He would have to go to someone high up in the police, someone he could be sure was above the drug gangs’ corruption money. He would have to go to the top.
Yes, Tord Schultz thought. He breathed out and felt muscles he had not noticed were tense relax. He would go to the top.
First of all, though, a drink.
And a line.
• • •
H
ARRY WAS GIVEN
the room key by the same boy in reception.
He thanked him and took the stairs in long strides. There had not been a single Arsenal shirt to be seen on the way from the Metro station in Egertorget to Hotel Leon.
As he approached Room 301 he slowed down. Two of the bulbs in the corridor had gone out, which made it so dark he could see the light under his door. In Hong Kong electricity prices were so high he had abandoned the bad Norwegian habit of leaving lights on when he went out, but he could not be sure that the maid hadn’t left it on. If she had, though, she’d also forgotten to lock the door.
Harry stood with the key in his right hand as the door opened with hardly a touch. In the light from the solitary ceiling lamp he saw a figure standing with its back to him, bent over his suitcase on the bed. As the door hit the wall with a little thud, the figure turned calmly, and a man with an oblong, furrowed face looked at Harry with Saint Bernard eyes. He was tall and stooped and wore a long coat, a wool sweater and a dirty priest’s collar around his neck. His long, unkempt hair was broken up on either side of his face by the biggest eyes Harry had ever seen. The man had to be seventy, at least. The two men could not be more dissimilar, yet Harry’s first thought was that it was like looking at a reflection.
“What the hell are you doing?” Harry asked from the corridor. Routine procedure.
“What’s it look like?” The voice was younger than the face, sonorous, with the distinct Swedish tone that Swedish dance bands and revival preachers adore for some unaccountable reason. “I broke in to check if you had anything of value, of course.” It wasn’t just a Swedish tone—he was speaking Swedish. He raised both hands aloft. The right one held a universal adapter, the left a paperback edition of Philip Roth’s
American Pastoral
.
“You don’t have anything, do you.” He threw the items on the bed. Peered into the little suitcase, and glanced inquiringly at Harry. “Not even a shaver.”
“What the …” Harry ignored routine procedures, strode into the room and smacked the suitcase lid down.
“Easy, my son,” said the man, holding up his palms. “Don’t take it personally. You’re new to this establishment. The question was only who would rob you first.”
“Who? Do you mean …?”
The old man proffered his hand. “Welcome. I’m Cato. I live in three-ten.”
Harry looked down at the grimy frying pan of a hand.
“Come on,” Cato said. “My hands are the only part of me it is advisable to touch.”
Harry said his name and shook his hand. It was surprisingly soft.
“Priest’s hands,” the man said in answer to his thoughts. “Got anything to drink, Harry?”
Harry nodded toward his suitcase and the open wardrobe doors. “You already know.”
“That you don’t have anything, yes. I mean on you. In your jacket pocket, for example.”
Harry took out a Game Boy and tossed it on the bed, where all his other possessions were strewn.
Cato angled his head and looked at Harry. His ear folded against his shoulder. “With that suit I might have thought you were one of the by-the-hour guests, not a resident. What are you doing here, anyway?”
“I still think that should be my line.”
Cato put a hand on Harry’s arm and looked him in the eyes. “My son,” he said in his sonorous voice, stroking the cloth with two fingertips, “that is a very nice suit. How much did you pay?”
Harry was about to say something. A combination of courtesy, rebuff and threat. But he realized it was pointless. He gave up. And smiled.
Cato smiled back.
Like a reflection.
“No time to chat. I’ve got to go to work now,” Cato said.
“Which is?”
“There you are. You’re a bit interested in your fellow mortals as well. I proclaim the Word of God to the hapless.”
“Now?”
“My calling has no church times. Good-bye.”
With a gallant bow the old man turned and departed. As he passed through the doorway Harry saw one of his unopened packs of Camel cigarettes protruding from Cato’s jacket pocket. Harry closed the door after him. The smell of old man and ash hung in the room. He went to push up the window. The sounds of the town filled the room at once: the faint, regular drone of traffic, jazz from an open window, a distant police siren rising and falling, a hapless individual screaming his pain between houses, followed by breaking glass, the wind rustling through dry leaves, the click-clack of women’s heels. Sounds of Oslo.
