by Jo Nesbo
“Is it broken again?” the boy said. “It was the previous lodger. He had a temper, I’m afraid.” He passed Harry the room key. “He was a policeman as well.”
“Lodger?”
“Yes, he was one of the permanent ones. An agent, ‘undercover,’ as you call him.”
“Mm. Sounds like his cover wasn’t worth much, if you knew.”
The boy smiled. “Let me go and see if I have a curtain pole in the storeroom.” The boy left.
“Beret Man was very like you,” a deep Swedish voice said. Harry turned.
Cato was sitting in a chair in what with a little charity could be termed the lobby. He looked drawn and was slowly shaking his head. “Very like you, Harry. Very passionate. Very patient. Very obstinate. Unfortunately. Not as tall as you, of course, and he had gray eyes. But the same police look about them, and just as lonely. And he died in the same place as you will. You should have gone, Harry. You should have caught the plane.” He gesticulated something incomprehensible with his long fingers. His expression was so mournful that for a moment Harry wondered if the old man was going to cry. He staggered to his feet as Harry turned to the boy.
“Is what he says true?”
“What who says?” the boy asked.
“Him,” Harry said, turning to point at Cato. But he was already gone. He must have flitted into the darkness by the stairs.
“Did the undercover cop die here, in my room?”
The boy stared at Harry before answering. “No, he went missing. He washed ashore by the Opera House. Afraid I don’t have a curtain pole, but what about this nylon line? You can thread it through the curtains and tie it to the pole attachments.”
Harry nodded slowly.
IT WAS TWO O’CLOCK in the morning. Harry was still awake and on his last cigarette. On the floor lay the curtains and the thin nylon line. He could see a woman on the other side of the yard; she was dancing a soundless waltz, without a partner. Harry listened to the sounds of the town and watched the smoke curling up toward the ceiling. Studied the winding routes it took, the apparently random figures it made, and tried to see a pattern in it.
It took two months after the meeting between the old man and Isabelle for the cleanup to begin.
The first ones to be busted were the Vietnamese. The newspapers said the cops had struck in nine places simultaneously, found five heroin stores and arrested thirty-six Vietcong. The week after it was the Kosovar Albanians’ turn. The cops used elite Delta forces to raid a flat in Helsfyr that the Gypsy chief thought no one knew about. Then it was the North Africans and Lithuanians. The guy who was head of Orgkrim, a good-looking model-type with long eyelashes, said in the papers they had been tipped off anonymously. Over the next few weeks street sellers, everyone from coal-black Somalis to milky-white Norwegians, were busted and imprisoned. But not a single one of us wearing an Arsenal shirt. It was already clear that we had more elbow room and the lines were getting longer. The old man was recruiting some of the unemployed street sellers, but keeping his end of the bargain: Heroin dealing had become less visible in downtown Oslo. We cut down on heroin imports because we earned so much more on violin. Violin was expensive, so some junkies tried to switch to morphine, but they always came back.
We were selling it faster than Ibsen could make it.
One Tuesday we ran out at half past twelve, and since cells were strictly forbidden—the old man thought Oslo was fricking Baltimore—I went down to the station and called the Russian Gresso phone from one of the phone booths. Andrey said he was busy, but he would see what he could do. Oleg, Irene and I sat on the steps on Skippergata waving away customers and chilling. An hour later I saw a figure come limping toward us. It was Ibsen himself. He was furious. Yelling and cursing. Until he caught sight of Irene. Then it was as if the storm were over. He followed us to the backyard, where he handed over a plastic bag filled with a hundred packages.
“Twenty thousand,” he said, holding out his paw. “This is cash on delivery.” I took him aside and said that next time we ran out we could go to his place.
“I don’t want visitors,” he said.
“I might pay more than two hundred a bag,” I said.
He eyed me with suspicion. “Are you planning to start up on your own? What would your boss say to that?”
“This is between you and me,” I said. “We’re talking chicken feed. Ten to twenty bags for friends and acquaintances.”
He burst out laughing.
