The Other Son

by Alexander Soderberg

  He made slow progress as he hung there in the darkness. Then another push…The effort was an additional drain on a life that was close to over.

  At last he broke the surface as his arms hung limply around the chain. A white plastic buoy attached to the end was bobbing beside him.

  But he wasn’t getting any oxygen, even though he was surrounded by fresh, cool, winter-evening air. Nothing, and he could taste blood in his mouth, an incredible pain radiating throughout his whole body, and a dull throbbing in his ears.

  Then all his organs turned inside out and he vomited water. Several liters of brackish, polluted Baltic Sea water gushed out of him in a steady stream.

  Then he was empty, wrung out like an old bath sponge, dry as a dead twig.

  But suddenly he could breathe air into his lungs. The pain was still there, worse than when death had held him in its clutches. But gradually life came back to Miles Ingmarsson. He waited until he heard what must have been Tommy Jansson’s car start up and drive away. Then he swam toward land.

  Miles was utterly drenched as he stood there with the lake behind him, but with solid ground under his feet and air in his lungs. He was alive.

  Miles began to swear. He swore as loudly and violently as he could, right into the black night. He swore and cursed everything that was fucked up on the planet he had been left to live on. No one but the animals, nature, and the punishing God listened to him. His screams died away like a drawn-out echo.

  Then he walked off into the darkness.

  The little house lay deserted in the midst of a cluster of winter-naked trees. A whitewashed, 150-year-old house with a thatched roof and pale-blue window frames.

  Jens found the key in a hollow tree trunk.

  He unlocked the door and showed them around, and they each found a bed on the upper floor. Then he waved to Mikhail, and the pair of them went back downstairs, into the library, where the old books were lined up on built-in cherrywood bookcases. On one section of open wall hung three rifles, one above the other. Jens unlocked them and lifted them down one by one and passed them to Mikhail. The first was a Winchester .22 repeater rifle, the second a shotgun: a Spanish Aya, double-barreled, old and reliable. The third and final one was an M1 Garand.

  Mikhail held the M1 in his hands, inspecting and weighing it, and almost smiled. The M1 Garand was a semiautomatic rifle from World War II. Wooden stock, five kilograms in weight, a meter long, and loaded with an en bloc clip that ejected automatically once the gunman had fired five shots.

  “Where did your grandfather get hold of this?” Mikhail asked.

  “No idea.”

  Jens fetched the ammunition from a chest and passed some to Mikhail.

  “The M1 upstairs, the shotgun in the kitchen, and the Winchester in the living room,” he instructed.

  With the M1 and suitable ammunition in his hands, Mikhail went back upstairs and walked past Lothar’s room. Mikhail hesitated, then turned back and knocked on the door with his foot, then handed the M1 to Lothar.

  “Do you know how to load one of these?”

  “No,” Lothar said.

  Mikhail put the boxes of ammunition down on the bed, sat down on the bedspread, and looked at Lothar.

  “Are you OK?” Mikhail mumbled.

  Lothar nodded.

  “Good. Then I’ll show you how to do it.”

  Mikhail put some bullets and the small clips on the bedspread.

  “You push the bullets in here,” he said, showing him. Lothar sat beside Mikhail and filled a magazine with more bullets.

  They sat there in silence next to each other, loading bullets.

  “Well done,” Mikhail said when they were finished.

  “Thanks,” Lothar replied politely.

  “You’ll be OK,” Mikhail said. “Time’s on your side.”

  Lothar looked Mikhail in the eye.

  “Thanks,” he said again.

  Mikhail stood up and left the room.

  —

  Jens lit a fire in the living room. The flame caught and the dry wood crackled.

  Jens crouched down by the fireplace, letting the heat warm him. Lothar came into the room and stopped by a sideboard, looking at the framed photographs on top.

  Jens turned around.

  “My grandparents spent their whole lives here. Grandma died a few months ago. I used to spend practically the whole of my summers here as a child,” he said.

