Knock Knock

by Anders Roslund

  No.

  I don’t believe in coincidences either. I didn’t believe in them this morning when I left a stairwell on Brännkyrka Street 56 for a herringbone floor at Oden Street 88 and saw two identical murders. And I don’t believe in them now when the deaths of arms traffickers are happening at almost the same time that Piet Hoffmann is being blackmailed by an international arms dealer looking to establish themselves in the Swedish market.

  He closed his eyes, the feeling of falling ceased.

  A few deep breaths of summer night.

  Then he went back to Hoffmann, who was sitting at the kitchen table on the chair that was actually Grens’s spot, but which his guest had claimed as his own.

  “Yes.”

  “Yes?”

  “Yes. I’ll infiltrate the police station, my own workplace, for your sake. And yes—I’ll try to discover who sold you out. Who is threatening children that I’m fond of in order to get their share in a market that is costing this country lives every day. But I have my conditions.”

  Piet Hoffmann opened his arms wide.

  “Excuse me?”

  “You heard right.”

  “And here I was starting to smile a little. Conditions, Grens?”

  The detective ripped opened the roll of biscuits; they were dry and crumbly and stuck to the top of the mouth and tongue and had to be washed down with coffee. Half a cup.

  “I’m investigating two murders that I’m convinced are part of this very power struggle, making money off young Swedes shooting each other. And I think they’re connected to what you’ve landed in the middle of. So here’s what we’re going to do, Hoffmann. You’ll be my handler as I infiltrate the police station for you. And I’ll be your handler while you infiltrate these weapons dealers for me.”

  Summer nights in Stockholm were vibrant, effervescent, and full of laughter. But to Ewert Grens, who was driving through it all, not even close to participating or wanting to, it seemed more like an endless stream of faceless bodies on their way somewhere. They didn’t make any impression, meant nothing, drew no attention from him.

  Five and a half minutes. From the parking lot near his apartment on Svea Road to the northern entrance of the police station on Kungsholms Street. That is if he drove a little too fast and didn’t slow for the high-spirited people loping across the various streets of the city.

  “Hermansson? Are you there?”

  He’d called her while stepping out of his car, and she picked up on the first ring.

  “Yes.”

  Her voice sounded faint, confused.

  “Hey—are you awake, Hermansson?”

  “Now I am. Again.”

  Grens greeted the guard on duty who nodded back in recognition and opened the door without asking for a badge.

  “In that case—I need all the information we’ve got on Pejović and Stojanović.”

  “Now? In the middle of the night?”

  “I’m in the elevator on my way up to the department.”

  He could hear her rising out of bed, her voice getting a little stronger.

  “Ewert, what are you up to?”

  “The usual. The same thing I’ve been up to every day since . . . well, before you were born. And I don’t know if that means I’m old or you’re young. But what I’m doing is investigating murder. In this case a double homicide.”

  “What I mean is—what exactly are you up to right now? I’ve been worried ever since you came back from that apartment where the Lilaj family was executed. You were . . . Well, you seemed different. Like you actually cared. About something. At all. You’ve been shakier than usual, more difficult and evasive. I even talked to Wilson about it. Because I’m worried, Ewert! Because you . . . And tonight? You call from your home and wake me up. Tell me you’ve got your service weapon out and ask me to send a car or you’ll shoot some intruder. A half hour later I get another call. From the patrol car! Telling me it was all a mistake. Apparently, you weren’t burgled at all, but instead were sitting there drinking coffee with an old friend. And now. You wake me up for a third time tonight. For something that could have waited a few hours, until tomorrow morning when we do our morning meeting. So, Ewert, I repeat—what exactly are you up to?”

  The elevator door jammed a little when he got to the department, it had been doing that for the last week. When it finally opened, he stepped out into a dark corridor lit only by the light of the vending machine.

  “Hermansson?”

  “Yes?”

  “The research. Everything we’ve gathered today on Pejović and Stojanović. Where did you say I could find it?”

  She hesitated a moment.

  “Hermansson, where . . .”

  “Who visited you?”

  “That’s none of your business.”

  “Who, Ewert?”

  “An old friend. I told you that.”

  “Who you mistook for a burglar? Try again.”

  “That’s the version you’re getting.”

  She hesitated again. As if trying to decide whether or not to keep demanding an explanation, or if she was too tired, wanted her bed too much for this, and didn’t have it in her to keep confronting a boss who had no intention of telling her what she wanted to know.

  “Some of it’s in my office. On a chair in the corner by the window, in a plastic folder that’s marked ‘P and S.’”

  Mariana Hermansson’s office was two doors down from the vending machine and four doors away from his own. And there, on an elegant and translucent straight-backed chair, which she must have brought in herself because there was no way the force would have sprung for something that nice, there sat the plastic folder. And inside it, on the top of the stack, was a black-and-white picture from the medical examiner—a close-up of the hole in Pejović’s temple.

  “Got it. And the rest?”

  “Sven has one. He might have taken it home with him, he sometimes does, but last I looked it was on his desk behind his phone.”

