The Son

by Jo Nesbo

  ‘Yes. Do you think I would let anything happen to Kari?’

  Pause.

  ‘No. No, you never had that in you, Simon.’

  ‘I guess that’s why I never made it to Commissioner.’

  ‘Very funny. When and where?’

  ‘Seven fifteen. Aker Brygge, number 86. See you there.’

  Simon opened the side window, tossed out the phone and saw it disappear over a neighbouring fence. In the distance he could hear the sound of fire engines.

  Then he put the car in gear and revved the engine.

  He drove westwards. At Smestad he took the exit to Holmenkollåsen. Zigzagged up to the viewpoint that had always given him a sense of perspective.

  The Honda had been removed by now and the CSOs had finished their work.

  After all, it was no longer a crime scene.

  Not for a murder, anyway.

  Simon parked the car so that he had a view of the fjord and the sunset.

  As it started to grow dark, Oslo began to look more and more like a dying fire with glowing red and yellow embers. Simon pulled up the collar on his coat and reclined the seat. He had to try to get some sleep. Tomorrow was a big day.

  The biggest of them all.

  If luck was on their side.

  ‘Try this one,’ Martha said, handing the young man a jacket.

  He was relatively new, she had only seen him here once before. Twenty years old, possibly, but he would be lucky if he lived to see twenty-five. Or at least that was the general opinion of the others in reception at the Ila Centre.

  ‘Great, it suits you!’ she smiled. ‘Try wearing it with these, perhaps?’ She handed him a pair of jeans, barely worn. She became aware that someone was standing behind her and turned round. He must have entered through the cafe, perhaps he had been standing in the doorway to the clothing storeroom, watching her for a while. The suit and the bandage around his head were enough to get him noticed, but Martha didn’t even see them.

  All she saw was his intense, hungry gaze.

  Everything she didn’t want. Everything she wanted.

  Lars Gilberg turned over in his brand-new sleeping bag. The shop assistant in the outdoor store had looked sceptically at the thousand-krone note before accepting it and handing him the miraculous sleeping bag.

  Gilberg blinked. ‘You’re back,’ he declared. ‘Jesus, you turned Hindu?’ His voice echoed sharply under the arches of the bridge.

  ‘Perhaps,’ the boy smiled and squatted down beside him. ‘I need a place to sleep tonight.’

  ‘Be my guest. Though you look as if you could afford a hotel.’

  ‘They’ll find me there.’

  ‘There’s plenty of room here and no surveillance.’

  ‘Can I borrow some of your newspapers, please? I mean, if you’ve read them, that is.’

  Gilberg chuckled. ‘You can borrow my trusty old snoozie – I use it as a mattress now.’ He pulled the old, dilapidated and filthy sleeping bag out from underneath him. ‘Know what? You take the new one and I’ll sleep in the old one tonight. There’s a little too much of me in the old one, know what I mean?’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes, old snoozie is missing me.’

  ‘Thank you so much, Lars.’

  Lars Gilberg just smiled in return.

  And when he lay down, he felt a pleasant warmth that didn’t come from the sleeping bag. It came from inside him.

  It sounded as if the corridors heaved a collective sigh when all the cell doors at Staten were simultaneously locked for the night.

  Johannes Halden sat down on his bed. It made no difference what he did. Sitting, lying or standing, the pain was the same. And he knew that it wouldn’t go away, but would only grow worse with each passing day. His disease was visible now. The cancer in his lungs had been joined by a tumour the size of a golf ball in his groin.

  Arild Franck had been true to his word. As a punishment for helping the boy escape, Johannes would be eaten up by cancer in his cell without medical attention or pain relief. It was possible that Franck might send him to the sickbay when he felt that Halden had suffered long enough and could die at any moment, simply to avoid having to register a death in a cell in his annual report.

