Three Seconds

by Anders Roslund

  Ewert Grens was sitting so close that if the body on the floor had started to whisper he would hear it. This death didn't feel like anything, it didn't even have a name.

  "The entrance wound, Ewert, here."

  Nils Krantz had crept around on all fours, filmed and photographed. He was one of the few experts Grens actually trusted and had proved often enough that he wasn't the kind of person who would take shortcuts just so he could get home an hour earlier to watch TV.

  "Someone held the gun hard to his head. The gas pressure between the muzzle and the temple must have been enormous. You can see for yourself. Half the side's been blown off."

  The skin on his face was already gray, his eyes empty, his mouth a straight line that would never talk again.

  "I don't understand. One entrance wound. But two exit wounds?" Krantz held his hand near the hole that was as large as a tennis ball in the middle of the right side of the head.

  "I've only seen this a couple of times in thirty-odd years. But it happens.

  And the autopsy will confirm it-that it's only one shot. I'm sure of it."

  He tugged at the sleeve of Grens's white overalls, his voice eager.

  "One shot to the temple. The bullet was jacketed, half lead and half titanium, and it split when it hit one of the skull bones."

  Krantz got up and stretched his arm in the air. It was an old flat and the ceiling was about three meters high. A few hairline cracks, but otherwise in good shape, except for where the forensic technician was pointing: a deep gash in the whitewash.

  "We took half the bullet down from there."

  Small pieces of plaster had fallen where careful fingers had dug out the hard metal.

  Some way off there was a considerably larger tear in some soft wood. "And that is from the other half. The kitchen door was obviously closed."

  "I don't know, Nils."

  Ewert Grens was still sitting by the head that had too many holes.

  "The call-out said execution. But having looked… it could just as easily be suicide."

  "Someone has tried to make it look like that."

  "What do you mean?"

  Krantz slid his foot closer to the hand that was holding a gun.

  "That looks staged. I think that someone shot him and then put the gun in his hand."

  He disappeared out into the hall and came back immediately with a black case in his hand.

  "But I'll check it. I'll do a GSR test on the hand. Then we'll know." Ewert started to calculate, looked over at Hermansson; she was doing the same.

  One hour and forty-five minutes since the alarm was raised, they still had plenty of time. The body hadn't yet started to attract enough foreign particles to make a residue test worthless.

  Krantz opened his case and looked for a round tube of fingerprint lifting tape. He pressed the tape against the victim's hand several times, in particular the area between the index finger and thumb. Then he went out into the kitchen, to the microscope that had been set up on the worktop, put the fingerprint lifting tape on the glass plate, and studied it through the ocular.

  A few seconds passed.

  "No gunshot residue."

  "As you thought."

  "So the hand that was holding the gun didn't fire it."

  He turned around.

  "This is murder, Ewert."

  He put his left hand to his right shoulder and pulled at the leather strap until the pressure on his shoulders was released and he could hold the holster with one hand. He opened it and pulled out a Radom with a nine-millimeter caliber. He did a recoil operation, put the last bullet in the magazine, so that fourteen were in place.

  Piet Hoffmann stood still for a while, his breathing so loud he could hear himself.

  He was alone in the room and the flat that looked out over Vasagatan and Kungsbron. The last mule had taken the train south a couple of hours ago, and Mariusz and Jerzy had just started their car and headed off in the same direction.

  A long day, but it was still only the afternoon and he had to stay awake for hours yet.

  The gun cabinets stood on the floor behind the desk. Two identical cabinets, a couple of meters high, about a meter wide, a smaller shelf on top and two rifles on a considerably larger shelf below. He put the gun on the top shelf in the first cabinet, and the full magazine in the same place in the second.

  He walked through the rooms that had functioned as offices for Hoffmann Security AB for two years now. One of Wojtek Security International's many branches. He had visited most of them several times, and the ones farthest north in Helsinki, Copenhagen, and Oslo more often.

