by Jo Nesbo
He stopped in front of me.
Now the thing is, I was never surprised anymore by the kind of people who bought heroin, but this man definitely wasn’t in the usual category.
“How much—”
“Three hundred fifty for a quarter.”
“—would you pay for a gram of heroin?”
“Pay? We sell, fuckwit.”
“I know. Just doing a bit of research.”
I looked at him. A journalist? A social worker? Or maybe a politician? While I was working for Odin and Tutu a bozo like that came over and said he was on the council, some committee called RUNO, and asked me very politely whether I would go to a meeting about “Drugs and Youth.” They wanted to hear “voices from the street.” I showed up for a laugh and listened to them drone on about European Cities Against Drugs and a big international plan for a drug-free Europe. I was given a soda and a cookie and laughed until I cried. But the broad leading the meeting was this MILF, a peroxide blonde with features like a man, huge jugs and the voice of a drill sergeant. For a second I wondered whether she’d had more than her tits done. After the meeting she came over to me, said she was secretary to the Councilwoman for Social Services and that she would like to talk more, could we meet at her place if I had “the opportunity” one day. She was a MILF without the M, it turned out. Lived alone on a farm, was wearing tight riding breeches when she opened the door and wanted “it” to take place in a stable. Didn’t bother me if she’d really had her dick done. They had cleaned up nicely and installed a pair of milkers that bounced up a storm. But there’s something weird about screwing a woman who howls like a fighter jet when you’re six feet away from a bunch of horses, who are watching you with a semi-interested stare. Afterward I had to pick straw from between my ass, and I asked her if she could lend me a thousand kroner. We kept meeting until I started to earn six thousand a day, and between fucks she had time to explain that a secretary did not sit writing letters for her councilwoman but dealt with practical politics. Even if she was a peon right now she was the person who made things happen. And when the right people understood that, it would be her turn to be a councilwoman. What I learned from her City Hall talk was that all politicians—high or low—wanted the same two things: power and sex. In that order. Whispering “cabinet minister” in her ear at the same time as getting two fingers up could make her squirt all the way to the pigsty. I’m not kidding. And in the face of the clubfooted guy in front of me I could read some of the same sick, intense longings.
“Fuck off.”
“Who’s your boss? I want to talk to him.”
Take me to your leader? The guy was either nuts or plain stupid.
“Fuck off.”
The guy didn’t budge, but just stood there and pulled something from the pocket of his all-weather jacket. A plastic bag of white powder—maybe half a gram.
“This is a sample. Take it to your boss. The price is eight hundred kroner a gram. Careful with the dosage—divide this into ten. I’ll be back the day after tomorrow, same time.”
The man passed me the bag, turned and limped down the street.
Normally I would have chucked the bag into the nearest trash can. I couldn’t even sell the shit myself; I had to maintain my reputation. But there was something about the gleam in the madman’s eye. Like he knew something. So, when the workday was over and we’d settled up with Andrey, I went with Oleg and Irene to Heroin Park. We asked if anyone there felt like being a test pilot. I’d done this before with Tutu. If there were new goods in town you went to where the most desperate junkies hung out, the ones willing to test anything as long as it was free, who didn’t care if it killed them because death was around the corner anyway.
Four volunteered, but said they wanted an eighth of real heroin on top. I said no and was left with three. I doled out the goods.
“Not enough!” shouted one of the junkies with the diction of a stroke patient. I told him to shut up if he wanted dessert.
Irene, Oleg and I sat watching as they searched for veins between scabs and injected themselves with surprisingly efficient movements.
“Oh, Jesus,” one of them groaned.
“Fffff …” another stuttered.
Then it went still. Total silence. It was like sending a rocket into space and losing all contact. But I already knew, could see the ecstasy in their eyes before they disappeared: Houston, we have no problem. When they landed back on earth it was dark. The trip had lasted for more than five hours, double the length of a normal heroin trip. The test panel was unanimous. They had never experienced anything with such a kick. They wanted more, the rest of the bag, now, please, and staggered toward us like the zombies in Thriller. We burst out laughing and ran away.
