The Blue Place

by Nicola Griffith

  “Desolate,” I supplied.

  “Yes. Desolate and empty. We can help to make it better, to give the people something good. And it will help to make more money, too.”

  He glanced at his watch and his face fell. “It’s five minutes past four o’clock.” He stood abruptly. “Thank you. Thank you. Perhaps we can meet again tomorrow?”

  Julia looked surprised at his haste but she stood. “Certainly. The same time?”

  “Earlier,” I suggested. “Perhaps the morning.”

  “Yes,” he said. “Eleven o’clock?”

  The corridor was crowded. There was a queue for the lift. We took the stairs. Unlike an American stairwell, it smelled fresh and well ventilated; often used.

  “So what happened?” Julia asked on the way down. “It all seemed to be going so well then suddenly, phhtt, he wants to get rid of us.”

  “Norwegians finish their workday at four sharp. He probably considered it very bad manners to have kept you past that time.”

  “Ah. Did you see how he blushed when I asked whose idea the park was? He seems a bit young to be in charge.”

  “He’ll live or die by this project. If it fails, his career fails.”

  “Then we’d better make sure it doesn’t.”

  We. How odd.

  Outside, the streets were busy with home-bound office workers. “Would you like a walk before dinner?”

  “Only if it’s an aimless American stroll. And only if we get a taxi back to the hotel first so I can change out of this corporate drag.”

  When we got to the hotel, Julia suggested I wait in the lobby: It wouldn’t take her a minute. I read Dagbladet, a name that translated pragmatically to The Daily Newspaper. Julia came back down in jeans and the sunset-coloured sweater.

  We wandered up Karl Johansgate, now almost deserted, to Slottsparken.

  We walked under the trees. “In winter this is all white, and crisscrossed by ski trails.” Strangers are easy to see. “Tante Hjørdis bumped into King Haakon, literally bumped into him, over there near that statue.”

  “No security people?”

  “The royal family are very informal.”

  “So how old is she?”

  “In her seventies, I think. And she skis every day in winter.”

  “You come from good genes. How about your mother—is she like you and Hjørdis?”

  “And how is that?”

  She looked me up and down slowly. “Tall. Strong. Hidden. But Hjørdis’s eyes are more blue. And she is less complicated, I think. Still very Norwegian. I don’t think you are.”

  Under the tree shadow, I couldn’t read her face. “My mother’s eyes are more blue, also. She’s shorter than Hjørdis. About your height, but wider. She is…subtle.”

  “You must have learned it from her.” We reached the statue, which was surrounded by an ironwork fence resembling bare winter branches. Before I could stop her, Julia climbed over it and strode to the bronze statue. “Camille Collett,” she read from the plaque. An early Norwegian writer. She beckoned me over. There was no English translation, but instead of asking me to tell her what it said, she touched my arm and said, “Aud, I want you to be less like your subtle mother and more Norwegian. I want you to tell me the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth—everything you know about Michael Honeycutt. Tell me what he’s up to, who those men might have been in his house. I need to know why Jim really died and if I’m…if they’re likely to come after me when we get back to Atlanta. I need to know.” She stood straight, unconsciously graceful, utterly serious.

  “Let’s find somewhere to sit.”

  The bar was only half a block from the Bristol. It had a Wurlitzer jukebox, a reasonable-looking menu, and table service. The music was loud, and the server had a sneer due more to a pierced upper lip than essential attitude.

  “Ol,” I said, “and akevit.” The shots and beer chasers came swiftly. “Just bring us refills when you see our glasses empty.” I picked up the akevit. “Skal.” We drank it down.

  Julia breathed heavily through her nose, and her eyes watered. “Not unlike grappa.” She folded her hands together before her on the table. The formal effect was spoilt by her having to shout above the music. “I know you’ve told me what I paid to find out, but I would like the rest, with no evasions, no elisions, and no sugarcoating.”

  “I don’t have all the pieces.”

  “Then give me what you have.”

  I sipped my beer, considering. “When you first asked for my help, you were adamant that the arson and Jim’s death had nothing to do with drugs. You were right in that Jim was just an innocent bystander, but you were wrong in that the case has everything to do with drugs. No, just listen. Honeycutt has been laundering money for the Tijuana cocaine cartel. Don’t confuse the Mexican cartels with those from Colombia. They don’t produce or process, all they do is ship or sometimes simply allow passage.”

