by Jo Nesbo
Sergey checked his watch. And confirmed that exactly twelve minutes had passed since he last checked. He closed his eyes and tried to visualise him. The policeman.
In fact, there was another detail about the story of his uncle’s alleged death. The officer who had stolen his knife had been found soon afterwards in the Taiga forest, what was left of him, that is – the rest had been eaten by a bear.
It was dark both outside and inside when the telephone rang.
It was Andrey.
10
TORD SCHULTZ UNLOCKED THE DOOR to his house, stared into the darkness and listened to the dense silence for a while. Sat down on the sofa without switching on the light and waited for the reassuring roar of the next plane.
They had let him go.
A man who introduced himself as an inspector had entered his cell, crouched in front of him and asked why the hell he had hidden flour in his trolley bag.
‘Flour?’
‘That’s what the Kripos lab say they’ve found.’
Tord Schultz had repeated the same thing he said when he was arrested, the emergency procedure, he didn’t know how the plastic bag had come into his possession or what it contained.
‘You’re lying,’ the inspector had said. ‘And we’re going to keep an eye on you.’
Then he had held the cell door open and nodded as a signal that he should leave.
Tord gave a start as a piercing ring filled the bare, darkened room. He got up and groped his way to the telephone on a wooden chair beside the training bench.
It was the operations manager. He told Tord that he had been taken off international flights for the foreseeable future and moved to domestic flights.
Tord asked why.
His boss said there had been a management meeting to discuss his situation.
‘You must appreciate we cannot have you on foreign flights with this suspicion hanging over you.’
‘So why don’t you ground me?’
‘Well.’
‘Well?’
‘If we suspend you and the arrest leaks out to the press they’ll immediately conclude we think you’re guilty and it will be grist to their mill … no pun intended.’
‘And you don’t?’
There was a silence before the answer came.
‘It would damage the airline if we admitted we suspected one of our pilots of being a drug smuggler, don’t you think?’
The pun was intended.
The remainder of what he said was drowned in the noise of a TU-154.
Tord put down the receiver.
He groped his way back to the sofa and sat down. Ran his fingertips over the glass coffee table. Felt stains of dried mucus, spit and coke. What now? A drink or a line? A drink and a line?
He got up. The Tupolev was coming in low. Its lights flooded the whole living room and Tord stared for a second at his reflection in the window.
Then it was dark again. But he had seen it. Seen it in his eyes, and he knew he would see it on colleagues’ faces. The contempt, the condemnation and – worst of all – the sympathy.
Domestic. We’re going to keep an eye on you. I see you.
If he couldn’t fly abroad he would have no value for them any more. All he would be was a desperate, debt-ridden, cocaine-addicted risk. A man on police radar, a man under pressure. He didn’t know much, but more than enough to be aware that he could destroy the infrastructure they had built. And they would do what had to be done. Tord Schultz wrapped his hands around the back of his head and groaned aloud. He was not born to fly a fighter jet. It had gone into a spin, and he didn’t have it in him to regain control; he just sat watching the rotating ground getting closer. And knew his sole chance of survival was to sacrifice the jet. He would have to activate the ejector seat. Fire himself out. Now.
He would have to go to someone high up in the police, someone he could be sure was above the drug gangs’ corruption money. He would have to go to the top.
Yes, Tord Schultz thought. He breathed out and felt muscles he had not noticed were tense, relax. He would go to the top.
First of all, though, a drink.
And a line.
Harry was given the room key by the same boy in reception.
He thanked him and took the stairs in long strides. There had not been a single Arsenal shirt to be seen on the way from the Metro station in Egertorget to Hotel Leon.
As he approached room 301 he slowed down. Two of the bulbs in the corridor had gone, which made it so dark he could barely see the light under his door. In Hong Kong electricity prices were so high he had abandoned the bad Norwegian habit of leaving lights on when he went out, but he could not be sure that the cleaner had left it on. If she had, she’d also forgotten to lock the door.
Harry stood with the key in his right hand as the door opened of its own accord. In the light from the solitary ceiling lamp he saw a figure. It was standing with its back to him, bent over his suitcase on the bed. As the door hit the wall with a little thud the figure turned calmly, and a man with an oblong, furrowed face looked at Harry with St Bernard eyes. He was tall, stooped and wore a long coat, a woollen jumper and a dirty priest’s collar around his neck. His long, unkempt hair was broken up on either side of his face by the biggest eyes Harry had ever seen. The man had to be seventy, at least. They could not be more dissimilar, yet Harry’s first thought was that it was like looking at a reflection.
