Phantom (57 page)

“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 he 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.

T
HE 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.

I
RENE 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.

T
RULS
B
ERNTSEN 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.

T
HE PRIEST IN
Gamlebyen Church unlocked the door and came out. Listened to the swish of the treetops in the cemetery. Peered up at the moon. A beautiful evening. The concert had been successful and the turnout good. Better than it would be for tomorrow’s early-morning service. He sighed. The sermon he was going to deliver to the empty pews would deal with the forgiveness of sins. He walked down the steps. Proceeded through the cemetery. He had decided to use the same sermon he had used for the burial on Friday. The deceased, according to the next of kin—his ex-wife—had been involved in criminal dealings at the end and even before that had lived a life so full of sin it would be a mountain to climb for all those who made the journey. They hadn’t needed to worry. The only mourners present were the ex-wife with their children, plus a colleague who had snuffled loudly throughout. The ex had confided to him that the colleague was probably the only flight attendant at the airline the deceased hadn’t slept with.