by Jo Nesbo
‘I … I swear. But that doesn’t change anything.’
Harry smiled wryly. ‘You’re right. Nothing changes. Nothing can change. It can’t ever change. The river flows along the same damned course.’
‘This makes no sense. I don’t understand.’
‘You will,’ Harry said. ‘And she will, too.’
‘But … you love each other. She said that straight out. You’re the love of her life, Harry.’
‘And she mine. Always has been. Always will be.’
Hans Christian regarded Harry with a mixture of bewilderment and something that resembled sympathy. ‘And yet you don’t want her?’
‘There is nothing I would rather have than her. But it’s not certain I’ll be here for much longer. And if I’m not, you’ve made me a promise.’
Hans Christian snorted. ‘Aren’t you being a trifle melodramatic, Harry? I don’t even know if she’ll have me.’
‘Convince her.’ The pains in his neck seemed to be making it more difficult for him to breathe. ‘Do you promise?’
Hans Christian nodded, and said, ‘I’ll try.’
Harry hesitated. Then he proffered his hand.
They shook.
‘You’re a good man, Hans Christian. I’ve got you saved under H.’ He lifted his mobile phone. ‘You’ve replaced Halvorsen.’
‘Who?’
‘Just a former colleague I hope to see again. I have to go now.’
‘What are you going to do?’
‘Meet Gusto’s murderer.’
Harry rose, turned to the counter and saluted to Rita, who waved back.
Once outside and striding across the road between cars, there was an explosion behind his eyes, and his throat felt as if it would be torn apart. And in Dovregata came the gall. He stood bent double by the wall in the middle of the quiet street and brought up Rita’s bacon, eggs and coffee. Then he straightened and walked on down Hausmanns gate.
In the end it had been a simple decision, despite everything.
I was sitting on a filthy mattress and felt my petrified heart throbbing as I rang. I hoped he would pick up the phone, and I hoped he wouldn’t.
I was about to hang up when he answered, and there was my foster-brother’s voice, lifeless and clear.
‘Stein.’
I have occasionally considered how apt that name is. Stone. An impenetrable surface with a rock-hard centre. Impassive, bleak, heavy. But even rocks have a weak point, a place where a soft blow from a sledgehammer can make them split. In Stein’s case it was easy.
I cleared my throat. ‘It’s Gusto. I know where Irene is.’
I heard light breathing. Stein’s breathing was always light.
He could run and run for hours, needed almost no oxygen. Or a reason to run.
‘Where?’
‘That’s the thing,’ I said. ‘I know where, but it’ll cost you to find out.’
‘Why?’
‘Because I need it.’
It was like a wave of heat. No, of cold. I could feel his hatred. Heard him swallow.
‘How mu—’
‘Five thousand.’
‘Fine.’
‘I mean ten.’
‘You said five.’
Fuck.
‘But it’s urgent,’ I said, even though I knew he was already on his feet.
‘Fine. Where are you?’
‘Hausmanns gate 92. The lock on the door’s broken. Second floor.’
‘I’m on my way. Don’t go anywhere.’
Go anywhere? I took a couple of dog-ends from the ashtray in the sitting room and lit up in the kitchen amid the deafening afternoon silence. Shit, it was so hot in here. Something rustled. I followed the noise. The rat again, scurrying along by the wall.
It came from behind the stove. Had a nice hiding place there.
I smoked dog-end number two.
Then I jumped up.
The stove weighed a bloody ton, until I discovered it had two wheels at the back.
The rathole was bigger than it ought to have been.
Oleg, Oleg, my dear friend. You’re smart, but this particular ruse you learned from me.
I fell on my knees. I was on a high even while working with the wire. My fingers shook so much I felt like biting them off. I could feel I had it, but then I lost it. It had to be violin. Had to be!
Then at long last I got a nibble, and it was a big ’un. I reeled it in. A large, heavy cloth bag. I opened it. It had to be, had to be!
A rubber tube, a spoon, a syringe. And three small transparent packages. The white powder inside was flecked with brown. My heart sang. I was reunited with the only friend and lover I have always been able to rely on.