  Sven Sundkvist had the office right next to Grens. And behind the phone, just as Hermansson guessed, there lay a folder labeled “Hit man? Arms dealers?” in Sven’s spindly handwriting.

  “Got that too. Was there anything else?”

  “Yes. In the cadets’ office. Lucas and Amelia. You met them this morning. I asked them to look into our victims’ pasts. They really are so good, both of them, much better at finding their way through all the various registries and websites than you and Sven and me.”

  “I didn’t know they had their own office.”

  “Well, they didn’t. So I arranged one. The space we used to have as an archive, near the copier. It’s been empty since we centralized our records in the basement. They helped me clean it out and track down a couple of desks. It turned out pretty nice, I think. But don’t say anything to the union, please—because the office lacks any windows or good ventilation.”

  A big closet. That’s how Grens would have described it.

  And two narrow desks that had nothing on them other than two more plastic folders, not yet labeled, but still full of papers. He thought again about how these two young cadets were only just starting out, and the fact that they were content to sit in a tiny closet without much oxygen, felt like a symbol of the long journey they had ahead of them. Someone leaves, someone arrives. I’m out, they’re in. He wondered which one would eventually have his office.

  The Stockholm night was still alive while he headed back home, unconcerned by the approach of day. Ewert Grens wove between late-night revelers still out on the streets, singing and shrieking with their arms around each other, streaming in and out of bars.

  When he opened the front door and stepped into his apartment, Piet Hoffmann was no longer in the kitchen. Grens found him in the library reading a book.

  “I don’t get it, Grens. I hardly knew places like thi
s existed. It’s enormous! I’ve been wandering around forever. Do you really live here? Is this your home? I mean, on a cop’s salary, how can, how did you . . . how the fuck can you afford it? And why? What are you gonna do with all this? My whole family could live here, and we’d never even bump into each other. All my relatives, come to think of it.”

  “We were two. Back then. About to be more. When we filled these rooms with furniture. It was another time—people were moving out of the inner city, not into it.”

  “We? Your wife?”

  “Anni.”

  “And more? So she was . . .”

  “Yes.”

  “But that’s been . . . well, a pretty long time if I understand correctly?”

  “Thirty-five years. Since she was injured and moved into a facility. She died just ten years ago.”

  Piet Hoffmann leaned back in the comfortably worn reading chair. He could have fallen asleep in it.

  “So—what you’re saying, Grens, is that for over thirty years you’ve walked through this world on your own? That seems, sorry to say it—kind of sad. Like the man who owns this place wasn’t living, just existing.”

  Hoffmann observed the detective superintendent. He didn’t mean to be cruel. But he realized it came out that way. Grens’s wounded expression showed he was trying to make sense of this half-life he’d lived in a place that made him feel like a stranger.

  “I don’t spend much time here. I prefer my office. Quite a bit more, if I’m being honest.”

  “Now you’re making it even easier to understand why you’d choose to live here. In solitude.”

  Or—Hoffmann looked at Grens again—maybe that wasn’t pain in his expression? Maybe, on the contrary, the detective had something in his face that seemed more like gratitude? Because his guest had interpreted his situation, his state of mind, so precisely? Had the courage to say it?

  “It’s . . . well, I’ve thought about it sometimes.”

  “Yes?”

  “Moving, I mean. Somewhere else.”

  “But . . . ?”

  “Well, I’m just not that good at it. I don’t know, really.”

  And suddenly the older man resembled his own apartment.

  “How does a person do it?”

  Desolate. Empty. Even a little sad.

  “How do they leave something?”

  The two of them observed each other. Not long, but long enough to note that Piet Hoffmann had taken another step further into Ewert Grens’s life, into a space where almost no one was welcome.

  “Let’s go to the kitchen. It’s easier to work there. Besides—if we’re gonna spend the rest of the night on this, I’d better brew up something hot for us.”

  Each sat with their cup of even stronger coffee, though Hoffmann hadn’t known that was possible. And the roll of dry biscuits that was still difficult to chew. At a kitchen table covered with pictures of the living and the dead—Dejan Pejović and Branko Stojanović. Older pictures taken of them in action discreetly from a distance by police officers during various investigations. And day-old pictures of the two of them on their backs with two bullet holes in their heads. Grens didn’t say a word, gave no explanations, no names, didn’t want to interrupt something as important as a first impression—so he sat in silence and drank coffee while he waited for Hoffmann’s reaction.

  “You’ll infiltrate for me, Grens, if I infiltrate for you?”

  “Exactly.”

  “And these two here are my mission?”

  “Not them. They don’t have much of a future as you can see. But it’s what they’re a part of. The illegal arms trade. I want to know who killed them and why. Before more people die.”

  Piet Hoffmann grabbed a picture taken with a telephoto lens by a hunched-over undercover detective from across Sergels Square. Two men were standing at the bottom of a large staircase near the entrance to the subway, obviously discussing something.

  “This is the only picture you have of the two of them together?”

  “I think so. At least the only one my colleagues have found so far. Do you recognize them?”

