by Jo Nesbo
The cigarette bobbed up and down in his mouth as he walked through the glass exit door, leaving the raw, unnatural heat of Oslo's underground behind him, and ran up the steps to Oslo's ultra-natural December darkness and freezing temperatures. Harry instinctively shrank. Egertorget. This small, open square was an intersection between pedestrian streets in the heart of Oslo, if the city could be said to have a heart at this time of the year. Shops were open this Sunday as it was the penultimate weekend before Christmas, and the square was teeming with people hurrying to and fro in the yellow light that fell from the windows of the surrounding modest three-storey shops. Harry saw the bags of wrapped presents and made a mental note to buy something for Bjarne Moller whose last day it was at Police HQ tomorrow. Harry's boss and chief protector in the police force for all these years was at long last realising his plans to reduce his hours and from next week onwards would take over as a so-called senior special investigator at Bergen police station, which meant in reality that Bjarne Moller could do as he liked until he retired. Cushy number – but Bergen? Rain and dank mountains. Moller didn't even come from Bergen. Harry had always liked – but not always appreciated – Bjarne Moller.
A man dressed head to toe in Puffa jacket and trousers slowly waddled past like an astronaut, grinning and blowing frosted breath from round, pink cheeks. Stooped shoulders and closed winter faces. Harry spotted a pallid-faced woman wearing a thin, black leather jacket with holes in the elbows standing by the jeweller's, hopping from one foot to the other as her eyes searched in hope of finding her supplier soon. A beggar, long-haired and unshaven, but well covered in warm, fashionable, youthful clothing sat in a yoga position, leaning against a lamp post, his head bent forward as if in meditation, with a brown paper cup from a cappuccino bar in front of him. Harry had seen more and more beggars over the last year, and it had struck him that they all looked the same. Even the paper cups were identical, as though it were a secret code. Perhaps they were creatures from outer space quietly taking over his town, his streets. No worries. Feel free.
Harry entered the jeweller's shop.
'Can you fix this?' he said to the young man behind the counter, passing him his grandfather's watch. Harry had been given it when he was a boy in Andalsnes the day they had buried his mother. He had almost been frightened, but his grandad had reassured him that watches were the sort of thing you gave away, and Harry should remember to pass it on. 'Before it's too late.'
Harry had forgotten all about the watch until Oleg visited him in his flat in Sofies gate and had seen the silver watch in a drawer while he was looking for Harry's Game boy. Oleg, who was ten years old, but had long had the measure of Harry at their shared passion – the rather outdated computer game Tetris – was oblivious to the duel he had been looking forward to, and instead sat fiddling with the watch trying to make it go.
'It's broken,' Harry said.
'Ooof,' Oleg answered. 'Everything can be repaired.'
Harry hoped in his heart of hearts that this contention was true, but he had days when he had severe doubts. Nonetheless, he had wondered in a vague way whether he should introduce Oleg to Jokke amp; Valentinerne and their album entitled Everything Can be Repaired. However, on reflection Harry had concluded that Oleg's mother, Rakel, was unlikely to appreciate the connection: her ex-alcoholic lover passing on songs about being an alcoholic, written and sung by a dead junkie.
'Can you repair it?' he asked the young man behind the counter. By way of an answer, nimble, expert hands opened the watch.
'Not worth it.'
'Not worth it?'
'If you go to an antiques shop, they have better working watches and they cost less than it would to have this fixed.'
'Do it anyway,' Harry said.
'OK,' said the young man who had already started examining the internal mechanisms and, in fact, seemed pretty pleased with Harry's decision. 'Come back next Tuesday.'
On leaving the shop Harry heard the frail sound of a single guitar string through an amplifier. It rose when the guitarist, a boy with scraggly facial hair and fingerless gloves, turned one of the tuning keys. It was time for one of the traditional pre-Christmas concerts when well known artistes performed on behalf of the Salvation Army in Egertorget. People had already begun to gather in front of the band as it took up a position behind the Salvation Army's black Christmas kettle, a cooking pot which hung from three poles in the middle of the square.
