The Leopard: An Inspector Harry Hole Novel

by Jo Nesbo

  The light from the ceiling fell on the tiny white patches on his face. So handsome, she thought. Someone should paint him.

  The marionettes are dancing as they should now. Harry Hole found out I called Elias Skog. I like him. I think perhaps we could have been friends if we had met when we were children or in our teens. We have a couple of things in common. Like intelligence. He is the only detective who seems to have the ability to see behind the veil. That also means, of course, I will have to be careful with him. I am looking forward to seeing how this develops. With childlike glee.

  46

  Red Beetle

  Harry opened his eyes and stared up at a large, square red beetle crawling toward him between the two empty bottles. It purred like a cat. It stopped, then purred again, tapped its way two more inches toward him along the glass coffee table, leaving a tiny trail in the ash. He stretched out his hand, grabbed it and put it to his ear. Heard his own voice sound like a rock being crushed. “Stop calling me, Øystein.”

  “Harry—”

  “Who the hell is this?”

  “It’s Kaja. What are you doing?”

  He looked at the display to make sure the voice was telling the truth. “Resting.” He felt his stomach preparing to evacuate its contents. Again.

  “Where?”

  “On the sofa. I’ll hang up now unless it’s important.”

  “Does that mean you’re at home in Oppsal?”

  “Well, let me see. The wallpaper’s right, anyway. Kaja, I have to go.”

  Harry threw the phone to the end of the sofa, lurched to his feet, stooped to find his center of gravity and staggered forward, using his head as a navigation aid and battering ram. It led him into the kitchen without any major collisions, and he placed his hands on both sides of the sink before the fountain of vomit gushed from his mouth.

  Opening his eyes again, he saw that the dish rack was still over the sink. The thin yellowish-green vomit was running down a single upright plate. Harry turned on the tap. One of the advantages of being an alcoholic back off the wagon was that by day two your sick stops blocking the drain.

  Harry drank a little water from the tap. Not much. Another advantage the experienced alcoholic possesses is a knowledge of what his stomach can tolerate.

  He went back to the living room, legs akimbo, as if he had just filled his pants. Which, as a matter of fact, he had not yet checked. He lay down on the sofa and heard a low croak coming from the far end. A small voice from a miniature person was calling his name. He groped between his feet and put the red cell to his ear again.

  “What’s up?”

  He wondered what he should do with the gall that was burning his throat like lava—cough it up or swallow it? Or let it burn, as he deserved.

  He listened as she explained she wanted to see him. Would he meet her at Ekeberg Restaurant? Like now. Or in an hour’s time.

  Harry looked at the two empty bottles of Jim Beam on the coffee table and then at his watch. Seven. The liquor stores were closed. Restaurant bar.

  “Now,” he said.

  He clicked off, and the phone rang again. He looked at the display and pressed answer. “Hi, Øystein.”

  “Now you’re answering! Shit, Harry, I was beginning to wonder if you’d done a Hendrix.”

  “Can you drive me to Ekeberg Restaurant?”

  “What the hell d’you think I am? A fucking cabdriver?”

  Eighteen minutes later Øystein’s car stood outside the steps to Olav Hole’s house and he called through the opened window with a grin. “Need any help locking the fucking door, you drunken asshole?”

  “Dinner?” Øystein exclaimed as they drove by Nordstrand. “To fuck her or because you have fucked already?”

  “Calm down. We work together.”

  “Exactly. As my ex-wife used to say: ‘You want what you see every day.’ She must have read it in a glossy magazine. Only she didn’t mean me, but that bastard at the office.”

  “You haven’t been married, Øystein.”

  “Could have been. The guy wore a Norwegian sweater and a tie and spoke Nynorsk. Not dialect, but fucking national-romantic Nynorsk, Ivar Aasen–style, I kid you not. Can you imagine what it’s like to sleep alone thinking that right now your could-have-been-wife is busy fucking someone on a desk? You visualize a colored sweater and a bare white ass going hammer and tongs, until it stops and seems to suck in its cheeks and the clod howls: ‘Eg kjem!’ ‘I’m coming!’ In Nynorsk.”

  Øystein glanced at Harry, but there was no reaction.

