“Tie it.”
The potbelly conceals his thin stomach, reshaping it.
“Felix? Tie it at the back, here.”
His little brother does so. He pulls the rope, and ties it with a bow. He shakes his head when he sees the result.
“You’ve dubbed him Druggie-Lars. It’s all wrong.”
“That’s his name.”
“Druggies never have stomachs like that.”
“Druggie-Lars drinks, too.”
“They’re thin, like threads.”
“He’s a binge drinker, mostly beer. A lot of vodka. A fucking boatload of carbohydrates.”
Then the breastplate, with padding that makes him seem thicker, while the shoulder pads sculpt him broader. Both of his upper arms are provided with a layer of rolled padding, which Felix tapes on instead of tying them on.
“What is it?”
Leo tries to catch Felix’s eye. He’s been too quiet for too long.
“Hey . . . Felix?”
Then he realizes that protesting about whether or not Druggie-Lars has a potbelly is hardly about fatness. Rather, his little brother was hesitating and maybe even trying to stop it.
“Hello, answer me—what’s the matter?”
Felix tears off the last bit of tape and the right arm is ready.
“I’ve never stolen anything before.”
So here comes stage two: the attempt to prevent. Since the first one didn’t work.
“But isn’t that good, Felix? Then it’s believable. You will get caught.”
In the outer pocket of the jacket is a mirror with a wooden handle. Leo holds it in one hand while he primps with his free hand—like Mama when she makes herself look pretty. He prepared at home, rubbing a thick pencil on a rag, a worn pillowcase Mama saved for polishing windows. Now he rubs the dark graphite on the rag onto the area under his eyes and his cheekbones.
“Ten minutes to six, sharp, Click will discover you. Remember to shoplift as goddamn obviously as you can.”
Finally, he adds a thin layer on the jaw to look more tired, hollow.
“Afterward, when Click has grabbed you, he’ll take you into the office. You’ll sit there a while. He’ll ask you where you live and what your mother’s name is. First you don’t reveal shit. You keep quiet and are as sulky as hell. Then maybe you say something, anything at all, that it’s a mess at home now, that sort of thing. Then nothing else happens—you are underage. The important thing is that you go into the office. A scolding behind closed doors and I’ll take care of the rest. Click will be dealing with you when the woman goes to the bank with the cash. Okay?”
The wig is pulled over his short blond hair. Then he puts on the jacket, which fits now, thanks to all the padding. Last of all, he pulls up the hood.
And Felix sees someone else. Surely not his big brother.
It’s Druggie-Lars. Even the freaking wig under the hood looks like real hair straggling.
“Shit. It works.”
“Told you so. Now repeat what you’re supposed to do.”
Felix ostentatiously holds up his wrist with the watch on it and starts to walk without a word toward the square and the ICA shop. Then halfway through the grove he turns around.
“I’ll shoplift so damn badly that Click takes me to the office.”
“Good, little brother. And what time?”
“Exactly ten to. Not earlier, not later.”
LEO PUTS ON the brakes and jumps off the stolen bicycle, all in one motion. It’s easy even though he looks big. Because a stomach, chest, and arm muscles made of padding don’t weigh a thing. But he’s sweating. A river and a couple of streams are running under his jacket and form a lake at the end of his back, and on his forehead, where the wig touches the skin, it itches, and especially under the band tightened to hold his hair in place, it itches so badly it’s driving him mad.
His goal is waiting behind the next crest and he gets off the bicycle path. Branches and twigs are stuck between the spokes of the wheels. It sounds like when he was younger and fastened the king and queen of clubs onto the bicycle fork with clothespins. When he’s sure no one can see his bike from the asphalt trail, he leans it against a tree and starts to walk briskly, zigzagging between crooked birches and straight pines while the lake of sweat around his body overflows.
There.
Right there the forest ends and the city center begins.
It’s right at the end of the trees, where the vegetation gives way to the stone of the square, that Druggie-Lars will stand and feel very nervous while he chain-smokes, cigarette after cigarette, to get up his courage. That’s what Leo wants the police to think afterward. The false lead: five cigarettes that were smoked beforehand at home at the kitchen table until they shriveled to butts and were saved in a plastic bag to be strewn out now over the moss.
THE ANTI-SHOPLIFTING MIRROR looks like a mastodon’s eye of glittering steel as it hangs in its obvious place on the ceiling and observes as he passes the aisle for juice and jam, heading for the sweets shelves.
An eye that sees everything: everyone who comes in empty-handed and goes out with full shopping bags; everyone who passes through the sliding doors and the uniformed guard standing next to them, between the autumn wind outside and white lighting inside.
Quarter to six.
Five minutes left. Felix checks the watch against the big square clock on the wall between the checkout counters. Will Click arrest Leo then? Even worse, what if the police car glides by, just like that, right when his big brother runs up and snatches the leather bag? Leo wouldn’t have a chance. That’s why Felix’s legs are shaking so damn much. Soon it will start. No one knows how it will end.
He looks up in the mirror and realizes that he can be clearly seen from all directions.
The steel eye.
That’s perhaps why he thinks of her.
