That’s what it said on the envelope. Just as Rasmus told him.

No stamp or postage, and nothing on the back.

He widened the gap with his gloved fingers.

There was something inside. A piece of white paper. Typed in the same style as on the outside of the envelope.

He fished it out, carefully, and read the sentence, which contained only five short words.

We know who you are.

Chapter 11

He’d slept a bit between two and three o’clock. Slept some more around half past four. A long night. The kind he thought he was done with. Tense. Completely prepared. His humanity reduced to instinct. Wait, watch, protect. While making sure that the people he was protecting neither noticed nor understood.

After finding the grenade on the kitchen table and the typed note in the mailbox, Piet Hoffmann had used the rest of the afternoon and evening to inspect the house, the garden, and its immediate surroundings. But he didn’t find anything else out of the ordinary. Meanwhile he’d gotten in touch with every contact he had left from a life spent in the criminal underworld, questioning the ones who always knew, those that made the threats and those who received them, but still he’d gotten no closer to an answer. He’d held Zofia like he always did when she came home, played with Luiza, who’d passed all the tests at her six-month checkup, quizzed Hugo on his English test, and listened to Rasmus practice the first part of a play that he was in. And then he lay down next to both his boys and read to them until they fell asleep. Not a word about his fury or his fear. Zofia, of course, had noticed what she wasn’t supposed to, and asked him what was wrong, but he avoided answering her. Later when it was just the two of them on the sofa, a glass of wine in hand, she’d looked at him as only she could, and he’d hidden behind the excuse that he and Rasmus had an argument about a toy, and that’s probably what she noticed, and they were both sorry, as always after that kind of conflict. He’d promised never to lie to her again, but he met her eyes anyway, and she’s seen through him, he was sure of it.

“I don’t want to, Dad.”

Hugo was only ten, but he already seemed like a teenager. Big, small. Clear, unclear. Sure, unsure. Right now he was lying in bed with his blanket over his head, and he didn’t want to get up.

“Hugo, you have to.”

“No I don’t. I stay home by myself all the time. We have a half-day off today. That means I get to sleep in as long as I want.”