And again it sounded as if someone was coughing audibly below him.
Now he understood it was the pump that was wheezing on the floor next to him—the prerequisite for keeping the room intact all these years, ensuring that the old lake couldn’t get back in. It was an incredibly clever construction, and in spite of his frustration it was hard not to be impressed.
He climbed up and out of the hole through the back of the safe. He unplugged the lamp, dropped the cord down, closed the trapdoor with the help of the wires in the electrical box on the wall, and put back both the concrete lid and the four black and white pieces of floor covering. No one would notice that he had been there. No one would be able to even begin to find out what he himself still didn’t know.
“Broncks?”
The prosecutor had returned his call.
“Yeah?”
Broncks walked to the hall and front door, waiting for the answer that would soon be mixed in with the rising wind.
“Okay. I’ll approve your request. Now you had damn well better deliver.”
“You’ll get your bust. At least as good a boost to your career as last time.”
He continued walking over the uneven asphalt courtyard to the exit, which reminded him of a prison gate because of the barbed wire. He had obtained the prosecutor’s decision, his right to tap the telephone.
It would be an entrance straight into the criminal mind of Leo Dûvnjac.
THE INSPECTOR AT the Intelligence Unit had alerted him almost immediately that the line was connected. Broncks hurried through the police complex, from the city police’s corridor to the federal police agency’s building on Polhems Street and then nine floors up in the elevator.
“Hi, Dad, it’s me. Do you have time to go for a little ride?”
The rather old man with a stoop always sat in one of the telephone tapping rooms to analyze the incoming and outgoing conversations. A blinking red LED lit up on the electronic map in the district of Södermalm approximately at the northern footing of Johanneshovs Bridge.
“Time? I have time—I’m just sitting here with a cup of black coffee. As usual.”
Then he pressed one of the keys on the keyboard’s top row, paused the recording, and looked at Broncks.
“You wanted me to get in touch every time—this call, the first one, lasts forty-eight seconds.”
The stooped-over detective pointed at the computer screen and a black line running below the blinking LED.
“And the recipient is located here—in one of the last dives on Göt Street.”
“Did you hear that, Leo? Not a damn drop of anything else.”
“Good. Good, Dad. I’ll pick you up in a couple of hours.”
“And where are we going?”
“I’m going to show you something.”
“What?”
“Our future. Seven o’clock on the dot in front of the door.”
Broncks nodded at the screen with the electronic map.
“Is he still there?”
“Who?”
“The recipient of the call. The person we’re investigating.”
The expert on telephone tapping, and on pitch and intonation, smiled.
“Your prosecutorial decision concerns the right to listen to his telephone conversations. Not to find out his whereabouts when he isn’t talking on the telephone.”
“But you can see it?”
“Yes.”
“Where?”
“In another room. From there—if you’d like, and when I’ve received the proper sort of formal request—I can follow the movements all the time for this particular telephone’s signal.”
Broncks smiled. They had a way of carrying on like this. The older man, whose age corresponded to his father’s, had once been an excellent police officer out in the real world, which he now partook of via headphones, trapped in a small, windowless space. It was clear he longed to be back out there, but with a different back and younger legs.
“The room three doors down on the left. If, on the way out, you happen to look in there, on the computer screen in the middle, I won’t see you, since I’m thinking of staying in here a little while longer.”
“I would never do that of course, as you know.”
Broncks was already halfway into the corridor when the inspector’s “Good luck, Broncks” caught up with him. Just as he had hoped, following Ivan Dûvnjac’s tracks had given him the insight into Leo Dûvnjac’s long sought-after criminal mind.
Those damned guns got even closer.
TEN MINUTES.
Eleven minutes.
Twelve minutes.
His father was late—in spite of the fact that both the place and time had been chosen especially to make it easy for him. Seven o’clock in front of the entrance. The lost time, which for someone not involved could seem negligible, was sufficiently important that the pressure, like a big black knot in the chest, was moving up toward his throat. And then the hellish itching on his scalp under the tight-fitting cap became fire moving over the top of his head.
Leo tried to peer into Dráva’s dimmed light through the rental car’s fogged windshield. The inquisitive owner and wife were there. A young couple was sitting at the table near the window, both chewing pieces of meat. A little farther in, an older man was leaning over the service counter as he waited for his two full beer glasses, which he would soon balance, bringing them to the table where he was sitting alone.
But his father was not there.
Thirteen hellish minutes he waited, with less than a day left before the moment he would take back what didn’t exist.
Stress never came calling when it was his own affair, when he was the one in charge and in control.
That was what the black knot in his chest and the itching on his scalp was about—that he was dependent on factors beyond his complete control for drawing the plan to conclusion. Like his father.
He had connected their direct line twice now—once to establish false leads, once to activate false leads.
