Three Seconds

milk.
    He looked at the man crouching on the floor with his face over a red plastic bowl. Some little shit from Warsaw: petty thief, junkie, spots, bad teeth, clothes he’d been wearing for too long. He kicked him in the side with the hard toe of his shoe and the evil-smelling prick toppled over and finally threw up. White milk and small bits of brown rubber on his trousers and the shiny kitchen floor, some kind of marble.
    He had to drink more.
Napij si ę kurwa.
And he had to throw up more.
    Piet Hoffmann kicked him again, but not so hard this time. The brown rubber round each capsule was to protect his stomach from the ten grams of amphetamine and he didn’t want to risk even a single gram ending up somewhere it shouldn’t. The fetid man at his feet was one of fifteen prepped mules who in the course of the night and morning had carried in two thousand grams each from Ś winouj ś cie, onboard M/S
Wawel
, then by train from Ystad, without knowing about the fourteen others who had also entered the country and were now being emptied at various places in Stockholm.
    For a long time he had tried to talk calmly – he preferred it – but now he screamed
pij do cholery
as he kicked the little shit, he had to damn well drink more from the bloody milk carton and he was going to fucking
pij do cholery
throw up enough capsules for the buyer to check and quality-assure the product.
    The thin man was crying.
    He had bits of puke on his trousers and shirt and his spotty face was as white as the floor he was lying on.
    Piet Hoffmann didn’t kick him any more. He had counted the darkobjects swimming around in the milk and he didn’t need any more for the moment. He fished up the brown rubber: twenty almost-round balls. He pulled on some washing up gloves and rinsed them under the tap, then picked off the rubber until he had twenty small capsules which he put on a porcelain plate that he had taken from the kitchen cupboard.
    ‘There’s more milk. And there’s more pizza. You stay here. Eat, drink and throw up. We want the rest.’
    The sitting room was warm, stuffy. The three men at the rectangular dark oak table were all sweating – too many clothes and too much adrenaline. He opened the door to the balcony and stood there for a moment while a cool breeze swept out all the bad air.
    Piet Hoffmann spoke in Polish. The two men who had to understand what he was saying preferred it.
    ‘He’s still got eighteen hundred grams to go. Take care of it. And pay him when he’s done. Four per cent.’
    They were very similar, in their forties, dark suits that were expensive but looked cheap, shaved heads; when he stood close to them he could see an obvious halo of day-old brown hair. Eyes that were devoid of joy and neither of them smiled very often. In fact, he’d never seen either of them laugh. They did what he said, disappeared into the kitchen to empty the mule who was lying there, throwing up. It was Hoffmann’s shipment and none of them wanted to explain to Warsaw that a delivery had gone tits up.
    He turned to the third man at the table and spoke in Swedish for the first time. ‘Here are twenty capsules. Two hundred grams. That’s enough for you to check it.’
    He was looking at someone who was tall, blond, in shape, and about the same age as himself, around thirty-five. Someone wearing black jeans, a white T-shirt and lots of silver round his fingers, wrists and neck. Someone who’d served four years at Tidaholm for attempted murder, and twenty-seven months in Mariefred for two counts of assault. Everything fitted. And yet there was something he couldn’t put his finger on, like the buyer was wearing a costume, or was acting and not doing it well enough.
    Piet Hoffmann watched him as he pulled a razorblade from the pocket of his black denim jacket and cut one of the capsules down the middle then leant forward over the porcelain plate to smell the contents.
    That feeling again. It was still there.
    Maybe the guy sitting there, who was going to buy the lot, was just strung out. Or nervous. Or maybe that was precisely what had made Piet call Erik in the middle of the night, whatever it was that wasn’t right, this intense feeling that he hadn’t been able to express properly on the phone.
    It smelt of flowers, tulips.
    Hoffmann was sitting two chairs away but could still smell it clearly.
    The buyer had chopped up the yellowish, hard mass into something that resembled powder, scooped some up on the razorblade and