The Sons: Made in Sweden, Part 2

by Anton Svensson

  “Yes?”

  “The person you’re inquiring about, Vincent Dûvnjac, was found dead.”

  THE INVESTIGATION DIVISION was slumbering in darkness. After six o’clock it usually looked like this. Colleagues had made their last calls to forensic technicians and fingerprint experts, finished listening to the day’s final interrogations, and put the printouts of the most recent witness testimony back in the correct file. But this evening, everyone, just like her, had orders to remain on duty—either down in the basement and corridors leading to and from the property room, the crime scene, or in the area around the courthouse’s underground station, where the last and most current evidence, a police uniform, had been located out on the rails in the tunnel.

  Halfway down the corridor, the dark became cold—as if somewhere the wind was blowing straight into the building. Elisa noticed that one of the doors stood open and moved a little in the draft. The door to John Broncks’s office.

  Broncks had vanished from the police station in the morning and since then had been impossible to find.

  She now knew Broncks had his own agenda.

  Broncks had secretly contacted a person she met and posed questions to as recently as yesterday, who was now reported dead.

  She increased her stride by the coffee machine—no shitty silver tea in a paper cup—and headed straight to his office. Without knocking she pushed open the rattling door and saw him sitting there at the desk with the lights dimmed and both windows wide open.

  “I want you to come with me to my office. I need to show you something.”

  “Elisa, not now.”

  “Right now.”

  It was difficult to see his expression, with his face dissolving into the blackness of the office, but his unmistakable sigh was audible.

  “I can’t cope with talking about investigations. It’s not the right circumstances. Please just leave me alone.”

  She wasn’t certain, but it could have been that he was smiling at the same time. And not just the discordant grin; it was that marginalizing and arrogant I-stood-and-watched-you-while you-slept smile, which he had used when he invited her to investigate with him.

  She switched on the ceiling light.

  “Elisa, for fuck’s sake, just get out of my office—”

  “No.”

  The bright fluorescent lights drowned them.

  “John, you’re coming with me to my office. You and I are going to talk to each other. And we’ll begin with someone extremely central to our joint investigation, but about whom you’ve failed to give me all the facts.”

  She had been right and she saw it now—it was that fucking smile.

  “Sam Larsen. Your brother.”

  A VIEW OVERLOOKING Birkastan, the black roofs looking like a hilly landscape of sheet metal. The sky above was much clearer when the light wasn’t reflected in the snow that slid down during the day. Or maybe the wine made sure that his brain cells moved more lightly, more freely, so that he perceived the stars as more sparkling, as if they were not so far away.

  Ivan supported himself with his hip against the balcony railing. He reached out his hand with the glowing cigarette in it and he could almost touch them. It wasn’t light years to them, but rather an arm’s length. A couple more drags and he tossed the butt toward the empty filler can and it landed among the others, easily four hundred of them, a pack a day for four weeks. It would be even more if he counted Vincent’s. He actually didn’t like it that the youngest of them smoked, but the feeling of belonging when they both stood out here together, father and son, had made him refrain from protesting.

  Vincent should be here. But the radio hadn’t been on, the damn heroin music that all young people listened to, and all the lights in the apartment had been switched off. With the moving in tomorrow, he had to come soon.

  Ivan shut the balcony door again and it felt good to walk through the sitting room and see a professionally painted ceiling, and to know that he was still just as quick as the young guys and even more skillful. Uneven and sloppily applied paint was always irritating. He was convinced that Vincent wanted to work with him on the next apartment as well—not just to continue to get to know his papa but also because it was damn difficult to find a better painter.

  The wine bottle stood on the kitchen counter. He had parked it there while he was listening for the heroin music. Bull’s blood, straight out of the bottle. He swallowed fast—he didn’t want the taste, only the feel of the heat in his chest. As he placed it down on the metal counter again, an odd double ring arose.

  Ding-dong. One more time. Ding-dong.

  The front door.

  Someone was ringing the bell.

  “Come in. Enter.”

  He moved the bottle to the empty pantry. Maybe it was the neighbor—she was always complaining—or the owner coming to see how nice it had turned out.

  “Come in, come in.”

  A woman. It was possible to tell from the footsteps, light and tentative.

  “Vincent?”

  It wasn’t the neighbor. And not the owner of the apartment.

  Her? What the hell is she doing in the hall?

  “Are you here, Vincent?”

  The mother of his three sons. Britt-Marie.

  He opened the pantry door and let three large gulps fill his chest. When he was done, she was standing in the kitchen and observing him.

  “Two years.”

  Just as surprised to see him as he was surprised to see her.

  “Two years, Britt-Marie. But now it’s over. I’m not sober anymore.”

  More large gulps. He held out the bottle.

  “Would you like some, Britt-Marie? Egri. Bull’s blood. That’s what it means, in Hungarian.”

  “I’m looking for Vincent.”

  She looked around and seemed to be listening for something.

  “He should be working here. That was what Vincent said anyway.”

