Phantom (20 page)

“City Council,” said the old man. “The Councilwoman for Social Services has a secretary named Isabelle Skøyen, who in effect runs the town’s drug policy. I’ve checked a source and she’s perfect. Intelligent, efficient and extremely ambitious. The reason she has not climbed higher, according to my source, is her lifestyle, which is bound to attract headlines. Just a question of time. She parties, speaks her mind and has lovers in east Oslo and west Oslo.”

“Sounds terrible,” I said
.

The old man sent me an admonitory look before continuing. “Her father was spokesperson for the Center Party, but was thrown out when he tried to enter national politics. And my source tells me Isabelle has inherited his dreams, and since the odds are best for the Socialist Party she’s left her father’s little party of farmers. In short, everything about Isabelle Skøyen is flexible and can be adapted to suit her ambition. Furthermore, she is single with a not-insubstantial debt on the family farm.”

“So what are we going to do?” I asked as if I were part of the violin administration
.

The old man smiled as though he considered the remark charming. “We’re going to threaten her, force her to come to the negotiating table,
where we will entice her into an alliance. And you’re in charge of the threats, Gusto. That’s why you’re here now.”

“Me? Threaten a woman politician?”

“Precisely. A woman politician you’ve copulated with, Gusto. A council employee who has used her position and status for sexual exploitation of a teenager with considerable social problems.”

At first I couldn’t believe my ears. Until he took a photo from his jacket and put it on the table in front of me. It looked as if it had been taken from behind a tinted car window. It was of Tollbugata and showed a boy getting into a Land Rover. The license plate was visible. The boy was me. The car belonged to Isabelle Skøyen
.

A cold shiver ran down my spine. “How do you know …?”

“My dear Gusto, I told you I was keeping an eye on you. What I want you to do is contact Isabelle Skøyen on the private number I am sure you have and tell her this story we have prepared for the press. And then ask for an extremely private meeting among the three of us.”

He walked over to the window and looked at the drab weather
.

“You’ll find she has a gap in her calendar.”

In the course of the last three years in Hong Kong Harry had done more running than in the whole of his former life. Yet in the thirteen seconds he spent covering the hundred yards to the prison entrance, his brain was playing various scenarios with a common theme: He was too late.

He rang and resisted the temptation to shake the door while waiting for it to open. At last there was a buzz, and he ran to reception.

“Forgotten something?” the officer asked.

“Yes,” Harry said and waited for her to let him through the locked door. “Sound the alarm!” he shouted, dropped the briefcase and ran. “Oleg Fauke’s cell.”

His footsteps echoed through the empty gallery, the empty corridors and the much-too-empty common room. He was not out of breath, yet his breathing sounded like a roaring inside his head.

Oleg’s screams reached him as he emerged from the last corridor. The door to his cell was half open, and seconds before he got there it felt like the nightmare, the avalanche, the feet that would not move fast enough.

Then he was inside and absorbing the scene.

The desk was on its side, paper and books strewn across the floor. At the other end of the room, with his back to the cupboard, stood Oleg. The black Slayer T-shirt was drenched in blood. He was holding the metal lid of the waste-paper basket in front of him. His mouth was open, and he was screaming and screaming. Harry saw the back of a Gym Tech singlet, above it a broad, sweaty bull neck, above that a shiny skull and above that a raised hand holding a bread knife. Metal resounded against metal as the blade struck the lid. The man must have noticed the change of light in the room, for the next moment he whirled around. He lowered his head and held the knife low, pointing it toward Harry.

“Out!” he barked.

Harry avoided the temptation of looking at the knife; instead he focused on the feet. He noted that behind the man Oleg had slid to the
floor. Compared with martial arts practitioners Harry had a lamentably small repertoire of offensive moves. He had only two. And also only two rules. One: There are no rules. Two: Attack first. And when Harry acted it was with the automatic movements of someone who has learned, practiced and repeated only two methods of attack. Harry stepped toward the knife so that the man was forced to retreat in order to swing at him. And by the time the man had wound up his arm Harry had raised his right leg and angled his hip. As the knife was on its way forward, Harry’s foot was on its way down. It struck the man’s knee above the patella. And since the human anatomy is not very well protected against violence from that angle, the quadriceps immediately gave way, followed by the knee-joint ligaments and—as the kneecap was pressed down in front of the tibia—also the patellar tendon.

The man fell to the ground with a howl. The knife clattered to the floor as his hands groped for his kneecap. And his eyes saucered when he found it in a completely new position.

Harry kicked the knife away and raised his foot to finish off the attack as he had been taught: stamp on the opponent’s thigh muscles to cause such massive internal bleeding that he would not be able to get up again. But he saw that the job had already been done and lowered his foot.

He heard the sound of running feet and the rattle of keys from outside in the corridor.

“Over here!” Harry shouted, stepping over the screaming man toward Oleg.

