Three Seconds

by Anders Roslund

  He knew his role, his lines, his history, he wasn't going to die. Dying was for other people.

  The Roof moved, not much, but gave a definite nod to the deputy CEO.

  He looked satisfied. Hoffmann was approved.

  The deputy CEO had hoped for that and counted on it. He got up, almost smiling. "We have plans to expand in the closed market. We've already invested and taken market shares in your neighbouring Nordic countries. Now we're going to do the same in your country. In Sweden."

  Piet Hoffmann looked at the Roof in silence, then at the deputy CEO.

  The closed market.

  The prisons.

  The harsh light from the angle-poise lamps was reflected in both metal spoons. Nils Krantz lifted up one of them and filled it with a light blue powder and water before asking Ewert Grens to pull back the green sheet that covered the person on the table in the middle of the room.

  A naked man's body.

  Pale complexion, well built, and not particularly old.

  A face with no skin, a skull on top of an otherwise complete body.

  A strange sight. The bones had been cleaned so the observer could get as close as possible, the skin that was in the way of a clear answer had been scrubbed off.

  "Alginate. We use it. It works. There are more expensive brands, but we don't waste them on autopsies."

  The forensic scientist separated the lower jaw from the upper jaw and pushed the metal spoon with the light blue fluid against the teeth in the upper jaw and held it there until it hardened.

  "Photographs, fingerprints, DNA, dental imprints. I'm pleased with that."

  He took a couple of steps back into the sterile room and nodded to Ludvig Errfors, the forensic pathologist.

  "Entrance wound."

  Errfors pointed to the bare skull bone on the right temple.

  "The bullet went in through the os temporale and then lost speed just here."

  He drew a line in the air with his finger from the large hole in the temple to the middle of the skull.

  "Mandible. The jaw bone. The trajectory shows clearly that the jacket of the bullet hit this hard bone and split into two smaller bullets with two exit wounds on the left side of the head. One through the mandible and one through the os frontale."

  Grens looked at Krantz. The forensic scientist had been right from the start, there on the floor in the flat.

  "And this, Ewert, I want you to have a look at this, in particular."

  Ludvig Errfors was holding the dead man's right arm, a peculiar sensation when the muscles don't react, the fact that something that was so recently alive can become so rubbery.

  "You see that? The visible marks around the wrist. Someone held his hand post-mortem."

  Grens looked at Nils Krantz again who gave a satisfied nod. He had been right about that too. Someone had moved the arm after he'd died. Someone had tried to make it look like suicide.

  Ewert Grens left the brightly lit table in the middle of the room and opened one of the windows out in the corridor. It was dark outside, and the late evening was deepening into night.

  "No name. No history. I want more. I want to get closer to him."

  He looked at Krantz, then at Errfors. He waited. Until the pathologist cleared his throat.

  There was always more.

  "I've looked at a couple of the fillings in his teeth. Take this one here, in the middle of the lower jaw. About eight, maybe ten years old. Most probably Swedish. I can deduce that from the way the work has been done, the quality, a plastic material that is noticeably different to the ones that the greater part of Europe import from Taiwan. I had a body here last week, a Czech who had a root filling in his lower jaw, cement in all the canals, which was… well, far from what we would see as acceptable here."

  The pathologist moved his hands from the skinless face to the torso. "He's had his appendix removed. See the scar here. A good cosmetic job. That, and the way in which the large intestine has been sewn up-both indicate that the operation was done in a Swedish hospital."

  A muffled sound and the feeling that the ground was moving. Just before midnight, and a truck had driven through the secured area, passing close to the window of the Solna institute of forensic medicine.

  Ludvig Errfors caught the question in Grens's eyes.

  "Nothing to worry about. They unload a short distance away. No idea what, but it's the same every evening."

  The pathologist moved away from the table; it was important that Ewert Grens came closer.

  "The fillings, the appendix and what I would call a Northern European appearance. Ewert, he's Swedish."

  Grens studied the face that was a death mask of white, washed bone.

  We found traces of bile, amphetamine and rubber.

  But they didn't come from you.

  We've confirmed a drug deal with the Polish mafia.

  But you're Swedish.

  You weren't a mule. You weren't the seller.

  You were the buyer.

  "Any traces of drugs?"

  "No."

  "Are you sure?"

  "No syringe marks, nothing in the blood, nothing in the urine." You were the buyer, but didn't use drugs yourself.

  He turned to Krantz.

  "The alarm call?"

  "What about it?"

  "Have you managed to analyze it yet?"

  Nils Krantz nodded. "I've just come back from Västmannagatan. I've got a theory. I went back to check it out. That sound you can hear just before the person who raised the alarm is about to finish with fourth floor? Right at the end of the brief call?" He watched Grens, he remembered. "Well, I had a hunch that it was the compressor in the fridge in the kitchen, Same frequency. Same interval."

  Ewert Grens's hand brushed the dead man's leg.

  "So the call was made from the kitchen?"

  "Yes."

  "And the voice? Did it sound Swedish to you?"

  "No accent whatsoever. Malardal dialect."

  "Then we have two Swedes. In a flat at the same time that the Polish mafia was concluding a drug deal, which ended in assassination. One of them is lying here. The other one raised the alarm."

