The Other Son (9 page)

A brief silence.

“
He liked hash and transvestites
,” Reuterswärd concluded.

“Who doesn't?” Antonia said drily.

Reuterswärd didn't share her humor. “
Well, anyway, I'll send over what we've got, it might help you make a start
.”

“I have to ask something,” Antonia said.

“
Yes?
”

“Are you always this considerate?”

“
How do you mean?
”

“I've never heard of the Security Police calling us to volunteer their material.”

Reuterswärd lowered his voice slightly.

“
Well, it does happen
,” he said.

“But?”

“
But that's not why I called. It's mostly that there's a peculiar coincidence
.”

“What?” she asked, growing tired of talking to him.

“
Sometime last year, toward the end of the summer, if I remember rightly, a former colleague called me here at the Security Police. Anders Ask. He asked about one of the members of that gang, Leif Rydbäck.
”

Her world stopped.
Ask…Rydbäck
.
She knew those names. Rydbäck slaughtered. And Anders Ask, who worked for Gunilla and later committed suicide…

“And?” she asked.

“
It was Rydbäck you found cut up in pieces at Trasten, wasn't it?
”

“Yes, that's right.” Antonia tried to sound indifferent.

“
That's not really a coincidence, but I just thought you should know. That's mainly why I called. An interesting quirk of fate, perhaps. After all, he and Conny were in the same gang.
”

“What did Anders Ask say to you when he called, why was he asking about Rydbäck?”

“
He didn't specifically ask about Rydbäck. He asked about someone else in the same gang, someone we'd been trying to pin down a few years before. A man named Håkan Zivkovic.
”

HÃ¥kan Zivkovic's office was located in a basement on Luntmakargatan. He ran a security business.

Dark '70s wooden paneling on the walls, green wall-to-wall carpet. A dead cactus on top of a metal filing cabinet. And Zivkovic himself, sitting at a walnut-laminated desk. On the wall behind him there was a picture of Sitting Bull.
WE WILL NEVER FORGET YOU
was printed beneath it in ornate silver writing. Above the old Indian chieftain an unleashed bull flew across the sky.

HÃ¥kan Zivkovic gestured toward a visitor's chair from the '90s, chrome with a woven seat. She sat down, asked about Conny Blomberg, and watched the man in front of her. Deep-set eyes in a coarse, angular face with a solarium tan. A
Top Gun
haircut, streaked with gray. His arms one size too big for his T-shirt, bulging muscles.

“We used to meet in prison, Conny and me, every so often,” HÃ¥kan said. “The first time was in '89. When we got out last time, we did a bit of work together. I set up this security business, he did a few small jobs for me, then it just sort of dwindled away, you could say.”

HÃ¥kan Zivkovic should have looked big and tough. But instead he made a rather cretinous impression. Possibly because of his weak chin, or the suspicious but stupid way his eyes kept looking for a threat that wasn't there. Perhaps it was simply the smell. He smelled of fabric softener.

“Leif Rydbäck?” she asked.

“What about him?”

Antonia waited coolly. HÃ¥kan tried to match her coolness, but she noticed that his eyes continued to dart around.

“What do you mean? He died six months ago. Murdered, chopped up, everyone knows that, it was in the papers.”

“Who killed him?”

“Why are you asking me?” Now he sounded like a child who had been accused of something.

“Why not, HÃ¥kan?”

He didn't answer.

“Was it Anders Ask?” she went on.

It was as if he blinked without actually blinking, then he touched his nose with his finger and pretended to think.

“No, I don't recognize the name.”

He was a hopeless actor.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

“Might Leif ever have mentioned that name?”

He looked at her with exaggerated steadiness. “No, I don't think so, I'd have remembered that.”

“Why? Why would you have remembered?”

“Anders Ask, it's an unusual name.”

She laughed. “Anders is an unusual name?”

His face began to twitch.

“No.”

She allowed a few moments of silence to torment him a bit more, and it worked. He almost looked mournful.

“But?” she said.

