The Father: Made in Sweden Part I Read Online Free

right to refuse to pay just ’cause we’re not on schedule. As if it says that anywhere in the contract.’
    ‘I’ll take care of him. But did you take care of your part?’
    ‘Section Eighty-three. Orthopaedics, I think,’ said Felix, taking off the white plastic cover. ‘I rolled it out and Vincent’s legs suddenly started hurting like hell.’
    A wide wooden toolbox with a shiny metal handle stood in the middle of the flatbed. And next to it, under a couple of yellow blankets bearing the logo of a hospital, was a folded-up wheelchair.
    They pulled the two pickups a little closer and opened the padlock on the black container – the kind that every construction company sets up at a building site to store tools and equipment. When the vehicles’ doors were thrown open, visibility was obscured on all sides, and they were able to lift the empty box and carry it in.
    Broad daylight in a residential area, just a few metres from a busy road, and they stood there – in front of piles of automatic weapons.
    ‘Where the hell have you been, Leo?’
    Gabbe’s high-pitched voice cut through the October day. He was in his sixties, wearing a blue tracksuit that had once fitted well but now sat tight over his expanding belly, a cup of coffee and a bag of cinnamon buns in his arms. ‘How the hell are you going to finish all this today?’
    He was outside, approaching the container.
    ‘Have you even been here at all in the last week?’
    Leo took a calm breath, and whispered to Felix, ‘Close this up again. I’ll take care of him.’
    He left the container and went to meet the red-faced, snorting foreman.
    ‘Leo! You weren’t here yesterday! I called you several times! You may be working on something else, but whatever the hell it is, it’s not this building!’
    Leo glanced quickly over his shoulder. Felix was closing the heavy container doors. The sound of a heavy padlock snapping shut.
    ‘But we’re here now. Aren’t we? And it’ll be finished today. Just like we agreed.’
    Gabbe was so close that he could have touched the wall of the container. Leo put his arm around Gabbe’s shoulders as he pushed him back towards the Blue House, not so firmly that it was uncomfortable, but insistently enough to ensure that they moved away from what no one else should see.
    ‘I don’t give a damn if you’ve taken on other jobs! Do you understand that, Leo? You have a contract with me!’
    Gabbe was audibly panting as they walked into the building. There, on the first floor, right inside, there’d be an Indian restaurant next to a flower shop next to a tanning parlour. On the floor below a tyre company, a print shop, a nail salon, and there, near the inner walls that would frame Robban’s Pizzeria, Jasper and Vincent were screwing together a plasterboard partition.
    ‘You see! You aren’t done, damn it!’
    That foreman’s fucking shrill voice. Shrill and overweight and old and hotheaded.
    ‘We will be.’
    ‘I’ve got a fucking tenant moving in tomorrow morning!’
    ‘And if I say we’ll be done, we’ll be done.’
    ‘If not, I
will
be keeping the final payment.’
    Leo was thinking he’d like to slug that little foreman – a single blow. Right on the nose. Instead he put his arm around him again.
    ‘My dear Gabbe – have you ever been disappointed in me? Have I ever done a bad job? Have I ever been late?’
    Gabbe wriggled his outraged body out of Leo’s overly tight grip and ran towards the other corner of the metal building.
    ‘The wall here! The hair salon! A layer of plaster is missing! Do the old ladies have to get their perms without a fire wall around them?’
    He ran out into the car park and the rain that had gently started falling again.
    ‘And … that damn container – you were supposed to move that. In a few weeks this is supposed to be customer parking!’
    Gabbe slapped his palms several times against the container that took up so much space in the car park. The sound was muted because the