I stuffed two of the packages in my pocket and opened the third. Now I had enough for a week if I was frugal, I just had to shoot up and vamoose before Stein or anyone else came. I sprinkled some powder onto the spoon, flicked my lighter. I usually added a few drops of lemon, the kind you buy in bottles and people put in tea. The lemon juice prevented the powder from going clumpy and you got all of it in the syringe. But I had neither the lemon nor the patience, now there was only one thing that mattered: getting the shit into my bloodstream.
I wrapped the tube round the top of my arm, put the end between my teeth and pulled. Found a big blue vein. Angled the syringe to give myself the biggest target and reduce the shaking. Because I was shaking. Shaking like hell.
I missed.
Once. Twice. Breathed in. Don’t think too much now, don’t be too keen, don’t panic.
The needle wobbled. I took a stab at the blue worm.
Missed again.
I fought against my despair. Thought I might smoke a bit of it first, to compose myself. But it was the rush I wanted, the kick you get when the whole dose hits the blood, goes straight to the brain, the orgasm, the free fall!
The heat and the sunlight, they were blinding me. I moved to the sitting room, sat in the shadow by the wall. Shit, now I couldn’t even see the sodding vein! Take it easy. I waited for my pupils to dilate. Luckily my forearms were as white as cinema screens. The vein looked like a river on a map of Greenland. Now.
Missed.
I didn’t have the energy for this, felt tears coming. A shoe creaked.
I had been concentrating so hard that I hadn’t heard him come in.
And when I looked up my eyes were so full of tears that shapes were distorted, like in a fricking fairground mirror.
‘Hi, Thief.’
I hadn’t heard anyone call me that for ages.
I blinked away the tears. And the shapes became familiar. Yes, now I recognised everything. Even the gun. It hadn’t been nicked from the rehearsal room by passing burglars, as I had thought.
The weird thing was I wasn’t frightened. Not at all. All of a sudden I was quite calm.
I looked down at the vein again.
‘Don’t do it,’ said the voice.
I studied my hand. It was as steady as a pickpocket’s. This was my chance.
‘I’ll shoot you.’
‘I don’t think so,’ I said. ‘Because then you’ll never find out where Irene is.’
‘Gusto!’
‘I’m doing what I have to do,’ I said and stabbed. Hit the vein. Raised my thumb to press the plunger. ‘So you can do what you have to do.’
The church bells started chiming again.
Harry sat in the shadow by the wall. The light from the street lamp outside fell on the mattresses. He checked his watch. Nine. Three hours to the Bangkok flight. The pains in his neck had suddenly got worse. Like the heat from the sun before it disappears behind a cloud. But soon the sun would be gone; soon he would be out of pain. Harry knew how this had to end. It was as inevitable as his return to Oslo. Just as he knew that the human need for order and cohesion meant he would manipulate his mind into seeing a kind of logic to it. Because the notion that everything is no more than cold chaos, that there is no meaning, is harder to bear than even the worst, thoug
h comprehensible, tragedy.
He groped inside his jacket pocket for a pack of cigarettes and felt the knife handle against his fingertips. Had a feeling he should have got rid of it. A curse lay over it. Over him. But it wouldn’t have made any difference; he had been cursed long before the knife appeared. And the curse was worse than any knife; it said that his love was a plague he carried around with him. Just as Asayev had said the knife transmitted the suffering and sickness of its owner to whoever had been stabbed by it, all those who had allowed themselves to be loved by Harry had been made to pay. Had been destroyed, taken from him. Only the ghosts were left. All of them. And soon Rakel and Oleg would be ghosts as well.
He opened the pack and looked inside.
What was it he had imagined? That he would be allowed to escape the curse? That he would be able to flee to the other side of the globe with them and live happily ever after? He was thinking this as he checked his watch again, wondering how late he could leave and still make the flight. This was his selfish, greedy heart he was listening to.
He took out the dog-eared family photo and looked at it again. At Irene. And the brother, Stein. The one with the grey look. Harry had had two hits in his memory database when he met him. One was from this photograph. The second was the night Harry came to Oslo. He had been to Kvadraturen. The close scrutiny to which Stein had subjected him made Harry think he was a policeman at first, but he was wrong. Very wrong.
