by Jo Nesbo
The tube hit something above him. He clambered up. Groped with his free hand. It was an iron grille. The kind they put on the tops of chimneys to keep squirrels and other animals out. He ran his finger along the edge. It had been set in concrete. Fuck!
Kaja’s faint voice reached him. “I’m dizzy, Harry.”
“Breathe in deep.”
He pushed the tube through the fine-mesh grille.
There was no snow on the other side!
He hardly noticed the lactic acid burning in his thighs, as he excitedly pushed the tube farther up. Only to experience disappointment when it hit something hard: the chimney cowl. He should have remembered that the cabin had such an attractive black metal cowl at the top of the chimney to protect it against snow and rain. He fumbled around until he angled the tube under the edge of the cowl and felt the hard-packed mass of snow, harder than in the cabin. But that could have been because the snow was now being forced down the opening of the hollow pole. He prayed that for every inch of ski pole he pushed into the snow he might feel it, the sudden absence of resistance, which would mean he had broken out of the snow hell. Which meant he could blow the snow out of this suction pipe and suck in air, fresh, life-giving air. Push Kaja up and give her the same injection of anti-death. But the breakthrough never came. He had the tube pressed right through the grille and nothing had happened. He tried anyway, sucked as hard as he could, getting cold, dry snow in his mouth, and it was still blocked. He couldn’t stand the pressure on his sides any longer and fell. Shouted, stuck out his arms and legs, felt the skin on his hands being scraped off, but slid farther down. He hit the body beneath with both legs.
“All right?” Harry asked, climbing up into the chimney again.
“Fine,” Kaja said with a deep groan. “And you? Bad news?”
“Yes,” Harry said, scrambling down beside her.
“What? You aren’t in love with me now, either?”
Harry chuckled and drew her to him. “Oh, I am now.”
He felt hot tears on her cheeks as she whispered, “Shall we get married, then?”
“Yes, let’s,” Harry said, aware that it was the poison in his brain talking now.
She laughed. “Till death do us part.”
He felt the warmth of her body. And something hard. Her holster with the service revolver. He released her and groped his way to Kolkka. Already he thought he could see how Kolkka’s cold face had started to turn to marble. He bored his hand through the snow by the dead man’s neck and down to his chest.
“What are you doing?” she mumbled weakly.
“I’m getting Jussi’s gun.”
He heard her stop breathing for a second. Felt her hand on his back, fumbling, like a small animal that has lost its orientation. “No,” she whispered. “Don’t do it … not like that … let’s just fall asleep … Even.”
It was as Harry surmised. Jussi Kolkka had gone to bed wearing his shoulder holster. He undid the button holding the gun in position, gripped the handle and dragged the gun from the snow. Ran a finger down the barrel. No sights—this was a Weilert. He stood up too quickly, felt giddy, looked for support. Then everything went black.
Bellman was looking down at the almost thirteen-foot-deep pit when he heard the intermittent whump-whump-whump of the rescue helicopter approaching, like a rug beater on speed. His men were using knapsacks to transport snow, lifting it up with interlocking trouser belts.
“The window!” he heard the man in the pit yell.
“Smash it!” Milano shouted back.
The glass tinkled.
“Oh, my God …” he heard. And knew the invocation boded bad news.
“Slide down a ski pole …”
Bellman heard dogs barking. And tried to work out how many hours it would take to clear the snow from the cabin. Correction: days.
Harry came to with a terrible pain in his jaw and something warm running down his forehead between his eyes. He guessed he must have hit his head and jaw against the rock when he fell. That was what must have woken him. The strange thing was he was still standing and holding the pistol in his hand. He tried to inhale air that wasn’t there. He didn’t know if he had enough for a last attempt, but so what? It was simple: There was nothing else he could do. So he stuffed the pistol in his pocket and, between gasps, climbed up the chimney again. Forced his legs against the sides when he was at the top, fumbled with the grille until he found the end of the metal pole that was still stuck in the snow. The pole was vaguely conical, with the larger aperture at Harry’s end, where he inserted the gun barrel. It jammed two thirds of the way along its length. Which also meant that it was perfectly aligned with the ski pole. It was like a silencer but five feet long. A bullet would not penetrate five feet of snow, but what if the pole was only a short distance from the end?
He leaned on the pistol so that the recoil wouldn’t cause it to come free and fire at an angle. Then he fired. And fired. And fired. It felt as if their eardrums would explode in the hermetically sealed space. After four shots he stopped, put his lips around the pole and sucked.
He sucked in … air.
For a second he was so astonished that he almost fell back down. He sucked again, careful not to destroy the tunnel in the snow that the bullet had made. The odd grain of snow fell and settled under his tongue. Air. It tasted like a mild, well-rounded whiskey with ice.
60
Pixies and Dwarfs
Roger Gjendem ran across Karl Johans Gate, where the shops were beginning to open. At Egertorget square he peered up at the red Freia clock and saw that the hands were showing three minutes to ten. He increased his speed.
He had been summoned as a matter of urgency by Bent Nordbø, their retired and, in all ways, legendary editor in chief, now board member and temple guardian.
