Phantom

by Jo Nesbo

  “Do you want to hear the truth?”

  Mikael seemed to hesitate before answering. “Love to.”

  “I was playing hooky.”

  The terrace went quiet for a couple of seconds; all that could be heard was the distant rumble from the town.

  “Playing hooky?” Mikael laughed. Skeptical but good-natured laughter. Truls liked his laugh. Everyone did, men and women alike. It was a laugh that said, You’re funny and nice and probably clever and well worth a friendly chuckle.

  “You played hooky? You, who never shirks work and loves making an arrest?”

  “Yes,” Truls said. “I’d gotten lucky.”

  Silence again.

  Then Mikael roared with laughter. He leaned back and laughed so much he was gasping for breath. Zero cavities. Bent forward again and smacked Truls on the shoulder. It was such happy, liberating laughter that for some seconds Truls simply couldn’t help himself. He joined in.

  “Fucking and building a terrace,” Mikael Bellman gasped. “You’re quite a man, Truls. Quite a man.”

  Truls could feel the praise making him grow back to his normal size. And for one moment it was almost like the old days. No, not almost—it was like the old days.

  “You know,” he grunted, “now and then you have to do things all on your own. That’s the only way you get a decent job done.”

  “True,” Mikael said, wrapping an arm around Truls’s shoulders and stamping both feet on the terrace. “But this, Truls, is a lot of cement for one man.”

  Yes, Truls thought, feeling exultant laughter bubble up in his chest. It is a lot of cement for one man.

  “I SHOULD HAVE kept the Game Boy when you brought it,” Oleg said.

  “You should have,” Harry said, leaning against the doorframe. “Then you could have brushed up on your Tetris technique.”

  “And you should have taken the magazine out of this gun before you left it here.”

  “Maybe.” Harry tried not to look at the Odessa pointing half at the floor, half at him.

  Oleg smiled wanly. “I guess we’ve made a number of mistakes, both of us.”

  Harry nodded.

  Oleg had got to his feet and was standing beside the stove. “But I didn’t only make mistakes, did I?”

  “Not at all. You did a lot right as well.”

  “Like what?”

  Harry shrugged. “Like claiming you threw yourself at the gun of this fictional killer. Saying he wore a balaclava and didn’t say a word, only used gestures. You left it to me to draw the obvious conclusions: that it explained the gunshot residue on your skin, and that the killer didn’t speak because he was afraid you would recognize his voice, so he had some connection with the drug trade or the police. My guess is you used the balaclava because you noticed that the policeman with you at Alnabru had one. In your story you located him in the neighboring office because it was stripped bare, and it was open, so everyone could come and go from there to the river. You gave me the hints so that I could build my own convincing explanation of why you hadn’t killed Gusto. An explanation you knew my brain would manage. For our brains are always willing to let emotions make decisions. Always ready to find the consoling answers our hearts need.”

  Oleg nodded slowly. “But now you have all the other answers. The correct ones.”

  “Apart from one,” Harry said. “Why?”

  Oleg didn’t reply. Harry held up his right hand while slowly putting his left in his trouser pocket and pulling out a crumpled pack and lighter.

  “Why, Oleg?”

  “What do you think?”

  “I thought for a while it was all about Irene. Jealousy. Or you knew he had sold her to someone. But if he was the only person who knew where she was, you couldn’t kill him until he had told you. So it must have been about something else. Something as strong as love for a woman. Because you’re no killer, are you?”

  “You tell me.”

  “You’re a man with a classic motive that has driven men, good men, to perform terrible deeds, myself included. The investigation has gone around in circles. Getting nowhere. I’m back where we started. With a love affair. The worst kind.”

  “What do you know about that?”

  “Because I’ve been in love with the same woman. Or her sister. She’s drop-dead gorgeous at night, and as ugly as sin when you wake up the next morning.” Harry lit the black cigarette with the gold filter and the Russian imperial eagle. “But when night comes you’ve forgotten and you’re in love again. And nothing can compete with this love, not even Irene. Am I wrong?”

  Harry took a drag and watched Oleg.

  “What do you want me to say? You know everything anyway.”

  “I want to hear you say it.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I want you to hear yourself say it. So that you can hear how sick and meaningless it is.”

