‘My dear Gabbe – have you ever been disappointed in me? Have I ever done a bad job? Have I ever been late?’
Gabbe wriggled his outraged body out of Leo’s overly tight grip and ran towards the other corner of the metal building.
‘The wall here! The hair salon! A layer of plaster is missing! Do the old ladies have to get their perms without a fire wall around them?’
He ran out into the car park and the rain that had gently started falling again.
‘And … that damn container – you were supposed to move that. In a few weeks this is supposed to be customer parking!’
Gabbe slapped his palms several times against the container that took up so much space in the car park. The sound was muted because the storage unit was filled up to the brim.
‘Calm down – we don’t want you to have a heart attack, all right?’ said Leo.
The foreman’s face was even more flushed after running around, but now his whipped-up anger started draining out of him and flowing away in the rainwater.
‘It will be done by midnight,’ said Leo. ‘I need this firm, Gabbe – I don’t think you really understand how much I need it. My construction firm, our collaboration, it’s absolutely necessary for me to be able to … expand.’
‘Expand?’
‘Maximise profit. Without increasing risk.’
‘Now you’ve lost me.’
‘You’re breathing pretty heavily. I’m worried about you. You should go home and rest. We’ll be done by midnight. You can depend on me.’
Leo stretched out his hand and held it aloft between them.
‘Right?’
Gabbe’s hand was small and moist and soft when it met his. Leo nodded.
‘Good. The job will be done today if I say it will. And then I’ll treat you to some cinnamon buns. OK?’
Leo waited between the container and the car as Gabbe left. He had stood there beating his greasy hands on a metal box filled with automatic weapons, and he’d had no idea. Next time he might want to open it.
When he was absolutely sure that the loud-mouthed foreman was far down the road, Leo set off across the street and into the residential area, towards the solution to his storage problem – a small, two-storey house, with a fenced-in yard and no lawn, right next to a major road. He’d seen the owners moving furniture out. Now it had a FOR SALE sign out the back. He walked beside a high chain-link fence towards the gate, entered the yard and, crossing the asphalt, went up to the house, peering in through the window to the left of the entrance – an empty kitchen. Through the window to the right of the entrance he saw an empty hallway. Around the corner and into the next window – an extension and an empty room. Around the corner again and into the next window – the stairs to a second floor.
Two floors, but no basement. The entire neighbourhood was built on an old lakebed. Every house was built on mud and could be extended up, but not down.
Several times in the last week he’d stopped nailing and drilling to look at the ugly little stone house that lay so close to the road. And every time he’d seen the Phantom’s Skull Cave. He knew it was a childish thought. But it was also a solution.
A house you didn’t really notice, for people without much money.
On the front door there was another FOR SALE sign. He looked at the picture of a smiling estate agent with a swept-back fringe and wearing a suit, searched for the pen in his inside pocket and wrote down the phone number on the back of the receipt from the wigmaker.
The big garage was a dream. He climbed up onto a pile of used tyres and wiped dirt off the window in order to see in – high ceilings and room for four, maybe even five vehicles. Perfect for the formation, the training of a group.
A door opened and closed.
He turned to the garden next door; a much larger house, with lawns covered in wet leaves and a row of apple trees like craggy skeletons. A woman with a small child stood on the gravel path; she looked at him, a curious prospective buyer, and he nodded.
The blows of hammers and the drone from across the road – the uniform an observer would see. A house with a garage to its right – headquarters and a place to train. And in the forest just a few kilometres away – the most remarkable night of his life.
And it had been so easy.
That three brothers and their childhood friend – all around the age of twenty, all snotty-nosed kids without any education – could decide to pull off the biggest arms coup of all time, equipped only with general construction knowledge, plastic explosive, and an older brother who knew the power of trust.
3
A STARRY SKY, brighter than the night before. Leo and Felix squeezed into the truck and drove to a suburb of high-rise apartments, away from the now completed Blue House and a satisfied Gabbe, away from a locked container that sleepy commuters would pass on their way to the bus stop.
The two brothers got out of the truck. Each grabbed one of the brass handles of the battered wooden toolbox on the flatbed.
‘It’s eleven fifty,’ said Leo.
The box was the same weight as when it had held tools, despite the new contents – the new life, their other life, which was about to start.
‘Eighteen hours to go.’
They carried it past some low bushes and a sparse flowerbed on their way to the block of flats and the staircase. Leo opened the door. While they waited for the lift, they could hear Jasper and Vincent laughing together in the basement storage rooms.
Fourth floor.
His door. Their door. DÛVNJAC/ERIKSSON. They put the wooden toolbox down while Leo searched for his keys, then took the stack of flyers crammed into the letterbox on the door and threw them in the garbage chute.
The lights were on inside.
Anneli was sitting in the kitchen on a simple wooden chair, the sound of the sewing machine her mother had given her colliding with the music coming from a cassette deck, the Eurythmics – she often played eighties music.
‘Hi,’ said Leo.
