The Sons: Made in Sweden, Part 2

by Anton Svensson

  He hadn’t felt ill at ease then. Only a sense of belonging. And when it wasn’t possible to persuade Leo, to stop him, his father changed course and asked instead to be allowed to be a part of their lives, to rob the next bank side by side with his own sons.

  The discomfort now was related to the contents of the news report. The difference. These robbers had encountered the police already on the scene. In a firefight one of them had been fatally hit by a bullet.

  “Your boy? Isn’t he a bit late? You’ve even reserved a table, though we’re never full.”

  Dacso, so curious that he didn’t even send a minion. The restaurant owner himself stood there with the coffee pot in his hand, offering a refill.

  “Leo’s on the way.”

  Hot black coffee fell into the half-full cup.

  “You asked me to arrange something special, Ivan. For you and your son. And I bought the best I could find.”

  Then he didn’t leave the table even though the cup had been refilled. He turned toward the television and saw what his customer saw. The new pictures, taken on a cell phone camera from a distance, yet clear all the same. A lifeless body in black overalls, a mask over the face, and an assault rifle fallen a short distance from the right arm.

  “It cost a lot. The meat, I mean.”

  And blood smeared on the ground, which the robber, according to the voice of the reporter, slipped in while he was trying to get up, when he was hit by a bullet that wedged in under the bulletproof vest. Before the next one—in the head.

  “And if something’s happened, you know, if your son isn’t coming, I mean, if . . .”

  Ivan hadn’t drunk a drop for two years. During that time he had also controlled his temper, hadn’t assaulted or struck anyone. But now he was so close to grabbing hold of Dacso’s bristly eyebrows. To ripping them off and shoving them down his throat to silence him.

  “What the fuck are you saying?”

  “Today. He was released. And I mean—”

  “Leo is never going to do a robbery again. He’ll be here in a minute. Go and fix your expensive fucking meat.”

  “Fillet of beef. Dry-aged from Argentina.”

  “Whatever you want. I don’t eat for the taste. If I did, I would certainly never come here to you and your lovely wife.”

  That got him to leave. But not to stop whispering, and Ivan was sure that what the restaurant owner was blowing into his wife’s ear was more insinuations—that it can’t be a coincidence that a spectacular, violent robbery had been carried out the same day the Papa Robber’s son was released.

  He had indeed felt something that morning, there at the gate. Something that couldn’t be put into words but that a father senses. Lack of approachability. Leo was cut off, only existing inside himself.

  He had thought then, had hoped, that it was the freedom. He had experienced that himself every time he was released from prison—years of longing and joy that were broken apart the moment the gate was opened and they turned into uncertainty and confusion. But . . . the fucking blood on the television screen. Was it his? Was that why he was late? Only ten minutes, so far. Leo could be a whole lot later and damn well not have managed to carry out a robbery in a Stockholm suburb, go through the roadblock, escape the police, hide the booty, change his clothes, and a bit later sit in a Hungarian restaurant in the city center with his papa.

  “Dacso?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Go ahead and cook your Argentinian beef.”

  “But if he doesn’t come, Ivan, if—”

  “Just cook it!”

  The wall. The gate. Even Felix and she had been there.

  If you hadn’t been the way you were when they were growing up . . . good God, Leo would never have robbed any banks!

  Britt-Marie broke the family. So he broke her.

  And Felix and Vincent wouldn’t have done time either.

  But now he would fix it, renovate it like a house in decline. The mistakes lay behind them. A better future was before them.

  If I can change, you can change.

  “Are you cooking it?”

  “In a minute.”

  “Because he’s coming now!”

  Those footsteps.

  Ivan leaned toward the cold windowpane in order to see better.

  Each step so fucking blatant, that was how he had always walked. Those very steps were on the way to the door now.

  And Ivan hugged his son for the second time that day.

  “Dacso . . . goddammit! We want to eat now. Get the hell going.”

