“Larsen, what sort of name is that actually?”
“You ask too many questions.”
“Otherwise you don’t find anything out.”
“It was Mama’s. Before she married. He took it the day he came of age.”
“I remember how it was for all of you. It was fucked up.”
Broncks continued to move the cursor forward. To the crossing at 14:00 back to the mainland. When he saw the car again, it was parked, pointing in the other direction, in the middle of the ferry. Dûvnjac was seen clearly through the windshield.
After that no one was on the 14:30 ferry, not to the island and not on the way back.
But then what he didn’t want to see. Sam. He left on the 15:00 ferry.
John got up and rushed out of the house, into the rising wind. The seagulls were screeching even louder.
He leaned against the lowered gate and looked away toward the island, as afraid as he was angry.
He vomited down into the water.
That’s how the memories were.
“Are you okay?”
The ferryman stood in the doorway and Broncks nodded weakly. He breathed in and out slowly a couple of times and went back to looking at the images. According to the numbers in the right margin an additional thirty-four vehicles were transported before the final crossing in the evening.
“So you became a police officer?”
The ferryman moved closer to him as if he were concerned and would like assurance that his guest didn’t need to run out again.
“You really went separate ways. One locked up. And one who locks people up for a living.”
Fear, anger—actually the same feeling. It came three more times.
19:00 Sam returned to the island.
20:00 Leo returned to the island.
22:00 Leo left the island on the next to last crossing.
By the time he thanked the ferryman for his help, John had watched parts of an entire day in the lives of two men. They were completely synchronized with a very serious crime committed an hour of travel time away.
He knew now.
He still had no evidence that both men had shared a prison corridor with a recently killed robber, and that they had ample time to be able to prepare and complete a robbery of a security van by traveling back and forth by ferry. It would not hold up in court.
But he knew all the same it was true. Gut feelings, which Elisa despised so much, were enough for him.
Dammit, Sam, what have you done?
And with him?
LEO COUNTED TWENTY-SEVEN advertising brochures and three weeks’ worth of free newspapers spread out over the hall floor. The window envelope lying in the middle of the unsorted pile of mail looked as if it contained a rent bill addressed to Fredrik Söderberg c/o Johansson. One of the apartments included in Sullo’s operation—temporary housing for individuals who needed to lie low for a few days.
He put the sports bags down on the hall rug. The Puma bag containing the newly fulfilled wish list and the bright red Adidas bag handed over a day earlier by the Albanian bruiser in baggy tracksuit bottoms. The laptop that cost one hundred thousand kronor was still at the bottom of the bag. He put it up on the kitchen counter and typed in the letters that cost an additional forty thousand kronor. Ten thousand per letter. The policeman who once owned the computer had either been a clown or a crossword fanatic. The password spelled out S-T-A-R backward—R-A-T-S.
The document he needed first took seven and a half minutes to locate among the submenus and folders and links—the template for requisitions. He made a copy of the form and started to look for the two files that held what he needed to be able to fill it in correctly—the roster of duty officers and the register of relevant seized property from ongoing investigations.
THE DOOR AT the police station’s exit to Kungsholms Street was caught by a sudden wind, and Elisa Cuesta held on to it hard so that it wouldn’t fly open and hit the wall. She put on her leather gloves and began to walk. It should only take ten minutes to get there. Fleming Street. St. Eriks Street. She slipped forward on the poorly maintained pavement, a layer of ice lingering stubbornly on the asphalt. She passed the avenue with red plastic signs warning of sharp icicles, which were clinging to the drainpipe despite the approaching spring and were ready to fall like deadly spears at any moment.
Investigating and eliminating the two names on the short task list had been quick to do. A and B. Sánchez and Bernard. According to the police authority in Bolivia, Joaquín Sánchez had moved to the land of his birth after serving his sentence and now a few months later was at El penal de San Pedro prison awaiting trial, suspected for a drug-related triple murder. Thor Bernard’s alibi checked out. Several witnesses had unanimously confirmed that at the time of interest he was on board a ferry between Gdánsk and Nynäshamn. Now she was waiting to hear from Broncks about C and D. He had looked so miserable standing by the gas stove in the cramped kitchen of his apartment, squeezing the bundles of paper hard that he himself had so stubbornly insisted they divide between them. Perhaps she shouldn’t have woken him after only two hours of sleep. Perhaps she shouldn’t have called him a psychopath again, either—the first time had been a label, the second time a joke that could have been perceived as harassment. Maybe he’d understood the joke as little as he had understood the admonishment earlier. And for a moment, just before he stepped out of the hallway, she had even considered giving him a hug. But if she had done so, she would probably have regretted that too.
St. Eriks Bridge and Rörstrands Street. She stopped short before the door to the building, looking up to be sure that the icicles would stay up there a while longer. Then she opened the door to the apartment building that Leo Dûvnjac’s middle brother had given as the current work address of the youngest brother.
In the hall was a beautiful staircase with light, peaceful walls, wide stairs of stone worn down by time and footsteps, and flowers in pots in the round windows, looking out over a well-maintained courtyard. They were apartments with a price per square foot surely matching those of exclusive districts in London and Paris. Insanely expensive.
