Nemesis (30 page)

Harry came to a halt. ‘What do you mean?’

‘I’m a gypsy. My world can be an inverted world. Do you know what God is in Romany?’

‘No.’

‘
Devel
. Devil. Strange, isn’t it? When you sell your soul, it’s good to know who you’re selling it to,
Spiuni
.’

Halvorsen thought Harry looked drained.

‘Define “drained”,’ Harry said, leaning back in his office chair. ‘Or, in fact, don’t.’

When Halvorsen asked Harry how things were going and Harry asked him to define ‘
going
’
,
Halvorsen sighed and left the office to try his luck with Elmer.

Harry dialled the number he had received from Rakel, but again got the Russian voice he assumed was telling him he was generally barking up the wrong tree. So he rang Bjarne Møller and tried to give his boss the impression he wasn’t barking up the wrong tree. Møller didn’t sound convinced.

‘I want good news, Harry. Not reports on how you’ve been spending your time.’

Beate came in to say she had watched the video ten more times and she no longer had any doubt that the Expeditor and Stine Grette knew each other. ‘I think the last thing he tells her is that she is going to die. You can see it in her eyes. Defiant and frightened at the same time, just like in the war films where you see resistance fighters lined up ready to be shot.’

Pause.

‘Hello?’ She waved a hand in front of his eyes. ‘You look drained.’

He rang Aune.

‘Harry here. How do people react when they know they’re going to be executed?’

Aune chuckled. ‘They’re focused,’ he said. ‘On time.’

‘And frightened? Panic-stricken?’

‘That depends. What sort of execution are we talking about?’

‘A public execution. In a bank.’

‘I see. I’ll ring you back in two minutes.’

Harry studied his watch as he waited. It took 120 seconds.

‘The process of dying, much like the process of being born, is a very intimate affair,’ Aune said. ‘The reason people in such situations instinctively have a desire to hide is not just because they feel
physically vulnerable. Dying in the sight of others, as in a public execution, is a double punishment as it is an affront to the victim’s modesty in the most brutal way conceivable. It was one of the reasons public executions were considered to have a more criminally preventative effect on the population than execution in the solitude of the cell. Some allowances were made, however, such as obliging the executioner to wear a mask. That wasn’t, as many think, to conceal the executioner’s identity – everyone knew it was the local butcher or rope-maker. The mask was out of consideration for the condemned man, so that he didn’t feel a stranger was close to him at the moment of death.’

‘Mm. The bank robber was also wearing a mask.’

‘The use of masks is a whole field of psychological research. For example, the modern notion that wearing a mask deprives us of freedom can be turned on its head. Masks can depersonalise in a way which allows freedom. To what do you otherwise attribute the popularity of masked balls in Victorian times? Or the use of masks in sexual games? A bank robber, on the other hand, has more prosaic reasons for wearing a mask, of course.’

‘Maybe.’

‘Maybe?’

‘I don’t know,’ Harry sighed.

‘You seem . . .’

‘Tired. See you.’

Harry’s position on earth slowly moved away from the sun and the afternoons became dark earlier and earlier. The lemons outside Ali’s shop shone like small yellow stars and a silent spray of fine rain fell as Harry walked up Sofies gate. The afternoon had been spent arranging the transfer of funds to El Tor. It hadn’t been such a major job. He had chatted to Øystein, got his passport number plus the address of the bank beside the hotel where he was staying and phoned the information through to the prison inmates’ newspaper
the
Returning Phantom
, where Raskol was working on an article about Sun Tzu. Then it was simply a question of waiting.

Harry had arrived at the front door and was about to search for keys when he heard a padding of feet on the pavement behind him. He didn’t turn.

Not until he heard the low growl.

In fact, he was not surprised. If you heat up a pressure cooker, you know that sooner or later something has to happen.

The dog’s face was as black as the night and contrasted with the whiteness of the bared teeth. The feeble light from the lamp over the front door caught a trickle of saliva hanging off a large canine tooth and it sparkled.

