“And?”
“The debt you inherited from Klaus. She needs help.”
Klaus had been lying on his deathbed, emaciated and pale, full of guilt and other crap. He had tried to make amends for his past before the devil came to get him, because he was going to; no one doubted that, least of all Klaus himself. So his promise to Sophie had been important to him. She had saved Klaus’s life twice in a short space of time, and that had evidently softened his heart.
Klaus had asked Mikhail for help, and Mikhail had taken on the debt in exchange for €40,000.
“What with?” Mikhail asked.
“I don’t know.”
“It’ll have to wait, I’m busy with other things right now.”
“That wasn’t what you agreed. Klaus was clear about that.”
“Klaus is dead. And I’m busy. I’m sorry, Rüdiger, not now.”
“Why would you say that about Klaus, Mikhail? You promised him. And you were also handsomely rewarded. Now the woman is asking for help. Keep the agreement. Do the right thing. That’s all Klaus wanted.”
Rüdiger was as measured as a teacher. Mikhail massaged his bull neck and looked around, surrounded by buildings. It was a fitting metaphor. He was trapped in Moscow. And the longer he stayed there, the closer the walls would press in on him.
“OK, I’ll contact her,” Mikhail said and hung up.
He walked across the yard, through the building, and out onto the street on the other side of the building. Then down into the underground again. They wouldn’t look there again for a while. He needed to get out of Moscow without being spotted; that was his first goal.
Aron was standing on the terrace looking out over the sea and Cap Ferrat.
The electronic gates down at the end of the garden swung open and the seven-seat family Jeep came driving up the hill.
Aron left the terrace and went down to meet them in front of the entrance.
Angela was leading Andres and Fabien by the hand.
“I’m Aron, welcome. Long journey?” he asked.
Angela nodded. She looked drained, anxious, no energy at all.
He said hello to the boys, smiled, and tried to make light of the situation. Sonya came to his rescue and helped Angela and the boys inside the house.
Leszek and Hasani were standing in front of him, and he gestured that they needed to talk without delay.
In spite of the chill in the air, they sat down at a secluded table at the back of the house. Raimunda brought cups and a flask of coffee. Aron and Leszek watched as Hasani put five sugar lumps in his cup and stirred it with the spoon.
They started talking.
“Is there any truth in it?” Aron asked.
The question was aimed at Leszek. He answered with a shrug, cautious as ever.
“It’s like this,” he began. “You call and tell us to come, all apart from Sophie. Without her knowledge, without saying anything to her. We do as we have been told. She is suddenly all alone, scared, possibly worried for her life, who knows. But she has betrayed us. So she does something drastic, and says her son is missing, to get our attention and sympathy.”
Aron nodded. But Leszek wasn’t finished.
“That’s the conclusion one comes to first, the most probable. But perhaps there is some truth in what she says,” he went on. “I’ve lived at her side. She’s never lied, never tried to distance herself from us, never tried to gain any personal advantage. Instead, she has done whatever we have asked her to. And she has done her best.”
“She was in Munich with the Hankes,” Aron said. “She gave us false information after her meeting with Ignacio and Alfonse. And now something unlikely about Albert going missing the moment we leave her?”
Leszek lowered his head, even he couldn’t get away from the inevitable.
“Hasani?” Aron asked.
Hasani stirred his coffee again.
“I don’t know her, so the little I’ve seen can’t really be taken to mean anything.”
He stopped stirring.
“I saw the grief in the boys’ eyes when Eduardo was taken from his family,” he continued. “I was a guest of Daphne and Thierry when they were murdered. So if she has anything at all to do with…”
He didn’t say any more, just raised the cup to his lips and drank his sweet coffee.
Angela shook out the clean sheets. They hung in the air for a moment before sinking onto the mattress.
The two boys, Andres and Fabien, were asleep on the bed, the window was ajar. Angela had heard fragments of the men’s conversation down below. Aron’s questions, Leszek’s answers, Hasani’s comments, their tentative tone of voice. They were talking about Sophie, and they were talking about treachery.
Angela realized that this was how it was going to be, that Aron and the others’ desire to protect her and the boys wasn’t the whole truth. She knew too much. So even if the threat against them disappeared, the situation wouldn’t change. She and the boys would always have to live a life of undefined captivity.
Hasani wasn’t on her side anymore, he was on theirs. Maybe he had been all along, but now it was obvious.
Angela wanted her husband back, Eduardo; she wanted to carry on living life the way it was meant to be….She put a pillowcase on one of the pillows.
“Are they asleep?”
Angela turned around.
Sonya was standing in the doorway, looking at the sleeping boys.
“Have you got everything you need, Angela?”
Angela realized she was clutching the pillow like a teddy bear.
“Yes, thanks,” she said, and finished putting the pillowcase on.
Sonya was about to leave when the men’s voices outside the window reached her. Suddenly she looked anxious, walked back into the room and over to the window, and looked down. Then she closed and bolted it.
“Have you been listening to what they’re talking about?”
