The Father: Made in Sweden Part I

by Anton Svensson

  ‘I thought you could … say hello to him.’

  Anneli – you have to get to the bunker.

  ‘Hold out your hand to his nose. Just let him sniff you.’

  I have to know if the hole’s started to sink.

  ‘You see, he’s nice if you’re nice.’

  He smiled now, for the first time. Anneli glanced at his helmet. MP. Military police. Then she looked at the dog next to his black boots, and wondered if it could distinguish between different kinds of fear; the unconscious instinctive fear and her conscious anticipatory fear.

  ‘I … is it OK if I cut through? To the other side of the gravel yard?’

  ‘Not really. Like I said, this is a military area.’

  ‘Ahh. OK.’

  ‘We’re military police. We’re on a training exercise here. I’ll have to ask you to leave.’

  ‘I didn’t know …’

  ‘There’s a “Don’t Enter” sign over there.’

  ‘I … didn’t see it. I walked through the woods, parked the car at …’

  ‘So what are you doing here?’

  ‘I …’

  He saw the hesitation. All eight saw it.

  She’d put the basket down. Now she lifted it up before him.

  ‘Mushrooms.’

  ‘You don’t have many.’

  ‘No, I …’

  ‘But that one … that’s a black trumpet. That’s rare. Where did you find it?’

  She laughed, nervously, artificially, hoping it sounded at least a little more relaxed.

  ‘You should never reveal your source. Right? But there aren’t that many, you know, because of all this rain.’

  ‘You can’t stay here.’

  She smiled and cocked her head slightly to one side.

  ‘Can I just cross over? Sir? I could get out of here faster?’

  He looked at her. She continued smiling, precisely as much as she thought might work.

  ‘Of course. Cut across.’

  They observed her, kept her under guard, even when she stopped at the bunker and turned around.

  ‘What’s this? This little building? Is that the kennels?’

  She moved closer, as if she wanted to see it.

  ‘No.’

  ‘No? It could be …’

  ‘It’s a storage facility.’

  A few metres from the door. Right here. She thought so anyway. She was standing on a spot that not too long ago had been a hole. She could almost touch the grey walls, the ones that were empty inside; ‘a shell’, that’s what Leo had called it, a hollow concrete shell.

  ‘A storage facility?’

  She pressed her right foot harder onto the gravel.

  ‘In the event of a war. If we need to equip a unit.’

  It wasn’t porous, or soft. The hole they’d dug and refilled could be neither seen nor felt.

  Anneli started to walk again. They were watching her. Sharp, prickly eyes on her back.

  She’d done it. Despite the dogs’ salivating jaws, despite the ache in her chest and the sweat running down her back beneath her raincoat.

  ‘Excuse me.’

  She’d been so close. Now his voice chased her, louder than before.

  ‘Excuse me!’

  She hesitated. Stopped. Closed her eyes.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘You’re picking mushrooms, you say?’

  ‘Yep … searching for them, at least.’

  Head tilted towards a serious-looking face.

  He knows.

  ‘And … you’re sure that one’s not poisonous?’

  They know.

  ‘Poisonous?’

  They’ve known all along.

  ‘The yellow-brown, skinny one in the middle there. You should look that one up.’

  ‘I … or, you mean …’

  ‘The Yellowfoot. It could be a Deadly Webcap. A lot of people get them confused.’

  He smiled.

  ‘You have to be careful.’

  He smiled, and it was for real. He hadn’t asked her to come back. He hadn’t asked any questions about the hole or the looted armoury.

  She nodded after a moment and waved. She wanted to turn around the whole time she was crossing the gravel yard to see them getting further away, but she didn’t.

  She ran through the woods, jumping over roots and rocks, drove her rented car faster than she’d imagined towards Tumba.

