The Andalucian Friend

by Alexander Soderberg

  “Hello?”

  No answer. There was no furniture apart from an old sofa in what was clearly meant to be the living room. Faded, striped wallpaper from a bygone age, little brown patches of damp on the ceiling and floor. He looked into the kitchen. A table, two chairs, a coffee machine, quiet as the grave. Jens turned around and glanced back at the front door, which he had closed behind him. Toward the bottom of the frame were two electrical contacts, the sort you see in shops, which set off a buzzer somewhere whenever the beam of light is broken. He inspected the amateurish setup, following the wire to where it was connected to a thin telephone cable that ran untidily along the top of the wall.

  With a sudden sense of urgency he rushed upstairs: two rooms and a bathroom. He checked the cupboards, keeping an eye out for hidden cubbyholes in the walls and floors. He ran back down and went through the same procedure in the kitchen, living room, and the back room facing the yard. Nothing. Jens considered getting out of there, realizing that he might have been lured into a trap. But which was worse—the Russians if they didn’t get their goods, or the German bastards who might be on their way right now? The answer was the Russians. He had to get his weapons back.

  The cellar door was hard to open, it had swollen with damp. He tugged and pulled at it, but it didn’t budge. Jens backed away, took aim, and kicked it. After another couple of kicks the door finally gave way.

  As he took the flight of steps in three strides he was hit by a strong sense of damp from the dark cellar. Jens felt along the wall, trying to find a light switch. As the seconds passed, he found no switch, stumbled over something, and made his way farther along the wall. A different smell hit him, a smell he recognized—the smell of something dead. He had noticed it at his place out in the country, when mice had found their way into the walls and died there. The same smell, but more pungent, stronger. He swallowed the urge to throw up, and began breathing into his elbow, still feeling along the wall with his other hand.

  In the far corner of the room he found a switch, the fluorescent lights flickered groggily into life, and Jens saw a body. He was in a garage with no cars in it, the room bathed in a thin, cold light. The dead body was lying on the boxes containing his weapons, in the middle of the floor, laid out across them on its back. Its face was swollen, pale-yellow, waxy. Jens stared at the body, frozen to the spot. He didn’t know what to do, and was trying to suppress the foreboding that was welling up inside him.

  He heard the front door open and close up above, and the footsteps in the empty room echoed down into the cellar. A pair of shoes appeared on the top step.

  “Come up,” Mikhail grunted.

  When Jens went up the stairs Mikhail grabbed him, checked him for weapons, found nothing, and pushed him away.

  On the old sofa sat a young man in a suit and a white shirt with the top button undone. By the window facing the street stood an older man with his back to Jens, more correctly dressed, more stiff.

  “I understand that you claim you’re nothing to do with Guzman?”

  Ralph Hanke turned around.

  “There’s a dead body lying on my boxes in the cellar,” Jens said.

  “Jürgen?”

  “I don’t give a damn what his name is. Would you mind removing him?”

  Ralph smiled. Jens noticed that the smile was mirthless, just a physical gesture in which the man turned the corners of his mouth up.

  “You see, we’ve been chasing Jürgen for quite some time. He took us for forty thousand euros, and thought no one would notice. What’s forty thousand worth today? Not even a decent car. But Jürgen couldn’t help himself.”

  Ralph turned to face the street again.

  “He caused a lot of other trouble for us.… We don’t kill people for forty thousand euros.… We’re not monsters.”

  “Could you please remove the dead body from my things, then I’ll leave. I had an agreement with Mikhail here,” Jens went on.

  “That still applies, in principle. I just want to talk to you before you go.”

  Jens looked at Christian, who had been glaring at him the whole time. Ralph turned around.

  “My son, Christian,” Ralph said.

  Jens shrugged to say that he wasn’t interested.

  Ralph got straight to the point.

  “I want to make the Guzmans an offer. I want them to come over to our side.… We’re taking care of their affairs from now on. They’re going to be employees, you could say. With reasonable perks.”

  Jens shrugged. “You’ve got the wrong man. I’ve got nothing to do with the Guzmans. I’m just here to pick up my things, nothing else.”

  Ralph took a deep breath and shook his head.

  “No, you’re going to pass on my proposal, then call us and tell us how they received it. You’re going to be the go-between. And as long as I’m in the room, any arrangements you’ve made with Mikhail are worthless. Sorry.”

  Ralph paused for effect.

  “Mikhail says he’s bumped into you several times. You’re the prefect man for the job. If I sent an intermediary, Guzman wouldn’t be interested. I want you to go back home with my question, you can take your goods with you. If you choose not to do as we ask, we’ll find you.” Ralph shrugged to suggest that Jens could probably guess the rest.

  Jens realized he had no choice. If Mikhail hadn’t been in the room he’d have taken them on, father and son, and it wouldn’t have been without its satisfaction.

  “What’s the question?”

  Ralph thought.

  “It’s not a question. Just say that we’d like to ask them in, they’ll understand what I mean by that.”

  “I’ll get back to you with the answer, then my part in this is over,” Jens said.

  “Who’s the woman?”

  The question came out of nowhere, and Jens tried his best to sound convincing.

