Stepping out of the elevator, Rygg scanned the lobby warily, hands slightly curled at his sides. Three men sat on flower-patterned armchairs, drinking beer. A couple was waiting at the reception desk. A woman stood by a potted ficus, looking into her handbag. She looked up, then walked swiftly toward him. She was tall, with high cheekbones and hair the color of white honey. Immediately, Rygg wished he’d shaved and worn the tie. He sensed the men in the armchairs turning to watch her walk.
“Mr. Rygg,” she said. Her hand was fine-boned in his, and she did not let it linger. “Come, please.” He followed her out the door. One of the seated men gave him a smirk and a wink, and Rygg frowned.
Outside, he grabbed her elbow. “Okay, what’s it about?” he said.
She nodded. “I am coming from Mr. Marin.”
“Mr. Marin?”
“You helped him. Three days ago.” He didn’t think her accent was German – it didn’t have the harsh gutturals – but he didn’t know for sure what it might be. Some kind of Eastern European, perhaps.
“All right.”
“He wants to thank you.”
“He already thanked me. I don’t need his money. And who are you?”
“My name is Lena. Come, Mr. Rygg. The car is here.” Her eyes were dark blue, like the sky at high altitude. He quickly scanned the street, but there were just a couple evening strollers.
The woman opened the back door for Rygg. He hesitated a moment, then got in. She sat in front. The driver was a long-haired man who said nothing at all. He drove very fast, down the Willy-Brandt-Strasse, then along the Elbe. The cranes of the docks stood to their left like angular twigs. They moved through back streets and Rygg had no idea where he was. Somewhere north of the Reeperbahn.
The car stopped on a narrow, poorly lit street. Lena got out and opened the door for him. No one had said a word during the ride. She led him up steps to what seemed to be a private house: one of those slightly baroque Hamburg facades – long narrow windows and curly iron banisters and a frieze of stone leaves halfway up the brickwork. She rang the bell and he noticed she wasn’t wearing nail polish. It seemed incongruous, somehow. All the pretty women he’d known wore nail polish. The door opened and a man in a green coat ushered them into a hallway that smelled of tobacco and varnish. He walked ahead of them across the carpet and opened a door that led into a large, low-ceilinged room. Lamps draped pools of gold light across tables. A wall of bottles glittered behind a bar. On a stage along one side of the room, a girl wearing only a thong writhed slowly in a cage of light. No one was looking at her.
Almost immediately, the little man was in front of him. He took Rygg’s hand in his left, a little awkwardly. His right arm was bound up in a sling. “Mr. Rygg,” said the man. “I am so delighted that you could come. My name is Marko. Marko Marin. I apologize for the rather sparse communication, but it was necessary.”
“What’s all this about?” He stepped back, but the little man beckoned him forward.
“Not here. Come. There is a room prepared for us.”
Rygg followed the little man among the tables, through a door behind the bar, and up a carpeted staircase. There were too many dark corners. He wished he’d brought a weapon. At the top, Marin opened a door and stepped aside to allow Rygg to enter. The room was immediately above the lounge; one wall was a window, angled outward, and it seemed to be completely soundproof; music played softly from hidden speakers. The girl squirmed below them to a different rhythm. On a low table between a leather sofa set was a vast spread of hors d’oeuvres: butterfly shrimp, colorful little sandwiches, sushi, caviar, and miniature kebabs. Against one wall was a bar.
Rygg turned. Marin and the girl were watching him. “Please take a seat, Mr. Rygg,” Marin said, extending his good hand. “Lena will pour you a drink. Whiskey? Aquavit? Or something else? She can make cocktails.”
“Aquavit’s fine.”
There was, he noticed, a bottle of Løiten Linie’s already open on the polished marble of the bar. Marin drank vodka, and Lena fixed herself a martini, then came to sit beside Marin, close enough that Rygg knew they were lovers.
“Please, help yourself to the food. I do not know your preferences, so I ordered a variety. But there are some specialties of Russia. This is pelmeni. A variety of dumpling. These are pirozhki. And caviar. Sterlet caviar, very nice. From Iran, because the sturgeon does not understand political boundaries.”
Rygg filled a plate and sat back. Marin had lit one of his Gauloises.
