The Father: Made in Sweden Part I

by Anton Svensson

‘I—’

  ‘They’ll do it again, and they’ll be more violent than they were in Farsta. And then again, even more violently.’

  The institution didn’t reign in this room, as it did in John’s: here sat a man who had a life he was proud of, that gave him security. On the wall behind Karlström hung a kind of map of his professional history – a law school diploma, certification from the police shooting club, and a framed notification of his appointment as chief of the City Police’s detective department. On his desk there was a second map, of his personal history: the back of three photographs that John knew were of his two daughters, siblings adopted from Colombia, five or maybe six years old; and his wife, who John had never heard his boss say anything negative about. Next to the photo frames lay an ergonomic plastic dolphin whose shoulders his boss rubbed every twenty minutes, a letter opener from the police union, and the book by Paul Bocuse, which John now saw was titled French Cooking.

  ‘The robbers were carrying an AK4 and a submachine gun. Military-grade weapons. I’ve looked into every case involving theft from the Home Guard, shooting ranges, military installations. I’ve looked into anyone with a similar record, either free or on probation. I’ve been able to exclude the possibility of an inside job, as far as I can.’

  He wasn’t sure if his boss was really listening. Karlström had only ever seen violence in the line of duty, but John had grown up with it, lived with it, and then decided to become a police officer in order to face it again.

  ‘We have two robbers who act single-mindedly and without deviating from a plan. The security van was hijacked, driven at normal speed from Farsta to Drevviken beach, and since the rest of the money was behind a locked door, they shot at it without hesitation, an entire magazine. They were disciplined, extremely focused, and didn’t once break character during a raid that took twenty minutes.’

  ‘Character?’

  ‘They haven’t convinced me. I’m not as sure as the guards that these robbers were Arabs. Just like one of them wasn’t really handicapped and in a wheelchair. They could have been men who were born here, putting on a good show under extreme pressure – who handled their guns like tools, as if violence was their craft, as if they were schooled in excessive force.’

  The photos of his wife and children stood lined up between them, it felt as if John knew them. Karlström was the type who talked about his family. John never talked about his family. To anyone.

  ‘And I also don’t think that there were only two people involved. There must have been more. And in that case we’re talking about a gang that will continue to evolve. There was nine million left behind that steel door. They’ll regard that as a failure. They didn’t get what they came for. This time.’

  ‘You said … schooled in violence.’

  ‘No, that’s not what I said. Schooled in excessive force.’

  ‘What do you mean by that?’

  ‘That they’ve grown up with it.’

  John Broncks had to hurry down the corridor. The case had just become a priority. He could now devote himself to a single folder for a month. He took the stairs three floors down, and headed towards the forensics lab, peering first into the dark room, then into the fibre room for offenders’ clothing, then into the fibre room for victims’ clothing. Sanna wasn’t there.

  Sanna, who’d walked away at the scene as if she didn’t even recognise him. Sanna who had returned to the City Police just as suddenly as she’d once left. Sanna, who he’d avoided a few years ago when they passed each other on King Street – he’d seen her from afar, and he’d waited too long to cross the street, so he was forced to keep walking, pretending to look away just as their paths crossed.

  Her black case lay on one of the counters in the large lab, next to a roll of gelatine film, a box of cotton swabs, some plastic containers, test tubes, tweezers and a microscope. She stood in front of a metal cabinet filled with CNA fumes, developing fingerprints.

  ‘Hi,’ he said.

  She turned around, looked at him, her face revealing nothing.

  ‘Hi.’

  ‘I read your report, Sanna. Several times.’

  This was what he’d wanted to avoid: standing here before her indifferent expression.

  ‘I’m getting nowhere. But I’ve just spoken to Karlström. And he gave me more time.’

  She continued to write, then put the notebook in her coat pocket and opened the door to the CNA cabinet, releasing whatever fumes were left.

  ‘John – as you know, there’s nothing more to add.’

