Phantom

by Jo Nesbo

  At first glance it was a standard closet. He pressed the back wall. It opened.

  An escape passage. German thoroughness.

  Harry shoved the shirts and jackets to the side and poked his head through the false panel. A cold gust of air met him. A shaft. Harry groped. Iron rungs had been hammered into the wall. Looked as if there were more rungs farther down; they had to lead to the cellar. An image fluttered through his brain, a detached fragment of a dream. He repressed the image, removed his gas mask and forced his way through the false wall. His feet found the rungs, and when he carefully made his way down and his face was level with the closet floor, he saw something lying there. It was a U-shaped, stiffened cotton material. Harry put it in his coat pocket and continued down into the darkness. He counted the rungs. After twenty-two one foot touched terra firma. But as he was about to lower the other foot, the no longer quite so firma terra moved. He lost his balance, but his landing was soft.

  Suspiciously soft.

  Harry lay still and listened. Then he took the lighter from his trouser pocket. Flicked it, let it burn for two seconds. Let it go out. He had seen what he needed.

  He was lying on top of a man.

  An unusually large and unusually naked man. With skin as cold as marble and the typical blue pallor of recent corpses.

  Harry detached himself from the body and stepped across the concrete floor to a bunker door he had noticed. With his lighter on he was a target; with more light everyone was a target. He held the MP5 at the ready while flicking the switch with his left hand.

  A line of bulbs came on. They stretched along a low, narrow tunnel.

  Harry established that he and the naked man were alone. He looked down at the body. It lay on a blanket on the ground and had a bloodstained bandage around its stomach. From the chest a tattoo of the Virgin Mary stared up at him. Which, as Harry knew, symbolized that the bearer had been a criminal since his childhood years. Since there were no other visible signs of injury, Harry assumed it was the wound under the bandage that had killed him, in all probability caused by a bullet from Truls Berntsen’s Steyr.

  Harry pressed his fingers against the bunker door. Locked. The tunnel ended at a metal plate cut into the wall. Rudolf Asayev had had, in other words, only one way out. The tunnel. And Harry knew why he tried all the other exits first. The dream.

  He stared down the narrow tunnel.

  Claustrophobia is counterproductive; it gives false signals of danger and is something that has to be fought. He checked that the magazine was slotted into his MP5 properly. Fuck it. Ghosts exist only if you let them exist.

  Then he set off walking.

  The tunnel was even narrower than he had imagined. He ducked, but he still banged his head and shoulders on the moss-covered ceiling and walls. He tried to keep his brain active so as not to give claustrophobia room to grow. And thought this must have been an escape passage the Germans had used; it all fit with the bricked-up back door. Force of habit ensured that he kept his bearings, and unless he was mistaken he was heading for the neighboring house with the identical water tower. The tunnel had been built with meticulous care; there were even a number of drains in the floor. Strange that the Autobahn-constructing Germans should have built such a narrow tunnel. As he formulated the word “narrow,” claustrophobia took a stranglehold on him. He concentrated on counting his paces, tried to visualize where he could be in relation to what was beyond the hill. Beyond the hill, outside, free, breathing air. Count, count, for Christ’s sake. When he reached 110 he saw a white line on the ground beneath him. He could see that the lights stopped some distance ahead and when he turned he realized the line had to be marking the middle of the tunnel. From the small steps he had been forced to take, he estimated the distance he had walked to be between sixty and seventy yards. Soon there. He attempted to quicken his pace, shuffling his feet beneath him like an old man. Heard a click and looked down. It came from one of the drains. The bars moved until they overlapped, like air vents in a car. And at that moment he heard a different noise, a deep rumble behind him. He turned.

