The Other Son

by Alexander Soderberg

  “Zero eight eighteen,” Miles read from the piece of paper.

  The official found the right box, inserted his key into one of the locks, and turned it. Then he gave a feeble smile, unconsciously apologizing for his whole existence, and slipped away.

  With sudden urgency Miles put his own key in the lock, turned it, and pulled out a long, deep, wide plastic tray. He put it down on an empty table and opened the lid.

  He looked down: a black sports bag, nothing else. Miles lifted it out; there was something inside it, something heavy. He wasn’t about to open it. He was planning to get the hell out of there with it as fast as he could, before anyone got any ideas.

  Miles shut the box again, locked it, and went back up the stairs and rang the bell that opened the gate, walked through the calmness of the bank, opened the front door, and stepped out into the cruel, wintry sunlight.

  Antonia was sitting in her car on the other side of the road. He hurried toward her. She opened the door, took the bag from Miles, and put it on the seat beside her, then glanced at it quickly. She was practically burning up with curiosity.

  “What’s inside it?”

  “No idea,” he said.

  Antonia pushed back in her seat, stretched her legs, and pulled a folded piece of paper from her jeans.

  Antonia passed the folded note to Miles, and he read the address: Hagagatan.

  “Roger Lindgren has a post-office box. No fixed address. But from time to time he lives with a woman in Vasastan.”

  She started the engine.

  “You’ve earned that,” she said, then put the car in gear.

  “How did you get hold of it?” he wondered.

  “At the dry cleaner,” she said with a smile. “See you, Miles Ingmarsson!”

  Antonia’s car started to move. Miles closed the door and took a step back, Antonia pulled away and disappeared into the traffic. Miles stared at the note. He was going to let his inner self decide this one. His dark inner self that wanted to do good.

  Though he was well aware that if you let loose the darkness inside you to help put things right, everything always ended up in a complete fucking mess.

  They walked back the same way they had come, across the fields to where the car was parked on a secluded gravel track. The boy refused to talk, refused to answer the questions Sophie asked.

  They got in the car.

  “My name is Sophie,” she said. “The boy I was asking about, Albert, he’s my son.”

  She saw a reaction in the boy’s eyes, but he remained silent.

  They took the elevator up from the hotel garage. Mikhail got out on the ground floor and disappeared into the bar.

  Jens, Sophie, and the boy continued up to Jens’s room.

  Once they were in, Sophie sat down on one of the two beds. She indicated that the boy should sit down opposite her, on the other bed.

  He hesitated, and for some reason he looked at Jens, as if to get the OK. Jens nodded and he sat down. Sophie looked at him carefully for the first time.

  He had pale brown skin, sharp features, eyes that seemed to shift between two colors, and that mouth…Hang on…

  She leaned forward and inspected him more intently. He grew uncomfortable and looked away.

  And his profile…

  She had never seen him before, but she knew without any doubt who he was. Hector was clearly discernible in his eyes, forehead, mouth. There was also a hard, impenetrable exterior, an intelligence, a deep courage; she had seen and felt that even during the short time she had known him. But there was something else as well, something warm and very human. Maybe that came from the boy’s mother, whoever she was.

  “Lothar?” she asked gently.

  He looked at her in surprise. So did Jens, from where he was standing over by the window.

  Sophie kept her eyes on him.

  “Your name is Lothar, isn’t it?” she asked quietly.

  The boy didn’t answer.

  “What are your mom and dad’s names?”

  Suddenly he looked at her anxiously, then at Jens.

  She leaned closer to him.

  “Tell me, Lothar, there’s no need to worry, we don’t mean you any harm.”

  His gaze flitted between Jens and Sophie.

  “My mom’s dead,” he eventually said.

  “Your dad?”

  “I haven’t got a dad, I never have.”

  His voice was low; he was hard as stone, this boy.

  “How old are you?”

