Three Seconds (9 page)

    "It wasn't a fiasco."

    "A person died!"

    "That's not relevant here. What's important is that the delivery is safe. We can tough out the consequences of the shooting in a matter of minutes."

    "That's what you say."

    "You'll get a full report when I see you."

    "Eleven hundred hours at number five."

    He waved in irritation when the taxi driver hooted his horn. A couple of minutes more in the dark loneliness and cool air. He was sitting between Mom and Dad again, traveling from Stockholm and Sweden to a town called Bortoszyce, only a few miles from the Soviet border, in an area that is now called Kaliningrad. They had never called it that. They refused. For Mum and Dad it was always Konigsberg; Kaliningrad
was
the invention of madmen. He had caught the contempt in their voices, but as a child had never been able to understand why his parents had left the place they always yearned for.

    The hooting driver swore loudly as they pulled out of al. Wincentego Witosa and drove past well manicured green areas and big business properties. Not many people around in this part of town. There seldom are in places where the price per square meter is adapted to supply and demand.

    They had emigrated at the end of the sixties. He had often asked his father why but never got an answer, so he had nagged his mother and been given a
few
scraps about a boat, and that she was pregnant, and about some nights in the dark on the high sea when she was convinced they would die, and that they had gone ashore somewhere near a place called Simrishamn in Sweden.

    Right onto ul. Ludwika Idzikowskiego, quarter of an hour to go.

    In the past few years he had visited this country, which belonged to him, so many times. He could have been born here, grown up here and then he would have been very different, like the people in Bortoszyce who had tried to keep in touch for so long after his mother and father died, and who had eventually given up when he gave nothing back. Why had he done that? He didn't know. Nor did he know why he never got in touch when he was nearby, why he had never gone to visit.

    "Sixty zloty. Forty for the journey and twenty for that bloody stop that we hadn't agreed on."

    Hoffmann left a hundred-zloty note on the seat and got out of the car.

    A big, dark, old building in the middle of Mokotów-as old as a building could be in Warsaw, which had been totally destroyed seventy years ago. Henryk was waiting for him on the steps outside. They shook hands but didn't say much; neither of them knew how to do small talk.

    The meeting room was at the end of a corridor on the tenth floor. Far too light and far too warm. The deputy CEO and a man in his sixties, who he assumed was the Roof, were waiting at the end of the oblong table. Piet Hoffmann accepted their unnecessarily firm handshakes and then went to sit down on the chair that had already been pulled out. There was a bottle of water on the table in front of it.

    He didn't shy away from their piercing eyes. If he had done that, chosen to retreat, it would be over already.

    Zbigniew Boruc and Grzegorz Krzyneywek.

    He still didn't know if they were sitting there because he was going to die. Or because he had just penetrated farther.

    "Mr Krzynówek will just sit and listen. I assume that you haven't met before?"

    Hoffmann nodded to the elegant suit.

    "We haven't met, but I know who you are."

    He smiled at the man whom he had seen over the years in Polish newspapers and on Polish television, a businessman whose name he had also heard whispered in the long corridors at Wojtek, which had emerged from precisely the same chaos as every other new organization in an Eastern European state; a wall had suddenly fallen and economic and criminal interests merged in a grab and scramble for capital. Organizations that were established by the military and police and that all had the same hierarchical structure, with the Roof on top. Grzegorz Krzynówek was Wojtek's Roof and he was perfect. A champion with a central position, extremely robust financially and unassailable in a society that required laws, a guarantee that combined finance and criminality, a facade for capital and violence.

    "The delivery?"

    The deputy CEO had studied him long enough.

    "Yes."

    "I assume that it's safe."

    "It's safe."

    "We'll check it."

    "It will still be safe."

    "Let's continue then."

    That was all. That was yesterday.

    Piet Hoffmann wasn't going to die this evening.

    He wanted to laugh-as the tension vanished something else bubbled up and longed to escape, but there was more to come. No threats, no danger, but more ritual that required continued dignity.

    "I don't appreciate the condition you left our flat in."

    First he made sure that the delivery was safe. Then he asked about the dead man. The deputy CEO's voice was calmer, friendlier now that he was talking about something that wasn't as important.

    "I don't want my people here to have to explain to the Polish police, on the request of the Swedish police, why and how they rent flats in central Stockholm."

    Piet Hoffmann knew that he had to answer this question too. But he took his time, looked over at Krzynówek.
Delivery. I don't appreciate the condition you left our flat in.
The respected businessman knew exactly what they were talking about. But words are strange like that. If they're not used officially, they don't exist. No one here in this room would mention twenty-seven kilos of amphetamine and a killing. Not so long as a person who officially didn't know anything about it was sitting in their midst.

    "If the agreement that I, and only
I,
have the authority to lead an operation in Sweden had been respected, this would never have happened." "I'd like you to explain."

