The Andalucian Friend: A Novel

by Alexander Soderberg

  Hector followed her out to her taxi and opened the door for her.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  She leaned forward and let him kiss her. His lips were softer than she had imagined. There was something very careful about him. He slid out of the kiss.

  She couldn’t sleep when she got home, so she sat on the veranda instead, listening to the birds singing to her, breathing in the magical smells of the early morning and absorbing all the beauty before her. The fresh, dark, early-morning green of the lawn, the dense foliage of the trees, the interconnectedness of the whole. She knew she was high, but didn’t feel at all guilty.

  She asked herself why she had so suddenly dropped her guard, and why she had willfully crossed so many boundaries in her life recently with such an intense inward smile.

  Lars was leaning against the wall watching Erik, who was sitting with his feet up on an open desk drawer, poking his ear with a pen. Eva Castroneves was making tiny half-inch turns on her office chair and Gunilla was reading a document with her glasses perched on her nose. She put down the sheet she had been reading, took off her reading glasses, and let them dangle on the cord around her neck.

  “OK, Lars, you start.”

  Lars shuffled on the spot as if he were trying to find a hole to crawl into, always this anxiety whenever he was asked to speak in front of other people. He searched inside himself for the part of his personality that could help rescue him from this. Maybe the slightly angry one, maybe the slightly vacant one, or perhaps a mix of the two. He found something, plugged it in, and started to explain to his colleagues in a more or less clear voice about how Sophie Brinkmann had met Hector Guzman at the NK department store and how last night she had gone to a party at a restaurant in Vasastan.

  “But I’ve written all that in my reports.”

  Gunilla took over.

  “Sophie and Hector have some sort of relationship, we know that now. What sort of relationship it is will doubtless become clear in the future. The party, Lars, tell us about that.”

  He cleared his throat quietly, clasped his hands, let them go; his arms were hanging awkwardly, his legs couldn’t find a relaxed posture.

  “I didn’t see or notice anything unusual except that two men took up position outside the restaurant after an elderly man arrived there late in the evening, probably Hector’s father. Sophie got in a taxi at 3:28, which in all likelihood drove her home from the city.”

  “Thank you,” Gunilla said, and nodded toward Eva.

  “I took photographs of the other guests as they left the venue,” Lars added. “The pictures are a bit grainy, but maybe you’d like to take a look, Eva?”

  Lars noticed that his voice was sounding higher than normal, and didn’t like it.

  “Good … let Eva have the pictures,” Gunilla said.

  He scratched his neck.

  Eva went back to her papers, looking through them, then leafing a bit further.

  “Sophie Brinkmann, born Lantz, seems like someone who lives a good life, probably on the inheritance from her husband, socializes sporadically with her friends and occasionally her mother. There aren’t really any question marks in her past. Normal school career, marks slightly above average, she spent a year in the United States as an exchange student, traveled in Asia for a few months with a friend after graduating from high school, then had a number of jobs before studying nursing at Sophiahemmet University College. She met David Brinkmann and gave birth to Albert two years later, they got married, moved into a villa in Stocksund from an apartment in Stockholm. When David died in 2003 she sold the villa and bought something smaller for her and her son in the same area.…”

  Eva stopped, leafed a bit further through her notes, then continued: “She’s close to her son, Albert, she doesn’t seem to have any hobbies or particular interests. The social side of things is difficult to interpret; we don’t know much about her circle of friends yet, apart from her best friend, Clara. That’s the woman she was out with that time you followed her, Lars. That’s what I’ve got for the time being.”

  Gunilla thanked her and went on: “Was she like this before we came across her? A woman who goes out with men? Or has she been the grieving widow sitting at home, and Hector is the first to draw her out of her shell?”

  “That’s probably how it is,” Eva said.

  “Which?”

  “That Hector’s the first.”

  “What makes you say that?” Gunilla wondered.

  “There’s nothing to suggest that she’s seen any men since the death of her husband, but I’ll keep looking.”

  “Erik?” Gunilla said.

  Erik was cleaning under his fingernails with a toothpick. “In and of herself she’s not of any interest, but the question is whether the Spaniard has fallen for her. Because if that’s the case then she has a role, but otherwise the question is irrelevant.”

  The room fell silent, as if everyone but Lars was thinking. He looked at them with a sudden feeling that he was alone in the room. Gunilla woke from her thoughts first.

  “Lars, can you give me a lift?”

  They drove through the lunchtime traffic. Gunilla was sitting in the passenger seat, applying lipstick, looking in the mirror on the back of the sun visor.

  “So what do you make of it?” she asked, pursing her lips together.

  “I don’t know.”

  She put the lid back on the lipstick and dropped it in her bag.

  “I’d like your opinion, Lars, not an evaluation or analysis, just your opinion.”

  He thought for a moment as they got stuck behind a bus on Sturegatan.

  “It feels flimsy,” he said.

  “It is flimsy. It’s always flimsy, often we don’t have anything. So I feel the opposite about this case, I think we’ve got a lot.”

  Lars nodded. “You’re probably right.”

  He was staring ahead, there was a lot of traffic.

