Phantom (25 page)

There were just two clouds in the bright-blue sky
.

One was the undercover cop with the stupid hat. We knew the police
had been told that the Arsenal shirts were not a priority target for the moment, but Beret Man was sniffing around anyway. The other was that Los Lobos had started selling violin in Lillestrøm and Drammen at a cheaper price than in Oslo, which meant some customers were catching the train there
.

One day I was summoned by the old man and told to take a message to a policeman. His name was Truls Berntsen, and it had to be done quietly. I asked why he couldn’t use Andrey or Peter, but the old man explained he didn’t want to have any contact that might lead the police back to him. It was one of his principles. And even if I had information that could expose him I was the only person besides Peter and Andrey he trusted. Yes, in many ways he did trust me. The Dope Baron trusts the Thief, I thought
.

The message was that he had arranged a meeting with Odin to discuss Lillestrøm and Drammen. They would meet at a McDonald’s on Kirkeveien, Majorstuen, on Thursday night at seven. They had booked the whole second floor for a private children’s party. I could just picture it, balloons, streamers, paper hats and a fricking clown. Whose face froze when he saw the birthday guests: beefy bikers with murder in their eyes and studs on their knuckles, two and a half yards of Cossack concrete, and Odin and the old man trying to stare each other to death over the French fries
.

Truls Berntsen lived alone in an apartment building in Manglerud, but when I stopped by early one Sunday morning, no one was at home. The neighbor, who’d obviously heard Berntsen’s doorbell, stuck his head out from the veranda and shouted that Truls was at Mikael’s, building a terrace. And while I was on my way to the address he’d given me I was thinking that Manglerud had to be a terrible place. Everyone clearly knew everyone
.

I had been to Høyenhall before. This is Manglerud’s Beverly Hills. Vast detached houses with a view over Kværnerdalen, the downtown and Holmenkollen. I stood on the road looking down over the half-finished skeleton of a house. In front were some guys with their shirts off, cans of beer in hand, laughing and pointing to the mess that was going to be the terrace. I immediately recognized one of them. The good-looking model-type with long eyelashes. The new head of Orgkrim. The men stopped talking as they caught sight of me. And I knew why. They were police officers, every single one of them, and they smelled a bandit. Tricky shit. I hadn’t asked the old man, but the thought struck me that Truls Berntsen was the ally in the police he had advised Isabelle Skøyen to find
.

“Yes?” said the man with the eyelashes. He was ripped. Abs like cobblestones. I still had the chance to back away and find Berntsen later in the day. So I don’t know why I did what I did
.

“I have a message for Truls Berntsen,” I said, loud and clear
.

The others turned to a man who had put his beer down and waggled over on bow legs. He didn’t stop until he was so close to me that the rest of them couldn’t hear us. He had blond hair and a powerful jaw that hung like a tilting drawer. Hate-filled suspicion shone from the small piggy eyes. If he’d been a domestic pet he would have been put down on purely aesthetic grounds
.

“I don’t know who you are,” he whispered, “but I can guess, and I don’t want any fucking visits of this kind. OK?”

“OK.”

“Quick, out with it.”

I told him about the meeting and the time. And that Odin had warned he would be turning up with his whole gang
.

“He wouldn’t do anything else,” Berntsen said and grunted
.

“We have information that he’s just received a huge supply of horse,” I said. The guys on the terrace had started back up with their beer-drinking, but I could see the Orgkrim boss shooting glances at us. I spoke in a low voice and concentrated on passing on every detail. “It’s stored in the club at Alnabru, but will be shipping out in a couple of days.”

“Sounds like a few arrests followed by a little raid.” Berntsen grunted again, and it was only then I realized it was supposed to be laughter
.

“That’s all,” I said, turning to go
.

I had only made it a few yards down the road when I heard someone shout. I didn’t need to turn to know who it was. I’d seen it right away in his gaze. This is, after all, my specialty. He came up alongside me, and I stopped
.

“Who are you?” he asked
.