  “No food for me, Dad.”

  Ivan stopped hugging his son and took him aside, away from curious ears.

  “Leo, aren’t you hungry? Let’s sit down now. What do you want to drink?”

  “I don’t have time. I just wanted to come by and tell you that. Something’s come up.”

  The voices from the giant television floated down from the wall and settled between them, a thin, temporary veil around their conversation—an expert was talking about increased violence between police and criminals, a researcher who assessed AK4s as unusual weapons for a robbery, and finally a spokeswoman for the police authority who explained that there was still no trace of the surviving robber.

  “Listen, we’ll be in touch, I’ll call you.”

  Leo had only gotten as far as half of the red carpet in the entryway before he turned and was on the way out again.

  “But the dinner? The meat? Ivan, I have prepared everything for you and your son.”

  Dacso lifted the frying pan and held it up as if for evidence. At the same moment Leo pulled a wad of cash out of his back pocket, mostly five-hundred-kronor notes, and held out four.

  “Is that enough?”

  Dacso shook both his hands and head.

  “It’s way too much.”

  “Keep them. I’ll come back and eat with my father some other time.”

  And so he left, his steps as certain as the ones that recently brought him there, and Ivan followed. He did not have time to fetch his coat, even though the tentative heat that crept up during the day had slipped away. It was raw, like autumn. As he used to think it felt in Yugoslavia, the country he left for Sweden in the 1960s and whose border with Hungary consisted of a river named Dráva. Now he was running to catch up with his eldest son outside a restaurant bearing the same name.

  “Hey, Leo . . . stop.”

  “Sorry, Dad. I really don’t have time. I have a meeting.”

  “But that’s a lot of money you have.”

  That got him to stop.

  “Do you have a problem with that, Dad?”

  “Yes, just a few hours after your release. I thought . . .”

  Ivan fell silent and Leo understood why. Two men in their fifties came along, crouching slightly and with their hands in their jacket pockets. Both of them nodded at Ivan as if they knew him, and he nodded back. People often tried to stay on good terms with him, without even being aware of it.

  “. . . that you burned everything up in that woodstove before the police arrested us?”

  “I found them in the forest today. If you look in the right place, they are growing in the soil more or less everywhere.”

  A quick glance at the restaurant Dráva’s window. Dacso and his ice-cold wife were standing there in full view, staring out, had stopped pretending.

  “So . . . so that was the reason, Dad?”

  “What?”

  “So is that why it was so damn important to invite me to dinner? To check up on me? To interrogate me a little about my plans for the future?”

  And behind the pair of curious restaurant owners the giant television’s bluish glow continued to give off light. More images from the manhunt after the robbery.

  “I get it. You’ve been looking at that. You don’t have to worry. I have nothing to do with that shit.”

  He looked around, mostly to avoid meeting his father’s eyes, which were perhaps likely to see more.

  It was the beginning o
f the evening in a capital city, yet so oddly deserted, silent.

  “Dad—I was released today. Do you think I’d commit a robbery the same day? Not even the cops think that. No one’s watching me.”

  “You were late. And now you don’t have time. Today, at the gate, it felt like . . . like when I tried to persuade you the time before not to do it. And it ended up with you surviving.”

  A father who was convinced he had saved his son’s life.

  A son who was convinced once he had saved his mother’s life.

  “Look, Dad, don’t go mixing our rugs up.”

  His father winced.

  “What the hell are you talking about, Leo?”

  “Don’t you remember, Dad? When I visited you in jail?”

  They both remembered. Nonetheless the older of the two shook his head.

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “Nothing about any rugs.”

  “Don’t you remember what it’s like when someone believes that he saved a life—and how someone else can so easily take it away from him?”

  The giant TV set inside the restaurant window. The newscast had moved on to the rest of the world. A feature on the UN building in New York, mixed with quick clips of some war somewhere.

