by Jon Michelet
It bursts into flames with even more intensity than he thought it would. Bård the Board runs across a field, which is fallow, almost falls head-first into a ditch, reaches his car and drives off. Not back to Halden where he came from, but inland to the forest roads towards the Anker mountains. Mountain after mountain, there are only forest-clad ridges, about three hundred metres high. But it is wonderful terrain to hide a car, and he knows where the key is in a cabin by a lake called Mørte.
In the rear-view mirror he can see the flames towering from the burning house and sparks flying, a shower of sparks. He passes a bend and then all there is to see is black forest.
The house, a stone’s throw from Isachsen’s, is the old farmhouse on what used to be a smallholding. Bjørn Riiser is inside sleeping on a hard bed in the kitchen, as he often does, at all times of the day and night. Beside him, on the floor, is a bottle of Polish vodka, which a friend of his bought on board one of the boats that transport magazine paper from the SBF paper plant to Germany.
Riiser is woken up by the smell of smoke. He opens his eyes and looks around. Fortunately he can see. So it wasn’t methanol in the vodka but proper alcohol. Did he forget to stub out his cigarette and set fire to the rag rug again? No, there isn’t any smoke in the kitchen. What he can smell is only smoke and it is very strong. He struggles to his feet and peeks out of the window.
The whole of Isachsen’s abandoned glory is ablaze. Sparks shoot up from this inferno of flames, right up to the heavens, but the wind scatters some here, there and everywhere.
Riiser looks down along his house wall. He thinks he can see a strange light there. It takes him seconds to realise that his wall is alight. His house is burning too. He will have to run up to the bedroom on the first floor to get his wallet, which is all the money he owns.
He arrives, finds the leather wallet where it should be, in his jacket, dives back down the stairs and into the porch. By the front door he almost chokes in the thick, fetid smoke; it must be the roofing felt which is burning like a torch.
The kitchen is smoke-free. He lifts the clasps on the window and tries to push it open. It hasn’t been opened for many years and is stuck fast.
Riiser knows what to do. He might have done little else but drink for the last ten to twelve years, but he is an old sea dog and he has done the odd fire drill. He wraps a kitchen towel round his right hand, remembers he used to have a decent right hook in his earlier days and punches the window until the glass shatters.
He clambers up and squeezes through the window frame. A sharp stabbing pain in his stomach. There must have been some shards left that have pierced the flesh. He tries to stand up, doesn’t have the strength and loses his grip. The pain spreads across his stomach like the fires of hell. Feels with his hand, looks at it. Covered with blood. It is pumping out of him.
‘Oh, Lord God,’ groans Bjørn Riiser. It isn’t a cry for salvation, for he doesn’t believe in such. It is his last and he has one final hope. He hopes life will manage to ebb out of him before he becomes prey to the flames.
*
Stribolt is sitting in his room at the Grand and working on the notes he made after the interviews with Rønningen and the receptionist. He hears sirens. He gets up, looks through the window and sees one fire engine, and then another, they are heading south. A fire must have broken out somewhere along Iddefjord.
Stribolt rings Vaage’s mobile.
She is still at Vilhelm Thygesen’s and her voice sounds thick. Stribolt briefs her on the interview with the excellent witness, Rønningen, and allows himself a comment: she doesn’t look as stylish in reality as on the net.
‘Thygesen’s telling me about the demise of the modern man,’ Vaage says.
‘Is it interesting?’
‘Yes.’
‘Is it relevant to our case?’
‘Not in the slightest.’
‘Watch yourself with that slimy buttock-groper,’ Stribolt says. ‘He’s supposed to have had quite a reputation as a seducer in his time.’
‘He won’t seduce me.’
‘I thought it was a stupid idea to fax over the photo of Picea. The quality won’t be good enough. Can you scan it and send it electronically to our friends at Halden police station?’
‘No problem.’
‘Early tomorrow morning. Preferably at nine on the dot.’
‘Jawohl.’
*
‘We have a problem, Kykke,’ Borken says. ‘Lips’s contact here in Sweden who we were relying on to exchange our Norwegian kroner for German marks hasn’t shown up.’
‘The marks we need for Tallinn,’ Lips explains.
