinking, her thoughts based on emotional equations. She looked once more in the direction where Sophie had just disappeared, then toward Room 11, in which Hector Guzman lay. There was something there. An energy … an emphasized form of something invisible to the naked eye. Something that woman, Sophie, had brought out of the room with her.

  Gunilla got up and walked down the corridor, then peered into the staff room. It was empty. The week’s roster was on the wall. She looked around the corridor before going in, then went over to the roster and ran her finger down it as she checked the names.

  Helena …

  Roger …

  Anne …

  Carro …

  Nicke …

  Sophie … Sophie Brinkmann, she read.

  Stuffing the bunch of flowers in an empty vase on a portable table, she left the ward. In the elevator she pulled out her cell, called the office, and asked for an address for a Sophie Brinkmann.

  Instead of heading back to the station on Brahegatan, she drove over the highway from Danderyd Hospital and turned off into the villas of Stocksund. She got lost in the maze of little roads that seemed actively to want to stop her from reaching her destination, and ended up driving around in circles. It felt like she was driving up and down hills at random, until eventually she found the right road. She checked the house number and pulled up outside a small, yellow wooden villa with white detailing.

  She sat for a while behind the wheel, looking around. It was a quiet area, leafy, birch trees about to flower. Gunilla got out of the car and the scent of bird cherry hit her. She did a full turn, looking at the neighboring houses. Then she looked at Sophie’s house. It was beautiful, smaller than its neighbors, and she got the impression that it was less tidy than the others. She turned around again, comparing them. No, Sophie Brinkmann’s house wasn’t untidy, it was normal. It was the neighboring houses that were odd: a sort of perfectionism—dull, soulless order. Sophie’s house again: more alive; the woodwork hadn’t just been painted, the grass hadn’t just been cut, the gravel path hadn’t just been raked, the windows hadn’t just been cleaned.

  Gunilla took a few tentative steps through the gate and walked carefully up the gravel path. She peered in through the kitchen window facing the road. What she could see of the kitchen looked tasteful. Old and new styles in an attractive combination; lovely brass faucets, an Aga stove, an old oak counter. A ceiling lamp that was so lovely, so unusual and well-chosen, that for a moment Gunilla felt a pang of envy. She went on looking, her gaze settling on the cut flowers in a large vase in the hall window. She backed away and looked up. She could see another beautiful arrangement on one of the upstairs windowsills.

  In the car on the way back to the city her brain started working at high speed.

  2

  Leszek Smialy felt like a dog, a dog with no master. He got anxious when he wasn’t close to his master. But Adalberto Guzman had told Leszek to go, had told him what to do. Leszek had gotten on the plane and landed a few hours later in Munich.

  He hadn’t left Guzman’s side for ten years, apart from one week every third month. His life was made up of three-month shifts, work followed by a week off. During those weeks he usually booked himself into a hotel, stayed in his room, and drank himself into a stupor, day and night alike. When he wasn’t too drunk or sleeping he would watch television. He didn’t know any better. He just waited for the week to be over so he could get back to work again. Leszek never understood why Guzman insisted on making him take the time off.

  He had just concluded one such week. The first days back after his vacation he had been unfocused and shaky from the hangover, and had cured it with exercise and eating properly, and now he felt like he was on his way back up again.

  Leszek was sitting behind the wheel of a stolen Ford Focus in the fashionable town of Grünwald, outside Munich. Large villas in big, enclosed gardens, not many signs of life anywhere.

  Guzman had given Leszek some photographs of Christian Hanke, twenty-five years old, good-looking, short dark hair. Also in the enlarged black-and-white photographs was his father, Ralph Hanke. Leszek thought they looked nice: successful smiles, tailored suits, and neat haircuts.

  He had been watching the young man through his binoculars but hadn’t been able to build up a clear picture of him, except that he came home at around eight o’clock in the evening, parking his BMW on the road outside the villa. He had female company, a housekeeper, and the light in his bedroom was on until two o’clock in the morning. Then, at half past seven the following morning, he walked from the front door down to the iron gate in the wall, crossed the road to his car, and drove off into Munich. That was all Leszek had to go on, that was what he had seen during twenty-four hours of surveillance.

