by The Helicopter Heist- A Novel Based on True Events (retail) (epub)
The last thing he had done before he entered the new-baby haze was to promise that he would try to verify Alexandra Svensson’s story. The idea of going straight through the roof into the room where they counted money on the sixth floor sounded almost too good to be true. Had she made it up because she wanted to impress them? Sami thought he knew a way to check. And so, one day in early May, he walked up to Pro Gym on Högbergsgatan to meet Ezra Ray.
* * *
—
“Here!”
Ezra shouted across the entire gym. It was just after ten on Saturday morning, but despite the relatively early hour, the place was full. As ever, interest in working out always peaked once spring was on its way; the thought of swimming trunks and bikinis terrified people back onto exercise bikes and StairMasters.
Sami waved and made his way over to the corner with the free weights, where Ezra was busy. He recognized that familiar gym scent: sweat and metal, deodorant and cleaning products.
“Jesus!” Ezra Ray shouted across the room. “You look like shit!”
Everyone within hearing distance automatically turned to see exactly who it was who looked like shit. Sami Farhan felt their eyes mercilessly boring through his thin sweater, revealing the excess fat he had gained around his stomach over the winter.
He’d had trouble getting back into working out for the past few years; he associated that sort of discipline with the routine in prison, and ever since he’d gotten out, lifting weights was the last thing he wanted to be doing.
“What about you, then?” he said to his friend. “You’re so weedy you look like a stickleback. You need to be able to put some weight behind those punches.”
Ezra had been using the dumbbells, but he dropped them onto the mat with a rattling thud. With his shaved head, high cheekbones, sunken cheeks, broken nose and wiry, overly muscular frame, Ezra Ray didn’t have trouble looking intimidating.
“You what?!” he shouted. “You what?”
The entire room fell silent.
Ezra clenched his fists and got into the classic boxing position. All around them, people’s mouths were open, they were staring. Sami lost no time in mirroring his friend’s pose.
“Right, you bastard,” said Ezra, “I’ll show you how weedy I am!”
A second later, he burst into laughter. Disappointed, the drama-thirsty gym rats had no choice but to turn their attention back to themselves.
“Seriously though, Sami,” Ezra said once he picked up the dumbbells to finish his last few repetitions, “you look like you’ve lost some of your edge.”
Sami nodded. There was no denying it.
The two men had first met during their teens. They had worked out together from time to time, but for Ezra Ray, boxing had been too traditional, too regulated. He had started with karate and jiujitsu, but he’d had trouble taking all the bowing and meditating seriously. When Ultimate Fighting broke through, it was as though the sport had been made for him. He was probably too old for it now, but so long as he won matches, his age wasn’t a problem. During the last ten years, Ezra Ray had constantly been in training for one championship or another, and that Saturday in May was no exception.
These days, he rarely ended up on the podium, but he never came last either.
“I’m just going to finish up,” he said, “then we can have a delicious protein drink and talk seriously.”
* * *
—
“I spoke to my sis,” Ezra Ray said a few minutes later when he joined Sami at the makeshift bar on the other side of the room. A strawberry white-chocolate protein shake was waiting for him. “I didn’t tell her exactly what it was about, but I asked how you could get hold of the plans for different buildings, if she could sort that kind of thing out. She said you just have to go to the town planning office.”
Ezra Ray’s sister Katinka worked for an architecture firm. She was the one Sami had been thinking of when he promised Maloof to double-check Alexandra Svensson’s story.
“The town planning office?”
“I checked. Anyone can go there. You don’t even have to be an architect. It’s on Fleminggatan. That’s your patch, Sami.” Ezra laughed. “Next to the police station and the jail.”
“Cool,” Sami said, though he didn’t smile.
“That’s that anyway.”
Ezra sipped his shake and was left with a pale pink protein mustache. Somehow, it suited his wild appearance. “Shit, that’s good!”
“I don’t know,” Sami replied. “Just going into the town planning office and asking for the drawings for the city’s biggest cash depot doesn’t exactly seem smart. You know what I mean?”
Though he was sitting on a bar stool, he managed to keep his ankle moving so that his leg bobbed up and down.
“Katinka said that was how it worked. Can’t you sit still?”
“But it’s a cash depot,” Sami replied, his foot keeping the same rhythm.
“Yeah.”
“She must’ve been joking. Course they won’t give out the drawings. You know? Maybe you can get the drawings for an ordinary house, but a bank? Of course you can’t.”
Ezra shrugged.
“She said all the drawings were at the town planning office. I’ve got no idea. Guess we can try.”
“You’re insane,” Sami declared.
“You know it,” Ezra laughed, downing the last of the liquid in his glass and getting strawberry on his nose. “I can test it out if you want?”
Sami smirked. Ezra Ray had been kicked in the head one too many times.
* * *
—
On Monday morning, they parked up on Scheelegatan. Sami waited in the car as some kind of moral support while Ezra walked down the hill toward the town planning office.
He crossed Fleminggatan in his typically inimitable way. His arms didn’t just swing by his sides, they were like small propellers. Ezra had been severely bow-legged since childhood, meaning that every step forward looked more like a lurch to the right or the left.
