Three Seconds

by Anders Roslund

  It was still warm outside, the last of the sun would soon disappear behind the roof of the neighboring house. Piet Hoffmann went over to the hedge that would have to be pruned properly this summer. He saw two children he recognized on the other side and called to them that food was ready. He heard a taxi approaching down the narrow road. It pulled up and parked in the driveway by the garage. The red plastic fire engine survived once again.

  "Hi."

  "Hi."

  They hugged each other, like they always did and every time he thought he would never let go.

  "I can't eat with you. I have to go to Warsaw this evening. An emergency meeting. But I'll be home again tomorrow night. Okay?"

  She shrugged.

  "No, not really. I was looking forward to having the evening together. But Okay."

  "I've made supper. It's on the table. I've told the boys food is ready so they're on their way. Or at least, they should be."

  He kissed her quickly on the lips.

  "One more. You know."

  One more. Always an even number. His hand on her cheek, two more kisses.

  "Now it's three. So one more."

  He kissed her again. They smiled at each other. He picked up his bag and walked over to the car, looked back at the hedge and the hole at the bottom in the middle where the children would appear.

  No sign of them. He wasn't surprised.

  He smiled again and started the engine.

  Ewert Grens looked at the mat that disappeared under the passenger seat and Sven Sundkvist. He had pushed the two cassettes in there. Two more were lurking in the glove compartment. He would take them with him sometime, pack them away, forget them.

  The two young but slightly less pale uniformed police were still standing on the pavement between the hood of the car and the entrance to Västmannagatan 79. Hermansson had started to reverse when one of them came over and knocked on the window, and Sven rolled it down.

  "What do you think?"

  Ewert Grens leaned forward from the back seat.

  "You were right. It was an execution."

  It was late afternoon at Kronoberg, and finding a parking place on Bergsgatan wasn't easy. Hermansson drove round the tired police headquarters three times before parking on Kungsholmsgatan, by the entrance to Norma1m Police and the County Criminal Police, despite protests from Ewert Grens. Grens nodded vaguely at the security guard and walked in through the entrance he hadn't used for years; he had long since learned to appreciate routine and had stuck to his rigidly in order not to fall apart. One corridor and a narrow staircase and then they came out into the County Communication Center, the heart of the vast building. In a room the size of a small football field, a police officer or a staff employee sat at every second computer, watching the three small screens in front of them and the considerably larger ones that covered the walls from floor to ceiling, ready to deal with the four hundred or so emergency calls that came in every day.

  Holding a cup of coffee each, they sat down next to a woman in her fifties, one of the civvies, and the sort of woman who put her hand on the arm of the person she was talking to.

  "At what time?"

  "Twelve thirty-seven, and a minute or so earlier."

  The woman who still had her hand on Ewert's arm typed in 12:36:00, and then the silence that felt like eternity, as is often the case when several people sit together listening to nothing.

  Twelve thirty-six twenty.

  An automatic voice, the same one that was used in the rest of the police world, followed by the voice of a real woman who was crying as she reported a domestic at an address in Mariatorget.

  Twenty thirty-seven ten.

  A child screaming about a dad who'd fallen down the stairs and there was alot of blood coming from his cheek and hair.

  Twelve thirty-seven fifty.

  A scraping sound.

  Obviously somewhere indoors. Possibly a mobile phone.

  Unknown number on the screen.

  "Pay-as-you-go card."

  The female operator had removed her hand from Ewert Grens, so he didn't answer in order to avoid anymore physical contact. It was years since anyone had touched him and he didn't know how to relax anymore.

  "Emergency services."

  The scraping sound again. Then a buzzing interference. And a man's voice that was tense, stressed, but he spoke in a whisper that was trying to sound calm.

  "A dead man. Vdstmannagatan 79."

  Swedish. No accent. He said something more, but the buzzing sound made it difficult to hear the last sentence.

  "I want to listen to it again."

  The operator slid the cursor back along the time code that stretched across one of the computer screens like a black worm.

  A dead man. Västmannagatan 79. Fourth floor."

  That was it. The buzzing disappeared and the call was cut. The monotone electronic voice said twelve thirty-eight thirty and a distressed old man reported a robbery in a newsagent on Karlavagen. Ewert Grens thanked her for her help.

  They walked together through the endless corridors of the police headquarters to the homicide unit. Sven Sundkvist slowed down to talk to his boss who limped more with each passing year, but refused to use a stick.

  "The flat, Ewert. According to the owner, it was rented out a couple of years back to a Pole. I've asked Jens Klövje at Interpol to find him."

  "A mule. A body. A Pole."

  Ewert Grens stopped by the stairs that would take them up two stories. He looked at his colleagues.

  "So, drugs, violence, Eastern Europe."

  They looked at him, but he didn't say anymore and they didn't ask. They went their separate ways at the coffee machine, and with a cup in each hand he managed to open the door to his office. Out of habit he went to the bookshelf behind his desk, lifted his arm and then suddenly stopped. It was empty. Straight lines of dust, ugly squares of varying sizes: the cassette player had stood there, and all his cassettes, and there, two identical squares, the loudspeakers.

