by Jo Nesbo
Harry peered into the closed-circuit TV camera, heard the low buzz and pushed open the door. Then he entered quickly. Held the briefcase up in front of him for all to see and laid his ID card on the counter while turning his good cheek.
“Hans Christian Simonsen …” the prison officer mumbled without looking up, running her eye down the list in front of her. “There, yes. For Oleg Fauke.”
“Correct,” Harry said.
Another officer led him through the corridors and across the open gallery in the middle of the prison. The officer talked about how warm the autumn had been and rattled the huge bunch of keys whenever he opened a new door. They walked through the common room, and Harry saw a Ping-Pong table with two rackets and an open book on top, and a kitchenette, in which a wholemeal loaf and a bread knife had been left out, along with spreads of various kinds. But no inmates.
They stopped by a white door and the officer unlocked it.
“I thought cell doors were open at this time of day,” Harry said.
“The others are, but this prisoner’s doing a one seventy-one,” the officer said. “He’s allowed out only one hour a day.”
“Where are all the others, then?”
“God knows. Maybe they’ve got the Hustler Channel on TV again.”
After the officer had let him in, Harry stood by the door until he heard the footsteps outside fading in the distance. The cell was the usual kind. Thirty square feet. A bed, a cupboard, a desk and chair, bookshelves, a TV. Oleg, who was sitting at the desk, looked up in surprise.
“You wanted to meet me,” Harry said.
“I thought I wasn’t allowed visitors,” Oleg said.
“This isn’t a visit. It’s a consultation with your defense counsel.”
“Defense counsel?”
Harry nodded. And saw the light dawn in Oleg’s eyes. Smart boy.
“How …?”
“The type of murder you’re suspected of committing doesn’t qualify you for a high-security prison. It wasn’t so difficult.” Harry opened the briefcase, took out the white Game Boy and passed it to Oleg. “Here you are. It’s for you.”
Oleg ran his fingers over the display. “Where did you find it?”
Harry thought he could see the suggestion of a smile on the boy’s serious face. “Vintage model with battery. I found it in Hong Kong. My plan was to crush you at Tetris the next time we met.”
“Never!” Oleg laughed. “Not at that, and not at underwater swimming.”
“That time in the Frogner pool? Mm. I seem to recall I was a yard ahead of you—”
“A yard behind is more like it! Mom was a witness.”
Harry sat still so as not to destroy anything, soaked up the happiness at seeing the pleasure in the boy’s face.
“What did you want to talk to me about, Oleg?”
The clouds drew back over his face. He fidgeted with the Game Boy, turned it over and over, as if looking for the start button.
“Take all the time you need, Oleg, but it’s often easiest to start at the beginning.”
The boy raised his head and looked at Harry. “Can I trust you? No matter what?”
Harry was about to say something, but stopped. Just nodded.
“You have to get something for me …”
It was like someone twisting a knife in Harry’s heart. He already knew how Oleg would continue.
“They’ve only got boy and speed here, but I need violin. Can you help me, Harry?”
“Was that why you asked me to come?”
“You’re the only person who’s managed to get around the ban on visitors.” Oleg stared at Harry with his solemn, dark eyes. A tiny twitch in the thin skin below one eye revealed the desperation.
“You know I can’t, Oleg.”
“ ’Course you can!” His voice sounded hard and metallic between the cell walls.
“What about the people you sold for—can’t they supply you?”
“Sold what?”
“Don’t lie to me!” Harry smacked his hand down on the briefcase lid. “I found an Arsenal shirt in your locker at Valle Hovin.”
“Did you break in …?”
“I found this as well.” Harry slung the photograph of the family on the desk. “The girl in the picture—do you know where she is?”
“Who …?”
“Irene Hanssen. Your girlfriend.”
“How …?”
“You were seen together at the Watchtower. There’s a sweater smelling of wildflowers and a junkie kit for two in the locker. Sharing your stash is more intimate than sharing the marital bed, isn’t it? Plus your mother told me she saw you in town, looking like a happy idiot. My diagnosis: in love.”
Oleg’s Adam’s apple went up and down.
“Well?” Harry said.
“I don’t know where she is! OK? She just disappeared. Maybe her brother picked her up again. Maybe she’s in rehab somewhere. Maybe she caught a plane and got away from all this shit.”
“Or perhaps the news is not so good,” Harry said. “When did you last see her?”
“I don’t remember.”
“You remember to the hour.”
Oleg closed his eyes. “One hundred and twenty-two days ago. Long before the stuff with Gusto, so what’s this got to do with the case?”
“It all fits together, Oleg. A murder is a white whale. A missing person is a white whale. If you’ve seen a white whale twice it’s the same whale. What can you tell me about Dubai?”
“It’s the biggest city, but not the capital, of the United Arab Emir—”
“Why are you protecting them, Oleg? What is it you can’t tell me?”
Oleg had found the start button on the Game Boy and flicked it to and fro. Then he flipped off the battery cover at the back, raised the lid of the metal trash basket beside the desk and dropped the batteries inside before passing the toy back to Harry.
