Three Seconds

by Anders Roslund

  "How?"

  "With all due respect, you know that I'm capable, that I'll take responsibility for it, and that should be enough."

  "Hoffmann, how?"

  Piet Hoffmann smiled-it felt unnatural-for the first time since last night.

  "Tulips and poetry."

  The door wasn't properly shut.

  He distinctly heard footsteps out in the corridor, and they were hurrying toward him.

  He didn't want any visitors right now He wasn't going to share this with anyone.

  Erik Wilson got up from his chair and checked the door handle. It was already closed. He had imagined it, the steps scraping on the floor, getting louder and louder, were not there. He was more anxious, more stressed than he realized.

  Two meetings in a matter of hours.

  The longer one at number five with Paula's version of the murder in Västmannagatan and his report from the meeting in Warsaw, and the considerably shorter one at number four when a plastic bag containing a bloody shirt changed hands.

  Wilson looked over at the locked cupboard by the wall on the other side of the room.

  It was in there. A murderer's battledress.

  It wouldn't stay there much longer.

  The steps out in the corridor had disappeared, as had the ones in his head. He looked at the computer screen.

  Name Piet Hoffmann

  Personal ID number 721018-002.0 Number of hits 75

  His most important tool over the past nine years for developing the best infiltrator he'd ever heard of.

  ASPEN, the criminal intelligence database.

  He had started as soon as Piet was released from Österåker, his first day of freedom and first day as a newly recruited infiltrator. Erik Wilson had himself met him at the gate, driven him the fifty kilometers to Stockholm in his own car and when he had dropped him off, he carried on straight to the police headquarters and recorded the first observation of 721018-0010 in ASPEN, intelligence that from that moment would be available to every police officer who logged on to find out more about Piet Hoffmann. A concise, but accurate account of how, on his release, the suspect was met at the gates of Österåker by a car and two previous convicts and known criminals with confirmed links to the Yugoslavian mafia.

  Over the years he had successively made him more dangerous observed near the property that was raided in connection with suspected arms dealing and more violent observed fifteen minutes before the murder in Ostling in the company of the suspect, Markovi? and more ruthless. Wilson had varied his formulations and the degree of misinformation, and with each new observation had added to the myth of Piet Hoffmann's potency until, according to a database on a computer, he was one of the most dangerous criminals in Sweden.

  He listened again. More footsteps out in the corridor. The sound got clearer, louder, until they passed his door and slowly disappeared again.

  He tilted the screen up.

  KNOWN.

  In two weeks' time, Piet would be given a long prison sentence and then take over enough power to control the drug supply, the kind of force that was treated with respect inside.

  DANGEROUS.

  Which was why Erik Wilson now wrote this in capital letters.

  ARMED.

  The next colleague to check Piet Hoffmann in the database would now be presented with a special page and a special code that was only used for a handful of criminals.

  KNOWN DANGEROUS ARMED

  Any patrol with access to this truth, which was their own intelligence after all, would know him to be extremely dangerous and confront him as such, and this reputation would then accompany him in the secure transport that would transfer him from custody to prison.

  He held the mobile phone to his ear. According to the automatic voice that spoke every ten seconds, it was exactly half past twelve when the dark door with HOLM on the letter box opened from inside and Piet Hoffmann walked into a plastic-sheeted flat on the second floor. The parquet floor was uneven and creaked, probably due to water damage.

  Number two.

  Högalidsgatan 38 and Heleneborgsgaran 9.

  Erik Wilson had made some instant coffee, as he usually did, and as normal, Hoffmann did not drink it. A soft sofa in what must have been the TV room, transparent plastic sheeting to protect the fabric during the two-month renovation that rustled when they moved and after a while clung to the film of sweat on his back.

  "We'll use this."

  Piet Hoffmann knew that they didn't have much time.

  He could see it in Erik's eyes, for the first time, as they darted around the room, restless and unfocused. The man who had been his contact for nine years and who had never laughed or cried was stressed, and therefore doing what stressed people often do, trying to hide it, thus making it all the more obvious.

  Hoffmann opened a small tin that once had been manufactured and sold for storing tea leaves, but which now contained the yellow, cohesive substance smelling strongly of tulips.

  "Blossom."

  Erik Wilson carefully scraped off a piece with the plastic knife that Hoffmann gave him, put it to his tongue, felt it burning, and knew he would get a blister there.

  "Bloody strong. Two parts grape sugar?"

  "Yep."

  "How much?"

  "Three kilos."

  "Enough for a fast-track trial and a long sentence in a high security prison."

  Piet Hoffmann pressed down the lid and put the tin back in his inner pocket. The other eighty-one kilos were still in the fan heater in the loft of the turn-of-the-century building on Vasagatan. He would later describe to Wilson where and how to find it. But not yet. It still had to be cut one more time, his own share, which he sometimes did, sold it on.

  "I'm going to need three days to knock out all other business. Wojtek will get the reports they need to continue. Then we'll do what we set out to do. Eliminate."

