Jo Nesbo

by Headhunters

  I thought I could make out something moving in the dark by the garage.

  Tomorrow was D-Day. Dream Day. Domesday. Demob Day. If everything went to plan this would be the last coup. I wanted to be finished, free, the one who got away with it.

  The town sparkled full of promise beneath us.

  Lotte answered on the fifth ring. ‘Roger?’ Careful, gentle. As if she had been the one to wake me and not vice versa.

  I hung up.

  And drained the glass in one swig.

  8

  G11SUS4

  I AWOKE WITH A splitting headache.

  I supported myself on my elbows and saw Diana’s delicate, panty-clad backside sticking up in the air as she rummaged through her handbag and the pockets of the clothes she had been wearing the previous day.

  ‘Looking for something?’ I asked.

  ‘Good morning, darling,’ she said, but I could hear that it was not. And I agreed.

  I dragged myself out of bed and into the bathroom. Saw myself in the mirror and knew the rest of the day could only get better. Had to get better. Would get better. I turned on the shower and stood under the ice-cold jets listening to Diana cursing under her breath in the bedroom.

  ‘And it’s gonna be …’ I howled in pure defiance: ‘PERFECT!’

  ‘I’m off,’ Diana called. ‘I love you.’

  ‘And I love you,’ I shouted, but didn’t know if she managed to catch it before the door slammed behind her.

  At ten o’clock I was sitting in my office trying to concentrate. My head felt like a transparent, pulsating tadpole. I had registered that Ferdinand had had his mouth open for several minutes and had formed it into what I assumed were words of varying interest. And even though his mouth was still open, he had stopped moving it and instead was staring at me with what I interpreted as an expectant look.

  ‘Repeat the question,’ I said.

  ‘I said it’s great I’m doing the second interview with Greve and the client, but you have to tell me a bit about Pathfinder first. I haven’t been told anything, and I’m going to look a complete fool!’ At this point his voice rose into the obligatory hysterical falsetto.

  I sighed. ‘They make tiny, almost invisible transmitters which can be attached to people and tracked via a receiver connected to the world’s most advanced GPS. Prioritised service from satellites of which they are part-owners, etc., etc. Ground-breaking technology, ergo buy-out potential. Read the annual report. Anything else?’

  ‘I’ve read it! Everything about the products is stamped secret. And what about Clas Greve being a foreigner? How am I going to get this obviously nationalistic client to swallow that?’

  ‘You won’t have to. I will. Don’t worry yourself about it, Ferdy.’

  ‘Ferdy?’

  ‘Yes, I’ve been giving it some thought. Ferdinand is too long. Is that all right?’

  He stared at me in disbelief. ‘Ferdy?’

  ‘Not with clients present, of course.’ I beamed and could feel my headache lifting already. ‘Have we finished, Ferdy?’

  We had.

  Through to lunch I chewed Paralgin and stared at the clock.

  At lunch I went to the jeweller’s opposite Sushi&Coffee.

  ‘Those ones,’ I said, pointing to the diamond earrings in the window.

  I had funds to cover the card. For as long as they lasted. And the scarlet box’s chamois surface was as soft as puppy fur.

  After lunch I continued to chew Paralgin and stare at the clock.

  At five on the dot I parked the car in Inkognitogata. Finding a place was easy; both the people who worked and lived here were obviously on their way home. It had just rained and my shoe soles squelched on the tarmac. The portfolio felt light. The reproduction had been of average quality and of course horrendously overpriced at fifteen thousand Swedish kroner, but that was not very important at this moment.

  As far as there can be said to be a fashionable street in Oslo, Oscars gate is it. The apartment buildings are a hotchpotch of architectural styles, mostly new Renaissance. Facades with neo-Gothic patterns, planted front gardens, this was where the directors and top civil servants had their estates at the end of the nineteenth century.

  A man with a poodle on a lead was coming towards me. No hunting dogs here in the centre. He looked through me. City centre.

  I walked up to number 25, according to the Internet search a block with ‘a Hanoverian variant of medieval-inspired architecture’. It was more interesting to read that the Spanish Embassy no longer had its premises here, hence there would hopefully be no annoying CCTV cameras. There was no one about in front of the property, which greeted me with silent black windows. The key I had been given by Ove was supposed to fit both the front and the apartment door. Anyway, it worked for the front door. I strode up the stairs. Purposeful. Not heavy, not light steps. A person who knows where he is going and has nothing to hide. I had the key ready so that I would not have to stand fumbling by the apartment door; that sort of noise travels in an old apartment building.

  Second floor. No name on the door, but I knew it was here. Double door with wavy glass. I was not as calm as I had believed, for my heart was pounding inside my ribs and I missed the keyhole. Ove had once told me that the first thing that goes when you are nervous is motor coordination. He had read it in a book about one-on-one combat, how the ability to load a weapon fails you when you are faced with another gun. Nevertheless I found the keyhole at the second attempt. And the key turned, soundless, smooth and perfect. I pressed the handle and pulled the door towards me. Pushed it away from me. But it wouldn’t open. I pulled again. Bloody hell! Had Greve had an extra lock put on? Would all my dreams and plans be crushed by an extra bloody lock? I pulled at the door with all my strength, I almost panicked. It came away from the frame with a loud crack and the glass in the frame quivered as the echo resounded down the staircase. I slipped inside, carefully closed the door behind me and exhaled. And the thought that had struck me the previous evening suddenly seemed stupid. Would I miss this tension to which I had become so accustomed?

