The Andalucian Friend (4 page)

“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 carriage, 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 carriage. 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.

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 him. 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 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 parting. 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.

She had told him about the working group she had been asked to put together, a sort of pilot project in the fight against organized crime, primarily international, and that they were being given precedence by the prosecutor’s office to bring things to resolution. She said she had read his report and had found it interesting. Lars had tried to conceal the pride welling up inside him. He had accepted the job before she finished explaining to him what it would involve.

Two weeks later he was transferred from the factory-farm team in the Western District to the more analytical group in Östermalm. He stepped out of his uniform and became a plainclothes officer at the age of thirty-six, got a raise, and was struck by the realization that this was how he had always imagined his career in the force — that someone would recognize and appreciate his talents and skills, which he himself felt stood out in comparison to all the other officers.

After shadowing Aron and Hector for a while without any results, the turning point had arrived, as Gunilla had predicted: she had said the nurse would pop up and become one of the focal points of the investigation. He had forgotten her prediction, but that morning as he watched from a distance as Aron held the car door open for the nurse outside the hospital, he realized once again just how good Gunilla was.

He parked outside the local police station on Brahegatan. He made his way through the station, nodding to fellow cops whose names he didn’t know, until he came to the tower block behind the single-story police station.

Three rooms in a row, an office like any other; standard-issue municipal furniture, box files on pale pine bookshelves, uninspiring pieces of art on the walls and windowsills; long, striped curtains that must have been there since the mid-’90s.

Eva Castroneves nodded to him as she went past. She was typing on her cell with one hand and had a sandwich in the other. She was always on the move, always going somewhere, moving quicker than everyone else. Lars nodded back, she didn’t see. He went in; Gunilla and Erik were in the room, Gunilla at her desk with the phone to her ear. Erik, her brother, his face blood-pressure red as usual, was transferring the chewing tobacco from the little plastic tub it came in into his own brass one with a Viking motif on the lid. Erik Strandberg lived off nicotine, caffeine, and fast food. He made a rather slovenly impression with his scruffy beard and unkempt gray hair. He was a loudmouth and always managed to give the impression that he was a bully, which Lars guessed was the result of misdirected youthful self-confidence that no one put a stop to early enough. But there was a side to him that Lars appreciated; Erik had welcomed him in a friendly and natural way when Lars started working with them. He didn’t seem to judge Lars in any way at all, just took him as he was. That wasn’t his usual experience.

Erik brushed the tobacco from his hands, looked Lars in the eye and nodded, then reached for a Danish pastry from a plate on the desk.

“All right?” he rumbled.

“All right?” Lars whispered.

“Well, shit,” Erik said.

“Yes, you could say that.” Lars replied, sitting down on the next chair.

“Your call cheered her up.”

Erik took a bite of the Danish, opened an abstract that was on his lap, and started to read.

“Sorry, just have to read this.”

“Of course,” Lars said, getting up a bit too quickly.

Erik went on chewing behind his beard. “No, stay, for God’s sake.”

“No, no,” Lars said, and went away with a somewhat forced steadiness in his walk.

Lars hated his insecurity, always had. He had a sort of innate sense of awkwardness that seemed to govern everything he did in life. It had now grown into him in some unjust way. He felt it in the way he moved his body, in the whole of his being. From the outside he ought to have been attractive — his fair hair, ice-blue eyes, relatively chiseled facial features — but his insecurity overshadowed all that. In a picture taken from the right angle he could look reasonably OK, but in person he just looked awkward.

Lars went over to the nearest of the room’s three large movable notice boards. He did that sometimes when he came into the office, mostly to avoid having to stand in a corner looking stupid. He could kill time this way.

The Guzman board was covered with a mass of photographs and findings from the investigation. He stared for a while at photocopies of passports, birth certificates and documents from the Spanish authorities, looking at photographs of Aron Geisler and Hector Guzman fastened to the right-hand side. Below Hector’s there were photographs of his brother and sister, Eduardo and Inez, as well as an old picture from the late ’70s of their mother, Pia, originally from Flemingsberg. She was pretty, blond. She looked like she was straight out of a shampoo ad Lars had seen at the cinema when he was young.

