The Leopard

by Jo Nesbo

  Kinzonzi opened his eyes. Harry saw the whites quiver. The terror of dying is a prerequisite for wanting to live. It had to be, at least here in Goma.

  Kinzonzi answered, slowly and clearly.

  88

  The Church

  KINZONZI LAY QUITE STILL. THE TALL, WHITE MAN HAD placed the torch on the floor so that it lit up the ceiling. Kinzonzi watched him put on Oudry’s clothes. Watched him tear his T-shirt into strips and tie them round his chin and head so that the gaping jaw, the wound running from his mouth to his ear, was covered. Tightened it to stop the mandible from hanging on one side. Blood soaked through the cotton material as Kinzonzi looked on.

  He had answered the few questions the man had asked. Where. How many. What weapons they had.

  Now the white man went to the shelf, pulled out a black case, opened it and examined the contents.

  Kinzonzi knew he was going to die. A young, violent death. But perhaps not now, not tonight. His stomach stung as though someone had poured acid on him. But it was OK.

  The white man was holding Oudry’s Kalashnikov. He moved towards Kinzonzi, stood over him with the light behind his back. A towering figure with his head wrapped in white cloth, the way they used to bind the chin for death before the deceased was buried. If Kinzonzi was going to be shot, it would happen now. The man dropped the torn strips of T-shirt he hadn’t used on Kinzonzi.

  ‘Help yourself.’

  Kinzonzi heard him groaning as he went up the ladder.

  Kinzonzi closed his eyes. If he didn’t wait too long, he could stop the worst bleeding before he fainted from blood loss. Get to his feet, crawl across the road, find people. And he might be lucky, they might not belong to the species: Goma vulture. He might find Alma. He could make her his. Because she had no man now. And Kinzonzi no longer had an employer. He had seen what was in the case the tall white man had taken with him.

  Harry stopped the Range Rover in front of the low church walls, radiator-to-radiator with the chunky Hyundai that was still standing there.

  A cigarette glowed in the car.

  Harry switched off the headlamps, rolled down the window and stuck his head out.

  ‘Saul!’

  Harry saw the cigarette glow move. The taxi driver came out.

  ‘Harry. What happened? Your face . . .’

  ‘Things didn’t quite go to plan. I didn’t imagine you’d still be here.’

  ‘Why not? You paid me for the whole day.’ Saul ran his hand over the bonnet of the Range Rover. ‘Nice car. Stolen?’

  ‘Borrowed.’

  ‘Borrowed car. Borrowed clothes, too?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Red with blood. The previous owner’s?’

  ‘Let’s leave your car here, Saul.’

  ‘Will I want this trip, Harry?’

  ‘Probably not. Does it help if I say I’m one of the good guys?’

  ‘Sorry, but in Goma we’ve forgotten what that means, Harry.’

  ‘Mm. Would a hundred dollars help, Saul?’

  ‘Two hundred,’ Saul said.

  Harry nodded.

  ‘… and fifty.’

  Harry got out and let Saul take the wheel.

  ‘Are you sure that’s where they are?’ Saul asked, as the car purred onto the road.

  ‘Yes,’ Harry said from the back seat. ‘Someone once told me that it’s the only place where people in Goma can get to heaven.’

  ‘I don’t like the place,’ Saul said.

  ‘Oh?’ Harry said, opening the case beside him. The Märklin. The instructions for how to assemble the rifle were glued to the inside of the lid. Harry set about the job.

  ‘Evil spirits. Ba-Toye.’

  ‘You studied in Oxford, didn’t you say?’ Matt, greased parts readily clicked into place.

  ‘You don’t know anything about the fire demon, I suppose.’

  ‘No, but I know these ones,’ Harry said, holding up one of the cartridges from its own compartment in the Märklin case. ‘And I would back them against Ba-Toye.’

  The feeble yellow interior light made the gold-coloured cartridge casing gleam. The lead bullet inside had a diameter of sixteen millimetres. The world’s largest calibre. When he had been working on the report after the Redbreast investigation, a ballistics expert had told him the calibre of a Märklin was way beyond all sensible limits. Even for shooting elephants. It was better suited to felling trees.

