The Father: Made in Sweden Part I (4 page)

Neighbours and passers-by called the site the Blue House, a large metal cube that had once been the Gamla Tumba Woodworking factory. Leo parked as he’d parked last night, far away from the wide highway and next to a locked container painted black.

They’d unloaded weapon after weapon without being disturbed, hidden from the view of the main road and any nearby houses.

He rolled down his window and listened to the familiar sounds coming from the large building site – loud music from a paint-spattered radio, short bursts from the air compressor of the nail gun. He did up the last button on his blue shirt, pulled up his blue braces, stretched, and got out.

The Blue House had long been an empty shell, and they’d spent several weeks removing all the old fittings. Then they’d reinforced two floors with beams, insulated them, laid flooring, and partitioned it with walls. Space by space, the building had been transformed into the premises of small independent businesses, a place some entrepreneur was trying to open as the Solbo Centre.

‘Did you take care of everything?’

He’d never thought about what Felix looked like when he walked until now. His brother, three years younger, was walking towards him across the makeshift car park, and he looked more like their father with every step. He took up space, feet angled sharply outwards, broad shoulders, thick forearms that he swung as if he were stretching as he walked; he looked idle, like
him
.

I look like Mamma. You look like Pappa.

‘Did you get it, Felix? Take care of it?’

‘I think Gabbe’s trying to shaft us on that last payment.’

Felix made him feel calm in a way he couldn’t explain. It should have been the opposite, with those similarities; they should have made him feel worried, hunted.

‘He’s inside counting every damn nail.’

‘Did you … take care of it?’

His younger brother began unhooking the plastic hood that covered the bed of the second company truck.

‘Gabbe and his freaking nagging. As if he has the right to refuse to pay just ’cause we’re not on schedule. As if it says that anywhere in the contract.’

‘I’ll take care of him. But did you take care of your part?’

‘Section Eighty-three. Orthopaedics, I think,’ said Felix, taking off the white plastic cover. ‘I rolled it out and Vincent’s legs suddenly started hurting like hell.’

A wide wooden toolbox with a shiny metal handle stood in the middle of the flatbed. And next to it, under a couple of yellow blankets bearing the logo of a hospital, was a folded-up wheelchair.

They pulled the two pickups a little closer and opened the padlock on the black container – the kind that every construction company sets up at a building site to store tools and equipment. When the vehicles’ doors were thrown open, visibility was obscured on all sides, and they were able to lift the empty box and carry it in.

Broad daylight in a residential area, just a few metres from a busy road, and they stood there – in front of piles of automatic weapons.

‘Where the hell have you been, Leo?’

Gabbe’s high-pitched voice cut through the October day. He was in his sixties, wearing a blue tracksuit that had once fitted well but now sat tight over his expanding belly, a cup of coffee and a bag of cinnamon buns in his arms. ‘How the hell are you going to finish all this today?’

He was outside, approaching the container.

‘Have you even been here at all in the last week?’

Leo took a calm breath, and whispered to Felix, ‘Close this up again. I’ll take care of him.’

He left the container and went to meet the red-faced, snorting foreman.

‘Leo! You weren’t here yesterday! I called you several times! You may be working on something else, but whatever the hell it is, it’s not this building!’

Leo glanced quickly over his shoulder. Felix was closing the heavy container doors. The sound of a heavy padlock snapping shut.

‘But we’re here now. Aren’t we? And it’ll be finished today. Just like we agreed.’

Gabbe was so close that he could have touched the wall of the container. Leo put his arm around Gabbe’s shoulders as he pushed him back towards the Blue House, not so firmly that it was uncomfortable, but insistently enough to ensure that they moved away from what no one else should see.

‘I don’t give a damn if you’ve taken on other jobs! Do you understand that, Leo? You have a contract with me!’

Gabbe was audibly panting as they walked into the building. There, on the first floor, right inside, there’d be an Indian restaurant next to a flower shop next to a tanning parlour. On the floor below a tyre company, a print shop, a nail salon, and there, near the inner walls that would frame Robban’s Pizzeria, Jasper and Vincent were screwing together a plasterboard partition.

‘You see! You aren’t done, damn it!’

That foreman’s fucking shrill voice. Shrill and overweight and old and hotheaded.

‘We will be.’

‘I’ve got a fucking tenant moving in tomorrow morning!’

‘And if I say we’ll be done, we’ll be done.’

‘If not, I
will
be keeping the final payment.’

Leo was thinking he’d like to slug that little foreman – a single blow. Right on the nose. Instead he put his arm around him again.

‘My dear Gabbe – have you ever been disappointed in me? Have I ever done a bad job? Have I ever been late?’

Gabbe wriggled his outraged body out of Leo’s overly tight grip and ran towards the other corner of the metal building.

‘The wall here! The hair salon! A layer of plaster is missing! Do the old ladies have to get their perms without a fire wall around them?’

He ran out into the car park and the rain that had gently started falling again.

‘And … that damn container – you were supposed to move that. In a few weeks this is supposed to be customer parking!’

Gabbe slapped his palms several times against the container that took up so much space in the car park. The sound was muted because the storage unit was filled up to the brim.

‘Calm down – we don’t want you to have a heart attack, all right?’ said Leo.

The foreman’s face was even more flushed after running around, but now his whipped-up anger started draining out of him and flowing away in the rainwater.

‘It
will
be done by midnight,’ said Leo. ‘I need this firm, Gabbe – I don’t think you really understand how much I need it. My construction firm, our collaboration, it’s absolutely necessary for me to be able to … expand.’

‘Expand?’

‘Maximise profit. Without increasing risk.’