  His hand moved toward the dead man's leg again, as if he hoped that it would somehow move.

  "What were you doing there? What were you both doing there?"

  He had been so scared. But he wasn't going to die. He had met the Roof for the first time and it hadn't meant death, so that meant he was farther in. He didn't know how or where, only that Paula was getting closer to the breakthrough he had risked his life for every day, every minute for the past three years.

  Piet Hoffmann sat beside the empty chair in the far-too-brightly-lit meeting room. Grzegorz Krzynówek had just left with his elegant suit and clean appearance and words that pretended to be something other than organized crime and money, and violence to get more money.

  The deputy CEO no longer had tight lips when he spoke, nor strained to keep his back straight. He opened a bottle of Zubrówka and mixed it with apple juice: there was an intimacy and confidentiality associated with drinking vodka with the boss, so Hoffmann smiled at the piece of grass in the bottle which wasn't particularly good, as that was polite and the custom, and at the former intelligence officer in front of him who had so meticulously transgressed his class and even swapped the ugly glasses from the kitchen table for two expensive, hand-blown tumblers, which his enormous hands were not quite sure how to hold.

  "Na zdrowie."

  They looked each other in the eye and emptied their glasses, and the deputy CEO poured another.

  "To the closed market."

  He drank up and filled the glasses a third time.

  "We're speaking plain language now."

  "I prefer it."

  A third glass was emptied.

  "The Swedish market. It's time for it. Now."

  Hoffmann found it hard to sit still. Wojtek already controlled the Norwegian market. The Danish market. The Finnish. He was starting to understand w
hat this was all about. Why the boss had been sitting there. Why he himself was holding a glass of something that tasted like bison grass and apple juice.

  He had been heading here for so long.

  "There are about five thousand people in prison in Sweden. And nearly eighty percent of them are big time consumers of amphetamines, heroin and alcohol, aren't they?"

  "Yes."

  "Which was also the case ten years ago?"

  "Yep, back then too."

  Twelve bloody awful months in ()sterner prison.

  "One gram of amphetamine costs one hundred and fifty kronor on the street. In the prisons it's three times as much. A gram of heroin costs a thousand kronor on the street. On the inside, three times as much."

  Zbigniew Boruc had had this conversation before. With other colleagues in other operations in other countries. It was always about the same thing. Being able to calculate.

  "Four thousand locked up drug addicts-the amphetamine freaks who take two grams a day, the heroin addicts who use one gram a day. Just one day's business, Hoffmann… between eight and nine million kronor."

  Paula had been born nine years ago. He had lived with death every day since then. But this, this moment, made it all worthwhile. All the damn lies. The manipulation. This was where he was headed. And now he had arrived.

  "An unprecedented operation. Initially, though, big money has to be invested before we can even start, before we get anything back."

  The deputy CEO looked at the empty chair between them.

  Wojtek had the power to invest, to wait as long as it took for the closed market to be theirs. Wojtek had a financial guarantee, the Eastern European mafia's variant of the consigliere, but with more capital and more power.

  "Yes. It's an unprecedented operation. But possible. And you are going to lead it."

  Ewert Grens opened the window. He normally did around midnight to listen to the clock on Kungsholms Church and then another one that he had never managed to locate, he only knew that it was farther away and couldn't be heard on nights when the wind swallowed any fragile sound. He had been pacing around his office with a strange sensation in his body, the first evening and night in the police headquarters without Siwan's voice anywhere in the dark. He had got so used to falling asleep to the past, and at this time of night had always listened to one of the cassettes he had recorded and mixed himself.

  There was nothing here now that even remotely resembled peace.

  He had never been bothered by all the night sounds that played outside his window before, and already he loathed the cars on Bergsgatan that accelerated as they approached the steep incline on Hantverkargatan. He closed the window and sat down with the sudden silence and the fax that he had just received from Klövje, from the Swedish section at Interpol. He read the interview, which he was reliably informed had been requested by the Swedish police, with a Polish citizen who had been the registered tenant of the flat in Västmannagatan 79 for the past two years. A man with a name that Ewert Grens didn't recognize and couldn't pronounce, forty-five years old, born in Gdansk, registered in the electoral roll for Warsaw. A man who had never been convicted or even suspected of any crime and who, according to the Polish policeman who had questioned him, had, without any doubt, been in Warsaw at the time when the incident in Stockholm took place.

  You're involved in some way.

  Ewert Grens held the printout in his hand.

  The door was locked when we got there.

  He got up and went out into the dark corridor.

  There were no signs of a break-in and no signs of violence. Two cups from the coffee machine. Someone had used a key to get in and out. A cheese sandwich wrapped in plastic and a banana-flavored yogurt from the vending machine. Someone who is linked to you.

  He stood there in the silence and dark, emptied one cup of coffee and ate half the yogurt, but left the sandwich in the bin. It was too dry, even for him.

  He felt safe here.

  The big, ugly police headquarters where colleagues were swallowed up or hidden away, the only place where he could bear to be, really-he always knew what to do here, he belonged; he could even sleep on the sofa if he wanted to and avoid the long nights on a balcony with a view of Sveavägen and a capital that never stopped.