  I used the salt shaker to pour an outline of central and north America onto the formica. I put my thumb across Mexico. “The Mexicans, here, are middlemen: the Colombians can’t get their product to the western U.S. if the Mexicans don’t allow it.” I lifted my thumb. “The Tijuana cartel employs Federal Police, U.S. border inspectors, local police on both sides of the border, and San Diego and Los Angeles gang members. For U.S. drug enforcement, it used to just be a western and border states problem, but according to the DEA and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation the influence of both Tijuana and Sinaloa cartels has been marching steadily east.” I drew a salt arrow. “Atlanta passed quietly into the hands of the Tijuana people three years ago. And I mean quietly.”

  The server brought us more akevit. I brushed away the map and sipped the icy liquor.

  “These cartels have a lot of power and influence. They are almost immune from the law. They own the Mexican Federal Police, and they own the politicians, and the Mexican voters think that’s fine because the only people getting hurt are Americans—and the few Mexicans who don’t play ball. They are smarter, more attuned to the rest of the world, and higher up the business evolutionary tree than the Colombians.”

  “What?”

  The music was getting louder. “I said, they’re a leaner organization. There’s no Tijuana guy in Los Angeles or San Diego, just his consultants—gang members who act as enforcers and hit men without any of the usual benefits, like protection. The key to the success of these cartels is their relatively low profile: the bloodshed can be passed off as gang warfare; which means the bribes are easier for those in authority to stomach. Money moves to and fro smoothly. Only there’s a great deal of money, and unless the cartel’s bankers can clean it up sufficiently, the heads of the cartels can’t really use it.”

  “Money laundering.”

  “Precisely.” Behind Julia, someone was smoking hash. I wondered if there were Moroccan cartels. “Honeycutt is laundering tens of millions a year. Some of it must go through his bank, probably in shell accounts, but some gets cleaned up by buying artworks, selling them overseas, then banking the sale money quite legitimately.”

  “Like the Friedrich. But that was a fake.”

  “This is where it gets interesting. Honeycutt uses dirty money to buy one legitimate painting or sculpture—”

  “Or Anglo-Saxon armring.”

  “—sells it for clean money, and banks it openly. But then he sometimes also gets a copy, a fake, made, and sells that, too. This time, the money goes into his own personal account. I suspect he was using the money to pay off a blackmailer. When you spot the fake, he panics: tries to have you, your colleague and the evidence all go up in smoke. But the good news, the very good news, is that the cartel doesn’t know about it.” Just the blackmailer.

  In the dim light, surrounded by swirls of sweet hash smoke, she was as clear as a cut-glass figurine. “Explain.”

  “Honeycutt hired in someone used by the man who used to run the drug trade in the Southeast—not someone who the Tijuana cartel would employ. Besides, the
cartels pay a lot of money for good, quiet, loyal service. They don’t want their employees or consultants drawing attention to themselves by silly stunts for personal gain.”

  “So Honeycutt is terrified the cartel will find out….”

  “And we can assume, for now at least, that they know nothing of you, or me.” And I would dearly like to keep it that way.

  “Then if the cartel doesn’t already know…” She tapped her fingernail on the table while she thought. I couldn’t hear it. “Who planted cocaine in Jim’s garage?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Could it have been Honeycutt?”

  “I doubt it. He is strictly a money man. He probably wouldn’t have had access to the drugs. And that coke was worth a lot of money. He would rather have pocketed the proceeds.”

  “Then who?”

  “The blackmailer. Those three men at Honeycutt’s house were there to remove any evidence of a link between him and the blackmailer. They didn’t succeed. It might have been better for us if they had. I have no idea who the blackmailer is, or how much they know about you, or what they might do about that. The whole operation smells of calculation and organization and money.” Which, of course, made absolutely no sense: where would someone who was blackmailing for money get the cash to pay for several kilos of cocaine? Assuming that it was, in fact, the blackmailer who planted those bags.

