What the hell were they doing down there?
It was up here where things seemed to be happening.
From multiple angles, video cameras showed the Kronoberg police complex was blocked off and the entrances were barred. Uniformed cops guarded flapping plastic—like a large package no one was allowed to open before the crime was solved.
A smell of tannic acid was being spread from the percolator behind the coffee machine and the bottom of the glass coffee pot was covered with black film. Neither Dacso nor his wife had filled it and now they were gone. There was no one behind the counter, and not a living soul could be seen through the little round window in the door leading out to the kitchen and the big work surface.
The restaurant was empty apart from the woman sitting a few tables away in the corner, where it was a little darker. Her thin fair hair was nearly invisible but formed a hairstyle that didn’t really agree with the orange-yellow face and dry lips. She usually sat there, at the same table, every day, and drank a demi-carafe of the house white wine.
He made an effort to ask her if she had seen the owner of the restaurant but changed his mind. People alone at places like Dráva were always looking for a chance for a drunken conversation, and it never stopped but ground on and on. It was still possible to see that she had been beautiful, though she was doing her best to spoil it. Her self-image was likely still there, in which she was probably just as beautiful. That was how she smiled and moved, unaware of how years of daily consumption of alcohol had carved away at her at the same time and created a false image that was so easy to hold on to. He too had been close to being caught up in it before he made the decision to change.
The plastic-wrapped police complex on Kungsholmen had been replaced by a bombed house on the West Bank. How something could look so black when the sky in the background was so blue. . . . He couldn’t bear wars that had been around longer than his sons. Instead he was heading in behind the checkout to the kitchen door, to look for Dacso and his fucking coffee beans, when he noticed that the sky on the TV changed again and now it was as gray as lead. The news report from the West Bank had switched to pictures of a Swedish plot of low-growing spruce forest around a bumpy gravel road.
And the feeling bit him on the neck. Again.
And deceit’s ice-cold blade landed. Again.
And it had to do with Leo. Again.
He reached over the bar, looking for the goddamn remote control. He recognized that particular gravel road and knew it ended at an abandoned farmhouse and a barn with its large doors hanging on rusty hinges.
Now.
Now he must hear what the voice had to say.
But the oblong box with little buttons in various colors and strange icons here and there was gone, just like the coffee and Dacso. He had to continue staring at a mute screen. The barn—which he recognized as he had the gravel road—was burning. It was burning! The reddish yellow fire was devouring the wooden walls and climbing further up to the sky as black smoke.
It was in there that Leo kept his tools.
What am I doing? Planning our future. You said it yourself—if you can change, I can change.
All they needed to build everything anew was in the truck. Father and son. Together.
It’s great that you aren’t hesitating anymore because I seriously need your help.
Now it was burning down. Leo had stood so close to him, displaying everything, explaining.
Everything was being consumed by red-and-yellow flames.
The telephone was always in the inner pocket of his suit jacket. Their own pathway of communication, just between them. He pressed the button for the preprogrammed number, as Leo had taught him, and waited. . . . Nothing. Leo’s telephone was switched off. Their line, broken.
Leo? Was your brother right?
Are you using me?
Ivan closed his eyes and tried to remember. What had Leo actually given as an answer to his question? No, he didn’t remember. Or was it that he didn’t want to remember the sentence that had sounded so convincing at the time?
Yeah. I mean what I’m saying.
“Coffee?”
It was burning on the screen, burning and burning.
“Do you want some, coffee?”
Everything . . . everything is a lie and is burning up, he thought. A big, fat fucking lie. Everything you attempt, everything you accomplish burns sooner or later.
That’s how it is. It burns.
It turns into flames.
It turns into soot.
That’s why you didn’t come to pick me up. I was on time and you didn’t come.
“Hey, Ivan? Coffee?”
“What?”
“I just put on some fresh coffee.”
Dacso. He had come back, from somewhere.
“No . . . no coffee.”
Leo had used his own father. Ivan didn’t know how or why but he was certain that Vincent had been right—that he had been reduced to a pawn in some kind of fucking game. A little green plastic soldier, a game piece. With no understanding of what it meant in the big picture. He felt it in his neck, chest, stomach, and it felt as if there was only one way to stop the pain gnawing him inside and out.
“Give me a bottle of wine.”
The grip fell on his neck, the second time in one week. Once too many—and the reason Ivan Dûvnjac could no longer manage what he’d promised himself.
“But you . . . you don’t drink? Wine, I mean.”
“The bottle, for fuck’s sake!”
Dacso shrugged.
“Okay. You’re a customer. You can do as you like. It’ll cost two hundred and twenty-five kronor.”
The fine row of bottles stood next to the loudspeaker on the shelf circling the bar. Dacso pulled one of them down, a bottle of red.
“And you’re sure about this, Ivan? Even though you’ve stopped.”
“The bottle.”
