Phantom (18 page)

The same armor that would take him down to the bottom and drown him like a rat
.

I woke up to pounding on the door. My head felt like a coal mine had been operating inside it, and I dreaded opening even one eye. The morning light seeped through the crack between the wooden boards nailed to the windows. Irene was lying on her mattress, and I saw Oleg’s white Puma Speed Cat sneakers sticking out between two amplifiers. I could hear that whoever it was had started using his feet
.

I got up and staggered across the room, trying to remember any messages about band practice. I opened the door a fraction and instinctively put my foot against it. It didn’t help. The shove knocked me backward into the room and I fell over the drums. One hell of a racket. After pushing
away the cymbal stands and the snare drum, I looked up into the kisser of my dear foster brother, Stein
.

Delete
dear.

He’d gotten bigger, but the air-force haircut and the dark, hate-filled flinty eyes were the same. I saw him open his mouth and say something, but my ears were ringing with the sound of the cymbals. Automatically I put my hands in front of my face as he came for me. But he rushed past, stepped over the drum set and went to Irene on the mattress. She gave a little scream as he grabbed an arm and dragged her to her feet
.

He held her tight while stuffing a few possessions into her knapsack. She’d given up resisting by the time he pulled her to the door
.

“Stein …” I started
.

He stopped in the doorway and looked at me expectantly, but I had nothing to add
.

“You’ve done enough damage to this family,” he said
.

He slammed the iron door shut. The air quivered. Oleg stuck his head up above the amplifier and said something, but I was still deaf
.

I stood with my back to the fireplace and felt the heat making my skin tingle. The flames and an antique fucking table lamp constituted the only light in the room. The old man sat in the leather chair examining the man we’d brought with us in the limo from Skippergata. He was still wearing his all-weather jacket. Andrey stood behind the man, untying his blindfold
.

“Well,” the old man said. “You’re the one who supplies this product that I have heard so much about.”

“Yes,” the man said, putting on his glasses and squinting around the room
.

“Where does it come from?”

“I’m here to sell it, not to provide information about it.”

The old man stroked his chin with thumb and finger. “In that case I’m not interested. Taking others’ stolen property always leads to dead bodies in this game. And dead bodies are trouble and bad for business.”

“This is not stolen property.”

“I venture to suggest I have a fairly good overview of supply channels, and this is not a product anyone has seen before. So I repeat: I will not buy anything until I have the assurance that this will not rebound on us.”

“I’ve allowed myself to be brought here blindfolded because I understand the need for discretion. I hope you can show me the same sensitivity.”

The heat had made his glasses mist up, but he kept them on. Andrey and Peter had searched him in the car while I had searched his eyes, body language, voice, hands. All I found was loneliness. There was no fat, ugly girlfriend, only this man and his fantastic dope
.

“For all I know, you could be a policeman,” the old man said
.

“With this?” the man said, pointing to his foot
.

“If you import goods, why haven’t I heard of you before?”

“Because I’m new. I don’t have a record and no one knows me, either in the police or in this business. I have a so-called respectable profession and have so far lived a normal life.” He made a cautious grimace, which I realized was supposed to be a smile. “An abnormally normal life, some might claim.”

“Hm.” The old man stroked his chin repeatedly. Then he grabbed my hand and pulled me to his chair so that I was standing beside him and looking at the man
.

“Do you know what I think, Gusto? I think he makes this product himself. What do you think?”

I deliberated. “Maybe,” I said
.

“You know, Gusto, you don’t exactly need to be an Einstein in chemistry. There are detailed recipes on the Net for how to turn opium into morphine and then heroin. Let’s say you get hold of ten kilos of raw opium. Then you find yourself some boiling equipment, a fridge, a little methanol and a fan, and hey, presto, you’ve got eight and a half kilos of heroin crystals. Dilute it and you have one point two kilos of street heroin.”

The man in the all-weather jacket coughed. “It requires a little more than that.”

“The question,” the old man said, “is how you get hold of the opium.”

The man shook his head
.

“Aha,” the old man said, stroking the inside of my arm. “Not opiate. Opioid.”

The man didn’t answer
.

“Did you hear what he said, Gusto?” The old man pointed a finger at the clubfoot. “He makes totally synthetic dope. He doesn’t need any help from nature or Afghanistan; he applies simple chemistry and makes everything at the kitchen table. Total control and no risky smuggling.
And it’s at least as powerful as heroin. We’ve got a clever guy among us, Gusto. That sort of enterprise commands respect.”

“Respect,” I mumbled
.

“How much can you produce?”

“Two kilos a week, maybe. It depends.”

“I’ll take all of it,” the old man said
.

“All of it?” The man’s voice was flat and contained no real surprise
.

“Yes, everything you produce. May I make you a business proposition, Herr …?”

“Ibsen.”

“Ibsen?”

“If you don’t mind.”

“Not at all. He was also a great artist. I would like to propose a partnership, Herr Ibsen. Vertical integration. We corner the market and set the price. Better margin for both of us. What do you say?”

Ibsen shook his head
.

The old man tilted his head, a smile on his lipless mouth. “Why not, Herr Ibsen?”

I watched the little man straighten up; he seemed to grow in the baggy, all-year-round, world’s-most-boring-person jacket
.

“If I give you the monopoly, Herr …”

The old man pressed his fingertips together. “You can call me whatever you like, Herr Ibsen.”

“I don’t want to be dependent on a single buyer, Herr Dubai. It’s too risky. And it means you can force prices down. On the other hand, I don’t want too many buyers, because then the risk that the police will trace me is greater. I came to you because you’re known to be invisible, but I want one more buyer. I have already been in contact with Los Lobos. I hope you can understand.”

