“What for?”
“No idea. It’s just what they want,” Risto replied.
The meeting in Prague had turned out to be pointless. The only reason for it was so they could get a sense of who he was, he realized. Dmitry, Gosha, and Vitaly behaved as if they were stuck in some sort of malevolent adolescence.
They drank vodka in Jens’s hotel room in Malá Strana. Vitaly pulled off the bathroom mirror and laid it on the coffee table, then cut out a load of fat lines with a badly worn Diners card with its laminate hanging off. Then came the hookers—several far too young—spaced-out girls from some former Soviet republic. Dmitry wanted to take everyone to dinner. They went to a modern, soulless place on Václav Square. Chrome, leather, and molded plastic décor. The hookers were strung out on heroin; one of them kept picking at a tooth at the back of her mouth, another kept rubbing her cheek with her index finger, and the third was scratching her lower arm far too hard. Dmitry bought Champagne for them all, and ended up having a pointless argument with Gosha. Jens realized that he had nothing in common with Dmitry. He snuck out and went to the Roxy, a nightclub on Dlouha. He sat there drinking and watching people dance until the sun came up.
The next day Dmitry and his hollow-eyed gang came to his hotel again and suggested they take some LSD and go and watch a football match between Sparta Prague and Zenit St. Petersburg, who were in town for the game. Jens said that sadly he couldn’t go, he had to head home early. They laughed mirthlessly, as usual, took their drugs in his hotel room, came up on the drugs and messed about with him for a while, then went off yelling and brandishing a fire extinguisher they’d pulled from the wall in the corridor.
Jens took an earlier flight back to Stockholm.
When Jens got back to his apartment he had a message: Buenos Aires in two days. He repacked his bag, slept badly, then went back to Arlanda Airport the next morning and flew to Buenos Aires via Paris. He landed at Ezeiza, slept a few hours at his hotel, ate lunch with a self-satisfied idiot of a courier. Jens paid off the courier, who handed him a set of car keys and told him that there was a van waiting in the hotel garage. He checked the boxes in the back of the van, the weapons were there, everything was going according to plan.
He was feeling tired and decided to stay an extra day before driving the goods to Paraguay. He went to a boxing match, but the fight disintegrated and ended up more like a case of grievous bodily harm than a fair contest. Jens stood up and walked out before the referee stopped it. Instead he spent the afternoon looking at tourist attractions. He wanted to feel normal but realized almost immediately how dull that was.
He found a decent restaurant, had a good meal, and read a copy of USA Today that he had taken with him from the hotel.
At first he didn’t react to his name. But when he looked up he recognized Jane at once, Sophie Lantz’s younger sister, as she stood there beside his table. She looked just the same as the last time he had seen her, when she had been just a child.
“Jens? … Jens Vall! What are you doing here?”
Jane’s smile turned to laughter. He stood up, infected by her laughter as they hugged each other.
“Hello, Jane.”
The silent man standing behind her was named Jesus. He didn’t introduce himself, Jane did. They sat down at his table and Jane started talking before her backside hit the seat. Jens listened and laughed in turn, realizing early on why she had picked a silent type like Jesus. She told him that she and Jesus were in Buenos Aires to visit his relatives, that they didn’t have any children, and that they lived in a three-room apartment near Järntorget in Stockholm’s old town.
He asked after Sophie and was given superficial information about her life: that she was now Sophie Brinkmann, that she was now a widow, had one son, and worked as a nurse. Jane realized that she’d come to a halt and started asking questions back. Jens lied with an honest face—said he was a fertilizer salesman, that he had to do a lot of traveling for his work, that he didn’t have a family yet but maybe that would change in the future.
They ate and drank late into the evening. Jesus and Jane took him to places in the city that he would never have found on his own. He saw the real face of the city and liked it even more.
Jesus’s silence remained unbroken all evening.
“Is he mute?” Jens asked, entirely reasonably.
“Sometimes he talks,” she said.
