Three Seconds

by Anders Roslund

  This time he would be locked up because he wanted to be-no time to feel anything at all, he was there to complete something and then leave.

  He stood by the rental car in the morning sun and light wind. In the distance, at one end of the high wall, he could see identical redbrick bungalows and a small town built up around the big prison. Those who didn't work as prison guards in the corridors, worked in the construction company that repaired the floor in Block C, or the catering company that supplied the ready portions to the dining hall, or the electricians who adjusted the lighting in the yard. The people who lived in freedom on one side of the wall in Aspsås were completely dependent on those who were locked up on the other side.

  I guarantee that you won't be charged for anything that happened at Viistmannagatan 79.

  The digital recorder was still in his trouser pocket. He had listened to her voice several times in the past few hours, his right leg and the microphone had been close to her and her words were dear and easy to understand.

  I guarantee that we will do our best to help you complete your operation in prison.

  He opened the gate. The path had been raked recently, his every step erasing the traces of a careful church warden. He looked at the graves that were well tended, simple headstones with small squares of grass, as if the people in the bungalows carried on living in the same way after death, with just enough distance between them not to interfere but close enough never to be alone, not too much and not too big, just a clearly marked separate space.

  The churchyard was surrounded by a stone wall and trees that had been planted long ago and still stood at regular intervals, with enough space to allow for growth but still give the impression of a protective screen. Hoffmann went closer, sycamore maples with leaves that had just sprung and that moved in the breeze, which meant that the wind strength was between two and five meters a second. He looked at the small branches, they were moving too, between seven and ten meters a second. He tilted back his head, trying to see if the bigger branches were moving, some way to go before it was fifteen meters per second.

  The heavy wooden door was open, and he entered a church that was too large: the white ceiling up high, the altar way back, it felt so big that the whole town of Aspsås could fit in the hard pews and there would still be space. One of those buildings from a time when power was measured in size.

  The nave was empty except for the warden who was moving some wooden chairs from just by the christening font, silent apart from a scraping sound up in a gallery near the organ.

  He went in and put a twenty-kronor note in one of the collection boxes on the table by the entrance, then nodded at the warden who had heard some movement and turned around. He went back out into the vestibule, waited until he was certain that he wasn't being watched before opening the gray door to the right.

  He slipped in as quickly as he could.

  The staircase was steep, with treads from a time when people were shorter. The door at the top swung open with a little pressure from a crowbar in the gap around the doorframe. The simple aluminum ladder leaned against a narrow hatch in the roof, the entrance to the church tower.

  He stopped.

  A sound made its way up. Muffled notes from the organ.

  He smiled, the scraping that he had heard earlier in the nave from the gallery had been a cantor preparing the day's psalms.

  The aluminum ladder swayed unsteadily when he pulled a pipe wrench from his bag and grabbed the hook of the padlock on the hatch. One firm thrust and it sprang open. He opened the hatch, climbed into the tower and ducked down under the enormous cast iron bell.

  One more door.

  He opened it and went out onto the balcony with a view that was so stunning that he was forced to stand still and follow the sky down to the woods and the two lakes and what looked like a rugged mountain in the far distance. With his hands on the rail, he inspected the balcony, which was not large-there was enough space to lie down. It was windier up here. The same wind that amused itself with leaves and small branches at ground level moved more freely here and the balcony shook when it was caught by a gust that tried to pull it along. He looked at the wall and the barbed wire and the buildings with bars on the windows. Aspsås prison was just as big and just as ugly from here and the view was uninterrupted, nothing in the way: it was possible to see every inmate in the heavily guarded prison yard, every pointless metal fence, every locked door in the concrete.

  And… that we will look after you when the work is done. I know that you will then have a death threat on you, branded throughout the criminal world. We will give you a new life, a new identity, and money to start over again abroad.

  The recorder was in his hand and her voice just as clear, despite the monotonous moan of wind.

  I guarantee you this in my capacity as a state secretary of the Ministry of Justice.

  If he succeeded.

  If he carried out his work behind those walls down there exactly as they had planned, he would have a death sentence on him, he would have to get out, away.

  He put down his shoulder bag and from the front pocket took out a thin black cable and two transmitters, both silver and about the size of a small coin, attached one transmitter to each end of the cable, which was about half a meter long, and fixed it to the outside of the railing with Blu-Tack, facing the prison, where it would be invisible to anyone standing on the church tower balcony.

  He squatted down and with a knife cut off a couple of centimeters of the black protective covering on the cable to expose the metal wires so he could splice it to another piece of cable which he then also attached to the outside of the railing. He lay down, his body close to the railing and wired that cable to what looked like a small piece of black glass.

  Always alone.

  He stuck his head out through the railings to check that the two cables, two transmitters, and solar cell were properly attached to the outside.

  Trust only yourself.

