The Father: Made in Sweden Part I

by Anton Svensson

  He shook Karlström’s hand from his arm. It felt wrong. Karlström was his boss, not his fucking pal. He shook it loose.

  ‘That’s enough.’

  Broncks stepped outside. It was snowing more heavily now.

  Go there.

  He knew his boss was right.

  37

  THE SNOW CRUNCHED beneath his tyres as Leo drove into the middle of some gloomy woods and parked a few kilometres into the Nacka Reserve, one of Sweden’s largest national forests, where a wide track narrowed to a path. He unbuttoned the flatbed cover and carried the five heavy boxes to a rocky hill that sloped down towards a deserted shoreline.

  In the shadowy illumination of his headlights, he threw each box onto the ice. A hole opened where each one sank, holes that would soon freeze over again – healing the membrane above a heap of sawn-up weapons encased in cement. In the spring, algae would grow over the hard surface of the boxes, and they’d become indistinguishable from the rest of the sea bed. Turning green like the glass of the aquarium that had stood between his bed and Felix’s, and which they’d never cleaned.

  Then he kicked a hole into the deep snow, tore up the earth and moss with a collapsible shovel, placing Jasper’s boots in it. He doused them with lighter fluid and lit them. Shiny leather and solid rubber soles melted while black wisps of smoke stung his nose and eyes.

  Not even Felix or Vincent knew where he was dumping these things. They’d never have to sit there and run the risk of being called snitches. Not like he’d sat there with a fat cop in front of him demanding answers over and over again.

  I didn’t betray you. I didn’t save myself. I saved you.

  Through the park and then the city, steaming in the cold, and there they were, waiting for him in the middle of the yard as he drove through the gate. He’d called Felix and told him to meet him at home.

  ‘What’s so damned important?’

  Leo could hear the alcohol in Felix’s words; he’d always known how much had been drained.

  ‘Let’s discuss this in the garage.’

  A taxi was standing some way off, the engine running.

  ‘You’re paying, brother. And it’ll be more expensive if we go inside. We’re going back to the bar.’

  ‘Go inside.’

  Leo knocked on the taxi driver’s window and handed him two 500-kronor notes. The window wasn’t even rolled up again before the driver turned his ‘for hire’ light on and the car disappeared.

  ‘You can call a new one when we’re finished.’

  The garage was dark and cold. Leo lit the lamp, turned on the heater. Vincent followed him inside, while Felix made a point of staying outside. Until Leo unfurled a detailed map of Stockholm and its southern suburbs, then he decided to come in. Using a red marker, he circled an area at one end of the map, near a main road and not far from the open sea.

  ‘Here.’

  ‘Here, what?’

  ‘Ösmo in about twenty days.’

  ‘Are you serious?’

  ‘Nobody’s ever robbed two banks at the same time.’

  ‘But, damn it, we already know that! Is this why we had to leave our window table and sit in a fucking taxi for forty-five minutes?’

  ‘Felix, listen to me.’

  ‘You listen to me! It’s Lucia, we were sitting in a pub, eating dinner, having a beer … and now here I am, in a freezing cold garage? It’s fucking Christmas soon! We have to have a few days off!’

  ‘You can celebrate next year.’

  Leo straightened the map.

  ‘Nobody’s ever robbed two banks simultaneously. So we’re going to rob three.’

  He drew a red line from the ring around the little town of Ösmo, west along Highway 225, and to a new ring around an even smaller town called Sorunda.

  ‘On our way home. We’ll pass through here. A small bank, completely unprotected.’

  Felix looked first at his smiling big brother then at the map marked with red ink.

  ‘Have I been drinking or have you?’

  He snatched the pen from Leo’s hand and drew a new, larger circle.

  ‘There are no fucking escape routes from there. Right? And you think we should give them our position, one more time? Let them surround us?’

  Leo grabbed the pen from Felix’s hand, drew a cross outside the map – directly onto the wooden surface of the workbench.

