by Jo Nesbo
After that she had smiled with a lighter heart.
Kaja put on a pair of khaki trousers and a thin waterproof jacket and floated weightlessly and soundlessly down to the lobby.
“Chungking Mansions?” the receptionist asked, unable to refrain from cocking an eyebrow, and pointed. “Kimberley Road, up to Nathan Road, then left.”
All hostels and hotels in Interpol member countries are legally obliged to register foreign guests, but when Kaja had called the Norwegian ambassador’s secretary to check where the man she was looking for had last registered, the secretary had explained that Chungking Mansions was neither a hotel nor a mansion, in the sense of a wealthy residence. It was a collection of stores, takeout shops, restaurants and probably more than a hundred classified and nonclassified hostels, with everything from two to twenty rooms spread over four large apartment towers. The rooms for rent could be characterized as everything from simple, clean and cozy to rat holes and one-star prison cells. And most important of all: At Chungking Mansions a man with modest demands of life could sleep, eat, live, work and propagate without ever leaving the anthill.
Kaja found the entrance to Chungking on Nathan Road, a busy shopping street with brand-name goods, polished shopfronts and tall display windows. She entered the complex amid cooking fumes from fast-food outlets, hammering from cobblers, radio broadcasts of Muslim prayer meetings and tired looks in used-clothes shops. She flashed a quick smile at a bewildered backpacker with a Lonely Planet guidebook in his hand and frozen white legs sticking out of overoptimistic camouflage shorts.
A uniformed guard looked at the note Kaja showed him, said, “Elevator C,” and pointed down a corridor.
The line in front of the elevator was so long that she didn’t get in until the third attempt, when they were squeezed up tight in a creaky, vibrating iron chest that made Kaja think of the Gypsies who buried their dead vertically.
The hostel was owned by a turban-clad Muslim who immediately, and with great enthusiasm, showed her a tiny box of a room, where by some miracle they had found space for a wall-mounted TV at the foot of the bed and a gurgling air-conditioning unit above the headboard. The owner’s enthusiasm waned when she interrupted his sales spiel to produce a photo of a man with his name spelled as it would have been in his passport, and asked where he was now.
On seeing the reaction, she hastened to inform him that she was his wife. The embassy secretary had explained to her that waving an official ID card around in Chungking would be “counterproductive.” And when Kaja added, for safety’s sake, that she and the man in the photo had five children together, the hostel owner’s attitude underwent a dramatic change. A young Western heathen who had already brought so many children into the world earned his respect. He expelled a heavy sigh, shook his head and said in mournful, staccato English, “Sad, sad, lady. They come and take his passport.”
“Who did?”
“Who? The triad, lady. It’s always the triad.”
Naturally enough, she was aware of the organization, but she had some vague notion that the Chinese mafia primarily belonged to the world of cartoons and kung-fu films.
“Sit yourself down, lady.” He quickly found a chair, onto which she slumped. “They were after him, he was out, so they took his passport.”
“Passport? Why?”
He hesitated.
“Please, I have to know.”
“Your husband bet on horses, I am sorry to say.”
“Horses?”
“Happy Valley. Racecourse. It is an abomination.”
“Does he owe money? To the triad?”
He nodded and shook his head several times to confirm and regret, alternately, this fact of life.
“And they took his passport?”
“He will have to pay back the debt if he wants to leave Hong Kong.”
“He can only get a new passport from the Norwegian embassy.”
The turban waggled from side to side. “Ah, you can get a false passport here in Chungking for eighty American dollars. But this is not the problem. The problem is Hong Kong is an island, lady. How did you get here?”
“Plane.”
“And how will you leave?”
“Plane.”
“One airport. Tickets. All names on computer. Many control points. Many at airport who get money from the triad to recognize faces. Understand?”
She nodded slowly. “It’s difficult to escape.”
The hostel owner shook his head with a guffaw. “No, lady. It’s impossible to escape. But you can hide in Hong Kong. Seven million people. Easy to go underground.”
Lack of sleep was catching up on Kaja, and she closed her eyes. The owner must have misunderstood because he laid a consoling hand on her shoulder and mumbled, “There, there.”
He wavered, then leaned forward and whispered, “I think he still here, lady.”
“Yes, I know he is.”
“No, I mean here in Chungking. I see him.”
She raised her head.
“Twice,” he said. “At Li Yuan’s. He eat there. Cheap rice. Don’t tell anyone I said. Your husband is good man. But trouble.” He rolled his eyes so that they almost disappeared into his turban. “Lots of trouble.”
Li Yuan’s comprised a counter, four plastic tables and a Chinese man who sent her an encouraging smile, when after six hours, two portions of fried rice, three coffees and two quarts of water, she awoke with a jolt, lifted her head from the greasy table and looked at him.
“Tired?” He laughed, revealing an incomplete set of front teeth.
