Phantom

by Jo Nesbo

  And when she came, stiffened and stared at him with that paradoxical, wronged expression, all the nights they had spent together came back, and he was close to tears.

  Afterward they shared a cigarette.

  “Why won’t you tell me that you’re a couple?” Harry said, inhaling and passing her the cigarette.

  “Because we aren’t. It’s a … a stop-gap thing.” She shook her head. “I don’t know. I don’t know anything anymore. I should stay away from everything and everyone.”

  “He’s a good man.”

  “That’s the point. I need a good man, so why don’t I want a good man? Why are we so fucking irrational when we actually know what’s best for us?”

  “Humans are a perverted and damaged species,” Harry said. “And there is no cure, only relief.”

  Rakel cuddled up to him. “That’s what I like about you, the indomitable optimism.”

  “I see it as my duty to spread sunshine, my love.”

  “Harry?”

  “Mm.”

  “Is there any way back? For us?”

  Harry closed his eyes. Listened to the heartbeats. His own and hers.

  “Not back, no.” He turned to her. “But if you think you still have some future left in you …”

  “Do you mean that?”

  “This is just pillow talk, isn’t it?”

  “Fool.” She kissed him on the cheek, passed him the cigarette and stood up. Got dressed.

  “You can stay upstairs at my place, you know.”

  He shook his head. “It’s best like this now.”

  “Don’t forget I love you,” she said. “Never forget that. Whatever happens. Do you promise?”

  He nodded. Closed his eyes. The door closed as gently again the second time. Then he opened his eyes. Looked at his watch.

  It’s best like this now.

  What else could he have done? Gone back to Holmenkollen with her, ensuring that Dubai would follow his trail there, and ending up dragging Rakel into this confrontation, the way he had with the Snowman? Because he could see it now; he could see they had been dogging his steps from the very first day. Sending an invitation to Dubai via his pushers had been superfluous. They would find him before he found them. And then they would find Oleg.

  So, the sole advantage he had was that he could choose the place. The scene of the crime. And he had chosen. Not here in the Plaza—this was so that he could have some time to himself, a couple of hours’ sleep, and collect himself. The place was Hotel Leon.

  Harry had considered contacting Hagen. Or Bellman. Explaining the situation to them. But it would give them no other choice but to arrest him. Even so, it was just a question of time before the police would put together the three descriptions they had been given by the barman in Kvadraturen, the security guard at Vestre Cemetery and the old lady on Madserud Allé. A man, 192 pounds, wearing a linen suit, scar on one side of his face and a bandaged chin and neck. They would soon be putting out a call for Harry Hole. So it was urgent.

  He got up with a groan, opened the closet.

  Put on the ironed underpants and a shirt with a polo player. Mulled over the Armani trousers. Shook his head with a soft expletive and donned his suit instead.

  Then he pulled out the tennis bag lying on the hat shelf. Hans Christian had explained it was the only one he had with enough space for a rifle.

  Harry bundled it over his shoulder and left. The door behind him closed with a soft kiss.

  I don’t know if it’s possible to say exactly how the throne changed hands. Exactly when violin came to power and began to rule over us, the tables turned. Everything had gone down the drain—the deal I’d tried to make with Ibsen, the heist at Alnabru. And Oleg went around with that depressed Russian scowl, complaining that life without Irene was meaningless. After three weeks we shot up more than we earned, we were high on the job and we knew it was all about to go tits up. Because even then it meant less than the next fix. It sounds like a cliché—it is a cliché, and that’s just how it is. So fucking simple and so absolutely impossible. I think I can safely say that I have never loved any human, I mean, really loved. But I was hopelessly in love with violin. Because even though Oleg was using violin to dull the pain of his broken heart, I was using violin like it’s supposed to be used—to be happy. And I mean just that: fricking happy. It was better than food, sex, sleep; yes, it was even better than breathing.

  And that was why it didn’t come as a shock when, one night after the showdown, Andrey took me aside and said the old man was concerned.

  “I’m fine,” I said.

  He explained that if I didn’t shape up and go to work with a clear head every goddamn day from now on, the old man said I would be forcibly packed off to rehab.

  I laughed. Said I didn’t realize this job had fringe benefits like a health plan and shit. Did Oleg and I get dental treatment and pensions, too?

  “Oleg doesn’t.”

  I saw in his eyes more or less what that meant.

  I had no intention of kicking the habit yet. And neither did Oleg. So we didn’t give a shit, and the following night we were as high as the Post Office Tower, sold half our stock, took the rest, stole a car and drove to Kristiansand. Played fricking Sinatra at full blast—“I Got Plenty of Nothing,” which was true; we didn’t even have a damn license. In the end Oleg was singing, too, but only to drown out Sinatra and moi, he claimed. We laughed and drank lukewarm beer—it was like the old days. We stayed at Hotel Ernst, which wasn’t as boring as it sounds, but when we asked at reception where the dope dealers hung out, we got only a blank look in return. Oleg had told me about the town’s music festival, which had been wrecked by some idiot who was so desperate to be a legend he booked bands so cool they couldn’t afford them. Even though people in the town claimed that half of the population between eighteen and twenty-five bought drugs because of the festival, we didn’t find any customers; we zoomed around on a dark night in the pedestrian area where there was one—one!—drunken man and also fourteen members of a Ten Sing choir, who asked if we wanted to meet Jesus.

