The Andalucian Friend by Alexander Söderberg Read Free Book Online

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