by Jo Nesbo
“Mm.”
“Perhaps he taught himself to lie. It happens to us all.”
Harry nodded. A gust of wind made him shiver. When was it he had taught himself to lie? Was it when Sis asked if their mother could see them from heaven? Had he learned so early? Was that why he found it so easy to lie when he pretended he didn’t know what Oleg had been doing? Oleg’s lost innocence was not that he had learned to lie, not that he had learned to inject heroin or steal his mother’s jewels. It was that he had learned, in a risk-free and effective way, how to sell drugs that consume the soul, cause the body to disintegrate and send the buyer into dependency’s cold, dripping hell. If Oleg was innocent of Gusto’s murder he would still be guilty. He had sent them by plane. To Dubai.
FLY EMIRATES.
Dubai is in the United Arab Emirates.
There were no Arabs, only pushers in Arsenal shirts selling violin. Shirts they had been given along with instructions on how to sell dope in the right way: one money man, one dope man. A conspicuous and yet run-of-the-mill shirt showing what they sold and to which organization they belonged. Not one of the standard ephemeral gangs who were always brought down by their own greed, stupidity, torpor and foolhardiness, but an organization that took no unnecessary risks, did not expose its backers and still seemed to have a monopoly on the junkies’ favorite new drug. And Oleg had been one of them. Harry didn’t know a great deal about soccer, but he was pretty sure that Van Persie and Fàbregas were Arsenal players. And absolutely sure that no Spurs supporter would have considered owning an Arsenal shirt if it hadn’t been for a special reason. Oleg had managed to teach him that much.
There was a good reason for Oleg talking to neither him nor the police. He was working for someone or something no one knew anything about. Someone or something that made everyone stay mum. That was where Harry had to begin.
Rakel had started crying, and she buried her face in his neck. The tears warmed his skin as they ran down inside his shirt, over his chest, over his heart.
Darkness fell quickly.
SERGEY WAS LYING on his bed, staring at the ceiling.
The seconds passed, one by one.
This was the slowest part: the waiting. And he did not even know for sure if it was going to happen. If it was going to be necessary. He had slept badly. Dreamed badly. He had to know. So he had called Andrey, asked if he could talk to Uncle. But Andrey had answered that the ataman was not available. No more than that.
That was how it had always been with Uncle. And, for the majority of his life, Sergey had not even known that he existed. It was only after he—or his Armenian straw man—had appeared and created order that Sergey had begun to make inquiries. It was an eye-opener how little the others in the family knew about this relation. Sergey had established that Uncle had come from the west and married into the family in the 1950s. Some said he came from Lithuania, from a kulak family, the peasant landowning class that Stalin had actively deported, and that Uncle’s family had been sent to Siberia. Others said he was part of a small group of Jehovah’s Witnesses who had been transported to Siberia from Moldavia in 1951. An aging aunt said that although Uncle had been a well-read, linguistically talented and courteous man, he had adapted immediately to their simple lifestyle and had espoused ancient Siberian urka traditions as if they were his own. And that perhaps it was precisely his ability to adapt, along with his obvious business acumen, that soon enabled other urkas to accept him as a leader. Within a short time he was running one of the most profitable smuggling operations in the whole of southern Siberia. His enterprise in the eighties was so wide-ranging that in the end the authorities could no longer be bribed to turn a blind eye. When the police struck, while the Soviet Union was collapsing around them, it was with a raid so violent and so bloody, according to a neighbor who remembered Uncle, that it was more reminiscent of a blitzkrieg than the hand of the law. At first Uncle was reported killed. It was said he had been shot in the back and the police, fearing reprisals, had secretly disposed of the body in the Lena River. One of the officers had stolen his switchblade and had not been able to stop boasting about it. Nevertheless, a year later, Uncle gave a sign of life, and by then he was in France. He said he had gone into hiding, and the only thing he wanted to know was if his wife was pregnant or not. She was not, and with that no one in Tagil heard a word from him for several years. Not until Uncle’s wife died. Then he appeared for the funeral, Father said. He paid for everything, and a Russian Orthodox funeral does not come cheap. He also gave money to those of her relatives who needed a handout. Father was not among them, but it was him Uncle had gone to when he wanted a rundown on what family his wife had left in Tagil. And that was when his nephew, little Sergey, had been brought to his attention. The next morning Uncle was gone, as mysteriously and inexplicably as he had arrived. The years passed, Sergey became a teenager, an adult, and most people probably thought Uncle—whom they remembered as seeming old even when he went to Siberia—was long dead and buried. But then, when Sergey was arrested for smuggling hash, a man had made a sudden appearance, an Armenian who had presented himself as Uncle’s straw man, sorted out matters for Sergey and arranged Uncle’s invitation to Norway.