Sitting on my mattress in the rehearsal room half an hour later, I did some thinking. A junkie usually uses a quarter gram of street heroin per shot, but Oslo’s most hardened junkies had just gotten as high as fricking virgins on a quarter of that! The guy had given me pure junk. But what was it? It looked and smelled like heroin, had the consistency of heroin, but to trip out for five hours on such a small dose? Whatever it was, I knew I was sitting on a gold mine. Eight hundred kroner per gram, which could be diluted three times and sold for fourteen hundred. Fifty grams a day. Thirty thousand straight into your pocket. Into mine. Into Oleg’s and Irene’s.
I raised the business proposition with them. Explained the figures.
They looked at each other. They weren’t as enthusiastic as I expected.
“But Dubai …” Oleg said.
I lied and told them there was no danger as long as we didn’t trick the old man. First, we would go and say we were stopping, that we’d found Jesus or some other bullshit. Then wait a little while before starting up on our own in a small way.
They looked at each other again. And I suddenly realized there was something going on, something I hadn’t picked up on before.
“It’s just that …” Oleg said, his eyes struggling for a place to focus. “Irene and I, we …”
“You what?”
He squirmed like an impaled worm and in the end looked to Irene for help.
“Oleg and I have decided to live together,” Irene said. “We’re saving up to put a deposit on a flat in Bøler. We’re planning to work through until the summer and then …”
“And then?”
“Then we’re going to finish school,” Oleg said. “And then start at a university.”
“Law,” Irene said. “Oleg’s got such good grades.” She smiled the way she used to when she thought she’d said something stupid, but her usually pale cheeks were hot and red with pleasure.
They’d been sneaking around and teaming up behind my fricking back! How did I miss that?
“Law,” I said, opening the bag, which still had more than a gram in it. “Isn’t that for people who want to go into law enforcement?”
Neither of them answered.
I found the spoon I usually ate cornflakes with and wiped it on my thigh.
“What are you doing?” Oleg asked.
“This calls for celebration,” I said, pouring the powder onto the spoon. “Besides, we have to test the product ourselves before we recommend it to the old man.”
“So you don’t mind?” Irene exclaimed with relief in her voice. “We can keep going like before?”
“Of course, my dear.” I put the lighter under the bowl of the spoon. “This one’s for you, Irene.”
“Me? But I don’t think—”
“For my sake, sis.” I looked up at her and smiled. Smiled the smile she knew I knew she couldn’t resist. “It’s boring getting high by yourself, you know. Sort of lonely.”
The melted powder bubbled in the spoon. I didn’t have any cotton balls, so I thought about straining it through a broken-off cigarette filter. But it looked so clean. White, even consistency. So I let it cool for a couple of seconds before drawing it into the syringe.
“Gusto …” Oleg began to say.
&nbs
p; “We’d better be careful we don’t OD—there’s enough for three here. You’re invited, too, my friend. But maybe you’d rather watch?”
I didn’t need to look up. I knew him too well. Pure of heart, blinded with love and clad in the armor of courage that had made him dive from forty-five-foot-high masts into Oslo Fjord.
“OK,” he said and began to roll up his sleeve. “I’m in.”
The same armor that would take him down to the bottom and drown him like a rat.
I woke up to pounding on the door. My head felt like a coal mine had been operating inside it, and I dreaded opening even one eye. The morning light seeped through the crack between the wooden boards nailed to the windows. Irene was lying on her mattress, and I saw Oleg’s white Puma Speed Cat sneakers sticking out between two amplifiers. I could hear that whoever it was had started using his feet.
I got up and staggered across the room, trying to remember any messages about band practice. I opened the door a fraction and instinctively put my foot against it. It didn’t help. The shove knocked me backward into the room and I fell over the drums. One hell of a racket. After pushing away the cymbal stands and the snare drum, I looked up into the kisser of my dear foster brother, Stein.
Delete dear.