  As I inhaled, my nose, mouth and lungs were filled with solvents: latex paint, varnish and glue.

  I stepped over the paint pots and the rolls of wallpaper in the hall. Grey protective paper on chequered oak parquet floor, wainscoting, brick dust, old windows that were clearly going to be replaced. Rooms the size of small ballrooms in a line, one after the other.

  I found the half-finished kitchen behind the middle room. Strict lines, metal and wood, expensive, no doubt about that; I guessed it was a Poggenpohl. I went into the maid’s room, and there was the door behind the shelves. I had already taken into account that it might be locked, but I knew that if necessary there would be tools in the apartment I could use to break it open.

  It wasn’t necessary. The hinges creaked a warning as the door opened.

  I stepped into the dark, empty, rectangular room, took the pocket flashlight from inside my overalls and shone the pale yellow light on the walls. There were four pictures hanging in there. Three of them were unknown to me. The fourth was not.

  I stood in front of it and felt the same dryness in my mouth as when Greve had mentioned the title.

  ‘The Calydonian Boar Hunt.’

  Light seemed to be forcing its way out of the underlying, 400-year-old layers of paint. Together with the shadows it gave the hunting scene an outline and form, what Diana had explained to me was called chiaroscuro. The picture had an almost physical impact, a magnetism that drew you in, it was like meeting a charismatic person you have only known from photos and hearsay. I was unprepared for all this beauty. I recognised the colors from earlier, better known hunting pictures of his in Diana’s art books – The Lion Hunt, The Hippopotamus and Crocodile Hunt, The Tiger Hunt. In the book I had read yesterday it had said that this was Rubens’s first hunting motif, the departure point for later masterpieces. The Calydonian boar had been sent by Artemis to murder and ravage in Calydon in revenge for huma
nity’s neglect of the goddess. But it was Calydon’s best hunter, Meleager, who killed the boar with his spear in the end. I stared at Meleager’s naked muscular torso, the hate-filled expression that reminded me of someone, at the spear entering the beast’s body. So dramatic and yet reverent. So naked and yet secretive. So simple. And so valuable.

  I lifted the picture, carried it into the kitchen and placed it on the bench. The old frame had, as I assumed it would, a canvas stretcher attached to the back. I produced the only two tools I had brought with me and needed: an awl and wire cutters. I snapped off most of the tacks, pulled out those I would reuse, slackened the stretcher and used the awl to force out the pins. I fumbled more than I usually do; perhaps Ove had been right about motor coordination skills after all. But twenty minutes later the reproduction was finally in position in the frame and the original in the portfolio.

  I hung up the picture, closed the door behind me, checked that I had not left any clues and left the kitchen with a sweaty hand round the portfolio handle.

  Walking through the middle room, I cast a glance out of the window and caught a glimpse of a semi-stripped crown of a tree. I stopped. The glowing red leaves that remained made the tree look as if it were aflame in the oblique rays of sunlight that leaked out between the clouds. Rubens. The colors. They were his colors.

  It was a magical moment. A moment of triumph. A moment of metamorphosis. In such a moment you see everything so clearly that decisions which had seemed fraught with difficulty before suddenly appear as self-evident. I was going to become a father, I had planned to tell her tonight, but I knew now that this was the right moment. Now, here, at the scene of the crime, with Rubens under my arm and this beautiful, majestic tree before me. This was the moment that should be cast in bronze, the eternal memory Diana and I should share and take out on rainy days. The decision that she, unsullied, would believe was taken in a moment of lucidity and for no other reason than love for her and our child-to-be. And only I, the lion, the paterfamilias, would know the dark secret: that the zebra’s throat had been savaged after an ambush, that the ground had been bloodied before the prize had been laid before them, my innocents. Yes, that’s how our love should be consolidated. I took out my phone, removed one glove and selected the number of her Prada phone. I tried to formulate the sentence in my head while waiting to be connected. ‘I want to give you a child, my darling.’ Or: ‘My darling, let me give you …’

  John Lennon played his G11sus4 chord.

  ‘It’s been a hard day’s night …’ So true, so true. Elated, I smiled.

  But in a flash I understood.

  That I could hear it.

  That something was wrong.

  I lowered my phone.

  And in the distance, but clear enough, I heard the Beatles beginning to play ‘A Hard Day’s Night’. Her ringtone.

  My feet were cemented to the grey paper on the ground.

  Then they began to move in the direction of the sound, my heart like the heavy beat of kettle drums.

  The sound came from behind a half-open door to the corridor on the far side of the reception rooms.

  I opened the door.

  It was a bedroom.

