The Leopard hh-8

by Jo Nesbo

  ‘Been waiting long?’ Harry asked.

  ‘No,’ she said, getting up before he had a chance to sit down, pulling him over, laying her head on his shoulder and holding him like that. ‘I’m just a bit cold.’

  She didn’t care about other people in the bar watching her, she didn’t let go, instead she stuffed both hands under his suit jacket, stroking his shirted back up and down to get them warm. Harry heard a discreet cough, looked up and received a friendly nod from a man with body language that said head waiter.

  ‘Our table is ready,’ she said.

  ‘Table? I thought we were only having a drink.’

  ‘We have to celebrate the end of the case, don’t we? I ordered the food beforehand. Something very special.’

  They were shown to a table by the window in the fully occupied restaurant. A waiter lit the candles, poured apple cider into the glasses, put the bottle back in the ice bucket and left.

  She raised her glass. ‘Skal.’

  ‘To what?’

  ‘To Crime Squad continuing as before. To you and me catching bad men. To being here now. Together.’

  They drank. Harry set his glass down on the cloth. Moved it. The base had left a wet mark. ‘Kaja…’

  ‘I’ve got something for you, Harry. Tell me what your greatest wish is right now.’

  ‘Listen, Kaja…’

  ‘What?’ she said, breathless, and leaned forward, eager to hear.

  ‘I told you I would be on my travels again. I’m leaving tomorrow.’

  ‘Tomorrow?’ she laughed, and the smile faded as the waiter unfolded their serviettes and spread them, heavy and white, over their laps. ‘Where to?’

  ‘Away.’

  Kaja stared down at the table without saying a word. Harry wanted to put his hand on hers. But refrained.

  ‘So I wasn’t enough?’ she whispered. ‘We weren’t enough?’

  Harry waited until he could catch her eye. ‘No,’ he said. ‘We weren’t enough. Not enough for you, not enough for me.’

  ‘What do you know about what’s enough?’ Her voice was thick with tears.

  ‘Quite a lot,’ Harry said.

  Kaja breathed heavily, tried to control her voice. ‘Is it Rakel?’

  ‘Yes. It was always Rakel.’

  ‘But you said yourself she didn’t want you.’

  ‘She doesn’t want me the way I am now. So I have to repair myself. I have to be well again. Do you understand?’

  ‘No, I don’t understand.’ Two tiny tears clung to the lashes under her eyes, wavering. ‘You are well. The scars are just-’

  ‘You know very well it’s not those scars I’m talking about.’

  ‘Will I ever see you again?’ she asked, trapping one of the tears with a fingernail.

  She grasped his hand, squeezed it so tight the knuckles went white. Harry looked at her. Then she let go.

  ‘I won’t go and bring you back another time,’ she said.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘You won’t cope.’

  ‘Probably not,’ he smiled. ‘But then who does?’

  She tilted her head. Then she smiled with those small pointed teeth of hers.

  ‘I do,’ she said.

  Harry remained in his chair until he heard the soft slam of a car door in the darkness and the diesel engine starting up. He looked down at the cloth and was about to get up when a soup plate came into his eyeline and he heard the head waiter’s voice announce: ‘Special order at the lady’s instructions flown over from Hong Kong. Li Yuan’s glass noodles.’

  Harry stared down at the plate. She is still sitting in her chair, he thought. The restaurant is a soap bubble and now it is taking off, hovering over the town and is gone. The kitchen never runs out and we never land.

  He got up and made a move to leave. But changed his mind. Sat down again. Lifted the chopsticks.

  95

  The Allies

  Harry left the dance restaurant that was no longer a dance restaurant, drove down the hill to the Seamen’s School that was no longer a seamen’s school. Continued to the bunkers that had defended the country’s invaders. Beneath him were the fjord and the town, hidden by mist. Cars crept forward carefully with yellow cat’s eyes. A tram emerged from the mist like a ghost gnashing its teeth.

  A car stopped in front of him, and Harry jumped into the front seat. Katie Melua oozed through the speakers with her honey-dripping agony, and Harry desperately searched for the ‘off ’ switch on the radio.

  ‘Jesus Christ, what do you look like!’ Oystein said, horrified. ‘The surgeon must have definitely failed the sewing course. But at least you’ll save a few kroner on the Halloween mask. Don’t laugh or your mug’ll tear again.’

  ‘I promise.’

  ‘By the way,’ Oystein said, ‘it’s my birthday today.’

