The Leopard: An Inspector Harry Hole Novel

by Jo Nesbo

  “You should be happy we don’t have to land at the old airport,” said the Chinese-looking passenger next to Kaja Solness, who was squeezing the armrests so hard her knuckles were white. “It was in the center of town. We would have flown straight into one of the skyscrapers.”

  Those were the first words the man had uttered since they had taken off twelve hours earlier. Kaja eagerly grabbed the chance to focus on something other than the fact that they were temporarily caught in turbulence.

  “Thank you, sir—that was reassuring. Are you English?”

  He recoiled as if someone had slapped him, and she realized she had mortally offended him by suggesting that he belonged to the previous colonialists: “Erm … Chinese, perhaps?”

  He shook his head firmly. “Hong Kong Chinese. And you, miss?”

  Kaja Solness wondered for a moment if she should reply, “Hokksund Norwegian,” but confined herself to “Norwegian,” which the Hong Kong Chinese man mused on for a while, then delivered a triumphant “Aha!” before amending it to “Scandinavian” and asked her what her business was in Hong Kong.

  “To find a man,” she said, staring down at the bluish gray clouds in the hope that terra firma would soon reveal itself.

  “Aha!” repeated the Hong Kong Chinese. “You are very beautiful, miss. And don’t believe all you hear about the Chinese only marrying other Chinese.”

  She managed a weary smile. “Hong Kong Chinese, do you mean?”

  “Particularly Hong Kong Chinese.” He nodded with enthusiasm, holding up a ringless hand. “I deal in microchips. The family has factories in China and South Korea. What are you doing tonight?”

  “Sleeping, I hope.” Kaja yawned.

  “What about tomorrow evening?”

  “I hope by then I’ll have found him and I’ll be on my way back home.”

  The man frowned. “Are you in such a hurry, miss?”

  Kaja refused the man’s offer of a lift and caught a bus, a double-decker, to downtown. One hour later she was standing alone in a corridor at the Empire Kowloon Hotel, taking deep breaths. She had put the key card into the door of the room she had been allocated and now all that remained was to open it. She forced her hand to press down the handle. Then she jerked the door open and stared into the room.

  No one there.

  Of course there wasn’t.

  She entered, wheeled her bag to the side of the bed, stood by the window and looked out. First down at the swarm of people in the street seventeen floors below, then at the skyscrapers that in no way resembled their graceful, or at any rate pompous, sisters in Manhattan, Kuala Lumpur or Tokyo. These looked like anthills, terrifying and impressive at the same time, like a grotesque testimony to how humankind is capable of adapting when seven million inhabitants have to find room in not much more than four hundred square miles. Kaja felt exhaustion creeping up on her, kicked off her shoes and fell back on the bed. Even though it was a double room and the hotel sported four stars, the four-foot-wide bed occupied all the floor space. And it hit home that from among all these anthills she now had to find one particular person, a man who, all the evidence suggested, had no particular wish to be found.

  For a moment or two she weighed the options: closing her eyes or springing into action. Then she pulled herself together and got to her feet. Took off her clothes and went into the shower. Afterward she stood in front of the mirror and confirmed without a hint of self-satisfaction that the Hong Kong Chinese man was right: She was beautiful. This was not her opinion; it was as close to being a fact as beauty can be. The face with the high cheekbones, the pronounced but finely formed raven-black eyebrows, the almost-childlike wide eyes, the green irises that shone with the intensity of a mature young woman. The honey-brown hair, the full lips that seemed to be kissing each other in her somewhat broad mouth. The long, slim neck, the equally slim body, with the small breasts that were no more than mounds, swells on a sea of perfect, though winter-pale, skin. The gentle curve of her hips. The long legs that persuaded two Oslo modeling agencies to make the trip to her school in Hokksund, only to have to accept her refusal with a rueful shake of the head. And what had pleased her most was when one of them said as he left: “OK, but remember, my dear: You are not a perfect beauty. Your teeth are small and pointed. You shouldn’t smile so much.”

