The prisoner named Leo Dûvnjac was no longer an object to be watched on any of them.
A few yards left.
To the ugly, gray, twenty-three-foot-high concrete wall. To those who were standing on the other side, waiting. To an embrace that he could already feel in his body. Big, warm hugs. They had always greeted one another like that, his brothers, Felix and Vincent.
Six years in this world.
The twenty steps took him across the asphalt area to a wrought-iron gate that slowly opened out. The air was pleasant to breathe, the dusty, incarcerated, restricted world entirely gone. He stopped to take another breath, drawing it in and becoming dizzy. Then he saw them: the three he expected and hoped would be there, who he’d missed every day, many times every day. Mama, Felix, Vincent.
He walked closer. And there was something that didn’t feel right.
Felix was there in the middle, like a border guard between two islands. They hadn’t seen each other for many years, but it was him—that dark hair, the broad shoulders. And on one side of him, to the left—the strawberry-blond hair a shade grayer, the slightly stooping posture—was Mama in a coat that looked like all her other ones. But on Felix’s other side, to the right, dressed up, the gray suit even pressed . . . Father? What the fuck was he doing here? And Vincent—why was he not here?
The gate’s slight creaking stopped when it was wide open, and as it began to swing shut again, he took his first step out, his back turned to a world he would leave and never return to again.
Mama got the first hug. She was so small, she could easily fit in his arms.
“Thanks for the clothes, dear Mama.”
“I’m so happy, Leo, so insanely happy that you are out.”
They held each other. To do that in freedom was very different. She wasn’t the only one holding tightly; he was too.
Then Felix.
“Wonderful to see you.”
A bear hug. Like always.
“Likewise, little brother.”
Then . . . Leo spun around once, and again, searching the parking lot.
“Where the hell is Vincent?”
“He’s . . . working. Couldn’t get away.”
“Six years, Felix—and he ‘couldn’t get away’?”
“A customer causing trouble. You know how it is.”
One left. Papa. He stood there with both arms outstretched. A man who never ever hugged had clearly seen how the others acted.
“Leo, my son.”
“You? I really didn’t think that . . . that you’d come here.”
His arms remained outstretched as Ivan took the final step and embraced him.
“If I can change, Leo, you can change.”
A forced hug. And his father whispered again, louder.
“If I can change, you can change.”
“Papa, what the hell are you talking about?”
The two outstretched arms became two raised fingers.
“Two years, my son.”
“Two years, what?”
“I’ve been out for two years. And not a goddamn drop.”
The hug. And Papa hadn’t smelled at all. The weak scent of red wine, which always swirled around him, was gone.
“And, Leo, listen, now we should—”
“Later.”
“Later?”
“I don’t have time, Papa.”
“But you’re released now!”
“Yeah. A whole lot to figure out.”
His father didn’t move.
“Look, Leo, how the fuck would I know that Felix and . . . she would come. I’ve reserved a table, but only for us, for you and me, a welcome-home lunch, we really need to talk, we—”
“This evening.”
Not a drop?
Leo examined his father, uncertain whether it had made him a whole lot calmer. Last time they saw each other he hadn’t drunk anything either, because that had been Leo’s demand—that Ivan should stay sober the days before the robbery.
Everything had gone to hell anyway.
For the moment he needed to keep his father at a distance without alienating him. Without stirring that paternal instinct that occasionally showed itself.
“Did you say this evening?”
“Yes. We can get together for a bit. I have . . . something to do before that. Okay?”
Leo avoided a disappointed look and passed by the shitty little Saab his papa pointed to and offered a ride in, and continued away from the wall and the prison gate and all those days locked up. He was already on his way somewhere else.
To a highway more than a dozen miles southwest of Stockholm.
And a completely ordinary rest area.
To dig up the past, and then, to take back what didn’t exist.
HE SHOULD FEEL happy, through and through. Free. Free to drive wherever the fuck he wanted, to stop to piss exactly where and when he wanted. But he hadn’t counted on being surprised outside the gate. Three people, sure. Mama. Felix. That was as expected. But the third should not have been Papa. A customer causing trouble. After all these years, Vincent couldn’t come and meet his big brother?
Leo traveled south, through a Stockholm he hadn’t seen for a long time. Past the suburban exits to Västertorp, Fruängen, and Bredäng, and when he reached the stretch where the old highway ran parallel with the new, he couldn’t resist turning in his seat for a glimpse of the woodland tract he had lain in evening after evening, on a carpet of moss among the humming mosquitoes, in order to scout and map out the military control unit. Back then, when he was faceless and had no criminal record; when he lacked criminal contacts both outside and inside the walls; when he had emptied a military weapons caisson of two hundred and twenty-one automatic weapons without being noticed.
Now they knew who he was.
Now he must think and plan in a new way.
The slow journey took him through a landscape that seemed to never end, not limited by cell doors and concrete crowned with double-toothed, razor-blade-sharp barbed wire. He passed Salem and Rönninge and waved at the exit to Hall—Sweden’s most oppressive prison, together with Kumla, and a place he had resided in three times when he was doing his time. The prison system operated like this—unannounced disciplinary removals in the early dawn—because an inmate should never know how the next day would look, shouldn’t have time to build up relationships, networks. He was a risk factor, classified as highly dangerous, and if you can break into weapons caissons, you can bust out of prison cells later on.