  “You don’t have to agree with me, Lars,” she said flatly.

  Lars coughed for some reason, he really wanted her to trust him.

  “I think I’ve got more to offer you, Gunilla.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “That I can do more than just surveillance. I’m analytical, I’ve got a lot to offer, I think. We talked about it when you offered me the job.…”

  Gunilla indicated that he should pull over a little way ahead.

  “You’re important to the group, Lars, you’re making a valuable contribution. I’d like to bring you in closer, but for that to happen we need something to go on, and the person who can come up with that is you. I’ll take full responsibility if anything goes wrong, but we have to increase the level now, the level of surveillance. Do you understand what I mean by that?”

  “I think so.”

  Lars found a gap in the traffic, pulled over to the curb, and stopped.

  “We’re on the right track,” she went on. “Have no doubt about that, just do whatever you can to take this a step further.”

  She closed her handbag. “I’m going to send you a number, Lars. It belongs to a man named Anders. He’ll help you. Anders is good.”

  Gunilla patted him lightly on the arm, opened the door, and got out of the car.

  Lars stayed where he was for a few minutes, thoughts flying through his head—somewhere there was a little bit of euphoria about what Gunilla had just said, about how valuable he was. But there was also a feeling of discomfort, but on the other hand that was always there. Gunilla could continue to be correct in her analysis of him. He wasn’t going to disappoint her.

  He pulled out into the heavy traffic again. His cell beeped and the screen asked him if he wanted to save the contact Anders.

  The sea was rough and cascades of water were washing over him. He was standing at the prow of the ship, looking at the flat mainland in the distance. Holland.

  The ship’s engines suddenly shut off, then a rumbling, thudding sound ran through the hu
ll as the helmsman put the ship into reverse. It wasn’t particularly noticeable, the ship was still moving forward at the same rate. It took time to stop a ship of this size. Jens looked around to find the reason why the captain had decided to stop this far out to sea.

  On the horizon he could see a relatively large open motorboat with a central console bouncing over the waves, heading directly toward the ship. He screwed up his eyes, trying to find anything that could tell what sort of boat it was, or who was steering it. He couldn’t see anything and left his position at the prow, crossing the deck back over to the metal staircase leading up to the bridge.

  He dragged the door open. The captain and helmsman were drinking tea, smoking foul-smelling cigarettes, and were in the middle of a game of backgammon.

  “There’s a boat coming.”

  The captain nodded.

  “Customs? Police?”

  The captain smiled, shaking his head.

  “Passengers,” he said, taking a sip from his mug of tea.

  Jens was suddenly nervous—and it was evidently noticeable, because the captain turned to his helmsman, said something brief in Vietnamese, and they both burst out laughing.

  There was a great commotion when the motorboat pulled up alongside the ship. A rope ladder was thrown down and two men climbed up, one short-haired and muscular, the other dark-haired with a black, waist-length jacket. The short-haired one was carrying a cloth sports bag. As the motorboat pulled away and accelerated back toward shore, one of the men went up to the bridge. The other man, the short-haired one, waited below.

  Jens watched them from his position on deck, the way one of them spoke to the captain, who gesticulated in a submissive way, as though he regretted something he had done, as if he were trying to explain. The conversation was short, then the man walked out, onto the metal staircase.

  “Leszek!” he shouted to the short-haired man, and waved at him to move toward the front of the ship. Leszek did as he was told and disappeared.

  The diesel engines belowdecks started to rumble again and the ship slowly chewed its way through the waves along the same course to Rotterdam. Jens went back belowdecks.

  The captain had forbidden him to go into the hold during the voyage, but Jens had no intention of asking his permission.

  He broke open two crates, put the guns back together, and repacked them into two smaller boxes that would be easier to shift over to the van he had ordered to be waiting on the quayside. The price he had paid for passage across the Atlantic included a promise that customs wouldn’t do any spot checks during the first hour they were in port. Jens wanted everything to be ready, so he could leave the ship as quickly as possible and get away from there.

  A few hours later the ship was piloted into harbor. Jens was sitting on the roof of the bridge, drinking bad coffee and smoking a cigarette. The sea was calm, the sun shining behind the fog. He could hear foghorns out there somewhere. Then Rotterdam harbor emerged clearly. It was enormous, everything was enormous. Cranes, containers, huge, brutish ships alongside vast docks. Jens felt very small as they made their way through this oversized world.

  After an hour the ship docked alongside a concrete quay in a remote part of the harbor. The captain ordered the hold opened from his position up on the bridge, cranes reached over the ship, and the crew began fastening straps and cables around the containers, which were slowly hoisted ashore.

  Just as Jens was starting to wonder when his rented van would show up, a car came driving along the quayside and parked beside the ship. It couldn’t be the one he had ordered, it was far too small. Three men got out. One was large and thickset, the other two somewhat smaller. The men walked quickly toward the ship and up the gangplank, onto the deck. Jens studied them from his position on the roof. The largest of the three kept going toward the bridge while the other two stayed on deck.

  Leaving the coffee mug on the roof, Jens clambered down and walked across the deck past the two men. He nodded to them—more like someone at a golf club than on a Vietnamese smuggler’s ship. Neither of them nodded back. He got a quick look at them as he passed. From close up they looked rough: skinny, hollow eyes, pocked skin … the look of addicts.

