Alexandra laughed as though he had told a joke, so that no one would believe she had gone along with the tea-and-honey idea.
Sami knew that Maloof’s family had put down roots in Fittja and then let those roots grow wide in the suburban Swedish world. Sami didn’t feel any such belonging to a place or neighborhood, not even to Södermalm.
They started walking. Maloof took them across the soccer field, which was currently bathed in darkness. The snow crunched beneath the soles of their shoes. Alexandra didn’t say a word, and Sami waited for Maloof to start the conversation. Lights from the highway fell across the field in thin strips, and as they walked through one of them, Sami took the chance to get a better look at Alexandra Svensson.
He would have described her as more ordinary than cute. The shadows of her long lashes fell onto her round cheeks, which had turned red in the cold night air. She sensed his gaze and turned her head. The glimmer in her eye told him that she was slightly drunk, but she wasn’t an idiot.
Sami made a mental note.
“Yeah, so,” Maloof began, “we were in town for dinner. A place in Kungsholmen… well… yeah… Did you know Sami was a chef?”
“You’re a chef?” Alexandra asked with interest. “I love food. And cooking. But I’m, like, not very good at it. I could never go on Come Dine with Me or anything like that. Or maybe I could? I’m good at chocolate mousse.”
“Right,” Maloof added, though it wasn’t clear what he was referring to.
“I like baking,” Sami confessed.
“Do you?” Alexandra sounded enthusiastic.
“Cookies, mostly.”
She stopped and looked up at him in surprise.
“Yeah, raspberry caves, Finnish sticks…” Sami went on. “You know?”
He sounded serious, but the thought of this big, strong man stooped over a baking tray, adding raspberry jam to his cookies, seemed so unlikely. She laughed briefly, as though to show that she understood.
“Where do you work?” she asked.
Sami told her the name of the restaurant in Liljeholmen.
“What about you? What do you do?” he asked.
“I count money,” she said, giggling again.
Maloof was impressed. Sami had managed to get her to bring up the subject much quicker than he had. That was what he had expected, it was the reason he had wanted to let Sami hear it from her rather than recapping what she had said. Maloof would never be anywhere near as convincing.
“Count money?”
“I work for G4S,” she explained, unnecessarily adding: “It’s a company that does secure transports. We collect money from shops and stuff like that.”
“Wow,” Sami said tonelessly. “You like it?”
“It’s OK, but like, I dunno…? The hours are a bit… two days a week you have to work nights. Then the day after’s ruined, you wake up late in the afternoon and can’t sleep that night because you’re not really tired. It’s tough.”
“A bit like being a chef,” said Sami.
“I never thought of that.”
Her voice sounded eager when she realized that she happened to have something in common with the stranger.
Maloof stopped by the far goalpost. A soft breeze was blowing across the open field, carrying with it the smell of exhaust fumes and an icy chill that stung their skin.
Without thinking about it, all three turned their backs to the wind and their faces to the ground. The sound of lone cars passing with a low whine on the highway was all they could hear. Sami stamped his feet hard against the snow, which was lying like a thin white blanket on the grass.
“Right, right,” said Maloof. “And… didn’t you say it felt like hard work… going out to Västberga every day?”
Maloof wanted her to get back to the main subject, and Alexandra was someone who quickly adapted to that kind of demand.
“Yeah, that’s the thing,” she willingly agreed. “Super hard. Västberga, I mean. What even is that place? I sublet in Hammarby Sjöstad, so you can go straight through Årsta, but… Especially in the evening and nights, it’s like traveling abroad. Trains and metros and buses. I applied for a job at Lugnet, the school right next to where I live, but I didn’t get it. There were like a thousand people who applied.”
“You can just ask your new boyfriend for a lift,” Sami joked, elbowing Maloof. “He works nights too, sometimes.”
“My new boyfriend?” Alexandra blurted, surprised, realizing a moment later who Sami meant. “Yeah, I mean… I don’t know…”
Maloof wasn’t amused by the joke. He urged her on.
“And,” he said gently, “you said you didn’t have the best colleagues either?”
“Nope, that’s true,” Alexandra replied, though a note of hesitation had appeared in her voice.
Maloof was worried. Was she starting to realize how odd the situation was; that she had been brought out onto a cold soccer field in Fittja to talk with a complete stranger about her pointless job? But he was counting on her need to please being stronger than her anxiety.
“No, it’s not exactly like I’d choose to socialize with them outside of work,” she continued. “But I guess it’s always like that? Plus, I’m not planning to stay there counting money for the rest of my life…”
“No,” said Sami. “You seem smart, you could do whatever you want.”
“Right, right.” Maloof backed him up.
“I’m freezing, Michel,” she said. “Can’t we…”
“We’re going,” he promised. “But… I mean… while we’re on the subject of your job…”
He turned to Sami. “When Alexandra told me about Västberga last time… you said… that it felt uncomfortable? Sometimes? ’Cause there are people who… you know, are planning to rob the place?”
“It’s like, pretty hard to rob us.” Alexandra nodded.
“Right, right,” said Maloof. “But it’s still possible?”
He was careful not to leave any pauses that might unintentionally increase the importance of what he wanted her to talk about.
“Because you had an idea…?” he continued.
She laughed self-consciously and glanced around. As though someone was listening. But the soccer field was deserted that dark evening, and if anyone was approaching, they would notice them from a mile off.
“It’s not exactly my idea,” she said. “Everyone talks about that kind of thing during the breaks, you know. About how the people working in the vault think they’re special because it’s impossible to get in there. And then the rest of us, working up in Counting, we ask why someone would try to get in the vault. There are like a thousand doors and locks and cameras. But up in Cash, we’ve got hundreds of millions of kronor and nowhere near as much security stuff.”
“I don’t understand,” said Sami.
“No, so,” Alexandra explained, “if you were a thief, you shouldn’t try to get into the vault. You should just go in through the roof. You’d just have to drill a hole and then you’d be in our section.”
“A hole in the roof?”
“Right.” Maloof nodded, trying to rein in his excitement. “Alexandra’s department is on the top floor.”
“So you’d go in through the roof?” Sami repeated in an attempt to understand.
“That easy.” Alexandra nodded.
“Right?” Maloof laughed.
That was exactly what he thought. For years, more than he could remember, Michel Maloof had been trying to find out how to get into the cash depot in Västberga. Nowhere else in Sweden held as much cash as it did. But it had always seemed impossible, and the security was legendary.
And then it turned out to be this easy.
Right beneath the ceiling was an unguarded room full of hundreds of millions in cash.