  “Only if he wants some violin,” I said.

  But apparently Jesus didn’t, so we went back to our hotel room and did a good-night shot. I have no idea why, but we hung around in the back of beyond. Did nothing, just got high and sang Sinatra. One night I woke up with Oleg standing over me. He was holding a fricking dog in his arms. Said the squeal of brakes outside the window woke him up and that, when he looked out, this dog was lying in the street. I took a look. It wasn’t good. Oleg and I agreed that the dog’s back was broken. Mangy with a lot of sores. The poor bastard had been beaten, whether by an owner or other dogs, it was not clear. But it was fine. Calm, brown eyes looked at me as if it believed I could fix what was wrong. So I tried. Gave it food and water, patted its head and talked to it. Oleg said we should take it to a vet, but I knew what they would do, so we kept the dog in the hotel room, hung a DO NOT DISTURB sign on the door and let it lie in the bed. We took turns staying awake and checking if it was breathing. It lay there, getting hotter and hotter, its pulse getting weaker. The third day I gave it a name. Rufus. Why not? Nice to have a name if you’re going to eat it.

  “It’s suffering,” Oleg said. “The vet’ll put it to sleep with an injection. Won’t hurt at all.”

  “No one’s going to inject Rufus with cheap dope,” I said, flicking the syringe.

  “Are you crazy?” Oleg said. “That violin is worth two thousand kroner.”

  Maybe it was. At any rate, Rufus left this fricking world business-class.

  I’m pretty sure the trip home was cloudy. Anyway there was no Sinatra, and no one sang.

  Back in Oslo, Oleg was terrified about what would happen. As for myself I was completely cool, weirdly enough. Like I knew the old man wouldn’t touch us. We were two harmless junkies on our way down. Broke, unemployed and after a while out of violin. Oleg had found out that the expression “junkie” was more than a hundred years old, from th
e time when the first heroin addicts stole junk metal from the harbor in Philadelphia and sold it to finance their consumption. And that was exactly what Oleg and I did. We began to sneak into building sites down by the harbor in Bjørvika and steal whatever we came across. Copper and tools were gold. We sold the copper to a scrap merchant in Kalbakken, the tools to a couple of Lithuanian guys.

  But as more people caught on to the scam, the fences got taller, more night watchmen were hired, the cops showed up and the buyers went AWOL. So there we sat, our cravings lashing us like rabid slave drivers around the clock. And I knew I would have to come up with a decent idea, an Endlösung. So I did.

  Of course I said nothing to Oleg.

  I prepared the speech for a whole day. Then I called her.

  Irene had just returned home from working out. She sounded almost happy to hear my voice. I talked without stopping for an hour. She was crying by the time I’d finished.

  The following night I went down to Oslo Central Station and was standing on the platform when the Trondheim train trundled in.

  Her tears were flowing as she hugged me.

  So young. So caring. So precious.

  Like I said, I’ve never really loved anyone. But I must have been close to it, because I was almost crying myself.

  Through the narrow opening of the window in Room 301 Harry heard a church bell strike eleven somewhere in the darkness. His aching chin and throat had one advantage: They kept him awake. He got out of bed and sat in the chair, tilted it back against the wall beside the window so that he was facing the door with the rifle in his lap.

  He had stopped at reception and asked for a strong lightbulb to replace the one that had gone out in his room, and a hammer to knock in a couple of nails sticking up from the doorsill. Said he would fix them himself. Afterward he had changed the weak bulb in the corridor outside and used the hammer to loosen and remove the doorsill.

  From where he was sitting he would be able to see the shadow in the gap beneath the door when they came.

  Harry lit another cigarette. Checked the rifle. Finished the rest of the pack. Outside in the darkness the church bell chimed twelve times.

  The phone rang. It was Beate. She said she had been given copies of four of the five lists from patrol cars trawling the Blindern district.

  “The last patrol car had already delivered its list to Orgkrim,” she said.

  “Thanks,” Harry said. “Did you get the bags from Rita at Schrøder’s?”

  “Yes, I did. I’ve told Pathology to make it a priority. They’re analyzing the blood now.”

  Pause.

  “And?” Harry asked.

  “And what?”

  “I know that intonation, Beate. There’s something else.”

  “DNA tests take more than a few hours, Harry. It—”

  “Can take days before we have a final result.”

  “Yes, so for the time being it’s incomplete.”

  “How incomplete?” Harry heard footsteps in the corridor.

  “Well, there’s at least a five percent chance there’s no match.”

  “You’ve been given an interim DNA profile and have a match in the DNA database, don’t you?”

  “We use incomplete tests only to say who we can eliminate.”

  “Who’s the match for?”

  “I don’t want to say anything until—”

  “Come on.”

  “No. But I can say it’s not Gusto’s own blood.”

  “And?”

  “And it’s not Oleg’s. All right?”

