Three Seconds

could tell that he’d been rehearsing what he had to say.
    ‘I want you to listen to me, Zofia. But most of all, I want you to sit there and not leave until I have finished.’
    He always knew more about every situation than those he would later share it with. If he was more prepared, he would have more control and someone who has control is always the one who decides.
    Not now.
    Her feelings, her reactions, they scared him.
    ‘Then— Zofia, you can do what you like. Listen to me and then do what you want.’
    He sat opposite her and in a quiet voice, started to tell a story about a prison sentence ten years ago, about a policeman who had recruited him as an infiltrator and about continued criminal activity and the police who turned a blind eye, about a Polish mafia organisation called Wojtek, about secret meetings in flats that were being renovated, that she had dropped off her husband and collected him from a shell company that he had called Hoffmann Security AB, about a fabricated criminal record and suspect database and prison records that described him as extremely violent and classified him as psychopathic, that the illusion that was one of Sweden’s most dangerous men would be arrested tomorrow morning at six thirty in a pool hall in central Stockholm, about the expected trial and outcome, a sentence with years in prison, a life behind high walls that would start in about ten days and continue for two months, about having to look his wife and children in the eye each day and know that their trust and confidence was built on a lie.

friday
     

They had lain beside each other in bed and tried very hard to avoid touching.
     
    She had been completely still.
    Now and then he had stopped breathing, scared that he might not hear what she didn’t say.
    He sat on the edge of the bed, knew that she was awake, that she was lying there looking at his false back. He had continued to talk as they shared a cheap bottle of wine and when he was done, she just got up, disappeared into the bedroom and turned off the light. She hadn’t spoken, screamed, only silence.
    Piet Hoffmann got dressed, suddenly in a hurry to get away – it wasn’t possible to stay with the nothingness. He turned around and they looked at each other without saying anything until he gave her a key to a safe deposit box in the Handelsbanken branch on Kungsträdgårdsgatan. If she still wanted to share a life together she should go there if he contacted her and said that everything had kicked off. She should open the safe deposit box and she would find one brown and one white envelope and she should do exactly what the handwritten letter instructed her to do. He wasn’t sure if she had listened, her eyes had been distant, and he fled to the two small heads that were sleeping on two small pillows and he breathed in the smell of them and stroked them on the cheek and then left the house in the residential area that was still fast asleep.
    __________
    Two and a half more hours. His face in the rear-view mirror. A dark chin with salt and pepper stubble that was even more obvious on his cheeks – he had been a much younger man the last time he had stopped shaving. It itched a little, it always did to begin with, and then the straggled hair. He tugged at it, not much better really, it was actually too thin to grow.
     
    He would be arrested soon, transported in a police van to Kronoberg remand prison, be issued with baggy prison clothes.
    He drove through the dawn, his final trip to a small town to the north of Stockholm with a church and a library that he had visited less than twenty-four hours ago. The weak light and confused wind were his only companions in the square at Aspsås, not even the magpies and pigeons and the bum who usually slept on one of the benches were there. Piet Hoffmann opened the returns box to the right of the library entrance and dropped in six books that were not borrowed often enough to merit being visible on the shelves. He then carried on to the church that took up so much space with its white facade, into the churchyard that was blanketed in a soft mist and looked up at the church tower that had a view over one of the country’s high security prisons. He picked the locks of the solid wooden door and the considerably smaller door just inside and went up the uneven steps and an aluminium ladder to a closed hatch just under a cast iron bell that must weigh several hundred kilos.
    Nine square concrete buildings inside