‘What the hell are you doing?’ Harry asked from the corridor. Routine procedure.
‘What’s it look like?’ The voice was younger than the face, sonorous with the distinct Swedish tone that Swedish dance bands and revival preachers adore for some unaccountable reason. ‘I broke in to check if you had anything of value, of course.’ It wasn’t just a Swedish tone, he was speaking Swedish. He raised both hands aloft. The right one held a universal adapter, the left a paperback edition of Philip Roth’s American Pastoral.
‘You’ve got nothing at all, have you.’ He threw the items on the bed. Peered into the little suitcase, and glanced enquiringly at Harry. ‘Not even a shaver.’
‘What the …’ Harry ignored routine procedures, strode into the room and smacked the suitcase lid down.
‘Easy, my son,’ said the man, holding up his palms. ‘Don’t take it personally. You’re new to this establishment. The question was only who would rob you first.’
‘Who? Do you mean …?’
The old man proffered his hand. ‘Welcome. I’m Cato. I live in 310.’
Harry looked down at the grimy frying pan of a hand.
‘Come on,’ Cato said. ‘My hands are the only part of me it is advisable to touch.’
Harry said his name and shook his hand. It was surprisingly soft.
‘Priest’s hands,’ the man said in answer to his thoughts. ‘Got anything to drink, Harry?’
Harry nodded towards his suitcase and the open wardrobe doors. ‘You already know.’
‘That you haven’t got anything, yes. I mean on you. In your jacket pocket, for example.’
Harry took out a Game Boy and tossed it on the bed where all his other possessions were strewn.
Cato angled his head and looked at Harry. His ear folded against his shoulder. ‘With that suit I might have thought you were one of the by-the-hour guests, not a resident. What are you doing here, anyway?’
‘I still think that should be my line.’
Cato put a hand on Harry’s arm and looked him in the eyes. ‘My son,’ he said in his sonorous voice, stroking the cloth with two fingertips. ‘That is a very nice suit. How much did you pay?’
Harry was about to say something. A combination of courtesy, rebuff and threat. But he realised it was pointless. He gave up. And smiled.
Cato smiled back.
Like a reflection.
‘No time to chat. I’ve got to go to work now.’
‘Which is?’
‘There you are. You’re a bit interested in your fellow mortals as well. I proclaim the Word of G
od to the hapless.’
‘Now?’
‘My calling has no church times. Goodbye.’
With a gallant bow the old man turned and departed. As he passed through the doorway Harry saw one of his unopened packs of Camel protruding from Cato’s jacket pocket. Harry closed the door after him. The smell of old man and ash hung in the room. He went to push up the window. The sounds of the town filled the room at once: the faint, regular drone of traffic, jazz from an open window, a distant police siren rising and falling, a hapless individual screaming his pain between houses, followed by breaking glass, the wind rustling through dry leaves, the click-clack of women’s heels. Sounds of Oslo.
A slight movement caused him to look down. The glow from the yard lamp fell on the skip. There was the gleam of a brown tail. A rat was sitting on the edge and sniffing up at him with a shiny nose. Harry was reminded of something his thoughtful employer, Herman Kluit, had said, and which perhaps, or perhaps not, was a reference to his job: ‘A rat is neither good nor evil. It does what a rat has to do.’
* * *
This was the worst part of an Oslo winter. The part before ice has settled on the fjord and the wind blows through the city-centre streets, salty and freezing cold. As usual I stood in Dronningens gate selling speed, Stesolid and Rohypnol. I stamped my feet on the ground. I had lost sensation in my toes and pondered whether the day’s profits should go on the hideously expensive Freelance boots I’d seen in the window of Steen & Strøm. Or on ice, which I had heard was for sale down at Plata. Perhaps I could filch some speed – Tutu wouldn’t notice – and buy the boots. But on reflection I thought it was safer to nick the boots and make sure Odin got what was his. After all, I was better off than Oleg, who’d had to start from scratch selling hash in the frozen hell by the river. Tutu had given him the pitch under Nybrua Bridge where he competed with people from all the fucked-up places round the world, and was probably the only person to speak fluent Norwegian from Anker Bridge to the harbour.
I saw a guy in an Arsenal shirt further up the street. Usually Bisken, a pimply Sørlander who wore a studded dog collar, stood there. New man but the procedure was the same: he was gathering a group together. For the time being he had three punters waiting. God knows what they were so frightened of. The cops had given up in this area, and if they hauled in pushers off the street it was only for appearances’ sake because some politician had been shooting his mouth off again.