  “Christ, Harry, this is great humor. Are you that drunk?”

  Kaja sat by the window, deep in thought, taking stock of the town, when a low cough made her turn. It was the head waiter; he had that apologetic it’s-on-the-menu-but-the-kitchen-says-we-don’t-have-it look, and had stooped very low over her, but spoke in such muffled tones that she could still hardly hear him.

  “I regret to say that your company has arrived.” Then he amended his statement with a blush. “I mean, I regret to say we could not admit him. He’s a bit … animated, I’m afraid. And our policy in such—”

  “Fine,” Kaja said, getting up. “Where is he?”

  “He’s outside waiting. I’m afraid he bought a drink from the bar on the way in, and he has got it with him. Perhaps you might be so kind as to bring the glass back in. We could lose our license for that sort of thing, you know.”

  “Of course—just get me my coat, would you, please?” said Kaja, hurrying through the restaurant with the waiter nervously tripping along after her.

  On emerging, she saw Harry. He was swaying next to the low wall by the slope, where they had stood last time.

  She joined him. There was an empty glass on the wall.

  “Doesn’t look like we’re meant to eat at this restaurant,” she said. “Any suggestions?”

  He shrugged and took a sip from his hip flask. “Bar at the Savoy. If you’re not too hungry.”

  She pulled her coat around her more tightly. “I’m not that hungry, actually. What about showing me around a bit? This is your stomping ground, and I’ve got a car. You could show me the bunkers where you used to spend your time.”

  “Cold and ugly,” Harry said. “Stink of piss and wet ash.”

  “We could smoke,” she said. “And admire the view. Have you got anything better to do?”

  A cruise ship, lit up like a Christmas tree, glided slowly and soundlessly through the dark to the town on the fjord beneath them. They were sitting on wet concrete on top of a bunker, but neither Harry nor Kaja felt the cold creeping into their bodies. Kaja sipped at the hip flask Harry had passed her.

  “Red wine in a hip flask?” she said.

  “That was all that was left in Dad’s cabinet. Just emergency supplies anyway. Favorite male actor?”

  “Your turn to start,” she said, taking a longer swig.

  “Robert De Niro.”

  She made a face. “Analyze This? Meet the Fockers?”

  “I swore eternal allegiance after Taxi Driver and The Deer Hunter. But, yes, it has been at some cost. What about you?”

  “John Malkovich.”

  “Mm. Good. Why?”

  She deliberated. “I think it’s the cultivated evil. Not something I like as a human quality, but I love the way he reveals it.”

  “And then he has a feminine mouth.”

  “Is that good?”

  “Yep. All the best actors have feminine mouths. And/or a high-pitched feminine voice. Kevin Spacey, Philip Seymour Hoffman.” Harry took a cigarette from the pack and offered her one.

  “Only if you light it for me,” she said. “Those boys are not exactly overmasculine.”

  “Mickey Rourke. Woman’s voice. Woman’s mouth. James Woods. Kissable mouth, like an obscene rose.”

  “But not a high-pitched voice.”

  “Bleating voice. Sheep. Ewe.”

  Kaja laughed and took the lit cigarette. “Come on. Macho men in films have deep, hoarse voices.
Take Bruce Willis, for example.”

  “Yes, take Bruce Willis. Hoarse fits. But deep? Hardly.” Harry scrunched up his eyes and whispered in falsetto, facing the town: “ ‘From up here it doesn’t look like you’re in charge of jack shit.’ ”

  Kaja burst out laughing; the cigarette shot from her mouth and bounced down the wall and into the thick shrubs, sending off sparks.

  “Bad?”

  “Sensationally bad,” she gasped. “Damn, now you’ve made me forget the macho actor with the feminine voice I was going to say.”

  Harry rolled his shoulders. “You’ll think of it.”

  “Even and I also used to have a place like this,” Kaja said, taking another cigarette and holding it between thumb and forefinger as if it were a nail she was going to hammer in. “Somewhere for ourselves we thought no one else knew, where we could hide and tell each other secrets.”

  “Feel like telling me about it?”

  “About what?”

  “Your brother. What happened?”

  “He died.”

  “I know. I thought you would tell me the rest.”

