The Sons: Made in Sweden, Part 2

by Anton Svensson

  “This time.”

  “What?”

  “What I’m trying to get you to understand. That you should be a part of it. That we will finish what someone interrupted. The largest Swedish holdup ever.”

  “Because you can.”

  “Keep calling it whatever you want, brother, if it makes you feel good. I’m going to do it. Are you in or are you out?”

  Felix glanced at the closed door and whispered again.

  “Burst blood.”

  “What?”

  “It’s a hell of a lot better than black gaps.”

  “Brother, are you okay?”

  “I’m fine, Leo. The question is—are you? Do you know what you really want? And where you’re actually heading? I know where I’m heading. And I will choose burst blood every time.”

  “Felix . . . what in fuck’s name are you talking about?”

  “When we were little—how old were you? Nine? Ten? You and Papa and that fucking Bear Dance. It was just you and him, Leo. Your fucking . . . philosophy. Your philosophy of violence that he taught you so that you could strike back if someone went after us. I’m sure you remember that—but I remember something else. When Papa beat Mama’s eyes red, on the outside, and at the same time beat in black gaps on the inside. I remember that the red disappeared but the gaps remained.”

  He didn’t have to whisper. The door was closed—she couldn’t hear. But that wasn’t the reason. It was as if the words weren’t allowed to become too large and imagine they would get to stay.

  “Do you get it, big brother? It is simple, but it’s my philosophy of violence—burst blood is better than black gaps.”

  Leo smiled a scornful smile.

  “Now I get it! You have gone to the prison psychologist and carped on about a whole load of shit—”

  “Why?”

  “—about how everyone feels bad on the fucking childhood potty, Felix—”

  “Why?”

  “—and sat there and thought backward while I thought forward and then—”

  “Leo—listen, for fuck’s sake! Why are you doing this?”

  Felix had stood up and he wasn’t whispering anymore.

  “Because it’s my only chance.”

  “No. We’ve had our chances.”

  “In two days we are going to do something the police won’t understand. That cop bastard Broncks won’t see it—not before we disappear.”

  “Disappear?”

  “Forever. You can’t stay around after a heist like this. That’s why we’re talking with each other now. I don’t want to disappear without you, without Vincent.”

  It would have been easier to be dealing with a big brother who was teasing, almost excessive. But he was serious now. What Leo was saying was absolutely in earnest and required an even clearer response.

  “I don’t want your stolen money, Leo. I decided that long before you were locked up—and you know it.”

  A glance toward the closed dining room door—it sounded like a doorbell out there, two high tones turning into two low tones and then two high tones again.

  “So there’ll be no heist with me along. You said it then, a one-time thing. Exactly as you are saying now. But it will keep on, keep on, keep on. I know it and you know it, Leo. And that isn’t my life, not anymore.”

  The doorbell, again. They were both sure of it. Then the footsteps, Mama’s footsteps, and the humming from the kitchen fan came rushing in when she opened the dining room door.

  “Leo, you have visitors.”

  The kitchen fan was accompanied by the smell of oily fish in dill, which would be ready soon, but she didn’t look so pleased when she looked in. All the recent expectations were gone.

  “Police. And they want to speak to you.”

  The door was ajar. It was possible to see into the kitchen. Two men and a woman. No uniforms. But obviously police, despite the civilian clothes—Leo vaguely recognized both the men—he had seen them in the morning when they were gliding by in a black unmarked car, the older one with a gray mustache and the younger one fit from working out and sunburned. He had understood that they constituted the vanguard sent out to confirm that Leo Dûvnjac was in the house.

  Since a robber had been shot to death and his weapon had fallen to the ground, he had foreseen that Broncks would come, but he hadn’t known when. He also guessed right about how the cop bastard would reason—bring him in when he was at his mother’s house because the probability of violence was low.

  Lunchtime. Still a long way until evening.

