Leo shot the object along the bar toward Ivan: a black cell phone with a wide, shiny screen.
“With that you can give me a ring whenever you want. Look at it as the direct line between you and me. We’ll even register it in your name. You just have to sign a paper and send it in so that it’s your own contract, which I’ll pay the bills for. If you are worried or just want to talk, then use it.”
Ivan picked up the shiny black phone lying on the transfer agreement document and balanced it between his thumb and his index finger. It was narrow and light, six ounces at most, and not longer than four inches.
“So damn little. The fucking thing will disappear in my pockets. I’m never going to find it when you call.”
“Just a second. Try it and see how it feels.”
Leo pressed a shortcut key on his own phone and Ivan at once felt how the slender black object vibrated like a small drill in his hand, giving off a signal that sounded like a trumpet.
“Not even you can mistake where it is.”
Ivan rubbed his neck. The pain was beginning to lessen. The conversation was starting to resemble what he had imagined it would’ve been during yesterday’s canceled dinner.
“When you dial my phone I know that it can only be you, Dad, and when I call yours you’ll know it is me and no one else.”
Ivan turned all the way around to face his son for the first time, and it felt good again.
“What do you say—do you want a cup of coffee?”
“Which of my brothers gave you the number yesterday, Dad?”
“So you don’t want a cup of coffee?”
“Tomorrow, when we meet again, I promise we’ll drink a cup.”
Ivan was certain his son’s words weren’t constructing a lie. Leo would call.
“Vincent. He gave me the number. Who the hell else would it be?”
Leo nodded. He understood. Their father had no contact with Felix. It would take years—perhaps they would never speak to each other again.
“Where can I find him—Vincent? Where does he live?”
“I have no idea. But I know where he’s working. And he’s there late today.”
“How do you know?”
“I help him sometimes during the day.”
Ivan saw the surprise in Leo’s face and felt a little pleased.
“So you are . . . working together?”
“Mmm.”
“And how long have you . . . ?”
“A couple of months. We aren’t all that strict. I help out with a bit of painting.”
Leo folded a napkin from Dacso’s serving cart and took a pen from the bowl by the cash register.
“Write down the address. Where he is now, that is.”
Ivan did so, even remembering what was on the door plaque, and handed the napkin to Leo. At the same time Dacso finally rattled out of the kitchen with a blue plastic crate in his arms, heavy with steaming white cups right out of the dishwasher. He was smiling when he filled one of them with black coffee and placed it on the bar.
“And you? Leo—that’s your name, right? Do you want to have some too? Or are you going to eat the dinner you’ve already paid for?”
“Some other day.”
“You are welcome here, whenever you want.”
Leo laid his hand lightly on his father’s shoulder.
“I’ll call you, Dad.”
“On my new telephone?”
“I promise. We’ll get together tomorrow, for a little longer.”
As Leo left, Dacso had fetched a bowl, filled it with lumps of sugar, the brown kind, and placed it next to Ivan’s steaming cup.
“Yesterday, Ivan, I didn’t see it. Your boy is fair and you’re dark. I thought, damn, has the mailman delivered the wrong package again?”
Dacso dropped in two lumps and stirred the cup with a teaspoon. He knew how Ivan liked it.
“But today I saw it right away, in his eyes. It’s the look that shows it—end of story. A spark! You both have a spark in the eye.”
Ivan tasted his coffee, the same dishwater as usual, and then nodded at Dacso’s wife, who came out from the kitchen through the swinging doors.
“I was wrong. You aren’t hyenas.”
“What?”
“You and your wife.”
“Yes, well, that sounds good. No one wants to be a hyena.”
“You and your wife are like tinder. Tinder that is never going to catch fire. There is no spark at all between you!”
Ivan looked at the restaurant owner, who seemed to be unsure whether he had understood correctly. He took his cup of coffee and moved to the window. The evening was already beginning to close in around his eldest son. It had been light outside when Leo came, and now it was almost dusk.
Ivan caught himself waiting for Leo to turn around and wave, like when he was little.
He was even more convinced that Leo was heading in a direction that would lead him back to the cell. It was as clear as the small black flies.
Now he was on the way to Vincent, bringing with him the influence he had as Vincent’s stand-in father—influence that he, Vincent’s real father, had never had.
And right then, far off in the twilight, Leo turned around and waved.
LEO FELT HE was being watched. When he realized he was, he turned around and waved. Papa was standing between the letters Á and V in the Dráva Restaurant’s window with a coffee cup in his hand. He looked smaller than he used to, with slouched shoulders, a bit sad.
One and a half cigarettes in the bus shelter on Ring Road later, the number 4 blue articulated bus had swung in, and seventeen minutes later let him off at St. Eriksplan. From there it was a couple of hundred yards’ walk to the stairs on Rörstrand Street. Leo checked the napkin with Papa’s straggly handwriting: number 12, entry code 7543, third floor, STENBERG on the door.
He rang the doorbell, and in spite of its being the old original bell, a clear electronic signal reverberated. That meant that a plastic box was fixed above the inside of the door, and that Vincent had unscrewed the cover when he’d painted the wall.
