The Leopard: An Inspector Harry Hole Novel

by Jo Nesbo

  The driver asked Harry to call him Joe. Joe was Congolese and spoke fluent French and rather more halting English. He had been hired by contacts at a Norwegian aid organization based in Goma.

  “Eight hundred thousand,” Joe said, guiding the Land Rover along a potholed but perfectly navigable paved road winding between green meadows and mountain slopes that were cultivated from top to bottom. Occasionally, he was charitable and braked so as not to run down people walking, cycling, wheeling and carrying goods at the edge of the road, but as a rule they made lifesaving leaps at the very last second.

  “They kill eight hundred thousand in just few months in 1994. The Hutus invade their kind, old neighbors and cut them down with machetes because they Tutsis. The propaganda on the radio say that if your husband is Tutsi it is your duty as Hutu to kill him. Cut down the tall trees. Many flee along this road …” Joe pointed out of the window. “Bodies pile up. Some places it is impossible to pass. Good times for vultures.”

  They drove on in silence.

  They passed two men carrying a big cat bound to a pole by its legs. Children were dancing and cheering beside it and sticking pins into the dead animal. The coat was sun-colored with patches of shade.

  “Hunters?” Harry asked.

  Joe shook his head, glanced in the mirror and answered in a mixture of English and French: “Hit by car, je crois. That one is almost impossible to hunt. It is rare, has large territory, only hunts at night. Hides and blends into environs during the day. I think it is very lonely animal, Harry.”

  Harry watched men and women working in the fields. At several points there was heavy machinery and men repairing the road. Down in a valley he saw a highway under construction. In a field children in blue school uniforms were kicking a soccer ball around and shouting.

  “Rwanda is good,” Joe said.

  Two and a half hours later Joe pointed through the windshield. “Lake Kivu. Very nice, very deep.”

  The surface of the huge expanse of water seemed to reflect a thousand suns. The country on the other side was the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Mountains rose on all sides. A single white cloud encircled the peak of one of them.

  “Not much cloud,” Joe said as if intuiting what Harry was thinking. “The killer mountain. Nyiragongo.”

  Harry nodded.

  An hour later they had passed the border and were driving into Goma. On the roadside an emaciated man in a torn jacket was sitting and staring ahead through desperate, crazed eyes. Joe steered the vehicle carefully between the craters in the muddy path. A military jeep was in front of them. The swaying soldier manning the machine gun looked at them with cold, weary eyes. Above them roared airplane engines.

  “UN,” Joe said. “More guns and grenades. Nkunda come closer to the city. Very strong. Many people escape now. Refugees. Maybe Monsieur Van Boorst, too, eh? I not see him long time.”

  “You know him?”

  “Everybody know Mr. Van. But he has Ba-Maguje in him.”

  “Ba-what?”

  “Un mauvais ésprit. A demon. He makes you thirsty for alcohol. And takes away your emotions.”

  The air-conditioning unit was blowing cold air. The sweat was running down between Harry’s shoulder blades.

  …

  They had stopped midway between two rows of shacks, in what Harry realized was a kind of downtown in Goma. People hastened to and fro on the almost impassable path between the shops. Black boulders were piled up alongside the houses and served as foundations. The ground looked like stiffened black icing, and gray dust whirled up in air that stank of rotten fish.

  “Là,” Joe said, pointing to the door of the only brick house in the row. “I wait in the car.”

  Harry noticed a couple of men stop in the street as he exited the car. They gave him the neutral, dangerous gaze that relayed no warning. Men who knew that acts of aggression were more effective without a warning. Harry headed straight for the door without looking to either side, showing that he knew what he was doing there, where he should go. He knocked. Once. Twice. Three times. Shit! Fucking long way to come just to—

  The door opened a fraction.

  A wrinkled white face with questioning eyes stared at him.

  “Eddie Van Boorst?” Harry asked.

  “Il est mort,” said the man in a voice so hoarse it sounded itself like a death rattle.

  Harry remembered enough school French to understand that the man was claiming Van Boorst was dead. He tried in English. “My name is Harry Hole. I was given Van Boorst’s name by Herman Kluit in Hong Kong. I’m interested in a Leopold’s apple.”