  The fire was compact and powerful, and Jens topped it up with two lumps of wood.

  “It went to her children, and was going to be sold.”

  He stood up, then went on.

  “I couldn’t bear to see it go, so I bought it from my mom and her brothers and sisters. I don’t know if that’s good or bad.”

  Lothar was holding one of the pictures in his hand: Grandma Vibeke and Granddad Esben standing side by side in their smart clothes, on their way to a party in the ’60s.

  “Why?” Lothar asked.

  “If it’s good or bad? It’s something to do with memories. They’re getting a bit hazy now that the place is mine. The exact opposite from the reason why I bought it.”

  He patted Lothar’s shoulder.

  “It’s a good house, this one; you’ll sleep well tonight,” Jens said.

  Sophie came into the room. Her eyes didn’t seem to want to settle on either of them.

  “I’ve spoken to Aron,” she said to Jens in Swedish.

  Jens waited for her to go on, ask something, suggest something. But instead she turned to Lothar and switched to English.

  “We need to talk.”

  “About what?” the boy asked.

  She hesitated before answering.

  “About your father,” she said.

  A parasol shaded Hector as he sat on a chair on the veranda and looked out across the garden toward Cap Ferrat. The parasol fluttered gently in the cool breeze.

  He was physically weak. Could barely walk, couldn’t lift anything. Raimunda had been forcing him to exercise since he woke up. It was irritatingly simple—humiliating to an extent—and very difficult. She said he was making progress, but far too little for him to be able to notice it. She had explained his physical shortcomings to him. Some of them would be with him for the rest of his life, others would fade in time, if he did as she told him. Raimunda was good. She was straight, honest, and positive, without being affected.

  His voice had returned, but his vocal cords were weak and had little strength. Sometimes his voice just faded away altogether, and then he would have to wait a while and drink a glass of water.

  But Hector Guzman had changed in other ways too. Ways that he noticed, without sharing them with anyone else. Sometimes things that didn’t exist could flash past at the edge of his vision. From time to time he would hear a voice saying something in a friendly tone, right next to him, even though there was no one there.

  His left hand didn’t obey him the way it used to, and sometimes he would find himself weeping even though he was neither sad nor in pain.

  Oddly, his sight seemed to have improved, as if he saw contrasts better. He could see colors more clearly, details, depth—everything was bolder than before. The world was lit up in a completely different way from how it had been.

  The extremes of his emotions were more pronounced. He could feel deeply affected by something extremely banal and unimportant while at the same time feeling empty and indifferent toward something that was big and important. He’d been like that before, admittedly, before the coma, but now it was more tangible, as if his astonishment at some things was now as big as his indifference to others.

  Hector was roused from his thoughts by footsteps approaching. Aron. He stood in front of Hector and looked at him. Then he pulled up a chair and sat down beside him. They shared the same view of the world.

  “I’ve just been on the phone,” Aron said.

  “Who to?” Hector whispered.

  “Sophie,” Aron replied.

  Sophie.

 
She was constantly in his thoughts, drifting around, out of reach, out of focus.

  “She’s got Lothar, she wants to let us have him.”

  “The Hankes,” Hector mumbled. “What do they want?”

  “They want you,” Aron said.

  “Of course. How?”

  “Dead.”

  “How are they going to do it?”

  “Use Lothar to lure you out. An exchange, that’s what Sophie’s doing at the moment.”

  “Does she know I’ve woken up?”

  “No.”

  Hector looked out across the bay, into beautiful infinity.

  “How did she sound?” he asked.

  “She sounded steady, like she usually does.”

  “And?”

  “I don’t know, something else, too. Empty, disillusioned. Tired, maybe.”

  Hector could see her in front of him, the way he remembered her…lighthearted, warm, no makeup, beautiful. Green eyes, almost invisible freckles, surrounded by light. An inner light that radiated outward. But it wasn’t just bright light, there was something deeper and more complicated there.

