The Sons: Made in Sweden, Part 2

by Anton Svensson

  THE BOOM GATE was red and white and was gliding upward a little at a time, as if it had to stop regularly and get ready so that it could manage to go the whole way. John Broncks rolled on board the small car ferry and the gate was lowered behind him. His was the only car on that particular crossing, so it seemed like a normal day. Five minutes from the mainland to the island in the middle of Lake Mälaren. He turned in the driver’s seat and waved to the ferryman up in the control room as Papa always did when he and Sam were little. Everyone on Arnö had a habit of waving—it separated the tourists from the homeowners. He drove up to the ramp that would open soon and represented never coming back. That’s how it was every time they left the mainland for a weekend or the summer holidays—as if they were surrendering to another world isolated by violence. That was why Sam always whispered “Welcome to Alcatraz” when the car lurched over the bump between the ramp and the land.

  Broncks felt—as he had then—the hellish nausea. Deep down in his stomach. The kind that he usually felt in his chest as an adult, taking the form of a large black ball that got in the way of breathing. But now—just like then—it sank to his stomach and settled there as if he had eaten anxiety.

  I am an adult now, for fuck’s sake.

  That didn’t help—not with how he thought or what he thought about. It stayed there in the pit of his stomach, weighed him down, and entered into him.

  The children he had met earlier in the morning had been the complete opposite. Noisy, inquisitive, full of self-confidence, constantly in motion. He had stepped into an apartment in Fruängen and at the same time into something so entirely different from what he had expected because of prejudice. D on the list—Semir Mhamdi—had found his way back to his wife and children with his newly found religious beliefs and an entirely new life. He was someone who was truly trying. Broncks had ended up in the middle of a school drop-off and walked there together with the family. Without being aware of it, the daughters had given their father the alibi that the policeman was there to investigate. Both yesterday and the day before, yeah, right after school when Papa took us to the swimming pool, then, can you believe it, he made a giant cannonball in the middle of the pool, and it splashed far, really, really, really far.

  So very different from how he grew up himself.

  On the way from the boat he waved to the ferryman’s control room again, just as a real islander would do. He did it automatically even though he had never been here as an adult.

  He had searched for the registration in the census without having a clue where his own brother was living after his release. He knew that Sam had inherited the summer house—Mama had wanted that in her will. His immediate feeling of jealousy had later transformed in his thoughts to a feeling of indifference. If Sam wanted the fucking house, he was welcome to do whatever the fuck he wanted with it. But John never could have imagined that his brother would choose to live in it.

  He passed the thirteenth-century church. Its white plaster was considerably discolored, and the lawn and gravel paths seemed no longer as well tended. It was there they met most recently, without saying a word to each other either before or after their mother’s burial. In spite of that, from a little distance, it could have made an ordinary picture of an ordinary family at an ordinary funeral—if it hadn’t been for the two prison guards standing on either side of Sam during the entire ceremony, and even they were in black suits.

  The road’s asphalt gave way to coarse-grained gravel and the farmland was replaced by dense forest. It seemed just as beautiful as when they were children. He turned off the engine at the end of the hillside and rolled silently along the final stretch to the red wooden fence.

  He remained in the car.

  A summer house on an early spring day always suggested lack of occupancy.

  Are you living here?

  How can a person voluntarily move into the house of his darkest memories?

  He opened the car door and perceived the sound very clearly—an ax meeting logs that were breaking apart and landing on either side of a chopping block.

  And it was then—when he was going to take the very first step—that the nausea increased, as if eating anxiety had turned into force-fed anxiety. If he could have vomited out his memories, he would have done so here and now.

  He moved slowly over the frozen, nearly snowless lawn toward a light that was increasing in strength. He heard the wooden fibers moaning as they were torn apart. But it wasn’t until he walked around the lilac arbor with its thick branches that he saw him. His back, the ax over his head, the concentrated force when the sharp edge was thrown forward. Broncks waited for the pieces to settle in their piles.

  “Hello.”

  Sam wasn’t startled and didn’t spin around—as if he had heard someone standing there behind him without caring about it. One more birch log, the ax in the air, the crack when it hit exactly where it was aimed.

  “I said . . . hello.”

  Then he turned around, and their eyes met briefly before Sam bent down and gathered up an armful of firewood. The moment passed quickly, but it was long enough for Broncks to catch his face, which had aged since Mama died. Broncks calculated, forty-two. That was how old his big brother was.

  “I thought you would have sold this shit.”

  Sam was silent and gathered the pile of firewood on the other side of the block as well. He carried it across to a stack against the wall of the firewood shed.

  “Surely it must be worth about a million?”

  Sam placed firewood on top of firewood in a stack that would not collapse, then closed the door to the shed and fastened the padlock.

  “Seriously, John—do you think it would be possible to sell it? The murder house? That’s what they still call it after all these fucking years.”

  It was just a few steps to the house. Sam went inside, leaving the door wide open behind him.