Dacso slowly pulled out the cork and reached for a fresh glass.
“Two hundred and twenty-five. If you want the whole bottle. Or sixty kronor by the glass.”
A promise to yourself, what the fuck is that?
Nothing.
Because it can’t change other people.
“All of it. The whole bottle. And you can take it out of the money you got from Leo.”
“I didn’t get any money for wine from your son. But he paid in advance for the dinner you’re going to eat here.”
If I can change, you can change.
Even that was a lie.
It burns, like everything burns.
“Yes, that money. For the shitty food we haven’t eaten and aren’t going to eat at your dive.”
“Your son said I should hold on to it until he came back.”
“My son isn’t coming back!”
Ivan pulled the room-temperature bottle out of Dacso’s hand. It felt better to fill the glass himself. Egri Bikavér, bull’s blood in Hungarian. He knew fucking well what it meant. As he swallowed the first lukewarm drops, he saw Dacso putting five-hundred-kronor notes, four of them, on the bar. Money that belonged to his son and now he would drink it up. And it felt so pleasant in his throat, in his whole body, like an old friend you’ve hated for two years, who suddenly makes you laugh again.
OUTSIDE AND INSIDE.
John Broncks had only had such a strong experience once before—back when his papa was lying in a bed with a fishing knife in his chest.
Everything simply continued to go on around him. A young woman walked by their window eating ice cream. Two older men sat down on the pier, fishing for perch and drinking bottles of pilsner.
The same feelings, the same motions now—alone in a car in the police station’s underground garage while his colleagues ran around on the other side of the vehicle’s sheet metal in another reality, pursuing an answer he already had.
That was why he was incapable of getting out. He must decide whether he would bury the answer forever or open the car door, snap his fingers, and freeze th
eir motion, shouting, I have the solution.
Only he had the correct information.
Only he could channel the energy buzzing around out there and direct it toward two robbers.
Only he knew that the plunder taken from here a few hours ago was right now packed in four suitcases on board a ferry that would dock in Riga’s harbor early tomorrow morning.
Outside and inside. The world and me.
He had lacked the strength to arrest Sam himself. But he could, with just a few words, see to it that someone else did.
Broncks put his hand on the door handle and let it rest there. Should he once again lock up someone who sacrificed twenty-three years for his sake?
Then he pressed down the handle, opened the door, and stepped out toward the other world, but not into it.
Should he hand over someone who saved his life?
He started to walk slowly through the huge garage and nodded to colleagues without taking in who they were, aiming for the metal door that led to the elevator and stairs to the investigation division.
It wasn’t about the fact that they were big brother and little brother. Not about blood and loyalty.
Maybe it was about—after all—a debt that had never been paid off?
That was why he stopped visiting Sam over the years. Every time they were silent, each on their side of a rickety table in a visitors’ cell, the debt had sat next to them and whispered: He saved your life, but in a little while only you will walk back out into freedom. Eventually Broncks stopped coming—how many times can a human being abide hearing the same thing repeated?
He opened the door to the elevator and pressed the button for the third floor but changed his mind and took the stairs. They took a little longer to walk up.
Long enough to be certain it was the right decision to let a debt that didn’t exist cost exactly 103 million kronor to redeem.
THE TURMOIL WAS so strong she was breaking apart, and combined with ten minutes of standing still and waiting, it was quite simply impossible. So to endure it, Britt-Marie walked two full turns around the Kronoberg police complex in the falling evening darkness, alongside something she’d never seen before—all the buildings had been encapsulated behind the sort of blue-and-white barrier tape that the police usually put up away from the police station. The entrance on Bergs Street looked exactly like the entrances via Polhems Street and Kungsholms Street and Police Station Park. The entire police operation was a single big crime scene. Even the underground had been blocked off and the buses diverted. She had gotten the same version from a couple of the many curious onlookers gathered side by side with journalists and photographers. Some kind of rather large crime had been committed inside the police station itself. Someone had even whispered excitedly that there was information about the largest theft in Swedish history.
After the second lap, she stopped at the low stone wall forming the boundary with the courthouse. She had an appointment to meet there with the young policewoman who had first picked up Leo and turned her whole house upside down, and later showed her a photo of the man in Leo’s car at the hospital—a workplace that should have been off limits. Elisa. An unusual first name, but a pretty one.
And there she was, coming out of the entrance to the police station. She lifted the thin plastic tape, walked under it, and zigzagged through the pack of onlookers.
“I only have a couple of minutes, unfortunately. As you can see, it’s a little chaotic in there.”
Britt-Marie nodded and smiled as best she could while she tried to find a comfortable position. Just as she hadn’t been able to stand still, it was also impossible for her to let her hands hang loose. So she secured them by crossing them over the upper part of her winter coat.
“Vincent called me. He’s my youngest son. I think you’ve also met him? He was upset. A little scared. He said he’d been contacted by a police officer.”