  “What? That it’s sick to shoot someone because they try to steal your dope? The dope you’ve slogged your guts out to scrape together?”

  “Can’t you hear how banal that sounds?”

  “Says you!”

  “Yes, says me. I lost the best woman in the world because I couldn’t resist. And you’ve killed your best friend, Oleg. Say his name.”

  “Why?”

  “Say his name.”

  “I’ve got the gun.”

  “Say his name.”

  Oleg grinned. “Gusto. What’s—”

  “Once more.”

  Oleg tilted his head and looked at Harry. “Gusto.”

  “Once more!” Harry yelled. “Gusto!” Oleg yelled back.

  “Once m—”

  “Gusto!” Oleg took a deep breath. “Gusto! Gusto …” His voice had begun to tremble. “Gusto!” It burst at the seams. “Gusto. Gus”—a sob intervened—“to.” Tears fell as he squeezed his eyes and whispered: “Gusto. Gusto Hanssen …”

  Harry took a step forward, but Oleg raised the gun.

  “You’re young, Oleg. You can still change.”

  “And what about you, Harry? Can’t you change?”

  “I wish I could, Oleg. I wish I had, then I would’ve taken better care of both of you. But it’s too late for me. I am the person I am.”

  “Which is? Alkie? Traitor?”

  “Policeman.”

  Oleg laughed. “Is that it? Policeman? Not a person or anything?”

  “Mostly a policeman.”

  “Mostly a policeman,” Oleg repeated with a nod. “Isn’t that banal?”

  “Banal and dull,” Harry said, taking the half-smoked cigarette and regarding it with disapproval, as if it weren’t working as it should. “Because that means I have no choice, Oleg.”

  “Choice?”

  “I have to make sure you take your punishment.”

  “You don’t work for the police anymore, Harry. You’re unarmed. And no one else knows that you know or that you’re here. Think of Mom. Think about me! For once, think about us, all three of us.” His eyes were full of tears, and there was a shrill, metallic tone of desperation in his voice. “Why can’t you just go away now, and then we’ll forget everything, then we’ll say this hasn’t happened?”

  “I wish I could,” Harry said. “But you’ve got me cornered. I know what happened, and I have to stop you.”

  “So why did you let me take the gun?”

  Harry shrugged. “I can’t arrest you. You have to give yourself up. It’s your race.”

  “Give myself up? Why should I? I’ve just been released!”

  “If I arrest you I’ll lose both your mother and you. And without you I am nothing. I can’t live without you. Do you understand, Oleg? I’m a rat that’s been locked out and there’s only one way in. And it goes through you.”

  “So let me go! Let’s forget the whole business and start fresh!”

  Harry shook his head. “Premeditated murder, Oleg. I can’t. You’re the one with the gun; you have the key now. You have to think about all three of us. If we go to Hans Christian h
e can sort things out and the punishment will be substantially reduced.”

  “But it’ll be long enough for me to lose Irene. No one would wait that long.”

  “Maybe, maybe not. Maybe you’ve lost her already.”

  “You’re lying! You always lie!” Harry watched Oleg blinking the tears from his eyes. “What will you do if I refuse to give myself up?”

  “Then I’ll have to arrest you now.”

  A groan escaped Oleg’s lips, a sound halfway between a gasp and disbelieving laughter.

  “You’re crazy, Harry.”

  “It’s the way I’m made, Oleg. I do what I have to do. As you have to do what you have to do.”

  “Have to? You make it sound like a fucking curse.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Bullshit!”

  “Break the curse, then, Oleg. Because you don’t really want to kill again, do you?”

  “Get out!” Oleg screamed. The gun shook in his hand. “Go on! You’re not in the police anymore!”