'Is that you?'
Harry turned. It was the woman with the junkie eyes.
'It's you, isn't it? Have you come instead of Snoopy? I need a fix right away. I've-'
'Sorry,' Harry interrupted. 'It's not me you want.'
She stared at him. Leaning her head to one side, she narrowed her eyes, as though appraising whether he was lying to her. 'Yep, I've seen you somewhere before.'
'I'm a policeman.'
She paused. Harry breathed in. There was a delayed reaction, as if the message had to follow detours around scorched neurons and smashed synapses. Then the dull glow of hatred that Harry had been waiting for lit up in her eyes.
'The cops?'
'Thought we had a deal. You were supposed to stay in the square, in Plata,' Harry said, looking past her at the vocalist.
'Huh,' said the woman standing straight in front of Harry. 'You're not in Narco. You're the guy on telly who killed-'
'Crime Squad.' Harry took her by the arm. 'Listen, you can get what you want in Plata. Don't force me to drag you in to the station.'
'Can not.' She tore her arm away.
Harry repented at once and held up both hands. 'Tell me you're not going to do any deals here and I can go. OK?'
She cocked her head. The thin, anaemic lips tightened a fraction. She seemed to see something amusing in the situation. 'Shall I tell you why I can't go to the square?'
Harry waited.
'Because my boy's down there.'
He felt his stomach churn.
'I don't want him to see me like this. Do you understand, cop?'
Harry looked into her defiant face as he tried to formulate a sentence.
'Happy Christmas,' he said, turning his back on her.
Harry dropped his cigarette into the packed, brown snow and walked off. He wanted this job off his back. He didn't see the people coming towards him, and, staring down at the blue ice as if they had a bad conscience, they didn't see him either, as if they, citizens of the world's most generous social democracy, were nonetheless ashamed. 'Because my boy's down there.'
In Fredensborgveien, beside Oslo Public Library, Harry stopped outside the number scrawled on the envelope he was carrying. He leaned back and looked up. The facade was grey and black and had recently been repainted. A tagger's wet dream. Christmas decorations were already hanging from some of the windows like silhouettes against the gentle, yellow light in what seemed like warm, secure homes. And perhaps they are indeed that, Harry forced himself to think. 'Forced' because you can't be in the police for twelve years without being infected by the contempt for humanity that comes with the territory. But he did fight against it; you had to give him that.
He found the name by the bell, closed his eyes and tried to find the right words. It didn't help. Her voice was still in the way.
'I don't want him to see me like this…'
Harry gave up. Is there a right way to formulate the impossible?
He pressed his thumb against the cold metal button, and somewhere inside the block it rang.
Captain Jon Karlsen took his finger off the button, put the heavy plastic bags down on the pavement and gazed up at the front of the block. The flats looked as if they had been under siege from light artillery. Big chunks of plaster had fallen off and the windows of a burnt-out flat on the first floor had been boarded up. At first he had walked right past Fredriksen's blue house; the cold seemed to have sucked all the colour out of the buildings and made all the house fronts in Hausmanns gate the same. It was only when he saw 'Vestbredden' – West Bank – scr
awled on the wall of a squat that he realised he had walked too far. A crack in the glass of the front door was shaped like a V. V for victory.
Jon shivered in his windcheater and was glad the Salvation Army uniform underneath was made of pure, thick wool. When Jon had gone to be kitted out with his new uniform after Officer Training School, none of the regular sizes had fitted him, so he had been issued some material and sent to a tailor, who blew smoke into his face and said apropos of nothing that he rejected Jesus as his personal redeemer. However, the tailor did a good job and Jon thanked him warmly; he was not used to made-to-measure clothes. That was why he had a stoop, it was said. Those who saw him coming up Hausmanns gate that afternoon might well have thought he was bent over to keep out of the ice-cold December wind sweeping icicles and frozen litter along the pavements as the heavy traffic thundered by. But those who knew him said that Jon Karlsen stooped to take the edge off his height. And to reach down to those smaller than him. As he did now, to drop the twenty-kroner coin in the brown paper cup held by a filthy, trembling hand next to the doorway.
