The Andalucian Friend

by Alexander Soderberg

  “So Sophie and Hector arrived at the restaurant, they went in, two men followed them. How long did you say it was before Sophie came out?”

  “About half an hour.”

  “About?”

  “I have the exact times written down, but not on me.”

  Gunilla thought for a moment.

  “And Lars followed her?”

  Anders nodded.

  Gunilla pulled out her cell and dialed a number.

  “Lars, am I interrupting anything? Can you come to Humlegården at once? Thanks very much,” she said, and ended the call.

  Anders smiled at the friendly tone that left Lars no room to respond or object. She noticed.

  “He’s coming,” she said.

  “I know.”

  Then they just sat there, as if they were two robots on standby mode, completely still, staring out across the park. Anders was the one who moved first. He put his hand in his jacket pocket, pulled out a crumpled bag of candy, and held it out to her. She came to life as well, possibly because of the rustling sound, took two pieces of licorice without thanking him, and chewed on them, deep in thought. One particular thought wouldn’t go away. She drifted back to the present, took out her phone again, and looked up Eva Castroneves’s number. She put the phone to her ear.

  “Eva, can you run a date check?”

  Gunilla waited.

  “Last Saturday, the fifth, I think it was.”

  Gunilla glanced at Anders, who nodded in agreement.

  “Run the whole day, but pay particular attention to the evening and early Sunday morning. Main focus on Vasastan, but the surrounding areas as well. Anything at all could be of interest. Thanks.”

  Gunilla ended the call. Anders was looking at her, and Gunilla shrugged.

  “Where else can I start?”

  He didn’t answer.

  Lars was approaching along the gravel path from Stureplan. She looked at him. His walk was stiff, as if he had a bad back. Which he probably did, people who felt guilty almost always transferred it to the base of the spine unconsciously.

  He walked up to them, there was something hesitant and antagonistic about him.

  “Hello?”

  Gunilla looked at him.

  “Have you cut your hair?”

  Lars ran a hand through his hair without thinking.

  “A bit,” he muttered.

  “Thanks for coming so quickly.”

  Lars waited, put one hand in his jeans pocket.

  “If I remember rightly, you wrote in your report for Saturday evening that Sophie drove home after her visit to the Trasten restaurant. Anders here says he saw you outside the restaurant, and that you followed Sophie when she left the restaurant?”

  “That’s right. She left her house at about eleven o’clock and drove to the restaurant. I seem to recall that she left about midnight. I followed her to Norrtull, then I let her go and went home. I presumed she was driving home.”

  Gunilla and Anders were looking at him, seemed to be searching for any small signs of lying. Lars scratched his neck.

  “Has anything happened?” he wondered.

  “I don’t know, Anders saw you,” Gunilla said.

  Lars looked at Anders.

  “Oh?”

  “And he saw two men go into the restaurant.”

  Lars was showing signs of impatience, irritation.

  “Yes? And?”

  “Did you see them?”

  Lars shook his head.

  “No. Well, maybe, people were coming and going, it’s a restaurant.”

  Lars dug out a cough drop and put it in his mouth, looking at Gunilla. “What is this? An interrogation?”

  Gunilla didn’t answer. Anders was looking at him intently the whole time.

  “The men never came out. Hector never came out. There’s an exit from the back. When you followed Sophie, when she left the restaurant, did she stop anywhere?”

  The cough drop gave him an excuse to swallow. He did, then shook his head.

  “No.”

  Lars had been insanely wired. He had practically no recollection of that evening. Just a hazy picture of losing her near Haga, then a total blank. God alone knew what had happened or how he had gotten home, and he couldn’t exactly ask Him; they weren’t on good terms.

  It was always a matter of persuading yourself that the lie was true, then you weren’t lying, then you didn’t betray any signs of uncertainty.

  “She drove straight home, and I broke off surveillance when she turned off the highway.”

  “Which route did she take?”

  He made an effort not to show any signs of uncertainty in his posture, visualizing the lie.