The old man laughed his
chug-chug
laugh. “Listen and learn, Gusto. Not only is he a pharmacist, he’s also a businessman. Good, Herr Ibsen, let’s say that, then.”

“The price …”

“I’ll pay what you asked. You’ll find this is a business in which you don’t waste time haggling, Herr Ibsen. Life’s too short and death too close at hand. Shall we say the first delivery next Tuesday?”

On the way out the old man acted as if he needed to support himself on me. His nails scratched the skin on my arm
.

“Have you thought about exporting, Herr Ibsen? The checks on exporting drugs from Norway are nonexistent, you know.”

Ibsen didn’t answer. But I saw it now. What he wanted. Saw it as he stood over his clubfoot with a pivoted hip. Saw it in the reflection from his sweaty, shiny forehead below the thinning hair. The condensation was gone from his glasses, and his eyes had the same gleam I’d seen on Skippergata. Payback, Dad. He wanted some payback. Payback for all the things he hadn’t received: respect, love, admiration, acceptance, everything supposedly you can’t buy. But you can, of course. Isn’t that right, Dad? Life owes you, but sometimes you have to be your own fucking debt collector. And if we have to burn in hell for it, heaven’s going to be sparsely populated. Isn’t that right, Dad?

H
ARRY SAT BY
the road looking out. Watched the planes taxiing in and taxiing out to the runway.

He would be in Shanghai within eighteen hours.

He liked Shanghai. Liked the food, liked walking down the Bund along the Huangpu River to the Peace Hotel, liked going into the Old Jazz Bar and listening to the ancient jazz musicians creaking their way through standards, liked the thought that they had been sitting there and playing without an audible break since the revolution in ’49. Liked her. Liked what they had, and what they didn’t have, but ignored.

The ability to ignore. It was a wonderful quality, not something he was naturally blessed with, but which he had practiced over the last three years. Not banging your head against the wall if you didn’t have to.

How unshakable is your faith in your gospel, actually? Aren’t you also a doubter?

He would be in Shanghai in eighteen hours.

Could
be in Shanghai within eighteen hours.

Shit.

She answered on the second ring.

“What do you want?”

“Don’t hang up again, OK?”

“I’m here.”

“Listen, how strong a hold do you have on that Nils Christian?”

“Hans Christian.”

“Is he besotted enough for you to persuade him to help me with a very dubious stunt?”

It had rained all night, and from where Harry was standing, in front of Oslo District Prison, he could see a fresh layer of leaves lying like a wet yellow tarpaulin over the park. He had not slept much after he had gone straight from the airport to Rakel’s. Hans Christian had come, not protested too much and gone again. Afterward Rakel and Harry drank tea and talked about Oleg. About how it had been before. About how it had been, but not about how it could have been. In the early hours Rakel had said Harry could sleep in Oleg’s room. Before Harry went to bed he had used Oleg’s computer to search for, and find, old articles about the police officer found dead beneath the Älvsborg Bridge in Gothenburg. It confirmed what Cato had told him, and Harry also found a piece in the ever-sensationalist
Göteborgs-Tidningen
leaking rumors about the dead man having been a burner, which it defined as a person criminals used to destroy evidence against them. It was only two hours since Rakel had woken him with a steaming cup of coffee and a whisper. She had always done that, started the day with whispers, to him and Oleg, as if to soften the transition from dreams to reality.

Harry peered into the closed-circuit TV camera, heard the low buzz and pushed open the door. Then he entered quickly. Held the briefcase up in front of him for all to see and laid his ID card on the counter while turning his good cheek.

“Hans Christian Simonsen …” the prison officer mumbled without looking up, running her eye down the list in front of her. “There, yes. For Oleg Fauke.”

“Correct,” Harry said.

Another officer led him through the corridors and across the open gallery in the middle of the prison. The officer talked about how warm the autumn had been and rattled the huge bunch of keys whenever he opened a new door. They walked through the common room, and Harry saw a Ping-Pong table with two rackets and an open book on top, and a kitchenette, in which a wholemeal loaf and a bread knife had been left out, along with spreads of various kinds. But no inmates.

They stopped by a white door and the officer unlocked it.

“I thought cell doors were open at this time of day,” Harry said.

“The others are, but this prisoner’s doing a one seventy-one,” the officer said. “He’s allowed out only one hour a day.”

“Where are all the others, then?”

“God knows. Maybe they’ve got the Hustler Channel on TV again.”

After the officer had let him in, Harry stood by the door until he heard the footsteps outside fading in the distance. The cell was the usual kind. Thirty square feet. A bed, a cupboard, a desk and chair, bookshelves, a TV. Oleg, who was sitting at the desk, looked up in surprise.

“You wanted to meet me,” Harry said.

“I thought I wasn’t allowed visitors,” Oleg said.

“This isn’t a visit. It’s a consultation with your defense counsel.”

“Defense counsel?”

Harry nodded. And saw the light dawn in Oleg’s eyes. Smart boy.

“How …?”

“The type of murder you’re suspected of committing doesn’t qualify you for a high-security prison. It wasn’t so difficult.” Harry opened the briefcase, took out the white Game Boy and passed it to Oleg. “Here you are. It’s for you.”

Oleg ran his fingers over the display. “Where did you find it?”

Harry thought he could see the suggestion of a smile on the boy’s serious face. “Vintage model with battery. I found it in Hong Kong. My plan was to crush you at Tetris the next time we met.”