  The fireplace with its dark tiles and white frame was beautiful, the sort that he knew Zofia wanted at home. He fished up a handful of small dry twigs from the bottom of the wood basket and lit them, then waited until the larger, thicker logs that he placed on top started to burn before taking his clothes off. The jacket, trousers, shirt, underpants, and socks were all eaten by the yellow flames. Next, a pile of Jerzy's and Mariusz's clothes. The flames were red and intense now, and he stood naked in front of the fire, enjoying the warmth until they died down sufficiently for him to close the bathroom door and shower away this awful day.

  A person had had half his head blown off.

  A person who probably had the same job as he had, but had a less solid background.

  He turned on the shower and the hot water pummelled his skin, testing his pain threshold, but he knew if he persevered, his body would eventually go numb and be filled with a strange calm.

  He'd been doing this for too long; he sometimes forgot who he was and it frightened him when his life as someone else encroached on his life as a husband and father, and day-to-day reality in a house in a neighborhood where people cur their grass and weeded their flowerbeds.

  Hugo and Rasmus.

  He had promised to pick them up just after four. He turned off the water and took a clean towel from the shelf by the mirror. It was nearly half past four. He hurried back into the office, checked that the fire had died down, opened the wardrobe and picked out a white shirt, a gray jacket, and worn jeans.

  You have sixty seconds to leave and lock the fiat.

  He jumped and realized that he would never get used to the electronic voice that spoke to him from the coded lock on the front door, as soon as he had punched in the correct six digits.

  The alarm will be activated in fifty seconds.

  He should contact Warsaw immediately, he should have done it already, but had waited on purpose, he wanted to know that the delivery was secure first.

  The alarm will be activated in forty seconds.

  He locked the front door of Hoffmann Security AB and closed the wrought-iron gate. A security firm. That was how the organization worked. That was how all branches of the Eastern European mafia worked. Piet Hoffmann remembered his visit to St. Petersburg a year ago, a city with eight hundred security firms, established by ex-KGB men and intelligence agents, different fronts for the same business.

  He was halfway down the stairs when one of his two phones rang. The mobile phone that only one person knew about.

  "Wait a minute."

  He had parked the car just down Vasagatan. He opened the door and got in, then carried on the conversation without the risk of being overheard.

  "Yes?"

  "You need my help."

  "I needed it yesterday."

  "I've booked a return flight and will be back in Stockholm tomorrow. Meet you at number five at eleven. And I think you should make a trip yourself, before then. For the sake of your credibility."

  The gaping holes in the dead man's head seemed even larger from a distance.

  Ewert Grens had followed Nils Krantz into the kitchen, but turned around again after a while to look at the man who was lying by an overturned chair and had one entrance wound in his right temple and two exit wounds in his left. He had been investigating murders for as long as the man on the floor had been alive and had learned one truth-each death is unique,
with its own story, its own sequence of events, its own consequences. Every time he was faced with something he had not seen before, and he knew even before he looked into the empty eyes that they were looking in a direction that he couldn't follow.

  He wondered where this particular death had ended, what these eyes had seen and were looking toward.

  "Do you want to know or not?"

  Krantz had been squatting on the kitchen floor for a bit too long. "Otherwise I've got plenty else to be getting on with."

  His hand was close to a crack in the marble floor. Ewert Grens nodded, I'm listening.

  "That spot there, can you see it?"

  Grens looked at something that was whitish with uneven edges.

  "Bits of stomach lining. And it's definitely no more than twelve hours old. There are several similar spots in this area."

  The forensic scientist drew a circle with his hand in the air around himself.

  "All with the same content. Food remains and bile. But also something far more interesting. Bits of rubber."

  When Grens looked closer, he could see the white spots with uneven edges in at least three places.

  "The rubber is partly corroded, probably by stomach acids."

  Krantz looked up.

  "And traces of rubber in vomit, we know what that means."

  Ewert Grens gave a loud sigh.

