Tonight we exchange our most valuable possessions. You get our weapon and we get your family. After you finish your mission, we trade back. If you fail, the exchange never happens. We’ll be in touch about the precise time.
Avoid. Lie. Delay.
He had to answer.
Somehow.
But he didn’t want to talk, didn’t want them to hear his new voice, so he’d have to text.
Been stuck in a meeting. I will do what you ask.
He put the phone back on the passenger seat and headed back toward the inner city and Södermalm. The salon where they dyed his hair and eyebrows dark was on Skåne Street. The optician who helped him try out brown contacts, had a small shop on a corner near Göta Street. And at Hornstull close to where Långholms Street met Högalids Street, there was a small studio that was key to the next step in his plan.
* * *
• • •
The cast that lay over his face, a membrane covering everything except his nostrils, was a pinkish color and just as cool on his skin as usual. The first time he did this, seven or eight years ago, the process made him feel trapped, even claustrophobic, when darkness concealed both his eyes. But now he trusted this woman, who usually worked with film or theater productions. She knew what she was doing, was the best he’d ever worked with. And she never asked why.
A bit messy, slightly runny, and about one centimeter thick. Alginate, which dentists used for dental imprints, and it solidified in ten minutes. Thinly spread and time-sensitive, so that her nimble fingers danced and danced across his face getting it into every nook and cranny. She had cut the plaster strips in advance—now she dipped them in water and draped them over the alginate mask, letting them be sucked into it. The burn. That’s what she called it. And the plaster strips did burn for real, got hot on the outside. She occasionally touched them, knocked them hard with her knuckles to check if it was done. Then she gently lifted off his provisional mask.
Piet Hoffmann could see again. And there it was suspended in front of him in her hands. The first version of his face.
“Do you need . . .”
He’d risen halfway out of his chair, nodding at the small studio’s exit.
“. . . me anymore?”
She’d a wonderful smile, he’d noticed it before, genuine, the opposite of the broker’s, and that’s how she answered his question. Not indulgently, but kind and patient.
“You know that.”
“Right now, I mean.”
The cement that was poured into the mask to make it even harder also needed to burn, for another half hour or so, then the alginate and plaster strips would be torn away and the next version of his face cast in the worktop. He knew that, just like she said. She preferred he stayed until the first cast was absolutely hard, until she was sure she had everything she needed to complete her work without him.
“You seem stressed today, Piet. Even more than usual. I mean, you usually are when you show up here. I guess that’s why you come, but today . . . you seem almost hunted.”
She worked with people’s exteriors, transforming them.
But in order to do that she needed to know their interiors as well.
Because the two were connected.
“Hunted. And hunting. What do you say—can I go?”
She smiled again, a smile you could linger in, lean against, someone who knew him at least a little.
“Go. I’ll call if I need you. See you in ten hours.”
He hurried over to the door and was just opening it when he heard her voice behind him.
“Two flaps above the eyes?”
He turned around.
“Perfect.”
“The nose—a little crooked? With large wings of the nose?”
“Sounds good.”
“And I was thinking . . . maybe sort of bloated? It’s been a while. Jaw. Cheeks. And a bit of a belly.”
“Great. Thanks.”
* * *
• • •
Early afternoon and traffic was still relatively sparse. He crossed the old bridge at Skanstull, headed eastward past South Hammarby Port. Shut down. That’s what he was. Because that’s all he could stand.
Forward, forward never letting himself feel.
Because if he did, if he lost this tunnel vision, let the other reality in, he’d never make it. If he gave in, took out his phone and called Zofia or Hugo or Rasmus just to hear their voices, if he let his own longing get out of hand, then no one would make it to safety.
Forward, forward.
The apartment was in the neighborhood called Tallbacken. The building itself was on a low hill, a large horseshoe-shaped complex with many different entrances and addresses. Number 37 was his destination. A green balcony behind an equally green hedge sat to the left of the front door. He recognized it from the brochure, the dirty yellow umbrella, the string of Chinese lanterns hanging above it like the branches of a very lean fruit tree. He entered the apartment building, went to the door of his apartment, and took out the keys that were the symbol of a completed home purchase. A security door. Two locks, in class 7 and class 6, as promised in the fine print on the website. He opened the door, stepped into the hall. Just a few hours ago people were walking around in here, drinking their coffee, waiting their turn to use the bathroom, looking out the window at a familiar view. They’d left the beds behind as promised, one double and two twins. Luiza would have to sleep with her mother, as she did for the first few months of her life. Kitchen table, kitchen chairs, even a corner sofa in the living room and a TV that should keep Rasmus and Hugo fairly occupied for a few days. It was relatively clean and there were a few sets of keys on the counter, marked Basement and Attic and Laundry Room. It had a particular smell. Their smell, whoever they were. Not bad, just theirs, just like all families have a particular smell that’s obvious to everyone but them. He wondered how his family smelled, how much came from him and how much from Zofia and the children.
