Jo Nesbo - Nemesis

'She's yours?'

'I wouldn't put it like that.'

'But you're together?'

'Yes.'

'And you're planning to spend the rest of your lives together?'

'Well. We don't plan. It's a little too early for that.'

Raskol gave him a doleful smile. 'You don't plan, you mean. But women plan. Women always plan.'

'Like you?'

Raskol shook his head. 'I only know how to plan bank robberies. All men are amateurs in the capturing of hearts. We may believe we have a conquest, like a general capturing a fortress, and then we discover too late-if at all-that we have been duped. Have you heard of Sun Tzu?'

Harry nodded. 'Chinese general and military strategist. He wrote The Art of War.'

'They maintain he wrote The Art of War. Personally, I believe it was a woman. On the surface, The Art of War is a manual about tactics on the battlefield, but at its deepest level it describes how to win conflicts. Or to be more precise, the art of getting what you want at the lowest possible price. The winner of a war is not necessarily the victor. Many have won the crown, but lost so much of their army that they can only rule on their ostensibly defeated enemies' terms. With regard to power, women don't have the vanity men have. They don't need to make power visible, they only want the power to give them the other things they want. Security. Food. Enjoyment. Revenge. Peace. They are rational, power-seeking planners, who think beyond the battle, beyond the victory celebrations. And because they have an inborn capacity to see weakness in their victims, they know instinctively when and how to strike. And when to stop. You can't learn that, Spiuni.'

'Is that why you're in prison?'

Raskol closed his eyes and laughed without sound. 'I could easily give you an answer, but you mustn't believe a word I say. Sun Tzu says the first principle of war is tromperie- deception. Believe me-all gypsies lie.'

'Mm. Believe you? As in the Greek paradox?'

'Well I never, a policeman who knows about more than the penal code. If all gypsies lie and I'm a gypsy, then it is not true that all gypsies lie. So the truth is I tell the truth and then it is true that all gypsies lie. So I'm lying. A circular argument which is impossible to break. My life is like that and that is the only truth.' He laughed a gentle, almost feminine laugh.

'Now you've seen my opening move. It's your turn.'

Raskol looked at Harry. He nodded.

'My name is Raskol Baxhet. It's an Albanian name, but my father refused to accept that we were Albanians. He said Albania was Europe's anal orifice. So I and all my brothers and sisters were told we were born in Romania, baptised in Bulgaria and circumcised in Hungary.'

Raskol explained that his family were probably Meckari, the largest of the Albanian gypsy groups. The family fled from Enver Hoxha's persecution of gypsies over the mountains into Montenegro and began to work eastwards.

'We were hounded everywhere we went. They claimed we were thieves. Of course we were, but they didn't even bother to gather evidence. The proof was we were gypsies. I'm telling you this because to recognise a gypsy you have to know he was born with a low-caste mark on his forehead. We have been persecuted by every single regime in Europe There is no difference between fascists, communists and democrats; the fascists were just a little more efficient. Gypsies make no particular fuss about the Holocaust because the difference from the persecution we were used to was not that great. You don't seem to believe me?'

Harry shrugged. Raskol crossed his arms.

'In 1589, Denmark introduced the death penalty for gypsy ringleaders,' he said. 'Fifty years later the Swedes decided all male gypsies should be hanged. In Moravia they cut the left ear off gypsy women, in Bohemia the right. The Archbishop of Mainz proclaimed that all gypsies should be executed without a conviction as their way of life was outlawed. In 1725, a law was passed in Prussia that all gypsies over eighteen should be executed without a trial, but later this law was repealed-the age limit was put down to fourteen. Four of my father's brothers died in captivity. Only one of them during the War. Shall I continue?'

Harry shook his head.

'But even that is a closed circle,' Raskol said. 'The reason we are persecuted and we survive is the same. We are-and want to be-different. Just as we are kept out in the cold, gadjos cannot enter our community. The gypsy is the mysterious, menacing stranger you know nothing about, but about whom there are all sorts of rumours. People of many generations believed gypsies were cannibals. Where I grew up-in Balteni, outside Bucharest-they claimed we were the descendants of Cain and doomed to eternal perdition. Our gadjo neighbours gave us money to stay away.'

Raskol's eyes flitted across the windowless walls.

'My father was a smith, but there was no work in Romania. We had to move out to the rubbish dump outside the town where the Kalderash gypsies were living. In Albania my father had been the bulibas, the local gypsy leader and arbitrator, but among the Kalderash he was just an unemployed smith.'

Raskol heaved a deep sigh.

'I'll never forget the expression in his eyes when he led home a small, tame brown bear. He had bought it with his last money from a group of Ursari. "It can dance," my father said. The communists paid to see a dancing bear. It made them feel better about themselves. Stefan, my brother, tried to feed the bear, but it wouldn't eat, and my mother asked if it was sick. He answered that they had walked all the way from Bucharest and just needed to rest. The bear died four days later.'

Raskol closed his eyes and smiled that doleful smile of his. 'The same autumn Stefan and I ran away. Two mouths fewer to feed. We went north.'

'How old were you?'

'I was eight, he was twelve. The plan was to get to West Germany. At that time they were letting in refugees from all over the world and feeding them. I suppose it was their way of compensating. Stefan thought that the younger we were, the better our chances of getting in. But we were stopped on the Polish border. We arrived in Warsaw where we slept under a bridge with a blanket each, in the enclosed area by Wschodnia, the eastern railway terminal. We knew we would be able to find a schlepper-a people smuggler. After several days' searching we found a Romany speaker who called himself a border guide and promised to get us into West Germany. We didn't have the money to pay, but he said there were ways and means; he knew some men who paid well for good-looking young gypsy boys. I didn't know what he was talking about, but obviously Stefan did. He took the guide to the side and they discussed in loud voices as the guide pointed to me. Stefan shook his head repeatedly and in the end the guide threw out his arms and gave in. Stefan asked me to wait until he came back in a car. I did as he said, but the hours passed. It was night and I lay down and slept. For the first two nights under the bridge I had been awoken by the screeching brakes of the goods wagons, but my young ears quickly learned that those were not the sounds I should be on my guard against. So I slept and didn't wake until I heard stealthy footsteps in the middle of the night. It was Stefan. He crept under his blanket and pressed up against the wet wall. I could hear him crying, but I squeezed my eyes shut and made no movements. Soon I could hear the trains again.' Raskol raised his head. 'Do you like trains, Spiuni?'

Harry nodded.

'The guide came back the next day. He needed more money. Stefan went off in the car again. Four days later I awoke at the crack of dawn and saw Stefan. He must have been up all night. He lay as he usually did with his eyes half open and I could see his breath hanging in the frosty early-morning air. There was blood on his scalp and one lip was swollen. I picked up my blanket and went to the main station where a family of Kalderash gypsies had settled outside the toilets, waiting to travel westwards. I talked to the oldest of the boys. He told me that the man we thought was a schlepper was a local pimp who frequented the station area; he had offered his father thirty zloty for the two youngest boys. I showed the boy my blanket. It was thick and in good condition, stolen from a washing line in Lublin. He liked it. It would soon be December. I asked to see his knife. It was inside his shirt.'