Three Seconds

watching him and then dialled a number that he’d learnt by heart. They stared at each other in silence as he sent the picture and then dialled the number again.
    The two men in suits, Mariusz and Jerzy, were agitated.
Z drugiej strony.
Mariusz was going to move, he should be on the other side, to the right of the buyer.
Blizej głowy.
He should get even closer, keep the gun up, hold it to his right temple.
    ‘I apologise. My friends from Warsaw are a bit edgy.’
    Someone answered.
    Piet Hoffmann spoke to whoever it was briefly, then showed the buyer the telephone display.
    A picture of a man with long dark hair in a ponytail and a face that no longer looked as young as it was.
    ‘Here. Frank Stein.’
    Hoffmann held his anxious eyes until he looked away.
    ‘And you … you still claim that you know each other?’
    He closed the mobile phone and put it down on the table.
    ‘My two friends here don’t speak Swedish. So I’m saying this to you, and you alone.’
    A quick glance over at the two men who had moved even closer and were still discussing which side they should stand on to aim the muzzle of the gun at the buyer’s head.
    ‘You and I have a problem. You’re not who you say you are. I’ll give you two minutes to explain to me who you actually are.’
    ‘I don’t understand what you’re talking about.’
    ‘Really? Don’t talk crap. It’s too late for that. Just tell me who the hell you are. And do it now. Because unlike my friends here, I think that bodies only cause problems and they’re no bloody good at paying up.’
    They paused. Waiting for each other. Waiting for someone to speak louder than the monotonous smacking sound coming from the dry mouth of the man holding his Radom against the thin skin of the buyer’s temple.
    ‘You’ve worked hard to come up with a credible background and you know that it crumbled just now when you underestimated who you were dealing with. This organisation is built around officers from the Polish intelligence service and I can check out what the fuck I like about you. I could ask where you went to school, and you might answer what you’ve been told, but it would only take one phone call for me to find out whether it’s true. I could ask what your mother’s called, if your dog has been vaccinated, what colour your new coffee machine is. One single phone call and I’ll know if it’s true. I just did, made one phone call. And Frank Stein didn’t know you. You never did time together at Tidaholm, because you were never there. Your sentence was faked so you could come here and pretend to buy freshly produced amphetamine.
So I repeat
, who are you? Explain. And then maybe, just maybe, I can persuade these two not to shoot.’
    Mariusz was holding the handgrip of the gun hard. The smacking noises were more and more frequent, louder. He hadn’t understood what Hoffmann and the buyer were saying, but he knew that something was about to go down. He screamed in Polish, ‘
What the fuck are you talking about? Who the fuck is he?
’ then cocked his gun.
    ‘OK.’
    The buyer felt the wall of immediate aggression, tense and unpredictable.
    ‘I’m the police.’
    Mariusz and Jerzy didn’t understand the language.
    But a word like
police
doesn’t need to be translated.
    They started shouting again, mainly Jerzy, he roared that Mariusz should bloody well pull the trigger, while Piet Hoffmann raised both his arms and moved a step closer.
    ‘Back off!’
    ‘He’s the police!’
    ‘I’m going to shoot!’
    ‘Not now!’
    Piet Hoffmann lurched towards them, but he wouldn’t make it in time, and the man with the metal pressed against his head knew. He was shaking, his face contorted.
    ‘I’m a police officer, for fuck’s sake, get him off me!’
    Jerzy lowered his voice and was
bli ź ej
almost calm when he instructed Mariusz to stand closer and to
z drugiej strony
swap sides again – it was better to shoot him through the other temple after all.

He was still lying in bed. It was one of those mornings when your body doesn’t want to wake up and the world feels a long way off.
     
    Erik Wilson breathed in the humidity.
    The south Georgia morning air that slipped in through the open window was still cool, but it would soon get warmer, even warmer than yesterday. He tried to follow the fan blades that played on the ceiling above his head, but gave up when he got tears in his eyes. He’d only slept for an hour at a time. They had talked together four