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But if we’re being picky, it wasn’t by definition even a bank robbery. Which isn’t to say that the bank robber didn’t fully intend to be a bank robber, because that was very much the intention, it’s just that the bank robber failed to pick a bank that contained any cash. Which probably has to be considered one of the main prerequisites for a bank robbery.

But this wasn’t necessarily the bank robber’s fault. It was society’s. Not that society was responsible for the social injustices that led the bank robber onto a path of crime (which society may well in fact be responsible for, but that’s completely irrelevant right now), but because in recent years society has turned into a place where nothing is named according to what it is anymore. There was a time when a bank was a bank. But now there are evidently “cashless” banks, banks without any money, which is surely something of a travesty? It’s hardly surprising that people get confused and society is going to the dogs when it’s full of caffeine-free coffee, gluten-free bread, alcohol-free beer.

So the bank robber who failed to be a bank robber stepped into the bank that was barely a bank, and declared the purpose of the visit fairly clearly with the help of the pistol. But behind the counter sat a twenty-year-old, London, deeply immersed in the sort of social media that dismantles a person’s social competence to the extent that when she caught sight of the bank robber she instinctively exclaimed: “Are you some kind of joke, or what? ” (The fact that she didn’t phrase her question as “Is this some kind of joke? ” but went straight for “Are you a joke? ” perhaps says a lot about the younger generation’s lack of respect for older bank robbers. ) The bank robber shot her a disappointed-dad look, waved the pistol, and pushed over a note which said: “This is a robbery! Give me 6, 500 kronor! ”

London’s entire face frowned and she snorted: “Six thousand five hundred? You haven’t left off a couple of zeroes? Anyway, this is a cashless bank, and are you really going to try to rob a cashless bank, or what? Are you, like, totally stupid? ”

Somewhat taken aback, the bank robber coughed and mumbled something inaudible. London threw her arms out and asked: “Is that a real pistol? Like, a really real pistol? Because I saw a television show where a guy wasn’t found guilty of armed robbery because he didn’t use a real pistol! ”

By this point in the conversation, the bank robber was starting to feel very old, especially since the twenty-year-old on the other side of the conversation gave the impression that she was around fourteen years old. Which of course she wasn’t, but the bank robber was thirty-nine, and had therefore reached an age where there’s suddenly very little difference between fourteen and twenty. That’s what makes a person feel old.

“Hello? Are you going to answer me, or what? ” London exclaimed impatiently, and obviously it’s easy in hindsight to think that this was a somewhat poorly considered thing to shout at a masked bank robber holding a pistol, but if you knew London you’d have known that this wasn’t because she was stupid. She was just a miserable person. That was because she didn’t have any real friends, not even on social media, and instead spent most of her time getting upset that celebrities she didn’t like hadn’t had their life together ruined, again. Just before the bank robber came in she had been busy refreshing her browser to find out if two famous actors were going to get divorced or not. She hoped they were, because sometimes it’s easier to live with your own anxieties if you know that no one else is happy, either.

The bank robber didn’t say anything, though, and had started to feel rather stupid by this point, and was now regretting the whole thing. Robbing a bank had clearly been a breathtakingly stupid idea right from the outset. The bank robber was actually on the point of explaining this to London before apologizing and walking out, and then perhaps everything that happened after that wouldn’t have happened at all, but the bank robber didn’t get a chance seeing as London announced instead: “Look, I’m going to call the cops now! ”

That was when the bank robber panicked and ran out of the door.

Witness Interview (Continued)

JACK: Is there anything more specific you could tell me about the perpetrator?

LONDON: You mean the bank robber?

JACK: Yes.

LONDON: So why not just say that instead?

JACK: Is there anything more specific you could tell me about the bank robber?

LONDON: Like what?

JACK: Do you remember anything about his appearance?

LONDON: God, that’s such a superficial question! You’ve got a really sick binary view of gender, yeah?

JACK: I’m sorry. Can you tell me anything else about “the person”?

