by Jo Nesbo
“A high price.”
“No,” Harry said. “Small beer.”
Aune nodded.
“Any news about when the case is due to come up?” asked Beate, who had got to her feet to put the baby in the stroller.
“No,” Harry said, watching the forensic officer’s efficient movements.
“The defense will try to have Lund-Helgesen declared mad,” Aune said, preferring the demotic form “mad,” which, in his opinion, was not only a suitable description but also poetic. “And not to achieve that would take an even worse psychologist than me.”
“Oh, yes, he’ll get life anyway,” Beate said, angling her head and straightening the baby’s blanket.
“Just a shame life isn’t life,” Aune growled and put out a hand for the glass on his bedside table. “The more aged I become, the more I tend to the view that evil is evil, mental illness or no. We’re all more or less disposed to evil actions, but our disposition cannot exonerate us. For heaven’s sake, we’re all sick with personality disorders. And it’s our actions that define how sick we are. We’re equal before the law, we say, but it’s meaningless as long as no one is equal. During the Black Death seamen who coughed were immediately heaved overboard. Of course they were. For justice is a blunt knife, both as a philosophy and as a judge. All we have is fortunate or less fortunate medical prospects, my dears.”
“Nevertheless,” Harry said, staring down at the still-bandaged stump of a middle finger, “in this case, it’ll be for life.”
“Oh?”
“Unfortunate medical prospects.”
The silence filled the room.
“Did I say that I was offered a finger prosthesis?” Harry announced, waving his right hand. “But basically I like my hand as it is. Four fingers. Cartoon hand.”
“What did you do with the finger that was there?”
“Tried to donate it to the Anatomy Department, but they weren’t interested. So I’ll have it stuffed and put it on my desk, just like Hagen does with the Japanese little finger. Thought an upright middle finger might be a suitable Hole welcome.”
The other two laughed.
“How are Oleg and Rakel doing?” Beate asked.
“Surprisingly well,” Harry said. “Toughies.”
“And Katrine Bratt?”
“Better. I visited her last week. She starts work again in February. Going back to her old unit in Bergen.”
“Really? Didn’t she almost shoot someone in her excitement?”
“Wrong call. Turns out she was walking around with an empty revolver. That was why she dared to press the trigger so far back. And I should have known that.”
“Oh?”
“When you move from one police station to another you hand in your service revolver and get a new one with two boxes of ammo. There were two unopened boxes in her desk drawer.”
A moment of silence followed.
“It’s good she’s well again,” Beate said, stroking the baby’s hair.
“Yes,” Harry said absentmindedly, and it occurred to him that it was true; she did seem to be getting better. When he had visited Katrine in her mother’s apartment in Bergen she had just had a shower after a long run on Sandviken Mountain. Her hair was still wet and her cheeks red as her mother served tea and Katrine talked about how her father’s case had become an obsession. And she apologized for having dragged him into the matter. He didn’t see any regret in her eyes, though.
“My psychiatrist says that I’m just a few notches more extreme than most people.” She had laughed, and then shrugged. “But now I’m done with all that. It’s pursued me from my childhood. Now he’s finally had his name cleared and I can move on with my life.”
“Shuffling papers for the Sexual Offenses Unit?”
“We’ll start there, then we’ll see. Even top politicians make comebacks.”
Then her eyes glided toward the window, across the fjord. Toward Finnøy, perhaps. And as Harry left he knew the damage was there and always would be.
He looked down at his hand. Aune was right; if every baby was a perfect miracle, life was basically a process of degeneration.
A nurse coughed by the door. “Time for a few jabs, Aune.”
“Oh, please let me off, sister.”
“No one is let off here.”
Ståle Aune sighed. “What is worse? Taking the life of a person who wants to live or taking death from a person who wants to die?”
Beate, the nurse and Ståle laughed, and no one noticed Harry twitch in his chair.
Harry walked up the steep hills from the hospital to Lake Sognsvann. There weren’t many people around, only the loyal throng of Sunday walkers doing their fixed circuit around the lake. Rakel waited for him by the roadblock.
They gave each other a hug and started the circuit in silence. The air was sharp and the sun matte in a pale blue sky. Dry leaves crackled and disintegrated beneath their heels.
“I’ve been sleepwalking,” Harry said.
“Oh?”
“Yes. And I’ve probably been doing it for a while.”
“It’s not so easy to be fully present all the time,” she said.
“No, no.” He shook his head. “Quite literally. I think I’ve been up and walking through the apartment at night. God knows what I’ve been up to.”
“How did you find out?”
“The night after I came home from the hospital I was standing in the kitchen looking at the floor, at some wet footprints. And then I realized I didn’t have a stitch on, except for my rubber boots, it was the middle of the night and I was holding a hammer in my hand.”
Rakel smiled and looked down. Skipped a pace so that they were walking in rhythm. “I started sleepwalking for a while. Right after I became pregnant.”
“Aune told me adults sleepwalk at times of stress.”
They stopped at the water’s edge. Watched a pair of swans float past, calm and noiseless, on the gray surface.
“I knew from the very first moment who Oleg’s father was,” she said. “But I didn’t know that he and I were having a child when he was informed that his girlfriend in Oslo was pregnant.”
Harry filled his lungs with the sharp air. Felt it bite. It tasted of winter. He closed his eyes to the sun and listened.
“By the time I found out, he had already made his decision and left Moscow for Oslo. I had two options. To give the child a father in Moscow who would love and look after him as if he were his own—so long as he thought he was his own—or for the child to have no father. It was absurd. You know how I feel about lying. If someone had told me that I—I, of all people—would one day choose to live the rest of my life based on a lie, I would of course have denied it vehemently. You think everything is simple when you’re young; you know nothing about the impossible decisions you may have to face. And if I’d only had myself to consider, this would have been a simple decision, too. But there were so many things to take into account. Not only whether I would crush Fjodor and affront his family, but also whether I would destroy things for the man who had gone to Oslo and his family. And then there was Oleg to take into account. Oleg came first.”