He listened with his ear pressed against the front door’s wooden panel as the signal faded out, and could just hear the advertising jingles from a scratchy radio that formed a part of the background noise of every construction site. When he flipped up the letterbox’s flap the music became louder and he was blinded by a cold, sharp beam from the shadeless builder’s light.
He rang again. Twice he had expected to be greeted by his youngest brother—first outside the prison gate and then at the lunch. Now it was the other way around—Vincent wouldn’t expect his older brother to be here.
A third ring. And then he heard the volume of the radio lower and steps approaching.
“Hello, little brother.”
Vincent looked at him in silence.
“Aren’t you happy to see me?”
Yesterday when they had spoken on the telephone—when Leo had called from the forest—he had heard the change, a teenager who had become an adult. Now he could see it. But he could also feel the change—which was not only about the growth in his body and how his face had resolved as to the features that would settle there. It was about something altogether different, about how his adult body related to him in distance, even though they stood close to each other.
“Leo?”
“Are you going to let me in?”
“What the hell are you doing here?”
“Do you really want to talk about it in the stairwell?”
Leo walked from room to room in the beautiful apartment, accompanied by the hollow echo that comes when nothing stops a sound playing freely between bare walls. Newly sanded parquet floors, plaster with luster and high, glistening baseboards made of wood. He guessed it was about three hundred and fifty flawlessly renovated square feet.
“Hey, Vincent?”
“What?”
Even in the bathroom.
“This isn’t Italian tile.”
“What?”<
br />
As Leo walked around, Vincent remained by the front door with his hand still on the door handle.
“This isn’t Italian tile that has cracked.”
Leo turned and went out into the long, narrow hall, empty apart from the corner with paint tins, tile cutters, and two toolboxes.
“Like you told Mama.”
He ran his hand along the white woodwork that framed one of the doors, an even, shiny, well-painted surface.
“And the inspection? How did it go, by the way?”
They looked at each other as two brothers do when both know that a white lie only works as long as it isn’t visible.
“Vincent?”
Leo pulled out the toolboxes, which were as long as trunks and as high as pallets.
“Let go of the handle and sit down. We need to talk.”
“Why?”
“Because I want to know if you know what the largest ever robbery in Sweden is. In Scandinavia.”
The only thing that hadn’t changed between them was the natural way Leo could talk about criminal plans.
“Come on, Vincent. The largest robbery?”
It would have sounded absurd in other company but sounded natural with his brothers.
“Okay, that must be . . . the terminal robbery.”
“And you call yourself a former bank robber? The terminal robbery was only a lousy forty-five million.”
“What about Bromma?”
“Yes. That’s still the highest. A lousy fifty million.”
“We forgot the Robbery of the Century.”
“No.”
“But that was so much bigger.”
“They went to prison. With all the loot. So it doesn’t count.”
Leo moved the toolbox a little so they would be closer to each other.
“Are you okay sitting there, little brother?”
“Say what you came to say.”
“You’re okay sitting there? So you can listen to this—think of the loot from Bromma. Then think of a robbery where you double that. More than double it.”
“Well?”
“I plan to pull it off. On Thursday. But I have a small problem. There were going to be three of us. Now there are only two. I need one more person.”
Vincent got up from his temporary chair, walked around and around in the empty apartment, and even though he was wearing soft shoes so as not to scratch the parquet, his steps pounded.
“Vincent, come and sit down again.”
And to silence his footsteps, silence his big brother, silence all the fucking shit ruining everything, he struck his right fist in misery against the beautiful bedroom door, and watched the paint come loose at the dent.
“Sit down, dammit—I just want to talk with you!”
Vincent struck the door again with the same fist and this time cracked not just the paint but the wood of the door panel, too.
“Don’t you understand?” The freshly painted door was red with blood, as were his knuckles. “It’s exactly this fucking shit that I was afraid of. I knew it! That was why I didn’t want to see you! I knew you’d come out of there with some ridiculous idea of continuing!”
He went into the bathroom and the blood was dropping onto the floor. He turned on the tap above the sink, waited until the water became ice cold, and rinsed his knuckles, wrist, and forearm.
“Leo, I was in prison for four years. I was released with five hundred kronor and a train ticket. Do you understand how hard it is to get back into society without fighting every bit of your way there? I’ve tried like hell. I’ve paid off the crime victims’ reparation. And still, it becomes fucking complicated when a girl finds out what I did, that I did time. When her parents and brothers and sisters and friends find out and try to get her to end it. I’m never going to commit a crime again. Understand that!”
Vincent undid the toilet paper roll and wrapped up his hand in several layers of paper until the blood stopped seeping through. Then he went back to the toolbox and sat down opposite Leo, holding the paper in place with his other hand.
“Are you finished now?”
“I don’t understand how you can stand it, Leo—can’t you just stop?”
“The biggest ever robbery. And at the same time, little brother, we take away from Broncks all that pride and cred that he’s running around with right now. We become insanely rich and he becomes nothing at all.”
The paper around Vincent’s injured hand loosened a little as he desperately struck it again, this time against his chest.
