Three Seconds

by Anders Roslund

The next time they opened it would be at room temperature on a governor's desk.

  When he wanted them to.

  Piet Hoffmann stood in his large office looking out of the window at the people and cars on Kungsbron and Vasagatan, as was his wont. He had filled fifty tulips with a total of 185 grams of 30 percent amphetamine, without even thinking about the fact that the whitish-yellow powder had stolen years of his life and there had been a time when every waking hour was used to steal enough to get more for the next day. The rehab center, the fear, the prison sentence, the drug had been all-consuming and everything else meaningless until the morning she was suddenly standing in front of him. He had never injected since. She had forced him to hold onto her hand hard, as only people who trust each other can.

  The cigar case was lying on the desk. The digital recorder beside it.

  The document- I've read it. I assumed… I assumed that it concerned a… woman?

  A recorder small enough to be transported in your anus.

  Now it was voices on the computer.

  That's my name, in here.

  He copied the whole recording onto two separate CDs and put one in a brown and one in a white 8 x 10 envelope. He took down four passports from the top shelf in the gun cabinet, put three of them in the brown envelope and the fourth in the white envelope. Finally, he got out two small transmitters and two earpieces and put one in each envelope.

  "It's me."

  He had dialed the only number stored on the mobile phone.

  "Hello."

  "Västmannagatan. Your colleague's name, I've forgotten it. The guy who's investigating."

  "Why?"

  "Erik, I've only got thirty-five hours left."

  "Grens."

  "His whole name."

  "Ewert Grens."

  "Who is he?"

  "I don't like the sound of this. What are you up to?"

  "For Christ's sake, Erik. Who?"

  "One of the older ones."

  "Good?"

  "Yes, he's good. And that makes me uneasy."

  "What do you mean?"

  "He's… he's the sort that doesn't give up."

  Piet Hoffmann wrote the name on the front of the brown envelope in big, clear letters, then the address underneath in smaller letters. He checked the contents. A CD, three passports, one earpiece.

  The sort who doesn't give up.

  Erik Wilson enjoyed the last of the sun as it sank slowly into Lake Vattern. A moment of peace after Piet's strange phone call about Ewert Grens a short while ago, and before a meeting that would make an infiltrator even more dangerous. He had sensed the change hour by hour in recent days, how Piet retreated more and more. The last conversation he had had was with someone who could only be called Paula. He knew that it was necessary and even what he preached, but it still shocked him every time someone he liked became someone else.

  He had walked the short distance from Jonkoping station to the Swedish Court Administration offices on several occasions in recent years, and if he cut down along Jarnvagsgatan and Vastra Storgatan, he could be at the heavy entrance door in just five minutes.

  He was there to manipulate the system.

  And he was good at it, at recruiting people, regardless of whether it was someone serving a sentence who could be used to infiltrate other criminal networks or a civil servant who could be used to add or delete a line or two here and there in a database. He was good at making them feel important, getting them to believe that they were helping society, as well as themselves, good at smiling when necessary and laughing when necessary and ingratiating himself with the infiltrator and informer so that they liked him more than he would ever like them.

  "Hi."

  "Thank you so much for staying late."

  She smiled, a woman in her fifties whom he had recruited several years ago in connection with a case in Gota Court of Appeal. They had met in the courtroom every day for a week, and over dinner one evening had agreed that her position gave her authority to make changes in the databases that might be of assistance to the Swedish police in their ongoing work to map organized crime.

  They walked up the steps of the imposing court building together and she waved over to the security guard I've got a visitor, then they continued ro Administration on the first floor. She sat down at her computer and he pulled over a chair from the neighboring empty desk and waited while she typed in her user name and password, and swiped a small plastic card along the top of her keyboard.

  "Who?"

  Her authorization card on a lanyard around her neck; she fiddled with it nervously.

  "721018-0010."

  He leaned his arm on the back of her chair. He knew she liked it. "Piet Hoffmann?"