  They would have plenty of time to implement stage two of the plan—“the house call”—afterward, albeit somewhat modified. Now that one of the weapons lay in Broncks’s hands, the house call must be made more comprehensive, taking up more time than he had imagined. But an altered plan didn’t have to mean a worse plan. New conditions can always, should always, be used to create an advantage. He would use the afternoon’s interview to provoke the bastard, to lead Broncks in the wrong direction so that, when the final stunt was carried out two days from now, he would find himself in an entirely different place—tricked twice.

  Leo shrugged his shoulders and stood up, while Felix leaned forward and hissed, “You will never speak to me about that again.” He passed his mother, smiled at her, and caressed her cheek as she had done his yesterday evening and whispered, “It will be all right, Mama,” and continued into the kitchen. He looked around and out through the window. There were two cars in the drive and in one an additional cop waiting for him.

  But not Broncks. Where the hell was he?

  He turned to the gray-haired one.

  “What do you want?”

  He got an answer, but not from the person he’d posed the question to—from the woman. She was not very much older than he was himself.

  “My name is Elisa Cuesta. And I’d like you to come with us. For an interview. For information.”

  He examined her, tall and slim, with a steady gaze, seemingly unconcerned. The same eyes that Mama looked at him with now, neither reproachful nor sad. Joy and expectation had been replaced by the hardened armor she wore sometimes when they were little—that which was nothing—and therefore so much worse. He nodded silently. It hadn’t mattered what he tried to say to her just now, and he walked toward the front door and the two police cars on her drive.

  “We are taking your son in for an interview—but we’ll also conduct a search of the premises since he provided your address as his current one.”

  Britt-Marie looked at the young policewoman. Search? Here? In her home? Her new security? She’d moved here herself and built it up when she left the shame, the constant whispering about a criminal family.

  “I don’t understand.”

  And now strangers would be rooting around in this new security while the new neighbors watched?

  “If so, I’d like to see the warrant.”

  Even back then they hadn’t rooted around in her home. Had something even worse happened now? Had Leo done something even worse? He came home late yesterday. Mostly drove around.

  She was just about to repeat her question to the woman, who seemed to be in charge of the small group of police, when she felt a pair of steady hands around her shoulders. Someone was holding her, from behind.

  “They don’t need one, Mama.”

  Arms that turned her around and hugged her. Felix.

  “In this country, they can walk right in and turn your house upside down without a warrant. It’s enough if the prosecutor on duty is having a bad day.”

  “You’re Felix, I presume.”

  Elisa looked at the young man who was a little taller than his older brother and rougher in some way, and as dark as his brother was fair.

  “Yes.”

  She pulled out a paper from the outside pocket of her jacket.

  “In that case I would like you to confirm that this . . .”

  She pointed to the lines of text at the bottom.

  “. . . is your correct ho
me address.”

  He nodded.

  “Yes. That’s right.”

  “And the one under that, can you verify that it is the correct home address for your younger brother?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Thank you. Then I would appreciate it if you would write down at the very bottom the addresses where you can be reached during the day.”

  She handed him a pen and at the same time Britt-Marie opened the oven door and took out the salmon. The cream was a little burned. She put it down hard on a trivet. A muted clunk.

  “Now I demand to know what this is about! You take one of my sons and then gather information about my two other sons—even though they have served their sentences, been free for two years, and during that time have not done a single thing to gain your interest!”

  The policewoman did not seem affected in the least by a woman shouting at her.

  “I am sorry, but it’s a routine procedure that—and certainly we are both hoping this—will be able to show that none of your sons needs to be investigated further.”

  Britt-Marie was looking at her but didn’t really hear what she was saying. She heard something entirely different. A closet door squeaking in her bedroom and clothes hangers clattering when they were thrown onto her bed. And now, now she heard someone pulling the drawers that contained her underwear out from her chest of drawers. She hurried to the room. And she got there in time to see them empty them out onto the floor, do the same with the drawer of her night table and tear her towels and bedding out of the corner cabinet. She was about to step in through the doorway to protest when the policewoman caught up with her.

