Phantom (9 page)

Sergey pushed from the hip the way he had been taught, could feel he was properly poised, and thrust upward. In and out. In and out. Fast, but not so fast that the blade did not enter to the hilt each and every time.

The reason it had to be with the knife was that the man he was going to kill was a policeman. And when policemen were killed the hunt afterward was always more intensive, so it was vital to leave as few clues as possible. A bullet could always be traced back to places, weapons or people. A slash from a smooth, clean knife was anonymous. A stabbing wasn’t quite as anonymous—it could reveal the length and shape of the blade—which was why Andrey had told him not to stab the policeman in the heart, but to cut his carotid artery. Sergey had never cut anyone’s throat before, nor stabbed anyone in the heart, just knifed a Georgian in the thigh for no more than being a Georgian. So he had decided he needed something to train on, something living. His Pakistani neighbor had three cats, and every morning, when he walked into the entrance hall, the smell of cat piss assailed his nostrils.

Sergey lowered his knife, stood with bowed head, rolled his eyeballs upward so that he could see himself in the mirror. He looked good: fit, menacing, dangerous, ready. Like a film poster. His tattoo would reveal that he had killed a police officer.

He would stand behind the policeman. Step forward. With his left hand he would grab his hair, pull him backward. Place the knife tip against his neck, to the left, penetrate the skin, arc the blade across the throat in a crescent shape. Like that.

The heart would pump out a cascade of blood; three heartbeats and the flow would diminish. The man would already be brain-dead.

Fold the knife, slip it into his pocket as he left, fast, but not too fast. Don’t look anyone in the eye. Walk, and feel free.

He stepped back a pace. Stood up straight, inhaled. Visualized the scene. Released his breath. Stepped forward. Angled the blade so that it had a wonderful glint, like a precious jewel.

Beate and Harry came out of Hausmanns Gate, turned left, rounded the corner of the block and crossed the site of the burned building, still with blackened glass shards and scorched bricks in the rubble. Behind it, an overgrown slope ran down to the river. Harry noted there were no doors at the back of Oleg’s building and that, in the absence of any other way out, there was a narrow fire escape descending from the top floor.

“Who lives in the neighboring flat?” Harry asked.

“No one,” Beate said. “Empty offices. It’s where
Anarkisten
, a little newspaper that—”

“I know it. It wasn’t a bad fanzine. The writers of the culture section work on the big papers now. Were the rooms unlocked?”

“Broken into. Probably were open for a long time.”

Harry watched Beate, who with a resigned air nodded confirmation of what Harry didn’t need to say: Someone could have been in Oleg’s flat and escaped unseen. Straws.

They walked down to the path along the Akerselva. Harry established that the river was narrow enough for a boy with a decent throwing arm to lob the gun over to the opposite bank.

“If you haven’t found the gun yet—”

“The prosecutor doesn’t need the gun, Harry.”

He nodded. Gunshot residue on his hands. Witnesses who had seen him showing off with the gun. His DNA on the dead boy.

Ahead of them, leaning against a green iron bench, two white boys in gray hoodies saw them, put their heads together and shuffled off down the path.

“Looks like pushers can still smell the cop in you, Harry.”

“Mm. Thought it was just Moroccans who sold hash here.”

“Competition has moved in. Kosovar Albanians, Somalis, Eastern Europeans. Asylum seekers selling the whole spectrum. Speed, methamphetamine, Ecstasy, morphine.”

“Heroin.”

“Doubtful. There’s almost no standard heroin to be found in Oslo.
Violin is what counts, and you can get that only around Plata. Unless you want to travel to Gothenburg or Copenhagen, where apparently violin has made a recent appearance.”

“I keep hearing about this violin stuff. What is it?”

“New synthetic dope. It doesn’t hinder breathing as much as standard heroin, so even if it ruins lives, there are fewer overdoses. Extremely addictive. Everyone who tries it wants more. But it’s so expensive not many can afford it.”

“So they buy other dope instead?”

“There’s a morphine bonanza.”

“One step forward, two steps back.”

Beate shook her head. “It’s the war on heroin that’s important. And he’s won that one.”

“Bellman?”

“So you’ve heard?”

“Hagen said he’s busted most of the heroin gangs.”

“The Pakistani gangs. The Vietnamese.
Dagbladet
called him General Rommel after he smashed a major network of North Africans. The motorcycle gang in Alnabru. They’re all in jail.”

“The bikers? In my time biker boys sold speed and shot heroin like crazy.”

“Los Lobos. Hells Angels wannabes. We figure they were one of only two networks dealing in violin. But they were caught in a mass arrest with a subsequent raid in Alnabru. You should have seen the smirk on Bellman’s chops in the papers. He was there when they carried out the operation.”

“Let’s do some good?”

Beate laughed. Another feature he liked about her: She was enough of a film buff to be on the ball when he quoted semi-good lines from semi-bad films. Harry offered her a cigarette, which she declined. He lit up.

“Mm. How the hell did Bellman achieve what the Narc Unit wasn’t even close to achieving in all the years I was at HQ?”

“I know you don’t like him, but in fact he’s a good leader. They loved him at Kripos, and they’re pissed off with the Chief of Police for taking him to Police HQ.”

“Mm.” Harry inhaled. Felt it pacify his blood’s hunger. Nicotine. A polysyllabic word, like
heroin
, like
violin
. “So who’s left?”

“That’s the snag with exterminating pests. You upset a food chain and you don’t know if all you’ve done is make way for something else. Something worse than what you removed …”

“Any evidence of that?”

Beate shrugged.