Sergey checked his watch. And confirmed that exactly twelve minutes had passed since he last checked. He closed his eyes and tried to visualize him. The policeman.
In fact, there was another detail about the story of his uncle’s alleged death. The officer who had stolen his knife had been found soon afterward in the taiga forest, what was left of him, that is—the rest had been eaten by a bear.
It was dark both outside and inside when the telephone rang.
It was Andrey.
Tord Schultz unlocked the door to his house, stared into the darkness and listened to the dense silence for a while. Sat down on the sofa without switching on the light and waited for the reassuring roar of the next plane.
They had let him go.
A man who introduced himself as an inspector had entered his cell, crouched in front of him and asked why the hell he had hidden flour in his suitcase.
“Flour?”
“That’s what the Kripos lab say they’ve found.”
Tord Schultz had repeated the same thing he said when he was arrested, the emergency procedure: He didn’t know how the plastic bag had come into his possession or what it contained.
“You’re lying,” the inspector had said. “And we’re going to keep an eye on you.”
Then he had held the cell door open and nodded as a signal that he should leave.
Tord gave a start now as a piercing ring filled the bare, darkened room. He got up and groped his way to the telephone on a wooden chair beside the weight bench.
It was the operations manager. He told Tord that, for the foreseeable future, he had been taken off international flights and moved to domestic ones.
Tord asked why.
His boss said there had been a management meeting to discuss his situation.
“You must appreciate we cannot have you on foreign flights with this suspicion hanging over you.”
“So why don’t you ground me?”
“Well.”
“Well?”
“If we suspend you and the arrest leaks out to the press they’ll immediately conclude we think you’re guilty and it will be grist for their mill … no pun intended.”
“And you don’t?”
There was a silence before the answer came.
“It would damage the airline if we admitted we suspected one of our pilots of being a drug smuggler, don’t you think?”
The pun was intended.
The remainder of what he said was drowned out by the noise of a Tu-154.
Tord put down the receiver.
He groped his way back to the sofa and sat down. Ran his fingertips over the glass coffee table. Felt stains of dried mucus, spit and coke. What now? A drink or a line? A drink and a line?
He got up. The Tupolev was coming in low. Its lights fl
ooded the whole living room, and Tord stared for a second at his reflection in the window.
Then it was dark again. But he had seen it. Seen it in his eyes, and he knew he would see it on colleagues’ faces. The contempt, the condemnation and—worst of all—the sympathy.
Domestic. We’re going to keep an eye on you. I see you.
If he couldn’t fly abroad he would have no value to them anymore. All he would be was a desperate, debt-ridden, cocaine-addicted risk. A man on police radar, a man under pressure. He didn’t know much, but more than enough to be aware that he could destroy the infrastructure they had built. And they would do what had to be done. Tord Schultz wrapped his hands around the back of his head and groaned aloud. He was not born to fly a fighter jet. It had gone into a spin, and he didn’t have it in him to regain control; he just sat watching the rotating ground getting closer. And knew his sole chance of survival was to sacrifice the jet. He would have to activate the ejector seat. Fire himself out. Now.
He would have to go to someone high up in the police, someone he could be sure was above the drug gangs’ corruption money. He would have to go to the top.