  “They’re going to come for me, aren’t they?” She could have been talking about a taxi pickup.

  “I don’t know.”

  “How would they do it?”

  When I had been three months in the APD, my partner and I had pulled over two men on a routine traffic stop. Officer King had stepped up to the car and asked for some identification. They had backed up their car and run him down. I still remember the crunch the tires made going over his left arm. I shot out the perps’ rear tires, called in their license plate, and drove King to the Piedmont emergency room. He had sat there, perfectly composed, while the doctor and nurses clipped away his uniform, cleaned up torn flesh and muttered over X rays. When they told him they were going to have to operate, to put all the bones back inside the flesh and then screw on a steel plate, he had pursed his lips, nodded, and said curiously, “What size screws do you use?” Partly shock, partly genuine curiosity, partly a need to drown the reality of the whole in a flood of incremental and essentially useless details.

  “There are as many different methods as there are killers.”

  “I thought we agreed no evasions, no elisions, no sugarcoating.” She folded her hands again, a neat, tidy package between the empty glasses, beer rings, and salt.

  “I would be guessing.”

  “Then guess.” Her gaze was unwinking.

  “Death is not something I like to play guessing games with.”

  “I don’t consider obtaining information in order to stay alive a game.” Her voice was suddenly savage. “I feel as though I’m spinning in a greased barrel here, with nothing to hang on to!” She picked up her brimming glass of akevit, swallowed it down in one gulp, and slammed the empty glass down. “So help me out.”

  “If I were the mystery person who sent those men to Honeycutt’s house, I would kill you in Norway. Less chance of it being connected back to Atlanta. There again, no one knows you’re here, so that’s unlikely.”

  “I gave Mrs. Miclasz the name of the hotel. But she promised not to mention it to anyone else.”

  Promises were useless in the face of torture. “You might want to give her a call, just to make sure everything’s all right.”

  Her hand tightened around the glass until the webbing between her thumb and index finger was quite white. “They wouldn’t!”

  “Probably not. Just a precaution.” But I was still uneasy. Why? What had I missed?

  “Go on.”

  “Supposing he knew you were here, it would be child’s play to bring you down from a distance with some kind of scoped hunting rifle, and those would be easy to get hold of in Norway. You were a perfect, stationary target in the park.” I imagined her folding down in surprise, eyes wide, hot red blood splashed on bronze. “But it’s not hunting season, there’s no way to make such a shot look like an accident, and that’s what he’ll want this to look like. He might shoot you, but if he did it would be with a World War II relic, an old Lahti pistol maybe, and it would be set up to look like an accidental discharge while you were cleaning it.” No. A tourist wouldn’t be cleaning a gun. “That’s unlikely.” I sipped at my beer. So much depended on how much time he had, what kind of person he was. I had a sudden image of an iceberg: cold and unwinking, nine-tenths hidden. “If he thinks he can afford to wait to bring in professional talent, then it would be an elegant accident: a drowning in the harbour”—Julia, hauled blue and swollen from the cold fjord, winch chains dripping, onlookers gawking—“maybe electrocution in your hotel bath”—thrashing water, hum and sizzle, stink of sphincter letting go. “But if he was in a rush, then it would be local talent with less finesse. A mugging gone wrong might be the way to go. Have you ever seen a body that has been bludgeoned to death?” Her face was pale and set but I couldn’t stem the flood of words. “The body is remarkably resilient. Take skin, for example. It has to take a blow over a bone before it will split.” Those lovely cheekbones, gaping wide. “And you can live with a dozen broken bones, with the loss of a kidney or lung, pierced by one of those splintered ribs.” Hiss of air like a punctured tire. “The surest method would be a blow across the throat, then the larynx swells and death by asphyxiation follows in two or three minutes. Most likely they would just beat you around the head for a while. The skull, though, is designed to take punishment. If they hit the wrong places you’d be conscious for quite a while….”

  She watched me, eyes soft as a doe’s, and I imagined a hand lashing out, a fist reddened by working on an offshore trawler, pulping her cheekbone, tearing open her cheek, ripping loose one of those eyes, and my throat tightened around the ugly words.

  “…there’s always fire. The way Jim went. Only if it’s a fool doing the setting it will be in a place where it won’t be fumes that take you but the flame itself….”