“I’ll bring the girl,” I said. “Her name’s Irene, by the way.”
He stopped laughing. Looked at me. Tried to laugh again, but couldn’t. And now everything was written in big letters in his eyes. Loneliness. Greed. Hatred. And desire. Fricking desire.
“Friday evening,” he said. “At eight. Does she drink gin?”
I nodded. From now on she did.
He gave me the address.
Two days later the old man invited me to lunch. For a second I thought Ibsen had snitched on me, because I could remember his expression. We were served by Peter and sat at the long table in the cold dining room while the old man told me he had cut out heroin imports across the country and from Amsterdam and now only imported from Bangkok via a couple of pilots. He talked about the figures, checked that I understood and repeated the usual question: Was I keeping away from violin? He sat there in the semi-gloom gazing at me, then he called Peter and told him to drive me home. In the car I considered asking Peter whether the old man was impotent.
Ibsen lived in a typical bachelor pad in a building on Ekeberg. Big plasma screen, little fridge and nothing on the walls. He poured us a cheap gin with lifeless tonic, without a slice of lemon, but with three ice cubes. Irene watched the performance. Smiled, was sweet, and left the talking to me. Ibsen sat with an idiotic grin on his face, gawping at Irene, though he did manage to close his gob whenever saliva threatened to leak out. He played fricking classical music. I got my packages and we agreed I would drop by again in two weeks. With Irene.
Then came the first report about the falling number of ODs. What they didn’t write was that first-time users of violin, after only a few weeks, were lining up with staring eyes and visible fits of the shakes from withdrawal symptoms. And as they stood there with their crinkled hundred-krone notes and found out that the price had gone up again, they cried.
After our third visit to Ibsen he took me aside and said that next time he wanted Irene to come alone. I said that was fine, but then I wanted fifty packages and the price was a hundred kroner apiece. He nodded.
It wasn’t easy to talk Irene into it, and for once the old tricks didn’t work. I had to be hard. Explain this was my chance. Our chance. Ask if she wanted to stay sleeping on a mattress in a rehearsal room. And in the end she mumbled that she didn’t. But she didn’t want to … And I said she didn’t have to, she should just be nice to the lonely old man—he probably didn’t have much fun with that foot of his. She nodded and said I had to promise not to tell Oleg. After she left for Ibsen’s pad I felt so down I diluted a bag of violin and smoked what was left in a cigarette. I woke up to someone shaking me. She stood over my mattress crying so much the tears were running down onto my face and making my eyes sting. Ibsen had made a move, but she had gotten away.
“Did you get the packages?” I asked.
That was obviously the wrong question. She broke down completely. So I said I had something to make everything all right again. I fixed up a syringe and she stared at me with big, wet eyes as I found a blue vein in her fine, white skin and inserted the needle. I felt the spasms transplant themselves from her body to mine as I pressed the plunger. Her mouth opened in a silent orgasm. Then the ecstasy drew a bright curtain in front of her eyes.
Ibsen might be a dirty old man, but he knew his chemistry.
I also knew that I had lost Irene. I could see it in her face when I asked about the packages. It could never be the same. That night I saw Irene glide into blissful oblivion along with my chances of becoming a
millionaire.
The old man continued to make millions. But still he wanted more, faster. It was like there was something he had to catch, a debt that was due soon. He didn’t seem to need the money; the house was the same, the limo was washed but not changed and the staff stayed at two: Andrey and Peter. We still had one competitor—Los Lobos—and they’d also extended their street-selling operations. They hired the Vietnamese and Moroccans who weren’t already in jail, and they sold violin not only downtown but also at Kongsvinger, in Tromsø, Trondheim and—so the rumor went—Helsinki. Odin may have earned more than the old man, but the two of them shared the market, there were no fights for territory, they were both getting very rich. Any businessman with his brain fully connected would have been happy with the status fricking quo.
There were just two clouds in the bright-blue sky.