He jogged up the stairs to the huge brick building, and used the information board at the entrance to work out where the town planning offices were located. It was just before eleven, and he didn’t see another soul on his way through the long corridors, which eventually came to an end by a pretty glass door.
He rang the buzzer. A whirring sound opened the door and Ezra stepped inside.
Without hesitating, not even for a fraction of a second, he walked over to the elderly man sitting behind the reception desk.
“Hi,” he said cheerily, “I’d like to look at the drawings for a building in Västberga? Västberga Allé Eleven?”
The man behind the desk studied the relatively young fighter wearing a pair of ripped jeans, a black leather jacket and a broad smile. He nodded and then typed the address into his computer.
“Aha,” he said without looking up. “Vreten Seventeen, you mean? By Georg Scherman. On the corner of Västberga Allé Eleven and Vretensborgsvägen Thirty-Two?”
“Exactly,” Ezra replied, not having a clue what the old man was talking about.
The man was reading the screen.
“The last time someone requested these drawings was October 1979,” he said. Ezra shrugged. The man seemed to be reading aloud from the archival notes.
“If you go in there,” he continued, nodding toward a small room full of desks and chairs, “I’ll bring you everything we’ve got. Are you familiar with the rules?”
Ezra didn’t dare answer yes to that question. His hesitation caused the old man to explain.
“You can study the plans on site, you can take photographs if you want, but the originals don’t leave this building. Understood?”
Ezra Ray nodded.
“Right then,” the old man said, waving his visitor away to the adjoining room and leaving Reception in order, Ezra assumed, to go down to some dark basement archive and dig out the drawings.
Ezra Ray wasn’t the least bit surprised. His big sister Katinka h
ad said it would be this way, and she was never wrong.
It took twenty minutes for the old man to return with a huge stack of papers, which he dumped onto the table in front of his young visitor.
“This is everything we had,” he said. “Enjoy.”
Ezra looked down at the pile of papers and leafed through them at random. Understanding these lines and numbers required knowledge he himself lacked.
“Thanks,” he said, pretending to be absorbed by one of the blueish originals.
But the old man was already on his way back to Reception, with zero interest in what Ezra Ray was doing with the documents.
Ezra stayed in that small room for almost an hour. That was how long it took for the next visitor to turn up. This time, again, there was a short discussion at Reception and then the old man got up to disappear into his archive.
Sami, waiting patiently in the car and, becoming more and more anxious about not making it back to Karin by twelve as promised, suddenly saw a madman running down Scheelegatan with his arms full of papers. Through the open window, he heard Ezra’s triumphant voice:
“I did it! See, you fuck! I did it!”
12
The first modern bridge to the Stockholm suburb of Lidingö was completed after the end of the First World War, and by the time the next one ended, the country’s politicians had decided to transform the villa enclave into a modern community. They planned and built new neighborhoods, with functionalist blocks of apartments in Rudboda, Käppala and Larsberg. These were the finishing touches to a suburb that would reflect the big city. Traces of the older rural society’s farms and fields remained, as did the beautiful merchants’ villas from the nineteenth century. A handful of the island’s industrial areas and magnificent brick factories even managed to survive the later vogue for tearing things down, all while the Swedish welfare state’s 1950s aspirations for solidarity were abandoned on the island, just as they were everywhere else.
Today, Lidingö is far from a homogeneous rich enclave, but the middle-class majority in the municipal council remains unchanged.
* * *
—
Hersby was one of a handful of areas on Lidingö mentioned as early as the Viking age, but the scrapyard next to Vasavägen isn’t named on any rune stones. For a couple of twenty-kronor notes, or maybe a hundred, Svenne Gustafsson offered a solution to busy city dwellers who didn’t know what to do with a car that was no longer worth repairing.
He towed the rusty vehicles around the corner, behind the little wooden building that also served as his office. He had blocked off the scrapyard with a high fence topped with barbed wire, and, using a stationary crane, stacked the car skeletons on top of one another while he waited to sell their unique spare parts, each of which was worth more than he had paid for the car itself.
The stacks of cars formed narrow alleyways, and at the very end of one of these was a large container, tucked halfway into the woods. From the outside, its green corrugated metal looked unassuming and rusty, but when Zoran Petrovic opened the door at one side, he stepped straight into a modern workshop. The walls had been clad with aluminum foil beneath an interior wall of steel, and the ceiling was soundproofed.
Petrovic was Svenne Gustafsson’s business partner and financier, but no one knew that. It was how Petrovic wanted it. He was involved in a number of other businesses in the same way: a cleaning firm, a couple of restaurants, a handful of beauty salons, a building firm in Tallinn and one in Montenegro.
Among others.
The tall, slim Yugoslavian, who had been born in the southern Swedish city of Lund almost forty years earlier, closed the container door behind him, and the six people working inside looked up from their workstations. On top of their clothes, each was wearing a bulletproof vest, and they all had on helmets with visors. It was like being on the set of a science fiction film where the props had been bought from Bauhaus.
“No, no, just keep working, keep working,” Petrovic instructed them.
