by Jo Nesbo
Harry breathed in and shoved his hand inside his coat. The metal hip flask was ice-cold against his fingertips. He found what he was looking for and pulled out an envelope. He hadn't written the letter, but knew the contents all too well. The brief official notification of death, stripped of all the verbiage. The bureaucratic act of pronouncing death.
'I'm sorry, but it's my job to give you this.'
***
'Your job to do what?' said the small, middle-aged man with the exaggerated mondaine French pronunciation uncharacteristic of the upper classes but of those who strive to belong. The visitor studied him. Everything matched the photograph in the envelope, even the mean-spirited tie-knot and the loose red smoking jacket.
He didn't know what this man had done wrong. He doubted it had been physical because despite the irritation in his expression his body language was defensive, almost anxious, even in the door to his own home. Had he been stealing money, embezzling? He could be the type to work with figures. But not the big sums. His attractive wife notwithstanding, he looked more like the kind who helped himself to small change here and there. He might have been unfaithful, might have slept with the wife of the wrong man. No. As a rule, short men with above average assets and wives much more attractive than themselves are more concerned with her infidelity. The man annoyed him. He slipped his hand into his pocket.
'This,' he said, resting the barrel of a Llama Minimax, which he had bought for just three hundred dollars, on the taut brass door chain, 'is my job.'
He pointed the silencer. It was a plain metal tube, made by a gunsmith in Zagreb, and screwed to the barrel. The black gaffer tape lashed round where the two parts met was to make it airtight. Of course, he could have bought a so-called quality silencer for over a hundred euros, but why? No one could silence the sound of a bullet breaking the sound barrier, of the hot gas meeting the cold air and the mechanical metal parts striking each other. Pistols with silencers that sounded like popcorn under a lid were pure Hollywood.
The explosion was like the crack of a whip. He pressed his face against the narrow opening.
The man in the photo was gone; he had fallen backwards without a sound. The hall was dark, but in the wall mirror he saw the sliver of light from the door and his magnified eye framed in gold. The dead man lay on a thick burgundy carpet. Persian? Perhaps he had had money after all?
Now he had a little hole in his forehead.
He looked up and met the eyes of the wife. If it was his wife. She was standing in the doorway of another room. Behind her, a large, yellow oriental lamp. She had her hand in front of her mouth and was staring at him. He gave a brief nod. Then he carefully closed the door, put the gun back in his shoulder holster and began to walk down the stairs. He never used the lift when he was making his getaway. Or rented cars or motorbikes or anything else that could malfunction. And he didn't run. He didn't talk or shout; the voice could be identified.
The getaway was the most critical part of the job, but also the part he loved best. It was like flying, a dreamless nothing.
The concierge, a woman, had come out of her flat on the ground floor and watched him in bewilderment. He whispered an Au revoir, madame, but she glared back in silence. When she was questioned by the police in an hour's time, they would ask her for a description. And she would oblige. A man, normal appearance, medium height. Twenty years old. Or thirty perhaps. Not forty anyway, she thought.
He emerged into the street. The low rumble of Paris, like thunder that never came any closer, but never stopped either. He discarded his Llama Minimax in a skip he had chosen for the purpose beforehand. Two new, unfired guns from the same manufacturer awaited his return in Zagreb. He had been given a bulk-purchase discount.
When the airport bus passed Porte de la Chapelle half an hour later, on the motorway between Paris and Charles de Gaulle, the air was full of snowflakes. They settled on the scattered strands of pale yellow straw pointing stiffly upwards to the grey sky.
After checking in for his flight and going through security control, he went straight to the men's toilets. He stood at the end of the line of white bowls, unbuttoned and sprayed the white urinal blocks at the bottom of the bowl. He closed his eyes and concentrated on the sweet smell of paradichlorobenzene and the lemon fragrance enhancer from J amp; J Chemicals. The connecting line to freedom had one stop left. He rolled the name on his tongue. Oslo.
3
Sunday, 14 December. The Bite.
