The Sons: Made in Sweden, Part 2

by Anton Svensson

  He got dressed.

  Just before going back to the mirror, he grabbed hold of the doorframe and closed his eyes. He groped his way forward the last step and stopped when his hip bumped into the sink. The contact lenses rubbed and tickled at the same time. In a moment he would open his eyes and look, but first he felt for the high doorsill with his left heel and stepped up on it. The right distance was important. His upper body should be visible.

  He stretched and let his eyelids glide up.

  The policeman in front of him smiled. The crown of his head gleamed and his eyes were as dark as they were friendly. But it was the uniform that carried the illusion, creating a balance between the head and body.

  He was more than satisfied with his new image in the mirror.

  Now all that was missing was property reference number 2017-0310-BG4743—a pair of sunglasses.

  HE HAD LIED to her.

  John Broncks crouched a little farther down behind the computer screen, staring into it as the image’s edges dissolved and became blurry. He hoped that Elisa wouldn’t see him when she passed by in the corridor. Just as he hoped she hadn’t understood from the outside what was going on inside.

  Alibis. For both of them.

  That his attempt to pretend everything was normal had worked.

  He had been forced to do it, after a day of all-seeing surveillance cameras, images that revealed what only he so far could see—that his own brother was involved.

  He straightened up and leaned back, and the blur became comprehensible—a frozen image of the back belonging to the robber in the black mask. He couldn’t escape it. He’d stood and watched it in real life just a few hours ago—the ax above Sam’s head and its sharp edge on the chopping block.

  Broncks zoomed in to get even closer to the fleeing robber—not so close that identification became possible, the resolution was too bad for that, but good enough to get part of the movement pattern—that which could not be masked or altered. At least not in a situation like this one, flight, when instinct becomes the movement that binds the personality together.

  He saw what he already knew.

  Sam.

  While the silent sequence of images was moving in front of him, Broncks could also faintly perceive a sound. The coffee beans were being ground in the machine next to the vending machine in the corridor and the hot liquid was running down into the paper cup. Then he saw Elisa go by in the other direction, heading back to her office. The first time he had actively invited someone to join an investigation, to share it and work side by side—when conditions changed direction completely—had become the first time he really had to work alone.

  I lied, Sam, and I will continue to do so.

  The moment it comes out that you are my brother, I will be taken off the case.

  I will catch Leo Dûvnjac. I will lock him up for everything.

  And to be able to do that, I also have to catch you, Sam. You are connected. I’ll sacrifice you. You understand, I am finished—my fucking debt to you does not exist anymore.

  You stood there again, trying to lay it on me, to make it stick. Even next to our father’s bed! So that I’d do what I always do—act on the basis of that.

  I don’t owe you shit.

  It was not my fault he decided to attack.

  It was not my fault you decided to kill him.

  No bastard is ever going to poke around in our shared history again, dig into it, dig up the guilt.

  I will work alone from now on.

  I will catch you both by myself.

  THE PARCEL HAD been confiscated on four occasions—each time getting stuck in customs at Arlanda even though they used different consignees—until they realized the problem was the method of delivery, as well as the choice of supplier. A parcel commissioned in Shanghai and shipped to Stockholm via UPS—the American delivery company—had to be registered at the Swedish airport’s reception center to be assessed for customs duty. So when they ordered the same 3D printer for the fifth time but chose the German company DHL, the parcel glided through bureaucracy via a different sorting system in Leipzig—and everything worked perfectly.

  Leo stretched as the strange machine continued to work on the table in front of him. He unconsciously drew his hand through his hair that wasn’t there. He still hadn’t become used to the fact that the gesture, which had been with him all his life, was superfluous, that there was no longer a swoop of hair to adjust.

  The hair.

  The lenses.

  The uniforms.

  The requisitions.

  The property reference number.

  The duty roster.

  Only one detail remained before the third stage could be carried out, “the test.” He was taking care of that now: police identification. That’s why he needed the 3D printer.

  He looked at his watch. The machine required half an hour, according to the instructions, then the new police ID would be complete.

  The rest of the prerequisite for a successful identification check lay already finished on the kitchen counter. A black leather case contained both identification cards with photographs, on which a blond Sam meets a dark-haired one. He smiled at the camera with a shaved head and brown eyes. Both have new names and personal identification numbers below the word POLICE in large red capitals and POLICE AUTHORITY IN STOCKHOLM COUNTY in smaller letters. Before the act that became his last job, Jari had been just as reliable and careful in the production of the identification cards for two policemen as he was for the driver’s licenses for two milkmen.

  There was also the one police shield—the only copy Sullo was able to obtain, and which therefore was now having its clone manufactured by a machine that hadn’t even been invented the day Leo had been sent to prison.

  So much had happened over the last few years.

  Leo went closer to the square-shaped pot occasionally hissing a little, puffing and murmuring tentatively.

