Leo smiled faintly, perhaps proud he had chosen the right partner. He stood up and went into the kitchen, opened the pantry, and began to turn a metal cap that sat in the wall between the second and third shelf—the air intake.
“It’s in here, right?”
Sam nodded and Leo spun the metal disk until the gap widened enough to stick his hand in and pull out an oblong package wrapped in protective plastic.
“Do you have a ruler? A folding ruler?”
“I think my mother had an old tape measure here somewhere.”
Sam pulled out a workbench drawer, rooted around in it, and soon handed over a small coil that shone, changing between red and green and yellow. Leo released it, a yard-long tape measure, and placed the soft, slack strip along the bundle of banknotes encased in plastic.
“Twenty centimeters. If each centimeter corresponds to fifty thousand—one million. And six bundles of equal length, that’s six million. That’s enough for conducting the house call and having a little pocket money.”
He stuffed the bundle of banknotes into the hole in the wall, between and above those already in there, screwed on the cap, and closed the pantry door.
“And the other gun?”
“It was left lying there on the asphalt a few feet from his body. No way I could have had time to pick it up.”
Never, ever leave traces.
The only traces left are the ones I choose to place there.
They looked at each other in silence, in the midst of some sort of calm. And even though the gentle glow of the floor lamp from the sitting room was too faint to distinguish facial features, Leo was certain that Sam’s eyes were back. The only reminders of death on his face were the spots of blood near his left eye and the left corner of his mouth.
“Tomorrow, Sam, we have to think a little. If I know cops right, the gun left behind means that I’ll be spending a couple of hours in a room I wasn’t planning to spend any more time in.”
The gun was now lying on a forensic technician’s table. Leo was aware what that meant, to have left that kind of trace. They could bring him in and interview him, but only for gathering information until they checked whether he had a solid alibi. They didn’t have a damn thing that could be linked directly to him—only tired old suspicions, which hadn’t worked to connect together a credible chain of evidence before.
“And when I’m done sitting with your cop brother, I’ll need a few more hours—to find a replacement for Jari.”
To be able to accomplish the very last stage—“the police station”—with someone he trusted. But he didn’t have time to build such relationships, so there were only two to choose from.
Felix and Vincent.
“So, Sam—I want you to contact the Albanians, and move the house call to the evening.”
Maybe Felix—who’d already said no, and was the most stubborn person he knew?
Or Vincent—who also said no and seemed to be avoiding him?
“You’re alive, Sam. And the loot is entirely intact and sitting here in your pantry. We’ll be a few hours late tomorrow because of . . . well, what happened today. But we’ll have time. Our plan holds—and we’ll finish it in three days.”
PANIC.
That was what she felt, without understanding where it came from.
Britt-Marie rolled over again in bed, sweaty from her neck to her lower back. The alarm clock on the nightstand shouted angular numbers at her—23:47.
She had gone to bed early, an hour and a half ago, hoping to find sleep somewhere in the dark—to avoid knowing when and in what condition he came home. She would wake up the next morning and he would just be lying there in her guest room, snoring lightly, wrapped up in the sheet as he had been as a child.
Strange feelings jostled and fought with each other, and she tried to understand if they were abnormal during those first sleepless hours, or whether she was simply a mother who loved and worried about her son, in spite of the fact that he had been released that morning after a long prison sentence and was probably just out celebrating.
They were normal, she had decided. It was love she felt—but also, in the midst of it, something else. Panic. A feeling so strong, so familiar, that every time she had been close to falling asleep and gliding into a dreamlike state, an image of the prison cell would appear right at that very moment, jolting her wide awake. Her panic was connected to her visits to musty, barren rooms at various prisons. Once every fortnight, year after year, in spite of the long journeys, she continued to visit her three sons, who were doing time behind bars in different parts of the country.
She looked around the small and rather simple house.
It had been built in a different era, about five miles south of Stockholm in an area called Tallkrogen, which consisted of cramped but cozy homes for ordinary wage earners. She was happy here, in spite of the busy Nynäs highway stretching along just outside one of her windows. It formed a backdrop of sound she never heard during the day, because she’d built it into her daily fabric long ago. But now, when night descended and the vehicles came one by one, she could hear them clearly, and even felt the tremors from the heavy trucks as perceptible vibrations in the wooden façade, wooden floor, and wooden bed. She had moved here in the time between her sons’ arrests and the first day of the trial. Partly to get away from all the talk in the small city of Falun—whispers out of the daily newspaper headlines sneaked behind her back both in the city and in the corridors of the nursing home where she worked—but also to be closer to her sons when they would be spread out in Sweden’s high-security prisons.
Two visits per month to each of them, which had been so different. When she visited Vincent for the first time, she already felt that he had grown up, repented, and would never commit a crime again. That’s the last time, Mama. He had put it just like that, word for word. The last time. Felix remained silent during interrogation, and then spoke not a single word referring to the crimes he was convicted of, not even when he was alone with her—she still didn’t know. But she hoped . . . With Leo, as with Vincent, one visit was enough to understand—but with him, the understanding was that he would never stop. That he had stepped into a criminal world that he did not want to leave. That he would never change.