Kaja yawned, ordered her fourth cup of coffee and continued to wait. Two Chinese men came and sat at the counter without speaking or ordering. They didn’t even spare her a glance, for which she was glad. Her body was so stiff from sitting on the plane that pain shot through her whatever sedentary position she adopted. She rolled her head from side to side to try to stimulate circulation. Then backward. Her neck cracked. She stared at the bluish-white fluorescent tubes in the ceiling before lowering her head. And stared straight into a pale, hunted face. He had stopped in front of the closed steel shutters in the corridor and scanned Li Yuan’s tiny establishment. His gaze rested on the two Chinese men by the counter. Then he hurried on.
Kaja got to her feet, but one leg had gone to sleep and gave way under her weight. She grabbed her bag and limped after the man as fast as she could.
“Come back soon,” she heard Li Yuan shout after her.
He had looked so thin. In the photographs he had been a broad, tall figure, and on the TV talk show he had made the chair he was sitting on look like it had been manufactured for Pygmies. But she had not the slightest doubt it was him: the dented, shaven skull, the prominent nose, the eyes with the spider’s web of blood vessels and the alcoholic’s washed-out, pale-blue irises. The determined chin with the surprisingly gentle, almost beautiful mouth.
She stumbled onto Nathan Road. In the gleam of the neon light she caught sight of a leather jacket towering above the crowd. He didn’t appear to be walking fast, yet she had to quicken her pace to keep up. He turned off the busy shopping street and she let the distance between them increase as they moved onto narrower, less populated streets. She registered a sign saying Melden Row. It was tempting to go and introduce herself, get it all over with. But she had decided to stick to the plan: to find out where he lived. It had stopped raining, and all of a sudden a scrap of cloud was drawn aside and the sky behind was high and velvet black, with glittering, pinhole stars.
After walking for twenty minutes, he came to a sudden halt at a corner, and Kaja was afraid she had been discovered. However, he didn’t turn around, just took something from his jacket pocket. She stared in amazement. A baby’s bottle?
He disappeared around the corner.
Kaja followed and came into a large, open square packed with people, most of them young. At the far end of the square, above wide glass doors, shone a sign written in English and Chinese. Kaja recognized the titles of some of
the new films she would never see. Her eyes found his leather jacket, and she saw him put the bottle down on the low plinth of a bronze sculpture representing a gallows with an empty noose. He continued past two fully occupied benches and took a seat on the third, where he picked up a newspaper. After about twenty seconds he got up again, walked back to the sculpture, grabbed the bottle as he passed, put it into his pocket and returned the same way he had come.
It had started to rain when she saw him enter Chungking Mansions. She slowly began to prepare her speech. There was no longer a line by the elevators; nevertheless he ascended a staircase, turned right and went through a swinging door. She hurried after him and suddenly found herself in a deserted, rundown stairwell with an all permeating smell of cat piss and wet concrete. She held her breath, but all she could hear were dripping sounds. As she made the decision to go on up, she heard a door bang beneath her. She sprinted down the stairs and found the only thing that could have made a bang: a dented metal door. She held the handle, felt the trembling come, closed her eyes and cursed to herself. Then she ripped open the door and stepped into the darkness. That is to say: out.
Something ran across her feet, but she neither screamed nor moved.
At first she thought she had entered an elevator shaft. But when she looked up, she glimpsed blackened brick walls covered with a tangled mass of water pipes, cables, distorted chunks of metal and collapsed, rusty iron scaffolding. It was a courtyard, a few square yards of space between towers. The only light came from a small patch of stars high above.
Although there wasn’t a cloud in the sky, water was splashing down onto the pavement and her face, and she realized it was condensed water from the small, rusty air-conditioning units protruding from the building. She retreated and leaned back against the iron door.
Waited.
And, eventually, from the dark, she heard: “What do you want?”
She had never heard his voice before. Well, she had heard it on the talk show when they were discussing serial killers, but hearing it in reality was quite different. There was a worn, hoarse quality that made him sound older than his forty years. But at the same time there was a secure, self-assured calm that belied the hunted face she had seen outside Li Yuan’s. Deep, warm.
“I’m Norwegian,” she said.
There was no response. She swallowed. She knew that her first words would be the most important.
“My name is Kaja Solness. I have been tasked with finding you. By Gunnar Hagen.”
No reaction to the name of his Crime Squad boss. Had he gone?
“I work as a detective on murder investigations for Hagen,” she said into the blackness.
“Congratulations.”
“No congratulations necessary. Not if you’ve been reading Norwegian papers for the last months.” She could have bitten her tongue. Was she trying to be funny? Had to be the lack of sleep. Or nerves.
“I mean congratulations on a well-accomplished mission,” said the voice. “I have been found. Now you can go back.”
“Wait,” she said. “Don’t you want to hear what I have to say?”
“I’d prefer not to.”
But the words she had jotted down and practiced rolled out. “Two women have been killed. Forensic evidence suggests it’s the same perp. Beyond that we don’t have any leads. Even though the press has been given minimal info, they’ve been screaming that another serial killer is on the loose. Some commentators have written that he may have been inspired by the Snowman. We’ve called in experts from Interpol, but they haven’t made any headway. The pressure from the media and authorities—”
“By which I mean no,” the voice said.
A door slammed.
“Hello? Hello? Are you there?”