  Ewert Grens ran his fingers through the traces of a lifetime.

  The music he had packed away that belonged to another era would never again play in this room. He felt like he'd been tricked, tried to get used to a silence that had never existed here before.

  He didn't like it. It was so damn loud.

  He sat down on the chair. A mule, a body, a Pole. He had just seen a man with three big holes in his head. So, drugs, violence, Eastern Europe. He had worked for thirty-Five years in the city police force and seen crime rise steadily, get worse. In other words, organized crime. Not surprising that he sometimes chose to live in the past. That's to say, mafia. When he started out as a young policeman who had thought he could make a difference, the mafia had been something far away in southern Italy, in American cities. Today, executions like the one he had just seen, the brutality, it was all so dirty-colleagues in every district could only stand by and watch while money was laundered from all kinds of organized crime: drugs, gun running, trafficking. Every year, new players made a violent debut in police investigations, and in recent months he had been introduced to the Mexican and Egyptian mafias. This was another he had not come across before, the Polish mafia, but it had the same ingredients: drugs, money, death. They investigated a bit here and a bit there, but would never catch up; every day the police risked their lives and sanity and every day they lost a little more control.

  Ewert Grens sat at his desk for a long time, looking at the brown cardboard boxes.

  He missed the sound.

  Of Siwan. Of Anni.

  Of a time when everything was far simpler.

  The arrivals hall at Frédéric Chopin airport in Warsaw was always overcrowded. The number of departures and arrivals had increased steadily in line with the airport's expansion and he had lost his luggage twice in the past year in a chaos of bewildered travelers and large forklift trucks that drove too fast and too dose.

  Piet Hoffmann walked past the luggage carousel with his small overnight
bag already in hand and went out into a city that was larger than Stockholm, which he had left two hours earlier. The dark leather in the taxi smelled of cigarettes and for a moment, as he looked out at the city that had changed beyond recognition, he was a child again, with his mom and dad on either side on the narrow back sear, on their way to visit Granny. He called Henryk at Wojtek and confirmed that the plane had landed and he would meet them at the time and place agreed. He was just about to hang up when Henryk told him that two other people would be there. Zbigniew Boruc and Grzegorz Krzynówek. deputy CEO and the Roof. Piet Hoffmann had visited Wojtek International's head office for meetings with Henryk every month for the past three years. Hoffmann had gradually won his trust and Henryk had been a helping hand from behind as Piet worked his way up the organization. Henryk was one of the many people who trusted him and who, without knowing it, was trusting a lie. The deputy CEO, however, Hoffmann had met only once before. He was a military man, and one of the many former secret police who had started and run the mother company from a forbidding building in the center of Warsaw. An army major with a straight back who still moved in the manner of an intelligence officer despite the applied veneer of a businessman-they were careful to call themselves that: businessmen. A meeting with the deputy CEO and the Roof, he didn't get it. He leaned back in the smoked leather car seat and felt something in his chest that might be fear.

  The taxi sped through the light evening traffic, past the big parks, and as they approached the part of town called Mokoraw, elegant embassies appeared behind the dirty window. He tapped the driver on the shoulder and asked him to stop, he still had two phone calls to make.

  "It'll cost you more."

  "Just stop, please."

  "It'll be twenty zloty more. The price you got was without stops." "Just stop the car, for Christ's sake!"

  He had leaned forward and was talking straight into the driver's ear, his unshaven cheek looking shiny and soft as the car pulled off Jana Sobieskiego and parked between a newspaper stand and a pedestrian crossing on al. Wincentego Witosa. Piet Hoffmann stood in the evening chill and listened to Zofia's tired voice explaining that Hugo and Rasmus had both fallen asleep with their pillows beside her on the sofa and that they had to get up early tomorrow, one of the nursery's many outings to the Nacka reserve, something to do with a wood and spring theme.

  "Piet?"

  "Yes?"

  "Thank you for the flowers."

  "I love you."

  He loved her so much. One night away, that was all he could bear. It was never like that before-before Zofia he hadn't felt the loneliness strangling him in unattractive hotel rooms, that it was pointless to breathe without having someone to love.

  He didn't want to hang up and stood for a long time with the phone in his hand, looking at one of Mokotów's expensive houses and praying that her voice wouldn't vanish. Which it did. He switched mobile phones and made another call. It would soon be five in the afternoon on the east coast of the USA.

  "Paula's meeting them in half an hour."

  "Good. But it doesn't feel good."

  "I'm in control."

  "There's a risk that they'll demand that someone takes responsibility for the fiasco in Västmannagatan."

  "It wasn't a fiasco."

  "A person died!"

  "That's not relevant here. What's important is that the delivery is safe. We can tough out the consequences of the shooting in a matter of minutes."

  "That's what you say."

  "You'll get a full report when I see you."

  "Eleven hundred hours at number five."