A red line connected Hector to two other black-and-white photographs on the left-hand side of the board. Two men that Lars didn’t recognize. One was a suntanned elderly gentleman with thin, slicked-back white hair — Adalberto Guzman, Hector’s father. The second picture was an enlarged passport photograph of a man with short hair and hollow eyes — Leszek Smialy, Adalberto Guzman’s bodyguard.

Lars read extracts from the summary of Smialy below the picture. Leszek Smialy had been in the security forces in Poland during the communist era. He’d had a number of different bodyguard jobs since the fall of the Soviet Union. Probably started working for Adalberto Guzman in the summer of 2001.

Lars moved on to Aron Geisler, and read the scant information about him. He attended the Östra Real Secondary School in Stockholm in the 1970s, was a member of Östermalm Chess Society in 1979. He spent three years doing military service in Israel during the ’80s. … He joined the Foreign Legion and had been part of the team that was first into Kuwait during the first Gulf War. His parents lived in Stockholm until 1989, when they moved to Haifa. Aron Geisler spent parts of the 1990s in French Guyana. There were large gaps in the timeline.

He backed away from the notice board, trying to take in the big picture but understanding none of it. So instead he went to get himself a cup of coffee from the kitchen, pressing the buttons for sugar and milk, and a pale brown sludge trickled into a cup. When he came back into the room Gunilla hung up the phone. She raised her voice.

“Today at 12:08 Aron Geisler went and picked up the nurse and drove her to a lunch restaurant, Trasten, in Vasastan, where she spent an hour and twenty minutes having lunch with Hector Guzman.”

Gunilla put on her reading glasses.

“Her name is Sophie Brinkmann, a qualified nurse, widow, one son — Albert, fifteen years old. She goes to work, comes home from work, she cooks. That’s pretty much all we know right now.”

Gunilla took off her glasses and looked up.

“Eva, you look into her personal life, see if you can dig up friends, enemies, lovers … anything.”

She turned to Lars. “Lars, drop Hector for now, and concentrate on the nurse.”

Lars nodded, took a sip from the cup.

Gunilla smiled and looked around the group. “Sometimes God sends a little angel down to earth.”

And with that the meeting was evidently over. Gunilla put her glasses back on and got back to work, Eva began typing on her computer, and Erik kept on reading the file as he tapped a blood-pressure tablet from a bottle of pills with a practiced hand.

Lars wasn’t keeping up, he had a thousand and one questions. How did they want him to proceed? How much information did Gunilla want? How long should he work, evenings and nights? What did they do about overtime? What exactly did she want him to do? He didn’t like having to make that sort of decision himself. He wanted clear guidelines to follow. But Gunilla wasn’t that sort of boss, and he didn’t want to draw attention to his uncertainty. He headed for the door.

“Lars. There are a few things I’d like you to take with you.”

She pointed to a large box over by the wall. He went over and opened it. It contained an old Facit typewriter, a fax machine, a digital system camera, — a Nikon with matching lenses of various sizes, and a small wooden box. Lars opened the lid of the little box and saw eight pin-button microphones resting in molded foam rubber.

“We’re surely not going to bug her?” he said, then immediately regretted it.

“No, you just need to keep those handy. You can start using the camera right away, get photographs, keep an eye on her. We need to gather as much information as we can, as quickly as possible. Write up your reports on the typewriter and fax them to me. The fax is encrypted, you can just plug it into your normal phone socket at home.”

Lars looked at the equipment, and Gunilla saw the quizzical look on his face.

“Everyone here writes their reports and evaluations on typewriters. We don’t leave any digital fingerprints anywhere, we don’t take any risks. Bear that in mind.”

He looked her in the eye, gave a quick nod, then picked up the box and left the office.