The Other Son

by Alexander Soderberg

  Ignacio Ramirez, or Don Ignacio as he was usually known. A drug baron from Valle del Cauca in Colombia. An old business acquaintance, principally of Adalberto Guzman, Hector’s father. The biggest fish they ever dealt with, by far.

  “What have you told him?”

  “The same as usual: that this is what the agreement looks like, for security reasons.”

  “Does he believe you?”

  “No, and I think we’ve dragged it out as far as we can now.”

  “What else?” Aron asked.

  Ernst picked up a document and began to talk about other business. To start with, the forged-goods industry in which they invested a lot of money in fake groceries, designer labels, and medicine; then people they were trying to extort information from in companies listed on the stock market. About drug smuggling, weapons, about the cold war between their organization and other factions, about securing their assets and ruining other people’s. Acquiring market share, getting rich by any means possible. Murder, blackmail. Striking hard and without mercy against anyone who got too close. Never questioning right and wrong. Just racing at full speed until you hit something without a safety belt. At which point you might be forced to consider things more thoughtfully. Something like that.

  Sophie switched off and thought about her own concerns.

  She missed Hector. She wondered where he was in his coma. Could he think? Dream? If he could, she knew he would be missing her, too. She had felt loved by Hector Guzman. Unconditionally. He had raised her up, awoken something inside her. But she hadn’t been able to return his love. He had too many hidden sides. And she didn’t feel able to love them all. And now his brother was dead. Hector didn’t know about that. His whole family, apart from one sister who lived in Madrid, was gone. Her heart ached for him….

  Aron’s voice crackled over the feeble loudspeaker.

  “Sophie? Pick up the phone.”

  She woke up from her thoughts and switched off the speaker-phone function.

  “Yes?”

  “How are you, Sophie?” Aron asked.

  The question surprised her, it wasn’t like Aron.

  “I’m OK.”

  He was silent for a moment, then said, “You did well in Istanbul.”

  “Thanks, Aron,” she said.

  Then he reverted to his professional self again. “I want you to arrange a meeting with Don Ignacio.”

  “What for?”

  “Calm them down. We need them on our side, but we can’t expand, not now. Ask them to be patient. Raise the price if you have to. We need time to figure out what’s happening to us calmly, so make sure they’re calm. It’s important that we’ve got them on our side….”

  She wanted to argue, saying that she could not do the things that they asked of her. That she was the wrong person. But it was her lifeline. As long as she filled a function…

  “Where shall I meet Ramirez?”

  “You’ll have to go to them, ask Ernst to arrange it.”

  He sounded stressed.

  “Colombia?” she asked.

  “That’s where they live.”

  The body was lying on its stomach on the parquet floor, a knife sticking out from between the shoulder blades. He was naked, or almost naked, except for a pair of white sport socks on his feet.

  Detective Inspector Antonia Miller considered the sight in front of her. Almost no blood where the knife had penetrated. And his position? She squatted down and looked at the body from different angles. Had he been stabbed in his bed while he slept? Perhaps he’d woken up and fallen to the floor before finally dying? Unless he was stabbed on the floor…

  She was blinded by the flash of a camera, followed by several more in quick succession. Forensics was taking forever to document the scene. Antonia stood up and looked slowly around the room. One picture: Elvis as a bartender, with Dean, Humphrey, and Marilyn at the bar. On the other wall, above a chest of drawers, a framed poster behind dirty Plexiglas, a basketball team, lots of stars and stripes, preprinted autographs—Harlem Globetrotters, 1979.

  A pine bookcase containing some old Dirty Harry and Charles Bronson films, as well as a few porn movies, mostly featuring transvestites.

  Antonia read from her small notebook, which was bent from being in her back pocket. The dead man had no name. The owner of the apartment was a woman who apparently had another twelve properties in the city and out in the suburbs. Probably a front.

  “I’m done,” the forensic technician said, and left the room.

  “Thanks,” she muttered.

