Phantom hh-9

by Jo Nesbo

  He rolled up a thousand-krone note he’d taken from an envelope he’d been given the last time he was here. There were especially designed plastic tubes for the purpose, but he was not that kind: he was not the heavy user she had told her divorce lawyer he was. The sly bitch maintained she wanted a divorce because she did not wish to see her children growing up with a drug-addict father and she had no interest in watching him sniff away their house and home. And it had nothing to do with air stewardesses, she couldn’t give a damn, she had stopped worrying about that years ago, his age would take care of that. She and the lawyer had given him an ultimatum. She would take over the house, the children and the remnants of the inheritance he hadn’t squandered. Or they would report him for possession and use of cocaine. She had gathered together enough evidence for even his own lawyer to say that he would be sentenced and dumped by his airline.

  It had been a simple choice. All she had allowed him to retain were the debts.

  He got to his feet and went to the window and stared out. Surely they would be here soon, wouldn’t they?

  This was quite a new arrangement. He was to take a package on an outward flight, to Bangkok. God knows why. Fish to Lofoten, as they said in Norwegian, and so on. Anyway, this was the sixth trip, and so far everything had gone without a hitch.

  There was light in the neighbouring houses, but they were so far apart. Lonely habitations, he thought. They had been officers’ quarters when Gardermoen had been a military base. Identical single-storey boxes with large, bare lawns between the houses. Least possible height so that a low-flying machine wouldn’t collide. Greatest possible distance between the houses so that a fire following a crash wouldn’t spread.

  They had lived here during his compulsory national service when he had been flying Hercules transport planes. The kids had run between houses, visiting other children. Saturday, summer. Men round the barbecues wearing aprons and holding aperitifs. Chatter coming from the open windows where the women were preparing salads and drinking Campari. Like a scene from The Right Stuff, his favourite film, the one with the first astronauts and the test pilot, Chuck Yeager. Damned attractive, these pilots’ wives. Even though they were only Hercules pilots. They had been happy then, hadn’t they? Was that why he had returned? An unconscious urge to go back in time? Or to find out where it all went wrong, and make amends?

  He saw the car coming and automatically checked his watch. Logged that they were eighteen minutes late.

  He went to the coffee table. Breathed in twice. Then placed the rolled-up note against the lowest end of the line, bent down and sniffed the powder up his nose. It stung the mucous membrane. He licked his fingertip, ran it over the remaining powder and rubbed it into his gums. It had a bitter taste. The doorbell rang.

  It was the same two Mormon guys as always. One small, one tall, both wearing their Sunday best. But tattoos protruded from under their sleeves. It was almost comic.

  They handed him the package. Half a kilo in one long sausage that would just fit inside the metal plate around the telescopic handle of the cabin bag. He was to remove the package after they had landed in Suvarnabhumi and put it under the loose rug at the back of the pilots’ locker in the cockpit. And that was the last he would see of it; the rest would probably be sorted out by the ground crew.

  When Mr Big and Mr Small had presented the opportunity to take packages to Bangkok, it had sounded like lunacy. After all, there was not a country in the world where the street price of dope was higher than in Oslo, so why export? He hadn’t probed, he knew he wouldn’t get an answer, and that was fine. But he had pointed out that smuggling heroin to Thailand carried a sentence of death if caught, so he wanted better payment.

  They had laughed. First the little one. Then the big one. And Tord had wondered if maybe shorter nerve channels produced quicker reactions. Maybe that was why they made fighter-jet cockpits so low, to exclude tall, slow pilots.

  The little one explained to Tord in his harsh, Russian-sounding English that it was not heroin, it was something quite new, so new that there wasn’t even a law banning it yet. But when Tord asked why they had to smuggle a legal substance they had laughed even louder and told him to shut up and answer yes or no.

  Tord Schultz had answered yes as another thought announced its presence. What would the consequences be if he said no?

  That was six trips ago.

  Tord Schultz studied the package. A couple of times he had considered smearing washing-up liquid over the condoms and freezer bags they used, but he had been told that sniffer dogs could distinguish smells and were not fooled so easily. The trick was to make sure the plastic bag was fully sealed.

