THE SHOVEL IS heavy in his hand. Perhaps that’s why it sinks so easily and so deeply into the ground. Or perhaps it’s the lack of tangled roots and angular stone. When the steel tip hits the wooden lid, it encounters a porous surface—as happens when time passes and a coffin has been buried a long time.
He knows exactly what’s in it.
Papa.
He wiggles the coffin lid and opens it slowly.
It doesn’t smell like anything. Shouldn’t it, though? And Papa is lying exactly as he did at the wake in one of the hospital’s prayer rooms. Fine suit. Hair combed back. Ashen complexion.
John Broncks unbuttons his papa’s pinstriped suit jacket and white shirt. He keeps the tie knotted but pushes it to one side so it won’t be in the way. When he bends forward he happens to bump his shoulder against the wall of the hole. The soil falls on his papa’s exposed stomach and chest. He pushes it away with his hand and feels the edges of the wounds with his palms and begins to count. Twenty-six holes. It said twenty-seven in the medical examiner’s report.
“You should look higher up.”
It sounds like Papa’s voice.
“The rib directly under the left arm. The last cut was there.”
And when he grabs hold of his papa’s arm and turns it to be able to see the twenty-seventh hole better, he hears his father’s heart beating, hard. Thump, thump. Thump, thump. As if his father is fighting back.
Thump, thump.
Broncks sat up in bed.
Thump, thump.
A dream—so bizarre. But the part that had felt so real, standing there in the middle of a grave, had not been real at all.
He felt relieved.
But then the thump came again, from the front door.
His cell phone was lying on the floor—05:57. He hadn’t even slept two hours.
Thump, thump.
Who the hell was banging on the door at this hour?
He padded softly through the hallway of his two-room apartment, sockless feet on the cold pine floor. There was a peephole above the door handle and lock. He leaned forward.
Her?
“What are you doing here?”
“Leo Dûvnjac.”
“And?”
“We have to talk about him.”
“I thought you were clear when you explained that you didn’t want to work on that investigation—or was it that you didn’t want to work with me?”
“Listen, Broncks?”
“Yeah?”
“I want to keep working on it. I don’t care if you are a psychopath. He sat in the interview chair yesterday and he is even worse.”
People don’t look sensible when they are smiling through a peephole that distorts lines and perspective. Elisa didn’t either. Her smile was crooked and round at the same time, and too big. Or perhaps that was what she looked like? He probably had not seen her smile especially often before. And now she was holding up something black, gesturing with it at the peephole. It was an investigation folder, or at least he thought so.
“Wait a minute.”
He went back to the bedroom, ignored the unmade bed, and pulled on his jeans, which were lying on the floor, and a T-shirt hanging on the armchair. Then he opened the front door. As she came in and hung her jacket on the hook on top of his jacket, it felt as if she was examining him, taking in his disheveled hair and bare feet.
“Yes, you are seeing correctly—you woke me up. Would you like something? Water? Coffee?”
“No, thanks.”
“Then I’ll just get some for myself.”
Broncks went into the kitchen and Elisa followed him.
“You broke off the interview, John.”
He filled the kettle and turned on the stove.
“You showed Dûvnjac out. And you didn’t come back.”
Hot water. Silver tea.
“Since then I’ve tried to call you.”
“And I thought you came here to talk about the job. Not about how I spend my time.”
“I said that I came here to talk about Leo Dûvnjac.”
He poured his steaming water into a large cup. From her seat she could take in the whole apartment with a glance. Single. She was certain of that. Not gay, although he had never looked at her in the way heterosexual men sometimes did. A home that could have been clipped out of any page of an Ikea catalog, entirely without personal effects. No photographs. Nothing on the walls that he was proud of. Nice but not distinctive. A hotel room. Anyone at all could stay here a couple of nights and then move on.
“I checked Dûvnjac’s alibi. It holds, John. He was at the restaurant he named and met his father at the time he stated. It was confirmed by the couple that runs the place and by a slightly drunk regular. And our house search at his mother’s gave us nothing either, as we anticipated.”
“But from what I have heard, it gave you something else—enemies. Because correcting colleagues, as you evidently did when they turned her bedroom upside down, is the best way to make yourself unpopular in the building where we work.”
“I have no problem with that if I know I’m right. I didn’t become a police officer because I was lonely—I already have friends.”
