The Other Son

by Alexander Soderberg

Hector waited for more.

  “Five months,” Aron said without elaboration.

  Hector looked down. He searched inside himself, looked up, was about to try to express something, but stopped as more questions seemed to occur to him.

  “Eduardo,” he mouthed again.

  “He was murdered in Biarritz a few weeks ago.”

  That was too much. Hector stopped. But there was no sign of grief. His eyes searched for Aron’s.

  “The Hankes, we think,” Aron said. “They found Eduardo….Shortly after that, Daphne and Thierry were murdered in their shop.”

  Hector listened.

  “Ernst disappeared at the same time. I’m assuming they’ve got him.”

  Aron was aware that another piece of bad news could have disastrous consequences. So he chose the only good news he had for his boss.

  “Carlos,” he said.

  Hector’s eyes got bigger.

  “He’s been tucked away with the Hankes, he fled to them after Trasten, after he’d told them your whereabouts in Málaga, after he betrayed you.

  “We found him, mainly thanks to Sonya. She saw it as her duty. She tracked him down and picked him up and took him to the house in the mountains. He saw you, and had to face up to what he did.”

  Aron stopped. Hector’s eyes narrowed.

  “Now?” Aron said. “Now Carlos is in hell, where he belongs.”

  It looked like Hector was smiling slightly, a few brief seconds of genuine happiness.

  The room was silent and still. Aron would have liked to stop there, but that was impossible.

  “Sophie…” he said cautiously. “I brought her in, when I wasn’t sure how you wanted things. She’s been working with me and Leszek, helping us…but…Carlos…Carlos said he’d seen her with the Hankes in Munich, they had some sort of meeting. Ralph Hanke, Sophie, and Roland Gentz.”

  Hector was listening intently.

  “Carlos didn’t hear everything, but he claimed she wanted to offer them what we’ve got, and give them parts of our organization. As soon as I heard that I pulled Leszek and Hasani out of Stockholm and brought them here, along with Angela and the boys. That was when Ernst disappeared, so she must have given him to them.”

  Hector began to write again, it took a long time.

  Damage? Aron read.

  “The authorities have frozen all your accounts and confiscated all your legal companies, seeing as there’s an international warrant out for your arrest. And the Hankes are busy helping themselves to the rest now, with Ernst’s help. They’re taking over all our operations and making them their own. Right now we can’t do anything but watch as it happens.”

  Hector pointed again to the word he’d written.

  “Total,” Aron concluded.

  Hector tried to absorb the information, but Aron wasn’t finished.

  “There’s one more thing. The Hankes may have managed to track down another one of us.”

  Aron leaned closer.

  “Lothar,” he whispered.

  Hector shook his head, as if that was an impossibility.

  “Carlos said that the Hankes had found a boy they’d been looking for. I called and reported a break-in at their address. The police said the apartment was empty, no one there, no break-in. Franka isn’t answering my calls. I’ve sent another man to Berlin, he’s been looking but hasn’t found anything. They’re gone.”

  Hector tried to think.

  “Who knows about Lothar, apart from you, me, and his mother?” Aron went on.

  Hector looked up at the ceiling, following the counterclockwise motion of the fan. He turned his head toward Aron, and there was a sad look on his face as he mouthed: “Sophie.”

  Tommy Jansson could talk to anyone. He regarded this as one of his greatest skills.

  And now he was talking to the branch manager of the bank where Lars Shitstain Vinge had his account.

  Tommy was so damn good at talking that the bank manager didn’t even question the right of a police officer, simply by flashing his ID, to look through the bank’s customers’ transactions without either a warrant or any other appropriate documentation.

  Tommy discovered that Lars Vinge had opened his safe-deposit box the previous day, was told the time, and was given access to the security footage for the time in question.

  Miles Ingmarsson, seen from above, in black and white, standing there confidently, talking to the cashier.

  Tommy stared at the picture as one of the nerves in his left eye began to twitch.

  —

  Tommy drove through the city toward Miles’s place, drinking gin and tonic from a take-out cup.