  After that she had smiled with a lighter heart.

  Kaja put on a pair of khaki trousers and a thin waterproof jacket and floated weightlessly and soundlessly down to the lobby.

  “Chungking Mansions?” the receptionist asked, unable to refrain from cocking an eyebrow, and pointed. “Kimberley Road, up to Nathan Road, then left.”

  All hostels and hotels in Interpol member countries are legally obliged to register foreign guests, but when Kaja had called the Norwegian ambassador’s secretary to check where the man she was looking for had last registered, the secretary had explained that Chungking Mansions was neither a hotel nor a mansion, in the sense of a wealthy residence. It was a collection of stores, takeout shops, restaurants and probably more than a hundred classified and nonclassified hostels, with everything from two to twenty rooms spread over four large apartment towers. The rooms for rent could be characterized as everything from simple, clean and cozy to rat holes and one-star prison cells. And most important of all: At Chungking Mansions a man with modest demands of life could sleep, eat, live, work and propagate without ever leaving the anthill.

  Kaja found the entrance to Chungking on Nathan Road, a busy shopping street with brand-name goods, polished shop fronts and tall display windows. She entered the complex amid cooking fumes from fast-food outlets, hammering from cobblers, radio broadcasts of Muslim prayer meetings and tired looks in used-clothes shops. She flashed a quick smile at a bewildered backpacker with a Lonely Planet guidebook in his hand and frozen white legs sticking out of overoptimistic camouflage shorts.

  A uniformed guard looked at the note Kaja showed him, said, “Elevator C,” and pointed down a corridor.

  The line in front of the elevator was so long that she didn’t get in until the third attempt, when the passengers were squeezed up tight in a creaky, vibrating iron chest that made Kaja think of the Gypsies who buried their dead vertically.

  The hostel was owned by a turban-clad Muslim who immediately, and with great enthusiasm, showed her a tiny box of a room, where by some miracle they had found space for a wall-mounted TV at the foot of the bed and a gurgling air-conditioning unit above the headboard. The owner’s enthusiasm waned when she interrupted his sales spiel to produce a photo of a man with his name spelled as it would have been in his passport, and asked where he was now.

  On seeing the reaction, she hastened to inform him that she was the man’s wife. The embassy secretary had explained to her that waving an official ID card around in Chungking would be “counterproductive.” And when Kaja added, for safety’s sake, that she and the man in the photo had five children together, the hostel owner’s attitude underwent a dramatic change. A young Western heathen who had already brought so many children into the world earned his respect. He expelled a heavy sigh, shook his head and said in mournful, staccato English, “Sad, sad, lady. They come and take his passport.”

  “Who did?”

  “Who? The triad, lady. It’s always the triad.”

  Naturally enough, she was aware of the organization, but she had some vague notion that the Chinese mafia primarily belonged to the world of cartoons and kung-fu films.

  “Sit yourself down, lady.” He quickly found a chair, onto which she slumped. “They were after him, he was out, so they took his passport.”

  “Passport? Why?”

  He hesitated.

  “Please, I have to know.”

  “Your husband bet on horses, I am sorry to say.”

  “Horses?”

  “Happy Valley. Racecourse. It is an abomination.”

  “Does he owe money? To the triad?”

  He nodded and shook his head several times to confirm and r
egret, alternately, this fact of life.

  “And they took his passport?”

  “He will have to pay back the debt if he wants to leave Hong Kong.”

  “He can only get a new passport from the Norwegian embassy.”

  The turban waggled from side to side. “Ah, you can get a false passport here in Chungking for eighty American dollars. But this is not the problem. The problem is Hong Kong is an island, lady. How did you get here?”

  “Plane.”

  “And how will you leave?”

  “Plane.”

  “One airport. Tickets. All names on computer. Many control points. Many at airport who get money from the triad to recognize faces. Understand?”

  She nodded slowly. “It’s difficult to escape.”