“No, I’ve just been standing here thinking about other things.” She smiled sweetly and believably.
Sonya was about to say something, then changed her mind and walked out.
Angela’s shoulders slumped.
She was frightened. She was going to get herself and her boys away from there. She would ask for help.
And she knew whom she was going to ask.
Albert woke up in a narrow bunk.
He looked around the room. The ceiling and walls were covered with soundproof rubber. There were no windows.
The room was sparsely furnished. Apart from the bed he was in, there was just a small table and a chair in the middle of the floor.
His wheelchair was beside the bed. Albert looked above his head, where there was a metal pole with a handle on a chain. It looked like they’d thought of everything.
The last thing he remembered was waking up in a car, and the man with the strange eyes had drugged him again, just like he had in the apartment on Norr Mälarstrand. A hard grip around his neck, the handkerchief against his nose and mouth, the strong, bitter smell. Albert had time to notice from the road signs that they were in Germany.
He heaved himself out of bed and into his wheelchair. There were two doors in the room, one of which was cut into the rubber and had no handle. The other one was an ordinary wooden door that led to a small bathroom, with a disabled-friendly toilet, basin, and shower.
He wheeled himself over to the door with no handle and tried to bang on it.
The hours ticked by. The lack of windows, of a horizon and any concept of time, made him anxious. And the room was so small.
Mom? What had happened to his mom?
He felt panic growing. He just wanted to know where he was, to hear another person’s voice. Anything at all…
Albert closed his eyes and tried to find a place inside himself, a calm place. But he couldn’t.
The hours blurred together and he drifted between dream and reality as he sat in his wheelchair in one corner of the room. The feeling of panic was there the whole time. It just
kept growing, and he found himself gasping for breath.
Albert started to shout, then scream. It made the panic worse. Albert stopped and sat still in his wheelchair, arms wrapped tightly around himself.
The sound was barely audible…something metallic. At first he thought it was in his mind, or some remnant from a dream. But it was there, just below him on the floor, halfway along one of the longer walls. A rattling sound, as if someone was running an object up and down a small grille—a high-pitched sound.
Albert lowered himself to the floor, listened, tried to identify where it was coming from, then pulled off some of the insulation and found a small ventilation hole at ground level. The sound became clearer. He put his mouth to the hole.
“Hello?”
The rattling continued. Albert called out again. Then it stopped. A voice, somewhat distant, words in German that Albert didn’t understand.
“Who’s that?” he asked in English.
A moment’s silence. Then the voice replied in the same language.
“I’m Lothar, who are you?”
Albert relaxed a bit, the sound of another person’s voice calmed his panic.
“I’m Albert. Are you locked up like me?”
“Yes,” Lothar replied.
“Why are we here?”
“I don’t know. Where are you from, Albert?”
Albert got the impression that the voice belonged to a young man, perhaps someone his own age.
“From Sweden, Stockholm. I’m sixteen. How old are you, Lothar?”
“I’m seventeen, from Berlin.”
Albert lay there by the hole, trying to figure out his next question.
“Where are we?” he asked.
“I don’t know, in Germany, I think. The south, maybe Bavaria.”
“Why do you think that?”
“The food they serve.”
“They?”
“Yes, whoever they are.”
“How long have you been here?”
“A few days. You?”
“I don’t know, I just woke up. Have you met anyone, seen anyone?”
“No, they bring the food in when I’m asleep. I haven’t seen or heard anyone.”
“What happened to you? How did you get here?”
“They killed my mom,” the voice said quietly.
Those words changed everything. The brief conversation with Lothar had made Albert forget how serious things were. Now the realization crashed back in on him with full force.
“They broke into our apartment. Killed her, drugged me, brought me here,” Lothar said.
Albert stared in front of him. She was dead. His mom was dead….
“Albert?”
“Yes,” he managed to say.
“What happened to you?”
“They broke into our apartment, drugged me.”
“Was anyone there with you?”
“My mom,” he said.
Antonia had two cases left to work on. They were hopeless—old and forgotten. There was nothing to investigate, and no suspect would ever be brought to trial. All the evidence had long since been cleared away or messed up.
The phone rang.
“Yes?”
“Hi, this is Jerry Karlsson again.”
“Hello, Jerry Karlsson,” she said, without having any idea of who the man was. He seemed to realize.
“I had a call from you the other day. I work with probate cases.”
“Probate?”
“The estates of people who’ve died.”
She remembered.
“Lars Vinge?”
“Yes, sweetie.”
“And you’ve got something for me?”
“Yes.”
“Where? What?”
“In the basement of the building I live in.”
—
Jerry Karlsson had trouble with his hips, and limped slightly on his right leg. He’d been retired for a few years now, his fair hair was almost yellow, and his thin face was adorned with a large, crooked nose. A sergeant in the Life Guards and a former lightweight boxer, he told her as they walked down the concrete corridor in a basement on Metargatan. He was friendly, cheerful.
“How long have you been doing this?”
“A few years. I’m always buying up estates and house clean-outs. Usually I sell them off at once, make a bit of profit in the process. But some people don’t have anything. People are generally fairly poor, especially the dead.”
