Three Seconds

by Anders Roslund

  They were very similar, in their forties, dark suits that were expensive but looked cheap, shaved heads; when he stood close to them he could see an obvious halo of day-old brown hair Eyes that were devoid of joy, and neither man smiled very often. In fact, he'd never seen either of them laugh. They did what he said, disappeared into the kitchen to empty the mule who was lying there, throwing up. It was Hoffmann's shipment and none of them wanted to explain to Warsaw that a delivery had gone all wrong.

  He turned to the third man at the table and spoke in Swedish for the first time. "Here are twenty capsules. Two hundred grams. That's enough for you to check it."

  He was looking at someone who was tall, blond, in shape, and about the same age as he was, around thirty-five. Someone wearing black jeans, a white T-shirt and lots of silver around his fingers, wrists, and neck. Someone who'd served four years at Tidaholm for attempted murder, and twenty-seven months in Mariefred for two counts of assault. Everything fit. And yet there was something he couldn't put his finger on, like the buyer was wearing a costume, or was acting and not doing it well enough.

  Piet Hoffmann watched him as he pulled a razor blade from the pocket of his black denim jacket and cut one of the capsules down the middle then leaned forward over the porcelain plate to smell the contents.

  That feeling again. It was still there.

  Maybe the guy sitting there, who was going to buy the lot, was just strung out. Or nervous. Or maybe that was precisely what had made Piet call Erik in the middle of the night, whatever it was that wasn't right, this intense feeling that he hadn't been able to express properly on the phone.

  It smelled of flowers, tulips.

  Hoffmann was sitting two chairs away but could still smell it clearly.

  The buyer had chopped up the yellowish, hard mass into something that resembled powder, scooped some up on the razor blade and put it in an empty glass. He drew twenty milliliters of water into a syringe and then squirted it into the glass and onto the powder which dissolved into a clear but viscous fluid. He nodded, satisfied. It had dissolved quickly. It had turned into a clear fluid. It was amphetamine and it was as strong as the seller had promised.

  "Tidaholm. Four years. That's right, isn't it?"

  It had all looked professional, but it still didn't feel right.

  Piet Hoffmann pulled the plate of capsules over in front of him, waiting for an answer.

  "Ninety-seven to two thousand. Only in for three. Got out early for good behavior."

  "Which section?" Hoffmann studied the buyer's face.

  No twitching, no blinking, no other sign of nerves.

  He spoke Swedish with a slight accent, maybe a neighboring country. Piet guessed Danish, possibly Norwegian. The buyer stood up suddenly, an irritated hand slightly too close to Piet's face. Everything still looked good, but it was too late. You noticed that sort of thing. He should have got pissed off much earlier, swiped that hand in front of his face right at the start: Don't you trust me, you bastard.

  "You've seen the judgment already, haven't you?"

  Now it was as if he was playing irritated.

  "I repeat, which section?"

  "C. Ninety-seven to ninety-nine."

  "C. Where?"

  He was already too late.

  "What the fuck are you getting at?"

  "Where?"

  "Just C, the sections don't have numbers at Tidaholm."

  He smiled.

  Piet Hoffmann smiled back.

  "Who else was there?"

  "That'll fucking do, okay?"

  The buyer was talking in a loud voice, so he would sound even more irritated, even more insulted.

  Hoffmann could hear something else.

  Something that sounded like uncertainty.

  "Do you want to get on with business or not I was under the impression that you'd asked me here because you wanted to sell me something."

  "Who else was there?"

  "Skane. Mio. Josef Libanon. Virtanen. The Count. How many names do you want?"

  "Who else?"

  The buyer was still standing up, and he took a step toward Hoffmann. "I'm going to stop this right now."

  He stood very close, the silver on his wrist and fingers flashing as he held his hand up in front of Piet Hoffmann's face.

  "No more. That's enough. It's up to you whether we carry on with this or not."