  “Correct,” Harry said. “But I am, as I said …” He clenched his lips around the black cigarette and inhaled deeply. Closed his eyes, and for two seconds he looked as if he were relishing it. Then he let air and smoke wheeze out from his lungs. “A policeman.” He dropped the cigarette on the floor in front of him. Trod on it as he moved toward Oleg. Lifted his head. Oleg was almost as tall as he was. Harry met the boy’s eyes behind the sights of the raised gun. Saw him cock the gun. Already knew the outcome. He was in the way. The boy had no choice, either; they were two unknowns in an equation without a solution, two heavenly bodies on course for an inevitable collision, a game of Tetris only one of them could win. Only one of them wanted to win. He hoped Oleg would have the gumption to get rid of the gun afterward, that he would catch the plane to Bangkok, that he would never breathe a word to Rakel, that he wouldn’t wake up in the middle of the night screaming with the room full of ghosts from the past and that he would succeed in making himself a life worth living. For his own was not. Not any longer. He steeled himself and kept walking, felt the weight of his body, saw the black eye of the muzzle grow. One autumn day, Oleg, ten years old, his hair ruffled by the wind, Rakel, Harry, orange foliage, staring into the pocket camera, waiting for the click of the timer. Pictorial proof that they had made it, been there, reached the peak of happiness. Oleg’s index finger, white at the knuckle as it curled tighter around the trigger. There was no way back. There had never been time to catch the plane. There had never been any plane, no Hong Kong, just a notion of a life none of them had been in a position to live. Harry felt no fear. Only sorrow. The brief salvo sounded like a single shot and made the windows vibrate. He felt the physical pressure from the bullets hitting him in the middle of the chest. The recoil made the barrel jump and the third bullet hit him in the head. He fell. Beneath him, darkness. And he plunged into it. Until it swallowed him up and swept him into a cooling, painless nothing. At last, he thought. And that was Harry Hole’s final thought. That at long, long last he was free.

  THE SCREAMS OF the rat’s young were even clearer now that the church bells had chimed ten and fallen silent and the police siren that had been approaching had faded into the distance again. Only the faint heartbeats were left. Last summer a younger human body lay here and bled on the same kitchen floor. But that was summer, long before the rat’s young had been born. And the body had not blocked the way to the nest.

  The rat bit once into the leather shoe.

  Licked the metal again, the salty metal that protruded between two of the fingers on the right hand.

  Scrabbled up the suit jacket that smelled of sweat, blood and food, so many types of food that the linen material must have been in a garbage can.

  And there they were again, molecules of the unusually strong smell of smoke that had not been completely washed out.

  She ran up the arm, across the shoulder, stopped at a bloodstained bandage around the neck. Then she scuttled up the chest. There was still a strong smell coming from the two round holes in the suit jacket. Sulfur, gunpowder. One was right by the heart. It was still beating. She continued up to the forehead, licked the blood running in a single thin stream from the blond hair. Went down to the lips, nostrils, eyelids. There was a scar along the cheek. The rat stopped again, as if considering how to get through.

  The moonlight glistened on the Akerselva River, making the filthy little stream run through the town like a gold chain. There were not many women who chose to walk along the deserted paths by the water, but Martine did. It had been a long day at the Watchtower, and she was tired. But in a good way. It had been a good, long day. A boy approached her from the shadows, saw her face in the flashlight beam, mumbled a low “Hi” and retreated.

  Rikard had asked, a couple of times, if she shouldn’t, now that she was pregnant as well, take a different way home, but she had responded that it was the shortest way to Grünerløkka. And she refused to let anyone take her town from her. Besides, she knew so many of the people who lived under the bridges that she felt safer there than in some hip bar in west Oslo. She had walked past the emergency room and Schous Plass and was heading for Blå when she heard the pavement resound with the short, hard smack of shoes. A tall young man came running toward her. Glided through the darkness, shining a light along the path. She caught a glimpse of his face before he passed, and heard his panting breath fade into the distance behind her. It was a familiar face, one she had seen at the Watchtower. But there were so many, and sometimes she thought she had seen people who colleagues told her the next day had been dead for months, years, even. But for some reason the face made her think of Harry again. She never spoke about him with anyone, least of all Rikard, of course, but he had created a tiny little space inside her, a small room where she could occasionally go visit him. Could that have been Oleg? Was that what had reminded her of Harry now? She turned. Saw the back of the boy who was running. As though he had the devil on his tail, as though he were trying to run away from something. But she couldn’t see anyone chasing him. He was getting smaller. And soon he was lost in the darkness.

