Three Seconds (24 page)

    He stopped the car in a deserted lot and listened to the surf by the cliffs where the sea flowed into Saltsjon. A few hours earlier, customers would have sat here, holding hands while they talked or yearned or just drank their café lattes in the kind of silence that is shared. A forgotten coffee cup on a bench, a couple of plastic trays with crumpled napkins on another. He sat down by the building with its closed wooden shutters and a table chained to a lump of gray concrete. Piet Hoffmann looked out over the city where he had lived for the greater part of his life, but he still felt like a stranger, someone who was just visiting for a while and would soon move on, wherever it was he was actually going.

    He heard footsteps.

    Somewhere in the blackness behind him.

    At first faint and far away, feet against a hard surface, then closer and clearer, gravel that loudly proclaimed how much the person walking on it was trying not to be heard.

    "Pier."

    "Lorentz."

    A dark, solid man of his own age.

    They embraced each other as usual.

    "How much?"

    The dark, solid man sat down in front of him, elbows heavy on the table which dipped slightly. They had known each other for exactly ten years. One of the few people he trusted.

    "Ten kilos."

    They had done time together at Österåker. Same unit, neighboring cells. Two men who became close in a way that they would never have done if they'd met anywhere else but there, cooped up and without much choice, they had become best friends, without realising it at the time.

    "Strength?"

    "Thirty?"

    "Factory?"

    "Siedlce."

    "Blossom. That's good. It's what they want. And I don't need to bullshit about the quality. But personally, I can't stand the smell."

    Lorentz was the only name he would never give to Erik. He liked him. He needed him. Lorentz sold on what Piet had cut, to earn some money for himself.

    "But thirty percent… too strong for Plattan and Centralen. No one there should have anything stronger than fifteen, otherwise there's just trouble. This- I'll sell it in the clubs, the kids want it strong and have the money to pay."

    Erik had realized that there was someone whose name he was not going to get. And why. So Piet could continue to earn money from his own business and Erik and his colleagues turned a blind eye and sometimes even facilitated it, in exchange for continued infiltration.

    "Ten kilos of thirty percent gear is a fuck of a lot. I'll take it, obviously. Like I always do when you ask. But-and now I'm talking to you as a friend, Piet-are you sure that you've got everything under control if anyone starts to ask questions?"

    They looked at each other. The supposed question could be interpreted as something else. Distrust. Provocation. It wasn't. Lorentz meant exactly what he said and Pier knew that he was asking because he was concerned. Before, what he'd done was to cut a little more of the supplies that he got from somewhere to sell on somewhere else, for his own purposes. But this time he needed big money and for other reasons, so some of the vacuum-packed tins of uncut gear had been moved from the fan heater shaft to an IKEA bag only a few hours after Henryk's visit.

    "I've got everything under control. And if I ever have to use the money from this lot one day, it'll be because it's too late to answer those questions."

    Lorentz didn't ask anymore.

    He had come to understand that everyone had their reasons and made their choices and if they didn't want to talk about it, it was pointless trying. "I'll deduct fifty thousand for the explosives. You gave me such damned short notice, Piet, that it cost more than usual."

    One hundred kronor per gram. A million kronor for ten kilos. Nine hundred fifty thousand in cash, the rest in explosives.

    "You've got everything?"

    "Pentyl."

    "Not good enough."

    "And nitroglycerine. High detonation velocity. Packed in plastic pockets."

    "That's what I want?"

    "You'll get the detonator and fuse thrown in."

    "If you insist."

    "It's going to be a big fucking bang."

    "Good."

    "You're a law unto yourself, Piet."

    The two cars were parked in the dark with open trunks when a blue IKEA bag with ten one-kilo tins of thirty percent amphetamine and a brown briefcase with 950,000 kronor in notes and two highly explosive packages swapped places. Now he had to move fast. He drove back down the narrow winding road from Danviksberget, opened the barrier with the key and carried on toward Enskede and the house that he constantly longed for.

    It was too late by the rime he realized he had driven over it. It was so dark in the driveway and the red plastic fire engine was impossible to see. Piet Hoffmann rolled forward about half a meter, and then got down on his hands and knees and felt around by the right front wheel until he found Rasmus's favorite car. It wasn't in the best condition, but if he used a red felt pen on the door to make it look like enamel and bent the white ladder that was supposed to be fixed to the middle of the roof back in shape, then maybe it could be returned to service in the sandpit or the floor upstairs within a few days.

    They were in there, asleep. The other plastic fire engines. Under the beds, sometimes even in the beds of the two boys he was going to hug so hard in a few hours' time.

    He opened the trunk and then the brown briefcase that was right at the back behind the spare wheel and hesitated before taking out two small packages and leaving the 950,000 kronor in notes untouched.

    Slowly through the shadows in the garden.

    He didn't turn on any lights until he was in the kitchen and had shut the door; he didn't want to wake Zofia with any irritating, unnecessary light, nor did he want to be caught out by naked feet on their way to the toilet or the fridge. He sat down at the table that had been wiped so well, the marks from the cloth still showing. In a few hours, they would eat breakfast here together, sticky, messy, and noisy.