She was beautiful, he forgot that sometimes. A kiss and a gentle pat on her cheek. The black fabric twisted, captured, impaled by the sewing machine’s needle. He turned to the sink and the cabinet below it. They were still there. Right where he’d hidden them, far at the back behind the bottles of washing-up liquid and bottles of floor cleaner. Three brown boxes. Not especially large, but heavy.
‘Wait.’
He’d already been on his way out.
‘Leo, I haven’t seen you for days.’
Last night he’d come in and, without stopping at the bathroom or refrigerator, had gone straight into the bedroom and laid down in a bed smelling of her – not her perfume or newly washed hair, just her, lying close to her and holding onto her sleeping body, the force of the explosion at the armoury still reverberating in his chest. The clock radio on his bedside table had blinked 4.42, and she’d turned over, her naked body against his as she yawned and pressed herself even closer.
‘And this morning when I woke up, you weren’t here any more. I miss you.’
‘Not now, Anneli.’
‘Don’t you want to see what I’ve made? The polo necks? You were the one who …’
‘Later, Anneli.’
He was just about to go down the hall to the living room where the others had already started unpacking and repacking, when he saw the empty wine bottle on the draining board and the wet cork in the sink.
‘Have you been drinking? You’re going to be driving.’
‘Just a little. But it was last night … Leo, you were in the woods, and I didn’t know a damn thing. How it was going, if you’d come home, if someone saw you and would … I couldn’t sleep! And now … what have you been doing?’
‘Construction. We weren’t finished. Now we are.’
He was already out of the room.
She stopped the sewing machine.
Why were her hands trembling? When she was the one who’d wanted to be involved? When she was the one who wanted to make the vests and
who would put masks on Leo and Jasper and drive them to the site?
Leo rolled down the blinds on the window overlooking the Skogås shopping centre. The living room looked just like every other living room: sofa, easy chair, TV, bookcase. But that was about to change.
The four men worked on opening the tool chest, the Adidas bag and the paper bags that Jasper and Vincent had brought up from the basement, and the three brown boxes that had been under the sink, and then placing each item in a long row on the wooden floor, as if this were a military inspection before an attack.
A folded wheelchair found in the corridors of Huddinge hospital, the kind that could be collapsed in just two moves, and two yellow blankets with the name of the hospital on them, found in the hospital ward among sleeping patients.
A bag with two wigs of real hair from the Folk Opera and two pairs of brown contact lenses from the optician on Drottninggatan.
Two AK4s and two submachine guns taken from the black container on the building site. Shoes, pants, shirts, jackets, hats, gloves. Torches – Vincent would carry the smaller one in his pocket, and Felix would signal with the larger one. Two five-litre drums full of petrol. And four sports bags beside four indoor hockey sticks.
Leo sat down in the wheelchair and rolled across the shiny floor towards the bathroom wall, turned around, rolled back. He spun around several times, and leaned, trying to tip the chair over.
It was steady.
He stood up and went back to Anneli in the kitchen, caressed her cheek as before.
‘How’s it going?’ he asked.
‘They’re ready.’
Extra fabric extended the black collar of the polo neck. Anneli pulled on it hard, and the seam held and stayed invisible. It was her design.
‘Each collar has a face mask. They all work.’
She then pointed to two green vests.
‘And these. Just like you wanted them. Beaver nylon fabric. Pockets for magazines.’
He tried on the vest he’d be wearing under his windcheater. It fitted perfectly. She knew his body.
He leaned forward and kissed her.
‘All that stuff on the living room floor, any amateur could get hold of that. But not this. Or one of these.’
He held onto the vest and picked up one of the sweaters with the elongated collar.
‘Details. That’s the difference. What makes it possible for us to get close enough and transform quickly enough.’
One more kiss and back to the wheelchair again. He folded down the leg rest and put his right leg on it, tried to sit as he thought someone with an injured leg would sit. Jasper squatted in front of him, wearing thin, transparent plastic gloves, opening up the first of the three compact brown boxes – 7.62 calibre, lead and steel core – then the second – 9 calibre, metal jackets – and the third – tracer ammo with phosphorus that would make a luminous red streak several hundred metres long. He then filled each magazine with cartridges and taped them together in pairs. Four pairs for the newly sewn pockets in his own vest, three pairs for Leo’s vest, and one pair each for Felix and Vincent, who would wear them in little bags on their stomachs.
‘No one looks directly at people who are different. And we’re going to take advantage of that. Of their prejudice, their fear.’
Leo spun around in the wheelchair.
‘And if they do look, it won’t be for long.’
He moved his wheelchair in the same way he remembered the disabled people that his mother worked with moving theirs. His mother, who’d worn a white nurse’s uniform and let her three sons come to the nursing home sometimes, when they couldn’t stay at home on their own. That’s when they’d all seen it – how adults turned their eyes away in uncertainty.
‘Right? Don’t stare at what’s different.’
Jasper handed him an AK4, and Leo tried holding it in his right hand under the yellow blanket, next to his leg on the footrest.
‘You’re exaggerating too much.’
‘No, I’m not.’
‘Yes, you are. Isn’t he?’
Jasper looked at Felix and Vincent, who both nodded.