  The man blinked twice. Stuck his head out of the door and looked left and right. Then he opened the door a little more. “Entrez,” he said, motioning Harry in.

  Harry ducked beneath the low door frame and just managed to bend his knees in time; the floor inside was seven inches lower.

  There was a smell of incense. As well as something else familiar—the sweet stench of an old man who had been drinking for several days.

  Harry’s eyes became used to the dark, and he discovered that the small, frail old man was wearing an elegant burgundy silk dressing gown.

  “Scandinavian accent,” said Van Boorst in Hercule Poirot English and placed a cigarette in a yellowing holder between his thin lips. “Let me guess. Definitely not Danish. Could be Swedish. But I think Norwegian. Yes?”

  A cockroach showed its antennae through a crack in the wall behind him.

  “Mm. An expert on accents?”

  “A mere pastime,” said Van Boorst, flattered, pleased. “In small nations like Belgium you have to learn to look outward, not inward. And how is Herman?”

  “Fine,” Harry said, turning to his right and seeing two pairs of bored eyes looking at him. One from a photo above the bed in the corner. A framed portrait of a person with a long gray beard, powerful nose, short hair, epaulets, chain and sword. King Leopold, unless Harry was much mistaken. The other pair of eyes belonged to the woman lying on her side in the bed with only a blanket draped over her hips. The light from the window above her fell on her small, supple young girl’s breasts. She responded to Harry’s nod with a fleeting smile that revealed a large gold tooth among all the white ones. She couldn’t have been more than twenty. On the wall behind the slim waist Harry glimpsed a nail hammered into the cracked plaster. From the nail dangled a pair of pink handcuffs.

  “My wife,” said the little Belgian. “Well, one of them.”

  “Mistress Van Boorst?”

  “Something of that kind. You want to buy? You have money?”

  “First I want to see what you’ve got,” Harry said.

  Eddie Van Boorst went to the door, opened it a crack and peered outside. Shut it and locked up. “Only got your driver with you?”

  “Yes.”

  Van Boorst puffed on his cigarette while studying Harry through the folds of skin that gathered when he squinted.

  Then he went to a corner of the room, kicked away the carpet, bent down and pulled at an iron ring. A trapdoor opened. The Belgian waved Harry down into the cellar first. Harry assumed it was a precaution based on experience, and did as he was told. A ladder led into pitch darkness. Harry reached solid ground after only the seventh rung. Then a light was switched on.

  Harry looked around the room; the ceiling was full height and there was a level cement floor. Shelves and cupboards covered three of the walls. On the shelves were the day-to-day products: well-used Glock pistols, a Smith & Wesson .38, boxes of ammunition, a Kalashnikov. Harry had never held the famous Russian automatic rifle known officially as the AK-47. He stroked the wooden stock.

  “An original from the first year of production, 1947,” Van Boorst said.

  “Seems like everyone down here has one,” Harry said. “The most popular cause of death in Africa, I’ve heard.”

  Van Boorst nodded. “For two simple reasons. First, when the Communist countries started exporting the Kalashnikov here after the Cold War, the gun c
ost as much as a fat chicken in peacetime. And no more than a hundred dollars in wartime. Second, it works, no matter what you do with it, and that’s important in Africa. In Mozambique they like their Kalashnikovs so much it’s on their national flag.”

  Harry’s eyes stopped at the letters discreetly stamped on a black case.

  “Is that what I think it is?” Harry asked.

  “Märklin,” said Van Boorst. “A rare rifle. It was manufactured in very limited numbers, as it was a fiasco. Much too heavy and large a caliber. Used to hunt elephants.”

  “And humans,” Harry said softly.

  “Do you know the weapon?”

  “World’s best telescopic sights. Not exactly something you need to hit an elephant at a hundred yards. Perfect for an assassination.” Harry ran his fingers along the case as the memories streamed back. “Yes, I know it.”

  “You can have it cheap. Thirty thousand euros.”

  “I’m not after a rifle this time.” Harry turned to the shelving unit in the middle of the room. Grotesque white wooden masks grimaced at him from the shelves.

