Knock Knock

by Anders Roslund

  “Zana?”

  “Yes.”

  “That was her name when you met her?”

  “Yes. And during those weeks she was in my care.”

  “And her . . . parents? Lilaj, you said? What was the trauma we weren’t allowed to know about?”

  “I promise to tell you everything the next time we meet. When I’ve found her. That’s why I’m here. I have to know where she is because I’m . . . worried. Something might happen to her.”

  It wasn’t that they didn’t trust him. It was more that they were shaken. The adoptive parents stood up—still no words exchanged, their lives synchronized—and headed toward the patio and backyard. Barefoot on the green lawn, a bit apart but still together in some way. Grens looked at the shiny gold clock ticking loudly on the wall, this would take the time it took. By the time they came back, they had walked through the past. Which must be why they looked so exhausted.

  “You’ll have to excuse us, Superintendent.”

  The woman, who had been childless for so long and then became someone’s mother and then just Anette, spoke quietly now, thoughts without energy.

  “But first we found out that she might be in grave danger; that’s what you meant even if you didn’t say it in so many words. Then we were given a name after so many years.”

  “No need to apologize. I think I understand.”

  “We don’t even know if she’s alive. We haven’t known for some years. So why . . . why do you think she’s in danger?”

  “I’ll tell you that, too. When I find her.”

  “We need . . .”

  “I’m sorry. But all you can do now is give me more information. I’m going to do everything I can to find her.”

  The woman looked at her husband again. It was his turn to bring them back in time.

  “Her questions continued, but not as often. For long periods she wouldn’t ask any at all. She seemed happier. Until one evening when she was fourteen years old. Then everything changed.”

  The man looked at his wife. Hesitated.

  “We still don’t know what happened. Nobody knows. Despite an extensive police investigation.”

  He sought his life companion’s eyes again. And she nodded. He could continue.

  “A party. Young people having fun. But one of the guests, a boy who was slightly older than the others, somebody’s brother, fell from a fifth-floor balcony. He died immediately. And no one knew why or how it had happened. Hannah took it very badly. Cried. For months. Didn’t want to leave home. We homeschooled her with the school’s permission. And her questions came back. More numerous and specific. She started to remember. Fragments, images of her biological parents. Her siblings. And words. Pesë. Tortë. We didn’t understand them at first, and neither did she. But mom and baba were easier. A linguist who worked for the city helped us. Five, cake, mom, dad were the first four words that just . . . came back. Then another twenty-five followed, maybe thirty. Albanian. The language she probably spoke before she came here.”

  The man’s eyes were full of sorrow. He was reliving it.

  “We didn’t know it yet. But the balcony and the boy who fell were the beginning of a long goodbye. She was fourteen years old then, and when she turned sixteen she disappeared. One day she was just gone. A few clothes were missing from her closet, her toothbrush, maybe a few other things. But no message, no explanation. She called us a couple of times in that first year. We managed to track one of the calls—it came from a telephone booth in a town called Shkodër in Albania. She didn’t say much, just told us she was doing well. We asked her where she was living, what she was doing, and when she wouldn’t answer we asked again. Then she hung up. And we never spoke again.”

  The adoptive father couldn’t go on anymore. He shook his head, stared down at his palms, then leaned back in the sofa. Collapsing into himself.

  His wife took over.

  “Our biggest mistake was trying to help her with those new words. Bringing a linguist here, buying those Albanian dictionaries, even tracking down university courses and encouraging her to seek them out later. We wanted to help her connect with her roots. But instead she became obsessed with them.”

  Ewert Grens looked at the parents who seemed so alone even though they were two. That’s what happens when you lose a child.

  “After that last phone call, there’s only been silence. We didn’t know anything. We still don’t, Superintendent.”

  But I know.

  Grens thought that, but he couldn’t tell them yet. That their grown-up little girl had journeyed backward. Back to where those new words carried her. To the memories she couldn’t reach. Or maybe she had reached them—more than her adoptive parents knew. She could have remembered her family and started asking questions without knowing the violent end they met. Maybe she was closing in on the people who had taken their lives without even knowing it. Maybe that’s when the contents of her file, locked inside the police archive, were plucked out. Because her questions awoke other people’s memories. Maybe that was when someone hired a dirty cop inside Kronoberg to find out who she really was.

  And then got rid of her.

  The brute they called Zaravic, who was going to be arrested today, locked up for seventy-two hours on Grens’s orders, had become even more important now, had even more questions to answer.

  “I’d like to ask your permission to search your daughter’s room.”

  They sat on her bed while the detective pulled out desk drawers and looked through various folders and photo albums, and now and then he asked them about where and how. But her childhood room led him no further. A half hour later they stood at the front door, and he thanked them, and promised again to contact them later about what he knew—which seemed to offer them some relief. They’d feared the worst when he appeared at their home, and now they had been given some hope. So as he headed to his car, he turned back and said, “Everything will turn out fine.” And he tried to sound much calmer and more confident than he actually was.

