The Andalucian Friend: A Novel Read online

  He nailed the boxes shut, wrote fake customs declarations, and loaded the goods onto an old truck that would be taking him and the weapons to Paranaguá the following morning.

  When everything was ready Jens went out into Ciudad del Este. It was total chaos. Filthy, noisy, crowded—and over everything there lay a thick stench that seemed to contain all the world’s smells in one. So thick that it sometimes felt like the whole city was losing its oxygen. The poor ran barefoot, the rich had shoes, everyone wanted to sell, a few wanted to buy—Jens loved it there.

  He kept himself awake with drink and some female tourists from New Zealand in a local bar but soon grew tired of their company. He crept away to another bar. There he found a dark corner and drank alone until he was very drunk.

  The drive to Paranaguá the next day was an eleven-hour nightmare. His hangover kept him awake, and the driver shouted and blew his horn all the way to Brazil.

  The ship was an old hulk from the ’50s, blue in the places where the color was still visible. It was some two hundred feet long, with diesel engines whose throbbing could be heard through the whole of the hull and right up to the quayside where he was standing looking at it. It was steered from the bridge, which was toward the stern of the vessel. Half the deck was open. Some shipping containers had been lashed down in the middle of it all. Then boxes, crates, and other half-successful attempts at packaging. It was a freighter whose best days were behind it—no more, no less.

  Jens went aboard via a rickety gangplank and looked around when he reached the deck. The ship felt larger up there.

  He found his cabin after wandering about for a while. It was more like a cell. Just wide enough for him to get inside without having to turn sideways. A narrow bed fixed to the wall, a small cupboard, and nothing else. But he was happy with it. Partly because the cabin had a window and lay above the waterline, but mainly because he didn’t have to share it with anyone.

  He stood at the railing as the ship pulled out. The sun was over the horizon as Jens watched the container port of Paranaguá disappear into the distance.

  Lars Vinge was finding the days long and dull. He had photographed Sophie as she cycled home from work. He had sat glowering somewhere nearby, trying to pass the time; he had taken a walk under cover of darkness, then took a few grainy pictures of her as she passed a window inside the house. He had followed Sophie and her son, Albert, as they drove into the city and went into a bar and then a cinema. Then two days when she ate dinner alone. Why he was doing this was a mystery to him, it felt utterly pointless.

  Lars was getting tired and cross, and because he didn’t have anyone he could share it with he kept going over it, again and again, as he always did.

  The evening before he had written a report for Gunilla about Sophie’s activities and had concluded it with a sentence in which he suggested the surveillance be suspended.

  Lars’s partner, Sara, was sitting in the living room of his apartment watching a television program about environmental destruction. She was upset, some professor in England had said everything was going to hell. Lars was leaning on the doorpost watching the program. Statistics and convincing arguments from well-educated people scared him.

  His cell received a text message and he read it on the screen. Gunilla wrote that he was important and valuable to the investigation, and that he couldn’t end the surveillance yet. She had ended the text with the word “Hugs.”

  Even though Lars realized that her flattery was a ploy to get him back in line again, he couldn’t help feeling a bit more cheerful. He made up his mind to carry on doing his job. In time he’d get other things to do, in time Gunilla would give him better duties, she’d promised him that—duties that better reflected his intellect than sitting in a car all day and all night watching a nurse who seemed to live an unusually routine-bound existence. Then he would understand what he was doing, then the others in the group would realize that he was unbeatable in his work.

  He sat down on the sofa beside Sara and watched the end of the program, which explained that it was partly his fault that the world would soon be coming to an end. He felt a pang of guilt and grew as annoyed as Sara at the information the reporter was presenting. Sara said she was thinking of not flying anymore, that she’d travel by train from now on … if they ever went abroad. Lars nodded, he felt the same way.

  “I’ve got to go back to work later this evening. Shall we go and lie down for a bit?”

  She shook her head, her eyes glued to the television.