  "Josef Libanon was deported for life and then disappeared when he landed in Beirut three and a half months ago. Virtanen has been put away in a maximum security psychiatric unit for the past few years, unreachable and dribbling due to chronic psychosis. Mio is buried-"

  The two men in expensive suits with shaved heads had heard the raised voices and opened the kitchen door.

  Hoffmann waved his arm at them to indicate that they should stay put.

  "Mio is buried in a sandpit near Alstaket in Varmdo, two holes in the back of his head."

  There were now three people speaking a foreign language in the room. Piet Hoffmann caught the buyer looking around, looking for a way out.

  "Josef Libanon, Virtanen, Mio. I'll carry on: Skane, totally pickled. He won't remember whether he did time in Tidaholm or Kumla, or even Hall for that matter. And as for the Count… the wardens in Harnosand remand cut him down from where he was hanging with one of the sheets around his neck. Your five names. You chose them well. As none of them can confirm that you did time there."

  One of the men in dark suits, the one called Mariusz, stepped forward with a gun in his hand, a black Polish-made Radom, which looked new as he held it to the buyer's head. Piet Hoffmann utspokoj sir do diabla shouted at Mariusz; he shouted utspokoj sir do diabla several times, Mariusz had better utspokoj sir do diabla take it easy, no fucking guns to anyone's temple.

  Thumb on the decocking lever, Mariusz pulled it back, laughed, and lowered the gun. Hoffmann carried on talking in Swedish.

  "Do you know who Frank Stein is?"

  Hoffmann studied the buyer. His eyes should be irritated, insulted, even furious by now

  They were stressed and frightened and the silver-clad arm was trying to hide it.

  "You know that I do."

  "Good. Who is he?"

  "C. Tidaholm. A sixth name. Satisfied?"

  Piet Hoffmann picked his mobile phone up from the table.

  "Then maybe you'd like to speak to him? Since you did time together?"

  He held the telephone out in front of him, photographed the eyes that were watching him and then dialed a number that he'd learned by heart. They stared at each other in silence as he sent the picture and then dialed the number again.

  The two men in suits, Mariusz and Jerzy, were agitated. Z drugiej strony. Mariusz was going to move, he should be on the other side, to the right of the buyer. Blizej glowy. He should get even closer, keep the gun up, hold it to his right temple.

  "I apologize. My friends from Warsaw are a bit edgy."

  Someone answered.

  Piet Hoffmann spoke to whoever it was briefly, then showed the buyer the telephone display.

  A picture of a man with long dark hair in a ponytail and a face that no longer looked as young as it was.

  "Here. Frank Stein."

  Hoffmann held his anxious eyes until he looked away.

  'And you… you still claim that you know each other?"

  He closed the mobile phone and put it down on the table.

  "My two friends here don't speak Swedish. So I'm saying this to you, and you alone."

  A quick glance over at the two men who had moved even closer and were still discussing which side they should stand on to aim the muzzle of the gun at the buyer's head.

  "You and I have a problem. You're not who you say you are. I'll give you two minutes to explain to me who you actually are."

  "I don't understand what you're talking about."

  "Really? Don't talk crap. It's too late for that. Just tell me who the hell you are. And do it now Because unlike my friends here, I think that bodies only caus
e problems and they're no bloody good at paying up."

  They paused. Waiting for each other. Waiting for someone to speak louder than the monotonous smacking sound coming from the dry mouth of the man holding his Radom against the thin skin of the buyer's temple.

  "You've worked hard to come up with a credible background and you know that it crumbled just now when you underestimated who you were dealing with. This organization is built around officers from the Polish intelligence service and I can check out what the fuck I like about you. I could ask where you went to school, and you might answer what you've been told, but it would only take one phone call for me to find out whether it's true. I could ask what your mother's name is, if your dog has been vaccinated, what color your new coffee machine is. One single phone call and I'll know if it's true. I just did, made one phone call. And Frank Stein didn't know you. You never did time together at Tidaholm, because you were never there. Your sentence was faked so you could come here and pretend to buy freshly produced amphetamine. So I repeat, who are you? Explain. And then maybe, just maybe, I can persuade these two not to shoot."

