Lothar sighed. A nervous sigh, as if the oxygen in the room were running out.
“Sit down,” Mikhail said, holding up a pair of handcuffs.
“I’m not going to run.”
It was non-negotiable. Lothar sat down on the bed, and Mikhail cuffed him to the metal frame.
Mikhail finished packing the case and zipped it up. He turned to Lothar.
“I’ve met your father,” he said. “I ran him down with a car in a pedestrian crossing in Stockholm. He broke his leg and ended up in the hospital. I was working for Ralph Hanke back then.”
Lothar tried to get his head around what Mikhail was saying.
“Then I returned to Sweden a few weeks later and threatened Hector Guzman with a pistol, and told him to back off. It didn’t turn out as we’d planned. Everything went to hell and we were overpowered. The man I arrived with, Klaus Köhler, had a gunshot wound in the stomach and I assumed he was going to die. But your father spared Klaus’s and my life.”
Lothar had relaxed slightly as he listened.
“Later on, I got a chance to repay him when I came to their rescue in a restaurant in Stockholm.”
“Trasten? Sophie told me,” Lothar said.
“Yes, Trasten…”
Mikhail rubbed his chin with the palm of his hand.
“All the way through, your father remained strong, dignified, and he never allowed anything or anyone to get the better of him. The same goes for you. You’re his son; never forget that you’re strong, and never let anyone else get the better of you, no matter how much power they may have over you.”
Lothar sat there, thoughts rolling around his head.
“Did you hear what I said?”
Lothar didn’t answer, instead he said:
“I played football a few weeks back. I was studying for a math exam. I had just started texting with a girl in school. We were about to go out soon. I had bought tickets to a football game, then we would go out for Asian food and I would walk her home. I was happy. Life was normal. Everything was good….”
“That’s in the past.” Mikhail’s words were a cold statement.
“Am I doomed to this, then? Being part of something that…”
“It doesn’t matter, Lothar. Let it go.”
Lothar was quiet. Mikhail continued:
“Did you hear what I said about your father?”
“Yes,” Lothar said after a brief pause.
“Are you going to take that with you?”
Lothar thought a moment.
“I don’t know,” he said.
Mikhail studied Lothar.
The hotel-room phone rang, cutting through the silence. Just once. It meant it was time to go.
“My dad will come and get me, eventually,” Lothar said.
“Good. Hold on to that.”
“What about you, Mikhail? Will you come and get me?”
“You just said your dad will be doing that.”
Mikhail looked hard at the boy.
“Goodbye, Lothar Guzman,” he said, then left the hotel room.
—
Mikhail walked through the lobby and out into the dark evening. It had just stopped raining. The air was heavy with moisture.
He felt depressed. He’d rather be angry. But anger didn’t seem to want to appear, just sorrow and emptiness….He liked Lothar, and didn’t like what was happening.
Mikhail walked a few blocks, got in a taxi that drove him to the appointed meeting place, and was dropped off at a little square in the slum district. There was a smell of food, garbage, and exhaust fumes. A spiderweb of electricity cables above him. And everywhere the sound of cars, mopeds, people, dogs, and music, together creating a jumble of impressions. But Mikhail couldn’t shake off his sadness.
Shit…
A gleaming drug dealer’s SUV stopped abruptly in front of him.
Mikhail got in the backseat. It was cool and quiet.
Alfonse grinned at him.
“This is like a reunion, a Trasten reunion.” He laughed unpleasantly.
Jens was waiting at a bus stop on a busy street in the eastern part of the city. People drove like idiots here; the mopeds and motorbikes appeared to have no fear of death.
A large silver Cadillac stopped at the bus stop. Jens opened the back door. Albert was sitting in the backseat, and Jens got in. Albert was suntanned, and his hair had grown.
“Jens?!” Albert practically shouted his name. “Mom?” he went on, fear and anxiety flashing across his face.
“She’s fine, Albert, don’t worry.”
Jens held Albert tight, as if he didn’t dare let go of him.
“You’re going home to her now….”
Albert relaxed, and Jens could feel his body trembling. As if the struggle to hold his fears and anxieties at bay was finally at an end. The dam had burst. But there were no tears; his body just shook as if he were frozen right down to the marrow.
Jens held Albert tighter.
“What’s going on?”
The car pulled out into traffic.
Albert was worried, he looked around as if he was searching for something.
“Everything’s OK, Albert,” Jens said quietly.
Albert was different, he was stressed and anxious. Foreclosed and distant. Jens had expected something else. Perhaps an angrier Albert. But this was a boy torn by inner turmoil. Shocked, confused…broken.
“Are we going home?” Albert asked.
“No…not yet. You’re going to Prague. You’ll be living there for a while.”
“And Mom’s there?”
“Yes, she’s safe, don’t worry.
But Albert was no longer listening. A new thought had just struck him.
“How did you get me out?”
The Cadillac was thundering along the two-way street, forcing its way through, bullying, running traffic lights. Jens let go of Albert, reached for his seat belt, pulled it across him, and fastened it.
“Does it make any difference?”
