The Andalucian Friend: A Novel Read online

  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 had 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 a file 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 bulletin 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 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 bulletin 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 registered 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 jack 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.

  Leszek came walking toward him, unwilling to look Guzman in the eye.

  Adalberto Guzman, or Guzman el Bueno as he was sometimes known, had just emerged from the sea. There was a glass of freshly squeezed orange juice on a small table on the beach. A towel was folded over a chair, a dressing gown hanging over its back. He dried himself off, sat down, and drank the juice as he looked out across the sea.

  As a child he used to swim alongside his mother as she swam in the same water he had just climbed out of. Every morning they would float there together. The swim remained the same, but the view from the return leg had changed over the years. In the early 1960s, around the time when he met the love of his life—a Swedish tour guide, Pia—he had bought all the available land around the villa, flattened the other houses, and planted cypress trees and olive groves. Now he owned the water he swam in and the beaches he landed on.

  Guzman was seventy-three years old, a widower and father of two sons and a daughter. Over the past three decades he had donated vast sums to charity without having any business interest in them whatsoever. He had built up an organization that had made him a wealthy man. He was known for his generosity, for his concern for those who were less well off; he was a friend of the church and a regular celebrity guest on the local television cookery shows. He was Guzman el Bueno—Guzman the Good.

  Guzman gave Leszek a brief pat on the arm when they met. Leszek allowed a suitable distance between him and Guzman before following him up toward the villa.

  “Sometimes things go wrong, Leszek, my friend.”

  Leszek walked in silence.

  “They got the message, didn’t they?” he went on. Guzman started to climb the stone steps up to the villa.

  “Not in the way we wanted,” the Pole muttered.

  “But they got the message, and you’ve come back unharmed, that’s the most important thing.”

  Leszek didn’t answer.

  The large glass terrace door was open, and the white linen curtains inside were swaying in the breeze from the sea. They went inside the house, and Guzman took off the dressing gown as a servant came in with his clothes for the day. He got dressed, unembarrassed, in front of Leszek.

  “I’m worried about the children,” Guzman said, pulling on his beige trousers. “Hector’s got Aron and can look after himself, but sort out security for Eduardo and Inez. If they make a fuss … well, they can’t make a fuss.”

  Eduardo and Inez lived their own lives, far from Adalberto Guzman. He had practically no contact with them at all but always sent birthday presents—presents that were too large and far too expensive for his grandchildren’s birthdays. Inez had told him to stop. Guzman took no notice.

  On the other hand, Hector, his firstborn, had always been by his side. At the age of fifteen Hector had started to take an interest in his father’s business. At eighteen he was running everything together with Adalberto. The first thing Hector did was to wind down the heroin trade between North Africa and Spain, seeing as the police had stepped up their efforts to stop drug trafficking. Instead he had devoted a lot of time and energy to building up a money-laundering operation. They laundered drug money, arms money, stolen money, anything that needed freshening up. It turned out to be almost as lucrative as bringing heroin into southern Europe. The Guzmans became renowned for being open to pretty much anything. During the ’90s, when the United States started to take its war on drugs seriously, which raised the price of cocaine to an all-time high, there was no question of them sitting on the sidelines looking on.

  They visited Don Ignacio in Valle del Cauca, in Colombia, to look into the possibility of setting up their own pipelines to Europe. Adalberto and Hector identified a few good smuggling routes, but it was difficult, expensive, and risky work. They switched pipelines a number of times and lost several shipments to both customs and theft. They gave up and let the idea drop. Adalberto and Hector’s legal businesses started doing worse after the year 2000, and it took them a while to recover. But they were never quite able to drop the idea of how valuable a well-run cocaine pipeline could be. They tested a route between Paraguay and Rotterdam, a relatively secure line that turned out to be their best yet. They leaned back, earned a lot of money, and everything was fun again.

  Then suddenly the Germans marched in and stole everything out from under their noses. Adalberto was reluctantly forced to admit that he had been caught napping. But his dealings with Ralph Hanke hadn’t started there. They had encountered each other indirectly during negotiations surrounding the construction of a viaduct in Brussels some years earlier. Hanke tried to buy off everyone involved, he was desperate to win the contract. But Guzman got the contract as Hanke stumbled at the finish line. In itself it wasn’t much of a contract, but the first time Hanke stole their cocaine Adalberto knew who he was dealing with: an idiot who had to win at any cost.

  Setting up and maintaining the pipeline between Paraguay and Rotterdam had taken a lot of effort. Bribes, bribes, and more bribes, that was how you established a pipeline and kept it going. The money wasn’t the problem, the hard part was finding people who were prepared to accept it. With time they had found good people who did what they were paid to do: customs officers, dockworkers, and a Vietnamese captain with his own ship—an old tub with a crew that he could vouch for. Everything had been relatively painless, and perhaps that was why Ralph Hanke one day stepped in and helped himself to everything. Hanke marched in and raised the price of every single person Guzman had bought off, threatened the courier who met the ship in Rotterdam, then took the goods and used his own network to distribute the cocaine throughout Europe.

  Adalberto Guzman had received a letter by courier, handwritten. It was well formulated, polite, formal, on expensive ivory writing paper. He read between the lines that every attempt at confrontation would be met with violence. He sent a reply, also handwritten, but less formal and on slightly cheaper paper, informing them that he would recoup his losses, with interest. As a response to that letter, it was extremely likely that Hanke had dispatched someone to Stockholm to run Hector down on a pedestrian crossing. It had been hit-and-run, the Swedish police had been unable to trace the car.

  Adalberto gave in to his first emotional instinct and sent Leszek to Munich to kill Hanke’s son. But that hadn’t gone according to plan. Maybe that was just as well, now that he came to think about it: at the moment it was a no-score draw. It could stay that way for a while.

  There was the sound of small paws on the floor. His dog, Piño, a ball in his mouth, showing the same delight and enthusiasm that he always did. Piño was a stray who had turned up on his doorstep five years ago, wanting to come in. Adalberto had let the dog in, and since then they had been good friends.

  Guzman el Bueno took the ball and threw it. The dog raced to fetch it, caught it, and ran back to his master. Always just as much fun.

  If the peace held, he could concentrate on planning how to retake his pipeline, because there was no question that he was going to, and in some style.

  The evening was still warm, the cicadas were loud, and a Paraguayan telev
ision show was echoing from somewhere nearby.

  Jens was packing boxes in an old warehouse. He had dismantled the automatic rifles and put their bolts in a packing case with steel pipes of various shapes and sizes. He packed the butts between vacuum-packed watermelons.

  The past few years had been hectic. He had spent time in Baghdad, Sierra Leone, Beirut, Afghanistan. It had been dangerous. He had been shot at, he had shot back, he had met people he never wanted to see again.

  Jens had decided to take some time off after this job, go home, take it easy. He didn’t usually accompany his goods, it was too risky. But this time he had decided to go along. He had booked passage for the goods from the Brazilian port on a Panamanian registered freighter that was heading for Rotterdam. The Vietnamese captain had his wits about him, said that another customer had already arranged for the unloading in Rotterdam to be risk-free, and that the price would take that into account. It would take two weeks to sail to Europe and he felt he needed to wind down a bit, get some rest—and even test his patience, see how bad his restlessness really was. The boat would give him no chance to escape. Which is what he usually did once he’d seen the same view twice.