The next morning, in the taxi back to the hotel, he felt melancholic. Melancholic at that moment because of his past. He slept badly that night.
The car lurched toward Ciudad del Este. He could see the city in the distance and was relieved to be rid of the Russians. He would make the preparations necessary before departure, then the cargo could be loaded into the truck.
There was a message waiting for Sophie in the staff room. A small, white, stiff envelope with her first name written on the front in black ink. She opened it while she waited for the coffee machine, read it quickly, and then put it in her pocket.
She carried on with her duties all morning, hoping she would forget what she had just read. She couldn’t. At a quarter to twelve she went into the changing room, took off her nurse’s uniform, grabbed her handbag and summer jacket, and went down to the entrance hall.
The cousin was waiting for her, nodding to indicate that she should follow him outside. She did so, feeling somehow rather uncertain, as if something inside her was telling her that this was the wrong decision. But behind any notion of uncertainty was a delight in doing something spontaneous and not thought through. It had been a while.
The car was new—one of those environmental Japanese cars. There was nothing special about it, it was just new. It smelled new and was comfortable to sit in.
“We’re heading for Vasastan,” he said.
She met his gaze in the rearview mirror. His eyes were blue, clear, and intense.
“You’re cousins, aren’t you? On which side?”
“All possible sides.”
She laughed. “Really? How do you mean?”
“All possible sides.”
He sounded as if that were his final word on the subject.
“My name’s Aron.…”
“Hello, Aron,” she said.
They sat in silence the rest of the way into the city.
Tables, chairs, and a swing door leading to a kitchen. The lighting was too bright, there were landscape prints on the walls, and there were checkered paper napkins. A standard lunch restaurant, nothing more.
She found herself smiling when Hector waved to her from a table toward the rear of the room, and she tried to erase the smile as she made her way through the tables toward him.
He stood up and pulled out a chair for her.
“I would have picked you up myself if it wasn’t for my leg.”
Sophie sat down. “It was fine, Aron was good company, if a little quiet.…”
He smiled.
“You came,” he said.
He slid a laminated menu toward her.
“We never said good-bye,” Hector went on.
“No, we didn’t.”
His tone of voice changed. “I come here for the shellfish. The best in the city, but hardly anyone knows about it.”
“Then that’s what I’ll have.”
She didn’t touch the menu, kept her hands in her lap. He made an almost invisible nod to someone standing behind the bar.
Meeting Hector outside the hospital was different. She had a giddy sense that she was about to eat lunch with someone she really didn’t know at all. But he noticed her uncertainty and started talking, telling little anecdotes about what it was like to have your leg in a cast in Stockholm, about the process of slicing up your favorite trousers, and how much he missed the hospital food and instant mashed potatoes. He was good at seeing the funny side of everyday life, turning a strained situation into something light and entertaining.
She listened to him with half an ear. She liked the way he looked, and her gaze kept getting caug
ht by his alert eyes, which seemed to be two different colors. The right one was dark blue, the left dark brown. In a certain light the color of his eyes seemed sharper, as if he became a different person for a while.
“So is it empty without me at the hospital?” he asked.
Sophie laughed and shook her head.
“No, it’s the same as usual.”
A waitress brought over two glasses of wine.
“Spanish white. Not our finest achievement … but perfectly palatable.”
He raised his glass in a relaxed toast. She left the wine where it was, picking up the water glass instead and taking a sip, then she did the Swedish thing of tilting her glass slightly and seeking eye contact with him. He didn’t notice, had already looked away. She felt foolish.
Hector leaned back, inspecting her calmly and confidently, then opened his mouth to say something. A fleeting thought seemed to stop him. He was left searching for words.
“What?” she wondered with a little laugh.
He shifted on his chair. “I don’t know … I don’t recognize you.… You’re different.”
“In what way?”
He looked at her.
“I don’t know, just different. Maybe because you’re not in your nurse’s uniform?”
“Would you prefer that?”
Her words seemed to embarrass him, which amused her.
“But you do recognize me? You know who I am?”