“All of a sudden we’re not getting any info off the streets. Our informers don’t know anything. Or they’re keeping mum. There are just whispers about the man from Dubai. No one has seen him, no one knows his name—he’s a kind of invisible puppeteer. We can see violin is being sold, but we can’t trace it back to its source. The pushers we nab say they’ve bought it off other sellers at the same level. It’s not normal for tracks to be covered so well. And that tells us this is a simple, very professional outfit controlling import and distribution.”

“The man from Dubai. The mysterious mastermind. Haven’t we heard that story before? And then he turns out to be a run-of-the-mill crook.”

“This is different, Harry. There were a number of drug-related murders over the New Year. A type of brutality we hadn’t seen before. And no one said a word. Two Vietnamese dealers were found hanging upside down from a beam in the flat where they worked. Drowned. Each one had a plastic bag filled with water on his head.”

“That’s not an Arab method—it’s Russian.”

“Sorry?”

“They hang them upside down, put a plastic bag over their heads and tie it loosely, around the neck. Then they begin to pour water down their heels. It follows the body down to the bag and fills it up. The method’s called the Man on the Moon.”

“How do you know that?”

Harry shrugged. “There was a wealthy surgeon named Birayev. In the eighties he got his hands on one of the original astronaut suits from
Apollo 11
. Two million dollars on the black market. Anyone who tried to pull a fast one on Birayev or didn’t pay a debt was put in the suit. They filmed the face of the poor guy as they poured in the water. Afterward the film was sent around to other debtors.”

Harry blew smoke toward the ceiling.

Beate sent him a lingering look and slowly shook her head. “What have you been doing in Hong Kong, Harry?”

“You asked me that on the phone.”

“And you didn’t answer.”

“Exactly. Hagen said he could give me another case instead of this one. Mentioned something about an undercover guy who was killed.”

“Yes,” Beate said, sounding relieved that they were no longer talking about the Gusto case and Oleg.

“What was that about?”

“A young undercover Narc agent. He was washed ashore where the Opera House slopes into the water. Tourists, children and so on. Big hullabaloo.”

“Shot?”

“Drowned.”

“And how do you know it was murder?”

“No external injuries; in fact, it looked as if he might have fallen into the sea by accident—his beat was the area around the Opera House. But then Bjørn Holm checked his lungs. Turned out it was fresh water. And Oslo Fjord is salt water, as you know. Looks like someone chucked him in the sea to make it look as if he had drowned there.”

“Well,” Harry said, “as a Narc agent he must have wandered up and down the river. That’s fresh water and it flows into the sea by the Opera House.”

Beate smiled. “Good to have you back, Harry. But Bjørn thought about that, and compared the bacterial flora, the content of microorganisms and so on. The water in his lungs was too clean to have come from the Akerselva. It had been through water filters. My guess is he drowned in a bath. Or in a pool below the water-purification plant. Or …”

Harry threw the butt down on the path in front of him. “A plastic bag.”

“Yes.”

“The man from Dubai. What do you know about him?”

“What I’ve just told you, Harry.”

“You didn’t tell me anything.”

“Exactly.”

They stopped by Anker Bridge. Harry checked his watch.

“Going somewhere?” Beate asked.

“Nope,” Harry answered. “I did it to give you a pretext to say you’ve got to be going, without feeling you were dumping me.”

Beate smiled. She was quite attractive when she smiled, Harry thought. Strange that she wasn’t with someone. Or perhaps she was. One of the eight on his phone contacts list, and he didn’t even know that.

B
for Beate.

H
was for Halvorsen, Harry’s ex-colleague and the father of Beate’s child. Killed in active duty. But his number still hadn’t been deleted.

“Have you contacted Rakel?” Beate asked.

R
. Harry wondered if her name had come up as a result of association
with the word
dumping
. He shook his head. Beate waited. But he had nothing to add.

They both started to speak at the same time.

“I suppose you’ve—”

“In fact, I have—”

She smiled. “Got to go.”

“Of course.”

He watched her walk up toward the road.

Then he sat on one of the benches and stared at the river, at the ducks paddling in a quiet backwater.

The two hoodies returned. Came over to him.

“Are you five-oh?”

American slang for police, stolen from a supposedly authentic TV series. It was Beate they had smelled, not him.

Harry shook his head.

“After some …?”

“Some peace,” Harry completed. “Peace and quiet.”

He took a pair of Prada sunglasses from his inside pocket. He had been given them by a shopowner on Canton Road who was a little behind with payments, but who considered himself fairly treated. They were a ladies’ model, but Harry didn’t care—he liked them.

“By the way,” he called after them, “got any violin?”

One snorted by way of response. “Downtown,” the other said, pointing over his shoulder.

“Where, precisely?”

“Look for Van Persie or Fàbregas.” Their laughter faded as they headed toward Blå, the jazz club.

Harry leaned back and studied the ducks’ strangely efficient kick, which allowed them to glide across the water like speed skaters on black ice.

Oleg was keeping his mouth shut. The way the guilty keep their mouths shut. That is their privilege and sole rational strategy. So where to go from here? How do you investigate something that is already solved, answer questions that have already found adequate answers? What did he think he could achieve? Defeat the truth by denying it? The way he, in his role as a Crime Squad detective, had seen relatives produce the pathetic refrain “My son? Not a chance!” He knew why he wanted to investigate crimes. Because it was the only thing he could do. The only thing he had to contribute. He was the housewife who insisted on cooking at her son’s wake, the musician who took his
instrument to his friend’s funeral. The need to do something, as a distraction or a gesture of comfort.

One of the ducks glided toward him, hoping for a few crumbs of bread, perhaps. Not because it was confident, but you never knew. It had calculated consumption of energy versus probability of reward. Hope. Black ice.

Harry sat up with a start. Took the keys from his jacket pocket. He had just remembered why he had bought the padlock that time. It hadn’t been for himself. It had been for the speed skater. For Oleg.