LONDON: You don’t have to use perverted commas for that.

JACK: I’m afraid I’m going to have to say that I do. Can you tell me anything about the bank robber’s appearance? For instance, was the bank robber a short bank robber or a tall bank robber?

LONDON: Look, I don’t describe people by their height. That’s really excluding. I mean, I’m short, and I know that can give a lot of tall people a complex.

JACK: I’m sorry?

LONDON: Tall people have feelings, too, you know.

JACK: Okay. Fine. Then I can only apologize again. Let me rephrase the question: Did the bank robber look like the sort of bank robber who might have a complex?

LONDON: Why are you rubbing your eyebrows like that? It’s really creepy.

JACK: I’m sorry. What was your first impression of the bank robber?

LONDON: Okay. My first “impression” was that the “bank robber” seemed to be a complete moron.

JACK: I’ll interpret that as suggesting that it’s perfectly okay to have a binary attitude to intelligence.

LONDON: What?

JACK: Nothing. On what did you base your assumption that the bank robber was a moron?

LONDON: I was handed a note saying “Give me six thousand five hundred kronor. ” Who the hell would rob a BANK for six and a half thousand? You rob banks to get ten million, something like that. If all you want is six thousand five hundred exactly, there must be some very special reason, mustn’t there?

JACK: I have to confess that I hadn’t thought of it like that.

LONDON: You should think more, have you ever thought about that?

JACK: I’ll do my best. Can I ask you to take a look at this sheet of paper and tell me if you recognize it?

LONDON: This? Looks like a kid’s drawing. And what’s it supposed to be anyway?

JACK: I think that’s a monkey, and a frog and a horse.

LONDON: That’s not a horse. That’s an elk!

JACK: Do you think? All my colleagues have guessed either a horse or a giraffe.

LONDON: Hang on. I just got a flash in my bud.

JACK: No, stay focused now, London—so you think this is an elk? Hello? Put your phone down and answer the question!

LONDON: Yes!

JACK: Sorry?

LONDON: At last! At last!

JACK: I don’t understand.

LONDON: They are getting divorced!

The truth? The truth is that the bank robber was an adult. There’s nothing more revealing about a bank robber’s personality than that. Because the terrible thing about becoming an adult is being forced to realize that absolutely nobody cares about us, we have to deal with everything ourselves now, find out how the whole world works. Work and pay bills, use dental floss and get to meetings on time, stand in line and fill out forms, come to grips with cables and put furniture together, change tires on the car and charge the phone and switch the coffee machine off and not forget to sign the kids up for swimming lessons. We open our eyes in the morning and life is just waiting to tip a fresh avalanche of “Don’t Forget! ”s and “Remember! ”s over us. We don’t have time to think or breathe, we just wake up and start digging through the heap, because there will be another one dumped on us tomorrow. We look around occasionally, at our place of work or at parents’ meetings or out in the street, and realize with horror that everyone else seems to know exactly what they’re doing. We’re the only ones who have to pretend. Everyone else can afford stuff and has a handle on other stuff and enough energy to deal with even more stuff. And everyone else’s children can swim.

But we weren’t ready to become adults. Someone should have stopped us.

The truth? The truth is that just as the bank robber ran out into the street, a police officer happened to be walking past. It would later become apparent that no police officers were yet looking for the bank robber, seeing as the alarm hadn’t been raised over the radio, seeing as twenty-year-old London and the staff in the emergency call center took plenty of time to become mutually offended by one another first. (London reported a bank robbery, which led the call operator to ask “Where? ” which led London to give them the address of the bank, which led the call operator to ask “Aren’t you a cashless bank? Why would anyone want to rob that? ” which led London to say “Exactly, ” which led the call operator to ask “Exactly what? ” which led London to snap “What do you mean ‘Exactly what’? ” which led to the call operator hitting back with “You were the one who started it! ” which led London to yell “No, you were the one who…, ” after which the conversation quickly deteriorated. ) Later it turned out that the police officer the bank robber saw in the street wasn’t actually a police officer but a traffic warden, and if the bank robber hadn’t been so stressed and had been paying attention, that would have been obvious and a different escape strategy might have been possible. Which would have made this a much shorter story.