  ‘I want to go through it once more. With you.’

  They walked down the stairs to the garage that lay below the entire block of police buildings.

  He wondered if she’d seen him on King Street, and whether she’d seen him look away. She could have recognised him without seeing his face – they’d both worked in witness protection and knew the first thing you had to change in order to form a new identity was your individual way of moving. It’s what the person you’re hiding from recognises first in a crowd – it’s movement that connects everything.

  In one corner of the garage there was a small square building the size of four parking spaces, a garage within a garage where the forensic department’s confiscated vehicles were kept. She opened it up and there it stood in the middle of the floor. A white van. Broncks walked over to it and climbed inside. The seats were wrapped in plastic. The shards of glass, documents and security bags were gone. He’d researched and eliminated every report of every stolen car and stolen boat near Farsta and Sköndal during the period before the robbery – and he’d come to believe that the two robbers had probably been delivered to the first crime scene by somebody using their own car and retrieved from the second scene by someone with their own boat.

  He crawled into the rear compartment with the open safe. The technical report had shown level four traces of blood, fibres, fingerprints – from the two security guards who’d been overpowered and from other security guards who used the vehicle. Nothing else. No traces from the suspects.

  Sanna opened the black case she always carried with her and lined up five cartridges on the bench in front of them.

  ‘Angle of impact ninety degrees.’

  She showed him the holes through the window on the driver’s side and the trajectories towards the door on the passenger side.

  ‘And here, beside them, five disfigured bullets – fully jacketed, 9 mm; they came to a stop in the truck door. They were fired from the same weapon. A Swedish m/45 submachine gun.’

  Mechanical. That was the word John had been searching for. That was how she talked about her work, and he wondered if that was how her briefings usually sounded or if she was just making an effort to seem indifferent to him.

  The wheelchair stood behind the car. One of the suspects had been sitting in it with a blanket over his legs. Stolen from Huddinge Hospital and, according to the forensic scientist, bearing the fingerprints of seven individuals that had been compared with the 120,000 fingerprints the police kept on file. No match.

  The security guards’ uniform shirt was green. That hadn’t been clear in the pictures. She poked a plastic-glove-covered finger gently through a hole on the right lapel.

  ‘He was lucky. If he’d leaned forward just a bit more the bullet would have gone straight through the cheekbone.’

  ‘They didn’t get what they were after,’ said Broncks.

  ‘They?’

  ‘Jafar from Aladdin. And someone named Gobakk.’

  ‘Jafar? Go … bakk?’

  ‘Our best witness. Six years old. We’re looking for someone who doesn’t exist. Someone who a little boy and a few others saw because it was what the perps wanted them to see. I don’t buy it. I don’t buy Jafar and Gobakk.’

  He knew how she walked, which scent he would always search a room for without even being aware of it, and how it felt when she smiled, even when she was standing as far away as she was now.

  ‘John – I work with fibres, blo
odstains, fingerprints. With facts. With what exists and can be proven. And, like you say, Jafar and Gobakk don’t exist. Not really. Just like you and I don’t exist any more. Do you understand?’

  John Broncks stayed behind after she’d left the garage, which was cold and whose air tasted of oil and dust. He walked around the empty security van again and again, but he was still questioning two security guards, who told of one robber who listened and waited, calm and self-possessed, his face in a mask, who was precise when he pressed a muzzle hard against their heads.

  Weapons like tools. Violence like a craft.

  Jafar didn’t exist. Gobakk didn’t exist.

  Schooled in excessive force.

  But you do.

  21

  LEO LAY ON his back for a while, as he often did when he awoke, close to Anneli’s heavy breathing. She was the kind who slept with her arms wide open. He, on the other hand, slept lightly and woke up easily, as he had always done.

  He still got up before anyone else to make breakfast.

  Snitch.

  A word that penetrated his defences as a word can sometimes do, sharp, pointed. But it didn’t sink in so deeply any more.