  At half past seven that evening he parked the Volvo a short distance from Sophie’s villa and took a stroll along the roads around her house, trying to find a way of getting closer. As usual, he saw nothing that struck him as odd, and he returned to his car. He sat there for a while, staring out into space, then went for a drive, making sure he knew the neighborhood for the tenth time. Then he parked in a different place, took a few indistinct pictures of her house, made a note of something that didn’t need noting. At nine o’clock Lars sighed to himself once more, started the car, and decided to swing past the house one last time before heading home.

  He passed the villa just as Sophie emerged and walked over to a taxi that was waiting outside her gate. She was wearing a thin, unbuttoned coat, an evening bag in her hand, and she got in the back of the taxi and it drove off.

  He had watched her for a few short seconds as he passed by in the car. Time had felt stretched, slower—as if everything had stopped for a while. In those short moments he had experienced her as something perfect, something ideal. Lars was struck by a strong impression that he knew her, that she knew him. He shook off the peculiar feeling, turned the car around farther down the road, and followed the taxi.

  Lars maintained a safe distance, nervousness throbbing inside him, and he wanted to pee, as if the two things were connected in some unfair way. He never let the taxi out of his sight as it passed Roslagstull and went on down Birger Jarlsgatan before turning left onto Karlavägen, past Humlegården Park. Eventually it pulled up on Sibyllegatan. He cruised past as she got out of the taxi, and watched her in the rearview mirror as she disappeared through a doorway.

  Lars parked farther down the street in the bus lane and waited for a minute before jumping out of the car.

  He shone his pocket flashlight through the door and wrote down all the names on the board inside the hall.

  It was eleven o’clock before she came out with a female friend. They walked arm in arm toward Östermalmstorg, laughing; her friend eventually had to stop and lean over in a fit of giggles. Lars stared for a while, then left his car and followed them on foot.

  Sophie and her friend went to three different places that evening. Lars was denied entry to two of them and had to show his police ID.

  Sophie and her friend were sitting at the bar. Several times men of various ages went up and tried to talk to them, but the women showed no interest. Lars was standing farther along the bar, drinking a Virgin Mary and feeling out of place. He seldom went out, and when it did happen it was to a restaurant, never a club, and absolutely not in the smartest part of the city. He watched her, realized he was staring, looked away, and finished his drink. The tomato juice tasted of tomato juice and the celery was bitter. Her proximity was knocking him off kilter. He glanced at her again, noting how attractive she was, how beautiful. He saw details he had never noticed before: the little, almost invisible wrinkles by her eyes, her bare neck, her hair, which seemed to have a life of its own … the nape of her neck, which he glimpsed every now and then, a perfect nape that seemed to hold up her whole body … her forehead, the shape of which made her look tasteful and beautiful as well as exuding an intelligence that radiated around her. He was close now, almost too close. But still he stared, peering at her like a teenage boy seeing someone naked for the first time.

  Sophie and her friend suddenly burst out laughing again. Lars was infected by her laughter and for a moment she turned to look at him, maybe alerted by the intensity of his stare. T
heir eyes met for a second, she smiled mid-laugh, he smiled back, but her gaze slid past him.

  He felt her smile on his face, let it fall, turned, and quickly left the bar.

  At home in the light from a low-energy lamp he wrote his report about the evening’s events, about Sophie’s friend, listed the names he had read in the hallway, then faxed the report to Gunilla.

  Sara was asleep. He crept in beside her; she moved in her sleep, woke up.

  “What time is it?” she whispered, confused.

  “It’s late … or early,” he said.

  She pulled the duvet around her and turned away. He pressed close to her, seeking intimacy, a feeble attempt at foreplay. He was useless at stuff like that, no finesse or feeling.

  “Stop it, Lars.” She let out an irritated sigh and pulled even farther away.

  He rolled onto his back, stared at the ceiling for a while, listening to the muffled sound of traffic down in the street. When he realized he wasn’t going to get to sleep he got up and went and sat in front of the television, which showed him Sophie Brinkmann’s face on every beautiful woman who flickered past on the screen.