  “On a lousy little island the gossip never moves on. It sort of travels around and around along the shoreline. Shit, they barely look at me, whispering that the murderer is back. That’s what they say when they think I don’t hear them.”

  Broncks looked beyond the open door into the little hall and kitchen but his feet refused to move. They didn’t want to enter the place where violence infused the walls.

  “The ferryman, he’s the only damn one of them who isn’t prejudiced. Do you remember him, John? I think he even almost likes me. Not so strange, maybe? He was certainly the only one who saw through our father.”

  Broncks stood where he was and listened to Sam’s voice coming to him from a distance, entirely devoid of feelings, exactly as if they were in any visitors’ cell.

  “You’re letting the heat out.”

  Broncks watched Sam laying the firewood in the rusty tin box that had always stood there by the right side of the woodstove.

  “I have to close it now—either come in or stay out there.”

  The hall.

  He was a kid the last time he’d stood there.

  Now, when he stepped in, it seemed so incredibly small, same as the kitchen where Sam was putting a piece of firewood in through the wood-burning stove’s door and then stirring the red coals with the poker. He saw Sam’s face clearly. So many more wrinkles under the eyes than last time. Exactly like their father. He had never thought in that vein before; that their father had been in his forties when he was murdered, about the same age his two sons were now.

  “Well? Are you here to wish me good luck and welcome me back?” Sam smiled a mocking smile. “In that case, brother, you are a few months late.”

  “No. You don’t want to have anything to do with me in private life—so I am here as a police officer.” John took a photograph out of his coat pocket and laid it down on the kitchen table at the place that had once been his own.

  “Do you know him?”

  Sam didn’t even look at the photo from the correctional system’s register.

  “I still don’t rat on people.”

 
“Sam, you’re not behind bars anymore.”

  “But, John, you’re just as much a policeman.”

  Broncks pushed the photo closer to Sam.

  “I know that you knew him—you were at Österåker at the same time. Jari Ojala was shot to death yesterday afternoon during the robbery of a security van. We believe that his accomplice, who got away, also did time at Österåker. You are one of them, Sam. I have come here to eliminate you from our inquiries. When I have done so, you can do what you want—we won’t see each other again.”

  “So do that. Eliminate me.”

  “When you have told me what you were doing on Monday between four and five.”

  “You’re a police officer—find out for yourself.”

  Broncks laid another photo on top of the first one. The second one covered it exactly, as if the register had a standard size.

  “You did time with him also. Leo Dûvnjac.”

  “And?”

  “Listen, Sam, fuck . . . we should be able to take care of this quickly and then both of us can get to where we want to be—you want to be left in peace and I want to get out of here. Just talk to me.”

  Sam threw a new log into the flames, though it wasn’t necessary.

  “Okay. Then talk.”

  Broncks saw thick, dark smoke streaming up from the edges of a broken stove plate. It was getting harder to breathe.

  “You and Dûvnjac did time together for more than a year, according to the correctional facility’s notes. Which inmate or inmates were close to him during that time?”

  “How the hell should I know?”

  You talked to each other, Sam.

  “Was there anyone he spent a lot of time with?”

  “One socializes as one socializes in a cell block.”

  You were talking about us, Sam.

  “A prison corridor isn’t all that fucking big—you ran into each other all the time. You must have seen who he associated with.”

  You knew each other well, Sam.

  “No one knows anyone when everyone is longing to get out.”

  It was quiet in the little house, as quiet as it was outside. And the logs, which earlier were moaning weakly, crackled loudly now.

  “The smoke is coming out of the stove there, you see that, don’t you? You need to replace the plate. I remember Mama replaced the other one when we were little.”

  The gray smoke formed beautiful veils above the stove. Broncks relaxed in it as it slowly made its way to the ceiling. Then he went to the kitchen table and gathered up the photos. He wouldn’t get any detailed answers, no matter how many times he repeated and varied the same questions.

  He opened the front door and the smoke followed, playing awkwardly.

  But he stopped outside on the small stone step, turned, and went in again.

  “Have you told anyone about us, Sam?”

  “What?”

  “About what happened here?”

  “Is it still the cop who’s asking?”

  “Interpret it as you want.”

  Sam smiled mockingly, like before.

  “Whether I’ve told?”

  And he went into the sitting room and pointed to the two small bedrooms.

  “You mean about what happened in there? Come in, John, and I’ll tell you what happened. Come in!”

  “I know what happened.”

  “The hell you do!”

  Sam vanished out of sight, a few steps farther in toward the bedrooms and Broncks was forced to do the same to be able to see him.

  “I decided not to feel anymore—but you didn’t. Because one can do that, John, decide not to feel pain. One can think, I don’t feel and then you damn well don’t. I remember the last time, how I just looked at him, and said that—hit me, go ahead and hit me, I don’t even feel it—and the old man turned red in the face and beat me and beat me and I didn’t feel it at all. That was the last time. He wouldn’t go for me anymore, and he knew it. We knew it, both of us. So he started to beat you, John. And you, you felt it.”

  Sam nodded at the green wall telephone still hanging there.