  It was very quiet. Camera-monitored and quiet. In the old days prison officers would do rounds after lockdown and hearing their footsteps had been comforting. One of the officers at Ullersmo Prison, Håvelsmo, an older, religious man, used to sing on his rounds. Old hymns in a deep baritone. It was the best lullaby a long-term prisoner could get, even the most psychotic ones stopped screaming when they heard Håvelsmo walk down the corridors. Johannes wished that Håvelsmo was here now. He wished that the boy was here now. But he wasn’t complaining. The boy had given him what he wanted. Forgiveness. And a lullaby on top of that.

  He held the syringe up to the light.

  The lullaby.

  The boy had told him that he’d got it in a Bible from the prison chaplain, the late Per Vollan – may his tormented soul find peace – and that this was the purest heroin available in Oslo. Then he had shown him how to inject it when the time came.

  Johannes put the needle on top of a thick blue vein in his arm. He took a trembling breath.

  So this was all there was, this was his life. A life which could have been so different if he hadn’t said yes to smuggling the two sacks from Songkhla Port. Strange. Would he have said yes today? No. But the man he once was had said yes. Over and over again. So it could be no other way.

  He pressed the needle against the skin, shuddered slightly when he saw the skin yield and the needle slide in. Then he pressed the plunger down. Evenly and calmly. It was important to empty the syringe completely.

  The first thing that happened was that the pain went away. As if by magic.

  Then the second thing happened.

  And he finally understood what the others had been talking about. The high. The free fall. The embrace. Could it really be that simple, that all this time it had only been one needle prick away? Had she only been one needle prick away? Because she was here now, in her silk dress, with her shiny black hair, her almond eyes. And her tender voice that whispered the difficult English words with soft cherry lips. Johannes Halden closed his eyes and collapsed on the bed.

  Her kiss.

  It was all he had ever wanted.

  Markus stared at the TV.

  They were talking about all the people who had been killed in the last few weeks, it was on the TV and the radio all the time. His mum had told him not to watch it so much, it would only give him nightmares. But he didn’t have nightmares any more. And now he was on the telly and Markus had recognised him. He was sitting at a table covered with microphones answering questions and Markus remembered him because of his frameless glasses. Markus didn’t know what any of it meant or how it all went together. All he knew was that the man wouldn’t have to come over to turn on the heating in the yellow house now that it had burned down.

  PART FIVE

  42

  AT 6.35 A.M., beatrice Jonasen, receptionist at Tomte & Øhre Solicitors, strangled a yawn while she tried to remember what film the woman in the trench coat in front of her reminded her of. Something with Audrey Hepburn. Breakfast at Tiffany’s? The woman also wore a silk scarf and sunglasses that gave her a sixties look. She placed a bag on the counter, said it was for Jan Øhre as arranged, and left.

  Half an hour later the sun bounced off the windows of Oslo town hall’s red-brick facade, the first ferries docked at Aker Brygge and commuters from Nesoddtangen, Son and Drøbak poured ashore on their way to work. It was going to be another cloudless day, but there was a crispness in the air, a hint that not even this summer would last forever. Two men walked side by side along the promenade between the piers, passing restaurants with chairs still upside down on tables, clothes shops that wouldn’t open for another couple of hours and street vendors unpacking and preparing for the last onslaught on the capital’s tourists. The younger
of the two men was wearing an elegant, but crumpled and stained, grey suit. The older wore a checked jacket bought in a sale at Dressmann and trousers that matched it only in terms of price. They wore identical sunglasses bought at a petrol station twenty minutes earlier, and were carrying identical briefcases.

  The two men turned into a deserted alleyway. Fifty metres into it they walked down a narrow iron staircase to the modest door of a restaurant which, judging by the discreet sign, appeared to serve fish and seafood. The older man tried the door, but found it was locked. He knocked. A face, distorted as if in a funfair mirror, appeared on the other side of the porthole in the door. The lips moved and the words sounded as if they came from underwater: ‘Hold up your hands where I can see them.’

  They did as he said and the door was opened.

  The man was blond and stocky. The pair looked down at the pistol he was pointing at them.

  ‘Nice to see you again,’ said the older man in the checked jacket and pushed his sunglasses up on his forehead.

  ‘Come in,’ the blond man said.