“I understand,” Harry said. “I understand everything.”
“No,” she said. “You don’t understand why I haven’t told you this before. With you there was no one else to take into account. You must think that I’ve tried to appear to be a better person than I am.”
“I don’t think that,” Harry said. “I don’t believe that you’re a better person than you are.”
She rested her head on his shoulder.
“Do you believe it’s true what they say about swans?” she asked. “That they’re faithful to each other until death do them part?”
“I believe they’re faithful to the promises they’ve made,” Harry said.
“And what promises do swans make?”
“None, I would assume.”
“So you’re talking about yourself now? In fact, I liked you better when you mad
e promises and broke them.”
“Would you like more promises?”
She shook her head.
When they started walking again she hooked her arm under his.
“I wish we could begin afresh,” she said with a sigh. “Pretend nothing had happened.”
“I know.”
“But you also know that that’s no good.”
Harry could hear that the intonation implied this was a statement; however, hidden somewhere there was still a tiny question mark.
“I’ve been thinking of going away,” he said.
“Oh, yes? Where?”
“I don’t know. Don’t come looking for me. Especially not in North Africa.”
“North Africa?”
“It’s a Marty Feldman line in a film. He wants to escape and be found at the same time.”
“I see.”
A shadow flitted across them and over the gray-yellow leached forest floor. They looked up. It was one of the swans.
“How did it work out in the film?” Rakel asked. “Did they find each other again?”
“Of course.”
“When are you coming back?”
“Never,” Harry replied. “I’m never coming back.”
In a cold cellar in a Tøyen high-rise two worried representatives of the residents’ committee were looking at a man in overalls wearing glasses with unusually thick lenses. The breath was coming out of the man’s mouth like white plaster dust as he spoke.
“That’s the thing about mold. You can’t see it’s there.”
He paused. Pressed his middle finger against the wisp of hair that was stuck to his forehead.
“But it is.”
An excerpt from
The Leopard
featuring Harry Hole
by Jo Nesbø
December 2011
Chapter 2
The Illuminating Darkness
December 18
The days are short. It’s still light outside, but here, in my clipping room, there is eternal darkness. In the light from my work lamp the people in the pictures on the wall look so irritatingly happy and unsuspecting. So full of expectations, as though they take it for granted that all life lies before them, a perfectly calm ocean of time, smooth and unruffled. I have taken clippings from the newspaper, snipped off all the lachrymose stories about the shocked family, edited out the gory details about the finding of the body. Contented myself with the inevitable photo a relative or a friend has given a persistent journalist, the picture of when she was in her prime, smiling as though immortal.
The police don’t know a lot. Not yet. But soon they will have more to work with.
What is it, where is it, whatever it is that makes a murderer? Is it innate, is it in a gene, inherited potential that some have and others do not? Or is it shaped by need, developed in a confrontation with the world, a survival strategy, a lifesaving sickness, rational insanity? For just as sickness is a fevered bombardment of the body, insanity is a vital retreat to a place where one can entrench oneself anew.
For my part, I believe that the ability to kill is fundamental to any healthy person. Our existence is a fight for gain, and whoever cannot kill his neighbor has no right to an existence. Killing is, after all, only hastening the inevitable. Death allows no exceptions, which is good, because life is pain and suffering. In that sense, every murder is an act of charity. It just doesn’t seem like that when the sun warms your skin or water wets your lips and you recognize your idiotic lust for life in every heartbeat and are ready to buy mere crumbs of time with everything you have accrued through life: dignity, status, principles. That is when you have to dig deep, to give a wide berth to the confusing, blinding light. Into the cold, illuminating darkness. And perceive the hard kernel. The truth. For that is what I had to find. That is what I found. Whatever it is that makes a person into a murderer.
What about my life? Do I also believe it is a calm, unruffled ocean of time?
Not at all. Before long I, too, will be lying on death’s refuse heap, together with all the other role players in this little drama. But whatever stage of decay my body may attain, even if all that remains is the skeleton, it will have a smile on its lips. This is what I live for now: my right to exist, my chance to be cleansed, to be cleared of all dishonor.
But this is only the beginning. Now I am going to switch off the lamp and go out into the light of day. The little that is left.
Chapter 3
Hong Kong
The rain did not stop first thing. Nor second thing. In fact, it didn’t stop at all. It was mild and wet, week upon week. The ground was saturated, European highways caved in, migratory birds did not migrate and there were reports of insects hitherto unseen in northern climes. The calendar showed that it was winter, but Oslo’s parkland was not just snowless, it was not even brown. It was as green and inviting as the artificial turf in Sogn, where despairing keep-fit fans had resorted to jogging in their Bjørn Dæhlie tights as they waited in vain for conditions around Lake Sognsvann to allow skiing. On New Year’s Eve the fog was so thick that the sound of fireworks carried from the center of Oslo right out to suburban Asker, but you couldn’t see a thing, even if you set them off in your backyard. Nevertheless, that night Norwegians lit six hundred kroners’ worth of fireworks per household, according to a consumer survey, which also revealed that the number of Norwegians who realized their dream of a white Christmas on Thailand’s white beaches had doubled in just three years. However, it seemed as if the weather had run amok also in Southeast Asia: Ominous clouds usually seen only on weather charts in the typhoon season were now lined up across the China Sea. In Hong Kong, where February tends to be one of the driest months of the year, rain was bucketing down, and poor visibility meant that Cathay Pacific Flight 731 from London had to circle again before coming in to land at Chek Lap Kok Airport.
“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 raven-black but finely formed 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.”