  24

  ANNELI LAUGHED ALOUD to herself. It felt so good. She’d been consumed by the fear of not knowing what was going to happen to the man she loved, the kind of fear that can only be neutralised by being there. Now she was involved. She’d had a mission no one else could have carried out, and she’d done it better than any of them could have imagined.

  A truck stood in front of the entrance to their new home, open at the back and completely empty. All the moving boxes had been carried inside. She’d hoped that Felix and Vincent and Jasper would still be there as usual so they’d hear her telling Leo the story.

  She was pressing down on the handle of the unlocked front door when she saw him come out of the huge garage, and she almost ran to him.

  ‘Leo, I’m back!’

  They should have been listening. Felix, Vincent, Jasper. To her.

  ‘And from now on I’m your robber queen!’

  She held him, kissed him on the cheek and on the lips.

  ‘There were people there,’ she whispered.

  ‘People?’

  ‘Military police. Eight of them. With dogs. But it was only an exercise. And I did exactly as you said.’

  His face changed.

  ‘You did … what?’

  ‘I checked the gravel in front of the door. Felt it with my foot. They didn’t suspect a thing!’

  Leo’s manner changed inwardly in that way it did when he retreated into himself, thinking thoughts she couldn’t make out.

  ‘So you stood there – a metre from the caisson – and scraped your foot while eight military police with trained dogs watched you?’

  ‘Yes, and they …’

  Leo looked towards the house next door, towards the road, where a car was stationary in one of the lanes with traffic backed up behind it.

  ‘Let’s go inside.’

  He grabbed her, not hard, but harder than usual, hard enough for her to have to follow him, shutting the front door behind them. There wasn’t much light in the hallway. Just a long cord with a naked bulb hanging down, which swayed back and forth after Leo bumped against it.

  ‘Military police. Who are trained to notice things you don’t notice. And you stand in front of them and … scrape your foot like a cat hiding her piss!’

  A bright and uncomfortable light.

  ‘Leo, I only did what—’

  ‘Did they get your name? Did you tell them your name?’

  ‘No, I—’

  ‘Did they see the car?’

  ‘I—’

  ‘If they saw it they can trace it!’

  He was usually so careful not to get angry, never losing his temper, always in control. She’d only seen this before when he interacted with other men – when someone challenged him. She’d even liked it, it made her feel safe. But she’d never seen it directed at her, or against his brothers, or anyone that was close.

  ‘No, they didn’t suspect anything.’

  ‘Nothing?’

  ‘I promise, Leo.’

  ‘If they find out that the bunker is completely empty and track you down, they’ll interrogate you. You know that, right? And in an interrogation, some fat bastard cop will be sitting across from you, turning everything you say against you, he’ll make demands until he gets what he wants. Can you handle that? Can you … my robber queen?’

  ‘What’s wrong with you? Stop it!’

  ‘Because if you can’t handle me right now – you’ll never be able to handle an interrogation.’

  ‘I would never turn you in,’ she said, taking his hand. ‘Leo, look at me … you know that, r
ight? I would never betray you.’

  ‘Well, you won’t end up being interrogated if you play your role right.’

  Leo moved two boxes and a coffee machine and made a narrow path to the kitchen and the fridge-freezer. He opened the top freezer drawer and took out the ice tray.

  ‘You’re living two lives now, Anneli. One outward, one inward. Six weeks ago I owned a construction company. Felix and Vincent and Jasper were my employees. And you, the woman I love, were my fiancée, my girlfriend.’

  Out of a box on top of the stove came an ice bucket and from the box beneath it, a towel.

  ‘Then we stole some weapons.’

  He smashed the container of ice cubes and emptied them into the ice bucket.

  ‘Then a security van.’

  He opened the refrigerator door and took out the only thing inside, a bottle on the upper shelf.

  ‘We’re being hunted. Anneli, do you understand that? The police are looking for us.’

  He wrapped a white terry-cloth towel around the beautiful bottle and lowered it into the ice bucket.

