The Andalucian Friend

by Alexander Soderberg

  Lars got out some bread, butter, and fillings for himself, sat down at the kitchen table, and ate a sandwich. He smiled toward his son as he came downstairs, then got up and kissed Sophie when she came down a little later, showing her that he had prepared breakfast, and she smiled and kissed him again. He said something witty, and Sophie and their son laughed.

  Lars left the house, stopping at the gate to wave imaginatively to his little family that didn’t exist, then went back through the dark of night to his car.

  Back home in the apartment he topped up with pills and slept like a child on the disgusting old mattress.

  His knees were rammed against the seat in front. Mikhail thought the airplane seat was far too small. Beside him sat Klaus. Klaus was forty or so, a German bodybuilder of the more sinewy variety. Klaus had thinning hair and streamlined muscles everywhere, even his face, which was adorned with a big porn-star’s mustache. He was a tough guy who knew a bit about a lot of things, but had no specific talent—an all-rounder who rarely turned down a job. They’d worked together before on a couple of home visits that Ralph had ordered. Klaus was good, unburdened by too much conscience.

  They had taken off from Munich, on their way to Stockholm. The flight attendant was serving coffee, a child was crying toward the back of the plane, old men were solving Sudoku, and middle-aged women were working on presentations on their laptops. Klaus had earphones in, leaking out the sound of the Bee Gees. Klaus was nodding his head in time and patting his right hand on his trouser leg.

  Mikhail thought through what was going to happen. He didn’t have a clear plan, and was working through various strategies in his head, weighing them against one another. In the end he kept coming back to the same conclusion—hitting back hard, in a very focused way. Roland had been in Stockholm two days before, he had come back with a grin on his face. We’ve got a guy now, he had said. He can arrange for you to see Hector.…

  There was a ringing sound and the seat belt sign lit up. A female voice came out of the loudspeakers in some Nordic language that he couldn’t understand. The plane began to descend for landing. There was a lot of turbulence and Klaus clasped the armrest and raised his feet in reflex each time the cabin shuddered.

  “I hate this,” Klaus said. “I really hate this.”

  They approached the runway through strong crosswinds. Klaus was pale. The plane lurched to the left, then back to the right again. Klaus grabbed Mikhail’s arm.

  “Scheisse …”

  The plane hit the ground, the engines reversed. Klaus breathed out.

  They took a rental car to Stockholm and booked into a hotel near Hötorget, then headed out into the city. Dusk was falling as they took a bite to eat at an outdoor terrace; it was warm, warmer than Munich.

  “As far as I know, he’s got three men, so that’s what we’ll have to assume. Two of them are pros: Hector’s bodyguard and the Polack. I don’t know anything about the third one.”

  Klaus listened as he ate his steak tartare, chewing quickly. He was holding his knife and fork strangely as he cut the meat.

  “He’s got an office here in the city but he doesn’t go there much. The last time I was here watching him he spent a lot of time in that restaurant, so that’s where we’ll strike. We’ve got a contact, he’s going to arrange it.”

  “Sounds good to me,” Klaus said without any emotion, then waved to the waiter and pointed at his empty glass.

  They left the restaurant and got back in their rental car, then tapped Sandsborgsvägen, Enskede, into the GPS.

  “Perform a U-turn now,” the GPS voice said in German, and Klaus did as it said.

  They struggled through the Stockholm traffic, made their way to the tunnel under Södermalm, sticking to the left-hand lane as they crossed the Johanneshov Bridge.

  “Like a big golf ball,” Klaus said as they passed the Globe.

  They stopped the car outside an unremarkable villa. They rang the doorbell, and it was opened by a balding, middle-aged man with a beer belly, wearing an unfashionable shirt and a tie that was too short. As if he’d just gotten home from work—unfashionable work.

  “Wilkommen … meine herren.”

  The man laughed at his attempt to speak German.

