The Father: Made in Sweden Part I (41 page)

‘Turn on the scanner,’ said Leo.

‘No.’

‘Felix? I want to hear what they’re saying.’

‘The news will be starting soon.’

Leo sank down into one of the armchairs and poured himself a few fingers of whisky.

‘Stop sulking – there’s over two million kronor in those bags out there.’

Felix didn’t answer – instead he pointed the remote at the TV and raised the volume.

‘Give it up, damn it.’

‘Give it up?’

Felix held half a glass of whisky. He emptied it.

‘You went back – had you planned that or was it just a fucking whim?’

‘It wasn’t a
fucking
whim. I just thought it … seemed to fit.’

‘It didn’t fucking fit me! You were on your way to the car. We were on our way out of there.’

The sound of the TV changed as the news programme began a more measured report.

‘Can you turn up the volume a little?’

Jasper came out of the kitchen, four bottles of beer between the fingers of each hand.

Vincent, who was sitting furthest away on the sofa, leaned forward to
see and hear better. He saw long camera shots of the train station in the capital city. He heard a muffled bang.

And then a hasty, shaky zoom in towards the black smoke pouring out of the entrance hall, rising upwards, thinning out.

But that wasn’t what he wanted to see and hear, not what he’d been carrying with him. He wanted to see images of someone who’d been hurt. Maybe blood on a white sheet or black asphalt. Maybe on a stretcher, maybe a paramedic. Nothing. The news only showed piles of rubble on the stairs and in the arrival hall and waiting areas, more barricades, long lines of travellers.

Now. Finally. A picture of an ambulance.

Vincent crumpled into the sofa. The policeman wasn’t dead.

And he laughed a little. It had all been so weird. All of this, the last few months, hadn’t felt real. More like a movie they’d talk about afterwards. But now he knew that it was real.

Felix filled his glass halfway again with the light single malt, then drained it again.

‘Are you proud, Jasper? A bomb. In the heart of the city. Does it feel … good?’

‘It’s not my fucking fault that you built it wrong.’

‘I know it was you!’

Felix got up off the sofa, grabbed Jasper’s shirt, yanked him up.

‘Let go!’

A shirt button bounced onto the floor. Savage breaths. Jasper grabbed onto Felix’s hands, which in turn gripped even harder.

‘Sit down, damn it!’ yelled Leo, pushing his hands against their chests. ‘What the hell are you two doing?
Sit down!
’

‘I know he’s lying!’

‘Sit!’

‘I won’t sit in the same room as this bastard!’

Felix let go of Jasper’s shirt collar, and Jasper released Felix’s wrists and started to do up whatever buttons were left.

‘Felix – be quiet now.’

Leo looked at his little brother, whose neck was flushed and his jaw clenched.

‘I believe Jasper. He looked me in the eye and swore.’

‘So you
believe
him?’

‘I believe him.’

‘He’s completely fucking unreliable. He put his gun in that security guard’s mouth, and he stayed too long at Sköndal and Svedmyra and kept shooting and fuck … today … it seems to be spreading, right, Leo … I don’t trust him any more. And we have to be able to fucking trust each other!’

‘But I trust Jasper when he says he didn’t do it.’

‘Then you can go to hell too!’

Felix overturned one of the armchairs and walked towards the hall.

‘Listen to me, all of you – it doesn’t fucking matter at all.’

When Vincent had seen the bomb for the first time three days ago, he’d challenged the man who’d taught him to walk. He knew he was probably the one who’d started this.

‘It doesn’t matter any more, Felix. No one died.’

He’d started this. Maybe he was the only one who could finish it.

‘Let’s forget it. Never talk about it again. And you two … stop arguing.’

He looked at Felix who was standing in the doorway, at Leo righting the overturned chair, at Jasper who, losing patience with the missing buttons, had taken off his shirt.

‘Vincent’s right.’

Leo bumped into the table, bottles colliding with glasses which collided with the police scanner, and pointed at the TV, where scenes of chaos from Central Station were replaced by scenes from a small town south of Stockholm – police tape and curious onlookers in front of two bullet-riddled banks whose vault doors stood open.

‘It doesn’t
matter
. The only thing that matters is that we’re here together. And that they’re out there still with no idea who we are or what we’re going to do next.’

A black horse. With a thick and streaming mane. And when it rises on its hind legs it watches him. Vranac. A label on a wine bottle.

That’s what other people see. But this horse is free and can’t be tamed. He can see it. And all the while, other people think they’re just drinking affordable red wine that tastes like plums and earth.

Ivan was sitting on a bench next to his kitchen table. He’d been doing
this most of the day; sometimes it happened like that, cold outside and too much time on his hands. A firm grip on the cork as it came out, poured half into the pan over a couple of tablespoons of sugar that would melt slowly, then into a big coffee mug that was almost clean. A typical day. But not really. After the first ten Keno tickets and the first bottle and the first cigarette, he’d called his eldest son. It was only the second time he’d called him in several years and without his address book he wasn’t sure he had the right number. It was. But not the right voice. Irritable and short and
I don’t have time
. Then an extended news bulletin on the radio about a bomb in a storage locker in Stockholm that had exploded while they were trying to disarm it. A bomb in the middle of the city. He’d been living in Sweden for three decades; bombs were something that happened in other places, places he’d left behind. And then, twenty more Keno tickets, and maybe half a bottle more, quite a bit of tobacco, and Radio Stockholm on talking about a bank robbery, about two bank robberies, right here, in Ösmo, just five hundred metres from his window.

A typical day. But not really.