The three of them are standing on the pavement outside Sjøfartshotellet in Stockholm, where Kykke has parked his bike.
‘There are banks in Stockholm, aren’t there?’ Kykke says.
‘Too much dough to change,’ Lips answers with a smile which is no more than a thin line. ‘Too risky. That’s why we’ve got to go and do the exchange with new guys we’ve found.’
‘I’ve had a long journey here,’ Kykke says. ‘What I fancy now is a hot shower and a cold beer. Can’t you boys fix the transaction?’
‘These guys live in Västerås,’ Borken says. ‘They’re Yugos.’
‘Yugos?’ Kykke repeats.
‘Yugoslavs,’ Lips says.
‘I’m not going to fuckin’ Västerås to deal with a gang of bloody Yugoslavs,’ Kykke says. ‘You go and sort out the shit.’
‘My bike’s in Tallinn,’ Lips answers.
‘And I’ve put mine in a shed on the ferry quay because this hotel doesn’t have a garage and there’s so much theft in Stockholm,’ Borken says. ‘You don’t have to go all the way back to Västerås. We’ve struck a compromise. They meet us halfway. Place called Bro. Lips can ride pillion with you, as the map reader. He’ll sort everything with the Yugos. You don’t have to think about a thing, Kykke. You’ve done your bit in Norway. Just one little job left and we’re ready for Estonia.’
‘Niet,’ Kykke says. ‘As we’re so bloody rich, Lips can take a taxi to the meeting place.’
‘You never know what kind of driver you get,’ Lips says. ‘It might be a blabber.’
‘The Yugos are going to clear off if we arrive in a taxi,’ Borken says. ‘Honestly, Kykke. We’ve just got the time. The boat sails at dawn.’
‘Norwegian money’s worth nothing in Tallinn,’ Lips says.
‘All it’s good for is wiping your arse,’ Borken adds with a hollow guffaw.
Kykke flings up his arms and says fine, OK. Lips puts on his helmet, shows the map he is holding and points to Bro, which is in a bay called Brofjärden by the northern bank of Lake Mälaren, halfway between Stockholm and Enköping. He shoves the map into his leather jacket and jumps on to the back of Brontes with a briefcase in his lap.
‘Let’s kick the ballistics,’ Kykke says.
16
Kykke sees a sign saying Bro, feels a tap on his right shoulder and turns off the motorway between Stockholm and Enköping. He goes through a tunnel under the motorway and slows as he enters the tiny town of Bro. A tap on his left shoulder and he turns on to a narrow country road that runs across cultivated land and forests of deciduous trees. Passes a little church that shines white in the night that has become surprisingly dark. According to the road sign this must be Låssa Church.
The road leads down a steep hill to a tarmacked turnaround on a headland by a fjord coming out of Lake Mälaren. From there a path goes down to the lake, probably to a beach or a pontoon. There are no houses here. But there is a sign warning people not to dump rubbish. Someone must have disobeyed the sign because there is an old stove on the edge of a ditch. It is tilted in such a way that the top is level with the ground.
The black hotplates, two large ones beside each other and a little one underneath, remind Kykke of the eyes an
d mouth of a death mask.
Kykke shudders at the sight. Can a dumped stove in a Swedish ditch be an omen of death? He doesn’t believe in omens. But he can feel in his bones that he is right in his suspicion that close friends can become bitter enemies. If he had been Socrates, friends would have had the poisoned chalice ready for him now.
Lips dismounts and goes for a walk around the area. Kykke doesn’t move from Brontes and keeps the engine running and the headlamps switched on. He takes off his helmet. Immediately there is the buzz of mosquitoes. The clearing is surrounded on almost all sides by alder thicket. The shrubs keep the dampness in the air under a sky which has become overcast.
Kykke rolls a cigarette and lights it to keep the mosquitoes at bay and his brain sharp. He switches off the lights, kills the engine.
‘The Yugos have chosen a bloody mozzie nest,’ says Lips, who has returned to the bike after his recce. He has also lit up. The cigarette glow looks like a laser beam in the darkness.
‘You’ve been here before,’ Kykke says. ‘Otherwise you’d never have found it.’
Lips nods. His head sways like a rice-paper lamp above his body.