“Gusto.” I stroked the hair out of my eyes so that he could see them better. “And you?”

For a second he looked at me with surprise, like it was a tough question. Then he answered with a little smile: “Mikael.”

“Hi, Mikael. Where do you work out?”

He coughed. “What are you doing here?”

“What I said. Delivering a message to Truls. Could I have a swig of your beer?”

The strange, white stains on his face seemed to light up all of a sudden. His voice was taut with anger when he spoke again. “If you’ve done what you came to do I suggest you clear out.”

I met his glare. A furious glare. Mikael Bellman was so stunningly handsome that I felt like placing a hand on his chest. Feeling the sun-warmed sweaty skin under my fingertips. Feeling the muscles that would automatically tense in shock at my audacity. The nipple that would harden as I squeezed it. The wonderful pain as he punched me to save his good name and reputation. Mikael Bellman. I felt the desire. My own fricking desire
.

“See you,” I said
.

The same night it struck me. How I would succeed in what I guess you never managed. Because if you had, you wouldn’t have dumped me, would you? How I would become whole. How I would become human. How I would become a millionaire
.

The sun glittered so intensely on the fjord that Harry had to squint through his ladies’ sunglasses.

Oslo was not only having a facelift in Bj
ø
rvika, it was also having a silicone tit of a new district stuck out into the fjord where once it had been flat-chested and boring. The silicone wonder was called Tjuvholmen and looked expensive. Expensive apartments with expensive fjord views, expensive boat moorings, expensive bijou shops with exclusive items, art galleries with parquet flooring from jungles you had never heard of, galleries that are more spectacular than the art on the walls. The nipple on the most prominent edge of the fjord was a restaurant with the kind of prices that had caused Oslo to overtake Tokyo as the most expensive city in the world.

Harry went in and a friendly headwaiter greeted him.

“I’m looking for Isabelle Sk
ø
yen,” Harry said, scanning the room. It seemed to be packed to the rafters.

“Do you know what name the table’s reserved under?” the waiter asked with a little smile that told Harry all the tables had been booked weeks ago.

The woman who had answered when Harry rang the Social Services Committee office in City Hall had at first been willing to tell him only that Isabelle Sk
ø
yen was out having lunch. But when Harry had said that was why he was calling, he was sitting at the Continental waiting for her, the secretary had, in her horror, blurted out that the lunch was at Sj
ø
magasinet!

“No,” Harry said now. “Is it all right if I go take a look?”

The headwaiter hesitated. Studied the suit.

“Don’t worry,” Harry said. “I can see her.”

He strode past the waiter before the final judgment could be passed.

He recognized the face and the pose from the pictures on the Net. She was leaning back against the bar with her elbows on the counter, facing the dining room. Presumably she was waiting for someone but looked more as if she were appearing onstage. And when Harry looked
at the men around the tables he understood she was probably doing both. Her coarse, almost masculine face was split into two by an ax blade of a nose. Nevertheless, Isabelle Sk
ø
yen did have a kind of conventional attraction other women might call “elegance.” Her eyes were heavily made up, a constellation of stars around the cold, blue irises, which lent her a predatory, lupine look. For that reason her hair was a comical contrast: a blond doll’s mane arranged in sweet garlands on either side of her manly face. But it was her body that made Isabelle Sk
ø
yen such an eye-catcher.

She was a towering figure, athletic, with broad shoulders and hips. The tight-fitting black trousers emphasized her big, muscular thighs. Harry decided that her breasts were bought, supported by an unusually clever bra or simply impressive. His Google search had revealed that she bred horses on a farm in Rygge; had been divorced twice, the second time from a financier who had made a fortune four times and lost it three; had been a participant in national shooting competitions; was a blood donor, in trouble for having given a political colleague the boot because he “was such a wimp”; and more than happily posed for photographers at film and theater premieres. In short: a lot of woman for your money.

He moved into her field of vision, and halfway across the floor her stare still hadn’t relinquished him. Like someone who considers it her right to look. Harry went up to her, fully aware that he had at least a dozen pairs of eyes on his back.

