Knock Knock

by Anders Roslund

  Piet Hoffmann slowed down as he passed by the city of Lezhë, stopped at a gas station for a coffee and a sandwich at a yellow plastic table under the hot sun. Halfway. A dry but pleasant landscape. Rolling hills, white houses scattered here and there. A blue, cloudless sky, and a wind that meant he wasn’t far from the sea.

  He’d come here because someone was trying to take over the Swedish arms trade, and that operation might be based in this region, which was quite familiar with military equipment going astray. A couple of dozen kilometers away, on the other side of the northeastern border, there were nine hundred thousand illegal Serbian weapons just waiting for new owners, and at the next border seven hundred and fifty thousand Bosnian weapons. And here and in Kosovo and in Montenegro and in Macedonia, many more were hidden—the weapons that, after the end of the Yugoslav wars, often followed soldiers back to their homes and then into Europe’s black market.

  A cloyingly sweet coffee, and then he bought a couple of bottles of lukewarm water, and continued on the SH1. Soon the mountains appeared, and the dry landscape beyond his rolled-up windows became greener, louder. He was almost to Shkodër.

  9:34 PM

  (2 days and 28 minutes remaining)

  He had visited Ulcinj once, the coastal city of Montenegro, which was about a half hour away over crappy roads and across a border. That was where he learned that an Ulcinj execution meant one shot in the right side of the forehead and one in the left temple. Though it lacked the sea, the city of Shkodër was more beautiful, its streets in better condition, its restaurants served better food. People seemed happier, more relaxed. He’d checked into a simple hotel on the outskirts of the city, which looked a bit like the apartment complexes in the southern suburbs of Stockholm that he grew up in. He walked around in the inner city, drank coffee, got a bite to eat. Waiting. For the dusk. The darkness. Which was blacker here, fewer splashes of artificial light.

  Now he was in the rental car. Where Rruga Komanit crossed Rruga Dasho Shkreli. Narrow roads, still paved, but grass sprang up along the edges and formed its own lane. Stone walls or high iron fences stood around every plot, enclosing it and keeping others out. Most were two-story houses, and telephone lines and power lines crisscrossed above him like a safety net for the sky.

  The house he was looking for was painted white and had a dozen antennas sticking up from its tile roof. It was the house Grens had showed him in his kitchen. That’s where the phone call placed by the now badly injured security guards had been traced to, specifically to its tower-like structure. According to the land registry that the detective superintendent had tracked down—with the assistance of the Albanian policeman Hoffmann would meet in the morning in his role as a Swedish police officer equipped with a real badge—the house belonged to a middle-aged woman. That was often the case. The kind of man who belonged to an organization like this never owned anything, officially. The lights were on in a few of the rooms, downstairs in what might be the kitchen, and upstairs in a room next to the tower. He’d identified two guards, both armed and each responsible for one of the floors. No other people were visible, yet. But he had time. If he sat here until two o’clock, maybe three, he could still catch a little sleep.

  7:06 AM

  (1 day, 14 hours, and 56 minutes remaining)

  Shkodër’s police station looked like most of the other buildings set off a little from the center of the city—the flat roof, the unassuming facade, the AC units hanging like giant square beehives, buzzing under each window. Inside, on the simple wooden chairs of the waiting room, there sat an elderly man waiting to report a break-in, a slightly younger man there to present documents about his two stolen cars, and a family who was there to proudly apply for a passport, our first, we’re going to Spain. And in the far corner—a Swede name Verner Larsson, whose mission was quite different from theirs.

  Gezim Latifi was tall, quite a bit taller than Hoffmann, his broad shoulders filled out his Albanian police uniform, and his eyes were as soft as his steps. A little too handsome, a little fictitious, a little bit Hollywood. He looked like the image of an image—as if he’d stepped straight out of a recruitment ad for the next generation of police officers. He even wore his police hat despite the heat and the fact that they were indoors—it sat low on his forehead.

  “Mr. Larsson?”

  Hoffmann nodded. The movie police officer in front of him had a very firm handshake.

  “After me.”

  He spoke English with what the Stockholm underworld called a Yugo accent. Though this was the Albanian variation. And this man worked on the other side of the law.

  A cubbyhole. His office was no bigger than that. Simple furniture, bare walls. A room without any personality. Hoffmann put the letter of recommendation and his fresh police ID on the equally anonymous desk. Latifi skimmed the text about what an exemplary police officer Verner Larsson was, opened the leather case, and ran his index finger over the coat of arms while he compared the photo to the face.

  “Okay. What can I do for you, Officer Larsson?”

  Here Piet Hoffmann sat, in an Albanian city, under extreme time constraints, his family in hiding from death threats a thousand kilometers away. But he couldn’t help but laugh, a little. He was an actual police officer. Being treated like a police officer, judged as a police officer. Quite a journey for a man who was once Sweden’s most wanted criminal.

