The Sons: Made in Sweden, Part 2

by Anton Svensson

  She went on to the scanned-in first page of the verdict. The only additional facts that were available. At the top-right corner, the oblong box explained that the verdict was reached in Eskilstuna district court.

  A few lines down,

  Accused: Larsen, Sam George

  Another couple of lines down,

  Claimant: Broncks, Maria Eva

  And it was as if at first she didn’t understand she had read what she had read. It was so truly out of place, so false, so . . . wrong, what was written there. For a moment she was convinced that she had allowed her frustration, which had turned into anger at a colleague’s behavior, to go to her head so that she had begun to see the name she was so upset about where it shouldn’t be found at all.

  She read it again.

  Broncks, Maria Eva.

  Slowly she understood.

  She wasn’t imagining it. She wasn’t thinking “Broncks” there by obsession. He had held back information.

  Sam Larsen, who had served his sentence at the same cell block at Österåker as Leo Dûvnjac, had murdered someone connected with a plaintiff named Broncks.

  Who?

  Why?

  The rest of the verdict—just like the entire preliminary investigation—was stored in the City Police archive according to a note in the final line on the screen. The archive was located in the basement of the police station, in the corridor she most often visited when she had errands in the property room.

  She stood up.

  That was where she had to head now.

  WHEN AN ACCESS card slips through the card reader, there’s sometimes a squeaking sound that seeks out your nervous system and makes you shudder involuntarily.

  That was how it sounded now.

  And he shivered.

  Or maybe it was the fact that the card worked a second time that gave him goosebumps. The fact that the access card, which he had bought from Sullo and which belonged to a cleaning company, made the bolt of the lock turn around and the plate-metal door open to the passage connecting the courthouse with the police station.

  13:35:00

  He had twenty-five minutes left. At 14:00, the time the regular transport arrived at the seized property room, he would have to have returned here and made his way out through the entrance on Scheele Street and loaded the goods into the truck there.

  He grabbed the handle of the cart and began to roll the two somewhat large moving boxes he had parked there while he waited for the starting point in the courtroom. The first steps into the underground passage were greeted in the same way they were the previous time, with sharp light from the bare fluorescent lighting and dry heat. Down here there were no seasons. Right at the first passage crossing after fifty yards, left after another seventy yards. The first leg had taken him one minute and ten seconds when he went to pick up the sunglasses, plus another ten seconds in front of the identification camera. This time he would give it two minutes. That time, even before the first turn, he had heard the hard sound of shoes, a warning that others were close—two prisoners escorted by four prison guards and a uniformed police officer. Now only the whining of one of the hand truck’s thick rubber wheels was audible. He should have checked and lubricated them.

  A little more than one hundred yards remaining to a heist no one had ever even considered before: stealing the banknotes that were to be sent to the Tumba paper mill to be destroyed. Burned up. Notes emblazoned with blocked serial numbers that constituted evidence in a trial and were already replaced by the Federal Bank of Sweden with new serial numbers and new banknotes. Yet they were still worth exactly as much as the amount given on them and were still genuine. So later when a foreign bank contact—in his and Sam’s case a woman by the name of Darya at the Russian Sberbank Rossii—would buy them at a discounted price and in turn sell them back to the Federal Bank of Sweden, the law gave the contact the right to receive 100 percent of their value.

  Fifty yards. The first crossroads.

  And a sense of unreality, as one of the country’s most well-known criminals—and until Monday morning when he had been released, also the most dangerous of individuals thus classified—strolled freely around Sweden’s central police station with the proper identification and dressed in one of their own uniforms.

  It was so close that he laughed; it was bubbling up inside him.

  Then Leo turned right at the passage crossing and didn’t meet anyone at all. It was going more straightforwardly than he’d dared hope.

  He knew the principle worked. The shortcomings of the system benefited those who thought a little longer. The agreement on the money’s permanent value had been tested before in Belgium just a few years ago. It stated that banknotes and coins issued by a state’s central bank always kept the value given on them.

  The Belgian central bank had gathered in a billion two-euro coins for destruction, old coins that were to be replaced by new ones. Gold-colored inside with a silver-colored frame. Coin machines struck out the middle, flinging the gold section to the right and the silver to the left. Then the central bank sold the whole thing as scrap. The ones who had thought about it a little longer and used the shortcomings of the system were the owners of a Chinese company. They bought both parts of the scrap. They had their employees press both sections together again by hand. Two billion euros! They bought the metal scrap for nothing and then sent it back to the national bank of Belgium and said, “Thanks, we’d like to have full value for our change.”

  Seventy yards and the second choice—left at the next passage crossing.

  It was halfway along the passage where the property room lay.

  And the unreal was suddenly real. Over there, at the other end, the first encounter was approaching. A lone individual. A woman, he was certain of it. She wore plain clothes and moved with purpose. She belonged here. If they both continued at their current pace, they would cross each other’s path exactly at the camera outside his final destination.