  Mariusz was holding the handgrip of the gun hard. The smacking noises were more and more frequent, louder. He hadn't understood what Hoffmann and the buyer were saying, but he knew that something was about to go down. He screamed in Polish, "What the fuck are you talking about? Who the fuck is he?" then cocked his gun.

  "Okay."

  The buyer felt the wall of immediate aggression, tense and unpredictable.

  "I'm the police."

  Mariusz and Jerzy didn't understand the language.

  But a word like police doesn't need to be translated.

  They started shouting again, mainly Jerzy, he roared that Mariusz should damn well pull the trigger, while Piet Hoffmann raised both his arms and moved a step closer.

  "Back off!"

  "He's the police!"

  "I'm going to shoot!"

  "Not now!"

  Piet Hoffmann lurched toward them, but he wouldn't make it in time, and the man with the metal pressed against his head knew. He was shaking, his face contorted.

  "I'm a police officer, for fuck's sake, get him off me!"

  Jerzy lowered his voice and was b/ii4 almost calm when he instructed Mariusz to stand closer and to z drugiej strony swap sides again-it was better to shoot him through the other temple after all.

  He was still lying in bed. It was one of those mornings when your body doesn't want to wake up and the world feels a long way off. Erik Wilson breathed in the humidity.

  The south Georgia morning air that slipped in through the open window was still cool, but it would soon get warmer, even warmer than yesterday. He tried to follow the fan blades that played on the ceiling above his head, but gave up when he got tears in his eyes. He'd only slept for an hour at a time. They had talked together four times through the night and Paula had sounded more and more tense each time, a voice with an unfamiliar edge, stressed and desperate, on the verge of fleeing.

  He had heard familiar sounds from the great FLETC training grounds for a while now, so it must be past seven o'clock, early afternoon in Sweden-they would be done soon.

  He propped himself up, a pillow behind his back. From his bed he could look out through the window at the day that had long since dawned. The hard asphalt yard where the Secret Service had protected and saved a president yesterday was empty, but the silence after a pretend gunshot still reverberated. A few hundred meters away, in the next practice ground, a number of bright-eyed Border Patrol officers in military-like uniforms were running toward a white and green helicopter that had landed near them. Erik Wilson counted eight men clambering on board, who then disappeared into the sky.

  He got out of bed and had a cold shower, which nearly helped. The night became clearer, his dialogue with fear.

  I want you to get out.

  You know that I can't.

  You risk ten to fourteen years.

  If I don't complete this, Erik, if I back out now, if I don't give a damn good explanation… I risk more than that. My life.

  In each conversation and in many different ways, Erik Wilson had tried to explain that the delivery and sale could not be completed without his backing. He got nowhere, not with a buyer and the seller and mules already in place in Stockholm.

  It was too late to call it off.

  He had time for a quick breakfast: blueberry pancakes, bacon, that light white bread. A cup of coffee and The New York Times. He always sat at the same table in a quiet corner of the dining room as he preferred to keep the morning to himself.

  He'd never had anyone like Paula before, someone who was so sharp, alert, cool; he was working with five people at the moment and Paula was better than all the others put together, too good to be a criminal.

  Another cup of black coffee, then he had to rush back to the room: he was late.

  Outside the open window, the green-and-white helicopter whirred high above the ground and three Border Patrol uniforms were hanging from a cable below, about a meter apart, as they shimmied down into pretend dangerous territory near the Mexican border. Yet another practice, always a practice here. Erik Wilson had been at the military base on the east coast of the United States for a week now; two weeks left of this training session for European policemen on informers, infiltration, and witness protection programs.