‘Sit!’ said a familiar voice from the shadows beneath the garage entrance on the other side of the quiet, narrow street. The Rottweiler reluctantly lowered its broad, muscular hindquarters onto the wet tarmac, but its shiny brown eyes, the furthest thing from ‘puppy-dog eyes’ you could imagine, never left Harry.

The shadow from the cap fell across the approaching man’s face.

‘Good evening, Harry. Frightened of dogs?’

Harry looked down at the red jaws in front of him. A fragment of trivia floated to the surface. The Romans had used the Rottweiler’s forefathers in the conquest of Europe. ‘No, what do you want?’

‘To make you an offer. An offer you . . . what’s the phrase again?’

‘That’s fine, just make me the offer, Albu.’

‘Truce.’ Arne Albu flipped up the peak of his cap. He tried his boyish smile, but it didn’t sit as well as the previous time. ‘You keep away from me and I’ll keep away from you.’

‘Interesting. And what would you do to me, Albu?’

Albu nodded towards the Rottweiler, which was not sitting but on its haunches ready to pounce. ‘I have my methods. And I’m not completely without resources.’

‘Mm.’ Harry patted his jacket pocket for cigarettes, but stopped when the growling became menacing. ‘You look drained, Albu. Is all the running tiring you?’

Albu shook his head. ‘It’s not me who’s running, Harry. It’s you.’

‘Oh? Vague threats against a police officer in a public place. I call that signs of fatigue. Why don’t you want to play any more?’

‘Play? Is that how you see it? A kind of ludo with human fate.’

Harry saw the anger in Arne Albu’s eyes. Something else, too. His jaw was working and the blood vessels in the temples and forehead stood out. It was desperation.

‘Do you realise what you’ve done?’ he almost whispered, no longer making any attempt to smile. ‘She’s left me. She’s . . . taken the children and gone. Because of a petty affair. Anna didn’t mean a thing to me any more.’

Arne Albu stood close to Harry. ‘Anna and I met when a friend of mine was showing me round his gallery and she happened to have a private viewing there. I bought two of her paintings, I don’t really know why. I said they were for the office. Of course they were never hung up anywhere. When I went to fetch the pictures the next day, Anna and I fell into conversation and suddenly I had invited her to lunch. Then it was dinner. And two weeks later a weekend trip to Berlin. Things got out of hand. I was stuck and didn’t even make an attempt to extricate myself. Not until Vigdis discovered what was going on and threatened to leave me.’

His voice had begun to tremble.

‘I promised Vigdis it was just a one-off, an idiotic infatuation men of my age occasionally pursue when they meet a young woman. She reminds them what it had been like once. To be young, strong and independent. But
you
aren’t any more. Independent, least of all. When you have children, you’ll know . . .’

His voice gave way and he was breathing heavily. He buried his hands in his coat pockets and went on.

‘Anna was an intense lover. It verged on the abnormal. It was as if she could never let go. I literally had to tear myself away; she ruined one of my jackets as I was trying to get out of the door. I think you know what I mean. She once told me about what it was like after you left. She almost went to pieces.’

Harry was too surprised to answer.

‘But I probably felt sorry for her,’ Albu continued. ‘Otherwise I wouldn’t have agreed to meet her again. I’d said quite clearly it was over between us, but she just wanted to give me back a few things, she said. I wasn’t to know you would come and blow everything out of proportion. Make it look as if we had . . . taken up where we’d left off.’ He bent his head. ‘Vigdis doesn’t believe me. She says she’ll never be able to trust me again. Not another time.’

He lifted his face and Harry saw the despair in his eyes. ‘You took the only thing I had, Hole. They’re all I have left. I don’t know if I can get them back.’ His features distorted in pain.

Harry thought of the pressure cooker. Any moment now.

‘The only chance I have is if you . . . if you don’t . . .’