  Ivan made a sweeping motion with his arm toward the newly painted kitchen ceiling and the newly painted walls and the new tiles between the sink and the cabinet doors.

  “Do you see how nice we’ve made it? Your youngest son and I. Everything is perfect. Vincent is so careful. Do you remember how he laid the pencils in a row when he was little? He is still like that. Everything in its place.”

  “Can you answer my question? Where is he?”

  “Why are you looking for Vincent?”

  “He called me this afternoon. He was upset. He had had contact with a police officer and said that it was about Leo. After that I haven’t been able to get hold of him. I’m worried, Ivan.”

  Fucking TV.

  A large area was blocked off about twelve miles outside Stockholm. At the same time around the courthouse and the police station inside the city.

  Ivan hadn’t understood how, or why, but he was certain that he had been used, one of those pawns in Leo’s plans that Vincent talked about. That in some way it had to do with what was on the television. But would Vincent have also been dragged in? No. He didn’t think so. Vincent had decided. And he had seemed clear about it.

  “You know, Britt-Marie, I’ve gotten to know Vincent now that we work together, and I can assure you, you don’t need to be worried. He would never commit a crime again.”

  She smiled, but it wasn’t a friendly smile.

  “So you don’t know where he is either? You have, as usual, not a clue, right?”

  “He’s coming soon. Don’t worry. What do you mean, as usual? What did you know, Britt-Marie, when they were robbing banks? They left you out. Leo came to me. We were sentenced together!”

  She shook her head slightly. As she sometimes had done before. Sadly. With resignation.

  “I believed . . . that they would split up. Hoped that, so fervently. That the disconnection had finally begun. That the insane, absurd bonds you forced on them as children, the twisted family loyalty—us against the world—that the bonds would have broken there in prison, that the sentence would have t
orn them apart and that our three sons were heading away from one another.”

  Up until then she was nearly whispering. Now she was gradually raising her voice and would soon be shouting.

  “Vincent didn’t even want to come home and eat lunch with Leo. He was afraid, Ivan, to be pulled in again. Do you understand that? I so wished that he would be here. But he isn’t. So he’s on his way there—where he doesn’t want to go! And it’s your fault, Ivan! The fault of your fucking bonds! The fault of that fucking loyalty! Everything you stand for is destroying my children, everything you ever—”

  Her head felt so small in his open hand as his blow hit the entire left side of her face. From the temple to nose to jawbone. He could even feel his fingertips sink into her scalp. And if she hadn’t fallen down, the next blow would have been with his fist.

  But there were no more.

  She didn’t scream, didn’t run, but just sat there on the newly sanded kitchen floor with the blood running out of her nose and looked at him.

  Then he reached for the bottle. There were a couple of gulps left at the bottom, enough to ward off the feeling that was starting.

  A single blow was all that was necessary to break apart all the fucking change and become himself again.

  “Hey, Ivan?”

  She was still looking at him as she got up.

  “The last time we saw each other in an apartment, our sons cleaned up after you. Wiped up fresh blood.”

  Then she walked toward the hall and front door.

  “Now you get to do it yourself.”

  NUMBER 41.

  John Broncks wasn’t sure, but he guessed that was the vending button she usually chose, black coffee with a little milk. His own drink didn’t correspond to any number—regular hot water taken from a special tap to the side of the drinks machine for the others in the investigation division.

  He’d succeeded in delaying the conversation in Elisa’s office for just over fifteen minutes now. He had been forced to hurriedly gather his thoughts to construct a lie—she had new information that threatened his entire existence, both as a policeman and as a private citizen.

  He now knew how the lie should appear and be best presented. As an interrogator, he had learned that skillful liars always begin with the truth and only truth can cover what the liar wants to hide. Quite simply, a lie must be true enough for the recipient to believe it.

  The last drops of coffee went down into the paper cup, and on the way to her office he did what she had done two days earlier on the way to his—held the slightly rounded lips of the cups to avoid burning himself.

  “Knock, knock.”

  He repeated Elisa’s movements again, this time raising the cups as an explanation for the verbal knocking, before he came in and put down her steaming coffee between a couple of large piles of paper.

  “One for me, one for you.”

  Start with the truth.

  For this particular lie, that meant—if there wasn’t another way out—to admit to what she now knew for some reason. That Sam was his brother. And he should add that it was a mistake not to talk about it. But he would never confess the crime or the guilt or the fact that he failed to fully act as a police officer. He had not only let his own brother go, in spite of an armed robbery of a security van with a deadly outcome, but he had also let him escape with suitcases containing 103 million kronor, stolen three floors below the chair he just now sat down on.

  “Seriously—coffee?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Coffee, John? Haven’t you understood that the one thing that we absolutely won’t do together now is have a coffee break?”

  Elisa took the paper cup and carried it to a gap between the binders on the bookcase in a corner of the office.

  “I’ll drink it cold—when you’re gone.”

  Then she let her hand wander among the three stacks of papers on the desk and patted them gently, as if they were alive.

