The Andalucian Friend Read online

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF CANADA

  Copyright © 2013 Alexander Söderberg

  English translation copyright © 2013 Neil Smith

  Published by agreement with the Salomonsson Agency.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Published in 2013 by Alfred A. Knopf Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, and simultaneously in the United States of America by Crown Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in the United Kingdom by Harvill Secker, a division of the Random House Group Ltd., London. Distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited.

  www.randomhouse.ca

  Knopf Canada and colophon are registered trademarks.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Söderberg, Alexander

  The Andalucian friend / Alexander Söderberg; translated by Neil Smith.

  Translation of: Den andalusiske vännen.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-36249-0

  I. Smith, Neil II. Title.

  PT9877.29.O34A6413 2013 839.73′8 C2012-904524-1

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Cast of Characters

  Prologue

  Part One

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Part Two

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Part Three

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Part Four

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  CAST OF CHARACTERS

  THE SWEDES

  Sophie Brinkmann

  Albert Brinkmann

  Jens Vall

  Lars Vinge

  Gunilla Strandberg

  Erik Strandberg

  Anders Ask

  Aron Geisler

  Hasse Berglund

  Sonya Alizadeh

  Svante Carlgren

  Tommy Jansson

  THE RUSSIANS

  Mikhail Asmarov

  Dmitry, Gosha, Vitaly

  THE SPANIARDS

  Hector Guzman

  Adalberto Guzman

  Carlos Fuentes

  Leszek Smialy

  THE GERMANS

  Ralph Hanke

  Roland Getz

  Christian Hanke

  Klaus Köhler

  PROLOGUE

  She kept looking between the rearview mirror and the road ahead. She couldn’t see the motorcycle, not just then. It had been there a moment before, looming up behind her, then it disappeared. She pulled into the inside lane of the highway, trying to seek cover from the cars behind her.

  He kept looking back, trying to direct her driving from the passenger seat. She couldn’t hear his words, just the panic in his voice.

  The outline of the motorbike appeared in the shaky rearview mirror, disappeared for a few moments, then reappeared—it kept going like that as it cruised between the cars behind them. She pulled out into the left-hand lane, which lay open ahead of her, and put her foot down, and the car vibrated with the rapid revolution of the engine as she put the car into fifth gear, the highest. She felt sick.

  There was a draft around her feet, the bullets must have hit somewhere down there. The holes made a whining noise that merged with the sound of the straining engine, a terrible noise that cut into her consciousness. She couldn’t remember how far she had driven before the shots came—sudden and unreal. She had time to see that the man riding the motorbike was wearing a blue helmet with a dark visor, that the gunman behind him had a black helmet with no visor; she had seen his eyes for a moment, she had seen the emptiness in them.

  They had been shot at from the left; the sound came out from nowhere—rattling in quick succession. The clatter inside the car sounded like someone was hitting the bodywork with a heavy chain. At the same time she heard a yell, but she couldn’t tell if it had come from her or the man beside her. She glanced quickly at him. He was different now: his nerves and fear were shining through, showing themselves as anger. That much was clear from his face: furrowed brow, staring eyes, every now and then a twitch in one of them. He pressed one of the speed-dial numbers on his cell phone again—he had done this once already since the shots were fired—he waited, staring intently ahead of him, no answer this time either, he hung up.

  The motorbike was heading toward them at high speed, he yelled at her to drive faster. She realized that speed wasn’t going to save them and neither would his yelling. She felt the metallic taste of fear in her mouth as a white noise buzzed feverishly in her head. Her panic had crossed a boundary, she was no longer trembling, she just felt a terrible weight in her arms, as if driving the car were somehow heavy. And like an invincible enemy, the motorbike was suddenly alongside them. She glanced to the left and saw the snub-nosed weapon in the gunman’s hand again as he raised it toward her. She ducked instinctively as the gun spewed out bullets: hard cracking sounds echoed as the shots hit the bodywork, the crash as the side window shattered, throwing a cascade of glass over her. She was slumped down with her head to one side, foot hard on the accelerator. The car was driving itself, she had no idea what was happening ahead of them. She had time to notice that the glove compartment by his knees was open, that there were several magazines in there, that he was holding a pistol in his hand. Then a loud bang, metal against metal. A loud scraping sound from the right as the car slid into the barrier along the side of the highway. There was a shrieking, scraping sound, the car was juddering, and there was a smell of burning.

  She sat up, turned the wheel, and straightened the car, and pulled out into traffic again. A quick look over her shoulder; the motorbike was off to the side behind her. He swore loudly and leaned across her, firing the gun through her window, three shots in quick succession. The explosions from the gun echoed improbably inside the car, the motorbike braked and disappeared.

  “How much farther?” she asked.

  He looked at her as if he didn’t understand the question, then he must have heard it as an echo in his head.