  The suffocating heat hounding the people of Stockholm’s inner city had turned Piet Hoffmann’s rental car into a roaring beast, which let loose the moment he sat down inside it. But starting the car and the air conditioning was not an option. Blend in. Attract no attention. Don’t stick out in any way. He adjusted his earbuds until they sounded right, and put his phone on the burning surface of the passenger seat. The tiny microphone hidden in the narrow opening between the bathroom door and its frame worked perfectly, and he opened the program whose software would translate their words if they spoke in another language. His disguise didn’t just get him closer—it got him all the way in.

  “Did you see his face when I said seventy-five thousand?”

  They spoke Swedish. And were probably in the larger room. But one was walking around, that’s how it sounded—hard heels against a hardwood floor.

  “Yep—the bastard looked like he was gonna swallow his wallet.”

  “His next break-in is gonna cost him a lot more than that.”

  “That’s what these idiots never get. They . . .”

  Suddenly the voices fell silent. And the footsteps ceased.

  “What the hell . . .”

  The leader, the one with the eyes used to being obeyed. He was the one speaking, and now he stopped. Right at the half-open bathroom door. It was easy to tell that the sound was coming straight from above. Now you could hear the door being pulled wide. The slight creak of its hinges.

  “Shit . . . come in here!”

  Now they see it.

  The little gift he left for them on the sink basin.

  “How the hell did that end up there?”

  “No clue.”

  “I was in here earlier, it wasn’t there.”

  A hand grenade. Loaded. Camouflaged with plastic arms and plastic legs. Just like the one they put in Rasmus’s red backpack.r />
  “That guy. Who was just here. He went to the toilet. He . . .”

  “Oh fuck—Hoffmann! Hoffmann sent that asshole!”

  Piet Hoffmann’s skin glistened with slippery, irritating sweat. The windows were down, but the air stood still while the sun beat down angrily onto the car’s metal shell. But he couldn’t tell if his racing heart and slight dizziness were related to the temperature inside the car or if they were a consequence of his uncertainty about what was about to happen.

  If these men who were being used to threaten his family would react as he’d hoped and planned for.

  Or if all of this had been in vain.

  “What was that fucker’s name?”

  “Peter Haraldsson, I think—sounds like something he made up during his elevator ride.”

  “Contact information?”

  “If he left any, it’s as fake as the name.”

  “What . . . I don’t even remember what he looked like?”

  “No clue. A little fat. Hasn’t been to the gym for a while, I thought. Too much alcohol or too much work. Or both.”

  “The cameras.”

  It was silent while they logged into the computer and checked the files from the hall camera.

  “What the hell . . . it’s black? Something’s wrong. It . . .”

  “I wanna see the others.”

  The next camera was probably in the same room as them, and the third was in the kitchen.

  “Black! Both of them! That fucker . . .”

  One of them slammed a fist against the desk or the bookshelf or maybe even a wall, a muffled sound that was hard to place.

  “. . . took them out!”

  So simple. He just had to make sure the jamming transmitter was sending out a much more powerful signal on the same frequency, disrupting it. The result was exactly what those two security guards were looking at.

  Black images. Nothingness. Or rather—everything.

  As in the very last piece of the puzzle.

  Because now after the family they were supposed to be watching had snuck out of their house. After a dressed-up grenade had been left behind on the sink of their office. After all of their surveillance cameras had been knocked out. Their opponent had proven he could reach them whenever and however he wanted to—and that gave them the final push.

  And they reacted exactly as he hoped.

  Piet Hoffmann could tell—he was sure of it even though the sound quality got worse after a moment—that after a heated discussion they decided to place the call he was waiting for—the whole point of this operation.

  The desperate phone call that would reveal their secret client. The organization threatening Piet Hoffmann and his family.

  “Hey, it’s . . .”

  “What the fuck—have you forgotten? I call you. You never call me. Don’t you . . .”

  “He was here!”

  “Who?”

  “Hoffmann!”

  “Hoffmann? Where?”

  “In our office. Not Hoffmann himself—but an intermediary.”

  Albanian. According to the information on his phone screen.

  “Intermediary?”

  “Yes. In our office.”

  “You’re certain?”

  “Yes. Piet Hoffmann knows who we are and wanted us to know that. We have to step back. Our company can’t be involved anymore.”

  He sometimes had difficulty hearing the voice on the other end. Someone was deliberately speaking quietly.

  “What you just said?”

  “Just now?”

  “About Piet Hoffmann knowing who you are and wanting you to know that, that . . .”

  But the microphone and interpreter heard and translated.

  “Yes?”

  “Hang up.”

  “What?”

  “That’s exactly what he . . . Hang up, for fuck’s sake! He wanted you to call me!”

  Piet Hoffmann took out his earpiece as soon as the call was disconnected. The Albanian-speaking voice was right. That was exactly what he wanted.

  Now there was only one way.

  It’s either you or me, and I choose me.