  He waited. Nothing happened. He cleared his throat.

  ‘Oh, I almost forgot,’ said Mr Small. ‘Yesterday’s delivery…’

  He slipped his hand inside his jacket with an evil grin. Or perhaps it wasn’t evil, perhaps it was Eastern bloc humour. Tord felt like punching him, blowing unfiltered cigarette smoke into his face, spitting twelve-year-old whiskey in his eye. Western bloc humour. Instead he mumbled a thank-you and took the envelope. It felt thin between his fingertips. They had to be big notes.

  Afterwards he stood by the window again and watched the car disappear into the darkness, heard the sound being drowned by a Boeing 737. Maybe a 600. Next generation anyway. Throatier and higher pitched than the old classics. He saw his reflection in the window.

  Yes, he had taken their coin. And he would continue to take it. Take everything life threw in his face. For he was not Donald Draper. He was not Chuck Yeager and not Neil Armstrong. He was Tord Schultz. A long-spined pilot with debts. And a cocaine problem. He ought to…

  His thoughts were drowned by the next plane.

  Bloody church bells! Can you see them, Dad, the so-called next of kin all standing over my coffin? Crying crocodile tears, their sombre mugs saying: ‘Gusto, why couldn’t you have just learned to be like us?’ Well, you sodding self-righteous hypocrites, I couldn’t! I couldn’t be like my foster-mother, a daft, spoilt airhead, going on about how wonderful everything is, provided you read the right book, listen to the right guru, eat the right fricking herbs. And whenever anyone punctured that woolly wisdom she had bought into, she always played the same card: ‘But look at the world we have created: war, injustice, people who don’t live in harmony with themselves any longer.’ Three things, baby. One: war, injustice and disharmony are natural. Two: you are the least harmonious of all in our disgusting little family. You wanted only the love you were denied, and you didn’t give a shit about the love you were given. Sorry, Rolf, Stein and Irene, but she had room only for me. Which makes point three all the more amusing: I never loved you, baby, however much you considered you deserved it. I called you Mum because it made you happy, and life simpler for me. When I did what I did it was because you let me, because I couldn’t stop myself. Because that’s the way I am.

  Rolf. At least you told me not to call you Dad. You really tried to love me. But you could not fool nature; you realised you loved your own flesh and blood more: Stein and Irene. When I told other people you were ‘my foster-parents’ I could see the wounded expression in Mum’s eyes. And the hatred in yours. Not because ‘foster-parents’ shrank you to the only function you had in my life, but because I wounded the woman you, incomprehensibly, loved. I think you were honest enough to see yourself as I saw you: a person who at some point in your life, intoxicated on your own idealism, undertook to raise a changeling but soon understood that your account was in deficit. The monthly sum they paid you for care did not cover the real expense. Then you discovered that I was a cuckoo in the nest. That I ate everything. Everything you loved. Everyone you loved. You should have realised earlier and thrown me out, Rolf! You were the first to see that I stole. Initially it was only a hundred kroner. I denied it. Said I’d been given it by Mum. ‘Isn’t that right, Mum? You gave it to me.’ And Mum nodded after some hesitation, with tears in her eyes, said she must have forgotten. The next time i
t was a thousand. From your desk drawer. Money that was meant for our holiday, you said. ‘The only holiday I want is from you,’ I answered. And then you slapped me for the first time. And it was as if it triggered something in you, because you went on hitting. I was already taller and broader than you, but I have never been able to fight. Not like that, not with fists and muscles. I fought in another way, one where you win. But you kept hitting me, with a clenched fist now. And I knew why. You wanted to destroy my face. Take my power away from me. But the woman I called Mum intervened. So you said it. The word. The Thief. True enough. But it also meant I would have to crush you, little man.