Yes, Tord Schultz thought. He breathed out and felt muscles he had not noticed were tense relax. He would go to the top.
First of all, though, a drink.
And a line.
• • •
HARRY WAS GIVEN the room key by the same boy in reception.
He thanked him and took the stairs in long strides. There had not been a single Arsenal shirt to be seen on the way from the Metro station in Egertorget to Hotel Leon.
As he approached Room 301 he slowed down. Two of the bulbs in the corridor had gone out, which made it so dark he could see the light under his door. In Hong Kong electricity prices were so high he had abandoned the bad Norwegian habit of leaving lights on when he went out, but he could not be sure that the maid hadn’t left it on. If she had, though, she’d also forgotten to lock the door.
Harry stood with the key in his right hand as the door opened with hardly a touch. In the light from the solitary ceiling lamp he saw a figure standing with its back to him, bent over his suitcase on the bed. As the door hit the wall with a little thud, the figure turned calmly, and a man with an oblong, furrowed face looked at Harry with Saint Bernard eyes. He was tall and stooped and wore a long coat, a wool sweater and a dirty priest’s collar around his neck. His long, unkempt hair was broken up on either side of his face by the biggest eyes Harry had ever seen. The man had to be seventy, at least. The two men could not be more dissimilar, yet Harry’s first thought was that it was like looking at a reflection.
“What the hell are you doing?” Harry asked from the corridor. Routine procedure.
“What’s it look like?” The voice was younger than the face, sonorous, with the distinct Swedish tone that Swedish dance bands and revival preachers adore for some unaccountable reason. “I broke in to check if you had anything of value, of course.” It wasn’t just a Swedish tone—he was speaking Swedish. He raised both hands aloft. The right one held a universal adapter, the left a paperback edition of Philip Roth’s American Pastoral.
“You don’t have anything, do you.” He threw the items on the bed. Peered into the little suitcase, and glanced inquiringly at Harry. “Not even a shaver.”
“What the …” Harry ignored routine procedures, strode into the room and smacked the suitcase lid down.
“Easy, my son,” said the man, holding up his palms. “Don’t take it personally. You’re new to this establishment. The question was only who would rob you first.”
“Who? Do you mean …?”
The old man proffered his hand. “Welcome. I’m Cato. I live in three-ten.”
Harry looked down at the grimy frying pan of a hand.
“Come on,” Cato said. “My hands are the only part of me it is advisable to touch.”
Harry said his name and shook his hand. It was surprisingly soft.
“Priest’s hands,” the man said in answer to his thoughts. “Got anything to drink, Harry?”
Harry nodded toward his suitcase and the open wardrobe doors. “You already know.”
“That you don’t have anything, yes. I mean on you. In your jacket pocket, for example.”
Harry took out a Game Boy and tossed it on the bed, where all his other possessions were strewn.
Cato angled his head and looked at Harry. His ear folded against his shoulder. “With that suit I might have thought you were one of the by-the-hour guests, not a resident. What are you doing here, anyway?”
“I still think that should be my line.”
Cato put a hand on Harry’s arm and looked him in the eyes. “My son,” he said in his sonorous voice, stroking the cloth with two fingertips, “that is a very nice suit. How much did you pay?”
Harry was about to say something. A combination of courtesy, rebuff and threat. But he realized it was pointless. He gave up. And smiled.
Cato smiled back.
Like a reflection.
“No time to chat. I’ve got to go to work now,” Cato said.
“Which is?”
“There you are. You’re a bit interested in your fellow mortals as well. I proclaim the Word of God to the hapless.”
“Now?”
“My calling has no church times. Good-bye.”
With a gallant bow the old man turned and departed. As he passed through the doorway Harry saw one of his unopened packs of Camel cigarettes protruding from Cato’s jacket pocket. Harry closed the door after him. The smell of old man and ash hung in the room. He went to push up the window. The sounds of the town filled the room at once: the faint, regular drone of traffic, jazz from an open window, a distant police siren rising and falling, a hapless individual screaming his pain between houses, followed by breaking glass, the wind rustling through dry leaves, the click-clack of women’s heels. Sounds of Oslo.