  He waved in irritation when the taxi driver hooted his horn. A couple of minutes more in the dark loneliness and cool air. He was sitting between Mom and Dad again, traveling from Stockholm and Sweden to a town called Bortoszyce, only a few miles from the Soviet border, in an area that is now called Kaliningrad. They had never called it that. They refused. For Mum and Dad it was always Konigsberg; Kaliningrad was the invention of madmen. He had caught the contempt in their voices, but as a child had never been able to understand why his parents had left the place they always yearned for.

  The hooting driver swore loudly as they pulled out of al. Wincentego Witosa and drove past well manicured green areas and big business properties. Not many people around in this part of town. There seldom are in places where the price per square meter is adapted to supply and demand.

  They had emigrated at the end of the sixties. He had often asked his father why but never got an answer, so he had nagged his mother and been given a few scraps about a boat, and that she was pregnant, and about some nights in the dark on the high sea when she was convinced they would die, and that they had gone ashore somewhere near a place called Simrishamn in Sweden.

  Right onto ul. Ludwika Idzikowskiego, quarter of an hour to go.

  In the past few years he had visited this country, which belonged to him, so many times. He could have been born here, grown up here and then he would have been very different, like the people in Bortoszyce who had tried to keep in touch for so long after his mother and father died, and who had eventually given up when he gave nothing back. Why had he done that? He didn't know. Nor did he know why he never got in touch when he was nearby, why he had never gone to visit.

  "Sixty zloty. Forty for the journey and twenty for that bloody stop that we hadn't agreed on."

  Hoffmann left a hundred-zloty note on the seat and got out of the car.

  A big, dark, old building in the middle of Mokotów-as old as a building could be in Warsaw, which had been totally destroyed seventy years ago. Henryk was waiting for him on the steps outside. They shook hands but didn't say much; neither of them knew how to do small talk.

  The meeting room was at the end of a corridor on the tenth floor. Far too light and far too warm. The deputy CEO and a man in his sixties, who he assumed was the Roof, were waiting at the end of the oblong table. Piet Hoffmann accepted their unnecessarily firm handshakes and then went to sit down on the chair that had already been pulled out. There was a bottle of water on the table in front of it.

  He didn't shy away from their piercing eyes. If he had done that, chosen to retreat, it would be over already.

  Zbigniew Boruc and Grzegorz Krzyneywek.

  He still didn't know if they were sitting there because he was going to die. Or because he had just penetrated farther.

  "Mr Krzynówek will just sit and listen. I assume that you haven't met before?"

  Hoffmann nodded to the elegant suit.

  "We haven't met, but I know who you are."

  He smiled at the man whom he had seen over the years in Polish newspapers and on Polish television, a businessman whose name he had also heard whispered in the long corridors at Wojtek, which had emerged from precisely the same chaos as every other new organization in an Eastern European state; a wall had suddenly fallen and economic and criminal interests merged in a grab and scramble for capital. Organizations that were established by the military and police and that all had the same hierarchical structure, with the Roof on top. Grzegorz Krzynówek was Wojtek's Roof and he was perfect. A champion with a central position, extremely robust financially and unassailable in a society that required laws, a guarantee that combined finance and criminality, a facade for capital and violence.

  "The delivery?"

  The deputy CEO had studied him long enough.

  "Yes."

  "I assume that it's safe."

  "It's safe."

  "We'll check it."

  "It will still be safe."

  "Let's continue then."

  That was all. That was yesterday.

  Piet Hoffmann wasn't going to die this evening.

  He wanted to laugh-as the tension vanished something else bubbled up and longed to escape, but there was more to come. No threats, no danger, but more ritual that required continued dignity.

  "I don't appreciate the condition you left our flat in."

  First he made sure that the delivery was sa
fe. Then he asked about the dead man. The deputy CEO's voice was calmer, friendlier now that he was talking about something that wasn't as important.

  "I don't want my people here to have to explain to the Polish police, on the request of the Swedish police, why and how they rent flats in central Stockholm."

  Piet Hoffmann knew that he had to answer this question too. But he took his time, looked over at Krzynówek. Delivery. I don't appreciate the condition you left our flat in. The respected businessman knew exactly what they were talking about. But words are strange like that. If they're not used officially, they don't exist. No one here in this room would mention twenty-seven kilos of amphetamine and a killing. Not so long as a person who officially didn't know anything about it was sitting in their midst.

  "If the agreement that I, and only I, have the authority to lead an operation in Sweden had been respected, this would never have happened." "I'd like you to explain."

  "If your people had followed your instructions instead of using their own initiative, the situation would never have arisen."

  Operation. Own initiative. The situation.

  Hoffmann looked at the Roof again.

  These words. We're using them for your sake.

  But why are you here? Why are you sitting next to me listening to all this that means everything and nothing?

  I'm not frightened anymore.

  But I don't understand.

  "I assume that this will not be repeated."

  He didn't answer. The deputy CEO would have the last word. That was the way things worked and Piet Hoffmann knew what to do, how to play the game, otherwise, he also knew, the end was nigh. The instant he became Paula, he no longer existed-he would end up like the buyer ten hours ago, in a car on his way to a Warsaw back street with two Poles and a cocked gun to his head.