“Dead.”
Harry looked at the Game Boy and slipped it into his pocket.
“If you can’t get me violin, I’ll shoot up the diluted shit they’ve got here. Heard of fentanyl and heroin?”
“Fentanyl is a recipe for an OD, Oleg.”
“Right. So you can tell Mom afterward it was your fault.”
Harry didn’t answer. Oleg’s pathetic attempt to manipulate him didn’t make him angry; it made him want to embrace the boy and hold him tight. Harry didn’t need to see the tears in Oleg’s eyes to know the struggle that was taking place in his body and head. He could feel the gnawing hunger in the boy—it was physical. And then there is nothing else, no morality, no love, no consideration, just the eternally pounding thought of the rush, the high, peace. Harry had once in his life been on the verge of accepting a heroin shot, but a chance second of clear-sightedness had made him decline. Perhaps it was the certainty that heroin would do what alcohol still had not been able to do: kill him. Perhaps it was the girl who had told him how she had been hooked from the first shot because nothing, nothing she had experienced or imagined, could surpass the ecstasy of it. Perhaps it was his pal from Oppsal who had gone to rehab to have his tolerance set to zero, because he hoped that when he injected himself afterward it would be something like the first sweet shot. And who said that when he saw his three-month-old son’s vaccination mark in his thigh, he began to cry because it had triggered such a strong craving for dope that he had been willing to sacrifice everything, to go straight from the clinic to Plata.
“Let’s make a deal,” Harry said, conscious of his own thick voice. “I’ll get you what you ask and you tell me all you know.”
“Great!” Oleg said, and Harry saw his pupils widen. He had read somewhere that with heavy heroin users parts of their brains could be activated even before the syringe was inserted, that they were already physically high while the melted powder was being pumped up a vein. And Harry also knew it was these parts of Oleg’s brain that were speaking now, that there was no other answer than “Great!” whether it was a lie or the truth.
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br /> “But I don’t want to buy it on the street,” Harry said. “Do you have any violin in your stash?”
Oleg seemed to hesitate for a second. “You’ve been to my stash.”
Harry remembered again that it was a lie that nothing was sacred to a heroin user. The stash was sacred.
“Come on, Oleg. You don’t keep dope where other junkies have access. Where’s your other stash, your reserves?”
“I only have one.”
“I’m not going to steal anything from you.”
“I don’t have another stash—I’m telling you!”
Harry could hear he was lying. But that was not so important; it only indicated he didn’t have any violin there.
“I’ll be back tomorrow,” Harry said, getting up, knocking on the door and waiting. But no one came. In the end he wrenched the handle. The door opened. Definitely not a high-security prison.
Harry walked back the way he had come. There was no one in the corridor, nor in the common room, where Harry noticed the food was still out but the bread knife had been put away. He continued to the door leading out of the unit and into the gallery and discovered to his surprise that it was open, too.
Only at reception did he find locked doors. He mentioned the fact to the prison officer behind the glass, and she raised an eyebrow and glanced at the monitors above her. “No one will get any farther than here anyway.”
“Apart from me, I hope.”
“Eh?”
“Nothing.”
Harry had walked almost a hundred yards through the park down toward Grønlandsleiret when it struck him. The empty rooms, the open doors, the bread knife. He froze. His heart accelerated so fast he felt nauseated. He heard a bird singing. The smell of grass. Then he turned and sprinted back to the prison. Felt his mouth go dry with fear and his heart pound adrenaline through his body.
Violin hit Oslo like a fricking asteroid. Oleg had explained to me the difference between a meteorite and a meteoroid and all the other shit that could hit us on the head at any second, and this was an asteroid, a huge ugly fucker that could flatten the earth with … Shit, you know what I mean, Dad—don’t laugh. We stood selling eighths, quarters, whole grams and five grams from morning to night. Downtown was turned upside down. And then we raised the price again. And the lines stretched even farther. And then we raised the price again. And the lines were just as long. And then we raised the price again. And that was when all hell broke loose.
A gang of Kosovar Albanians robbed our team behind the Stock Exchange. There were two Estonian brothers operating without a scout, and the Albanians used baseball bats and brass knuckles. Took the money and the dope and smashed their hips. Two nights later a Vietnamese gang struck on Prinsens Gate, ten minutes before Andrey and Peter were due to collect the day’s take. They attacked the dope man in the backyard without the money man or the scout noticing. It felt like: “What next?”
That question was answered two days later.
Oslo residents who were up early and on their way to work got to see a slit-eye dangling upside down from Sanner Bridge. He was dressed like a lunatic, with a straitjacket on and a gag in his mouth. The rope around his ankles was just long enough for him not to be able to hold his head above the water. At least after his stomach muscles failed him.