  Erik Wilson should have felt calmer, happier, curious. His best infiltrator was on his way to prison, exactly where both the Swedish police and Wojtek had planned for him to be, and he would start and end a mafia branch expansion. He wasn't used to the stress and he saw that Piet had clocked it.

  "I'm trying to solve Västmannagatan in the usual way. A report to the head of homicide and the secret locker. But… it's not enough this time. Murder, Piet! We'll have to take it higher than police headquarters. We have to go to Rosenbad. And you're going to come too."

  "You know that's not possible."

  "You don't have any choice."

  "Erik, for fuck's sake, I can't just stroll in through the main entrance of the Government Offices, together with the police and politicians!"

  "I'll collect you from 2B."

  Piet Hoffmann sat on the sofa that was protected with plastic sheeting that was sticking to his back and slowly shook his head.

  "If anyone sees me… I'm dead."

  "In the same way that you'll be dead the minute anyone in prison discovers who you are. Only, you'll be banged up then. You need the authorities. To get out. To survive."

  He left the instant coffee in the second floor flat and instead drank a dark roast coffee with warm milk in a café on the corner of Palsundsgatan, and tried to concentrate on the sound of Italian crooners and a table of giggling girls who had swapped their school lunches for a plate of cinnamon buns, and two people at a table at the back who were trying to look like poets and talking too loudly about writing, but only succeeded in being an imitation of others who talked too loud.

  Erik was right. Always on your own. He had no choice. Trust no one but yourself

  He put down his empty coffee cup and walked over Vasterbron accompanied by a cautious sun, paused quietly for a while by the railings, twenty-seven meters above the water, and wondered how it would feel to jump, the seconds that were all and nothing before your body slammed into the transparent surface. He phoned home and spoke to Zofia from the middle of Norr Malarstrand and, yet another lie, told her that her work was just as important as his but that he couldn't c
ome home and hold the fort until later on tonight. He heard her raise her voice and then put the phone down when he couldn't bear to lie anymore.

  The asphalt became harder the closer to the heart of the city he came.

  When he walked into a multi-story garage opposite an expensive department store, the pavement on Regeringsgatan was empty despite the fact it was only early afternoon. He climbed the narrow stairs up to the first floor, moved between the parked cars in section B until he spotted the black minivan with darkened windows in the far corner by the concrete wall. He went over and tried the handle on one of the back doors. It was unlocked. He opened the door to the back seat of the abandoned car, then looked at his watch. He would have to wait ten more minutes.

  Zofia had not stopped talking when he put the phone down. She had continued to talk to him in his head as he walked along the water at Norr Malarstrand and past the ugly buildings at Tegelbacken, and was there beside him with her frustration on the seat in the empty car. She wasn't to know that he was the sort who lied.

  He shivered.

  It was always cold in these sterile garages, but this particular chill came from within, a chill that neither clothes nor movement could change. There is nothing that chills like self-contempt.

  The door to the driver's seat opened.

  He checked his watch. Ten minutes exactly.

  Erik usually waited somewhere on the floor above, where you could see every car in Section B if you bent down, and anyone who might be too close. He didn't turn around when he got in, said nothing, just started the minivan and drove the short distance from Hamngatan to Mynttorget, and in through the gate to the small stone yard and the building where the MPs had their offices. They got out and were no sooner through the door than a security guard came to meet them and asked them to follow him down two flights of stairs and along a corridor under the Riksdag building that came out in Rosenbad; it only took a few minutes to walk along the corridor between the two centers of political power in Sweden, and it was the only way to get into the Government Offices without being seen.

  He checked the door, only a few meters from the main security office by the official entrance to Rosenbad. He held the door handle until he was certain that it was locked.

  It was hard to move.

  The sink merged into the toilet seat and the whitewashed walls pressed against him.

  The thin oblong digital recorder was in his trouser pocket, with the cigar case and plastic tube from the drug store. He pushed in a button on the front, it flashed green. The battery was fully charged. He held it in front of his mouth and whispered: Government Offices, Tuesday the tenth of May and was careful not to turn it off as he slipped it into the cigar case which he would cover in lubricant until it glistened.

  Paper towels around the base of the toilet. The microphone lead slipped through the small hole in the top of the cigar case.

  He had done this many times before; fifty grams of amphetamine or a digital recorder, a prison or the Government Offices, the only way to safely transport something that you didn't want to be found.

  He undid his trousers and sat down, the cigar case between his thumb and forefinger. He leaned forward and pushed it slowly up his anus, short thrusts until he felt it slip in a few centimeters, only then to slide out again and land on the paper towels.

  Another attempt.

  He pushed again, short thrusts, centimeter by centimeter, until it disappeared.

  The microphone lead was long enough for him to pull it from his anus, along his crotch to his groin, where he fixed it to his skin with a small piece of tape.

  The security guard behind the glass window was wearing a gray-and-red uniform, an older man with almost white hair and a shy smile. Piet Hoffmann stared at him for a bit too long, then looked away when he realized it.

  He reminded him of his father. He would have looked just like that.

  "Your colleague has already gone in."

  "Toilet, had to go."

  "Sometimes you just have to. State secretary for the Ministry of Justice, is that right?"