    The packages were lying in the middle of the table. He hadn't checked them, he never did. When they were from Lorentz, that was enough. He opened the first one, which looked like a thin pencil case, and took out a long cord. At least, that was what it seemed to be, like eighteen meters of thin, coiled cord. But for anyone who knew anything about explosives, it was something completely different. A pentyl fuse and the difference between life and death. He unwound it, felt it, then cut it in the middle and put back the two nine-meter lengths. The other package was square, a plastic sleeve with twenty-four small pockets, a bit like the ones that his dad had had in the green album where he kept his coins from the time he had called Konigsberg his home, used coins that were of no particular value. Once, when his body was screaming for another fix, Pier had tried to sell them and had realized that the brown bits of metal that he had never been interested in were very worn and of no value to collectors other than his father, who saw a value that was connected to his memories from times gone by. He gingerly touched each little pocket, the transparent fluid inside, a total of four centiliters of nitroglycerine divided into twenty-four flat plastic pockets.

    Someone let out a whimper.

    Piet Hoffmann opened the door.

    The same whimper again, then silence.

    He started to go up the stairs. Rasmus was having a nightmare, but this time it disappeared without need for comfort.

    So he went down instead, to the cellar and his personal gun cabinet that stood in one of the storerooms. He opened it and there they were, several on one shelf. He took one of them and went upstairs again.

    The world's smallest revolver, SwissMiniGun, no bigger than a car key.

    He had bought them direct from the factory in La Chaux-de-Fonds last spring, six-millimeter bullets in the miniature revolver's cylinder, each one powerful enough to kill. He rested the weapon on his palm and weighed it as he swung his arm backward and forward across the table-only a few grams were needed to end a life.

    He closed the kitchen door for a second time and started to saw both ends of the trigger guard with a hacksaw blade-the metal band that ran around and protected the trigger was too small, he couldn't get his index finger in and he was removing it so he could squeeze the trigger and shoot-a couple of minutes was all that was needed for it to fall to the floor.

    He then held the tiny gun with only two fingers, raised it and aimed at the dishwasher, pretending to fire.

    A deadly weapon no longer than a toothpick, but still too big.

    So he was going to divide it up into even smaller components with the minute screwdriver that reminded him of his granny in Kaliningrad, where she kept it in a drawer under her sewing machine that stood in the bedroom and seemed like a huge bit of furniture to a seven-year-old. First, with great care, he undid the screw on one side of the wooden butt, put it down on the white surface of the worktop so that he could see it-he mustn't lose it. The next screw was on the other side of the butt and closer to the hammer. Then with the point of the screwdriver against the pin in the middle of the revolver, he tapped it lightly a couple of times until it fell out and the toothpick-sized gun broke up into six separate parts: the two butt sides, the revolver frame with the barrel and cylinder pivot and trigger, the cylinder with six bullets, the barrel protector and a part of the frame that didn't have a name. He put each piece in a plastic bag and carried them out with eighteen meters of pentyl fuse and four centilitres of thinly packaged nitroglycerine, all of which was then placed on top of 950,000 kronor in a brown bag behind the spare tire in the trunk of the car.

     Piet Hoffmann had sat on one of the kitchen chairs and watched the light force back the night. He had been waiting for her for hours, and now he heard her heavy tread on the wooden stairs, foot flat down on the surface in the way that she always did when she hadn't had enough sleep. He often listened to people's steps-they clearly reflected what was going on inside and it was always easier to work out how someone was feeling by closing his eyes when he or she approached.

    "Good morning."

    She hadn't seen him and she jumped when he spoke.

    "Hi."

    The coffee was already made, so he poured in just the amount of milk she liked in the morning. He carried the cup over to the beautiful and tousled and sleepy woman in a dressing gown, and she took it. Such tired eyes, she had been furious for half the night and then slept in a bed with a feverish child for the other half.

    "You haven't slept at all."

    She wasn't irritated, her voice didn't sound it, she was just tired. "Just worked out that way."

    He put some bread, butter, and cheese on the table.

    "Their temperatures?"

    "They've gone down. For the moment. A few more days at home, maybe just two."

    More footsteps, much lighter, feet that were bright from the moment they left the bed and touched the floor. Hugo was oldest but still woke up first. Piet went over to him, picked him up, and kissed and squeezed his soft cheeks.

    "You're prickly."

    "I haven't shaved yet."

    "You're more prickly than normal."

    Bowls, spoons, glasses. They all sat down, Rasmus's chair still empty, but they would leave him to sleep as long as he needed to.

    "I'll take them today."

    She had expected him to say that. But it was hard. Because it wasn't true.

    "The whole day."

    The set table. Not so long ago, nitroglycerine had lain there beside some pentyl fuse and a loaded gun. Now it was laden with porridge and yogurt and crispbread. The cornflakes crunched noisily and some orange juice was spilled on the floor. They ate their breakfast as they usually did until Hugo banged his spoon down on the table.

    "Why are you angry with each other?"

    Piet exchanged glances with Zofia.

    "We're not angry."

    He had turned to his oldest son as he spoke and instantly realized that this five-year-old was not going to be satisfied with a platitude and therefore decided to hold his challenging eyes.

    "Why are you lying? I can tell. You
are
angry."

    Piet and Zofia looked at each other again and then she decided to answer.

    "We
were
angry. But we're not anymore."

    Piet Hoffmann looked at his son with gratitude and felt his shoulders dropping. He had been so tense, longing to hear those words, but he hadn't dared ask the question himself.

    "Good. No one's angry. Then I want more bread and more cornflakes."

    His five-year-old hands poured more cereal on what was already in his bowl and put some cheese on another slice of bread which then lay next to the first one that hadn't even been started yet. His parents chose not to say anything. This morning he was allowed to do as he pleased. He was wiser than they were right now