Though he was sitting on a bar stool, he managed to keep his ankle moving so that his leg bobbed up and down.
“Katinka said that was how it worked. Can’t you sit still?”
“But it’s a cash depot,” Sami replied, his foot keeping the same rhythm.
“Yeah.”
“She must’ve been joking. Course they won’t give out the drawings. You know? Maybe you can get the drawings for an ordinary house, but a bank? Of course you can’t.”
Ezra shrugged.
“She said all the drawings were at the town planning office. I’ve got no idea. Guess we can try.”
“You’re insane,” Sami declared.
“You know it,” Ezra laughed, downing the last of the liquid in his glass and getting strawberry on his nose. “I can test it out if you want?”
Sami smirked. Ezra Ray had been kicked in the head one too many times.
On Monday morning, they parked up on Scheelegatan. Sami waited in the car as some kind of moral support while Ezra walked down the hill toward the town planning office.
He crossed Fleminggatan in his typically inimitable way. His arms didn’t just swing by his sides, they were like small propellers. Ezra had been severely bow-legged since childhood, meaning that every step forward looked more like a lurch to the right or the left.
He jogged up the stairs to the huge brick building, and used the information board at the entrance to work out where the town planning offices were located. It was just before eleven, and he didn’t see another soul on his way through the long corridors, which eventually came to an end by a pretty glass door.
He rang the buzzer. A whirring sound opened the door and Ezra stepped inside.
Without hesitating, not even for a fraction of a second, he walked over to the elderly man sitting behind the reception desk.
“Hi,” he said cheerily, “I’d like to look at the drawings for a building in Västberga? Västberga Allé Eleven?”
The man behind the desk studied the relatively young fighter wearing a pair of ripped jeans, a black leather jacket and a broad smile. He nodded and then typed the address into his computer.
“Aha,” he said without looking up. “Vreten Seventeen, you mean? By Georg Scherman. On the corner of Västberga Allé Eleven and Vretensborgsvägen Thirty-Two?”
“Exactly,” Ezra replied, not having a clue what the old man was talking about.
The man was reading the screen.
“The last time someone requested these drawings was October 1979,” he said. Ezra shrugged. The man seemed to be reading aloud from the archival notes.
“If you go in there,” he continued, nodding toward a small room full of desks and chairs, “I’ll bring you everything we’ve got. Are you familiar with the rules?”
Ezra didn’t dare answer yes to that question. His hesitation caused the old man to explain.
“You can study the plans on site, you can take photographs if you want, but the originals don’t leave this building. Understood?”
Ezra Ray nodded.
“Right then,” the old man said, waving his visitor away to the adjoining room and leaving Reception in order, Ezra assumed, to go down to some dark basement archive and dig out the drawings.
Ezra Ray wasn’t the least bit surprised. His big sister Katinka had said it would be this way, and she was never wrong.
It took twenty minutes for the old man to return with a huge stack of papers, which he dumped onto the table in front of his young visitor.
“This is everything we had,” he said. “Enjoy.”
Ezra looked down at the pile of papers and leafed through them at random. Understanding these lines and numbers required knowledge he himself lacked.
“Thanks,” he said, pretending to be absorbed by one of the blueish originals.
But the old man was already on his way back to Reception, with zero interest in what Ezra Ray was doing with the documents.
Ezra stayed in that small room for almost an hour. That was how long it took for the next visitor to turn up. This time, again, there was a short discussion at Reception and then the old man got up to disappear into his archive.
Sami, waiting patiently in the car and, becoming more and more anxious about not making it back to Karin by twelve as promised, suddenly saw a madman running down Scheelegatan with his arms full of papers. Through the open window, he heard Ezra’s triumphant voice:
“I did it! See, you fuck! I did it!”
12
The first modern bridge to the Stockholm suburb of Lidingö was completed after the end of the First World War, and by the time the next one ended, the country’s politicians had decided to transform the villa enclave into a modern community. They planned and built new neighborhoods, with functionalist blocks of apartments in Rudboda, Käppala and Larsberg. These were the finishing touches to a suburb that would reflect the big city. Traces of the older rural society’s farms and fields remained, as did the beautiful merchants’ villas from the nineteenth century. A handful of the island’s industrial areas and magnificent brick factories even managed to survive the later vogue for tearing things down, all while the Swedish welfare state’s 1950s aspirations for solidarity were abandoned on the island, just as they were everywhere else.
Today, Lidingö is far from a homogeneous rich enclave, but the middle-class majority in the municipal council remains unchanged.
Hersby was one of a handful of areas on Lidingö mentioned as early as the Viking age, but the scrapyard next to Vasavägen isn’t named on any rune stones. For a couple of twenty-kronor notes, or maybe a hundred, Svenne Gustafsson offered a solution to busy city dwellers who didn’t know what to do with a car that was no longer worth repairing.
He towed the rusty vehicles around the corner, behind the little wooden building that also served as his office. He had blocked off the scrapyard with a high fence topped with barbed wire, and, using a stationary crane, stacked the car skeletons on top of one another while he waited to sell their unique spare parts, each of which was worth more than he had paid for the car itself.
The stacks of cars formed narrow alleyways, and at the very end of one of these was a large container, tucked halfway into the woods. From the outside, its green corrugated metal looked unassuming and rusty, but when Zoran Petrovic opened the door at one side, he stepped straight into a modern workshop. The walls had been clad with aluminum foil beneath an interior wall of steel, and the ceiling was soundproofed.
Petrovic was Svenne Gustafsson’s business partner and financier, but no one knew that. It was how Petrovic wanted it. He was involved in a number of other businesses in the same way: a cleaning firm, a couple of restaurants, a handful of beauty salons, a building firm in Tallinn and one in Montenegro.
Among others.
The tall, slim Yugoslavian, who had been born in the southern Swedish city of Lund almost forty years earlier, closed the container door behind him, and the six people working inside looked up from their workstations. On top of their clothes, each was wearing a bulletproof vest, and they all had on helmets with visors. It was like being on the set of a science fiction film where the props had been bought from Bauhaus.
“No, no, just keep working, keep working,” Petrovic instructed them.
On each of the six workbenches was a blue security bag that had recently been stolen from a secure transport vehicle or a guard. Without the right code and key, a dye ampoule would explode if they tried to open the bags using force. Petrovic was paying the six amateur engineers to find a way of opening the bags without setting off the explosives. The youngsters—and all six were young—had divided the methods of attack among themselves. One was using a welding flame to try to open the bag, another a small circular saw. One was trying to pick the lock, and another was trying to tackle the bag from the bottom. Each had a digital camera mounted on a tripod just behind them, filming his or her every move. What all six had in common was that none had made any progress in weeks.