The Andalucian Friend (21 page)

Thierry nodded at his words. There was a knock on the door. Jens looked at Thierry.

“Don’t worry.”

He opened the garage door. A young man in a hood smiled broadly and handed over a rolled-up rubber mat.

“Land Cruiser, as ordered.”

Thierry took it and the young man closed the door. Jens heard a souped-up car engine start outside and disappear.

Thierry went over to Sophie’s car and pulled out the blood-smeared rubber mat from the baggage compartment. It was glued down and took a while to come out. He put it down on the garage floor, then held the new one up and compared them.

“It’s a bit smaller, but it’ll have to do.”

Sophie could hear
noises from the garage as she drank from the cup of tea Daphne had put in front of her. The tea tasted different, and after another sip it tasted repulsive. She put the cup on the table.

Daphne took Sophie’s hand in hers and Sophie jerked, feeling uncomfortable, the woman was quite invasive. But Daphne didn’t let go and after a while it felt better.

“How did you get caught up in this?” she asked.

Sophie had no answer, she shrugged lightly and tried to smile, but failed. Daphne squeezed her hand tighter.

“Hector’s a good man,” she said. “He’s a good man,” she said again, her eyes fixed on Sophie.

Then she let go of Sophie’s hand, leaned back in her chair, put her hands in her lap, and said in a low voice, almost a whisper, “You’ve seen something that wasn’t meant for your eyes. If you want to talk about what you’ve been through, come to me, no one else.”

Sophie suddenly saw a different side to Daphne, the tone was different, more serious, firmer, almost as if she were issuing a warning.

The door opened and Jens and Thierry came into the kitchen in full regalia. If things had been different she would have laughed.

The Land Cruiser
felt like new, smelled new when she got into the passenger seat. Jens climbed in behind the wheel. They drove out of the suburb and onto the main road back into Stockholm.

He looked at her. She was staring at the world going past outside.

“We have to talk sometime,” he said.

“Yes.”

They sat in silence, neither of them wanted to start, neither of them wanted to get into small talk.

Jens found a scrap of paper, wrote down his phone number leaning on the wheel, and handed the note to Sophie.

“Thanks,” she whispered.

He got out at Karlaplan and Sophie moved into the driver’s seat. Their good-bye was short and impersonal.

Albert was fast
asleep in his room. She looked at him for a while. Then she went downstairs and turned on the lights, then looked at her hands as she stood there in the kitchen. They weren’t trembling, they were still. She felt inside herself, she was calm there as well. She was amazed, thought it felt wrong. She ought to have been wound up about what had happened, frightened and upset. She looked at her hands again, soft, smooth, and still. Her pulse was beating steadily inside her. She put on a pan of water and got out her English tea, then went to stand by the window as she waited for it to boil. The view was the same as always, the streetlamp lighting up the road, the nightlights in her neighbors’ windows. Everything was the way it had always been, but she didn’t recognize it; none of what she could see looked familiar anymore.

Jens had gotten home
to his apartment, packed a bag, got changed. He had walked off to a twenty-four-hour gas station, rented a car under a false name, and set off on his journey down to Munich.

He was sweating in the warm evening, drinking sports drinks to stay awake, smoking cigarettes.

He was thinking about Sophie Lantz … Brinkmann.

Carlos Fuentes was two teeth worse off.
His eyes were swollen shut and when he tried to talk, nothing but a gurgling sound emerged because of all the blood in his mouth.

He was sitting on a chair in the office of the Trasten restaurant, a chair that he had fallen off numerous times in the past half hour. He had sobbed, begged and offered to do anything in the world.

Neither Hector nor Aron was in the mood to listen to that sort of thing. They had picked him up at home. He knew what it was about the moment the doorbell rang, and confessed his involvement with Roland Gentz in the car on the way to the restaurant. Hector and Aron had sat in silence.

Carlos wiped the blood from his mouth with one hand.

“You’re confessing too quickly, Carlos.”

Carlos was breathing heavily, his body racing with adrenaline. “Maybe I am, but it’s the truth, Hector!”

The panic that Carlos was radiating was impossible to miss. Aron gave Carlos a towel to wipe himself with. Carlos thanked his tormentor. Aron didn’t acknowledge it.

“Why, Carlos?” Hector wondered.

Carlos wiped the blood with the towel. “Because he threatened to kill me.”

“And that was enough for you?”

Carlos said nothing, just stared ahead of him.

Hector wiped something invisible from his eye. He went on in a low voice.

“Carlos, you betray me and lure me into a trap, the trap is sprung, but I get out of it. You confess the moment I ring at your door … What else have you said, what else have you done, who else have you spoken to about me?”

The tears came, Carlos’s heavy body shaking in time with his sobs.

“No one, I swear to you, Hector … he paid me as well.”

“Gentz?”

