Three Seconds (37 page)

    Fredrik Göransson sat on one of the national police commissioner's sofas and listened to the voice on the other end of the telephone talk loudly, the initial low murmur had become clear words in short bursts.

"Mutual problem?"

    "Yes."

"This early in the morning?"

    The deep man's voice sighed and the national police commissioner continued.

    "It's about Hoffmann."

"Well?"

    "He's going to be called in for questioning this morning, in one of the visiting rooms. A detective superintendent from city police who's investigating Västmannagatan 79."

    He waited for an answer, a reaction, anything. He got nothing.

    "That interview, Pål, is not going to happen. Under no circumstances are you going to let Hoffmann meet a policeman as part of the preliminary investigation in connection with that address."

    Silence again and when the voice responded, it was once more a low murmur that couldn't be heard from a few meters away.

    "I can't say anymore. Not here, not now. Apart from that you've got to fix it."

    The national police commissioner was sitting on the edge of the desk and it was starting to be uncomfortable. He straightened his back and there was a crunching sound from somewhere in his hip.

    "Pål I just need a couple of days. A week maybe. I want you to do this for me."

    He put the phone down and leaned forward, a few more crunches, sounded like his lower back.

    "We've got ourselves a few days. Now we have to take action. In order to avoid the same situation happening again in seventy-two or ninety-six hours."

    They shared what was left in the coffeepot. Göransson lit another cigarette.

    The meeting a couple of weeks earlier in a beautiful room with a view of Stockholm had mutated into something
new
Code Paula was no longer an operation that the Swedish police had worked on and waited for for several years, it now also involved a criminal counterpart who they did not know much about and who had knowledge that would have consequences far beyond that oblong meeting table if it were to be passed on.

    "So, Erik Wilson is abroad?"

    Göransson nodded.

    "And Hoffmann's Wojtek contacts in the unit, do we know who they are?"

    Chief Superintendent Göransson nodded again, leaned back a touch and for the first time since he sat down, the fabric felt almost comfortable.

    The national police commissioner looked at his face, which seemed calmer.

    "You're right."

    He lifted up the empty coffeepot to see if there was anything left. He was thirsty: he'd never really understood all the fuss about water with bubbles, but poured himself a glass as it was there and, because the room was full of cigarette smoke, found it refreshing.

    "If we let it our who Hoffmann is? If the members of an organization find out there's an informant among them-what the organization does then with that knowledge is not our problem. We will not and cannot be responsible for other people's actions."

    One more glass, more bubbles.

    "Like you said, we'll burn him."

Thursday

    He had dreamed about the hole. For four nights in a row, the straight edges in the dust on the shelf behind his desk had become a yawning, bottomless hole and no matter where he was or how much he tried to get away, he was drawn toward the black hole and then just as he started to fall, he woke up breathless on the floor behind the corduroy sofa, his back slippery with sweat.

    It was half past four and already warm and bright in the courtyard of Kronoberg. Ewert Grens went out into the corridor and over to the small pantry, where a blue hand towel was hanging from the tap. He wet it and went back to the office and the hole that was much smaller in reality. So many hours, such a large part of his day for thirty-five years had revolved around a time that no longer existed. With the wet cloth he wiped over the long, hard edges that marked where the cassette recorder he had been given for his twenty-fifth birthday had stood, then the considerably shorter edges from the cassettes and the photo, even the squares that had been the two loudspeakers, which were kind of beautiful in their clarity.

    And now there wasn't even dust.

    He moved a cactus plant from the windowsill, the files from the floor-the majority of which contained long-since completed preliminary investigations that should have been filed somewhere-and filled every tiny space on the now empty shelves so that he wouldn't need to fall anymore; the hole had gone and if there wasn't a hole, there couldn't be a bottomless pit.

    A cup of black coffee around which the air was still full of swirling dust particles looking for a new home didn't taste as good as usual, as if the dust had dissolved in the brown liquid; it even looked a shade lighter.

    He left early-he wanted straight answers and prisoners who were still sleepy were often less mouthy, not so insolent and scornful; interviews were either a power struggle or an attempt to gain confidence and he didn't have time to build up trust. He drove out of the city too fast and along the first kilometers of the E4, then suddenly slowed when he passed Haga and the large cemetery on the left, hesitated before continuing straight on and accelerating again. He could turn off the road on the way back, drive slowly past the people with plants and flowers in one hand and a watering can in the other.

    It was still thirty kilometers to the prison that he had visited at least twice a year for the past three decades. As a policeman in Stockholm he would regularly be involved in investigations that ended up there, questioning, prison transport, there was always someone who knew something and someone who had seen something, but the hatred of uniforms was greater there than anywhere else and their fear of the consequences justified, as a never survived long in an enclosed space, so the most usual answer on the recorder was a sneering laugh or simply empty silence.