  The footsteps behind her changed. She turned around.

  Her boss, Tommy Jansson, was standing there staring at the body. He had brought the weather inside with him; at least it felt like it, the cold and the melted snow on the shoulders of his black leather jacket. He had also brought something else with him: his stressed anger, his constant companion.

  Tommy pointed behind him with his thumb and whispered irritably, “This goddamn street is one-way. I came from the wrong direction and had to park and walk two blocks!”

  Tommy stared at Antonia. Perhaps he was expecting a response, a sign of agreement, some display of sympathy. But he got nothing.

  “What are you doing here, Tommy?” she asked instead.

  It was a good question. He rarely came to crime scenes anymore.

  “Heard it on the radio, was in the area,” he muttered in reply. He pointed at the corpse.

  “Can you take this one, Antonia?”

  “Yes, I’m here, aren’t I?”

  “All the way, I mean,” Tommy said.

  “Yes.”

  “You’re always saying you have too much to do,” he went on.

  “No, I’m not,” she said.

  —

  Antonia and Tommy left the apartment at the same time. The old elevator mechanism creaked as it made its way down to the ground floor.

  Antonia Miller and Tommy Jansson in a confined space. They didn’t get along. Didn’t have much to say to each other as they stood on their own in the creaking elevator. Thank God she knew his wife was dying of ALS.

  “How’s Monica?”

  Tommy’s eyes were fixed on the floor, then he looked up and stared at her as if to discern a motive for her question.

  “No change.”

  His reply was so abrupt that she felt a stab of guilt in her guts.

  They reached the ground floor. Tommy slid the internal grille aside with a rattle. He pushed his way out ahead of her. “Ladies first” didn’t apply when he was in charge.

  The snow had turned to hail as they stepped out into Sofiagatan.

  “Might see you this evening,” she said.

  “Maybe,” he said blankly, then cursed the weather and headed off to the right.

  She watched him go, then looked up at the dark, cold sky that was firing small icy bullets at them. Antonia steeled herself and headed out into the grim weather, hurrying to her car and throwing herself into the front seat. The hail got stronger, banging hard against the metal roof. She sat there for a while before turning the key and starting the engine. The heater worked hard to clear the condensation from the inside of the windshield. Then she drove away, passing Tommy, who was walking quickly along the sidewalk, close to the walls of the buildings, his hands stuck deep in his jacket pockets, his body language ample evidence that he was suffering.

  Antonia didn’t even entertain the idea of giving him a lift to his car.

  His first name was pronounced like the measure of distance, or the first name of an American jazz trumpeter. But his parents didn’t have American roots, nor were they particularly fond of jazz. They were diplomats, and thought it was important to have an “international” first name. The whole Ingmarsson family were diplomats, and had been for generations. They all had un-Swedish names, like John, Catherine, Sandy, Ted, Sam, Molly. Miles’s younger brother was called Ian, and had named his own children Sally and Jack. A pervasive Scandinavian Kennedy complex ran through the entire family:
success, white summer houses, yachts, ambitious side-partings, always on the ball, and the fantastic ability never to show the world around them a hint of what was going on inside them. They demonstrated a form of surface tension where cocktail conversation and other banal talk about nothing held their lives in check.

  Miles had also been a diplomat. But he had been lost in that world right from the outset. He understood nothing of the collective social rules that everyone else seemed so comfortable with.

  His career ended up going backward. He started high, then clambered quickly but surely downward. From the embassy in Ankara, to Skopje in Macedonia, then Chisinau in Moldova, before ending up in Khartoum in Sudan, where his post was so vague that no one really knew what it involved.

  His family tried to give him advice about the future. Miles couldn’t bear it. Changing careers was his only escape, and he applied for a job as far away from the Foreign Office and Diplomatic Service as he could imagine: the police.

  His family stopped talking to him. Their disappointment was immense, as was his feeling of liberation.

