Broncks began walking around the room again, even though it was not his choice. The energy demanded it.
He should have been offended, earlier.
But he wasn’t.
He should have been insulted, now.
But he wasn’t this time either.
“Before you go, Elisa, and leave the investigation, I want to ask you something.”
She had managed to get halfway to the door—she stopped now.
“Yes?”
“Will you bring him in—for me? Interview him for me. If I sit down across from Leo Dûvnjac at this point, it won’t accomplish shit. I tried for almost six months of investigation back then, and now it’s a total stalemate. Plus, I don’t want him to gather that I have the investigation on my desk. Not yet.”
“Bring him in, for what? As I see it, we have nothing—and can hold him for at most a couple of hours.”
“Yeah. And he knows it. But if we don’t bring him in—when he also knows that we have one of the guns he stole, and with time can link the robbery to the day he was released—we’ll make him anxious and he’ll be on his guard. I want him to stay confident so he’ll continue with what I’m certain was just a robbery for bankrolling, the first stop on the way to something bigger. I want to be able to grab him when he commits that crime. And, at the same time, find the rest of the guns.”
She didn’t respond and just started walking to the door again while he kept talking.
“And, by the way, Elisa, you sat up the whole night, in this hellish building. Until you were so tired that you dropped off in the kitchenette. Can you honestly say to me that you aren’t a little curious about him?”
IN THE MIDDLE of his chest.
John Broncks had not felt it right there in such a long time.
Yet he remembered the feeling exactly—how the energy pushed up inside him, seeking its way in an arc from the stomach to the point called the solar plexus. That is where it always settled first, burning, hot and fiery. The next place was in the throat. As if all the joy and anger and fear melted together in the flames. As if breathing got caught there.
Half an hour. Then it burned less, each time he moved the cursor along the timeline on his computer, following the robber on the video sequence she had copied and sent. A large man in bulky clothing jumping down from a loading dock and driving away in a truck transporting milk.
The first trace after all these years.
The fire in his chest so often scared him as a child, pushing out when every muscle in his stomach tightened inward, not outward. When violence was near, it could strike at any time.
Now, as an adult, he had learned to keep the fire under control, carrying the flame with him like an early cave dweller, protecting it so that it never went out and letting it flare up only when he wanted.
Broncks moved the cursor along the timeline again, watching the man carrying a shoulder bag. The description fit, to a degree. But it was difficult to decide if it was Dûvnjac. This man looked . . . bigger. Which actually wasn’t strange. Inmates always increased in muscle mass inside the prison walls. And the gym wasn’t just an area for training and the exchange of anabolic steroids. Just like everywhere else in a prison, it was a meeting place for contacts to be established and for ideas to grow and take shape.
He leaned in closer to the rather blurry, jerking picture.
If the man he was studying was Leo Dûvnjac, why was it someone named Jari Ojala was lying there, dead, and not one of Dûvnjac’s two brothers?
Broncks had sensed the rift between the brothers when he interviewed each of them, not that any of them spoke about it. And he thought he understood how the rift had begun—the two younger brothers had quit while the oldest brother continued robbing banks with their father and was locked up. And for that reason the younger brothers were also put away. Fourteen days after a snowstorm and a crashed getaway car, Felix and Vincent Dûvnjac were arrested in an apartment in Göteborg without drama, as if they were waiting for it. Then everyone involved was silent throughout the investigation, and the two younger brothers thought they would get off entirely. But with the publicity and the media attention—which grew more intense after all their arrests—tips flooded in from the general public. One of them was so good that Broncks was able to locate the destroyed weapons used for one of the robberies. A private individual had stated that he had seen the vehicle that appeared in some of the photos shown on television, a company car that the brothers drove around in. Their robbers’ façade. The tipster had seen the car drive into a wooded area and unload “something heavy” there that they then dumped in a small lake. Divers found the heavy objects—boxes with gun parts, infused with concrete. DNA and fingerprints linked Leo as well as Felix and Vincent Dûvnjac to one of the bank robberies.
Broncks followed the man dressed in overalls to the truck one last time.
If you had succeeded in involving your brothers, you would have been as unwilling as you were then to allow one of them to die. You have assembled a new constellation—and one of them is already dead.
If it is you driving away in the milk truck, maybe you’re the only one left.
If it isn’t you, you have at least one partner who’s alive.
You, or your partner, are acting totally calm. You, or your partner, are walking around as if nothing happened. One of you was shot, and you, or your partner, simply continue.
And I haven’t felt this good in six years.
Because, you see, what’s burning in my chest is happiness.
I just got a second chance to bust you, to make your life the same hell you emerged from yesterday, although for a whole lot longer this time.
THE BLACK CAR was too new, too expensive, too shiny. It glided past her kitchen window for the third time now and slowed down at the driveway without stopping completely.
Britt-Marie could see the two men in the front seat clearly, an older, gray-haired one and a younger one with short-cropped hair, the same men every time.
It was a car that didn’t belong here.