He heard panting from the door.

“Get that man out and get hold of a doctor.” Harry had to yell to drown out the screams.

“Fucking hell, what—”

“Never mind that now—get hold of the doctor.” Harry tore the Slayer T-shirt and searched through the blood for the wound. “And the doctor should come here first. He’s only got a fucked-up knee.”

Harry held Oleg’s face between his bloodstained hands while listening to the screaming man being dragged away.

“Oleg? Are you there? Oleg?”

The boy’s eyes rolled and the word that escaped his lips was so faint that Harry barely heard it. And felt his chest constrict.

“Oleg, it’ll be all right. He hasn’t stabbed anything you really need.”

“Harry—”

“And soon it’ll be Christmas Eve. They’re going to give you morphine.”

“Shut up, Harry.”

Harry shut up. Oleg opened his eyes. There was a feverish, desperate sheen to them. His voice was hoarse, but quite clear now.

“You should have let him complete the job, Harry.”

“What are you saying?”

“You have to let me do this.”

“Do what?”

No answer.

“Do what, Oleg?”

Oleg placed a hand behind Harry’s head, pulled him down and whispered: “You can’t stop this, Harry. It’s all happened. It has to run its course. If you get in the way, more will die.”

“Who’s going to die?”

“It’s too big, Harry. It’ll swallow you up, swallow everyone up.”

“Who’s going to die? Who are you protecting, Oleg? Is it Irene?”

Oleg closed his eyes. His lips barely moved. Then not at all. And Harry thought he looked like he had when he was eleven and had just fallen asleep after a long day. Then he spoke.

“It’s you, Harry. They’re going to kill you.”

A
S
H
ARRY WAS
leaving the prison the ambulances had arrived. He thought of how things used to be. The town as it used to be. His life as it used to be. While he had been using Oleg’s computer he had also looked for Sardines and the Russian Amcar Club. He hadn’t found any signs to suggest they had been resurrected. Resurrection may be generally too much to hope for. Perhaps life doesn’t teach you much, apart from this one thing: There is no way back.

Harry lit a cigarette, and before he took the first drag, the brain already celebrating the fact that nicotine would accompany the blood, he heard the sound being played back, the sound he knew he would hear for the rest of the evening and night, the almost inaudible word that had first crossed Oleg’s lips in the cell:

“Dad.”

The mother rat licked the metal. It tasted of salt. She gave a start as the fridge sprang into life and began to hum. The church bells were still ringing. She darted up the jacket sleeve of the human. There was a vague smell of smoke. Not smoke from a cigarette or a bonfire. Something in gas form that had been in the clothes, but had been washed out so that only a few molecules of air were left between the innermost threads in the cloth. In the distance there was the sound of a police siren.

There were all those small decisions, Dad. I thought they were unimportant: here today, gone tomorrow. But they pile up. And before you know it they become a river that drags you along with it. That leads you to where you’re going. And that was where I was going. In fricking July. But I didn’t want to go, Dad
.

As we turned toward the main building Isabelle Skøyen stood in her driveway, in her tight riding breeches, legs akimbo
.

“Andrey, you wait here,” the old man said. “Peter, you check the area.”

We got out of the limo to a cowshed smell, the buzz of flies and distant cowbells. She shook hands stiffly with the old man, ignored me and invited us in for a cup of coffee, “a” being the operative word
.

In the hallway hung pictures of nags with the best bloodlines, the most racing cups and fuck knows what. The old man walked along by the photos and asked if one was an English Thoroughbred and praised the slim legs and impressive chest. I wondered whether he was talking about a horse or her. But it worked. Isabelle’s expression thawed a little and she became less curt
.

“Let’s sit in the lounge and talk,” he said
.

“I think we’ll go to the kitchen,” she said, and the ice was back in her voice
.

We sat down, and she put the coffeepot in the middle of the table
.

“You pour for us, Gusto,” the old man said, looking out the window. “Nice farm you have here, Fru Skøyen.”

“There’s no ‘Fru’ here.”

“Where I grew up we called all women who could run a farm ‘Fru’ whether they were widows, divorced or unmarried. It was considered a mark of respect.”

He turned to her with a broad smile. She met his eyes. And for a couple of seconds it was so quiet all you heard was the retard fly banging against the window trying to get out
.

“Thank you,” she said
.

“Good. For the moment let’s forget these photos, Fru Skøyen.”

She stiffened on her chair. In the phone conversation I’d had with Isabelle she’d started by attempting to laugh off the suggestion that we could send the photos of her and me to the press. She said she was a single, sexually active woman who had taken a younger man—so what? First of all, she was an insignificant secretary to a councilwoman, and second, this was Norway. Hypocrisy was an issue in American presidential elections, not here. So I took it up a notch. She had paid me, and I could prove it. Prostitution and drugs were issues she tackled in the press on behalf of the Social Services Committee, right?