“Yes, it makes a difference,”Albert said.
“Albert. We’re on our way out of here now. You’re going home to your mom, that’s all that matters.”
The driver blew his horn, then accelerated.
“I heard them talking about it,” Albert said.
“Who? Talking about what?”
“That I was going to be exchanged for someone.”
Jens said nothing, and Albert turned toward him.
“Lothar?” Albert asked.
Jens was staring in front of him.
“Yes…”
“Did anyone think to ask me about this?”
“No.”
“I want to stay here,” he said.
Jens turned toward him in his seat.
“Listen to me now, Albert.”
Albert’s eyes wavered.
“Your mom’s been hurt.”
Albert froze.
“She was stabbed,” Jens went on.
Albert struggled to say something. Eventually he said, “How is she?”
“OK, under the circumstances.”
A thousand thoughts.
“Who stabbed her?”
“Aron Geisler,” Jens replied.
A look of surprise. “Aron? Why?”
“We don’t know yet…but that doesn’t matter. We’re all being hunted, Albert, tracked down and searched for. There’s no space to accommodate your individual wishes. You’re going to your mom, that’s what’s going to happen. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
Albert seemed lost in thought.
“Do you understand what I’m saying?” Jens repeated.
“Yes,” he replied.
“If it’s any consolation to you, I’m going to be staying here with Lothar,” Jens said quietly.
“Staying?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“I’m part of the deal. But that’s nothing for you to worry about.”
Albert lowered his head, as if he
were ashamed.
“I don’t know what to say,” he whispered after a while.
“You don’t have to say anything. And don’t feel guilty. This is just the way things have turned out.”
—
It was raining as the car turned into the military airfield and drove out onto the apron. A 737 bearing the insignia of the Colombian Air Force on its tail was waiting with its engines running, a movable flight of stairs leading up to the rear entrance.
Another Cadillac pulled in ahead of them. Jens watched it as it stopped. He saw Mikhail get out in the rain and walk toward them.
“Come on,” he said to Albert. “Let’s get you out of here.”
Jens helped Albert out from the SUV, the driver waited outside with Albert’s wheelchair.
Mikhail and Albert shook hands. Then the three of them headed toward the plane.
“What are you going to do after this, Mikhail?” Jens asked.
“After this?”
“When you get back. Are you going to leave Prague?”
“No, I’ll stay for a while.”
“Why?”
“Various reasons.”
“Give me one.”
Mikhail glanced at Jens, then said, “I don’t think Lothar should have to live in this country with these people. Nor you, Jens.”
He fished out a piece of paper.
“You can contact me via this website,” he went on, and tucked the note into Jens’s pocket.
The two men carried Albert up the steps in his wheelchair. When they reached the top they put Albert down inside the door of the plane.
Jens held out his hand to Albert, who took it.
“Look after yourself, and your mom,” Jens said, then turned around, gave Mikhail a pat on the shoulder, then jogged down the steps and over to the car, where Alfonse was waiting.
—
Mikhail rolled Albert into the plane. The rear section was open cargo space, with seven rows of old first-class seats from the ’80s toward the front.
He helped Albert into one of the seats.
A pilot came out from the cockpit in a green Air Force uniform. He folded Albert’s wheelchair away.
“We’ll be landing in Prague. While we’re taxiing, we’ll have to put the boy into a wooden crate in the hold. It’s marked as a diplomatic consignment. You,” he said, pointing at Mikhail, “will leave with us. You’ll have time to peel off once we’re through.”
Jens watched the 737 as it headed toward the runway. The flashing of the navigation lights cast a harsh glow through the rain-drenched car windows.
Then the howl of the engines, and the plane accelerated along the wet runway, took off steeply, and banked away from him into the darkness.
Albert, on his way to Sophie…
“The address of the hotel?” Alfonse said beside him in the backseat.
Jens felt an urge to break Alfonse’s neck, strangle the driver, then take Lothar and run.
But Alfonse had a pistol in his hand, and the driver had one on his lap, in full view.
It would have to wait.
—
Alfonse went with Jens up to the hotel room, his pistol swinging from his hand.
Jens released Lothar’s handcuffs and picked up his case, and the three of them left the room.
Once they had been driving through the countryside for a while, Jens turned to Lothar.
“I’ll be staying here with you.”
Lothar didn’t understand at first.
“I’m going to be working for these people. I’ll have to do quite a bit of traveling, but I’ll come back to you as quickly and as often as I can.”
Lothar seemed absorbed in a particular thought, then relaxed and lightened up.
“OK,” he whispered.
—
Their new home. A prison. The drugs castle in the jungle appeared as they emerged from driving through the dense forest.
They looked at the animals in their enclosures, the tennis courts, swimming pools, waterfalls, and the helicopter pad, all lit up in the evening.
The car didn’t stop in front of the main building but carried on beyond it, through another patch of jungle and along a gravel road.
At the foot of a verdant hillside lay a row of white, single-story buildings, with small gardens, an orangery, and two more buildings without windows. It looked like a miniature suburb, but it was all surrounded by a three-meter-high metal fence with signs warning of extremely high voltage. There was a barred gate in the middle, and guards patrolling outside.
