by Jo Nesbo
“Yes.”
She put it down. “You didn’t say what we’re going to do, Olav.”
“What we have to do,” I said, “is fix Daniel Hoffmann before he fixes us.”
The sentence had sounded stupid when I formulated it inside my head. And just as stupid when I said it out loud.
CHAPTER 8
I went to the hotel early the next morning. Both of the rooms that faced Hoffmann’s apartment were already taken. I went and stood outside in the morning darkness, hidden behind a parked van, and looked up at his living room. Waiting. Squeezing the pistol in my coat pocket. This was the time he normally left home to go to work. But of course things weren’t normal. The lights were on, but it was impossible to see if there was anyone up there. I presumed that Hoffmann realised I wouldn’t have taken off with Corina and now be holed up in a hotel in Copenhagen or Amsterdam, say. To begin with, that wasn’t my style, and anyway, I didn’t have the money, and Hoffmann knew that. I’d had to ask for an advance to cover my expenses for this job. He’d asked why I was so broke, seeing as he’d only just paid me for two jobs. I said something about bad habits.
If Hoffmann was assuming that I was still in the city, then he would also assume that I’d try to get him before he got me. We knew each other fairly well by now. But it’s one thing to think you know something about someone, and another to know for certain, and I’ve been wrong before. Maybe he was on his own up there. And if that was the case, I’d never get a better opportunity than when he emerged from the building. I’d just have to wait until the lock clicked shut behind him so he couldn’t get back inside, run across the street, two shots to the torso from five metres, then two in the head from close range.
That was a lot to hope for.
The door opened. It was him.
And Brynhildsen and Pine. Brynhildsen with the toupee that looked like it was made from dog hair and the pencil-thin moustache that looked like a croquet hoop. Pine in the caramel-brown leather jacket he wore all year round, summer and winter alike. With his little hat, the cigarette tucked behind his ear, and a mouth that just wouldn’t stop. Random words drifted across the street. “Fucking cold” and “that bastard.”
Hoffmann stopped inside the doorway while his two attack dogs went out onto the pavement and looked up and down the street with their hands deep in their jacket pockets.
Then they waved at Hoffmann and began to walk towards the car.
I hunched my shoulders and headed in the opposite direction. Fine. It was, as I said, a lot to hope for. And now at least I knew that he had worked out how I was thinking of solving this. With him dying rather than me.
Either way, it meant I had to go back to Plan A.
The reason I had started with Plan B was that there wasn’t a single thing I liked about Plan A.
CHAPTER 9
I like watching films. Not as much as reading books, but a good film has something of the same function. It encourages you to look at things differently. But no film has managed to persuade me to take a different view of the advantages of being in the majority and being more heavily armed. In a fight between one man and several others, in which both parties are pretty much prepared and armed, the one who’s on his own will die. In a fight where one party has an automatic weapon, whoever has that weapon will win. This was the result of hard-won experience, and I wasn’t about to pretend it wasn’t true just so I wouldn’t have to go and see the Fisherman. It was true. And that’s why I went to see him.
The Fisherman, as I’ve already said, shares the heroin market in Oslo with Daniel Hoffmann. Not a big market, but because heroin was the main product, the customers were good at paying and the prices were high, the profits sky high. It all started with the Russian route—or the North Passage. When it was established by Hoffmann and the Russians in the early seventies, most of the heroin came from the Golden Triangle via Turkey and Yugoslavia, the so-called Balkan route. Pine had told me that he had been working as a pimp for Hoffmann, and that because ninety per cent of the prostitutes used heroin, getting paid with a fix was just as good as Norwegian kroner for most of them. So Hoffmann worked out that if he could get hold of cheap heroin, he’d be able to increase his takings from their sexual services accordingly.