  IRENE LOOKED AT her watch. Five past eleven. She leaned back in her seat and stared at the monitor above the desk. In a few minutes they would be allowing passengers to board the plane. Dad had texted that he would meet them at Frankfurt Airport. She was sweating and her body ached. It was not going to be easy. But it would be all right.

  Stein squeezed her hand.

  “How’s it going, pumpkin?”

  Irene smiled. Squeezed back.

  It would be all right.

  “Do we know her?” Irene whispered.

  “Who?”

  “The dark-haired one sitting over there on her own.”

  She had been sitting there when they arrived as well, on a seat by the gate opposite them. She was reading a Lonely Planet book about Thailand. She was good-looking, the type of good looks that age never fades. And she radiated something, a kind of quiet happiness, as though she were laughing inside even if she was on her own.

  “I don’t. Who is she?”

  “I don’t know. She reminds me of someone.”

  “Who?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Stein laughed. That secure, calm older-brother laugh. Squeezed her hand again.

  There was a drawn-out pling, and a metallic voice announced that the flight to Frankfurt was ready for boarding. People got up and swarmed toward the desk. Irene held on to Stein, who also wanted to get up.

  “What is it, pumpkin?”

  “Let’s wait until the line thins a little.”

  “But it—”

  “I don’t feel like standing in the tunnel so close … to people.”

  “OK. Stupid of me. How’s it going?”

  “Still good.”

  “Good.”

  “She looks lonely.”

  “Lonely?” Stein looked over at the woman. “I disagree. She looks happy.”

  “Yes, but lonely.”

 
“Happy and lonely?”

  Irene laughed. “No, I’m mistaken. Perhaps it’s the boy she resembles who is lonely.”

  “Irene?”

  “Yes?”

  “Do you remember what we agreed? Happy thoughts, OK?”

  “Right. The two of us aren’t lonely.”

  “No, we’re here for each other. Forever, right?”

  “Forever.”

  Irene hooked her hand under her brother’s arm and rested her head on his shoulder. Thought about the policeman who had found her. Harry, he had said his name was. At first she had thought of the Harry Oleg had always gone on about. He was a policeman as well. But the way Oleg had talked she had always imagined him as taller, younger, perhaps better-looking than the somewhat ugly man who had freed her. But he had visited Stein, too, and now she knew it was him. Harry Hole. And she knew she would remember him for the rest of her life. His scarred face, the wound across his chin and the big bandage around his neck. And the voice. Oleg hadn’t told her he’d had such a soothing voice. And all of a sudden she was sure, there was a certainty, where from she had no idea, it was just there:

  It was going to be all right.

  Once she left Oslo, she would be able to put everything behind her. She wasn’t to touch anything, either alcohol or dope—that was what Dad and the doctor she had consulted had explained to her. Violin would be there—it always would—but she would keep it at a distance. Just as the ghost of Gusto would always haunt her. The ghost of Ibsen. And all the poor souls to whom she had sold death by powder. They would have to come when they came. And in a few years perhaps they would pale. And she would return to Oslo. The important thing was that she was going to be all right. She would manage to create a life that was worth living.

  She watched the woman reading. And the woman looked up, as though she had noticed. She flashed her a brief but sparkly smile, then her nose was back in the travel guide.

  “We’re off,” Stein said.

  “We’re off,” Irene repeated.

  TRULS BERNTSEN DROVE through Kvadraturen. Trundled down toward Tollbugata. Up Prinsens Gate. Down Rådhusgata. He had left the party early, got into his car and driven wherever the whim took him. It was cold and clear and Kvadraturen was alive tonight. Prostitutes called after him—they must have scented the testosterone. Dope pushers were undercutting one another. The bass in a parked Corvette thudded, boom, boom, boom. A couple stood kissing by a tram stop. A man ran down the street laughing with glee, his suit jacket wide open and flapping; another man in an identical suit was running after him. On the corner of Dronningens Gate one solitary Arsenal shirt. No one Truls had seen before; he must be new. His police radio crackled. And Truls could feel a strange sense of well-being: The blood was streaming through his veins, the bass, the rhythm of everything that was happening, sitting here and watching, seeing all the small cogs that knew nothing of one another, yet made the others rotate. He was the only one to see, to see the totality. And that was precisely how it should be. For this was his town now.