  Miles Ingmarsson was now forty-five, wiry, and in pretty good shape, thanks to his habit of doing sit-ups and push-ups before going to bed. He had dark hair with streaks of gray, his face and eyes reminiscent of an old-style film star. But the way he looked was mostly overshadowed by his posture, which was weighed down by an invisible sadness that not even Freud would have understood, and certainly not Miles himself.

  He had a serious addiction to strippers. It was only around them that he was able to relax. The warmth exuded by feminine company, just being allowed to look for a while—breasts, curves, the essence of femininity…It wasn’t about sex. More a sort of warped compulsion for security that he had never managed to find anywhere else. And God knows he had tried—everywhere and everything. Alcohol, hash, food, exercise, gambling. Nothing worked as well as striptease. He went to the strip club five times a week, all year round.

  Now he was sitting there at a table in a dark corner, staring at a thin woman with silicone breasts as she performed a pole dance to cheap, electronic, eastern European music. She was very bad at it. He felt like telling her she didn’t have to dance, that she could forget all that and just stand there, maybe just move a bit….

  His cell phone vibrated in his jacket pocket.

  “Yes?”

  Tommy Jansson from National Crime wanted to know what he was doing.

  “I’m having lunch,” Miles replied.

  “Do you want to come and work for me?”

  The woman spun around the freshly polished pole far too fast and with very little balance.

  “OK,” Miles said as he continued to watch the entertainment.

  —

  There was always a moment of shame involved in leaving a strip club in broad daylight. Seven seconds of what it took to open the door, step outside, close the door again, and walk off, soaking up the looks on the faces of anyone nearby: a perv.

  Miles pushed through the snow that had been falling heavily all morning. Now it was lying there, shoved up onto the sidewalks for pedestrians to kill themselves on so motorists could pass unimpeded.

  Keeping close to the walls, he fished a cigarette out of his pocket, stuck the filter tip between his lips, and lit it with his Zippo. He sucked the smoke in as he walked, allowing it to burn holes in his lungs before letting it out again. Then two quick, deep drags, one after the other, to calm the craving and give him a destructive sense of pleasure.

  He had spent the past few years in the Economic Crime unit, where he investigated uninteresting cases that rarely led anywhere. Which was fine: he never had to feel involved.

  But now Tommy Jansson had called. Tommy wanted to meet, Tommy wanted a chat. There was a “blue-light” evening at that pub in the Klara district in the city center where all the cops hung out. And tonight there’d be ambulance staff and firemen as well. They all met up and drank themselves senseless in the middle of the week. Miles had been a few times, didn’t like it. The paramedics were retarded, the firemen either stupid or gay—or both. And his colleagues, as a certain type of cop insisted on calling other officers, were so far removed from Miles’s sensibilities that he felt nauseous in their company. But Tommy wanted to meet there, and he was going to offer Miles a new job. It was probably time to move on. Miles had a feeling that he was dying a little bit with each passing day. And he’d had that feeling for a very long time.

  —

  The smell of sweat, cheesy pop music from the ’70s, flat beer on tap, and lighting that was far too bright—the prerequisites for a blue-light evening. Miles made his way through the sea of people.

  Tommy was sitting farther in at a table with some other senior officers. That corner was reserved for them, the top cops. Occasionally an ignorant newcomer would wander over and sit down there, and it always ended in deep embarrassment. Everyone there wanted to show that they knew the rules. Lots of booing and shouting.

  Tommy held up his right hand when he saw Miles. Ingmarsson sat down and gestured for a beer. They plodded through the social crap, which went quickly, seeing as they were both completely hopeless at it. Then Tommy got to the point.

  “Do you want to take over a murder investigation?”

  “Which one?”

  “Trasten.”

  “Trasten?” Miles asked.

  “The restaurant in Vasastan. The gangster shootout last summer. When Hector Guzman fled the country,” Tommy explained.

  Miles nodded. No one could have missed that one.

