After the giant garage, the house awaited. It was his and Anneli’s jointly owned home and was the center for every new plan for a robbery. It looked the same. “Compact” was surely the word that best described it. Three hundred square feet—officially, he had extended it somewhat—divided between two floors.
Leo took a short break before going in, taking deep drags on his cigarette. He peered through the fence into the neighboring plot—the beautiful wooden house that Anneli had admired so much, her picture of their next shared home. Separate cells—that was how it actually happened.
It was hardly possible to see through the fence now. The neighbor’s planted bushes had transformed into small trees. He made out the light in one of the windows, the room he remembered as the kitchen, with the same family lighting a candle, gathered around the dinner table. Without knowing, they had been the neighbors of Sweden’s most dangerous bank robber, and they were sitting there again now, without the slightest clue that in the same neighbor’s house a transaction would soon be completed between that very bank robber and two representatives of the Albanian mafia.
Leo put out his cigarette with the heel of his shoe, nodded at Sam, and walked to the door of the house, which so obviously had once been his. The sign on the wall to the left still read Dûvnjac on a white, handwritten note under the doorbell’s plastic cover. And in the diamond-shaped window a crack was still finding its way along like a crystal worm, from the fight with Felix before the last robbery.
He pushed the handle down and opened the door.
On the inside of the house, the signs of time having stood still had a different character. Here there was a strong odor from waste pipes and floor drains that hadn’t been cleaned and dried out, and closed-in, scratchy, dry air tearing into his throat.
The two Albanians were in the room immediately to the left; previously the guest room. The older one, who stood leaning on the windowsill, matched the description—suit and balding and a noticeably caved-in nasal bone, having been exposed to external violence one or more times without having lost the certainty of his eyes. The other one corresponded to the archetype of someone there to protect, if what shouldn’t happen happened after all. He was tall, broadly built without having had to train himself to it, with a shaved head and wearing baggy gray tracksuit bottoms worn for a long time without being washed—and probably armed under the puffy hooded jacket. Repeated scarring, identical cuts all the way from the wrist to the crook of the arm on his exposed forearms, showed he was a man who wasn’t just dangerous to his surroundings.
“Well, I’ll be damned—here comes the homeowner himself, and wouldn’t you know that he . . .”
It was only now—when the one in the suit was talking—that Leo understood how far his nasal bone was caved in. It was even in the way of his words, nasal and drawling each time he exhaled.
“. . . is here in the company of his little keeper?”
Sam was wise and said nothing. An entire adult life in prison fosters an individual’s impulse control. And Leo also, even if he had considered for a moment throwing back a sarcastic remark, decided they didn’t have time to reprimand small bosses who ran errands for big bosses. He was here to complete an almost year-long business deal, and to do it as smoothly as possible.
“Jahmir? Is that your name? I have what you need—do you have what I want?”
Leo looked around the room, and especially at the floor, while he waited for an answer. Everything seemed untouched. He had succeeded in keeping the house locked up for five years, but then the money for the mortgage and interest ran out with a final year to pay and no more possessions to sell off. The bank had foreclosed and the house was about to be lost, so he had taken action in the only possible way, reaching an agreement with the contacts he’d made inside the walls.
The type of contacts you would rather not be in debt to—but he’d had no choice.
“I have your title deed, purchase contract, and house keys. Do you have our money?”
Two and a half million kronor. That’s how much it cost the contact’s organization to acquire the house at the executive auction and make Sam the official owner. And for interest of an additional two and a half million kronor they promised to wait a year for the debt to be paid off.
“Exactly one hundred centimeters of five hundred kronor banknotes, in a plastic bag from the shopping center at Kungens kurva. We usually shop there.”
When the man with the caved-in nose ran a thumbnail over the plastic, the banknotes gave off a sound like a deck of cards being shuffled. He nodded, seemed content, and handed over the documents and keys.
“And of course you wanted a very special computer too?”
The man in the suit’s nod to his partner in the baggy tracksuit bottoms meant that the bright-red Adidas bag on the floor should be opened, revealing a single item at the bottom of the bag—a seemingly simple laptop.
“Exactly the special kind you ordered. It costs two centimeters of your five hundred kronor notes. It might be nice to have a password too, huh? That costs a centimeter extra.”
———
After, Leo waited until the visitors had left the house and were across the asphalt. When he saw the BMW’s rear lights disappear out through the exit, he went back to the guest room.
“Help me with the sofa.”
He took one end of the guest-room sofa and Sam took the other. They carried it through the hall and into the kitchen so that it wouldn’t be in the way. There were four loose tiles he had once placed in the center of the guest room. That way, when he wedged one of the door keys into the joint between two of them and wiggled one of them up, it was easy to lift up the other three as well. A concrete block of the same size as the removed tiles with two metal handles was waiting there. He grabbed the handles, lifted it, and put it aside. And there, under the concrete block, lowered and embedded in the floor, was a safe. It lay horizontally, with its back downward. He entered the numbers, turned the combination lock, and opened it. The inside was still covered with black velvet, and that was as far as the police would have reached if they had ever discovered it. A forensic technician would have been able to vacuum every millimeter and yet barely find what lay there now—a couple of crumpled thousand kronor notes, a pile of papers that seemed important, and some rifle cartridges for fruitless test firing.
