Phantom (5 page)

A voice from far back: “Th-th-thief.”

Tutu’s tribe sitting there in biker jackets and bandanas. And even farther back: the whimpering of a dog. Rufus. Good, loyal Rufus. You came back? Or am I already gone?

T
ORD
S
CHULTZ PLACED
his Samsonite bag on the conveyor belt winding its way into the X-ray machine beside the smiling security official.

“I don’t understand why you let them give you such a schedule,” the flight attendant said. “Bangkok twice a week.”

“I asked them to,” Tord said, passing through the metal detector. Someone in the union had proposed that the crews should go on strike against having to be exposed to radiation several times a day. American research had shown that proportionally more pilots and cabin crew members died of cancer than the rest of the population. But the agitators had said nothing about the average life expectancy also being higher. Air crew members died of cancer because there was very little else to die of. They lived the safest lives in the world. The most boring lives in the world.

“You want to fly that much?”

“I’m a pilot. I like flying,” Tord lied, taking down his bag, extending the handle and walking away.

She was alongside him in seconds, the clack of her heels on Gardermoen’s gray antique
foncé
marble floor almost drowning out the buzz of voices under the vaulted wooden beams and steel. Unfortunately, it did not drown out her whispered question.

“Is that because she left you, Tord? Is it because you have too much time on your hands and nothing to fill it with? Is it because you don’t want to sit at home—”

“It’s because I need the overtime,” he interrupted. At least that was not an outright lie.

“Because I know exactly what it’s like. I got divorced last winter, as you know.”

“Ah, yes,” said Tord, who didn’t even know she had been married. He shot her a swift glance. Fifty? Wondered what she looked like in the morning without makeup and the fake tan. A faded flight attendant with a faded flight attendant dream. He was pretty sure he had never screwed her. Not face-on, anyway. Whose stock joke had that been? One of the old pilots. One of the whiskey-on-the-rocks, blue-eyed fighter pilots. One of those who managed to retire before their status crashed. He accelerated as they turned in to the corridor that led to the flight crew center. She was out of breath, but still kept up with him. But if he maintained this speed she might not have enough air to speak.

“Erm, Tord, since we’ve got a layover in Bangkok perhaps we could …”

He yawned aloud. And felt no more than that she had been offended. He was still a bit groggy from the night before—there had been some more vodka and powder after the Mormons had gone. Not that he had ingested so much he would have failed a Breathalyzer test, of course, but enough for him to dread the fight against sleep for the eleven hours in the air.

“Look!” she exclaimed in the idiotic glissando tone that women use when they want to say something is absolutely, inconceivably, heartrendingly sweet.

And he did look. It was coming toward them. A small, light-haired, long-eared dog with sad eyes and an enthusiastically wagging tail. A springer spaniel. It was being led by a woman with matching blond hair, big drop earrings, a universally apologetic half-smile and gentle brown eyes.

“Isn’t he a dear?” she purred beside him.

“Mm,” Tord said in a gravelly voice.

The dog stuck its snout into the groin of the pilot in front of them, and passed on. The pilot turned around with a raised eyebrow and a crooked smile, as if to suggest a boyish, cheeky expression. But Tord was unable to continue that line of thought. He was unable to continue any line of thought except his own.

The dog was wearing a yellow vest. The same type of vest the woman with the drop earrings was wearing. On which was written
CUSTOMS
.

It came closer, and was only fifteen feet from them now.

It shouldn’t be a problem. Couldn’t be a problem. The drugs were packed in condoms with a double layer of freezer bags on the outside. Not so much as a molecule of odor could escape. So just smile. Relax and smile. Not too much, not too little. Tord turned to the chattering voice beside him, as though the words that were issuing forth demanded deep concentration.

“Excuse me.”

They had passed the dog, and Tord kept walking.

“Excuse me!” The voice was sharper.

Tord looked ahead. The door to the flight crew center was less than thirty feet away. Safety. Ten paces. Home and dry.

“Excuse me, sir!”

Seven paces.

“I think she means you, Tord.”

“What?” Tord stopped. Had to stop. Looked back with what he hoped did not appear to be feigned surprise. The woman in the yellow vest was coming toward them.

“The dog picked you out.”