  “And what is the rest?”

  “Well, why have you canonized him, for example.”

  “Have I?”

  “Haven’t you?”

  Her searching gaze lingered on him. “Wine,” she said.

  Harry passed her the hip flask and she took a greedy swig.

  “He left a note,” she said. “Even was so sensitive and vulnerable. At times he could be all smiles and laughter; it was like he brought the sunshine when he arrived. If you had any problems, they seemed to evaporate when he appeared, like … erm, like dew in the sun. And in the black periods it was the opposite. Everything went quiet around him; a brooding tragedy seemed to hang in the air and you could hear it in his silence. Music in a minor key. Beautiful and terrible at once—do you understand? And yet, some of the sunshine seemed to have been stored in his eyes, because they continued to laugh. It was eerie.”

  She shivered.

  “It was during summer vacation, a sunny day, the kind only Even could make. We were at our summer house in Tjøme, and I had gotten up and gone straight to the shop to buy strawberries. When I returned breakfast was ready, and Mommy called up to the first floor for Even to come down. But he didn’t answer. We assumed he was sleeping—now and then he slept really late. I went up to fetch something from my room and tapped on his door and called out, ‘Strawberries,’ as I passed. I was still listening for a response when I opened the door to my room. When you go into your own room, you don’t look around—you just look for whatever it is you want, the bedside table where you know your book is, the windowsill or the box of fishing lures. I didn’t see him right away, only noticed that something about the light was not as it should have been. Then I glanced to the side and at first saw only his bare feet. I knew every inch of his feet—he used to pay me a krone to tickle them; he loved that. My first thought was that he was flying, at last he had learned to fly. My gaze continued upward; he was wearing the pale-blue sweater I had knitted for him. He had hanged himself from the lamp with an extension cord. He must have waited until I’d gone out, and then come into my room. I wanted to run, but I couldn’t move—my legs were rooted to the floor. So I stood there staring at him, and he was so close, and I called my mother—I did all the things that should have produced a shout, but not a sound would come out of my mouth.”

  Kaja bent her head and flicked her cigarette. Took a tremulous breath.

  “I can remember only fragments of the rest. They gave me medicine to calm me down. When I recovered, three days later, they had already buried him. They said it was just as well I wasn’t there, that the strain might have been too great. I fell ill right afterward and was in bed with a fever for long periods over the summer. I’ve always thought it was a little too hurried, the funeral, as if there were something shameful about the way he had died. You know what I mean?”

  “Mm. You said he had written a note?”

  Kaja gazed across the fjord. “It was on my bedside table. He wrote that he had fallen in love with a girl he could never have, he didn’t want to live anymore and asked for forgiveness for all the pain he was inflicting on us, and that he knew we loved him.”

  “Mm.”

  “That came as quite a surprise. Even had never told me there was a girl, and he used to tell me most things. Had it not been for Roar—”

  “Roar?”

  “Yes. I had my first boyfriend that summer. He was so nice and patient, visited me almost every day when I was ill and listened to me talking about Even.”

  “About what an immeasurably wonderful person he had been.”

  “You’ve got it.”

  Harry shrugged. “I did the same when my mother died. Øystein wasn’t as patient as Roar. He asked me straight out if I was founding a new religion.”

  Kaja giggled and sucked on her cigarette. “I think Roar eventually felt that the memory of Even was smothering all life as he knew it, including himself. It was a brief relationship.”

  “Mm. But Even was still there.”

  She nodded. “Behind every single door I opened.”

  “That’s why, isn’t it?”

  She nodded again. “When I came home from the hospital that summer and had to go to my bedroom, I couldn’t open the door. I simply couldn’t. Because I knew that if I did, he would be hanging there again. And it would be my fault.”

  “It’s always our fault, isn’t it?”

  “Always.”

  “And no one can persuade us that it isn’t—not even we can do that.” Harry stubbed out his cigarette in the dark. Lit another.

  The cruise ship beneath them had slid into the quay.

  A gust of wind whistled through the gun slits, making a hollow, gloomy sound.

  “Why are you crying?” he asked softly.

  “Because it is my fault,” she whispered with tears rolling down her cheeks. “Everything is my fault. You’ve known all along, haven’t you?”

