The car sped through what appeared to be a virtually deserted neighbourhood. Only the odd figure could be seen outdoors, and a solitary yellow dog ran down the street, past the long line of single-storey storefronts painted pink, blue or soft yellow, and street-food restaurants, all of which looked to be closed.
‘Where are all the people?’ she asked Nati, who glanced at her in surprise.
‘So, you’re alive?’ she said. ‘Siesta, mi amor. Siesta. Everyone hides away during the hottest time of the day.’
Sonja understood. The car’s air-conditioning was running at full blast, but she was still running with sweat. The burning sun was directly above them, in the centre of the sky, so no shadows fell and the road ahead of them undulated in the heat haze. The black surface sweated tar, which glittered like metal in the sunshine.
The car turned into a neighbourhood that looked densely packed. The imposing houses stood shoulder to shoulder. They were painted pastel colours, with gilded decoration, and each house had a cross on its roof so that the district looked like a collection of little churches. The car came to a halt outside a yellow house, larger than those around it, with stained glass in the windows and a half-moon of steps leading up to a pair of carved hardwood doors.
The silent man got out of the car and opened the door for Nati while the driver simultaneously did the same for Sonja.
‘We’re staying here?’ Sonja asked, admiring the massive carved angel on the roof that had been placed to look as if it was about to take to the air.
‘No, silly!’ Nati laughed quietly. ‘This is a mausoleum.’
‘A mausoleum?’
‘That’s right. My husband’s mausoleum. May God bless his wicked soul.’ Nati crossed herself.
‘Mr José’s mausoleum?’
‘Yes. The memorial service begins at four, so we have to be quick.’
Sonja was too surprised to ask any more questions and followed Nati into the building, relieved to be back with air-conditioning after the crushing heat outside.
From the main door they went into a large chamber that was empty apart from a few chairs along the walls and a vast altar at the far end where countless candles burned before a giant photograph of Mr José. The picture showed him with a gentle expression on his face, wearing a suit and with his hair combed smooth. Sonja stared at the picture, and although it showed a very different side to him than she had known, just looking at him gave her a chill that merged with the drops of sweat down her back. Blended with the fear the photograph triggered, Sonja suddenly felt nauseous as an iron-tinged smell of blood filled her nose and everything before her eyes became tinted red, like the pool of blood she had found Mr José lying in.
‘The candles have been burning here since he died,’ Nati said and it was obvious that she was touched. ‘The people here loved him, monster that he was. They absolutely loved him.’
76
Agla had showered, dried her hair and applied a thick layer of foundation in the hope that she could hide the soreness across her cheek. María had lashed out pretty hard when she had kissed her. The redness had disappeared, and although she could still feel it smarting, that had to be just her imagination at work. It was actually shame that was making her skin glow. She felt herself tremble slightly as she dressed and once again ran through the confusion that had enveloped them both after that slap had been delivered.
Agla had apologised half a dozen times while María gathered her bag and then yanked her coat from the hook by the door so hard that it came off the wall, and all of the coats landed in a pile on the floor. María had marched out without glancing at them.
Showered and fresh, Agla screwed the coat hanger back onto the wall and hung all the coats up again, and then realised that her phone was nowhere to be found. Her Icelandic phone was there, but the other one was gone – her main phone. She was certain that it hadn’t been far away. She recalled using it to search for something on the internet earlier in the day, before María’s visit. She looked around in the bedroom and then back in the living room, lifting all the cushions, but without any luck. Maybe it was in the car? She decided to take a look once she had got over the slap and no longer had the feeling that one cheek was glowing bright red.
Despite her discomfort, Agla felt that this unfortunate event had been a victory of a kind. It had been strange and awkward, but a joyful triumph all the same. She felt that she had conquered a barrier by getting closer to María. Even though her head had been full of coke, she had managed to misread the situation completely and she didn’t know herself where she had found the courage to kiss her, she still had. And that was where the triumph lay.
She had always been much more curious about girls than boys. Boys were just boys; she saw enough of them at home. But girls were something of a mystery and she had always been half afraid of them. She had always found it hard to read their thoughts and never understood why they preferred to be shut away chattering in a bedroom when they could be outdoors playing football. It wasn’t as if she didn’t have female friends; she found plenty of them. But they never lasted long. All the friends she made had no interest in sport, had no ambition to get good grades and were more likely than not offended when Agla preferred to go home to finish her homework rather than going with them to the pictures. On top of that, she was bored by their endless talk about boys. It was astonishing how much they could talk about them. She was crowded out by boys at home, so they were the last thing she wanted to think or talk about when she finally met some girls.
Agla finished replacing the cushions on the sofa and was startled by a knock at the door. She tiptoed out into the hall, peered through the spyhole and was surprised to see Ingimar there. Previously, a visit from him had set her nerves jangling. But now she found she enjoyed Ingimar’s company. It helped that he had taken up knocking on the door instead of letting himself in uninvited.