  An honest-to-God bloodbath in Vasastan six months earlier, at the Trasten restaurant. Four dead. Three killed in the restaurant, Russian gangsters. Two shot and killed in the restaurant, one tortured to death in the kitchen. The police also found parts of a dismembered body in the freezer. This latter turned out to be a harmless local petty criminal, Leif Rydbäck. Not long after that, the lead investigator, Gunilla Strandberg, was murdered by one of her colleagues, Lars Vinge. A really screwed-up story. The newspapers wallowed in theories and the questions just kept piling up, even within the investigation. The police were casting about; they had nothing to go on, seeing as the central character, a hitherto unknown major-league criminal, Hector Guzman, a Spaniard based in Stockholm, had vanished from the face of the earth after the shootout.

  “Why?” Miles asked.

  “Because I need a different detective.”

  “Why me?”

  “Because you’ve been around a while, you know the ropes,” Tommy said.

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Yes, you do.”

  “What’s the catch?” Miles asked.

  “No catch, I just want to replace the current detective with you.”

  “What’s the catch?” Miles asked again.

  “Don’t be so fucking critical of yourself. We’ve got a lot going on, you can get a promotion. And I need her elsewhere.”

  “Her?”

  “Miller, Antonia Miller.”

  Antonia Miller. She was good, according to what he’d heard.

  “When?”

  “Soon,” Tommy said, taking a deep swig from his glass of beer.

  “I’m in the middle of a load of cases at Eco,” Miles said. “I can’t leave the others in the lurch; not now.”

  Tommy stifled a hiccup.

  “ ’Course you can. They’re all a bunch of goddamn socialists up there, the whole lot of them. I’m pulling you out of there.”

  Their paths had crossed now and then over the years. They were half friends, you could probably say. They hadn’t met for a while, and Miles thought Tommy seemed different somehow, more acerbic.

  “What about Miller?”

  “Don’t worry about her,” Tommy said gruffly.

  A waiter appeared with a sloppily poured beer and put it on the table, spilling some in the process.

  Miles took a gulp of his, while Tommy took three deep swigs.

  “Do you want another one?” Tommy asked.

&nbs
p; Miles shook his head. Tommy belched.

  Antonia was standing a short distance away at the bar. She saw Tommy and another man but didn’t think too much about it. She and Tommy saw each other pretty much every day, worked together, and argued about all manner of things. That was how it should be. Tommy was her boss. But their relationship was wrecked, for some reason. He’d changed in the past few months, with mood swings—a very short fuse, caustic and arrogant. He was micromanaging her, getting in the way of her work. And he reeked of a hangover pretty much the whole time. Probably because of the stress of living with a wife with a fatal disease. Even so, Antonia was sick to death of trying to adapt to his bad qualities. Not that she could deny that she had some of her own. It was obvious Tommy thought she was a nuisance, a lot of people thought that. That she was trouble, too eager, too pushy. What was she supposed to do about that? Give in and back down?

  Antonia had grown up in a loving home. That was how she remembered it anyway. But in that love there had also been a fear of the truth. Lots of whispering and hushing when she approached adults having a conversation. Maybe her parents were just scared that so-called reality was too cold and raw for her gentle little ears. In itself it didn’t actually matter. What did matter was that because of the whispering that surrounded her when she was growing up, she had developed an almost obsessive need to know things. Whatever it was, she needed answers in order to carry on living and breathing.

  And she had found many answers over the years. That had accelerated her career, and she was recognized as a good detective. But Tommy had started to whisper when she approached. And she wanted to know why.

  She looked at the men over in the corner again. The dark-haired one stood up, shook hands with Tommy, and left the table. He walked in her direction, and they looked at each other as he passed. She recognized him: he worked for Economic Crime. One of the thousands of disillusioned men she had seen coming and going. What marked him out from the crowd was the way he dressed. Jeans, black oxfords, a smart shirt under an expensive lambswool sweater. A thin beige coat over his arm. There was something tiresomely stylish about him….