by Jo Nesbo
'Rikard?' she said, surprised.
'Yes. What would he say if you, his own sister, announced your engagement to me right now?'
'Ah, I see what you mean. As you're both competing for the head of admin job?'
'You know very well that the High Council sets great store by high-ranking officers having a respectable officer as their spouse. It's obvious that the right thing to do from a tactical point of view would be to announce my marriage to Thea Nilsen, the daughter of Frank Nilsen, the commander's right hand. But would it be morally right?'
Thea chewed her bottom lip. 'Why is this job so important to you and Rikard?'
Jon shrugged. 'The Army has paid our way through Officer Training School and four years for an economics degree at a school of management. I suppose Rikard thinks the way I do. You have a duty to apply for Salvation Army jobs seeking your qualifications.'
'Maybe neither of you will get it. Dad says no one under thirty-five has ever been appointed head of admin.'
'I know.' Jon sighed. 'Don't tell anyone but actually I would be relieved if Rikard gets the job.'
'Relieved?' Thea said. 'You? You've had the responsibility for all the rental property in Oslo for over a year now.'
'That's right, but the head of admin has all of Norway, Iceland and the Faeroes. Did you know that the Army's property company owns over 250 plots, with three hundred buildings in Norway alone?' Jon patted himself on the stomach and stared at the ceiling with a familiar concerned expression. 'I saw my reflection in a shop window today and it struck me how small I am.'
Thea did not seem to have heard. 'Someone told Rikard that whoever gets the job will be the next Territorial Commander.'
Jon laughed out loud. 'I definitely do not want that.'
'Don't mess about, Jon.'
'I'm not messing about, Thea. You and I are much more important. I'm saying I'm not interested in the admin job, so let's announce our engagement. I can do other important work. Lots of the corps need economists, too.'
'No, Jon,' Thea said, horrified. 'You're the best we've got. You have to be employed where we need you most. Rikard is my brother, but he doesn't have… your intelligence. We can wait until the decision has been made to tell them about the engagement.'
Jon shrugged.
Thea looked at the clock. 'You'll have to leave before twelve today. In the lift yesterday Emma said she had been worried about me because she had heard my door open and close in the middle of the night.'
Jon swung his legs onto the floor. 'I don't understand why we bother living here.'
She sent Jon a reproving glance. 'At least we can take care of each other here.'
'Right,' he sighed. 'We take care of each other. Goodnight then.'
She wriggled over to him and slipped her hand up his shirt and, to his surprise, he could feel her hand was sweaty, as if she had been clenching it or squeezing something. She pressed herself against him and her breathing began to quicken.
'Thea,' he said. 'We mustn't…'
She went rigid. Then she sighed and took her hand away.
Jon was amazed. So far Thea had not exactly come on to him, more the opposite, she had seemed anxious about physical contact. And he valued that modesty. She had seemed reassured after their first date when he had quoted the statutes and said, 'The Salvation Army considers abstinence before marriage a Christian ideal.' Even though many thought there was a difference between 'ideal' and the word 'command', which the statutes used when referring to tobacco and alcohol, he saw no reason to break a promise to God because of nuances.
He gave her a hug, stood up and went to the toilet. Locked the door behind him and turned on the tap. Let the water run over his hands as he regarded the smooth surface of molten sand reflecting the face of a person who to all outward appearances ought to be happy. He had to ring Ragnhild. Get it over with. Jon took a deep breath. He was happy. It was just that some days were harder than others.
He dried his face and went back to her.
The waiting room of Oslo's emergency services in Storgata 40 was bathed in harsh, white light. There was the usual human menagerie at this time of day. A trembling drug addict stood up and left twenty minutes after Harry arrived. As a rule they couldn't sit still for longer than ten. Harry could understand that. He still had the taste of whisky in his mouth; it had stirred up his old friends who heaved and tugged at the chains below. His leg hurt like hell. And the trip to the harbour had yielded – like 90 per cent of all police work – nothing. He promised himself he would keep the appointment with Bette Davis next time.