  The car radio was playing southern German Europop. Some guy was singing, through a broad smile, it sounded like, and
there were electronic strings in the background, a predictable melody. Leszek picked up words like “mountaintop,” “family ties,” and “edelweiss.” There was something sick about this country that he could never quite put his finger on.

  He sat there with his hands in his lap, breathing calmly. It was a beautiful morning, mist in the air. The sun’s rays were shining through the foliage, casting a yellowish glow over the scene. He thought it was beautiful, almost painfully beautiful.

  He looked down at his hands, they were dirty. Installing the bomb had been a messy job. He’d done it before, a long time ago during his years in the security service. It had been easier then, less time consuming, easier to get at compared to today’s modern, self-contained engines. He stretched and shut his eyes for a moment.

  When he opened them again he could just make out the shape of someone coming out of Christian’s house, behind the trees, down toward the road. Leszek tried to make out who it was. He grabbed the Swarovski binoculars from the passenger seat and raised them to his eyes. The person behind the trees was a woman, a fairly young woman. Leszek glanced at his watch: quarter to eight. The woman opened the iron gate in the wall and stepped out into the road. Leszek found the focus with his index finger. She was blond, maybe twenty years old, maybe twenty-five, with long hair, large, dark sunglasses, ripped designer jeans, and high-heeled boots, and she was walking toward the car, a handbag over her shoulder. She looked expensive. Leszek quickly trained the binoculars on the house. Where the hell was Christian? He looked back at the woman, who was crossing the road toward the BMW. Instead of getting in the passenger side she opened the driver’s door and slid in easily behind the wheel, putting her handbag on the passenger seat. Leszek turned the binoculars toward the house again, no sign of Christian Hanke anywhere.

  The seconds that followed ticked past slowly. Leszek felt an urge to blow his horn, open the door and wave at her, get her attention by doing something dramatic, something odd. But instead he just sat there, aware of how pointless it would be to try to change an already predetermined course of events. With his field of vision enlarged ten times through the lenses of the binoculars, with the smarmy German’s voice singing in the background, he watched as the beautiful fair-haired woman did that little thing you do when you start a car, one hand on the wheel, leaning forward slightly to turn the key.

  In the millisecond that the electricity traveled from the battery to the starter motor, an electrical wire captured it along the way and ignited a detonator, which in turn set off the explosives fastened beneath the car.

  The force of the blast threw the woman up against the roof and broke her neck as the car lifted almost two feet off the ground. And at that moment the container full of napalm that he had fixed inside the car ignited and transformed the twisted wreckage into a blazing inferno.

  Leszek watched through his binoculars as the woman caught fire. Sitting there completely still, burning inside the wreckage. How her beautiful hair disappeared, how her lovely fair skin disappeared … How her whole being slowly disappeared.

  Leszek made his way out of Grünwald, found a deserted spot in the forest where he could set fire to the stolen car. Then he made his way into Munich and called Guzman, leaving a short message to say that it hadn’t gone according to plan, that Guzman should stay alert and have friends at his side. He dumped the phone in a drain in the street, then meandered aimlessly around the city for a while to reassure himself that he wasn’t being followed.

  When he felt safe, he flagged down a taxi and went to the airport. A few hours later he was on his way back home to his master again.

  From the day he first arrived, Hector had asked Sophie questions, about her life, her childhood, her teenage years. About her family, what she liked, what she didn’t like. She found herself answering all his questions honestly. She liked being the focus of his attention and in spite of the flood of questions she had never felt that he was being intrusive. When he got too close to something she didn’t want to talk about, he stopped, as if he understood where her boundaries lay. But the more they got to know each other, the shier he became with her. Anything medical that was too intimate had to be dealt with by one of her colleagues. Which meant that Sophie didn’t have much reason to go into his room. She had to sneak in to see him, pretending to work.

  He asked if she was tired.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You look tired.”

  Sophie folded a towel. “You certainly know how to flatter a woman.”

  He smiled.

  “I don’t think you’re going to be here much longer,” she went on.

  He raised an eyebrow.