  "Yes."

  "Stockrosvägen 21, 122 32 Enskede."

  He looked at the screen and the first page of the Swedish National Police Board's records for Piet Hoffmann.

  1. SERIOUS FIREARMS OFFENSES 08-06-1998

  CHAPTER 9, PART 1, SECTION 2 THE FIREARMS ACT

  2. UNLAWFUL DISPOSAL 04-05-1998 CHAPTER 10, PART 4, SPC

  3.UNLAWFUL DRIVING 02-05-1998 PART 3, SECTION 2 RTOA (1951:649)

  IMPRISONMENT ONE (1) YEAR SIX (6) MONTHS

  04-07-1998 SENTENCE COMMENCED

  01-07-1999 RELEASED ON PAROLE

  Remaining term of imprisonment six months

  "I just want to make a couple of adjustments."

  He might have touched her back as he leaned toward the screen. Never more than that, the illusion of togetherness. They both knew what it was about, but she let herself be fooled because she needed something that resembled human contact, and he pretended because he needed someone to work for him. They used each other in the same way that a police handler and informer did, a silent agreement that was never defined, but that was a prerequisite for wanting to meet in the first place.

  "Adjustments?"

  "I want you… to add just a few things."

  He changed position, leaned back, his hand near her back again. "Where?"

  "The first page. The Österåker bit."

  "Sentenced to one year and six months."

  "Change it to five years."

  She didn't ask why. She never did. She trusted him, trusted that the detective superintendent from the crime operations unit in Stockholm was sitting close to her in the best interests of society and crime prevention. Light fingers dancing on the keyboard as the line with ONE (I) YEAR six (6)

  MONTHS became FIVE (5) YEARS.

  "Thank you."

  "Is that all?"

  "Next line. Convicted of serious firearms offenses. That's not enough. I want you to add a couple more offenses. Attempted murder. Aggravated assault on an officer."

  Only one computer on, only one desk lamp on in the large room on the first floor of the National Courts Administration. Wilson was aware of the risk that the woman who had stayed late was taking; while her colleagues had left long ago and were now lounging around on sofas in living rooms watching TV, she weighed the feeling of being important against the risk of prosecution and gross document forgery.

  "Now he's got a longer sentence and more ratio decidendi. Anything else?" She printed off the relevant page of 721018-0010's criminal record and gave it to the man who was sitting so close and made her feel alive. She waited while he read and after a while seemed to lean in even closer. "That's fine. For today."

  Erik Wilson held two pieces of paper that made the difference between respect and suspicion. Within the first hour of being inside Aspsås Prison walls, Piet Hoffmann would have to prove his convictions to insistent fellow prisoners and doing five years for ATTEMPTED MURDER AND AGGRAVATED ASSAULT ON AN OFFICER was the same as getting the security classification: powerful and capable of killing, if necessary.

  Paula would be seen as what he was pretending to be from the very minute he entered his cell.

  Erik Wilson stroked the smiling woman on the arm, gave her a fleeting kiss on the cheek, and she was still smiling as he rushed away to get
the late train back to Stockholm.

  The house looked smaller as the dark started to gnaw at the corners.

  The facade was leached of color, the chimney and new tiled roof sank lower over the upstairs windows.

  Piet Hoffmann stood between the two apple trees in the garden and tried to see into the kitchen and sitting room. It was half past ten, it was late, but she was usually still up at this time, somewhere to be seen behind the white or blue curtains.

  He should have phoned.

  The meeting at Rosenbad had finished just after five and then spilled over into the three bunches of tulips from the flower shop and the CD copies of a recording made in a room at the Government Offices and two letters addressed to two people who would never receive them and then up into the dark loft again and eleven tins with eleven kilos of amphetamine in a bag and buds that two by two were first put in the oven, then the freezer before being put in the fridge and suddenly the evening had disappeared without him having called.