'Harry Hole?'
Harry looked up at the man in the white coat in front of him.
'Yes?'
'Could you come with me?'
'Thank you, but I think it's her turn,' Harry said, nodding towards a girl with her head in her hands in the row of chairs opposite.
The man leaned forwards. 'It's the second time she's been here this evening. She'll survive.'
Harry limped down the corridor after the doctor's white coat and into a narrow surgery with a desk and a plain bookshelf. He saw no personal items.
'I thought you police had your own medicine men,' the coat said.
'Fat chance. Usually we don't even get priority in the queue. How do you know I'm a policeman?'
'Sorry. I'm Mathias. I was on my way through the waiting room and spotted you.'
The doctor smiled and reached out his hand. He had regular teeth, Harry saw. So regular you could have suspected him of wearing dentures, if the rest of his face had not been as symmetrical, clean and square. The eyes were blue with tiny laughter lines around them, and the handshake firm and dry. Straight out of a doctor novel, Harry thought. A doctor with warm hands.
'Mathias Lund-Helgesen,' the man enlarged, taking stock of Harry.
'I realise you think I should know who you are,' Harry said.
'We've met before. Last summer. At a garden party at Rakel's place.'
Harry went rigid at the sound of her name on someone else's lips.
'Is that right?'
'That was me,' Mathias Lund-Helgesen gabbled in a low voice.
'Mm.' Harry gave a slow nod. 'I'm bleeding.'
'I understand.' Lund-Helgesen's face wrapped itself in grave, sympathetic folds.
Harry rolled up his trouser leg. 'Here.'
'Aha.' Lund-Helgesen assumed a somewhat bemused smile. 'What is it?'
'A dog bite. Can you fix it?'
'Not a lot to fix. The bleeding will stop. I'll clean the wounds and put something on it.' He bent down. 'Three wounds, I can see, judging by the teeth marks. And you'd better have a tetanus jab.'
'It bit right through to the bone.'
'Yes, it often feels like that.'
'No, I mean, its teeth did go…'
Harry paused and exhaled through his nose. He had just realised that Mathias Lund-Helgesen thought he was drunk. And why shouldn't he? A policeman with a torn coat, a dog bite, a bad reputation and alcohol on his breath. Was that what he would say when he told Rakel that her ex had turned to drink again?
'… right through,' Harry finished.
4
Monday, 15 December. The Departure.
'TRKA!'
He sat up in bed with a start hearing the echo of his voice between the bare white hotel walls. The telephone on his bedside table rang. He snatched at the receiver.
'This is your wake-up call…'
'Hvala,' he thanked, although he knew it was only a recorded voice.
He was in Zagreb. He was going to Oslo today. To the most important job. The final one.
He closed his eyes. He had been dreaming again. Not about Paris, not about any of the other jobs; he never dreamt about them. It was always about Vukovar, always about the autumn, about the siege.
Last night he had dreamt about running. As usual he had been running in the rain and as usual it had been the same evening they sawed off his father's arm in the infants ward. Four hours later his father had died
, even though the doctors had pronounced the operation a success. They said his heart had just stopped beating. And then he had run away from his mother, into the dark and the rain, down to the river with his father's gun in his hand, to the Serbian positions, and they had sent up flares and shot at him and he hadn't cared and he'd heard the smack of the bullets into the ground, which had disappeared beneath his feet and he had fallen into the huge bomb crater. The water had swallowed him up, swallowed all sound, and it was quiet and he had kept running under the water, but he got nowhere. As he'd felt his limbs stiffening and sleep numbing him, he had seen something red moving in all the blackness, like a bird beating its wings in slow motion. When he had come to he was wrapped in a woollen blanket and a naked light bulb was swinging to and fro as Serbian artillery pounded them, and small lumps of earth and plaster had fallen into his eyes and mouth. He spat, and someone had stooped down and told him that Bobo, the captain himself, had saved his life in the water-filled crater. And pointed to a bald man standing by the steps of the bunker. He had been wearing a uniform with a red cloth tied around his neck.