A black horse rearing up. He remembered a white horse that he’d been given by eight-year-old Leo on his pappa’s thirty-fifth birthday. A white porcelain horse that lay down, resting. His son had seen the label on this bottle so many times, he’d thought it was the horses that Ivan liked.

More sips. Earth and plums. And warmth from his throat to his chest.

The window had been open, but he hadn’t heard any shooting, he knew what it sounded like – the sound was easy to distinguish from a firecracker, a gunshot petered out so much faster. He should have heard it if someone was shooting.

Above the narrow radiator in the bathroom hung four socks that he’d washed by hand. The wine had neutralised the pain in his knee and helped now against the dampness of his socks as he slid his feet into his worn-out shoes.

Two jackets on the hat rack. He wavered between the light grey and the dark grey one. Light grey.

Hands jammed into his jacket pockets, the fabric stretched across his back, he went out and down the stairs and through the gate. The envelope filled with cash still made it difficult to button the shirt breast pocket, though it had become thinner. Pocket money. Forty-three thousand that was now twenty-nine and a half thousand. Rolling, Rizla, Vranac and a lot of Keno.

Down a sleepy street past villas and townhouses, down the hill and round the bus shelter outside the library, and there he met the first police car. Then the cordoned-off square, where cops in uniforms and ridiculous hats were walking around, talking to anyone who would talk to them under the Christmas lights shaped like snowflakes and Santas and Christmas trees. Fucking Christmas. Gluttony. People fattening themselves up – dead pigs fed to living pigs. Manufactured joy, everyone laughing until their children started to scream. But for once those Christmas lights would be put to good use, illuminating the scene of a crime. The largest Santa shone the brightest, its light landing on all those self-important faces; they had a story to tell that was unique and for a moment it made them unique.

Ivan stretched his head above the crowd. He saw them more clearly now, the fronts of the banks, and people moving around inside.

The busybody.

There he was. He was one of
them
. Ivan was sure.

That busybody who’d waved his fucking badge in his face, trying to insinuate that Ivan Dûvnjac was a fucking little rat who sneaked into other people’s homes.

He pushed his way through the curious onlookers and watched as the little busybody walked around the bank premises looking at fallen security cameras and overturned chairs and upside-down cash boxes. Next to him, on her knees, a woman dressed in a solid white plastic jumpsuit with plastic gloves was picking up cartridge cases. Ivan waited there until the busybody turned and looked at the people looking at him.

You should recognise me. You sought me out, provoked me. And now you look at me like I don’t exist. Because you didn’t come round looking for me to ask about fucking burglaries.

Then the busybody moved behind the counter and into what Ivan guessed was the vault. And he saw what the cop had been standing in front of, looking at without understanding it.

Eight bullet holes in a security window.

And together they formed a … face. With two eyes and a nose and a mouth with a crooked smile.

A fucking sneer. At that busybody and his colleagues.

Ivan stood there in the late afternoon darkness outside the bank and looked at a face among the shards of glass and bullet casings, and he tried not to listen to the people around him, talking and talking about what they’d seen, which had already started to change and expand. And
he thought about the clusters. Events that didn’t seem like they belonged together, but they did, just like the number sequences on a Keno ticket. He thought about that busybody and the envelope in his breast pocket and two banks robbed just five hundred metres from his home and a smile that was a sneer, smiling at the people who were in pursuit, but also at the people standing there looking on right now, at him.

He broke away from the crowd and with every step the feeling of being watched grew stronger, two hollow eyes that never blinked lingering on his back.

THEY’RE STILL STANDING
in the confines of the lift, motionless, in the kind of light that hurts your eyes. They’re still looking at each other in the narrow gap at the very top of the mirror, where the layers of spray paint are a little thinner. And once in a while, but just for a moment so Pappa won’t notice, Leo glances at the Mora knife in his father’s hand, still visible even though Pappa is gripping the wooden handle so hard that his knuckles have turned white.

‘I’ll be damned. You actually did it.’

Pappa’s voice is trembling from within. And Pappa swallows it, just as Leo usually does.

‘I could have lost you.’

‘Pappa, everything’s going to be fine. I thought everything through. They followed me here. And you saw it all. Saw me hit them on the nose, like this, in the middle.’

‘Open the door.’

‘Don’t you want to see? Like this, in the middle—’

‘Are you ever going to open the damn lift door?’

Pappa’s voice almost sounds normal. He isn’t trembling quite so much inside.

Leo opens the lift door, then the door to the apartment.

He knows that it’s the same four-bedroom flat on the seventh floor in the middle of Skogås – the one he left not long ago. He knows that, of course. And yet, it’s as if the rooms are smaller.

Cramped. Tight.

It feels as if he has to crouch down not to hit his head on the ceiling when Pappa tells him to take off his jacket and sweater. He’s cold enough to get goose bumps from his stomach to his neck as Pappa inspects the rip in the sleeve of his jacket and then the hole in the shoulder. Then the scratch on Leo’s shoulder just where the clavicle ends, which isn’t bleeding any more. Pappa runs his fingers over its dry, uneven surface.

‘It doesn’t hurt at all, Pappa, it barely even touched …’

Pappa has already gone into the kitchen. He turns on the stove, heats up his wine and sugar. He sits down at the kitchen table, pours himself half a glass.

Leo watches his back; he’d like to sit down beside him, show him the scratch again, the blood that’s turned brown and which he can’t feel. He walks down the hallway that used to feel so much longer, stops at the open door – Vincent, who has placed all his soldiers on the floor in one big group, crawls under his bed and retrieves a new tennis ball from among the clumps of dust, then turns to Leo with a smile.