The Father: Made in Sweden Part I (33 page)

‘I sat down this morning with a man who’s been robbed of his humanity. I don’t want to do that again.’

He looked at Karlström.

‘Forty years old. And he can’t even stand up on his own. His father has to hold him up.’

And then at that beautiful desk. And out the other window, at the diametrical opposite of the decisions his boss faced every day – plastic gnomes draped with Christmas lights.

‘The same group?’

‘The same group.’

‘And how can—’

‘I was already sure. Now I have an identification.’

Karlström never sighed, he wasn’t the type.

‘As of tomorrow, John. Put all your other investigations aside. And investigate this until we stop them from robbing any more banks.’

Broncks nodded and walked towards the door and the stairs, already on his way.

‘I said
tomorrow
.’

His boss knew him. John Broncks would head directly to Kronoberg and the department and spend the evening there.

‘Now I’ve heard you out, and you’ll get your investigation full time. On one condition.
You
have to do something for
me
.’

‘Yeah?’

‘Stay for dinner. Can you smell how good that smells, John? Thyme. Celery. Shallots. And good red wine.’

Later Broncks sat at one end of the dining table with his boss, an elf, St Lucia, and the boss’s wife who he’d never met, but who was the kind of socially confident person who knew everyone’s name at the party within a few minutes and made everyone feel important. It hadn’t worked on him. He felt so uneasy sitting there pretending to be part of the family that it was hard to eat, or listen to the story of the St Lucia celebration at nursery, or even to answer how long he’d been acquainted with the two girls’ father. He had declined Karlström’s offer of a brandy and felt relieved as he said his thanks and started to open the front door.

‘John?’

Karlström put a hand on Broncks’s arm. And Broncks didn’t like it.

‘You stay late every evening.’

‘Yes.’

‘Searching and searching.’

‘Yes.’

‘And all your investigations revolve around extreme violence.’

‘That’s the way the world works.’

‘When I finish
my
day I shut the folders on whatever investigation I’m working on and put them in my desk drawer, and I decide the next day if I want to pick them up again. But you open them right before you go, lay out the pictures of broken bones and black eyes. And read. For hours.’

‘That’s the way the world works.’

The hand on his arm felt as if it was weighing him down, pinning him in place.

‘You’re not reading those cases in order to solve them. Are you?’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘You want to get closer. To
him
.’

‘Thank you for dinner. It was nice.’

Broncks turned the doorknob he’d been holding for so long and opened the front door. But the hand remained on his shoulder.

‘I haven’t finished.’

Karlström held on tight.

‘John, you don’t care about the people in those folders. What their names are, where they’re going. You’re just trying … to understand.’

A door held open between warmth and cold. The kind of cold that crept inside your jacket and the warmth of family.

‘But you’re never going to succeed. Or understand. If you don’t go and see him. Someday. Right, John? Maybe you should do it now, with just a couple of weeks’ head start. Go there.’

He shook Karlström’s hand from his arm. It felt wrong. Karlström was his boss, not his fucking pal. He shook it loose.

‘That’s enough.’

Broncks stepped outside. It was snowing more heavily now.

Go there.

He knew his boss was right.

THE SNOW CRUNCHED
beneath his tyres as Leo drove into the middle of some gloomy woods and parked a few kilometres into the Nacka Reserve, one of Sweden’s largest national forests, where a wide track narrowed to a path. He unbuttoned the flatbed cover and carried the five heavy boxes to a rocky hill that sloped down towards a deserted shoreline.

In the shadowy illumination of his headlights, he threw each box onto the ice. A hole opened where each one sank, holes that would soon freeze over again – healing the membrane above a heap of sawn-up weapons encased in cement. In the spring, algae would grow over the hard surface of the boxes, and they’d become indistinguishable from the rest of the sea bed. Turning green like the glass of the aquarium that had stood between his bed and Felix’s, and which they’d never cleaned.

