The Father: Made in Sweden Part I Page 6

  They had arrived.

  They jumped ashore carrying three automatic rifles and the security deposit bag, while Felix picked up from the tall grass four identical Adidas bags, which contained the jeans, shirts, jackets and indoor hockey sticks. He put on his flippers and mask, and they started filling the rubber boat with the boulders he’d rolled forward, then tied a long rope around each one and attached them to the engine.

  Leo, Vincent and Jasper pushed the boat out into the cold water towards Felix, who swam beside it. When he got to the middle of the sound, he hoisted himself up onto the side and started slashing holes into the rubber with a large knife. The air hissed out and it began to sink.

  It drifted slowly below the surface.

  Felix couldn’t see far, just a meagre arm’s length ahead of him, but he knew that according to the nautical chart the lake was ten metres deep at this point, and he followed the boat down for three, maybe four metres before resurfacing. They’d gone swimming here so many times as children, swimming and diving and looking for non-existent treasure, without ever getting close to the lakebed of blue clay – so perfect for a rubber boat to get stuck in.

  John Broncks had taken the report about the security van robbery and hurried towards his car in the Kronoberg police station garage. He’d driven over the Västerbron Bridge and stopped for a hot dog at 7-Eleven – four hundred calories that took the same amount of time to eat as it took to read a recipe for lobster ravioli. As he drove south past Skanstull, people were on their way out on a Friday night, making the transition from one life to another, our collective reward system.

  An hour and seven minutes had passed by the time he received the report. Twenty-two minutes in the car. He knew the two masked robbers who’d hijacked the security van and its guards were already somewhere else.

  He increased his speed, but his thoughts remained with the case files on his desk. The husband who’d killed his wife and then sat there waiting for the police to arrive, who couldn’t handle his fear of loneliness, who’d just felt lonelier as he beat her. The father who’d taken his son to the doctor and forced him to lie, explain how the injuries made by a hardback book had been caused by a skateboard that didn’t slide down the handrail as he’d hoped. And the man who’d remained silent in the face of pictures of a battered shop assistant, convinced that he’d been in control and could have stopped whenever he wanted to. Broncks had interrogated all of them this week. And they’d confessed.

  He exited the motorway, on which the Friday rush hour traffic had gradually reduced to weekend levels, hurried down a smaller road into the Stockholm suburb of Sköndal, passed first apartment blocks then houses, then arrived at an empty beach on a bay. Or it should have been an empty beach. But instead there were three police cars, an ambulance and a security van with its doors open.

  You got the weekend you wanted. And I got the one I wanted.

  A helicopter buzzed overhead, dogs barked in the distance. He’d meet up with them later. First, the white van. He walked over to it, seeing five bullet holes in a side window, the congealed blood which streaked a security guard from chin to neck as he lay down, a paramedic at his side – the real damage, which wouldn’t heal, was on the inside.

  ‘Not yet.’

  A young woman wearing a green uniform with a red name tag on her chest nodded first at Broncks and then towards the security guard on the ground. The guard looked around without seeing, his brain turned off so it wouldn’t break.

  ‘OK. When?’

  ‘He’s in shock.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘You can’t question him yet. Understood?’

  Broncks continued towards the other guard, who was making a wide circle around the security van again and again.

  ‘Hi, I’m John Broncks and I’d like—’

  ‘It was me. I was the one who let them in.’

  A little faster, a little wider, around the front of the van.

  ‘They would have killed us otherwise. Do you understand? They’d already fired through the window. But then, the steel door, Lindén had already locked it, and they wanted to get in, they wanted … they fired again.’

  ‘The steel door?’

  ‘Where the safe was. The rest of the money.’

  Broncks looked into the van. Blood and glass and bullet casings were scattered on the seats and on the floor. On the dashboard, a receipt reading Forex Central Station 3001 under a thin layer of glass splinters.

  ‘They knew there was more. And he started shooting. The desperate one, he was screaming at us … he wanted to get in.’

  The guard was standing behind him, about to start walking in circles again.

  ‘One of the Arabs.’

  ‘Arabs?’

  ‘Yeah. Jalla jalla. Sharmuta. Like that. And the rest in English. With an accent.’

  A plastic duffel bag lay between the driver’s seat and the passenger’s. John had seen that kind of bag before, in other robberies.

  ‘How much?’

  The security guard was already walking away.

  ‘Excuse me … but how much is left in there?’

  A ragged voice, but clear, and with his back to Broncks.

  ‘Eight pickups at eight exchange offices. About a million at each one. They got one.’

  The security guard, whose name was Samuelson, continued walking in circles around the van. Broncks was following him with his eyes – this man who didn’t know where he was going – when the paramedic shouted for him.

  ‘It’s fine now. Five minutes.’

  John Broncks returned to the other guard, who was lying on a stretcher, and they shook hands. The guard’s was cold, damp, passive.

  ‘John Broncks, City Police.’

  ‘Jan Lindén.’

  Lindén tried to stand up, but stumbled and lost his balance. Broncks grabbed him and helped him lie down again.

  ‘How are you? Should I …’

  ‘The robber … he was … leaning forward.’