    "If your people had followed your instructions instead of using their own initiative, the situation would never have arisen."

Operation. Own initiative. The situation.

    Hoffmann looked at the Roof again.

    These words. We're using them for your sake.

    But why are you here? Why are you sitting next to me listening to all this that means everything and nothing?

    I'm not frightened anymore.

    But I don't understand.

    "I assume that this will not be repeated."

    He didn't answer. The deputy CEO would have the last word. That was the way things worked and Piet Hoffmann knew what to do, how to play the game, otherwise, he also knew, the end was nigh. The instant he became Paula, he no longer existed-he would end up like the buyer ten hours ago, in a car on his way to a Warsaw back street with two Poles and a cocked gun to his head.

    He knew his role, his lines, his history, he wasn't going to die. Dying was for other people.

    The Roof moved, not much, but gave a definite nod to the deputy CEO.

    He looked satisfied. Hoffmann was approved.

    The deputy CEO had hoped for that and counted on it. He got up, almost smiling. "We have plans to expand in the closed market. We've already invested and taken market shares in your neighbouring Nordic countries. Now we're going to do the same in your country. In Sweden."

    Piet Hoffmann looked at the Roof in silence, then at the deputy CEO.

The closed market.

    The prisons.

     The harsh light from the angle-poise lamps was reflected in both metal spoons. Nils Krantz lifted up one of them and filled it with a light blue powder and water before asking Ewert Grens to pull back the green sheet that covered the person on the table in the middle of the room.

    A naked man's body.

    Pale complexion, well built, and not particularly old.

    A face with no skin, a skull on top of an otherwise complete body.

    A strange sight. The bones had been cleaned so the observer could get as close as possible, the skin that was in the way of a clear answer had been scrubbed off.

    "Alginate. We use it. It works. There are more expensive brands, but we don't waste them on autopsies."

    The forensic scientist separated the lower jaw from the upper jaw and pushed the metal spoon with the light blue fluid against the teeth in the upper jaw and held it there until it hardened.

    "Photographs, fingerprints, DNA, dental imprints. I'm pleased with that."

    He took a couple of steps back into the sterile room and nodded to Ludvig Errfors, the forensic pathologist.

    "Entrance wound."

    Errfors pointed to the bare skull bone on the right temple.

    "The bullet went in through the
os temporale
and then lost speed just here."

    He drew a line in the air with his finger from the large hole in the temple to the middle of the skull.

"Mandible.
The jaw bone. The trajectory shows clearly that the jacket of the bullet hit this hard bone and split into two smaller bullets with two exit wounds on the left side of the head. One through the mandible and one through the
os frontale."

    Grens looked at Krantz. The forensic scientist had been right from the start, there on the floor in the flat.

    "And this, Ewert, I want you to have a look at this, in particular."

    Ludvig Errfors was holding the dead man's right arm, a peculiar sensation when the muscles don't react, the fact that something that was so recently alive can become so rubbery.

    "You see that? The visible marks around the wrist. Someone held his hand post-mortem."

    Grens looked at Nils Krantz again who gave a satisfied nod. He had been right about that too. Someone had moved the arm after he'd died. Someone had tried to make it
look
like suicide.

    Ewert Grens left the brightly lit table in the middle of the room and opened one of the windows out in the corridor. It was dark outside, and the late evening was deepening into night.

    "No name. No history. I want more. I want to get closer to him."

    He looked at Krantz, then at Errfors. He waited. Until the pathologist cleared his throat.

    There was always more.

    "I've looked at a couple of the fillings in his teeth. Take this one here, in the middle of the lower jaw. About eight, maybe ten years old. Most probably Swedish. I can deduce that from the way the work has been done, the quality, a plastic material that is noticeably different to the ones that the greater part of Europe import from Taiwan. I had a body here last week, a Czech who had a root filling in his lower jaw, cement in all the canals, which was… well, far from what we would see as acceptable here."

    The pathologist moved his hands from the skinless face to the torso. "He's had his appendix removed. See the scar here. A good cosmetic job. That, and the way in which the large intestine has been sewn up-both indicate that the operation was done in a Swedish hospital."

    A muffled sound and the feeling that the ground was moving. Just before midnight, and a truck had driven through the secured area, passing close to the window of the Solna institute of forensic medicine.

    Ludvig Errfors caught the question in Grens's eyes.

    "Nothing to worry about. They unload a short distance away. No idea what, but it's the same every evening."

    The pathologist moved away from the table; it was important that Ewert Grens came closer.

    "The fillings, the appendix and what I would call a Northern European appearance. Ewert, he's Swedish."

    Grens studied the face that was a death mask of white, washed bone.

We found traces of bile, amphetamine and rubber.

But they didn't come from you.