The Andalucian Friend (5 page)

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 — the 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 stared 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 US 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 and kept a pipeline 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 through 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, 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 television 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.

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 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.