She fumbled her way forward and found a door. Opened it before terror managed to gain a foothold, and she was in another darkened stairwell. She glimpsed light farther up and climbed three steps at a time. The light was coming through the glass of a swinging door, and she pushed it open. Entered a plain, bare corridor in which attempts to patch the peeling plaster had been given up, and damp steamed off the walls like bad breath. Leaning against the wall were two men with cigarettes hanging from the corners of their mouths, and a sweet stench drifted toward her. They appraised her through sluggish eyes. Too sluggish to move, she hoped. The smaller of the two was black, of African origin, she assumed. The big one was white and had a pyramid-shaped scar on his forehead, like a warning triangle. She had read in The Police magazine that Hong Kong had almost thirty thousand officers on the street and was reckoned to be the world’s safest metropolis. But then that was on the street.
“Looking for hashish, lady?”
She shook her head, tried to flash a confident smile, tried to act as she had advised young girls to do when she had visited schools: to look like someone who knew where she was going, not like someone who had lost the flock, prey.
They returned her smile. The only other doorway in the corridor had been bricked up. They took their hands out of their pockets, the cigarettes from their mouths.
“Looking for fun, then?”
“Wrong door, that’s all,” she said, turning to go back out. A hand closed around her wrist. Her terror tasted like tinfoil in her mouth. In theory, she knew how to get out of this. Had practiced it on a rubber mat in an illuminated gym with an instructor and colleagues gathered around her.
“Right door, lady. Right door. Fun is this way.” The breath in her face stank of fish, onions and marijuana. In the gym there had been only one adversary.
“No, thanks,” she said, struggling to keep her voice steady.
The black man sidled up, grabbed her other wrist and said in a voice that slipped in and out of falsetto: “We’ll show you the way.”
“Only there’s not much to see, is there.”
All three turned toward the swinging door.
She knew according to his passport he was six foot four, but standing there in the doorway that had been built to Hong Kong measurements, he looked at least seven feet tall. And twice as wide as only an hour ago. His arms hung down by his sides, slightly away from his body, but he didn’t move, didn’t stare, didn’t snarl, just looked calmly at the white man and repeated: “Is there, jau-ye?”
She felt the white man’s fingers tense and relax around her wrist, noticed the black man shift weight from foot to foot.
“Ng-goy,” said the man in the doorway.
She felt their hands hesitantly let go.
“Come on,” he said, lightly taking her arm.
She felt the heat in her flushed cheeks as they walked out. Heat produced by tension and shame. Shame at how relieved she was, how tardily her brain had functioned in the situation, how willing she had been to let him take on two harmless drug dealers who only wanted to ruffle her a little.
He accompanied her up two floors and in through the swinging door, where he positioned her in front of an elevator, pressed the arrow for down, stood beside her and focused his gaze on the illuminated “11” above the elevator door. “Guest workers,” he said. “They’re alone and bored.”
“I know,” she said defiantly.
“Press G for ground floor, turn right and go straight ahead until you’re on Nathan Road.”
“Please listen to me. You are the only person in Crime Squad with the appropriate expertise to catch serial killers. After all, it was you who caught the Snowman.”
“True,” he said. She registered a movement in his eyes, and he ran a finger along his jaw under his right ear. “And then I resigned.”
“Resigned? Went on leave, you mean.”
“Resigned. As in finished.”
It was only now that she noticed the unnatural protrusion of his right jawbone.
“Gunnar Hagen says that when you left Oslo he agreed to give you leave until further notice.”
The man smiled, and Kaja saw how it changed his face completely. “That’s because Hagen can’t get it into his head …” H
e paused, and the smile vanished. His eyes were directed toward the light above the elevator that now read “5.” “Nonetheless, I don’t work for the police any longer.”
“We need you …” She inhaled. Knew that she was skating on thin ice, but that she had to act before she lost sight of him again. “And you need us.”
His eyes shifted back to her. “What on earth makes you think that?”
“You owe the triad money. You buy dope off the street in a baby’s bottle. You live”—she grimaced—“here. And you don’t have a passport.”
“I’m enjoying myself here. What do I need a passport for?”
The elevator pinged, the door creaked open and hot, stinking air rose off the bodies inside.
“I’m not going!” Kaja said, louder than she had anticipated, and noticed the faces looking at her with a mixture of impatience and obvious curiosity.
“Yes, you are,” he said, placing a hand in the middle of her back and pushing her gently but firmly inside. She was immediately surrounded by human bodies closing in on her and making it impossible for her to move or even turn. She twisted her head in time to see the doors gliding shut.
“Harry!” she shouted.
But he had already gone.
FORTHCOMING FROM JO NESBØ
THE HEADHUNTERS
Roger Brown is a corporate headhunter, and he’s a master of his profession. But one career simply can’t support his luxurious lifestyle and his wife’s struggling art gallery. At an opening one night he meets Clas Greve, who is not only the perfect candidate for a major CEO job, but also, perhaps, the answer to his financial woes: Greve’s inherited flat just so happens to contain a priceless Peter Paul Rubens painting, missing since World War II—and Roger Brown just so happens to dabble in art theft. With The Headhunters, Nesbø has crafted a funny, dark, and twisted caper worthy of Quentin Tarantino and the Coen brothers.
Crime Fiction