  Moving boxes were beside the bed. He counted seven and there were just as many in the living room and hallway, on their way to an ugly little house next to a giant garage – the Phantom’s Skull Cave, the solution to their storage problems. To no longer getting stuck renting someone else’s ground floor, filled with crumpled Keno tickets.

  It had rained all through the night and into the early morning. Hour after hour, into the hole they’d refilled in front of a high-specification security door – wet gravel that might start to sink, and that could be spotted by the smoking inspector.

  Anneli straightened and mumbled something that he couldn’t make out, turned onto her back and started snoring again. He had to talk to her. Tell her. She had to go there, she was the only one who could do it.

  Leo was in the hall when he heard voices outside the door to the flat – and then a brief pause before the doorbell rang. His younger brother never acted before thinking.

  ‘What the fuck are you wearing?’ asked Leo as he opened the door.

  Felix was dressed in a red check flannel shirt, worn jeans that were a bit too loose, beige Timberland boots; Jasper was behind him in a 5000-kronor leather jacket, new jeans and black Reebok trainers.

  ‘You’re supposed to come here every weekday morning in blue work trousers, a blue shirt and old work boots!’

  Leo closed the bedroom door, while Felix and Jasper went into the kitchen for freshly brewed coffee.

  ‘Our cover, damn it! What other people are supposed to see. Jasper, you look like a fucking secret agent on bodyguard duty! And you, Felix, you can travel later, I promise – buy a used Mustang in Sydney, windsurf, drink cold beers.’

  As days had turned into weeks, gradually they had started doing the one thing they shouldn’t – feeling safe.

  He took out bread, butter, cheese, juice, yogurt, dessert plates, coffee cups.

  ‘We’re construction workers. That’s what we should look like. No bastards should ever think how are they earning the cash, they’re not doing any building. From now on we don’t need to hammer in a single nail, but we’ll do it anyway! Renovate a kitchen here, a new roof there. We need the firm as cover.’

  The doorbell rang again. A short, careful signal. Then the door opened.

  ‘It’s me,’ called Vincent.

  ‘We’re in the kitchen. There’s breakfast.’

  He stopped in the doorway. Blue work trousers, a blue shirt and battered construction boots. They all stared quietly at him.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Somebody gets it,’ said Leo.

  ‘Gets what?’

  Leo lifted out the coffee filter and filled four cups with black coffee, then turned to Jasper and Felix.

  ‘After we’ve finished eating, you two are going to take a pickup and go home. And change into exactly the same clothes that the youngest person here is already wearing. And when you’ve done that, drive to Kenta’s timber yard and pick up 150 square metres of eight-millimetre oak flooring and deliver it to Grönlandsgången 32 in Kista. It’s some computer office that Gabbe is fixing up. And then wait until Vincent and I get there.’

  Jasper put down the cup he’d just picked up.

  ‘Are you serious, we’re going to … build?’

  ‘From now on, we’ll be taking a few of those kinds of jobs. OK? One hundred and fifty metres of wood flooring – we can do this in two days. And always—’

  ‘But damn it, we—’

  ‘—always for a fixed price. So we can make it last for at least a week. Extensive but simple jobs that four carpenters can finish quickly, but keep working on for days and charge at a fixed price. We’ll come and go and make sure to be seen there sometimes.’

  Leo and Vincent drove across Skogås, past the school and their childhood home, the big but claustrophobic flat.

  Leo parked the car, and they walked down the slope through high grass between a football pitch and the school gym they’d passed after the robbery carrying identical duffel bags with their indoor hockey sticks clearly visible.

  Into the woods along a track past a steep hill, the same path he’d walked several times in recent weeks to make sure the sunken rubber boat hadn’t found its way to the surface. They walked out onto a peninsula that had been much larger when Leo was young, that he’d swim to from the opposite shore. Past a couple of large rocks, a row of low and thorny bushes, a few withered and crouching ferns, and there, just behind those pines – a few metres of fine sandy beach, the place where they had landed. They searched, peering out over the water.

