The Sons: Made in Sweden, Part 2

by Anton Svensson

  A nearly full bus halted in front of them and a long line of passengers at the bus stop were making things difficult and taking their time while they were boarding and trying to find a seat. But Sam sat patiently as they had agreed and waited without trying to overtake it.

  “But what about you? How did it go for you?”

  Then the bus finally closed its doors and they could continue, past City Hall and the white archipelago ships with their reflection in the waters of Lake Mälaren.

  “How did it go?” asked Leo.

  “Yeah?”

  “There are five hundred pounds of banknotes back there.”

  JOHN BRONCKS RAN along the deserted gravel road, aware that he was lured here and that the weapons in the red barn constituted the bait. Just as on the previous occasion, he opted to bypass the large doors with the heavy-duty padlock and kept going to the smaller entrance on the long side. The same rebar lay on the border where gravel became grass. He used it to pry off the metal hoop the smaller padlock was fastened in, jerked the door open, and went in.

  Everything looked as it did the day before. Nothing appeared to have changed.

  He approached the truck and took away the rubber cord holding the tarp in place. The cargo was untouched. The terra-cotta tiles covering the bed and walls of the truck were still there, along with two hundred stacked automatic weapons, decorated on top with a bomb in a wooden box.

  “Underground station Rådhuset temporarily closed off.”

  A new warning.

  He took out the earpiece and unfastened the communications radio from the belt to be able to hear better.

  “Police uniform located on the track adjacent to platform.

  Perpetrator likely inside the underground system.”

  He wasn’t the only one completely taken in. Those who found the uniform and shut down train traffic, and who were now reporting it on the radio, were also utterly duped. They didn’t know what he knew—that Leo Dûvnjac’s criminal mind operated just like this. That it wasn’t a robber escaping in the underground system that they were chasing, but rather someone who had shed his skin and become what he had always dreamed of—someone who carried out the grand heist. That they were looking in the wrong place, where he wanted them to search, where he allowed them to find the shed skin.

  Broncks picked up his cell phone to call the directors of the various task forces in turn, who now must know who they were looking for and that they should therefore continue in a different direction.

  But his phone rang before he could dial.

  And for a moment the emptiness that became violation and anger turned into emptiness again.

  You? Now?

  He nearly shouted his name.

  “Sam!”

  But he got no reply.

  “Sam, for fuck’s sake, say something. I see that it’s you! If you only understood how happy I am. I have tried to reach you lots of times, and I—”

  “I see that. It’s on the screen of the cell, Broncks. Forty-three missed calls.”

  That voice? On Sam’s phone?

  “And you still don’t get it that your brother doesn’t want to talk to you?”

  The voice belonged to Leo Dûvnjac.

  “And when he doesn’t want to—I get to do it instead.”

  The noise of city traffic. He heard that.

  John Broncks pressed the handset harder against his ear.

  The other phone was in a car—that muffled sound that always comes from a badly insulated car.

  “And by the way, Broncks? If we are going to talk now, I want us to see each other. Eye contact. If you turn half to the left and look up at an angle to the corner above the doors, you will find a camera.”

  Broncks did as he was told. And there was the lens of a very small webcam.

  “Good. Now I can see you, Broncks. You seem to have lost weight. And you’re unshaven as hell. Are you ill? Perhaps a bit overscheduled?”

  Provocations. He didn’t give a shit about them. He couldn’t afford to be provoked. He knew that more would soon be coming that required his strength and that the piece of shit on the other end of the line didn’t call to insult him.

  “And since you’ve gotten all the way to my little truck, I assume that you have also realized that I’m not coming to meet you today. That I’ve got something else going on. And it’s too late for you to do anything about it.”

  Broncks stared into the lens, the eye representing another eye. Only now he saw that its shell was painted red in the same shade as the rest of the barn wall.

  “But you shouldn’t be sad about it, Broncks. Even though you didn’t get to meet me, you’re going to get to keep all the guns I let you find. That is, if I don’t happen to see anything in the camera that I don’t want to see, or hear something on the police radio that I don’t want to hear.”

  Broncks wondered if Sam was sitting there next to Dûvnjac in the car, whether he was also listening to this, also watching him.

  “So I don’t want to hear either my name or Sam’s name on the police radio. If there’s a fucking police message, the guns will be destroyed. If the camera is turned off and the monitor goes dark, the guns will be destroyed.”

  A calmness turning into unpleasantness. The same calm that every security guard and bank official described being addressed with during robbery after robbery.

  “So now, Broncks, you son of a bitch, you’ll do what you liked so much before: acting like a private citizen instead of a policeman.”

  A brief clicking sound, followed by electronic silence. He had hung up.

  Broncks stood with the phone in his hand, staring at a barn wall. And maybe he should feel as annihilated as the calm voice assumed.

  But he didn’t.

  Because during the absurd monologue, in which demands were stipulated and guidelines drawn up, a new thought was beginning to take shape. How he could respond to it. He wouldn’t do what the man watching him through the camera lens expected.