“I’m starting to wonder,” he said.
“About what?”
“Who you are …”
“You know who I am.”
He shook his head. “Well, I know a bit … but not everything.”
“Why would you want to know everything?”
He stopped himself. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to be intrusive.”
“You’re not intrusive.”
“I think I probably am.…”
“How do you mean?”
Hector shrugged. “Sometimes I’m in a hurry to get what I want. That can make me a bit pushy. But let’s not talk about that. Instead I’d like us to carry on where we left off.”
She wasn’t quite with him. “Where did we leave off?”
The food arrived, and plates were put in front of them. Hector set about the shellfish with his fingers, peeling them with a practiced hand.
“Your dad had passed away, and you spent a few years being lonely and sad.… Then your mom met Tom and you moved into his house. Wasn’t that it?”
At first she didn’t get it, then it struck her that his questions while he was in the hospital had been about her life, from childhood onward. She had told him everything chronologically, or rather he had asked his questions chronologically. She was surprised she hadn’t realized before.
He met her eyes as if to say go on. Sophie thought, searching her memory, then picked up the story where she had left off. How she and her sister had felt brighter as time passed after their father’s death. How they had moved into Tom’s villa with their mother, just a few minutes away from their childhood home. How she started smoking Marlboro Lights in year nine, how life seemed brighter.
They ate oysters, saltwater crayfish, lobster. Sophie kept on talking. Told him about her exchange trip to the United States, her first job, her travels through Asia, how hard she found it to understand love when she was young, and the lingering anxiety of growing up—a feeling that had clung to her long into her thirties. She picked at the food, absorbed in her own story. The time passed and she realized that she had been talking nonstop without giving him any chance to interrupt. She asked if she was talking too much, boring him? He shook his head.
“Go on,” he said.
“I met David. We got married, had Albert, and suddenly the years ran away with us. I don’t really remember that well.”
With that she didn’t want to go on, it felt uncomfortable.
“What don’t you remember?”
Sophie picked at her plate.
“Some periods in your life seem to blend, merge together.”
“How do you mean?”
“I don’t know.”
“Yes, you do.” He smiled.
She poked at her plate with her fork.
“Passiveness,” she said quietly.
The word seemed to make him even more curious.
“In what way?”
She looked up. “What?”
“Passive, how?”
She emptied her glass, thinking about his question, then shrugged.
“The way most moms are, I guess. Children, loneliness. David worked, traveled a lot. I stayed at home.… Nothing happened.”
She could tell what her face looked like, she could feel the furrow in her brow and straightened herself out and tried to smile. Before he had time to ask another question she went on.
“The years passed and David got ill, and you know the rest.”
“Tell me.”
“He died,” she said.
“I know. But what happened?”
This time he didn’t seem to pick up on her boundary.
“There’s not much to say, he was diagnosed with cancer. Two years later he passed away.”
The way she said this last sentence stopped him from milking the subject further. They ate in silence. After a while things picked up again in the same way. He asked more questions, she replied, but resisted saying too much. When she found a suitable opportunity she glanced at her wristwatch. He picked up the hint. To hide it, Hector looked at his own watch.
“Time’s flying,” he said neutrally.
Maybe he realized there and then that he had been too inquisitive, too pushy. He seemed to be in a hurry, folding his napkin and becoming impersonal.
“Would you like Aron to drive you back?”
“No, thanks.”
Hector stood up first.
She leaned her head against the window of the underground railcar, staring out into the darkness at the vague shapes flying past before her unseeing eyes.
He wasn’t pushy. He just seemed to be trying to understand who she was in relation to him. And she recognized it; she was the same, she mirrored herself in others, wanted to know, to understand. But the similarities alarmed her as well. She had probably always been a bit scared in his company. Not of him, but maybe of something he radiated, something he did to her.