  They followed him down into the basement and the man opened a metal door and indicated for them to go in. Mikhail stepped inside and saw a mass of weapons: revolvers and automatic pistols along one wall, shotguns and high-velocity rifles along the other.

  The man smiled excitedly and talked like a presenter on a shopping channel about his darlings—a gun freak, Mikhail thought. He interrupted the man’s sales pitch and pointed at the wall.

  “Give me a Sig and two telescopic batons.”

  The idiot got the gun down and gave Mikhail a small box of ammunition, then started babbling about how the ammunition was Swiss, how much the bullets weighed, what they were particularly good for. He pulled a box from a shelf and took out two batons. Mikhail passed the gun to Klaus and handed the man a bundle of euros.

  They left the basement and house without saying good-bye and got back in the car. Klaus checked a piece of paper, then keyed an address into the GPS. Mikhail tapped the number Roland Gentz had given him into his cell and pressed the green button. A man answered.

  “Carlos? I was told to call you, do as you were instructed, we’ll be there in”—Mikhail leaned over and checked the GPS—“in twenty minutes.”

  Mikhail ended the call.

  “Perform a U-turn now,” the digital woman said once more.

  “Shut up,” Klaus said.

  The antiques shops on Roslagsgatan, the tourist traps in Gamla stan and along Drottninggatan, and all the little shops on Södermalm and Kungsholmen—anything that might be connected to ethnic art, antiques, or just New Age nonsense. Jens had looked everywhere for Thierry. That was pretty much all he had to go on, the guy’s interest in a stone statue from South America.… The chances of bumping into Aron or Leszek in the city were fairly slim, but he had been traipsing about for several days now.

  Less well-known were the shops in Västmannagatan. Jens had bought a glass globe there a long time ago. The shops lining the street were more focused on curiosities and ’50s design. Jens started from Norra Bantorget and worked his way up toward Odenplan. His tiredness was exacerbated by a serious dose of frustration. However, he had no choice but to continue. In and out of the shops, asking pretty much the same question about whether they dealt in South American cultural artifacts. And whether they knew a man who went by the name of Thierry. The same blank faces each time.

  After five blocks he passed the shop where he had bought the globe twenty years before. The shop looked just the same, even if the prices in the window were different. Two doors farther on he came to a little shop that he wouldn’t have noticed if he hadn’t been looking. The window was small and dark, with just a few select items. Boldly patterned blankets, masks, shields, and spears. He stepped inside. A bell attached to the door rang.

  The shop was stuffed to overflowing with artifacts from every corner of the world, it was like stepping into several different periods from several different places at the same time. Jens found he couldn’t stop looking. There was so much to take in. Old works of art, textiles, furniture, jewelry, statues. It was all beautiful, enticing, and different—imposing, in an inexplicable way. In a glass cabinet in one corner he saw a number of small stone statues, like miniature versions of what he had seen in Thierry’s hand on board the ship.

  He heard steps behind him and turned around. The woman who emerged from the curtain to the back room was beautiful. Her hair was big and round, and she was upright without being tall. He guessed she was originally from the West Indies.

  “Hello,” he said.

  She responded with a smile.

  “Thierry …,” Jens said, as if he had suddenly unconsciously realized that he was in the right place.

  She hesitated, then turned and went back behind the curtain again.

 
Jens could feel his heartbeat quicken. It took a few seconds for the man who emerged to recognize Jens.

  “You?”

  Thierry had called Aron and given him a brief explanation of the situation, then passed the receiver to Jens.

  Aron had told him to go back out into the street, carry on a bit farther, and go into a restaurant.

  Thierry opened the door for him, gesturing along the street.

  “That way, he’s waiting for you.”

  Jens began walking toward the restaurant. It all felt ridiculous. What were the odds against this? He couldn’t even begin to work it out.

  TRASTEN, it said on a small sign. Jens stepped in and headed toward the bar, counting a dozen or so people at various tables. He asked for a glass of tonic, then looked around the room as he drank.

