The baby on his shoulder was slowly waking up. Sami assumed that Maloof wouldn’t appreciate sitting down with a bottle, so they started walking again, Sami in a bobbing motion he hoped would send the baby back to sleep.
“Right, right,” said Maloof. “We’ll have to… find someone. A pilot.”
“I don’t know,” Sami said again. “Do you know anyone?”
“I don’t know anyone,” Maloof said with unexpected firmness. He laughed briefly. “Or actually… I know someone who can sort something out.”
“Your friend? Tall? Petrovic?”
“Right, right.” Maloof smiled.
“Seems difficult. And her, the girl…”
“Alexandra.”
“You’re completely sure about her now?”
“Definitely.”
“I don’t know. Why would she tell you so much? You know? She must be wondering.”
“Nope,” Maloof replied. “We talk… you know. I’m not the one asking. She just talks.”
“OK… Maybe…” Sami said hesitantly. “So what do we do once we’ve landed the helicopter on the roof?”
Maloof nodded and smiled. “We’ll have five minutes… There’s a police station two blocks away. Maybe ten minutes? Max. We blow a hole in the roof… we find someone who can blow a hole in the roof. Below that’s the room where Alexandra works. Cash. Counting. She calls it different things. On Tuesdays and Thursdays they take in… a few hundred million in cash.”
They were standing outside a secondhand shop, studying the strange objects in the window. Sami was rocking gently to keep the baby asleep.
“Money into bags…” Maloof continued, “back up onto the roof… using a ladder? And then we fly off.”
“And the police helicopters?” Sami asked. “Where are they? You know what I mean? If we’re on the roof and there’s a swarm of police helicopters just waiting for us above?”
“Right, right,” said Maloof. “No. We’ll have to make sure the police helicopters never get airborne.”
“How do we do that?”
“We’ll work something out.” Maloof laughed confidently.
Sami nodded. Then he shook his head. He felt the tiny body on his shoulder wake and stretch, the prelude to a loud protest that could be stopped only by giving him something to suck on.
“What you’re saying is,” Sami quickly tried to sum up, “that we need to find a helicopter. And a pilot. Then we’re going to blow our way in through the roof and climb down a ladder to grab the money. And that all this can take ten minutes max. And at the same time we need to make sure the police helicopters can’t take off.”
“Exactly, exactly.” Maloof nodded. That was roughly what he had envisioned.
“It sounds… you know how it sounds, right?” Sami asked. “You know what I mean?”
Maloof laughed, but it was with pride. He thought the plan was full of possibility, challenges, grandeur.
People were mad, Sami thought. Horses and helicopters.
He quickly said goodbye to his friend and headed into an Espresso House, where he could ask the staff to warm a bottle of breast milk for him.
It sounds crazy, he thought with a wry smile.
Hundreds of millions?
JUNE–JULY 2009
16
Zoran Petrovic, sometimes called Tall by his friends, was sitting in Café Stolen on Upplandsgatan. The restaurant was only a powerful stone’s throw from the building where he lived. He had ordered a glass of lukewarm water, and it stood on the table in front of him. The place was almost empty, but he had still chosen a table far enough toward the rear that he wouldn’t be visible from the street.
He was speaking on the phone, in Montenegrin.
It was an agitated conversation, and he used his left hand to paint a wide arc through the air as the words poured out of him. His right hand had a tight grip on the glass of water. Zoran Petrovic was a storyteller. He spoke both as he inhaled and exhaled; he wasn’t going to let language, objections or reality get in his way. It was that which had taken him to the top.
Over the years, Petrovic had bought up all the places he liked to visit on Upplandsgatan, from his building down to Norra Bantorget. That had left him with a handful of restaurants, Café Stolen and Mandolin among them, and a beauty salon, where he liked to sit down in the comfortable chairs for manicures and pedicures—he flashed his vanity, it was the best way to avoid being accused of it—and he had also stepped in as a financier for a framing shop and a secondhand-clothes boutique.
Zoran Petrovic had been born in Lund, but he’d barely had time to learn to walk before a moving van brought the family up to the capital. Once in Stockholm, the Petrovics bought Benny Andersson’s old house in Tumba. This was a few years into the seventies, and the former owner naturally became more and more interesting to mention as the popularity of his band grew. A few years after ABBA’s success with “Waterloo,” Petrovic’s parents divorced. He and his brother moved with their mother to Hallunda, and later to Norsborg; by the time Petrovic began school, he had lived at six different addresses.
After he’d been thrown out of his first school just in time for Christmas, and the second during second grade, Petrovic’s parents decided to send him to Montenegro, where discipline and respect for adults were built in to the system. However, their hopes that a tougher school system would tame him turned out to be futile.
In the playground on the very first day, Petrovic had been given a taste of the forbidden fruits that he would never be able to get enough of going forward: the power of manipulation and the force of provocation. He had realized that he could make people do what he wanted, sometimes in exchange for nothing but flattery, praise or a smile. Other times, using threats of violence as persuasion. People reacted in different ways, and discovering what worked for each individual in his class was a challenge he could spend days, weeks and months on.
Until he had learned to control them all.
Unfortunately, this was at roughly the same time that the school decided to expel him. Norsborg or Podgorica, it made no difference.
The best thing about the two years he spent with his maternal grandparents in Montenegro was that he had learned a new language. Plus, he’d made friends for life. He returned to Sweden and continued his education in Fittja, but by then it was more like the school had adapted to Zoran Petrovic than the other way around.
His mother would often blame the school system for the career her son later chose. But what made his parents most bitter, both of them dyed-in-the-wool Communists, was to see their son grow up to be a full-fledged capitalist.
Money was Zoran Petrovic’s first great love.
And it was a love that would never fade.
The new waitress changed the radio station and carefully turned up the volume. Petrovic gestured for her to turn it down again. He was working. It was just after lunch, and the afternoon clientele who usually sat playing with their beer coasters still hadn’t turned up.
Petrovic had barely finished the call with Montenegro when his phone rang again. A typical day for him. A never-ending stream of phone calls.
“Yes?” he said into the phone.
“It’s Svenne,” said Gustafsson from the scrapyard in Lidingö. “Something’s arrived for you. Damn dodgy thing. Big as hell. Should we try to set it up? There are drawings and stuff with it.”
A powerful feeling of joy filled Petrovic. Finally.
“Yeah, yeah,” he said breathlessly down the phone. “Set it up! Put it in the container. Drop everything else and assemble the bastard. I’ll be there in fifteen!”