  Hector had told her he was sixteen, that day they had been out on his boat in the archipelago. It had been as if he wanted to give her something, the greatest of all confidences, his biggest secret. I’ve got a son, he had said. Lothar Manuel Tiedemann. He lives in Berlin with his mother….

  “Seventeen,” the boy whispered.

  Sophie hadn’t taken her eyes off him.

  “Albert?”

  He hesitated, as if he had already said too much.

  “Albert?” she asked again. “Have you seen Albert? Answer me.”

  “Who are you?”

  “I’ve already told you, I’m his mother.”

  Lothar tried to read her.

  “What’s Albert’s father’s name?” he asked.

  “David,” Sophie replied.

  “What happened to him?”

  “He got sick and died.”

  “What sort of sick?”

  “Cancer. Tell me now, Lothar.” She’d run out of patience.

  He hesitated a little longer.

  “Yes, I met Albert,” he said.

  “When and where?”

  “A few days ago.”

  “Where?”

  “Where you found me.”

  She waited for more. Lothar looked at her from under his bangs.

  “He was in the room next to me for a few days. We talked through an air vent.”

  “Did you see him, did you actually meet him?”

  “No, I never saw him.”

  “How was he?”

  “OK, I think.”

  “What did you talk about, what did he say?”

  “All sorts of things.”

  “Like what?”

  Lothar thought.

  “His dad being dead. And you being a nurse, and his girlfriend, Anna. And the fact that he’s in a wheelchair. That you live in an apartment in Stockholm…that you used to have a dog, a yellow Labrador, I don’t remember the name.”

  Rainer…Sophie thought.

  “That you’re in trouble,” he went on. “And that’s why they took him.”

  “Did he have his wheelchair with him?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. But he thought it was a pain that there was no one to help him with the things he couldn’t do for himself.”

  Sophie looked down at the hotel-room carpet. It was thick, dark-blue. She held her feelings in check.

  “What else happened?” she asked. “What did he say, what did he do, how did he sound?”

  “We were both scared and upset, we kept each other company. Albert thinks you’re dead. I thought that too; I thought what happened to my mom had happened to you.”

  Now she looked up at him.

  “What happened to your mom?”

  “They shot her.”

  At first she didn’t understand. His tone of voice was so normal. As if the significance of the event hadn’t hit him yet.

  “How do you know?” she asked.

  “I was there,” he said.

  The images came back to him. He struggled to hold them at bay.

  She went on living while innocent people died around her. Sophie met his gaze. Perhaps he was asking himself the same question: Why did they let you live, and not my mom?

  “Who took me?” he asked quietly. “Who killed my mom?”

  She knew the answer to his questions, but wasn’t going to tell him. Instead she thought about the Hankes and their compulsive brutality. As if it were a language, the violence, talking to her, reminding her that
she was ultimately powerless. No chance at all.

  Sophie stood up and turned toward Jens.

  “We leave in a few hours.”

  She left Jens’s hotel room. The door closed with a click behind her.

  Jens sat down on the armchair. Lothar was sitting on the bed, his feet on the floor, his hands in his lap.

  “How do you know who I am?” he whispered.

  “Try to get some rest, Lothar,” Jens said. “I’ll be sitting here with you.”

  “How do you know who I am?” he asked again, harder this time.

  “I don’t know who you are.”

  “She knew,” he said, pointing to the door.

  Jens shrugged.

  “I’m not her.”

  “Why did they take Albert?”

  “Get some rest now, Lothar,” Jens said.

  Lothar was about to protest, but Jens hushed him.

  “Not now; you’ll get your answers soon enough, but first you need to rest.”

  With a degree of reluctance, Lothar lay down on the bed with two pillows behind his head.

  Jens could see fatigue, worry, and anxiety in the boy as he sat there, staring out at nothing.

  Lothar came back to reality, was about to switch the television on with the remote.

  “How are you feeling?” Jens asked.

