The Andalucian Friend (33 page)

He let go of his lip. Stared ahead of him.
Surprised
was probably the wrong word, actually — he hadn’t felt anything at all.

Lars let the hours pass. He just sat there. But something started to dawn on him in his drug-addled confusion, a little glimpse of meaning. His phone was gone, his wallet, the magazine of his pistol, the keys to the car … all gone, together with his personality and soul … together with his previous life. Maybe it was a sign? A sign of change? That now was the time to start again, start afresh, from scratch. Figure out what was really going on around him, pick a side.

It suddenly struck him that he was free to take this in whatever direction he wanted. Lars saw time stretching out ahead of him, saw in his mind’s eye what he ought to do from now on, what he was obliged to do.

He reached his arm back and pulled out his magazine-less service revolver from the floor behind the seat, jumped out of the car, and went around to open the trunk. He closed the little case around the surveillance equipment using the Velcro strips, then took it out and walked a little way toward a garden, putting it down behind a birch tree. Lars sat down and pulled the laces from his sneakers, tied them together to make a longer cord, then went back to the Saab, opened the cap of the gas tank, dangled the shoelace in as far as he could, pulled it out, sniffed —
Gas, what a fantastic smell. …

He dipped the other end in as far as it would go. Just a few centimeters of the shoelace were visible. He looked over toward the tree, trying to figure out his escape route. Three, maybe four seconds. No, longer. Five, six.

He pulled out a lighter and set light to the gas-soaked end. The shoelace burned fast, quicker than he had anticipated. Lars ran like never before, taking long strides, panic raging at the back of his head.

The explosion was muffled and thick, as if someone had dropped a heavy carpet on the whole area. The pressure wave felt like a warm, burning squall on his back as he threw himself to the ground on top of the bag of surveillance equipment. He looked back from where he was lying. The pillar of flame stood straight up for a few seconds. The flames along its top edge formed a mushroom shape where they seemed to want to burn downward and inward. Then it vanished in the semidarkness of the evening. The Saab was in flames. It snapped and crackled and popped. The rear window was gone, the lid of the trunk was hanging from one hinge. The plastic was beginning to melt, glass cracked, the rear left-hand wheel was squirting out rubber as it burned. He stared wide-eyed at the fireworks.

Sophie had dreamed that the boiler
in the cellar had exploded. She bumped into Albert outside her bedroom.

“What was that?” he asked.

“I don’t know.”

She went downstairs but nothing looked any different. She went down into the cellar, looking around, sniffing for any wrong smell, but there was nothing there, either. She heard Albert’s voice calling her from outside.

When she got out she saw a glow above the trees one block away. A strong, yellowish glow.

They started walking in that direction.

A large group of people was standing watching the fire. More were on their way from the surrounding streets. Sophie could see it was a car, an old Saab.

Albert met up with a friend, and they started laughing and joking. She stared at the burning car and heard the fire-brigade sirens in the distance, over the crackling sound of plastic, rubber, and metal.

He was standing
right behind her.

Lars had got to his feet after the explosion and had been about to leave the area when a thought suddenly struck him: she was bound to come and look. He had stopped, turned around, and tucked himself away in the darkness. He had watched as people came out from the neighboring houses. Lars had hidden the bag, roughed up his hair, then went back.

Now he was a homeowner who had been woken by the blast, got dressed, and gone out to see
what was going on
.

He hadn’t seen her at first, which made him impatient. Lars tried to calm himself down by listening to what other people were saying. They were mostly joking. Someone asked for a light. A man said something about Saab, shares, and bankruptcy. Lars didn’t get the joke but everyone else seemed to. More people joined the crowd to watch the spectacle. And then he saw her.

She had come down the road off to one side behind him. He had glanced in that direction, saw Albert walking ahead of her, saw her beautiful apparition. He smiled, then realized he was smiling. He stopped, turned around, and stared into the fire, and saw her from the corner of his eye as she stopped a short distance from him. Lars had slowly moved closer to her through the crowd.

Now he was standing right behind her, staring into the back of her neck, the part of her that he found so attractive. She had her hair tied up loosely, her neck was bare. He wanted to reach out a hand and stroke it, massage it, press his finger into the little hollow.

“Sophie?”

A woman in a dressing gown came up to her. “This is crazy! What happened?”

Lars listened intently.

“Hello, Cissi, I don’t know, the explosion woke me up.”

“Me too. …”

He had spent so long listening to her on his headphones, had seen her through his telephoto lens, had stood beside her as she slept, but he had never seen her like this — normal, awake,
Sophie
. He carried on staring at her little movements, the small ways she moved and acted, and smiled again.

Cissi pulled a packet of cigarettes from the pocket of her dressing gown.

“I remembered to bring these, do you want one?”

“Thanks.”

They lit up, then watched the burning car.