The windows on one side of the house faced the wide, humming Nynäs highway, groaning with constant traffic from dawn to dusk, with just a sparse hedge between. From the window on the other side, where the narrow road formed a U (or was it a V?), binding together fourteen semidetached houses, the only other thing she saw was the neighbors’ cars. But the black, shiny car, with its stealth and streamlined hood, made her think of a predator’s drawn-back shoulders.
The first time she observed it must have been around nine o’clock. She had just woken up on her day off from the nursing home and was sitting with a cup of coffee. Through the window she saw it glide past like a shark, at a time when usually no one ever passed by. It became so empty in a residential area where everyone was still working and could afford to drive alone to work. She noticed the car the most then, thinking that it didn’t seem to know where it was going. Then she forgot about it and started preparing lunch instead. The pot with potatoes and water would stand ready on the burner, and she’d simply have to turn the knob. The side of salmon was on the cutting board in front of her, glossy and pink, much like raspberry gumdrops. She had pulled out the salmon’s small, transparent bones, like plucking eyebrows, except the salmon bones were harder to remove, having become entrenched like rebar even though they were delicate, and put it in an oblong ovenproof dish on the top shelf in the fridge. She would simply have to put it in the oven for twenty minutes when all three of her sons had arrived. Salt and pepper, pile on the full-fat cream and dill, let it sit an additional ten minutes. It was Vincent’s favorite dish—he had managed to visit her several times since his release—but she was a bit uncertain whether Leo liked salmon these days, it was so long ago.
Together.
She shivered, involuntarily, quite moved, which she seldom was, but it was also seldom that she saw them all at the same time.
The second time she saw the black predator car slink by was about half an hour later. She felt stron
g discomfort without knowing why. Suddenly she thought of—him. Of Ivan. What did he have to do with predator cars? Showing up at the wall and buzzing about like a foul-smelling blue bottle fly. What was he really doing there? Was he going to start meddling again? The same going-on about changing and that he had made new decisions and would start over and that it included other people who didn’t want it?
Change—it was hardened in concrete. It could no longer be changed.
Could never be undone.
She had chosen not to think about him for six years—actually eighteen. But six years ago she was forced to think about him again in connection with the bank robbery, trial, and sentence. How in heaven’s name can a father be made in such a way that he gets involved in a bank robbery with his own son? And believes that it’s a good way to get to know the sons he lost because of violence and blows; that he can receive, as well as give, closeness? And then has the gall to stand in front of the wrought-iron gate at the wall and maintain that if he hadn’t been there, Leo would have died. With his infernal ideas about creating conflicts, building a clan united against the whole world! The goddamn holy family! And now—would these bonds continue to entangle her sons? The bonds Ivan tied so tight during their childhood, at a time when her sons were finally heading in different directions?
She leaned farther forward to see better, resting one cheek against the windowpane. That was the third time the predator car had slowed down then slipped past. She didn’t take her eyes off it, moving from room to room and window to window, until it turned off toward Nynäs highway and the rumbling traffic. Gone. She’d imagined it. And she knew why. Her panic from the night, over the attachments so tight they threatened to pull everything apart. She’d let Ivan, like the predator, sneak into her head, churning, going around and around and watching her, making her overinterpret what she saw.
A rippling, hearty laugh.
She heard Leo and Felix’s voices from the dining room, Felix laughing though he didn’t often laugh these days. He seemed pleased, almost happy about sitting there again with his big brother. Felix’s laugh answered Leo’s silly, disguised voice imitating someone as he used to do, when the two were together, the jargon they’d always had between them. Leo had always been the one who could most easily break through Felix’s blunt opposition.
Britt-Marie shook off the unpleasant feelings brought on by the predator car. Now they were going to have a lovely time and celebrate being together again as a family, her image of a family.
She had been waiting and longing for it.
This lunch—reuniting all her sons around the table. The image had become the goal she thought about before each new prison visit, which made her able to carry on.
The telephone attached to the wall above the work desk didn’t ring especially often these days—most phone calls had stopped at the time of her sons’ arrests. Shame works like that, and she had had her own share of silence. Shame isolates and makes the ashamed withdraw.
But now it rang. Repeated, penetrating rings.
“Hello, Mama.”
“Vincent! So good that you called.”
She walked toward the fridge with the telephone cord stretched out and pulled out the prepared oven dish.
“When are you getting here? Should I put the salmon in now? It needs some time, you know, for the cream to thicken, which you like so much.”
“I can’t come, Mama.”
She stood in the middle of the kitchen floor, the telephone receiver in one hand and the oven dish in the other, balanced, perfectly still.
“Has something . . . happened?”
“I just can’t make it. The apartment, I have the inspection tomorrow and two large floor tiles have cracked. Expensive Italian crap that’s always breaking in old bathrooms. I told the owners right from the start.”
She listened to her son, the one who never usually talked so much, nor so specifically. Too much and too detailed, like when a person is lying.
“Is that really true, Vincent? Is it?”