But instead the bank robber rushed through the first available open door, which led to a stairwell, and then there weren’t exactly many options except to go up the stairs. On the top floor one of the apartment doors was wide open, so that’s where the bank robber went, out of breath and sweating, with the traditional bank robber’s ski mask askew so that only one eye could see anything. Only then did the bank robber notice that the hall was full of shoes, and that the apartment was full of people with no shoes on. One of the women in the apartment caught sight of the pistol and started to cry, “Oh, dear Lord, we’re being robbed! ” and at the same time the bank robber heard rapid footsteps out in the stairwell and assumed it was a police officer (it wasn’t, it was the postman), so in the absence of other alternatives the bank robber shut the door and aimed the pistol in various different directions at random, initially shouting, “No…! No, this isn’t a robbery… I just…, ” before quickly thinking better of it and panting, “Well, maybe it is a robbery! But you’re not the victims! It’s maybe more like a hostage situation now! And I’m very sorry about that! I’m having quite a complicated day here! ”

The bank robber undeniably had a point. Not that this is in any way a defense of bank robbers, but they can have bad days at work, too. Hand on heart, which of us hasn’t wanted to pull a gun after talking to a twenty-year-old?

A few minutes later, the street in front of the building was crawling with journalists and cameras, and after they came the police arrived. The fact that most of the journalists arrived before the police should in no way be interpreted as evidence of their respective professions’ competence, but in this instance more as proof that the police had more important things to be getting on with, and that the journalists had more time to read social media, and the unpleasant young woman in the bank that wasn’t a bank was evidently able to express herself better on Twitter than over the phone. On social media she announced that she had watched through the large front window of the bank as the robber ran into the building on the other side of the street, whereas the police didn’t receive the call until the postman who had seen the bank robber in the stairwell called his wife, who happened to work in a café opposite the police station. She rushed across the road, and only then was the alarm sounded, to the effect that what appeared to be a man armed with what appeared to be a pistol, wearing what appeared to be a ski mask, had rushed into a viewing in one of the apartments and had locked the real estate agent and prospective buyers inside. This was how a bank robber failed to rob a bank but instead managed to spark a hostage drama. Life doesn’t always turn out the way you expect.

Just as the bank robber closed the door to the apartment, a piece of paper dislodged from a coat pocket fluttered out into the stairwell. It was a child’s drawing of a monkey, a frog, and an elk.

Not a horse, and definitely not a giraffe. That was important.

Because even if twenty-year-olds can be wrong about a lot of things in life (and those of us who aren’t twenty can probably agree that most twenty-year-olds are wrong so often that most of them would have just a one in four chance of answering a yes or no question correctly), this particular twenty-year-old was actually right about one thing: normal bank robbers ask for large amounts and round figures. Anyone can go into a bank and yell: “Give me ten million or I’ll shoot! ” But if a person walks in armed and nervous and very specifically asks for exactly six thousand five hundred kronor, there’s probably a reason.

Or two.

The man on the bridge ten years ago and the bank robber who took people hostage at an apartment viewing aren’t connected. They never met each other. The only thing they really have in common is moral hazard. That’s a banking term, of course. Someone had to come up with it to describe the way the financial markets work, because the fact that banks are immoral is so obvious to us that simply calling them “immoral” wasn’t enough. We needed a way to describe the fact that it’s so unlikely that a bank would ever behave morally that it can only be considered a risk for them even to try. The man on the bridge gave his money to a bank so that they could make “secure investments, ” because all investments were secure in those days. Then the man used these secure investments as security against loans, and then he took out new loans to pay off the old ones. “Everyone does this, ” the bank said, and the man thought: “They’re the ones who should know. ” Then one day all of a sudden nothing was secure anymore. It was called a crisis in the financial markets, a bank crash, even though the only ones who crash are people. The banks are still there, the financial markets have no heart that can be broken, but for the man on the bridge, a whole life’s savings had been replaced by a mountain of debt, and no one could explain how that had happened. When the man pointed out that the bank had promised that this was “entirely risk-free, ” the bank threw out its arms and said: “Nothing’s entirely risk-free, you should have known what you were getting into, you shouldn’t have given us your money. ”