‘Now you’ve lost me.’

‘You’re breathing pretty heavily. I’m worried about you. You should go home and rest. We’ll be done by midnight. You can depend on me.’

Leo stretched out his hand and held it aloft between them.

‘Right?’

Gabbe’s hand was small and moist and soft when it met his. Leo nodded.

‘Good. The job will be done today if I say it will. And then
I’ll
treat
you
to some cinnamon buns. OK?’

Leo waited between the container and the car as Gabbe left. He had stood there beating his greasy hands on a metal box filled with automatic weapons, and he’d had no idea. Next time he might want to open it.

When he was absolutely sure that the loud-mouthed foreman was far down the road, Leo set off across the street and into the residential area, towards the solution to his storage problem – a small, two-storey house, with a fenced-in yard and no lawn, right next to a major road. He’d seen the owners moving furniture out. Now it had a
FOR SALE
sign out the back. He walked beside a high chain-link fence towards the gate, entered the yard and, crossing the asphalt, went up to the house, peering in through the window to the left of the entrance – an empty kitchen. Through the window to the right of the entrance he saw an empty hallway. Around the corner and into the next window – an extension and an empty room. Around the corner again and into the next window – the stairs to a second floor.

Two floors, but no basement. The entire neighbourhood was built on an old lakebed. Every house was built on mud and could be extended up, but not down.

Several times in the last week he’d stopped nailing and drilling to look at the ugly little stone house that lay so close to the road. And every time he’d seen the Phantom’s Skull Cave. He knew it was a childish thought. But it was also a solution.

A house you didn’t really notice, for people without much money.

On the front door there was another
FOR SALE
sign. He looked at the picture of a smiling estate agent with a swept-back fringe and wearing a suit, searched for the pen in his inside pocket and wrote down the phone number on the back of the receipt from the wigmaker.

The big garage was a dream. He climbed up onto a pile of used tyres and wiped dirt off the window in order to see in – high ceilings and room for four, maybe even five vehicles. Perfect for the formation, the training of a group.

A door opened and closed.

He turned to the garden next door; a much larger house, with lawns covered in wet leaves and a row of apple trees like craggy skeletons. A woman with a small child stood on the gravel path; she looked at him, a curious prospective buyer, and he nodded.

The blows of hammers and the drone from across the road – the uniform an observer would see. A house with a garage to its right – headquarters and a place to train. And in the forest just a few kilometres away – the most remarkable night of his life.

And it had been so easy.

That three brothers and their childhood friend – all around the age of twenty, all snotty-nosed kids without any education – could decide to pull off the biggest arms coup of all time, equipped only with general construction knowledge, plastic explosive, and an older brother who knew the power of trust.

A STARRY SKY
, brighter than the night before. Leo and Felix squeezed into the truck and drove to a suburb of high-rise apartments, away from the now completed Blue House and a satisfied Gabbe, away from a locked container that sleepy commuters would pass on their way to the bus stop.

The two brothers got out of the truck. Each grabbed one of the brass handles of the battered wooden toolbox on the flatbed.

‘It’s eleven fifty,’ said Leo.

The box was the same weight as when it had held tools, despite the new contents – the new life, their other life, which was about to start.

‘Eighteen hours to go.’

They carried it past some low bushes and a sparse flowerbed on their way to the block of flats and the staircase. Leo opened the door. While
they waited for the lift, they could hear Jasper and Vincent laughing together in the basement storage rooms.

Fourth floor.

His door. Their door. D
ÛVNJAC
/
ERIKSSON
. They put the wooden toolbox down while Leo searched for his keys, then took the stack of flyers crammed into the letterbox on the door and threw them in the garbage chute.

The lights were on inside.

Anneli was sitting in the kitchen on a simple wooden chair, the sound of the sewing machine her mother had given her colliding with the music coming from a cassette deck, the Eurythmics – she often played eighties music.

‘Hi,’ said Leo.

She was beautiful, he forgot that sometimes. A kiss and a gentle pat on her cheek. The black fabric twisted, captured, impaled by the sewing machine’s needle. He turned to the sink and the cabinet below it. They were still there. Right where he’d hidden them, far at the back behind the bottles of washing-up liquid and bottles of floor cleaner. Three brown boxes. Not especially large, but heavy.

‘Wait.’

He’d already been on his way out.

‘Leo, I haven’t seen you for days.’

Last night he’d come in and, without stopping at the bathroom or refrigerator, had gone straight into the bedroom and laid down in a bed smelling of her – not her perfume or newly washed hair, just her, lying close to her and holding onto her sleeping body, the force of the explosion at the armoury still reverberating in his chest. The clock radio on his bedside table had blinked 4.42, and she’d turned over, her naked body against his as she yawned and pressed herself even closer.

‘And this morning when I woke up, you weren’t here any more. I miss you.’

‘Not now, Anneli.’

‘Don’t you want to see what I’ve made? The polo necks? You were the one who …’

‘Later, Anneli.’

He was just about to go down the hall to the living room where the others had already started unpacking and repacking, when he saw the
empty wine bottle on the draining board and the wet cork in the sink.

‘Have you been drinking? You’re going to be driving.’

‘Just a little. But it was last night … Leo, you were in the woods, and I didn’t know a damn thing. How it was going, if you’d come home, if someone saw you and would … I couldn’t sleep! And now … what have you been doing?’

‘Construction. We weren’t finished. Now we are.’

He was already out of the room.

She stopped the sewing machine.

Why were her hands trembling? When she was the one who’d wanted to be involved? When she was the one who wanted to make the vests and who would put masks on Leo and Jasper and drive them to the site?