A slight movement caused him to look down. The glow from the yard lamp fell on the garbage pail. There was the gleam of a brown
tail. A rat was sitting on the edge and sniffing up at him with a shiny nose. Harry was reminded of something his thoughtful employer Herman Kluit had said, and which perhaps, or perhaps not, was a reference to his job: “A rat is neither good nor evil. It does what a rat has to do.”
This was the worst part of an Oslo winter. Before ice settles on the fjord and when the wind blows through the city streets, salty and freezing cold. As usual, I stood on Dronningens Gate selling speed, Stesolid and Rohypnol. I stamped my feet on the ground. I couldn’t feel my toes and pondered whether the day’s profits should go to the hideously expensive Free Lance boots I’d seen in the window of Steen & Strøm. Or to ice, which I’d heard was for sale down at Plata. Maybe I could filch some speed—Tutu wouldn’t notice—and buy the boots. But on reflection I thought it was safer to steal the boots and make sure Odin got what was his. After all, I was better off than Oleg, who’d had to start from scratch selling hash in the frozen hell by the river. Tutu had given him the pitch under Nybrua Bridge, where he competed with people from all the fucked-up places around the world, and was probably the only fluent Norwegian speaker from Anker Bridge to the harbor
.
I saw a guy in an Arsenal shirt farther up the street. Usually Bisken, a pimply Sørlander who wore a studded dog collar, stood there. New man, but the procedure was the same: He was gathering a group together. He had three customers waiting. God knows what they were so frightened of. The cops had given up in this area, and if they hauled in pushers off the street it was only for appearances’ sake because some politician had been shooting his mouth off again
.
A guy dressed like he was going to confirmation passed the group and I saw him and Arsenal Shirt exchange barely perceptible nods. The guy stopped in front of me. He was wearing a trench coat from Ferner Jacobsen, a suit from Ermenegildo Zegna and a side part from the Silver Boys. He was big
.
“Somebody wants to meet you.” He spoke English with a sort of Russian growl
.
I figured it was the usual. He had seen my face, thought I was a male prostitute and wanted a blow job or my teenage ass. And I had to confess that on days like today I did consider a change of profession: heated car seats and four times the hourly rate
.
“No thanks,” I answered in English
.
“Right answer is ‘Yes, please,’ ” the guy said, grabbing my arm and
lifting me rather than dragging me off to a black limo, which just then had pulled soundlessly up by the curb. The rear door opened, and because resistance was futile I began to think about a price. Paid rape is better than unpaid, after all
.
I was shoved into the backseat, and the door closed with a soft, expensive click. Through the windows, which from the outside had seemed black and impenetrable, I saw that we were moving west. Behind the wheel sat a little guy with much too small a head for all the things trying to fit on it: a huge nose, a white, lipless shark mouth and bulging eyes that looked like they’d been stuck on with cheap glue. He had his own fancy funeral suit and hair parted like a choirboy’s. He looked at me in the rearview mirror. “Sales good?”
“What sales, fuckwit?”
The little guy gave a friendly smile and nodded. I’d decided not to give them a group discount if they asked me, but now I could see in his eyes it wasn’t me they were after. There was something else, which I couldn’t figure out. We passed City Hall. The American Embassy. The palace gardens. Farther west. Kirkeveien. The Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation. And then houses and rich men’s addresses
.
We stopped in front of a large timber construction on a hill and the funeral directors escorted me to the gate. As we shuffled through the gravel to the oak door I took a look around. The property was as big as a soccer field, with apple and pear trees, a bunkerlike cement tower that looked like it came from a desert country, a double garage with iron bars that looked like it was for public emergency vehicles. A six- to nine-foot-high fence enclosed the whole caboodle. I already had an inkling where we were going. Limo, English with a growl, “Sales good?” and fortress sweet home
.
