Three Seconds

told him that two other people would be there. Zbigniew Boruc and Grzegorz Krzynówek. Deputy CEO and the Roof. Piet Hoffmann had visited Wojtek International’s head office for meetings with Henryk every month for the past three years. Hoffmann had gradually won his trust and Henryk had been a helping hand from behind as Piet worked his way up the organisation. Henryk was one of the many people who trusted him and who, without knowing it, was trusting a lie. The Deputy CEO, however, Hoffmann had met only once before. He was a military man, and one of the many former secret police who had started and run the mother company from a forbidding building in the centre of Warsaw. An army major with a straight back who still moved in the manner of an intelligence officer despite the applied veneer of a businessman – they were careful to call themselves that, businessmen. A meeting with the Deputy CEO and the Roof, he didn’t get it. He leant back in the smoked leather car seat and felt something in his chest that might be fear.
    The taxi sped through the light evening traffic, past the big parks, and as they approached the part of town called Mokotów, elegantembassies appeared behind the dirty window. He tapped the driver on the shoulder and asked him to stop, he still had two phone calls to make.
    ‘It’ll cost you more.’
    ‘Just stop, please.’
    ‘It’ll be twenty zloty more. The price you got was without stops.’
    ‘Just stop the car, for Christ’s sake!’
    He had leant forward and was talking straight into the driver’s ear, his unshaven cheek looking shiny and soft as the car pulled off Jana Sobieskiego and parked between a newspaper stand and a pedestrian crossing on al. Wincentego Witosa. Piet Hoffmann stood in the evening chill and listened to Zofia’s tired voice explaining that Hugo and Rasmus had both fallen asleep with their pillows beside her on the sofa and that they had to get up early tomorrow, one of the nursery’s many outings to the Nacka reserve, something to do with a wood and spring theme.
    ‘Piet?’
    ‘Yes?’
    ‘Thank you for the flowers.’
    ‘I love you.’
    He loved her so much. One night away, that was all he could bear. It was never like that before – before Zofia he hadn’t felt the loneliness strangling him in unattractive hotel rooms, that it was pointless to breathe without having someone to love.
    He didn’t want to hang up and stood for a long time with the phone in his hand, looking at one of Mokotów’s expensive houses and praying that her voice wouldn’t vanish. Which it did. He switched mobile phones and made another call. It would soon be five in the afternoon on the east coast of the USA.
    ‘Paula’s meeting them in half an hour.’
    ‘Good. But it doesn’t
feel
good.’
    ‘I’m in control.’
    ‘There’s a risk that they’ll demand that someone takes responsibility for the fiasco in Västmannagatan.’
    ‘It wasn’t a fiasco.’
    ‘A person died!’
    ‘That’s not relevant here. What’s important is that the delivery is safe. We can tough out the consequences of the shooting in a matter of minutes.’
    ‘That’s what you say.’
    ‘You’ll get a full report when I see you.’
    ‘Eleven hundred hours at number five.’
    He waved in irritation when the taxi driver hooted his horn. A couple of minutes more in the dark loneliness and cool air. He was sitting between Mum and Dad again, travelling from Stockholm and Sweden to a town called Bortoszyce, only a few miles from the Soviet border, in an area that is now called Kaliningrad. They had never called it that. They refused. For Mum and Dad it was always Königsberg, Kaliningrad was the invention of madmen. He had caught the contempt in their voices, but as a child had never been able to understand why his parents had left the place they always yearned for.
    The hooting driver swore loudly as they pulled out of al. Wincentego Witosa and drove past well manicured green areas and big business properties, not many people around in this part of town. There seldom are in places where the price per square metre is adapted to supply and demand.
    They had emigrated at the end of the sixties. He had often asked his father why but never got an answer, so he had nagged his mother and been given a few scraps about a boat, and that she was pregnant, and about some nights in the dark on the high sea when she was convinced they would die, and that they had gone ashore somewhere near a place called