He approached the three lights of the small house where the ferryman spent his time between departures. The bright-yellow car ferry could be made out faintly at the water’s edge, unmoving in the pitch-black water. And right then, the humming again—the phone in his breast pocket, the same Stockholm number. He let the vibrations subside and continued walking.
With its motor off, a single car was waiting to drive on board. Waiting for him? A police car? And if so, was someone outside it hiding in the dark? He drew closer. He had no choice; he had to know. Sam was irreplaceable. Together they had done all the planning month after month in Sam’s cell. Jari, the hit man who was doing time for manslaughter and aggravated blackmail, had been brought in late. The first meeting with Jari consisted of pure salary negotiation—compromises on both sides in order to meet halfway at an agreed price tag that included a quick robbery of a security van and an active role in the final heist’s getaway plan. Jari had been relatively easy to reason with, just like everyone who knows what they’re good at and what they contribute—he never wanted to know too much, always did what he was supposed to, and was known for keeping quiet during interrogation. Fifteen million kronor—that’s what he’d cost, and both sides were happy with the arrangement. With final booty expected to be so large, it was a reasonable sum in a criminal world for keeping your mouth shut forever, corresponding to written contracts and clauses about confidential information in the other world.
So, if Sam were dead or arrested then everything crashed, because this plan was restricted by time. Never had there been so short a time for so many events. Before he was locked up, and became known to the police, Leo had been able to plan and conduct the next bank robbery right after the one before it. He had been faceless. He refined and committed one robbery after another that would bankroll him all the way to the grand finale. That wouldn’t work anymore. He was one of the most familiar faces in the police’s criminal register, clearly etched in every cop’s consciousness. One of the few they knew with the capacity to carry out a heist of that magnitude. That meant he got only one chance. The risk would be greater than ever, a risk he was willing to take because the profit would also be greater. A chance that would never come again.
The seven o’clock news, on the way here, hadn’t given any more details. The identity of the man who had been shot was not provided; and not a word about the other robber either, whether he’d been arrested or was still on the run. The entire newscast had revolved around the gunfire and the dead man. The only new thing flowing out of the car speakers was the voices of witnesses from the parking lot and shopping center, confused words about how shots tore metal bits off cars and they all took cover by throwing themselves on the ground. The chatter of terror. But nothing about the second robber.
The ferryman’s little cottage had four windows, one on each side, the light gently flowing out. Leo crept toward the one overlooking the forest. From that direction he was hidden by the unruly shrubbery. He inched forward to the wood paneling, pressed up against it, and looked in. A lone man, with a full cup of coffee and an open newspaper in front of him on the table. The same ferryman as in the afternoon.
No one else. He was sure of it.
The clock on the wall behind the older man hung there, white and too large. It reminded him of a school clock, the long hands on the clock face pointing to a quarter to eight. Fifteen minutes until departure.
He took the same way back, into the dense shrubbery, then a U-turn to be able to approach the stationary, waiting car from behind.
A man in the driver’s seat, a woman in the passenger’s seat.
As he came closer, he also saw that it was a rather old car, red, without antennas or dual rearview mirrors. Not a painted car, nor a civilian police car either. They were listening to the radio, and a jingle was clearly audible, singing out from the station called Radio Uppland. And when he had crept up so close that he could have put his hand on the car, he saw that the woman was wearing a hat and a coat with a high collar, that the man was balding and had a cap and quilted jacket. The police probably weren’t here. Not yet.
Leo returned to the station house, one last time. The ferryman seemed just as peaceful, and the contents of the coffee cup had sunk down to half of what it had been. The school clock said eleven minutes to eight. He was the only person with a full view of everyone who traveled to and from the little island, and on a weekday evening, very few crossed over. He sat there in his luminous yellow vest as if nothing beyond the expected had happened. If it had, he would have been more wary, attentive, walking around out there, standing in the wheelhouse and looking out over the asphalt area—not slurping coffee and reading the sports section.
Leo breathed in the humid lake air. Everything it was possible to confirm was now checked. He would cross the waterway with the ferry at 20:00 because that was what he had to do. He didn’t need to run to the car to get there in time and drive the last stretch to the boom gate, but he probably should increase the length of his stride somewhat.
———
It felt so wrong.
He sat at the same table at the Dráva restaurant that he always did. The same regular guests around the other tables. The same Dacso, with his white cloth hat and pizza peel, leaning over the oven. Nevertheless, there it was, the fucking discomfort that pressed so damn hard on his chest. He had not understood that it could spread so quickly, divide and attack, like restless cancer cells.
The dinner didn’t happen. Nothing happened. Leo had been focused, extremely and disagreeably focused, exactly as he had been then, before the last robbery, when they were arrested together.
Nastily unapproachable.
Ivan had stood there on Ring Street for a while and watched the rental car drive away and disappear in the direction of Gullmarsplan, before he returned to the restaurant in the company of growing uneasiness and, despite the protests of the regular bums, turned up the volume on the goddamn television with all its goddamn newscasts and all the goddamn pictures from a goddamn robbery of a security van. He had glanced at the restaurant owner and his wife, who were crouched behind the counter, just as interested in the stream of news as he was himself. Two hyenas who thought they knew who his son was.
