The Redeemer

by Jo Nesbo

  'You?' she said.

  'Me,' he said in an alien, tremulous, husky voice.

  Then he was on top of her. His eyes glittered in the dark as he bit her lower lip until he drew blood and one hand found the way under her nightie and tore off her knickers. She lay there crippled with fear beneath the knife blade that stung the skin on her neck while he kept thrusting his groin into her before he had even got his trousers off, like some crazed copulating dog.

  'One word from you and I'll cut you into pieces,' he whispered.

  And not one word issued from her mouth. Because she was fourteen years old and sure that if she shut her eyes tight and concentrated she would be able to see the stars through the roof. God had the power to do things like that. If it was His wish.

  2

  Sunday, 14 December 2003. The Visit.

  HE STUDIED HIS REFLECTED FEATURES IN THE TRAIN window. Tried to see what it was, where the secret lay. But he saw nothing in particular, apart from the red neckerchief, just an expressionless face and eyes and hair that, approaching the walls of the tunnels between Courcelles and Ternes, was as black as the eternal night of the métro. Le Monde lay in his lap, forecasting snow, but above him the streets of Paris were still cold and deserted beneath impenetrable, low-lying cloud cover. His nostrils flared and drew in the faint but distinct smell of damp cement, human perspiration, hot metal, eau de cologne, tobacco, sodden wool and bile, a smell they never managed to wash out of the train seats, or to ventilate.

  The pressure created by an oncoming train made the windows vibrate, and the darkness was temporarily banished by the pale squares of light that flashed past. He pulled up the sleeve of his coat and checked his watch, a Seiko SQ50 which he had received in part payment from a client. There were already scratches on the glass, so he was not sure it was a genuine item. A quarter past seven. It was Sunday evening and the carriage was no more than half full. He looked around him. People slept on the métro; they always did. On weekdays in particular. Switched off, closed their eyes and let the daily journey become a dreamless interval of nothing between the red or the blue lines on the métro map, as a mute connecting line between work and freedom. He had read about a man who had sat like this for a whole day, eyes closed, to and fro, and it was only when they came to clean the carriage at the end of the day that they discovered he was dead. Perhaps he had descended into the catacombs for this very purpose, to draw a blue connecting line between life and the beyond in this pale yellow coffin, knowing he would be undisturbed.

  As for himself, he was forming a connecting line in the other direction. Back to life. There was this job tonight and then the one in Oslo. The last job. Then he would be out of the catacombs for good.

  A dissonant signal screamed before the doors closed in Ternes. They picked up speed again.

  He closed his eyes, trying to imagine the other smell. The smell of urinal blocks and hot, fresh urine. The smell of freedom. But perhaps it was true what his mother, the teacher, had said. That the human brain can reproduce detailed images of everything you have seen or heard, but not even the most basic smell.

  Smell. The images began to flash past on the inside of his eyelids. He had been fifteen years old, sitting in the corridor of the hospital in Vukovar, listening to his mother repeat the mumbled prayer to Thomas the Apostle, the patron saint of construction workers, to let God spare her husband. He had heard the rumble of the Serbian artillery firing from the river and the screams of those being operated on in the infants ward, where there were no longer any infants because the women of the town had stopped producing after the siege started. He had worked as an errand boy in the hospital and learned to shut out the noises, the screams and the artillery. But not the smells. And one smell above all others. Surgeons performing an amputation first had to cut through the flesh to the bone, and then, so that patients did not bleed to death, to use something that looked like a soldering iron to cauterise the blood vessels so that they were closed off. The smell of burnt flesh and blood was like nothing else.

  A doctor came into the corridor and waved him and his mother in. Approaching the bed, he had not dared to look at his father; he had just concentrated on the big brown hand clutching the mattress and trying, as it seemed, to tear it in two. It could have succeeded, for these were the strongest hands in the town. His father was a steel-bender – he was the person who went on building sites when the bricklayers were finished, put his large hands round the ends of the protruding steel used to reinforce the concrete, and with one quick, practised movement bent the ends of the steel poles and wove them into each other. He had seen his father working; it looked like he was wringing a cloth. No one had invented a machine that did the job better.

  He squeezed his eyes shut as he heard his father scream out in pain and anguish: 'Take the lad out!'

  'But he asked—'

  'Out!'

  The doctor's voice: 'The bleeding has stopped. Let's get cracking now!'

  Someone grabbed him under the arms and lifted him. He tried to struggle, but he was so small, so light. And that was when he noticed the smell. Burnt flesh and blood.

  The last thing he heard was the doctor's voice:

  'Saw, please.'

  The door slammed behind him and he sank down onto his knees and continued to pray where his mother had left off. Save him. Maim him, but save him. God had the power to do things like that. If it was His wish.