  ‘Leaning forward?’

  ‘The one who shoved that fucking … that shoved it into my mouth.’

  ‘Leaning forward – how?’

  ‘He … had a low centre of gravity, you know what I mean? When he aimed. At me.’

  The guard stretched out his legs, bending them at the knees, to demonstrate.

  ‘Like this … as if he was holding the gun above himself. With his legs bent. With one boot sinking down.’

  ‘Boot?’

  He stood up from the stretcher again. It went better this time.

  ‘You said “one boot sinking down”.’

  And he started walking, too.

  ‘I have to go home now.’

  The paramedic and Broncks followed him, and each took hold of one of his arms.

  ‘They took my ID. They know where I live.’

  He tried to break free, but lacked the strength.

  ‘My kids, don’t you understand, I have to get home to them!’

  And he wept. The paramedic gently guided him to the stretcher.

  Broncks was left alone. The questions would have to continue the next day.

  The truck in front of him was lit up like an outdoor stage and a forensic scientist crawled in and out of it. Lights streamed weakly from the beach behind him as other scientists went from one jetty to the next.

  He’d seen fear. He knew what it looked like, how it sounded. And this kind, he’d learned never to avoid it again.

  Excessive force.

  Who terrorises people in that conscious way? Who uses fear like that?

  Someone who’d felt it before.

  Someone who knew how it worked – that it did work.

  Broncks walked towards the water and the wandering lights. They’d had a well-developed plan – location, time. They’d been heavily armed. They’d used extreme violence. They’d stayed cool during a kidnapping. They’d chosen a remote destination. These were no first-time robbers, no debutants – this was a group that had carried out similar robb
eries before.

  He approached a long jetty surrounded by thick reeds.

  And there – another forensic scientist with a torch.

  Sometimes you just know.

  It was dark except for that torch, but only one person in the whole world moved like that. He went a little closer. She became clearer.

  ‘Petrol.’

  She still looked young. He knew that he didn’t.

  ‘And here, on the first few planks, grass and dirt.’

  She hunched down, with her torch pointed at the water’s surface and at the droplets gleaming and melting together.

  ‘They went this way.’

  That was all. She said no more, turned around, and left him. Back to the security van in order to search it on her knees with infrared light.

  She’d looked at him as if they didn’t know each other.

  Those first few years he’d thought about her every day, several times a day. About meeting again. He’d worried and hoped and dreamed. Then not every day, but almost. And now … this. Not even a hello or a smile.

  A peculiar feeling. To not exist.

  John Broncks climbed onto the jetty, slippery with dew. Farsta was just across the water behind the trees. And in the other direction a line of southern suburbs. Thousands of landing sites for a small boat.

  She’d been right.

  They’d fled this way. A group of criminals who used assault as an instrument, professionals who’d done this before.

  And would do it again.

  6

  ANNELI WAS FREEZING, but she didn’t want to leave the balcony. The dimly lit underpass could be seen from here – and it was from there that Leo would emerge. Besides, the cigarettes – Mindens, from green packs, cigarettes that tasted of menthol and comfort – were warming her up a little as she chain-smoked.

  She’d parked the car, run up the stairs and opened the door to the flat. Without even taking off her coat, she continued through the hallway and the living room and out onto the balcony where she heard sirens.

  She had no idea what was happening. The police could be there right now, could be shooting at them right now, Leo could be hit and dying without her right now.

  She’d been hearing them talk for months about how you blow up a an arms dump, how you empty an armoured security van. Heard, but hadn’t taken part, and the few times she’d said something, they didn’t listen. Leo hadn’t listened. The four of them were a closely knit group she could never be part of. Leo seemed absent when he was with her, and present when he was with his two brothers and his third wannabe brother. They didn’t even eat together any more. She’d lost four kilos, which was too much if you were already a little skinny. He hadn’t even noticed.

  One more cigarette. She inhaled, deeply, filling the empty space inside.

  The sirens were multiplying. Getting louder. They buzzed around in her head even when she covered her ears. She went in, closed the balcony door, shutting them out, drank the other half of a bottle of wine, put on the television. Seven thirty: the news. She’d never liked the news. It wasn’t relevant to her, not here, not in a flat in Skogås. And the intro music, the stories that were supposed to sound so important, just sounded like the sirens outside. Pictures of people lying on cracked and parched earth with their stomachs distended, people in suits standing in front of stock prices, people jumping in front of cameras in the middle of a war and shooting at other people.

  A smiling newsreader. A woman she recognised.

  Two heavily armed men made off with over a million kronor in a raid on a security van in southern Stockholm only an hour and a half ago.

  A mouth. The only thing she saw. Lips moving slowly.

  The security guards were abducted at gunpoint and one of them was shot.

  Shot.

  Who?

  Anneli went closer to the TV and the woman with the moving lips. I didn’t hear, don’t you get that! Who? Again! Say it again! Who was shot? She grabbed the remote control from the coffee table.

  A large area has been cordoned off, but the police still have no leads on the two robbers and any possible accomplices.

