Anders Roslund - Three Seconds

This evening.

This evening they would knock out the three main dealers.

He offered to clear the table and wash up while the others smoked roll-your-owns with no filter out in the gravel yard or played stud poker for thousand-kronor toothpicks. Alone in the kitchen, there was no one who saw him wiping down the sink and worktop and stuffing two spoons and a knife into the front pockets of his trousers at the same time.

He walked over to the aquarium, the guards' glass box, knocked on the pane and got an irritated flick of the wrist back. He knocked again, a bit harder and a bit longer, making it clear that he had no intention of leaving.

"What the hell d'you want? It's lunchtime. Wasn't it you who was going to clean the kitchen?"

"Does it look like there's anything left to do out there?"

"That's not the point."

Hoffmann shrugged, he wasn't going to pursue it.

"My books?"

"What about them?"

"I ordered them yesterday. Six of them."

"Don't know anything about it."

"Well, then it might make sense to have a look, eh?"

He was an older warden, not one of the ones who had dealt with him yesterday. He waved his arm around in irritation, but after a while went into the glass box and looked on the desk.

"These ones?"

Hardbacks, library covers. A label stuck on the front of each one: STORE in blue typed letters.

"That's them."

The older guard glanced quickly at the author presentations on the back sleeve, leafed through some pages here and there without really concentrating and then handed them over.

"Nineteenth Century Stockholm. The Marionettes. What the hell is all that?" "Poetry."

"A bit gay, eh?"

"Maybe you should try reading some."

"Listen here, you prick, I don't read faggot books."

Piet Hoffmann closed his cell door enough so that no one could see, but nor so much that it would arouse suspicion. He put the six books on the small bedside table; titles that were seldom borrowed and which therefore had to be collected from the store in the basement of Aspsås library when the request from the large prison came through that morning, and that were then handed over to the driver of the library bus by an out-of-breath, single female librarian in her fifties.

The knife he had stolen from the kitchen had felt sharp enough when he had run his fingertips across the blade.

He pressed it hard down the hinge between the front board and the first page of Lord Byron's Don Juan. It loosened thread by thread and soon the front and the spine were hanging just as freely as they had thirteen days earlier when he had opened it at a desk on Vasagatan. He thumbed to page 90, took hold of all the pages and pulled them off in one go. In the left-hand margin of page 91, a hole that was fifteen centimeters long and one centimeter wide, with thin walls constructed of Rizla papers, three hundred pages deep. The contents lay there untouched, just as he had left them.

Yellowish-white, a little sticky, exactly fifteen grams.

Ten years earlier he had consumed most of what he smuggled in himself. Only occasionally when he had too much might he sell some on. On a couple of occasions he was so hard up that he used it as part payment for his most pressing debts. This time, it was going to be put to different use. Four books with a total of forty-two grams of 30 percent manufactured amphetamine was his weapon for squashing the competition and taking over himself.

Books, Blossom.

Small amounts, but he didn't need more right now. The tricks he had learned over the years were foolproof and wouldn't be discovered by prison routines.

Back then, he'd been sent to Österåker as soon as he'd come back from his first secure leave. Someone had tipped the guards off about drugs up his ass or in his belly, and he'd been put in the dry cell, with glass walls, a bunk to lie on and a toilet that was a closed system… that was it. He had stayed there for a week, naked twenty-four/seven, three guards watching him when he went for a dump, checking his shit, eyes staring at him through the glass as he slept, always without a blanket, an ass that couldn't be covered.

He had had no choice then, what with the debts and threats, he became just another dry celler. But now, he had a choice.

Every day in every prison, every waking hour was about drugs: how to get them in, and how to use them without it being discovered by the regular urine tests. A relative who came to visit was also a relative who could be forced to smuggle in some urine, their own, urine that was clean and would test negative. Once, in his first few weeks in Österåker, some mouthy Serb got his girlfriend to piss into a couple of mugs, the content of which was then sold for a great deal of money. None of them tested positive, despite the fact that more than half of them were under the influence, but the tests did show something else, and that was That every man in the unit was pregnant.

Don Juan, The Odyssey, My Life's Writings, French Landscape.

He emptied them one after the other, stopping every now and then when he heard steps passing his cell door or sounds that were unfamiliar-fortytwo grams of amphetamine in four books that not many people chose to read.

Two books left. Nineteenth Century Stockholm and The Marionettes. He left them on the bed, untouched, texts that he hoped he would never need to read.

He looked at the yellowish-white substance that people killed for. Every gram would cost more in here.

Here demand was greater than supply. Here the risk of being caught was greater in a locked cell than when you were free. Here the judgment inside would be harsher than outside; the same amount would always give you a longer sentence.

Piet Hoffmann divided up the forty-two grams of amphetamine into three plastic bags. He would keep one himself for the Greek in Cell 2 and put the other two out for collection, for Block H where the two other major suppliers were, on the top and bottom floor. Three plastic bags with fourteen grams that would knock out all the competition in one go.

The spoons from the kitchen were still in one of his trouser pockets.

He took them out and felt them, then pressed them hard against the edge of the steel bunk until they were both bent to nearly right angles like two hooks; he checked them, they would do. His blue jogging pants with the Prison and Probation Service logo were lying on his bed. With the knife he cut the waistband, pulled the elastic out and then cut it again into two lengths.

The cell door ajar, he waited-the corridor was empty.

The bathroom was fifteen fast steps away.

He closed the door behind him, went into the toilet cubicle furthest to the right and made sure that the door was properly locked.

Ewert Grens had gone to get another plastic cup of black coffee and bought yet another crumbly almond slice with sickly icing on top. The handwritten list of seven names had acquired several more brown stains, but it was still legible and it would stay where it was on the table by the sofa until they had all been investigated and struck off one by one.

They had three days.

One of those handwritten, coffee-stained names held the key to keeping open the investigation into an execution carried our during the day at a rented flat in the middle of Stockholm. Or else, in three days, it would be scaled down to one of the thirty-seven preliminary investigations in thin files on his desk and would probably never amount to much more than that. There was always a new murder case, or an assault that would gobble up all the resources for a week or two until it was solved or left on a forgotten pile.

He studied the names. Maciej Bosacki, Piet Hoffmann, Karl Lager. All owners of security firms, which, like all other security firms, installed alarm systems, sold flak jackets, gave courses in self-defense, offered bodyguard services. But these three had all been used by Wojtek Security International in connection with Polish state visits. Official jobs with official invoices. Nothing strange about that, really. But it piqued his curiosity. Sometimes what was official concealed what was unofficial and he was looking for things that couldn't be seen, if they existed at all-links to another Wojtek, the real organization, the one that bought and sold drugs, weapons, people.