“Mama?”
“Yes?”
“I can’t cope with it. Not right now.”
She should have felt betrayed, disappointed. Her goal, the image of them all together, would now be missing one of the three. But she felt the opposite, she felt relieved. She thought she understood what it was that he couldn’t cope with. It was the bonds—the same bonds she herself had broken loose from. Vincent didn’t show up at the prison yesterday either. And somehow she was glad that her youngest son seemed aware that bonds can ensnare—because only then is it possible to face them. Even if it includes lying to Mama.
“I’ll save you some. Put it in the fridge. Come by when you’re hungry.”
She balanced the glass dish, opened the oven door, and placed it roughly in the center. She turned on the potatoes and took out the pitcher of ice water. Lemon wedges were crowded in with ice cubes, which rattled when they hit the glass. She walked toward the infectious laughter and the consciously idiotic voice: Felix and Leo, as they were back then. With the pitcher on the table the ice cubes weren’t rattling anymore. Then she took away one of the four plates that had been set on the table.
“The food will be ready soon. But there’ll just be three of us. Vincent isn’t coming.”
She hurried to turn back and had managed to get to the kitchen doorway, when Leo’s question caught up with her.
“Mama?”
“Yes?”
“Why?”
“It was something about . . . Italian tiles cracking. And an inspection.”
“What the fuck? The job again.”
She heard in Leo’s voice that he had recognized a lie, that he understood. His mother was participating in the lie, not just conveying it. He realized that his little brother was avoiding him. And when she stepped into the kitchen, the laughter and merriment, which had been so heartwarming, stopped.
“Mama?”
They looked at each other from separate rooms.
“If Vincent calls again—tell him that I’ve worked quite a lot in construction also, tiled a few bathrooms, and have a pretty good idea of what an inspector is looking for when he wants to expose scams in the building trade.”
Felix had sat passively until then, but when his mother disappeared behind the kitchen wall he leaned forward, whispering.
“Leave him alone, Leo. He’ll be in touch with you when he’s ready.”
Leo didn’t answer, and instead reached for the door to the dining room, pulled it gently shut, and invited in the sort of blank silence that enters when an oven and kitchen fan’s monotonous hum is suddenly abated.
“Now we have a moment to ourselves.”
“To ourselves? What the fuck are you up to, Leo?”
“More or less the same thing as when we were little and Mama called from the balcony that dinner would be ready soon.”
The ice cubes clinked like before when he filled their glasses.
Closed doors, water, two parties.
Like at a negotiation.
“Felix?”
“Yeah?”
“How do you want to live? I mean, really live?”
“Stop it.”
“Do you want to continue to live on student grants? Hounded for debts to the crime victims’ authority? Not able to take out even a shitty loan at the bank? Turned down for jobs because you’re on the crime register? Or . . . do you maybe want to have unlimited money, move away from this hellish country, and start over?”
Felix leaned back, as they do in negotiations to announce that they dislike the question.
“It’s almost time for lunch, big brother, so what the fuck do you want?”
“I need your help.”
“Help? What does that mean?”
“A replacement.”
A sip of water and a piece of ice was stuck between chewing surfaces on the right side of Felix’s jaw and it crunched loudly when it was bitten in two.
“Replacement? Oh, yeah, there was evide
ntly a lot of shooting yesterday. I have a television too.”
Leo waited for the damn crunching to subside.
“Help with a one-time deal. No armed robbery, nothing like what we were doing before. A job.”
“A one-time deal, Leo? A job? That was exactly how it sounded all those fucking years ago. Do you remember? Before the ICA shop. Before the thirty thousand in the leather bag, one time and then we don’t need any more. Or what was it you called it . . . a heist? Heist, brother!”
“That’s exactly what it is. A heist. A supercool robbery. We walk right in, take out a hundred million, and no one is going to see it. I would never do it, or get you involved, if it was about, say . . . twenty million. That wouldn’t be enough, when it’s full speed ahead and all the damn costs to disappear and the loot’s gone in two years. But now, my brother, a hundred million. And they won’t even know we’re doing it.”
Leo put his hand lightly on Felix’s forearm, and it was as if Felix jumped, so familiar that both of them rather regretted it—Leo for putting his hand there, Felix for reacting to it.
“And look, by the way, we didn’t do anything else. At least not for ten years.”
“But I knew the whole time. That you would continue. At some point. That’s . . . you. What you became, after that. When Papa beat Mama. When you took over.”
“Amateur psychologists. I got my fill of them inside.”
“Call it whatever the fuck you want. But it was never about the money—about snatching a bank money bag and making off with thirty thousand. It was about . . . the fact that you could. Plan. Get away. Control the circumstances. Just like ten banks were never about the money either, not for you, Leo. Whatever you say about it, it was the same thing—because you could. A robbery would become a double robbery would become a triple robbery. And who the fuck knows what it would have become if someone hadn’t stopped you then.”
The Sons: Made in Sweden, Part 2 Page 12