  Thirty-three hours left.

  He opened the front door that was locked. No TV humming in the sitting room, no light over the round table in the kitchen, no radio from the study and the slow P1 talk shows that she liked so much. He had come home to a hostile house, to reactions that he couldn't control and that scared him.

  Piet Hoffmann swallowed the feeling of being so totally fucking alone.

  He had actually always been lonely, never had many friends as he dropped them one by one because he didn't understand the point, didn't have many relatives as he lost touch with those who hadn't dropped him first. But this was a different loneliness, one that he hadn't chosen himself.

  He turned the light on in the kitchen. The table was empty, no blobs of jam and crumbs from just one more cookie, it had been wiped in circles until everything had been cleaned off. If he leaned forward he could even see the stripes from a J-doth on the shiny pine surface. They had sat there eating supper, just a few hours ago. And she had made sure that they finished their meals. He had not been there and wouldn't be part of it later either.

  The vase was in the cupboard over the sink.

  Twenty-five red tulips, he straightened the card, I love you, they would stand in the middle of the table where the card was visible.

  He tried to put his feet down as quietly as possible on the stairs, but every tread creaked in warning and the ears that were listening would know he was near. He was frightened, not of the anger he would confront any minute now, but of the consequences.

  She wasn't there.

  He stood in the doorway and looked into an empty room. The bedspread was still on the bed and hadn't been touched. He continued on to Hugo's room and coughs from a throat that was only five years old and swollen. She wasn't there either.

  One more room. He ran.

  She was lying on the short, narrow bed snuggled close to their youngest son. Under the blanket, curled up. But she wasn't asleep, her breathing wasn't that regular.

  "How are they?"

  She didn't look at him.

  "Have they still got a temperature?"

  She didn't answer.

  "I'm so sorry, I couldn't get away. I should have called, I know, I know that I should have."

  Her silence. It was worse than everything else. He preferred open conflict.

  "I'll look after them tomorrow. The whole day. You know that." That damn silence.

  "I love you."

  The stairs didn't creak as much when he went down. His jacket was hanging on the coat rack in the hall. He locked the front door behind him.

  Thirty-two hours and thirty minutes left. He wouldn't sleep. Not tonight. Not tomorrow night. He would have plenty of time to do that later, locked up in five square meters for two weeks on remand, on a bunk with no TV and no newspapers and no visitors, he could lie down then and close out all this shit.

  Piet Hoffmann sat in the car while the rest of the street went to sleep. He often did this, counted slowly to sixty and felt his body relaxing limb by limb.

  Tomorrow.

  He'd tell her everything tomorrow.

  The windows in the neighboring houses that shared his suburban life went black one by one. The blue light of a TV still shone upstairs at the Samuelssons' and the Sundells'; a light that changed from yellow to red in the Nymans' cellar window, where he knew one of their teenage sons had a room. Otherwise, night had fallen. One last look at the house and the garden he could touch if he wound down the window and stuck out his hand, he was sure of it, which were now blanketed in silence and blackness, not even the small lights in the sitting room were on.

  He would tell her everything tomorrow.

  The car crept along the small streets as he made two phone calls; the first about a meeting at midnight at number two, the second about another meeting later at Danviksberget.

  He wasn't in a rush anymore. An hour to hang around. He drove toward the city, to Soderrnalm and the area round Hornstull, where he had lived for so many years when it was still a rundown part of town that the city suits sneered at if they happened to stray there. He parked down by the waterfront on Bergsunds Strand, by the beautiful old wooden bath house that some crazy people had fought so hard to pull down a few years back and was now a hidden gem in this hip area, where women could swim on Mondays and men on Fridays. It was warm, even though night was at hand, so he took off his jacket and walked along the asphalt, with his eyes on the luminous water that reflected the headlamps of the occasional car that crept down past the flats looking for a place to park.