Södertälje Bridge—he had forgotten that something as simple as a highway bridge and a view of a canal below could be so beautiful. The abrupt right turn onto the E20, the highway that ends somewhere at Sweden’s coast, straight out to a sea that spreads toward the rest of the world. He wouldn’t drive that far, not yet, and he put on the brakes for the first time near a highway sign giving the distance to Örebro and Strängnäs. He braked again at the next sign—a smaller blue-and-black one with an illustration of a bench beside a spruce tree next to the number 3. That meant a rest area and the first stage of his goal.
A tractor trailer with Polish registration plates. Two toilets. A group of benches surrounded by trash cans.
That was all—no kiosk, no gas station, the sort of place that looks the same after a long time in prison.
That was why he had picked out this site; it was here he had buried his cache.
He turned off the rental car’s engine and stepped out into the streaming sun, which enticed him to yawn and stretch. He looked around. Just one person here. Balding, unkempt beard, an unfiltered cigarette in one corner of his mouth. A driver who spent his life behind the truck’s padded steering wheel.
Leo nodded to him, got a nod back, and turned away. Vehicle after vehicle passed at high speed nearby while he looked around in the other direction, into the woodland—mostly pines and an occasional birch with heavy, hanging branches, here and there white patches of snow.
Sometime between bank robberies seven a
nd eight he had stood exactly here and identified a tall, nearly round rock thirty-two paces away from the edge of the ditch. The first landmark. It had been autumn and early morning and it had smelled of compost. Now it smelled of meltwater, yellow grass, and exhaust.
He moved to the car’s trunk and observed, before he opened it, how the truck driver was still occupied in lighting cigarettes and blowing out smoke in old-fashioned rings. And when he opened the truck and looked down, everything was in place. The rental car, which had been prepaid and was waiting with a full tank at the service station in Västberga, had been stocked according to his instructions—the duffel bag and the plastic tub and the folding spade to the left, the box with waterproof boots, compass, and two preprogrammed cell phones to the right.
He changed his shoes, folded the jacket, and waited out the truck driver. Not until the driver had disappeared into the inside lane of the busy road and he was entirely convinced that no other living creature was approaching did Leo jump over the gravel-filled ditch with the duffel bag on his shoulder and go into the spruce forest. His boots sank deep into the wet grass and heavy snow, but he felt light, strong. During the last six months of his sentence he had filled much of his time with building up his muscles. Not bulk, like the others. Strength training—push-ups, lat pull-downs, lunges, sit-ups—fine-tuning a body that would never get in the way of its own movements. If he ended up in that situation once again—hunted by twenty-five elite police officers—he would move quicker and for a longer time than his pursuers.
He didn’t remember the rock being so big; he felt over the rough surface with his hand at chest height until his fingertips discovered the narrow crevice. Cold, heavy snow came loose and fell down, but it was here he should stand, with his back against the crevice, to identify landmark number two.
The split tree.
One half was gone, decomposed for a long time, while the other half was reaching toward a crisp spring sky—he had already guessed the last time that it had been a lightning strike.
Correctly positioned, he turned his back to the remaining tree trunk and held the transparent compass against the glossy paper of the map. He twisted the compass housing until the meridian lines lay parallel with the lines on the map. The north arrow pointed to the north, the orienting arrow on the compass slanted to the left, and he began to walk the last ninety-two paces of the final stretch.
They had been everything to one another that day they were locked up in three different prisons—now one of them didn’t even show up when they were to be reunited.
The irritation gnawed, chafed, didn’t let go.
Fourteen paces.
All this time separated and his youngest little brother, whose diapers he had changed, who he’d prepared breakfast for, hadn’t even been there!
Twenty-two paces.
Two cell phones in his breast pocket: the one with the encryption program built in that he’d use later, and the ordinary one, pay as you go, without a registered subscriber, to contact one of the numbers that had been preprogrammed. He waited while the signal searched for purchase. One ring, another, another. No answer.
Twenty-seven paces.
He called again. Several rings.
Or . . . twenty-eight?
Still no fucking answer.
Maybe twenty-nine?
Leo stopped, breathed deeply. That didn’t help. He had totally lost count. The irritation was gliding across his skin and pricked everywhere like a needle, in, out, in, out.
He went back. Landmark two. The split tree, his back to the healthy trunk and the compass on the glossy paper of the map. And he began to walk and count again, at the same time as he dialed the number for the third time.
Long rings. Then the voice he wanted.
“Hello . . . ?”
It had been a teenager’s voice then, and now belonged to someone halfway between twenty and thirty.
“Hello yourself, little brother.”
Who was the same age he had been himself at the time of the arrest.
“Leo?”
“Yeah.”
“Is that you . . . shit, I didn’t recognize the number.”
“You weren’t there today.”
“I . . .”
Fifteen paces.