That same night Andrey gave Oleg and me a gun. It was Russian; Andrey trusted only Russian things. He smoked black Russian cigarettes, used a Russian cell phone (I’m not kidding, Dad. Gresso, an expensive luxury number made from African blackwood, apparently waterproof and didn’t send out signals, so the cops couldn’t trace it) and swore by Russian pistols. Andrey explained that the brand of the shooter was Odessa, which was a cheap version of a Stechkin, as if we knew anything about either. Whatever—the Odessa’s speciality was that it could fire fricking salvos. It had a magazine capable of holding twenty rounds of Makarov, nine-by-eighteen-millimeter caliber, the same Andrey and Peter and some of the others used. We got a box of bullets, and he showed us how to load, put on the safety catch and fire the strange, clumpy gun. He said we had to hold it tight and aim a little lower than we thought. We weren’t supposed to aim for the head, which was what we thought, but anywhere on the upper torso. If we twisted the little lever on the side to C, it would fire salvos, and a little pressure on the trigger was enough to get off three to four shots. But he assured us that nine times out of ten you just had to show the gun. After he left, Oleg said it looked like the shooter on the cover of some Foo Fighters record, and he wasn’t fucking shooting anyone—we should chuck it in the trash. So I said I’d take it.
The newspapers went crazy. They screamed about gang warfare, blood in the streets, fricking L.A., and so on. The opposition politicians went on about a failed crime policy, failed drug policy, failed head of the City Council, failed City Council. One Center Party loony said Oslo was a failed city and should be wiped off the map—it was a disgrace to the country. The person who took most of the flack was the Chief of Police, but as we know shit sinks, and after a Somali shot two relatives dead at point-blank range down by Plata, in broad daylight, and no one was arrested, the head of Orgkrim handed in his resignation. The Councilwoman for Social Services—who was also head of the Police Commission—said that crime, drugs and the police were primarily the state’s responsibility, but she saw it as her duty to ensure that Oslo’s citizens could walk the streets in safety. That was sweet of her. And her secretary stood behind her. It was my old friend, MILF without the M. She looked serious and businesslike. But all I saw was a hot bitch with riding breeches around her ankles.
One night Andrey came early, said we were finished for the day and I should go with him to Blindern.
When he drove straight past the old man’s place I began to think very nasty thoughts. But then, fortunately, Andrey turned in to the neighbor’s place, which of course the old man also owned. Andrey escorted me in. The house was not as empty as it looked from the outside. Behind the peeling walls and cracked windowpanes it was furnished and heated. The old man was sitting in a room with bookshelves from floor to ceiling, and some of that classical-type music was belting out of large speakers on the floor. I sat on the only other chair in the room, and Andrey closed the door as he left.
“I’ve decided to ask you to do something for me, Gusto,” said the old man, placing a hand on my knee.
I glanced at the closed door.
“We’re at war,” he said, getting up. He went to the shelves and pulled out a thick book with a brown, stained cover. “This text is from six hundred years before Christ was born. I can’t read Chinese, so I have only this French translation, which was made more than two hundred years ago by a Jesuit named Jean Joseph Marie Amiot. I went to an auction and had my bid of one hundred and ninety thousand accepted. The book’s about how to fool the enemy in war, and it’s the most quoted work on the subject. Stalin, Hitler and Bruce Lee had it as their bible. And do you know what?” He replaced the book and pulled out another. “I prefer this one.” He threw the book over to me.
It was a thin volume with a shiny, blue cover, new-looking. I read the title: Chess for Beginners.
“Sixty kroner at a sale,” the old man said. “We’re going to perform a move called castling.”
“Castling?”
“A sideways switch of king and castle to provide a defense. We’re going to form an alliance.”
“With a castle?”
“Think City Hall castle.”
I thought.
“City Council,” said the old man. “The Councilwoman for Social Services has a secretary named Isabelle Skøyen, who in effect runs the town’s drug policy. I’ve checked a source and she’s perfect. Intelligent, efficient and extremely ambitious. The reason she has not climbed higher, according to my source, is her lifestyle, which is bound to attract headlines. Just a question of time. She parties, speaks her mind and has lovers in east Oslo and west Oslo.”
“Sounds terrible,” I said.
The old man sen
t me an admonitory look before continuing. “Her father was spokesperson for the Center Party, but was thrown out when he tried to enter national politics. And my source tells me Isabelle has inherited his dreams, and since the odds are best for the Socialist Party she’s left her father’s little party of farmers. In short, everything about Isabelle Skøyen is flexible and can be adapted to suit her ambition. Furthermore, she is single with a not-insubstantial debt on the family farm.”
“So what are we going to do?” I asked as if I were part of the violin administration.
The old man smiled as though he considered the remark charming. “We’re going to threaten her, force her to come to the negotiating table, where we will entice her into an alliance. And you’re in charge of the threats, Gusto. That’s why you’re here now.”
“Me? Threaten a woman politician?”
“Precisely. A woman politician you’ve copulated with, Gusto. A council employee who has used her position and status for sexual exploitation of a teenager with considerable social problems.”
At first I couldn’t believe my ears. Until he took a photo from his jacket and put it on the table in front of me. It looked as if it had been taken from behind a tinted car window. It was of Tollbugata and showed a boy getting into a Land Rover. The license plate was visible. The boy was me. The car belonged to Isabelle Skøyen.