“Did it?” Tord looked down at the dog. How? he was thinking.

The dog looked back, wagging its tail wildly, as though Tord were its new playmate.

How? Double layer of freezer bags and condoms. How?

“That means we have to check you. Could you come with us, please.”

The gentleness was still there in her brown eyes, but there was no question mark behind her words. And at that moment he realized how. He almost fingered the ID card on his chest.

The cocaine.

He had forgotten to wipe down the card after chopping up the last line. That had to be it.

But it was only a few grains, which he could easily explain away by saying he had lent his ID card to someone at a party. That wasn’t his biggest problem now. The bag. It would be searched. As a pilot he had trained in and practiced emergency procedures so often it was almost automatic. That was the intention, of course; even when panic seized you this was what your brain would do. How many times had he visualized this situation: the customs officials asking him to go with them? Thinking what he would do? Practicing it in his mind? He turned to the flight attendant with a resigned smile, caught sight of her name tag. “I’ve been picked out, it seems, Kristin. Could you take my bag?”

“The bag comes with us,” the official said.

Tord Schultz turned back. “I thought you said the dog picked
me
out, not the bag.”

“That’s true, but—”

“There are flight documents inside that the crew needs to check. Unless you want to take responsibility for delaying a full Airbus 340 to Bangkok.” He noticed that he—quite literally—had puffed himself up, filled his lungs and expanded his chest muscles in his captain’s jacket. “If we miss our slot that could mean a delay of several hours and a loss of hundreds of thousands of kroner for the airline.”

“I’m afraid rules—”

“Three hundred and forty-two passengers,” Schultz interrupted. “Many of them children.” He hoped she heard a captain’s grave concern, not the incipient panic of a dope smuggler.

The official patted the dog on the head and looked at him.

She looks like a housewife, he thought. A woman with children and responsibility. A woman who should understand his predicament.

“The bag comes with us,” she said.

Another official appeared in the background. Stood there, legs apart, arms crossed.

“Let’s get this over with,” Tord said, sighing.

T
HE HEAD OF
Oslo’s Crime Squad, Gunnar Hagen, leaned back in his swivel chair and studied the man in the linen suit. It had been three years since the sewn-up gash in his face had been bloodred and he had looked like a man on his last legs. But now his ex-subordinate looked healthy; he had put on a few sorely needed pounds, and his shoulders filled out the suit. Suit. Hagen remembered the murder investigator
in jeans and boots, never anything else. The other difference was the sticker on his lapel saying he was not staff but a visitor:
HARRY HOLE
.

But the posture in the chair was the same, more horizontal than vertical.

“You look better,” Hagen said.

“Your town does, too,” Harry said with an unlit cigarette bobbing between his teeth.

“You think so?”

“Wonderful opera house. Fewer junkies in the streets.”

Hagen got up and went to the window. From the sixth floor of Police HQ he could see Oslo’s new district, Bjørvika, bathed in sunshine. The cleanup was in full flow, the demolition work over.

“There’s been a marked fall in the number of fatal ODs in the last year,” Harry remarked.

“Prices have gone up, consumption down. And the City Council got what it craved. Oslo no longer tops OD stats in Europe.”

“Happy days are here again.” Harry put his hands behind his head and looked as if he were going to slide out of the chair.

Hagen sighed. “You didn’t say what brings you to Oslo, Harry.”

“Didn’t I?”

“No. Or, more specifically, to Crime Squad.”

“Isn’t it normal to visit former colleagues?”

“Yes, for other, normal, sociable people, it is.”

“Well.” Harry bit into the filter of the Camel cigarette. “My occupation is murder.”

“
Was
murder, don’t you mean?”

“Let me reformulate that: My profession, my area of expertise, is murder. And it’s still the only field I know something about.”

“So what do you want?”

“To practice my occupation. To investigate murders.”

Hagen arched an eyebrow. “You’d like to work for me again?”

“Why not? Unless I’m very much mistaken, I was one of the best.”

“Correction,” Hagen said, turning back to the window. “You were
the
best.” And added in a lower tone: “The best and the worst.”

“I would prefer one of the drug murders.”

Hagen gave a dry smile. “Which one? We’ve had four in the last six months. We haven’t made an ounce of headway with any of them.”

“Gusto Hanssen.”