  ‘You can never, ever leave a trace. Never risk being seen. They know nothing and have nothing. The only tracks are and should be the ones I choose to leave. We’re five criminals working together with no criminal record – it’s something they’ve never seen before. Hardened criminals who commit serious crimes, but can’t be found anywhere in the police records. We’re their worst nightmare – we don’t exist!’

  He grabbed her again, but not like before, softer, and he pulled her closer.

  ‘Two lives, Anneli. One that our neighbours see and the real one – bank robbers that the newspapers write about.’

  In one of the otherwise empty kitchen cupboards stood two glasses, champagne glasses, brand new, never used. Leo put them next to each other on the sink and pulled out the cork. It sounded like it did in the movies and foamed over a little as he filled the fragile glasses.

  ‘Cheers, Anneli, to our new home.’

  He’s sent his brothers home because he knows I don’t want them here.

  He’s put an expensive bottle of Dom Pérignon in the fridge, because he thinks I think it’s romantic.

  ‘Cheers,’ he said.

  She raised her glass, looked at him, drank. She’d realised what she’d really been carrying around – the fear of not belonging. Belonging was what she’d brought away with her from the forest, and what he’d just taken away from her. And it wouldn’t come back now, no matter how much she smiled.

  25

  SANNA HAD LIKED to walk naked across the polished wood floors. She was the one who’d taught him to sleep naked, brush his teeth naked, taught him that his bony, pale body had permission to be exposed. Broncks had been at the kitchen table and she’d been sitting opposite him on that first morning when shyness turned to silence. They’d talked about nothing to avoid looking at each other, and her feet suddenly touched his. That was all it had taken for the previous night’s closeness and trust to return. Even though he’d thought for a very long time that there was no one he could be naked in front of.

  You know I don’t want to talk about it. That I’ve … moved on. John? You know that.

  He got dressed and exited his one-bedroom apartment into the courtyard, on the western side of Södermalm in Stockholm. It was November, but the morning was so warm that it seemed as if autumn and winter had slept in, and late summer had crept back to play for a while. He crossed the courtyard towards the turn-of-the-century house on Högalid Street and the huge church with its double towers keeping watch over the door. A church bell let out a muffled stroke four times every hour; he’d found the sound irritating for the first few years he’d lived here, but now he couldn’t even be sure it still rang. Past a window that was always open, Stockholm Radio and local traffic reports blaring, and then into a café with two small tables, the aroma of bread and a baker who served Italian loaves while singing Italian arias, and who knew what kind John liked: coarse and with no tomato.

  One day, two years after she’d moved in, he’d packed up her things from the bathroom, her unscented body wash and toothpaste, The Second Sex and Purple Rain – the kind of things that people bring with them as they move, piece by piece, inside someone else. He’d put a big yellow Ikea bag on the hall carpet and asked her to leave, and she did her best to understand. When she left, he’d been sitting right here, in the café a block away, killing time drinking enough herbal tea to be absolutely sure she was gone.

  Broncks grabbed a glass of orange juice and one of the small, somewhat drier cookies still lying on a large baking sheet.

  I think about you every day.

  He’d asked her to move out. He’d decided she’d got too close, and at that moment he’d had all the power. But he didn’t understand that it could be taken back ten years later in an aluminium boat – and she carried it with her, while he felt only emptiness.

  I never think about you.

  The three drawings lay in a heap on top of the next pile of moving boxes. Leo lifted the one on top and examined it. Conveyor belt. Drainage pump. Cement pipe. He’d designed and drawn every step for the creation of his Skull Cave himself.

  He carried the drawing into the only room that contained no boxes, the one to the left of the entrance, the extension that one of the previous owners had used as an office.

  As a boy he would spend break time sketching the new parking meters he passed on his way to school, learning how to remove the tops of two rivets on the back of the machine with a chisel and a hammer, prise off the loose cover plate and take out all the small coins. Or pretend to sharpen his pencil during the last class of the day while he gently propped open the window, and then hurry home to set his alarm clock – coming back in the middle of the night with a sleepy Felix, who would stand outside with a black bin bag while Leo jumped in through the open window and threw out all the building models his teacher had ordered – real Airfix aircraft from World War II and Revell cars like the ones in American Graffiti.