  ‘Not if they don’t have any cops to surround us with.’

  He looked at them and then pointed to the cross outside the map.

  ‘That … is Central Station. The middle of Stockholm. Forty-nine kilometres away. And they’ll have their hands full … defusing a bomb.’

  38

  A FLAT LANDSCAPE. White as chalk. It had been dark when he left Stockholm, but now it was bright, sun bouncing off the snow, blinding him as he drove the 220 kilometres to the Kumla Maximum Security Prison.

  He could still feel his boss’s hand on his arm. He knew he wasn’t doing this because of Karlström, and yet, he was just as sure that Karlström was right.

  Just like Sanna had been right.

  They’d used all their contacts with any connection to the criminal underworld. No results. But there was one contact left – one that was his alone.

  The grey wall, seven metres of concrete and barbed wire, loomed in the distance beyond the fields. It had been a few years since the last time he’d been here, but he had the same feeling as he got closer – were there really people inside, walking around and thinking and sleeping and eating and longing away huge chunks of their lives?

  He parked near the gate, got out and rang the bell.

  ‘John Broncks, City Police.’

  The crackling speaker on the door did not work.

  ‘John Broncks, City—’

  ‘I heard you the first time.’

  ‘To visit Sam Larsen.’

  ‘You don’t have an appointment.’

  ‘I’m making one right now.’

  ‘Six hours. Even for police officers.’

  ‘This is not a visit. This is a criminal investigation.’

  The click of the door unlocking and then a short walk to the guard post where a uniformed man sat surrounded by institutional Christmas decorations – a plastic star in one window and an ugly straw goat sitting on one of the monitors that transmitted images from fifty-eight surveillance cameras.

  He showed his ID and received a visitor’s badge; he was supposed to wear it on his chest, but put it inside his pocket. A guard escorted him to the visiting area and left him alone in a room with a conjugal bed covered by rough protective plastic, a simple table with two equally simple chairs, a sink with a dripping tap, and a view through the barred window of the wall outside. Here there was no Christmas, no holiday season for those who didn’t have the luxury of counting out time.

  Fifteen minutes later, the door opened and two prison officers came in with a figure, then exited, closing the door after them. They left the man they’d brought with them behind. He was two years, three months and five days older than John Broncks. And a couple of centimetres taller. And, nowadays, thirty kilos heavier. They’d been the same size, but eighteen years of lifting weights daily, a structure when all other structure was lacking, had changed that.

  ‘Hello,’ said Broncks.

  They looked at each other. One in jeans, a jacket and winter boots. One in baggy trousers made from fabric that was simultaneously stiff and loose, a worn T-shirt with a prison logo on the chest, and slippers on his bare feet.

  ‘I said … hello.’

  Broncks sat down at the rickety table. Sam went over to the barred window and looked out.

  ‘How are you?’ Broncks tried again.

  He’d visited occasionally in the beginning, those first few years the life sentence was being served, first at the Hall Prison and then at Tidaholm. That was before he understood that not being able to think in terms of time was the same as not being able to hope, not having a future. And when Broncks finally under
stood that this kind of life changes a person, he visited less frequently, and eventually not at all. And he’d probably never even been in this particular visiting room before.

  ‘Listen … next time you come here, make a fucking appointment,’ said Sam. ‘Just like everybody else. Just like people who aren’t cops. Next time I don’t want any questions when I get back to my kitchen section about where I’ve been. You should know that as well as anyone – a visit from a cop without any explanation is about the worst thing that can happen to you in here!’

  Sam was still standing by the barred window, his back to Broncks.

  ‘I asked you how you were.’

  ‘How I am?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘When the hell did you become interested in that?’

  He turned his broad back around and looked at Broncks.

  ‘And since you can’t answer me – what the hell are you doing here, anyway?’

  John Broncks pulled out the second chair from the table. It was going better than he’d hoped. They were talking.

  ‘Two big robberies. Svedmyra. Farsta. By the same guys.’