  “From Odenplan she turned left onto Sveavägen, even though that’s not allowed. Then all the way along Sveavägen to the roundabout, then north on the E4.”

  “Why not Roslagstull and Roslagsvägen? That’s closer for her.”

  Lars shrugged.

  “Same difference, really. She must have turned off at Bergshamra and got to the Stocksund Bridge that way. I don’t know.”

  “Why didn’t you follow her all the way home?”

  Lars sucked the cough drop, and it made a sound as it hit his teeth.

  “It was late, not much traffic. I had to be careful.”

  Gunilla was looking at him, Anders likewise.

  “Thank you, Lars, thanks for taking the time to come down here.”

  Lars looked at the pair of them.

  “And?”

  The look on Gunilla’s face said that she didn’t understand what he meant.

  “What else? What’s happened?” Lars asked.

  “Oh, nothing’s happened. I just couldn’t quite get the evening to make sense.”

  “What’s he doing here?”

  Lars directed the question to Gunilla without so much as looking at Anders.

  “I don’t need tailing, Gunilla,” he said in a low voice.

  The anger in his voice surprised her.

  “No, Lars, and that’s not what we’re doing. Anders is helping us to identify the people around Hector, and you just happened to be in the same place at the same time. When I couldn’t get the evening to make sense I asked to speak to you. But you don’t seem to have anything to add that wasn’t in your report, so everything’s as it should be. Isn’t it?”

  Lars didn’t answer, but the darkness surrounding him eased a little.

  “Thank you, Lars.… Continue your surveillance.”

  He turned on his heel and walked back the way he had come. He only just managed to keep everything under control, inside he was shaking.

  Gunilla and Anders sat in silence until Lars had disappeared.

  “What do you think?” she asked.

  Anders thought.

  “I don’t know, I honestly don’t know. He doesn’t seem to be lying.”

  “But?”

  Anders glared out across the park.

  “He’s insecure by nature. Today he seemed too certain, almost as if he was trying to find a way of hiding a lie of some sort.”

  Gunilla stood up.

  “Come with me back to the station, stay close for a while.”

  Gunilla was sitting in front of Eva Castroneves’s desk. Eva gathered her papers together and read through in silence until she found the right section.

  “Saturday. Nothing of note in Vasastan apart from a few drunk and disorderlies, a couple of fights and a robbery from the 7-Eleven on Sveavägen … an overdose in Guldhuset in Vasaparken, stolen cars, vandalism. An ordinary Saturday. The only thing I found that stuck out was an unidentified man with gunshot wounds who was dropped off at Karolinska at about one o’clock in the morning.”

  “Who is he?”

  Eva turned to her computer and began tapping at the keyboard. She read from the screen.

  “No info about his name. The hospital staff told the police that he spoke German when he was feverish. Nothing else in the file so far, he’s probably still unconscious.�
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  “Dropped off, you said?”

  Eva nodded. “Yes, by a private car that drove off.”

  A short while later Gunilla and Anders were standing looking at Klaus Köhler’s unconscious body under a white hospital sheet.

  “I don’t know.… Could have been one of them, the smaller one.”

  Gunilla waited for more. Anders took his time, looking at Klaus from different angles. Gunilla started to get impatient.

  “Anders?”

  He shot her an irritated glance, as if her talking was interrupting his concentration.

  “I don’t know, can we lift him up?”

  Tubes, drips, and wires led from the man to a stand beside the bed. Gunilla leaned over and looked under the bed.

  “I think the top end will go up.”

  Anders went over and found the pedal under the bed. He put his foot on it, the hydraulics started to work, and, against his will, the bed started to sink. The needles from the drips and other equipment that were fastened under the skin of Klaus’s hand were caught under his arm and popped out when the bed touched bottom. A machine started to beep.

  “Shit.”

