Three Seconds (8 page)

    "I can't eat with you. I have to go to Warsaw this evening. An emergency meeting. But I'll be home again tomorrow night. Okay?"

    She shrugged.

    "No, not really. I was looking forward to having the evening together. But Okay."

    "I've made supper. It's on the table. I've told the boys food is ready so they're on their way. Or at least, they should be."

    He kissed her quickly on the lips.

    "One more. You know."

    One more. Always an even number. His hand on her cheek, two more kisses.

    "Now it's three. So one more."

    He kissed her again. They smiled at each other. He picked up his bag and walked over to the car, looked back at the hedge and the hole at the bottom in the middle where the children would appear.

    No sign of them. He wasn't surprised.

    He smiled again and started the engine.

     Ewert Grens looked at the mat that disappeared under the passenger seat and Sven Sundkvist. He had pushed the two cassettes in there. Two more were lurking in the glove compartment. He would take them with him sometime, pack them away, forget them.

    The two young but slightly less pale uniformed police were still standing on the pavement between the hood of the car and the entrance to Västmannagatan 79. Hermansson had started to reverse when one of them came over and knocked on the window, and Sven rolled it down.

    "What do you think?"

    Ewert Grens leaned forward from the back seat.

    "You were right. It was an execution."

    It was late afternoon at Kronoberg, and finding a parking place on Bergsgatan wasn't easy. Hermansson drove round the tired police headquarters three times before parking on Kungsholmsgatan, by the entrance to Norma1m Police and the County Criminal Police, despite protests from Ewert Grens. Grens nodded vaguely at the security guard and walked in through the entrance he hadn't used for years; he had long since learned to appreciate routine and had stuck to his rigidly in order not to fall apart. One corridor and a narrow staircase and then they came out into the County Communication Center, the heart of the vast building. In a room the size of a small football field, a police officer or a staff employee sat at every second computer, watching the three small screens in front of them and the considerably larger ones that covered the walls from floor to ceiling, ready to deal with the four hundred or so emergency calls that came in every day.

    Holding a cup of coffee each, they sat down next to a woman in her fifties, one of the civvies, and the sort of woman who put her hand on the arm of the person she was talking to.

    "At what time?"

    "Twelve thirty-seven, and a minute or so earlier."

    The woman who still had her hand on Ewert's arm typed in 12:36:00, and then the silence that felt like eternity, as is often the case when several people sit together listening to nothing.

Twelve thirty-six twenty.

    An automatic voice, the same one that was used in the rest of the police world, followed by the voice of a real woman who was crying as she reported a domestic at an address in Mariatorget.

Twenty thirty-seven ten.

    A child screaming about a dad who'd fallen down the stairs and there was alot of blood coming from his cheek and hair.

Twelve thirty-seven fifty.

    A scraping sound.

    Obviously somewhere indoors. Possibly a mobile phone.

    Unknown number on the screen.

    "Pay-as-you-go card."

    The female operator had removed her hand from Ewert Grens, so he didn't answer in order to avoid anymore physical contact. It was years since anyone had touched him and he didn't know how to relax anymore.

"Emergency services."

    The scraping sound again. Then a buzzing interference. And a man's voice that was tense, stressed, but he spoke in a whisper that was trying to sound calm.

"A dead man. Vdstmannagatan 79."

    Swedish. No accent. He said something more, but the buzzing sound made it difficult to hear the last sentence.

    "I want to listen to it again."

    The operator slid the cursor back along the time code that stretched across one of the computer screens like a black worm.

A dead man. Västmannagatan 79. Fourth floor."

    That was it. The buzzing disappeared and the call was cut. The monotone electronic voice said
twelve thirty-eight thirty
and a distressed old man reported a robbery in a newsagent on Karlavagen. Ewert Grens thanked her for her help.

    They walked together through the endless corridors of the police headquarters to the homicide unit. Sven Sundkvist slowed down to talk to his boss who limped more with each passing year, but refused to use a stick.

    "The flat, Ewert. According to the owner, it was rented out a couple of years back to a Pole. I've asked Jens Klövje at Interpol to find him."

    "A mule. A body. A Pole."

    Ewert Grens stopped by the stairs that would take them up two stories. He looked at his colleagues.

    "So, drugs, violence, Eastern Europe."

    They looked at him, but he didn't say anymore and they didn't ask. They went their separate ways at the coffee machine, and with a cup in each hand he managed to open the door to his office. Out of habit he went to the bookshelf behind his desk, lifted his arm and then suddenly stopped. It was empty. Straight lines of dust, ugly squares of varying sizes: the cassette player had stood there, and all his cassettes, and there, two identical squares, the loudspeakers.