The first call—establishing—had been at the weapons cache, which, because of a dropped gun, he’d realized Broncks would soon locate, with a little standard police work, through Sam’s ownership. From there he had rung the registered and identifiable phone, a call long enough to be sure that the signal could be traced. Then it had simply been a matter of waiting for the surveillance camera to alert him, to study how Broncks broke in through a window and once in was so pleased to discover the small but clear signs that had been arranged there.
The second call—activating—was just a few hours ago. When it was reasonable to conclude that, through more standard police work, the telephone tapping would have been set up.
Leo glanced at the digital clock hanging a short distance away on one of the building façades. Fourteen minutes of waiting with the clock ticking, for someone totally unaware of the importance of completing the false lead.
Then the itching stopped all of a sudden.
The pressure in his chest eased.
His father had arrived. He strolled out of the restaurant as if resurrected out of nothing. His coat fluttering in the eager wind, embers between his lips.
Leo flashed the full beam headlights twice.
His father saw the strong lights and flicked his cigarette toward a manhole.
“You are fourteen and a half minutes late.”
“Coffee, my son. Don’t you know? You must both pay for it and shit it out. I was in the bathroom. Then that damn Dacso wanted to count every penny into the cash register.”
Ivan sank heavily into the passenger seat. But he let the door point straight out over the pavement as if by not closing it he was indicating that he did not go around waiting for his eldest son to call him.
“And fourteen and a half minutes? What does that mean? Are we in a hurry?”
“Close the door.”
“You want to see me, fine, that makes a father happy, but it would make him even happier to understand why the time is s
o damn important again.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about the cop woman grilling me in the apartment where your brother and I are working. Asking questions about you, Leo. About where you were at such-and-such a time, and with whom, and where. You must know that Vincent gets nervous about that kind of thing? And if someone gets nervous, others start to interpret.”
Ivan placed his hand on the door handle, but still without pulling the door shut.
“And he who interprets, Leo, can misinterpret . . .”
“It’s cold. Close the door.”
“. . . can believe things are not as they are. Even feeling, well, used. Do you understand?”
Leo leaned over his father, hip against his stomach, got hold of the window frame, and pulled the passenger door shut himself.
“Let’s go.”
“And cold, by the way? You have a goddamn hat. And inside! Didn’t I teach you that a real man never goes around in shorts? And that he never has a fucking hat on indoors?”
Leo shrugged his shoulders, and then pulled off the gray wool hat, revealing his head.
“That’s why. Satisfied? Can we stop bickering and get out of here? That is, if you still want to hang out with me?”
Ivan looked at him in silence for a long time.
“What have you . . . Leo, why the hell have you shaved off your hair? The men in our family, your grandfather in Croatia, and your grandfather’s father, had a lot of hair, year after year. Genes, Leo! Good genes! Thick hair, we aren’t baldies. Only radiation and propaganda make people lose their hair like that. So—are you ill or have you read Mein Kampf?”
Leo turned the car key a half turn to the right. The accelerator pedal down, first gear, and a U-turn across the double line and they were headed south. Ivan sat silent across Johanneshovs Bridge, silent through the tunnel from Gullmarsplan. Not until the heights of Västberga, where they turned off toward the E4, did he stop staring at Leo’s bald head.
“And where are we going with your shaved head?”
Interpreting and misinterpreting.
Leo had clearly understood the question his father had asked, without asking it, when he failed to close the car door.
“I said that over the phone.”
And if you only knew how correctly you are thinking, Dad.
“I’m going to show you our future.”
But sometimes it’s better not to know.
“And what the hell’s that supposed to mean, Leo? That I’m also going to shave off my hair?”
You don’t need to know your role in order to take part.
“The future, Dad. Something we are going to build together. You’ll understand when we’re there.”
Since your actual task in this car, and at the place we are on the way to, is to be the bait.
THE GRAVEL CRUNCHED under the tires of the rental car as it rolled into the courtyard twelve minutes later. The last part they had traveled in darkness, which reminded him of what he had gone smack into when he visited Sam on the island. But well ahead, the house, which stood proudly with its two stories, and the considerably larger red-and-white painted barn next to it, bathed the surroundings in bright light that made it easy to orient themselves.
It was several hundred yards to the nearest neighbor, and there was overgrown forest on both sides of the road.
Leo had time to think the desolation and silence made the location perfect.
No one—when it was time—would have to get hurt.
“We’re here.”
A quick glance at his father, who was staring through the windshield without the slightest indication of wanting to get out.
“This is what I wanted you to look at, Dad.”
“A fucking . . . farm?”
“Yes, it is. If it’s wooden planks, walls, and roofs you choose to see. But if you follow me, I’ll show you what it could actually become.”
A small grove spread out between the farmhouse and the barn. Dense branches pointing outward from many pear trees and a few plum trees here and there, which someone should have pruned a few years ago. Leo was followed by his own long shadow, mimicking his movements, as Ivan slowly got out of the passenger seat, stretching himself using the car roof for support.
