The Father: Made in Sweden Part I

by Anton Svensson

  ‘The van is empty.’

  And then, their laughter, which turned into more raised glasses and ceremonial toasts, requiring even more bottles to be opened and emptied. Leo looked around, from face to face. He didn’t need to laugh; he’d shot the police’s advantage to pieces, and now those bastards were outside the first getaway car with no clue how four bank robbers had made their way out of there.

  Hit the bear’s nose and dance, anticipate and wait for your opponent’s fear, go straight to the centre, where he’s strongest and therefore weakest – use violence to tear away his security and replace it with confusion.

  And act in the gap.

  The sense of security that people took for granted was just an illusion. Chaos and order were like two snakes coiled tightly together that changed places when you crossed a line they didn’t even know existed. It was violence that created that gap. Time he’d frozen for those who lay on the floor of the bank, for those who’d shouted over their radios that the robbers were shooting indiscriminately – things that couldn’t be understood because they weren’t logical. And therefore it made them even more bewildered and gave him three minutes of freedom to act.

  ‘Vincent?’

  Among the hugs and champagne, Leo had been observing Vincent, who never seemed to put into words what he was thinking or feeling.

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Come with me, Vincent.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Just come.’

  They left the scene of post-robbery celebration, diluted now by a mixture of expensive alcohol and thick cigarette smoke, and went into the kitchen to a single bottle of whisky and two glasses, pouring a few fingers in each. It was dark outside, and the kitchen of their neighbours’ house was like an illuminated stage, as a young woman placed a glass bowl on a round table, a young man strapped a baby into a high chair and put a bib over the baby’s chest, a spoon in his hand, and someone insisted on eating by himself.

  ‘Do you remember? You always spat out your mashed bananas.’

  ‘I still do.’

  ‘But you liked the canned peaches. If I cut them into cubes.’

  You were a year old. I’d just turned eight. A whole lifetime ago.

  ‘You did well today.’

  ‘No. I hesitated.’

  ‘But after that. Not one mistake. You jumped up on the counter, took the keys to the vault, opened the door for Jasper, emptied the tills. All within our schedule.’

  ‘I stopped. Hesitated. Everything could have gone to hell.’

  ‘You solved the problem. Right? We were in control in there for three minutes. That’s how you have to see it, Vincent – we were safe and everyone else wasn’t. And that’s why we had time to correct a mistake we hadn’t anticipated.’

  The family in the other house had started eating beef stew and salad. Leo raised his glass, waited for Vincent to lift his. They emptied them.

  ‘Now, you have to let go of that. You hear me? You didn’t stop. The only thing you should think from now on is that you did well – that’s what you should take with you to the next time.’

  They walked from the kitchen to the room above the Skull Cave and the bags that just an hour before had been hanging off Vincent and Jasper’s stomachs as they shovelled in thick bundles of kronor.

  ‘Over a million. Maybe one and a half. So … how does it feel?’

  Vincent put his hand into a bag that held hundreds of thousands of kronor.

  ‘Surreal.’

  Leo turned towards the window and the kitchen table in the other house. The one-year-old no longer ate by himself; his father was beside him wiping off his shirt and hair, and then feeding him one spoonful at a time.

  ‘It is, I know that. We robbed a bank. But they don’t have a fucking clue how we did it. There’s only one moment that absolutely cannot go to hell – the first vehicle switch. The transformation.’

  34

  THE GRAINS OF shattered glass looked different in direct light. The floodlight the forensic scientists had set up on the small square streamed through the bank window, creating a sparkling fog out of thousands of shards.

  Broncks didn’t look back as he walked away. If he turned round, he’d have to face microphones and cameras and even more questions from reporters. On his way in he’d managed to avoid the seven news teams that were already in place, and he intended to continue avoiding them.