And above the hyenas’ heads the bottles stood there in a row.
Red wine.
For the first time in a long while he felt it, like an itchy amputated arm, the room-temperature wine dancing inside even though he hadn’t swallowed it: phantom thirst. The safe, numb feeling that finds its way into one’s head.
No, thought Ivan. No way in hell. Not weak. Not now. Only I can get him to change and lead him away from wherever the hell he’s on his way to.
Ivan got up from the uncomfortable plastic stool and for the third time he borrowed the restaurant’s phone, floury from Dacso’s pizza hands. For the third time he got an alternating tone for an answer. He compared the number he had entered with the one handwritten on a slip of paper that he had badgered Vincent into giving him and that Leo had called from earlier in the day. Number by number, correct. One more time, the last, the same number—and he wasn’t at all ready when someone answered.
“Yes?”
Leo’s voice. Right?
“It’s . . . Ivan.”
It went totally quiet. He tried to listen for where the other voice might have gone but heard nothing. Too quiet.
“What do you want?”
“I . . . listen, you know I care about you. You understand that, don’t you?”
“Well?”
“Think about it. I’m here. If you need help.”
“Where are you calling from?”
“The restaurant.”
“And my number?”
“From your brother.”
Silence again.
“Hey, Ivan?”
“Yeah?”
“In the future, you call me only from numbers I’ve approved.”
A different sort of silence. Leo had hung up.
Ivan wa
s confused. A moment ago, he was full of uneasiness, discomfort, worry. And now, anger.
He had been dismissed for the third time that day. First the wall, then the dinner, and now again, he thought. Approve? I call from whatever fucking number I want to.
“Did you get ahold of him?”
Dacso, the hyena, calling from the pizza oven. The hyena with his hyena wife. They were looking at him, laughing at him. Their hyena laugh.
“What does my phone call have to do with you? Mind your own business.”
“But surely that was your son? It sounded like it anyway.”
“So hyenas eavesdrop as well?”
“What?”
“Bake your fucking pizza. And don’t listen to what you shouldn’t be listening to.”
He recognized that music on the television. It warbled and sang out every time before a new newscast. He turned the volume up more, not giving a shit about the bums who were protesting again. One of them even stood up to register his complaint more physically until he saw who it was sitting there. Then he regretted it and turned away toward the wheeled serving cart, pretending to look for napkins or see if there was a salt shaker.
The first news item was presented by a male newscaster. He had taken care with his hair and makeup, but it didn’t help. It was entirely clear that the gestures were the rehearsed mannerisms of someone imitating seriousness. Above the newscaster’s shoulder, there was a still picture, an assault rifle swimming in a sea of blood.
Ivan shot out of his chair so that he could see better when the segment began to roll. So far, the same information as in earlier news broadcasts. More blood. A dead robber. Shocked guards on stretchers. A few minutes into the story Ivan was about to turn it off when suddenly new pictures pushed the old ones out of the way. A spokeswoman in a police uniform in front of a police car. She hadn’t been on before. She was being interviewed at the crime scene, which was clearly illuminated like a temporary backdrop in a scene from a film, as if she had arranged and placed herself in the scenery, just as planned out as the newsreader’s manner had been. Even her voice was as artificially serious when she explained that police investigators confirmed that two masked men had carried out the attack, that the robber shot in the firefight had now been identified, that the other robber was still at large with the proceeds and that he was heavily armed, under stress, and therefore highly dangerous.
Ivan reached for the glass of water—coffee and water while the wine waved attractively at him. He leaned back a little proudly and emptied it without releasing the spokeswoman from his gaze.
Now she was ducking questions. She explained that, in consideration of the sensitive state of the investigation, it was too early to talk about this and that. That was what she said—but he saw that she was lying. Cops always knew more than they said. Probably they had already fucking figured out who it was. With one robber identified, it never took long to home in on the others. He and his three sons, if anyone, had a lot of experience with that.
It couldn’t be Leo. He knew that too. His visit to the restaurant made it impossible.
But still, he couldn’t quite put it all together.
Why did his son behave in such a peculiar way toward him on his first day of freedom? And where was he now, instead of being at the dinner table with his father as they had agreed?
———
A five-minute crossing by ferry and a five-minute drive from one side of the island to the other took him the same way as a few hours ago, but the journey was edged with hellish worry. Everything was possibly over now, before it had even begun. Then came the last section, with dimmed headlights. He put on the brakes and stopped. There, a way off in the dense blackness, the lights switched off, was the house that couldn’t be seen but that right now meant everything.
If Sam was there.
If Sam wasn’t there.
Leo lingered in the car and rolled down the window. Cold air. Wide awake. To stay sitting here was the same as not knowing—and not knowing was the same as Sam still being alive and the swag still his.
His cell had rung a third and fourth time. Persistently, pleadingly—it could have been the Blue Robber. He broke, jerked it out of his breast pocket, pressed the button, and answered. Dad, from a fucking restaurant telephone. With other people around him, for a conversation that could be overheard, tracked.