  “These piles, John, are my own system of investigation, which you have never been particularly interested in. Because what separates you and me is that I work with facts, not gut feelings. Each pile is built on facts. This one, for example, to your far left, I call ‘You struck first, you bastard,’ and in it are always the conditions that shaped the moment of the deed.”

  She pulled out a sheet of paper randomly from somewhere in the middle. One of the forensic technician’s photographs of a pile of cartridges under two ATMs.

  “For example, like . . . well, a photo of ammunition—the precondition for entering the scene of the crime. Where did it come from? The Swedish defense. What gun can it be matched to? An AK4, stolen from a military armory. What does that give me in the investigation? Facts, John, to link to a suspect.”

  Elisa drew out another paper, just as randomly.

  “A second example so you’ll completely get it. Here we have another photo. Of an entirely ordinary registration plate. According to the established report, the plate was stolen, as you know, the night before the crime. And it was placed on the vehicle that the surviving robber drove from the scene—the precondition for being able to pass as one of Arla’s milk trucks. Facts, John, to link to a suspect.”

  She placed her two examples aside and took a stapled pile of papers from the top of the stack—now it wasn’t random anymore and Broncks guessed that it was seven, maybe eight documents.

  “But the strange thing is, John, that in the same pile there’s something that can be linked to . . . you.”

  And she pushed them along the surface of the table to him.

  “A district court verdict. Twenty-four years old. A murder—a father stabbed to death by his son. If you look here . . .”

  Her index finger searched along one of the lines at the top of the first page of the bundle.

  “. . . you see the murder victim is named George Broncks. Your father. And here, in this line, John, you see the convicted murderer’s name is Sam Larsen—Larsen, your mother’s maiden name. A name that had been changed from Sam Broncks.”

  That verdict.

  On her desk.

  Elisa had done exactly what no one should ever have the right to do again. She had dug up his family’s business—a father who abused, a mother who looked the other way, a big brother who murdered for the sake of his little brother, and a little brother who turned him in.

  “What the fuck does that have to do with you? You stand in front of your fucking piles and . . . throw it in my face! That has nothing to do with me today.”

  She pretended not to notice his flushed cheeks and loud voice. If she even noticed them. She was so focused on what she had begun to demonstrate and prove.

  “So you are in the first pile. The facts show the precondition for a crime—that you and Sam Larsen are brothers. Then if we look a little at the next pile, the one in the middle that is called ‘You fucked up’ in my system and defines when crimes become clues, you are there too, John. Because in that pile, there’s this.”

  She handed him the sheet on top, which only had four handwritten lines and which he had scribbled on when they’d stood in his kitchen.

  “Four names to check. Four inmates who did time at Österåker in the same cell block at the same time as Leo Dûvnjac. You were quick to circle the name of Sam Larsen. And to explain that we should follow up on two each, alone, because of shortage of time. You didn’t say a word about him being your brother. Not a word about his description matching the robber we both sat and examined on the video sequence. The only thing you said, John, was that he had an alibi. An alibi I’ve never seen.”

  Then she moved her hand to the third stack.

  “I usually call my final pile of papers ‘You can’t fucking think you’ll get away.’ When clues become the perpetrator. And in that one, John, is this report.”

  It was also on top.

  “Recorded by a patrol from the Eskilstuna police I sent out to your brother’s registered address. It shows that in a recent fire at the back of the house—still with
smoldering embers under the ashes—remains of furniture, clothes, books, and even photographs were found. The fridge and freezer were emptied out and the electricity was shut off. Although a neighbor saw him there as late as yesterday.”

  Fifteen minutes. That was all he’d had for the lie.

  “Do you hear what I’m saying, John? All that taken together shows that your brother left for good.”

  He had used the better part of the time to make a call from his office telephone to someone he hoped would be his lifeline.

  “Dammit, John—did you let that happen?”

  So when he leaned back, it was to play the one thing he didn’t feel—ordinary.

  “Elisa, you’re right. I made a mistake.”

  Even though inside he only wanted to run out of there.

  “Of course I should have immediately told you that we are relatives. But our ties have never been especially strong. We have only seen each other a few times in twenty years. Blood doesn’t mean shit to us.”

  The judgment from childhood still lay in front of him and he grabbed it and held it up. Up to this point he had given her the truth, in order to now be able to continue with a lie.

  “You’ve read it yourself, right? In that case, you know I was the one who turned him in and saw to it that he was arrested. And I wouldn’t hesitate to do it again if he committed a crime. But he hasn’t. Since he has an alibi.”

  The lie she would evaluate right now and test whether it held up.

  “Then I want you to give it to me, John. So I can check it myself.”

  ———

  He had managed to make a telephone call.

  “Do you remember you said you’d gladly help if there was a problem?”

  To a lifeline.

  “I remember.”

  “I need your help now.”

  ———

  “There’s a man named Bertil Lundin. He works as a ferryman on the car ferry that connects the mainland with the island we lived on back during that judgment you were waving just now, the island where Sam lived after his release. The ferry is the only link over and back, and Lundin will confirm—when you contact him—that Sam was on board the car ferry at 16:30 on the day of interest, heading to the island.”