  “I don’t know.…”

  The accelerator pedal was still on the floor, the needle of the speedometer was quivering as the car lurched around curves in the road. Another quick glance in the rearview mirror.

  “Here it comes again,” she said.

  He tried to open his own window but the collision with the barrier had buckled the door and the window was stuck. He leaned back toward her, took aim with his right foot, and kicked at the window. Most of the glass fell out. He cleared the
rest with the barrel of the gun, then leaned out and shot at the motorbike, which pulled back once more. She realized how hopeless their situation was. The motorbike was in control.

  Then everything fell silent, as if someone had switched off all sound. They sailed along the highway, staring ahead as if they were both trying to reconcile themselves to their approaching death, faces pale, incapable of comprehending what was happening to their lives at this precise moment. He looked tired, his head was hanging, his eyes sad.

  “Say something!” She uttered the command in a loud voice, both hands on the wheel, eyes on the road, speed unchanged.

  At first he didn’t answer; he seemed to be thinking, then he turned toward her.

  “Sorry, Sophie.”

  PART ONE

  STOCKHOLM, SIX WEEKS EARLIER, MAY

  1

  There was something about her that made some people say she didn’t look like a nurse, and she could never figure out if this was a compliment or an insult. She had long, dark hair and a pair of green eyes that sometimes gave the impression that she was about to burst out laughing. She wasn’t; that was just the way she looked, as if she had been born with a smile in her eyes.

  She went down the stairs, which creaked beneath her feet. The house—a fairly small, yellow wooden villa built in 1911, with leaded windows, shiny old parquet floors, and a garden that could have been bigger—was her place on this earth, she realized that the first time she saw it.

  The kitchen window was open to the still spring evening. The smell coming through the window was more summer than spring. Summer wasn’t supposed to arrive for several weeks, but the heat had come early and not wanted to leave. Now it was just hanging there, heavy and completely still. She was grateful for it, needed it, enjoyed being able to have her windows and doors open—being able to move freely between outside and in.

  There was the sound of a moped in the distance, a thrush was singing in a tree—other birds too, but she didn’t know their names.

  Sophie got out the china and set the table for two, with the best plates, nicest cutlery, and the finest glasses, avoiding the workaday as best she could. She knew she would be eating alone, seeing as Albert ate when he was hungry, which seldom coincided with her timing. She heard his steps on the stairs—sneakers on old oak wood; a bit too heavy, a bit too hard—Albert wasn’t bothered by the noise he was making. She smiled at him as he came into the kitchen; he smiled back boyishly, yanked open the fridge door, and stood there for far too long, staring at the contents.

  “Shut the fridge, Albert.”

  He stood where he was; she ate for a while, idly leafing through a newspaper, then she looked up, said the same thing again, this time with a hint of irritation in her voice.

  “I can’t move …,” he whispered theatrically.

  She laughed, not so much at his dry sense of humor but more because he was just funny, which made her happy … proud, even.

  “How was your day?” she asked.

  She could see he was close to laughter. She recognized the signs, he always thought his own jokes were funny. Albert took a bottle of mineral water from the fridge, slammed the door, and jumped up onto the kitchen counter. The carbon dioxide hissed as he unscrewed the top.

  “Everyone’s mad,” he said, taking a sip. Albert started to tell her about his day in small fragments as they occurred to him. She listened and smiled as he made fun of the teachers and other people. She could see he enjoyed being amusing, then suddenly he was done. Sophie could never figure out when this was going to happen; he would just stop, as if he had gotten fed up with himself and his sense of humor. And she felt like reaching out to him to ask him to stay, carry on being funny, carry on being human, friendly, and mean at the same time. But that wasn’t how it worked. She’d tried before and it had gone wrong, so she let him go.

  He disappeared into the hall. A short silence; maybe he was changing his shoes.

  “You owe me a thousand kronor,” he said.

  “What for?”

  “The cleaning lady came today.”

  “Don’t say ‘cleaning lady.’ ”

  She heard the zip of his jacket.

  “So what should I say?”

  She didn’t know. He was on his way out through the door.

  “Kiss, kiss, Mom,” he said, his tone suddenly gentle.

  The door closed and she could hear his steps on the gravel path outside the open window.

  “Give me a ring if you’re going to be late,” she called.

  Sophie went on as normal. She cleared the table, tidied up, watched some television, called a friend and talked about nothing—and the evening passed. She went up to bed and tried to read some of the book on her bedside table, about a woman who had found a new life helping the street children of Bucharest. The book was dull; the woman was pretentious and Sophie had nothing in common with her. She closed the book and fell asleep alone in her bed as usual.

  Eight hours later, and the time was quarter past six in the morning. Sophie got up, showered, wiped the bathroom mirror, which revealed hidden words when it steamed up: Albert, AIK, and a load of other illegible things that he wrote with his finger while he was brushing his teeth. She had told him to stop doing it, but he didn’t seem to care, and in some ways she rather liked that.