  But his big brother chose to remain standing.

  ‘Mamma was here last week.’

  ‘Heavily armed. Very well planned.’

  ‘I offered her marble cake. Do you remember what that tastes like, John?’

  ‘Do you think it could be someone you’ve done time with? It’s surely—’

  ‘And the time before that … muffins.’

  ‘—being talked about in here, right?’

  Sam leaned over the table, furious.

  ‘You haven’t been here for three fucking years! But you come here and think that I’m about to give you information! That you can use me in your fucking investigation!’

  Sam was shaking as he walked over to the metal disc attached to the door, reaching for the red button.

  ‘Fuck you, John!’

  ‘Sam, you know I want to see you, too. You’re my brother.’

  ‘Even if I did know something, I sure as hell wouldn’t say anything to you! But I don’t. No one knows! No one in here has ever heard of them! Are you with me, bro? These guys are completely unknown. They’ve never done time. And they still know exactly what they’re doing.’

  Sam stared at him with eyes John couldn’t reach, his finger on the red button again. He pushed it in and leaned toward the microphone.

  ‘This visit is over.’

  ‘You have more than half an hour left.’

  ‘What part of over do you not understand? I want to go back to my section.’

  They avoided looking at each other just as they had when they’d fought as children, when they would have done anything to see over and around each other.

  ‘So Mamma visited?’

  Marble cake. Muffins. Prisoners serving long sentences and who were considered a security threat always baked before a visit. Broncks smiled weakly.

  ‘Do you know, Sam, that you have more contact with her than I do?’

  Steps outside the door, then it was opened by the prison officers. Sam had already started to leave, one of them in front of him and one behind, when he turned round.

  ‘You should see her. She’s getting old.’

  John Broncks watched his older brother disappear down the prison corridor, his broad back between a pair of scrawny men in uniforms, returned his visitor’s badge, passed the central guard post and walked through the gate in the wall, then sat motionless in his car.

  Seven-metre-high walls. Four hundred and sixty-three of Sweden’s most violent criminals serving long sentences. One had been elected spokesperson for all of them, one of the few whom everyone spoke to.

  His own brother.

  And even Sam hadn’t heard anything. The men Broncks was searching for were just as anonymous inside those walls.

  He started the car and drove away. The sunlight still glistened on the snow.

  39

  STREETS THAT WERE white and clean outside the walls of the prison turned muddy and dirty 220 kilometres later as the E4 motorway to Stockholm became the Essinge Highway and then the garage entrance in the rock beneath the police headquarters at Kronoberg Park.

  He was heading for the lift when he heard a sound from the little garage inside the garage, where the forensic technicians kept the vehicles they were working on. He walked over and went inside, and there was Sanna, just like last time. She lay halfway inside a van with HEATING SOLUTIONS written on both sides, an infrared lamp in her hand.

  ‘First getaway car. A Dodge van.’

  Sanna crawled out and went over to the next vehicle, switched to a lamp with ultraviolet light.

  ‘Second getaway car. A Dodge van.’

  The same mechanical voice. He wondered if she was aware of it, or if her voice was only like that when she talked to him.

  ‘An older model. Stolen the night before the robbery.’

  She held up an elongated tool, metal protruding from a wooden handle – aimed it at a small, black, square sticker sitting on the van door just below the side window.

  ‘It’s just as fast as using a key.’

  She was done. Broncks recognised her way of turning her back when she didn’t want to talk. She opened the computer that was on the bonnet of the car. Not even a goodbye. He said it, bye, but she didn’t hear, and he was on his way out, halfway to the lift, when she called after him.

  ‘John? I hadn’t finished.’

  He stopped, turned around.

  ‘You hadn’t?’

  ‘One more thing.’

  She turned the screen towards him, waited for him to come closer.

  ‘This picture. I want you to look at it again.’

  CAMERA 2. Twelve seconds in. From above. Robbers in blue jumpsuits, black boots, black masks.

