The Sons: Made in Sweden, Part 2

by Anton Svensson

  Elisa stopped at the pile of papers again.

  On the line for additional suspects, she wrote Broncks’s name in pencil next to Dûvnjac’s and moved the printout to the next pile, which was lying in the middle of the desk and was called “You fucked up.”

  Until she found an acceptable explanation for his actions during the interview, John Broncks would also remain there. And if he wouldn’t provide it himself, she would, when the night turned into dawn and morning, have to find and speak to someone else who could—Leo Dûvnjac.

  FAREWELL.

  He had never even thought the word before. Old-fashioned, unnaturally grand, distancing. All the same, he was here for that reason, to say farewell. Not goodbye, not see you later. To close the door, not hold it open.

  To take leave. Forever.

  Leo had just put the key in the lock and turned it halfway when he stopped. Mere hours earlier the Broncks bastard had gone up these same steps to insult his family. He stared at his mama’s closed front door while in his mind he went through the eight stages of the plan’s final step—its working title was “the police station.” It would be set in motion in just a few hours. The last stage meant leaving the country at exactly 19:00; the first one was to say goodbye no matter how fucking awful it felt inside—the precondition to be able to neutralize everything disturbing, to enter unencumbered, to avoid thoughts other than taking back what didn’t exist.

  During the long string of bank robberies, he had never had any problem opening bank doors and using a loaded gun to demand the attention of strangers. He never hesitated even while realizing it meant danger and escape and other guns soon being pointed at him.

  When he finished turning that key, he would have to open this door and look at her, at someone who in another world was all the love and security, and who wouldn’t understand that it was the last time she would see him.

  He took a quick look at Sam, who was sitting in the car in Mama’s driveway waiting, then a deep breath before he turned the key the rest of the way and opened the door slightly. The lights were on in both the kitchen and the hallway and there was the smell of freshly brewed coffee, despite the early hour. When they were young, Mama packed her lunch bag, went to the nursing home in Sköndal in the evening, took care of the disabled all night, and slept while her three children were at school. Now she worked days, and he heard the sound of spread-out pages of the newspaper being turned, time alone she hadn’t had then.

  She was sitting at the pine table in the kitchen, the seat closest to the window and the radiator, the seat that had always been Mama’s. Already dressed to go. The bowl of porridge and frozen blueberries empty. She wore red reading glasses, which she pulled down when she looked at him.

  “Hi, Mama.”

  “Leo? I didn’t hear you come in.”

  The coffee maker was waiting lukewarm on the counter and he poured half a cup.

  “Okay if I take the last?”

  “Go ahead. I’m leaving in a couple of minutes anyway.”

  “Then I’ll go at the same time. I have a lot to do too.”

  He leaned against the row of kitchen cabinets. He’d often stood like this, drinking a cup of coffee on the go, but it didn’t feel like it used to. It was uncomfortable and the cabinet edges cut deep into his back.

  “Mama?”

  “Yes?”

  “I’m sorry about what happened last night. The idiot who frightened you.”

  His mother folded her reading glasses and laid them carefully in a black case. Then she cupped her hand and gathered the crumbs on the table and dropped them on the plate.

  “I wasn’t afraid, Leo. Pensive, rather.”

  “You don’t need to think about it. The cop was talking shit. Do you hear that, Mama? You shouldn’t worry.”

  She opened up the newspaper. She flipped past the culture section, the sports, and the local section.

  “Leo? Do you know how I read the morning paper these days?”

  She flipped back to the pages with the national news.

  “I always start here. Not with culture, not with sports or financial news or foreign news or Stockholm or entertainment. And there’s a reason. I have to know if anything has happened—to be able to feel some sort of peace. Whether large robberies were committed. Maybe gunfire. Crimes. Pages I never looked at before. I started doing that when all of you were arrested. After the bank robberies.”

  Her fingertips glided over pages six, seven, and eight.

  “Every day something else was written. New charges, new pieces of evidence and witnesses. When finally after a few months I was allowed to visit you and I asked you about what happened, if everything they wrote was true—do you know what you answered, Leo? You said, ‘Don’t worry, Mama.’ Just like you said a moment ago.”

  She held out the newspaper. As if she wanted him to take care of it, to take responsibility for it.

  “Mama, nothing is going to happen to Felix and Vincent. I promise.”

  “But what about you?”

  He held out his arms, smiling the warm, slightly lopsided smile he knew she liked so much.

  “Mama, I always get by.”

  “So—look at me, Leo—why have the police already been here twice in the three days since your release?”

  “Because they’re like that.”

  It seemed as if she was going to ask something else but then she changed her mind and got up instead with the glasses case in her hand. She smiled her Mama smile as she turned off the coffee maker and passed him on her way out to the hall where she put on her coat and scarf and a pair of low leather boots with a zipper.

  Now. Now, dammit. That was what he was thinking.