“You are Isabelle Sk
ø
yen,” he said.

She looked as if she were about to give him short shrift, but changed her mind, angled her head. “That’s the thing about these overpriced Oslo restaurants, isn’t it? Everyone is someone. So …” She dragged out the
o
as her gaze took him in from top to toe. “Who are you?”

“Harry Hole.”

“There’s something familiar about you. Have you been on TV?”

“Many years ago. Before this.” He pointed to the scar on his face.

“Oh, yes, you’re the policeman who caught the serial killer, aren’t you?”

There were two ways to play this. Harry chose to be direct.

“I was.”

“And what do you do now?” she asked without interest, her gaze wandering over his shoulder to the exit. Pressed her red lips together and widened her eyes a couple of times. Warmup. Must be an important lunch.

“Clothes and shoes,” Harry said.

“I can see. Cool suit.”

“Cool boots. Rick Owens?”

She looked at him, apparently rediscovering him. Was about to say something, but her glance caught a movement behind him. “My lunch date’s here. See you again perhaps, Harry.”

“Mm. I had hoped we might have a chat now.”

She laughed and leaned forward. “I like the move, Harry. But it’s twelve o’clock, I’m as sober as a judge and I already have a lunch date. Have a nice day.”

She walked away on her click-clacking heels.

“Was Gusto Hanssen your lover?”

Harry said it in a low tone, and Isabelle Sk
ø
yen was already nine feet away. Nevertheless, she stiffened, as if he had found a frequency that cut through the noise of heels, voices and Diana Krall’s background crooning, and beamed into her eardrum.

She turned.

“You called him four times the same night, the last time at twenty-six minutes to two.” Harry had taken a bar stool. Isabelle Sk
ø
yen retraced the nine feet. She towered over him. Harry was reminded of Little Red Riding Hood and the Big Bad Wolf. And she was not Little Red Riding Hood.

“What do you want, Harry boy?” she asked.

“I want to know everything you know about Gusto Hanssen.”

The nostrils on Ax-Nose flared and her majestic breasts rose. Harry noticed that her skin had large black pores, like dots in a comic strip.

“As one of the few people in this town concerned about keeping drug addicts alive, I’m also one of the few to remember Gusto Hanssen. We lost him, and that’s sad. These calls were because I have his cell number saved on my phone. We had invited him to a meeting of the RUNO committee. I have a good friend whose name is similar, and sometimes I hit the wrong key. That sort of thing can happen.”

“When did you last meet him?”

“Listen here, Harry Hole,” she hissed under her breath, stressing
Hole
and lowering her face even closer to his. “If I’ve understood correctly, you are not a policeman, but someone who works with clothes and shoes. I see no reason to talk to you.”

“Thing is,” Harry said, leaning back against the counter, “I’m very anxious to talk to someone. So if it isn’t you, it’ll be a journalist. And they’re always so pleased to talk about celebrity scandals and the like.”

“Celebrity?” she said, turning on a radiant smile aimed not at Harry
but a suit-clad man standing by the headwaiter and waving back with his fingers. “I’m just a council secretary, Harry. The odd photo in the papers doesn’t make you a celebrity. Look how soon you’re forgotten.”

“I believe the papers see a rising star in you.”

“Do you? Perhaps, but even the worst tabloids need something concrete, and you have nothing. Calling the wrong number is—”

“The sort of thing that can happen. What cannot happen, however …” Harry took a deep breath. She was right; he had nothing on her. And that was why it was not a great idea to play it direct. “Is that blood of the type AB Rh-negative appears by chance in two places in the same murder case. One person in two hundred has that group. So when the forensics report shows the blood under Gusto’s nails is AB Rh-negative and the papers say that’s your blood type, an aging detective cannot help but put two and two together. All I need to do is ask for a DNA test—then we’ll know with a hundred percent certainty who Gusto stuck his claws into before he died. Does that sound like a somewhat above-average interesting newspaper headline, Sk
ø
yen?”