    Ewert Grens ran his fingers through the traces of a lifetime.

    The music he had packed away that belonged to another era would never again play in this room. He felt like he'd been tricked, tried to get used to a silence that had never existed here before.

    He didn't like it. It was so damn loud.

    He sat down on the chair.
A mule, a body, a Pole.
He had just seen a man with three big holes in his head.
So, drugs, violence, Eastern Europe.
He had worked for thirty-Five years in the city police force and seen crime rise steadily, get worse.
In other words, organized crime.
Not surprising that he sometimes chose to live in the past.
That's to say, mafia.
When he started out as a young policeman who had thought he could make a difference, the mafia had been something far away in southern Italy, in American cities. Today, executions like the one he had just seen, the brutality, it was all so dirty-colleagues in every district could only stand by and watch while money was laundered from all kinds of organized crime: drugs, gun running, trafficking. Every year, new players made a violent debut in police investigations, and in recent months he had been introduced to the Mexican and Egyptian mafias. This was another he had not come across before, the Polish mafia, but it had the same ingredients: drugs, money, death. They investigated a bit here and a bit there, but would never catch up; every day the police risked their lives and sanity and every day they lost a little more control.

    Ewert Grens sat at his desk for a long time, looking at the brown cardboard boxes.

    He missed the sound.

    Of Siwan. Of Anni.

    Of a time when everything was far simpler.

    The arrivals hall at Frédéric Chopin airport in Warsaw was always overcrowded. The number of departures and arrivals had increased steadily in line with the airport's expansion and he had lost his luggage twice in the past year in a chaos of bewildered travelers and large forklift trucks that drove too fast and too dose.

    Piet Hoffmann walked past the luggage carousel with his small overnight bag already in hand and went out into a city that was larger than Stockholm, which he had left two hours earlier. The dark leather in the taxi smelled of cigarettes and for a moment, as he looked out at the city that had changed beyond recognition, he was a child again, with his mom and dad on either side on the narrow back sear, on their way to visit Granny. He called Henryk at Wojtek and confirmed that the plane had landed and he would meet them at the time and place agreed. He was just about to hang up when Henryk told him that two other people would be there. Zbigniew Boruc and Grzegorz Krzynówek. deputy CEO and the Roof. Piet Hoffmann had visited Wojtek International's head office for meetings with Henryk every month for the past three years. Hoffmann had gradually won his trust and Henryk had been a helping hand from behind as Piet worked his way up the organization. Henryk was one of the many people who trusted him and who, without knowing it, was trusting a lie. The deputy CEO, however, Hoffmann had met only once before. He was a military man, and one of the many former secret police who had started and run the mother company from a forbidding building in the center of Warsaw. An army major with a straight back who still moved in the manner of an intelligence officer despite the applied veneer of a businessman-they were careful to call themselves that: businessmen. A meeting with the deputy CEO and the Roof, he didn't get it. He leaned back in the smoked leather car seat and felt something in his chest that might be fear.

    The taxi sped through the light evening traffic, past the big parks, and as they approached the part of town called Mokoraw, elegant embassies appeared behind the dirty window. He tapped the driver on the shoulder and asked him to stop, he still had two phone calls to make.

    "It'll cost you more."

    "Just stop, please."

    "It'll be twenty zloty more. The price you got was without stops." "Just stop the car, for Christ's sake!"

    He had leaned forward and was talking straight into the driver's ear, his unshaven cheek looking shiny and soft as the car pulled off Jana Sobieskiego and parked between a newspaper stand and a pedestrian crossing on al. Wincentego Witosa. Piet Hoffmann stood in the evening chill and listened to Zofia's tired voice explaining that Hugo and Rasmus had both fallen asleep with their pillows beside her on the sofa and that they had to get up early tomorrow, one of the nursery's many outings to the Nacka reserve, something to do with a wood and spring theme.

    "Piet?"

    "Yes?"

    "Thank you for the flowers."

    "I love you."

    He loved her so much. One night away, that was all he could bear. It was never like that before-before Zofia he hadn't felt the loneliness strangling him in unattractive hotel rooms, that it was pointless to breathe without having someone to love.

    He didn't want to hang up and stood for a long time with the phone in his hand, looking at one of Mokotów's expensive houses and praying that her voice wouldn't vanish. Which it did. He switched mobile phones and made another call. It would soon be five in the afternoon on the east coast of the USA.

    "Paula's meeting them in half an hour."

    "Good. But it doesn't feel good."

    "I'm in control."

    "There's a risk that they'll demand that someone takes responsibility for the fiasco in Västmannagatan."