  “Leo, I have to go. Run, actually. There’s rush-hour traffic and I start at eight.”

  Now I should say it, what I’ve come for.

  “Mama?”

  “Yes?”

  “I . . . listen . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “I’ll follow you out.”

  She reached for her purse on the chest of drawers and then rested her fingers around the door handle.

  “Leo, you’re also leaving?”

  “Yes.”

  “So why did you come here?”

  “Because I . . . told you last night I would. I wanted to check that everything was okay.”

  “No, Leo, why did you really come here?”

  She waited for an answer she didn’t get. So she pushed down the handle and held the door, which was boosted by a lively morning wind. She let him go by, then locked up and walked toward her car, which was parked on the asphalt driveway and which took her each workday to the large hospital in Huddinge. Just as she was about to get in she noticed the other car, which was on the street and almost in the way of her being able to drive out.

  “Who is that?”

  A large blond man in the driver’s seat. She guessed he was about forty, perhaps forty-five. She looked at him and he greeted her with a cautious nod. A few days ago she had observed the predatory car with police in it, the ones who later picked up Leo just when lunch was ready. This car also had something to do with her eldest son. She was sure of it, just as certain as she was that the man sitting and waiting was not Leo’s enemy.

  “Hey, Leo? Who is that?”

  “Sam.”

  “Oh?”

  “A good friend.”

  Britt-Marie quickly realized this wouldn’t be followed by more information. So she turned off her car alarm, got in, and started the engine. But when she was about to close the door, Leo caught it.

  “Okay then, Mama . . .”

  He clasped the frame of the side window uncertainly and leaned over the car door.

  “Well, then . . . have a good day today.”

  She pressed lightly on the accelerator to keep the engine running.

  “And . . . listen, Mama—don’t worry now.”

  Then she sat there—surrounded by the engine’s insistent sound—and looked at him for a long time with
a gaze that was neither reproachful nor resigned.

  “Leo?”

  “Yes, Mama?”

  As if she somehow knew that all she could do tomorrow was to continue reading the news.

  “I love you.”

  THEY HAD TWO cups of black coffee and two ham and cheese sandwiches on a beautiful table made of some kind of metal. It was a fairly small café, empty at the moment except for the waitress, most likely the owner, behind the counter among the bulging piles of cinnamon buns and apple pies. And the two patrons sitting by the window facing Bergs Street and the police station.

  “You should eat, Sam.”

  “I can’t. Can’t get anything down. I can’t fucking swallow.”

  Sam poked a little at the plate and the untouched coffee cup as if to illustrate that he couldn’t even touch them. He was nervous in a way that Leo had never seen him before, not even before the bankrolling robbery with a milk truck as the only getaway car.

  “I know there’s not much time—but it’s the time we have.”

  “Leo—it’s not about that.”

  “Just a minute.”

  Leo got up and walked toward the water pitcher on a separate table along with white napkins and shiny teaspoons. From there the view of the building across the street was almost better.

  Kronoberg. An entire complex, the beating heart of the Swedish police, which pumped out uniformed police officers and marked cars to watch over the circulation of civil society. Fifteen paces away and absolutely none of them knew that he would be moving around in there in just a couple of hours.

  He put the glass of water, filled to the brim, in front of Sam.

  “At least drink something.”

  “There should have been three of us, Leo. You were going to get a replacement for Jari. One of your brothers.”

  Together they had followed the news about the Robbery of the Century on the television in one of the prison’s assembly rooms. A series of reports over about a year. And he had hoped that it would drag out even longer before the judgment would be binding. But two weeks before his release came the fucking news. The Supreme Court would not take up the case. Everything changed with that. They had a deadline.

  He knew that, according to the information he ordered from Sullo, the transport from the police station only went once a fortnight, every other Thursday, at 14:00. And the transport this time was unique—today, all the seized money from the largest robbery in Swedish history would be driven to Tumba paper mill to be burned. Because that was how it worked in the Swedish legal system. The banknotes had fulfilled their purpose as evidence in an investigation and therefore would be destroyed.

  A once-in-a-lifetime chance.

  “They said no, and I don’t trust anyone else. We’ll figure it out anyway.”

  “The plan was to have one person outside to keep track of the real cops coming in. And two people on the inside. As it is, you’ll be running around alone in there. It doesn’t fucking feel good.”

  “That’s why it was all the more important that I conducted the test alone yesterday. I picked up a pair of sunglasses from some lousy investigation to try out the procedures and check the blueprints of the building. To measure the time. So that the staff saw me. And it went well, Sam! So easy! They couldn’t imagine that anyone would be so brainless as to attack . . . in the station. In the basement beneath floor after floor of little fucking detectives who will try to anticipate how criminals like us would pull this off on the outside and arrest us there.”

  Reaching across the table, he pointed out the window.

  “Do you see, Sam?”

  Sam had managed to take a couple of sips of water, but they stopped somewhere in his throat again. And he really tried to follow Leo’s index finger, but he saw only more cars with more police.