“You’re Russian?” Rygg said.
Marin nodded. “And you live outside of Oslo,” he said.
Damn internet, Rygg thought. Nobody’s anonymous any more. “Drammen” he said. “I commute to Oslo.”
“And you are a lawyer, as I understand.”
Rygg shrugged. “Insurance work. Oil, gas, shipping. Pushing paper, mostly. Sometimes I get to travel for a couple days. Yourself?”
“I am a journalist. I used to be a journalist for a newspaper, now I am freelance.”
“I see. And what are you up to in Hamburg? Besides getting shot.”
Marin laughed carefully, watching Rygg. “I am, like you, mixing business and pleasure. I am doing some research.”
“Are you going to tell me what happened back there, in Orfeoplatz?”
Marin reached forward and tapped his cigarette into a brass ashtray. He leaned back. “Mr. Rygg, I wanted to thank you properly.” Marin spread his hand toward the table, leaving a curl of smoke hanging in the air. “You helped me. You and the woman. Katrin Heilbronner.”
“Yes, why was she … ? She wasn’t with you, was she?”
“She got in the way. Unfortunate for her, but happy for me. She saved my life.” Lena put her hand on his thigh. He ignored it. “The bullet passed through her neck.” He placed his finger and thumb like pincers on either side of his voice box. And suddenly Rygg was back in the platz, in the spring sunshine, the woman’s thin lips working, the abrupt applause of the pigeons. That sweet rush of blood to the head. Marin held his hand out vertically. He turned the fingers a centimeter outward. “It was enough,” he said. “Just enough to move the bullet from here—” he touched his chest “—to here.” His hand hovered over his wounded arm.
“Why didn’t they try again?”
Marin smiled, a little more broadly. “Because you chased them. You are a big man, Mr. Rygg. I think they were surprised. Maybe they thought you were polizei, or my bodyguard.”
“And why were they trying to shoot you?”
Marin gave a one-shoulder shrug, and sipped his vodka. “I make some enemies in my work. In Russian journalism it is impossible not to make enemies. Any story you write you make an enemy, on this side or on this side. So, Russia is at an interesting place now. You follow the news?”
Rygg shrugged, nodded.
“After Gorbachev, there was a vacuum at the top. The criminals entered at all levels: political, social, economic. There has always been a criminal element in Russia. But for some years, for nearly a decade, it was impossible to do business without involving the criminal element. Now things change. There is a group of people, similar to those who resisted communism, who are speaking out. Journalists, mainly, but also ordinary people. So it is still difficult to do business without involving criminals. But it is also difficult for the criminals to do their work in secret.”
“And you’re a whistle-blower?”
“I fell into something. On accident.” Marin looked down into the lounge. He seemed suddenly pensive. “But tell me about yourself. How did you end up as a lawyer?”
Rygg sat back. Tersely, he outlined his career: college, business school, law school, lawyer for Iversen Foss & Co., marriage, divorce. “She got everything,” he concluded. “House, car, investments.”
“Children?”
“Nora. Studying to be a dentist. We don’t talk.”
“Now, and I apologize for this, Mr. Rygg, but I think you have left out a minor section. Between college and business sc
hool. I hope I am not intruding too much on your privacy.”
Rygg glared at him. “Hvordan i helvette?” he said.
Marin spread his hands. “I have many connections,” he said. “I apologize. But would you mind telling us a little about—”
Rygg shook his head.
“We just need a few details.”
Rygg narrowed his eyes and felt a raging storm brewing somewhere deep inside of him. “I think our little meeting here is over!” He gripped the cushion of the leather sofa as if he would stand up.
“Relax. I am not out to get you. I just need to know who you are. I may have an offer for you at some point.”
“I’m finished with all that. I’m a lawyer, as I told you.”
“Of course. I’m sorry I asked. Let’s just eat and have a good time, Mr.Rygg, shall we?”
