Three Seconds

knocked again, a bit harder and a bit longer, making it clear that he had no intention of leaving.
    ‘What the hell d’you want? It’s lunchtime. Wasn’t it you who was going to clean the kitchen?’
    ‘Does it look like there’s anything left to do out there?’
    ‘That’s not the point.’
    Hoffmann shrugged, he wasn’t going to pursue it.
    ‘My books?’
    ‘What about them?’
    ‘I ordered them yesterday. Six of them.’
    ‘Don’t know anything about it.’
    ‘Well, then it might make sense to have a look, eh?’
    He was an older warden, not one of the ones who had dealt with him yesterday. He waved his arm around in irritation, but after a while went into the glass box and looked on the desk.
    ‘These ones?’
    Hardbacks, library covers. A label stuck on the front of each one: STORE in blue typed letters.
    ‘That’s them.’
    The older screw glanced quickly at the author presentations on the back sleeve, leafed through some pages here and there without really concentrating and then handed them over.
    ‘
Nineteenth Century Stockholm. The Marionettes.
What the hell is all that?’
    ‘Poetry.’
    ‘A bit poncy, eh?’
    ‘Maybe you should try reading some.’
    ‘Listen here, you prick, I don’t read poofs’ books.’
    Piet Hoffmann closed his cell door enough so that no one could see, but not so much that it would arouse suspicion. He put the six books on the small bedside table; titles that were seldom borrowed and which therefore had to be collected from the store in the basement of Aspsås library when the request from the large prison came through that morning, and that were then handed over to the driver of the library bus by an out-of-breath, single female librarian in her fifties.
    The knife he had stolen from the kitchen had felt sharp enough when he had run his fingertips across the blade.
    He pressed it hard down the hinge between the front board and the first page of Lord Byron’s
Don Juan
. It loosened thread by thread and soon the front and the spine were hanging just as freely as they had thirteen days earlier when he had opened it at a desk on Vasagatan. He thumbed to page 90, took hold of all the pages and pulled them off in one go. In the left-hand margin of page 91, a hole that was fifteen centimetres long and one centimetre wide, with thin walls constructed of Rizla papers, three hundred pages deep. The contents lay there untouched, just as he had left them.
    Yellowish-white, a little sticky, exactly fifteen grams.
    Ten years earlier he had consumed most of what he smuggled in himself, only occasionally when he had too much might he sell some on. On a couple of occasions he was so hard pushed that he used it as part payment for his most pressing debts. This time, it was going to be put to different use. Four books with a total of forty-two grams of 30 per cent manufactured amphetamine was his weapon for squashing the competition and taking over himself.
    Books, Blossom.
    Small amounts, but he didn’t need more right now. The tricks he had learnt over the years were foolproof and wouldn’t be discovered by prison routines.
    Back then, he’d been sent to Österåker as soon as he’d come back from his first secure leave. Someone had tipped the screws off about drugs up his arse or in his belly, and he’d been put in the dry cell, with glass walls, a bunk to lie on and a toilet that was a closed system … that was it. He had stayed there for a week, naked twenty-four/seven, three screws watching him when he went for a dump, checking his shit,eyes staring at him through the glass as he slept, always without a blanket, an arse that couldn’t be covered.
    He had had no choice then, what with the debts and threats, he became just another dry celler. But now, he had a choice.
    Every day in every prison, every waking hour was about drugs: how to get them in, and how to use them without it being discovered by the regular urine tests. A relative who came to visit was also a relative who could be forced to smuggle in some urine, their own, urine that was clean and would test negative. Once, in his first few weeks in Österåker, some mouthy Serb got his girlfriend to piss into a couple of mugs, the content of which was then sold for a great deal of money. None of them tested positive, despite the fact that more than half of them were under the influence, but the tests did show something else, and that was that every man in the unit was pregnant.
    Don Juan
,
The Odyssey
,
My