Hagen didn’t answer, continued to study the people outside, sprawled over the grass. And the thoughts came unforced. Welfare cheats. Thieves. Terrorists. Why did he see that instead of hardworking
employees enjoying a few well-earned hours in the September sunshine? The police look. The police blindness. He half-listened to Harry’s voice behind him.

“Gusto Hanssen, nineteen years old. Known to police, pushers and users. Found dead in a flat on Hausmanns Gate on July 12. Bled to death after a shot to the chest.”

Hagen burst out laughing. “Why do you want the only one that’s cleared up?”

“I think you know.”

“Yes, I do.” Hagen sighed. “But if I were to employ you again I would put you on one of the others. On the undercover-cop case.”

“I want this one.”

“There are about a hundred reasons why you will never be put on that case, Harry.”

“Which are?”

Hagen turned to Harry. “Perhaps it’s enough to mention the first. The case has already been solved.”

“And beyond that?”

“We don’t have the case. Kripos does. I don’t have any vacancies. Quite the opposite—I’m trying to make cuts. You’re not eligible. Should I go on?”

“Mm. Where is he?”

Hagen pointed out the window. Across the lawn to the gray-stone building behind the yellow leaves of the linden trees.

“Botsen,” Harry said. “On remand.”

“For the moment.”

“Visits out of bounds?”

“Who traced you in Hong Kong and told you about the case? Was it—”

“No,” Harry interrupted.

“So?”

“So.”

“Who?”

“I might have read about it online.”

“Hardly,” Hagen said with a thin smile and lifeless eyes. “The case was in the papers for one day before it was forgotten. And there were no names. Only an article about a drugged-up junkie who had shot another junkie over dope. Nothing of any interest for anyone. Nothing to make the case stand out.”

“Apart from the fact that the two junkies were teenage boys,” Harry said. “Nineteen years old. And eighteen.” His voice had changed timbre.

Hagen shrugged. “Old enough to kill, old enough to die. Next year they would have been called up for military service.”

“Could you arrange a meeting for me?”

“Who told you, Harry?”

Harry rubbed his chin. “Friend in Krimteknisk.”

Hagen smiled. And this time the smile reached his eyes. “You’re so damned kind, Harry. To my knowledge, you have three friends in the police force. Among them Bjørn Holm in Krimteknisk. And Beate Lønn in Krimteknisk. So which one was it?”

“Beate. Will you arrange a visit?”

Hagen sat on the edge of his desk and observed Harry. Looked down at the telephone.

“On one condition, Harry. You promise to keep miles away from this case. It’s all sunshine and roses between us and Kripos now, and I could do without any more trouble with them.”

Harry grimaced. He had sunk so low in the chair now he could study his belt buckle. “So you and the Kripos king have become bosom buddies?”

“Mikael Bellman stopped working for Kripos,” Hagen said. “Hence, sunshine and roses.”

“Got rid of the psychopath? Happy days …”

“On the contrary.” Hagen’s laugh was hollow. “Bellman is more present than ever. He’s in this building.”

“Oh, shit. Here in Crime Squad?”

“God forbid. He’s been running Orgkrim for more than a year.”

“You’ve got new wombos, I can hear.”

“Organized crime. They merged a load of the old sections. Burglary, Trafficking, Narc. It’s all Orgkrim now. More than two hundred employees, biggest unit in the Crime Department.”

“Mm. More than he had in Kripos.”

“Yet his salary went down. And you know what that means when people take lower-paid jobs?”

“They’re after more power,” Harry said.

“He was the one who got the drug trade under control, Harry. Good undercover work. Arrests and raids. There are fewer gangs and there’s no infighting now. OD figures are, as I said, on the way down.” Hagen now pointed a finger at the ceiling. “And Bellman’s on the way up. The boy’s going places, Harry.”

“Me, too,” Harry said, rising to his feet. “To Botsen. I’m counting on there being a visitor’s permit in reception by the time I arrive.”

“If we’ve got a deal?”

“ ’Course we have,” Harry said, grabbing his ex-boss’s outstretched hand. He pumped it twice and made for the door. Hong Kong had been a good school for lying. He heard Hagen lift the telephone receiver, but as he reached the threshold he turned nonetheless.