Then he kicked a hole into the deep snow, tore up the earth and moss with a collapsible shovel, placing Jasper’s boots in it. He doused them with lighter fluid and lit them. Shiny leather and solid rubber soles melted while black wisps of smoke stung his nose and eyes.

Not even Felix or Vincent knew where he was dumping these things. They’d never have to sit there and run the risk of being called snitches.
Not like he’d sat there with a fat cop in front of him demanding answers over and over again.

I didn’t betray you. I didn’t save myself. I saved you.

Through the park and then the city, steaming in the cold, and there they were, waiting for him in the middle of the yard as he drove through the gate. He’d called Felix and told him to meet him at home.

‘What’s so damned important?’

Leo could hear the alcohol in Felix’s words; he’d always known how much had been drained.

‘Let’s discuss this in the garage.’

A taxi was standing some way off, the engine running.

‘You’re paying, brother. And it’ll be more expensive if we go inside. We’re going back to the bar.’

‘Go inside.’

Leo knocked on the taxi driver’s window and handed him two 500-kronor notes. The window wasn’t even rolled up again before the driver turned his ‘for hire’ light on and the car disappeared.

‘You can call a new one when we’re finished.’

The garage was dark and cold. Leo lit the lamp, turned on the heater. Vincent followed him inside, while Felix made a point of staying outside. Until Leo unfurled a detailed map of Stockholm and its southern suburbs,
then
he decided to come in. Using a red marker, he circled an area at one end of the map, near a main road and not far from the open sea.

‘Here.’

‘Here, what?’

‘Ösmo in about twenty days.’

‘Are you serious?’

‘Nobody’s ever robbed two banks at the same time.’

‘But, damn it, we already know that! Is this why we had to leave our window table and sit in a fucking taxi for forty-five minutes?’

‘Felix, listen to me.’

‘You listen to me! It’s Lucia, we were sitting in a pub, eating dinner, having a beer … and now here I am, in a freezing cold garage? It’s fucking Christmas soon! We have to have a few days off!’

‘You can celebrate next year.’

Leo straightened the map.

‘Nobody’s ever robbed two banks simultaneously. So we’re going to rob three.’

He drew a red line from the ring around the little town of Ösmo, west along Highway 225, and to a new ring around an even smaller town called Sorunda.

‘On our way home. We’ll pass through here. A small bank, completely unprotected.’

Felix looked first at his smiling big brother then at the map marked with red ink.

‘Have I been drinking or have you?’

He snatched the pen from Leo’s hand and drew a new, larger circle.

‘There are no fucking escape routes from there. Right? And you think we should give them our position, one more time? Let them surround us?’

Leo grabbed the pen from Felix’s hand, drew a cross outside the map – directly onto the wooden surface of the workbench.

‘Not if they don’t have any cops to surround us with.’

He looked at them and then pointed to the cross outside the map.

‘That … is Central Station. The middle of Stockholm. Forty-nine kilometres away. And they’ll have their hands full … defusing a bomb.’

A FLAT LANDSCAPE
. White as chalk. It had been dark when he left Stockholm, but now it was bright, sun bouncing off the snow, blinding him as he drove the 220 kilometres to the Kumla Maximum Security Prison.

He could still feel his boss’s hand on his arm. He knew he wasn’t doing this because of Karlström, and yet, he was just as sure that Karlström was right.

Just like Sanna had been right.

They’d used all their contacts with any connection to the criminal underworld. No results. But there was one contact left – one that was his alone.

The grey wall, seven metres of concrete and barbed wire, loomed in the distance beyond the fields. It had been a few years since the last time he’d been here, but he had the same feeling as he got closer – were there really people inside, walking around and thinking and sleeping and eating and longing away huge chunks of their lives?

He parked near the gate, got out and rang the bell.

‘John Broncks, City Police.’

The crackling speaker on the door did not work.

‘John Broncks, City—’

‘I heard you the first time.’

‘To visit Sam Larsen.’

‘You don’t have an appointment.’

‘I’m making one right now.’