  He stepped out into the empty street and walked toward the door he exited less than an hour ago. This time, he didn’t plan on warning them he was coming. He tore away the tape he left on the lock and hurried up five flights of stairs. Checked his mask, adjusted his holsters. And rang the doorbell.

  It didn’t take them long to open.

  “You . . . ?”

  “I had a question about the price. Do you have time?”

  The other security guard stood a few steps farther down the hall. The way they looked at him. They thought they knew something he didn’t.

  “Of course.”

  But they didn’t know he knew they knew.

  “We have time. Come in.”

  The security guard that Piet Hoffmann had heard speaking Albanian invited him inside in perfect Swedish, and couldn’t quite stop a small smile from stretching over his tense lips. He thought he was looking at an idiot who had voluntarily rung the doorbell and asked to come inside to his own execution.

  “Sit down. We’ll figure this out.”

  Those eyes. The look the Swedish Albanians passed between them. Get ready. I’ll take him from the left, you take him from the right. Hoffmann understood the glance they exchanged. There was always a particular feeling in being surrounded by professionals who’d attacked together before and would do so again very soon.

  “I don’t need to sit. Just have a few simple questions.”

  “You have questions?”

  “Yes.”

  At that point the man who was in charge transformed. The aggressiveness that had been lurking behind those cautious eyes came rushing forward, game time was over.

  “I think you misunderstood something. You are gonna give us some answers. Here’s my first easy question: Why did Piet Hoffmann send you?”

  “Piet Hoffmann?”

  “You heard me.”

  “Who is that?”

  His eyes. Their eyes. They were close now. About to attack.

  “The man who sent you.”

  The security guard reached over to make sure the blinds were turned down. While his colleague checked that the front door was locked. Then they both stretched. Made themselves bigger. On either side of Piet Hoffmann.

  “And you will only get out of here somewhat intact if you tell us why.”

  “I don’t know Hoffmann very well. But I know Rasmus.”

  “Who the fuck is Rasmus?”

  “Hoffmann’s youngest son. He wanted to figure something out. Which one of you put the grenade in his backpack. He didn’t like that.”

  The last glance.

  There it was. The signal.

  To attack.

  And it was the security guard on Hoffmann’s left side who should make the first move. He was going to start beating information out of their flabby visitor. A blow to the kidney. So he’d collapse onto the floor and they’d drag him up again and ask the same question. Until he answered.

  But the attack never happened.

  Because the flabby man suddenly pulled out a gun. And fired. Twice, once into each kneecap. The attacker fell forward, headlong. Hoffmann spun around, pointing the gun at his colleague instead.

  “Your friend never answered Rasmus’s question. Which one of you put that grenade in his backpack.”

  Surprise.

  That was the most salient expression on the security guard’s face.

  “And who put it on top of the Manchester United pen case. He really didn’t like that. Tell me . . . who?”

  It took a moment. Until the silent security guard could stay silent no longer. He pointed to his suffering friend on the floor.

>   “Him.”

  “Him—what?”

  “He did it. He dropped off the hand grenade.”

  The next two shots hit more to the side of the kneecaps. Now the other security guard fell forward, toward Hoffmann, who had taken a step closer to the desk to avoid having the body fall onto him.

  Then everything got so quiet. Not in the room. But inside him.

  Because there was no choice. That’s when it never felt like much to hurt someone.

  He had even been prepared to kill.

  They’d talked so much about it in recent years, he and Zofia. About being human. Remaining human. Zofia, who feared his ability to feel became less every day he spent with violence. A worry that he himself had pushed away. Where is my limit? When I’ve pushed it too far—will I still be myself? Mostly they’d talked about this—giving yourself the right to destroy someone else, maybe even their lives, in order to survive.

  And they never arrived at an answer.

  He tied their hands and feet together with sharp cable ties, wrapped a scarf around their open mouths, then pulled their cell phones out of their bloody pockets. He grabbed both of their right hands and tried each of their respective index fingers, placing them on the button for Touch ID. And the phones unlocked. Once inside, he deleted all the security codes and replaced them with his own. On one of these phones the last number dialed would give him what he wanted. The location of their client. The organization that was threatening Piet Hoffmann and his family. He did the same with the laptops on the desk—opened them with fingerprints. But he had to use one of their thumbs, almost broke it off unlocking. A quick check of the phones and computers showed what he expected—communication had been encrypted. But he had the most important thing, the telephone number of the person he was trying to find. He could work on the encrypted contents in Grens’s apartment later.

  The two cadets were sitting on a bench in the shade outside the local police station, each with an ice cream in their hands. When Ewert Grens pulled up, they both jumped into the same seats as before. No one said anything for the first few kilometers; the detective superintendent had made it clear he didn’t want to talk, and the cadets were young and inexperienced enough to respect that. Though Grens’s body was on its way back to the capital, his mind was still with the foster parents who loved every centimeter of their home. He’d gone there to find a missing girl, or at least something that might lead to finding her. He’d achieved neither. But he knew more now.