Antonia’s and Jerry’s steps echoed along the corridor.
“In cases like that I store the belongings until they’ve built up. Then I sell the entire contents of the store. If there’s no interest, I donate the whole lot to charity once a year. You’re in luck; all this old rubbish will be going soon, it’s been here for six months. Nothing of value.”
He stopped at a metal door and pulled out a key ring worthy of a janitor.
“How about you, sweetie?” He found the right key with a practiced hand.
“Nothing special.”
Jerry turned the key in the lock and pulled the door open, gesturing for her to enter.
Antonia stepped into an enclosed room. The fluorescent light flickered and hummed for a moment before turning on properly. She saw a ton of different storage areas divided by wooden frames covered with chicken wire and by plastered walls.
The man limped through the labyrinth until eventually he stuck a key in one of the padlocks.
“This used to be two storage spaces, but I got rid of the dividing wall. After you,” he said, opening the mesh door.
She looked inside. The space was three meters by four in size, piled full of belongings from floor to ceiling.
“This is all Lars Vinge’s?”
Jerry read a handwritten note.
“No, three different estates in this store, but only their loose effects, no furniture.”
“But one of them is Vinge’s?”
Jerry glanced at the note again.
“Yes, according to my notes, that’s the case. But there’s no proper organization in here, so I don’t know what was his.”
Antonia looked at the mountain in front of her. Boxes, plastic bags full to bursting. Clothes, books, paraphernalia, clutter, odd bits and pieces…
“OK, thanks. Can I just start looking?”
Jerry gave her the thumbs-up and left the basement.
Antonia stifled a sigh and looked around at the mess.
She pulled out a big moving crate. Clothes, women’s clothes. She closed the lid again, sat down on it, and slowly began to go through everything in front of her. First she looked through the books; people sometimes tucked things inside them, notes, money. It was time-consuming, dusty. She felt through the clothes, looked through cutlery and kitchen equipment, moved two framed posters.
Behind them she found more moving crates, containing more clothes, books, and bed linen.
It was tiring work, made all the more difficult by her underlying belief that she wasn’t going to find anything.
The hours rolled past, and she was drowning in clutter.
Antonia was struck by the fact that there was nothing personal. No letters or notes, no photographs, no mementos, nothing that gave any clue as to what sort of person Lars Vinge had been. Everything seemed to have been cleaned up.
After five hours Antonia had been through the whole of the storage room, bit by bit. She was tired, thirsty, and in need of a pee. The working day was long since over. She called Jerry on his cell phone, and he offered to let her use his loo upstairs.
She went up. Jerry offered her some fruit and something to drink, showed her his trophies from his boxing career, standing dusty on a top shelf in his living room. Then she went back to the basement and started again from scratch, carefully and methodically going through everything one more time.
Jerry was kind enough to show up with a flask of coffee and some store-bought buns, then limped off again.
It was past eleven in the evening when she heard a lovel
y sound. She had missed it before when she had pulled out all the front pockets of all the trousers she found. Before starting the second time she decided to shake all the clothes properly. It fell out of the back pocket of a pair of jeans…there was a flash as it flew weightlessly through the air, followed by a wonderful metallic tinkling sound as it hit the concrete floor, like the note from a tuning fork—an A, perhaps, in a strangely high octave.
Antonia looked at the key, then bent over and picked it up. Yes, she had been right. It was the key to a safe-deposit box.
“Sophie, tell me what you need, and I’ll see if I can help you.”
These words, spoken by Klaus Köhler’s boyfriend, Rüdiger, were odd; he sounded like a bank clerk who wanted to talk about pension arrangements.
Then Rüdiger explained that Klaus had kept the promise he had made to her at the Trasten restaurant six months ago by passing it on to Mikhail Asmarov before he died.
Mikhail Asmarov…
Something cracked inside Sophie and she almost broke down.
“Does Mikhail still work for the Hankes?” she asked.
“No, not after the incident in Stockholm. He’s been freelance since then.”
Mikhail Asmarov wasn’t the kind of person who helped others. He was a machine, a violent machine. She had seen that several times, perhaps most clearly at Trasten, when he and Klaus shot and killed the Russians who were after Jens….
“What do you need, Sophie?” Rüdiger repeated.
Sophie gave him a brief summary of the situation, that her son was missing, that the Hankes probably had him. That she needed all the help she could get if she was going to be able to find him and get him to safety.
“If the Hankes have got him, you should start in their backyard, in Munich. I’ll tell Mikhail to meet you there.”
—
Sophie and Jens made their way out to the western suburbs, where a Greek named Socrates sold half-reasonable secondhand cars. Jens looked around, checked the engine block, the color of the oil, the wear on the tires, but didn’t pay much attention to anything else. He bought an Audi loaded with horsepower. Handshake, key in hand, key in the ignition, the engine sounded capable of killing someone.
Jens headed south. Sophie leaned her head against the window, her thoughts clouding her vision.
The Other Son Page 16