  “The woman?”

  “Yes, the woman who was driving when you so courageously rescued Hector.”

  “Don’t know, one of Hector’s women, I suppose.”

  Ralph nodded. “Is that what he’s like?”

  “What?”

  “A man who likes a lot of women?”

  “I can’t answer that.”

  “What’s her name?”

  Jens shook his head. “Don’t know.”

  Ralph stared at Jens for a moment, trying to read his eyes.

  “Mikhail will stay here and help you with your things,” he said, then turned and walked toward the door. Christian got up from the sofa and followed him. They left the house, the door closed behind them, and everything went quiet.

  Mikhail pointed to the cellar stairs. Jens looked at the monster standing in front of him. He rubbed the tiredness from his eyes, sighed, and went down into the cellar. Mikhail followed him.

  They lifted the dead Jürgen off the boxes and carried him into what looked like an old laundry room, and put the body down on the cold floor. They went back out into the garage.

  “How’s Klaus?” Mikhail asked in a low voice.

  “Better than Jürgen …”

  Mikhail repeated his question.

  “What do you care?” Jens asked.

  “I care.”

  He stopped beside the boxes.

  “We drove him to the emergency room, he’ll be OK.”

  Mikhail went over and opened the garage door. The room filled with daylight. They each took hold of one end of the first of Jens’s boxes, picked it up, and carried it out to his car by the sidewalk.

  “He’s a good person, Klaus.”

  They put the box in the trunk.

  “What’s your definition of a good person?” Jens asked.

  Mikhail didn’t answer and they went back inside the garage and moved the second box. Jens closed the lid of the trunk.

  “Give me your number,” Mikhail said.

  Jens gave him his temporary cell number. Mikhail sent his own contact details. Jens’s phone buzzed.

  “Call this number when you’ve spo
ken to the Guzmans. Make sure you get this sorted out. This whole thing feels fucked-up,” Mikhail said, then went back into the house with his rolling walk without saying good-bye.

  Jens drove out of Munich, heading toward Poland. The most direct route was through the Czech Republic, but he wanted to avoid any unnecessary border crossings. He kept going, up through Germany, hoping to find a straightforward crossing somewhere. He found one by the German city of Ostritz and slid into Poland without any problem.

  He called Risto and told him that things had got pretty messed up, but that he was now on his way. He asked Risto to persuade the Russians not to make a big deal of the delay, said that he’d be prepared to take a small reduction in the fee, but that he wasn’t prepared to take any shit from them. He’d be in Warsaw in seven hours, and gave Risto the name of a hotel where he could be reached the following day. Risto said he’d see what he could do.

  It was dark out, it felt like this part of the Polish countryside had no electricity. Thick darkness everywhere. He didn’t meet any cars, saw no houses lit up in the distance. He had a fleeting sense that he was all alone in the world. Du-dunk, du-dunk. It sounded like a train as the tires hit the gaps in the concrete road surface. The noise was monotonous and hypnotic. His eyes never got used to the dark. The headlights only lit up a narrow corridor ahead of him and the road looked exactly the same the whole time, as gray and featureless as the darkness beyond. Du-dunk, du-dunk. In the end it turned into a lullaby. Jens started to nod off at the wheel and opened the window, and tried to stay awake by singing out loud. It didn’t work and he stopped singing, but thought he was still singing, although the song was just carrying on in his head. His head began to nod again. Du-dunk, du-dunk … then suddenly a different sound somewhere. A persistent sound. His cell!

  The ringtone saved him from driving off the road into a field. He was on his way into a ditch and had to twist the wheel to get back onto the road again, then sighed to get over the shock.

  “Hello?”

  “Did I wake you?”

  “Yes, you did. Thanks.”

  “It’s Sophie.”

  “I know.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Driving.”

  He closed the window and slowed down so he could hear better.

  “I think I need some help.”

  “What sort of help?” he replied.

  “Someone’s been in my house.”

  “Are you calling from home?”

  “No. I’m in one of the few remaining phone booths.”

  “Good.”

  Eons of silence.

  “Did you feel threatened?”

  “Yes … but not desperately.”

  “I’ll be home in a day or two, give me a call then. If anything happens before that, let me know.”

  “OK.”

  She stayed on the line, as if she didn’t want to hang up. He listened to the sound of her breathing.

  “I didn’t know who to call.”

  “Take care,” he said, and ended the call.

  Everything was starting to get a bit much. He found a packet of cigarettes in the door pocket, lit one with the lighter set into the dashboard, then opened the window again and blew the smoke out. He breathed in the rural Polish air, lightly spiced with the smell of brown coal from a nearby power station.

  Change of cars. Lars had switched the Volvo for a Saab. An old, dark-blue 9000 that he was driving out to Stocksund, with the recording equipment in the back.

  He parked, made sure he had decent reception, then switched to voice activation, locked the car, and walked to Stocksund Square. He caught a bus and got off at Danderyd Hospital, slid into the subway and got a train back to Central Station.