Only much later, on the plane back to Oslo, did he think about how they listened, Marin and the girl. They nodded at the right places, murmuring sympathetically, laughing their careful laughs. If he stalled, or leaned to choose another shrimp or kebab or one of the delicious little crêpe things, Marin would rephrase what he’d just said, or ask a question, and he’d be off again. After another couple aquavits he ended up telling them all about his broken marriage and his dreadful job: how it made him feel physically ill to head out into the traffic every morning, knowing he’d have to stare at the figures and go through tons of documents and make the stupid phone calls for the next eight or nine hours. Once or twice a year he got to make a trip like this. “But basically I’m dead,” he said grimly, and Marin nodded understandingly. “I’m a corpse, among the other corpses. I can’t remember the last time I felt really alive.”
On the plane, staring out the window at the clouds over the Baltic, he remembered saying that, and knew the last time he’d felt alive: when the woman had died in front of him in the square, when he’d run after the shadow, and knelt beside a wounded man. He hadn’t felt a rush like that since the escapade in Assiut.
At one point during that evening with Marin, he had excused himself. Rygg had looked down into the lounge. Another dancer had taken the place of the first. She was taller and slimmer, and moved with a jerkier energy.
Lena had leaned forward. “I know what you are thinking,” she said. He’d looked at her as she nodded. “You are thinking: Russia, guns, secrets – he is criminal. But he is not criminal. Marko is a good man. Maybe you can say he is best man. He try, tries to do the good thing for Russia.”
“I never said he was a criminal.”
“No. I am only saying, so you know the truth.”
“I believe you.” And he had. There was something about the little man, his attentiveness perhaps, that reminded him of one of his university professors. Not one of the law profs – they were all chilly wonks – but during his junior year he’d taken a philosophy course for kicks, and the professor had the same ability to listen with his eyes, to keep people talking.
Toward the end of the evening, Marin had gestured with his chin to the dancer beyond the glass. “I want you to have a good time,” he’d said. “If you like … I do not know your desires, but if you like, there are rooms in this club … Very private.” He was matter-of-fact about it, causing Rygg to shake his head, then immediately regret it. It had been a very long time since he had been with a woman and he could already feel the rush of blood down to his lower limbs.
“I am sorry,” said Marin. “In Russia, it is common …”
“Oh, I’m no saint,” Rygg had responded. “But I’ll pass, I think.”
“Once again, I thank you for saving my life. I am in your debt.”
“Forget it. If you ever need anything, give me a call, okay?”
“Do you mean that, Mr. Rygg?” he asked.
“Of course. Of course I do,” Rygg had responded.
Then Marin held out his left hand and they shook, a little less awkwardly that time, as if they were sealing some sort of pact.
April 3
Something was wrong. Dmitri Egorov scrubbed viciously at the ring of spaghetti sauce on the massive pan. From the beginning of this whole run, he’d felt something was wrong. First, the captain had actually come to his apartment in Zelenogradsk. His mother had invited him in and given him tea. Dmitri was embarrassed – the apartment was cramped and the walls were dirty and his mother was missing all but one of her front teeth. And then Boris had wandered in, drunk. But the captain seemed to take no notice of his surroundings, and had greeted Boris so courteously that he subsided, muttering, in a corner. The captain asked Dmitri whether he’d join him for the next run. It was nothing, he said, just moving some timber to Algiers, like they’d done last August. But the pay would be a bit better because they were dealing with a new company. Dmitri had agreed, mystified. Why hadn’t the captain gotten Yuri to round up the crew? Or, if he had to do it himself, why the house visit? Why hadn’t he just called?
Then Boris started talking about the fight he’d seen at the harbor, over some Bulgarian whore. One guy had his nose sliced off. Boris had picked up the piece of nose and dropped it in his friend’s vodka. Boris pretended to pluck something from his tea, and mimed his friend’s surprise. Dmitri’s mother watched from the door to the kitchen, her dress unevenly buttoned, her hand covering her mouth. The captain, tapping his fingers lightly against the rim of the teacup, waited until Boris’s laughter subsided into soggy coughing. Then he told Dmitri not to tell the others – he was going around personally. He gave Dmitri a time and date: seven thirty-eight p.m., April 2, gate C3. He had Dmitri repeat it twice. Then he left. He hadn’t touched his tea.