  At about that moment Leo smiled for the first time.

  “Listen, don’t worry so damned much. If it had been me there today, that never would have happened. It doesn’t end like that when I’m part of it. The people I rob with don’t end up dead.”

  “You can never do it again, Leo! Next time the sentence won’t ever end!”

  “I wasn’t there. I’m here, right?”

  “Never again—got that? You all were damn lucky last time. You stole two hundred and twenty-one automatic weapons, robbed a shitload of security vans and banks, and then, then you blew up a bomb in the middle of Stockholm. But, Leo, you were convicted of two bank robberies, and Felix and Vincent of one! The same amount as I got and I was just along for one. You’ve had so much goddamn luck. Or it was a lousy job by the prosecutor. In any case, one thing I’ve understood—nothing is barred by statute because you served a few years in various prisons. Mountains of papers from solid investigations are waiting out there. If you, or all of you, do it one more time, you are risking getting put away for everything next time. And then you’ll be middle-aged, as old as I am, when they let you out again.”

  Another glance at the window. They had stopped spying now. Dacso was drying glasses and his wife was moving salt cellars around.

  “Look at me, Leo.”

  Ivan sought his son’s eyes, waiting until he was sure they had made eye contact.

  “You can change. Like I changed.”

  “Oh—so I’m not good enough as I am?”

  “You don’t have to copy . . . me, Leo. Everyone can change. Even me! If you just use your will. Wills collide, remember? Just like I showed you when you were little. When I taught you to dance with the bear.”

  “Dad—I robbed banks, I didn’t drink. Bank robberies are something you choose to do, and if you plan them well, if you minimize all the risks . . . Drinking is what people like you do who can’t handle reality.”

  A dinner in a nice warm place, a good cut of meat, a conversation . . . but it had ended up like this, on a damp pavement in a neighborhood at dusk, as far apart from each other as when they began.

  “Nothing, Leo, of all that crap that went on before, none of it is left anymore. We have everything before us. That’s what matters.”

  “It was nice to see you, Ivan.”

  The car was parked facing out in the closest parking space. It had gone quickly, and he’d had no intention of staying. A rental car, as it said on the sticker in the rear window. They didn’t say anything else to each other. They didn’t look at each other. Leo opened the car door, got behind the wheel, and started the engine, which barely made a sound as the car rolled away.

  Ivan.

  It had always been like this when the distance grew. Dad disappeared and he became Ivan to his son.

  And that didn’t feel good. The discomfort from the morning was carving out an even bigger hole now. His eldest son was truly cutting himself off, as he always did when he was on his way somewhere and it was no longer possible to reach him.

  DARKNESS TO DROWN in.

  So incredibly black.

  Darkness that conceals.

  Leo parked in a curve intended as a passing place on the narrow forest road’s final stretch. Turned off the car engine. Turned off the headlights. Vanished into the blackness.

  Breathing slowly. In, out, in, out, while his heart seemed to speed up even faster. When everything around him was completely quiet, it became apparent how hard it was beating in his chest.

  It was the cold of early spring, and there was quite a lot more snow remaining on the ground here than there had been at the rest area where he dug up the weapons. He hadn’t thought about it when he drove here the first time, to the ferry at 13:00, but a little farther inland it always got colder, and what had melted during the day froze slowly to a thin, fine crust of ice that cracked and gave way when he began to walk toward the light.

  Over there, the road’s absolute end, at the waters of Lake Mälaren—a quarter mile according to the map—three streetlights were blazing, piercing the darkness and casting their light proudly around the ferry landing.

  He was walking too fast. His heart rate, which was galloping, must be kept under control. Without his knowing it, unease whipped his steps forward among the trees, but he should not be moving too fast. He was the one who should catch sight of them—not the other way around. If they were there, he must be able to turn around and go back without having been seen.

