by Jo Nesbo
Her eyes were closed. She was sitting quite still. As though she were used to this. Being inspected with a flashlight.
“Irene?” Harry asked tentatively.
At that moment the phone in Harry’s pocket began to vibrate.
I looked at my watch. I’d searched the whole flat and still hadn’t found Oleg’s stash. And Ibsen should have been here twenty minutes ago. He’d pay for this, the perv! It was life for kidnapping and rape. The day Irene came to Oslo Central I took her to the rehearsal room, where I said Oleg was waiting for her. He wasn’t, of course. But Ibsen was. He held her while I gave her a shot. I thought about Rufus. About how it was for the best. Then she calmed right down, and all we had to do was drag her into his car. He had my half-kilo in the trunk. Did I have any regrets? Yes, I regretted I hadn’t asked for a kilo! No, of course I had some regrets. I’m not completely soulless. But when I started to think, “Fuck, I shouldn’t have done that,” I told myself that Ibsen would take good care of her. He must love her, in his own warped way. Anyway it was too late—now the main thing was to get some medicine and to be healthy again.
This was new territory for me, not getting what the body needed. I always got what I wanted—I realized that now. And if that wasn’t the way it was going to be in the future I would rather drop dead on the spot. Die young and beautiful, with my teeth more or less intact. Ibsen wasn’t coming; I knew that now. I stood by the kitchen window looking out onto the street, but the fricking limp-dick was nowhere to be seen. No sign of Oleg, either.
I’d tried them all. There was only one left.
I’d avoided this option for a long time. I was scared. Yes, I was. But I knew he was in town. He’d been here from the day he found out she had disappeared. Stein. My foster brother.
I looked down the street again.
No. I’d rather die than call him.
The seconds passed. Ibsen wasn’t coming.
Hell! Better to die than be so sick.
I pinched my eyes again, but insects were crawling out of the cavities, darting under my eyelids, scrabbling all over my face.
Dying lost out.
The finale awaited.
Call him or die?
Fuck, fuck, fuck!
HARRY SWITCHED OFF the flashlight when the phone began to vibrate. Saw from the number that it was Hans Christian.
“Someone’s coming,” his voice, hoarse with anxiety, whispered in Harry’s ear. “He parked outside the gate, and now he’s heading for the house.”
“OK,” Harry said. “Take it easy. Text me if you see anything. And clear out if—”
“Clear out?” Hans Christian sounded genuinely indignant.
“If you can see this is going down the tube, OK?”
“Why should I—”
Harry hung up, switched the light back on and shone it at the wire. “Irene?”
The girl blinked at the light with saucer eyes.
“Listen to me. My name’s Harry. I’m a policeman and I’m here to get you out. But someone’s coming. If he comes down here, act as if nothing’s happened, OK? I’ll soon have you out of here, Irene. I promise.”
“Do you have …?” she mumbled, but Harry didn’t catch the rest.
“Do I have what?”
“Do you have any … violin?”
Harry gritted his teeth. “Hold out for a bit longer,” he whispered.
Harry ran to the top of the stairs and turned off the light. Pushed the door ajar and peered out. He had a clear view of the front door. He heard a shuffling gait on the gravel outside. One foot being dragged after the other. Clubfoot. And then the door opened.
The light came on.
And there he was. Big, round and plump.
Stig Nybakk.
The department head at the Radiumhospitalet. The one who remembered Harry from school. Who knew Tresko. Who had a wedding ring with a black nick. Who had a bachelor flat in which it was impossible to find anything out of the ordinary. But also a house left by his parents he hadn’t sold.
He hung his coat on the rack and walked toward Harry with his hand outstretched. Stopped suddenly. Fluttered his hand in front of him. A deep furrow in his brow. Stood listening. And now Harry knew why. The thread he had felt on his hand when he entered, which he had taken to be a spider’s web, must have been something else. Some invisible fiber Nybakk had wound across the hall to indicate whether he had had any unwelcome visitors.
Nybakk moved with surprising speed and agility toward a cupboard. Stuck his hand in. Pulled at something and the metal gleamed. A shotgun.