“Together…‘Anders' and ‘Ask,' that's the sort of thing you remember.”

Antonia laughed again. “You're very funny.”

He tried to smile back.

“I heard that Anders Ask contacted you last fall,” she went on.

“I don't know anything about that,” he said.

She smiled. “Yes, you do, HÃ¥kan.”

“No, I said.”

“Are you nervous, HÃ¥kan?”

“What do you mean?”

Antonia softened her voice. “I don't mean you any harm, I just want answers.”

He bit his cheek. “You're a cop, and you're asking weird questions. I don't like that.”

It didn't sound very convincing. She looked at him hard. HÃ¥kan Zivkovic looked pretty pathetic sitting there. Not that it mattered at all. What mattered was his utter inability to hide the fact that he knew what she was talking about.

“Anyway, they're all dead,” she said. “So why the hell are we sitting here talking about them?”

She waited a few moments.

“Are you on the side of the Indians?” she eventually said.

Zivkovic didn't follow her. Antonia nodded toward Sitting Bull.

He turned around and looked at the picture. “Obviously.”

“Why?”

“The white men took their land!” There was conviction in his voice.

They parted with a handshake. It hurt.

Antonia spent the
rest of the day in her office, pretending to work. When her colleagues walked past down the drab corridor at five o'clock a few of them wished her a good weekend.

Antonia drove back to Luntmakargatan, parked, and watched in her rearview mirror as Zivkovic left the office at six o'clock.

She crossed the street, holding the lockpick like a key in her hand. She shielded the door with her body. People passed by behind her, completely unaware. Fourteen seconds to get the door open, enter the dark office, and close the door behind her.

She quickly got used to the darkness, then set to work. She hunted through the filing cabinets, and leafed through the address book on the desk, all under the watchful gaze of Sitting Bull. He looked seriously pissed off, probably with good reason.

Antonia photographed each page of the address book with her cell, then did the same with the Rolodex. She recognized a few of the names: petty criminals, fences, dealers, and pimps.

Nothing of interest.

“
Where are you going?
”

“Doctor's appointment.”

“
Where?
”

“The Karolinska.”

“
What for?
”

“A mammogram.”

“
How long?
”

“I don't know. It always takes longer than you expect.”

Sophie was standing in the kitchen with the phone to her ear, answering Leszek's questions.

“
You need to give me a time
.”

“Afternoon, five o'clock.”

“
Before then?
”

“I'll be at home, might go shopping.”

“
Call and tell me if you do
,” he said, and hung up.

She looked at her watch. She had to hurry. Sophie switched her cell phone off and stuffed it into her handbag.

Her heart was pounding in her chest.

Downstairs a taxi was waiting to drive her to Stockholm's Arlanda Airport.

An SAS flight would carry her to Munich.

Then a beige Mercedes would take her from the airport into the city.

She wasn't supposed to be there; it was enemy territory, the home turf of the Hanke family. She had spent two days thinking about how to make contact. In the end she simply picked up the phone, called Ralph Hanke's office, and introduced herself by name. His secretary said he was busy. Two hours passed before he called her back.

The security arrangements that met her when she got out of the taxi at Marienplatz were thorough and careful. She was driven around for an hour: two cars, a local bus, and finally a taxi. She was taken all over the place before finally being dropped off in front of a house in the city's most exclusive residential area.

The façade of the building was white, as was the short flight of steps that led up between two stone pillars to a door painted shiny black.

She stopped abruptly. Doubt crashed in on her like a thunderclap.

“What the hell am I doing?” she heard herself whisper.

The urge to run was trying to pull her away. But she knocked on the door.

A man she didn't recognize opened it and led her into a large, arched hallway.

There were three armed men standing inside, weapons raised, looking agitated. The doubt she had felt outside was replaced by an all-pervading sense of fear. Were they just going to grab her now? Kidnap her and use her for blackmail?

Sophie was searched thoroughly by the man who had opened the door.