In the Red Zone on the sixth floor of Police HQ, the concrete and glass colossus with the largest concentration of police in Norway, Harry sat back in his chair in room 605. This was the office that Halvorsen – the young policeman Harry shared the ten square metres with – liked to call the Clearing House. And that Harry, when Halvorsen had to be taken down a peg or two, called In-House Training.
But at this moment Harry was on his own, staring at the wall where the window might have been if the Clearing House had such a thing.
It was Sunday; he had written the report and could go home. So why didn't he? Through the imaginary window he saw the fenced-off harbour in Bjorvika where fresh snow lay like confetti on the green, red and blue containers. The case was solved. Per Holmen, a young heroin addict, had had enough of life and had taken his final shot inside a container. From a gun. No external signs of violence; the gun down by his side. As far as the undercover boys knew, Per Holmen did not owe any money. When dealers execute junkies with debts, they don't usually try to camouflage it as something else. Quite the contrary. A cut-and-dried case of suicide then. So why waste the evening ferreting round a grim, wind-blown container terminal where all he would find was more sorrow and grief?
Harry looked at his woollen coat hanging on the hatstand. The small hip flask in the inside pocket was full. And untouched since he went to the vinmonopol in October, bought a bottle of his worst enemy, Jim Beam, and filled his flask before emptying the rest down the sink. Since then he had carried the poison on him, a bit like the way Nazis kept cyanide pills in the soles of their shoes. Why bother with such a stupid idea? He didn't know. He didn't have to know. It worked.
Harry looked at the clock. Soon be eleven. At home he had a much used espresso machine and a DVD he had put by for just such an evening as this. All About Eve, Mankiewicz's 1950 masterpiece with Bette Davis and George Sanders.
He took an internal reading. And knew it was going to be the harbour.
Harry had turned up the lapels of his coat and stood with his back to the north wind that blew right through the tall fence in front of him and formed snowdrifts around the containers on the inside. The harbour area and the large, empty expanses looked like a desert at night.
The enclosed container terminal was illuminated, but the lamp posts swayed in the gusting wind and the metal boxes piled up in twos or threes cast shadows over the streets. The particular one Harry had his eye on was red and something of a colour clash with the orange police tape. But it was a great refuge on a December night in Oslo, with almost identical measurements and the same level of comfort as the security cells in the custody block at Police HQ.
The report by the Crime Scene Unit – though it was hardly a unit, numbering one detective and one technician – said the container had stood empty for a while. Unlocked. The site watchman had explained that they didn't bother much about locking empty containers as the area was fenced off and, furthermore, under surveillance. Nevertheless a drug addict had got in. Per Holmen, he supposed, had been one of the many who had hung out around Bjorvika, which was a mere stone's throw from the junkies' supermarket in Plata. Perhaps the watchman had turned a blind eye to them using the containers as accommodation? Perhaps he knew that in so doing they had saved the odd life or two?
There was no lock on the container, but there was a big, fat padlock on the gate in the fence. Harry regretted that he hadn't rung from HQ to say he was coming. If there were any guards here, he couldn't see any.
Harry checked his watch. Deliberated and surveyed the
top of the fence. He was in good shape. Better than for a long time. He hadn't touched alcohol since the catastrophe last summer, and he had been training on a regular basis in the police gym. More than regular. Before the snow came, he had broken Tom Waaler's old steeplechase record in Okern. A few days later Halvorsen had cautiously asked if all the training had anything to do with Rakel. Because his impression was that they weren't seeing each other any more. Harry had explained to the young officer in a curt yet clear way that they might share an office but not a private life. Halvorsen had shrugged, asked who else Harry talked to and had his assumption confirmed when Harry got up and marched out of room 605.
Three metres. No barbed wire. Easy. Harry caught hold of the fence as high as he could, put his feet against the fence post and straightened up. Right arm up, then left, hung with arms outstretched until his feet got a grip. Caterpillar movements. He swung himself over to the other side.