So the man went to another bank to borrow money to pay off the debts he now had because the first bank had lost all his savings. He explained to the second bank that he might lose his business otherwise, then his home, and he told them he had two children. The second bank nodded and was very understanding, but a woman who worked there told him: “You’ve suffered what we call moral hazard. ”

The man didn’t understand, so the woman explained that moral hazard is “when one party in an agreement is protected against the negative consequences of its own actions. ” When the man still didn’t understand, the woman sighed and said: “It’s when two idiots are sitting on a creaking tree branch, and the one closest to the trunk is holding the saw. ” The man was still blinking uncomprehendingly, so the woman raised her eyebrows and explained: “You’re the idiot furthest away from the trunk. The bank’s going to saw the branch off to save itself. Because the bank hasn’t lost any of its own money here, just yours, because you’re the idiot who let them hold the saw. ” Then she calmly gathered together the man’s papers, handed them back to him, and told him that she wasn’t going to authorize a loan.

“But it isn’t my fault that they lost all my money! ” the man exclaimed.

The woman looked at him coolly and declared: “Yes it is. Because you shouldn’t have given them your money. ”

Ten years later a bank robber walks into an apartment viewing. The bank robber had never had enough money to hear a woman in a bank talk about moral hazard, but the bank robber had a mother who often said that “if you want to make God laugh, tell Him your plans, ” and sometimes that comes down to the same thing. The bank robber was only seven years old the first time this was said, and that may well be a little early to hear something of that nature, because it pretty much means “life can go all sorts of different ways, but it will probably go wrong. ” Even seven-year-olds understand that. They also understand that if their mom says she doesn’t like making plans, and even if she never plans to get drunk, she still ends up getting drunk a little too often for it to be a coincidence. The seven-year-old swore never to start drinking hard liquor and never to become an adult, and managed to keep half that promise.

And moral hazard? The seven-year-old learned about that just before Christmas Eve the same year. When Mom kneeled down on the kitchen floor and lurched into a hug that left the seven-year-old’s hair peppered with cigarette ash. In a voice shaken by sobs, the seven-year-old’s mom said: “Please don’t be upset with me, don’t shout at me, it wasn’t actually my fault. ” The child didn’t understand exactly what that meant, but slowly began to realize that whatever it was, it might have some connection to the fact that the child had spent the past month selling Christmas editions of magazines every day after school, and had given all the money to Mom so she could buy food for Christmas. The child looked into the mother’s eyes, they were shiny with alcohol and tears, intoxication and self-loathing. She wept as she clung to the child. She whispered: “You shouldn’t have given me the money. ” That was the closest the woman ever came to asking her child for forgiveness.

The bank robber often thinks about that to this day. Not about how terrible it was, but about how odd it is that you can’t hate your mom. That it still doesn’t feel like it was her fault.

They were evicted from their apartment the following February, and the bank robber swore never to become a parent, and, when the bank robber ended up becoming a parent anyway, swore never to become a chaotic parent. The sort who can’t cope with being an adult, the sort who can’t pay bills and has nowhere to live with their kids.

And God laughed.

The man on the bridge wrote a letter to the woman at the bank who had told him about moral hazard. He wrote down exactly what he wanted her to hear. Then he jumped. The woman at the bank has been carrying that letter in her handbag for ten years. Then she met the bank robber.

Jim and Jack were the first police officers to arrive on the scene outside the building. That wasn’t so much an indication of their competence as a sign of the size of the town: there just weren’t that many police officers around, especially not the day before New Year’s Eve.

