Anders Roslund - Three Seconds

The warden in front of him stopped.

"Excuse me?"

"I'd like to borrow-"

"I heard what you said. I was just hoping that I'd heard wrong. You've only been here a few hours, you're not even in your unit yet, and you start talking about books."

"You know it's my right."

"We'll talk about that later."

"I need them. It's important to me. Without books I won't survive this."

"Later."

You don't understand.

I'm not here to serve some shitty sentence.

I'm here to knock out all the drug dealers in your leaky prison in a matter of days and then take over myself.

Then I'll carry on working, analyzing, putting together the pieces until I know everything I need to know, and with that knowledge I will destroy the Polish organization's operations, in the name of the Swedish police.

I don't think you've understood that.

The unit was completely deserted when he arrived, sandwiched between two young and quite nervous guards.

Ten years had passed and it was a completely different prison, but it could well have been the same unit as back then: he was back on the corridor with eight cells on each side, the well-equipped kitchen, the TV corner with card games and thoroughly thumbed newspapers, the table tennis table at the far end of the small storeroom with a broken bat hanging in the middle of the tattered net, the pool table with the dirty green baize and every ball safely locked away… even the smell was the same: sweat, dust, fear, and adrenaline and perhaps a hint of moonshine.

"Name?"

"Hoffmann."

The principal prison officer was as short as he was round and he nodded at the two guards from inside his glass box, indicating that from here on he would take charge.

"Haven't we met before?"

"Don't think so."

He had small eyes that seemed to pierce everything he looked at and it was hard to imagine that there was actually a person in there.

"From your papers, I understand that you… Hoffmann, was it?… are someone who is familiar with the way things work in a place like this."

Piet Hoffmann nodded silently at the principal officer. He wasn't there to tell some fat fucking inspector that he deserved a thrashing.

"Yes. I know very well how it works."

The unit would be empty for another three hours, until they came back from the workshop or the library and classroom. He had time for a guided tour with the unit's principal officer to learn how and where he should piss and why lock-in time was seven thirty and not seven thirty-five, and still have plenty of time to sit down in his own cell and come to terms with the fact that from now on this was his home.

Piet Hoffmann positioned himself in the TV corner a few minutes before the others were due back. He had seen photos of all the other fifteen prisoners in the unit and knew their backgrounds, and if he sat here he could see every single one as they came in, but more important, he himself would be seen, it would be obvious that there was someone new in Cell 4, someone who wasn't scared, someone who didn't hide and wait for the right moment to sneak out and show his papers for approval, someone who had already sat down in someone else's favorite chair and taken someone's marked cards and started to play solitaire on someone's table without even asking if he could.

He was looking for two faces in particular.

A heavy, almost square pale face with small eyes that were set too close together. A thinner, longer face with a nose that had been broken in several places and not healed well and a chin and a cheek that had been sewn up by a hand that wasn't a doctor's.

Stefan Lygas and Karol Tomasz Penderecki.

Two of the four members of Wojtek who were serving long sentences at Aspsås, his helpers in knocking out the competition and taking over the drug market, and his executioners the moment he was exposed as Paula.

The first questions were asked at supper. Two of the older men, thick gold around bull necks, one on either side of him with their warm plates and sharp elbows. Stefan and Karol Tomasz got up to stop them but he waved to them, they should hold off, he would let the two men ask the same questions that he had on the prison bus a few hours ago; it was all about the same thing really, respect based on the shared hate of perverts.

"We want to see your papers."

"That's what you say."

"Have you got a problem with that?"

Stefan and Karol Tomasz had already done the bulk of the work. They had been talking about the fact that Piet was coming for the past few days, what he had been taken in for, who he'd worked with, his status with one of the eastern European mafias. They had managed to get in copies of 721018-0010 from the National Police Board criminal records, the criminal intelligence database, prison records and his most recent judgment, via Stefan's lawyer.

"No, but I've got a problem with people sitting too close."

"Your papers, for fuck's sake!"

He would ask them into his cell and he would show them his papers and then he wouldn't have to answer anymore questions. The new prisoner in Cell 4 wasn't a sex offender or a wife beater, but in fact had precisely the background he claimed to have; he would probably even get a few smiles and a cautious slap on the shoulder-prisoners who had shot at policemen and were convicted of attempted murder and aggravated assault of an officer were the kind who didn't need to fight for their status.

"You'll get my judgment, if you just shut it now and let me finish my food."

They played stud poker later with toothpicks that cost a thousand kronor each and he sat in the place that he'd taken from someone who no longer dared to take it back and he boasted about the fucking pig in Söderhamn who had begged for his life when he aimed at his forehead and he smoked rollies for the first time in years and he talked about a woman he was going to fuck senseless on his first supervised leave and they laughed loudly and he leaned back and looked around at the room and the corridor that was full of people who had longed to get away for so long that they no longer knew where.

He had driven slowly through the Stockholm dark which now had turned to light-one of those nights again, long hours of turmoil and restlessness. He hadn't been there for more than two weeks, but at around half past three he had found himself in the middle of the Udine, bridge once again, looking at the sky and water, I never want to see you here again, he had been on his way to the nursing home that he was no longer allowed to visit and the window where she no longer sat, what you are frightened of has already happened, when he suddenly turned around, drove back toward the houses and people, the capital that was so big and yet so small, where he had lived and worked all his life.

Ewert Grens got out of the car.

He had never been here before. He hadn't even known he was on his way here.

He had thought about it so many times and planned and started to drive, but never made it. Now, here he was standing by the southern entrance that was called Gate 1 and his legs felt rubbery like they would both collapse and there was pressure in his chest from his stomach or maybe his heart.

He started to walk but then stopped after a few steps.

He couldn't do it, his legs lacked the strength and whatever it was that was pressing inside came in regular thumps.

It was a gentle dawn and the sun shone so beautifully on the graves and grass and trees, but he wasn't going to go on. Not this morning. He would turn back to the car and drive into the city again as North Cemetery disappeared into the distance in his rearview mirror.

Maybe next time.