Elisa turned toward the group of onlookers. Someone who had tried to go over the barriers was turned back, politely but firmly.
“Excuse me, I had to. . . . What did you say, Britt-Marie? Had he been contacted by police? By us?”
“Yes. That was what he said. Do you know anything about that?”
“No. I’ve met your son Vincent on only one occasion, and that was yesterday at his place of work. He seemed calm then. A police officer? Did he or she say what it was about?”
“Only that it had something to do with Leo. And that he was urged to accompany a police officer—the same one who investigated the bank robberies before the prison sentence.”
Elisa was forced to engage with the increasingly vocal crowd again, assisting the two deployed security guards in a discussion with the photographers who had pushed their way to the front. And while Britt-Marie stood there at a distance waiting for her reply, she turned over what she had actually heard herself say just now.
A police officer demanding that Vincent do the one thing he didn’t want to—take part in an investigation of his brother.
“I apologize again, Britt-Marie. It’s starting to resemble the atmosphere of a riot over there. Reporters demanding answers because the editors who sent them are demanding answers. A crime inside the police station is evidently tantalizing. But now I’m back.”
Vincent, who decided never again to commit crimes, never again to have anything to do with the police.
“And as for your question, Britt-Marie, about your son Vincent, unfortunately I can’t help you. I have absolutely no knowledge about him right now. But I promise to look into it right away.”
Nevertheless, she simply knew: Vincent had been drawn into exactly what he feared.
And he had been right—this did not feel good at all.
HE HAD NEVER been afraid of the dark. Quite the opposite. It protected, just as silence protected.
But not this time.
It was only now, after the decision about Sam, and with the ceiling light and desk lamp still off and thus alone in all that was nothing, that he dared to feel the unbearable heat and the intense white light.
A firebomb.
None of them had had time to scream.
He had not grasped what scorched skin looked like right afterward.
John Broncks pushed, almost threw open one of the office windows, which looked out onto the courtyard of Kronoberg police station, and let the evening chill rush in. He closed his eyes. Slow breaths. He leaned out into the swirling wind.
It made no difference.
The fire from the roaring explosion shattered the silence, just as the white light penetrated the safe darkness.
He had never killed or even injured anyone. During his entire adult life, he had worked with the violence of others without ever using it himself. He had investigated the hellish consequences of violence again and again, but always after the fact. Now he had also experienced the very moment of death as a professional. When violence took a life. It had even been lying on the ground in front of him.
And he knew why.
For the first time in his service, he had acted as a private citizen, not as a police officer. And the decisions John Broncks the private individual had taken had now brought consequences for the policeman John Broncks.
It had always been the other way around.
The violence that he hated so much had forced him, evening after evening through investigation after investigation, to become sharper and more interested—a force that involved him and kept him there. Until the culprit sat in a detention cell four floors up.
As he leaned out of the window even farther into the icy wind and cold air, he perceived from his clothes that he even smelled of the consequences—burned hair, scorched skin, phosphorus, and gunpowder. And he realized that whatever he tried, no matter how far he leaned out, this day and the decisions that led to the explosion—and death—would never leave him.
So he must, from that moment on, escape it.
Just like all others who were responsible for the aftermath of violence and took flight
from him in investigations. He must reshape the truth and carry the anguish without it being seen from the outside. He would never be able to tell his colleagues about what had happened. About what really happened.
He let his office remain dark.
And he opened the other window too so that the wind would play freely.
ELISA LIFTED THE thin plastic barrier tape that was flapping in the light wind and crouched down as she ducked under it toward the east entrance of the Kronoberg police station. Someone in the front of the crowd called after her—What happened in there? When will we get information?—and she turned around to see who it was, her eyes fixed instead on the woman a bit behind the curious onlookers, at the mother of Leo and Felix and Vincent Dûvnjac.
Britt-Marie had sat down on the low stone wall. She seemed so fragile.
Elisa could still feel her anxiety and worry about her son.
Urged to accompany a police officer who had investigated the bank robberies.
That fucking Broncks.
He was the one she should be calling on her cell, which she pulled out of her jacket pocket, to get the answer to the question the anxious mother had asked. But you didn’t call people who withheld information—you confronted them. For the moment, she had to use an alternative route and dialed an entirely different number.
“Duty officer.”
Even though she was well aware that the duty officer was fully occupied with the catastrophe in the confiscations room.
“Hi, Elisa Cuesta here. I need help with an immediate search for a Vincent Dûvnjac, spelled D-Û-V-N-J-A-C. He’s in our records, photo and description out to all patrol cars.”
“How much of a hurry? What priority?”
“The highest.”
She hadn’t even reached the stairs to the investigation division’s corridor when he called back.
“Elisa, we got an immediate response.”
“Yes?”
“One of our cars responded to an alarm south of the city a few hours ago.”
The Sons: Made in Sweden, Part 2 Page 37
