Three Seconds

It was years since anyone had touched him and he didn’t know how to relax any more.
    ‘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. Västmannagatan 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 Karlavägen. 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 storeys. He looked at his colleagues.
    ‘So, drugs, violence, Eastern Europe.’
    They looked at him, but he didn’t say any more 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, organised 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 organised 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 cases twice in the past year in a chaos of bewildered travellers and large forklift trucks that drove too fast and too close.
     
    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 smelt 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 mum and dad on either side on the narrow back seat, 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