  Leo drew his hand over the shaved crown of his head. The thin blanket of stubble had begun to grow. Then he blinked a couple of times to ensure that his lenses sat properly, and so that the irritation to his cornea and the damn stinging would calm down. Finally, he steered the hand truck next to the concrete wall. He wanted to leave plenty of room. They should be able to pass without thinking.

  In just a few seconds they would look at each other, nod, and continue. But—plain clothes? And with no other visible signs of the profession? Maybe he was worrying unnecessarily. Maybe she wasn’t even a police officer.

  He hadn’t worried unnecessarily.

  She was a police officer.

  Of all people . . . her?

  Dark, curly hair. A silver hoop in each ear. And that look that refused to give way no matter how much it was provoked in an interview room.

  Elisa something.

  He had directed Broncks far, far away from here, being careful that the policeman who knew him and would recognize him the best wouldn’t run into him. But he hadn’t expected to meet her, here. She had picked him up in his mother’s kitchen. She had sat across from him when he was intentionally unpleasant and defiant in order to get to Broncks. He had made an impression, an imprint she would remember.

  And for the first time he doubted his disguise.

  With three, at most four, steps remaining.

  What if after the nod, after maybe even a collegial hello between two police officers, she was to recognize him?

  What would he be prepared to do for one hundred million kronor?

  Everything.

  Then they met. Glanced at each other, and it was as if she saw him without seeing him. She seemed focused, on her way somewhere. He nodded and she barely acknowledged it.

  And the moment was over.

  She passed by just about as the whining from the cart’s wheel faded as he stopped in front of the door to the property room and the security camera that would view and approve him.

  A last look in her direction.

  S
he stopped too.

  Shit.

  She turned around.

  Fuck. Fuck!

  But not to look at him—to take out one of her plastic cards and swipe it through the reader that opened the next storage door, a sign with ARCHIVE above it.

  It wasn’t because of him that she stopped.

  She hadn’t recognized him.

  He breathed excessively slow and regular breaths to force his body to be calm. He tried to simply look into the camera and hold up his identification until he heard the buzz of the door’s lock and went in.

  13:36:40

  He checked the time—it had taken one minute and forty seconds to reach the property room. Twenty seconds in the plus column.

  The room was full of brown envelopes and boxes and empty of people; no one before him in line, but no one behind the delivery counter either. He looked into the basement room along shelf after shelf with seizures from ongoing investigations. Just as airless and dusty as yesterday’s visit. And then there was a sound from a little way back into the room, impossible to see but in all likelihood considerably larger, more of a hall, where most of the evidence envelopes were stored. A sound like scraping, only smoother and more crisp—corrugated cardboard against corrugated cardboard, boxes rubbing their sides against each other. The sound recalled hands, in an attic storage room that rose and ran over like dough, rearranging piles of trash that must give way to new trash.

  “Sorry, I had to stay back there for a little while. So you have a pick-up again today?”

  The same suit jacket as yesterday, with a red shirt in a shade that went better with the sweaty cheeks. Oscarsson. Leo hadn’t had access to the storage personnel’s schedule, but was equally relieved and grateful to be greeted by the same face.

  “Yes, today again.”

  “Eriksson, right?”

  Leo nodded.

  “Peter Eriksson. And I have—”

  “Old crimes, Eriksson, have to give way to new ones. Do you know how many seizures an investigation averages today?”

  “I’m sure it depends. On how many shots are fired. On how many participated in the crime. On how many—”

  “Exactly, Eriksson! Exactly so. It’s crawling with things that every fucking detective thinks are crucial for precisely his or her investigation, from the crime scene and perpetrator’s home and victim’s home and . . . It’s clear as hell that most of my time nowadays goes to moving boxes around in there to try to find more room.”

  Leo let the indignant, hardworking man drone on so as not to seem stressed; not to risk questions about the requisition he’d printed out from the same stolen police computer as for the trial pick-up and right now slipped onto the wooden counter between them. With the name of the day’s duty officer on the top line and all the property reference numbers on the bottom line.

  “And, listen, Eriksson, with the workload we all have today, I really get it—as soon as one investigation is finished, the next one is going to begin and people don’t have time to run down here and sort out used evidence.”

  Leo gently pushed the requisition closer to the storage room keeper, even turning it around to be easier to read, and let his index finger wander among the numbers corresponding to the property he was here to pick up.

  “Then you’re going to be happy now, Oscarsson, because here I come to create a little space for you—ten packages, all at once.”

  Then it was Oscarsson’s index finger wandering from evidence numbers 2016-0407-BG1713, the first, to 2016-0407-BG1722, the last, before he looked up, almost a little guiltily.

  “Well, sure, I saw it yesterday, but . . . for the record. Your identification.”

  Leo also turned the leather case around the right way, even opening it for him, service card for Peter Eriksson in one plastic pocket and the metal police shield in the other.

  “Thanks. And these, Eriksson, all of them, are in . . . Rosengrens safes. So something valuable, one can imagine?”

  “That’s what’s so good. That neither you nor I know these things, what envelopes and packages contain. You give out sealed exhibits and I transport them. And we avoid being tempted to do anything stupid. Isn’t that right?”