She welcomed him in, then went to the kitchen and opened two bottles of beer and handed him one without asking if he wanted it. Ingimar took the bottle and sat down in the living room, this time taking the sofa and leaving Agla the armchair. These were the kind of interactions she could understand. Boys and men were so easy to deal with, so straightforward. The world of men was a structured hierarchy that they constantly rearranged, and a single chair that faced the entrance demonstrated a position of power. A sofa with its back turned to the door signified subservience. Agla had become fluent in reading the symbols of the male environment among the horde of brothers she had grown up with. She settled in the armchair and smiled at Ingimar as he stretched out on the sofa and swigged his beer.
‘I heard from Jón,’ Ingimar said. ‘The big debt write-off should go through during the week.’
Agla raised her beer, leaned forwards and they clinked bottles.
‘It wouldn’t do any harm to keep this to ourselves, just for now,’ she said, and Ingimar raised an eyebrow. ‘I’d be happy to be able to keep the thumbscrews on the boys for a while,’ she explained.
Ingimar grinned. ‘You’re a competitor,’ he said. ‘You think several moves ahead, don’t you?’
‘Yep,’ Agla agreed. ‘Most of the time I manage to do that.’
She could keep the screws on the boys’ thumbs for as long as she needed to. She would tell them that half the debt had been written off and they would be delighted with that. Then she could tell them that she was working on the remainder, and that would buy her peace and quiet. That way they would make sure that none of their former bank colleagues would mix Agla up in any of the special prosecutor’s investigations.
77
María withstood the temptation to pour herself a coffee. It was too late in the evening, and in any case, her conscience would cause her enough problems, preventing her from sleeping. She had also made up her mind to stay at the office until she could be sure that Maggi was asleep so she wouldn’t have to speak to anyone at all tonight. She was sure that he could tell instinctively when she had behaved badly. And she knew she had.
In fact, as the time passed since she had stormed out of Agla’s apartment, she increasingly wondered what she had been playing at. What the hell had she been thinking?
She had prepared a spreadsheet detailing all of Agla’s calls – both to and from the few numbers on the Icelandic phone, which the phone’s provider had supplied, and those numbers she had extracted from the phone she had stolen from Agla. There were two numbers that were in both: an unregistered number that María knew belonged to Sonja Gunnarsdóttir, who Agla seemed to call at any time of the day or night; and the number of Jean-Claude Berger, the concierge of the building that was Agla’s legal residence in Luxembourg. María clicked on the rows of calls to Sonja and Jean-Claude and tagged them in yellow. These were the personal calls, the ones that were of no importance.
Then she set to work to mark the numbers according to nationality. Most began with 352, which was Luxembourg, and then there had been a cluster of calls over a week to 33 numbers, meaning France, every one of them beginning with a 1, which indicated Paris. On two occasions Agla had called numbers starting with 32 and María had to look that up to find that it denoted Belgium. After that were a few calls to numbers with a 44 prefix, meaning Britain, and of these most began with 20, which meant London.
Arranging the calls by date showed her a pattern that began in Luxembourg with a call to Belgium, went from there to France and ended in London. María used the Luxembourg Yellow Pages and began typing in numbers. Two were restaurants and she quickly gave these yellow tags. The others belonged to banks and one to an investment fund. María was already sure that, once she had been through all the numbers, she would be able to see a trip calling at financial institutions across Europe.
Scattered across the spreadsheet were dozens of calls to numbers she had seen many times in the call registers of suspects during the financial crash investigations: they were 1-345 and 1-284 numbers; the Cayman Islands and Tortola. There was no doubt that Agla was up to something.
78
A crowd had gathered around the mausoleum and most of the guests were anxious to pay their respects to Nati. She stood by the photograph of Mr José at the far end of the building, accepting embraces, kisses and garlands of flowers from the people, some of whom dropped to their knees to kiss her hands. Sonja watched in growing astonishment as figures in rags, most of them indigenous people, pressed bank notes into Nati’s hands as they muttered their condolences, while she laid a hand on their heads as if she were a priest blessing children at their confirmation.
Nati had carried an imposing earthenware urn in for the ceremony, placed it on the altar in front of the photograph and knelt down in prayer for a moment, crossing herself repeatedly. She was dressed from head to foot in black, and the tailored dress two seamstresses had brought to her before the ceremony showed off her figure perfectly, while her face was half hidden behind gauze that fell from her hat. Sonja stood and tried to adjust the synthetic material of the dress the seamstresses had brought for her, and which clung to her like plastic, as she wondered what was in the earthenware urn. The only sure thing was that it didn’t contain Mr José’s ashes.
From a short conversation with their driver she had learned that Mr José had had the mausoleum built long ago, and up to know it had been used for banquets. The driver had told her with pride that it had long been the finest mausoleum in the cemetery; his face then darkened as he whispered that it was as well that Mr José hadn’t lived to see the mausoleum that another narco was building not far away. That one had three storeys.
As the driver turned away, another man appeared at Sonja’s side. She was about to greet him politely when the smile froze on her face. The broad cheekbones and the buzzcut hair were instantly familiar. This was one of the two men who had kidnapped her and Tómas in Florida. She felt her body react instinctively, a wave of nausea passing through her; she could almost feel the tape wrapped too tightly around her wrists.