“I have made a promise to never commit crimes again. A promise to myself, in here.”
“Break it.”
“What?”
“The promise. You’ll gain something from it. I’ll take the risks, but I need one more person to minimize them.”
His hand was bleeding again. The blow to his chest had hit harder than he intended.
“Leo? Can’t you just let it go, all of it? Live a normal life. Get a job.”
“A normal life? What the hell is that—is it running around being afraid? Like you? Vincent, it’s not about you being afraid to go to prison again. It’s because he got to you, that cop bastard. When he arrested you. When he interrogated you. Don’t you understand that that was exactly what he wanted to achieve—to divide us?”
“You know what I mean.”
“No.”
“Papa believes in you.”
“Does he?”
“‘If I can change, Leo can change.’ He always says that.”
“Well, you work together now so you have time to chat a good deal.”
Vincent looked down and away, perhaps having hoped to tell Leo about that himself.
“And after? What the hell are you planning to do then? After the fucking idiocy?”
“Then, little brother, I disappear. That’s why I’m pestering you—I want to have you with me. I love you, little brother, you know that.”
“And I love you. But it’s not about that.”
“We’ll disappear. I want you to disappear with me. It’s us against the world, right?”
There was a balcony leading out from the sitting room. Leo had noticed it when he’d arrived. So as Vincent was weighing the question that lay on the floor between the two toolboxes one last time, Leo opened the doors to it and went out in the cold, pleasant air. The cold that nibbled his cheeks on the way to Papa was now biting into his bare skin. He leaned on the railing and thought about his little brother who was seriously trying to become ordinary. There were no secret rooms under the floor in his life. He took a couple of deep breaths and was just about to turn to come back in when he caught sight of the coffee can with cigarette butts in it. Vincent didn’t smoke—but he recognized these. Hand-rolled. Rizla paper and rolling tobacco. Papa.
“Leo?”
Vincent was still sitting on the toolbox, leaning forward as he had been a little while ago.
“No.”
“No?”
“Never again.”
Leo looked at him. He was not going to change.
“In that case, little brother . . . we’ll never see each other again. This is where our paths part. There is no alternative for me. I can’t break my promise to myself, Vincent, just like you can’t break yours.”
After a few minutes, maybe more, Vincent stood up.
“I would never have robbed any banks if it hadn’t been for you.”
He looked at his big brother and his gaze was calm, steady.
“All the guys in their twenties, the ones I know, have at one time or another sat with a case of beer and fantasized about the big heist. But there was a difference for me, and for Felix. You were there, Leo. You are the kind of person who says okay—we’ll do it. And gets others to follow you.”
Adult, independent eyes.
“And today, Leo? After having waited so long to have lunch together, how the hell do you think it felt for Mama? First, I didn’t come. And then the cops pick you up and turn everything upside down. Every
thing you do has consequences for us. It doesn’t matter that we aren’t part of it—we are still somehow involved.”
“Okay, little brother. So it’s decided. I’ll put a million in your bank account.”
“I prefer to earn my own money.”
Then Vincent took a step forward, stretched out his arms, and didn’t stop hugging until it was completely over. He stood there a long time in the empty hall and laid his cheek carefully on his swollen knuckles, which had begun to ache, a pulse throbbing in time with his heart.
It felt unreal, and if it weren’t for the pain in his hand, he would not have been certain that he had just met his big brother for the first time in six years—and the last time in his life.
DARK. COLD. THE roads were well and truly slippery, as always when the temperature danced around the zero mark.
“We leave the main road at the crossing in about a quarter mile.”
Leo pointed and Sam put on the brakes a little, hand on the gearstick, ready. The trip through the suburb called Tumba, the residential area, was so familiar. It was here they had lived back then, the base for all the plans during the couple of crazy years of bank robberies—a house among other houses, a neighbor among other neighbors.
“Up there, by the blue building, we go to the right. And then, after just fifty yards, right again.”
They were to stop at the gate in the ten-foot-high chain-link fence, crowned with coiled barbed wire. He had probably not thought of it then, how much the enclosure resembled the perimeter security around a prison.
They parked by a black BMW, this year’s model. The rest of the meeting’s participants were already in place.
“The 3D printer, Leo, is in a box back there, just like you wanted. Don’t forget it. Getting another through customs . . . we don’t have enough time.”
Sam nodded toward the small truck’s otherwise empty cargo space where it lay—the key that would take them to “the test” and “the police station”—to the final heist.
“Constable Dûvnjac thanks you very much.”
With the truck’s lights off, the darkness was even darker. No one lived on this plot of land, in this house. They walked across the asphalt, which was as uneven as he remembered. The pools of water that had formed in depressions in the surface were encapsulated under a thin layer of ice. They passed the big garage that, when he bought the place, had functioned as a showroom for a small car dealership, but that they’d transformed into a training space. It was there they had made scale models of bank premises, with the cash desks built out of chipboard and mannequins as cashiers. There had been plenty of room for drilling the movements until they were perfect—all within the hundred and eighty seconds that every bank robbery had to take. Each of them had a role and everything was rehearsed.
The Sons: Made in Sweden, Part 2 Page 15