She turned over in bed, her forehead and temples also sweating now. The brightly shining clock was soundless, but nevertheless was ticking too loudly.
The panic didn’t subside. Rather it spread out with her here in the bed. It jostled and shoved from beside her.
She should be pleased, happy even, that they were all free. When was the last time they saw one another, all of them together? She should think about tomorrow, when they would all be here for lunch. She should be ready to cry out, You see, my beloved boys, this is the beginning of the continuation of our family. But she knew, deep inside, that it wasn’t so. On the contrary, it was perhaps the beginning of the end.
Then the panic rose up again, and she understood, finally, what it was connected with: the twisted, pathetic, sick bonds Ivan had created. Him standing there this morning by the gate had reminded her that all the years of distance had meant nothing. He had made his way back in, like before.
And now, again, the fucking fraternal bonds would be able to destroy the determination of her younger sons.
Could Vincent and Felix stand up to Leo? Was their will strong enough for that?
That was exactly where the panic stemmed from—that Leo would start to pull on the bonds again, pulling his brothers with him once again, pulling them down once again. He would use the attachment as Ivan used it. Leo would act like the man she had been forced to leave in order to survive. And she did not want to be forced to leave her own son.
She heard a car, just as clear as the others, but not from the highway.
This engine noise came through the kitchen window facing the other direction, toward the neighbors’ houses and the narrow, crescent-shaped street that divided the housing estate. The car drove closer, the brakes were app
lied, and it stopped outside her house. Then came steps, she recognized them perhaps, forceful but gentle at the same time—if he still walked that way—and the door to the house opened.
She never heard the latch bolt click, but the hall floor creaked as usual.
And now she knew that it was his step and that she wanted to see her eldest son—to see how he was and try to figure out where he had been.
She straightened her nightgown before she opened the bedroom door.
Leo was standing in the middle of the glow streaming out of the fridge. Since neither the overhead light nor any of the kitchen cabinet lights were on, his skin, pale from prison, was almost white.
“Mama? Aren’t you sleeping?”
Dead. That was what she thought—her son would look just like that if the blood wasn’t pumping through his thirty-one-year-old body any longer.
“Not yet. It’s only twelve o’clock.”
He took the Herrgård cheese and the smoked pork and put both the plates on the stovetop.
“Where do you keep the bread?”
Britt-Marie fetched a wicker basket with triangular knäckebröd.
“Where have you . . . have you been out?”
“And celebrated, you mean?”
She nodded. And he shrugged his shoulders.
“No, Mother. I haven’t been celebrating.”
“So what did you do then?”
“Nothing special.”
The cheese slicer was blunt, and the slices were small crumpled heaps that he divided up, one in each corner of the triangular bread.
“Mostly drove around. Enjoying being able to do it.”
He cut thick slices of the pork and put them on the next piece of bread.
“So don’t worry, Mama.”
She looked at his white skin again; now it was almost blue. She tried not to worry, but what he had just said didn’t give her any relief. She lingered there in front of him, in her nightgown, with her hair in some sort of ponytail so that it wouldn’t get tangled during the night, with her bare feet on the cold floor.
She might have seemed small but she was steady and well balanced on her feet nevertheless.
“Whatever you do, Leo,” she said, standing as she had the times she had gone against Ivan, “don’t get your brothers involved.”
She reached out, up, and the back of her hand caressed his unshaven cheek.
Leo listened to the sound of her bare feet until it ebbed in the darkness of the hall.
His mother’s touch had always been there. She was soft, physical. But now, the back of her hand against his cheek had felt almost unpleasant.
He took the two knäckebröd sandwiches and two glasses of orange juice to the guest room.
The sofa bed was folded out and had fresh sheets. She had placed a reading lamp on one of the kitchen chairs, and next to it had laid a new toothbrush, new underwear, and a new pair of socks.
This would be his home for the first week following his release from prison. Then he would be offered a place in a halfway house called The Maple, a thirty-two-square-foot room in a corridor among others who had been released from prison and treatment centers.
He wouldn’t stay there.
He was on his way somewhere. And so he must do exactly what she’d just asked him not to do.
I have no choice, Mama, thought Leo. Jari has to be replaced by either Felix or Vincent. And then, Mama, I’m going to worry you even more. Because the gun Jari held is now in the hands of the police. And tomorrow that fucking cop Broncks will be informed of the fact. And by lunchtime, or preferably after, he’s coming here to your home and he’s going to bring me in.
ELISA SQUINTED CAUTIOUSLY, one eye, two eyes. The edge of a table. Farther away, a stove, a cabinet, and a wall painted white.
She was certain she was lying down.
And she had slept. How had that happened?
A gap of skin was showing between the edge of her shirt and her pants, and was glued as if permanently to the surface. An angry red vinyl upholstered sofa had bitten into her back.