  The next time someone stood out here and spoke, he or she would do so without knowing that every word, every sentence could be heard by someone who had been sentenced to serve time down there, inside the walls of Aspsås prison.

  He paused to look at the view again.

  Two extremes, so close, so far apart.

  If he stood on the church tower's windy balcony with his head cocked, he could see the glittering water and treetops and endless blue sky.

  If he bent his head even farther, he met a separate world with a separate reality, nine square concrete buildings that from a distance looked like a collection of identical Lego pieces, where the most dangerous individuals in the country were crammed together and locked up with days that were totally predictable.

  Piet Hoffmann knew that he would be given the job of cleaner in Block B, one of the conditions from the meeting at the Government Offices and one of the tasks that the general director of the Swedish Prison and Probation Service had been ordered to sort out. He concentrated therefore on the Lego piece that stood roughly in the middle of the world that was framed by a seven-meter-high wall and with binoculars studied, section by section, the building that he did not know yet but which in a couple of weeks' time would be his day-to-day reality. He picked out a window on the second floor, the workshop, the largest workplace for inmates at Aspsås who chose not to study. A window that was positioned near the roof, with reinforced glass and closely spaced metal bars, but with the binoculars he could still see several of the people in there working on the machines, faces and eyes that stopped every now and then to look out and yearn-so dangerous when all you could do was count the days and pass the time.

  A closed system with no escape.

  If I'm exposed. If I'm burned. If I'm alone. He would no longer have any choice.

  He would die.

  He lay down on the balcony, crawled over to the railing holding an imaginary gun with both hands and aimed at the window he had just decided on, on the second floor of Block B. He studied the trees by the
churchyard wall-the wind had increased and the bigger branches were moving now.

  Wind strength twelve meters per second. Adjust eight degrees to the right.

  He aimed his imaginary gun at a head that was moving around inside the workshop window. He opened his bag and took out a rangefinder, aimed it at the same window.

  He had already estimated the distance to be around fifteen hundred meters.

  He checked the display, a hint of a smile.

  It was exactly fifteen hundred and three meters from the balcony of the church tower to the reinforced window.

  Distance fifteen hundred and three meters. Clear view. Three seconds from firing to impact.

  His hands gripped the nonexistent gun hard.

  It was five to ten when he walked back past the graves and protecting sycamore trees, down the neatly raked gravel path to the car that was parked outside the gate. He was on schedule-he had managed to sort out what he had to at the church and would be the first customer in Aspsås library when it opened.

  A separate building on the square, tucked between the bank and the supermarket, a librarian in her fifties who was as friendly as she looked. "Can I help you?"

  "In a moment. I just want to check some titles."

  A children's corner with cushions and small chairs and Pippi Longstocking books stacked in equal piles, three plain tables for anyone who wanted to study or just read for a while in peace, a sofa with headphones for listening to music and computers for surfing the Internet. It was a nice little library, quiet with a prevailing atmosphere of meaningful time in contrast to the prison wall that dominated the view through each window, signalling trouble and detention.

  He sat down at one of the screens by the lending desk and searched in the library catalogue. He needed the titles of six books and looked for ones that presumably had not been borrowed for a long time.

  "Here."

  The friendly librarian looked at his handwritten list.

  Byron Don Juan

  Homer The Odyssey

  Johansson Nineteenth Century Stockholm

  Bergman The Marionettes

  Bellman My Life Writings

  Atlantis Collection of World Literature The French Landscape "Poetry… and titles which… no, I don't think we'll find any of them up here."

  "I thought as much."

  "It will take a while to get them up."

  "I need them now."

  "Well, I'm on my own here and… they're in the storage. That's what we do with books that are not borrowed very often."

  "I would really appreciate it if it was at all possible to get them now I don't have that much time."

  She gave a sigh, a little one, like someone who has been asked to do something that is a problem, but also actually a joy.

  "Well, you're the only one here at the moment. And I'm sure there won't be manymore in until just before lunch. I'll go down to the basement if you could just keep an eye on things for me here."

  "Thank you so much. Only hardback copies, please."

  "I'm sorry?"

  "Not paperback or those flimsy bindings."

  "Paper bindings? They're cheaper for us to buy. And the content is the same."

  "Hardbacks, please. It's the way I read. Or rather, where I read."

  Piet Hoffmann sat down on the librarian's chair by the lending desk and waited. He had been here before and borrowed books that weren't popular and were therefore kept in storage in the basement as he had in several other libraries in the small communities close to the country's high security prisons. He had borrowed books from Kumla public library, whose customers included the inmates of Kumla prison, and Sodertalje public library, which had had customers from Hall prison for many years. And when prisoners inside the walls that were only a few hundred meters from the library ordered their books, they were always collected from here, Aspsås library, and what's more, if they were titles from storage, the borrower could be certain to get precisely the book he had ordered.