  Lothar thought about the question, pain and anguish on his face as he looked for an answer that didn’t seem to be there.

  “I don’t know,” he said, clicking the remote control. A sports channel appeared on the screen. The Bundesliga. The match was fast, the play well organized, the attacks clever, the long balls hard. The crossbar—bang! The post—bang! Goal disallowed for offside. The protests not particularly vociferous.

  Soon after, Lothar was fast asleep.

  Jens got up from the armchair, went over to the boy, and pulled the bedspread over him, then switched the television off. He sat back down again.

  He had also noticed those features. The same things Sophie had seen. Elements of Hector Guzman in the boy’s face.

  Jens rubbed his eyes. Tiredness was taking its toll. His eyes closed and he fell asleep.

  He was awakened by a noise.

  Lothar was sitting up in bed and screaming out loud in terror.

  Hector Guzman opened his eyes.

  His pupils shrank from huge to pinpricks. He stared at the ceiling for a few seconds. Then he was seized by some sort of horror and began to kick at the bed he was lying in. His movements were weak and impotent, aimed at something that didn’t exist, something that was still suffusing his drowsy consciousness. There was panic in his movements; everything happened very fast and he fell helplessly out of bed, landing on the floor. He lay there, breathing hoarsely and unevenly.

  He didn’t know where he was, and he was scared.

  Hector Guzman had been born again.

  The sports bag on the coffee table in front of her was black and unassuming, but Antonia looked at it as if it were something sacred, as if it contained all the answers in the world. And perhaps it did.

  She leaned forward and undid the bag’s zipper. She peered in and took out the contents and put them on the table with trembling hands.

  A plastic folder, full to bursting; a thick, heavy official folder; and a black notebook.

  Antonia looked down into the bag again and ran her hand over the bottom to make sure she hadn’t missed anything. There, tucked into one of the corners, was something small and plastic. She took it out.

  A USB memory stick.

  She looked at her coffee table. Where to start?

  She might as well start with the little black notebook. She opened it. Feminine handwriting, all written in pencil, tiny writing, the pages completely covered. A lot of reasoning and theories about things that Antonia couldn’t make sense of. Human behavior, theories about what might happen. It was all too unclear, too complicated. Neither could she get any clear picture of who had written it. She closed it. The lined folder. Masculine writing, sloppy. A lot of text, again, even less comprehensible than the notebook. Antonia opened the official folder. Information about Hector Guzman and his business dealings, including a route for smuggling cocaine between Paraguay and Rotterdam. About direct connections to other syndicates, his background, going back a long way. This was almost unparalleled evidence. Antonia went back to the black notebook and read more carefully. It was Gunilla Strandberg’s notebook. Antonia read it alongside the folder. An image began to form. It was hazy, but it was enough to suggest that Gunilla Strandberg had been embezzling money from the cases she had worked on.

  Antonia leafed through the pad. Lars Vinge’s. Notes, confused ideas. She reached the last page.

  Diagonally across an empty page of the pad Lars Vinge had hastily scrawled: Tommy Jansson.

  Her mind was racing. What the hell?

  The contents of the plastic folder spilled out. All sorts of documents: computer printouts, handwritten notes, printed photographs…a lot of photographs. She recognized the faces: Gunilla Strandberg, her brother Erik, Anders Ask, the police officers who were investigating Trasten before the shootout. A few photographs of Hector Guzman and Aron Geisler. And toward the bottom of the pile, masses of photographs of the same woman. Of perhaps the last person Antonia had expected to see. She held up one of the pictures in front of her. The woman was standing in a kitchen window. It was a close-up, taken with a telephoto lens. There was no doubt at all.

  It was the nurse, Sophie Brinkmann.

  A ceiling fan was whirring soundlessly above them.

  Hector looked at the woman by his side who was carefully swabbing the inside of his elbow where she had just given him an injection. Her name was Raimunda; she spoke to him in Spanish, acted as if she knew him, lit up like the sun when she spoke, even laughed.

