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north in Helsinki, Copenhagen, and Oslo more often.
        The fireplace with its dark tiles and white frame was beautiful, the sort that he knew Zofia wanted at home. He fished up a handful of small dry twigs from the bottom of the wood basket and lit them, then waited until the larger, thicker logs that he placed on top started to burn before taking his clothes off. The jacket, trousers, shirt, underpants, and socks were all eaten by the yellow flames. Next, a pile of Jerzy's and Mariusz's clothes. The flames were red and intense now, and he stood naked in front of the fire, enjoying the warmth until they died down sufficiently for him to close the bathroom door and shower away this awful day.
        A person had had half his head blown off.
        A person who probably had the same job as he had, but had a less solid background.
        He turned on the shower and the hot water pummelled his skin, testing his pain threshold, but he knew if he persevered, his body would eventually go numb and be filled with a strange calm.
        He'd been doing this for too long; he sometimes forgot who he was and it frightened him when his life as someone else encroached on his life as a husband and father, and day-to-day reality in a house in a neighborhood where people cur their grass and weeded their flowerbeds.
        Hugo and Rasmus.
        He had promised to pick them up just after four. He turned off the water and took a clean towel from the shelf by the mirror. It was nearly half past four. He hurried back into the office, checked that the fire had died down, opened the wardrobe and picked out a white shirt, a gray jacket, and worn jeans.
    You have sixty seconds to leave and lock the fiat.
        He jumped and realized that he would never get used to the electronic voice that spoke to him from the coded lock on the front door, as soon as he had punched in the correct six digits.
    The alarm will be activated in fifty seconds.
        He should contact Warsaw immediately, he should have done it already, but had waited on purpose, he wanted to know that the delivery was secure first.
    The alarm will be activated in forty seconds.
        He locked the front door of Hoffmann Security AB and closed the wrought-iron gate. A security firm. That was how the organization worked. That was how all branches of the Eastern European mafia worked. Piet Hoffmann remembered his visit to St. Petersburg a year ago, a city with eight hundred security firms, established by ex-KGB men and intelligence agents, different fronts for the same business.
        He was halfway down the stairs when one of his two phones rang. The mobile phone that only one person knew about.
        "Wait a minute."
        He had parked the car just down Vasagatan. He opened the door and got in, then carried on the conversation without the risk of being overheard.
        "Yes?"
        "You need my help."
        "I needed it yesterday."
        "I've booked a return flight and will be back in Stockholm tomorrow. Meet you at number five at eleven. And I think you should make a trip yourself, before then. For the sake of your credibility."
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        The gaping holes in the dead man ' s head seemed even larger from a distance.
        Ewert Grens had followed Nils Krantz into the kitchen, but turned around again after a while to look at the man who was lying by an overturned chair and had one entrance wound in his right temple and two exit wounds in his left. He had been investigating murders for as long as the man on the floor had been alive and had learned one truth-each death is unique, with its own story, its own sequence of events, its own consequences. Every time he was faced with something he had not seen before, and he knew even before he looked into the empty eyes that they were looking in a direction that he couldn't follow.
        He wondered where this particular death had ended, what these eyes had seen and were