  “If you leave, Britt-Marie, I will see to it that it is done a bit more carefully.”

  Elisa waited as Britt-Marie walked to the kitchen.

  “Stop.”

  The two colleagues looked at her and kept on searching through the panties and pillowcases with their hands.

  “I said stop.”

  Then they did. They stopped.

  “From now on conduct this in a dignified manner. We aren’t in a hurry. All you’re doing right now is destroying trust and room for collaboration—and perhaps we’ll need her help later.”

  Elisa stayed long enough to establish that they’d both listened to her. Then she returned to the woman who was standing by the stove, her back toward her as she scraped away the burned layer of salmon in the ovenproof dish.

  “I apologize, Britt-Marie. I know how it feels. It’s like witnessing a burglary at your own home.”

  Britt-Marie didn’t respond even though the young police officer made an effort to sound pleasant. She didn’t even turn around—she quite simply lacked the strength. She used a fork to poke away the burned surface of the cream, dropping what couldn’t be eaten into the garbage. She pulled out a piece of aluminum foil long enough to cover the entire dish. All the while she heard the two men continue to root around, but more calmly, with less clattering, and then the female detective open and close the front door on her way out to the drive and the car with Leo in the back seat.

  And it was then that she realized that what she had just tried, to bring them together, would never succeed. Because this was how division looked, bonds loosened and torn apart.

  A STERILE ROOM. Cramped, like a large closet. A simple table with a monitor, sixteen-inch, in the middle of it. That was all. Nothing on the walls. Not much in the way of lighting.

  But a cup of silver tea.

  John Broncks grabbed the hot cup, took a first sip, and swallowed.

  Silver tea. It would have been unthinkable in a previous life. Until the police authority’s doctor explained five years ago that at the age of thirty-five he had consumed a lifetime’s supply of coffee and needed to stop. It seemed so strangely empty. Not the emptiness without twelve doses of caffeine—that withdrawal stopped after a couple of weeks: the fatigue, the headache, the shaky hands—it was the absence of the habit, the regularity becoming abstinence that preyed on him. Not stirring a spoon around in a hot cup, holding on to the heat of the liquid and feeling it fill his chest. Then he remembered his grandfather, a white-haired man, as wise and friendly as he was old, who began every morning with a cup of what he called silver tea: regular, heated water. Once, he’d jazzed it up, hot water with a teaspoon of cream. When Broncks arrived early at the station the next day and felt the infernal loss, he went into the kitchenette, turned on the electric kettle, and made his own first cup of silver tea. The old habit was replaced by a new one. Still the hot cup to hold on to and the warmth spreading in his chest.

  He put the cup down by the monitor and with his right hand adjusted the microphone, which formed a gentle arc from his ear to mouth, and fine-tuned it until it didn’t slide with the movements of his head.

  “Elisa?”

  No answer.

  “Elisa, can you hear me?”

  It crackled in his ear, and then she did as he had, adjusted the microphone and earpiece.

  “Now I hear you, John. Perfectly.”

  “Okay then. Before you go in I’ll go over what we agreed on. Under no circumstances does he get to know that I am overseeing the interview. Because it is only the beginning of something much bigger. And when he leaves here, he has to feel so calm that he will continue with his plans. Good luck.”

  Broncks turned one of the monitor’s few knobs. It was working and he peered into a room just like the one he was sitting in. Bare walls, a drab table as the focal point with the monitor replaced by a smaller camera. But it was neither the table nor what was on it that interested him. It was the man who sat at it, leaning on his elbows. Someone he knew so incredibly well, yet not at all. The fair hair, blue eyes, and stiff, thin lips.

