Three Seconds

Lennart Oscarsson walked toward Cell 9 with two huge holes in his back. He could feel his perhaps best friend's eyes, staring, and he wanted to turn around and explain the order that he himself had so recently been appalled by. Martin was a wise friend, an experienced colleague, the sort who had the courage to speak up when someone who should know better was wrong.

An unconscious hand to the back of his jacket as he approached the locked cell, brushed over the fabric, by the holes, the eyes, trying to get rid of them. The temps with no names were close behind him and stopped by the door, keys jangling as they looked for the right one.

The prisoner was lying on the iron bed, naked except for a pair of white underpants. He was resting, trembling, his torso as white as his face. 'You're going back.'

The pale body, he didn't look like much, but only a couple of hours ago he had punched him hard in the face.

'Tomorrow morning. Eight o'clock.'

He didn't move.

'To the same unit and the same cell.'

He didn't seem to hear, to see.

'Did you hear what I said?'

The chief warden waited, then nodded to his young colleagues and to the door.

'The books.'

'Excuse me?'

'I need the books. It's my legal right.'

'Which books?'

'I've asked for two of the five books that I have the right to have. Nineteenth Century Stockholm. The Marionettes. They're in my cell.'

'You're going to read?'

'The nights are long here.'

Lennart Oscarsson nodded to the wardens again-they should close and lock and leave the cell.

He sat up. Back. He was going to die. Back. He was dead the moment he went back into the same unit, hated, hunted, he had broken one of the first prison rules, he was a snitch, and you killed snitches.

He got down on his knees in front of the cement toilet bowl, two fingers down his throat, he held them there until he started to puke.

Fear had sucked everything out of him and he spat it out, he had to get rid of it. He stayed on his knees and emptied himself, emptied out everything that had been, everything that was inside him, he was on his own now, the people who could burn him had burnt again.

He pressed the button.

He wasn't going to die, not yet.

He had kept it pressed in for fourteen minutes when the hatch in the door opened and the warden with the eyes shouted at him to goddamn take his finger off.

He didn't turn round, just pressed even harder.

'The books.'

'You're going to get them.'

'The books!'

'I've got them with me. Chief's orders. If you want me to come in, take your finger off the button.'

Piet Hoffmann spotted them as soon as the door opened. His books. In the guard's hand. His chest, the pressure that had been there, making him shake, was released. He relaxed, wanted to collapse, wanted to cry, that was how it felt, released and he just wanted to cry.

'It smells of puke in here.'

The guard peered into the cement hole, started retching, and moved back.

'It's your choice. You know that no one cleans in here. That smell, you'll just have to get used to it.'

The warden gripped the books in his hands, shook them, flicked through, shook them again. Hoffmann stood in front of him but felt nothing, he knew that they would hold up.

He had sat on the iron bed for a long time holding the two books from Aspsas library close by. They were intact. He had just been down on his knees and emptied himself, now, now he was calm, his body felt soft, he could nearly bend over again and if he rested, if he slept for a while, he could refill it with energy, he wasn't going to die, not yet.

Friday

He had woken gleaming with sweat, fallen asleep again, dreamed in fragments and without color, the sort of sleep that is shallow and black and white and far away. He had woken again and sat up on the iron bed and looked at the floor and the books that were lying there for a long time-he wouldn't lie down again, his body was screaming for rest, but as sleep rook more energy than it gave he chose to stay sitting where he was and wait as the dawn turned into morning.

It was quiet, dark.

The solitary confinement corridor would sleep for a few more hours.

He had emptied himself yesterday of the fear that got in the way and had to be gotten rid of, the smell still stringent in the air around the cement hole. He had emptied himself and now there was only one thing left, the will to survive.

Piet Hoffmann lifted up the two books and put them down in front of him on the bed. Nineteenth Century Stockholm. The Marionettes. Bound in hard, mono colored library boards, marked with STORE in blue and ASPSS LIBRARY in red. He opened the first page, got a firm grip of the cover and with a powerful rug pulled it loose. Another tug and the spine of the book collapsed, a third and the back came off He looked over at the locked cell door. Still quiet. No one walking around out there, no one who had heard and hurried over to the hatch at the top of the door with meddlesome eyes. He changed position, back to the door-if anyone were to look in all they would see was a fidgety long-termer who couldn't sleep.

He ran his hand carefully over the torn book. His fingers along the left-hand margin and a cut-out, rectangular hole.

It was there. In eleven pieces.

He turned the book over, coaxed out the metal that in a matter of minutes would be a five-centimeter-long mini-revolver. First the larger pieces, the frame with the barrel and cylinder pivot and trigger, a couple of gentle taps with the handle of the sewing machine screwdriver on the millimeter-long pins between them, then the barrel protector with the first screw, the butt sides with the second screw and the butt stabiliser with the third.

He turned to the door, but the footsteps were only in his head, as before.

He spun the tiny revolver's cylinder, emptied it, took his time checking the six bullets as long as half a thumbnail that were lined up on the iron bed-ammunition that together weighed no more than a gram.

He had seen a person stop breathing in that godforsaken toilet far away in winoujcie ferry terminal, the short barrel right up close to a petrified eye, the miniature revolver had killed with a single shot.

Piet Hoffmann held it, raised it, aimed it at the dirty wall. Left index finger light on the trigger-there was just enough room with the trigger guard sawn off-slowly pull back, he watched the hammer follow the movement of the finger, a final squeeze and it leaped forward, then the sound, the sharp click. It worked.

He ripped apart the second book in the same way, revealing a hole in the left-hand margin, a detonator the size of a nail and a receiver the size of a penny. He ran the sewing machine screwdriver along the bottom edges of the book's thick covers, front and back, cut open the glued hinge and pulled out two nine-meter-long pieces of pentyl fuse and an equally thin plastic envelope containing twenty-four centilitres of nitroglycerine.

It was a few minutes past seven.

He heard the wardens changing shift out in the corridor behind the locked door-night shift to day shift. One