The Father: Made in Sweden Part I

by Anton Svensson

  The latest job was a 1930s house a few kilometres from Leo’s home in Tumba. He’d put in a bid low enough to undercut any other firms. Gabbe had probably wondered why, but didn’t say anything. Not much profit in it, but it wasn’t about that; with each new bank robbery their cover became more important.

  The two banks had given them 1,368,000 kronor to finance their next robbery – the biggest one so far.

  Now it was 4 April: inspection day. The day Leo been living with since that dark night spent pressed against the moss and bilberries. The night everything had changed.

  The police would discover the missing piece of the puzzle that linked together a series of robberies, a gang whose arsenal was bigger than all the other gangs in Sweden combined.

  Leo drove slowly past fields dried out by the sun after the winter. New grass was sprouting in the verge, and in a few weeks it would push away everything yellow and lifeless.

  After a long, sweeping bend, he came to the military area and the locked barrier.

  He slowed down a little. And then he recognised it: the car he’d watched night after night, a beaten-up Volvo, owned by an elderly inspector who usually stood in the dark smoking a couple of cigarettes. But he recognised another vehicle too – a van with military licence plates.

  Now. Now he knew.

  They were there. They were going to open the door, perhaps already had opened it. They would discover what had happened, and it would terrify them.

  A few minutes past ten, still plenty of time to spare. The train from Falun wasn’t due to arrive until 10.37.

  53

  THIRTY-SIX VIOLENT ROBBERIES in three months all across Sweden. Twenty-two banks, eleven security vans, two exchange offices and a pawnshop. A dramatic increase without precedent – and the gang he was trying to capture was certainly not responsible for them all.

  John Broncks was standing in a brightly lit corridor, digging coins from his right back pocket. There were always more there than he thought.

  Twelve bank robberies a month in such a small country created a state of constant, feverish anxiety and fear – this world was unfamiliar and as long as nothing changed, as long as there was no cure, they’d all sink further into the sickness – a crime pandemic. By mid-February the security vans were being given police escorts, but the banks, too numerous and too scattered, were impossible to protect from infection. Their work had been reduced to waiting for the next alarm and the next investigation.

  Broncks pushed coin after coin into the vending machine.

  A pandemic has a source. In this case, eight shots shaped like a smiley face in shatterproof glass. And he still had no leads, except for piles of cartridges that couldn’t be linked to any specific weapons and several wounded psyches that would never completely heal.

  Smile, you bastard.

  A time of change had turned into a time of confusion – which always happened when a new conceptual model was introduced, when a system fell apart and gave way to a new one, and this new model had spread almost instantly among those who were willing to take risks, those with nothing to lose. The four masked bank robbers had not only changed how the police protected likely targets, they’d changed the behaviour of the entire criminal world – other criminals looked up to that fucking smile, read the newspapers and watched reports on TV and were inspired to copy, committing more robberies, using even more extreme violence as a tool to get more loot. An escalation between us and them. Violence had torn apart the moral compass of the criminal landscape. If we’re armed, you have to be armed, and then we need even more guns to stop you. In ten or twenty years researchers would say that this was when the banking system had been forced to change how it managed its cash handling and when ruthlessness became an admired tool, Broncks was sure of it.

  He pressed the square buttons and waited while the metal spring released the first marzipan and chocolate cake. Then another one. Sugar and silver tea during the day and takeaway pizza at night. That’s how it had been since he’d joined this search that was leading nowhere. Long, aimless walks through Stockholm early in the morning and late at night to let off some of his restlessness and energy – then in the middle of the night, visits to the police station’s gym. Alone in a big room at three o’clock in the morning, he fought with dumbbells and barbells and treadmills and punchbags in order to avoid fighting people. He tore open the plastic, shoved in more green marzipan and chocolate, and swallowed, feeling a creeping disgust for the sweet goo in his mouth. But he had no choice, he had to fill the hollow inside to keep at bay the mirror image of a gaunt, pale, wiry body.

  A homogeneous and close-knit group. No connections to the criminal underworld, and hence none to the network of informants that Broncks and his colleagues worked with. The group’s four members might not have a criminal record; if so they would be anonymous until they made a mistake, and they didn’t make mistakes.

  The newly polished linoleum glistened in the bright light streaming through the office windows. Restless and so tired that he was wide awake, he headed towards the exit for his second walk of the day, even though it was only late morning. He zipped up his lined leather jacket; it was too warm for the spring sun, but he hadn’t yet had time to take down a thinner spring jacket from the attic.

  He’d started to feel a different kind of anger in the last few weeks, an anger he didn’t recognise. He’d been watching him almost every day, a few seconds at a time, on jerky black-and-white surveillance films. The leader. The one who performed the countdown, who shot smiley faces into shatterproof glass, who was able to direct excessive force in order to get what he wanted. That was probably what it was about, this anger. It wasn’t just violence. It was violence combined with playfulness, and that was what Broncks couldn’t relate to. The man in those pictures solved his problems like a child in an adult world, and that was why he was successful – thinking in ways they didn’t and getting around their roadblocks using the kind of magic tricks you’d find wrapped in a box under the Christmas tree. The police knew how to deal with adult criminals, but not this, an inventiveness as fascinating as it was unpleasant.

