by Jo Nesbo
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Is that a good thing?’
A fleeting smile. ‘I don’t know. It’s both good and bad. Do you understand?’
Harry nodded and pulled her to him.
‘You’re the worst thing that’s ever happened to me,’ she said. ‘And the best. Even now, merely by being here, you can make me forget everything else. No, I’m not sure that’s good.’
‘I know.’
‘What’s that?’ she asked, pointing to the suitcase.
‘I’m checking in to Hotel Leon.’
‘But…’
‘We’ll talk tomorrow. Goodnight, Rakel.’
Harry kissed her on the forehead, opened the door and went out into the warm autumn evening.
The boy in reception said he didn’t need to fill in another registration form and offered Harry the same room as last time, 301. Harry said that was fine so long as they fixed the broken curtain pole.
‘Is it broken again?’ the boy said. ‘It was the previous lodger. He had a bit of 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 up to 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 grey 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 was 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 gone 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 the 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 towards the ceiling. Studied the winding routes it took, the apparently random figures it made and tried to see a pattern in it.
19
It took two months from the meeting between the old boy and Isabelle for the clean-up 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 troops to raid a flat in Helsfyr which the gypsy chief thought no one knew about. Then it was the turn of 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 given anonymous tip-offs. Over the next few weeks street sellers, everything from coal-black Somalis to milky-white Norwegians, were busted and banged up. But not a single one of us wearing an Arsenal shirt. It was already clear that we had more elbow room and the queues were getting longer. The old boy was recruiting some of the unemployed street sellers, but keeping his end of the bargain: heroin dealing had become less visible in Oslo city centre. We cut down on heroin imports as we earned so much more on violin. Violin was expensive, so some tried to switch to morphine, but they soon came back.
We were selling faster than Ibsen could make it.
One Tuesday we ran out at half past twelve, and since it was strictly forbidden to use mobiles — the old boy thought Oslo was fricking Baltimore — I went down to the station and rang the Russian Gresso phone from one of the call boxes. Andrey said he was busy, but he would see what he could do. Oleg, Irene and I sat on the steps in Skippergata waving away punters and chilling. An hour later I saw a figure come limping towards us. It was Ibsen in person. He was furious. Yelling and cursing. Until he caught sight of Irene. Then it was as if the storm was over and his tone became more conciliatory. Followed us to the backyard where he handed over a plastic bag containing 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. Club Foot 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 boy invited me to lunch. For a second I thought Ibsen had grassed 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 boy 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 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 boy was impotent.
Ibsen lived in a typical bachelor pad in a block 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 a fortnight. 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 queueing 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 the 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.
Persuading Irene required some effort, 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 fo
r 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 tried it on, but she had managed to get 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 alright 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 boy continued to make millions. Yet still he wanted more, faster. It was as if 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 limousine was washed but not changed and the staff remained at two: Andrey and Peter. We still had one competitor — Los Lobos — and they too had extended their street-selling operations. They hired the Vietnamese and Moroccans who were not already banged up, and they sold violin not only in the town centre but also at Kongsvinger, in Tromso, Trondheim and — so the rumour went — in Helsinki. Odin and Los Lobos may have earned more than the old boy, but the two of them shared this 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 snouting around anyway. The other was that Los Lobos had started selling violin in Lillestrom and Drammen at a cheaper price than in Oslo, which meant some punters were catching the train there.
One day I was summoned by the old boy and told to take a message to a policeman. His name was Truls Berntsen, and it had to be done with discretion. I asked why he couldn’t use Andrey or Peter, but the old boy explained that 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 beside 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 Lillestrom and Drammen. They would meet at McDonald’s in Kirkeveien, Majorstuen, on Thursday evening at seven. They had booked the whole of the first floor for a private children’s party. I could visualise 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 metres of Cossack concrete, and Odin and the old boy trying to stare each other to death over the pommes frites.
Truls Berntsen lived alone in a block of flats in Manglerud, but when I called round early one Sunday morning, no one was at home. The neighbour, who’d obviously heard Berntsen’s bell ring, 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 had given me I was thinking that Manglerud had to be a terrible place. Everyone clearly knew everyone.
I had been to Hoyenhall before. This is Manglerud’s Beverly Hills. Vast detached houses with a view over Kv?rnerdalen, the centre and Holmenkollen. I stood in the road looking down over the half-finished skeleton of a house. In front were some guys with their shirts off, can of beer in hand, laughing and pointing to the formwork which was obviously going to be the terrace. I immediately recognised 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, who smelt a bandit. Tricky situation. I hadn’t asked the old boy, but the thought had struck me that Truls Berntsen was the alliance in the police he had advised Isabelle Skoyen to form.
‘Yes?’ said the man with the eyelashes. He was in very good shape as well. Abs like cobblestones. I still had the opportunity to back away and visit Berntsen later in the day. So I don’t quite 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 others couldn’t hear us. He had blond hair, a powerful, prognathous jaw that hung like a tilting drawer. Hate-filled suspicion shone from the small piggy eyes. If he had 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 daren’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 resumed their beer-drinking, but I could see the Orgkrim boss casting 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 realised it was meant to be laughter.
‘That’s all,’ I said, turning to go.
I had only gone a few metres down the road when I heard someone shout. I didn’t need to turn to know who it was. I had seen it in his gaze at once. This is after all my speciality. He came up alongside, 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 regarded me with surprise, as though it was a tough question. Then he answered with a little smile: ‘Mikael.’
‘Hi, Mikael. Where do you train?’
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 off.’
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 hardened as I squeezed it between thumb and forefinger. 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. For 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.
20
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 Bjorvika, 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 jungle
s you had never heard of, galleries which 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 head waiter greeted him.
‘I’m looking for Isabelle Skoyen,’ 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 Skoyen was out having lunch. But when Harry had said that was why he was ringing, he was sitting at the Continental waiting for her, the secretary had in her horror blurted out that the lunch was at Sjomagasinet!
‘No,’ Harry said. ‘Is it alright if I go and have a look?’
The waiter hesitated. Studied the suit.
‘Don’t worry,’ Harry said. ‘I can see her.’
He strode past the waiter before the final judgement was passed.
He recognised the face and the pose from the pictures on the Net. She was leaning 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 on stage. 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 axe-blade of a nose. Nevertheless, Isabelle Skoyen did have a kind of conventional attraction other women might call ‘elegance’. Her eyes were heavily made up, a constellation of stars round the cold, blue irises, which lent her a predatory, lupine look. For that reason her hair was a comical contrast: a blonde doll’s mane arranged in sweet garlands on either side of her manly face. But it was her body that made Isabelle Skoyen such an eye-catcher.