  She ate a light breakfast on her feet as she read the front page of the morning paper. It would soon be time to leave for work. She shouted up to Albert three times that it was time to get up, then fifteen minutes later she was sitting on her bicycle and letting the mild morning air wake her up.

  He went by the name of Jeans. They seriously believed that was his name. They’d laughed and pointed to their trousers. Jeans!

  But his name was Jens, and he was sitting at a table in a hut in the jungle in Paraguay together with three Russians. The boss’s name was Dmitry, a lanky guy in his thirties, his face still looked like a child’s—a child whose parents were cousins. His colleagues, Gosha and Vitaly, were the same age—and their parents may have been siblings. They kept laughing without showing any sign of pleasure, their eyes wide, half-open mouths letting on that they didn’t really understand anything at all.

  Dmitry was mixing a batch of dry martinis in a plastic container. He tipped in some olives and shook it around, poured it into some rinsed-out coffee mugs, spilling it, then proposed a toast in Russian. His friends roared; they all drank the martinis, which had an undertone of diesel.

  Jens didn’t like them, not a single one. They were repulsive: dishonest, rude, twitchy.… He tried to not show his distaste but it shone through; he’d always been bad at hiding his feelings.

  “Let’s take a look at the goods,” he said.

  The Russians lit up like children on Christmas morning. He went out of the shed toward the jeep that was parked in the middle of the dusty, poorly lit yard.

  He had no idea why the Russians had come all the way to Paraguay to look at the goods. Normally someone ordered something from him, he delivered, got paid, never met the customer. But this time it was different, as if the whole business of buying arms was a big deal for them, something fun, an adventure in itself. He had no idea what they were involved in either, and he didn’t want to know. It didn’t matter; they were there to look at their purchases, test the weapons, snort some cocaine, fuck some whores, and pay Jens the second of three installments.

  He had brought one MP7 and one Steyr AUG with him. The rest were packed away in a warehouse by the harbor in Ciudad del Este awaiting shipment.

  The Russians grabbed the guns and pretended to shoot one another. Hands up … hands up! They were shrieking with laughter, jerking about. Dmitry had a white smear of coke in his stubble.

  Gosha and Vitaly were arguing over the MP7, pulling and tugging at the gun, punching each other hard in the head with their fists. Dmitry separated them, brought out the container of dry martinis.

  Jens watched from a distance. The Russians would get out of hand, the Paraguayans would come back with s
ome whores as a gesture of goodwill. The Russians would get even more wired and drunk and then they’d start firing live rounds. He knew what was going to happen and he couldn’t do anything to stop it, and it would all be terrible. He wanted to leave, but he had to stay until sunrise, stay alert and sober, to take his money whenever Dmitry decided it was time to hand it over.

  “Jeans! Where the fuck is the ammo?”

  Jens pointed to the jeep. The Russians ran over, tore open the doors, and began searching. Jens put his hand in his pocket, he only had one piece of nicotine gum left. It was two months since he had stopped using chewing tobacco, and three years since he stopped smoking. And now he was in the jungle twenty-five miles from Ciudad del Este. The nicotine synapses in his brain were screaming for attention. He pulled out the last piece of gum, chewed hard on it, looked over at the Russians with ill-concealed disgust, and realized that he was about to start smoking again.

  Once she was at the hospital, she worked. There was rarely time for anything else, and besides, she didn’t enjoy drinking coffee with her colleagues; it felt uncomfortable. She wasn’t shy, but maybe there was something missing, preventing her from socializing over coffee. She was mainly there for the patients’ sake, not because of any particular piety or a specific desire to look after other people. She worked at the hospital so she could talk to them, spend time with them. They were there because they were ill, which meant that they were basically themselves. Open, human, and honest. And that made her feel safe and functional. That was what she wanted, that was what kept her coming. Patients rarely talked nonsense, except when they were getting better, and that’s when she left them, and they her. Maybe that was why Sophie had chosen this as her career in the first place.

  Did she wallow in other people’s misfortune? Possibly, but it didn’t really feel to her as if that was what she was doing. It felt more like she was dependent. Dependent on other people’s honesty, dependent on their openness, dependent on the chance to see glimpses of people’s inner selves shine through every now and then. And when that happened, those patients would often become her favorites on the ward. Her favorites were almost always imposing characters. “Imposing” was the word she used. And when they appeared before her, she would stop and think, impressed, maybe, and filled with an indefinable sense of hope. Straight-backed people who dared to face life with a smile, the ones who were imposing on the inside: she had always been able to see them, right from the very first glance, without being able to explain how or why. As if these few people let their souls blossom, as if they chose the very best over what was merely good, as if they dared to see all sides of themselves, even the shady, hidden aspects.