  “Well, I’m not supposed to say things like that, of course, that’s up to the doctors.… But I just did.”

  Sophie opened a window, letting the air in, then went over to him, gesturing with her hand that he should sit up, pulling out the pillow from behind his head and replacing it with a fresh one. She made her duties in his room look like routine, tidying up, airing, making sure his notes were in place before the doctor’s round. She could tell from the corner of her eye that he was watching her. She went over to his bedside table, was about to pick up the empty water jug when he suddenly caught hold of her hand. Her reaction should have been to pull it away and walk out. But instead she left it where it was. Her heart was pounding. They stayed like that, as if they were two shy teenagers touching each other for the first time, not even looking at each other. Then she pulled away and went over toward the door.

  “Was there anything you wanted?” she asked. Her voice was thick, as if she’d just woken up. Hector looked at her, then shook his head.

  She wanted to tell herself that he wasn’t her type, but who was? She’d liked so many different types over the years, and there hadn’t been many similarities among them. She persuaded herself that it wasn’t a physical attraction, he was just someone she liked being around. Not as a father figure, not as a lover, not as a husband, not as a friend, but somehow all of those mixed together.

  She spent the rest of the day working down in the ER. When she came back to the ward later that afternoon Hector and his belongings were gone from Room 11.

  Everything had gone completely to hell. The evening had deteriorated just as he had predicted. The Russians had started shooting after spending their minutes with the poor Paraguayan whores. They were wired, shooting the automatic weapons uncontrollably. Bullets flew in all directions. Jens had been forced to punch Vitaly. Dmitry and the other one were killing themselves laughing.

  The next morning they met up again in the hut and went through all the preparations one more time. Delivery date, logistics, and payment. The Russians didn’t seem bothered. Dmitry offered him some coke and asked if Jens would like to go to a cockfight with them. Jens declined and said good-bye to the Russians.

  He got a lift back to Ciudad del Este from one of the Paraguayans. The drive took two hours. They bounced along on poor roads. The seat had no cushion. The man driving was taciturn, and, as always in this country: the ever-present radio. Always poor reception, turned up too high, with an annoyingly shrill treble that in this instance howled from two speakers in the thin doors of the car. It was OK, Jens was used to it. He had time to go through his plans. It felt good, not perfect, but good—as was usually the case. He couldn’t remember the last time it had felt perfect.

  He wasn’t quite forty yet. Six-foot-two, blond, thickset with a weather-bitten appearance and a dark, low voice that was the result of premature puberty together with a vast number of cigarettes over the years. His way of moving was heavy rather than agile, and he seldom said no to anything, which was clear from the look in his eyes; a curiosity that shone through the creases of age that were starting to show.

  The automatic weapons the Russians had bought from him would be transported by truck from Ciudad del Este, east to the port of Paranaguá, in Brazil, where they would be loaded onto a ship and taken across the Atlantic, then unloaded in Rotterdam. From
there they would be driven to Warsaw, and Jens’s work would be done.

  The business with the guns had begun two months before. Risto had called from Moscow to say that he had been asked for MP7s, and something more powerful.

  “How many?”

  “Ten of each.”

  “That’s not much.”

  “No, but this is an ambitious group. They’ll be needing more help from you in the future. Try to look at it like that.”

  It was a small job, ought to be fairly easy to put together.

  “OK … I’ll have a look ’round and get back to you.”

  He contacted the Dealer. The Dealer was anonymous down to his very marrow, he had a website about model airplanes where you could contact him by typing a password on the site’s discussion forum. He was an expensive but reliable resource who thus far had never said no or failed to fulfill any of Jens’s requirements. The Dealer organized the deals with a seller whom Jens didn’t know. That way there were no leaks, and no one could rat on anyone else. Jens asked for MP7s and Steyr AUGs—a not-too-old-fashioned Austrian submachine gun. The Dealer had gotten back to him, saying yes to the Steyr AUGs and no to the MP7s, but said the seller could offer MP5s instead. Risto’s clients had been clear, they wanted MP7s. And as usual the matter had resolved itself, almost. A full set of the Austrian guns plus eight MP7s and two MP5s. Good enough, Jens thought.