  They entered and two men in black suits immediately started patting them down while the blond man leaned casually against the cloakroom counter, but without ever lowering his pistol.

  A pistol was taken from the older man’s shoulder holster and handed to the blond man.

  ‘This one’s clean,’ said the other man in the black suit, nodding towards the young man. ‘But he has some bandage thing round his waist.’

  The blond man stared at the young man. ‘So you’re, like, the Buddha with the Sword, yeah? The Angel from Hell, eh?’ The young man said nothing. The blond man spat on the floor in front of his shiny, black Vass shoes. ‘Good nickname – looks like someone stitched a fucking crucifix on your forehead.’

  ‘And on yours.’

  The blond man frowned. ‘What the fuck do you mean, Buddha?’

  ‘Can’t you feel it?’

  The blond man took a step forward and raised himself up on his toes so that their noses almost touched.

  ‘Now now,’ the older man said.

  ‘Shut up, grandad,’ the blond man said, pulling aside the young man’s jacket and shirt. His fingers slowly probed the bandage around his waist.

  ‘Here?’ he asked when his hand had reached the young man’s side.

  Two beads of sweat appeared on the young man’s forehead above his sunglasses. The blond man prodded the bandage. The young man opened his mouth, but no sound came out.

  The blond man snarled. ‘Yep, here it is.’ He dug his fingers in, squeezed the flesh and pulled.

  A hoarse rattling came from the young man.

  ‘Bo, he’s waiting,’ one of the others reminded him.

  ‘Yeah, yeah,’ the blond man said softly without taking his eyes off the young man who was gasping for air. The blond man pressed harder. A single tear rolled down the pale cheek under the young man’s sunglasses.

  ‘Greetings from Sylvester and Evgeni,’ the blond man whispered. Then he released his grip and turned to the others.

  ‘Take their briefcases and bring them in.’

  The new arrivals handed over their briefcases and entered the dining room.

  The older man instinctively slowed down.

  The silhouette of a man, a big man, was outlined against the green light from the aquarium where colourful fish darted back and forth and a crystal sparkled on a large white stone with long grasses that waved in the current from the bubbles. Lobsters with wired claws lay on the bottom.

  ‘Like I promised you . . .’ the older man whispered. ‘Here he is.’

  ‘But where’s the mole?’ the young man said.

  ‘Trust me, he’ll be here.’

  ‘Chief Inspector Simon Kefas,’ the big man thundered. ‘And Sonny Lofthus. I’ve been waiting a long time for this. Sit down.’

  The young man moved more stiffly than the older as they stepped forward and took their seats opposite the big man.

  Another man slipped in silently through the swing door to the kitchen. Broad-shouldered and with a bull neck like the other three. ‘They came alone,’ he said and positioned himself with the rest of the welcoming committee so that they formed a semicircle behind the two newcomers.

  ‘Too bright for you in here, is it?’ said the big man, addressing the young man who was still wearing his sunglasses.

  ‘I can see everything I want to see, thank you,’ the young man replied in a deadpan voice.

  ‘Good answer – I wish I had your young, fresh eyes.’ The big man pointed to his own eyes. ‘Did you know that the eyes’ sensitivity to light is reduced by thirty per cent before you’ve even turned fifty? Viewed like that life is a journey towards the darkness, not the light, yes? No pun intended as far as your wife is concerned, Chief Inspector Kefas. That’s why we have to learn to navigate life without being able to see as soon as we can. We must acquire the mole’s ability to use our other senses to see what obstacles and threats lie ahead of us, yes?’

  He flung his arms out. It was like watching a JCB with two buckets.

  ‘Or you could, of course, buy yourself a mole to see for you. The problem with moles is that they tend to stay underground, so they’re easy to lose. That’s how I lost mine. No idea what happened to him. And I understand that you’ve been looking for him as well, yes?’

  The young man shrugged.

  ‘Let me guess. Kefas talked you into coming here by promising you the mole, yes?’