When Click has caught me.
When I sit across from him in his office, then I must say what Mama’s name is.
That’s how it works.
He’s come to the candy shelves, close to the first checkout and the sliding doors that Click spies from. Four minutes and thirty seconds left. Until then he’s going to pretend to be choosing chocolate bars, which according to the sign weigh one hundred grams each and vary between milk chocolate, whole nut, and Swiss nut, and the kind Mama likes with fruit and almonds.
Mama’s name. So she will find out what I’m about to do.
Tomorrow when I’m sitting by her hospital bed, her eye and the red deep in it, burst blood, will stare at me like the steel eye on the ceiling.
And I, who told on Leo, will become the thief now and she will look at me like she looked at him.
No.
He won’t fucking do it.
He’ll leave the chocolate bars there on the shelf. Forget it and just go home. Avoid sitting first in the office and then by a bed as someone he doesn’t want to be.
Right then the woman with the leather bag steps out of the stockroom, and when he glances up into the mirror, events are distorted. He is visible, the woman is visible, and Click is visible—but upside down and somewhat skewed.
The steel eye sees everything and nothing looks as it should look.
Felix feels like he’s shaking all over. The woman with the leather bag is on her way to the exit and the square and the bank on the other side. If Leo snatches the money, and Click is standing where he is now, his big brother will be arrested. Like Papa.
He has to. He has to steal the blasted chocolate.
Felix reaches for the shelf and closes his eyes when he grabs the first, best, one-hundred-gram bar—and immediately drops it. It makes a sound when it hits the floor.
His hands are even shaking so much that his fingers are useless.
Once more. His right hand. Whole nut, even bigger, two hundred grams. And in a second he pushes it down inside his pants. One more, just as big, and his belt is pulled so tight that both chocolate bars are broken in half.
&nb
sp; And then—pain.
A bite of a dog’s drooling chops around his shoulder.
Such fucking pain.
“You haul those up again as quick as hell, boy!”
Click, with a grip that feels mechanical, a claw clutch that can’t be turned off.
“Open your jacket and show what the fuck you’re hiding there!”
Click is bellowing. At the same time the woman with the leather bag is bellowing outside. Her scream gets Click to release the claw clutch somewhat and turn his eyes toward the large shop window.
When the scream is heard again, he goes closer to the window to get a better look and find out where it’s coming from and what it’s associated with. On his way there, he drags the eleven-year-old shoplifter behind him, the soles of his shoes sliding along the ICA floor from the heavy tugging.
Now the shop window is like a television, like at the hospital when Leo screened off the world between his shoulder and the doorframe. It gets ever bigger, and the outside becomes distorted in the same way and seems less real.
The picture shows a woman.
She is sitting on the ground with her hands over her mouth while her shriek forces its way out between her fingers. She is crying and the TV window’s sound reproduction is perfect. It’s easy to grasp the eight words she is repeating: He took the bag. He took the money.
At the same time, in the left corner of the picture, someone is rushing away from her. A large man dressed in a dirty green jacket with the hood up. Click sees it just as clearly as Felix while he presses him up against the wall, hard.
“You stay here! Do you get that, you piece of shit?”
“Yeah.” His voice is shaking so much that the shoplifter doesn’t even hear it himself. “I get it.”
The last thing Felix sees before the screen goes blank is the guard in his uniform leaving the ICA shop and hurrying across the square.
In the direction Druggie-Lars disappeared.
HIS LEGS MOVE freely and effortlessly past bare trees and leaf-covered moss, as if he’s floating forward, and in his hand he’s holding on to the leather bag, hard. But not as hard as she held it when he pulled it out of her grip. It took three strong tugs before she collapsed.
All that remains are the cries his light steps are taking him away from.
He couldn’t stand them. She screamed for her bag, yet his mama had kept quiet during the entire beating.
They are surely the reason he hears something else. Behind him. Someone else’s breathing. Twigs snapping beneath heavy black guard boots.
Click. Shit. Shit.
How the hell can he be so fast?
Soon—just past the next grove, the next moss-covered stone.
Soon—the tree with the bicycle.
Leo throws himself on the saddle and pedals. It’s fairly slow. Wandering branches find their way into the wheels and he stands up, pressing the pedals down, while the guard’s uniform is coming closer.
Roll, roll, roll, you bastard of a bike!
A dip, an uprooted tree, a thicket. He glances back again—just as Click reaches out his fat arm and his fingertips brush the metal basket.
“Stop, you son of a bitch!”
A small grab, enough to slow the momentum—Click has gotten hold.
I’m caught.
But in the jolt that occurs when two forces meet and pull in opposite directions, the guard’s tired legs get tangled. He stumbles, loses his grip, and in the same motion shoves the bicycle down.
Leo lands softly in the blueberries; Click rolls twice, hits a rock, and begins bleeding heavily from his forehead. Nonetheless they both get up—at the same time.
The bastard doesn’t give up.
He has to grab the bike again, roll, pedal, roll, pedal, before the guard can get to him.
There, only a few yards away, the bike path is waiting, a downhill stretch.
His last chance.