  ‘Oh, fuck. Here’s a smoke, from me to you. Free.’

  ‘That’s exactly what I wanted.’

  ‘Mm. Any bigger presents you’d like?’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘World peace.’

  ‘The day you wake up to world peace, you don’t wake up, Harry. Because they’ve dropped the big one.’

  ‘OK. No private wishes?’

  ‘Not a lot. New conscience maybe.’

  ‘New conscience?’

  ‘The old one’s not so good. Smart suit you’ve got. Thought you had only the one.’

  ‘It’s Dad’s.’

  ‘Jesus, you must have shrunk.’

  ‘Yes,’ Harry said, straightening his tie. ‘I have shrunk.’

  ‘How’s Ekeberg restaurant?’

  Harry closed his eyes. ‘Fine.’

  ‘Do you remember the leaky shack we sneaked into that time. How old were we? Sixteen?’

  ‘Seventeen.’

  ‘Didn’t you dance with the Killer Queen there once?’

  ‘Possibly.’

  ‘Frightening to think that the MILF of your youth has ended up in an old people’s home.’

  ‘MILF?’

  Oystein sighed. ‘Look it up.’

  ‘Mm. Oystein?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why did you and I become pals?’

  ‘Because we grew up together, I suppose.’

  ‘Is that all? A demographic coincidence? No spiritual fellowship?’

  ‘Not that I’ve noticed. As far as I know, we’ve only ever had one thing in common.’

  What’s that?’

  ‘No one else wanted to be pals with us.’

  They wound their way through the next bends in silence.

  ‘Apart from Tresko,’ Harry said.

  Oystein snorted. ‘Who stank so much of toe-fart no one else could bear sitting next to him.’

  ‘Yes,’ Harry said. ‘We were good at that.’

  ‘We nailed that one,’ Oystein said. ‘But, Christ, how he stank.’

  They laughed together. Gentle, light-hearted. Sad.

  ***

  Oystein had parked the car on the brown grass with the doors open. Harry clambered up onto the top of the bunker and sat on the edge with his legs dangling. From the speakers inside the car doors Springsteen sang about blood brothers one stormy night and the vow that had to be kept.

  Oystein passed Harry the bottle of Jim Beam. A lone siren from the town rose and fell until it lost power and died. The poison stung Harry’s throat and stomach, and he threw up. The second swig went better. The third was fine.

  Max Weinberg sounded as if he was trying to destroy the drumhead.

  ‘It often strikes me how I ought to wish I had more regrets,’ Oystein said. ‘But I don’t give a shite. I think I just accepted from my first waking second that I was a bloody slob. What about you?’

  Harry ruminated. ‘I have loads of regrets. But perhaps that’s because I carry around such high notions of myself. In fact, I imagine I could have chosen differently.’

  ‘But you bloody couldn’t.’

  ‘Not at that time. But next time, Oystein. Next time
.’

  ‘Has it ever happened, Harry? Ever in the fucking history of mankind?’

  ‘Just because nothing has happened doesn’t mean that it can’t happen. I don’t know that this bottle is going to fall if I drop it. Fuck, which philosopher was it again? Hobbes? Hume? Heidegger? One of the headcases beginning with H.’

  ‘Answer me.’

  Harry shrugged. ‘I think it’s possible to learn. The problem is that we learn so damned slowly, so that by the time you’ve realised, it’s too late. For example, someone you love might ask you for a favour, an act of love. Like helping him to die. Which you say no to because you haven’t learned, you haven’t had the insight. When you do finally see the light, it’s too late.’ Harry took another swig. ‘So instead you perform the act of love for someone else. Perhaps for someone you hate, even.’

  Oystein accepted the bottle. ‘Got no idea what you’re chuntering on about, but it sounds fucked up.’

  ‘Not necessarily. It’s never too late for good actions, is it.’

  ‘It’s always too late, don’t you mean?’

  ‘No! I always thought we hate too much for it to be possible for us to obey other impulses. But my father had a different opinion. He said hatred and love are the same currency. Everything starts with love, hatred is the reverse side of the coin.’

  ‘Amen.’

  ‘But that must mean you can go the other way, from hatred to love. Hatred must be a good starting point for learning, for changing, for doing things differently next time.’

  ‘Now you’re so optimistic I’m considering puking, Harry.’

  The organ came in the refrain, a whine, cutting through like a circular saw.