Shit, shit, shit. Harry hated shotguns.
Nybakk took out a box of cartridges, which was already open. Removed two large red cartridges, held them between first and middle fingers.
Harry’s brain whirred and whirred, but failed to come up with any good ideas, so he chose the bad one. Took his phone and began to press.
B-e-e-p a-n-d w-a-j-p
Shit! Wrong!
He heard the metallic click as Nybakk broke the gun.
Delete. Where are you? Out with j and p and in with i and t.
Heard him loading the cartridges.
w-a-i-t t-i-l-l h-e i-s
Tiny fucking keys! Come on!
Heard the barrel click into place.
i-n t-h-e w-i-n-c
Wrong! Harry heard Nybakk’s shuffling gait come closer. Not enough time. Would have to hope Hans Christian could use his imagination.
l-i-g-h-t-s!
He pressed SEND.
Harry could see Nybakk had raised the shotgun to his shoulder. And it struck him that the pharmacist had noticed that the cellar door was ajar.
At that moment a car horn sounded. Loud and insistent. Nybakk flinched. Looked to the sitting room, which faced the road. Hesitated. Then went into the room.
The horn beeped again, and this time it didn’t stop.
Harry opened the cellar door and then followed Nybakk, didn’t need to tiptoe, knew the horn would drown out his footsteps. From the door to the sitting room he watched Nybakk as he drew the curtains aside. The room was filled with blinding light from the powerful headlights on Hans Christian’s car.
Harry took four long strides, and Stig Nybakk neither saw nor heard him approach. He was holding one hand in front of his face to shield it from the light as Harry reached both arms around Stig Nybakk’s shoulders, grabbed the gun, pulled the barrel into his fleshy neck. Dug his knees into the back of Nybakk’s legs, forcing both of them down as Nybakk desperately fought for air.
Hans Christian must have realized the beeping had done its job, because it stopped, but Harry continued to apply pressure. Until Nybakk’s movements slowed and lost energy and he seemed to wilt.
Harry knew Nybakk was losing consciousness. After a few minutes without oxygen the brain would be damaged and after a few more Stig Nybakk, the kidnapper and brain behind violin, would be dead.
Harry took stock. Counted to three and allowed one hand to let go of the gun. Nybakk slid to the floor without a noise.
Harry sat on a chair, panting. Gradually, as the adrenaline level in his blood sank, the pain from his chin and neck returned. It had been getting worse by the hour. He tried to ignore it, and pressed o and k to Hans Christian.
Nybakk began to groan softly and hunched himself up into a fetal position.
Harry searched him. Laid everything he found in his pockets on the coffee table. Wallet, cell phone and bottle of prescription pills: Zestril. Harry remembered his grandfather had taken them to prevent a heart attack. Harry stuffed the pills into his jacket pocket, put the muzzle of the shotgun to Nybakk’s pale brow and ordered him to get up.
Nybakk looked at Harry. Was about to say something, but changed his mind. Struggled to his feet and swayed.
“Where are we going?” he asked as Harry nudged him forward into the hall.
“Downstairs,” Harry said.
Stig Nybakk was still unsteady, and Harry supported him with one hand on his shoulder and th
e gun in his back as they clambered down to the cellar. They stopped by the door where he had found Irene.
“How did you know it was me?”
“The ring,” Harry said. “Open up.”
Nybakk took a key from his pocket and twisted it in the padlock.
Inside, he switched on a light.
Irene had moved. She was cowering in the corner farthest from them, trembling, one shoulder raised, as though afraid someone might hit her. Around her ankle was a shackle attached to a chain that led up to the ceiling, where it was nailed to a beam.
Harry noticed that the chain was long enough for her to move around. Long enough for her to switch on the light.
She had preferred darkness.
“Release her,” Harry said. “And put the shackle on.”
Nybakk coughed. Held up his palms. “Listen, Harry—”
Harry hit him. Completely lost his head and hit him. Heard the lifeless thud of metal on flesh and saw the red weal the gun barrel had made across Nybakk’s nose.