  “What did she say about Lothar?”

  “She didn’t say much.”

  “How is he?”

  “OK, she said.”

  “Did you find out anything else?”

  “No.”

  “Is she being threatened?”

  Aron shrugged.

  “She passed on the information, didn’t want to answer any questions.”

  A propeller plane sailed across the bay.

  “What does this mean, Aron?”

  “That the Hankes are working hard right now. They’re on a roll.”

  “I know that. But why Sophie?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “Yes,” Hector said.

  “The Hankes want to take everything from us. What could be better than taking your son and the woman you love?”

  Hector watched the plane.

  “We agree to a meeting—an exchange, or whatever it is they want.”

  “Knowing that they’ll do all they can to kill you?”

  “Do what you can to prevent that. That’s what I pay you for. Get me and Lothar out of there. Outwit those bastards, Aron.”

  “There must be some other way.”

  “Do you have any suggestions?”

  “I have a lot of suggestions.”

  “Do you have a suggestion that keeps Lothar safe?” asked Hector.

  “How could I make that sort of claim…?”

  “They’re going to hurt him,” Hector interrupted.

  He tried to move the fingers of his left hand.

  “We don’t have any choice,” he went on. “I don’t have any choice. Call her, tell her I’m awake, and that we agree to meet wherever they want.”

  “I’d like to ask you to reconsider, Hector.”

  “I will not….”

  Exhaustion hit. Hector quickly grew pale and tired.

  Aron noticed and tapped gently on one of the sliding doors.

  Raimunda came out.

  “Come along, I’ll help you,” she said.

  Angela had put Andres and Fabien in front of the television and was waiting for an opportunity. It came when Aron tapped on the door and Raimunda went out to help Hector.

  Angela hurried into the kitchen, pulled the phone from its charger, and went upstairs, into the bathroom, turned the shower on, and dialed the number she knew by heart. The police in Biarritz.

  During her years as a legal assistant at a law firm in the city she had met Gustave Peltier, a lieutenant with the Police Nationale, on several occasions. He was a tenacious detective, a career cop.

  There was a click, then a voice welcoming her to the police in Biarritz.

  Angela asked in fluent French to be put through to Lt. Gustave Peltier.

  “Tell him it’s Angela Garcia Rivera, and that it’s urgent.”

  Thirty seconds of heavy silence followed, then two rings, crackly and hesitant. A phone was picked up.

  “Angela?”

  Gustave’s voice, gruff and deep.

  “Yes,” she replied.

  “You disappeared. We’re investigating Eduardo’s death. Where are you?”

  She spoke quietly, close to the receiver.

  “I need your help, Gustave.”

  Her plea, and her tone of voice, seemed to surprise him.

  “What do you need help with, Angela?”

  “The boys and I need protection.”

  “OK…” He drew the word out.

  “Do you know the name Hector Guzman?”

  “Hector Guzman…” he muttered tentatively to himself.

  “Spanish,” Angela said. “Son of a gangster named Adalberto Guzman, Marbella. Lived in Stockholm?”

  “Yes, now I remember. Interpol was after his father for years, without success. Stockholm, did you say? There was some sort of shootout at a restaurant last summer? Hector Guzman escaped; there’s an international warrant out for him. Is that right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why are we talking about Hector Guzman, Angela? Where are you?”

  “Listen to me, Gustave. I can give you Hector Guzman, his closest associates, and a whole lot more information. In return for protection. The boys and I need protection.”

  More silence.

  “What are you talking about, Angela?”

  Beside her the shower was running.

  “My husband, Eduardo, and Hector Guzman were brothers.”

  The sun had risen by the time Miles made his way to the road, and there wasn’t much traffic. He waved his left hand and stuck his thumb up, and eventually got a lift with a Pentecostal pastor with no cell phone who thought God was cool.

  “He isn’t at all,” Miles said, seeing as he’d just met Him.

  “You look like you could do with a hospital.” The pastor smiled.