  “The Mai Mai tribe’s spiritual masks,” said Van Boorst. “They think that if they dip themselves in holy water, the enemy’s bullets cannot hurt them. Because the bullets will also turn to H2O. The Mai Mai guerrillas went to war against the government army with bows and arrows, shower hats on their heads and bath plugs as amulets. I am not kidding you, monsieur. Naturally, they were mown down. But they like water, the Mai Mai do. And white masks. And their enemies’ hearts and kidneys. Lightly grilled with mashed corn.”

  “Mm,” Harry said. “I hadn’t expected that such a basic house would have such a full cellar.”

  Van Boorst chuckled. “Cellar? This is the ground floor. Or was. Before the eruption six years ago.”

  Everything fell into place for Harry. Black boulders, black icing. The floor upstairs that was lower than the street.

  “Lava,” Harry said.

  Van Boorst nodded. “It flowed straight through the center of town and took my house by Lake Kivu. All the wooden houses around here burned to the ground; this brick house was the only one left standing, but was half buried in lava.” He pointed to the wall. “There you can see the front door to what was street level six years ago. I bought the house and just put in a new door where you entered.”

  Harry nodded. “Lucky the lava didn’t burn down the door and fill this floor, too.”

  “As you can see, the windows and doors are in the wall facing away from Nyiragongo. It’s not the first time. The fucking volcano spews lava on this town every ten or twenty years.”

  Harry cocked an eyebrow. “And still people move back?”

  Van Boorst shrugged. “Welcome to Africa. But the volcano is damn useful. If you want to get rid of a troublesome corpse—which is a fairly normal problem in Goma—you can of course sink it in Lake Kivu. But it is still down there. Whereas if you use Nyiragongo … People think that volcanoes have these red-hot, bubbling lava lakes at the bottom, but most do not. None of them, in fact—apart from Nyiragongo. Eighteen hundred degrees Fahrenheit. Drop something down there and, poof, it is gone. It returns as a gas. It is the only chance anyone in Goma has to reach heaven.” He broke into a hacking laugh. “I witnessed an overenthusiastic coltan-hunter drop a tribal chief’s daughter on a chain into the crater up there once. The chief wouldn’t sign the papers giving the hunters the right to mine on their territory. Her hair caught fire at sixty feet above the lava. At thirty feet above, the girl was burning like a candle. And fifteen feet farther down she was dripping. I am not exaggerating. Skin, flesh, it flowed off her bones … Is this what you were interested in?” Van Boorst had opened a cupboard and taken out a metal ball. It was shiny, perforated with tiny apertures and smaller than a tennis ball. From a slightly larger opening there hung a wire loop. It was the same instrument Harry had seen at Herman Kluit’s house.

  “Does it work?” Harry asked.

  Van Boorst sighed. He stuck his little finger in the loop and pulled. There was a loud bang and the ball jumped in the Belgian’s hand. Harry stared. Protruding from the holes in the ball were what looked like antennae.

  “May I?” he asked, and put out his hand. Van Boorst passed him the ball and watched with great vigilance as Harry counted the antennae.

  Harry nodded. “Twenty-four,” he said.

  “Same as the number of apples made,” said Van Boorst. “The number had some symbolic value for the engineer who designed and made it. It was the age of his sister when she took her own life.”

  “And how many of them do you have in your cupboard?”

  “Only eight. Including this pièce de résistance in gold.” He took out a ball that gleamed in the light from the electric bulb, then returned it to the cupboard. “But it is not for sale. You would have to kill me to get your paws on that one.”

  “So you’ve sold thirteen since Kluit bought his?”

  “And for ever-increasing sums. It is a guaranteed investment, Monsieur Hole. Old instruments of torture have a loyal body of followers who are keen to pay, croyez-moi.”

  “I believe you,” Harry said, trying to press down one of the antennae.

  “Spring-loaded,” Van Boorst said. “Once the wire has been pulled, the victim will not be able to remove the apple from his mouth. Nor will anyone else, for that matter. Do not take step two if you want to retract the circular ridges. Don’t pull the wire, please.”