  Harry clicked the telescopic sights into place. ‘Put your foot down, Saul.’

  He laid the barrel over the top of the empty passenger seat and tested the trigger while keeping his eye some distance from the sights because of the bumpy ride. The sights needed adjusting, calibrating, fine-tuning. But there would be no chance to do that.

  They had arrived. Kaja looked out of the car window. The scattered lights beneath them, that was Goma. Further away, she saw the illuminated oil rig on Lake Kivu. The moon glittered in the greenish-black water. The last part of the road was no more than a dirt track winding round the top, and the car headlamps swept across the bare black moonscape. When they had reached the highest plateau, a flat disc of rock with a diameter of around a hundred metres, the driver had headed for the far end, through clouds of drifting white smoke tinted red beside the Nyiragongo crater.

  The driver switched off the ignition.

  ‘May I ask you something?’ Tony said. ‘Something I have given a lot of thought to over the last few weeks. How does it feel to know you’re going to die? I don’t mean how it feels to be afraid because you’re in danger. I’ve experienced that several times myself. But to be absolutely certain that, here and now, your life will cease to exist. Are you capable … of communicating that?’ Tony leaned forward a fraction to catch her eye. ‘Just take your time to find the right words.’

  Kaja held his gaze. She had expected to panic. But it just didn’t come. Emotionally, she was like the stone in the terrain around them.

  ‘I don’t feel anything,’ she said.

  ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘The others were so frightened that they couldn’t even answer, could only babble. Charlotte Lolles was transfixed, as if in shock. Elias Skog couldn’t keep his language clean. My father cried. Is it mere chaos or is there some reflection? Do you feel sorrow? Remorse? Or relief that you don’t have to put up a fight any more? Look at Lene, for example. She’s given up and is going to her death like the meek lamb she is. How is it with you, Kaja? How much do you long to relinquish control?’

  Kaja could see there was genuine curiosity in his eyes.

  ‘Let me ask you instead how much you longed to gain control, Tony,’ she said, scouring her mouth for moisture. ‘When you killed one person after the other, under the guidance of an invisible person who turned out to be a boy whose tongue you had cut off. Can you tell me that?’

  Tony looked into the middle distance and slowly shook his head, as if answering another question.

  ‘I had no idea until reading on the Net that good old Skai had arrested someone from my village. Ole, no less. Who would have thought he had the guts?’

  ‘The hatred, don’t you mean?’

  Tony took a pistol from his pocket. Checked his watch.

  ‘Harry’s late.’

  ‘He’ll come.’

  Tony laughed. ‘But unfortunately for you minus a pulse. I liked Harry, by the way. Really. Fun to play with. I called him from Ustaoset – he had given me his number. Heard the voicemail say he would have no network coverage for a couple of days. That made me laugh. He was at the cabin in Håvass, of course, the old sly boots.’ Tony rested the pistol in one palm while stroking the black steel with the other. ‘I could see it in him when we met at the police station. That he was like me.’

  ‘I doubt that.’

  ‘Oh yes, he is. A driven man. A junkie. A man who does what he must to have what he wants, who walks over dead bodies if need be. Isn’t that right?’

  Kaja didn’t answer.

  Tony checked his watch again. ‘I reckon w
e’ll have to start without him.’

  He’ll come, Kaja thought. I’ll have to play for time.

  ‘So you did a runner, did you?’ she said. ‘With your father’s passport and teeth?’

  Tony looked at her.

  She knew that he knew what she was doing. And also that he liked it. Telling her. How he had tricked them. They all did.

  ‘Do you know what, Kaja? I wish my father were here to see me now. Here, on the top of my mountain. To see me and understand me. Before I killed him. The way that Lene understands that she must die. The way I hope you understand too, Kaja.’

  She felt it now. The fear. More as a physical pain than a fit of panic that would cause her rational brain to implode. She saw clearly, heard clearly, reasoned clearly. Yes, clearer than ever before, she thought.

  ‘You started killing to hide that you had been unfaithful,’ she said, her voice hoarser now. ‘To safeguard the Galtung millions. But what about the millions you have tricked Lene out of here, are they enough to save your project?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Tony smiled, grasping the butt of the pistol. ‘We’ll have to see. Out.’