  Stein. The silent elder brother. The first to recognise the cuckoo by the plumage, but smart enough to keep his distance. The clever, bright, smart lone wolf who upped and left for a student town as far away as possible and as soon as he could. Who tried to persuade Irene, his dear little sister, to join him. He thought that she could finish school in fricking Trondheim, that it would do her good to get away from Oslo. But Mum put a stop to Irene’s evacuation. She knew nothing of course. Didn’t want to know.

  Irene. Attractive, lovely, freckled, fragile Irene. You were too good for this world. You were all I was not. And yet you loved me. Would you have loved me if you had known? Would you have loved me if you had known that I was shagging your mother from the age of fifteen? Shagging your red-wine-soaked, whimpering mother, taking her from behind against the toilet door or the cellar door or the kitchen door while whispering ‘Mum’ in her ear because it made both her and me hot. She gave me money, she covered my back if anything happened, she said she only wanted to borrow me until she was old and ugly and I met a nice, sweet girl. And when I answered, ‘But, Mum, you are old and ugly,’ she laughed it off and begged for more.

  I still had the bruises after my foster-father’s punches and kicks the day I rang him at work and told him to come home at three, there was something important I had to tell him. I left the front door ajar so that she wouldn’t hear him come in. And I spoke into her ear to drown his footsteps, said the sweet nothings she liked to hear.

  I saw the reflection in the kitchen window, of him standing in the kitchen doorway.

  He moved out the next day. Irene and Stein were told that Mum and Dad had not been getting on well for a while and had decided to separate for a bit. Irene was broken-hearted. Stein was in his student town, and he answered with a text: ‘Sad. Where would u like me to go 4 Xmas?’

  Irene cried and cried. She loved me. Of course she searched for me. For the Thief.

  The church bells rang for the fifth time. Crying and sniffling from the pews. Cocaine, incredible earnings. Rent a city-centre flat in the West End, register it in some junkie’s name who you pay off with a shot, and start selling in small quantities by stairways or gates, ratchet up the price as they begin to feel secure; coke folk pay anything for security. Get on your feet, get out, cut down on dope, become somebody. Don’t die in a squat like a bloody loser. The priest coughs. ‘We are here to commemorate Gusto Hanssen.’

  A voice from far back: ‘Th-th-thief.’

  Tutu’s tribe sitting there in biker jackets and bandanas. And even further back: the whimpering of a dog. Rufus. Good, loyal Rufus. Have you come back here? Or is it me who has already gone there?

  Tord Schultz placed his Samsonite bag on the conveyor belt winding its way into the X-ray machine beside the smiling security official.

  ‘I don’t understand why you let them give you such a schedule,’ the flight attendant said. ‘Bangkok twice a week.’

  ‘I asked them to,’ Tord said, passing through the metal detector. Someone in the trade union had proposed that the crews should go on strike against having to be exposed to radiation several times a day. American research had shown that proportionally more pilots and cabin crew died of cancer than the rest of the population. But the strike agitators had said nothing about the average life expectancy also being higher. Air crew died of cancer because there was very little else to die of. They lived the safest lives in the world. The most boring lives in the world.

  ‘You want to fly that much?’

  ‘I’m a pilot. I like flying,’ Tord lied, taking down his bag, extending the handle and walking away.

  She was alongside him in seconds, the clack of her heels on Gardermoen’s grey antique fonce marble floor almost drowning the buzz of voices under the vaulted wooden beams and steel. However, unfortunately it did not drown her whispered question.

  ‘Is that because she left you, Tord? Is it because you have too much time on your hands and nothing to fill it with? Is it because you don’t want to sit at home-’

  ‘It’s because I need the overtime,’ he interrupted. At least that was not an outright lie.

  ‘Because I know exactly what it’s like. I got divorced last winter, as you know.’

  ‘Ah, yes,’ said Tord, who didn’t even know she had been married. He shot her a swift glance. Fifty? Wondered what she looked like in the morning without make-up and the fake tan. A faded flight attendant with a faded flight attendant dream. He was pretty sure he had never rogered her. Not face on, anyway. Whose stock joke had that been? One of the old pilots. One of the whiskey-on-the-rocks, blue-eyed fighter pilots. One of those who managed to retire before their status crashed. He accelerated as they turned into the corridor towards the flight crew centre. She was out of breath, but still kept up with him. But if he maintained this speed she might not have enough air to speak.