Then he heard the footsteps on the stairs.
The church bells chimed. They sounded so frail and lonely.
Truls Berntsen stopped on the top step and stared at the front door. Felt his heart beating. They were going to see each other again. He looked forward to the meeting and yet dreaded it. Inhaled.
And rang.
Straightened his tie. He did not feel comfortable in a suit. But he had known there was no way out when Mikael had told him who was coming to the housewarming party. All the top brass, from the outgoing Chief of Police and unit heads to their old Crime Squad rival, Gunnar Hagen. Politicians would be there, too. The foxy council woman whose pictures he had stared at, Isabelle Skøyen. And a couple of TV celebs. Truls had no idea how Mikael had got to know them.
The door opened.
Ulla.
‘You look nice, Truls,’ she said. Hostess smile. Glittering eyes. But he knew at once he was too early.
He just nodded, unable to say what he should have said, that she looked very attractive herself.
She gave him a quick hug, said to come in. They would be welcoming guests with glasses of champagne but she hadn’t poured them yet. She smiled, wrung her hands and cast semi-panicked glances at the staircase to the first floor. Probably hoping that Mikael would come soon and take over. But Mikael must have been changing, inspecting himself in the mirror, checking every hair was in the right place.
Ulla was speaking a bit too fast about people from their childhood in Manglerud. Did Truls know what they were doing now?
Truls didn’t.
‘Don’t have much contact with them any more,’ he answered. Even though he was fairly sure she knew he had never had any contact with them. Not one of them, not Goggen, Jimmy, Anders or Krøkke. Truls had one friend: Mikael. And he too had made sure to keep Truls at arm’s length as he had risen through the ranks socially and professionally.
They had run out of things to say. She had run out. He hadn’t had anything to say from the start. A pause.
‘Women, Truls? Anything new there?’
‘Nothing new there, nope.’ He tried to say it in the same jokey tone as she had. He really could have done with the welcome drink now.
‘Is there really no one who can capture your heart?’
She had tilted her head and winked one smiling eye, but he could see she was already regretting her question. Perhaps because she could see his flushed face. Or perhaps because she knew the answer. That you, you, you, Ulla, could capture my heart. He had walked three steps behind the super-couple Mikael and Ulla in Manglerud, been ever-present, ever at their service, though this was gainsaid by the sullen, indifferent I’m-bored-but-I-have-nothing-better-on-offer look. While his heart had burned for her, while from the corner of his eye he had registered her every movement or expression. He could not have her, it was an impossibility, he knew. Yet he had yearned the way people yearn to fly.
Then at last Mikael strode down the stairs, pulling down his shirtsleeves so that the cufflinks could be seen under the dinner jacket.
‘Truls!’
It sounded like the somewhat exaggerated heartiness usually reserved for people you don’t really know. ‘Why the long face, old friend? We have a palace to celebrate!’
‘I thought it was the Chief of Police job we were celebrating,’ Truls said, looking round. ‘I saw it on the news today.’
‘A leak. It’s not been formally announced yet. But it’s your terrace we’re going to pay tribute to today, Truls, isn’t it? How’s it going with the champagne, dear?’
‘I’ll pour it now,’ Ulla said, brushing an invisible speck of dust off her husband’s shoulder and departing.
‘Do you know Isabelle Skøyen?’ Truls asked.
‘Yes,’ Mikael said, still smiling. ‘She’s coming this evening. Why?’
‘Nothing.’ Truls inhaled. It had to be now, or not at all. ‘There’s something I’ve been wondering about.’
‘Yes?’
‘A few days ago I was sent on a job to arrest a guy at Leon, the hotel, you know?’
‘I think I know it, yes.’
‘But while I was in the middle of the arrest two other policemen I don’t know turned up, and they wanted to arrest us both.’
‘Double booking?’ Mikael laughed. ‘Talk to Finn. He coordinates operational matters.’
Truls slowly shook his head. ‘I don’t think it was a double booking.’
‘No?’
‘I think someone sent me there on purpose.’
‘You mean it was a wind-up?’