The light from the window facing the police station courtyard was hitting her through the glass pane. That was what woke her up. Or maybe it was the feeling of not sleeping at home, of feeling naked even though you’re dressed.
The watch on her left wrist read 7:25. In the morning, right? Her back was really stiff when she got up from the hard sofa, just as her neck had become from the temporary pillow—her rolled-up white quilted jacket. She was in a kitchenette in the investigation division’s corridor at the city police station, in the middle of the police building that linked all the other police units in the area on Kungsholmen in Stockholm constituting the core of the operations of the Swedish police. She had sworn to never do this—live out the cliché of sleeping overnight at the workplace with a cup of black cop coffee and two pastries for breakfast.
The bathroom shared the space with the kitchenette; she rinsed out her mouth, washed her face with unperfumed soap from an economy pack, wet her hand and ran it through her dark hair, wet her index finger and straightened the hairs of her equally dark eyebrows. As one of the youngest detectives at the age of thirty-four, she had managed to lead several major investigations and every time kept her promise to herself to never wake up as a police cliché. Never sleep over, never end the evening with shitty food, and, perhaps most important, never, ever make reference to gut feelings—a police investigation was a puzzle, every piece of which served a function. Sometimes she had to leave the puzzle behind, look at the pieces with fresh eyes to be able to join them together—but never guess. And never make allowances. Whoever it was about, whatever consequences a new piece had for others, or for herself, it must be put in place.
Gut feelings were disastrous.
Gut feelings rarely agreed with the final results.
Gut feelings never held up in court and never got anyone convicted.
Last night she broke two of her three rules. She had fallen asleep and eaten shitty food. Last night at ten o’clock—four and a half hours after being called to a parking lot at a shopping center and a pool of blood with a dead robber—when she suddenly held a document connected with a forty-one-page, seven-year-old report from a theft and realized that this was so much more than a robbery of a security van, she couldn’t go home. An entire evening became an entire night, and just past five in the morning she had the thought to lie down on the sofa in the kitchenette and stretch out for a little while.
She yawned as she headed out into the still-silent corridor. Breaking a promise always had consequences. She was standing now for the first time ever at the vending machine. Number 41—machine latte. Number 12—two slices of hard bread cemented together with a thick layer of soft herb cheese. Number 23—vanilla yogurt with a compartment of round cookie crumbs and plastic spoon under the lid. Her bag with damp exercise clothes was on the desk where she had left it after the alarm during yesterday’s workout. And here in her office, the clichés stopped. They didn’t come in here, not even this morning. There was no whiteboard with notes and arrows and blurry photos that would be linked together during the course of the investigation, no baskets overflowing with papers, no rows of plastic mugs that had been drunk out of.
Her own system was in command in here. Each current investigation was reduced to three piles of papers on her desk, a photograph on the top of each one, photos that functioned like a poster for a film; if you have seen the film and then look at the poster, you can also fill in the story, placing the scenes in order underneath the photo.
Three piles. Three key moments.
Yawning again, she distractedly picked up the picture lying on top of the pile to the left, the one she always called “You struck first, you bastard.” The moment of the deed, when a thought becomes a crime, this time represented by a reasonably sharp photo of a shot-up security door. Behind it, the loot, the robbers’ target, was exposed. And they had struck at the exact moment when the guards felt most secure. She called the
pile in the middle “You fucked up.” When crimes become clues. This pile was always the thinnest at the start of the investigation but grew the most in the end. This time it already contained a strong card at the beginning. The photo on top depicted a dead robber, but it wasn’t the robber’s identity that formed the you-fucked-up goad. Nor the blood he was lying in, or the fact that he was dead. But the gun—a military-grade assault rifle, AK4, about three feet from his body—that was the link to the forty-one-page-long report of a theft that had transformed her evening and night and morning. At the far right was the third pile—“You can’t fucking think you’ll get away.” When the clues become the perpetrator. On top there was a photo of a man who was stepping onto a loading dock with his back to the camera, wearing a cap and a bulky jacket, a grainy black-and-white image from a surveillance camera.
She drank some of the coffee and it was bitter, even acidic, without containing an ounce of taste. It entirely lacked roundness. The vending machine needed to be decalcified, and she made a note to call the provider and request a servicing. A tasteless, warm drink, bread, and soft cheese—baby gruel for adults.
Three piles that were just beginning. Large pieces of the facts, witness testimony, and evidence were lacking. But even though she had just scratched the surface, she would soon hand over the investigation. In ordinary cases it would have seemed damn hopeless, but given the gun and the document she was drawing out now from pile number two along with the photo on top and considering who she would hand it over to, it was an obvious step forward.
She went out into the corridor again and stopped by the shop, open around the clock, for the second time that morning—a number 41, machine coffee and one that lacked a number, a cup of hot water. Hot water with milk: silver tea. She knew that he was usually early, and that was his preferred drink. If she walked quickly and held the photo and document under her arm and kept her fingers high up on the slightly thicker edges of the paper cups, she would manage to get there without burning herself.
The Sons: Made in Sweden, Part 2 Page 10