  He closed the window as the cleaners didn't like them being open-something about the new air conditioning in the officers' accommodation, that it would stop working if everyone aired their rooms whenever they pleased. He changed his shirt, looking at the tall and fairish middle-aged man in the mirror who should by now have been making his way toward a day indoors in a classroom with his fellow students and policemen from four American states.

  He stood still. Three minutes past eight. They should be done now. Paula's mobile phone was the extreme right of the five on the desk and just like all the others only had one number stored.

  Erik Wilson didn't even have time to ask.

  "It's a total fucking mess."

  Sven Sundkvist had never learned to like the long, dark, and, at times, damp corridors of the homicide unit. He had worked with Stockholm City Police all his adult life, and from his office at one end of the unit, not far from the pigeonholes and vending machines, had investigated every category of crime in the penal code. This morning, as he made his way through the dark and damp, he stopped suddenly as he passed the open door to his boss's office.

  "Ewert?"

  A large, rather bulky man was crawling along one of the walls. Sven knocked gingerly on the doorframe.

  "Ewert?"

  Ewert Grens didn't hear him. He continued to crawl in front of a couple of large brown cardboard boxes and Sven repressed that sinking feeling. He had once before seen the obstreperous detective superintendent sit on another floor in the police headquarters. Eighteen months ago. Grens had sat on the floor in the basement with a pile of papers from an old case in his lap and slowly repeated two sentences over and over. She's dead. I killed her. A twenty-seven-year-old preliminary investigation into an assault on a constable, a young policewoman who had been seriously injured and would never again be able to live outside a nursing home. When he read the report later, Sven Sundkvist had come across her name in several places. Anni Grens. He had had no idea that they were married.

  "Ewert, what on earth are you doing?"

  He was packing something into the large brown cardboard boxes. That much was plain to see. But not what. Sven Sundkvist knocked again. The room was completely silent, and yet Ewert Grens still didn't hear him.

  It had been a difficult period.

  Like all others who grieve, Ewert's first reaction had been denial-it hasn't happened-and then anger-why have they done this to me? But he hadn't moved on to the next phase, he just carried on being angry, his way of dealing with most things. Ewert's grieving process had probably not started until very recently, a few weeks ago-he was no longer as irascible, but more reserved,
more pensive, he talked less and presumably thought more.

  Sven went into the room. Ewert heard him, but didn't turn around, sighing loudly instead as he often did when he was irritated. Something was bothering him. It wasn't Sven, something had been bothering him since he had gone to the nursing home, which usually gave him peace. Susann, the medical student who had been there for so long and looked after Anni so well and who had now become a junior doctor, her comments, her disgust, you can't regulate your grief; well it was bloody easy enough for a little girl to run around Udine, spreading her twenty-five-year-old wisdom, what you're frightened of has already happened. What the hell did she know about loneliness?

  He had driven away from the nursing home faster than he'd intended, straight to the police headquarters, and, without knowing why, gone down to the stores to get three cardboard boxes and carried them to the office that he'd had for as long as he could remember. He had stood for a while in front of the shelf behind his desk and the only things that meant anything to him: the cassettes of Siw Malmkvist songs that he had recorded and mixed himself, the early record sleeves from the sixties that still had strong colors, the photograph of Siwan that he had taken one evening in Kristianstads Folkets Park; everything that belonged to a time when all was good.

  He had started to pack it all away, wrapped in newspaper, and then stacked one box on top of the next.

  "She doesn't exist anymore."

  Ewert Grens sat on the floor and stared at the brown cardboard. "Do you hear me, Sven? She will never sing in this room again." Denial, anger, grief.

  Sven Sundkvist was standing directly behind his boss, looking down at his balding pate and seeing images from all the times he had waited while Ewert slowly rocked back and forth alone in his room in the dismal light-early mornings and late evenings and Siw Malmkvist's voice, standing dancing with someone who wasn't there, holding her tight in his arms. Sven realized that he would miss the irritating music, the lyrics that had been forced on him until he knew them by heart, an intrinsic part of all the years he had worked with Ewert Grens.

  He would miss the picture.