  He stood by the doors of the subway car, holding on to a bar in the ceiling. The bastards were trying to get rid of him, he was sure of that. Gunilla’s behavior supported that theory—the way she ignored him, kept him at arm’s length, giving him endless surveillance jobs, not discussing or commenting on his reports. Treating him like some unknown, fleeting acquaintance—he hated it. And now some retarded racist moron had turned up in their offices on Brahegatan. Gunilla had introduced him as the group’s new asset. Hasse Berglund: former rapid-response cop, former airport police officer, and overweight loser from what Lars could see. She had said that he would be helping out, but with what, exactly? Was he going to take Lars’s place? What had Gunilla and Anders been talking about in Humlegården? What was going on? The more he thought about it, the more confused he got. Fuck, his brain wasn’t working like it should. He closed his eyes and tried to concentrate, creating little squares in his head, like little boxes where he could put various occurrences that belonged together. He ended up with three boxes, one for Gunilla, one for the surveillance, and one for Sophie. So far, so good. He put various events in the different squares, but then he began to worry, switching events between the boxes. He got angry when he lost his concentration, realized he was standing there muttering, and opened his eyes.

  A dad with a stroller was looking at him with concern, and quickly looked away. Lars closed his eyes again and tried to find his way back to the boxes, but was distracted when someone nearby blew their nose. A voice said “Technical College” over the loudspeaker, then added something about changing there for trains to Roslagen. It was hopeless, and Lars gave up as the squares disintegrated in his head.

  The doors opened and a drunk entered the car, and started to shout at a young woman who was sitting reading a book at the far end of the car. Six months ago Lars would have gone over, shown his police badge, and forced the man off the train. Now he didn’t care, he couldn’t give a damn, and just looked down at the floor as the drunk roared and the woman suffered.

  He was sitting on the floor in his office, sketching on a sheet of paper, writing down everything that had happened, asking himself questions: Gunilla, Sophie, what happened on the road at Haga. What did Gunilla know that he didn’t? Lars wrote and scribbled on the sheet: names, arrows, question marks. And Anders … What was Anders Ask doing there with Gunilla?

  More questions, no more answers. He wrote, he thought, he wrote some more, the page got messy, too much writing, too many question marks.

  Lars got up from the floor and looked at the two pictures on the wall: a monkey in a Hawaiian shirt sitting on a toilet with a roll of toilet paper in its mouth. He’d had it in his room when he was little, it had always moved with him. Beside it was an enlarged photograph of Ingo Johansson in shorts and boxing gloves, leaning forward slightly, ready to go on the attack. Lars had been given that by his dad for his eighth birthday. Ingo’s not your average fucker, you need to remember that, kid. Lennart used to drink four Rob Roys before dinner, and liked play-boxing far too hard, and used to say the Jews ran the world and that Olof Palme was a communist, stuff like that.

  Lars took the monkey and Ingo off the wall and put them on the floor, then grabbed a thick marker from the desk. He stood in front of the wall and began to transfer what he had just written on the sheet of paper onto the wall. He wrote, drew, created, then backed away and admired his work, thinking hard.… There was something missing.

  Lars printed a picture of Sophie from the computer, stuck it in the middle of everything, then backed away and took another look. She stared at him and he stared back. Something that he hadn’t realized began to take shape. Lars scratched his head hard with his nails, and his heart beat fast within him. He printed out more pictures from the computer, pictures of everyone involved in the case, and stuck them up on the wall, like a halo around her. He wrote their names, what they had done, what they hadn’t done.… He drew red lines between all the faces in an attempt to find what connected them.

  The lines all led to Sophie.

  Hector had called. His voice sounded almost submissive, as if he were being careful, anxious about scaring her or making her uncomfortable. He had asked for her help. She realized it was just an excuse to meet up.

  Hector was lying on
the sofa in the living room of his apartment in Gamla stan. Sophie was sitting by his plastered leg examining the crack at the top of the cast. She tugged carefully at it.

  “I can’t say. You ought to go back and get a doctor to look at it.”

  “Take it off,” he said.

  “You’ve got at least another week left.”

  “I’m not in any pain, I can move my leg inside the cast, so it’s probably too late now anyway, isn’t it?”

  “How long has it been like this?”

  “Since that night.”

  That night … No one wanted to talk about that evening, least of all her.

  “Are you sure?” she asked.

  “About what?”

  “About taking the cast off. It might be too early, you could end up with complications.”

  He nodded. “Take it off.”

  “Pliers, scissors?”

  “In the kitchen, second drawer down, pliers in the toolbox under the sink.”

  She got up and went into the kitchen, and started going through the drawers. She found a pair of scissors, then opened the cupboard under the sink. She pulled out the toolbox, opened it, and found what she was looking for: a pair of pliers with straight blades. But they were very small, it was going to take a while.

  She went back out into the living room. He was lying on the sofa watching her. Sophie sat down beside his leg again and started to cut the cast from the top, bending it back as she went. She could feel him looking at her.

  “You could have done this yourself,” she said.

  She went on clipping.

  “You weren’t supposed to get involved in this,” he said.

  “Aron made that very clear to me,” she said curtly.

  “He’s the one worrying, not me.”

  She looked at Hector. “And I’m supposed to believe that?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re not worried?”