One was the undercover cop with the stupid hat. We knew the police had been told that the Arsenal shirts were not a priority target for the moment, but Beret Man was sniffing around anyway. The other was that Los Lobos had started selling violin in Lillestrøm and Drammen at a cheaper price than in Oslo, which meant some customers were catching the train there.
One day I was summoned by the old man and told to take a message to a policeman. His name was Truls Berntsen, and it had to be done quietly. I asked why he couldn’t use Andrey or Peter, but the old man explained he didn’t want to have any contact that might lead the police back to him. It was one of his principles. And even if I had information that could expose him I was the only person besides Peter and Andrey he trusted. Yes, in many ways he did trust me. The Dope Baron trusts the Thief, I thought.
The message was that he had arranged a meeting with Odin to discuss Lillestrøm and Drammen. They would meet at a McDonald’s on Kirkeveien, Majorstuen, on Thursday night at seven. They had booked the whole second floor for a private children’s party. I could just picture it, balloons, streamers, paper hats and a fricking clown. Whose face froze when he saw the birthday guests: beefy bikers with murder in their eyes and studs on their knuckles, two and a half yards of Cossack concrete, and Odin and the old man trying to stare each other to death over the French fries.
Truls Berntsen lived alone in an apartment building in Manglerud, but when I stopped by early one Sunday morning, no one was at home. The neighbor, who’d obviously heard Berntsen’s doorbell, stuck his head out from the veranda and shouted that Truls was at Mikael’s, building a terrace. And while I was on my way to the address he’d given me I was thinking that Manglerud had to be a terrible place. Everyone clearly knew everyone.
I had been to Høyenhall before. This is Manglerud’s Beverly Hills. Vast detached houses with a view over Kværnerdalen, the downtown and Holmenkollen. I stood on the road looking down over the half-finished skeleton of a house. In front were some guys with their shirts off, cans of beer in hand, laughing and pointing to the mess that was going to be the terrace. I immediately recognized one of them. The good-looking model-type with long eyelashes. The new head of Orgkrim. The men stopped talking as they caught sight of me. And I knew why. They were police officers, every single one of them, and they smelled a bandit. Tricky shit. I hadn’t asked the old man, but the thought struck me that Truls Berntsen was the ally in the police he had advised Isabelle Skøyen to find.
“Yes?” said the man with the eyelashes. He was ripped. Abs like cobblestones. I still had the chance to back away and find Berntsen later in the day. So I don’t know why I did what I did.
“I have a message for Truls Berntsen,” I said, loud and clear.
The others turned to a man who had put his beer down and waggled over on bow legs. He didn’t stop until he was so close to me that the rest of them couldn’t hear us. He had blond hair and a powerful jaw that hung like a tilting drawer. Hate-filled suspicion shone from the small piggy eyes. If he’d been a domestic pet he would have been put down on purely aesthetic grounds.
“I don’t know who you are,” he whispered, “but I can guess, and I don’t want any fucking visits of this kind. OK?”
“OK.”
“Quick, out with it.”
I told him about the meeting and the time. And that Odin had warned he would be turning up with his whole gang.
“He wouldn’t do anything else,” Berntsen said and grunted.
“We have information that he’s just received a huge supply of horse,” I said. The guys on the terrace had started back up with their beer-drinking, but I could see the Orgkrim boss shooting glances at us. I spoke in a low voice and concentrated on passing on every detail. “It’s stored in the club at Alnabru, but will be shipping out in a couple of days.”
“Sounds like a few arrests followed by a little raid.” Berntsen grunted again, and it was only then I realized it was supposed to be laughter.
“That’s all,” I said, turning to go.
I had only made it a few yards down the road when I heard someone shout. I didn’t need to turn to know who it was. I’d seen it right away in his gaze. This is, after all, my specialty. He came up alongside me, and I stopped.
“Who are you?” he asked.
“Gusto.” I stroked the hair out of my eyes so that he could see them better. “And you?”
For a second he looked at me with surprise, like it was a tough question. Then he answered with a little smile: “Mikael.”
“Hi, Mikael. Where do you work out?”
He coughed. “What are you doing here?”