'How's it going?' Jon asked the human bundle sitting cross-legged on a piece of cardboard on the pavement in the swirling snow.
'I'm in the queue for methadone treatment,' the piteous person said in a halting, monotonous voice like an ill-rehearsed psalm, while staring at Jon's black uniformed knees.
'You should go down to our cafe in Urtegata,' Jon said. 'Warm up a bit and get some food and…'
The rest was drowned in the roar of the traffic as the lights behind them changed to green.
'No time,' the bundle replied. 'You wouldn't have a fifty note, would you?' Jon never ceased to be surprised by drug addicts' unwavering focus. He sighed and thrust a hundred-kroner note in the cup.
'See if you can find some warm clothes at Fretex. If not, we've got some new winter jackets at the Lighthouse. You'll freeze to death in that thin denim jacket.'
He was resigned to the fact that he was speaking to someone who already knew the gift would be used to buy dope, but so what? It was the same refrain, yet another of the irresolvable moral dilemmas that filled his days.
Jon pressed the bell once again. He saw his reflection in the dirty shop window beside the doorway. Thea said he was a big man. He wasn't big at all. He was small. A small soldier. But when he was finished the little soldier would sprint down Mollerveien, across the river Akerselva, where East Oslo and Grunerlokka started, over Sofienberg Park to Goteborggata 4, which the Army owned and rented out to its employees, unlock the door to entrance B, say hello to one of the other tenants he hoped would assume he was on his way to his flat on the third floor. However, he would take the lift to the fourth, go through the loft space to the A building, make sure the coast was clear, then head for Thea's door and tap out their prearranged signal. And she would open the door and her arms, into which he could creep and thawout.
Something was trembling.
At first he thought it was the ground, the city, the foundations. He put down the bag and delved into his pocket. His mobile phone was vibrating in his hand. The display showed Ragnhild's number. It was the third time today. He knew he could not put it off any longer; he would have to tell her. That he and Thea were getting engaged. When he had found the right words. He put the phone back in his pocket and avoided looking at his reflection. But he made up his mind. He would stop being a coward. He would be frank. Be a big soldier. For Thea in Goteborggata. For his father in Thailand. For the Lord above.
'Yes,' came the shout from the loudspeaker above the bells.
'Oh, hi. This is Jon.'
'Eh?'
'Jon from the Salvation Army.'
Jon waited.
'What do you want?' the voice crackled.
'I've got some food for you. I thought you might need-'
'Got any cigarettes?'
Jon swallowed and stamped his boots in the snow. 'No, I only had enough money for food this time.'
'Shit.'
It went quiet again.
'Hello?' Jon shouted.
'Yeah, yeah. I'm thinking.'
'If you want, I'll come back later.'
The mechanism buzzed and Jon quickly pushed open the door.
Inside the stairwell there were newspapers, empty bottles and frozen yellow pools of urine. Thanks to the cold weather Jon did not have to inhale the pervasive, bitter-sweet stench that filled the hallway on milder days.
He tried to walk without making much noise, but his footsteps reverberated on the stairs anyway. The woman standing in the doorway and waiting for him was ogling the bags. To avoid looking him in the eye, Jon thought. She had that same bloated, swollen face that came with many years of addiction, was overweight and wore a filthy white T-shirt under her dressing gown. A stale smell emanated from the door.
Jon stopped on the landing and put down the bags. 'Is your husband in, too?'
'Yes, he's in,' she said in mellifluous French.
She was good-looking. High cheekbones and large, almond-shaped eyes. Narrow, bloodless lips. And well dressed. At any rate, the bit of her he could see through the crack in the door was well dressed.
Instinctively, he adjusted his red neckerchief.