  The music in the department store was beautiful, calming. She was looking at the underwear in the women’s department, looking and feeling the quality and material. She carried on toward the makeup, buying some cream that was far too expensive and promised something unlikely.

  “Sophie?”

  She turned around and saw Hector with his stick and his leg in a cast, behind him Aron with two paper bags from a men’s clothes shop in his hands.

  “Hector.”

  The silence that followed was a second too long.

  “Have you found anything you like?” he asked.

  “Some cream, so far.”

  She raised her little bag. Hector nodded.

  “How about you?” she asked.

  Hector looked at the bags in Aron’s hand, nodding to himself.

  “I don’t know,” he said quietly.

  He fixed his eyes on her.

  “We never had coffee,” he said.

  “Sorry?”

  “We didn’t have time for coffee after lunch the other day. There’s a decent place downstairs, by the food hall?”

  Sophie took her coffee with milk, Hector did the same. The girl in the checkered apron behind the counter had offered them all sorts of different coffees but they had rejected her suggestions, they just wanted ordinary, reliable coffee. Aron sat down a short distance away and waited patiently, looking around the room.

  “Doesn’t he even drink coffee?”

  Hector shook his head. “He doesn’t like coffee. He’s not like other people, Aron.”

  They sat in silence for a moment until Sophie broke it. “So how are things in the book world?”

  Hector smiled at her stillborn question, didn’t bother to answer. “How are things in the sick world?”

  “Same as usual. People get sick, some get better, everyone’s brave.”

  Hector nodded when he realized that her answer was serious.

  “That’s the way it is,” he said, taking a sip of his coffee. “It’s my birthday soon.”

  The look on her face showed that she liked that.

  “I’d like to invite you to my party.”

  “Maybe,” she said.

  Hector glanced at her quickly. She had time to note a change in him. As if the humor and happiness had gone, and some sort of opposite emotion had replaced them—something ordinary that she didn’t recognize.

  “It’s an invitation. It’s not very polite to say maybe to an invitation. You can say yes or no, just like everyone else,” he said quietly.

  Sophie felt stupid. As if she had been playing a game—as if she were assuming he had been flirting with her and that she should play hard to get. Maybe he wasn’t flirting with her at all. The longer she looked at him, the more she realized that he wasn’t courting her. He was doing something else, maybe he was just a friend who was fond of her. That was what he seemed to be saying; anyway, he hadn’t implied anything else.

  “Sorry,” she said.

  “You’re forgiven,” he replied just as quickly.

  “I’d love to come to your birthday party, Hector.”

  Hector smiled again.

  4

  There was a ripple of flashbulbs. Ralph Hanke smiled for the cameras as he shook hands with a short man with thinning hair and a mustache.

  One journalist asked the local politician if he thought it was wise to build a shopping mall on a site where there was believed to be un-exploded ordnance from World War II. The politician started to ramble and after just a couple of sentences was left fumbling for words. Ralph Hanke stepped in.

  “That’s a ridiculous idea. We’ve spent a lot of time and money making sure that this site is absolutely safe.…”

  The journalists fired a torrent of questions at Ralph. None of them concerned the impending building project or the munitions. Now it was about everything from his fortune to his rumored romance with a Ukrainian model.

  Ralph Hanke never gave interviews and only showed himself in public very occasionally at small, unexpected places where there was little at stake, such as the construction of this small shopping mall in a Munich suburb.

  His right-hand man, Roland Gentz, stepped in front of him and thanked the journalists for their interest, then shepherded Ralph away from the podium.

  They got into the car driven by Mikhail Sergeyevich Asmarov, a big Russian whose neck was almost as broad as the seat he was sitting in.

  “He doesn’t know when to shut up. The problem with that moron is that he thinks he’s working for the people,” Roland said from the passenger seat.

