The Sons: Made in Sweden, Part 2

by Anton Svensson

  Elisa disappeared out of the picture and when she was visible again it was just a bit of her neck and shoulder and cheek, as before.

  INTERVIEWING OFFICER ELISA CUESTA (IO): Information-gathering interview with Leo Ivan Dûvnjac beginning 14:17 at the City Police Department, Kronoberg.

  She held a folder in her hands, and she hit it hard against the wooden surface, as if to straighten what was in it. That wasn’t the reason at all, Broncks was certain of that. She thumped it again, a powerful blow amplified by the bare room. It found its way into the camera’s microphone and drilled into his earpiece. She knew precisely where the blow would land. He supposed she had finished her demonstration, but he lowered the volume for incoming sound to be on the safe side.

  Then she put the folder down, opened it, and pushed the document on top toward the man being interviewed.

  A photograph of a man lying on the ground in a parking lot.

  IO: Do you know who this is?

  LEO DÛVNJAC (LD): No. There’s a ski mask in the way.

  No unintended look. No unintended gesture.

  Not the fleeting finger on the tip of the nose, the temple, or point of the chin—touching the face to feel security in an insecure situation. Not the second of hesitation when the eye steers its gaze upward off to the right for constructing a lie, instead of off to the left for searching among existing memories.

  Even though he was forced to look at a dead man he might have had a relationship with.

  On the contrary.

  Leo Dûvnjac ran one hand over the surface of the table, adjusted something that wasn’t there, and moved pieces on the invisible board game.

  IO: In that case . . . perhaps you know now. Who it is. Since this is the same person—without a mask.

  No reaction. Even though the photograph, which they had agreed should be number two in the sequence, showed a head lying on a steel frame on a shiny metal autopsy table. The eyes lifeless. The mouth almost disappointed, sullen, frozen at the moment of death. The forehead with an opening that resembled red, upturned, glossy petals that had just burst out of the exit hole and now were covered with fragments of the skull, skin, and tufts of hair.

  LD: No.

  IO: No . . . what?

  LD: I don’t recognize him.

  The third and final photo from the folder.

  IO: Let’s try again. The same person. When he was alive. A photo from the criminal register you’re in yourself.

  She pushed it forward, careful so that it would reach all the way to his side of the table.

  IO: Do you know who he is?

  LD: Yes.

  IO: Can you expand on that?

  LD: Yes, I know who it is.

  IO: Okay. You want to have it that way. Then we’ll try this. Who is it?

  LD: Jari Ojala.

  IO: How do you know Jari Ojala?

  LD: We were in the same cell block at Österåker. But surely you knew that already?

  IO: How well did you know him?

  LD: And how well do you know him? The man who’s sitting looking at the monitor on the other side of the camera? People who spend their time in the same corridor, a few locked doors away, don’t always know each other very well, right?

  Broncks had heard—and he knew exactly what it meant.

  The man who’s sitting looking at the monitor on the other side of the camera.

  Leo assumed that Broncks was leading the investigation. But they had made him uncertain and he was looking for confirmation.

  IO: You can keep looking at me. I am the one conducting this interview and I want to know if you had any contact since his release.

  LD: No.

  IO: In that case did you have any contact since your release?

  LD: No.

  IO: No contact at all?

  LD: Hey, policewoman, Broncks’s puppet?

  Broncks’s puppet.

  An additional gamble.

  LD: If it’s as you are saying—that it’s the same person in all the photos—I don’t really understand how it would have come about. It is difficult to have contact with the dead.

  The same facial expressions and restricted patterns of motion. Whether he replied yes or no, whether he admitted he recognized him or not.

  Broncks saw Elisa gather up the three photographs and put them back in the folder. A planned break before the next question.

  IO: I want to know where you were yesterday at four thirty p.m.

  LD: In a car.

  IO: Where?

  LD: On the way to dinner with my father. The Dráva restaurant, near Skanstull. There are several witnesses who can confirm that. My father, the owner, and the owner’s wife, who were well paid for the food, and other patrons who sat drinking beer. But I don’t understand why that would be of interest—am I suspected of something?

  IO: I am the one who asks the questions of you.

  LD: No, it’s . . .

  Leo reached across the table and suddenly hit the lens of the camera with his fingertips, knocking it hard.

  LD: . . . him sitting in there.

  And he stared straight into the camera. Challenging. Provoking. Broncks managed to think that it was good that he had placed himself in a different room and let Elisa sit there—because it was working. He felt the challenge, became provoked, and actually wanted to get up and shout that.

  LD: In there!

  Leo hit the lens again and his gaze penetrated the camera and into the room Broncks was sitting in. And it remained there. Pure hatred of the cop who once locked him up.

  IO: On the way to a restaurant, you say. Then I would like to know where you were before that. Before four thirty.

  Disappointment.

  Broncks was certain of it. That was what he caught a glimpse of in the face of the man being interviewed.