He opened his eyes again and looked at the thermometer he had put on the bedside table. The temperature in the room had not risen above sixteen degrees since November even though in reception they maintained that the heating was on full. He got up. He had to hurry; the airport bus would be outside the hotel in half an hour.
He stared into the mirror over the basin and tried to visualise Bobo's face. But it was like the northern lights; little by little it faded as he stared. The telephone rang again.
'Da, majka.'
After shaving, he dried himself and dressed in haste. He took out one of the two metal boxes he kept in the safe and opened it. A Llama Minimax Sub Compact which could hold seven bullets – six in the magazine plus one in the chamber. He disassembled the weapon, and divided the parts into the four small, purpose-designed hideaways under the reinforced corners of the suitcase. If customs officers stopped him and checked his suitcase, the reinforced metal pieces would hide the gun parts. Before leaving, he checked he had his passport and the envelope with the ticket which she had given him, the photograph of the target and the information he needed for when and where. It was due to happen tomorrow night at seven in a public place. She had told him this job was riskier than the previous one. Nevertheless, he was not afraid. Now and then he wondered whether the ability to be afraid had been lost along with his father's amputated arm that night. Bobo had said you cannot survive for long if you are not frightened.
Outside, Zagreb had just woken up, snow-free, grey with mist, its face drawn and haggard. He stood in front of the hotel entrance thinking that in a few days' time they would be going to the Adriatic, a little place with a little hotel, off-peak prices and a bit of sun. And talking about the new house.
The bus to the airport should have been here by now. He peered into the mist. The way he did that autumn, crouching beside Bobo and trying in vain to see something behind the white smoke. His job had been to run messages they didn't dare send over the radio link, as the Serbs were tuned to the frequency and didn't miss a thing. And as he was so small, he could run through the trenches at full speed without having to duck. He had told Bobo he wanted to kill tanks. Bobo had shaken his head. 'You're a messenger. These messages are important, sonny. I've got men to take care of the tanks.'
'But they're frightened. I'm not frightened.'
Bobo had raised an eyebrow. 'You're only a nipper.'
'If bullets find me here rather than out there, I don't get any older. And you said yourself that if we don't stop the tanks, they'll take the town.'
Bobo had given him a searching look.
'Let me think about it,' he said in the end. So they had sat in silence scanning the white screen without being able to distinguish between autumn mist and smoke from the ruins of the burning town. Then Bobo had cleared his throat: 'Last night I sent Franjo and Mirko to the gap in the embankment where the tanks come out. The mission was to hide and attach mines to the tanks as they rolled past. You know how they got on?'
He had nodded again. He had seen the bodies of Franjo and Mirko through the binoculars.
'If they'd been smaller, they might have been able to hide in the hollows in the ground,' Bobo said.
The boy had wiped away the snot from under his nose with a hand. 'How do I fix the mines to the tanks?'
At the crack of dawn on the following day he had wriggled back to his own lines, shaking with cold and covered in mud. Behind him, on the embankment, lay two destroyed Serbian tanks with smoke belching out of the open hatches. Bobo had dragged him down into the trench and shouted in triumph: 'To us a little redeemer is born!'
And that same day, when Bobo had dictated the message to be radioed to HQ in the town, he was given the code name that would follow him until the Serbs occupied and razed his home town to ashes, killing Bobo, massacring doctors and patients at the hospital, imprisoning and torturing any who offered resistance. It was a bitter paradox of a name. Given to him by the one person he had not been able to save. Mali spasitelj. The little redeemer.
A red bus appeared from the sea of mist.
The meeting room in the red zone on the sixth floor buzzed with low conversations and muted laughter as Harry approached and saw that he had timed his arrival well. Too late to mingle, eat cake and exchange the jokes and jibes with colleagues that men resort to when they have to say goodbye to someone they appreciate. On time for the presents and the speeches laden with too many pompous words men feel emboldened to use when they are in front of an audience and not in private.