“Sam?”
“Yeah?”
“Go over to the window, about where the suit was leaning against the wall. See the electrical box up there? Open the protective cover and hold the bare electric cables together.”
Leo picked up the banknotes, documents, and cartridges and remained squatting by the now opened safe as Sam connected the wires and closed the electrical circuit—he wanted to be close by, to listen and be certain that everything still worked.
It did.
The metallic humming and buzzing played in time with the bottom of the safe sinking down. The black velvet slot slowly widened between the wall and floor and joined up with an even darker blackness under the floor.
It appeared to be exactly as he remembered it.
No matter how many times he saw the back of the safe being lowered or sensed the smell of oil hitting him, he felt profound happiness.
“A room under the floor. A cellar where there shouldn’t be one, since the entire residential area is built on an old lake bottom.”
Sam looked over his shoulder down into the square opening. Leo was leaning into the hole and reaching for a loose hanging cord He grabbed it, pulled it up, and stuck it in one of the guest-room’s wall sockets.
An angry, naked light revealed a secret underground room.
“Do you know how many cubic yards of clay and mud we shoveled out of here?”
The aluminum ladder stood leaning against the only wall of the hidden room. He pulled it to the hole, climbed down, and waited for Sam to join him, looking silently around.
“How many wheelbarrows of gravel we poured down to get control of the water level when
the fucking lake tried to come back in? Or what a hellish job it was to frame a safe in rebar and embed it in the floor? And then bring down everything here, one item at a time, and place it neatly on the shelves?”
Leo spun all the way around in the room he and his brothers had dug out, shovelful after shovelful. He didn’t need to count them. Eighty-two AK4s. One hundred and thirteen submachine guns. Four machine guns. Tightly packed in neat rows in the country’s largest private weapons cache.
“If you climb up, Sam, I’ll hand them up to you.”
Kneeling down, Sam grabbed the first gun when Leo stuck it up through the opening, and then the second, third, fourth, and fifth. That was all they needed and he stood up and stretched, ignoring the sixth that appeared.
“Five. That’s enough.”
“We should bring them all up.”
“Five. Two for the uniforms and three for our little heist. That was what we agreed.”
“All of them have to be brought up and put into the rental car.”
“Five. Because we have a joint plan.”
“That was the plan, Sam. Until Jari dropped his gun and your brother got ahold of it. And thought he could use it to get me. He was even looking at me on a monitor, imagining he was in control and that the gun had given him an advantage that he’d get me with.”
Leo was still holding the barrel and pointing the stock of the rifle straight up in the air.
“And yeah—he’ll get them. The whole lot. My entire collection of weapons. Your brother will be proud and think he has succeeded.”
He was interrupted by a gurgling from the cement pipe in the floor of the hidden room, a well with a drainage pump mounted on the inside of the pipe, announcing that it was still working perfectly and had decided to begin pumping since the water level had reached the upper limit.
“But when he’s standing there, your fucking brother, glowing away, then we’ll take from him what he thinks doesn’t exist. Because it’s the exact opposite—I’m the one in control.”
“Huh?”
“Well?”
“Now I don’t understand. How many are going to have guns? Are there more people involved that I don’t know about? You and I, Leo, have made the decisions together so far. And we should continue doing that if I’m going to be a part of this.”
“Sam, I’m sorry, but Jari fucked up and I’ve been interviewed by the police. You’re right, that wasn’t the plan, but now it is. Trust me—I’ll tell you everything in the car when we drive away, okay? Pulling off major robberies works like that. New circumstances come up and you have to adjust to them. Otherwise everything goes to hell and we end up where we just were—in the slammer. And you don’t simply adjust, you turn it around. I should have told you all this, but there hasn’t been a chance, a time and place.”
Sam stood there for a while, just staring at the butt of the rifle, the sixth gun was hanging in the air between them. Then, his decision made, he grabbed it and laid it next to the five others. And before he even had time to turn back again, the next one was held up, and the next one. In twenty-four minutes the entire collection, a couple of hundred automatic weapons, filled up the guest-room floor.
“Hello, Papa.”
While he was climbing up, Leo had pressed the button for the direct number to the newly purchased, definitely traceable mobile.
“Leo?”
And now, leaning against the same window the small-time Albanian boss had about half an hour earlier, he began a conversation, which Sam could hear clearly.
“I just wanted to hear your voice, Dad.”
“My voice? You wanted . . .”
His Swedish was still accented in spite of so many years in the country, and it was clear that he was almost proud of being called by his eldest son.
“. . . to hear my voice, Leo? Just a few hours after we saw each other? Do you understand how happy that makes me?”
A tone that collided with the last image Leo had, the man waving in the window of the Dráva Restaurant, hunched over and sad.
“Yes, and I’m sorry I vanished so quickly again. Talk to you tomorrow.”
