Jo Nesbo - Phantom

‘The way you lied you would always be there for us.’

Harry removed the photos from the locker door and slipped them into his inside pocket.

When he emerged the sun was on its way down behind Ullern Ridge.

Can you see I’m bleeding, Dad? I’m bleeding your bad blood. And your blood, Oleg. It’s you the church bells should be tolling for. I curse you, curse the day I met you. You’d been to a gig at Spectrum, Judas Priest. I had been hanging around and joined the crowd of people coming out of the venue.

‘Wow, cool T-shirt,’ I said. ‘Where did you get it?’

You gave me a strange look. ‘Amsterdam.’

‘Did you see Judas Priest in Amsterdam?’

‘Why not?’

I knew nothing about Judas Priest, but at least I had done some swotting and found out it was a band, not a guy, and that the lead singer’s name was Rob something or other.

‘Great. Priest rules.’

You stiffened for a second and looked at me. Concentrated, like an animal that had caught a scent. A danger, or prey, a sparring partner. Or — in your case — a possible soulmate. For you carried your loneliness like a wet, heavy raincoat, Oleg, you walked with a bent back and shuffled your feet. I had picked you out precisely because of your loneliness. I said I’d buy you a Coke if you told me about the Amsterdam gig.

So you talked about Judas Priest, the concert at Heineken Music Hall two years ago, about the two friends of eighteen and nineteen who shot themselves after listening to a Priest record with a hidden message that said ‘Do it’. Except that one of them survived. Priest were heavy metal, had been into speed metal. And twenty minutes later you had spoken so much about goths and death that it was time to introduce meth into the conversation.

‘Let’s hit the high spots, Oleg. Celebrate this meeting of like minds. What do you say?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I know some fun people who are going to do a bit of smoking in the park.’

‘Really?’ Sceptical.

‘No heavy stuff, just ice.’

‘I don’t do that, sorry.’

‘Hell, I don’t do it either. We can smoke a bit of pipe. You and me. Real ice, not the powder shit. Like Rob.’

Oleg stopped in mid-gulp. ‘Rob?’

‘Yes.’

‘Rob Halford?’

‘Sure. His roadie bought from the same guy I’m going to buy from now. Got any money?’

I said it in such a casual way, such a casual and matter-of-fact way that there was not a shadow of suspicion in the serious eyes he fixed on me. ‘Rob Halford smokes ice?’

He forked up the five hundred kroner I asked him for. I told him to wait, got up and left. Down the road to Vaterland Bridge. So, when I was out of range, to the right, I was over the road and down the three hundred metres to Oslo Central Station in minutes. Thinking that would be the last I saw of Oleg fricking Fauke.

It was only when I was sitting in the tunnel under the platforms with a pipe in my mouth that I realised he and I were not finished with each other yet. Nowhere near. He stood above me without saying a word. He leaned against the wall and slid down beside me. Stuck out his hand. I gave him the pipe. He inhaled. Coughed. And stuck out his other hand. ‘The change.’

With that, the team of Gusto and Oleg became a fact. Every day, after he had finished at Clas Ohlson, where he had a summer job in the warehouse, we went down to the city centre, the parks, bathed in the filthy water in Middelalder Park, and watched them building a new part of town around the Opera House.

We told each other about all the things we were going to do and become, about the places we would go, smoking and sniffing everything we could buy with his summer job money.

I told him about my foster-father, how he had thrown me out because my foster-mother had made advances on me. And you, Oleg, talked about a guy your mother had been with, a cop called Harry you claimed was ‘top notch’. Someone you could trust. But something had gone sour. First of all, between him and your mother. And then you had been dragged into a murder case he was working on. And that was when you and your mother had moved to Amsterdam. I said the guy probably was ‘top notch’, but it was a pretty corny expression. And you said ‘fricking’ was even cornier. Had anyone told me the word was ‘frigging’? Even that was childish. And why did I speak such exaggerated cockney Norwegian? I wasn’t even from the East End of Oslo. I said exaggerating was a principle I had, it emphasised a point and ‘fricking’ was so wrong it was right. And the sun shone, and I thought that was the best thing anyone had said about me.

We begged for money on Karl Johans gate for fun. I nicked a skateboard from Radhusplassen and swapped it for speed on Jernbanetorget half an hour later. We took the boat to Hovedoya, swam and bummed beers. Some girls wanted me to join them in Daddy’s yacht and you dived from the mast, only just clearing the deck. We caught the tram to Ekeberg to see the sunset and there was the Norway Cup, and a sad football coach from Trondelag was looking at me, and I said I would give him a blow job for a thousand kroner. He stumped up and I waited until his trousers were round his ankles before I scarpered. And you told me afterwards he had looked ‘totally lost’ and turned to you, as if asking you to take over the job. Jeez, how we laughed!

That summer never ended. Then it did after all. We spent your last pay packet on spliffs, which we blew into the pale, empty night sky. You said you were going to return to school, get top grades and study law, like your mother. And that afterwards you would do fricking Police College! We laughed so much we had tears in our eyes.

But when school began I saw less of you. Then even less. You lived up on Holmenkollen Ridge with your mother while I crashed on a mattress in the rehearsal room of a band who said I was fine there so long as I kept an eye on their gear and stayed away when they were practising. So I gave up on you, thinking you were comfortable back in your conventional little life. And that was about the time I started dealing.

It happened quite by chance. I had milked a woman I was staying with, then I went to Oslo Central and asked Tutu if he had any ice. Tutu had a bit of a stammer and was slave to Odin, the boss of Los Lobos in Alnabru. He had got his name from the time Odin, needing to launder a suitcase of drugs money, had sent Tutu to a state bookies’ in Italy to put a bet on a match that Odin knew was fixed. The home team was supposed to win 2–0. Odin had instructed Tutu how to say ‘two-nil’, but then came the turning point. Tutu was so nervous and stammered so much as he tried to place the bet that the bookie only heard tu-tu and wrote it on the coupon. Ten minutes before the end the home side was of course leading 2–0, and everything was peace and light. Except for Tutu, who had just seen on the betting slip that he had put the money on tu-tu: 2–2. He knew that Odin would kneecap him. He has a thing about kneecapping people. But then came turning-point number two. On the away bench was a new forward from Poland whose Italian was as bad as Tutu’s English, so he hadn’t picked up that the game was a fix. When the manager sent him onto the field, he played as well as he thought they had paid him to do: he scored. Twice. Tutu was saved. But when Tutu landed in Oslo that night and went straight to Odin to tell him about his stroke of good fortune, his luck evened out. He started by giving the news that he had blundered and put the cash on the wrong result. And he was so worked up and stammered so much that Odin lost patience, grabbed a revolver from a drawer and — turning-point number three — shot Tutu in the knee long before he came to the bit about the Pole.