  Rubber meant human containers. Human containers meant drugs. A dead man in connection with a delivery meant a drugs-related murder. And a drugs-related murder always meant investigation and lots of hours, lots of resources.

  "A mule, a swallower who's delivered the goods right here in the kitchen."

  He turned toward the sitting room.

  'And him? What do we know about him?"

  "Nothing."

  "Nothing?"

  "Not yet. You have to have something to do, Grens."

  Ewert Grens went back into the sitting room and over to the man who no longer existed, watched as two men took hold of the dead man's arms and legs, as they lifted him and put him into a black body bag, as they pulled up the zipper and put the body bag on a metal stretcher that they only just managed to push down the narrow hall.

  He left Vasagatan and then got caught in a traffic jam by Suisun. It was nearly five o'clock and he should have been at the kindergarten an hour ago.

  Piet Hoffmann sat in the car and desperately tried to fend off the stress and heat and irritation caused by the afternoon traffic, which he could do nothing about. Three lanes at a standstill as far down the tunnel as he could see. To combat this battle with the city, he often thought about the soft skin on Zofia's face when he stroked it, or Hugo's eyes when he managed to ride his bike on his own, or Rasmus's hair, splashed with carrot soup and orange juice, standing out in every direction. It didn't work. Who did you do time with? Images of the people he was thinking about merged every time into images of a deal in a flat in Västmannagatan that had ended in another man's death. Skåne. Mio, Josef Libanon, Virtanen. The Count. How many names do you want? Another infiltrator with the same mission as he had. Who else? But the other infiltrator who sat facing him just didn't act as well. Who else? He, if anyone, should know what a faked background looked like, how it was put together, and which questions were needed to make it collapse. They had both been working for the police in their respective ways and ended up in the same place. He didn't have any choice, otherwise they might both have died, and one was in fact enough, one who wasn't him.

  He had seen people die before. It wasn't that. It was part of his daily life and his credibility required it; he had learned to shrug off dead people who weren't close to him. But he had been in charge of this operation. A murder, he risked life imprisonment.

  Erik had phoned from the airport outside Jacksonville. Nine years as a secret civil servant on the unofficial payroll of the Swedish police had taught Piet Hoffmann that he was valuable. The authorities had magicked away offenses in both a private and professional capacity before, so Erik Wilson should be able to make this one vanish too. The police were good at that, a few secret intelligence reports on the right bosses' desks was usually enough.

  The temperature had risen in the stationary car and Piet Hoffmann dried away the sweat from his shirt collar just as the blasted line started to move. He fixed his eyes on a number plate that was edging slowly forward a few meters ahead and forced his mind back to images of Hugo and Rasmus and his real life, and twenty minutes later got out of the car in the visitors' parking lot at Hagtornsgarden, in the midst of all the flats in Enskededalen.

  By the front door he suddenly stopped with his hand in the air, a few centimeters from the handle. He listened to the voices of the noisy, boisterous children who were playing and smiled, lingering awhile in the best moment of the day. He went to open the door, but stopped again; something tight across his shoulders. He quickly felt under his jacket, heaved a sigh of relief-he had remembered to take off his holster.

  He opened the door. It smelled of baking, a late snack for some of the children who were sitting around a table in the lunch room. The noise was coming from farther in, the big play room. He sat down on a low stool in the entrance, near the tiny shoes and colorful jackets on pegs marked with the children's names and hand-drawn elephants.

  He nodded at one of the young women, a new member of staff. "Hi."

  'Are you Hugo and Rasmus's dad?"

  "How did you guess? I haven't-"

  "Not many left."

  She disappeared behind some shelves filled with well-used jigsaw puzzles and square wooden building blocks and reappeared almost immediately with two boys aged three and five who made his heart laugh.

  "Hello, Daddy."

  "Hello-lello, Daddy."

  "Hello-lello-lello, Daddy."

  "Hello-lello-lello-"

  "Hello, you two. You both win. We haven't got time for anymore hellos today. Maybe tomorrow. Then there will be more time. Okay?"