‘Yeah, I know this place. Kykke, we’ve always worked on a need-to-know basis. So we never told you who was delivering the goods that we’ve earned our dough on. I doubt I’ll be saying too much if I tell you it was the Yugos and this is one place we’ve used for the handover.’
Kykke listens to the lapping of the waves from Lake Mälaren, to the distant drone of traffic on the motorway, to the rustling in the scrub, caused by the wind or maybe a small animal.
‘How long are we going to wait here?’ he asks.
‘They’re coming,’ Lips says. ‘They’ve got further to come than we had.’
A sound like the blast of a muted trumpet causes Lips to swivel round. More blasts from down by the lake.
‘Eurasian bittern,’ Kykke says.
‘Eh?’
‘It’s a bittern. A bird. A wading bird. Lives in the reeds. Rare in Norway, but one spring a bittern landed in the mere by my cabin in the Finnish Forest. That’s how I know.’
‘Oh, yeah,’ Lips answers, unnecessarily trampling his cigarette end flat.
‘There’s a car coming.’
A big, white van rolls down the slope to the turnaround.
‘VW van,’ Lips says. ‘That’s our guys.’
The van halts as soon as it enters the tarmac, thirty metres away from Brontes, facing it with the headlamps on full.
‘Haven’t they heard about dipping lights?’ Kykke mutters.
‘Wait here,’ Lips says. ‘I’ll go over and do the business.’
Kykke gets off the bike and stands with it between him and Lips and the van.
Lips saunters. He has taken only seven to eight steps, then he stops. Kykke hears the clicks as Lips opens the locks on the briefcase. Kykke undoes the straps round the toolbox. Lips throws the briefcase down and turns with a gun in his hand.
Kykke crouches behind Brontes. A shot is fired. Lead hits a harder metal. The ricochet whines through the air.
‘Run for it, Lips!’ Kykke yells. ‘I’ve got live hand grenades.’
Another shot, which hits something soft. Must have been a tree trunk.
‘I’m gonna chuck a grenade!’
‘You’re bluffing.’
‘And you can’t hit a bloody barn door.’
Kykke takes the grenade. On his knees, hidden behind the bike, he holds up the grenade in his right hand.
Lips shoots for the third time. The shot seems to lose itself in thin air, probably where the bittern is flying off now, far from the battle of the flightless bipeds.
‘I’m taking out the pin!’ Kykke shouts.
Trembling hands fumble and the pin is caught in the cotton, but he manages to pull it out. Through the spikes of the front wheel he sees Lips turn and set off at a run.
Kykke can’t remember how many he has to count before he throws. It is several lives since he was in the army. He counts to three and tosses it to a point between Lips and the van Lips is making for, hears the grenade land on the tarmac and then he rolls away from the bike in case a hot splinter hits the petrol tank.
Nothing happens.
An immense flash of light, followed by a sharp, but not deafening, explosion, splinters whizz through air, a gurgled scream. Silence. Kykke lies stock-still, flat on his stomach. Behind him, in the scrub, an animal leaps through the dry undergrowth. In front of him he hears what sounds like an angry snake hissing. He knows what it is. A splinter must have punctured a tyre. He hopes it isn’t one of Brontes’.
The lights on the van come closer. They seem to be tilted. One of the VW’s front wheels must be holed.
Kykke keeps rolling, away from the open area, down into the ditch where the stove is, stinging himself on the nettles. The van reverses and wobbles from side to side. He sees it is towing a trailer with Statoil written on the side. It is a rented vehicle. The Yugoslavian mafia does not drive rental vehicles. There is a scream of metal on metal. The steel rim is destroying the rubber.
‘You won’t get far, Borken,’ Kykke whispers. He swallows the taste of blood. ‘You used to be my best pal.’ He tries to curb the red madness roaming his brain in an attempt to leave through his eyes, putting immense pressure on his eyeballs. He closes his eyes and sees a burning monk on each retina. The monks sit in the lotus position and allow the flames to rise. No one can stand such a vision, so Kykke opens his eyes again.
The van veers to one side, turns towards the steep slope, starts moving, now all he can see is the rear lights. Kykke crawls out of the ditch on all fours, past Brontes, to a dark figure strewn across the tarmac. There is blood, a pool of blood. The gun is in the pool.