  They had sat in the interview room Broncks was looking into now, across from each other, during a period of six months. Days filled with a family—interviews switching from oldest brother to middle brother to youngest brother to father and back to oldest brother. And not a word out of place from any of them. They were fully synchronized in their rehearsed reactions—the superior silence, the provocative stare at the floor. The smile accompanying “no comment,” which became a new smile along with “I’ve never heard of that” and “I don’t know him, have never met him—what did you say his name was?”

  Twenty-nine hours in freedom. And that bastard was sitting there again, waiting for the door to open, for the other chair to be pulled out and the questions that would not bring forth answers.

  Broncks leaned closer to the screen.

  Leo Dûvnjac seemed calm, not like someone who had robbed a security van the day before and seen his fellow robber shot to death. Nonetheless—the gun, the robber holding it, the getaway, the timing—all in all it made John certain that Elisa’s piecing together of the facts was correct.

  I am looking at you.

  Do you know that?

  Dûvnjac seemed not only calm but also focused, almost pleased. When he examined the ugly institutional table, he was trying to sink down into it. Broncks had already realized in the last round that they were similar in that way, both being fascinated by the interview’s built-in theatrical art. Leo Dûvnjac studied the tabletop and ran his palm slowly over it and soon after performed the same motion with just his middle finger.

  Gently, almost sensually.

  As if he were rectifying an invisible board, waiting for the pieces that would be moved, one at a time.

  But not by me, you bastard—not this time.

  Broncks had not even managed to finish his thought when the man he was watching also leaned forward, aiming his gaze straight at the camera, his eyes full of intensity. As if he was not just observing a camera lens but rather a person. So he smiled, as if at a mirror, and Broncks was close to smiling back.

  Now. The clicking sound of a door handle being pushed down and of light footsteps he had come to recognize as Elisa’s after a few years in the corridor of the criminal investigation division. Finally, the sound of a chair scraping against the floor
as it was dragged by someone not seen in the picture but who sat down. On the left edge of the picture, the camera showed a trace of shoulder and a cheek and short, dark hair at the back of a neck.

  “You made me wait. Was that deliberate? To make me stressed? If so, you should know that it didn’t work. You’ve tried that trick before.”

  Leo’s voice was composed, as always during interviews. He had been the only one who had sometimes engaged in real conversation between all the silence and “no comments” without giving away too much. Dûvnjac, an intelligent man, had shown himself to be surprisingly well read, with a sense of humor that stemmed from the kind of thoughts that range freely, albeit through forced conversation.

  “And, listen, policewoman? This is an interrogation room. I have seen enough of them to know that. And back at my mother’s house I thought that it sounded as though it was going to be an interview to get some information, not that you were going to interrogate me.”

  Elisa didn’t answer. It wasn’t a question.

  “Do you mind if I turn on the camera?”

  “Yes.”

  “Yes? And why would you—”

  “I think it would be rather strange. Even a bit peculiar and not amusing. To turn it on, I mean. Since it already is on.”

  He looked into it again and smiled at Broncks, who remembered how it felt. To realize that the man he was interrogating, and who he was certain had committed ten bank robberies, had an adult child’s brain—impossible to predict—and that he had wished so strongly that he could penetrate and understand it.

  Elisa’s chair scraped but not like before. Now the plastic tips of the chair legs cut into the plastic carpet and she approached the camera’s microphone, looking for the red light. She checked and saw that it was on. And her voice was ironic when she admitted it.

  “Yes, you’re right—it is on. The technician should have let me know when he turned it on.”

  The technician.

  She had looked directly into the camera when she said that. At him.

  And she was certainly right. He should have informed her. But he had been so eager, almost looking forward to it as if he was seeing an old friend again. Wondering if the face had changed. If the wisdom in the eyes was different. If the smile had become stiff. If the man who was sitting there, filling the monitor, had altered. If the time in prison had given any insight, or if daily life among Sweden’s worst criminals, with the status a successful bank robber has, had, on the contrary, strengthened his criminal identity. It was like meeting an old friend, but with one essential difference—he hoped that time hadn’t changed him for the better.