The building didn’t have the bulletproof concrete he’d sought at first. But it fulfilled his other demands. And since the walls lacked the sufficient thickness, he’d have to re-reinforce them himself. In the trunk and back seat of his car he had a heat gun, a toolbox, and polymer plastics and laminates. He was planning to build an inner security door out of plastic, much lighter than transporting a steel plate that weighed a few tons. A transparent film of bulletproof glass that could withstand gunfire even from some of the most difficult angles. A few years ago, he’d come across a Russian manufacturer who specialized in a plastic that was both hard and tough when vacuum-glued to ordinary glass, and he bought out his whole stock. And even at only a thickness of twenty-five millimeters it could withstood automatic gunfire.
He’d build the inner door first, then reinforce the balcony door, then reinforce all the windows.
He’d place seven tiny, hard-to-spot cameras at strategic points outside—strange how something so threatening in one context felt like protection in another—then put detcord in four spots, ambush-mines that he could easily activate from his cell phone.
And finally the most important improvement of all—the closet in one bedroom.
* * *
• • •
He couldn’t take it anymore. Couldn’t leave it be.
“Hello.”
She’d been just the press of a few buttons away.
“Hello? Who . . . ?”
“It’s me. Piet.”
He could hear Zofia’s silence. Her confusion.
“Your voice? Do you have a cold? It sounds like you’re having trouble breathing. Is everything all right?”
“I’ll explain when I see you.”
He tried to make out where she was. Interpret the sounds around her. He would guess she was doing the same.
“Tomorrow. You wrote that on the note.”
“Maybe earlier. I hope so. But I don’t know.”
“Where are you?”
“Not very far away.”
“What are you doing?”
She’d long since realized something had happened. And that they were back again to him keeping all the whats and whys to himself.
“I can’t tell you. Yet.”
“Your voice Piet—maybe it’s the connection? Can you call again?”
Home. That’s what it sounded like. He could hear the fridge buzzing, a creak in the stairs.
“Hugo? Rasmus? Luiza?”
“Everyone . . . everything’s fine. Hugo’s still in school, he’s coming home late today, Rasmus is at the neighbor’s playing football and Luiza is asleep.”
Then silence again. No fridge, no creaking.
Only her slow breath.
“Zo?”
“Yeah?”
“We can handle . . . anything, right?”
“Piet, what . . .”
“We can, right, Zo? Anything?”
She pulled out a chair, probably in the kitchen—sounded like the sharp scrape of the kitchen chairs.
“I think so.”
They didn’t say more. After a while he kissed the phone twice, and she kissed twice, and they hung up at the same time. Always an even number.
* * *
• • •
The well-stocked home improvement store was just a few kilometers away. That was where he went to buy a small jackhammer. And the spade. And the plasterboard. And the glue. And the putty. And the screws. And the white paint. And the brass hinge that looked like it belonged on a piano, and the small doorknob. And finally, after he packed the car and was on his way back, he stopped at another store and bought a piece of wood that would form the false floor of the closet.
Back in Tallbacken, he headed down to the basement of the apartment building, walked through its slightly mildewy hall, and passed by a row of storage spaces his neighbors had stuffed to the brim and a laundry room. Around the corner he found the air raid shelter. He grabbed two metal wheels that looked like steering wheels, one at the top and one at the bottom of the heavy steel door, twisted them simultaneously clockwise until, with a deep sigh, the locking mechanism released. An air raid shelter almost identical to the one in the high-rise apartment building where he grew up, housing projects really, that the politicians called left behind. Outsiders in this society. He’d never looked at it that way. He never put it in those words, never formulated the anxiety, restlessness, hopelessness—to him it was the only life he knew, the only place he had. He learned to fight, survive, be part of something instead of outside it. And the air raid shelter in his childhood apartment building had been their playground—the kids used to sneak down there and turn off all the lights in that windowless room and could play hide-and-seek in the dark. That’s where he had his first kiss, his first cigarette, his first beer.
The air raid shelter he stepped into now was, according to the building drawings, below one of the bedrooms in his newly purchased apartment. He checked the emergency exits, the walls, the ceiling, and everything looked exactly how he’d hoped.
On his way back up, he taped a handwritten note on the bulletin board next to the entrance and on the mirror in the elevator asking his neighbors for their patience for a few hours, he’d just moved in and would be doing some renovations, it might be loud. Then he unloaded all of the building materials into the apartment, spread them across the floor of the bedroom, and opened the closet, which had double doors that ran the length of the wall. It was empty just as it should be, only a rod with a few bare hangers on it, and as he opened the doors, even more of the former family’s scent rushed out—the smell of their skin against their clothes.