He bore right, up Akersgata, where all the newspapers had bunched together in those days when the paper edition was the king of the journalistic heap. He turned left toward the law courts, right up Apotekergata, and stepped, out of breath, into Stopp Pressen. It didn’t seem quite to have been able to make up its mind whether it was going to be a sports bar or a traditional English pub. Perhaps both, as the aim was for all types of journalists to feel at home here. On the walls hung press photographs showing what had engaged, shaken, gladdened and horrified the nation over the last twenty years. They were mostly of sporting events, celebrities and natural disasters. Plus a number of politicians who fell into the latter two categories.
Since this establishment was within walking distance of the two remaining newspaper offices on Akersgata—Verdens Gang and Dagbladet—Stopp Pressen was almost considered an extended cafeteria for them, but for the moment there were only two people visible inside: the barman behind the counter, and a man sitting at the table farthest back, beneath a shelf of classic books published by Gyldendal and an old radio, which were obviously meant to give the place a certain cachet.
The man beneath the shelf was Bent Nordbø. He had John Gielgud’s superior appearance, John Major’s panoramic glasses and Larry King’s suspenders. And he was reading a genuine newspaper’s newspaper. Roger had heard that Nordbø read only The New York Times, the Financial Times, The Guardian, China Daily, Süddeutsche Zeitung, El País and Le Monde, and he read them every day. He might take it into his head to flick through Pravda and the Slovenian Dnevnik, but he insisted that “East European languages are so heavy on the eye.”
Gjendem stopped in front of his table with a cough. Bent Nordbø finished reading the last lines of an article about some Mexican immigrants’ revitalization of a former condemned area of the Bronx, and glanced down at the page to make sure there was nothing else of interest. Then he removed his enormous glasses, snatched the handkerchief from the breast pocket of his tweed jacket and looked up at the nervous, and still breathless, man standing by his table.
“Roger Gjendem, I presume.”
“Yes.”
Nordbø folded the newspaper. Gjendem had also been told that wh
en the man opened it again you could take it that the conversation was over. Nordbø tilted his head and started the not-inconsiderable task of cleaning his glasses.
“You’ve worked on criminal cases for many years and you know many of the people at Kripos and Crime Squad, don’t you?”
“Er … yes.”
“Mikael Bellman. What do you know about him?”
Harry scrunched up his eyes at the sun flooding into his room. He had just woken up and spent the first seconds shaking off dreams and reconstructing reality.
They had heard his shots.
And uncovered the ski pole at the first thrust of the spade.
Afterward they had told him that what had frightened them most was being shot at while they were digging down to the chimney.
His head ached as if he had been off the booze for a week. Harry swung his legs out of bed and looked around the room he had been given at the Ustaoset hotel.
Kaja and Kolkka had been taken by helicopter to Oslo and Rikshospital. Harry had refused to join them. Only after he had lied and said he’d had loads of air the whole time and was absolutely fine did they let him stay.
Harry put his head under the tap in the bathroom and drank. “Water’s never that bad and is sometimes quite nice.” Who used to say that? Rakel, when she wanted Oleg to drink up at the table. He switched on his cell phone, which had been off since he left for Håvass. There was coverage here in Ustaoset, the display said. It also showed there was a message waiting. Harry played it, but there was only a second of coughing and laughing before the connection was broken. Harry checked the caller’s number. A cell number—could be anyone’s. There was something vaguely familiar about it, but it definitely wasn’t from Rikshospital. Whoever it was would probably call again if it was important.
In the breakfast room Mikael Bellman sat in solitary majesty with a cup of coffee in front of him. Papers folded and read. Harry didn’t need to look at them to know it was more of the same. More about the Case, more about the police’s helplessness, more pressure. But today’s edition would hardly have been quick enough off the mark to include the death of Jussi Kolkka.
“Kaja’s fine,” Bellman said.
“Mm. Where are the others?”
“They caught the morning train to Oslo.”
“But you didn’t?”
“Thought I would wait for you. What do you think?”
“About what?”
“About the avalanche. Just something that can happen?”
“No idea.”
“No? Did you hear the boom before it came?”
“Might have been the snowdrift on top falling and hitting the side of the mountain. Which in turn triggered the avalanche.”
“Do you think it sounded like that?”
“I don’t know what it’s supposed to sound like. Noises do definitely trigger avalanches, though.”
Bellman shook his head. “Even experienced mountain people believe that myth about sound waves triggering them. I climbed the Alps with an avalanche expert and he told me that people there still believe that the avalanches during the Second World War were caused by cannon fire. The truth is that for a shell to start an avalanche there has to be a direct hit.”
“Mm. So?”
“Do you know what this is?” Bellman held up a piece of shiny metal between his thumb and first finger.
“No,” Harry said, signaling to the waiter clearing away the breakfast buffet that he wanted a cup of coffee.
Bellman hummed the verse of Wergeland’s “Pixies and Dwarfs” about building in the mountains and blowing the rock to pieces.
“Pass.”