He rolled the window up again. It was raw and cold outside but the warmth inside the car hung on.
Before, there was always a solution, a way out. But this time . . . maybe there wasn’t one—not if the police were waiting in the dark house, if they had come over on the earlier ferry in an unmarked car and not alerted the ferryman, if they were also bedded down in the same darkness that hid him. If at that very moment they were watching him, following his body heat with night-vision goggles when it shone in greenish, shimmering light.
He opened the car door, feeling around for firm footing, and started to walk toward the fence and gate. He stopped and listened. Nothing. Not even the wind.
They had been two who became three. The bank robber, the murderer, the muscle. Now one of them was dead. They were two again—but which two?
Spreading out, the lawn formed a gently ascending slope. The lightly frozen ground was therefore deceptively slippery and the hard soles of his shoes sometimes slid against his will. Here somewhere, close to the stone wall, Sam’s car had been parked during his visit in the afternoon. The parking space was empty now. It might mean the worst—or that he had deliberately hidden it somewhere else.
Leo remembered that the door to the house had a small angular window in it at about face height, the kind you couldn’t see through. And there was too large a risk of detection to look into the kitchen through the ordinary window, or the one at the back of the house.
The door handle was made of light metal and gleamed a little when he touched it and carefully pulled it. Unlocked. He stepped into the small, dark hall, over the threshold and into the kitchen, past the wood stove they had burned the map in.
Breathing.
Or was he imagining it?
The two kitchen chairs were waiting as empty as the sofa in the kitchen.
He continued into the small sitting room. And . . . yes, there. Maybe. In the armchair. It seemed as if someone was sitting in it, slightly hunched forward.
Like the shadow of someone.
“It could have just as easily been me.”
Sam.
And Leo did not know if it was joy he felt now or relief, or even some sort of disguised rage. The only thing he knew for certain was that he felt so much more than he had time for.
He reached for the kitchen chair and pulled it closer to the shadow.
“But it wasn’t, Sam. It wasn’t you.”
“Damn, I saw . . . how he staggered. And grabbed himself . . . here.”
Sam’s shadowy arm fluttered and pointed to his side, between the hip and the shoulder blade.
“And I ran out. Got hold of him, tried . . . I didn’t understand that he took a bullet in the head too. That it hit, there. But I felt Jari die then—felt it in his hand, you know, when the muscles stop functioning. And I understand now—it could have just as easily been me.”
Leo had probably never touched Sam much, apart from the ritual hugs that they, and so many others on cell block H, greeted each other with. But now he reached for Sam’s shadowy hand and put his own hand on it.
“But you are alive. I feel it in your hand.”
It was strange considering the crime he had been convicted of, but in Sam, Leo was sitting in front of a man who really did not know how violence could be used. A man who used violence once, twenty-five years ago, and then never went back to it or sought it out.
Leo pressed the shadowy hand lightly but got no reaction, no push in return. Leo pressed the hand again a bit harder, still nothing in return, nothing signaling contact.
He got up and in one motion drew down the blinds, covering both windows of the room. He gro
ped along the floor with his fingers, searching for the cord to the only floor lamp. He switched it on, a weak filament, but good enough to see and read someone.
Sam’s light hair was flat and disheveled as it got when one has been wearing a black ski mask for a long time and sweated into it. His eyes looked inward, not outward, and still lingered at a parking lot outside a shopping center, repeating the same sequence. Barely visible were small drops of dried blood that had hit the only exposed parts of his skin—around his left eye and left corner of his mouth—drops of blood ending where the cloth edge had begun.
“The thumb. The cop at the roadblock. It was just like you said.”
The first words other than it could have just as easily been me, and they squeaked. As if the vocal cords didn’t want to release them.
“He rubbed it back and forth, unconsciously. Over the embossing. Over the UV image. Rubbed his thumb and looked more at it than at me.”
The squeaking slowly slackened off as he leaned in closer.
“The hood, overalls, boots—I burned all of it, exactly as we said.”
“And what you were wearing at the roadblock? The milk uniform?”
“That, too.”
Leo saw so strongly how Sam’s eyes dared to leave that parking lot for a second time to come here.
“And the milk truck. It burned up at the same time.”
The eyes of a shocked robber of a security van became an asset when the preoccupied gaze was taken for the calm of a professional driver who has just delivered today’s dairy products.
“And the gun, my gun—I dropped it along with the empty cassettes into eighty feet of water, two minutes out by rowing boat down there by the pier.”
They looked at each other, and it was as if the friendship, the trust, grew right there, right then. In spite of the shock, Sam had acted exactly as they had agreed upon—transformed himself from robber to private individual and made it through the roadblock, burned his clothes and the first getaway vehicle, switched to the next getaway vehicle, his personal car, and continued to the island, where he’d gotten rid of the gun and the last traces. And only when he had reached the darkness and solitude of the house had he allowed himself to fall apart.
The Sons: Made in Sweden, Part 2 Page 9