“I'm here to see Ralph Hanke,” she said in as firm a voice as she could muster.

No one replied; the men acted like she didn't exist, but one of them muttered something inaudible into a radio.

Sophie was led into a sitting room, large and airy, with tall windows, and a group of sofas in the middle of the room on a huge Persian carpet. In the middle of the coffee table there was a large vase of fresh flowers—lilies, roses, peonies, a sea of blue Himalayan poppies, even a few orchids.

She sat down on the edge of one of the sofas and looked at the flowers, trying to find some calm in the beautiful arrangement.

Coming here had been a huge mistake….

“I can't tell you what those flowers are. But perhaps you know?” a voice beside her said.

She looked up.

Ralph Hanke was gazing down at her. His black-gray hair was neatly combed, with a stiff side-part; his smile was white, his nails recently manicured. He was wearing beige trousers, black shoes, a pale-blue shirt and a dark-blue cardigan, and smelled of eau de cologne, something spicy and masculine.

“Yes, I do,” she said quietly.

Ralph Hanke's handshake was warm and brief. He sat down opposite her.

Another man came into the room. A suit, tousled hair, glasses from the '90s. He evaded her gaze.

“Roland Gentz,” he said, and sat down on one of the armchairs.

Roland Gentz. Ralph's right-hand man.

Ralph Hanke, a German businessman who ran a clandestine criminal empire. The man who had ordered the murder of Adalberto Guzman, who had sent gunmen to kill her and Hector while they were driving to Marbella from the airport, who had recently seen to it that Eduardo Garcia was blown to pieces in Biarritz. He was the root of all evil….

“I'm glad you've come,” Hanke said. “I gather that your meeting with Don Ignacio went much as expected. Now you're here with an answer to our proposal. Very sensible. Let me tell you a little bit about our work….”

His left hand was open on his lap, the fingers splayed and bent slightly inward, a sign of arthritis, of age. And Roland Gentz, unkempt, traces of shaving foam by one ear. Two men sitting there, two old men.

“I'm not here to give you a reply,” she said tentatively.

Ralph gave a surprised smile at having been interrupted in the middle of a sentence.

“I'm here to ask you to reconsider your proposal. To think again,” she went on.

Her heartbeat was thudding in her chest and neck.

His smile faded. The German businessman's gray eyes looked over at her glassily.

“I'm here without anyone else's knowledge,” she said. “I've come to ask you to look at this from a different perspective, to think long-term.”

The same mute look from Ralph Hanke. Then suddenly another expression. Something old, tired, almost ill. Only for a few moments, ash-gray and listless,
disappointed
. Then he became focused.

“Go on,” he said.

Sophie was nervous, needed to swallow.

“After Adalberto's murder and Hector's flight, the organization has shrunk, business has decreased significantly. There are only crumbs left. What you want to take over is no longer of any real value.”

“What
do
you have today, do you think?” Roland asked from his armchair.

She knew that he was bound to know, so there was no point in lying.

“We've got insight into a number of stock-market-listed Swedish companies. We trade in that information via investment companies. Nothing big, but the numbers are growing, slowly but steadily….”

“Why slowly?” Roland interrupted disinterestedly.

“We need to be careful.”

She gulped, then went on in a voice she wished wasn't so thin. “We're developing a market for forged goods. That could be big. We're still profiting from investments Adalberto made a long time ago, but that's not much.”

“Such as?” Roland gave her no opportunity for reflection.

“A percentage of takings, smuggling from Morocco, black-market money from construction, money laundering, collaborations with the Italians and other groups in Europe…weapons smuggling, protection rackets, and so on.”

“ ‘And so on'? And you call that ‘crumbs'?” Ralph Hanke said.

“Yes, comparatively speaking.”

“Compared to what?”

“Compared to you and Don Ignacio.”

He was staring at her, back to his usual color.

“And your outgoings?” Roland asked.

She tried to speak in a neutral voice.