  Just as Jens put his foot on the metal staircase leading down into the hold he heard one of the men behind him shout.

  “Mikhail!”

  Then three distant bangs followed in quick succession. Somewhere he thought he heard a scream and at that same millisecond came a whining noise combined with the hard sound of something small striking flesh at high velocity. Out of pure reflex he threw himself down the steps into the hold. During the seconds that followed there was complete silence. As if the recent shots had destroyed all the sound in the universe. He clambered up a few steps and peered over the edge. One of the men he had just nodded to was lying, apparently dead, in front of him in a contorted, unnatural position. Jens could just make out a submachine gun under the man’s jacket. With the sun against him he could see the outline of the man named Leszek up on the observation deck, on one knee, following the other man, who was running across the deck through the telescopic sights of his rifle. The marksman on the observation deck let off four rapid-fire shots. The man on deck just made it to the shelter of the wall beneath the bridge as the bullets ricocheted off the metal.

  Jens’s pulse was racing. He watched as Leszek quickly slung his gun on his back and scampered nimbly down and disappeared. Suddenly there were two more shots. They came from inside the bridge, it sounded like a pistol. He saw the door open and the man named Mikhail came out with a large automatic pistol in his hand. He shouted something to the man below him. They exchanged some short sentences in Russian. Mikhail came down the steps, didn’t appear to be in any hurry. Then they both disappeared along the length of the ship toward the stern. Jens crawled quickly over to the dead man, lifted his jacket, removed his submachine gun, and then slid backward down the steps into the hold, hurrying into the cover of darkness.

  The hold was large, cold, and damp, with packing crates and freezers strapped tightly together. Farther in, the larger containers were stacked on top of one another, seven in total, one of them hanging in the air above him. The cranes and all work on the quayside had stopped when the firing began. He found a safe place, breathing hard, trying to think, trying to pull himself together. No matter how he thought it through, he always came to the same conclusion: neither of the two factions who were shooting at each other—the Mikhail group or the Leszek group—knew who he was, so it was more than likely that they would take him for an enemy. He looked at the weapon he was holding in his hand, it was a Bizon. A Russian submachine gun.

  He suddenly felt horribly alone, and fiddled unconsciously with the safety catch with his right thumb. It was making a clicking sound, and he realized that the sound must be carrying a long way and stopped doing it. No further shots had rung out up on deck. Jens stood up quietly and began to make his way through the crates.

  The noise came out of nowhere. A hail of bullets slammed into packing crates close to him. He threw himself to the ground, then without thinking he stood up just as quickly, held out the gun, and pulled the trigger. The weapon clicked, nothing happened. He crouched down again, swore at himself and changed the position of the safety catch that he had been fiddling with earlier. He took a deep breath, realized that he had used up his only chance and that the gunman knew his position now. He got to his feet and ran a few yards across an open space until he reached the rear part of the hold, then kept going, throwing himself behind the shelter of a freezer. His breathing was quick and shallow, and Jens was listening so hard that after a while he thought he could hear things that weren’t really there. He glanced out, saw nothing, and was about to get up and move when a voice whispered in English behind him.

  “Drop your gun.”

  He hesitated and the man repeated the words, and Jens put the Bizon on the floor.

  “How many of you are there?” the voice asked quickly.

  “Just me.
”

  “Who are you?”

  “A passenger.”

  “Why are you armed?”

  “I took the gun from the dead man up on deck.”

  “Did you see the men who came on board?”

  “Yes.”

  “How many of them were there?”

  “Three. One got shot. One went up to the bridge, the third one joined forces with him. I think they headed back toward the stern.”

  Jens swore to himself in Swedish, then said to the man in English: “Were you the one shooting at me?”

  Now the man addressed him in Swedish: “No, it wasn’t me, it was the others shooting at you, not us.”

  At first Jens thought he must have misheard.

  There were noises from the open section of the cargo hold. Jens tried to look, then turned to face the man. He was gone. Jens picked up his gun once more.

  5

  Anders Ask was the name of the man Gunilla had told Lars to call. Anders turned out to be a cheerful soul, more cheerful than Lars could handle. He had picked him up in the city center and they had driven out to Stocksund.

  Anders was sitting comfortably in the passenger seat, going through the microphones in his lap.

  “So, who’s Lars, then?”

  Lars glanced quickly at Anders. “Oh, well, what can I say, nothing special.”

  Anders held up a microphone to the light, examining it for a moment.

  “God, they’re tiny,” he whispered to himself. He smiled at this, then tucked the microphone back into the foam rubber. “What were you doing before?”

  “Western District,” Lars said.

  “Crime?”

  Lars cast a quick look at Anders. “No …”

  Anders waited for more, then laughed. “No?”

  Lars shifted in his seat, a small frown on his brow.

  “Law and order,” he said quietly.

  Anders smiled broadly. “A beat cop. Fucking hell. I’m in a car with a beat cop! That doesn’t happen every day. What the hell did you do to get a job with Gunilla?”