  THE FRONT OF the truck was very close to the patterned concrete wall with gaps wide enough to see through—the NK building’s brown façade. The pavement and street could be seen down below if they leaned forward.

  That’s what they saw from the top level of the multistory parking garage, level 6, in the heart of Stockholm. The higher up, the fewer the vehicles, and so the fewer car owners who might risk encountering something they shouldn’t. Behind the truck, they changed from the blue work overalls to regular jeans, shirts, and jackets—clothes that would blend in on the journey across the Baltic Sea. In the truck’s cargo space, the contents of the two packed moving boxes were divided between four large suitcases. Then they moved the suitcases to the next vehicle, a gray Volvo—a car that would blend in for the trip between the city center and Värta Harbor. While Sam held tightly onto the wheel and steered around and around on a narrow roundabout taking them level by level down to the ground, Leo sank down in the passenger seat and checked the webcams. Empty. Both on the outside and inside of the barn. When he looked at the last recorded sequence, from thirteen minutes ago, he saw Broncks leave the farm and disappear. The cop bastard had done exactly as he had been instructed. He hadn’t spread the forbidden names over the police radio, hadn’t sabotaged the camera, and hadn’t called for backup.

  They were down and drove out of the concrete merry-go-round into the daylight and afternoon traffic and shopping tourists who were getting in the way of stressed-out suits.

  Four and a half hours until departure.

  To a new life.

  THE NEWLY VARNISHED parquet floors no one had tramped on; the chalk-white ceilings that absorbed the light nicely; the walls, which still had no stories to tell—Vincent liked the feeling of being in an entirely freshly renovated apartment and able to hand over a normal new beginning. It was so completely different from starting over in a prison cell, or after a prison sentence, in a transitional apartment arranged by a consultant at the Probation Office.

  He drove here for
the very last time to ensure that he hadn’t missed any details in any of the rooms or forgotten improvements. Then, unable to leave, he stood there in a place that would soon be furnished with smells, lives, and movement. Love and conflicts had not yet reached these rooms and taken root.

  And he knew why it was so difficult to go.

  Out there, beyond the windows of the apartment, the opposite was residing right now.

  A little while ago he heard on the radio that a robbery had been carried out inside the police station, a unique robbery presumably involving large amounts. A heist. Leo had always talked about this and, over the last few days, had tried to get one of his younger brothers to participate. He even sat right there on a toolbox to badger him about it.

  Vincent ran two fingertips over the knuckles of his right hand, which were still sore and discolored.

  A final look at the shiny new place before he locked the door with the keys he would hand over tomorrow. When he was on his way down the stairs, he heard footsteps on the way up. He cursed that he’d stayed a little too long; now he would run into the couple who owned the apartment and who perhaps were here to look and plan and mentally move in. He wasn’t in the mood for that, for small talk, not today.

  It wasn’t the middle-aged childless couple. It was the neighbor, the old man with his hair in a ponytail, smelling of turpentine and oil paint. They had seen each other nearly every day since he started work and not exchanged a word the entire time. They mutely nodded to each other for the last time.

  His van was where he usually parked it, in one of the places belonging to the housing cooperative. As he approached, he saw someone standing there leaning on the hood of the van. A man in his forties. Leather jacket and jeans. A face he recognized even though he hadn’t seen it in six years.

  “Hello, Vincent. I tried reaching you by phone. You didn’t answer. So I thought I’d come here.”

  John Broncks.

  The cop who led the investigation of the bank robbers popularly called the Military League.

  “I don’t answer if I don’t recognize the number. And hey—you’re blocking my car.”

  “It doesn’t matter. Because you aren’t going to use it right now. You’re coming with me.”

  “I’m not going anywhere with you. I did my time. And I haven’t committed a fucking crime since. You know that. At least your cop colleague does, who came around here fishing for alibis.”

  Broncks struck the side of the van a couple of times with his hand.

  “You work here?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And it’s going rather well? For you? For the company?”

  He hit the metal of the van again, this time clearly on the logo, V CONSTRUCTION.

  “Yeah.”

  “In that case—would you rather we come here and pick you up with uniforms and a marked car? Do your customers know your history?”

  Fucking idiot.

  Leave me in peace.

  He wanted to scream. Or to sit in the van and back over the fucking cop who was threatening the one thing that couldn’t happen in a job built on recommendations.

  “Listen—that’s not okay. What the hell are you doing?”

  “That’s the sort of thing you get to enjoy when you’ve done time. Sometimes you get to ride in a patrol car and answer questions. Routine. Ask all your buddies from the slammer.”

  Back over him, drive forward again and back over him one more time.

  “What’s this about?”

  “We’ll talk about it in the car.”

  “No—what’s it about?”

  “Your brother. Leo.”

  But a scene that attracted attention tomorrow at the formal handover of keys and the final bill . . . that didn’t feel good at all.

  “I’ll just make a phone call.”

