You sleep, and you have no control over your dreams this time. Afterwards you cannot remember whether they were peaceful out-of-body experiences or nightmares, but at least they can’t have been any worse than lying awake in the darkness.
Sooner or later you are awake again, and totally dehydrated. You have no idea if it is morning, but breakfast consists of a little water from the bottom of the bucket. It is slightly gritty, with hairs floating around in it, but you drink it anyway. Every last drop.
Is that a rumbling noise? You put down the bucket and listen. No, it isn’t the Secret Avenger opening the door. Perhaps it was a car driving past the back of the gym.
You are going to die here in the sauna. You know that now. There is no more water. It is a little bit like lying in a dark desert. A night of tropical heat. Your body is gradually drying out.
Is it possible to drink sweat? It doesn’t really matter, because you are so dehydrated that you have stopped sweating — there is just a greasy film coating your skin.
Is it possible to drink urine? You are naked and you need to pee, so it isn’t difficult to test the theory, all you have to do is let a little bit trickle into your hand.
It tastes bitter, but you drink a mouthful anyway. One mouthful. That’s all you can get down.
You crawl over to the door. The gap at the bottom is tiny, but you push your face up against it and try to see out. The lights are still on. The shower room looks just the same as it always does, with its shiny tiled floor. Out there the whole world is going about its business as if nothing terrible has happened, as if the Gang of Four does not exist.
Eventually, at some point when you are almost unconscious, you slowly clamber up to the top bench and the beer can — the one that is half full of some unidentified liquid. And you drink that too. It is warm and sour and slightly viscous, but you drink and drink and empty the can. You are too thirsty to care what is sliding down your throat.
When it is all gone you swallow again, hard.
Clamp your lips together, you mustn’t be sick. You must retain the liquid in your stomach, otherwise you will die.
But by now you want to die. So why do you go on fighting here in the darkness, minute by minute?
You lie down on the floor again. Is it Saturday or Sunday? You have given up, you simply lie there.
‘Perhaps I died right there on the floor,’ Jan said. ‘Perhaps the Unit is heaven.’
Somehow he had ended up lying on the floor, with his head on Rami’s lap. He looked up at her, but she shook her head.
‘You didn’t die.’
She bent her head and opened her mouth. Jan saw the tip of her tongue and was expecting the second kiss of his life, but Rami was aiming for his eyes.
She closed his eyelids with her tongue, first the right, then the left.
And when his eyes were closed she pushed her tongue into his mouth. This kiss felt better than the first one, like a journey across the vault of heaven. He felt her upper body pressing against him. It was soft, not hard as he had expected.
Rami released his lips eventually, exhaled with a gentle sigh and looked at him. ‘But somebody rescued you in the end?’
Jan nodded without speaking. He wanted to lie here for the rest of his life; he didn’t want to think about the sauna.
At long last you hear noises through the wooden door; someone is moving around in the changing room.
You open your eyes. The sauna is still as hot, but you are shivering.
More noises. Shoes stomping across the tiled floor.
‘Hello?’ a man’s voice calls out.
You try to stand up and manage to get to your knees, but then you run out of strength. You fall forward, straight into the door. Your arms and your forehead hit the wooden panel and you stay there, leaning against the door, trying to bang on it.
The door opens.
It happens so quickly that you lose your balance and fall down on to the tiles.
The air in the shower room is ice-cold. The shock is so great that you lose consciousness again in a dark wave of nausea; there is nothing you can do about it. It lasts for only a few seconds, because when you open your eyes the man is still standing there. The man who has set you free.
A tennis player. He has grey hair and a bushy grey moustache, and he is wearing a white tracksuit. He is holding a broom in his hand — gradually you realize that the Gang of Four must have jammed the door shut with the broom handle before they took off.
The man is looking at you in amazement, as if you have performed some kind of trick by popping out of the sauna. ‘What were you doing in there?’ he asks.
You cough and take great gulps of air, but you do not answer him. Your throat is too dry. You simply crawl past your saviour across the tiled floor, past his white shoes, and slowly drag yourself to your feet.
You appear to be alive.
You stagger over to the washbasin by the entrance and turn the cold-water tap with a shaking hand. Then you drink, and drink and drink. Five deep gulps, six, seven. In the end your stomach starts to hurt; the water is too cold.
‘Did someone shut you in?’ The tennis player isn’t prepared to give up. He is waiting for an answer. Explanations.
But you shake your head and totter out of the shower room.
At last you are free. You are so cold you are shaking now, but you have no intention of going back to stand under a hot shower. You just want to see if your clothes are still here.
They are. Your jeans, T-shirt, jumper and jacket are still there in one of the lockers — the gang didn’t take them. You pull on the thin cotton T-shirt first, then the woolly jumper.
Then you pick up your jeans. You will put them on in a minute and head out into the winter, but you want to find your watch first.
The tennis player has followed you into the changing room. ‘What’s your name?’
You don’t answer that question either, but you look at him and ask in a hoarse voice, ‘What day is it today?’
‘Sunday,’ he says. ‘We’ve got a match shortly.’
You take out the watch. It is one thirty-five.
One thirty-five on Sunday afternoon.
Close your eyes and work it out. You have been locked in the sauna for almost two days — forty-six hours.
Was it a happy ending for all concerned? Jan assumed so. William Halevi had been found, and his parents could relax after two days of torture.
The staff at the nursery were also feeling better. Everyone except Sigrid, who was still signed off sick a week after William’s disappearance. Jan heard that she was having some kind of counselling for post-traumatic stress.
And he was interviewed again by the police.
They didn’t actually come out with it in so many words, but they suspected something. The day after William had been found, two plain-clothes officers came to Jan’s apartment and looked around; he let them carry on. There was nothing to see. He had been back in the forest the previous evening, cleaned out the bunker, and thrown away or burned everything that had been inside it.