  He felt someone watching him, opened his eyes and was back in the métro. On the seat opposite was a woman with taut jaw muscles and a weary, distant gaze that moved away when it met his. The second hand on his wristwatch jerked forward as he repeated the address to himself. He felt his pulse. Normal. His head was light, but not too light. He was neither hot nor cold, felt neither fear nor pleasure, neither satisfaction nor dissatisfaction. The train was slowing down. Charles de Gaulle-Étoile. He sent the woman a final glance. She had been studying him, but if she should ever meet him again, maybe even tonight, she still would not recognise him.

  He got to his feet and waited by the doors. The brakes gave a low lament. Urinal blocks and urine. And freedom. As impossible to imagine as a smell. The doors slid open.

  Harry stepped onto the platform and stood inhaling the warm underground air as he read the address on the slip of paper. He heard the doors close and felt the draught of air on his back as the train set off again. Then he walked towards the exit. An advertising hoarding over the escalator told him there were ways of avoiding colds. 'Like hell there are,' he coughed, stuffing a hand down the deep pocket of his woollen coat and finding the pack of cigarettes under the hip flask and the tin of throat lozenges.

  The cigarette bobbed up and down in his mouth as he walked through the glass exit door, leaving the raw, unnatural heat of Oslo's underground behind him, and ran up the steps to Oslo's ultra-natural December darkness and freezing temperatures. Harry instinctively shrank. Egertorget. This small, open square was an intersection between pedestrian streets in the heart of Oslo, if the city could be said to have a heart at this time of the year. Shops were open this Sunday as it was the penultimate weekend before Christmas, and the square was teeming with people hurrying to and fro in the yellow light that fell from the windows of the surrounding modest three-storey shops. Harry saw the bags of wrapped presents and made a mental note to buy something for Bjarne Møller whose last day it was at Police HQ tomorrow. Harry's boss and chief protector in the police force for all these years was at long last realising his plans to reduce his hours and from next week onwards would take over as a so-called senior special investigator at Bergen police station, which meant in reality that Bjarne Møller could do as he liked until he retired. Cushy number – but Bergen? Rain and dank mountains. Møller didn't even come from Bergen. Harry had always liked – but not always appreciated – Bjarne Møller.

  A man dressed head to toe in Puffa jacket and trousers slowly waddled past like an astronaut, grinning and blowing frosted breath from round, pink cheeks. Stooped shoulder
s and closed winter faces. Harry spotted a pallid-faced woman wearing a thin, black leather jacket with holes in the elbows standing by the jeweller's, hopping from one foot to the other as her eyes searched in hope of finding her supplier soon. A beggar, long-haired and unshaven, but well covered in warm, fashionable, youthful clothing sat in a yoga position, leaning against a lamp post, his head bent forward as if in meditation, with a brown paper cup from a cappuccino bar in front of him. Harry had seen more and more beggars over the last year, and it had struck him that they all looked the same. Even the paper cups were identical, as though it were a secret code. Perhaps they were creatures from outer space quietly taking over his town, his streets. No worries. Feel free.

  Harry entered the jeweller's shop.

  'Can you fix this?' he said to the young man behind the counter, passing him his grandfather's watch. Harry had been given it when he was a boy in Åndalsnes the day they had buried his mother. He had almost been frightened, but his grandad had reassured him that watches were the sort of thing you gave away, and Harry should remember to pass it on. 'Before it's too late.'

  Harry had forgotten all about the watch until Oleg visited him in his flat in Sofies gate and had seen the silver watch in a drawer while he was looking for Harry's Game boy. Oleg, who was ten years old, but had long had the measure of Harry at their shared passion – the rather outdated computer game Tetris – was oblivious to the duel he had been looking forward to, and instead sat fiddling with the watch trying to make it go.

  'It's broken,' Harry said.

  'Ooof,' Oleg answered. 'Everything can be repaired.'

  Harry hoped in his heart of hearts that this contention was true, but he had days when he had severe doubts. Nonetheless, he had wondered in a vague way whether he should introduce Oleg to Jokke & Valentinerne and their album entitled Everything Can be Repaired. However, on reflection Harry had concluded that Oleg's mother, Rakel, was unlikely to appreciate the connection: her ex-alcoholic lover passing on songs about being an alcoholic, written and sung by a dead junkie.

  'Can you repair it?' he asked the young man behind the counter. By way of an answer, nimble, expert hands opened the watch.

  'Not worth it.'

  'Not worth it?'

  'If you go to an antiques shop, they have better working watches and they cost less than it would to have this fixed.'

  'Do it anyway,' Harry said.

  'OK,' said the young man who had already started examining the internal mechanisms and, in fact, seemed pretty pleased with Harry's decision. 'Come back next Tuesday.'