The idea of getting hold of cheap gear didn’t come from the south but the north. From the inhospitable little Arctic island of Svalbard which is shared between Norway and the Soviet Union, who each run coal mines on their respective sides of the island. Life there is hard and monotonous, and Hoffmann had heard Norwegian miners tell horror stories of how the Russians drowned their sorrows with vodka, heroin and Russian roulette. So Hoffmann went up and met the Russians, and came back home with an agreement. Raw opium was shipped from Afghanistan into the Soviet Union, where it was refined into heroin and then sent north to Archangel and Murmansk. It would have been impossible to get it across to Norway, seeing as the Communists guarded the border with Norway, a NATO country, so carefully—and vice versa. But on Svalbard, where the border was only guarded by polar bears and temperatures of minus forty degrees, there wasn’t a problem.
Hoffmann’s contact on the Norwegian side sent the goods with the daily domestic flight to Tromsø, where they never checked so much as a single suitcase, even if everyone knew the miners were bringing in litre upon litre of cheap, tax-free spirits. It was as if even the authorities thought they deserved that much of a bonus. Obviously they were the ones who claimed in hindsight that it was naive to think that so much heroin could be brought in and shipped on to Oslo by plane, railway and road without anyone knowing about it. And that a few envelopes must have ended up in the hands of public officials.
But according to Hoffmann not a single krone was paid. It simply wasn’t necessary. The police had no idea what was going on. Not until an abandoned snow-scooter was found on the Norwegian side of the island, outside Longyearbyen.
The human remains left by the polar bears turned out to be Russian, and the petrol tank contained plastic bags holding a total of four kilos of pure heroin.
The operation was put on hold while the police and officials swarmed around the area like angry bees. A heroin panic broke out in Oslo. But greed is like meltwater: when one channel gets blocked it simply finds a new one. The Fisherman—who was many things, but first and foremost a businessman—put it like this: demand that isn’t being met demands to be met. He was a jovial, fat man with a walrus moustache who made you think of Santa Claus, until it suited him to slash you with a Stanley knife. He’d spent a few years smuggling Russian vodka that was shipped out on Soviet fishing boats, transferred to Norwegian fishing boats in the Barents Sea, then unloaded at an abandoned fishing station that the Fisherman not only ran, but owned, lock, stock and barrel. There the bottles were loaded into fish crates and driven down to the capital in fish vans. There was fish in them as well. In Oslo the bottles were stored in the cellar of the Fisherman’s shop, which was no fake front but a fishmonger’s that had been in the Fisherman’s family for three generations without ever being particularly profitable, but without going under either.
And when the Russians wondered if he could imagine swapping the vodka for heroin, the Fisherman did some calculations, looked at the legal penalties, looked at the risk of getting caught, then went for it. So, when Daniel Hoffmann started up his Svalbard trade again, he realised that he had competition. And he didn’t like that at all.
And that was where I came into the picture.
By that time—as I think I’ve already made clear—I had a more-or-less failed criminal career behind me. I’d done time for bank robbery, worked for and got fired by Hoffmann as an assistant pimp to Pine, and was on the lookout for something vaguely useful to do. Hoffmann contacted me again because he’d heard from reliable sources that I had fixed a smuggler who was found in the harbour at Halden with his head only partially intact. A very professional contract killing, Hoffmann declared. And seeing as I had no better reputation at my disposal, I didn’t deny it.
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The first job was a man from Bergen who worked as a dealer for Hoffmann, but had stolen some of the goods, denied it, and had gone to work for the Fisherman instead. He was easy to track down: people from the west talk louder than other Norwegians, and his rolling Bergen r’s ripped through the air down by the central station where he was dealing. I let him see my pistol, and that put an abrupt halt to those rolling r’s. They say it’s easier to kill the second time, and I suppose that’s true. I took the guy down to the container port and shot him twice in the head to make it look like the Halden fix. Seeing as the police already had a suspect for the Halden case, they were on the wrong track from day one, and never came close to giving me any grief. And Hoffmann got confirmation of his conviction that I was fixer number one, and gave me another job.
