Anders Roslund: Three Seconds

"A mule, a swallower who's delivered the goods right here in the kitchen."

He turned toward the sitting room.

'And him? What do we know about him?"

"Nothing."

"Nothing?"

"Not yet. You have to have something to do, Grens."

Ewert Grens went back into the sitting room and over to the man who no longer existed, watched as two men took hold of the dead man's arms and legs, as they lifted him and put him into a black body bag, as they pulled up the zipper and put the body bag on a metal stretcher that they only just managed to push down the narrow hall.

He left Vasagatan and then got caught in a traffic jam by Suisun. It was nearly five o'clock and he should have been at the kindergarten an hour ago.

Piet Hoffmann sat in the car and desperately tried to fend off the stress and heat and irritation caused by the afternoon traffic, which he could do nothing about. Three lanes at a standstill as far down the tunnel as he could see. To combat this battle with the city, he often thought about the soft skin on Zofia's face when he stroked it, or Hugo's eyes when he managed to ride his bike on his own, or Rasmus's hair, splashed with carrot soup and orange juice, standing out in every direction. It didn't work. Who did you do time with? Images of the people he was thinking about merged every time into images of a deal in a flat in Västmannagatan that had ended in another man's death. Skåne. Mio, Josef Libanon, Virtanen. The Count. How many names do you want? Another infiltrator with the same mission as he had. Who else? But the other infiltrator who sat facing him just didn't act as well. Who else? He, if anyone, should know what a faked background looked like, how it was put together, and which questions were needed to make it collapse. They had both been working for the police in their respective ways and ended up in the same place. He didn't have any choice, otherwise they might both have died, and one was in fact enough, one who wasn't him.

He had seen people die before. It wasn't that. It was part of his daily life and his credibility required it; he had learned to shrug off dead people who weren't close to him. But he had been in charge of this operation. A murder, he risked life imprisonment.

Erik had phoned from the airport outside Jacksonville. Nine years as a secret civil servant on the unofficial payroll of the Swedish police had taught Piet Hoffmann that he was valuable. The authorities had magicked away offenses in both a private and professional capacity before, so Erik Wilson should be able to make this one vanish too. The police were good at that, a few secret intelligence reports on the right bosses' desks was usually enough.

The temperature had risen in the stationary car and Piet Hoffmann dried away the sweat from his shirt collar just as the blasted line started to move. He fixed his eyes on a number plate that was edging slowly forward a few meters ahead and forced his mind back to images of Hugo and Rasmus and his real life, and twenty minutes later got out of the car in the visitors' parking lot at Hagtornsgarden, in the midst of all the flats in Enskededalen.

By the front door he suddenly stopped with his hand in the air, a few centimeters from the handle. He listened to the voices of the noisy, boisterous children who were playing and smiled, lingering awhile in the best moment of the day. He went to open the door, but stopped again; something tight across his shoulders. He quickly felt under his jacket, heaved a sigh of relief-he had remembered to take off his holster.

He opened the door. It smelled of baking, a late snack for some of the children who were sitting around a table in the lunch room. The noise was coming from farther in, the big play room. He sat down on a low stool in the entrance, near the tiny shoes and colorful jackets on pegs marked with the children's names and hand-drawn elephants.

He nodded at one of the young women, a new member of staff. "Hi."

'Are you Hugo and Rasmus's dad?"

"How did you guess? I haven't-"

"Not many left."

She disappeared behind some shelves filled with well-used jigsaw puzzles and square wooden building blocks and reappeared almost immediately with two boys aged three and five who made his heart laugh.

"Hello, Daddy."

"Hello-lello, Daddy."

"Hello-lello-lello, Daddy."

"Hello-lello-lello-"

"Hello, you two. You both win. We haven't got time for anymore hellos today. Maybe tomorrow. Then there will be more time. Okay?"

He reached out for the red jacket and pulled it on to Rasmus's outstretched arms, then sat him on his lap to take his indoor shoes off the feet that wouldn't keep still, and put on his outdoor shoes. He leaned forward and glanced at his own shoes. Shit. He'd forgotten to put them in the fire. The black shininess might be a film of death, with traces of skin and blood and brain tissue-he had to burn them as soon as he got home.

He checked the child car seat that was strapped onto the passenger seat, facing backward. It felt as secure as it should and Rasmus was already picking at the pattern on the fabric as was his wont. Hugo's seat was more like a hard square that made him sit a bit higher and he fastened the seat belt tight before giving his soft cheek a quick kiss.

"Daddy's just going to make a quick phone call. Will you be quiet for a while? I promise to be finished before we drive under Nynäsvägen."

Capsules with amphetamine, child car seats secured, shoes shiny with the remains of death.

Right now he didn't want to see that they were different parts of the same working day.

He closed his phone the moment the car passed the busy main road. He had managed to make two quick calls, the first to a travel agent to book a ticket on the 6:55p.m. SAS flight to Warsaw, and the second to Henryk, his contact at the head office, to book a meeting there three hours later.

"I did it! I finished on this side of the road. Now I'm only going to talk to you."

"Were you talking to work?"

"Yes, the office."

Three years old. And he could already distinguish between the two languages and what Daddy used them for. He stroked Rasmus's hair and felt Hugo leaning forward to say something behind him.

"I can speak Polish too. Jeden, diva, trzy, cztery, pire, szege, siedem-"

He stopped, and then carried on in a slightly darker voice: "-eight, nine, ten."

"Very good. You know lots of numbers."

"I want to know more."

"Osiem, dziewire, dziewire."

"Osiem, dzieunre… dziewirc?"

"Now you know them."

"Now I know."

They drove past the Enskede flower shop and Piet Hoffmann stopped, reversed and got out.

"Wait here. I'll be back in a moment."

A couple of hundred meters farther on, a small red plastic fire engine was standing in front of the garage and he just managed to avoid it, but only by scraping the right-hand side of the car against the fence. He released the seat belts and child car seats and watched his children's feet run over the moss green grass. They both threw themselves down on to the ground and crawled through the low hedge into the neighbor's garden, where there were three children and two dogs. Piet Hoffmann laughed and felt a warmth in his belly and throat. Their energy and joy-sometimes things were just so simple.

He held the flowers in one hand as he opened the door to the house that they had left in such a rush-it had been one of those mornings when everything took a little bit longer. He would tidy away the breakfast dishes that were still on the table, and pick up the trail of clothes that spread through every room downstairs, but first he had to go down into the cellar and the boiler room.