  “There, Sam. Two police vans. They are driving away from the place they think is the most protected. And there, do you see, four uniforms are leaving the building through the main entrance, laughing. Check it out, the one in front with the mustache is saying something really, really funny and she, the one next to him, is laughing her head off. They’re having a damn good time. And do you know why, Sam? Because they’re only a couple of feet from what they have always considered to be their security—the fucking security that we’re going to take from them forever!”

  He scooted the glass of water across the table to Sam who responded by shaking his head.

  And that wasn’t good at all.

  There was no time for that sort of nervousness. To feel a little anxiety before a bank robbery or security-van robbery was always propitious. It sharpened the senses. But it shouldn’t take over. It didn’t just affect movements; it made thought slow and impaired courage.

  “Sam, the only thing you need to do is to make sure the empty suitcases are in the car as they should be and pick me up with the hand truck and full boxes when I send a signal that I’m out again; from your vantage point you have an overview of the entrance to the police station on Kungsholms Street and the courthouse on Scheele Street the entire time.”

  Leo reached out and put his hand on Sam’s shoulder, as he had sometimes done with Vincent when he hesitated.

  “So, Sam, you don’t risk anything before we’re finished and on our way. I’m the only one who can get caught on the inside.”

  An old cowbell jangled. It sounded when the café door opened and closed, when customers came and went. Just then four new ones were arriving. The laughing police officers. They hadn’t been on the way out to arrest anyone, they were going to eat buns and continue to laugh in here.

  “Okay, for safety’s sake—have we thought of everything?”

  Leo had lowered his voice even though the uniforms sat down at the other end of the café, right in front of the serving counter. He smiled.

  We are sitting so close—and I’m about to go through the checklist before the most audacious coup you’ll ever hear about.

  “Requisition slip is ready—with the signature of the right duty officer according to the schedule in the cop computer. Property reference number, ready—ten packages twenty-five centimeters high, thirty-two centimeters long, and thirty centimeters wide. They need to fit in two large moving boxes with a little extra room. Uniforms—I wear one and you, Sam, plant the other, together with the real police shield, right after you drop me off at the courthouse.”

  Then they sat in silence for a moment, listening to the laughing fools and to the large clock on the wall ticking so loudly. Finally, Sam grabbed the glass of water and drank half of it. He even chewed a little on the ham and cheese sandwich.

  “Good, Sam. Let’s do it then.”

  Leo had hung his leather jacket over the empty chair next to him. Now he took the cell phone out of the inner pocket. He would only use this phone for calling preprogrammed numbers. And he went out of the café for a while. While he was waiting for a connection, he looked at the police station, its yellow plastered walls oblivious.

  There was just one policeman who couldn’t be there at 13:45.

  You arrested me, you bastard.

  Only you would recognize Sam, and even recognize me—in spite of the lenses and shaved head.

  Therefore, you will find yourself far away from here. Now I’m going to set the false lead into motion.

  Then he heard the tone, which was repeated regularly and stopped when he got a reply from a familiar voice.

  FOR THE FIRST time, John Broncks had met his own death. The thought came that he would die right then. And he hadn’t felt anything. He still wasn’t sure whether that was good or bad. In the shadow of a church and in the gloom of a broken streetlight, without warning, Leo Dûvnjac had pressed a pistol—a Sig Sauer, the police’s own service revolver, which strangely enough had been what Broncks focused his mind on—against his temple. It was sufficiently hard that it formed a round red ring in the sensitive skin.

  He stretched. A small leather sofa was not the best place to spend the night.

  It h
adn’t been possible to sleep afterward. He had tossed and turned in bed, sweated and fought with the sheet and pillow for about an hour before he gave up, wide awake. And that had nothing to do with the death threat. The muzzle of the pistol had not frightened him. Dûvnjac had not frightened him. But Sam . . . a life gathered in a pile of ashes; a family, a childhood home in smoldering embers. This frightened him—a brother who refused to communicate or meet, who hated, and yet this was the only thing left.

  With the sweaty sheet around his body, he got up and fetched a large glass of water, settled on the sofa, and stared at TV channels broadcasting history documentaries about dictators, naval battles, and royal psychopaths. And in the middle of a scene that was about the beheading of a nobleman who committed adultery, he grabbed the bottle of whiskey standing unopened on the bookshelf, which he had received as a gift from a colleague in connection with the Robbery of the Century—even though he never drank alone. He filled the glass halfway with the hard liquor instead. A few beheadings later he dozed off.

  Until his telephone rang.

  The stooped fellow on the ninth floor. The helpful detective at the intelligence unit office.

  He advised him that he would send an audio file soon—the tapped telephone had recently been used a second time.

  “Dad, I’ll pick you up in three hours. Okay?”

  And Broncks recognized both voices well.

  “Skanstull. In front of the restaurant.”