  The older man cleared his throat. ‘Sonny is here of his own volition because he wants to make peace. He thinks he has avenged his father. And that the parties should now go their separate ways. In order to show that he’s serious, he’s prepared to give back the money and the drugs he took. In return, the hunt for him will be called off. Could we have the briefcases, please?’

  The big man nodded to the blond man who put the two briefcases on the table. The older man reached for one of the briefcases, but the blond man pushed his hand away.

  ‘As you wish,’ said the older man, holding up his palms. ‘I just wanted to show you that Mr Lofthus has brought you a third of the drugs and a third of the money for now. You’ll get the rest when he has your promise of a truce and gets to walk out of here alive.’

  Kari switched off the ignition in the car. Looked up at the neon sign of the former shipyard where red letters spelled out A-k-e-r B-r-y-g-g-e. People were flowing out from the ferry which had just arrived.

  ‘Is it really safe for the Commissioner to meet with criminals without backup?’

  ‘Like a friend of mine used to say,’ Pontius Parr replied, checking his pistol before he put it back in the shoulder holster, ‘no risk, no reward.’

  ‘That sounds like Simon,’ Kari said and looked at the clock at the top of the town hall tower. 7.10.

  ‘Correct,’ Parr said. ‘And do you know something, Adel? I have a feeling today will earn us many plaudits. I want you to accompany me to the press conference afterwards. The Commissioner and the young female officer.’ He smacked his lips as if he was tasting something. ‘Yes, I think that will go down well.’ He opened the passenger door and got out.

  Kari almost had to run along the promenade to keep up with him.

  ‘Well?’ the older man said. ‘Do we have a deal? You get back what was taken from you and Lofthus gets safe passage so he can leave the country.’

  ‘And you get a small commission for brokering the deal, yes?’ The big man smiled.

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘Mm.’ The big man looked at Simon as if searching for something he couldn’t find. ‘Bo, open the briefcases.’

  Bo stepped forward and tried to open the first one. ‘It’s locked, boss.’

  ‘1,’ the young man said in a soft, almost whispering voice, ‘9-9-9.’

  Bo rotated the metal cylinders. Flipped up the lid. Swivelled the briefcase around to his boss.

  ‘There we are,’ the big man said, holding up one of the white bags. ‘A third. And where is the res
t?’

  ‘In a secret location,’ the older man said.

  ‘Of course it is. And the code to the briefcase with the money?’

  ‘The same,’ the young man said.

  ‘1999. The year your father passed away, yes?’

  The young man said nothing.

  ‘OK?’ said the older man, forcing a smile and clapping his hands. ‘Can we go now?’

  ‘I thought we would eat together,’ the big man said. ‘You like lobster, don’t you?’

  No reactions.

  He sighed. ‘Frankly, I don’t like lobster, either. But do you know something? I still eat it. Why? Because it’s expected of a man in my position.’ The suit jacket pulled back from his mighty chest as he threw his arms out. ‘Lobster, caviar, champagne. Ferraris with missing spare parts, ex-models demanding divorce settlements. The loneliness on the yacht, the heat of the Seychelles. We do a lot of things we don’t really want to, yes? But it’s necessary to keep up the motivation. Not mine, but the motivation of the people who work for me. They need to see these symbols of success – of what I have achieved, of what they can achieve, if they do their job, yes?’

  The big man stuck a cigarette in between his fleshy lips. The cigarette looked strangely small against his big head. ‘But, of course, these status symbols are also there to remind potential rivals and opponents of my power. It’s the same with violence and brutality. I don’t like it. But sometimes it’s necessary to maintain motivation. Incentivise people to pay me what they owe me. Induce them not to work against me . . .’ He lit the cigarette with a pistol lighter. ‘For example, there was a man who used to modify weapons for me. He retired. I accept that a man would rather fix motorbikes than make guns. What I can’t accept is that he then gives an Uzi to someone he knows has already killed several of my men.’

  The big man tapped the aquarium glass.

  The young and the older man’s gaze followed his finger. The young man jumped in his chair. The older man just stared.

  The white stone with the undulating grass growing from it. It wasn’t a stone. And the reflection didn’t come from a crystal. But from a gold tooth.