    Yesterday, Ewert Grens had met and written off two of three names on the periphery of the investigation who owned security firms with official links to Wojtek International. He had drunk coffee with a certain Maciej Bosacki in Odensala outside Marsta, and more coffee with Karl Lager in Sodertalje and after only a couple of minutes at each table had known that they didn't do executions in city center flats.

    Far in the distance, the mighty wall.

    He had on occasion walked under the huge prison yard through a network of passages and each time he had met people he avoided in reality, in life. He had taken days and years from them, and he understood why they spat at him, he even respected it, but it did not affect him. They had all pissed on other people and in Ewert Grens's world, anyone who felt they had the right to harm someone else should have the balls to stand up for it later.

    The gray concrete grew longer, higher.

    He had one name left on the brown-stained paper. Piet Hoffmann, previously convicted of aiming and firing at a policeman, and who had then been granted a gun license all the same. Something was amiss.

    Ewert Grens parked the car and walked over to the prison entrance and the prisoner who would shortly be sitting in front of him.

    It didn't feel right.

    He didn't know why. Maybe it was too quiet. Maybe he was getting locked into his own head as well.

    He had fought off any thoughts that carried Zofia with them, which had been worst around two in the morning, just before it started to get light.

    He had gotten up, like before, chin-ups, jumping with his feet together until the sweat poured from his forehead and down his chest.

    He should be relaxed. Wojtek had gotten their reports, three days in a row. He had stamped out and taken over. From this afternoon, he would be getting bigger deliveries and selling more.

    "Morning, Hoffmann."

    "Morning."

    But he couldn't relax. Something was bothering him, something that demanded space and couldn't be reasoned away.

    He was scared.

    The doors had been unlocked, his neighbors were moving around out there, he couldn't see them but they were there, shouting and whispering. The sock between the door and the doorframe, the chair in front of the threshold, the pillow under the covers.

    Two minutes past seven. Eighteen minutes to go.

    He pressed himself against the wall.

     The older man at central security studied his police ID, typed something on a computer, sighed.

    "Questioning, you say?"

^"
Yes.
^"

    "Grens."

    "Yes."

    "Piet Hoffmann?"

    "I've reserved a room. So it would be great if you could let me in. So I could get to it."

    The older man was in no rush. He lifted the phone and punched in a number.

    "You'll have to wait a moment. There's something I need to check."

     It took fourteen minutes.

    Then all hell broke loose.

    The door was pulled open.
One second.
The chair was kicked over.
One second.
Stefan passed close to him on the right, a screwdriver in his fist.

There's a moment left, a beat, people always experience half a second in such different ways.

    There were probably four of them.

    He had seen this happen several times, even taken part himself twice.

    Someone ran in with a screwdriver, a table leg, a cut piece of metal. And straight behind, more hands to punch or kill. Two out in the corridor, always at a distance to keep watch.

The pillow and sweatshirt under the covers, his two and half seconds were over, his protection, his escape.

    One blow.

    He wouldn't manage more.

One single blow, right elbow to the carotid receptors on the left side of the throat, a hard blow right there and Stefan's blood pressure would rocket, he would collapse, faint.

    His heavy body fell to the floor, blocking the door for the next pair of balled fists, a sharp piece of metal from the workshop, Karol Tomasz hit out in the air with it in order to keep his balance. Piet Hoffmann squeezed out between the doorframe and a shoulder that still hadn't quite fathomed where the person who was going to die was hiding. He ran out into the corridor between the two who were standing guard and on toward the closed door of the security office.

They know.

    He ran and looked around, they were standing there.

They know.

    He opened the door and went into the guards' room and someone roared
stukatj
behind him and the principal prison officer shouted
get the hell out of here.
He probably didn't shout anything himself, he couldn't be certain but it didn't feel like it, he stayed where he was in front of the closed door and whispered
I want to be put in isolation,
and when they didn't react, he said a bit louder
I want a P18
and when none of the goddamn staring guards moved at all, in spite of everything he did scream,
now, you fuckers,
presumably that's what he did, I
need to be in isolation now.

      Ewert Grens sat on a chair in the visiting room and looked at a roll of toilet paper on the floor by the bed and a mattress that was covered in plastic and stuck our over the end of the frame-fear and longing that for one hour every month was distilled down to two bodies holding each other tight. He moved over to the window, not much of a view: a couple of crude bars edged with barbed wire and farther back, the lower part of a thick gray concrete wall. He sat down again, the restlessness that was always in him and never let him relax. He played with the black cassette recorder that stood in the middle of the table every time he came here to question people who hadn't seen or heard anything; he remembered the faces as they came closer and lowered their voices, stared at the floor, full of hate, until he shut off. He wasn't sure that any of the interviews he'd done in this room had ever really helped him to solve an investigation.