  Then she heard. More than a million. For the first time in her life, the news was actually about her. Still no leads. The only thing they showed was an abandoned van. Behind blue and white plastic crime scene tape that shook in the wind. And next to it there were people in uniform who were hard to make out, talking, searching.

  And then it was over.

  Images from the Swedish parliament turned into pictures from the UN headquarters in New York.

  She had no idea how long it had lasted. Thirty, maybe forty-five seconds. But it had been that van, it had been about them, about her.

  She went back out onto the balcony for a cigarette and leaned over the railing to get a better view of the viaduct and the underpass, her feet almost leaving the cold floor.

  The sirens were gone. Now there was only wind, and music coming from an open window one floor down.

  She felt so light and leaned even further out. What if she fell? It would be so painful.

  She was the one who’d told Leo where to find the wigmaker, who’d said she could transform them into two immigrants. She’d brushed them and painted them, and the first few times they shook with laughter. And she was the one who’d designed and sewn the polo-neck collar that could be pulled up to cover their faces, and Leo had said they were so good they should sell them to other robbers.

  And there they were.

  She stood on the balcony, looking down on them as they exited the viaduct, lit by the short streetlights. They carried a bag each over their shoulders from which their hockey sticks projected, hiding their machine guns and more than one million kronor.

  And there they were.

  She was flooded with the kind of warmth she only felt when they made love, or like when she’d seen Sebastian for the first time, sticky and newborn on her stomach.

  She wanted to run to the door, but didn’t – Leo mustn’t see how worried she’d been. He wouldn’t like it.

  Jasper entered first. And it was as if he was about to explode, as if he desperately needed to tell her something, over and over again in different words. He marched into the living room, put the bag on the floor, turned on the TV, hurry up, Leo, for fuck’s sake, come and see, and then he laughed, or sang, still traces We! of adrenalin left Made! from pushing a gun into another The! human being’s mouth, he tore off his Front! jacket and shirt and T-shirt and it smelled strongly of sweat Page! and unlaced his boots and pulled off his pants and his erection showed through his underwear.

  Then Felix and Vincent came in. Arms above their heads in triumph, wide smiles and muffled shouts of joy as they took turns embracing her, like Jasper smelling strongly of sweat, then threw themselves down in an armchair as relieved as they were proud. Finally, she heard his step. Leo.

  She kissed him and whispered, ‘They don’t have any leads on us, I just heard it now, on the news.’

  ‘They had time to lock the security door.’

  He passed her on the way to the kitchen with a plastic bag full of mobile phones, opening them one by one.

  ‘The door?’

  He plucked out the SIM cards and cut them apart with pliers.

  ‘To the money.’

  Filled a small pot up halfway with acetone and then put the bits of SIM card in to dissolve.

  ‘But they just said on the TV … they said you got a million.’

  ‘And missed nine.’

  ‘Missed?’

  ‘Nine million fucking kronor behind a locked steel door. And it was my fault. I was the one who … it won’t happen again.’

  He put the mobile phones, minus SIM cards, into a fabric bag.

  ‘But all the rest?’

  ‘What “all the rest”?’

  Tied a string tightly around the bag until it was completely closed.

  ‘The collars I sewed?’

  ‘They were perfect.’

  ‘And the
makeup, how …?’

  ‘It worked.’

  He took a hammer from the drawer under the kitchen sink and put the cloth bag on a chopping board and struck it, repeatedly, until the four phones became impossible to piece together again.

  ‘You did a good job. Sweetie – it’s like you were with us the whole time. Right?’

  His hand against her cheek. And she saw it on him. That he’d thought it would feel different. He should feel pride, joy. But he was empty, he had already left her and she knew it. Even though he’d just got home, he was already on his way to the next job.

  He had the same look on his face as he pretended to be happy, beside her on the sofa with Jasper on his other side, Felix and Vincent in the armchairs; the same look as when Felix overturned an imaginary wheelchair and jumped over a wall, and everyone laughed, when Vincent picked up a large empty fish bowl and filled it to the brim with money, or when Jasper hugged him and wanted his attention, Leo, did you see, when you were on the bonnet, how he looked at you first and then at me, did you see his eyes, then he raised his voice and pretended to be an Arab again, we know your names, pretended to pull off their IDs, sharmuta I will come for you.

  It was at that point she realised what this reminded her of: it was as if they were talking about a movie. As if they’d gone the other way, into the city, seen some new movie together, and now sat drinking a beer at a bar, comparing their favourite scenes, trying to outdo each other in recreating them. She hadn’t seen that movie. That’s why she sat in silence and squeezed Leo’s hand until he noticed that she felt left out, and stood up and walked over to the goldfish bowl and waited for everyone to fall silent. And when they were quiet, he started taking out handfuls of notes, 20s and 100s and 500s, counting them out, and then handed them ten thousand kronor each.

  ‘Are you kidding me?’

  Felix wasn’t sitting in a pub and recounting scenes from a movie any more. He got up from his chair in a shabby flat in a shabby concrete suburb and started taking more bills out of the goldfish bowl.

  ‘Hey! Felix, what the hell are you doing?’ snapped Leo. ‘Ten thousand each.’