  He could see the light glint on the metal. It was the metal plate that had been cut into the end of the corridor, and it moved. Slid down to the floor—that was what had made the noise. Harry stopped and held his machine gun at the ready. He couldn’t see what was behind the plate; it was too dark. But then something glittered, like the sunlight reflecting on Oslo Fjord one beautiful autumn afternoon. There was a moment of total silence. Harry’s heart was racing wildly. Beret Man had been lying in the middle of the tunnel and had drowned. The water towers. The undersize tunnel. The moss on the ceiling that was not moss, but algae. Then he saw the wall coming. Greenish black with white edges. He turned to run. And saw a matching wall coming toward him from the other end.

  It was like standing between two oncoming trains. The wall of water in front hit him first. Threw him backward, and he felt his head strike the ground. Then he was picked up and whirled onward. He flailed desperately, his fingers and knees scraping against the wall, trying to catch hold of something, but he had no chance against the forces around him. Then, as quickly as it had started, it stopped. He could feel the currents as the two cascades of water neutralized each other. And saw something by his back. Two white arms with a shimmer of green embraced Harry from behind, pale fingers reaching up to his face. Harry kicked, twisted around and saw the body with the bandage around its stomach revolving in the dark water like a weightless, naked astronaut. Open mouth, slowly flapping hair and beard. Harry put his feet on the floor and stretched up to the ceiling. There was water to the very top. He crouched down, glimpsed the MP5 and the white line on the floor beneath him as he took his first swimming strokes. He had lost his bearings until the body told him which way he had to go to get back to where he had come from. Harry swam with his body at a diagonal to the walls, so that he had maximum arm span, shoved off, forcing himself not to think the other thought. Buoyancy wasn’t a problem—quite the contrary, the bulletproof vest was dragging him down too far. Harry considered whether to spend time removing his coat; it kept drifting up above him and creating greater resistance. He tried to concentrate on what he had to do, swim back to the shaft, not count seconds, not count yards. But he could already feel the pressure in his head, as though it were going to explode. And then the thought came, after all. Summer, fifty-yard outdoor pool. Early morning, almost no one around, sunshine, Rakel in a yellow bikini. Oleg and Harry were to settle who could swim farthest underwater. Oleg was in shape after the ice-skating season, but Harry had a better swimming technique. Rakel cheered and laughed her wonderful laugh as they warmed up. They both strutted about for her—she was the queen of the Frogner pool and Oleg and Harry her subjects seeking the favor of her gaze. Then they started. And it was a dead heat. After forty yards they both broke the surface, panting, and each certain he had won. Forty yards. Ten yards to the end. With the pool wall to kick off from and unrestricted arm movement. A little more than half the distance to the end of the shaft. He didn’t have a prayer. He would die here. He would die now, soon. His eyeballs felt as if they were being squeezed out of his head. The plane left at midnight. Yellow bikini. Ten yards to the end. He took another stroke. Would manage one more. But then, then he would die.

  IT WAS HALF past three in the morning. Truls Berntsen was driving around the streets of Oslo in a drizzle that whispered and murmured against the windshield. He had been doing it for two hours. Not because he was searching for something, but because it brought him calm. Calm to think and calm not to think.

  Someone had deleted an address from the list Harry Hole had been given. And it had not been him.

  Maybe not everything was as cut and dried as he had believed, after all.

  He replayed the night of the murder one more time.

  Gusto had stopped by, so desperate for a fix that he was shaking, and threatened to snitch on him unless Truls gave him some money for violin. For some reason there had been no violin for week
s, there had been panic in Needle Park, and a quarter cost three thousand, at least. Truls had said they would drive to an ATM; he’d just have to fetch his car keys. He had taken his Steyr pistol along; there was no doubt what would have to be done. Gusto would use the same threat again and again. Dopeheads are pretty predictable like that. But when he went back to the front door the boy had fled. Presumably because he had smelled blood. Fair enough, Truls had thought. Gusto wouldn’t do any snitching as long as he had nothing to gain by it, and after all he’d been in on the burglary as well. It was Saturday, and Truls was on what was known as reserve duty, which meant he was on call, so he had gone to the Watchtower, read a bit, watched Martine Eckhoff and drunk coffee. Then he had heard the sirens and a few seconds later his cell had rung. It was the Ops Room. Someone had called in to say there was shooting at 92 Hausmanns Gate, and they had no one from Crime Squad on duty. Truls had run there—it was only a few hundred yards from the Watchtower. All his police instincts were on alert; he had observed the people he passed on the way, in the full knowledge that his observations could be important. One person he saw was a young man with a woolen hat, leaning against a house. The youngster’s attention was caught by the police car parked by the gate of the crime scene address. Truls had noticed the boy because he didn’t like the way his hands were buried in the pockets of his North Face jacket. It was too big and too thick for the time of year, and the pockets could have concealed all manner of things. The boy’d had a serious expression on his face, but didn’t look like a dope seller. When the police had accompanied Oleg Fauke from the river and into the patrol car the boy had turned his back and gone down Hausmanns Gate.