This one was a young guy who’d called Hoffmann and said he’d rather deal for him than for the Fisherman. He wanted them to meet somewhere discreet so they could discuss the details without the Fisherman finding out. Said he couldn’t stand the stink of the fishmonger’s any more. He should probably have worked a bit harder on his cover story. Hoffmann got hold of me and said he thought the Fisherman had told the guy to fix him.
The following evening I was waiting for him at the top of the park at Sankt Hanshaugen. There’s a good view from up there. People say it was once used for sacrifices, and that it’s haunted. My mum told me printers used to boil ink there. All I know is that it’s where the city’s rubbish used to be burned. The forecast said it was going to be minus twelve degrees that evening, so I knew we’d be alone. At nine o’clock a man came walking up the long path to the tower. In spite of the cold his forehead was wet with sweat by the time he reached the top.
“You’re early,” I said.
“Who are you?” he asked, mopping his brow with his scarf. “And where’s Hoffmann?”
We both reached for our pistols at the same time, but I was faster. I hit him in the chest and in the arm just above the elbow. He dropped his gun and fell backwards. Lay there in the snow blinking up at me.
I put the pistol to his chest. “How much did he pay?”
“Tw…twenty thousand.”
“Do you think that’s enough for killing someone?”
He opened and closed his mouth.
“I’m going to kill you anyway, so there’s no need to come up with a smart answer.”
“We’ve got four kids and we live in a two-room flat,” he said.
“Hope he paid in advance,” I said, and fired.
He groaned, but lay there blinking. I stared at the two holes in the front of his jacket. Then I tore the buttons open.
He was wearing chain mail. Not a bulletproof vest, but fucking chain mail, the sort the Vikings used to wear. Well, they did in the illustrations of Snorri’s Sagas of the Kings that I read so many times as a boy that in the end the library refused to let me take it out any more. Iron. It was hardly surprising the climb up the hill had made him sweat.
“What the fuck’s this?”
“My wife made it,” he said. “For the play. About St. Olav.”
I ran my fingers over the loops of metal, all hooked together. How many thousands of them could there be? Twenty? Forty?
“She won’t let me go out without it,” he said.
Chain mail, made for a play about the murder of a holy king.
I put the pistol against his forehead and fired. The third one. It should have been easier.
His wallet contained fifty kroner, a photograph of his wife and kids, and an ID card with his name and address.
Those fixes were two of the three reasons why I wanted to stay out of the Fisherman’s way.
I went to his shop early the next day.
Eilertsen & Son Fishmonger’s was located on Youngstorget, just a stone’s throw from the central police station at 19 Møllergata. Word is that when the Fisherman still sold smuggled vodka, the police were among his best customers.
Huddled against the piercing, icy wind, I crossed the sea of cobbles.
The shop had only just opened when I stepped inside, but there were already plenty of customers.
Sometimes the Fisherman himself served in the shop, but not that day. The women behind the counter went on serving their customers, but a young man—I could tell from the look he gave me that he had other duties apart from just cutting, weighing and packing fish—vanished through a swing door.
Shortly afterwards the boss came in. The Fisherman. Dressed in white from top to toe. With an apron and cap. He even had white wood-soled sandals. Like some fucking lifeguard. He walked round the counter and came up to me. He wiped his fingers on the apron, which bulged over his stomach. Then nodded towards the door that was still swinging back and forth on its hinges. Each time there was a gap I could see a skinny, familiar figure. The one they called Klein. I don’t know if it was the German sense of the word, small. Or the Norwegian, sick. Unless it really was his name. Maybe all three. Every time the door swung open, my eyes met his, dead, pitch black. I also got a glimpse of the sawn-off shotgun hanging down by his foot.
“Keep your hands out of your pockets,” the Fisherman said quietly with his broad Santa Claus grin. “Then you might make it out of here alive.”
I nodded.
“We’re busy selling fish for Christmas, lad, so say what you came to say, then get the hell out of here.”