‘My name is Sebastian,’ the man said in English, extending a hand while Sonja automatically took a step back. ‘I know you must be mad at me, but we need to talk,’ he said, taking her arm and steering her into a little side room.
‘Don’t shut it!’ Sonja said, flustered as he was about to close the door, stiff with fear even though common sense was telling her that the man was hardly going to kidnap her a second time, whisking her away with the memorial service in progress.
‘This is a life-and-death matter. You must listen to me,’ Sebastian said. ‘There is more at stake than you can imagine. I implore you to listen!’
He dropped to take a seat on a bench by the wall and clasped his hands together as if in prayer. Sonja felt the tension disappear from her body now that the man was no longer looming over her. Of course she could listen to what he had to say.
As Sonja came back into the hall, a small woman in a colourful poncho approached her, handing her a dish covered with silver foil and muttering something in Spanish that Sonja could not understand. She tried to apologise and push the dish back into the woman’s hands, but she shook her head, crossed herself and turned on her heel. This left her standing dressed in a sticky synthetic dress with a dish of food in her hands, watching the people flow out of the mausoleum. A kaleidoscope of thoughts spun through her mind, triggered by the conversation with Sebastian and the proposal he had made. This could be the solution to all her problems. Or it could cost her life.
It had all become a bizarre dream, the kind of nonsense that someone on the verge of heatstroke would imagine. Thinking it through, she could see a clear line, a string of events. It was a road – admittedly one with plenty of twists and turns – leading from her initial decision to earn some extra cash by running that mysterious errand for Thorgeir the lawyer a year and a half ago, and taking her to this moment; standing awkwardly in a Mexican mausoleum in Culiacán and staring at a decision that she was ill-prepared to take. The problem with seeing the sequence of events like this was that, with hindsight, it was all pretty obvious, but there was no possible way to have anticipated any of it.
79
Sonja’s ears were still ringing after the endless string of songs played by the mariachi band. The only thing she could make out of from the lyrics, though, was Mr José’s name – Meester Hozee – as it sounded on the lips of the gaily dressed singers. The music had clearly been appreciated by the guests, who repeatedly raised their glasses to the band.
Nati had said that the music was called narcocorridos. ‘The songs are about what a gangster José was. It’s pretty popular music.’
They had departed from the mausoleum as the party was at its height, escorted by the men who had fetched them from the airport – the driver and the silent man who still sported sunglasses even though it was now fully dark. Sebastian had joined them, crammed into the back seat between her and Nati.
The car came to a halt outside a low building and they got out, following the driver. A smell of gas and charcoal floated on the warm air as most of the city’s population prepared an evening meal. The driver walked to one of the steel doors and hammered on it. A skinny wraith of a man in filthy clothes immediately opened the door. They went inside and stopped in front of something that stood on the bare concrete floor – it resembled a giant metal salad bowl.
‘What’s that?’ Sonja asked.
‘It’s a limpet,’ Nati said. ‘Parasito.’
Sonja waited for a better explanation, but for some reason the group stared at her as if they were waiting for her reaction to the metal thing on the floor.
‘And?’
‘You fix the limpet to a ship that’s going from Europe to Iceland, and then move it to a ship that’s going from Iceland to the US. It’s a wide-open route! And then we don’t need to worry about Greenland anymore. In the US they check ships that come from the south, but not the ones that come from the north. We can carry forty kilos in each limpet.’ Nati smiled with satisfaction.
‘What do you mean, that I’m supposed to put this on a ship?’
&nb
sp; ‘You dive,’ Nati said. ‘And fix it under the ship.’
If Sonja hadn’t been so frightened, she would have laughed. ‘I don’t know how to dive.’ This was ridiculous.
‘You can take a course. I’ll pay for it. Anyone can learn to dive.’
Sonja sniggered helplessly. ‘I really think you’re crazy,’ she said. ‘I can’t fix this to a ship. I don’t reckon I could even lift it.’ She bent down and tested the weight of the metal dish. It was as heavy as it looked. ‘I’d just sink to the bottom with this,’ she said.
The skinny man in the filthy clothes waved his hands. ‘No, no! There will be floats on it,’ he said in stiff English. ‘No problem to swim with it when the floats are there.’
‘No problem,’ Nati echoed. ‘No problem for you. There’s a rubber sleeve inside that the goods go in. This is a system that has been used many times. Sebastian will show you exactly how it works.’
She turned and headed for the door, but stopped and asked the skinny man when the limpet would be ready.
‘In two weeks,’ the man said and bowed. ‘Sebastian can collect it in two weeks.’
Nati turned around slowly, eyes flashing at the man, and switched to Spanish, and while Sonja could not understand the words, her tone left no doubt that she was heaping abuse on him. The man muttered something that appeared to be an apology and began to tremble so violently that his teeth chattered.
Nati snapped out something that seemed to be her final word, spat on the floor at the man’s feet and nodded to the driver, who reacted fast, picked up a length of pipe from the bench and swung it hard against the man’s leg. He sank to the floor, whining in pain.
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