  In the middle of the bank, dust and splinters had floated down from the ceiling and settled on a red packet of baby formula. The woman had hidden her face against the cold stone floor, and her shopping bag had overturned near one of the perpetrator’s boots. Afterwards she’d sat on a bench in a corner listening to Broncks’s questions without being able to respond. He’d seen it before, the confused expression – the loud reverberations of repeated gunshots had damaged her hearing, cracking both eardrums, resulting in a sustained, intense whine inside her head.

  Two cameramen were running behind him, shouting at him as he crossed the same pavement the getaway car had crossed. When he stepped onto the roundabout, still on the same path as the getaway car, they gave up and ran back towards the bank and other potential interviewees.

  He’d lifted up the dusty packet of baby formula and handed it to the woman whose eardrums had burst. A total of nine witnesses. Three bank employees and six customers, all of whom had lain on the floor for three minutes that lasted a lifetime. Two were so shocked that they were unable to recount anything that had happened. The six who could speak gave reasonable, but not unanimous statements, and not even the two teenage boys who’d been standing close to each other by the window could agree on the perpetrators’ appearance …

  Rickard Toresson (RT): blue jumpsuits … I think, like a car mechanic.

  Lucas Berg (LB): Not jumpsuits, it was more like jackets and trousers with side pockets.

  … on who’d shot down the protective glass, who’d emptied the vault, who’d made the countdown …

  RT: They were wearing masks, covering everything except the eyes.

  LB: They didn’t all have masks, I don’t think so anyway. I saw at least one mouth clearly.

  … just as every consciousness interprets events differently when faced with extreme violence. Fear distorted appearance, size, the passage of time.

  RT: I was at his feet. He was at least six foot five. I’m sure of it. They were all so fucking tall.

  LB: I was at his feet, and he was quite short, no taller than I am, and kind of overweight.

  Only one witness had been able to calmly and reliably describe what she’d seen – a woman in her fifties who’d been behind cashier three when a masked man aimed his machine gun and fired about forty shots at her security window. She had small, sad eyes, and she showed him how she’d held up her hand with its red nails towards a voice telling her to hand over the keys to the vault, as all the while the shards of glass fell off her clothes, her hair, her skin.

  Inga-Lena Hermansson (IH): Swedish. No dialect. No accent. A deep, slightly strained voice, like it was almost too deep. And his eyes – it was like he was looking above me, through me, but never at me. The other man was waiting farther away and had a harness around his chest, like soldiers wear. And protruding ears, they all had those.

  One who demanded the keys and one who opened the vault. And both of them, she was sure, had glanced several times at the one who remained on the other side of the counter.

  IH: He was counting down. Without having to raise his voice. Until the end.

  Protruding ears – headphones. Quiet voice – a microphone.

  The leader.

  One who ruled and the others who were ruled.

  Broncks looked around from the middle of the roundabout, checked to make sure no one was following him as he crossed the other side of the road, back to the car park where the empty getaway van stood. A train pounded rhythmically over the bridge above his head from the reopened Tunnelbana line.

  Communication equipment. Load-bearing vests. Auto
matic weapons.

  A military operation.

  According to the plumbing company that owned it, the vehicle, a yellow Dodge van with fluorescent text printed on both sides, had been stolen sometime during the night. Somewhere between thirteen and eighteen hours, Broncks calculated, before it was used as a getaway car.

  The nameless Huddinge policeman was circling the rough pillars.

  ‘Entrance to the Tunnelbana. Streets in front, behind and beside us. Bike rack after bike rack. We’re standing in the middle of a damn junction!’ he said. ‘This is where commuters switch from train to bus, from bus to train, arrive or leave on foot or by bike, everyone’s in motion all the time. And no one saw them leave the van!’

  Broncks didn’t answer, as he looked towards the bank, the square, the roundabout. Four roads to choose from. And each one, after a few kilometres, led to a new roundabout with four new roads. Four times four times four. Sixty-four options. As many routes as there are squares on a chessboard, and just as many ways to escape.

  ‘John?’

  The nameless guy had used his name again. And John couldn’t – not again – refuse to answer, while pretending that he, too, knew.