  ‘Is it worth it, Tony? Is this really worth all these lives?’

  Kaja gasped as the gun barrel was jabbed into her ribs. Tony’s voice hissed in her ear.

  ‘Look around you, Kaja. This is the cradle of humanity. See what a human life is worth. Some die and even more are born in one unending feverish race, round and round, and one life gives no more sense than any other. But the game makes sense. The passion, the fervour. The gambling addiction, as some idiots call it. It’s everything. It’s like Nyiragongo. It’s all-consuming, all-destroying, but it is a prerequisite of all life. No passion, no meaning, no boiling lava within and everything out here would be stone dead, frozen stiff. Passion, Kaja – have you got any? Or are you a dead volcano, a speck of human dust, summed up in three sentences in a funeral speech?’

  Kaja jerked away from the barrel, and Tony cackled with amusement.

  ‘Are you ready for the wedding, Kaja? Ready to thaw?’

  She smelt the stench of sulphur. The driver had opened the door, watched Kaja with indifference, pointed a short-barrelled gun at her. Even here in the car, ten metres from the edge of the crater, she could feel the overwhelming heat. She didn’t move. The black man leaned in and grasped her arm. She let him pull her without offering any resistance, just made sure she was heavy enough for him to be off balance, so that when she suddenly bounded out he would be caught by surprise. The man was amazingly slight and probably a bit shorter than she was. She struck with her elbow. Knowing it was much more powerful than a fist. Knowing that the neck, the temple, the nose were good targets. The elbow hit something with a crunch, the man fell and dropped his weapon. Kaja lifted her foot. She had learned that the most effective way to neutralise a person on the ground was to trample on the thigh. The combination of a full-bodied stamp from the top and the pressure from the ground underneath will immediately cause such widespread bleeding to the thigh muscles that the person will be rendered incapable of pursuit. The alternative is to stamp on the chest and neck with potentially fatal consequences. She had her eyes fixed on the exposed neck when the moonlight fell on the man’s face. She hesitated for a fraction of a second. He couldn’t have been older than Even.

  Then she felt arms enclosing her from behind, her own arms forced into her sides and the air from her lungs expelled as she was lifted off the ground with her legs kicking helplessly. Tony’s voice close to her ear sounded cheerful. ‘Good, Kaja. Passion. You want to live. I’ll make sure his wages are docked, I promise you.’

  The boy on the ground in front of her got to his feet and grabbed his weapon. The indifference was gone now; a white fury shone in his eyes.

  Tony pressed her hands together behind her back and she felt thin plastic ties being tightened around her wrists.

  ‘So,’ said Tony. ‘May I ask you to be Lene’s maid of honour, frøken Solness?’

  And now – at last – it came. The panic. It emptied her brain of all else, rendered everything blank, clean, cruel. Easy. She screamed.

  89

  The Wedding

  KAJA STOOD AT THE EDGE LOOKING DOWN. THE SCORCHING air rose, hit her face like a hot breeze. The poisonous smoke had already made her dizzy, but perhaps that was just the tremulous air blurring her vision, making the lava quiver, down there in the abyss where it shone with tinges of yellow and red. A strand of hair fell into her face, but her hands were bound behind her back with the plastic ties. She stood shoulder to shoulder with Lene Galtung who, Kaja assumed, must have been drugged from the way she stood staring in front of her like a sleepwalker. A white-clad, living corpse with only frost and wasteland within. A shop dummy dressed as a bride in the window of a ropery.

  Tony was right behind them. She felt his hand on the small of her back.

  ‘Do you take the man at your side and promise to love, honour and respect him for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness or in health . . .’ he whispered.

  This wasn’t out of cruelty, he had explained. It was just so practical. There wouldn’t be a trace left of them. Barely a question. People in the Congo go missing every day.

  ‘I hereby declare you married.’

  Kaja mumbled a prayer. She imagined it was a prayer. Until she heard the words: ‘… because it is impossible for me and the person I want to have to be together.’

  The words from Even’s farewell note.

