The doctor readjusted the collar of his white coat, smiled slightly.

“And there’s also the matter of your singing voice. It won’t sound like it did before. You lost a few notes. But maybe it’s not singing that’s got you in such a hurry?”

•   •   •

The traffic was heavier, but still navigable. A couple of times he had to drive up onto a sidewalk, spent a short stretch headed the wrong way on a one-way street, took the car down a pedestrian-only street, but soon he was back in the tunnel beneath the city, headed south. He exited at the Johanneshov Bridge, made a sharp turn toward Södermalm and Skanstull. A right just before Ring Road, where he knew there were a few good short-term parking spots beneath the Clarion Hotel, maximum thirty minutes.

He turned off his car and took out his phone, opened the browser window. Apartments for sale. That’s what he was looking for now. A condo in a southern suburb, at least five but no more than ten kilometers from his family’s house in Enskede. The price didn’t matter, nor did the number of rooms, nor did he care if it had a balcony or tiled stove. He was looking for a building that was cast in place, where the structure was solid concrete, with walls at least fifteen centimeters thick. Impossible for most weapons to pierce. That was his first priority as he searched through everything that was on the market, hundreds of apartments that looked the same because they’d been home-staged by the same companies.

But he couldn’t find what he wanted.

His second choice then was to find apartments located on the ground floor in buildings built in the fifties. Especially in the years 1953, 1955, 1958. This yielded more options. He found a total of seven apartments, and he was pretty sure that at least four of them sat on hollow-core slabs—which was key. He cleared his throat, tried out his new voice. It worked. And the doctor was right, not so uniquely deep anymore, just a normal voice, that’s who he was from now on. He made the call. Talked to a very friendly and helpful woman at the Stockholm city planning office, who confirmed this was such a building, built with exactly that sort of floor slab. So the ceilings, walls, and floors would have a helluva lot of air in them—a thin outer layer of three centimeters of concrete framed from two sides in twenty-two centimeters of sand and sound insulation and nothing more.

He asked her to email him the floor plans for these four addresses.

Waited impatiently for what never seemed to arrive and was about to give up when his inbox pinged.

He opened the attachments one at a time.

Turned and twisted the pictures, enlarged and reduced, juxtaposed the sketches of these large residential buildings constructed over sixty years ago.