  Anders grabbed the needle and drove it back into Klaus’s hand and the beeping increased. Eventually he found the right pedal under the bed. Klaus Köhler’s upper body rose majestically toward them. The more upright he got, the more noise the machine made. The curve on one screen was lurching up and down. Anders looked down at the floor in an attempt to summon up an image from memory. He looked up again, then repeated the process several times. Then he left the room. Gunilla followed him, the apparatus beeping insistently as the door closed behind them.

  “Well?” Gunilla asked.

  A nurse was running down the corridor toward them.

  “Maybe … probably. Somewhere between the two, leaning toward probably. Seventy percent, I’d say.”

  She was sitting on the edge of a concrete flowerbed outside the hospital, phone to her ear, asking Sophie friendly questions, and getting friendly answers back.

  “But weren’t you planning to have dinner?”

  “It didn’t work out. Hector had a last-minute meeting, so I went home.”

  Anders was standing a short distance away. He was killing time by trying to hit an ashtray with small stones, making an annoying ringing sound.

  “Has anything happened?”

  “There are just a few details that are a bit unclear.”

  Sophie was silent at the other end.

  “Do you know who he was meeting?” Gunilla went on.

  “No, no idea.”

  Anders Ask hit the ashtray several times. Clang, clang, clang.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes. What is it, Gunilla?”

  She sat down with the phone in her hand, staring in front of her at the wax cloth on the coffee table in the staff room. The conversation with Gunilla was echoing in her head. She tried to remember what she had said, how the conversation had developed. She tried to remember her tone of voice … her style. Had she given anything away? The thoughts were flying around. The phone in her hand rang again, ringtone and vibration at the same time. In her confusion she forgot to check the screen.

  “Hello?”

  His voice was clipped. He said he wanted to meet her, which surprised her. She asked where Hector was.

  “That doesn’t matter,” he said.

  She felt suddenly uneasy. He told her to wait outside the hospital when she’d finished for the day, and that he’d pick her up.

  “I can’t,” she replied.

  “Yes, you can,” Aron said, and ended the call.

  He stayed behind the wheel, didn’t meet her gaze as she opened the door and got into the passenger seat.

  Aron pulled away from the traffic circle and drove out onto the highway. But instead of turning toward Stockholm he drove down the other exit ramp, into the lane leading to Norrtälje.

  “Where are we going?” she asked.

  He didn’t answer, so she asked again.

  “We’re going to have a talk.… Stop asking questions.”

  He let the car carry them along the highway. It felt never-ending.

  “What is it, Aron?” she whispered.

  Aron didn’t answer, didn’t seem to see or hear her. Fear was creeping up on her.

  “Can’t you tell me where we’re going?” she pleaded.

  He must have been able to hear how anxious she sounded, perhaps that was exactly what he wanted.

  After a while he turned off the highway, sticking to the right-hand lane. A road sign flashed past and she managed to read Sjöflygvägen. He carried on toward the water, found a secluded spot, and switched off the engine. The silence that followed was worse than she could ever have imagined, so dense and almost evil. He was staring straight ahead through the windshield.

  “You’ll soon start asking yourself questions about that evening. Those questions won’t have any obvious answers. And when you don’t find any answers, you’re going to want to share your questions with someone else.”

  She didn’t answer.

  “Don’t do that,” he said in a low voice.

  Sophie looked down at her lap, then out through the window. The sun was shining as usual, and the water was glittering in the distance.

  “Does Hector know about this?” she asked quietly.

  “That doesn’t matter,” he said.

  She could feel her heart pounding in her chest as the air inside the car seemed to get thinner.

  “Are you threatening me, Aron?”

  Now he turned toward her and looked at her. The fear she had felt suddenly took physical form in her tear ducts. Tears began trickling down her cheeks, fat and heavy. She cleared her throat, wiping away the tears on her sleeve.

  “Am I supposed to take this seriously?”

  She didn’t know why she asked that question, maybe because she wanted to see if there was an ounce of humanity in him.

  “Yes,” he said in a measured tone.

