Ю Несбё - Blood on Snow

As a rule I get nervous more than twenty-four hours before a job. And then I get less and less nervous as I start to count down the hours.

It was the same this time.

I stopped by the travel agent’s and booked the Paris tickets. They recommended a small hotel in Montmartre. Reasonably priced, but cosy and romantic, the woman behind the counter said.

“Great,” I said.

“A Christmas present?” The woman smiled as she typed in the booking under a name that was close to mine, but not quite the same. Not yet. I’d correct it just before we set off. She had her own name on a badge on the front of the pear-green jacket that was evidently the agency’s uniform. Heavy make-up. Nicotine stains on her teeth. Suntan. Maybe subsidised trips to the sun were part of the job. I said I’d be back the following morning to pay in full.

I went out onto the street. Looked left and right. Longing for darkness.

On my way home I realised I was mimicking her. Maria.

Was. That. It.

“We can buy what you need in Paris,” I said to Corina, who seemed considerably more nervous than I was.

By six o’clock I had dismantled, cleaned and oiled my pistol and put it back together. Filled the magazine. I showered and changed in the bathroom. Thought through what was about to happen. Thought that I’d have to make sure Klein was never behind me. I put my black suit on. Then sat down in the armchair. I was sweating. Corina was freezing.

“Good luck,” she said.

“Thanks,” I said, then got up and left.

I stamped my feet on the slope in the darkness behind the old skating and football stadium.

It had said in the Evening Post that it was going to be really cold that night and over the next few days, and that the record was bound to be broken now.

The black van pulled up at the edge of the pavement at exactly seven o’clock. Not a minute before, and not a minute after. I took that as a good sign.

I opened the back door and jumped in. Klein and the Dane were each sitting on a white coffin. They were both wearing black suits, white shirts and ties, as I had requested. The Dane welcomed me with some funny remark in his guttural grunt of a language, but Klein just glared. I sat down on the third coffin and banged on the window of the driver’s cab. This evening’s chauffeur was the young guy who had noticed me when I first went into the fishmonger’s.

The road up to Ris Church wound through quiet residential streets. I couldn’t see them, but I knew what they were like.

I sniffed. Had the Fisherman used one of his own delivery vans? If he had, I hoped for his sake that he had put a fake number plate on it.

“Where’s the van from?” I asked.

“It was parked in Ekeberg,” the Dane said. “The Fisherman asked us to find something suitable for a funeral.” He laughed out loud. “ ‘Suitable for a funeral.’ ”

I dropped my follow-up question about why it stank of fish. I’d just realised that it was them. I remembered that I too had smelled of fish after my visit to the back room.

“How does it feel?” Klein suddenly asked. “Getting ready to fix your own boss?”

I knew that the less Klein and I said to each other, the better. “Don’t know.”

“Course you do. Well?”

“Forget it.”

“No.”

I could see that Klein wasn’t going to let it go.

“First, Hoffmann isn’t my boss. Second, I don’t feel anything.”

“Of course he’s your boss!” I could hear the anger as a low rumble in his voice.

“If you say so.”

“Why would he not be your boss?”

“It’s not important.”

“Come on, man. You want us to save your arse tonight, how about giving us” — he rubbed his thumb and forefinger together — “something in return?”

The van turned sharply and we slid around on the slippery coffin lids.

“Hoffmann paid for my services per unit,” I said. “And that makes him my customer. Apart from that—”

“Customer?” Klein repeated. “And Mao was a unit ?”

“If Mao was someone I fixed, then Mao was a unit. I’m sorry if that was someone you had an emotional attachment to.”

“An emotional att—” Klein spluttered the words, then his voice cracked. He stopped and took a deep breath. “How long do you expect to live, then, fixer?”

“Tonight it’s Hoffmann who’s the unit,” I said. “I suggest we try to focus on that.”

“And when he’s been fixed,” Klein said, “someone else will be the unit.”

He stared at me without even trying to conceal his hatred.

“Seeing as how you evidently like having a boss,” I said, “maybe I should remind you of the orders the Fisherman gave you.”

Klein was about to raise his ugly shotgun, but the Dane put a hand on his arm. “Take it easy, Klein.”

The van slowed down. The young man spoke through the glass. “Time to get in your vampire beds, boys.”

We each lifted the lid of our diamond-shaped coffin and squeezed inside. I waited until I saw Klein lower the lid on his own coffin before lowering my own. We had two screws to fasten the lids from the inside. Just a couple of turns. Enough to hold them in place. But not so much that they couldn’t be pushed off when the time came. I was no longer nervous. But my knees were trembling. Weird.

The van stopped, doors were opened and closed, and I could hear voices outside.

“Thanks for letting us use the crypt.” The driver’s voice.

“Not a problem.”

“I was told I could have some help carrying them.”

“Yes, don’t suppose you’ll get much help from the dead ’uns.”

Gruff laughter. I reckoned we’d been met by one of the gravediggers. The back door of the van opened. I was closest to it, and felt myself being picked up. I lay as still as I could. Air holes had been drilled in the base and sides, and I could see beams of light in the darkness of the coffin as they carried me into the passageway.

“So this is the family that died on the Trondheim road?”

“Yes.”

“Read about it in the paper. Tragic. They’re being buried up north, aren’t they?”

“Yes.”

I could feel that we were going down, and I slid backwards, hitting my head against the end of the coffin. Shit, I thought they always carried coffins feetfirst.

“You haven’t got time to drive them up before Christmas?”

“They’re being buried in Narvik, that’s a two-day drive.” Little shuffling steps. We were in the narrow stone staircase now. I remembered it well.

“Why not send them up by plane?”

“Those concerned thought that was too expensive,” the young man said. He was doing well. I’d told him that if there were too many questions he should say he’d only just started work at the funeral directors’.

“And they wanted them in a church in the meantime?”

“Yes. Christmas and all that.”

The coffin levelled out again.

“Well, that’s understandable. And there’s plenty of room here, as you can see. Just that coffin there, being buried tomorrow. Yes, it’s open, the family are due soon for a viewing. We can put this one on these trestles.”

“We can put it straight on the floor.”

“You want the coffin on the concrete floor?”

“Yes.”

They’d stopped moving. It felt as if they were deliberating.

“Whatever you want.”

I was put down. I heard a scraping sound by my head, then steps fading away.

I was alone. I peered through one of the holes. Not quite alone. Alone with the corpse. A unit. My corpse. I had been alone here last time as well. My mum had looked so small lying there in the coffin. Dried up. Maybe her soul had taken more room inside her than most people’s do. Her family were there. I’d never seen them before. When my mum hooked up with my father, her parents had cut her off. The idea that someone in their family would marry a criminal wasn’t something my grandparents, uncles and aunts could tolerate. That she had moved to the eastern side of the city with him was the only consolation: out of sight, out of mind. But I was in sight. In full sight of my grandparents, uncles and aunts, who up to then had only been people Mum had talked about when she was drunk or high. The first words I heard any of my relatives apart from my parents say to me were “so sorry.” About twenty people saying how sorry they were, in a church on the west side of the city, just a stone’s throw from where she grew up. Then I had withdrawn to my side of the river once more, and had never seen any of them again.