  Piet Hoffmann nodded and wrote his name in the visitors' book just under Erik Wilson, while the white-haired man checked his ID. "Hoffmann, is that German?"

  "From Konigsberg. Kaliningrad. But a long time ago. My parents." "What do you speak then? Russian?"

  "When you're born in Sweden, you speak Swedish."

  He smiled at the man who for a moment could have been his father. "And a fair bit of Polish."

  He had spotted the camera as soon as they had arrived, right at the top of the glass box; he looked straight at it as he passed, stopped for a couple of seconds, his visit registered yet again.

  It took seven minutes to walk behind a third security guard from the entrance and along a corridor on the second floor. It came over him so suddenly. He wasn't prepared. The fear. He was standing in the elevator when it hit him, felled him, made him shake. He had never felt fear like it before, fear that spilled over into panic, and then angst, and when he still couldn't breathe, death.

  He was frightened of a man lying on the floor with three gaping wounds in his head and a breakthrough in a conference room in Warsaw and nights in a small cell and a death sentence that would become even more critical inside those walls, and Zofia's cold voice and the children's feverish skin and of no longer being able to tell the difference between the truth and lies.

  He sat down on the floor of the elevator, exhausted, and avoided the guard's eyes until his legs stopped shaking so much and he dared to walk gingerly to the door that was standing half open at the end of a rather nice corridor.

  One more time.

  Piet Hoffmann stopped a couple of meters from the door, emptied himself as he always did of all thoughts, all feelings, pushed them aside and kicked them down and then he had put on his armor-that thick, horrible layer, his bloody shield, he was good at it, at not letting himself feel anything-one more time, one more bloody time.

  He knocked on the door frame and waited until the feet that he heard scraping the floor stood in front of him. A policeman in civvies. He recognized him. They had met on two occasions. Erik's boss; the one called Göransson.

  "Do you have anything that should be left out here?"

  Piet Hoffmann emptied his inner pocket and trouser pockets of two mobile phones, a stiletto, folding scissors and put it all in an empty glass fruit bowl on the table opposite the door.

  "Hold out your arms and spread your legs."

  Hoffmann nodded and turned his back to the man who was tall and thin with an ingratiating smile.

  "Apologies. You know that we have to do this."

  The long, slim fingers felt over his clothes, against his neck, back, chest. When they pressed against his backside and balls, they touched the thin microphone lead twice without feeling anything. It slipped down a bit and Piet Hoffmann held his breath until it got stuck, about halfway down his thigh. It felt like it was going to stay there.

  Big windows with deep white sills and a view over the still waters of Norrström and Riddarfjärden. The room smelled of fresh coffee and detergent and there were six chairs around the meeting table. He was last, only two places left, he moved toward one of them. They studied him without a word. He passed behind their backs and made sure to feel the fabric of his trousers with a casual hand: the microphone was still there, but facing in the wrong direction. He adjusted it as he pulled out a chair and sat down.

  He recognized all four people, but had met only two of them before, Göransson and Erik.

  The state secretary was sitting closest to him and she pointed to a document in front of her, then got up and held out her hand.

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

  She had a firm handshake. She was like the others, the ones who press too hard and think that it's the same as power.

  "Paula."

  Piet Hoffmann kept hold of her hand.

  "That's my name, in here."
/>   The uncomfortable silence dragged out and while he waited for someone to start speaking, he looked down at the papers that the state secretary had referred to.

  He recognized Erik's way of expressing himself.

  Västmannagatan 79. The secret report.

  A copy of the same document lay in front of each of them. They were already part of the chain of events.

  "This is the first time that Paula and I have met like this."

  Erik Wilson was careful to look everyone straight in the eye when he spoke.

  "With other people. In a room that we haven't secured. Where we don't have control."

  He held up the report, the detailed description of a murder witnessed by one of the people at a meeting table in the Government Offices.

  "An unprecedented meeting. And I hope that we will leave having made an unprecedented decision."

  Ewert Grens had been lying on the office floor when Sven Sundkvist had knocked on his door a couple of minutes earlier and walked in. Sven hadn't said anything, hadn't asked any questions, he just sat down on the corduroy sofa and waited, like he always did.

  "It's better here."

  "Here?"

  "On the floor. The sofa is starting to get too soft."

  He had slept there for a second night. His stiff leg didn't ache at all and he had more or less gotten used to the cars accelerating all the way up the steep slope on Hantverkargatan.

  "I want to report on Västmannagatan."

  "Anything new?"

  "Not much."

  Ewert Grens lay on the floor and peered at the ceiling. There were some large cracks near the lamp, which he had never paid attention to before. Whether they were new or whether the music had always just been in the way.

  He sighed.

  He had investigated murders all his adult life. Västmannagatan 79, a feeling somewhere in his chest-there was something that didn't fit. They had identified the body, the flat owner, even the remains of amphetamine and bile from the mule. They had blood stains and the angle from which the gun was fired. They had a witness with a Swedish voice who chose to raise the alarm and a Polish security firm that meant the Eastern European mafia.