  It was different here. A capital city had its enormous globe of light, an artificial glow that lay over the buildings like an enormous soft cap, stronger closer to where visitors came. Here there were just the stars, and three simple streetlights became everything then, the beckoning signal that led him on the right path. It was precisely at this point that the relief should come, the calm—his reward for having broken through the police search net. Not now. This time, he had not been able to control the course of events at the scene or during the flight afterward. That was why he was late for the meeting with Dad. He must know! First there was the evening news at quarter to five. He had stopped by the side of the road, listening on the car radio to live reporting of an armed robbery of a security van that ended in gunfire and the neutral voice of the news saying

  . . . some information suggests that one of the robbers was shot.

  Shot?

  One of the robbers?

  Who?

  The dark was all around him, like the bottomless hole he used to so often dream about, a dark as if falling forever or like when he used to swim farther and farther down to the lake’s bottom as a child and wondered how it would be to stay there.

  Something was moving in the bushes to the right. Then came the sharp odor that always meant living creatures, many of them, a herd of elk or wild boar resting for the night so close to his step. And in the midst of the pitch black, in the midst of the smell of animals, suddenly his phone rang, a soundless humming in his breast pocket. Sam! He groped for it, pulled it out, in a moment Sam’s voice. Wrong. The wrong fucking phone! Not the encrypted one, the other one. An 08 number. Stockholm. What did it mean? Sam, but from another number? Sam, who was stuck somewhere? He should answer. Not here. Not so close to those who might be waiting for him. Or . . . was it Jari? No. Neither Sam nor Jari would contact him on the unencrypted phone. And if it were either of them he couldn’t take the risk of answering almost halfway. The sound always traveled quickly and without resistance through such silence.

  He turned slightly, headed for the road again, made his way along the edge of the ditch, and tried to discern the ferry landing. He was attempting to make out whether a car stood in front of the boom gate waiting to be ferried across and if anyone was sneaking around on the c
ircular asphalt area and was looking, watching.

  He had been about to turn the car around then and there, in the middle of the evening news, to drive directly here and find out what had happened. But he had continued, just managed to get to the restaurant at the right time and be seen just as long as he needed to be so that he would be definitely remembered. And not just by his father—he had insisted on paying for the food they didn’t eat, a couple of five-hundred-kronor notes too much. The owner wouldn’t forget that. If, or rather when, the police came to the kitchen of the restaurant to ask their routine questions, Leo Dûvnjac had a solid alibi, and from outside the family—timing that made it theoretically impossible to carry out the robbery of the security van in one of Stockholm’s southern suburbs, clean up, and then close the door to a Hungarian restaurant in the city center.

  It had been unbearable to stand there on the pavement outside the shitty restaurant glancing in at the television screen as the excited, chattering voices were reporting about a robbery he had planned himself.

  Four days. That was all they had. He was the only one who couldn’t be involved in the bankrolling robbery, because he was the one, out of the three of them, who risked a routine check afterward. He was the bank robber in this new constellation, as well as the well-known, newly released bank robber. The other two, Sam and Jari, had done time in cell block H for different crimes. And if you didn’t have time for unnecessary questioning and wanted to have time for the final heist and to take back what didn’t exist, you also had to ensure a watertight alibi.

  What he saw through the steamed-up restaurant window were moving images from a shaking cell phone that a witness had filmed. Cell phones exploded in scope during the time he was in prison and had become a new part of the human body. In the first run of bank robberies they only had to concern themselves with registered surveillance cameras—shoot them apart as soon as they entered a bank, ending every possibility for an investigator to map out a pattern. Then only confused testimony of witnesses survived, fragmentary and distorted pictures painted in different ways because people in shock see what they think they see, a collection of experiences that it would take the police a long time to piece together. These days the instant pictures from mobile phones provided a supplement, which he couldn’t plan away from the hands of a public that couldn’t be controlled. And the shaky amateur pictures confirmed that the worst might have happened, that it was Sam who lay there bathed in his own blood.