  The bed in the middle of the room was made but had obviously been slept in. At the foot lay a suitcase, and beside it was a chair with some clothes draped over the back. A suit hung on a hanger in the open wardrobe. The suit Clas Greve had worn at the interview. From somewhere in the room Lennon and McCartney were singing in unison with an energy they were never to regain on subsequent records. I looked around. And knelt. Bent down. And there it was. The Prada mobile phone. Under the bed. It must have slipped out of her pocket. Presumably as he tore her trousers off. And she had not realised the phone was gone until … until …

  I visualised her tempting backside this morning, the furious search through clothes and handbag.

  I stood up again. Much too quickly, I suppose, for the room began to whirl around. I stuck out a hand against the wall.

  The answerphone cut in, and there was her chirrupy voice.

  ‘Hi, this is Diana. I haven’t got my phone to hand …’

  True enough.

  ‘But you know what to do …’

  Yes, I did. My brain had registered somewhere that I had used the ungloved hand to support myself, and that therefore I would have to remember to wipe the wall.

  ‘Have a brilliant day!’

  That might be difficult, though.

  Beep.

  PART THREE

  Second Interview

  9

  SECOND INTERVIEW

  MY FATHER, IAN BROWN, was a keen, though not a very good, chess player. He had been taught to play by his father when he was five, and he read chess manuals and studied classic games. However, he didn’t teach me to play chess until I was fourteen, when my most receptive years were over. I had an aptitude for chess, though, and when I was sixteen I beat him for the first time. He smiled as though he were proud of me, but I know he hated it. He reassembled the pieces and we began a revenge match. I played with the white pieces as usual; he tried to make me believe that he was giving me an advantage. After a few moves he excused himself and went into the kitchen, where I knew he took a swig from a bottle of gin. When he returned I had swapped two pieces, but he didn’t realise. Four moves later he sat gawping at my white queen opposite his black king. And he saw that the next move would be checkmate. He was so funny to look at that I couldn’t restrain myself and started to laugh. And I could see from his expression that he knew what had happened. He stood up and swept all the pieces off the board. Then he hit me. My knees gave way and I fell, more out of terror than the force of the blow. He had never hit me before.

  ‘You switched some pieces,’ he hissed. ‘My son does not cheat.’

  I could taste blood in my mouth. The white queen lay on the floor in front of me. The crown was chipped. Hatred burned like bile through my throat and chest. I picked up the damaged queen and put it back on the board. Then the other pieces. One by one. Replaced them exactly as they had been.

  ‘Your move, Dad.’

  For that is what the player with the most cold-blooded hatred does when he has been on the point of winning and his opponent has unexpectedly hit him in the face, struck somewhere it hurts, found his terror. He doesn’t lose his overview of the board but puts his terror aside and keeps to his plan. Breathes in, reconstructs, continues the game, walks away with the victory. Leaves the scene without any triumphant gestures.

  I sat at the end of the table and saw Clas Greve’s mouth moving. Saw his cheeks tensing and relaxing and forming words that were obviously comprehensible to Ferdinand and the two Pathfinder representatives, at any rate they were clearly satisfied, all three of them. How I hated that mouth. Hated the grey-pink gums, the solid tombstone teeth, yes, even the shape of that revolting orifice; a straight cleft between two upward-pointing corners suggesting a smile, the same incised smile with which Bjørn Borg had charmed the world. And with which Clas Greve was now seducing his future employer, Pathfinder. But most of all I hated his lips. The lips that had touched my wife’s lips, my wife’s skin, probably her pale red nipples and for certain her dripping wet, open vagina. I imagined I could see a blonde pubic hair in a crease in the fleshy part of his lower lip.

  I had sat silently for almost half an hour while Ferdinand with imbecilic commitment had reeled off idiotic questions from the interview guide as though they were his own.

  At the beginning of the interview Greve had exclusively addressed himself to me. But increasingly he realised that I was only there as an unannounced, passive monitor and that his job today was to enlighten the other three with the gospel according to Greve. He had, however, at regular intervals sent me quick questioning looks as though searching for a hint as to my role.

  After a while the two representatives from Pathfinder, the company chairman and the public relations manager, had asked their questions, which naturally enough had centred around Greve�
��s time with HOTE. And Greve had given an account of how he and HOTE had taken a leading role in the development of TRACE, a lacquer containing around a hundred transmitters per millilitre which could be applied to any object. Its advantage was that the varnish was almost invisible and just like normal varnish it adhered so firmly to the object that it was impossible to get rid of it without using a paint scraper. The disadvantage was that the transmitters were so small that their signals were too weak not to penetrate any matter denser than air that might cover the transmitters, such as water, ice, mud or the extremely thick layers of dust to which vehicles in desert wars might be subject.

  On the other hand, walls, even made of thick bricks, were seldom a problem.

  ‘Our experience was that soldiers painted with TRACE lost contact with our receivers when the dirt on them reached a certain point,’ Greve said. ‘We don’t yet have the technology to make microscopic transmitters more powerful.’

  ‘We do at Pathfinder,’ the chairman said. He was a sparse-haired man in his fifties who kept twisting his neck at various junctures as though afraid it would stiffen, or else he had swallowed something big that he couldn’t quite get down. I suspected it was an involuntary spasm caused by a muscular disease for which there was only one outcome. ‘But unfortunately we don’t have the TRACE technology.’