‘Six hours. Even for police officers.’

‘This is not a visit. This is a criminal investigation.’

The click of the door unlocking and then a short walk to the guard post where a uniformed man sat surrounded by institutional Christmas decorations – a plastic star in one window and an ugly straw goat sitting on one of the monitors that transmitted images from fifty-eight surveillance cameras.

He showed his ID and received a visitor’s badge; he was supposed to wear it on his chest, but put it inside his pocket. A guard escorted him to the visiting area and left him alone in a room with a conjugal bed covered by rough protective plastic, a simple table with two equally simple chairs, a sink with a dripping tap, and a view through the barred window of the wall outside. Here there was no Christmas, no holiday season for those who didn’t have the luxury of counting out time.

Fifteen minutes later, the door opened and two prison officers came in with a figure, then exited, closing the door after them. They left the man they’d brought with them behind. He was two years, three months and five days older than John Broncks. And a couple of centimetres taller. And, nowadays, thirty kilos heavier. They’d been the same size, but eighteen years of lifting weights daily, a structure when all other structure was lacking, had changed that.

‘Hello,’ said Broncks.

They looked at each other. One in jeans, a jacket and winter boots. One in baggy trousers made from fabric that was simultaneously stiff and loose, a worn T-shirt with a prison logo on the chest, and slippers on his bare feet.

‘I said … hello.’

Broncks sat down at the rickety table. Sam went over to the barred window and looked out.

‘How are you?’ Broncks tried again.

He’d visited occasionally in the beginning, those first few years the life sentence was being served, first at the Hall Prison and then at Tidaholm. That was before he understood that not being able to think in terms of time was the same as not being able to hope, not having a future. And when Broncks finally understood that this kind of life changes a person, he visited less frequently, and eventually not at all. And he’d probably never even been in this particular visiting room before.

‘Listen … next time you come here, make a fucking appointment,’ said Sam. ‘Just like everybody else. Just like people who aren’t cops. Next time I don’t want any questions when I get back to my kitchen section about where I’ve been. You should know that as well as anyone – a visit from a cop without any explanation is about the worst thing that can happen to you in here!’

Sam was still standing by the barred window, his back to Broncks.

‘I asked you how you were.’

‘How I am?’

‘Yes.’

‘When the hell did you become interested in that?’

He turned his broad back around and looked at Broncks.

‘And since you can’t answer me – what the hell are you doing here, anyway?’

John Broncks pulled out the second chair from the table. It was going better than he’d hoped. They were talking.

‘Two big robberies. Svedmyra. Farsta. By the same guys.’

But his big brother chose to remain standing.

‘Mamma was here last week.’

‘Heavily armed. Very well planned.’

‘I offered her marble cake. Do you remember what that tastes like, John?’

‘Do you think it could be someone you’ve done time with? It’s surely—’

‘And the time before that … muffins.’

‘—being talked about in here, right?’

Sam leaned over the table, furious.

‘You haven’t been here for three fucking years! But you come here and think that I’m about to give you information! That you can use me in your fucking investigation!’

Sam was shaking as he walked over to the metal disc attached to the door, reaching for the red button.

‘Fuck you, John!’

‘Sam, you know I want to see you, too. You’re my brother.’

‘Even if I did know something, I sure as hell wouldn’t say anything to you! But I don’t. No one knows! No one in here has ever heard of them! Are you with me, bro? These guys are completely unknown. They’ve never done time. And they still know exactly what they’re doing.’

Sam stared at him with eyes John couldn’t reach, his finger on the red button again. He pushed it in and leaned toward the microphone.

‘This visit is over.’

‘You have more than half an hour left.’

‘What part of
over
do you not understand? I want to go back to my section.’

They avoided looking at each other just as they had when they’d fought as children, when they would have done anything to see over and around each other.

‘So Mamma visited?’

Marble cake. Muffins. Prisoners serving long sentences and who were considered a security threat always baked before a visit. Broncks smiled weakly.