  “No, that can wait. What I need first is a phone.”

  Forest and fields. Signs with strange place names, little wooden houses with obsessively neat gardens with no fences. This was a world Miles didn’t recognize.

  He got out in a hamlet with no name.

  “God bless you,” the pastor said.

  “And you,” Miles said.

  He found a roadside café. A smell of fried food, friendly atmosphere. “I need to borrow a phone,” he said to the woman behind the counter. She lent him her cell phone, an old one with buttons.

  “How are you doing, dear?” she asked.

  He knew he looked terrible, assaulted, broken hand, dead and resurrected, filthy, and in a wretched state generally.

  “I’ll survive, thanks.”

  “Your hand?” She pointed to his limp right hand.

  “It’s broken, I think, but not to worry.”

  She was about to say something else, but Miles stepped aside and called Antonia Miller. Her voicemail clicked in immediately.

  “Disappear and go underground,” he said, then hung up.

  Then he called his brother, Ian—a congenitally unfaithful bastard with a secret fuck pad in Birkastan that he used whenever he wasn’t at home playing daddy and loving husband out in Åkersberga.

  “I need the apartment, your secret one,” Miles said.

  He hadn’t spoken to his younger brother for a very long time. He was soon reminded why.

  “I don’t know, it’s not convenient right now.”

  “Ian, I’ll call your wife and kids.”

  “Piss off and go to bed, Miles.” It was like he was twelve again, perhaps he always had been.

  But before Miles could say anything, Ian backed down in the face of the threat.

  “I’ll unlock it and leave the keys on the kitchen table, but you’d better not break anything.”

  Miles ended the call, then handed the phone back to the kind woman. She passed him a bandage from the first-aid box.

  “Wrap it up for now, and make sure you get to a doctor.”

  Miles took the
bandage. He was so grateful he could have kissed her.

  —

  Miles traveled by bus, commuter train, and underground. He was returning to reality and Stockholm at the same time. He tried to remain calm, but it didn’t work.

  He bought a new pay-as-you-go cell phone from a newsstand, and hurried to Birkastan.

  The fuck pad was a two-room apartment, registered to a company that was owned by a friend of Ian’s. Evidently they shared it. The friend was in the telecom business, and was keen on young girls. Miles had no idea what Ian was keen on, and didn’t want to know.

  Miles was surprised by the furnishings. The apartment was very tastefully laid out. That wasn’t thanks to Ian, he knew that much. And at a guess, it wasn’t the telecom pedophile, either. Perhaps it had been bought already furnished.

  On the coffee table there was an old Chianti bottle with a candle in it, and an eternity of wax had run down and solidified in the woven basket that covered half the bottle.

  He sat down on the sofa, a big velvet thing. It was supposed to look old but was new. And expensive.

  He searched for Antonia Miller’s home number on his new phone. She didn’t have one. He tried to find someone related to her. He called people named Miller, but no one knew her. Perhaps she wasn’t even still alive.

  He searched his memory. The man in her kitchen popped into his head. With the Dalarna accent, with the football T-shirt….Real Madrid…

  What was his name? Ulf.

  Miles had seen him at blue-light events, he’d been a patrol cop for years. Then he got promoted and went into surveillance. Miles didn’t know anyone in Surveillance. He didn’t really know anyone at all. He dialed the number of the internal police exchange.

  A male voice answered.

  “Surveillance, please,” Miles said.

  “Putting you through,” the voice said.

  The line bleeped a few times. Then another voice, female this time, who answered by giving the department number.

  “Uffe?” Miles said.

  “Sorry?”

  “I’d like to speak to Uffe….”

  “Uffe who?” She sounded annoyed.

  “Yes, what is his surname? Big guy, from Dalarna, I think. Arrived at Surveillance a couple of years ago, used to be in a patrol car…”

  “Oh, I know who you mean. But no one calls him Uffe. He’s just Ulf. His surname’s Lange.”