He raised the bolt and pulled open the door of the container, took out his solid, black army torch, ducked under the police tape and went in.
It was eerily quiet inside; sound seemed to have been frozen, too.
Harry switched on the torch and shone it inside the container. In the cone of light he could see the chalk outline on the floor where they had found Holmen. Beate Lonn, head of Forensics in the new building in Brynsalleen, had shown him the pictures. Holmen had been sitting with his back to the wall with a hole in his right temple and the gun on his right. Very little blood. That was the advantage of shots to the head. The only one. The gun fired ammunition of a modest calibre, so the entry wound was small and there was no exit wound. Forensics would find the bullet in the skull where it would have bounced around like a pinball and pulped what Per Holmen had once thought with, made this decision with, and at the end ordered his forefinger to press the trigger with.
'Incomprehensible,' his colleagues tended to say when they discovered young people who had chosen to take their lives. Harry assumed they said that to protect themselves, to reject the whole idea of it. If not, he didn't understand what they meant by it being incomprehensible.
All the same, that was the word he himself had used this afternoon standing at the entrance and looking down the hallway at Holmen's father on his knees, his back bent, shaking with sobs. And since Harry had had no words of comfort to say about death, God, redemption, life afterwards or the sense of it all, he had just mumbled the same feeble: 'Incomprehensible…'
Harry switched off the torch and put it in his coat pocket; the darkness closed in around him.
He thought of his own father. Olav Hole, the retired teacher and widower living in a house in Oppsal. Of how his eyes lit up when Harry, or Sis, visited him once a month and how the light slowly faded as they drank coffee and talked about things of little import. Anything of meaning had pride of place in a photo on the piano she had once played. Olav Hole did almost nothing now. Read his books. About countries and empires he would never see, and in fact no longer had any desire to see, since she could not join him. 'The greatest loss of all,' he said on the few occasions they talked about her. And what Harry was thinking about now was what Olav Hole would call the day they went to tell him his son was dead.
Harry left the container and walked towards the fence. Grabbed hold of it with his hands. Then there was one of those strange moments of sudden total silence when the wind catches its breath to listen or change its mind and all that is heard is the reassuring rumble of the town in the winter darkness. That, and the sound of wind-borne paper scraping against the tarmac. But the wind had dropped. It wasn't paper, it was steps. Quick, light steps. Lighter than footsteps.
Paws.
Harry's heart accelerated out of control and, facing the fence, he bent his knees lightning-quick. And straightened up. Only afterwards would it occur to him what had made him so frightened. It was the silence, and the fact that he heard nothing in this silence, no growling, no signs of aggression. As though whatever it was out there in the dark did not want to frighten him. Quite the contrary. It was hunting him. Had Harry known much about dogs, he might have been aware that there was one kind of dog that never growls, neither when it is frightened nor when it attacks: the male of the black Metzner species. Harry stretched his arms upwards and was bending his knees again when he heard the change in rhythm and then silence, and he knew it had launched itself. He pushed upwards.
The claim that you don't feel pain when terror has pumped the blood full of adrenalin is, at best, somewhat less than accurate. Harry let out a yell when the teeth of the large, lean dog gripped the flesh of his right leg and sank further and further in until finally they were pressing on the sensitive tissue membrane around the bone. The wire fence sang, gravity pulled at them both, but in sheer desperation Harry managed to hang on. By normal standards he would have been safe by now. Because any other dog weighing as much as a mature black Metzner would have let go. But a black Metzner has teeth and jaw muscles which can crush bone, hence its alleged reputation as a relative of the bone-devouring speckled hyena. So it hung there, bolted to Harry's leg by two canine teeth set backwards in the upper jaw and one in the lower jaw, which stabilised the bite. It had broken the second canine in the lower jaw on a steel prosthesis when it was just three months old.