  ‘His microphone. I was trying to find out what make it was, so I enlarged it and concentrated on the collar, seconds before they went inside.’

  She rewound, froze the picture.

  ‘Four seconds in – fifteen frames per second. I want you to look at each one.’

  Her voice wasn’t so mechanical. She was standing closer to him. And he knew exactly how she smelled. How strange. As if it were another time. As if they could walk away from here together to the apartment they shared. As if ten years had never gone by.

  ‘There.’

  The first bank robber had only one step left to the door.

  Then he stopped.

  ‘His hand.’

  She enlarged the image.

  ‘Do you see?’

  John nodded. He saw it clearly.

  The one going in first, leading, stopped and turned round, lowering his weapon and putting his left hand over his collar, where the microphone was, covering it with his palm. He leaned forward and moved the other robber’s headphones with his right hand.

  ‘The movement … there.’

  The hand over the microphone. The hand on the headphones. And then, Broncks was sure of it, he … whispered.

  ‘It doesn’t make sense,’ said Sanna.

  She zoomed in on the mouth and its thin lips, two light streaks in dark fabric as they formed words.

  ‘The hand. The whispering. It doesn’t make sense.’

  Sanna, standing close, looked at John – just as the leader in the frozen film frame was standing close to his partner.

  ‘Intimacy. As if he’s putting his hand over his microphone, then raising the headphones almost lovingly. Do you see? Just before he’s about to start firing live rounds.’

  After two months of round-the-clock police investigation, he had no clues, knew nothing about them. But this. John Broncks could see and feel it. He knew something now. He wasn’t exactly sure what, but for the first time in his search for shadows, he saw real people. And they were standing close to each other in a way that two violent bank robbers shouldn’t.

  Something he almost recognised.

  ‘Can you return the picture to its original size? And
play the same sequence again? The first four seconds?’

  She did so.

  ‘Stop … there. And enlarge … there. His face. Just that.’

  Three robbers in a row on their way into a bank and Broncks’s index finger on the screen. Pointing to the one in the middle.

  ‘Do you see? He closes his eyes.’

  Cursor on the timeline, she moved it manually, frame by frame.

  ‘He hesitates. He’s worried.’

  The eyes in the mask remained closed.

  ‘He’s scared and that was … like a damn hug! The leader who’s holding his microphone, he’s being protective – they belong together.’

  40

  JOHN BRONCKS AVOIDED the lift. Sometimes he needed to keep moving, force his heart to beat faster, to squeeze every breath through his chest and into his throat.

  He practically ran up the stairs.

  And then into his office – he threw the windows wide open, let the damp chill from the inner courtyard of the police station hit the dry heat inside.

  They’d looked so intimate. Bank robbers shouldn’t look like that. The leader should have been in command – but the other robber’s hesitation had been more important.

  Something Broncks recognised.

  One who was taller and one who was a little shorter. One who was broader across the shoulders and one who hadn’t finished growing. One who was older and one who was younger.

  Intimacy. Trust.

  That was what Broncks recognised. The bond between them. Someone who had always been close by, who’d held him in the evening, who’d said everything would be all right, and then later that night had crept into their parents’ bedroom and put a knife between their father’s ribs. A big brother who’d held him and whispered to him and calmed him down, right before an act of violence.

  A few deep breaths at the open window. John Broncks knew now.

  For the first time since the beginning of this investigation, he actually knew something, and they were no longer completely faceless, there was an outline.

  Intimacy. Trust.

  They were brothers.

  41

  LEO STOOD AT the window, which was carefully decorated for Christmas, watching a grey, misty dawn. The weather had turned in the last few weeks. The snow was melting by Christmas Eve, and Christmas morning arrived with steady rain, the ground turning into a dirty mix of ice, snow, gravel and dirt. Leo had been hoping for this – a grey Christmas and snow-free roads. He hoped that it would continue – if the surface were dry it would simplify the getaway after the bank robbery.