  Now Truls could probably have come up with another ten people he had observed around the crime scene and tied theories to them. The reason he remembered this one was that he had seen him again. In the family photo Harry Hole had shown him at Hotel Leon.

  Hole had asked if he recognized Irene Hanssen, and he had answered—truthfully—no. But he hadn’t told Hole whom he had recognized in the photo. Gusto, of course. But there had been someone else. The other boy. Gusto’s foster brother. It was the same serious expression. He was the boy he had seen by the crime scene.

  Truls stopped the car on Prinsens Gate, just down from Hotel Leon.

  He had the police radio on, and at last came the message to the Ops Room he had been waiting for.

  “Zero One. We checked the report about the noise on Blindernveien. Looks like there’s been a battle here. Tear gas and signs of one helluva lot of shooting. Automatic weapon, no question about that. One man shot dead. We went down to the cellar, but it’s full of water. Think we’d better call Delta to check the second floor.”

  “Can you clarify whether there is still anyone alive?”

  “Come and clarify it yourself! Didn’t you hear what I said? Gas and an automatic weapon!”

  “OK, OK. What do you want?”

  “Four patrol cars to secure the area. Delta, SOC group and … a plumber, perhaps.”

  Truls Berntsen turned down the volume. Heard a car screech to a halt, saw a tall man cross the street in front of the car. The driver, furious, sounded his horn, but the man didn’t notice, just strode in the direction of Hotel Leon.

  Truls Berntsen squinted.

  Could that really be him? Harry Hole?

  The man had his head hunched down between the shoulders of a shabby coat. It was only when he twisted his head and the face was illuminated by the street lamp that Truls saw he had been wrong. There was something familiar about him, but it wasn’t Hole.

  Truls leaned back in the seat. He knew now. Who had won. He looked out over his town. For this was his now. The rain mumbled on the car roof that Harry Hole was dead, and cried in torrents down the windshield.

  MOST PEOPLE HAD generally fucked themselves to exhaustion by two and gone home, and afterward Hotel Leon was quieter. The boy in reception barely lifted his head as the pastor came in. The rain ran off his coat and hair. He used to ask Cato what he had been doing to arrive in such a state, in the middle of the night, after an absence of several days. But the answers he received were always so exhaustingly long, intense and detailed about the misery of others that he had stopped. Tonight, though, Cato seemed more tired than normal.

  “Hard night?” he asked, hoping for a “yes” or a “no.”

  “Oh, you know,” the old man said with a pale smile. “Humanity. Humanity. I was almost killed just now.”

  “Oh?” said the boy and regretted asking. A long explanation was sure to be on its way.

  “A car almost ran me over,” Cato said, continuing up the stairs.

  The boy breathed out with relief and concentrated on The Phantom again.

  The old man put the key in his door and turned. But to his surprise he discovered it was already open.

  He went in. Switched on the light, but the ceiling lamp didn’t come on. Saw the bedside lamp was lit. The man sitting on the bed was tall, stooped and wearing a long coat, like himself. Water dripped from the coattails onto the floor. They were so different, yet it struck the old man now for the first time: It was like staring at his own reflection.