The security lock between them was made of solid brass and attached to a heavy oak door without a nameplate. While standing outside the block in avenue Carnot waiting for the concierge to open the door, he had noticed that everything seemed new and expensive, the door furniture, the bells, the cylinder locks. And the fact that the pale yellow facade and the white shutters were covered in an unsightly, dirty layer of black pollution served to emphasise the established and solid nature of this district of Paris even more. Original oil paintings hung in the hallway.
'What do you want?'
The eyes and the intonation were neither friendly nor unfriendly, but contained perhaps a smidgeon of scepticism because of his terrible French pronunciation.
'A message, madame.'
She hesitated. But acted as expected in the end.
'Alright. Could you wait here please, and I'll get him?'
She shut the door and the lock fell into position with a well-oiled click. He stamped his feet. He ought to learn to speak better French. His mother had force-fed him English in the evenings, but she had never sorted out his French. He stared at the door. French knickers. French letter. Good-looking.
He thought about Giorgi. Giorgi of the white smile was one year older than he was, so twenty-eight now. Was he still as good-looking? Blond and small and pretty like a girl? He had been in love with Giorgi, in the unprejudiced, unconditional way that only children can fall in love.
He heard steps coming from inside. A man's steps. Someone fiddling with the lock. A blue connecting line between work and freedom, from here to soap and urine. The snow would come soon. He prepared himself.
***
The man's face appeared in the doorway.
'What the fuck do you want?'
Jon lifted the plastic bags and ventured a smile. 'Fresh bread. Smells good, doesn't it.'
Fredriksen laid a large brown hand on the woman's shoulder and pushed her away. 'All I can smell is Christian blood…' It was said with clear, sober diction, but the washed-out irises in the bearded face told a different story. The eyes tried to focus on the bags of shopping. He looked like a large, powerful man who had shrunk inside. His skeleton and even his cranium had become smaller inside the skin that drooped, three sizes too big, from the malevolent face. Fredriksen ran a grubby finger over the fresh cuts along the bridge of his nose.
'You're not going to preach now, are you.'
'No, actually I wanted-'
'Oh, come on, soldier. You want something back for this, don't you. My soul, for example.'
Jon shivered in his uniform. 'It's not me who deals with souls, Fredriksen. But I can arrange for food, so-'
'Oh, you can manage a little sermon first.'
'As I said-'
'A sermon!'
Jon stood l
ooking at Fredriksen.
'Give us a sermon with that wet little cunt-hole of yours!' Fredriksen yelled. 'A sermon so that we can eat with a good conscience, you condescending Christian bastard. Come on, get it over with. What's God's message today?'
Jon opened his mouth and closed it again. Swallowed. Tried again and this time his vocal cords responded. 'The message is that He gave His only son, who died… for our sins.'
'You're lying!'
***
'No, I'm afraid I'm not, 'Harry said, observing the terrified face of the man in the doorway in front of him. There was a smell of lunch and a rattle of cutlery in the background. A family man. A father. Until now. The man scratched his forearm and gazed at a spot above Harry's head as if someone were there. The scratching made an unpleasant rasping noise.
The rattle of cutlery had stopped. The shuffle of feet came to a halt behind the man and a small hand was placed on his shoulder. A woman's face with large red eyes peeped out.
'What is it, Birger?'
'This policeman has something to tell us,' Birger said in a monotone.
'What?' the woman said looking at Harry. 'Is it about our son? Is it about Per?'
'Yes, fru Holmen,' Harry said and saw the fear steal into her eyes. He searched for the impossible words. 'We found him two hours ago. Your son is dead.'
He had to look away.
'But he… he… where…?' Her eyes jumped from Harry to the man who kept scratching his arm.
Won't be long before he draws blood, Harry thought, and cleared his throat. 'In a container by the harbour. What we feared. He's been dead for a good while.'
Birger Holmen seemed to lose his balance, staggered backwards into the lit hallway and grabbed a hatstand. The woman stepped forward and Harry saw the man fall to his knees behind her.