  Harry inhaled. Took out the cigarette and blew on the glow. “Not all along.”

  “Since when?”

  “Since I saw Bjørn Holm’s face in the doorway on Holmenveien. Bjørn Holm is a good forensics officer, but no De Niro. And he was genuinely surprised.”

  “Was that all?”

  “It was enough. I knew from his expression that he had no idea I was on to Leike. Therefore he had not seen anything on my computer, and he had not passed it on to Bellman. And if Holm wasn’t the mole, there was only one other person it could have been.”

  She nodded and dried her tears. “Why didn’t you say anything? Why didn’t you do anything? Why didn’t you behead me?”

  “What would have been the point? I assumed you had a good reason.”

  She shook her head and let the tears flow.

  “I don’t know what he promised you,” Harry said. “I would guess a leading position in the new, all-powerful Kripos. And I was right when I said that the guy you were hung up on was married and told you he would leave his wife and kids for your sake, but he never would.”

  She sobbed quietly, her neck bent as though it had become too heavy. Like a rain-burdened flower, Harry thought.

  “What I don’t understand is why you wanted to meet me this evening,” he said, giving his cigarette a disapproving look. Perhaps he should change brands. “I thought at first it was because you wanted to tell me you were the mole, but I soon realized it wasn’t. Are we waiting for someone? Is something going to happen? I mean, I’ve been sidelined—what harm can I do to them now?”

  She looked at her watch. Sniffled. “Can we go back to your place, Harry?”

  “Why? Is someone waiting for us there?”

  She nodded.

  Harry drained his hip flask.

  …

  The door had been broken down. The splinters of wood on the floor suggested it had been levered open with a crowbar. Nothing refined, no attempt to be discreet. Poli
ce break-in.

  Harry turned on the steps and looked at Kaja, who had gotten out of the car and stood with crossed arms. Then he went inside.

  The living room was dark; the only light came from the liquor cabinet, which was open. But it was enough for him to recognize the person sitting in shadow by the window.

  “Bellman,” Harry said. “You’re sitting in my father’s armchair.”

  “I took the liberty,” Bellman said. “Since the sofa had a particular smell. Even the dog shied away.”

  “May I offer you something?” Harry nodded toward the cabinet and sat down on the sofa. “Or did you find something for yourself?”

  Harry could discern Bellman shaking his head. “Not me. But the dog did.”

  “Mm. I take it that you have a search warrant, but I am curious about the grounds given.”

  “An anonymous tip-off about you having smuggled drugs into the country via an innocent third party and the possibility that it was here.”

  “And it was?”

  “The sniffer dogs found something, a ball of some yellowish-brown substance wrapped in silver foil. Doesn’t look like the usual sort of thing we confiscate in this country, so for the moment it’s not clear what we’re dealing with. But we’re considering having it analyzed.”

  “Considering?”

  “It might be opium, or it might be a lump of plasticine or clay. It depends.”

  “Depends on what?”

  “On you, Harry. And me.”

  “Really?”

  “If you agree to do us a favor, I might tend to the view that it is plasticine and overlook any tests. A boss has to prioritize his resources, isn’t that so?”

  “You’re the boss. What sort of favor?”

  “You’re a man who doesn’t like beating around the bush, Hole, so let me give it to you straight. I want you to take on the role of scapegoat.”

  Harry saw a brown ring of Jim Beam at the bottom of the bottle on the table but resisted the temptation to put it to his lips.

  “We’ve just had to release Tony Leike, as he has watertight alibis for at least two of the murders. All we have on him is a phone call to one of the victims. We’ve been a bit forceful with the press. Together with Leike and his future father-in-law, they could make things uncomfortable for us. We’ll have to issue a press release tonight. And it will say that the arrest was undertaken on the basis of the blue chit you, the controversial Harry Hole, wheedled out of the poor sylphlike prosecutor at Police HQ. And that this was a solo operation that you, and you alone, organized, and you shoulder all of the responsibility. Kripos smelled a rat after the arrest, intervened and, in conversation with Leike, clarified the facts. And immediately released him. You will have to join us and sign the press release, and you will never make a statement about the investigation again, not a word. Understood?”