In the lobby the bigger of the two suits frisked me, then he and the little one went to a corner where there was a small table with a red felt cloth and loads of old icons and crucifixes hanging all over the wall. They drew their guns from their shoulder holsters, put them on the red felt and placed a cross on each pistol. Then a door to a lounge opened
.
“Ataman,”
he said, pointing the way to me
.
The old man must have been at least as old as the leather armchair he was sitting in. I stared. Gnarled fingers clutched a black cigarette
.
There was a lively crackle coming from the enormous fireplace, and I made sure to position myself near enough for the heat to reach my back. The light from the flames flickered over his white silk shirt and old-man face. He put down the cigarette and raised his hand as though he expected me to kiss the large blue stone he wore on his ring finger
.
“Burmese sapphire,” he said. “Six-point-six carat, four and a half thousand dollars per carat.”
He had an accent. It wasn’t easy to hear, but it was there. Poland? Russia? Something to the east, anyway
.
“How much?” he said, resting his chin on the ring
.
It took me a couple of seconds to understand what he meant
.
“Just under thirty thousand,” I said
.
“How much under?”
I paused. “Twenty-nine thousand, seven hundred is pretty close.”
“The exchange rate for the dollar is five eighty-three.”
“Around a hundred seventy thousand.”
The old man nodded. “They said you were good.” His old-man eyes shone bluer than the fricking Burmese sapphire
.
“They’ve got brains,” I said
.
“I’ve seen you in action. You have a lot to learn, but I can tell you’re smarter than the other imbeciles. You see a customer and know what he’s willing to pay.”
I shrugged. I wondered what he was willing to pay
.
“But they also said you steal.”
“Only when it’s worth my while.”
The old man laughed. At first I thought it was a halfhearted coughing fit, like from lung cancer. There was a kind of gurgling noise deep in his throat, like the nice old
chug-chug
of a motorboat. Then he fixed his cold, blue Jew-eyes on me and said in a tone like he was telling me about Newton’s Second Law: “You should be able to manage the next calculation as well. If you steal from me I will kill you.”
The sweat was pouring down my back. I forced myself to meet his gaze. It was like staring into the fricking Antarctic. Nothing. Freezing-cold wasteland. But I knew what he wanted. Number one: money
.
“The biker gang will let you sell ten grams on your own for every fifty grams you sell for them. Seventeen percent. For me you sell only my stuff and you’re paid in cash. Fifteen percent. You have your own street corner. There are three of you. Money man, dope man and scout. Seven percent for the dope man, three percent for the scout. You settle up with Andrey at midnight.” He nodded toward the smaller choirboy
.
Street corner. Scout
. The
fricking
Wire.
“Deal,” I said. “Give me the shirt.”
The old man smiled in a sort of reptilian way that tells you roughly where in the hierarchy you are. “Andrey will sort it out.”
We continued to chat. He asked about my parents, friends, whether I had anywhere to live. I told him I lived with my foster sister and lied
no more than was necessary, because I had the feeling he already knew the answers. Only once was I out of my depth, when he asked why I spoke a kind of outdated east Oslo dialect when I’d grown up in a well-educated family north of town, and I answered it was because of my father, the real one, who was from the East End. Fuck knows if that’s right, but it’s what I’ve always imagined, Dad—you walking around east Oslo, down on your luck, unemployed, hard-up, a freezing flat, not a good place to bring up a kid. Or maybe I talked the way I did to annoy Rolf and the posh neighbors’ kids. And then I discovered it gave me a kind of upper hand, like a tattoo; people got scared, shied away, gave me a wide berth. While I was droning on about my life the old man was studying my face and kept rapping the sapphire ring on the armrest, again and again, relentlessly, like some kind of countdown. When there was a break in the questioning and the only sound was the rapping, I felt like we would explode unless I broke the silence
.
“Cool pad,” I said
.
That sounded so lame I blushed
.
“It was the head of the Gestapo’s residence in Norway from 1942 to 1945. Hellmuth Reinhard.”
“S’pose the neighbors don’t bother you.”
“I own the house next door as well. Reinhard’s lieutenant lived there. Or vice versa.”