  In the end Oscarsson took the requisition, finally, and limped away into a passage between shelves. As soon as he vanished into the rather large hall, where the safes stood, Leo checked the stopwatch.

  13:38:50

  Twenty-one minutes in here seemed plenty of time when he made the plan. But not any longer. The relief that it was Oscarsson, who recognized him and could reasonably shorten the identification process, transformed to stress during the detailed account of the workload when he, on the contrary, lengthened it. What should have taken thirty seconds had cost over two minutes.

  And then, in the silence that arose when the man in the storage room stopped talking, Leo listened for what was hopefully going on in there. No longer a smooth and crisp sound, it was mechanical and heavy and he recognized it well. The shiny, thick steel rods abandoning their fastenings in a safe. Rosengrens safes had stood in every Swedish bank during the time he used considerably more force to get at considerably less money. Hearing the metallic clunking, the very symbol of a heist he had dreamed of and which he had somehow been planning for his whole life, gave him a feeling he so rarely approached—pure happiness.

  Be what you do.

  Breathe and live the intoxication.

  Control the adrenaline relative to risk—let out a little at a time and always have enough remaining.

  “Here comes the first—damn heavy, I’m guessing fifty pounds.”

  Oscarsson was walking toward the counter with the package, the length of a newborn baby. He carried it like that—in his arms and gently.

  “Eriksson—what the hell’s in them?”

  Tightly packed banknotes. Don’t you know that?

  “I told you. Not a clue.”

  And fifty pounds—if every five hundred note weighs 0.96 grams—corresponds to more than ten million kronor.

  More than one hundred million kronor divided over ten seizures of just about the same size.

  Oscarsson plunked down the package on the counter and headed back toward the shelves.

  “I can only carry one at a time—nine runs left.”

  Wrapped in brown paper and well compressed with just as brown packing tape.

  Then Leo reached for the safe, held on to it, and took back what didn’t exist: banknotes that were to be burned and had already been replaced with new ones yet still held their value. Evidence in an investigation that John Broncks once led, solved, and was acclaimed for.

  He placed it down at the bottom of one of his two reinforced boxes—nine packages to go, yes, he had calculated correctly. They would all fit, with a little space left over.

  13:41:40

  The watch, again.

  Sixteen minutes remaining of the time he allotted for this stage of the plan. With a rather old man, who probably moved more slowly and chatted more with each new package. The risk of standing here side by side with the regular transport, the ones who had been instructed to pick up ten pieces of seized property, was now more than a risk—it was probable.

  But what if in spite of everything he was lucky?

  In the best-case scenario, he would be out in the police corridors with a head start of only a few minutes at the moment the main alarm went off. And with the cart’s whining wheel weighed down by five hundred pounds of banknotes, he would move neither especially quickly nor smoothly when they pursued him through the underground passages, on the way back to the courthouse and the world beyond.

  THE HANDLE WAS actually a wheel, or a steering wheel. When Elisa took hold of it and turned it sideways, the next section of shelves glided slowly apart and revealed two metal walls filled from floor to ceiling with completed police investigations.

  A room filled with a silence she found nowhere else.

  Folders and boxes and bundles of papers that, gently on the ears, muffled deca
des of crimes preserved in chronological order. The end of this section was marked MARCH ’93–JUNE ’93 in typewritten text, and when she walked into the narrow aisle, her irritation gradually subsided. It had begun with Broncks’s duplicity and was reinforced by that awful whining from the cart belonging to a policeman on his way to the property room. Down here in this room, she was always simply present, alert. Others usually complained about the bad air and lack of daylight, but she observed and experienced something different—harmony. To her, the archive of the City Police was the same as peace and security, rows of preliminary investigations that brought order in often devastating events—violence and chaos examined, evaluated, and explained.

  There were seven levels of shelves in each section and she searched for the target number, which was B 347/9317 according to the documentation in Sam Larsen’s criminal record. Almost at the very back and very top she found it. She fetched the rolling step stool parked at the entrance, climbed up on the rubberized surface, and pulled down the rather heavy light beige archive box. She carried it to the little corner with two desks and began to flick through the bundle lying on top, the technical report. The first few pages depicted a simple sketch of the one-hundred-fifty-square-foot summer cottage, followed by twenty-eight pages of black-and-white photographs of various exhibits—a touch grainy as crime scene technicians’ photos often used to be. Two of them caught her interest. One with the caption:

  Photo no. 5: Northeast angle from the sitting room into bedroom 1. A bed is situated against the far bedroom wall. Sheets, blankets, mattress, and pillow heavily stained with the victim’s blood.

  And the second, a close-up of a considerably smaller object, with the caption:

  Photo no. 14: Knife manufactured by Rapala. Found on the floor. Grooved thumb grip, marked finger grooves. Tip of the knife is broken off.

  Elisa turned the lampshade away and redirected the light. The bulb was altogether too strong. It should have been forty watts, not sixty. She studied the close-up of the knife, which reminded her of those she had seen as a child when they scaled the single perch after several hours of fishing.