  Leo Dûvnjac hadn’t gotten the reaction he expected.

  No matter how she was attacked or disturbed, Elisa had not taken the bait and acknowledged what he’d hoped.

  IO: Perhaps you didn’t understand what I said? So I’ll ask one more time. Slowly. Where were you before four thirty p.m.?

  LD: I was in prison. For six years.

  Broncks realized that Elisa had just given Dûvnjac the same look he’d received himself not long ago, the ice-cold look hurled at anyone trying to diminish her.

  IO: A third time. Even clearer. According to the correctional system’s personnel at Österåker, you were released at nine a.m. Eleven minutes later, according to the surveillance cameras, you disappeared from the area in a car driven by a younger man, identified as your brother, and a middle-aged woman, identified as your mother. I would like to know what you did between nine eleven and four thirty.

  LD: And why does Broncks’s puppet want to know that?

  IO: I want to know that because yesterday an AK4 with the serial number 10663 was used at the robbery of a security van. Because it comes from a cache of guns stolen nearly eight years ago and you were a suspect. That’s why I’m asking that question.

  It happened so quickly then. Dûvnjac grabbed hold of the camera’s microphone and the picture went dark, his chest covering the light.

  IO: May I ask you to stay seated!

  Deep breaths. His mouth close to the microphone.

  LD: Broncks?

  And then he hit the palm of his hand against the microphone several times, dull blows that grew to sound like the cracks of a whip in a cramped room.

  LD: Broncks—your little puppet and I have just been talking about how well people know their neighbors in a corridor. That they don’t always know them, that secrets are hidden behind the next door. Just like you’re trying to hide yourself from me right now. But you should know something—we get to know each other there, in the prison corridors. We have plenty of time, sitting together—bank robbers, drug kings, even the occasional . . . patricide.

  The face out of focus.

  But Broncks didn’t see it. Now there was only the sound of Leo’s voice, in an interview dur
ing which control had slowly dissolved and lost its planned form.

  LD: Broncks—you get trust if you earn it. And I got the trust of many in there.

  A plan that was based on the idea of Leo Dûvnjac leaving here feeling calm.

  LD: For example, there was a prisoner—can you imagine?—who told me about how he stabbed his father to death in a summer cabin.

  But he would never do that now, unless the person he was trying to flush out now, John Broncks, made himself known.

  LD: Twenty-seven fucking cuts in his own father’s chest.

  No one beyond the police investigation team knew about the twenty-seven stab wounds in Broncks’s own father.

  LD: Broncks? You hear? I even know the details.

  Broncks was not aware that he’d gotten up, hurried to the door, and opened it.

  It was several years since he’d had regular contact with Sam. That was when his brother was at Kumla. But prisoners were moved around among prisons, and he remembered Sam was at Österåker when he came with the news of their mother’s death.

  Did those two get to know each other? Sam—and this bastard?

  LD: Listen, Broncks, a fucking fishing knife, evidently. Cut after cut. Do you want to hear even more?

  Broncks had left his seat in front of the monitor, and when he no longer heard Leo Dûvnjac’s voice filtered through a microphone, when he met Elisa’s warning look, that was when he first realized that he had entered the interview room.

  “I think we’ll . . . stop now.”

  “Stop?”

  Elisa’s gaze demanded he look at her but he turned away toward the interview chair.

  “And I’ll follow you out to the exit.”

  Now.

  Now he was aware.

  Of every step he took. That they took.

  Side by side, in silence, through the first of Kronoberg police station’s corridors, down the stairs, through still more corridors.

  Aware of how long it took for a stride on average. Of how powerful the forward motion of the foot was and how it began in the hip, not in the ball of the foot or heel, as he’d always thought. Of how the sound from the heels of the shoes stole over the stone floor before it struck the wall of the corridor and became entangled with the next step. Of how everything around him had to be larger to make what was breaking inside him smaller.

  My corridors. My world.

  I was supposed to see through him, penetrate his brain. Whereas he saw through me and has already forced his way into my brain.

  As Broncks put his hand on the cold, grooved handle of the heavy iron door that would lead them out into the afternoon light of Berg Street, he stopped staring down at the floor and could bear to look at him again. It was then that he realized it.

  That bastard knows my brother better than I do.

  My history.

  I have avoided it, even broke off an interview to dodge it—it came in uninvited. And on his face, that’s not a superior sneer, that is years of accumulated hate.

  “Hey, Broncks?”

  They had just parted company and Dûvnjac had gone down the last of the stone steps that ended at the pavement when he began to speak, attacking again.

  “Black thread, Broncks.”

  Broncks grabbed the heavy iron door to stop it from closing again and responded to Dûvnjac’s hateful sneer in a low voice.

  “I don’t understand what you’re talking about. But it doesn’t matter—you and I are finished for today.”

  Dûvnjac continued to walk away, while Broncks stood there, wanting to be sure that he was actually leaving. Dûvnjac walked ten steps before he stopped again, and began moving his arms against his upper body like a rower, or a gymnast. Broncks couldn’t put the gestures into a context.