  Vincent took a step away from the car and pressed one of his few preprogrammed numbers on the keypad.

  “Hey—you fucking better not be calling your brother. If you are, you’ll be guilty of a crime, you understand that, right?”

  Then he held the cell phone close to Broncks’s face so it would be easy to read MAMA on the screen.

  “Is that a crime too?”

  He turned around, waited for the signal to be sent and lowered his voice.

  “Mama?”

  “Yes?”

  “I don’t think you should count on me for dinner this evening.”

  “No? Vincent—why not?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “But I told you that Leo isn’t coming. You don’t need to feel the way you did about the lunch. I understood that, and that’s why it will be only you and me.”

  A step farther away and now he was whispering.

  “Mama, something feels . . . not right.”

  She didn’t reply. Perhaps she didn’t hear.

  “Listen, Mama, this, it—”

  “What? Vincent, what doesn’t feel right?”

  “I’m . . . standing here with a policeman. In front of my workplace. That’s why I can’t come. He wants me to come in for an interview.”

  “What do you mean a policeman?”

  “The same one who investigated the bank robberies.”

  She hesitated again. He could hear her breathing and knew she was upset.

  “I don’t understand at all. You’ve done well. Paid off your reparations and taken your prison sentence. They should . . . they should leave you in peace!”

  “It isn’t about me.”

  Now he was the one breathing audibly, hesitating.

  “It’s about Leo.”

  ———

  The gigantic passenger ferry was still in the water at the quay, farthest out at the new pier at Värta Harbor. Four hours until departure. Three hours until they could go on board and step into a luxury cabin on the upper deck with a clear view as the Baltic Sea came to an end. They were going to spend the time in between at the hotel located just a few hundred yards away, in front of which they were now stopping. At a reception desk deserted in the afternoon, they picked up the room key and continued to the elevator. They stood together in it on the way up, a space reminiscent of the cramped cell where they’d planned the heist and felt the hunger. It was even more pleasant surrounded by four suitcases loaded with banknotes.

  ———

  The car turned right at the crossing at Fridhemsplan toward Drottningholms Road, not left toward the police station at Kronoberg, where they should be heading.

  “Where are we going?”

  “I told you. You’re going to answer some questions.”

  Vincent turned around so he could see more. It was the first time he’d been in the front seat of a police car and could move freely. He had been handcuffed and in the back seat on every previous occasion.

  But it felt just as wrong.

  “Yes. You are going to interview me. At the police station.”

  Broncks shrugged his shoulders. The bastard actually did that.

  “As you might know, a thing or two happened there today. It’s roped off and kind of a mess.”

  “Well? Sure—I heard it on the radio. But we’re on our way out of the city.”

  “Yeah, we are.”

  Vincent looked around at both sides of the road when somewhere past Thorildsplan, they turned onto Essingeleden, the highway going south.

  “This isn’t right. What the hell do you think I’ve done? Tell me! And I’ll give you an answer right away! I’ve kept a journal with entries for every hour of my parole, which ends in less than a month. You will never get me!”

  He turned to Broncks. The policeman had sat there in the driver’s seat, silently staring straight ahead since they left the building with the newly renovated apartment.

  “That’s good, Vincent. Smart.”

  When they came out of the first tunnel, he accelerated.

  “But it won’t help you one bit now. This is about the crimes you committed long before you started to keep your journal.”

  �
��——

  A waiting room, that’s what the hotel room was. Temporary shelter in the final stage of a robbery getaway as they waited for the departure of the passenger ferry, which they could see through the window.

  Leo was sitting on an orange sofa, tucked in between a wardrobe and an oversized floor lamp. He took both the ferry tickets out of the inner pocket of the jacket intended to blend in and put them on the coffee table. The name on the first one matched a driving license used three days ago when the milkman Johan Martin Erik Lundberg sailed through a roadblock, while the name on the second ticket matched a police identification used late that afternoon when the uniformed Peter Eriksson picked up ten boxes of evidence at the police station’s confiscations room. Then he pulled out of the waistband of his pants one of the police service pistols he’d bought in a cold basement from a fixer called Sullo, which he had later pressed against the cop Broncks’s temple when the church clock approached midnight and which he had just carried unseen during the entire duration of the robbery.

  While Sam drew the curtains to prevent anyone looking in from windows on the other side of the street, Leo reached for one of the suitcases, opened it, and took out the police radio wedged in between two packages of bundled banknotes. And he listened. Constant radio traffic revolving around a robbery inside the police station. The entire area around Kronoberg was closed off and the hunt was now focused on the underground system, where a police uniform was found on the rails in an easterly direction.

  The time to departure had shrunk, and so had the distance to the ferry.

  Champagne would soon be rolled into Cabin 571, uncorked, and toasted with.

  ———

  “Here. All the way, Vincent. This is where I want you to stand.”

  John Broncks waved with both hands to Vincent, who was still standing at the doorway to the barn.

  “Then take a good hold on the tarp on your side of the truck, as you help me to pull it up.”