  He had scanned in Sullo’s authentic shield and let the printer’s 3D reader analyze the form and size and identify color codes. The correct red, blue, and gold shades. That was all. The machine solved the rest itself. Liquid metal printing—it also spat out the metal alloy in the right direction as it built up a perfect copy. It was fascinating how it even painted the fucking thing. An hour and a half, and now they had an additional authentic police shield at their disposal. The round black disk, the golden crown, the blue bottom, even the brass-colored plate with STOCKHOLM 4321.

  He picked up the leather case, poked the service card into the plastic sleeve to the left, the shield with the police department’s coat of arms into the plastic sleeve to the right, and pushed it down into the uniform jacket’s inner pocket. He now carried identification that was exactly the same, and could open as many doors as that of everyone else in the police headquarters in Kronoberg.

  THE ROLL OF brown lining paper grew with each new turn of the roll, laying bare new parts of the sitting room’s beautiful herringbone parquet. In spite of the intense pain in his hand, Vincent pushed the roll down into a trash bag of sturdy plastic, carried it into the hall, through the front door, and placed it in the stairwell. When he came back to roll up the paper in the other part of the sitting room as well, he passed the bedroom where Ivan was putting the final touches on the shiny white paint of the window trim with his small, fine paintbrush. They glanced at each other but said nothing. The quiet left behind by the policewoman became a tense, maintained silence. His father made several attempts to get a conversation going but Vincent avoided it every time—anything to prevent more talk that could lead to his father realizing what his eldest son was up to.

  “Uh, Vincent?”

  His persistent voice echoed again, took off inside the bedroom, and ricocheted dangerously between them.

  “I like you too.”

  And this time it caught hold.

  “What? What’d you say?”

  “I know what you’re doing, Vincent, why you go around and talk as little as my paint t
ins do.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “First, I don’t say that I was there at the wall. Then I don’t say that I met him again the same evening. And now I’m even going to confess another thing—Leo and I had time for a phone call too. You know, ‘how are you, I’m fine,’ the sort of things sons and fathers do.”

  Ivan smiled, his eyes sparkling.

  “So I certainly understand if my youngest son is a little jealous.”

  Vincent looked at him without answering. If you only knew, Papa. If you could only imagine how it looked when I came here at five in the morning. I filled and sanded and painted a door that I had broken apart for a second time because Leo was here.

  “But surely you know, Vincent, that I like you too?”

  Then he patted his breast with the palm of his hand, just as pleased.

  “Because all my sons have a place in here.”

  “Listen, Papa, we have worked together for . . . what the hell is it now, two months, barely? It’s not enough to become jealous. Leo is more a father to me, has been more a father to me, no matter how you figure it. If being someone’s father is about how many hours you spend together, who protected me, taught me, was a male role model. No matter how you look at it, Papa.”

  “That doesn’t mean that I don’t care about how your lives are going. Your life.”

  “You don’t need to worry about me.”

  The pain in his hand.

  “Papa?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Haven’t you thought that he went there, to the restaurant, because he was using you? Saying ‘how are you, I’m fine’ on the telephone because he’s using you? Just as he’s using us?”

  “What the hell do you mean? Why would he use me?”

  “Maybe because he needed an alibi?”

  “Come on, Vincent. Don’t turn us against each other. What’re you doing? Are you trying to create a conflict between us? Just like your fucking mother always did?”

  The last roll of paper became thicker and Vincent had more to pick up and his hand hurt again when he stuffed it into the trash bag. But if he was working, he could stay turned away and they didn’t have to look at each other.

  “Listen, Papa, when Leo was planning all the bank robberies we did, we used to sit in the garage. He had two blocks of wood and a sheet of plywood as a table. He would spread out a big map of the target on it.”

  He couldn’t stand to meet his father’s scrutinizing gaze any longer, the one that pursued them when they were little, always demanding truth and loyalty, and that would be able to see that his youngest son knew so much more about his eldest son’s plans than he could show.

  “And then he laid a ten kronor coin on the map, sometimes several, to symbolize the bank or banks, and every getaway car was a toy car that he placed out on the map’s roads. And do you know how the fuck we were represented? Little green plastic soldiers, model warriors, 1:72 scale. Because that’s what we were to him, and always will be. And you too, Papa. Little toy pieces in his plan for the next job.”

  FROM HERE THE courthouse resembled a palace. Broad wings with a tiled roof supported the large tower clad in green-colored copper. One-hundred-year-old patina.

  The parking garage at Kungsholms Square, a few minutes’ walk away, was as close as he could get to this proud building without stepping out of the car in front of the police complex, thus limiting the time of exposure outside. Leo was seldom nervous; he didn’t function that way. Worrying did not solve very many problems. But now he was nervous. He would soon take his first steps, as a policeman, inside the police station. He had the correct uniform. He had the correct identification and police shield. He had the correct requisition signed by the correct duty officer with the correct evidence number. He had modified his appearance. He knew where he should go and had memorized the route on the map. He had done everything properly for appearances, what would be seen. But he must also act correctly, completing the illusion by becoming the policeman he was dressed up as. He was by himself now. The original plan had been that Sam would be here beside him for enhanced credibility, but instead he was taking the deceased Jari’s place. Thus a year of planning and his whole future would now be decided. Because if he’s unable to make it through any of the three checkpoints he was headed toward, then everything would come crashing down before tomorrow.