She looked at him. That look that only she had.
“You, on the other hand, don’t seem to have too many friends there—so what have you said?”
He drank the warm water, so pleasant when it spread through his chest.
“Alibi, no result. House search, no result. So you came here and woke me entirely unnecessarily? If so, you can go home now. And I can go back to sleep.”
She made no attempt at all to go, but instead pulled out one of the pine chairs and sat down at the kitchen table.
“John, when I don’t find what I’m looking for, I keep looking. Until I find it.”
She opened the folder she had waved in front of the peephole and the first paper she picked up seemed—at least from what he could see upside down—to be a page from the correctional system’s register.
“We knew that Jari Ojala, the dead robber, served the last six months of his sentence at Österåker prison. In cell 2, cell block H—the same prison and same cell block as Leo Dûvnjac. That they knew each other, and that Dûvnjac could certainly have planned, and led, exactly as before, but without being at the scene of the crime.”
The next paper also had the correctional system’s logo in the upper corner.
“Now we know that an additional fourteen prisoners were in cell block H during the time both Dûvnjac and Ojala were there. Ten of them are still locked up and no one had temporary leave right then. So we can eliminate them.”
“Well?”
“That leaves four. This one . . . we can call him A. Joaquín Sánchez. Twelve years for serious drug offenses. Belongs to a Bolivian cartel. If you are prepared to cross a border with a suitcase full of clothes impregnated with cocaine, you would probably be ready to carry out a robbery of a security van.”
Four bundles of paper, each held together with a paper clip.
“And this one, the one with the ruddy complexion, in the next bundle, we’ll call B.”
She laid them out on the table in front of her, careful to make sure they formed a semicircle.
“Thor Bernard. Eight years for kidnapping when he was advancing from probationer to regular member in a motorcycle club. Ready to do anything to gain the leader’s appreciation. Next, this bundle, John, we’ll call C. Sam Larsen. Life sentence for murder, now released. Even though he was not convicted for anything like robbery, he was inside long enough to be totally damaged by prison life. And the last, that bundle, which we’ll call D. Semir Mhamdi. Six years for manslaughter. Member of a Moroccan criminal network, or rather North African. It extends over the border to Algeria. Exhibits extreme contempt for the police and is known for keeping his mouth shut during interrogation, just like the dead man Ojala.”
The water in the kettle was still hot. Broncks turned around and filled his cup again, even though he did not intend to drink more.
Sam.
You—again.
We have only seen each other four times in twelve years, most recently when I told you in the visitors’ room that our mother was dead—and you didn’t even want to touch me. Then suddenly you were there again in the interview. Then last night when I couldn’t sleep. And now, as one of the names on a list that will be investigated further. I know you. You are not a robber. At the same time, I don’t know you at all.
“So once you finish getting dressed, John, we’ll start to deal with them. One after another.”
And you, Sam.
If we’re going to see each other again now, under these circumstances, an investigation to eliminate you from our inquiries, I do not want to do it in the company of someone who runs around calling me a psychopath.
“Elisa—let’s divide them up instead.”
Someone who still doesn’t know about our background, and won’t afterward.
“You take the first two and I’ll take the second two.”
“I don’t understand—when you invited me in, John, you said you wanted to work side by side.”
Because there have been enough outsiders digging in our family grave for now.
“It’s better like this. It’s about time, Elisa—if Dûvnjac decides to strike on his first day of freedom, then he’s working on a deadline. Don’t you think?”
He pulled two of the bundles toward him.
“I’ll take, yeah, these ones, C and D. And you take A and B. Okay?”
He sat down across from her to do what she was doing—browsing through the small piles of personal details and criminal records and photographs. But while Elisa flipped pages methodically forward, Broncks was already stuck on the first photo of a then very young inmate. Sam Larsen.
Broncks had forgotten how his big brother once looked.
It was as if every childhood memory of Sam was replaced with a different person, the one he met in the visitors’ room—muscles and bad prison tattoos and eyes that repel. The Sam who looked at him now from a black-and-white photograph—eighteen years old, narrow neck, bangs a bit too long and tousled, and eyes staring straight into the camera—knew well that the twenty-seventh and last stab with a serrated fishing knife was stuck in their father’s left side, high up under his arm.