“Say my name one more time,” Harry whispered and felt himself forcing out the words, “and I’ll plaster your head against the wall with the wrong end of the gun.”
With quaking hands Nybakk unlocked the shackle on her foot while Irene stared into the distance, stiff and apathetic, as though none of this concerned her.
“Irene,” Harry said. “Irene!”
She seemed to wake up, and looked at him.
“Get out of here,” he said.
She pinched her eyes as if it cost her every ounce of concentration to interpret the sounds he had made, to convert the words into meaning. And actions. She walked past him and into the cellar passage with a slow, fixed, somnambulist gait.
Nybakk had sat down on the mattress and pulled up his trouser leg. He was trying to attach the narrow shackle over his fat white calf.
“I …”
“Around your wrist,” Harry said.
Nybakk obeyed, and Harry jerked the chain to check that it was tight enough.
“Take off the ring and give it to me.”
“Why? It’s just cheap—”
“Because it’s not yours.”
Nybakk coaxed the ring off and passed it to Harry.
“I know nothing,” he said.
“About what?” Harry asked.
“About what I know you’re going to ask. About Dubai. I’ve met him twice, but both times I was led there blindfolded, so I don’t know where I was. His two Russians came here and collected goods twice a week, but I never heard any names mentioned. Listen, if it’s money you want, I’ve—”
“Was that it?”
“Was that what?”
“Everything. Was it for money?”
Nybakk blinked a couple of times. Shrugged. Harry waited. And then a kind of weary smile flitted across Nybakk’s face. “What do you think, Harry?”
He motioned toward his foot.
Harry didn’t answer. Didn’t know if he wanted to hear. He might understand. That for two guys growing up in Oppsal, under the same conditions, by and large, a congenital defect can make life dramatically different for one of them. A few bones out of line, turning the foot inward. Pes equinovarus. Horse foot. Because the way someone with a clubfoot walks is redolent of a horse tiptoeing. A defect that gives you a slightly worse start in life, for which you find ways to compensate, or you don’t. Which means you have to compensate a bit more to become Mr. Popular, the one they want: the boy who is the class leader, the cool dude who has cool pals and the girl in the row by the window, the one whose smile makes your heart explode, even though the smile isn’t for you. Stig Nybakk had limped through life, unnoticed. So unnoticed Harry couldn’t remember him. And it had gone reasonably well. He’d got himself an education, worked hard, been made head of a department, had even begun to be class leader himself. But the essential ingredient was missing. The girl from the row by the window. She was still smiling at the others.
Rich. He had to become rich.
Because money is like cosmetics—it conceals everything, it gets you everything, including those things that it is said are not for sale: respect, admiration, love. You just have to look around; beauty marries money every time. So now it was his turn, Stig Nybakk’s, Clubfoot’s.
He had invented violin, and the world ought to be at his feet. So why didn’t she want him? Why did she turn away in barely concealed disgust even though she knew—knew—that he was already a rich man and would be richer with every week that passed? Was it because there was someone else she was thinking about, the one who had given her the foolish, tawdry ring she wore on her finger? It was unjust; he had worked hard, tirelessly, to fulfill the criteria in order to be loved, and now she had to love him. So he had taken her. Snatched her from the row by the window. Shackled her here, so that she would never disappear again. And to complete the forced marriage, he had taken her ring and put it on his own finger.
The cheap ring Irene had been given by Oleg, who in turn had stolen it from his mother, who in turn had been given it by Harry, who in turn had bought it at a street market, where in turn … it was like the Norwegian children’s song “Take the Ring and Let It Wander.” Harry stroked the black nick in the ring’s gilt surface. He had been observant and yet blind.
Observant the first time he had met Stig Nybakk and said: “The ring. I used to have an identical one.”
And blind because he hadn’t reflected on what was identical.
The nick in the copper that had gone black.
It was only when he had seen Martine’s wedding ring and heard her say he was the only person in the world who would buy a tacky ring that he had linked Oleg with Nybakk.