Harry took stock of the crowd and found the three faces he could rely on to be friendly. His departing boss Bjarne Moller. Police Officer Halvorsen. And Beate Lonn, the young head of Krimteknisk, the forensics department. He did not make eye contact with anyone and no one tried with him. Harry was under no illusions about his popularity in Crime Squad. Moller had once said there was only one thing people disliked more than a sullen alcoholic, and that was a tall, sullen alcoholic. Harry stood one metre and ninety-two centimetres of sullen alcoholic, and the fact that he was a brilliant detective mildly mitigated in his favour, but no more than that. Everyone knew that had it not been for Bjarne Moller's protective wing, Harry would have been off the force years ago. And now that Moller was going, everyone also knew that top brass were just waiting for him to step out of line. Paradoxically, what was protecting him now was the same thing that stamped him as an eternal outsider: the fact that he had brought down one of their own. The Prince. Tom Waaler, an inspector in Crime Squad, one of the men behind the extensive gun-running operation in Oslo for the last eight years. Tom Waaler had ended his days in a pool of blood in the basement of a residential tower block in Kampen. In a brief ceremony in the canteen three weeks later the Chief Superintendent had, through clenched teeth, acknowledged Harry's contribution to cleaning up their own ranks. And Harry had thanked him.
'Thank you,' he had said, running his eyes across the assembled officers to check if anyone's met his. In fact, he had meant to restrict his speech to these two words, but the sight of averted faces and sardonic smiles had whipped up a sudden fury in him, and he had added: 'I suppose this will make it a bit more difficult for someone to give me the boot now. The press might believe that the person in question is doing it out of fear that I will be after him as well.'
And then they had looked at him. In disbelief. He had continued nevertheless.
'No reason to gawp, guys. Tom Waaler was an inspector with us in Crime Squad and dependent on his position to do what he was doing. He called himself the Prince and, as you know,…' Here Harry had paused while his gaze moved from face to face, stopping at the Chief Superintendent's. 'Where there's a prince, there's usually a king.'
'Hello, old boy. Lost in thought?'
Harry looked up. It was Halvorsen.
'Thinking about kings,' Harry mumbled, taking the cup of coffee that the young detective passed him.
By the table of presents there was a man in a blue suit talking to the Chief Superintendent and Bjarne Moller.
'Is that Gunnar Hagen?' Harry said with coffee in his mouth. 'The new PAS?'
'They're not a Politiavdelingssjef any more, Harry.'
'No?'
'POB. Politioverbetjent. They changed the names of the ranks more than four months ago.'
'Is that so? I must have been sick that day. Are you still a police officer?'
Halvorsen smiled.
The new POB seemed agile, and younger than the fifty-three years it said he was in the memo. More medium-tall than tall, Harry noticed. And lean. The network of defined muscles in his face, around the jaw and down his neck suggested an ascetic lifestyle. His mouth was straight and firm and his chin stuck out in a way you could either designate determined or protruding. The little hair Hagen had was black and formed half a wreath around his pate; however, it was so thick and compact you might be forgiven for thinking the new POB had a rather eccentric choice of hairstyle. At any rate the enormous, demonic eyebrows boded well for the growing conditions of his body hair.
'Straight from the military,' Harry said. 'Perhaps he'll introduce reveille.'
'He was supposed to have been a good copper before switching pastures.'
'Judging from what he wrote about himself in the memo, you mean?'
'Nice to hear you being so positive, Harry.'
'Me? I'm always keen to give new people a fair chance.'
'A being the operative word,' Beate said, joining them. She flicked her short blonde hair to the side. 'I thought I saw you limping as you came in, Harry?'
'Met an overexcited guard dog down at the container terminal last night.'
'What were you doing there?'
Harry studied Beate before answering. The job of head in Brynsalleen had been good for her. And it had been good for Krimteknisk, too. Beate had always been a competent professional, but Harry had to admit he hadn't seen obvious leadership qualities in the self-effacing, shy young girl when she went to the Robberies Unit after Police Training College.