Sam had caught every word of the short, odd conversation.
“Well?”
“Yeah?”
“Leo, what the hell was that? Are you serious? When we’re handling hot weapons that the police are looking for? A nonsense call to your own father, from the house you lived in and that the cops would trace as easily as hell if they decided to work on it?”
The electrical box up on the wall was open as Sam had left it and Leo stuck his thumb and index finger in and put together the two loose cables a second time. He listened to the humming sound as the metal cylinders that were attached to the base of the safe slowly pulled up the secret trapdoor.
“Yes. Exactly. They should be able to trace it, as easily as possible. That’s why we’re going to leave the floor tiles loose. That’s why I’m not going to close up the electrical box all the way and I’m leaving the cover open at a slight angle. And why I’m about to set up the first web camera hidden on the shelf in the entryway. Since my weapon collection guarantees that we won’t be disturbed when we strike for the very last time—and then disappear.”
Burst Blood
SOMEONE IS PULLING on his right arm.
Large jaws are dragging him through an untamed, entangled forest. Over a hard, sharp-edged mountain. Until he falls headlong through the hidden, bottomless gap.
“Felix, wake up.”
And even though there is no end, he lands. In a second pair of jaws. Then they are fighting over him, tearing and tugging at both of his arms, from opposite directions.
“Hey, Felix?”
“What . . . ?”
It is always pitch black in the bottomless pit.
“Rise and shine, brother.”
The jaws are above him. Bright contours in eternal darkness.
“Who . . . ? Let go! Let go of me!”
“Felix? It’s me—Leo. You have to get up.”
The light gets clearer. Leo’s hair. Leo’s face. It is him.
“But . . . it’s really dark.”
“Shhh. Not so loud. Don’t wake Vincent.”
“Has something happened?”
“No. Nothing’s happened. Yet.”
His big brother is dressed, even wearing a jacket and sneakers.
Felix sits up and is completely still on the edge of the bed.
Outdoor clothes inside? In the middle of the night?
His legs and arms aren’t working. He thinks that he is going to move them, but it doesn’t work. Everything is stuck.
He feels one of his feet wiggle a little and that someone is putting it into a shoe and tying it. Then the other foot. His arms are raised at his sides and a warmish jacket is slipped over them. Leo disappears out into the kitchen and the tap can be heard running a while before he returns with what looks like a glass full of blood.
“Drink it down.”
It isn’t blood, but a red mixed-fruit drink, the glass full right up to the brim.
“Drink up now. So you’ll be more alert.”
“More alert? For what?”
“You’ll see.”
Somewhere in the middle of the hallway, when they are on the way to the front door, Leo sneaks into Vincent’s room to peer at his bandaged body and listen to his regular breathing.
“We can’t leave him, Leo, can we?”
“We’ll be right back. Half an hour at most.”
Leo wiggles the blinds and closes them, shutting out the glow from the full moon, and from one of the streetlights, which has a broken pane of glass and glares angrily.
“But what if he wakes up? And is all alone?”
“He won’t wake up. When Vincent sleeps, he really sleeps. And no one should ever wake up mummies against their will. Then a curse is unleashed. Don’t you know that, Felix?”
They carry out a last check around Vincent’s mouth, widening the opening in the bandages. It’s
important that the air flows freely. Then they leave the apartment. But Felix thinks it’s a bit strange that Leo is carrying his schoolbag over his shoulder. Surely school isn’t open in the middle of the night?
There are no traces left in the stairwell of Mama’s escape—Leo finally succeeded in wiping away the last spots and it’s as if it had never happened. They creep past Agnetha’s door on the second floor. She offered to sleep at their apartment the first few nights their mother was in the hospital, but Leo convinced her that they would be fine on their own and promised to let her know if they needed help and to make sure they all went to bed early.
Outside, there is only darkness and the long row of streetlights. And at a distance, music and cars accelerating quickly and putting on the brakes abruptly. Friday night in Falun. In the other direction, into the city, it’s lively. But here, along an asphalt walkway to the school, it’s quiet and still.
Leo breathes in deeply. It is a lot hotter than he thought. Or else he himself is hot on the inside, with the tension trying to make its way out.
It’s September and there are several piles of leaves on the ground, which are fun to kick around in. They are now about one month into the autumn term. He is in the eighth year and Felix in the fifth. Even Vincent, their big little brother, has started in the first class and so they are now all going to the same school together.
He knows exactly what he needs for their caper.
He knows where wigs are sold, one hundred and twenty-five kronor for the long ones he has picked out. And the big gray cloth jacket with a hood is at H&M for ninety-nine kronor and fifty öre—it’s going to be made greenish and dirty with textile paint from the shop that sells fabric and sewing machines. Then the body will need to look different, with shoulder pads and extra stomach, which he could easily sculpt out of padding from the same fabric shop with the paint. Finally, he’ll need the cigarettes. He has to smoke, unfiltered cigarettes, the strongest—John Silver.
The Sons: Made in Sweden, Part 2 Page 16