  “What are you doing?” he whispered.

  “I broke in, of course,” the other man said. “To see if you had anything of value.”

  “Did you find anything?”

  “Of value? No. But I found this.”

  The old man caught what was thrown over. Held it between his fingers. Nodded slowly. It was made of stiffened cotton, formed into a U-shape. Not as white as it should be.

  “So you found this in my room?” the old man asked.

  “Yes, in your bedroom. In the closet. Put it on.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I want to confess my sins. And because you look naked without it.”

  Cato looked at the man sitting hunched over on the bed. Water was running from his hair, down the scar on his jaw to his chin. From there it dripped onto the floor. He had placed the sole chair in the middle of the room. The confessional chair. On the table lay an unopened pack of Camels and beside it a lighter and a sodden, broken cigarette.

  “As you like, Harry.”

  He sat unbuttoning his coat and pushed the U-shaped priest’s collar into the slits in his priest’s shirt. The other man flinched when he put his hand in his jacket pocket.

  “Cigarettes,” the old man said. “For us. Yours look like they’ve drowned.”

  The policeman nodded and the old man took out his hand and held up an opened pack.

  “You speak good Norwegian.”

  “Tiny bit better than I speak Swedish. But as a Norwegian you can’t hear the accent when I speak Swedish.”

  Harry took one of the black cigarettes. Studied it.

  “The Russian accent, you mean?”

  “Sobranie Black Russian,” the old man said. “The only decent cigarettes to be found in Russia. Produced in Ukraine now. I usually steal them from Andrey. Speaking of Andrey, how is he?”

  “Bad,” the policeman said, allowing the old man to light his cigarette for him.

  “I’m sorry to hear that. Speaking of bad, you should be dead, Harry. I know you were in the tunnel when I opened the sluices.”

  “I was.”

  “The sluices opened at the same time and the water towers were full. You should have been washed into the middle.”

  “I was.”

  “Then I don’t understand. Most suffer from shock and drown in the middle.”

  The policeman exhaled the smoke from a corner of his mouth. “Like the Resistance fighters who went after the Gestapo boss?”

  “I don’t know if they ever tested his trap in a real retreat.”

  “But you did. With the undercover officer.”

  “He was just like you, Harry. Men who think they have a calling are dangerous. Both to themselves and their environment. You should have drowned like him.”

  “But as you see, I’m still here.”

  “I
still don’t understand how that’s possible. Are you claiming that having been battered by the water you still had enough air in your lungs to swim eighty yards in ice-cold water through a narrow tunnel, fully clothed?”

  “No.”

  “No?” The old man smiled. He seemed genuinely curious.

  “No, I had too little air in my lungs. But I had enough for forty yards.”

  “And then?”

  “Then I was saved.”

  “Saved? By whom?”

  “By the man you said was good, deep down.” Harry held up the empty whiskey bottle. “Jim Beam.”

  “You were saved by whiskey?”

  “A bottle of whiskey.”

  “An empty bottle of whiskey?”

  “On the contrary, a full bottle.”

  Harry put the cigarette in the corner of his mouth, unscrewed the cap, held the bottle over his head.

  “Full of air.”

  The old man gave a look of disbelief. “You …?”

  “The biggest problem after emptying my lungs of air in the water was to put my mouth to the bottle, tilt it so the neck was pointing upward, and I could inhale. It’s like diving for the first time. Your body protests. Because your body has a limited knowledge of physics and thinks it will suck in water and drown. Did you know that the lungs can take four liters of air? Well, a whole bottle of air and a bit of determination were enough to swim another forty yards.” The policeman put down the bottle, removed his cigarette and looked at it skeptically. “The Germans should have made a slightly longer tunnel.”

  Harry watched the old man. Saw the furrowed old face split. Heard him laugh. It sounded like the chug-chug of a boat.

  “I knew you were different, Harry. They told me you would come back to Oslo when you heard about Oleg. So I made inquiries. And I know now the rumors did not exaggerate.”