Harry had not doubted himself for a moment, even though he hadn’t found anything suspicious in Stig Nybakk’s flat. Quite the contrary, it was so utterly devoid of compromising objects that Harry had assumed at once that Nybakk had to be keeping his bad conscience elsewhere. The parents’ house that stood empty and he could not sell. The red house on the hill above Harry’s family home.
“Did you kill Gusto?” Harry asked.
Stig Nybakk shook his head. Heavy eyelids. He seemed sleepy.
“Alibi?”
“No. No, I don’t have one.”
“Tell me.”
“I was there.”
“Where?”
“On Hausmanns Gate. I was going to see him. He had threatened to expose me. But when I got to the address there were police cars everywhere. Someone had already killed Gusto.”
“Already? So you planned to do the same?”
“Not the same. I don’t have a pistol.”
“What do you have, then?”
Nybakk shrugged. “Chemistry studies. Gusto was suffering from withdrawal symptoms. He needed violin.”
Harry looked at Nybakk’s tired smile and nodded. “So whatever white stuff you had you knew Gusto would inject on the spot.”
The chain rattled as Nybakk raised his hand to point to the door. “Irene. May I say a few words to her before …?”
Harry watched Stig Nybakk. Saw something he recognized. A damaged person, a finished man. Someone who had rebelled against the cards fate had dealt him. And lost.
“I’ll ask her,” he said.
Harry found Irene upstairs in the sitting room. She was in a chair with her feet tucked up underneath her. Harry fetched a coat from the hall closet, draped it over her shoulders. He spoke to her in a whisper. She answered in a tiny voice, as though afraid of the echoes from the cold sitting-room walls.
She told him Gusto and Nybakk, or Ibsen, as they called him, had worked together to trap her. Payment had been half a kilo of violin. She had been locked up for four months.
Harry let her say her piece. Waited until he knew she had run out before asking the next question.
She didn’t know anything about the murder of Gusto, beyond what Ibsen had told her. Or who Dubai was, or where he lived. Gusto hadn’t said anything, and Irene hadn’t wanted to know. All
she had heard about Dubai were the same rumors about his flitting around town like some kind of phantom and that no one knew who he was or what he looked like, and that he was like the wind, impossible to catch.
Harry nodded. He had heard that image rather too often of late.
“H.C. will drive you to the police station. He’s a lawyer and will help you to report this. Afterward he’ll take you to Oleg’s mother’s, where you can stay for the meantime.”
Irene shook her head. “I’ll call Stein, my brother. I can stay with him. And …”
“Yes?”
“Do I have to report this?”
Harry looked at her. She was so young. So small. Like a baby bird. It was impossible to say how much damage had been done. “It can wait until tomorrow,” Harry said.
He saw the tears well up in her eyes. And his first thought was: At last. Was about to lay a hand on her shoulder, but changed his mind. A strange man’s hand was perhaps not what she needed. But the next instant her tears were gone.
“Is there … is there any alternative?” she asked.
“Such as?” Harry said.
“Such as never having to see him again.” Her eyes would not release his. “Ever.”
Then he felt it. Her hand on top of his. “Please.”
Harry patted the hand, then placed it back in her lap. “Come on—I’ll take you to H.C.”
AFTER HARRY HAD watched the car go, he went back into the house and down to the cellar. He couldn’t find any rope, but under the stairs hung a garden hose. He took it to the storeroom and threw it at Nybakk. Looked up at the beam. High enough.
He took the bottle of Zestril tablets he had found in Nybakk’s pocket. Emptied the contents into his hand. Six.
“You’ve got a heart condition?” Harry asked.
Nybakk nodded.
“How many tablets do you have to take a day?”
“Two.”
Harry put the tablets in Nybakk’s hand and the empty bottle in his jacket pocket.
“I’ll be back in two days. I don’t know what your reputation means to you. The shame would certainly have been worse if your parents had been alive, but I’m sure you’ve heard how other prisoners treat sex offenders. If you don’t exist when I return, then you’re forgotten, your name will never be mentioned again. If you do, we’ll take you to the police station. Got that?”