“Mainly to Don Ignacio; he costs us sixty percent of what we earn on his supplies. A lot of rolling contracts, percentages for protection, bringing the goods in. And standing payments to the justice system here and there, especially in Spain. And of course a lot of expenses associated with our expansion into the fake-goods industry.”

The expression on Ralph Hanke's face…empty, impossible to read.

“And you say you've come here with no mandate?”

A nod from her.

“No one knows you're here?” he went on.

She didn't want to sit there any longer

“Are you brave or just foolish, Sophie?”

“Does it matter?” she replied.

“What do you want?” he asked.

“I want you to back off.”

Ralph Hanke looked at Roland Gentz. Roland's face was blank.

“Where should we back off to?” Ralph asked.

“It's going to grow,” she said. “It's going to get bigger. Take over then.”

He came close to shrugging his shoulders. “I can do that myself, get it to grow.”

“That's one way of looking at everything,” she said.

A half smile from him.

“It's my way,” Ralph said.

There was a muffled sound of traffic out in the street.

“Leave it alone,” she suggested.

“Leave what alone?”

“Us, the people around Hector.”

Hanke didn't even need to think; he had an answer to that. “I need to know where Hector and Aron are. Give me their location and I promise that nothing else will happen to anyone.”

He wiped his mouth, his arthritic hand clearly exposed.

“I don't know where they are,” she said.

Tapping on the parquet floor.

“Can you find out?”

“No.”

Ralph Hanke leaned back in the sofa, realized his arthritic hand was visible, and hid it.

“Do you regard yourself as disloyal for coming here, for going behind Hector's and Aron's backs?” he asked.

She didn't answer.

“Or perhaps you're not going behind their backs?”

She remained silent.

“Is he alive?”

Sophie nodded.

“How can I be sure that's true?”

Sophie remained silent.

“What do you need, Sophie, to get Hector to hand himself over to us?” Roland asked.

“Nothing.”

“Meaning?”

“Nothing. I can't do it.”

“What
can
you do?”

“I can give you more than you'd get if you went in and took over now. If you're patient, if you wait.”

“How long?”

“How long can you wait?”

Ralph shrugged. He suddenly seemed completely uninterested in the whole meeting.

“Anything else?” he asked.

She twisted the ring on the ring finger of her right hand subconsciously.

“I know about pretty much all the activities of Hector's organization. Take whatever you want, I'll help you, on condition that there's no violence.”

“You took a huge risk in coming here,” Ralph said. “I don't know if you're brave or just foolhardy. But here you are. And we know that you were in Istanbul with Aron.”

Ralph fell into thought but stared at her the whole time.

“Should I ask you to stay here with us?” he mused, almost to himself.

Sophie hid her fear by looking away from him and staring down at her lap. Her left hand twisted the ring on her right ring finger. She could feel him still staring at her.

“No,” he whispered, and leaned back.

And with that, the meeting was over. Roland stood up and gestured for her to follow him. She remained seated for a few seconds, then stood up.

There was a car waiting in the street. She got into the backseat. The car began to roll through Munich.

Sophie put her hand to her mouth.

Fuck…fuck…fuck!

Roland Gentz sat
back down on his chair, Ralph Hanke on the sofa.

“What's her role in all this?” Ralph asked.

Roland gave the question a few seconds in his head. But instead of answering he posed another question: “Was that Hector talking? Were we listening to Hector?”

Ralph reflected. “No, not the way I saw it.”

“So who was it, then? Aron? Herself?”

Ralph and Roland considered this, without arriving at a conclusion.

“What was she asking for, really?” Ralph asked.

“She was asking for a respite,” Roland replied.

“Can she be useful? Does she know all about the business?”

“No, not the way she's trying to make out. But with enough pressure she could still be useful.”

“Her son?” Ralph asked.

“Albert.”

“He's all she's got?”

“Yes.”

Ralph's eyes were focused on a point on the floor.

“So she comes here and asks for more time. Time for them to gather their strength and hit back against us. Unless it really is the way she says, and she's trying to avoid violence and conflict?”