  —

  Miles Ingmarsson’s front door had seen better days. Easier to smash in than open with a lockpick. Tommy broke the lock with a crowbar. The door flew open and he stepped into the hall, shut the battered door behind him, and listened in silence—nothing but faint clicking sounds from small movements in the walls and floor of the old building.

  Tommy worked quickly, like a burglar, going through every room. The kitchen, living room, bedroom, study, bathroom, hall, then back to the living room. He searched everywhere, cleared everything out onto the floor.

  He was out of breath by the time he finished. Standing there in the middle of the mess, he looked around. He hadn’t found any trace of what he was looking for.

  The USB memory stick in Lars Vinge’s sports bag contained audio files. Antonia listened to them on her cordless headphones. They were surveillance recordings of Sophie Brinkmann at her house in the suburbs…a dead loss. Nothing but pointless, everyday conversations between Sophie and her son, Albert. A few telephone calls. Nothing that stood out in any way.

  Antonia went through the pictures again, one at a time—Sophie Brinkmann at close quarters, in various situations.

  She had been scrupulously observed. Why?

  The other material was scattered across the floor and she tried to piece everything together, all the while with the audio files playing on her headphones.

  A different sound from somewhere. She lifted one side of the headphones. The doorbell was ringing insistently and monotonously out in the hall.

  Through the spyhole, Tommy Jansson looked rough. He was standing out in the stairwell looking down at his shoes. He leaned forward and pressed the bell again, staring right at her.

  Fear cut through Antonia and she took a step back. She didn’t know why Tommy was standing outside her door…yet somehow she did know.

  Antonia backed away silently. The doorbell rang several more times. She tried to think; should she open the door? She tried to think of something…come up with a lie, some sort of explanation for Tommy….

  The next sound she heard outside the door was quiet—a rasping, clicking sound. Tommy was trying to pick her lock.

  Antonia had no time to lose. She hurried into the living room. There were photographs and notes spread out across the parquet floor, and she gathered everything together with her arms and stuffed it all into the sports bag. The lockpick was working quickly outside the door.

  A loud tug at the door handle, but the door didn’t budge, and the clicking continued.

  Antonia tried to gather the papers, storage devices, printed photographs, notebooks, and all the other things she had found.

  She thought she was going to die of the paralyzing fear that took hold of her as the door opened and she heard Tommy Jansson break into her home.

  Picking up Lars Vinge’s sports bag and her computer, Antonia crept out of the living room. Tommy’s footsteps were close.

  She didn’t have time to think clearly; there was only one place she could hide.

  Antonia made her way quickly and quietly into the kitchen. She saw an old cupboard turned into a pantry, no door, just a curtain across the front, and she had just tucked herself inside it when Tommy Jansson stomped into the kitchen. Antonia didn’t move, didn’t breathe. He stopped just a couple of meters away from her on the other side of the curtain. She could hear him
breathing, and could smell stale alcohol.

  Then he left the kitchen and went into the living room. Antonia heard him searching as things fell to the floor and furniture was turned upside down.

  Antonia was trapped. The only way out was through the living room. She waited. Her pistol was in her handbag, hanging in the hall behind her jacket.

  Then everything was silent. Completely silent. Had he gone? New sounds, loud. From her bedroom. Cupboards and drawers being opened, Tommy acting like a burglar.

  She stepped out from behind the curtain and started to walk through the kitchen, passing her bedroom where, from the corner of her eye, she caught a glimpse of her boss tugging at her bedclothes with his back to her.

  She carried on, out into the hall, grabbing her jacket and handbag on the way, went on out through the half-open front door and down the stairs, outside through the rear exit, and then turned right, the whole time expecting to hear a voice behind her shouting at her to stop. But there was no voice. She dropped her cell phone in a trash can, left her car standing in the street, and kept on walking fast. She didn’t look back. After a while she realized that she wasn’t wearing any shoes, and was walking in just her socks.

  Antonia waved down a taxi, sank into the backseat, then gave the driver the address of Ulf’s apartment out in Sundbyberg.

