be wrong, mostly out of consideration to himself, because the very fact that Ewert was doing what he was doing was answer enough in itself. He was moving on, though not yet aware of it himself.
'What have you done?'
She hadn't knocked.
She had walked straight into the room and stopped abruptly in the absence of music, in front of the gaping hole on the shelf behind the desk. 'Ewert? What have you done?'
Mariana Hermansson looked at Sven who first nodded at the gap on the shelf and then at the pile of three cardboard boxes. Never before had she been to his room without hearing music, the now removed Siw Malmkvist. She didn't recognize it without her voice.
'Ewert…'
'You want something?'
'I want to know what you've done.'
'She no longer exists.'
Hermansson went over to the empty shelf, ran a finger along the dusty lines left by the cassettes, the cassette player, speakers, and a black and white photo of the singer that had stood there all these years.
She wiped off a dust ball, hid it in her hand.
'No.'
'Who?
'Her.'
'Who? Anni? Or Siw Malmkvist?'
Ewert finally turned around and looked at her.
'Did you want something, Hermansson?'
He was still sitting on the floor, leaning against the boxes and wall. He had been grieving for nearly a year and a half now, lurching between a breakdown and madness. It had been an awful time, and she had told him to go to hell more than once and just as many times apologized afterward. On a couple of occasions she had almost given up, resigned and walked away from this difficult man's bitterness that seemed to have no end. She had gradually come to believe that one day he would capitulate, go to pieces completely, lie down and never get up again. But his face now, in the midst of all the suffering, had something purposeful about it, a determination that had not been there before.
Some cardboard boxes, a gaping hole on a bookshelf, things like that could spark unexpected relief.
'Yes, I did want something. We've just had a call-out. Vastmannagatan 79.'
He was listening, she knew that, he was listening to her in that intense way that she had nearly forgotten.
'An execution.'
Piet Hoffmann looked out of one of the beautiful apartment's big windows. It was a different flat in a different part of the center of Stockholm, but they were similar, three carefully renovated rooms, high ceilings and light- colored walls. Only there was no prospective buyer lying on the wooden floor here, with a gaping hole in one temple and two in the other.
Down on the wide pavement, groups of well-dressed people were making their way, full of anticipation, into a matinee performance at the large theater; breathless and slightly hammy actors going in and out of doors onto the stage, proclaiming their lines.
Sometimes he longed for that kind of life, just everyday, normal people doing normal things together.
He left the dressed-up, excited people and the window with a view of both Vasagatan and Kungsbron, and crossed the largest room in the flat, his room, his office with its antique desk and two locked gun cabinets and an open fire that was very effective. He heard the last mule spewing up in the kitchen-she had been at it for a long time now. She wasn't used to it: it took a couple of trips before you were. Jerzy and Mariusz were standing by the sink with yellow rubber gloves on, picking out the bits of brown rubber that the young woman threw up, along with the milk and something else, in the two buckets on the floor in front of her. She was the fifteenth and final mule. They had emptied the first one in Vastmannagatan, and had been forced to empty the rest here. Piet Hoffmann didn't like it. This flat was his protection, his cover, he didn't want it to be linked with either drugs or Poles. But they didn't have time. Everything had gone wrong. A person had been shot through the head. He studied Mariusz; the man with the shaved head and expensive suit had killed someone only a couple of hours ago, but showed nothing. Maybe he couldn't, maybe he was being professional. Hoffmann wasn't frightened of him, and he wasn't frightened of Jerzy, but he respected the fact that they had no limits; if he had made them nervous, suspicious of his loyalty, the shot that had been fired could just as easily have been aimed at him.
Anger chased frustration chased dread and he struggled to stand still with all the turmoil inside him.
He had been there and he hadn't been able to prevent it.
To prevent it would have meant death for him.
So another person had died instead.
The young woman in front of him was done. He didn't know her, they had never met. He knew that she was called Irina and she came from Gdansk, that she was twenty-two and a student and was prepared to take a risk that was far greater than she imagined and that was enough. She was a perfect mule. Just the sort they were looking for. Of course there were others, junkies from the suburbs of larger cities who flocked in their thousands, willing to use their bodies as containers for less than she was paid, but they had learned not to use drug addicts as they were unreliable and often seemed to throw up by themselves long before they reached their destination.
Inside, the anger and frustration and dread, more emotions, more thoughts.
But without any backup, there was no operation, no result, not even a deal.
It was an unchecked delivery that had ended in murder.
Piet Hoffmann gave the young, wan woman called Irina a brief nod. The money had been in his trouser pocket since the morning, counted and rolled up in bundles. He pulled out the last bundle and flicked through the banknotes so she could see it was all there. She was one of the new ones and didn't yet have the capacity that the organization expected. She had only delivered fifteen hundred grams on her first trip, which would be three times as much when cut to its sellable form, worth a total of 675,000 kronor.
'Your four percent. Twenty-seven thousand kronor. But I've rounded it up to three thousand euros. And if you dare to swallow more next time, you'll earn more. Your stomach stretches a little each time.'
She was pretty. Even when her face was pale and her hairline sweaty. Even when she had been on her knees in a three-room flat in Sweden, puking up her guts for a couple of hours.
'And my tickets.'
Piet Hoffmann nodded to Jerzy, who took out two tickets from the inner pocket of his dark jacket. One for the train from Stockholm to Ystad and one for the ferry from Ystad to winoujcie. He held them out to her, and she was just about to take them when he pulled back his hand and smiled. He waited a bit then held them out again, and just when she was about to take them, he pulled back his hand, again.
'For fuck's sake, she's earned them!'
Hoffmann snatched the tickets from him and gave them to her. 'We'll be in touch. When we need your help again.'
The anger, the frustration, the dread.
They were finally alone in the flat that functioned as an office for one of Stockholm's security firms.
'This was my operation.'
Piet Hoffmann took a step closer to the man who had shot and killed a person that morning.