  Ralph was looking out the window. Buildings glided past, houses, shops, and people—all unknown to him, and that would always be the case. In recent times he had started playing for high stakes, and he liked that. His construction company was getting all the contracts he wanted. Building shopping malls, docks, parking structures, and office buildings looked good, it made him legitimate. He provided a lot of work and earned a lot of money, clean money.

  Ralph Hanke lived a life he had created for himself, no one could say otherwise. As the only child of a poor family he had grown up in the former German Democratic Republic. His then wife gave birth to his son, Christian, in 1978, but he divorced her two years later when she developed an unhealthy taste for heroin.

  He spent the years before the Wall fell working in the post office, where he informed on his colleagues to the Stasi. His activities as an informant gave him advantages that he went on to exploit later. He got to know some security officers who were smart enough to predict the collapse of East Germany. He resigned from the post office and prepared a coup with his friends in the Stasi to steal archive material about informants in order to sell it back to them after the Wall fell.

  He spent the last year working solely for the Stasi, where he was part of Kommerzielle Koordinierungs—KoKo. The purpose of the department was to use the security service to acquire Western currency to keep the bankrupt country afloat a bit longer.

  Ralph Hanke and his friends sold small arms from the East German Army to anyone who wanted them. The first time he ever went abroad it was to General Noriega’s Panama. Noriega paid for the guns in cash, with dollars, and for the first time Ralph realized he had found his role in life. On November 9, 1989, he walked free as a bird into West Berlin, his son, Christian, by his side. The sun shone behind him, lighting up the way ahead as they walked through the opening at the Brandenburg Gate.

  He lived for a while with an old friend in West Berlin, waiting a few months before he started selling the files to the former informants. The longer he waited, the more money he could get for them. He used this small fortune to buy stolen supplies from the collapsed army: vehicles, weapons, and other equipment that could be snapped up for next to nothing; then he resold them and earned back his money tenfold. He kept copies of the Stasi reports he had sold b
ack to the informants, many of whom went on to occupy positions of power in the new Germany.

  In the late 1990s, when most of these men and women felt that their secret was safe, they received another visit from Ralph Hanke, this time with young Christian by his side. But this time Ralph didn’t ask for money. This time he wanted other services, all designed to build up a sphere of power and wealth around them.

  Ralph and Christian traveled the world, establishing contact with governments and big business, paying bribes and selling planes, vehicles, and radar equipment to warring countries through intermediaries and fake companies. Within the space of a few years they had built up Hanke GmbH and were raking in profits.

  The view from the car window had changed. They were now in the center of Munich. There was a sparkle to this city, he thought. A sparkle that was a mixture of success and common sense.

  The leather seat creaked as he changed position.

  “Have you got hold of Christian?” he asked Roland.

  “Yes …,” Roland replied.

  Ralph waited.

  “And?”

  “He’s at home, drowning his sorrows. Evidently she meant a great deal to him.”

  “Yes, she must have.”

  Ralph looked out the window. His reaction when Christian’s car had been blown up had been one of relief—relief that Christian hadn’t been sitting inside it. He had been trying to figure out if that really was Guzman’s response. Were they aiming at the girlfriend or Christian? Or was it a message from someone else, and in that case, who? No, it was Guzman, but he was surprised by the approach he had taken. Did they think the girlfriend was somehow a fitting response to the injuries Hector suffered on the pedestrian crossing? Or was she an accident? Had they been trying to get Christian to show that they meant business?

  They were passing the Frauenkirche. Ralph looked up at the domes and started thinking again: curious at how the Guzman affair would develop, curious at how Adalberto Guzman would react when he had brought him to his knees. Because he would, mainly because he wanted to find out who Guzman really was. Because that was the only time you got to see what a man was really worth, when he was lying beaten on the floor, only then could you judge. Some just lay there pathetically, begging for forgiveness. Some got up and let themselves get knocked down time after time. Others got up, blamed someone else, and sold their souls to the devil. Some would call it the survival instinct, but Ralph called it fear of life. But there were also a small group of people who hit back with full force. They demanded respect, and maybe Guzman was one of those?