“What I said. Delivering a message to Truls. Could I have a swig of your beer?”
The strange, white stains on his face seemed to light up all of a sudden. His voice was taut with anger when he spoke again. “If you’ve done what you came to do I suggest you clear out.”
I met his glare. A furious glare. Mikael Bellman was so stunningly handsome that I felt like placing a hand on his chest. Feeling the sun-warmed sweaty skin under my fingertips. Feeling the muscles that would automatically tense in shock at my audacity. The nipple that would harden as I squeezed it. The wonderful pain as he punched me to save his good name and reputation. Mikael Bellman. I felt the desire. My own fricking desire.
“See you,” I said.
The same night it struck me. How I would succeed in what I guess you never managed. Because if you had, you wouldn’t have dumped me, would you? How I would become whole. How I would become human. How I would become a millionaire.
The sun glittered so intensely on the fjord that Harry had to squint through his ladies’ sunglasses.
Oslo was not only having a facelift in Bjørvika, it was also having a silicone tit of a new district stuck out into the fjord where once it had been flat-chested and boring. The silicone wonder was called Tjuvholmen and looked expensive. Expensive apartments with expensive fjord views, expensive boat moorings, expensive bijou shops with exclusive items, art galleries with parquet flooring from jungles you had never heard of, galleries that are more spectacular than the art on the walls. The nipple on the most prominent edge of the fjord was a restaurant with the kind of prices that had caused Oslo to overtake Tokyo as the most expensive city in the world.
Harry went in and a friendly headwaiter greeted him.
“I’m looking for Isabelle Skøyen,” Harry said, scanning the room. It seemed to be packed to the rafters.
“Do you know what name the table’s reserved under?” the waiter asked with a little smile that told Harry all the tables had been booked weeks ago.
The woman who had answered when Harry rang the Social Services Committee office in City Hall had at first been willing to tell him only that Isabelle Skøyen was out having lunch. But when Harry had said that was why he was calling, he was sitting at the Continental waiting for her, the secretary had, in her horror, blurted out that the lunch was at Sjømagasinet!
“No,” Harry said now. “Is it all right if I go take a look?”
The headwaiter hesitated. Studied the suit.
“Don’t worry,” Harry said. “I can see her.”
>
He strode past the waiter before the final judgment could be passed.
He recognized the face and the pose from the pictures on the Net. She was leaning back against the bar with her elbows on the counter, facing the dining room. Presumably she was waiting for someone but looked more as if she were appearing onstage. And when Harry looked at the men around the tables he understood she was probably doing both. Her coarse, almost masculine face was split into two by an ax blade of a nose. Nevertheless, Isabelle Skøyen did have a kind of conventional attraction other women might call “elegance.” Her eyes were heavily made up, a constellation of stars around the cold, blue irises, which lent her a predatory, lupine look. For that reason her hair was a comical contrast: a blond doll’s mane arranged in sweet garlands on either side of her manly face. But it was her body that made Isabelle Skøyen such an eye-catcher.
She was a towering figure, athletic, with broad shoulders and hips. The tight-fitting black trousers emphasized her big, muscular thighs. Harry decided that her breasts were bought, supported by an unusually clever bra or simply impressive. His Google search had revealed that she bred horses on a farm in Rygge; had been divorced twice, the second time from a financier who had made a fortune four times and lost it three; had been a participant in national shooting competitions; was a blood donor, in trouble for having given a political colleague the boot because he “was such a wimp”; and more than happily posed for photographers at film and theater premieres. In short: a lot of woman for your money.
He moved into her field of vision, and halfway across the floor her stare still hadn’t relinquished him. Like someone who considers it her right to look. Harry went up to her, fully aware that he had at least a dozen pairs of eyes on his back.
“You are Isabelle Skøyen,” he said.
She looked as if she were about to give him short shrift, but changed her mind, angled her head. “That’s the thing about these overpriced Oslo restaurants, isn’t it? Everyone is someone. So …” She dragged out the o as her gaze took him in from top to toe. “Who are you?”