  Three police cars and two prisoner transport vehicles stood in front of the courthouse’s main entrance on Scheele Street, just as he had expected. Every day legal proceedings were taking place in there, which would set people free or impose sentences on them. Judges and prosecutors and lawyers and plaintiff’s counsels and cops and guards and journalists all gathered together in various courtrooms to feed on the accused.

  He opened the door, which was as heavy as it looked, and went into the building that seemed to sigh incessantly, with coarse, worn stone in dark corridors and stairs, a stern church resting on a foundation of law books. Each step echoed. Every breath slid down, dusty and without oxygen.

  A voice over a loudspeaker called out the next hearing somewhere on the ground floor and he automatically looked toward the ceiling. It was a couple of floors up in the old high-security courtroom where he himself had sat in sessions during a trial several months long. And on not one occasion had he arrived as he had just now, through the public entrance. At each new day of a trial he had come from there—the stairs ahead of him to the left that led up from the basement, always wearing handcuffs and escorted by four prison guards.

  That was where he was going now—to the underground entrance.

  To the door of the passage leading to and from the police station.

  He glanced into the corridor in both directions, then at the administration office straight ahead, and finally at the little sentry box for the guards and the short queue for the toilets. No one seemed to care about the lone policeman.

  The stairs to the basement echoed exactly like the rest of the interior of the building, in spite of how gently he tried to put down the soles of his boots. The door to the passage looked how he remembered it. Back then, someone else would always open it with their access card. Now Leo took the card Sullo had sold him out of his breast pocket, pulled it through the card reader, and waited for the mechanical click.

  He pressed lightly on the door handle, and the metal door yielded—it worked.

  The first checkpoint was passed.

  Two deep breaths of the dusty, oxygen-poor air.

  Then he started the cell phone’s stopwatch and went in.

  So different to move around here without a pair of guards in front and a pair of guards behind. With his arms free. Without a prison uniform.

  It was about fifty yards from the first intersection in the path, where he was supposed to turn right, when he heard them: the heels of shoes, two or even three pairs.

  When he veered off, he realized that there were more than that. He counted two prisoners who came toward him escorted by four prison guards and, furthest back—the one he would meet last—a uniformed policeman.

  Don’t go faster than normal. Or slower either. Don’t look away. Don’t make eye contact unnecessarily.

  In just a moment, a couple of yards more, they would be side by side.

  He nodded to the prisoners, but they didn’t nod back. And for a thousandth of a second it felt as if something was very wrong—until he realized that it was his own appearance, the uniform. No fucking way they would greet a cop. The prison guards nodded, not much, but politely. Now the cops. They would look at him as a colleague. They must look at him as a colleague.

  A quick nod.

  And a quick nod back.

  It was all that was needed. Sometimes the difference between going on and giving up was no bigger than that.

  The cop hesitated—or was it just him overinterpreting?—before nodding.

  A stiff fucking nod from someone who was not sure if he should recognize the colleague with the shaved head and brown eyes. />
  Maybe he even did—recognized something familiar without knowing what.

  Then the moment was over.

  Leo wanted to turn around to reassure himself that they were continuing—the one thing he shouldn’t do. But he became increasingly confident—their steps were slowly moving away.

  Those who walked around here every day had bought into the illusion.

  The country’s infamous bank robber was not only dressed as a police officer in a police station—he was a police officer and was being treated like one.

  The second checkpoint was passed.

  Sixty yards later came the next intersection. The passage was broken by a four-way crossing where he would change direction, turning left. The property room was halfway down the corridor—the third and last and absolutely critical checkpoint. Inside the steel door, his paperwork would be examined minutely, the sum of his preparation assessed and evaluated by the Swedish bureaucracy. The grand treasure chest was always buried at the end of the rainbow.

  With his index finger on the doorbell and his identification toward the camera on the wall, he waited to be let in, glancing at his phone and the stopwatch’s first interval. One minute and fifteen seconds from the courthouse to the property room. An additional ten seconds before someone decided to let him in, with the paper that was folded in half in his wide front pocket.

  Here there was an even stronger smell of dust, if that was possible, and even less oxygen. He was in a basement flowing into a large room, surrounded by thousands of objects involved in ongoing investigations, or investigations that had been closed but were still not legally binding, or that were deemed necessary to move work forward, or that constituted direct evidence. Seizure after seizure in envelope after envelope, on shelf after shelf.

  The man behind the wooden counter, probably the eyes that had observed him through the camera, was in his sixties and looked as Leo expected. Gray jacket and checked shirt, balding and sufficiently overweight that he would no longer be able to keep up with the thugs. This was the last stop for a police officer finished working in the field, soon to be shunted out into the civilian world. Exactly like the brown envelope his visitor was here to collect—and the envelopes he would come back and pick up tomorrow.