  ‘Erm, Tord, since we’ve got a stay-over in Bangkok perhaps we could…’

  He yawned aloud. And felt no more than that she had been offended. He was still a bit groggy after the night before — there had been some more vodka and powder after the Mormons had gone. Not that he had ingested so much he would have failed a breathalyser test, of course, but enough for him to dread the fight against sleep for the eleven hours in the air.

  ‘Look!’ she exclaimed in the idiotic glissando tone that women use when they want to say something is absolutely, inconceivably, heart-rendingly sweet.

  And he did look. It was coming towards them. A small, light-haired, long-eared dog with sad eyes and an enthusiastically wagging tail. A springer spaniel. It was being led by a woman with matching blonde hair, big drop earrings, a universally apologetic half-smile and gentle, brown eyes.

  ‘Isn’t he a dear?’ she purred beside him.

  ‘Mm,’ Tord said in a gravelly voice.

  The dog stuck its snout into the groin of the pilot in front of them, and passed on. He turned round with a raised eyebrow and a crooked smile, as if to suggest a boyish, cheeky expression. But Tord was unable to continue that line of thought. He was unable to continue any line of thought except his own.

  The dog was wearing a yellow vest. The same type of vest the woman with the drop earrings was wearing. On which was written CUSTOMS.

  It came closer, and was only five metres from them now.

  It shouldn’t be a problem. Couldn’t be a problem. The drugs were packed in condoms with a double layer of freezer bags on the outside. Not so much as a molecule of odour could escape. So just smile. Relax and smile. Not too much, not too little. Tord turned to the chattering voice beside him, as though the words that were issuing forth demanded deep concentration.

  ‘Excuse me.’

  They had passed the dog, and Tord kept walking.

  ‘Excuse me!’ The voice was sharper.

  Tord looked ahead. The door to the flight crew centre was less than ten metres away. Safety. Ten paces. Home and dry.

  ‘Excuse me, sir!’

  Seven paces.

  ‘I think she means you, Tord.’

  ‘What?’ Tord stopped. Had to stop. Looked back with what he hoped did not appear to be feigned surprise. The woman in the yellow vest was coming towards them.

  ‘The dog picked you out.’

  ‘Did it?’ Tord looked down at the dog. How? he was thinking.

  The dog looked back, wagging its tail wildly, as th
ough Tord was its new play pal.

  How? Double layer of freezer bags and condom. How?

  ‘That means we have to check you. Could you come with us please.’

  The gentleness was still there in her brown eyes, but there was no question mark behind her words. And at that moment he realised how. He almost fingered the ID card on his chest.

  The cocaine.

  He had forgotten to wipe down the card after chopping up the last line. That had to be it.

  But it was only a few grains, which he could easily explain away by saying he had lent his ID card to someone at a party. That wasn’t his biggest problem now. The bag. It would be searched. As a pilot he had trained and practised emergency procedures so often it was almost automatic. That was the intention, of course, even when panic seized you this was what you would do, this brain kicked in for lack of other orders: the emergency procedures. How many times had he visualised this situation: the customs officials asking him to go with them? Thinking what he would do? Practising it in his mind? He turned to the flight attendant with a resigned smile, caught sight of her name tag. ‘I’ve been picked out, it seems, Kristin. Could you take my bag?’

  ‘The bag comes with us,’ the official said.

  Tord Schultz turned back. ‘I thought you said the dog picked me out, not the bag.’

  ‘That’s true, but-’

  ‘There are flight documents inside which the crew needs to check. Unless you want to take responsibility for delaying a full Airbus 340 to Bangkok.’ He noticed that he — quite literally — had puffed himself up, filled his lungs and expanded his chest muscles in his captain’s jacket. ‘If we miss our slot that could mean a delay of several hours and a loss of hundreds of thousands of kroner for the airline.’