  He wasn’t home. She sat down to wait on the stairs, clutching the sports bag on her lap.

  Tommy drove through the city. There was a picture of a face on the seat next to him, a woman’s face. He’d found a printout in Antonia Miller’s living room, under an armchair. He wouldn’t have spotted it if he hadn’t put his head down on the floor. It was a printout of a photograph. He recognized it immediately. It, along with plenty more, had been in a sports bag that Lars Vinge had handed to him at Mariatorget last summer. It was Sophie Brinkmann, the nurse Gunilla had tried to use to infiltrate Hector Guzman’s network…one of many pictures of her.

  Tommy had finally made sense of everything. Lars Vinge, the idiot, had made copies of everything and put them in his safe-deposit box. Miles Ingmarsson had taken them out using a fake ID, and had passed them to that bitch, Antonia Miller.

  —

  Vanessa’s tree-hugging boyfriend, the cocksucking ethnologist Mattias, was sitting in Tommy’s armchair in the living room, being a twat and reading a book. There was clattering from the kitchen, Vanessa and Emelie helping their mother.

  Tommy stood in the doorway. Mattias felt his presence and looked up.

  “Hi,” the little Communist bastard said.

  Tommy didn’t answer, just nodded, barely perceptibly.

  Mattias held up a paperback book.

  “I found this in the bookcase.”

  Tommy squinted. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. One of Monica’s books.

  “Oh?”

  “It’s about a guy who’s paralyzed, he’s got Locked-in Syndrome.”

  Tommy glared at the slack-limbed boy. No muscle on him, which was presumably why he had to emphasize how clever he was. Difficult books evidently were part of all that.

  Tommy didn’t move. Mattias grew uncertain.

  “It’s quite interesting,” he said, then buried himself in the book again.

  “Why aren’t you helping in the kitchen?”

  “They said they didn’t need me.”

  “They said that?”

  Mattias nodded.

  “Word for word?”

  Mattias didn’t answer.

  “So you came and sat down here, in my armchair?”

  “Yes?”

  “It’s a bit early to be taking over, don’t you think?”

  Tommy walked out.

  He heard Mattias chuckling behind him.

  Oh là là, Tommy sang silently to himself to keep from turning around and going back to strangle the boy on the spot.

  He gave his daughters a hug in the kitchen.

  “Hi, Dad.”

  The hugs were distanced and impersonal. The atmosphere was tense and odd. Half smiles and fear of the unknown circling around their father’s peculiar personality.

  Monica tried to smile. Tommy noticed an oxygen cylinder on wheels beside her, a transparent breathing mask in her hand. Every so often she would take a breath from it.

  “Is that new?” was all he could find to say.

  Monica tried to smile in confirmation.

  “Oh. Great,” he said, then pulled a bottle of wine from the rack on the wall.

  —

  As usual, the evening meal was of a high standard. They ate and made small talk. Tommy was worrying about Ingmarsson and Miller. The pressure in his chest had found its way up through his neck to his brain. It was making him stupid and sluggish. He drank his wine, quietly but quickly; it was a trick that seemed to work, he didn’t think anyone noticed.

  Mattias was talking about gender issues. The kid knew what he was doing, declaiming loudly and authoritatively to Tommy’s women around the table.

  Tommy ate, looking down at his plate, breathing shallowly through his nose. His blood pressure rose as Mattias talked about power structures, patriarchal society….

  Tommy tried to think about something else, but the left-wing nightmare’s holier-than-thou voice cut through the room at a frequency it was impossible to ignore. Phrases like gender trap, sexism, women’s football, liberal feminism, quotas, gender roles. The words forced themselves into Tommy’s consciousness.

  In the end he blew his top, it was impossible to hold back. Fury burst out of his reptile brain, through his head and out from his eyes.