She stopped at the door on the third floor. It stood open a little and had empty paint cans on both sides, sharp-edged flakes of paint all over the landing. She rang the bell and through the gap heard how the signal drowned in a radio’s pop music moving freely through the bare rooms. When no one seemed to have noticed her, she opened it all the way and went into a hall framed by toolboxes and tool bags along the newly painted white walls. The apartment was under complete renovation, a building site that reminded her of her own plumbing renovation—four weeks of dust morning, noon, and night.
“Hello?”
Like the music, her voice danced around the empty rooms and settled unheard at her feet. She kept on going into what she assumed was the sitting room. It was cold, as if all the heating elements were turned off. And the room seemed basically finished. This wouldn’t be his workplace much longer.
Then she saw him. Rather, she saw two people, out on the balcony. Because of that the heat was blowing out of the room. They had their backs to her, cigarettes in their hands. As soon as she knocked on the open door of the balcony, they turned around. A young man about twenty-five, a middle-aged man about fifty-five. The younger man was dressed in blue carpenters’ overalls and the older man in white painters’ pants. She recognized them both. The father and youngest son in the Dûvnjac family.
“My name is Elisa Cuesta and I’m from the investigation division, city police. And I have some questions for you, Vincent—you’re Vincent, right?”
The younger one in overalls nodded, put his cigarette out, and stepped into the sitting room.
“First I would like to know where you were on Monday between four and five p.m.”
“Here. Right now it’s round-the-clock work if I’m going to finish in time.”
“Can anyone confirm that?”
“I—he was here!” The older one in painters’ pant
s shouted from the balcony and then he came in.
“We were working here, both of us.”
She looked at him, long enough for it to become uncomfortable.
“Ivan, that’s right, yeah? What you’re saying sounds, to be frank, strange. Since the couple running a restaurant called Dráva, where you’re a regular, say you were there at that time in the company of your eldest son. That, conveniently enough, gave both you and him an alibi for the time I’m asking about.”
“Yes, I said that. I left here, when the hell was it, Vincent, 4:10, maybe 4:15—so I can give alibis to both of my sons!”
“They also said that you were there that day by 3:30. You were evidently planning to have dinner with your eldest son. So what you are saying can’t be right.”
She turned again to the younger man.
“Is there anyone else, Vincent, who can confirm that you were here?”
“I was here. That’s how it goes when you get this sort of job. Deadline. Working like hell. Ready for the move-in day. Good money—a lot of demands.”
“And who can back that up?”
“I don’t know. My father was obviously done for the day. The pizza shop, maybe. I don’t remember exactly when I picked it up, a capricciosa. I always get one of those. Maybe the old lady next door? She was here sometime in the afternoon, complaining as usual that I bang too much. And yourself, where were you, by the way? Would you be able to answer that? And if so, do you remember whether anyone saw you?”
“So no alibi. And Leo, your big brother—how and where and when have you seen him since his release?”
“What the fuck is all this?”
The older man raised his voice again even though he was standing close to her. Then he came even closer. He stuck out his chin and bottom lip while he lowered his forehead and stared at her through his eyebrows in a way that was most likely intended to make her afraid, or at least uncertain.
“What do you have to do with this? You say yourself that I can give Leo an alibi—so why are you going on about him? You can leave now, police lady, and leave my family in peace.”
She was neither afraid nor uncertain. She was furious. That’s what she was.
“Family? If we’re going to talk about family, Ivan, I met your ex-wife yesterday. And she was very cooperative.”
“She usually is. When it comes to talking too much to cops.”
“Too much? Well, yeah, maybe that depends on whose perspective. I’ve been looking at your record. Including the assaults.”
“I’ve changed now.”
Elisa didn’t close the door when she went—she let the front door stand half open as it was when she came. Changed. When Ivan had repeated that for a third time in response to each new question, she realized she wouldn’t get any further and that the visit to the nearly finished apartment was over.
She went back down the beautiful staircase, pushed open the heavy door, and stepped into Rörstrands Street and the same wind she had just felt from the balcony.
No.
You are not changed.
On the other hand, your youngest son might very well be. He has no alibi, but no facts at this point show that the picture your ex-wife gave of him at the house search is wrong—that he’ll never commit a crime again.
She walked back to the police station.
Icicles hung above her and fallen ice crunched beneath her feet. It was a season that seemed as lost and unpredictable as the people she was investigating.
Yesterday she had met two brothers and their mother in a house smelling of baked salmon. She thought that outwardly they could be perceived as members of any family at all. Now, when she met the third brother and their papa, she felt something else. The father was the broken hub of the Dûvnjac family. The father set the pace by defiance. Even the eldest son, whom she’d interviewed, was sublime by comparison.
She came to the crossing at the intersection of St. Eriks Street and Fleming Street. The blinking green light unexpectedly turned red and she stopped mid-step, waiting for the signal’s slow ticking to speed up again.