“You disappoint me, Harry. Well, OK, I may have a head start on you. I grew up in Manglerud in the seventies in an expanding suburban town. They dug plots around us on all sides. The soundtrack of my childhood was dynamite charges going off. After the builders had left I went around finding pieces of red plastic cable and tiny fragments of paper off the dynamite sticks. Kaja told me that they have a special way of fishing up here. Sticks of dynamite are more common than moonshine. Don’t say the thought didn’t cross your mind.”
“OK,” Harry said. “That’s a part of a blasting cap. When and where did you find it?”
“After you were transported out last night. A couple of the guys and I did a little search around where the avalanche started.”
“Any tracks?” Harry took the coffee from the waiter and thanked him.
“No. It’s so exposed up there that the wind could have swept away any ski tracks there might have been. But Kaja said she thought she had heard a snowmobile.”
“Barely. And there was quite a time between her hearing it and the avalanche. He might have parked the snowmobile well before he got there so that we wouldn’t hear it.”
“I had the same idea.”
“And what now?” Harry took a tentative sip.
“Look for snowmobile tracks.”
“The local officer …”
“No one knows where he is. But I’ve got us a snowmobile, map, climbing rope, ice ax, provisions. So don’t get too comfortable with that coffee—there’s snow forecast for this afternoon.”
To reach the top of the avalanche zone, the Danish hotel manager had explained that they would have to drive in a wide arc west of the Håvass cabin, but not too far northwest, where they would come into the area known as Kjeften. It had been given this name, “Jaws,” on account of the fang-shaped rocks scattered around. Sudden crevices and precipices were carved into the plateau, making it an extremely dangerous place to roam in poor weather if you weren’t familiar with the surroundings.
It was around noon when Harry and Bellman looked down the mountainside, where they could make out the excavation of the chimney at the bottom of the valley.
Clouds had already moved in from the west. Harry squinted to the northwest. Shadows and contours were erased without the sun.
“It must have come from there,” Harry said. “Otherwise we would have heard it.”
“Kjeften,” Bellman said.
Two hours later, after crossing the snowscape from south to north in a crablike manner without finding any snowmobile tracks, they took a break. Sat next to each other on the seat, drinking from the thermos Bellman had brought with them. A light snow fell around them.
“I once found an unused stick of dynamite on an estate in Manglerud,” Bellman said. “I was fifteen years old. In Manglerud there were three things kids could do. Play sports, study the Bible or smoke dope. I wasn’t interested in any of them. And certainly not in sitting on the post office window ledge waiting for life to take me from hash and heroin, via glue-sniffing, to the grave. As happened to four boys in my class.”
Harry noticed how the old Manglerud patois had crept back into his Norwegian.
“I hated all that,” Bellman said. “So my first step toward policing was to take the stick of dynamite behind the Manglerud church where the dopeheads had their earth bong.”
“Earth bong?”
“They had dug a pit in which they placed, upside down, a decapitated beer bottle with a grille inside, where the hash smoked and stank. They had laid plastic tubes under the ground, running from the pit to various points a few feet away. Then they lay on the grass around the bong, each sucking on his tube. I don’t know why …”
“To cool the smoke.” Harry chortled. “You get more of a buzz from less dope. Not bad coming from dopeheads. I’ve obviously underestimated Manglerud.”
“Nevertheless, I pulled out one of the tubes and replaced it with dynamite.”
“You blew up the earth bong?”
Bellman nodded, and Harry laughed.
“Soil hailed down for thirty seconds.” Bellman smiled.
Silence. The wind rushed, low and rasping.
“Actually, I wanted to say thank you,” Bellman said, looking down at his cup. “For getting Kaja out in the nick of time.”
Harry shrugged. Kaja. Bellman knew that Harry knew about the tw
o of them. How? And did that mean Bellman knew about Kaja and Harry, as well?
“I had nothing else to do down there,” Harry said.
“Yes, you did. I looked at Jussi’s body before the helicopter took him away.”
Harry didn’t answer, just squinted through the thickening snowflakes.
“The body had a wound in the side of the neck. And there were more on both palms. From the pointed end of a ski pole, perhaps. You found him first, didn’t you?”
“Maybe,” Harry said.
“The neck wound had fresh blood. His heart must have been beating when he received that wound, Harry. Beating pretty strongly, too. It should have been possible to dig out a living man in time. But you prioritized Kaja, didn’t you?”
“Well,” Harry said, “I think Kolkka was right.” He emptied the rest of his coffee in the snow. “You have to choose sides,” he quoted in Swedish.
They found the snowmobile tracks at three o’clock, half a mile from where the avalanche originated, between two large fang-shaped rocks, a refuge from the wind.
“Looks like he paused here,” Harry said, pointing along the edge of the track left by the tread of the rubber belt. “The vehicle had time to sink in the snow.” He ran his finger along the middle of the left ski runner while Bellman swept away the light, dry, drifting snow.
“Yep,” he said, pointing. “He turned here and then drove on northwest.”
“We’re approaching the cliffs and the snow’s getting thicker,” Harry said, looking up at the sky and taking out his phone. “We’ll have to call the hotel and ask them to send a guide on a snowmobile. Shit!”
“What?”
“No signal. We’ll have to make our own way back to the hotel.”