  Hector tried to come to grips with the situation. He couldn’t speak; he’d tried, but couldn’t make a sound.

  He could barely keep his eyes open, let alone lift his arms or legs. Everything felt heavy, mentally as well as physically.

  He had feeling. And he could see, even if his vision was poor at a distance of more than a few meters, and he couldn’t really focus. It was as if his sense of balance had been knocked out and he was drifting on waves.

  The woman had checked his condition when she helped him up from the floor and back into bed. She asked yes-or-no questions about his name, family, and friends to gauge his memory and general state. Hector replied with nods or shakes of his head. His hair was long, he could see it from the corners of his eyes.

  The low voices and footsteps. Aron appeared in the doorway.

  “Raimunda,” he said, “leave us for a while.”

  Aron sat down on a chair beside Hector.

  “Aron,” Hector mouthed.

  “Hector,” Aron said.

  Hector swallowed and tried to say something.

  Aron handed Hector a pad and a pen. Hector couldn’t take them; his muscles weren’t there, nor the signals from his brain.

  Aron helped him, laid the pad on the bed and put the pen between Hector’s fingers and squeezed, then he sat down, aware that his old boss would rather do it himself.

  Hector tried to lift his arm, and Aron jumped up to help him again, making sure the point of the pen was resting on the paper.

  Hector sat like that, motionless, incapable even of scribbling a few letters on a piece of paper. Aron was at the point of getting up again but Hector shook his head, radiating fury, fury at the loss of his dignity. He concentrated and managed to draw a line on the paper.

  Aron waited patiently, knew better than to interrupt Hector, knew Hector had to do this.

  Minutes passed, and eventually he managed to write a word on the page: what.

  No question mark, just the word what.

  The question that encompassed everything.

  “We’re in the villa in Villefranche,” Aron began. “The woman you just met is Raimunda, she was a member of the emergency group of doctors a
nd nurses that your father established some years ago.”

  Hector’s eyes were glued to Aron’s.

  “Do you remember Stockholm, the Trasten restaurant?”

  Hector thought. Aron continued:

  “You had a meeting with Alfonse Ramirez….Sophie and Jens came. Three Russians were after Jens. They came shortly after…”

  Hector nodded a yes.

  “Do you remember escaping from Trasten to Spain with Sophie on board your dad’s plane?”

  Hector gathered his memories. Aron went on.

  “And you and Sophie were attacked on the motorway between Málaga and Marbella?”

  “Sophie,” Hector mouthed.

  “Later,” Aron said. “At the same time, the Hankes attacked your father’s house in Marbella. You got Sophie there, then you lost consciousness. The doctors there helped you. Our security arrangements kicked in and we moved you to the house in the mountains, where Raimunda became your nurse.”

  Aron stopped, scratched the back of his head hard, then met Hector’s gaze again.

  “Adalberto didn’t make it. Your father’s dead, Hector.”

  There was the sound of quick footsteps on the stairs, children bouncing down to the hallway barefoot, then running straight into the room where Hector and Aron were sitting. Two boys in pajamas. The smaller one looked terrified when he saw Hector awake, and grabbed the bigger boy’s hand.

  Hector squinted, unable to understand what was going on, then Angela came into the room. Then he realized, even though he hadn’t seen her or the boys for many years.

  “Get Fabien and Andres out of here,” Aron said.

  Angela put her hands on their shoulders. But Fabien shook it off.

  “Are you awake now?” he asked, wide-eyed.

  Hector nodded.

  “You’ve been asleep for a very long time,” the boy said.

  Angela pulled the boys away.

  “Come on, Uncle Hector needs to rest.”

  She turned toward Hector, looked blankly at her brother-in-law, then left the room.

  Hector wanted to say something, but Aron got up and closed the door to the room.

  “Eduardo?” Hector mouthed.

  “You’ve just woken up from a coma, Hector,” Aron said.