  He started to describe in his version of English—which probably sounded as Swedish as Latifi’s sounded Albanian—the assignment that Grens stressed was not a normal investigation, and therefore couldn’t be conducted in a normal way. A list of eighteen Albanian cases that involved unidentified female bodies. That needed to be compared to the appearance and special characteristics of a missing Swedish citizen. A document now transported by secure messenger, rather than by electronic means, less danger of falling into the wrong hands.

  “Hannah Ohlsson?”

  “That was her name at the time of her disappearance.”

  “Who is she?”

  “I don’t know more than that, yet. Just a name for me. But my . . . well, my boss, would be very grateful if I was allowed to look over those investigations. As for me, I’m mainly here on behalf of another case. Someone who over the last few days killed at least three men who emigrated from this region. Detective Superintendent Grens talked to you about it over the phone. And mentioned, among other things, a man he arrested many years ago in connection with a multiple homicide of a family, and who had once employed the men who were recently murdered. Arrested—but they couldn’t hold him. The suspect left Sweden as soon as he was released, and according to sources the superintendent had at that time, he moved back here. And now, since we’ve tracked a phone call here, he’s a suspect again. Possibly the one who has ordered the hits.”

  The impersonal room had an impersonal bookcase with long rows of impersonal binders. Latifi pulled one out, opened it with a click, and pulled out the contents, every document, facedown on the desk.

  “Was this the man your boss was talking about?”

  Hoffmann studied the black-and-white passport photo that Latifi held—a very young man who would later become a major player in Stockholm’s underworld. He’d met him at the bar and in jail. King Zoltan. A ridiculous name. But it fit somehow. The type that took up a lot of space.

  “Yes. That’s him.”

  “In that case, I know much more now.”

  “And?”

  The Albanian policeman seemed to be searching for the words in English. Not because he was worried, he just wasn’t familiar with the investigative terms in a foreign language.

  “When I go through our various criminal records I find page after page of misdemeanors—but all very long ago. He was in and out of juvenile facilities. Then everything stops. Not a word all through the nineties. Suddenly his name pops up again. Many years later—October 2001. Just as suddenly as it disappeared. I
n the General Surveillance Registry with several notes, KZ was observed in connection with a presumed illegal weapons transaction, and the same in the suspect registry, KZ interrogated in connection with an armed robbery and kidnapping, a total of about twenty hits. Soon the image emerges of an individual in our part of Albania who has taken over the micro-smuggling of weapons along what we call the Balkan route. Deliveries to the whole of northern Europe, but with a focus on the country where demand and thus profitability are greatest. Where you come from—Sweden.”

  Piet Hoffmann looked at King Zoltan’s passport. A young boy who was now a middle-aged man. There should be more current photos at a police station responsible for watching him.

  “Suspicions. Interrogation. We never got further. Or, my colleagues never got further, I was serving in Tirana at the time.”

  “And what does that mean? That they didn’t get further?”

  “Frankly? In this room?”

  “Yes.”

  “Corrupt cops make more money if the weapons dealers make more money.”

  “Your colleagues?”

  Latifi shrugged his broad shoulders wearily.

  “Many of them. It has always worked that way.”

  “And you?”

  Now he smiled.

  “Your boss wouldn’t have received a recommendation from Germany if I had been one of them. And you would not be sitting here.”

  A man you couldn’t bribe. That’s how Grens described him. Hoffmann wondered why. Why not do what all of his other colleagues do? Why settle for less when others have more? Why fight a system that fights back?

  “I see you were looking at the photo.”

  Hoffmann nodded.

  “Yes. Surprised there wasn’t a more recent one.”

  “There is. A couple of them.”

  Latifi gathered the documents that lay with their white backs upward on his desk. Turned over the top one. Photographs from a crime scene.

  “Taken just over five years ago. When Zoltan had climbed to the very top of the criminal food chain. Really was King. About to expand, take over the whole of Albania, all the weapons routes from here.”

  Piet Hoffmann’s eyes were drawn to it, and he realized what he was looking at.

  One trail had ended.

  He had seen this kind of image before, just a few days earlier, at Grens’s kitchen table.

  A dead man lying on a floor.

  Two shots to the head.

  One through the forehead, one through the temple.

  8:14 AM

  (1 day, 13 hours, and 48 minutes remaining)

  Ewert Grens was sitting in the back seat. That had become his spot in recent years. Mariana Hermansson took the driver’s seat because she was a much better driver than him, and Sven Sundkvist got the passenger seat because he was much better at reading the maps. An aging detective is like a soccer player over thirty—he got moved successively back on the field, from the forward position at the front, making the goals, to midfielder, where his job was to wear down the other team, and then when his career was coming to an end, they moved him to fullback, where it was all about toughness and playing dirty until your opponents gave up.