Cissi tore her eyes away, turned around, and found herself looking straight at Lars’s odd smile. She looked him up and down.

“And what the hell are you grinning at?”

Sophie turned around as well and caught sight of Lars. They stared at each other. He looked down at the ground, turned around, and quickly made his way through the crowd and disappeared.

Cissi took a puff on her cigarette.

“Who the hell was that creep?”

Sophie knew. … She knew who he was. She felt scared. She had thought he would be sturdier, bigger, more like a policeman, whatever they were supposed to look like. Not like what she had just seen, with an insipid, searching gaze, weird posture, hollow eyes.

“I don’t know,” she said, trying to find him in the crowd. But Lars Vinge had vanished.

The wall. The confusion of pictures,
names, arrows, notes. Complete chaos. He let his breathing calm down. Concentrated on the pictures of Sophie. He backed away, saw a flicker of a connection, he wanted to reach out and touch it, but lost it and …
Fuck!

Lars wrote on the wall:
Man 35 – 40, Swedish, armed, calm
. He drew an arrow to Sophie. He backed away again, looked, tried to remember. Did he recognize the voice of the man in the car? His eyes slid to the photograph of the man Sophie had met on Strandvägen. Thoughts were bouncing around inside his head. Time flowed onward, his concentration wavered. His reasoning refused to stay with him.

Lars went into the bathroom, prepared a new dose. This time he thought he’d managed to mix a concentration cocktail. He gulped down the pills, looked at himself in the mirror, lazily humming “New York, New York” Lars was pale, saggy, and he had little yellow spots around his mouth — he liked what he saw.

The wall again, Lars carried on working, looking, searching. He scratched at his spots, his legs were in constant motion, he was grinding his teeth like some fucking ruminating elk. Was there some pattern that he wasn’t seeing? A code embedded in everything he had written on the wall? As if he had subconsciously created a code containing the answer to everything he didn’t understand? Maybe that was it … The divine answer to everything? Maybe it was there, amidst the chaos on the wall? Maybe there were other answers too? Lars could feel his drug-fueled intelligence racing. Then it stopped. As if Ingo Johansson had stepped out of the picture leaning against the wall, taken a step forward, and hit him with a heavy right hook to the face.

Lars sat down on the chair, his neck hanging, unable to think or even move. He was mentally knocked out, his brain sluggish with morphine. He was drooling from the side of his mouth. He stared down at his legs, saw the grass stains on the knees of his jeans … like when he was a little boy! Lars laughed at the thought, grass stains on his knees! The dose had been too high. Tiredness made its way through his neck and shoulders and out into his body, his chest, stomach, legs, feet — to every corner of Lars Vinge. He slid off the chair and ended up on his knees, then fell forward and put his hands out to stop himself. His wrists and lower arms hurt as he landed.

He saw a single cable that wasn’t attached to anything beneath the desk. Lars stared at the cable. It suggested a number of associations that flickered past.

He topped up with Ketogan and benzo … and something else as well. A decent enough overdose. But the dose didn’t give him what he was looking for. Instead it felt as though something outside him was exerting great pressure on him, at least that was how he experienced it. He couldn’t move, couldn’t think, he was heavier than the mass of an exploding star. And then Ingo popped up again. This time he made some Gothenburg joke, jabbed from the left, feinted, and followed up with a heavy right uppercut. Everything went black.

The phone was
ringing, dragging him back from a dense, soundless darkness. Lars looked at the time, he must have been gone for many long hours. The phone rang again. It was persistent and discordant. He got up on his knees. The phone was shrieking now. Leaning on the desk, he got to his feet and walked unsteadily over the wooden floor. The base of his spine and his knees were aching.

“Hello?”

“Lars Vinge?”

“Yes?”

“My name is Gunnel Nordin, I’m calling from Lyckoslanten Care Home. I’m sorry to have to tell you that your mother passed away this morning.”

“Oh … That’s a shame.”

Lars hung up and went out into the kitchen without knowing why. Maybe he was looking for something. The phone rang again. He looked around, hoping that would help him remember what it was he was looking for. The phone kept ringing. He looked up at the ceiling, then down at the floor, then looked all around him, turning 360 degrees. The phone went on ringing. No, he couldn’t remember what he was looking for, although his brain was racing.

The ringing carried on. He picked up the receiver.

“Hello?”

“I’m calling from Lyckoslanten again. Gunnel Nordin …”

“Yes?”

Lars looked down at his feet.

“I don’t know if you understood what I just told you.”

“Yes, you told me Mom died.”

His cheek was itching, as if he’d been bitten by a gnat. Irritated, he scratched hard with his fingernails.

“Do you want to come over? See her before they take her away?”

He looked at his nails, there was a bit of blood on them.

“No, no, that’s fine, take her away.”

Gunnel Nordin was silent for a moment.