Three Seconds

just about to hang up when Henryk told him that two other people would be there. Zbigniew Boruc and Grzegorz Krzynowek. 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 organization. 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 center 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 leaned 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 Mokoraw, elegant embassies 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 leaned 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 Mokotow'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 Vastmannagatan.'

'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 Mom and Dad again, traveling 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 Konigsberg; 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 meter 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 Simrishamn in Sweden.

Right onto ul. Ludwika Idzikowskiego, quarter of an hour to go.

In the past few years he had visited this country, which belonged to him, so many times. He could have been born here, grown up here and then he would have been very different, like the people in Bortoszyce who had tried to keep in touch for so long after his mother and father died, and who had eventually given up when he gave nothing back. Why had he done that? He didn't know. Nor did he know why he never got in touch when he was nearby, why he had never gone to visit.

'Sixty zloty. Forty for the journey and twenty for that bloody stop that we hadn't agreed on.'

Hoffmann left a hundred-zloty note on the seat and got out of the car.

A big, dark, old building in the middle of Mokotow-as old as a building could be in Warsaw, which had been totally destroyed seventy years ago. Henryk was waiting for him on the steps outside. They shook hands but didn't say much; neither of them knew how to do small talk.

The meeting room was at the end of a corridor on the tenth floor. Far too light and far too warm. The deputy CEO and a man in his sixties, who he assumed was the Roof, were waiting at the end of the oblong table. Piet Hoffmann accepted their unnecessarily firm handshakes and then went to sit down on the chair that had already been pulled out. There was a bottle of water on the table in front of it.

He didn't shy away from their piercing eyes. If he had done that, chosen to retreat, it would be over already.

Zbigniew Boruc and Grzegorz Krzyneywek.

He still didn't know if they were sitting there because he was going to die. Or because he had just penetrated farther.

'Mr Krzynowek will just sit and listen. I assume that you haven't met before?'

Hoffmann nodded to the elegant suit.

'We haven't met, but I know who you are.'

He smiled at the man whom he had seen over the years in Polish newspapers and on Polish television, a businessman whose name he had also heard whispered in the long corridors at Wojtek, which had emerged from precisely the same chaos as every other new organization in an Eastern European state; a wall had suddenly fallen and economic and criminal interests merged in a grab and scramble for capital. Organizations that were established by the military and police and that all had the same hierarchical structure, with the Roof on top. Grzegorz Krzynowek was Wojtek's Roof and he was perfect. A champion with a central position, extremely robust financially and unassailable in a society that required laws, a guarantee that combined finance and criminality, a facade for capital and violence.

'The delivery?'

The deputy CEO had studied him long enough.

'Yes.'

'I assume that it's safe.'

'It's safe.'

'We'll check it.'

'It will still be safe.'

'Let's continue then.'

That was all. That was yesterday.

Piet Hoffmann wasn't going to die this evening.

He wanted to laugh-as the tension vanished something else bubbled up and longed to escape, but there was more to come. No threats, no danger, but more ritual that required continued dignity.