‘You’re overacting, Leo,’ said Felix. ‘It ruins it.’
‘That’s how they moved their wheelchairs. But you don’t know that. You were too small.’
Leo got up out of the chair and looked around the room. Their very first time. None of them had carried out a major robbery before. But everyone had their roles and knew what to do. And on the floor in front of him was everything they needed.
In less than twenty-four hours, they would be transformed.
4
SIX THIRTY-FIVE P.M. Fifteen minutes remaining.
A journey in silence.
All of them were focused inward.
Anneli adjusted the van’s rear-view mirror; she was tall in comparison to her few female friends, but despite that she was significantly shorter than Leo, who was sitting next to her in the middle seat, and Jasper, who was in the passenger seat. A red traffic light, the last before Farsta. It was as if she was slowly being sucked into that light – the more she stared, the more it took hold of her and carried her away.
She didn’t remember the single moment in which she’d decided to be involved, the moment when someone had shoved this into her life, my God, because if anyone had suggested just a few years ago that she was capable of this, that she’d be on her way to rob a security van … Or maybe there was no single moment. Maybe there were just small moments melting together that she never noticed. Maybe one day someone says there is an arms dump in the forest, and someone else says it might be possible to open it up and empty it out, and someone else says that if you empty out a bunker full of weapons, then you might as well use them to rob someone – perhaps when you find yourself surrounded by such moments you slowly become a part of them. No one had ever really asked her a question that she’d stood up and said yes to. Abnormal becomes normal, the ideas of others become her ideas and suddenly a woman named Anneli – a mother – is driving a car towards something she could never have imagined. That was probably why she took off too fast when the light turned green, her driving uncharacteristically erratic.
She was shaking. Not very much, not enough for Leo to notice; he had long since retreated into himself. She was shaking because she’d only ever been so scared before when she gave birth to Sebastian. That had been just like this, crossing a border, knowing that your old life was over.
‘There.’
Leo pointed to a pavement lined with lamp posts. She guessed there were another two hundred metres to the middle of Farsta.
‘Stop right between those two – where it’s darkest.’
Leo closed his eyes, feeling a calm that only existed inside him.
Only I know. No one out there knows what’s going to happen. I am the only one who can feel each new step.
They sat waiting for his signal. Anneli was on his left, almost gasping, Jasper on his right, his breathing slow and steady as if he were trying to relax himself.
The van’s engine was off, and it had become obvious how dark this October evening was. Leo had sat alone here for four Fridays in a row in a parking spot facing the rear of the forex office, near the bus stop and the entrance to the metro, the Tunnelbana. He’d recorded every moment of the actions taken by the two uniformed guards in an armoured security van, the route they chose, the pattern of their movements, how they communicated with each other.
‘Sixty seconds.’
Her hands started trembling again. He grabbed them, looked at her, holding her hands until the trembling decreased. She did one last, very quick inspection.
First the wigs, made from real human hair. If any traces were found later, they would be from a person with thick, dark hair. She reassured herself that they were on straight and covered all of their blond hair, made sure they weren’t too perfect, tousling both Leo’s and Jasper’s fringes.
Then the makeup. Waterproof mascara on the eyelashes and eyebrows; she brushed them up
wards, making them bushier. Their foreheads, cheeks, noses, chins, necks had been scrubbed clean of dirt and dead cells in the apartment bathroom, moisturised and covered with Sunless tanning lotion.
‘Thirty seconds.’
She told them to blink so she could see if their brown contacts sat right.
She examined their jeans, jackets and boots, Leo’s windcheater and Jasper’s oilskin coat; they’d worked together to survey men’s fashion, and this was what they’d agreed two young Arabs, recent immigrants, might wear.
Finally, the polo necks.
‘Lean forward.’
Her idea, her design.
‘Both of you.’
She folded them down, pulled them up, folded them down again.
‘You’re wearing them too high. In order for them to work, you have to be able to grab hold of them and pull them over your face without them slipping down again.’
‘Fifteen seconds.’
He adjusted his vest, its extra magazines chafing slightly against his chest.
‘Ten seconds.’
The thin leather gloves.
‘Five seconds.’
He leaned over to kiss her, and she flinched a little as his moustache, also made from human hair, brushed against her upper lip; it was slightly awry, and she smiled as she readjusted it with two fingers until it was straight.
‘Now.’
Anneli opened the door and stepped out onto the pavement, loosened the cover on the white truck bed and lifted out the wheelchair and two blankets. Right footrest up – with a new, shorter butt, the AK4 could be hidden under the blanket completely. Jasper steadied Leo as he sat him down on the plastic padded seat and nodded towards the van as Anneli drove away.
Along the dark pavement. Down the gently sloping hill, which would become much steeper in a moment – the loading bay for one of Stockholm’s largest forex offices.
Leo had carefully mapped out every section of their course.
‘Leo?’
Jasper had stopped the wheelchair, leaning down to unlace his shoes and then tie them up again, so he could whisper without anyone seeing.
The Father: Made in Sweden Part I Page 3