Harry managed to put his left elbow over the edge of the fence and tried to drag them both up, but the dog had one paw in the wire. With his right hand he groped for his coat pocket, found it and his hand grabbed the rubber shaft of the torch. He looked down and for the first time saw the animal. The black eyes in the equally black face had a dull sheen. Harry swung the torch. It hit the dog on the head right between its ears and so hard that he heard a crunch. He raised the torch and struck again. Hitting the sensitive snout. Struck out in desperation at the eyes which still had not blinked. He lost hold of the torch and it fell to the ground. The dog was still hanging from his leg. Soon Harry would not have the strength to hold on to the fence. He did not want to think about what might happen then, but was unable to stop himself.
'Help!'
Harry's feeble cry was carried away on the wind that had sprung up again. He changed grip and felt a sudden urge to laugh. Surely it couldn't all end like this? Being found in a container terminal with his throat savaged by a guard dog? Harry took a deep breath. The jagged points from the wire netting were digging into his armpit; his fingers were wilting fast. He was seconds away from letting go. If only he had a weapon. If only he had had a bottle instead of the hip flask, he could have smashed it and used it to stab with.
The hip flask!
Summoning his last strength, Harry reached inside his coat and pulled out the flask. He stuffed the spout into his mouth, sank his teeth in the metal top and twisted. The top loosened and he held it between his teeth as the whisky filled his mouth. A shock ran through his body. Christ. He pressed his face against the fence, forcing his eyes closed, and the distant lights of the Plaza and Opera hotels became white stripes in all the darkness. With his right hand he lowered the flask until it was above the dog's red jaws. Then he spat out the top and the whisky, mumbled 'Skal' and emptied the flask. For two long seconds the black doggy eyes stared up at Harry in total perplexity as the brown liquid gurgled and trickled down Harry's leg into the open jaws. The animal relinquished its hold. Harry heard the smack of living flesh on bare tarmac. Followed by a kind of death rattle and low whimpering, then the scratching sound of paws, and the dog was swallowed up by the dark from which it had emerged.
Harry swung his legs over the fence. He rolled up his trouser leg. Even without the torch he knew the evening was going to be spent in A amp;E and not watching All About Eve.
Jon lay with his head in Thea's lap and his eyes closed, enjoying the regular drone of the TV. It was one of these series she liked so much. King of the Bronx. Or was it The King of Queens?
'Have you asked your brother if he would do your shift in Egertorget?' Thea asked.
She had placed a hand over his eyes. He could sm
ell the sweet fragrance of her skin, which meant that she had just given herself a shot of insulin.
'Which shift?' Jon asked.
She snatched away her hand and stared at him in disbelief.
Jon laughed. 'Relax. I spoke to Robert ages ago. He agreed.'
She gave a groan of resignation. Jon grabbed her hand and put it back over his eyes.
'I didn't say it was your birthday though,' he said. 'If I had, I'm not sure he would have agreed.'
'Why not?'
'Because he's crazy about you, and you know it.'
'That's what you say.'
'And you don't like him.'
'That's not true!'
'Why do you always go stiff whenever I mention his name then?'
She laughed out loud. Must have been something in Bronx. Or Queens.
'Did you get a table at the restaurant?' she asked.
'Yes.'
She smiled and squeezed his hand. Then she furrowed her brow. 'I've been thinking. Someone might see us there.'
'From the Army? Out of the question.'
'What if they do?'
Jon didn't answer.
'Perhaps it's time we went public,' she said.
'I don't know,' he said. 'Isn't it best to wait until we're absolutely sure that-'
'Aren't you sure, Jon?'
Jon moved her hand and looked up at her in dismay: 'Thea, please. You know very well that I love you above all else. That's not the point.'
'What is the point then?'
Jon sighed and sat up beside her. 'You don't know Robert, Thea.'
She gave a wry smile. 'I've known him since we were tiny, Jon.'
Jon squirmed. 'Yes, but there are things you don't know. You don't know how angry he can get. He takes after Dad. He can be dangerous, Thea.'
She leaned back against the wall and stared into the air.
'I suggest we defer it for a while.' Jon wrung his hands. 'Out of consideration for your brother, too.'