A guy dressed as if he was going to confirmation passed the group and I saw him and Arsenal Shirt exchange barely perceptible nods. The guy stopped in front of me. Wearing a trench coat from Ferner Jacobsen, a suit from Ermengildo Zegna and a side parting from the Silver Boys. He was big.
‘Somebody wants to meet you.’ He spoke English with a sort of Russian growl.
I reckoned it would be the usual. He had seen my face, thought I was a rent boy and wanted a blow job or my teenage ass. And I had to confess that on days like today I did consider a change of profession; heated car seats and four times the hourly rate.
‘No thanks,’ I answered in English.
‘Right answer is Yes please,’ the guy said, grabbing my arm and lifting me rather than dragging me off to a black limousine, which at that moment pulled soundlessly up by the pavement. The rear door opened, and as resistance was useless I began to think about a proper price. Paid rape is better than unpaid, after all.
I was shoved onto the back seat, and the door was slammed with a soft, expensive click. Through the windows, which from the outside had seemed black and impenetrable, I saw that we were moving west. Behind the wheel sat a little guy with much too small a head for all the big things that should fit in it: a huge nose, a white, lipless shark-mouth and bulging eyes that looked as if they had been stuck on with crap glue. He too had a posh funeral suit and a parting like a choirboy’s. He looked at me in the rear-view mirror. ‘Sales good, eh?’
‘What sales, fuckwit?’
The little guy gave a friendly smile and nodded. In my mind, I had decided not to give them a bulk discount if they asked me, but now I could see in his eyes it wasn’t me they were after. There was something else, which for the moment I couldn’t interpret. The City Hall appeared and was gone. The American Embassy. The Palace Gardens. Further west. Kirkeveien. Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation. And then houses and rich men’s addresses.
We stopped in front of a large timber construction on a hill and the funeral directors escorted me to the gate. As we waded through the shingle to the oak door I had a look around. The property was as big as a football pitch with apple and pear trees, a bunker-like cement tower similar to the stores they have in desert countries, a double garage with iron bars that gave the impression it housed public emergency vehicles. A two- to three-metre-high fence enclosed the whole caboodle. I already had an inkling where we were going. Limousine, English with a growl, ‘Sales good?’, fortress sweet home.
In the lobby the bigger of the two suits frisked me, then he and the little one went to a corner where there was a small table with a red felt cloth and loads of old icons and crucifixes hanging all over the wall. They drew their shooters from their shoulder holsters, put them on the red felt and placed a cross on each pistol. Then a door to a lounge opened.
‘Ataman,’ he said, pointing the way to me.
The old boy must have been at least as old as the leather armchair he was sitting in. I stared. Gnarled elderly fingers around a black cigarette.
There was a lively crackle coming from the enormous fireplace, and I made sure to position myself near enough for the heat to reach my back. The light from the flames flickered over his white silk shirt and old-man face. He put down the cigarette and raised his hand as though he expected me to kiss the large blue stone he wore on his ring finger.
‘Burmese sapphire,’ he said. ‘Six point six carat, four and a half thousand dollars per carat.’
He had an accent. It was not easy to hear, but it was there. Poland? Russia? Something to the east anyway.
‘How much?’ he said, resting his chin on the ring.
It took me a couple of seconds to understand what he meant.
‘Just under thirty thousand,’ I said.
‘How much under?’
I pondered. ‘Twenty-nine thousand seven hundred is pretty close.’
‘The exchange rate for the dollar is five eighty-three.’
‘Around a hundred and seventy thousand.’
The old boy nodded. ‘They said you were good.’ His old-man eyes shone bluer than the fricking Burmese sapphire.
‘They’ve got brains,’ I said.
‘I’ve watched you in action. You have a lot to learn, but I can see you’re smarter than the other imbeciles. You can see a customer and know what he’s willing to pay.’
I shrugged. I wondered what he was willing to pay.
‘But they also said you steal.’
‘Only when it’s worth my while.’
The old boy laughed. Well, since it was the first time I had met him, I thought it was a half-hearted coughing fit, like from lung cancer. There was a kind of gurgling noise deep in his throat, like the nice old chug-chug of a sailing boat. Then he fixed his cold, blue Jew-eyes on me and said in a tone that suggested he was telling me about Newton’s Second Law: ‘You should be able to manage the next calculation as well. If you steal from me I will kill you.’
The sweat was pouring down my back. I forced myself to meet his gaze. It was like staring into the fricking Antarctic. Nothing. Freezing cold wasteland. But I knew what he wanted. Number one: money.