Three Seconds (10 page)

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 Zubr
ówka 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 what 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.