Free Three Seconds by Anders Roslund, Börge Hellström Page B

away and then slowly grew as they sank through the dark toward the runway at Frédéric Chopin. Piet Hoffmann had lain down fully clothed on the hard hotel bed just before midnight, and tried to sleep, but had soon given up-the day that had started with someone being killed in front of him and ended with the responsibility of taking over the drug market in Swedish prisons continued to live inside him; it whispered and screamed until he couldn't be bothered to block his ears and wait for sleep.
        It was blowing hard outside the window. Hotel Okęcie was just eight hundred meters from the airport and the wind often swept over the open ground, creating spots of light that were prettiest when the branches on the trees refused to stay still. He liked to sit here, for one night at a time, looking out over this last piece of Poland, where he always observed but never took part, even though he should feel at home here-he had cousins and aunts and an uncle here. He looked like them and talked like them but was forever someone who didn't belong.
        He was nobody.
        He lied to Zofia and she held him tight. He lied to Hugo and Rasmus and they hugged their daddy. He lied to Erik. He lied to Henryk. He had just lied to Zbigniew Boruc and drank another Zubrawka with him.
        He had been lying for so long that he'd forgotten what the truth looked and felt like, who he was.
        The specks of light had now become a huge plane that had just landed; it swerved in the strong crosswinds and the small wheels bounced out of control a couple of times on the asphalt before sinking down and rolling the plane toward some steps by the newer part of the arrivals hall.
        He leaned forward to the window and rested his forehead on the cool glass.
        The day that wouldn't end, that whispered and screamed.
        A person had stopped breathing in front of him. He had realized too late. They had the same role, were part of the same game, but on different sides. A person who perhaps had children, a wife, who had maybe also lived a lie for so long that he didn't know who he was anymore.
    My name is Paula. What was yours?
        He sat on the window sill, looking out into the dark, as he cried.
        It was the middle of the night in a hotel room a few kilometers from central Warsaw. He had a real person's death on his hands and he cried until he could cry no more and sleep took him, and he fell headlong into something that was black and couldn't be lied to.
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Tuesday
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        Ewert Grens had woken when the first light forced its way through the thin curtains and started to irritate his eyes. He was sitting on the floor with his back against the three stacked cardboard boxes, but he then lay down on the hard linoleum to avoid the dawn light and slept for another couple of hours. It wasn't a bad place to sleep: his back barely ached and he had been able to keep his stiff leg stretched almost straight the whole night, which he never got room for on the soft corduroy sofa.
        No more nights there.
        Suddenly he was wide awake, rolled over on to his belly and used his arms to lever up his bulky frame. From the tin on his desk he grabbed a blue marker, which released a strong odor as he wrote on each side of the brown cardboard boxes.
    PI Malmkvist.
        Ewert Grens looked at the taped-up boxes and laughed out loud. He had been able to sleep with the packed music and felt more rested than he had done for a long time.
        A couple of dance steps, no singing, no music, just unaccompanied steps.
        He tried to lift the box on top, but it was far too heavy, so he pushed it out of the room and down the long corridor to the elevator. Three floors down, to the cellar, to the property store. He wrote a reference number on the top of the box with the marker again-I9361231. Then he went down another corridor, even darker than the last, and pushed and sweated on to