  My voice went on and on, harsh and brutal, and the pictures in my head flickered like a series of Technicolor slides: Julia, blackened like charbroiled steak, bits of clothing sticking to raw muscle; Julia, butchered like a goat; broken like a painted doll on the rocks…. I couldn’t stop talking, and I couldn’t stop the pictures. Those beautiful hands, folded so neatly before her on the table, would lash out but he would have her from behind in a garrotte. When she fell she might have five seconds’ strength left, which she would spill out scrabbling against the pavement, tearing out her nails.

  “…or they could smother you in your bed. Is it real enough for you yet? Is it? Because this might be a foreign country for you but people still die here. They still leak blood.” Their bright eyes still fade. Her nostrils were wide and although her fingers were still folded, they were white around the knuckles.

  “It’s real,” she said. The words were squeezed out, the way you squeeze air from a Ziploc bag before you seal it. I wondered if she might faint.

  “Julia…”

  She breathed for a moment. “If you were trying to scare me, you succeeded.”

  “I wasn’t trying to—”

  “Yes, you were.” She stood. “I’m going to call Annie. I can find my own way back to the hotel. It’s only half a block. Good night.” Her back was straight; she moved with enormous, fragile dignity.

  Had I been trying to frighten her? Yes. Yes, because she had to see, she had to know, because she had to stay safe, had to, because someone—someone I didn’t know, someone I couldn’t see or hear or smell—was waiting back in America, and maybe their reach didn’t extend across the Atlantic and the North Sea to Norway, but maybe it did. I watched through the window as she entered the Bristol. “Another akevit over here!”

  The corridor was quiet, the lights muted. The hote
l hummed in shut-down, nighttime mode. There was a tray outside Julia’s room. I squatted down to look: the remains of a hamburger and fries. Upset enough to revert to familiar food, but not upset enough to lose her appetite. I touched the bun. Stone cold. Not surprising. It was two in the morning.

  The door to my room seemed narrower than it had been. I clipped the doorjamb with my left shoulder as I went in. I did not turn the light on; there was enough illumination coming through the gauzy inner curtains to make out the tightly made, impersonal bed, the chaise longue, the connecting door. I stood for a while and listened. I was breathing heavily through my mouth. I shut it. Nothing.

  I took off my jacket and threw it on the bed. Sat down. Stood up again. Still no sound from Julia’s room.

  I eased the connecting door open. It was warm, much darker than my room. I closed the door behind me, listened. Nothing. I crept towards the bed. Still nothing. My heart began to pound like an asymmetric crank. There was a shape on the bed, very still.

  My eyes were adjusting. I could make out her head, the spill of hair across her pillow. I reached out, held my hand, palm down, just above her face. Warm breath, steady and strong. I blinked hard. She slept on.

  She knocked on the connecting door just before eight. “Aud, are you awake?”

  “Come in.”

  She was still in her robe, hair tucked behind her ears. She seemed surprised to find me still in mine, drinking coffee on the bed. She smiled tentatively. “That smells good.”

  I picked up the phone, talked to room service.

  “What did you say?”

  “They’re bringing more coffee, another cup, and breakfast. I asked them to hurry.” She hovered. “Please, sit. Or we can sit over by the window if you would be more comfortable.” I felt ridiculously formal. “Julia, I want to apologize. Last night—”

  “No. I came to apologize to you. I asked.”

  “There was no need for me to go into such detail.”

  “No, it was me who—Oh, give me some of that coffee will you?” I handed her my cup. She took a sip, then a gulp, made to hand it back but I made a keep it motion. She finished off the coffee, despite the cream. “That was good. You know what frightened me more than the details? The way you talked about it. Your face was…I’ve never seen anything like it, except maybe some African sculpture. All implacable planes. Almost inhuman. And your voice, harsh as a broken engine. And I looked at you and thought: Oh, that’s what he’ll look like when he comes for me. I’ll just be a thing, a problem to be solved, and it doesn’t matter that I’ve eaten cod’s tongues, or that I really don’t much care for akevit, that I like roses even though they have too many thorns, and hot coffee in the morning. I felt inconsequential.”