A slight movement caused him to look down. The glow from the yard lamp fell on the garbage pail. There was the gleam of a brown tail. A rat was sitting on the edge and sniffing up at him with a shiny nose. Harry was reminded of something his thoughtful employer Herman Kluit had said, and which perhaps, or perhaps not, was a reference to his job: “A rat is neither good nor evil. It does what a rat has to do.”
This was the worst part of an Oslo winter. Before ice settles on the fjord and when the wind blows through the city streets, salty and freezing cold. As usual, I stood on Dronningens Gate selling speed, Stesolid and Rohypnol. I stamped my feet on the ground. I couldn’t feel my toes and pondered whether the day’s profits should go to the hideously expensive Free Lance boots I’d seen in the window of Steen & Strøm. Or to ice, which I’d heard was for sale down at Plata. Maybe I could filch some speed—Tutu wouldn’t notice—and buy the boots. But on reflection I thought it was safer to steal the boots and make sure Odin got what was his. After all, I was better off than Oleg, who’d had to start from scratch selling hash in the frozen hell by the river. Tutu had given him the pitch under Nybrua Bridge, where he competed with people from all the fucked-up places around the world, and was probably the only fluent Norwegian speaker from Anker Bridge to the harbor.
I saw a guy in an Arsenal shirt farther up the street. Usually Bisken, a pimply Sørlander who wore a studded dog collar, stood there. New man, but the procedure was the same: He was gathering a group together. He had three customers waiting. God knows what they were so frightened of. The cops had given up in this area, and if they hauled in pushers off the street it was only for appearances’ sake because some politician had been shooting his mouth off again.
A guy dressed like he was going to confirmation passed the group and I saw him and Arsenal Shirt exchange barely perceptible nods. The guy stopped in front of me. He was wearing a trench coat from Ferner Jacobsen, a suit from Ermenegildo Zegna and a side part from the Silver Boys. He was big.
“Somebody wants to meet you.” He spoke English with a sort of Russian growl.
I figu
red it was the usual. He had seen my face, thought I was a male prostitute and wanted a blow job or my teenage ass. And I had to confess that on days like today I did consider a change of profession: heated car seats and four times the hourly rate.
“No thanks,” I answered in English.
“Right answer is ‘Yes, please,’ ” the guy said, grabbing my arm and lifting me rather than dragging me off to a black limo, which just then had pulled soundlessly up by the curb. The rear door opened, and because resistance was futile I began to think about a price. Paid rape is better than unpaid, after all.
I was shoved into the backseat, and the door closed with a soft, expensive click. Through the windows, which from the outside had seemed black and impenetrable, I saw that we were moving west. Behind the wheel sat a little guy with much too small a head for all the things trying to fit on it: a huge nose, a white, lipless shark mouth and bulging eyes that looked like they’d been stuck on with cheap glue. He had his own fancy funeral suit and hair parted like a choirboy’s. He looked at me in the rearview mirror. “Sales good?”
“What sales, fuckwit?”
The little guy gave a friendly smile and nodded. I’d decided not to give them a group discount if they asked me, but now I could see in his eyes it wasn’t me they were after. There was something else, which I couldn’t figure out. We passed City Hall. The American Embassy. The palace gardens. Farther west. Kirkeveien. The Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation. And then houses and rich men’s addresses.
We stopped in front of a large timber construction on a hill and the funeral directors escorted me to the gate. As we shuffled through the gravel to the oak door I took a look around. The property was as big as a soccer field, with apple and pear trees, a bunkerlike cement tower that looked like it came from a desert country, a double garage with iron bars that looked like it was for public emergency vehicles. A six- to nine-foot-high fence enclosed the whole caboodle. I already had an inkling where we were going. Limo, English with a growl, “Sales good?” and fortress sweet home.