  A car engine roared in a low gear with headlamps scanning the skies. The Range Rover appeared on the other side of the crater.

  ‘And there are the others,’ Tony said. ‘Wave goodbye, there’s good girls.’

  Harry didn’t know what sight would greet him when they turned onto the plateau by the crater. Kinzonzi had said that, apart from the girls, Mister Tony had only his chauffeur with him. But that he and Mister Tony were armed with automatic weapons.

  Before they reached the top Harry had offered Saul the chance to be dropped off, but he had declined. ‘I have no family left, Harry. Maybe it is true that you are on the side of the angels. Anyway, you paid for the whole day.’

  They skidded to a halt.

  The headlights pointed across the crater, to the clutch of three standing on the edge. Then they disappeared in a cloud, but Harry had seen them and already summed up the situation: one man with a short-barrelled gun behind the three of them. One parked Range Rover. And no time. Then the cloud wafted past and Harry saw that Tony and the other man were shielding their eyes as they watched the car, as though expecting something.

  ‘Switch off the engine,’ Harry said from the back seat, resting the Märklin on the front seat. ‘But leave the lights on.’

  Saul did as instructed.

  The man in camouflage knelt down with the gun to his shoulder and took aim.

  ‘Flash the lights a couple of times,’ Harry said, putting his eye to the sights. ‘They’re waiting for some signal or other.’

  Harry squeezed his left eye shut. Closed out half the world. Closed out the wan faces, the fact that Kaja was there, that Lene was there with bulging cheeks and shock-blackened eyes, that these seconds counted. Closed out the turquoise eyes examining him as he said the words: ‘I swear.’ Closed out the popping sound of a shot that told him they had sent the wrong signal, closed out the clunk as the bullet hit the car body, followed by another thud. Closed out everything that did not concern the light refraction on the windscreen, the light refraction in the quivering heat above the crater, the bullet’s probable deviation to the right, the same way the clouds of steam were drifting. He knew that now he was being sustained by one thing: adrenalin. Knew the effect of the natural stimulant would be short. It could wear off at any second. But as long as his heart was still supplying blood to the brain, it was the second he needed. For the brain is a fantastic computer. Tony Leike’s head was half hidden by Lene’s, but it was a little higher.

  Harry aimed at
Kaja’s pointed teeth. Moved to the gleaming ball between Lene’s lips. Moved the sights up higher. No fine-tuning. Chance. Place your bets, last race.

  A cloud of steam was coming from the left.

  Soon they would be enshrouded in it, and as if he had been granted a second of visual clarity, Harry saw it: that when the cloud had passed no one would be standing there any longer. Harry pressed the trigger. Saw Kaja blink above the cross on the sights.

  I swear.

  He was doomed. At last.

  The inside of the car felt as if it would explode with the sound; his shoulder as if it would be knocked out of joint. There was a small, frostwhite perforation in the windscreen. The blood-red cloud covered everything on the other side of the crater. Harry took a deep, tremulous breath and waited.

  90

  Marlon Brando

  HARRY WAS LYING ON HIS BACK, FLOATING. FLOATING AWAY. Sinking into Lake Kivu while the blood, his and that of others, mingled with the lake’s, became one, disappeared in the universe’s great sleep, and the stars above him were extinguished in the cold, black water. Peace in the depths, silence, nothingness. Until he resurfaced in a bubble of methane gas, a night-blue corpse with Guinea worm-infected flesh that seethed and churned beneath the skin. And he had to get out of Lake Kivu to live. To wait.

  Harry opened his eyes. He could see the hotel balcony above him. He rolled onto his side and swam the few metres to the shore. Rose from the water.

  Soon dawn would break. Soon he would be sitting on the plane back to Oslo. Soon he would be in Gunnar Hagen’s office telling him it was over. That they were gone, gone for ever. That they had failed. So he, too, would try to be gone.

  Trembling, Harry wrapped himself in the large white towel and walked towards the stairs up to his hotel room.

  When the cloud passed, no one was standing by the edge of the crater.

  Harry’s sights had automatically sought the marksman. Found him and he had been on the point of firing. But discovered he was looking at the man’s back, heading for the car. Then the Range Rover had started up, passed them and gone.