  ‘It’s been forty minutes since we opened the first getaway van,’ said Broncks.

  Maybe he could keep talking, avoiding it, hoping to suddenly remember.

  ‘In the perfect place to carry out a robbery.’

  No. He couldn’t.

  ‘The search area is already too large.’

  This colleague, who he’d worked with several times, kept catching his eye after every new reply.

  ‘You don’t know it, do you?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Erik.’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘My name.’

  Erik let the statement hang, and turned back to the scene, sweeping his arm in a wide arc.

  ‘What if they split up? If they left the car one by one and disappeared from here? If the first one took the Tunnelbana before we’d stopped it, went a few stations and got off? If the next one took the 163 bus in either direction? If the third one took a bike along the cycle path to the residential area up there and the fourth simply walked away from here and into that neighbourhood over there?’

  Tunnelbana. Bus. Bicycle. On foot. Or sixty-four different routes by car.

  Broncks peered into the van.

  ‘Erik?’

  His colleague seemed pleased, he really did. But it felt uncomfortable to use a name he’d only just learned.

  ‘They came here prepared for war – and nobody could leave here unseen carrying machine guns, body armour, load-bearing vests and communications equipment.’

  Broncks knocked lightly on the side door of the hollow, empty van.

  ‘Someone saw the car drive here. Someone saw them get out. Four full-grown men in black masks don’t just disappear without a trace.’

  A little greasy spoon restaurant was wedged between the pillars of the Tunnelbana tracks. Broncks had never liked the rancid smell of frying oil. It crept in underneath the mouldings and behind kitchen counters and clung there. He made sure to breathe through his mouth as he looked out of the window towards the van. The restaurant’s owner had a clear view of the poorly lit car park – he was the only person who might have seen something. He was a scrawny man of indeterminate age – the kind of face that was asked to show ID at the off-licence even when he was the father of four children – wearing an apron that had once been white. That was probably why the smell followed them out into the tiny dining area, where three high stools stood along a counter.

  ‘They get here in the morning and leave in the evening,’ he said, pointing out into the car park. ‘But that one, the Ford, the brown one in the middle, arrived at lunchtime. And the big yellow Dodge … it turned up about an hour ago.’

  ‘And the yellow one – you didn’t see anybody leave it?’

  ‘Nobody.’

  Broncks guessed there were no more than fifteen metres between the door of the greasy spoon and the getaway car.

  ‘But that’s not so strange,’ the restaurant owner shrugged. ‘Sometimes they just sit there. Waiting. For someone who’s coming by bus or train. And then they leave again.’

  ‘And today? You’ve seen everybody who arrived and left?’

  ‘I see everybody every day,’ he replied defensively. ‘There are only ten spaces. And I’m standing here … the whole time.’

  Broncks took two napkins from the metal holder on the counter and a pen from the inner pocket of his jacket. He drew ten oblong squares and wrote brown on the spot that corresponded to where the old Ford sat and yellow where the getaway car was.

  ‘These are the ones here now. But do you remember any more?’

  ‘More?’

  ‘Cars that have been here during the last few hours.’

  ‘Yep,’ said the restaurant owner, pointing though the window. ‘Over there, for example, a—’

  ‘Write it down in the boxes.’

  ‘There … in that space … an estate car. I’ll write it down. Estate car. I don’t remember the colour.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘And over there … a dark blue Dodge. Exactly like the yellow one standing there now, but next to it. I’ll write it down. Dark blue Dodge van.’

  ‘And the other spaces?’

  ‘Nothing. At least not near the end.’

  The restaurant owner pushed the napkins across the counter, preparing to go.

  ‘We’re not finished yet,’ said Broncks. ‘I want to know which ones left after the yellow Dodge was parked.’

  ‘After?’

  ‘After the getaway car arrived.’

  ‘I don’t remember!’

  ‘Try.’

  Pen in hand, the restaurant owner glanced at the car park, then at the napkin, then at Broncks, and then put a big ring around the space in the centre, the estate car.

