The Father: Made in Sweden Part I (29 page)

No explosions flashed in the darkness.

No shots echoed against the concrete.

No screams, no hatred, just a voice over the radio.

‘The van is empty.’

LEO SHOOK THE
beautiful bottle and the cork popped. The Pol Roger champagne bubbled over the sides of the narrow glasses as they toasted their first bank robbery, singing and hugging each other. Anneli drank up and refilled her glass. Vincent, who hadn’t said a word since they stood outside the bank, raised his glass and howled just as Felix had howled, out of the self-control that had kept them all together, which they could return to and draw strength from when needed. Jasper talked and talked about how he’d shot open every compartment in the vault and made another toast, voice bubbling over with champagne.

‘Everyone in position.’

They fell silent, leaned forward, listening to the police scanner in the middle of the coffee table among half-full beer glasses and newly opened whisky bottles.

‘Forced entry in five …’

A scratchy voice counted down as eight fully armed members of the SWAT team gradually approached the plumber’s van.

‘… four, three, two, one …’

Now the voice fell silent, just as the voices in this room had, and they perceived new sounds. Not words, but still a language.

the scrape of feet

harsh breathing

a car door squeaking

And then.

The most powerful and clear sound.

silence

The silence that occurs when a group stands close together, listening to an opponent who is defeated.

‘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.’

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 …

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

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

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.

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.

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. Automatic 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.