  She was out of breath when she opened the heavy door up from the basement.

  "Steep stairs."

  She smiled.

  "I guess I should perhaps jog a bit more."

  Six books on the lending desk.

  "Are these okay?"

  Hardbacks. Big. Heavy.

  "Tulips and poetry."

  "Excuse me?"

  "Perfect, just as I like them."

  The square was windy, relatively sunny, nearly empty. An old lady with a zimmer frame labored over the cobbles, a man of roughly the same age with plastic bags on the handlebars of his bike was rummaging in a rubbish bin with both hands, looking for empty bottles. Piet Hoffmann drove slowly out of the small town, which he would return to in ten days' time, in handcuffs and a secure police van.

  "I still want to know how."

  "We've already done this three times before."

  A closed system with no escape.

  An exposed infiltrator, a snitch, as hated in prison corridors as perverts, pedophiles or rapists, always at the bottom of the hierarchy that ruled in European prisons, which gave murderers and major drug dealers their status and power.

  "Officially, you will be pardoned. On humanitarian grounds. That doesn't need to be explained in anymore detail. Medical or humanitarian grounds are sufficient for a decision that the Ministry of Justice will then stamp as confidential."

  If anything happened. Her promise was all that he had. That, and the things he had prepared himself.

  He looked at the clock on the dashboard. Eighteen hours to go.

  A few miles out of Stockholm, driving slightly too fast through sleepy suburbs, one of his two mobile phones rang. An irritated woman's voice, one of the nursery teachers from Hagtornsgarden.

  Both boys had a temperature.

  He drove toward Enskededalen, it was his turn today and the Calpol had stopped working.

  A wise woman, a couple of years younger than he was, Hugo and Rasmus had always been safe with her.

  "I don't understand it."

  The same woman who had phoned him only a couple of days ago about two sick little boys. Now she was sitting in front of him in the office, frowning at him while two warm children waited on a bench out in the playroom.

  "That you… both of you… it's just not like you, after all these years, you, if anyone, just wouldn't play that stupid Calpol trick. I just don't understand."

  "I'm not quite sure what you're-"

  He had started to defend himself as he always did when someone accused him of something. But then stopped. This was not an interrogation, the nursery teacher was not the police and he was not suspected of a crime.

  "We have rules here. You know them. You both know them. Rules that say when a child is welcome and when he or she is not. This is a workplace, a workplace for adults, and for your children and other people's children."

  He was ashamed and didn't answer.

  "And what's more- Piet, it isn't good for the children. It's not good for

  Hugo or Rasmus. You can see for yourself how they look. Being here when their little bodies are overheated… it could have other, more serious consequences. Do you understand that?"

  When a person crosses a boundary he promised never to cross. Who is he Then?

  "I understand and it will never happen again."

  They flopped on his shoulders as he carried them out to the car. They were hot and he kissed their foreheads.

  One more time. Just one more time.

  He explained to them what they had to do. They had to get better. He gave them each a dose of Calpol.

  "I don't want it."

  "Just one more time."

  "It's yucky."

  "I know. This is the last time. I promise."

  He kissed them on the forehead again and started to drive in a direction that Hugo realized was not home.

  "Where are we going?"

  "To Daddy's office. We'll just be there for a little while. Then we're done. Then we can go home."


  A couple of minutes' drive up the main road into the city via Skanstull and Soderleden; he switched lane in the tunnel under Sodermalm and drove toward Hornsgatan and the road down to Mariatorget. He parked outside the video shop that was squeezed between the supermarket and bowling hall, rushed in, keeping his eyes on the back seat of the car through the window, and picked out three videos: twelve episodes of Winnie the Pooh. The children knew all the lines by heart already, but it was one of the few he could cope with. The sound wasn't as hysterical as most others: adults as cartoon characters shouting in falsettos, pretending to be children.

  The next time he stopped was right outside the door on Vasagatan. Hugo and Rasmus were still just as hot and tired and he wanted them to walk as little as possible. They had been with him to Hoffmann Security AB before, several times in fact, curious as children always are about where Mommy and Daddy work, but never when he was actually working-for them it was just a place where Daddy went while he waited for his children to finish playing at nursery.

  Half a litre of vanilla ice cream, two big glasses of Coke and twelve episodes of waddling Winnie the Pooh. He set them up in the spacious office in front of the TV screen with their backs to the desk and explained that he had to go up to the loft for a few minutes, but they didn't hear him, they were busy watching something about Rabbit and Eeyore and a wooden cart that they wanted Pooh to sit in. Piet Hoffmann got three tins out of the fan heater, carried them down and put them on the floor, cleared his desk so he would have space to work.

  Six books that belonged to Aspsås library that were seldom asked for and therefore had a note stuck on the front page, STORAGE, in blue print.