  Ewert Grens went back to the only room in the homicide unit where the lights were still on, to the boxes of packed-away music, which he gave a light kick. He hadn't even gone to the funeral. He had paid for it, but hadn't taken part, and he kicked the boxes again, harder this time. He wished he had been there, maybe then she would be gone, truly gone.

  Klövje's fax was still lying on the desk. A Polish citizen who could in no way be linked to a dead body. Grens swore, marched across the room and kicked one of the boxes for the third time, his shoe leaving a small hole in the side. He hadn't gotten anywhere. He didn't know anything except that a couple of Swedes had been in the flat while the Polish mafia were completing a drug deal, and that one of them was now dead and the other had raised a whispered alarm from near a fridge in the kitchen-a Swedish voice with no accent, Krantz was certain of that.

  You were there and raised the alarm while someone was being murdered. Ewert Grens stood by the cardboard boxes, but didn't kick them again. You are either the murderer or a witness.

  He sat down, leaned back against the boxes, covering the recent hole.

  A murderer doesn't shoot someone, make it look like suicide, and then ring and raise the alarm.

  It felt good to sit with his back to the forbidden music, he was probably just going to stay there on the hard floor through the night, until morning. You're a witness.

  He had been sitting by the window for two hours, watching the specks of light that were so tiny when they were far away and then slowly grew as they sank through the dark toward the runway at Frédéric Chopin. Piet Hoffmann had lain down fully clothed on the hard hotel bed just before midnight, and tried to sleep, but had soon given up-the day that had started with someone being killed in front of him and ended with the responsibility of taking over the drug market in Swedish prisons continued to live inside him; it whispered and screamed until he couldn't be bothered to block his ears and wait for sleep.

  It was blowing hard outside the window. Hotel Okęcie was just eight hundred meters from the airport and the wind often swept over the open ground, creating spots of light that were prettiest when the branches on the trees refused to stay still. He liked to sit here, for one night at a time, looking out over this last piece of Poland, where he always observed but never took part, even though he should feel at home here-he had cousins and aunts and an uncle here. He looked like them and talked like them but was forever someone who didn't belong.

  He was nobody.

  He lied to Zofia and she held him tight. He lied to Hugo and Rasmus and they hugged their daddy. He lied to Erik. He lied to Henryk. He had just lied to Zbigniew Boruc and drank another Zubrawka with him.

  He had been lying for so long that he'd forgotten what the truth looked and felt like, who he was.

  The specks of light had now become a huge plane that had just landed; it swerved in the strong crosswinds and the small wheels bounced out of control a couple of times on the asphalt before sinking down and rolling the plane toward some steps by the newer part of the arrivals hall.

  He leaned forward to the window and rested his forehead on the cool glass.

  The day that wouldn't end, that whispered and screamed.

  A person had stopped breathing in front of him. He had realized too late. They had the same role, were part of the same game, but on different sides. A person who perhaps had children, a wife, who had maybe also lived a lie for so long that he didn't know who he was anymore.

  My name is Paula. What was yours?

  He sat on the window sill, looking out into the dark, as he cried.

  It was the middle of the night in a hotel room a few kilometers from central Warsaw. He had a real person's death on his hands and he cried until he could
cry no more and sleep took him, and he fell headlong into something that was black and couldn't be lied to.

  Tuesday

  Ewert Grens had woken when the first light forced its way through the thin curtains and started to irritate his eyes. He was sitting on the floor with his back against the three stacked cardboard boxes, but he then lay down on the hard linoleum to avoid the dawn light and slept for another couple of hours. It wasn't a bad place to sleep: his back barely ached and he had been able to keep his stiff leg stretched almost straight the whole night, which he never got room for on the soft corduroy sofa.

  No more nights there.

  Suddenly he was wide awake, rolled over on to his belly and used his arms to lever up his bulky frame. From the tin on his desk he grabbed a blue marker, which released a strong odor as he wrote on each side of the brown cardboard boxes.

  PI Malmkvist.

  Ewert Grens looked at the taped-up boxes and laughed out loud. He had been able to sleep with the packed music and felt more rested than he had done for a long time.

  A couple of dance steps, no singing, no music, just unaccompanied steps.

  He tried to lift the box on top, but it was far too heavy, so he pushed it out of the room and down the long corridor to the elevator. Three floors down, to the cellar, to the property store. He wrote a reference number on the top of the box with the marker again-I9361231. Then he went down another corridor, even darker than the last, and pushed and sweated on to the door that opened into confiscated property.

  "Einarsson."

  A young lad, civilian staff, was standing behind the long wooden counter that felt so old. Every time Grens came here he was reminded of a grocer's shop he often went to as a boy on his way home from school, a shop near Odenplan which had long since disappeared and was now yet another cafe for teenagers who drank milky coffee and compared mobile phones.

  "Can I help you?"

  "I want Einarsson to look after this."

  "Yes, but I-"

  "Einarsson."

  The young man snorted loudly, but said nothing. He left the counter and went to get a man of Ewert's age, with a black apron tied tightly round his rotund body.