Loneliness was simple and monotonous. She was all too familiar with it, had hidden herself away in it for an eternity by now. And every time anyone got close to her, suggesting that her self-imposed isolation wasn’t solid or absolute, she took a step back, pulled away.… But it was different this time. Hector’s appearance in her life meant something.…
Suddenly there was blinding light. The underground train was rushing over the bridge between Bergshamra and Danderyd Hospital, the sun’s rays bombarding the railcar. She was roused from her thoughts, got up, and went to stand by the doors, holding on to keep her balance as the train pulled into the station.
Sophie went up to the hospital and changed back into her nurse’s uniform. She worked to keep her thoughts at bay. She didn’t have a favorite patient on the ward, and hoped that one would soon turn up.
3
Lars Vinge called Gunilla Strandberg. As usual, she didn’t pick up, so he hung up. His cell rang forty seconds later.
“Hello?”
“Yes?” Gunilla Strandberg asked.
“I just called you,” he said.
A moment’s silence. “Yes …?”
Lars cleared his throat.
“The accomplice picked up the nurse.”
“And?”
“He drove her to a restaurant, where she had lunch with Guzman.”
“Pull back and come in,” she said, and hung up.
Lars Vinge had been watching Hector Guzman and Aron Geisler on and off since Hector was discharged from the hospital.
It had been a slow job, nothing to report. He thought someone else could have done this. Considered himself overqualified. He was
an analytical person, and that was why he had been recruited. At least that’s what Gunilla had said when she offered him the job two months before. Now he was spending days on end sitting in a car while the rest of the team was busy with the background analysis, potential scenarios, and theoretical approaches.
Lars had been in the police twelve years before Gunilla contacted him. He had been a beat cop in the Western District, where he had been trying to find ways to defuse ethnic tensions. He felt isolated in his work. His colleagues didn’t show the same sense of social engagement as he did. Unbidden, Lars wrote an analysis of the area’s problems. The report hadn’t exactly made much of an impact or received any great recognition, and, if he was being honest, he had written it mainly to stand out from the rest of his factory-farmed colleagues. That was how he perceived the majority of his male colleagues, factory-farmed: their upper arms were too big, their faces too heavy, they were pretty solid, pretty dense, too dim for his liking. And they for their part didn’t like him much either; he wasn’t considered one of them, he knew that. Within the force, Lars Vinge wasn’t the man you wanted as your partner. He was cautious when they were out at night, when things got violent he pulled back and let the big gorillas go in and take charge. He was always getting teased about that in the changing room.
He looked in the mirror one morning and realized how childish he looked. Lars tried to solve it with a new hairstyle, water-combed with a part. He thought it made him look a bit more substantial. His colleagues started calling him Sturmbannführer Lars. That was better than Little Cunt or Front Bottom, the things they used to call him. As usual, he pretended not to hear.
Lars Vinge did his work as best he could, avoiding violent crime and night duty, trying to win the approval of his superiors, trying to make small talk with his colleagues. Nothing went his way, everyone avoided him. Lars ended up having trouble sleeping and developed eczema around his nose.
Two years after his report on local tensions was finished, and probably archived and forgotten somewhere, a woman from National Crime called and introduced herself as Gunilla Strandberg. He didn’t think she sounded much like a police officer, and she didn’t look like one either when they met for lunch in Kungsträdgården. She was in her mid-fifties and had short black hair with a scattering of gray, beautiful brown eyes, smooth, healthy skin. That was the first thing that struck him, her skin. She looked younger than her years, healthier somehow. Gunilla Strandberg made a calm, stern impression, lightened every now and then with a little smile. The calm that she radiated seemed to be based on circumspection, together with a sort of reflection upon everything that happened. Something she seemed to have actively chosen over impulse and spontaneity. She behaved maturely, like someone who had learned that things could go wrong just because they happened too fast. And all of this was illuminated by a deep intelligence; she was smart and knowledgeable and seldom indulged herself with either exaggeration or understatement. She saw the world in a clear, uncluttered way. He felt smaller than her, but it didn’t matter, that was just how it was—it felt natural.
The Andalucian Friend: A Novel Page 3