  He reached out for the red jacket and pulled it on to Rasmus's outstretched arms, then sat him on his lap to take his indoor shoes off the feet that wouldn't keep still, and put on his outdoor shoes. He leaned forward and glanced at his own shoes. Shit. He'd forgotten to put them in the fire. The black shininess might be a film of death, with traces of skin and blood and brain tissue-he had to burn them as soon as he got home.

  He checked the child car seat that was strapped onto the passenger seat, facing backward. It felt as secure as it should and Rasmus was already picking at the pattern on the fabric as was his wont. Hugo's seat was more like a hard square that made him sit a bit higher and he fastened the seat belt tight before giving his soft cheek a quick kiss.

  "Daddy's just going to make a quick phone call. Will you be quiet for a while? I promise to be finished before we drive under Nynäsvägen."

  Capsules with amphetamine, child car seats secured, shoes shiny with the remains of death.

  Right now he didn't want to see that they were different parts of the same working day.

  He closed his phone the moment the car passed the busy main road. He had managed to make two quick calls, the first to a travel agent to book a ticket on the 6:55p.m. SAS flight to Warsaw, and the second to Henryk, his contact at the head office, to book a meeting there three hours later.

  "I did it! I finished on this side of the road. Now I'm only going to talk to you."

  "Were you talking to work?"

  "Yes, the office."

  Three years old. And he could already distinguish between the two languages and what Daddy used them for. He stroked Rasmus's hair and felt Hugo leaning forward to say something behind him.

  "I can speak Polish too. Jeden, diva, trzy, cztery, pire, szege, siedem-"

  He stopped, and then carried on in a slightly darker voice: "-eight, nine, ten."

  "Very good. You know lots of numbers."

  "I want to know more."

  "Osiem, dziewire, dziewire."

  "Osiem, dzieunre… dziewirc?"

  "Now you
know them."

  "Now I know."

  They drove past the Enskede flower shop and Piet Hoffmann stopped, reversed and got out.

  "Wait here. I'll be back in a moment."

  A couple of hundred meters farther on, a small red plastic fire engine was standing in front of the garage and he just managed to avoid it, but only by scraping the right-hand side of the car against the fence. He released the seat belts and child car seats and watched his children's feet run over the moss green grass. They both threw themselves down on to the ground and crawled through the low hedge into the neighbor's garden, where there were three children and two dogs. Piet Hoffmann laughed and felt a warmth in his belly and throat. Their energy and joy-sometimes things were just so simple.

  He held the flowers in one hand as he opened the door to the house that they had left in such a rush-it had been one of those mornings when everything took a little bit longer. He would tidy away the breakfast dishes that were still on the table, and pick up the trail of clothes that spread through every room downstairs, but first he had to go down into the cellar and the boiler room.

  It was May and the timer on the boiler would be turned off for a long time yet, so he started it manually by pressing the red button, then he opened the door and listened to it cranking into action and starting to burn. He bent down, undid his shoes and dropped them into the flames.

  The three red roses would go on the middle of the kitchen table in the vase that he liked so much, the one they'd bought at the Kosta Boda glassworks one summer. Plates for Zofia, Hugo, and Rasmus in the places where they had sat every day since they left the flat the same summer. Half a kilo of defrosted ground beef from the top shelf in the fridge which he browned in the frying pan, salt and pepper, cream and two tins of chopped tomatoes. It was starting to smell good. He dipped a finger in the sauce, which tasted good too. A half-full pan of water and a bit of olive oil so that the pasta wouldn't boil over.

  He went upstairs to the bedroom. The bed was still unmade and he buried his face in the pillow that smelled of her. His overnight bag was in the wardrobe, already packed: two passports; wallet with euros, zloty, and U.S. dollars; a shirt, socks, underwear, and a toilet bag. He picked it up and carried it down into the hall. The water had started to boil, half a bag of dry spaghetti into the bubbling water. He looked at the clock. Half past five. He didn't have much time, but he would make it.