“I can help you get rid of the competition.”
“You?”
“Yes. Me.”
“I didn’t think you were the treacherous type, lad.”
The fact that he called me lad instead of my name may have been because he didn’t know it, or didn’t want to show me any respect by using it, or else saw no reason to let me know how much—if anything—he knew about me. I guessed the last of the three.
“Can we talk in the back room?” I asked.
“Here will do fine, no one will overhear us.”
“I shot Hoffmann’s son.”
The Fisherman screwed up one eye while the other stared at me. For a long time. Customers called out “Happy Christmas!” and let gusts of cold air into the warm, steamy shop as they headed out through the door.
“Let’s go into the back,” the Fisherman said.
Three men fixed. You have to be a bloody cold businessman not to bear a grudge against someone who has fixed three of your people. I just had to hope that my offer was good enough, and that the Fisherman was as cold as I thought he was. Like hell he didn’t know my name.
I sat down at a worn wooden table. On the floor were sturdy polystyrene boxes full of ice, frozen fish and—if Hoffmann was right about the logistics—heroin. The room couldn’t have been much more than five or six degrees. Klein didn’t sit down, and while I was talking it was like he wasn’t consciously thinking about the vicious shotgun he was holding, but the whole time its barrel was aimed at nothing but me. I ran through recent events without lying, but also without going into unnecessary detail.
When I was done the Fisherman went on staring with that fucking Cyclops eye of his.
“So you shot his son instead of his wife?”
“I didn’t know it was his son.”
“What do you think, Klein?”
Klein shrugged his shoulders. “It said in the papers that a guy had been shot in Vinderen yesterday.”
“So I saw. Maybe Hoffmann and his fixer here have used what it said in the papers to cook up a story they were sure we’d believe.”
“Call the police and ask what his name was,” I said.
“We will,” the Fisherman said. “Once you’ve explained why you spared Hoffmann’s wife and are now keeping her hidden.”
“That’s my business,” I said.
“If you’re planning on getting out of here alive, you’d better start talking. Fast.”
“Hoffmann used to hit her,” I said.
“Which one?”
“Both of them,” I lied.
“So? The fact that someone gets hit by some
one stronger doesn’t mean they don’t deserve it.”
“Specially not a whore like that,” Klein said.
The Fisherman laughed. “Look at those eyes, Klein. The lad would like to kill you! I think he might just be in love.”
“No problem,” Klein said. “I’d like to kill him too. He was the one who took out Mao.”
I had no idea which one of the three of the Fisherman’s men was Mao. But it had said “Mauritz” on the driving licence of the guy in Sankt Hanshaugen, so maybe it was him.
“The Christmas fish is waiting,” I said. “So what’s it to be?”
The Fisherman tugged the end of his walrus moustache. I wondered if he ever managed to wash out the smell of fish. Then he stood up.
“ ‘What loneliness is more lonely than distrust?’ Do you know what that means, lad?”
I shook my head.
“No. That’s what the guy from Bergen said when he came over to us. That you were too simple for Hoffmann to use as a dealer. He said you couldn’t put two and two together.”
Klein laughed. I didn’t respond.
“That’s T. S. Eliot, boys,” the Fisherman sighed. “The loneliness of a suspicious man. Believe me, all leaders end up suffering that loneliness sooner or later. And plenty of husbands will feel it at least once in their lives. But most fathers manage to escape it. Hoffmann has had a taste of all three versions. His fixer, his wife and his son. Almost enough to make you feel sorry for him.” He went over to the swing door. Looked through the round window into the shop. “So what do you need?”
“Two of your best men.”
“You make it sound like we’ve got an army at our disposal here, lad.”
“Hoffmann’s going to be expecting it.”
“Really? Doesn’t he think he’s the one hunting you now?”
“He knows me.”
The Fisherman looked like he was trying to pull his moustache off. “You can have Klein and the Dane.”
“How about the Dane and—”