  Dusko Zaravic’s large condo was on Valhalla Road, and Grens’s search warrant for it was justified by only the vaguest reasons, which in some way confirmed the extremely vague justifications for his arrest. Two lies always added up to a better truth. On the first floor in the stairwell they found the on-call locksmith waiting for them, and he was putting down his toolbox just as the detective superintendent’s telephone started to ring. Hoffmann’s new number. His first report.

  “Can you talk?”

  “A moment.”

  Grens climbed one floor up, lowered his voice.

  “I’m listening.”

  “Your investigation, Grens, is the result of something that began here.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Seventeen years ago your suspect did come here. And he became the leading arms dealer in the region with his headquarters in Shkodër. And—five years ago he was killed in exactly the same way, same MO, as your three victims in Stockholm this last week.”

  “Well . . . damnit.”

  “Yes. It’s never as simple as you think it’s gonna be. Not even for a detective superintendent who’s hoping to lock up the same individual again. Except this time for good.”

  “An Ulcinj execution?”

  “Yep.”

  Sven had come up the stairs and had been waiting at a bit of a distance for a break in the conversation. Now he interrupted to say that the locksmith was ready, they could go in.

  “Soon, Sven.”

  Grens continued once he was on his own again.

  “And now?”

  “The house you positioned the call in. I’ve been watching it, and I know what to do. Nothing has changed other than the name of the man sitting in the tower room, the person in charge. The current king of smuggling. Because that’s how this fucking world works. The Smuggling King Is Dead, Grens, Long Live the King of Smuggling. But I’ll need some more help. More information.”

  “Yes?”

  “Latifi? You’re sure about him?”

  “I’m absolutely sure.”

  “Because these are no nice guys. And I’m alone. How can we be certain he’s not on the payroll of this weapons dealer? No matter how many German contacts you talked to.”

  “Trust, Hoffmann. It doesn’t come easy to you and me.”

  “I have to know that he’s reliable.”

  “Listen: this guy is solid. Loyal. Keeps his mouth shut no matter what. I can’t tell you how I know. But I do.”

  Ewert Grens had, as he hung up, caught every cautious inhalation, every shift in Hoffmann’s voice. Perfect sound reproduction. It had occurred to him before, most recently during the investigation that led him to West Africa last year—how the expansion of the mobile network sometimes worked unexpectedly. Because the richest countries already had good networks, the telecom companies prioritized the poorer regions that lacked good infrastructure. That’s where they put their most modern equipment. So when he received a call in a stairwell in Sweden from someone who was in one of Europe’s poorest countries, it was via the most advanced mobile network—the kind a police officer could use to track a call that ended up sending an infiltrator to Albania. Which seemed to have turned out to be the right place.

  The door to Dusko Zaravic’s apartment was open. The locksmith had hurried on to another door for another search, while Mariana and Sven were waiting outside for their boss.

  “Important call?”

  Sven gave him the same look as when he asked Grens to step into his office, when he made sure no one was listening and warned him about their closest colleague.

  A strange, unwelcome feeling.

  If Hermansson isn’t the person we think she is, if she’s leaking information—then more people could end up hurt.

  “Yes, Sven. An important call.”

  They both avoided looking at Mariana. It was simpler that way. For now.

  “Plastic gloves on. We’re searching for anything that can help a prosecutor extend Zaravic’s stay in Kronoberg jail—he just got more interesting.”

  “Oh, really—how?”

  “Such as a weapon. Most preferably a paper weapon.”

  “Paper?”

  “The folder that was stolen from Wilson’s safe. Highly classified documents linked to our infiltrator program. As dangerous as any other weapon for those who were involved.”

  Five rooms. High ceilings. Glass and steel furniture, illuminated by bulging crystal chandeliers. Interior design magazine elegance, blatantly expensive. All immaculate. As if the cleaning lady had just folded up her dustcloths and mopped her last hardwood floor. They opened cupboards, drawers, closets. Turned Ande
rs Zorn paintings, rolled up Persian rugs. Knocked on walls, lit up floor joints, poked at drains and ventilation slots. Until Sven came out of the kitchen and put his hand on Grens’s arm.

  “Come with me.”

  Warm air. That was the detective superintendent’s first thought as he stepped into the kitchen. Wind from the open window on the wall next to the refrigerator.

  “Someone was here for a visit, Ewert. Just now.”

  “Just now?”

  “Look here.”

  Sven pointed a blue plastic gloved finger.

  “Double glazing. You don’t want to break it or cut a hole in it because you think it might make too much noise. So you cut the putty instead, pull out the small pins that are behind it, and loosen the entire pane with two large suction plugs. Climb in. When you’re done, you clean up any the evidence the cops might look for, climb out again. And because it’s supposed to seem like no one was here, you put the glass back and put new putty on the outside.”