  ‘That one.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘I don’t know … maybe ten minutes later.’

  ‘That’s the only one?’

  He tapped the pen absently against the counter, making an annoying sound.

  ‘Then the other Dodge. The one that was dark blue.’

  He drew a ring of ink around the box that said Dark blue Dodge van, several times, until it was thick and uneven.

  ‘Maybe … yeah, it left about two minutes later. Or five. Or … around that.’

  ‘That one?’

  ‘Yep. The square one next to the yellow. Right next to it.’

  Broncks examined the napkin. The square one next to the yellow van. He looked up from the drawing towards the real parking space. Dim light from the streetlamps seeped in and landed on the tarmac.

  ‘You’re sure? It drove away straight afterwards?’

  ‘I’m sure. It didn’t back out.’

  ‘Back out?’

  ‘Everybody who parks here drives in front first and has to back out. But that one was the opposite.’

  Two cars parked in the parking spaces next to each other. Two cars of the same kind. One with the front facing inwards, the other front outwards.

  Broncks crumpled up the napkin and threw it hard at the rubbish bin. And hit.

  It was so damn easy, like when two people sleep head to foot. Two similar cars parked close to each other, turned in opposite directions, and therefore less than half a metre apart on their right-hand sides – their sliding doors.

  Broncks nodded towards the man who owned the greasy spoon, and let out a defeated sigh as he went back out into the darkness into an ever-expanding search area.

  Leo stretched up towards the opening of the Skull Cave, grabbed hold of the sports bag filled with 500-kronor notes, and placed it on one of the shelves on the far wall. The next duffel bag, containing notes of various denominations, he put next to boxes of ammunition.

  They’d stopped there in the car park in the middle of rush hour and among all the commuters, with loaded guns and ski masks pulled down
. Completely silent. Completely still. The Tunnelbana passed overhead. The bus stopped and dropped off passengers. The voices of two young boys, who’d gone past without realising that only the thin shell of a van separated them from four bank robbers on the run.

  ‘The vests, Vincent, pass them to me.’

  Vincent was kneeling by the hatch, unzipping one of the bags – guns, magazines, ammunition, load-bearing vests.

  ‘Not that one – the other one.’

  The next zip got caught, and he had to coax it a little bit. Bulletproof vests, large, round headphones, the thin microphone. One thing at a time through the safe into Leo’s hands and onto the shelf above the bags filled with money.

  They’d stayed there for sixty seconds. Until Felix opened the side door, reached over to the other van, which was parked in the opposite direction, pressed down on the handle and opened its side door. Two identical vans turned into one unit, two open doors opposite each other, hidden from view. A short leap from one getaway car to the next. Felix into the driver’s seat, Jasper and Vincent carrying one bag each, and finally Leo who closed the doors to the two vans, now two separate entities again. The same movements as they’d made five minutes and thirty seconds earlier, when they’d been on their way to the bank. But in reverse.

  ‘Vincent? Jumpsuits and ski masks should be kept separate – we’ll burn those.’

  Their first important car change. Just a few hundred metres from the bank they’d just robbed. The transformation. No one had seen them leave a yellow van, no one knew that they’d driven on in a similar blue van. And the circle had widened. The mathematical formula the police used in every pursuit – the time elapsed since the offence multiplied by the distance to the final getaway car – the circle that became the police’s search area and indicated their chances of catching up.

  One more kilometre until the next car change, another car park in another neighbourhood, sandwiched between a three-storey house and a copse of trees. Thirty seconds to change out of the jumpsuits and masks into work trousers and shirts, thirty seconds to move the bags and trunks through the copse, twenty-five seconds to climb into the last getaway car – one of their own Construction Ltd pickup trucks that would soon blend in with all the other contractors driving home at the end of the day, Felix and Leo in the front seat, Jasper and Vincent under the cover on the flatbed. Twenty minutes later they were in their living room, listening to the radio as a SWAT team crept and crawled towards nothing.