  “You cocky little bastard,” Tommy growled as he flew up from his chair and grabbed hold of Mattias by his hair. He bit his bottom lip as he hit the boy’s head hard against the table repeatedly. His plate shattered. The girls screamed, and Monica’s dark, slurred, weak voice urged him to stop. But Tommy didn’t hear, he was hard at work and enjoying himself. It was like finally being able to scratch somewhere you couldn’t reach. The release of tension put him in a strangely happy mood, made him feel soft inside as a feeling of warmth embraced him.

  Tommy stopped and looked at Mattias. Fragments of his plate were stuck to his face, along with vegetables and sauce.

  From the corner of his eye he saw Monica trying to stand up to stop him, but her paralysis prevented her. He carried on with the assault for a while longer with an open palm. Then he was done. He let go of the boy’s hair and sat down on his chair again and leaned back, feeling relaxed and harmonious.

  Mattias looked bewildered. His nose was bleeding steadily, his hair was on end, and his anxious eyes darted around the table, not quite aware of what had just happened to him.

  The girls were crying quietly. Monica stared at her husband. He realized he was still smiling. It came from the heart.

  “I’m fine, Monica,” he whispered. “Absolutely fine.”

  She said nothing, just carried on staring at him. Tommy met his daughters’ gaze. They looked away, and that’s when he began to doubt.

  “You’ve got to be allowed to feel good sometimes, haven’t you?”

  The conviction in his voice was suddenly gone.

  Tommy’s cell phone vibrated in his pocket. He took it out.

  “Saved by the bell,” he said happily.

  Vanessa started to cry more loudly.

  He checked the number, then hushed her irritably to get her to be quiet.

  “Yep,” he said into the phone as he stood up.

  The reception was bad. He waved his hand to Vanessa to tell her to stop crying.

  “Tommy here,” he said.

  The voice at the other end was high-pitched.

  “This is Roger Lindgren. Your friend Miles is here, in my apartment.”

  Tommy left the table and called Ove Negerson.

  The first round was going to hell. Miles was lying on the floor. Roger Lindgren was taking great, swinging kicks at his face.

  Miles had prepared carefully, planning exactly what he was going to do.
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br />   He went upstairs in the building on Hagagatan and rang the doorbell. He pushed Roger Lindgren back into the apartment and slapped him around a bit. Miles had expected to gain some advantage from the confusion he created. The plan was to get Lindgren down on the floor and then do what he was there for.

  But Roger wasn’t at all confused. Not even surprised. Miles figured that out the moment the guy opened the door.

  Roger Lindgren was chewing, only without gum; he had a tense smile, a shiny druggy glow to his face, and madness in his eyes. Roger Lindgren was high.

  “Is your name Miles Ingmarsson?” he asked.

  “How the hell do you know that…?”

  Roger Lindgren broke into joyous anger and quickly and violently punched Miles Ingmarsson down onto the parquet floor.

  Things moved pretty damn fast after that. Seemingly endless kicks to the face. Miles sensed it wouldn’t be long before he lost consciousness. Blood flew, and the violence focused on his head was brutal and remorseless. The adrenaline in his body was working hard to control the pain, but it couldn’t keep up. It soon became clear to Miles that he was going to die right there on the floor.

  Then, just as he felt he was about to pass out, Roger stopped kicking him. Through the fog of the assault, Miles saw Roger sit on top of him, pull a cell phone from his jeans pocket, and make a call.

  Miles lay there, about to die. And he realized why.

  He hadn’t been angry when he stormed in, not the slightest. He had been nervous, expectant, deluding himself compulsively that his plan would work. Which of course it hadn’t. He had forgotten the most important ingredient—fury. That was why he was lying there like an idiot, just taking it.

  Miles backed up in his thoughts. Sanna…Her pleading messages on his voicemail…her battered face in the hospital…How lovely she was, how honest…

  That was why he was there, after all…Miles looked up at Roger Lindgren’s ugly, drugged frame sitting on top of him. Roger ended the call and was about to continue his assault when Miles grabbed Roger’s hair with his left hand. A hard punch with his right fist.

  The blow landed just below Lindgren’s eye, and Miles felt something break. Two more punches. Whatever had broken was going to be impossible to mend.