  After a few minutes Aron came out through the swinging doors to the kitchen, saw Jens, and waved him over.

  Jens followed Aron through the kitchen, passed through a little corridor, and was shown inside an office.

  The office was very small. A desk with a computer on it, messy, half-full ashtrays, a pile of newspapers, an old stolen road sign leaning against the wall—NO WAITING. Dirty coffee cups and a year planner that was several years out of date. A room that was obviously used by more than one person, and most of them probably men. Men who wanted this to be a free zone, a place where no one needed to take any responsibility.

  “Sit down, if you can find a chair.”

  Jens found one.

  “You work here?” he asked as he sat down.

  Aron shook his head. “No.”

  Aron sat down behind the desk.

  “So what’s on your mind?” he asked breezily, smiling at his choice of words.

  Jens composed himself quickly.

  “After we separated I drove up through Jutland and stopped at my grandmother’s for the night. I woke up with a Glock in my mouth and the big Russian sitting on the edge of the bed.”

  Aron raised one eyebrow.

  “He knocked me unconscious and took my boxes.”

  “The boxes containing your weapons?”

  Jens nodded.

  “Who were they supposed to be going to?”

  “A customer.”

  “But not here in Sweden?”

  Jens shook his head. Aron thought for a moment.

  “Did he know there were weapons in the boxes?”

  “No, I don’t think so. He must have attached a transmitter to one of the boxes while they were on the ship. It just happened to be one of mine, not yours.”

  Aron pondered for a moment, then looked up.

  “So what can I do to help you?”

  “I have to get my goods back, I need to know what you know about him … where he is, how I can get hold of him.”

  The inn wasn’t an inn. It was a pizzeria with a sign that read BEER AND WINE in the window. Dark wood furniture and the cheapest possible paper napkins, coarse and thin.

  He ate half a pizza, drank four beers and six shots of something stronger. He had felt the need to get drunk. Lars let his thoughts wander, something he’d recently started to enjoy. Previously he had felt guilty if he didn’t use his thoughts for something profitable, something useful. Now he allowed himself just to let them go without giving them any particular direction, and simply followed them wherever they went. It was wonderful. New feelings rose up and disappeared. He kept himself topped up on pills and felt as relaxed as a sleeping baby. Maybe this was how everyone wanted to feel, maybe this was the state that everyone was looking for once they’d spent a few years in the grown-up world? He smiled to himself, catching the cook’s eye behind the counter. The man seemed worried, and looked away. Lars guessed that he could see his own nirvana-like calm and was upset because he himself wasn’t sharing it. Everyone was jealous of him, that had always been the case.

  Lars scratched his cheek hard, he had a small pimple that didn’t seem to want to go away.

  His face was hot and he had narrow tunnel vision when he headed up toward Sophie’s house just after nine o’clock. He had eight different places where he could sit and listen to what was going on inside the house, and he alternated between them to avoid attracting too much attention, all of them within a short distance of the house. He parked at number four, unless it was number three? He switched the engine off, pulled on his headphones, and listened. It was silent inside the house. He tried to find Sophie in the soundscape—was she just sitting there? He popped a couple more pills, and the world became more porridgey.

  After a while he heard steps in the kitchen heading toward the hall, then the front door opened and closed. He switched to the kitchen microphone, listening to hear if she had gone to open the door for someone or had gone out herself. No sounds in the kitchen, silence in the hall. He waited. She had left the house.

  Lars started the car and drove up toward the villa and met her Land Cruiser coming down the hill toward him. He turned the Volvo around at the top.

  Being drunk made it harder to follow her; he struggled to stay not too close, but not so far back that he lost her. At least the evening traffic was helpful, there weren’t many cars heading into the city along Roslagsvägen. He kept to the middle lane, squinting and using the lines on the road to steer by.

  He followed her in to Vasastan, where she stopped outside the Trasten restaurant. Lars found a parking spot farther down and watched in his rearview mirror as Hector walked up to meet her on the sidewalk, then he and Sophie kissed each other on the cheek before going inside the restaurant.