Kykke runs back, starts Brontes, there is no smell of petrol, the tank must be intact. He loads the gun and slips it behind his belt. Heads up the slope in no great haste. Sees the white van and trailer bumping along the road. There is a smell of burnt rubber and metal.
Kykke approaches until he is ten metres behind the van, which has no speed left in it. Kykke brakes and stops. Plants his feet on the ground. Raises the gun with both hands as he has seen in films, aims at the rear window and fires. The shot smashes the window to pieces. But the van continues to limp on.
Kykke gets closer, stops and aims again. Left of the hole where the window was. Squeezes the trigger. The flame from the muzzle blinds him. The van comes to a sudden halt and he almost crashes into the trailer.
He waits, sitting on his bike. The van must be in gear, otherwise it would have rolled back. His ears are ringing. His nose smarts with the smell of gunpowder. He is breathing heavily, like a beached whale, in gasps, then he hyperventilates. He kicks out the stand for Brontes. Creeps along the left side of the van with his gun raised. If Lips had a shooter, Borken may have one too. Borken is a slippery customer; he may well be playing possum.
Was a slippery customer.
Borken is slumped over the wheel with a gaping wound in the back of his head.
Kykke takes a deep breath, leans inside and switches off the ignition. The lights die. There isn’t a sound to be heard anywhere along the deserted road. The boys chose a good place to carry out the liquidation. Give them that. Their own fault they underestimated him. There is nothing new in this world. He takes another deep breath and pulls the wallet from Borken’s jacket pocket. The dead man will have to fund the living man on his further travels. On the dashboard is Borken’s favourite knife, a Rambo job with a jungle-green shaft. Kykke takes the knife. It might come in handy when he has to cut dwarf birch on the northern plateaus.
He motors back to the turnaround to pick up his helmet, and then Kykke roars off, eases the throttle through Bro, finds a turning to Sigtuna, stops where the road crosses a bridge, goes down to the river, slings the gun in and washes the blood off hi
s hands. Washes his face. Puts the leather rag in his pocket.
What now? Now Lapland is waiting.
He has read in a magazine about a recluse who pans for gold on the Anarjohka on the Finnmark Plateau. There has to be room for another recluse up in Norway’s most deserted wilderness.
*
Gerhard Ryland leaves the dinner in Bærøe, sated and full of distinguished cognac, business unfinished. Both the Finns and Peterson are playing hard poker, keeping their cards close to their chests. He asks the taxi driver he ordered to drive to Haslum.
The driver from Moss doesn’t know where Haslum is. He receives an explanation and grunts with satisfaction at the long trip ahead.
‘Have you got enough money on you or on your card?’ the driver asks.
‘Money’s the only thing I have enough of,’ Ryland answers.
Vanja Vaage can’t say the same as she leaves Thygesen’s place in a taxi. She has counted her loose change and hopes two hundred and thirty-five kroner will get her back home to Hellerud late on a Friday evening.
She has listened to Thygesen. He gave a lecture that could have been entitled ‘From near-Marxist to total misanthrope’. If what he said can be considered pieces in the puzzle the Picea case is becoming, the pieces will have to swirl around loose in her subconscious. She is too tired to think and falls asleep on the back seat.
*
By Lake Mørte in the Anker mountains, Bård Isachsen is standing in front of a mirror in the bedroom of the cabin he has gone to. He has lit a candle to be able to see his own face. As soon as he arrived there he crept under all the duvets with a torch to drive away his fear of the darkness. He woke up from a terrible nightmare, and by then the batteries were flat. He had dreamed about maggots. White maggots, like those under the bark of old trees. Crawling over his face and eating it.
Now he has woken up, he can see his face is intact. ‘Nice and regular’, as a girl once said, ‘but a bit bland, kind of.’ Perhaps he should have let his hair grow a little longer. With it cut short, his head looks like a ball, a furry tennis ball. It is not his fault he seems so ordinary. It is his parents’ fault; they gave him the genes he has. But it wasn’t them who gave him the talent he has for skateboarding. He has developed this talent himself through hard training. You don’t get board-artistry genes from a father who grafts in Kakken and a mother who works in a shoe shop.
