Jo Nesbo - Phantom

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 snouting around anyway. The other was that Los Lobos had started selling violin in Lillestrom and Drammen at a cheaper price than in Oslo, which meant some punters were catching the train there.

One day I was summoned by the old boy and told to take a message to a policeman. His name was Truls Berntsen, and it had to be done with discretion. I asked why he couldn’t use Andrey or Peter, but the old boy explained that 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 beside 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 Lillestrom and Drammen. They would meet at McDonald’s in Kirkeveien, Majorstuen, on Thursday evening at seven. They had booked the whole of the first floor for a private children’s party. I could visualise 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 metres of Cossack concrete, and Odin and the old boy trying to stare each other to death over the pommes frites.

Truls Berntsen lived alone in a block of flats in Manglerud, but when I called round early one Sunday morning, no one was at home. The neighbour, who’d obviously heard Berntsen’s bell ring, 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 had given me I was thinking that Manglerud had to be a terrible place. Everyone clearly knew everyone.

I had been to Hoyenhall before. This is Manglerud’s Beverly Hills. Vast detached houses with a view over Kv?rnerdalen, the centre and Holmenkollen. I stood in the road looking down over the half-finished skeleton of a house. In front were some guys with their shirts off, can of beer in hand, laughing and pointing to the formwork which was obviously going to be the terrace. I immediately recognised 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, who smelt a bandit. Tricky situation. I hadn’t asked the old boy, but the thought had struck me that Truls Berntsen was the alliance in the police he had advised Isabelle Skoyen to form.

‘Yes?’ said the man with the eyelashes. He was in very good shape as well. Abs like cobblestones. I still had the opportunity to back away and visit Berntsen later in the day. So I don’t quite 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 others couldn’t hear us. He had blond hair, a powerful, prognathous jaw that hung like a tilting drawer. Hate-filled suspicion shone from the small piggy eyes. If he had 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 daren’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 resumed their beer-drinking, but I could see the Orgkrim boss casting 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 realised it was meant to be laughter.

‘That’s all,’ I said, turning to go.

I had only gone a few metres down the road when I heard someone shout. I didn’t need to turn to know who it was. I had seen it in his gaze at once. This is after all my speciality. He came up alongside, 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 regarded me with surprise, as though it was a tough question. Then he answered with a little smile: ‘Mikael.’

‘Hi, Mikael. Where do you train?’

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 off.’

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 hardened as I squeezed it between thumb and forefinger. 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. For 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 Bjorvika, 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 which 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 head waiter greeted him.

‘I’m looking for Isabelle Skoyen,’ 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 Skoyen was out having lunch. But when Harry had said that was why he was ringing, he was sitting at the Continental waiting for her, the secretary had in her horror blurted out that the lunch was at Sjomagasinet!

‘No,’ Harry said. ‘Is it alright if I go and have a look?’

The waiter hesitated. Studied the suit.

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

He strode past the waiter before the final judgement was passed.

He recognised the face and the pose from the pictures on the Net. She was leaning 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 on stage. 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 axe-blade of a nose. Nevertheless, Isabelle Skoyen did have a kind of conventional attraction other women might call ‘elegance’. Her eyes were heavily made up, a constellation of stars round the cold, blue irises, which lent her a predatory, lupine look. For that reason her hair was a comical contrast: a blonde doll’s mane arranged in sweet garlands on either side of her manly face. But it was her body that made Isabelle Skoyen such an eye-catcher.