  ‘Yep. It’s still there, right on the bottom.’

  Leo put his hand on Vincent’s shoulder.

  ‘You were supposed to stand there and wait.’

  Vincent wriggled his upper body, shook off his brother’s hand.

  ‘Damn it, I … the cops were on their way, I had to warn you, I—’

  Leo smiled.

  ‘You did damn well, little brother. You were by yourself, in the dark, and you made a decision. For us. I chose to trust you – and you showed me I was right. But next time won’t be quite the same. Target two is no security van – it’s a bank, and it’ll be surrounded by people.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘And … I have to be absolutely sure you understand, really understand, that if you don’t want to do this, you can pull out. Now. I won’t say a thing about it. Felix and Jasper won’t either. It’s your fucking right. And it’s my fucking duty to explain that to you.’

  Vincent gave him a crooked smile.

  ‘I want to do this.’

  ‘I’m your big brother. I’m responsible for you. I’m leading this, and there’ll be no way back later. But there is now.’

  ‘I know. And I don’t want out.’

  Light gusts of wind, white geese ride the small waves, as if they were in a hurry.

  Leo hugged his younger brother. They were on their way. Together.

  ‘Well then.’

  And they set off side by side back along the winding forest path, in the same direction they’d travelled in the darkness.

  ‘You’ll be wearing a bulletproof vest. Kevlar. Better than what the cops run around in. And a loaded submachine gun. Black boots, blue jumpsuits, mask in front of your face – you’ll look bigger, and those skinny teen legs will disappear. But not the way you walk.’

  Leo stopped and waited until Vincent did the same.

  ‘You walk like a seventeen-year-old. Do you know that? And when you ran towards the security guards and the van, when you came up behind us in the dark, and Jasper turned around and raised his rifle at you … I stopped him. I recognised your movements.’

  Leo set off again down the forest path, slowly, taking noticeably longer strides.

  ‘If this is going to work – you have to seem like a grown man. The cashiers n
eed to be absolutely certain it was three adult males who opened the doors. And the uniforms have to see three adult males when they examine those few lousy seconds of tape they’ll end up with. A movement can be recognised and remembered. They should see a gang, professionals who rob banks like they’ve never done anything else. They should think where the hell did they come from, who are they, what are they capable of, and be … very worried. And they won’t if you keep walking around like a teenager.’

  The path wasn’t wide enough for two any more.

  ‘Follow me.’

  Leo stepped out into the grass, straight across the meadow.

  ‘Take firm steps. Put down your entire foot. Feet pointed straight ahead, no flapping around taking up the whole pavement.’

  Leo turned around and saw his brother trying to walk like a man.

  ‘Good. Good, Vincent! And imagine that you weigh more, you’re heavy, and that you know where you’re going. Teenagers don’t have a fucking clue.’

  He stopped, and his younger brother stopped too. Mid-stride, legs wide.

  ‘There’s a difference between knowing where you’re going and trying to take up room on your way there.’

  ‘I get it.’

  ‘And a lower centre of gravity. Like this.’

  Leo sank down a bit, softening both knees. Vincent watched, imitated. Until Leo put his arm around him and pushed down a little.

  ‘Not up here. No vulture neck. You should lower your dick, here, a little bit closer to the earth. Your cock is your centre of gravity from now on, Vincent. Lower your torso. Do you feel that?’

  They stood next to each other in the open field and bounced slightly up and down, up and down.

  ‘I feel it.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Leo pushed his hand hard into Vincent’s chest. And his little brother barely faltered.

  ‘You feel that? You were stable. Right?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good. One more thing. Your voice.’

  ‘My voice?’

  ‘You can’t sound like you’re going through puberty. You need to lower your voice. “The keys.” Say it.’