  “That was why you called me that night, so long ago, crying, and asked me to come here.”

  There was only the firewood crackling.

  And the cast-iron stove radiating heat, dry and pleasant.

  And the nausea that couldn’t be vomited out, with someone who decided to live among his memories, in the same fucking house.

  And it was as if Sam was enjoying that it was the first time in so many years that he had the upper hand. He was free. Not locked in a cell. He was safe here, unlike his visitor.

  “Come on in! John, come and try out the bed he slept in. If you want to investigate so damn much.”

  On the small shelf for trinkets there was something that looked like a knife on a crocheted cloth among the photographs and glass bowls. Sam reached for it, picked it up, and waved it in front of himself.

  It was that knife. Serrated blade, the very end of the point broken.

  “I requested it. Dammit, it was left as an old piece of evidence in a fucking archive box. You see the dried blood, John, and without the steel at the tip that came off and stayed in his sternum.”

  Broncks left the house for a second time. For the last time. Down the sloping lawn, toward the fence and the car by the edge of the gravel road. He didn’t think much on the way back to the ferry, not while he waited for it nor when he got out of the car during the short crossing to let the wind play in his face and to be able to see the gulls chasing the foaming water.

  He knew that the nausea would accompany him until he saw the contour of Stockholm in the distance again.

  But he hadn’t counted on the doubt that was following him back. He had gone there to eliminate his brother, but that was no longer possible. And it wasn’t about the blows within those walls. They had echoed precisely as much and as loudly as he knew they would. It was the questions concerning Leo Dûvnjac. When he’d broached the subject of how well they knew each other, Sam responded with arrogance, evaded, attacked with counter questions, and was vague. But at least he answered. However, when John turned at the door and posed the question that had been bothering him since yesterday’s interview, whether Sam had told someone about their shared history, what happened in the house—the kind of thing you tell only someone very close—instead of answering, Sam had gone on the attack, launching a shitload of guilt.

  He had known that would knock his little brother off balance.

  Broncks wandered around the empty ferry—from rail to rail, inside the warm passenger lounge and out again. He tapped the lifeboat lightly as if to assure himself it would hold and he fiddled with the timetables on the metal rack. When he was looking up at the control room and ferryman for a while, he saw it.

  The surveillance camera.

  Perhaps they were there—the answers that Sam didn’t want to give.

  Broncks rolled off the ferry but got out of his car immediately past the gate. He waited for the ferryman at the entrance to the little house.

  “Excuse me.” He held out his identification and the ferryman looked at it without it registering.

  “I am a police officer—and I would like to take a look at your surveillance footage from the last couple of days.”

  “Surveillance footage?”

  “From the camera by the control room on the ferry.”

  “It has been there all these years without anyone ever actually asking to see what is recorded on it.”

  “Then it’s about time. The last forty-eight hours.”

  The ferryman went into the house and Broncks followed him to the computer.

  “I think it’s easier if you look yourself. I have never . . . I don’t even know if I could get any life out of that blasted machine.”

  John Broncks sat down and found the icon for the surveillance camera on the screen, clicked on it, and then clicked on today’s date.

  “And what is it you’re looking for?”

&nb
sp; “I don’t really know. It’s more that I’m looking for something that should not be there.”

  “Now I really don’t understand.”

  “And I must ask you not to tell anyone I was here.”

  The quality was like that of all images from surveillance cameras. Jerky, grainy, and lacking both color and sound. There was a timeline at the bottom, and he caught Monday with the computer mouse and dragged the cursor forward.

  Sixty-four crossings. More vehicles than average. It was made clear by a tally in the right margin of the picture.

  He was looking for what he didn’t want to find—Sam leaving the island that day. So he almost missed the vehicle that arrived on the crossing at 13:00. A smallish passenger car, probably a Toyota, that seemed reasonably new, with a driver who couldn’t be seen through the slightly tinted windows. Before the ferry was halfway across, two and a half minutes into the journey, the door on the driver’s side opened. A male stepped out, walked to the rail, and stared down into the water.

  It was then that Broncks saw it.

  Him.

  Leo Dûvnjac. And he was just standing there, on his way to Broncks’s childhood home.

  The nausea had never been so strong, settled so deep, and drilled so sharply in. He tried to embrace reasonable explanations that it wasn’t at all particularly strange that two old cellmates who spent a long time together found each other and built a friendship of the sort that forced confinement made possible; that it wasn’t at all odd if they wanted to meet the first day they both were now free.

  “Excuse me?”

  The ferryman tapped him on the shoulder and studied him intensely.

  “I recognize you.”

  “Yeah? Well, I made the crossing. An hour ago.”

  “No. Not that. I recognize you. You were just a boy then. But you are Sam’s brother. Little brother. John, isn’t it?”

  “John.”

  “I read about you. But wasn’t certain if it was you. The Robbery of the Century. One hundred and three million.”

  “Mmm.”

  “And you got them?”

  “Yes.”

  “So you never changed your surname?”

  “No.”