Harry reacted instinctively when he saw Albu’s hand moving in his coat pocket. He kicked out and hit Albu in the side of the knee, sending him into a kneeling position on the pavement. Harry swung his forearm into the face of the Rottweiler as it attacked; he heard the sound of material being ripped and felt teeth puncturing his skin, sinking into the flesh. He hoped its jaws would lock, but the smart bastard let go. Harry aimed a foot at the black mound of naked muscle and missed. He heard its claws scratch at the tarmac as it launched itself and saw the jaws open to meet him. Someone had told him that Rottweilers know before they are three weeks old that the most effective method of killing someone is to tear open the throat, and now the seventy-kilo muscle machine was past his arms. Harry used the momentum the kick had given him to spin round. As the dog’s jaws locked it was thus not around his throat, but his neck. Not that that meant his problems were over. He reached behind him and grabbed the upper jaw with one hand and the lower with the other and pulled with all his strength. Instead of opening, however, the jaws sank a few more millimetres into his neck. The sinews and muscles of the dog’s jaws were like steel. Harry charged backwards and threw himself against the wall. He heard the dog’s ribs crack, but the jaws didn’t yield. He felt himself panicking. He had heard about
jaws locking, about the hyena whose jaws were fastened onto the male lion’s throat long after it had been torn to shreds by lionesses. He felt the warm blood running down his back inside the T-shirt and discovered he had fallen to his knees. Had everything begun to lose sensation? Where was everyone? Sofies gate was a quiet street, but Harry had never seen it as deserted as now, he thought. It struck him how everything had happened in silence, no shouts, no barking, just the sound of flesh against flesh and flesh being torn. He tried to shout, but couldn’t force out a sound. His field of vision was beginning to darken at the margins; he knew an artery was being squeezed and he was getting tunnel vision because his brain wasn’t receiving enough blood. The shiny lemons outside Ali’s shop were losing their shine. Something black, flat, wet and solid came up and exploded in his face. He tasted gravel. Far away, he could hear Albu’s voice: ‘Let go!’

The pressure around his neck eased. Harry’s position on earth moved slowly away from the sun and it was pitch dark when he heard someone say: ‘Are you alive? Can you hear me?’

Then a steel click close to his ear. Gun parts. Cocking the trigger.

‘Fu . . .’ He heard a deep groan and the splat of vomit as it hit the tarmac. More steel clicks. Safety catch being removed . . . In a few seconds it would all be over. That was how it felt. Not despair – not fear – not even regret. Only relief. There wasn’t much to leave behind. Albu was taking his time. Time for Harry to realise there was something after all. Something he was leaving behind. He filled his lungs with air. The network of arteries absorbed the oxygen and pumped it up to the brain.

‘Right, now . . .’ the voice began, but it stopped abruptly as Harry’s fist struck the larynx.

Harry got to his knees. He didn’t have much strength left. He tried to retain consciousness while waiting for the final onslaught. A second passed. Two seconds. Three. The smell of vomit burned in his nose. The streetlights above him came into focus. The street was empty. Deserted. Apart from a man lying beside him in a blue quilted
jacket and what looked like a pyjama top sticking out from the neck, gurgling. The light shone on metal. It wasn’t a gun; it was a lighter. Only now did Harry see that the man was not Arne Albu. It was Trond Grette.

With a scalding hot cup of tea in his hand, Harry sat at the kitchen table opposite Trond, whose breath was still laboured and wheezy, and whose panic-stricken goitre eyes bulged out of his skull. As for himself, he was dizzy and nauseous, and the pains in his neck throbbed like burns.

‘Drink,’ Harry said. ‘There’s loads of lemon in it. It numbs the muscles and relaxes them so you can breathe more easily.’

Trond obeyed. To Harry’s great surprise, the drink seemed to work. After a few sips and a couple of coughing fits a hint of colour returned to Trond’s pale cheeks.

‘Ulkterbl,’ he wheezed.

‘Sorry?’ Harry sank back in the other kitchen chair.

‘You look terrible.’

Harry smiled and felt the towel he had tied around his neck. It was already soaked in blood. ‘Was that why you threw up?’

‘Can’t stand the sight of blood,’ Trond said. ‘I go all . . .’ He rolled his eyes.