FELIX RESTS HIS hands on his knees, letting them carry the weight of his whole upper body. Leaning forward, breathing heavily. He has to stand like this outside the door until he’s breathing normally. It can’t be noticed when he passes Agnetha’s door on the second floor on the way up the stairs.
He did as Click said—he waited inside ICA’s sliding door, in front of the wide noticeboard. The guard hadn’t actually needed to say a word. Felix couldn’t move anyway. Paralyzed, he had observed through the shop window Click pursuing Leo across the square and into the trees, while a lot of people gathered to help the ICA woman up and console her. In the confusion, he decided to run. Not in order to escape, but to avoid seeing the guard come back out of the forest with a kicking, yelling Leo.
It took fifteen minutes to run home. He isn’t tired, even though his heart is pounding and the soles of his feet are throbbing. There’s a small chance that Leo will get away, that he’s already here. It’s much faster on a bicycle.
He can hardly contain himself. He throws open the door, trips up the stairs, and rushes into the apartment.
“Leo!”
He checks behind every door and peers into every room.
“Where the hell are you!”
Finally, Vincent’s room, and before he can even ask, their little brother shakes his head so that the loops of bandage fly in a storm.
“Leo isn’t home. Not yet.”
Shit. Click caught up with him.
Leo is on his way to the same police station and the same detention center that Papa’s in.
And Mama’s questions will come.
How the hell will he answer them when he doesn’t know the answers?
He thinks of the radio. Radio Dalarna, the station she always listens to, local news every half-hour. He runs to her bedroom and the radio standing on the night table and he tunes it to 100.2.
Crummy music. But it’s just a few minutes until the next newscast, and he lets the crappy music continue so he won’t risk missing the start of the program. He doesn’t notice Vincent until the mummy dance begins. Vincent climbs up on the bed and jumps, with the gauze fluttering.
“Stop!”
“No!”
The news is starting now. The first item.
“Stop, you idiot!”
His little brother looks offended and even hurt, but there isn’t time to care about that.
“You sit still and keep your mouth shut while I listen!”
The news item is over and the newsreader’s voice is as pleasant as it is serious when she begins the next item.
“Half an hour ago—right before closing time—a robbery was carried out at a shop in the Slätta district when a courier was assaulted and robbed of a large sum of money.”
Felix is even more frightened on the inside and therefore even angrier on the outside, so when Vincent jumps up on the bed a second time, he yells at him loudly. When that doesn’t help, he wallops his upper arm, where it hurts most.
“Wha . . . what . . . Felix, what the hell are you doing!”
“Surely you don’t feel a thing—you have bandages on your whole body.”
“But it hurt.”
“So wrap more bandages on yourself. And leave me alone!”
“Witness statements relate that a lone man was seen leaving both the scene and the victim of the robbery, first running and then on a bicycle.”
That was it. The news voice explains that they will come back to the robbery at the shop on the next newscast when they know more, before she continues with an interview with the local Falun commissioner, something about the budget deficit. Everything while Vincent jumps up on him again, a third time, and lands more heavily than before.
“Vincent, I said . . .”
But when Felix turns around to wallop him a second time, he encounters a different face. Visible traces of smeared graphite under the eyes and along the cheekbones.
His big brother has sneaked in through the front door without being noticed.
“Are you home?”
“Are you home?”
They don�
�t hug. But it feels as though they do, all the same.
“Yeah. I took off, Leo. When Click chased you.”
“Did you say your name?”
“What?”
“Was there time for you to say your name?”
“I was going to. Then she screamed. And you ran past with the bag.”
Leo smiles and bends down toward something on the bedroom floor. He lifts it up onto the bed.
“I snatched it. I ran like hell. And I rode away from the fat bastard guard when he lay whimpering in the ditch.”
The brown leather bag! It’s really here.
“So why . . . in that case are you coming home now? If you rode the bicycle? If you managed it? Don’t you get it that I . . .”
Leo places the leather bag between them.
“Felix—wait.” He yells toward the hall. “Vincent, come here too. I’ll show you something.”
Time passes. When Vincent answers, his voice is low and morose as it gets when he’s irritated or crabby or angry.
“I don’t want to.”
Or possibly all at the same time.
“Come and you’ll see.”
“I don’t want to! Felix is fighting. He hit me.”
“Come on, Vincent. Look at this. You’ve also been a part of this. You were there and decided that we’d do it. And that was important.”
Shuffling through the hall. Just as curious as he is wary.
“Come. Up on the bed. With us.”
Vincent hesitates and tries to meet Leo’s eyes first and then Felix’s. Felix beckons him, which means he should come.
“Sorry. Do you hear? I shouldn’t have hit you. Come on.”
Vincent pulls distractedly at one of the loose gauze bandage bits, as if he’s fixing them and fastening what came off in the mummy dance, and jumps up on the bed.
“Good. Now we’re all here.”
The brown leather bag is closed with a zipper. Leo pulls it and widens the opening with his hands. He moves so that Felix can peer down, and when he is finished, he moves so that Vincent can look down into it.
The Sons: Made in Sweden, Part 2 Page 40