  “Step two?”

  “Give it to me.”

  Harry passed Van Boorst the ball. The Belgian carefully threaded a pen through the loop, held it horizontally and at the same height as the ball and then let go of the ball. As the wire became taut there was another bang. The Leopold’s apple jiggled six inches below the pen and the sharp needles sticking out of each of the antennae glistened.

  “Å faen,” Harry swore in Norwegian.

  The Belgian smiled. “The Mai Mai called the device ‘Blood of the Sun.’ This sweet child has several names.” He placed the apple on the table, put the pen in the opening where the wire came from, pushed hard, and the needles and antennae retracted with a bang, and the royal apple regained its smooth, round shape.

  “Impressive,” Harry said. “How much?”

  “Six thousand dollars,” Van Boorst said. “Usually I add a bit each time, but you can have it for the same price I sold the last one.”

  “Why’s that?” Harry asked, running his forefinger over the sleek metal.

  “Because you have come a long way,” Van Boorst said, blowing cigarette smoke into the room. “And because I like your accent.”

  “Mm. And who was the last buyer?”

  Van Boorst chuckled. “Just as no one will ever find out that you have been here, I will not tell you about my other customers. Does that not sound reassuring, Monsieur …? See, I have already forgotten your name.”

  Harry nodded. “Six hundred,” he said.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Six hundred dollars.”

  Van Boorst emitted the same brief chuckle. “Ridiculous. But the price you mention happens to be the price of a three-hour guided tour of the nature preserve where there are mountain gorillas. Would you prefer that, Monsieur Hole?”

  “You can keep the royal apple,” Harry said, taking out a slim wad of twenty-dollar bills from his back pocket. “I’m offering you six hundred for information about who bought apples from you.”

  He placed the wad on the table in front of Van Boorst. And on the top an ID card.

  “Norwegian police,” Harry said. “At least two women have been killed by the product over which you have a monopoly.”

  Van Boorst bent over the money and studied the ID card without touching either.

  “If that is the case I am truly sorry,” he said, and it sounded as if his voice had become even more gravelly. “Believe me. But my personal security is probably worth more than six hundred dollars. If I were to talk openly about all the people who have shopped here
, my life expectancy would be—”

  “You should worry more about your life expectancy in a Congolese prison,” Harry said.

  Van Boorst laughed again. “Nice try, Hole. But the chief of police in Goma happens to be a personal acquaintance of mine, and anyway”—he threw his arms in the air—“what have I done, after all?”

  “What you have done is less interesting,” Harry said, taking a photo out of his breast pocket. “The Norwegian state is one of the most important providers of aid to the Congo. If the Norwegian authorities call Kinshasa, name you as a noncooperative source of the murder weapon in a Norwegian double murder, what do you think will happen?”

  Van Boorst was no longer smiling.

  “You won’t be falsely convicted of anything—gracious, no,” Harry said. “You’ll just be on remand, which should not be confused with punishment. It’s the judicious confinement of a person while a case is being investigated and perhaps there are fears that evidence may have been tampered with. But it is prison nevertheless. And this investigation could take a long time. Have you ever seen the inside of a Congolese prison, Van Boorst? No, I suppose there are not many white men who have.”

  Van Boorst pulled the dressing gown around him more tightly. Eyed Harry while gnawing at the cigarette holder. “OK,” he said, “a thousand dollars.”

  “Five hundred,” Harry said.

  “Five? But you—”

  “Four,” Harry said.

  “Done!” Van Boorst shouted, raising his arms into the air. “What do you want to know?”

  “Everything,” Harry said, leaning against the wall and producing a pack of cigarettes.

  When, half an hour later, Harry stepped out of Van Boorst’s house and into Joe’s Land Rover, darkness had fallen.

  “The hotel,” Harry said.

  The hotel turned out to be right down by the lake. Joe warned Harry against swimming. Not because of the Guinea parasite he would be unlikely to discover until one day a thin worm began to wriggle under his skin, but because of the methane gas that rose from the bottom in the form of large bubbles that could render him unconscious and precipitate drowning.