He’d gotten bigger, but the air-force haircut and the dark, hate-filled flinty eyes were the same. I saw him open his mouth and say something, but my ears were ringing with the sound of the cymbals. Automatically I put my hands in front of my face as he came for me. But he rushed past, stepped over the drum set and went to Irene on the mattress. She gave a little scream as he grabbed an arm and dragged her to her feet.
He held her tight while stuffing a few possessions into her knapsack. She’d given up resisting by the time he pulled her to the door.
“Stein …” I started.
He stopped in the doorway and looked at me expectantly, but I had nothing to add.
“You’ve done enough damage to this family,” he said.
He slammed the iron door shut. The air quivered. Oleg stuck his head up above the amplifier and said something, but I was still deaf.
I stood with my back to the fireplace and felt the heat making my skin tingle. The flames and an antique fucking table lamp constituted the only light in the room. The old man sat in the leather chair examining the man we’d brought with us in the limo from Skippergata. He was still wearing his all-weather jacket. Andrey stood behind the man, untying his blindfold.
“Well,” the old man said. “You’re the one who supplies this product that I have heard so much about.”
“Yes,” the man said, putting on his glasses and squinting around the room.
“Where does it come from?”
“I’m here to sell it, not to provide information about it.”
The old man stroked his chin with thumb and finger. “In that case I’m not interested. Taking others’ stolen property always leads to dead bodies in this game. And dead bodies are trouble and bad for business.”
“This is not stolen property.”
“I venture to suggest I have a fairly good overview of supply channels, and this is not a product anyone has seen before. So I repeat: I will not buy anything until I have the assurance that this will not rebound on us.”
“I’ve allowed myself to be brought here blindfolded because I understand the need for discretion. I hope you can show me the same sensitivity.”
The heat had made his glasses mist up, but he kept them on. Andrey and Peter had searched him in the car while I had searched his eyes, body language, voice, hands. All I found was loneliness. There was no fat, ugly girlfriend, only this man and his fantastic dope.
“For all I know, you could be a policeman,” the old man said.
“With this?” the man said, pointing to his foot.
“If you import goods, why haven’t I heard of you before?”
“Because I’m new. I don’t have a record and no one knows me, either in the police or in this business. I have a so-called respectable profession and have so far lived a normal life.” He made a cautious grimace, which I realized was supposed to be a smile. “An abnormally normal life, some might claim.”
“Hm.” The old man stroked his chin repeatedly. Then he grabbed my hand and pulled me to his chair so that I was standing beside him and looking at the man.
“Do you know what I think, Gusto? I think he makes this product himself. What do you think?”
I deliberated. “Maybe,” I said.
“You know, Gusto, you don’t exactly need to be an Einstein in chemistry. There are detailed recipes on the Net for how to turn opium into morphine and then heroin. Let’s say you get hold of ten kilos of raw opium. Then you find yourself some boiling equipment, a fridge, a little methanol and a fan, and hey, presto, you’ve got eight and a half kilos of heroin crystals. Dilute it and you have one point two kilos of street heroin.”
The man in the all-weather jacket coughed. “It requires a little more than that.”
“The question,” the old man said, “is how you get hold of the opium.”
The man shook his head.
“Aha,” the old man said, stroking the inside of my arm. “Not opiate. Opioid.”
The man didn’t answer.
“Did you hear what he said, Gusto?” The old man pointed a finger at the clubfoot. “He makes totally synthetic dope. He doesn’t need any help from nature or Afghanistan; he applies simple chemistry and makes everything at the kitchen table. Total control and no risky smuggling. And it’s at least as powerful as heroin. We’ve got a clever guy among us, Gusto. That sort of enterprise commands respect.”
“Respect,” I mumbled.
“How much can you produce?”
“Two kilos a week, maybe. It depends.”
“I’ll take all of it,” the old man said.
“All of it?” The man’s voice was flat and contained no real surprise.
“Yes, everything you produce. May I make you a business proposition, Herr …?”
“Ibsen.”
“Ibsen?”
“If you don’t mind.”
“Not at all. He was also a great artist. I would like to propose a partnership, Herr Ibsen. Vertical integration. We corner the market and set the price. Better margin for both of us. What do you say?”