  Hoffmann examined the photograph. Used to reading a room under great stress. Now he was in no hurry, and he turned and twisted the slightly grainy image. Until he pointed to the man on the left, the taller of the two who was wearing a black leather jacket and some kind of hat.

  “Dejo P. That’s what they called him. His name was Dejan, don’t remember the rest. A dangerous motherfucker. Or more likely, wanted to be. I once saw him walk straight into a fucking drug den with a chain saw in his hand. Seriously. Like in some shitty movie. Not sure what he was after. Respect, maybe. He never got mine.”

  Piet Hoffmann’s index finger wandered over the picture of the other man. Wide-shouldered, slightly bent. White T-shirt, gray trousers, and red sneakers. Fat gold chain around his neck, and a newsboy cap pulled low on his forehead.

  “Branko. I’m sure of it. Last name starts with an S. And unlike Dejo P, he was dangerous—for real. Branko didn’t need chain saws. You just knew. A guy you’d have a real problem with if you made any trouble.”

  “How well do you know them? Knew?”

  “If you spend twenty years in the underbelly of Stockholm, you meet just about everybody. We didn’t know each other, Grens—we knew of each other. Saw each other around the pubs. Bought and sold a bit. Made sure others could buy and sell. We were all the type that wasn’t supposed to be seen. And it wasn’t like Dejo P or Branko or I was very interesting—the interesting ones were those we were being paid to protect.”

  Ewert Grens lifted two of the documents and placed them on the table, propping them against the wall. Pictures from two crime scenes and two dead men.

  “You got the first names right, Hoffmann. Meet former Mr. Dejan Pejović and former Mr. Branko Stojanović. Murdered this morning. And as you can see—both have double bullet holes in their heads.”

  Hoffmann leaned closer to the pictures, studied them, and after a moment he pointed to the two destroyed heads.

  “Ulcinj.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “A city in eastern Montenegro. A few miles from the Albanian border. Not far from either Podgorica or Tirana.”

  “And?”

  “It’s an Ulcinj execution. That’s what they call it, Grens. Two shots to the head—on the right of the forehead and below the left temple.”

  They drank strong coffee and shared the last of the biscuits, three each. The detective gathered the pictures and placed the four plastic folders in front of his guest, patted them.

  “Your task in our little infiltration exchange: who killed them and why? This all the information we were able to gather today. Read it. Memorize it. Because I can’t make any copies—and I’ll need to take them back to the police station later this morning.”

  Piet Hoffmann patted the stack of documents in the same way the detective had. Illustratively. Before making a similar point by patting his new puffy cheeks and crooked nose.

  “And your part, Grens? What are you gonna do for me?”

  Ewert Grens opened a cabinet beneath the sink. When he closed it again, he was holding a bottle of whiskey in his hand. Single malt. Light and not at all smoky.

  “As you know Hoffmann, I very rarely drink. But not even I can take any another cup of coffee tonight. A glass?”

  Grens filled two small drinking glasses. They looked at each other, swallowed, felt that warmth spread through their chests. It was rather nice even if it did share space with so much anxiety. Maybe for that reason.

  “Okay—I ask you to find out who murdered two hit men with links to Europe’s mafia-run weapons trade. You ask me to infiltrate my own workplace because an organization is threatening you and your family and trying to take over the illegal arms trade. Let’s start there, Hoffmann. I think we’re sitting across from each
other because this is connected. Connected by the Swedish arms trade.”

  Piet Hoffmann didn’t drink hard liquor very often either—wasn’t the type who needed extra courage to meet himself. But right now, at this table, in the home of the detective superintendent—it just tasted good. Hoffmann emptied his glass and waited for Grens to refill it before responding.

  “I sold drugs. You know that, Grens. And I did time for it. But drugs are a completely different business—that’s all about mass imports. Weapons on the other hand, you don’t fill up trucks with those. Micro smuggling. Two or three Kalashnikovs or maybe five handguns at a time. No more. That’s how it works. The weapons market in this country isn’t controlled by large arms dealers. Not yet. It’s driven by self-interest. Every criminal organization ensures that they have enough for their own purposes, and then they’re satisfied. They buy abroad and use their own channels to bring that shit in. And they don’t resell, that’s not the point. So, for example, a few years ago when the Råby Soldiers bought up every fucking piece they could get their hands on so that a rival gang couldn’t get any, then things got a bit shaky for a while. But that was the exception, Grens. If a new player, the one threatening me, were to step in with a train car full of very powerful machine guns—well, that would change everything. You’d know it immediately, you’d hear about it in your police station within ten minutes. And if you think you have problems now with gang shootings . . . well, all I can say is good luck.”

  “So who’s threatening you? Who wants to corner the Swedish market?”

  “Listen, if I knew I wouldn’t be sitting here. I have gone through every single contact I have—and I’ve got quite a few, both inside and outside prison walls. They usually know if anything’s up. But not this. The only thing I can say for sure is that one of your fucking colleagues has switched sides and that’s key.”

  Grens picked up the top folder and pointed to a picture of a still living Dejan Pejović.

  “And these two? Or rather whomever they worked for? Could they be threatening you? Could they know who you are and what you did?”