He had felt his father’s hesitancy during the whole trip, hanging there between them and vibrating like an electric barrier, dividing the two front seats. And now his slowness, stretching his back and shuffling over the courtyard, were his way of demonstrating a lack of interest in what his son explained he wanted to show.
“Come on, Dad, what do you think?”
His father didn’t answer, except with eyes that seemed to be entirely somewhere else, somewhere other than the property Leo was pointing at.
“You and me, Dad. Together. As you wanted. A renovation project—this is exactly what we need.”
He grew up like this. With a father who made a living as a carpenter, painter, whatever that meant, for—preferably—cash off the books improving the local houses and apartments. Then, before the final conflict, they had even had a construction company together for a few years. For someone whose only task right now was to act unconsciously as bait, this project should be the bait’s perfect bait.
“Dad, dammit, this is exactly what you ran around going on about for years, long before that fucking robbery we should never have done together. A dad and his eldest son who build together, again. So now I’ve bought this little farm for us. I thought you’d be happy.”
Cautious silence. The one that always stopped when Ivan drank. But now, when he hadn’t had alcohol in his body for over two years, it filled more space and meant something.
“You and me renovating together, just like back then. Then we sell the shit at a profit. And I already have a potential buyer who’s going to want to meet us here to ensure that we can deliver. Don’t you recognize a good business deal when you see it, Dad?”
And with the silence came the suspicion.
Leo looked at his father.
He hadn’t counted on that—that the bait wouldn’t accept his own bait. His father’s sobriety had sharpened his senses to crystal clarity.
“Business deal? What are you up to, Leo?”
“What am I up to? Planning our future. You said it yourself—if you can change, I can change.”
The light fell sharply on the worn, once perfectly painted red barn, and his father took his time as he let his eyes wander from side to side, from roof to foundation.
“So you want to show me some damn house with a damn barn that we should spend months fixing up, Leo?”
As a child, he had learned to avoid the sometimes temporarily sober eyes, in order to wait and confront the drunken ones instead. He learned to play against that father. But this was a new version of his father with whom he had no experience.
“In the middle of pitch-black nothing, Leo? Where no bastard would want to live? Is that what you’re trying to sell me?”
His father drew the fingers of one of his hands across the house’s rough wood façade and brittle red paint fell off with the motion. The wood paneling had received as little maintenance as the pear trees. Cupping his hands on either side of his eyes, he leaned forward to look into one of the dwelling’s filthy windows. There were no curtains to obscure it. His father looked straight into a house that lacked life.
“Come, Dad.”
Now the crunching was under their shoes, not under the tires. They both walked toward the giant barn. Leo stayed the whole time in the strong light from the farm’s four lampposts. It was important that they be seen, and occasionally he glanced out into the darkness as if he wondered whether someone lay there watching them. That was also why they needed to go in, to open the barn’s door and attract attention.
“Follow me in. I especially want to show you this.”
There was a key in his hand and it fit the heavy padlock. The shiny silver shackle was turned and lifted out of the two halves of the steel
latch that held the wooden doors together. Three solid hinges on each one, old and rusty. The barn had been built much earlier than the main house.
“Then we’ll renovate in here as well.”
Leo made a sweeping gesture to indicate the huge room.
“Two stories, duplex, stairs, bedrooms upstairs, living room downstairs.”
After just a few steps the sensation of generations of grain and dry hay hit them. The roof seemed considerably higher from the inside and made the truck standing in the middle look much smaller than it was.
“A truck, Leo? What the hell is it doing here?”
“Full of tools. We’re going to need them.”
“So, you’ve already had time to buy tools and put them in here? With what money? What if there’s no deal?”
“Dad—if you’re with me, there will be a deal. Maybe as soon as tomorrow.”
Ivan stopped abruptly and Leo felt the critical gaze on his back. As if his father didn’t plan to go a single step closer to the truck or anything else in the empty shell of a building.
“In my home town of Karlovac, Leo, every spring when I was growing up and the water rose in the river . . .”
And his father’s gaze there on his back was accompanied by his father’s voice.
“. . . then the catfish played. It was thick with slippery fish. And when they had finished playing, we could play, all the children. The water became warm and we threw ourselves in from the willow trees that were growing out over the river.”
They stood for a long time—a son a few feet in front of his father in the giant wooden room. A son who couldn’t explain the real motive for their visit, and a father who longed for reconciliation and at the same time fought against the whisper pecking at his head—he is using you.
“We dove down into the green water. And with every dive we were forced to turn up right away when we went in, otherwise we hit the bottom. Down and immediately up. Like a U.”
Leo sensed that his father might have taken a step forward and he caught in the corner of his eye a hand slowly gliding through the air, up, down, as if in a U.
The Sons: Made in Sweden, Part 2 Page 25