“. . . shit, Leo, I’m sorry . . .”
It was easier to count now.
“. . . work, you know, a customer who couldn’t decide what fucking tile she wanted above the stove.”
Leo’s irritation began to fade slowly.
“Work? Mama mentioned that. Vincent—so you have your own business!”
“Mmm.”
Six conversations from a telephone in a grubby prison corridor. One a year. That had been all the contact, and now—with the sound of someone opening a paint can in the background—it became very clear. His little brother was actually at a construction site, living an adult life with a well-ordered workday.
“So when can we see each other?”
“See each other?”
“Yeah, Vincent. Meet. Naturally I want to see my youngest brother.”
“There’s, well, a lot going on right now . . . Shit, I don’t really know. I—”
“Tomorrow maybe? Or will you have a customer causing trouble then too?”
“Yes . . . maybe, I’ll . . .”
“Are you trying to get out of seeing me, Vincent?”
“No. No, dammit. You know that. I just—”
“Well, then. Tomorrow at Mama’s. Okay?”
“Sure. See you tomorrow.”
Thirty-two paces. The forest was so still, the sun piercing through the tight lattice of branches, the persistent rays heating up as they did in April. Forty-four paces. He avoided stepping into a muddy puddle, looked around, and checked the compass one last time. Fifty-seven paces. The red arrow quavered under the plastic base plate and pointed toward the magnetic north pole, while the other arrow, the one in the compass housing, pointed toward his future.
Thirty-five paces left.
———
Vincent held the phone for a long time, cradling it in his hand. The whole conversation was still there. Words he didn’t want to utter again, to trot out again, always the case when you’re ashamed.
If he turned off the ringer, if he laid the phone on the can of filler’s lid with the display turned downward, then if it rang again, then with no sound, no light, he would not have to know. Not need to answer.
He was kneeling in a bathroom covered with standard white tiles, away from a thin row of yellow-speckled mosaic tiles around a heart-shaped mirror, color that seemed to ooze out of the wall and become a pus-filled sore.
He tried to smile at the image in the mirror.
It didn’t work. The lips formed an uncertain straight line instead.
Are you trying to get out of seeing me?
If his voice had sounded as guilty as the eyes that were staring back at him now, then Leo had understood. A lie. From one brother to another.
Only the grouting left to do, the sticky, white paste that would make the tile wall come together. Out of the kitchen came the slapping sound of a wet roller as it applied paint onto a ceiling. One more day and this apartment would be finished and the new owners could move in.
He tried to think away the anxiety.
Whatever, all thoughts were allowed, the more twisted the better, as long as they kick-started his brain and drove away the hellish anxiety that had climbed into his chest in earnest a couple of weeks earlier and from there had crept upward—from the moment he had suddenly realized that his brother would be let out, that he was getting ready for his release.
He walked out into the hall, his steps echoing in empty rooms, and he looked around at what was his job now, his life. He had started the business six months after his own release; no more foremen asking about his past. Everything got going quickly and one job led to another, one satisfied customer becoming the next satisfied customer.
Employment that was enough, just: in
come that made the workday go by, but nothing more. But dammit, he had employed a worker part-time—those wet roller strokes that were painting the ceiling in the kitchen. From never having had any contact, they painted and nailed and tiled side by side now. But he hadn’t told anyone yet, neither Felix nor Mama. How could he when he couldn’t explain why even to himself? Why he had offered employment to an additional pair of hands when his own were enough. Why a one-time case of stepping in for a single paint job had turned into another and another.
“When you’re done in here, there are a few small spots on the bathroom ceiling too.”
He had stopped in the doorway to the kitchen, following the painter’s practiced movements.
“In a minute. But here, have you seen this? The idiots want to have matte paint—not glossy. Who the fuck’s that brainless—matte on a kitchen ceiling? And by the way, Vincent, who was that? Who were you talking to?”
He knew.
Vincent felt himself slipping closer. Closer to hazy memories.
He is seven years old when his father comes back and forces his way in through the front door and hall—furious and sober and with clenched fists that methodically smash Mama.
That’s why. Why he’d employed him. But, in spite of a couple of months among cans of paint and tile cutters, he hadn’t come any closer to understanding those memories.
“Vincent?”
“Yes?”
“Who was that?”
The newly employed painter looked at him. It was a small apartment, not more than a few feet between bathroom and kitchen, and sound easily carried through empty rooms. He had heard the whole conversation and gathered who had called.
“Who was what?”
“The person you were talking to.”
“Nobody.”
Vincent swallowed down what was stuck in his throat. He had called Leo nobody.
“Nobody, Vincent? Who the fuck is that? Or do you sit there on the toilet and talk to the tiles?”
“You know who.”
Nobody.
“Leo. It was Leo. My big brother. Your oldest son.”
Nobody.
Vincent was ashamed, like before, when he looked into the kitchen and met his father’s eyes, their father’s eyes. The roller in the rough hand was lowered from the ceiling and wayward paint drops fell onto the hard, protective lining paper.
The Sons: Made in Sweden, Part 2 Page 4