Carlos nodded without looking at Hector, wiping his nose on his sleeve.

“How much?”

“A hundred thousand.”

Hector started. “One hundred thousand? Kronor?”

Carlos looked down at the floor.

“But you could have had that from me! Twice, three times as much if you wanted it!”

Carlos cleared his throat.

“I was scared, he was as cold as fucking ice and he meant what he said! It wasn’t the money, of course it wasn’t … I had no choice, he left the hundred thousand in a plastic bag … I didn’t ask for the money, you have to believe me!”

Hector and Aron were staring curiously at Carlos.

“Why didn’t you warn us?”

Carlos looked up at Aron, he had no answer.

Hector leaned back in his chair. “What are we going to do with you, Carlos?”

The big man, usually so confident and loud, was now a shadow of his former self, his mouth and face in tatters. Hector almost felt sorry for him.

“Carlos?”

Carlos shook his head.

“I don’t know. Do whatever you like,” he muttered.

Hector thought for a moment.

“We’ll carry on as usual. If you have anything else to tell us, say it now,” he said.

Carlos shook his head.

Hector asked himself if he was being too kind, if he’d live to regret this one day. He stood up and walked out. Aron followed him.

“Thank you,” Carlos said.

Hector didn’t stop, didn’t look back.

“Don’t thank me.”

Aron was driving, with Hector
in the passenger seat, the Stockholm night outside. The city passed by before Hector’s eyes. The car headed down Hamngatan, the neon lights shining even though dawn was approaching. They wove through to Gustav Adolfs torg and crossed Norrbro. Hector was still deep in thought.

“Carlos …” He sighed to himself.

Aron parked the car on the quayside along Skeppsbron.

“I’m thinking of getting drunk, do you want to join me?”

Aron shook his head. “No, but I’ll come to the door with you.”

They walked up between the buildings of Brunnsgränd, then turned right into Österlånggatan. Laughter, chatter, and music could be heard from up above.

“Hector,” Aron said in a low voice.

“Yes?”

“The nurse.”

They walked a few steps.

“What about her?”

Aron glanced quickly at Hector, a glance that said something like
Look, just stop that
.

“It’ll be fine, she’s not a problem.”

“How do you know?”

Hector didn’t answer.

“She’s intelligent,” Aron said.

“Yes, she is.”

Aron tried to find the right words.

“And she’s a nurse … Presumably a woman with her own values and morals, she seems pretty independent. What she’s seen and experienced tonight will have stirred everything up for her. When the dust settles she’ll start asking herself questions, weighing right against wrong … looking for answers, moral answers. That’s when she might do something hasty, without thinking it through properly.”

Hector kept on walking, unwilling to discuss the subject.

They reached Brända Tomten, the little square surrounded by tall houses. They stopped and Hector looked at Aron, at the injuries the beating had left on his face.

“You look pretty terrible.”

Aron looked at Hector.

“You seem to have come out of it OK.”

Aron glanced down at Hector’s dirty clothes, then his leg and the cracked cast.

“But you need to get that fixed.”

Hector didn’t reply. He patted Aron on the shoulder and walked toward his door.

Aron waited down in the square until he saw the lights go on in the window of the third floor, then he went back the way they had come.

In the apartment Hector turned on the lights
in every room, pulled the curtains, and put on some quiet music. He opened a bottle of wine and drank half of it in just a few minutes. The stress of the evening subsided slightly.

He called his father and they talked about what had happened. Adalberto calmed his son as best he could.

Hector fell asleep on the sofa with an old revolver on his stomach.

She read the report in the Stockholm section
of the morning paper — one of the small items at the bottom of the page, down among the ads.

In the early hours of Sunday morning a man suffering from a gunshot wound was left at the emergency room at Karolinska Hospital by unidentified men who fled the scene in a car. He was operated on during the night and his condition is reported as stable. The man, who is in his forties, has not yet been questioned by the police.

She sat back, relieved. The man was alive.

She heard Albert’s steps on the stairs and turned the page.

“Morning,” he said.

“Morning,” she said back.

“Were you late home last night?” he asked.

She nodded in reply. He reached for the tub of muesli in the cupboard above the stove.

“Did you have a good time?”

“Yes, it was nice,” Sophie muttered, her eyes on the paper.

Sophie spent the morning in the garden,
weeding and removing suckers from the roses. The birds were singing, people walking past greeted her with a nod or a dignified wave. Everything was lovely, but she didn’t find the idyllic scene calming or even appealing, she just felt restless.

She finished up by pruning the roses but let the shears hang limply in her hand as she realized that she couldn’t be bothered.

Sophie sat down on a sun lounger, letting the warmth embrace her, letting tiredness take its due, lulling her into a calmer world. She closed her eyes.

She dreamed that her dad was still alive, and that he was helping her with all the things she needed help with.