Ivan Dûvnjac had forced his way into the conversation when she addressed her questions to Vincent. He tried to protect his son, but it had the opposite effect. She noticed that Vincent, like a child ashamed by an embarrassing parent, backed away and looked down every time Ivan interrupted. As if he still didn’t know his father essentially, didn’t know what to expect and became vulnerable, unsure of how he would act.
The green light again—she crossed the busy street and, as she sometimes did when she had a little extra time, turned left on St. Görans Street and walked through Kronobergs Park and by the playground with noisy children and their mothers, all about her age. Whenever she tried to see herself there, it just didn’t work. She wasn’t interested. It simply wasn’t her, at least not yet, and she wondered if it ever would be.
Vincent and his father had performed like an out-of-tune band that had never rehearsed and it was not until they stepped out onto the stage and greeted their audience—her—that they realized their notes clashed—a discord.
She decided to go in the Polhems Street entrance and continued through the whole police complex to reach the investigation division and John Broncks’s office, located at one end of it.
Discord.
A fitting word when you don’t understand someone you share a corridor with, never talk with, and are suddenly going to work with.
She went into Broncks’s office without knocking.
A surveillance video. He sat engrossed in front of the computer screen. In the gap between his shoulder and the point of his chin, she could see that it was the same images they had looked at the day before. The surveillance camera at the back of the shopping center, a loading dock and a milk truck and the back of a fleeing robber.
She waited for him to finish, the whole sequence, frame by frame, while studying him. He had looked miserable when they parted earlier, and now he was, as usual, unreachable. The contact surface that had been exposed was hidden again. But he smiled at her, something he never used to do. The smile was also discordant.
“That back.”
She pointed at the screen and the man in overalls who jumped from the loading dock.
“It’s exactly that piece of information that rules him out.”
Then the back ran to the truck cab.
“Because of that, Vincent Dûvnjac is the fourth possible suspect I am eliminating today. A and B—Sánchez and Bernard have solid alibis, just like the middle brother, Felix Dûvnjac. The youngest brother, Vincent, lacks an alibi—but all the other facts clear him. He is the one in the brotherhood who has most clearly left criminality and has paid off his penalty to the crime victims’ authority. He has a functioning company with a turnover that has increased each quarter, and according to the prison personnel was the only one of the family who didn’t meet the big brother at the gate, as if he disapproved. He plainly lacks a motive, and, in addition, about sixty pounds of muscle, if you compare him with the back there—he doesn’t match the description.”
She waited for Broncks to begin telling her how things had gone for him. But he didn’t seem ready, so she continued.
“And then, well, if I go outside the collected facts for a moment, the youngest brother also seems to have a . . . well, vulnerability, which I haven’t seen in the others.”
“Vulnerability?”
“Yes. He’s open. Possible to reach. If we need to.”
She waited for him again.
“John? Now is when you explain to me—how it went for you today.”
In vain, again.
“With C. And D.”
He was taking notes. She noticed that now and realized that there seemed to be a whole lot in the corner of the sheet of paper. He must have been writing them when he was watching the film on the computer screen.
That was why he wasn’t answering. He had discovered something.
She came closer.
He was doodling.
That was what he was doing—he was running the ballpoint pen aimlessly over the paper in some sort of pattern of broken lines, maybe a flower, possibly a star.
“Sam Larsen. Semir Mhamdi. John—how did it go?”
Then he put down the pen. He had been drawing a man, a face, she saw it now. He stopped the sequence of images and froze the man’s back just as he jumped into the truck cab.
And John looked at her.
“Alibis.”
With that damn discordant smile.
“Both of them, unfortunately.”
THE STRANDS LANDED in uneven balls in the white sink and were so unlike the mental picture he went around with. He had grown up as the one out of three brothers who inherited Mama’s hair color. He had always been the blond. And then it had sort of become a fixed idea and he continued to think of himself as fair. It was only now, when his hair was coming off his head and he was confronted with memories, that the adult Leo Dûvnjac’s color became clear. It was considerably darker.
The electric shaver was set to zero millimeters and left bare skin behind. Stroke after stroke after stroke over the top of his head until the image in the mirror could have belonged to someone else, if it hadn’t been for his eyes with clear-blue irises. They were still his own.
The new ones lay in a gray plastic container and were brown, even dark brown. He placed the two lenses on his fingertips and carefully tipped them in, one at a time, over each cornea. After that he avoided the mirror, not wanting to take away from the first impression of the whole image, when he would be looking at a completely changed person.
Leo left the bathroom and went into the hall, heading for the main room. A nearly unfurnished one-room apartment with a kitchen at the top of the building, in the section of the city called Gamla Sickla, commonly sought after for its beautiful view of both Nacka and downtown Stockholm. But this particular temporary tenant preferred to have all the blinds shut.
A single bed was the room’s remaining piece of furniture and the glow from the makeshift ceiling light settled softly by the uniform and belt lying stretched out on the blanket. A pair of boots stood on the floor in the shadows below the bed.
The Sons: Made in Sweden, Part 2 Page 22