  The hostel owner shook his head with a guffaw. “No, lady. It’s impossible to escape. But you can hide in Hong Kong. Seven million people. Easy to go underground.”

  Lack of sleep was catching up on Kaja, and she closed her eyes. The owner must have misunderstood, because he laid a consoling hand on her shoulder and mumbled, “There, there.”

  He wavered, then leaned forward and whispered, “I think he still here, lady.”

  “Yes, I know he is.”

  “No, I mean here in Chungking. I see him.”

  She raised her head.

  “Twice,” he said. “At Li Yuan’s. He eat there. Cheap rice. Don’t tell anyone I said. Your husband is good man. But trouble.” He rolled his eyes so that they almost disappeared into his turban. “Lots of trouble.”

  Li Yuan’s comprised a counter, four plastic tables and a Chinese man who sent her an encouraging smile when, after six hours, two portions of fried rice, three coffees and two quarts of water, she awoke with a jolt, lifted her head from the greasy table and looked at him.

  “Tired?” He laughed, revealing an incomplete set of front teeth.

  Kaja yawned, ordered her fourth cup of coffee and continued to wait. Two Chinese men came and sat at the counter without speaking or ordering. They didn’t even spare her a glance, for which she was glad. Her body was so stiff from sitting on the plane that pain shot through her whatever sedentary position she adopted. She rolled her head from side to side to try to stimulate circulation. Then backward. Her neck cracked. She stared at the bluish-white fluorescent tubes in the ceiling before lowering her head. And stared straight into a pale, hunted face. He had stopped in front of the closed steel shutters in the corridor and scanned Li Yuan’s tiny establishment. His gaze rested on the two Chinese men by the counter. Then he hurried on.

  Kaja got to her feet, but one leg had gone to sleep and gave way under her weight. She grabbed her bag and limped after the man as fast as she could.

  “Come back soon,” she heard Li Yuan shout after her.

  He had looked so thin. In the photographs he had been a broad, tall figure, and on the TV talk show he had made the chair he was sitting on look like it had been manufactured for Pygmies. But she had not the slightest doubt it was him: the dented, shaven skull, the prominent nose, the eyes with the spider’s web of blood vessels and the alcoholic’s washed-out, pale-blue irises. The determined chin with the surprisingly gentle, almost beautiful mouth.

  She stumbled onto Nathan Road. In the gleam of the neon light she caught sight of a leather jacket towering above the crowd. He didn’t appear to be walking fast, yet she had to quicken her pace to keep up. He turned off the busy shopping street and she let the distance between them increase as they moved onto narrower, less populated streets. She registered a sign saying MELDEN ROW. It was tempting to go and introduce herself, get it all over with. But she had decided to stick to the plan: to find out where he lived. It had stopped raining, and all of a sudden a scrap of cloud was drawn aside and the sky behind was high and velvet black, with glittering, pinhole stars.

  After walking for twenty minutes, he came to a sudden halt at a corner, and Kaja was afraid she had been discovered. However, he didn’t turn around, just took something from his jacket pocket. She stared in amazement. A baby’s bottle?

  He disappeared around the corner.

  Kaja followed and came into a large, open square packed with people, most of them young. At the far end of the square, above wide glass doors, shone a sign written in English and Chinese. Kaja recognized the titles of some of the new films she would never see. Her eyes found his leather jacket, and she saw him put the bottle down on the low plinth of a bronze sculpture representing a gallows with an empty noose. He continued past two fully occupied benches and took a seat on the third, where he picked up a newspaper. After about twenty seconds he got up again, walked back to the sculpture, grabbed the bottle as he passed, put it into his pocket and returned the same way he had come.

  It had started to rain when she saw him enter Chungking Mansions. She slowly began to prepare her speech. There was no longer a line by the elevators; nevertheless he ascended a staircase, turned right and went through a swinging door. She hurried after him and suddenly found herself in a deserted, run-down stairwell with an all-permeating smell of cat piss and wet concrete. She held her breath, but all she could hear were dripping sounds. As she made the decision to go on up, she heard a bang beneath her. She sprinted down the stairs and found the only thing that could have made such a bang: a dented metal door. She held the handle, felt the trembling come, closed her eyes and cursed to herself. Then she ripped open the door and stepped into the darkness. That is to say: out.

