Three Seconds

down the narrow winding road from Danviksberget, opened the barrier with the key and carried on towards Enskede and the house that he constantly longed for.
     
    __________
    It was too late by the time he realised he had driven over it. It was so dark in the driveway and the red plastic fire engine was impossible to see. Piet Hoffmann rolled forwards about half a metre, and then got down on his hands and knees and felt around by the right front wheel until he found Rasmus’s favourite car. It wasn’t in the best condition, but if he used a red felt pen on the door to make it look like enamel and bent the white ladder that was supposed to be fixed to the middle of the roof back in shape, then maybe it could be returned to service in the sandpit or the floor upstairs within a few days.
     
    They were in there, asleep. The other plastic fire engines. Under the beds, sometimes even in the beds of the two boys he was going to hug so hard in a few hours’ time.
    He opened the boot and then the brown briefcase that was right at the back behind the spare wheel and hesitated before taking out two small packages and leaving the nine hundred and fifty thousand kronor in notes untouched.
    Slowly through the shadows in the garden.
    He didn’t turn on any lights until he was in the kitchen and had shut the door; he didn’t want to wake Zofia with any irritating, unnecessary light, but nor did he want to be caught out by naked feet on their way to the toilet or the fridge. He sat down at the table that had been wiped so well, the marks from the J-cloth still showing. In a few hours, they would eat breakfast here together, sticky, messy and noisy.
    The packages were lying in the middle of the table. He hadn’t checked them, he never did. When they were from Lorentz, that was enough. He opened the first one, which looked like a thin pencil case, and took out a long cord. At least, that was what it seemed to be, like eighteen metres of thin, coiled cord. But for anyone who knew anything about explosives, it was something completely different. A pentyl fuse and the difference between life and death. He unwound it, felt it, then cut it in the middle and put back the two nine-metre lengths. The other package was square, a plastic sleeve with twenty-foursmall pockets, a bit like the ones that his dad had had in the green album where he kept his coins from the time he had called Königsberg his home, used coins that were of no particular value. Once, when his body was screaming for another fix, Piet had tried to sell them and had realised that the brown bits of metal that he had never been interested in were very worn and of no value to collectors other than his father, who saw a value that was connected to his memories from times gone by. He gingerly touched each little pocket, the transparent fluid inside, a total of four centilitres of nitroglycerine divided into twenty-four flat plastic pockets.
    Someone let out a whimper.
    Piet Hoffmann opened the door.
    The same whimper again, then silence.
    He started to go up the stairs. Rasmus was having a nightmare, but this time it disappeared without need for comfort.
    So he went down instead, to the cellar and his personal gun cabinet that stood in one of the storerooms. He opened it and there they were, several on one shelf. He took one of them and went upstairs again.
    The world’s smallest revolver, SwissMiniGun, no bigger than a car key.
    He had bought them direct from the factory in La Chaux-de-Fonds last spring, six-millimetre bullets in the miniature revolver’s cylinder, each one powerful enough to kill. He rested the weapon on his palm and weighed it as he swung his arm backwards and forwards across the table – only a few grams was needed to end a life.
    He closed the kitchen door for a second time and started to saw both ends of the trigger guard with a hacksaw blade – the metal band that ran round and protected the trigger was too small, he couldn’t get his index finger in and he was removing it so he could squeeze the trigger and shoot – a couple of minutes was all that was needed for it to fall to the floor.
    He then held the tiny gun with only two fingers, raised it and aimed at the dishwasher, pretending to fire.
    A deadly weapon no longer than a toothpick, but still too big.
    So he was going to divide it up into even smaller components with the minute screwdriver that reminded him of his granny in Kaliningrad, where she kept it in a drawer under her sewing