Ibsen shook his head.
The old man tilted his head, a smile on his lipless mouth. “Why not, Herr Ibsen?”
I watched the little man straighten up; he seemed to grow in the baggy, all-year-round, world’s-most-boring-person jacket.
“If I give you the monopoly, Herr …”
The old man pressed his fingertips together. “You can call me whatever you like, Herr Ibsen.”
“I don’t want to be dependent on a single buyer, Herr Dubai. It’s too risky. And it means you can force prices down. On the other hand, I don’t want too many buyers, because then the risk that the police will trace me is greater. I came to you because you’re known to be invisible, but I want one more buyer. I have already been in contact with Los Lobos. I hope you can understand.”
The old man laughed his chug-chug laugh. “Listen and learn, Gusto. Not only is he a pharmacist, he’s also a businessman. Good, Herr Ibsen, let’s say that, then.”
“The price …”
“I’ll pay what you asked. You’ll find this is a business in which you don’t waste time haggling, Herr Ibsen. Life’s too short and death too close at hand. Shall we say the first delivery next Tuesday?”
On the way out the old man acted as if he needed to support himself on me. His nails scratched the skin on my arm.
“Have you thought about exporting, Herr Ibsen? The checks on exporting drugs from Norway are nonexistent, you know.”
Ibsen didn’t answer. But I saw it now. What he wanted. Saw it as he stood over his clubfoot with a pivoted hip. Saw it in the reflection from his sweaty, shiny forehead below the thinning hair. The condensation was gone from his glasses, and his eyes had the same
gleam I’d seen on Skippergata. Payback, Dad. He wanted some payback. Payback for all the things he hadn’t received: respect, love, admiration, acceptance, everything supposedly you can’t buy. But you can, of course. Isn’t that right, Dad? Life owes you, but sometimes you have to be your own fucking debt collector. And if we have to burn in hell for it, heaven’s going to be sparsely populated. Isn’t that right, Dad?
HARRY SAT BY the road looking out. Watched the planes taxiing in and taxiing out to the runway.
He would be in Shanghai within eighteen hours.
He liked Shanghai. Liked the food, liked walking down the Bund along the Huangpu River to the Peace Hotel, liked going into the Old Jazz Bar and listening to the ancient jazz musicians creaking their way through standards, liked the thought that they had been sitting there and playing without an audible break since the revolution in ’49. Liked her. Liked what they had, and what they didn’t have, but ignored.
The ability to ignore. It was a wonderful quality, not something he was naturally blessed with, but which he had practiced over the last three years. Not banging your head against the wall if you didn’t have to.
How unshakable is your faith in your gospel, actually? Aren’t you also a doubter?
He would be in Shanghai in eighteen hours.
Could be in Shanghai within eighteen hours.
Shit.
She answered on the second ring.
“What do you want?”
“Don’t hang up again, OK?”
“I’m here.”
“Listen, how strong a hold do you have on that Nils Christian?”
“Hans Christian.”
“Is he besotted enough for you to persuade him to help me with a very dubious stunt?”
It had rained all night, and from where Harry was standing, in front of Oslo District Prison, he could see a fresh layer of leaves lying like a wet yellow tarpaulin over the park. He had not slept much after he had gone straight from the airport to Rakel’s. Hans Christian had come, not protested too much and gone again. Afterward Rakel and Harry drank tea and talked about Oleg. About how it had been before. About how it had been, but not about how it could have been. In the early hours Rakel had said Harry could sleep in Oleg’s room. Before Harry went to bed he had used Oleg’s computer to search for, and find, old articles about the police officer found dead beneath the Älvsborg Bridge in Gothenburg. It confirmed what Cato had told him, and Harry also found a piece in the ever-sensationalist Göteborgs-Tidningen leaking rumors about the dead man having been a burner, which it defined as a person criminals used to destroy evidence against them. It was only two hours since Rakel had woken him with a steaming cup of coffee and a whisper. She had always done that, started the day with whispers, to him and Oleg, as if to soften the transition from dreams to reality.