He sank down onto his knees and drew a large circle on the floor, about the size of a well cap. The small jackhammer looked like a hammer drill with a chisel instead of a drill, relatively easy to handle even in confined spaces. He let it hack along his penciled-in line through the thin upper layer of concrete. Breaking into an intermediate space. Air, sand, and even more air in that twenty-two-centimeter thick nothingness. He dug out the sand and shoved it into a trash bin he’d borrowed from the laundry room. The lower layer of equally thin concrete was exposed and the jackhammer chewed and spat its way around the next hole. Done. He was through. He pushed an arm down into the circle, used the flashlight on his phone to illuminate the cold walls below.
Then hurried down into the basement and the shelter to clean up the edges of the hole. It stared down at him like a giant eye—he glued on the Sheetrock, plastered it, painted it, and cleaned the mess off the concrete floor.
Back up to the closet. He didn’t want the hole to be visible from either side.
He cut out the particleboard, fashioned it into a blind bottom for the closet, screwed the piano hinge along its short side, and hid the small doorknob behind the doorframe. The hatch could be lifted up with the knob, then pulled back again without landing wrong. He tried and it worked perfectly, at a right angle to the threshold. The closet now seemed to have a completely normal floor.
Piet Hoffmann paused, momentarily overcome by exhaustion.
A break, it was surely several hours since his last.
Deep, slow breaths with his eyes closed.
Yes.
It would work. If it became necessary.
If they had to escape this place, too.
* * *
• • •
He picked up a coffee and a cinnamon bun at the gas station near the roundabout on Hammarby Road, took the smaller roads through Björkhagen and Kärrtorp to avoid rush hour, and in Bagarmossen picked up two more cups of coffee at a café that had looked exactly the same for as long as he could remember. He parked in his usual spot and took the elevator to the eighth floor and the studio apartment whose blinds were always drawn.
“Hi, Andy—want a coffee?”
“Sure, thanks.”
“Splash of milk, that’s how you like it?”
“You got a good memory, boss.”
Hoffmann handed him one of the warm cardboard cups. The huge security guard took it in one of his enormous hands, thankful for even a moment’s respite from the eighteen screens he’d had his eyes on.
“Easy like yesterday?”
“Some drunk dude pissed in the doorway to number 8 just now, two dogs had a fight outside 10 just an hour ago, and a young woman in 12 punched her boyfriend rather skillfully early in the morning on their way home from what I would guess was a bar. So yes—just as calm.”
Piet Hoffmann sank down onto the only thing in the room resembling a free chair—an unpacked moving box, which had never found its place—and slurped down the last drop in his paper cup. He cleared his throat, tried to lower his voice as best he could, felt like the guard had already noticed the difference.
“Allergies. Nothing contagious—just an itch in my throat.”
“Got it, boss. Pollen is a motherfucker. And grass is the worst—whenever they mow it, I can’t stop sneezing.”
Hoffmann nodded and glanced at one of the monitors, saw an older couple washing their windows from the outside, the man in the flower bed balanced on a long metal rod with a squeegee in his hand, and a woman with the living room window half-open pointing and directing him.
Hoffmann and the guard exchanged a smile.
Watching people had its moments.
“It’s like this, Andy. I need you to listen to me.”
“Okay.”
“We’re adding another safe house.”
“A new one?”
“Seven new surveillance cameras. I need you to connect to them this evening and keep watch to make sure everything’s as it should be.”
“Which number?”
“Not here—a bit further away. Tallbacken, in the Gamla Sickla area.”
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“I’m not sure I follow.”
“Emergency. As usual.”
“But if anything happens . . . I mean, I thought the whole point was to have them all in the same place—I can’t get there in time if something happens, and I’d have to leave the other three . . .”
Lie.
Piet Hoffmann was pretty good at it; only Zofia could see straight through him.
“A single woman in her forties. Three children, two boys, ten and eight, and a baby, a girl. Safe house has the highest level of security. Nacka Municipality called me this morning, and I said yes—so it is what it is. But I’ve gone through everything. Doors secured, windows secured, cameras in place. I’ll help them move in sometime tonight. And as far as you and Carlos and Bill are concerned, no change other than a few more cameras to follow, one more family.”
* * *
• • •
He was still hungry, his body leaking energy, so he parked in the bus lane near Hornstull and ran into 7-Eleven to grab a hot dog and a low-alcohol beer. Wolfed the first one down, ordered another, checked the time—almost ten hours had passed since he left the small studio on the corner. This time he entered through the back entrance on Borgar Street, crossed the courtyard, and went into the building on Högalids Street, where she waited for him with the smile he could have drowned in once—and she looked pleased.
“Sit down. Let’s try this on.”
The makeup artist who had helped him so many times rolled out a long and narrow cart whose metal wheels whined angrily, just like always.
“I think . . . well, we’ve never transformed you quite this much before? Or am I forgetting something, Piet?”
“You’re right. It’s never been necessary. Now it is.”
Four trays were jammed onto the shelves of the trolley, prepped and full.
“I should have broken it down into more sections, then I could have made the details even better, but I wanted to simplify it for you.”
Knock Knock Page 10