On each of the six workbenches was a blue security bag that had recently been stolen from a secure transport vehicle or a guard. Without the right code and key, a dye ampoule would explode if they tried to open the bags using force. Petrovic was paying the six amateur engineers to find a way of opening the bags without setting off the explosives. The youngsters—and all six were young—had divided the methods of attack among themselves. One was using a welding flame to try to open the bag, another a small circular saw. One was trying to pick the lock, and another was trying to tackle the bag from the bottom. Each had a digital camera mounted on a tripod just behind them, filming his or her every move. What all six had in common was that none had made any progress in weeks.
Zoran Petrovic had lost count of how many bags he had sacrificed so far in his quest to open them without setting off the explosives.
He slowly went over to each of the young workers and exchanged a few words with them. Petrovic found talking to a nineteen-year-old emo kid as easy as talking to the infrastructure minister of Montenegro. That was how it had always been.
“Good, good,” he said to a girl in her twenties. She was busy using the welding flame to burn a hole in the bottom right-hand corner of the bag.
Petrovic stretched out a long arm and, with a lazy elegance, drew a pattern in the air above the metal of the bag.
“That’s how to do it, that’s right. It’s like painting a picture, you move the flame back and forward, like Monet. Or Manet. I have an acquaintance, he’s the head of a museum in Lyon, obsessed with brushstrokes, he’s filled his yard with sand and bought a special rake that’s finer than a normal rake, so he can drag it across the sand and…”
“Zoran?”
It was Svenne Gustafsson’s assistant who had stuck his head around the door. The Yugoslavian turned around, annoyed.
“What?”
“You’ve got a visitor. Maloof’s here.”
“OK.” Petrovic nodded. “OK. I’ll finish the story later. Just keep going. And remember, we’re not in a hurry. We’re never in a hurry, nothing good will come of that.”
His statement was met with a certain gratitude, but Zoran Petrovic had made it only halfway back through the scrapyard labyrinth to Gustafsson’s office when he heard a dull thud, a sound so familiar that he didn’t even jump. Yet another bag had been triggered, and they would be forced to burn yet another stack of dyed notes. They had tried cleaning the dye from the notes in every way possible, but not even boiling them, putting them into the washing machine with chlorine or scrubbing them by hand had brought the color out. It simply couldn’t be done.
Petrovic stooped to avoid hitting his head as he stepped into the building through the back door. Michel Maloof was waiting on a chair in the kitchen behind Svenne Gustafsson’s office. Gustafsson was currently out, something he always made sure to be whenever Maloof stopped by.
“Just a glass of lukewarm water,” said Petrovic.
“What?”
“I don’t want anything else.”
Maloof stared at his tall friend in amazement as he sat down at the table. “Water? You want me to get your water?” he asked.
Petrovic made a gesture that showed it was clear that Maloof should be serving him the water. Maloof laughed and shook his head.
“Right, right,” he said, getting up. “Yeah, well, it is your…lukewarm water.”
Maloof went over to the counter and filled a glass from the tap. Overly casually, he returned to the table and placed it in front of Zoran Petrovic, who nodded indulgently.
The two men had known one another a long time, but their relationship would always be shaped by the fact that Petrovic had been leader of the playground where Maloof had hung out during his school years. Zoran Petrovic became the only role model that Maloof had who didn’t play soccer. And since Petrovic had known how to spend money even back then—his wardrobe had been full of nothing but Armani, and he had never left home on a Friday evening without his American Express card—that had hel
ped Maloof define his own life goals.
“I’m going to be a millionaire,” the young Maloof had said, and Petrovic had laughed.
“A million’s what I make in a month,” he had replied.
* * *
—
“Through the roof?”
“Right, right,” Maloof explained with a smile, “through the roof.”
It was two thirty in the afternoon. The stack of plates and mugs in the sink had been there for months. Svenne Gustafsson wasn’t the pedantic type, and both Maloof and Petrovic did their best to pretend that the broken drain in the toilet didn’t stink. They never usually had this type of conversation unless they were out walking somewhere, but the heavens had suddenly opened and neither of them wanted to get wet. They had been talking about all the money they would earn from the black security bags when Maloof mentioned Alexandra Svensson.
“Talk about an old dream,” said Petrovic. “You’ve been going on about Västberga for years.”
Maloof smiled and nodded.
“OK,” said Petrovic, “But how the hell do you get onto the roof?”
“There must be a way.”
“Jumping shoes?” Petrovic sneered. “Or what’s it called…a jet pack? With a jet pack, like in the opening ceremony of the Olympics. Is that what you’ve got planned?”
“Right, right.” Maloof smiled. “Like the Olympics. Exactly. No.”
“Maybe you could use a cherry picker? I’ve got a friend with a company in Monaco. He cleans windows, you know, thirty floors up. Monaco’s one great big window. He sends people up in a box. It’s big enough for five, six people. I sat in one of his cherry pickers once during the Formula One. You know, fifteen floors up, right above the track. The cars were driving past under our feet. We were drinking fizz and the girl dropped a sandal. I thought I’d shit myself. You know? A sandal straight onto the track. Jesus.”
“A cherry picker?” Maloof asked. “Is it on a flatbed?”
Petrovic nodded. “He has them mounted on cars.”