  Oystein leaned his head to the side while flicking ash. And Harry was almost moved to tears. Simply because he saw the years that had become their lives, that had become them, in the way his friend flicked ash as he had always done, leaning to the side as if the cigarette were too heavy, his head angled as if he liked the world better from a slanted perspective, the ash on the floor of the smokers’ shed at school, down an empty beer bottle at a party they had gatecrashed, on the cold, rough concrete of a bunker.

  ‘Anyway, you’re beginning to get old, Harry.’

  ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘When men start quoting their fathers, they’re old. The race has been run.’

  And then Harry found it. The answer to her question about what he most wanted right now. He wanted an armoured heart.

  Epilogue

  Bluish-black clouds swept over Hong Kong’s highest point, Victoria Peak, but it had finally stopped raining after dripping constantly since the beginning of September. The sun poked through, and a huge rainbow formed a bridge between Kong Island and Kowloon. Harry closed his eyes and let the sun warm his face. The spell of good weather had come just in time for the horse-racing season due to open in Happy Valley later that evening.

  Harry heard the buzz of Japanese voices approach and then pass the bench on which he was sitting. They were coming from the funicular railway, which since 1888 had attracted tourists and locals up here to the fresh air above the town. Harry opened his eyes again and flicked through the racing programme.

  He had contacted Herman Kluit as soon as he’d arrived in Hong Kong. Kluit had offered Harry a job as a debt collector, that is, he had to trace people who were trying to flee from their debts. In this way, Kluit would not have to sell the debt with a substantial discount to the Triad, or think about the brutal recovery methods they employed.

  It would have been stretching things to say Harry enjoyed the job, but it was well paid and simple. He didn’t have to recover the money, just locate the debtors. However, it turned out that his appearance – one metre ninety-two and a grinning scar from mouth to ear – was often enough for them to settle their accounts on the spot. And he very rarely had to resort to using a search engine on a server in Germany.

  The trick, nevertheless, was to keep off dope and alcohol, which he had succeeded in doing thus far. There were two letters waiting for him in reception today. How they had found him he had no idea. Only that Kaja must have been involved. One letter bore the logo of Oslo Police District on the envelope, and Harry guessed Gunnar Hagen. With the other he didn’t need to guess, he immediately recognised Oleg’s upright and still childish handwriting. Harry had put both letters in his jacket pocket without taking a decision on when or indeed whether he would read them.

  Harry folded the racing programme and put it down beside him on the bench. He peered across to the Chinese mainland where the yellow smog was becoming thicker by the year. But up here at the top of the mountain the air still felt almost fresh. He looked down on Happy Valley. On the cemeteries, west of the Wong Nai Chong road, where there were separate sections for Protestants, Catholics, Muslims and Hindus. He could see the racecourse where he knew jockeys and horses were already on the turf being tested before the evening’s races. Soon the spectators would be pouring in: those with hope, those without, the lucky and the unlucky. Those who went to have their dreams fulfilled and those who went purely to dream. The losers who took uncalculated risks and those who took calculated risks, but lost anyway. They had been here before, and they all came back, even the ghosts from the cemeteries down there, the several hundred who died in the great fire at Happy Valley Racecourse in 1918. For tonight it was definitely their turn to beat the odds, to conquer chance, to stuff their pockets full of crisp Hong Kong dollars, to get away with murder. In a couple of hours from now they would have entered the gates, read the racing programme, filled the coupons with the day’s doubles, quinellas, exactas, triples, superfectas, whatever their gambling god is called. They would have queued by the bookies’ hatches, holding their stakes at the ready. Most of them would have died a bit every time the tape was crossed, but redemption is only fifteen minutes away, when the staring gates open for the next race. Unless you’re a bridge jumper, of course, someone who risks all their assets on one horse in a race. But no one complains. Everyone knows the odds.

  But you have those who know the odds, and then you have those who know the outcome. At a racecourse in South Africa they recently found underground pipes in the starting gates. The pipes contained compressed air and mini-darts with tranquillisers that could be fired into the horses’ stomachs by pressing a remote control.

  Katrine Bratt had informed him that Sigurd Altman was booked into a hotel in Shanghai. It was barely an hour’s flight away.

  Harry cast a final glance at the front page of the programme.

  Those who know the outcome.

  ‘It’s just a game.’ Herman Kluit used to say that. Perhaps because he used to win.

  Harry looked at his watch, got to his feet and started to walk to the tram. He had been tipped off about a promising horse in the third race.

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