  Jens didn’t recognize the man who came into the room where he and Aron were sitting talking.

  “Is Carlos here?”

  Aron shook his head.

  “He called me, told me to come down.”

  Aron shook his head again. “No, I haven’t seen him.”

  The man seemed to think about this for a moment, then dropped it when he saw Jens sitting in the room. He held out his hand.

  “Hector Guzman.”

  Jens took his hand. Hector was a large man, with his leg in a cast, smartly dressed, he looked friendly, and there was a confidence to him—the dog that ate first, not only here, but probably everywhere.

  “Jens is the man I was telling you about, on the boat,” Aron said. “He has a problem that happens to be ours as well.”

  “That’s good, he can have our share too,” Hector smiled. “What sort of problem, exactly?”

  Jens told him the story, from when they loaded up in Paraguay to Mikhail’s visit to his grandmother’s house in Jutland. In the middle of it Hector sat himself down on a chair, looking at Aron, who occasionally elaborated on some detail. Hector thought for a while when Jens had finished.

  “That’s some fucking story.”

  Jens waited.

  Hector thought some more. “What did your poor grandmother say?”

  Jens hadn’t been expecting that question.

  “She’s fine.”

  A smell of cooking from the kitchen seeped into the office where they were sitting.

  “If we help you to get your goods back, you can choose to either pay cash for our services or repay the favor in kind in the future.”

  “And if you don’t succeed?”

  “We always succeed,” Hector said.

  “OK. What do we do?” Jens said.

  Aron answered. “We don’t do anything yet. We’ll have to get in touch with them. It’s in our interests that they understand that the weapons aren’t ours.”

  Hector looked at Jens. “We’re dealing with very volatile people here, but you already know that.”

  Hector fell into deep thought, then turned to Aron.

  “You’re sure Carlos isn’t here?”

  Aron nodded.

  “OK, Jens,” Hector said, slapping his hands on his knees, “it was good meeting you. Now I’m going out to have dinner with a lady I rather like. She’s been waiting out in the restaurant for long enough.” He gestured with his thumb, then s
tood up and turned to Jens. “Do you have anyone like that?”

  “No, I’m afraid not.”

  “A shame,” he said, and walked toward the door.

  Jens watched him go. Just as Hector was about to open the door it flew open in his face. He staggered back. Mikhail and another man burst in. Jens had time to see the smaller of the pair hit Hector over the head with a telescopic baton as he was knocked to the floor by a hard blow to the throat. Mikhail flew straight at Aron. It was quick, practiced. Jens leaped instinctively at the smaller man. Head-butted him hard and rained blows down on him, and managed to get him on the floor. But Mikhail had come up behind him once Aron had been dealt with. A hard kick against the side of Jens’s head got him off balance. He managed to turn around, started to get up and throw out a fist, but the blows to his head from Mikhail’s baton were quick and hard. Jens tried to defend himself. He blacked out.

  He could hear muffled sounds, someone was shaking him, saying something he couldn’t make any sense of. The sounds were woven together in some indeterminate world where he was swept in and out of consciousness and dream.

  Jens opened his eyes. His headache was monumental, with a hint of migraine cutting through everything; the world was sharp and blinding, and he closed his eyes again. Someone was shaking him, harder this time—he felt like protesting, telling whoever it was to leave him alone, but the shaking was relentless. He opened his eyes again and in the harsh light he saw something that made him realize he was dreaming: Sophie Lantz was there, shouting at him. He was happy to see her in his dream, he’d forgotten how pretty she was. She was older now, had little wrinkles around her eyes, but she was still attractive. He smiled at her and rolled over to carry on sleeping. He discovered that he was lying on the floor of the office behind the restaurant, and realized that he had brought part of the real world into his dream. His memory returned, Mikhail had come into the room.…

  Jens moved his legs, checking them out, then his hands, opening and closing his eyes; he wanted to get out of this bizarre dream.