  On leaving the shop Harry heard the frail sound of a single guitar string through an amplifier. It rose when the guitarist, a boy with scraggly facial hair and fingerless gloves, turned one of the tuning keys. It was time for one of the traditional pre-Christmas concerts when well known artistes performed on behalf of the Salvation Army in Egertorget. People had already begun to gather in front of the band as it took up a position behind the Salvation Army's black Christmas kettle, a cooking pot which hung from three poles in the middle of the square.

  'Is that you?'

  Harry turned. It was the woman with the junkie eyes.

  'It's you, isn't it? Have you come instead of Snoopy? I need a fix right away. I've—'

  'Sorry,' Harry interrupted. 'It's not me you want.'

  She stared at him. Leaning her head to one side, she narrowed her eyes, as though appraising whether he was lying to her. 'Yep, I've seen you somewhere before.'

  'I'm a policeman.'

  She paused. Harry breathed in. There was a delayed reaction, as if the message had to follow detours around scorched neurons and smashed synapses. Then the dull glow of hatred that Harry had been waiting for lit up in her eyes.

  'The cops?'

  'Thought we had a deal. You were supposed to stay in the square, in Plata,' Harry said, looking past her at the vocalist.

  'Huh,' said the woman standing straight in front of Harry. 'You're not in Narco. You're the guy on telly who killed—'

  'Crime Squad.' Harry took her by the arm. 'Listen, you can get what you want in Plata. Don't force me to drag you in to the station.'

  'Can not.' She tore her arm away.

  Harry repented at once and held up both hands. 'Tell me you're not going to do any deals here and I can go. OK?'

  She cocked her head. The thin, anaemic lips tightened a fraction. She seemed to see something amusing in the situation. 'Shall I tell you why I can't go to the square?'

  Harry waited.

  'Because my boy's down there.'

  He felt his stomach churn.

  'I don't want him to see me like this. Do you understand, cop?'

  Harry looked into her defiant face as he tried to formulate a sentence.

  'Happy Christmas,' he said, turning his back on her.

  Harry dropped his cigarette into the packed, brown snow and walked off. He wanted this job off his back. He didn't see the people coming towards him, and, staring down at the blue ice as if they had a bad conscience, they didn't see him either, as if they, citizens of the world's most generous social democracy, were nonetheless ashamed. 'Because my boy's down there.'

  In Fredensborgveien, beside Oslo Public Library, Harry stopped outside the number scrawled on the envelope he was carrying. He leaned back and looked up. The facade was grey and black and had recently been repainted. A tagger's wet dream. Christmas decorations were already hanging from some of the windows like silhouettes against the gentle, yellow light in what seemed like warm, secure homes. And perhaps they are indeed that, Harry forced himself to think. 'Forced' because you can't be in the police for twelve years without being infected by the contempt for humanity that comes with the territory. But he did fight against it; you had to give him that.

  He found the name by the bell, closed his eyes and tried to find the right words. It didn't help. Her voice was still in the way.

  'I don't want him to see me like this . . .'

  Harry gave up. Is there a right way to formulate the impossible?

  He pressed his thumb against the cold metal button, and somewhere inside the block it rang.

  Captain Jon Karlsen took his finger off the button, put the heavy plastic bags down on the pavement and gazed up at the front of the block. The flats looked as if they had been under siege from light artillery. Big chunks of plaster had fallen off and the windows of a burnt-out flat on the first floor had been boarded up. At first he had walked right past Fredriksen's blue house; the cold seemed to have sucked all the colour out of the buildings and made all the house fronts in Hausmanns gate the same. It was only when he saw 'Vestbredden' – West Bank – scrawled on the wall of a squat that he realised he had walked too far. A crack in the glass of the front door was shaped like a V. V for victory.

  Jon shivered in his windcheater and was glad the Salvation Army uniform underneath was made of pure, thick wool. When Jon had gone to be kitted out with his new uniform after Officer Training School, none of the regular sizes had fitted him, so he had been issued some material and sent to a tailor, who blew smoke into his face and said apropos of nothing that he rejected Jesus as his personal redeemer. However, the tailor did a good job and Jon thanked him warmly; he was not used to made-to-measure clothes. That was why he had a stoop, it was said. Those who saw him coming up Hausmanns gate that afternoon might well have thought he was bent over to keep out of the ice-cold December wind sweeping icicles and frozen litter along the pavements as the heavy traffic thundered by. But those who knew him said that Jon Karlsen stooped to take the edge off his height. And to reach down to those smaller than him. As he did now, to drop the twenty-kroner coin in the brown paper cup held by a filthy, trembling hand next to the doorway.

  'How's it going?' Jon asked the human bundle sitting cross-legged on a piece of cardboard on the pavement in the swirling snow.

  'I'm in the queue for methadone treatment,' the piteous person said in a halting, monotonous voice like an ill-rehearsed psalm, while staring
at Jon's black uniformed knees.