The journalists were already there, of course. Or maybe they were just locals and curious onlookers, it can be hard to tell these days when everyone films, photographs, and documents their whole life as if every individual were their own television channel. They all looked expectantly at Jim and Jack, as if the police ought to know exactly what was going to happen next. They didn’t. People simply didn’t take other people hostage in this town, and people didn’t rob banks here, either, especially now that they’d gone cashless.

“What do you think we should do? ” Jack wondered.

“Me? I don’t know, I really don’t, you’re the one who usually knows, ” Jim replied bluntly.

Jack looked at him despondently.

“I’ve never been involved in a hostage drama. ”

“Me neither, son. But you went on that course, didn’t you? That listening thing? ”

“Active listening, ” Jack muttered. Sure enough, he’d been on the course, but precisely what use that might be to him now was hard to imagine.

“Well, didn’t that teach you how to talk to hostage takers? ” Jim said, nodding encouragingly.

“Sure, but in order to be able to listen, there has to be someone talking. How are we going to contact the bank robber? ” Jack said, because they hadn’t received any kind of message, no ransom demand. Nothing. Besides, he couldn’t help thinking that if that course on active listening was as good as the tutor claimed, then surely Jack ought to have a girlfriend by now.

“I don’t know, I really don’t, ” Jim admitted.

Jack sighed.

“You’ve been in the police your whole life, Dad, you must have some experience of this sort of thing? ”

Naturally, Jim did his best to act like he definitely had experience, seeing as dads like teaching their sons things, because the moment we can no longer do that is when they stop being our responsibility and we become theirs. So the father cleared his throat and turned away as he took out his phone. He stood there for a good while, hoping he wasn’t going to be asked what he was doing. He was, of course.

“Dad…, ” Jack said over his shoulder.

“Mmm, ” Jim said.

“Are you seriously googling ‘what should you do in a hostage situation’? ”

“I might be. ”

Jack groaned and leaned over with his palms on his knees. He was growling silently to himself because he knew what his bosses, and his bosses’ bosses, would say when they called him in the very near future. The worst words Jack knew. “Perhaps we should call Stockholm and ask for help? ” Sure, Jack thought, because how would it look if we actually managed to do something for ourselves in this town? He glanced up at the balcony of the apartment where the bank robber was holed up. Swore under his breath. He just needed a starting point, some way of establishing contact.

“Dad? ” he eventually sighed.

“Yes, lad? ”

“What does it say on Google? ”

Jim read out loud that you have to start by finding out who the hostage taker is. And what he wants.

Okay. A bank robber robs a bank. Think about that for a moment.

Obviously, it has nothing to do with you. Just as little as a man jumping off a bridge. Because you’re a normal, decent person, so you would never have robbed a bank. There are simply some things that all normal people understand that you must never under any circumstances do. You mustn’t tell lies, you mustn’t steal, you mustn’t kill, and you mustn’t throw stones at birds. We all agree on that.

Except maybe swans, because swans can actually be passive-aggressive little bastards. But apart from swans, you mustn’t throw stones at birds. And you mustn’t tell lies. Unless… well, sometimes you have to, of course, like when your children ask: “Why does it smell like chocolate in here? ARE YOU EATING CHOCOLATE? ” But you definitely mustn’t steal or kill, we can agree on that.

Well, you mustn’t kill people, anyway. And most of the time you mustn’t even kill swans, even if they are bastards, but you’re allowed to kill animals if they’ve got horns and are standing in the forest. Or if they’re bacon. But you must never kill people.

Well, unless they’re Hitler. You’re allowed to kill Hitler, if you’ve got a time machine and an opportunity to do it. Because you must be allowed to kill one person to save several million others and avoid a world war, anyone can understand that. But how many people do you have to save in order to be allowed to kill someone? One million? A hundred and fifty? Two? Just one? None at all? Obviously, you won’t have an exact answer to that, because no one does.