  Something ran across her feet, but she neither screamed nor moved.

  At first she thought she had entered an elevator shaft. But when she looked up, she glimpsed blackened brick walls covered with a tangled mass of water pipes, cables, distorted chunks of metal and collapsed, rusty iron scaffolding. It was a courtyard, a few square yards of space between towers. The only light came from a small patch of stars high above.

  Although there wasn’t a cloud in the sky, water was splashing down onto the pavement and her face, and she realized it was condensation from the small, rusty air-conditioning units protruding from the building. She retreated and leaned back against the iron door.

  Waited.

  And, eventually, from the dark, she heard: “What do you want?”

  She had never heard his voice before. Well, she had heard it on the talk show when they were discussing serial killers, but hearing it in reality was quite different. There was a worn, hoarse quality that made him sound older than his forty years. But at the same time there was a secure, self-assured calm that belied the hunted face she had seen outside Li Yuan’s. Deep, warm.

  “I’m Norwegian,” she said.

  There was no response. She swallowed. She knew that her first words would be the most important.

  “My name is Kaja Solness. I have been tasked with finding you. By Gunnar Hagen.”

  No reaction to the name of his Crime Squad boss. Had he gone?

  “I work as a detective on murder investigations for Hagen,” she said into the blackness.

  “Congratulations.”

  “No congratulations necessary. Not if you’ve been reading Norwegian papers for the last months.” She could have bitten her tongue. Was she trying to be funny? Had to be the lack of sleep. Or nerves.

  “I mean congratulations on a well-accomplished mission,” said the voice. “I have been found. Now you can go back.”

  “Wait,” she said. “Don’t you want to hear what I have to say?”

  “I’d prefer not to.”

  But the words she had jotted down and practiced rolled out. “Two women have been killed. Forensic evidence suggests it’s the same perp. Beyond that we don’t have any leads. Even though the press has been given minimal info, they’ve been screaming that another serial killer is on the loose. Some commentators have written that he may have been inspired by the Snowman. We’ve called in experts from Interpol, but they haven’t made any headway. The pressure from the media and authorities—”

  “By which I mean no,” the voice said.


  A door slammed.

  “Hello? Hello? Are you there?”

  She fumbled her way forward and found a door. Opened it before terror managed to gain a foothold, and she was in another darkened stairwell. She glimpsed light farther up and climbed three steps at a time. The light was coming through the glass of a swinging door, and she pushed it open. Entered a plain, bare corridor in which attempts to patch the peeling plaster had been given up, and damp steamed off the walls like bad breath. Leaning against the wall were two men with cigarettes hanging from the corners of their mouths, and a sweet stench drifted toward her. They appraised her through sluggish eyes. Too sluggish to move, she hoped. The smaller of the two was black, of African origin, she assumed. The big one was white and had a pyramid-shaped scar on his forehead, like a warning triangle. She had read in The Police magazine that Hong Kong had almost thirty thousand officers on the street and was reckoned to be the world’s safest metropolis. But then that was on the street.

  “Looking for hashish, lady?”

  She shook her head, tried to flash a confident smile, tried to act as she had advised young girls to do when she had visited schools: to look like someone who knew where she was going, not like someone who had lost the flock, like prey.

  They returned her smile. The only other doorway in the corridor had been bricked up. They took their hands out of their pockets, the cigarettes from their mouths.

  “Looking for fun, then?”

  “Wrong door, that’s all,” she said, turning to go back out. A hand closed around her wrist. Her terror tasted like tinfoil in her mouth. In theory, she knew how to get out of this. Had practiced it on a rubber mat in an illuminated gym with an instructor and colleagues gathered around her.