  She realized that her arms were trembling, just a little, almost imperceptibly, but the trembling was there. Her arms ached. A different pain rose in her neck and she fought against it, trying to swallow, all her anxiety seemed to have gathered in her throat.… She wanted to swallow, her entire body wanted her to. Sophie turned away from Aron and gulped.

  “Can we go back?”

  “If you say you understand what I’ve told you.”

  Sophie stared out through the car window.

  “I understand,” she said in a hollow voice.

  Aron leaned forward, turned the key, the car started.

  12

  Hasse Berglund was standing in line at a hamburger restaurant. They were running a Mexican theme. The idiots behind the counter had little plastic sombreros on their heads. He ordered an El Jefe—a triple burger with extra everything, including two helpings of fries. Hasse sat down, the feeding frenzy could begin. He took big mouthfuls, breathing through his nose.

  A gang of immigrants was sitting a few tables away. Black hair, pale, with stupid little mustaches and black tracksuits. They were noisy, raging with hormones, sinewy, knew no bounds. Two of them started wrestling in their seats. They were yelling, far too loudly, far too intensely, spilling ice and cola on the floor.

  Hasse looked at them, unable to understand how they could be so pale when they came from some Arab country. After all, it was sunny there.

  He grimaced when it got too noisy. A milkshake got knocked over and spilled across the table. One of them started shouting when the liquid splashed his tracksuit. Another one started swearing crudely, a third started throwing ice cubes from his drink at his friends.

  Hasse went on chewing his mouthful and watched the youths. They kept on wrestling. Roughly, hard, thoughtlessly … It turned violent, one of them was getting angry. He started shouting in a language Hasse didn’t recognize. Then the whole gang joined in, an infernal choir of breaking voices. Hasse closed his eyes.

 
Eighteen months earlier Hasse Berglund and his colleagues in the rapid-response unit of the Stockholm Police Department had set about a young Lebanese man in Norra Bantorget. His colleagues knew when to stop, but Hasse didn’t. His colleagues had pulled him off. Hasse had calmed down, demonstrated that he was OK … that he was thinking again. His colleagues eased their grip, Hasse pulled loose, and got in that last, satisfying kick. The boy lay unconscious for three days. The doctors found broken ribs, internal bleeding, a dislocated jaw, and a broken collarbone. During the trial Hasse’s colleagues testified to his innocence. Two magistrates found no reason for their sleep to be troubled, and the prosecutor was friends with everyone in the room except the boy. A bearded doctor declared that it “wasn’t impossible” that the boy had caused his injuries himself, and the boy’s lawyer, who was in a hurry to get to another court case, asked stupid and ill-considered questions. Hasse walked free, and the boy was left with lifelong problems. But Hasse’s boss had had enough, and offered him a choice: leave the city force for the airport, or leave the city force for whatever-the-fuck-you-like.

  Hasse was sent into exile to Arlanda Airport, where he had been stuck for an eternity, trying to pick up the illegal immigrants that so disgusted him.

  Then out of the blue he got a phone call. A woman from the National Crime Division, a Gunilla Strandberg, saying she wanted him to meet two of her colleagues. Hasse didn’t really understand. But anything was better than the airport.

  The youths went on yelling, Hasse finished his mouthful, swallowed, ran his tongue over his teeth, pulled out his police ID, and put it on the table. He took a few deep breaths, then picked up one of the cartons of fries and threw it hard at the young men. It hit one of the wrestlers on the cheek, and fries flew out and hit a couple of the others. They lost their flow and silently stared at Hasse, who took a fresh bite, at the very limits of what his jaw could handle.

  One of the young men stood up with a jerk and thumped his chest. He asked something that Hasse couldn’t be bothered to listen to. He was so sick of that immigrant Swedish. The young man was on his way over to him. Hasse Berglund shoveled more food into his mouth, chewed, held up his police badge, opened his jacket with the same hand to show the pistol in its shoulder holster, then gestured with his chin.