Jo Nesbo - The Leopard

‘No.’ The large gold teeth in the upper set glinted.

‘I want to buy some handguns, Miss. Can you help me?’

She shook her head. ‘Sorry. Goodbye.’

Harry shoved his foot in the gap. ‘I pay well.’

‘No guns. Van Boorst not here.’

‘When will he be back, Miss?’

‘I not know. I not have time now.’

‘I’m looking for a man from Norway. Tony. Tall. Handsome. Have you seen him around?’

The girl shook her head.

‘Will Van Boorst be coming home this evening? This is important, Miss.’

She looked at him. Weighed him up. Lingered, from top to toe. And back. Her soft lips slid apart over her teeth. ‘You a rich man?’

Harry didn’t answer. She blinked sleepily, and her matt-black eyes glistened. Then she smirked. ‘Thirty minutes. Come back then.’

Harry returned to the taxi, sat in the front seat, told Saul to drive to the bank and rang Kaja.

‘I’m still sitting in the arrivals hall,’ she said. ‘No announcements to say anything except that the Zurich flight is on time.’

‘I’ll check us into the hotel before I go back to Van Boorst and buy what we need.’

The hotel lay to the east of the centre towards the Rwandan border. In front of reception was a car park coated with lava and wreathed with trees.

‘They were planted after the last eruption,’ Saul said, as though reading Harry’s thoughts. There were almost no trees in Goma. The double room was on the first floor of a low building by the lake and had a balcony overlooking the water. Harry smoked a cigarette, watching the morning sun glitter on the surface and glint off the oil rig far out. He checked his watch and went back to the car park.

Saul’s state of mind seemed to have adapted to the sluggish traffic he was in: he drove slowly, talked slowly, moved his hands slowly. He parked outside the church walls, a good distance from Van Boorst’s house. Switched off the engine, turned to Harry and asked politely but firmly for the second third of the sum.

‘Don’t you trust me?’ Harry asked with a raised eyebrow.

‘I trust your sincere desire to pay,’ Saul said. ‘But in Goma money is safer with me than with you, Mr Harry. Shame but true.’

Harry acknowledged the reasoning with a nod, flipped through the rest of the money and asked if Saul had something heavy and compact in the car, the size of a pistol, such as a torch. Saul pursed his lips and opened the glove compartment. Harry took out the torch, stuffed it in his inside pocket and looked at his watch. Twenty-five minutes had gone.

He strode down the street, his eyes fixed straight ahead. But sidelong glances registered men turning after him with appraising eyes. Appraising height and weight. The elasticity of his strides. The jacket hanging slightly askew and the bulky shape in the inside pocket. And dismissing the opportunity.

He went up to the door and knocked.

The same light steps.

The door opened. She glanced at him, then her gaze wandered past him, to the street.

‘Quick, come in,’ she said, grabbing his arm and pulling him inside.

Harry stepped over the threshold and stood in the semi-gloom. All the curtains were drawn, apart from by the window over the bed where he had seen her lying half naked the first time he was here.

‘He not arrive yet,’ she said in her simple but effective English. ‘Soon come.’

Harry nodded and looked at the bed. Tried to imagine her there, with the blanket over her hips. The light falling on her skin. But he couldn’t. For there was something trying to catch his attention, something was not right, missing, or was there and shouldn’t have been.

‘You come alone?’ she asked, walking around him and sitting on the bed. Placing one hand on the mattress, allowing the shoulder strap of her dress to slip down.

Harry shifted his gaze to locate what was wrong. And found it. The colonial master and exploiter King Leopold.

‘Yes,’ he said automatically, without quite knowing why yet. ‘Alone.’

The picture of King Leopold which had been hanging on the wall was gone. The next thought followed hard on its heels. Van Boorst wasn’t coming. He was gone, too.

Harry took half a step towards her. She tilted her head slightly, moistening her full, red-black lips. And he was close enough to see now, to see what had replaced the painting of the Belgian king. The nail the picture had been hanging from impaled a banknote. The face that made the note distinctive was sensitive and sported a well-tended moustache. Edvard Munch.

Harry realised what was going to happen, was about to turn, but something also told him it was far too late, he was positioned exactly as planned in the stage directions.

He sensed more than saw the movement behind him and didn’t feel the precise jab in his neck, only the breath against his temple. His neck froze to ice, the paralysis spread down his back and up to his scalp, his legs buckled beneath him as the drug reached his brain and consciousness faded. His last thought before darkness enveloped him was how amazingly fast ketanome worked.

Kaja bit her lower lip. Something was wrong.

She called Harry’s number again.

And got his voicemail yet again.

For several hours, she had been sitting in the arrivals hall – which, as far as that went, was also the departures hall – and the plastic chair rubbed against all the parts of the body with which it came into contact.

She heard the whoosh of a plane. Immediately afterwards the only monitor present, a bulky box hanging from two rusty wires in the ceiling, showed that flight number KJ337 from Zurich had landed.

She scanned the gathering of people every second minute and established that none of them was Tony Leike.

She phoned again, but cut the connection when she realised she was doing this for the sake of doing something, but it wasn’t action, it was apathy.

The sliding doors to baggage reclaim opened and the first passengers with hand luggage came through. Kaja stood up and went to the wall beside the sliding doors so that she could see the names on the plastic signs and the scraps of paper the taxi drivers were holding up for the arriving travellers. No Juliana Verni and no Lene Galtung.

She went back to her lookout post by the chair. Sat on her palms, could feel they were damp with sweat. What should she do? She pulled down her sunglasses and stared at the sliding doors.

Seconds passed. Nothing happened.

Lene Galtung was almost concealed behind a pair of violet sunglasses and a large black man walking in front of her. Her hair was red, curly, and she was wearing a denim jacket, khaki trousers and solid hiking boots. She was dragging a wheeled bag tailor-made to the maximum measurements allowed for hand luggage. She had no handbag, but a small, shiny metal case.

Nothing happened. Everything happened. In parallel and at the same time, the past and the present, and in a strange way Kaja knew the opportunity was finally there. The opportunity for which she had been waiting. The chance to do the right thing.

Kaja didn’t look straight at Lene Galtung, just made sure she was to the left of her field of vision. Stood up calmly after she had passed, took her bag and began to follow her. Into the blinding sunlight. Still no one had addressed her, and judging from her quick, determined steps, Kaja assumed she had been schooled down to the last detail about what she was to do. She walked past taxis, crossed the road and got into the back seat of a dark blue Range Rover. The door was held open for her by a black man in a suit. Slamming it after her, he then walked round to the driver’s seat. Kaja slipped onto the back seat of the first taxi in the queue, leaned forward between the seats, reflected quickly, but concluded that basically there was no other way of formulating it. ‘Follow that car.’