Let’s take a much simpler example, then: Are you allowed to steal? No, you mustn’t steal. We agree on that. Except when you steal someone’s heart, because that’s romantic. Or if you steal harmonicas from guys who play the harmonica at parties, because that’s being public spirited. Or if you steal something small because you really have to. That’s probably okay. But does that mean it’s okay to steal something a bit bigger? And who decides how much bigger? If you really have to steal, how much do you have to have to do it in order for it to be reasonable to steal something really serious? For instance, if you feel that you really have to and that no one will get hurt: Is it okay to rob a bank then?

No, it probably isn’t really okay, even then. You’re probably right about that. Because you’d never rob a bank, so you haven’t got anything in common with this bank robber.

Except fear, possibly. Because maybe you’ve been really frightened at some time, and so was the bank robber. Possibly because the bank robber had small children and had therefore had a lot of practice being afraid. Perhaps you, too, have children, in which case you’ll know that you’re frightened the whole time, frightened of not knowing everything and of not having the energy to do everything and of not coping with everything. In the end we actually get so used to the feeling of failure that every time we don’t disappoint our children it leaves us feeling secretly shocked. It’s possible that some children realize this. So every so often they do tiny, tiny things at the most peculiar times, to buoy us up a little. Just enough to stop us from drowning.

So the bank robber left home one morning with that drawing of the frog, the monkey, and the elk tucked away in a pocket without realizing it. The girl who had drawn it put it there. The little girl has an older sister, they ought to fight the way sisters are always said to do, but they hardly ever do that. The younger one is allowed to play in the older sister’s room without the older one yelling at her. The older one gets to keep the things she cares for most without the younger one breaking them on purpose. Their parents used to whisper, “We don’t deserve them, ” when the girls were very small. They were right.

Now, after the divorce, during the weeks when the girls live with one of their parents, they listen to the news in the car in the morning. Their other parent is in the news today, but they don’t know that yet, they don’t know that one of their parents has become a bank robber.

During the weeks when the girls live with their bank robber parent they go on the bus. They love that. All the way they invent little stories about the strangers in the seats at the front. That man there, he could be a fireman, their parent whispers. And she might be an alien, the youngest daughter says. Then it’s the older daughter’s turn, and she says really loudly: “That one could be a wanted man who’s killed someone and has their head in his backpack, who knows? ” Then the women in the seats around them shuffle uncomfortably and the daughters giggle so hard that they almost can’t breathe, and their parent has to put on a serious face and pretend that it really isn’t funny at all.

They’re almost always late to the bus stop, and as they run across the bridge and the bus stops on the other side, the girls always shriek with laughter: “The elk’s coming! The elk’s coming! ” Because their bank robber parent’s legs are very long, out of proportion, and that means you look funny when you run. No one noticed that before the girls appeared, but children notice people’s proportions in a different way from adults, possibly because they always see us from below, and that’s our worst angle. That’s why they make such good bullies, the quick-witted little monsters. They have access to everything that’s most vulnerable in us. Even so, they forgive us, the whole time, for almost everything.

And that’s the weirdest thing about being someone’s parent. Not just a bank robber parent, but any parent: that you are loved in spite of everything that you are. Even astonishingly late in life, people seem incapable of considering that their parents might not be super-smart and really funny and immortal. Perhaps there’s a biological reason for that, that up to a certain age a child loves you unconditionally and hopelessly for one single reason: you’re theirs. Which is a pretty smart move on biology’s part, you have to give it that.

The bank robber parent never uses the girls’ real names. That’s the sort of thing you never really notice until you belong to someone else, the fact that those of us who give children their names are the least willing to use them. We give those we love nicknames, because love requires a word that belongs to us alone. So the bank robber parent always calls the girls what they used to feel like, kicking in their mother’s belly six and eight years ago. One of them always seemed to be jumping about in there, and the other always seemed to be climbing. One frog. One monkey. And an elk that would do anything for them. Even when it’s completely stupid. Perhaps you have that in common after all. You probably have someone in your life whom you’d do something stupid for.

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