Three Seconds

five. Stockholm was starting to wake up. There were only a few cars on the road, the odd person rushing to catch a train or bus. He parked on Norrtullsgatan opposite the primary school and opened the door to a café that opened early and served porridge and stewed apples and a cheese sandwich and an egg and black coffee on a red plastic tray for thirty-nine kronor. He saw Erik as soon as he walked in, a face over by the newspaper stand that disappeared behind
Dagens Nyheter
in order to avoid eye contact. Piet Hoffmann ordered his breakfast and chose a corner on the other side of the room as far away from him as he could get. There were six other customers: two young men from a construction site in high-viz jackets and four considerably older men dressed in suits, with their hair combed for the only fixed point in the day. Breakfast cafés often looked like this, men who didn’t have anyone and fled the loneliness of eating alone – women seldom did that, maybe they coped with loneliness better than men, maybe they were more ashamed and didn’t want to make it public.
     
    The coffee was strong and the porridge was a bit lumpy, but it would be the last meal for a while where he could decide what he wanted, how he wanted it and where he wanted it. He had avoided the breakfasts at Österåker, too early in the day to eat with people whose only common reference point was the need for drugs, the sort he’d been afraid of, but had met with aggression, scorn, distance, anything that didn’t resemble weakness, in order to survive.
    Erik Wilson walked past his table on his way out, nearly bumped into it. Hoffmann waited exactly five minutes and then followed, acouple of minutes’ walk to Vanadisvägen. He opened the door of a silvery-grey Volvo and sat down in the passenger seat.
    ‘You came in the red Golf, the one that’s parked by the school?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘From the OK petrol station at Slussen, like normal?’
    ‘Yep.’
    ‘I’ll take it back this evening. You might find it hard to deliver it yourself.’
    They pulled out of Vanadisvägen, drove slowly along Sankt Eriksgatan, and didn’t say anything between the first two sets of red lights on Drottningholmsvägen.
    ‘Have you got everything sorted?’
    ‘Sorted.’
    ‘And Zofia?’
    Piet Hoffmann didn’t answer. Wilson stopped the car by a bus stop on Fridhemsplan, made it clear that he wasn’t going any further.
    ‘And Zofia?’
    ‘She knows.’
    They sat there at the start of the morning rush, with groups of people or long lines on the move now, rather than just the odd person.
    ‘I made you even more dangerous in ASPEN yesterday. The patrol that arrests you will be full of preconceived ideas and adrenaline. It’ll be violent, Piet. You can’t be armed, because then it might get really nasty. But no one, no one who sees it, no one who hears about it or reads about it will even suspect who you’re actually working for. And by the way, there’s a warrant out for your arrest.’
    Piet Hoffmann started.
    ‘A warrant? Since when?’
    ‘A few hours ago.’
    __________
    The place still smelt of cigarette smoke. Or perhaps he just imagined it. There had always been a fug above the green felt. Piet Hoffmann leant down towards it and sniffed, and he caught it again, the smell of smoke that was indelibly linked to the blue chalk on your fingertips and ashtrays on the corner of every pool table … he could even hear the coarse, sneering laughter when someone missed and a hard ball misfired. He downed half the cup of black coffee from the 7-Eleven onFleminggatan in one and looked at the clock. It was time. He checked again that the knife that he usually kept in his back pocket really wasn’t there and then walked over to the window that looked out over Sankt Eriksgatan. He stood still, pretending to talk to someone on his mobile phone until he was sure that the man and the woman in the front of the patrol car had seen him.
     
    __________
    They had been tipped off by an anonymous untraceable phone call that a serious, wanted criminal was going to be in Biljardpalatset this morning.
     
    And then there he was in the window.
    They had his name, and when they pressed enter again on the car computer keypad, they also got his life.
    KNOWN DANGEROUS ARMED
    They were both young and new and had never come across this particular code in the criminal intelligence database that was only used for a handful of criminals.
    Name
Piet Hoffmann
ID