  He wanted to peer inside that head, talk to it, understand it.

  He headed downstairs, through four locked doors, using first his plastic card and then the key to the gate. It was brighter outside than Broncks had expected, so he closed his eyes, breathing in the mild, spring air, and set off east, towards the city centre.

  Thirty-six aggravated robberies scattered the length of Sweden had taken place since the double robbery at Ösmo, and he had examined them all carefully. He was struck by two. One that followed this group’s MO to the letter, and one that was quite different.

  The first in Kungsör, a sleepy little town an hour’s drive from Stockholm, a bank robbery taken straight from their manual. The leader – Broncks had started calling him Big Brother – always went in first and shot down the camera above the door. Then came Little Brother, always armed with a submachine gun, who would either jump over the counter or run around it to empty the tills. Then the third, the Soldier, who moved into shooting position as if the robbery were a military engagement, urban warfare, a tactical course in which he’d been given a mission. The Soldier was always armed with an assault rifle and shot down the second camera before going behind the tills to the vault. The fourth Broncks called the Driver, who took them to and from the site, who guarded the bank premises from the outside, and who, according to witness testimonies, drove with restraint, neither too fast nor too wildly.

  When Broncks first read the witness statements and technical descriptions from the second robbery – Rimbo, north of Stockholm – he’d put it back in the folder, dismissing it as unrelated. Only two men on the bank premises. Jeans and jackets. Stockings over their heads. And they didn’t shoot down any cameras – so he’d been able to follow the entire robbery, every movement, from entrance to exit. They’d been very calm, polite to the staff, never raised their voices. They’d walked in, shown their weapons, take
n the money, and left the scene in a stolen Opel Kadett. Nothing that resembled their earlier actions. It was only after Sanna had shown him a short sequence caught by the camera on the bank’s exterior, just as she’d done once before, that he opened the folder again. Just before going inside the first man had turned round, as if checking on his colleague, put his hand on his shoulder and said something, and they had shared a lingering look. One who protected and led. Big Brother. One who was protected and who followed. Little Brother.

  ‘John!’

  Broncks, squinting in the intense sunlight, was nearing Scheele Street when he heard hasty steps behind him.

  ‘Wait!’

  He’d never seen his boss run before. And definitely never here. They met each other every day, but only in the corridors, or occasionally at a crime scene, except for the evening he’d visited Karlström’s beautiful home in Äppelviken.

  ‘A hundred and twenty-four m/45 submachine guns!’ shouted Karlström, breathless and triumphant. ‘Ninety-two AK4 automatic rifles! And five model 58 machine guns!’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Quite a few, right?’

  ‘Depends on which war you’re fighting.’

  ‘What if you’re robbing banks and security vans?’

  Broncks had just started an aimless walk in order to burn off nervous energy. Now he no longer needed it.

  54

  THE FOREST ROAD climbed sharply for a couple of hundred metres, dissolving at the top of the hill into a gravelled plateau where a crowd of people mingled – uniformed policemen, soldiers in green uniforms, some in civilian clothes, and one technician in a white jumpsuit glowing in the sun. Then he found it. A small, cube-shaped building. It was around this the crowd had gathered.

  Broncks greeted his colleagues from both the City and Huddinge police, representatives from military security, and an older man smelling of cigarettes who introduced himself as the inspector, and whose anxious eyes followed him as he continued towards the building.

  The white jumpsuit. Kneeling in front of a closed door of thick metal. She heard his footsteps on the gravel and turned round.

  ‘Hello,’ said Broncks.

  ‘You noticed the lock down there? At the barrier?’ said Sanna.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Intact. At least, it looked intact. The original had been removed and replaced with an exact replica. Even the serial numbers were the same. The key fits, but can’t be turned.’

  There was a large hole in the ground at Sanna’s feet.

  ‘Just like here. Everything looked intact.’

  Sanna nodded towards the civilian with anxious eyes.

  ‘He’s been inspecting this bunker every evening and hasn’t spotted anything. From the outside.’

  She strained against the heavy security door as she opened it. She moved slightly to the side to let Broncks look in.

  ‘This is how the perpetrators got inside. A tunnel underneath the building. It was completely filled, we’ve just dug it up again now.’

  She went inside and he followed her into the cramped, sealed space. He thought of his big brother.

  ‘They did a good job.’

  Olive-coloured boxes, all opened and stacked on top of each other along the walls. On the part of the floor that was still whole, the lids had been stacked in a high pile. AK4, submachine gun m/45, KSP 58 in black, slightly sharp type.

  ‘They made efforts to hide what they’d done, and they succeeded.’

  ‘So this is where it began,’ he replied. ‘The unknown variable.’

  ‘What variable?’