They pulled up in front of the gate; Jens could see some men sitting on the illuminated veranda of one of the houses. They were dressed in casual clothes, almost as though they were on vacation, sitting around a table, perhaps they were playing cards….
In the front seat, Alfonse turned around.
“Do you recognize them?” Alfonse asked, nodding toward the veranda.
They were some distance away, but Jens recognized one of them, at least.
“Ernst Lundwall, Hector’s adviser,” he said.
“That’s right,” Alfonse said. “The other two are Christian Hanke and Roland Gentz.”
Ralph Hanke’s son and his right-hand man.
Don Ignacio Ramirez was collecting people. Just like the animals in the enclosures. And now he and Lothar were collector’s items of his as well. The picture was becoming clearer. Alfonse and Don Ignacio had the right people in their possession to take over whatever they wanted to from Hanke’s or Guzman’s businesses. Possibly everything. Because they had their sons.
Jens looked at Lothar. He sat there beside him, his expression not revealing anything of what he thought about things.
“You’re not going to be living here. You’re guests in the main house,” Alfonse said.
“What does that mean?” Jens asked.
“That we start up there. If you behave yourself, Jens, and if you’re cooperative…well, you understand. Then Lothar will have a decent life here.”
Tommy was pushing Monica in her wheelchair. It was cold. She was looking at the wildlife, it was always beautiful. However gray and miserable it was, she always enjoyed looking at things.
She had stopped talking to Tommy. He thought it was because of her illness. She could talk, sometimes really well. But she was never going to talk to him again. She had made her mind up about that. And then he had begun to talk to her, properly. Their walks, like this one, were unbearable. He pushed her ahead of him in her wheelchair and told her one appalling truth after the other. As if he were unburdening himself to her. As if that was what she was for, now. The truths were partially camouflaged, but she understood. Tommy was a murderer, a mass murderer, who used his warped sense of honesty to justify everything with wise words and childish psychology. And all the while he reminded her that it was for her sake that all of this was happening, because he was going to make her better.
He was so sick, her Tommy. He didn’t even have the decency not to say that, not to try to lay the blame on her.
“Do you remember Denmark?” he said. “That was our best holiday, wasn’t it? The girls were so happy. They loved that beach, and the restaurants. We’re going to go back there again. We’ll stay at the same place, and it will be just as much fun.”
He sounded so convinced of everything he said. As if every thought in his head were a truth. She couldn’t even remember Denmark.
And Monica knew that Tommy would never help her with anything again, and certainly not help her on her way. The biggest thing she had ever asked from her husband, after a lifetime in his service.
But Tommy was only capable of helping himself the whole time, over and over again, sucked in by centrifugal force toward the center of his own self-obsessed and warped universe.
And she could no longer do anything but pray for him, pray hard and intensely in the vague hope that one day he would come to his senses and put a bullet in his own head.
Kennet Wessman showed his diplomatic passport to the cu
stoms official at Václav Havel Airport in Prague. He signed to acknowledge receipt of a large wooden crate sent from the Swedish diplomatic delegation to Colombia.
The crate was loaded into his van.
Miles was sitting behind the wheel as Kennet jumped in. They drove away from the customs office. But instead of heading toward the center of the city, they steered around the building and drove a short distance until a large man in just his shirtsleeves emerged from the darkness.
Mikhail pulled the back door open and climbed inside.
“God, it’s cold,” he said, shivering.
With Kennet driving, they sped off. Miles clambered into the back and helped Mikhail to open the crate. The lid came off.
Albert was sitting inside the box, his legs tucked beneath him.
“I’m Miles Ingmarsson,” Miles said, sticking his hand in the crate.
“I’m Albert Brinkmann,” Albert said, taking his hand.
—
She was lying in bed, and heard the door open, heard Miles talking, heard Albert answer. Then the sound of rubber tires on the wooden floor of the apartment. Albert’s wheelchair.
He came into her room. They looked at each other. Albert looked the same, but was different in a way that she couldn’t quite put her finger on. Something in his eyes.
Tears were running down her cheeks. She held his hand and leaned toward him. And in spite of the pain from the knife wound, she managed to hug Albert. She held him tight. He felt a long way away.
“Hello, Mom,” he said.
“Hello, darling,” she whispered.
The house was quiet when Tommy opened the door. He walked through the hall and into the living room. It felt clean, as if someone had been hard at work.
“Hello?” he said cautiously.
In the kitchen, at the table, Monica was sitting in her wheelchair, her head lolling sideways, dead; staring eyes, arms hanging limply. On the table a glass of water and an open bottle of pills.
Tommy stood there motionless. The afternoon sun was shining on her. A scene of calm. He took a few careful steps closer. He took hold of a chair and realized he was moving quietly, as if he didn’t want to upset her spirit, which he knew was still in the kitchen. Tommy sat down beside Monica.
Her hand was cold, but he held it in his, tried to warm her up.
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