  A rather hard park bench for ten minutes, a slow beer at Gamla Uret where the bartender, whom Hoffmann knew from late nights in another life, had a very loud laugh, a couple of articles in a forgotten evening paper, oily fingers from the bowl of peanuts at the far end of the bar.

  He had frittered away the hour.

  He started to walk toward Högalidsgatan 38 and Heleneborgsgatan 9, and a flat on the second floor with an uneven parquet floor.

  Erik Wilson was sitting on a plastic-covered sofa when the man who now could only be Paula opened the front door and crossed the water-damaged hall floor.

  "It's not too late. To pull out. You know that"

  He looked at him with something that resembled warmth, which he shouldn't do but that was the way it was. An infiltrator should be an instrument, something that he and the police authorities could use for as long as it was productive or simply abandon if things got too risky.

  "You're never going to be particularly well paid. You'll never get any official thanks."

  With Piet though, or Paula, it was different. He had become something more. A friend.

  "You've got Zofia. And the boys. I've no idea what that feels like, but… I think about it sometimes, long for it. And if I had… there's no bloody way that I'd risk it for someone who wouldn't even say thanks."

  Wilson was very aware that right here, right now, he was doing something that he shouldn't. Giving a unique infiltrator an argument for backing out when the authorities needed him most.

  "This time you're taking a risk that is far bigger than before. I said it yesterday in the tunnel on the way over from Rosenbad. Piet, look at me when I'm talking. I'll say it again. Look at me! The moment you've completed our mission, you'll be on Wojtek's hit list. Are you sure you understand what that means, really means?"

  Nine years as an infiltrator. Piet Hoffmann looked at the plastic-covered furniture and chose a green, or possibly brown, armchair. No. He wasn't sure anymore that he did understand what it entailed or why they were in fact sitting here facing each other in a secret meeting place while his wife and children slept in a silent house. Sometimes it's just like that. Sometimes something starts and then carries on and days become months and years without you being able to reflect on it. But he remembered clearly why he said yes, and what they had said about a sentence that could instead be served with regular leave and then when he was released, a life where his criminal activity could be simplified, as long as he worked for
the police they would turn a blind eye to his own criminal record, hide it away and make sure that the criminal operations unit and public prosecutor didn't bother him. It had all seemed so bloody simple. He hadn't even considered the lies, the danger of being exposed as a snitch, the lack of appreciation and protection. He didn't have a family then. He existed only for himself, and then barely.

  "I'm going to finish this."

  "No one will blame you if you pull out."

  He'd started, and then continued. He'd learned to live for the kicks, for the adrenaline that forced his heart to explode in his chest, for the pride of knowing that he was better at this than anyone else, he who had never been best at anything.

  "I'm not going to pull out."

  He was addicted. He didn't know what life was like without the adrenaline, the pride.

  "Well, we've talked about it openly then."

  He was one of those people who had never managed to finish anything. He was going to do it this time.

  "I really appreciate you asking, Erik. I realize that it's not really your job. But, yes, we have talked openly about this."

  Erik Wilson had asked the question. And got the answer he wanted to have.

  "In case anything should happen."

  He changed his position on the uncomfortable plastic-covered sofa.

  "If you're about to be exposed, you can't escape very far in a prison, but you can demand to be put in isolation."

  Wilson looked at Paula, Piet.

  "You might be given a death sentence. But you're not going to die. When you've asked to be put in isolation, once you have that protection, contact us and wait for a week. That's the time we'll need to get the papers sorted for someone to come and get you out."

  He opened the black briefcase that was standing by his feet and put two folders on the coffee table between them. A new section from the Swedish National Police Board's criminal records and an equally new interrogation transcript which was now included in the documentation of a ten-year-old preliminary investigation.

  INTERROGATING OFFICER JAN ZANDER (JO): A nine millimeter Radom. PIET HOFFMANN (PH): Right.

  RD: When you were arrested. Recently fired. Two bullets were missing from the magazine.