  He crouched down, a layer of cement and dust on the knee of his trousers.

  ‘Farsta. Svedmyra and Ösmo. Rimbo and Kungsör.’

  ‘What variable, John?’

  He put his hand against the edges and bottom of the hole. The starting point. For the late nights, early mornings and long weekends, and always he was still running behind, arriving too late. With his arm deep in a void of damp gravel, he was just as impressed as he was pissed off.

  ‘If you’ve never been to jail, if you have no weapons, nor any criminal ties to get weapons through, but you want to build your own criminal operation – what do you do? You simply get them from an arms dump.’

  ‘Never been to jail? John, did you visit him?’

  John Broncks didn’t respond. He didn’t need to. They knew each other in a way that made hiding something like that impossible. And they smiled, quickly, at each other, before he broke away and went outside.

  According to the forensic investigation of a total of five aggravated robberies, the group had never fired any weapon more than once. Broncks had been assuming that after each bank robbery their weapons had been scrapped and replaced by new ones so that the crimes they committed would never be linked technically, and so if the perpetrators were arrested none of them would be linked to more than one robbery.

  But now he had the missing variable: 221. If they continued using an average of two automatic weapons for each new robbery, they would have enough weapons to commit 110 bank robberies.

  That is unless someone caught them.

  A beautiful, arched ceiling. Infinity. Leo always got the same feeling when he found himself in a vaulted stone hall like that of Central Station – the feeling that it went on for ever.

  He proceeded towards platform seven, where trains came in from the north, and made his way under the sheltering roof. He’d always felt most at home in buildings that echoed and stretched out, buildings with open spaces, and he often stopped and leaned his head back to look upward, something people rarely did. Every time he did, he thought of the very first time – when they’d visited Stockholm Cathedral. Mamma had wanted them to see the statue of St George and the dragon, but he’d already discovered the vaulted ceiling, and was standing on tiptoe, trying to touch it even though Mamma kept pointing to the large pedestal of St George in shining armour, a sword raised above his head and a roaring dragon under his horse’s hooves. A moment frozen in time. The moment before it was all over. When the dragon might still wriggle away and tear down the weakling hiding behind his armour and horse.

  He’d also frozen for a moment.

  He’d stopped time, right here, in Central Station. Travellers had been kept waiting behind wire fences, while most of the police in the Stockholm region manned the barricades and guarded the bomb robots. A moment that had stretched out for several hours, as the system shuddered to a halt both before and after an explosion that should never have happened. And now it was as if it never had.

  He wasn’t sure that Jasper hadn’t actually taken out the safety ring, but he’d decided not to ask again. He didn’t want to risk getting the wrong answer. He wanted to keep the ever-widening fissure between Felix and Jasper from growing any further. He’d stepped in between them and stayed there, forcing them to treat each other professionally while simultaneously minimising the number of occasions they needed to work together.

  In the distance a train rolled in and came to a stop. All the doors opened, and the passengers swarmed out with suitcases and buggies. He could see her, a woman in her fifties, with strawberry-blonde hair that had grown a little greyer and a step that wasn’t quite so light. He waited there watching her, and after a moment of searching she looked at him too. But didn’t keep walking. Instead, she took out her phone, and his rang.

  ‘Where are you?’ she asked.

  He smiled.

  ‘I’m standing here. Right in front of you.’

  ‘I can’t see you.’

  There are people between us. But I’m here, I can see you. And you can see me.

  ‘I’m waving.’

  He raised his hand until she saw it, lowered her phone and walked towards him. They hugged. Then she took a step back to study him.

  ‘Dear lord, how strange! I didn’t recognise you.’

  ‘It’s only been a year.’

  ‘More like, I recognised you, but I didn’t see you. It was as if … I was looking for som
eone else.’

  ‘Mamma.’

  He hugged her again, and she examined him again.

  ‘You’re older.’

  ‘I am older.’

  ‘It’s not a bad thing. I don’t mean it like that. It’s just … I don’t know, maybe just time.’

  He tried to take her bag, but she held it up to show she could manage by herself and set off along the platform, through Central Station, towards his car outside – when she stopped.

  ‘Was it here?’

  In the middle of the arrivals hall. In front of the long row of lockers.

  ‘I saw it on TV. There was police tape all across the hall, and people waiting for their trains.’

  She looked at him, remembering other police tape, fluttering in the air around a much smaller house after a different kind of bomb. A basement and her father running back and forth as the flames grew, and in the midst of everything her ten-year-old son had looked at her through the window, so scared.

  ‘Fucking idiots!’

  She put her hand on Leo’s arm. He couldn’t look at her, so he took hold of her bag and wouldn’t let go until she let him carry it.

  ‘The idiots were lucky, Mamma. No one died.’

  The company truck was waiting for them not far from the exit, a parking ticket under one wiper. He tore it up and dropped it on the asphalt, while his mother walked around both the vehicle and him, nodding proudly at the logo on the door: CONSTRUCTION LTD.