  Then Dûvnjac raised his voice and repeated the incomprehensible phrase.

  “Today, John Broncks, was a truly black fucking thread for you.”

  LEO TURNED AROUND one last time and watched the bastard cop go in before the heavy door to the police station slid shut.

  He set off on a walk along Hantverkar Street in the slightly cold weather. He passed a clock on the wall of a café that pointed to a quarter past three and continued to walk for a couple more blocks, this time in the shade with the wind biting his cheeks, just enough to feel pleasant. The afternoon rush hour had started and at this time of day walking or riding the bus took the same amount of time, so he decided to continue walking the whole way to Skanstull.

  Somewhere around the heights of City Hall he slowly started to understand what had made him suddenly shout out “black thread” at the bastard cop. It had felt so familiar—like when he was little and had left a different police station with the same light steps. The feeling now with Broncks was similar to a feeling then with Papa—a feeling of having turned a situation to his advantage, having won and gained strength from it. It was always a dizzying feeling.

  An information-gathering interview? Then I’m going to gather information from you, you bastard Broncks.

  And now he would use both of them, linking the antagonist then with the antagonist now, Papa and Broncks, who were in some way responsible for himself and his brothers being arrested and split up. As a present to his papa, he would see to it that none of them was in the way when he walked into the police station that he had just left—to carry out the final job.

  He walked across the bridge along the railway tracks and around Riddarholmen on the outer edge, enjoying watching the remains of chipped ice formations drift with the current. He could see the houseboats at the quay at Söder Mälarstrand with their lights, and a bit higher up the other light shooting from the cliffs of Södermalm, a dome of artificial glow that he had missed in the compact darkness on Sam’s island. He passed Slussen and Götgatsbacken, which these days was a pedestrian street, and continued down Göt Street past the rebuilt and completely commercialized “Tax Scraper,” toward Ring Road, unfurling like a runway from the southern footing of Johanneshovs Bridge and the Dráva restaurant.

  But he wasn’t planning on going there yet. For the moment, he turned to enter Ring Galleria and the sort of telephone shop he didn’t normally frequent. Telephones that needed to be secure and properly encrypted were bought in another way—the one in his pocket, called Quasar X, came from Japan. It had been chosen as the world’s best terrorist phone in product tests. The one he was here to buy needed to be the opposite—to operate like the world’s worst terrorist phone, completely without encryption programs and guaranteed to be easily tracked.

  When he came out of the shop twenty minutes later with the present in his pocket, he crossed Ring Road and walked back past Åhléns department store at Skanstull with the blue clock hanging on the façade, still five minutes off. He approached the restaurant his father had chosen as his regular hangout. It was strange, if you thought about it, that he spent a large number of his waking hours at a bar after having decided to never drink alcohol again. It was as if he wanted to show the world that will is stronger than desire.

  Through an illuminated window, with D-R-Á-V-A written in letters divided into three colors horizontally, green, white, and red, he could see it was nearly empty inside, apart from a pair of day drinkers—the sort who managed to keep up a routine of steady drinking, but would never sink below the surface and be mistaken for outcasts. Then he saw his father, staring at the beer taps. Was he going to buy a pint and surrender? Maybe it was already standing there, a glittering gold tankard hidden by his body?

  It had sounded different yesterday.

  Not a drop in two years.

  He went in and tapped on his father’s somewhat drooping but still broad shoulder.

  “Dad.”

  His father barely turned his head.

  “Today I’m Dad—yesterday I was Ivan.”

  Ivan’s gaze wandered back to the beer taps, which stood in a row and smelled sour and sweet at the same time. That was probably the reason two black flies hovered there. He’d noticed them when he came
in looking for Dacso, hankering like hell for coffee.

  “Dad, listen, it was stupid of me to sound so angry when you called yesterday.”

  The flies had caught his interest right away, two black dots equipped with wings, defying gravity. He had increasingly failing vision, and that he could still see a fly that was not making a sound put him in high spirits, even though he knew very well that the smell attracting them was a sign that Dacso wasn’t keeping his bar clean.

  “I had no reason to, Dad, when . . . well, you tried.”

  “No reason?”

  Ivan turned around, the irritation pressing against his neck. He knew his eldest son was lying. Lies always lay there, right below the back of the skull, scratching and foreboding, like the edge of an ax that would separate his head from his body.

  “There is always a reason, Leo. I am old enough to know that. I even know that if you suddenly have to run to the toilet, it’s not because of what you ate but because of all the shit you’ve filled yourself with.”

  “The toilet? It’s been many years since I got to go there without permission.”

  Leo took the object from his jacket pocket and put it down on the bar, but it wasn’t covered with his hand.

  “And not a telephone call during all that time in prison that wasn’t scheduled. I don’t know how it was for you, Dad, when you got out, but I get tense as hell when the phone rings and I don’t recognize the number.”