‘It was a wind-up, yes,’ Truls said, searching Mikael’s eyes, but found no indication that he understood what Truls was actually talking about. Could he have been mistaken after all? Truls swallowed.
‘So I was wondering if you knew anything about it, if you might have been in on it.’
‘Me?’ Mikael leaned back and burst out laughing. And when Truls saw into his mouth he remembered how Mikael had always returned from the school dentist with zero cavities. Not even Karius and Bactus got the better of him.
‘I wish I had been! Tell me, did they lay you out on the floor and cuff you?’
Truls eyed Mikael. Saw he had been wrong. So he laughed along with him. From relief as much as at the image of himself being sat on by two other officers, and because Mikael’s infectious laughter always invited him to laugh along. No, commanded him to laugh along. But it had also enveloped him, warmed him, made him part of something, a member of something, a duo consisting of him and Mikael Bellman. Friends. He heard his own grunted laughter as Mikael’s faded.
‘Did you really think I was in on it, Truls?’ Mikael asked with a pensive expression.
Truls, smiling, looked at him. Thought about how Dubai had found his way to him, thought of the boy Truls had beaten to blindness in remand. Who could have told Dubai that? Thought of the blood the SOC group had found under Gusto’s nail in Hausmanns gate, the blood Truls had contaminated before it got as far as a DNA test. But some of which he had procured and kept. It was evidence such as this that could be valuable one rainy day. And since it had definitely begun to rain, he had driven to the Pathology Unit this morning with the blood. And been given the result before coming here this evening. The test suggested, so far, that it was the same blood and nail fragments as those received from Beate Lønn a few days ago. Didn’t they talk to each other down there? Didn’t they think they had enough to do at Forensics? Truls had apologised and rung off. And considered the answer. The blood under Gusto Hanssen’s nails came from Mikael Bellman.
Mikael and Gusto.
Mikael and Rudolf Asayev.
Truls fingered the knot of his tie. It hadn’t been his father who taught him how to do it; he couldn’t even tie his own. It had been Mikael who had taught him when they were going to the end-of-school party. He had shown Truls how to tie a simple Windsor knot, and when Truls had asked why Mikael’s knot seemed so much fatter Mikael had answered that it was because it was a double Windsor, but it was unlikely to suit Truls.
Mikael’s gaze rested on him. He was still waiting for an answer to his question. Why Truls thought Mikael had been in on the stunt.
Been in on the decision to murder him and Harry Hole at Hotel Leon.
The doorbell rang, but Mikael didn’t move.
Truls pretended to be scratching his forehead while using his fingertips to dry the sweat.
‘No,’ he said and heard his own grunted laugh. ‘An idea, that’s all. Forget it.’
The stairs creaked under Stein Hanssen’s weight. He could feel every step and predict every creak and groan. He stopped at the top. Knocked on the door.
‘Come in,’ he heard from inside.
Stein Hanssen entered.
The first thing he saw was the suitcase.
‘Packed and ready?’ he asked.
A nod.
‘Did you find the passport?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’ve ordered a taxi to take you to the airport.’
‘I’m coming.’
‘OK.’ Stein looked around. The way he had in the other rooms. Said his farewells. Told them he wouldn’t be coming back. And listened to the echoes of their childhood. Father’s encouraging voice. Mother’s secure voice. Gusto’s enthusiastic voice. Irene’s happy voice. The only one he didn’t hear was his own. He had been silent.
‘Stein?’ Irene was holding a photograph in her hand. Stein knew which one, she had pinned it over her bed the same evening Simonsen, the solicitor, had brought her here. The photograph showing her with Gusto and Oleg.
‘Yes?’
‘Did you ever feel a desire to kill Gusto?’
Stein didn’t answer. Just thought of that evening.
The phone call from Gusto saying he knew where Irene was. Running to Hausmanns gate. And arriving: the police cars. The voices around him saying the boy inside was dead, shot. And the feeling of excitement. Yes, almost happiness. And after that, the shock. The grief. Yes, in a way he had grieved over Gusto. At the same time as nursing a hope that Irene would at last be clean. That hope had of course been extinguished as the days passed and he realised that Gusto’s death meant he had missed out on the chance to find her.