  “Very all right,” Harry said, suddenly aware that he had been holding his breath.

  A shadow under the door.

  “Harry?”

  Harry hung up. Pointed the rifle at the door. Waited. Three short knocks. Waited. Listened. The shadow didn’t move. He tiptoed along the wall toward the door, out of any possible firing line. Put his eye to the peephole in the middle of the door.

  He saw a man’s back.

  The jacket hung straight and was so short he could see the trouser waistband. A black piece of cloth hung from his back pocket, a cap, perhaps. But he wasn’t wearing a belt. His arms hung close to his sides. If the man was carrying a weapon it had to be in a holster, either on his chest or on the inside of his calf. Neither very common.

  The man turned to the door and knocked twice, harder this time. Harry held his breath while studying the distorted image of a face. Distorted, and yet there was something unmistakable about it. A pronounced underbite. And he was scratching himself under the chin with a card he had hanging from his neck. The way police officers sometimes carried ID cards when they were going to make an arrest. Shit! The police had been quicker than Dubai.

  Harry hesitated. If the guy had orders to arrest him he would also have a blue chit with a search warrant he had already shown the receptionist and he would have been given a master key. Harry’s brain calculated. He tiptoed back, pushed the rifle in behind the wardrobe. Went back and opened the door. Said: “What do you want and who are you?” while glancing up and down the corridor.

  The man stared at him. “What a state you’re in, Hole. Can I come in?” He held up his ID card.

  “Truls Berntsen. You used to work for Bellman, didn’t you?”

  “Still do. He sends his regards.”

  Harry stepped aside and let Berntsen go first. “Cozy,” Berntsen said, looking around.

  “Take a seat,” Harry said, indicating the bed and sitting on the chair by the window.

  “Chewing gum?” Berntsen said, offering a packet.

  “Gives me cavities. What do you want?”

  “As friendly as ever.” Berntsen grinned, rolled up the chewing gum, placed it in his drawerlike prognathous jaw and sat down.

  Harry’s brain was registering intonation, body language, eye movement, smell. The man was relaxed, yet threatening. Open palms, no sudden movements, but his eyes were collecting data, reading the situation, preparing for something. Harry already regretted stowing his rifle. Not having a license was the least of his problems.

  “Thing is, we found blood in connection with a grave desecration at Vestre Cemetery last night. And the DNA test shows it to be yours.”

  Harry watched as Berntsen neatly folded the silver paper that had been wrapped around the chewing gum. Harry remembered him better now. They had called him Beavis. Bellman’s errand boy. Stupid and smart. And dangerous. Forrest Gump gone bad.

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Harry said.

  “No, I can imagine,” Berntsen said with a sigh. “Mistake in the system, perhaps? I’ll have to drive you down to Police HQ to take another blood sample.”

  “I’m searching for a girl,” Harry said. “Irene Hanssen.”

  “She’s in Vestre Cemetery?”

  “She’s been missing since this summer, at any rate. She’s the foster sister of Gusto Hanssen.”

  “News to me. Nevertheless, you’ll have to come with me down to—”

  “It’s the girl in the middle,” Harry said. He had taken the Hanssen family photograph from his jacket pocket and passed it to Berntsen. “I need a little time. Not much. Afterward you’ll understand why I’ve had to do things like this. I promise to report within forty-eight hours.”

  “48 HRS.,” Berntsen said, studying the picture. “Good film. Nolte and that Negro. McMurphy?”

  “Murphy.”

  “Right. Stopped being funny, didn’t he? Isn’t that strange? You have something, and then suddenly you’ve lost it. How do you think that feels, Hole?”

  Harry looked at Truls Berntsen. He wasn’t so sure about this Forrest Gump thing anymore. Berntsen held the photograph up to the light. Squinted with concentration.

  “Do you recognize her?”

  “No,” said Berntsen, passing the picture back as he twisted around. Obviously it wasn’t comfortable sitting on the item of clothing he had in his back pocket because he quickly moved it to his jacket pocket. “We’re going for a ri
de to Police HQ, where we will review your forty-eight hours.”

  His tone was light. Too light. And Harry had already done his thinking. Beate had prioritized her DNA tests at the Pathology Unit and still did not have a final result. So how come Berntsen had a blood test result off Gusto’s shroud already? And there was another thing. Berntsen hadn’t moved the item quickly enough. It wasn’t a cap—it was a balaclava. The type used when Gusto was executed.

  And the next thought followed hard on its heels: the burner.

  Had the police maybe not been the first on the scene? Was it Dubai’s lackey instead?

  Harry considered the rifle in the wardrobe. But it was too late to escape now. In the corridor he heard footsteps approaching. Two people. One of them so big the floorboards creaked. The footsteps stopped outside the door. The shadows of two pairs of legs, standing akimbo, fell under the crack and across the floor. He could, of course, have hoped they were police colleagues of Berntsen, that this was a real arrest. But he had heard the floor’s lament. A big man, he guessed the size of the figure running after him through Frogner Park.

  “Come on,” Berntsen said, getting up and standing in front of Harry. Scratched his chest beneath his lapel in an apparently casual way. “A little ride, just you and me.”