  He hadn’t realised it until later – if he did what other people didn’t expect, if he made his own rules, then he could control his world.

  He’d made up his mind never to do what his father did, make a noise and be seen and get caught. Like his father, he’d make his own rules, but he’d keep them inside where no one else could see them.

  John Broncks had had the same office since the day he left uniformed life for civilian clothes. No longer the kind of cop who was first on the scene with his gun ready, he was a detective who arrived later, piecing together what had happened from the fragments left behind – the echo of threatening voices, the heat of a body about to run – slowly mapping the geography of violence.

  He opened the folder and flipped past the interviews with witnesses, search reports, expert opinions, to enlarged photographs of shattered glass on the car seat, bullet holes in the car door. Broncks twisted and turned the pictures, moved them from the computer keyboard and opened a register called the Rational Notification Routine, or RNR. He was going back, just as Sanna had suggested, to the place Jafar and Gobakk were last seen, searching for anyone with connections to the abandoned swimming area in Sköndal, someone who’d taken care to hide all physical traces, and yet still left a clear behavioural trace: the use of excessive force.

  A large map lay in the second drawer. He unfolded it and began to follow a line with a red felt marker along the shore of Drevikken Lake. He turned his marker down the black line of a street, and then again, until finally it led back to the beach where it had begun, where the trail stopped. An area encompassing seven square kilometres.

  One finger inside the square, he stopped at every new street, entered every address into the computer for the first search – people who lived inside the square who had been sentenced to prison for violent crimes.

  ‘Hi.’

  He made a second search – for people who didn’t live there but had been sentenced for violent crimes committed inside the area.

/>   ‘John? Hello?’

  He looked up from the screen. He hadn’t even heard her come in.

  ‘Did I wake you?’

  Sanna leaned lightly against the doorframe, a stack of papers in her hand.

  ‘All the cartridges are labelled on the back with the numbers 80 700, which confirms what we already knew – Swedish manufacture, for military use.’

  She looked curiously around the room and handed him the stack. An institutional room. Cardboard boxes along the walls and floor. As if he’d never really moved in.

  ‘How long have you had this office?’

  ‘Since I got here.’

  ‘That’s almost ten years. And there’s no sign of you. Not a single personal item. Not a photo, not … anything.’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘John … it doesn’t even smell like you.’

  ‘That’s how I want it.’

  He leafed through the stack of papers without looking up.

  ‘Are we done here, Sanna?’

  He didn’t see when she turned around and walked away.

  ‘Yes, we’re done, John.’

  But heard her steps, which he knew so well, fading down the hallway.

  He looked at his computer screen, the RNR system and the results of his first two searches.

  He’d received a total of seventeen hits.

  The first drawing was still in his hand, the one of the Skull Cave and the solution to their storage problems, when Leo looked out through the room’s only window, towards the entrance, and saw them arriving in the truck, all three sitting in the front seat.

  They parked at the front door, next to the low stairs and makeshift porch. They were on time. They were properly dressed. Felix took off the cover of the truck bed and Jasper and Vincent lifted down the thirty-kilo jackhammer, four spades, four shovels, a wooden tool chest, a bag of surgical masks and gloves, and a case of Coca-Cola.

  They filled the room with tools while Leo spoke.

  ‘We’re the ones who moved the boundaries, changed the rules. Those rules only apply until the day they open that armoury.’

  He handed the longer crowbar in the toolbox to Felix, keeping the shorter one for himself. First, they attacked the floor’s thin baseboard, then the yellow plastic underlay, then finally the layer of hardboard and particleboard. Jasper and Vincent carried the pieces out and heaped them up next to the truck.