The sauce was seared on. Dmitri sprayed more water over it and set it aside to soak, then started cleaning the cutlery. He had one foot back and his hip propped against the edge of the steel refrigerator to counter the rolling of the ship. The Baltic, always an unruly sea, seemed choppier than usual. Seven thirty-eight. Why the precision? He couldn’t figure it out. He was still new at the game, sure. He’d done just fifteen runs, and some of those were little hops across the pond, to Frederikshavn or Stockholm. But the instructions had always been “morning of the 24th” or something like that, and they’d usually met in a bar beforehand for a round of vodka. Seven thirty-eight. The others seemed equally bemused, when they were clustered around gate C3 at 7:30, and Ilya had suggested that the captain had gone Swiss, but Ludo, the engineer, shook his head. “Don’t be naïve,” he said.
“What? You think …” said Ilya, but Ludo had just glanced at the sentry in his box.
Then there were the new sailors. Dmitri thought of them as the gray brothers. They’d shown up at exactly 7:38, and hadn’t bothered to shake hands. One was short and square, with hair the color of granite. The other was tall, with pale gray eyes. His name, he said, was Alexey. The short brother didn’t speak. Each carried a large duffel bag. Dmitri looked at the bags scornfully: all his belongings fit tidily into his backpack. When Ilya asked where they were from, Alexey said he was new in town. He’d been on the Black Sea mostly and had come to try his luck in the Baltic. Ludo, who’d been everywhere, said he’d seen him before somewhere, but he didn’t think it was on the Black Sea. Alexey had laughed, two little snorts, and offered Ludo a cigarette. When the captain arrived, coming at the gate from the port side, Ilya asked him where Yuri was.
“Yuri’s not coming,” said the captain. He seemed angry. “His mother’s in hospital.”
“His mother’s always in hospital.”
“She’s worse.”
Dmitri set the pan aside, and started on the bread dough, first taking off the necklace with its silver-and-amber cross and hanging it from a hook above his head. The cross was special – it had been his grandfather’s and his father’s, and he didn’t want it getting into the dough. He liked kneading – it allowed his mind to wander. He pummeled the dough like a boxer.
And finally, there had been the incident at lunch yesterday. Dmitri had been filling the bread basket and saw it all. Wolfie was sittin
g beside the squat brother and had just finished his steak. Taking out his cigarettes, he turned to the brother and patted his jacket pocket. “Got a light?” he asked. And then Wolfie was screaming, with his face in the gravy on his plate, and the whole table had risen to see what was happening. Only the brother looked calm, though he was holding the little finger of Wolfie’s left hand. He let go of the finger, and Wolfie picked up the hand and looked at it. His hair was matted to his cheek with gravy that dripped onto his collar. He screamed again. The finger was bent backwards at the second knuckle. “You broke my fucking finger!” he screamed. “Fucking bastard! Fucking bastard!”
The brother cut a sliver of steak, wiped it in gravy, and put it in his mouth. He chewed and swallowed. “Not broken. Dislocated,” he said, and they heard his voice for the first time. He spoke Russian with a flat accent. Cutting another slice, he held it up. Then he said: “Don’t touch my jacket again. I don’t like it.”
Dmitri was still kneading when Ludo came down and sat on the steps of the galley, one leg up on the doorjamb. He often did that; he claimed it was the perfect smoking perch: out of the wind but still with a view of the sky. Sometimes he said nothing at all, but occasionally Dmitri could winkle a story out of him. Ludo had the craziest tales if you got him going – he’d worked in an emerald mine in Colombia and had lived in Yemen for a while, and there were rumors that he had an African girlfriend. Tonight, however, he just smoked, not even answering when Dmitri asked how his girlfriend was. Dmitri looked at him. Ludo’s face was crumpled brown leather, little triangles torn open so the eyes could peer through. He kept his hair, even on board, slicked down to his collar. Ilya claimed he used axle grease. Finally, toward the end of his second cigarette, he said, “You keep your eyes open on this one, all right, little Dmitri?”
“What do you mean?”
“Each run has its own smell. You’ve smelled something funny with this one already, right?”
Dmitri nodded.
“After a while you get to know the different smells. If there’s a hidden cargo, if the cargo’s under a false name, you can sniff it. But I haven’t smelled this one before.”
Chasing the Storm Page 2
