Ю Несбё - Blood on Snow

The Fisherman, as I’ve already said, shares the heroin market in Oslo with Daniel Hoffmann. Not a big market, but because heroin was the main product, the customers were good at paying and the prices were high, the profits sky high. It all started with the Russian route — or the North Passage. When it was established by Hoffmann and the Russians in the early seventies, most of the heroin came from the Golden Triangle via Turkey and Yugoslavia, the so-called Balkan route. Pine had told me that he had been working as a pimp for Hoffmann, and that because ninety per cent of the prostitutes used heroin, getting paid with a fix was just as good as Norwegian kroner for most of them. So Hoffmann worked out that if he could get hold of cheap heroin, he’d be able to increase his takings from their sexual services accordingly.

The idea of getting hold of cheap gear didn’t come from the south but the north. From the inhospitable little Arctic island of Svalbard which is shared between Norway and the Soviet Union, who each run coal mines on their respective sides of the island. Life there is hard and monotonous, and Hoffmann had heard Norwegian miners tell horror stories of how the Russians drowned their sorrows with vodka, heroin and Russian roulette. So Hoffmann went up and met the Russians, and came back home with an agreement. Raw opium was shipped from Afghanistan into the Soviet Union, where it was refined into heroin and then sent north to Archangel and Murmansk. It would have been impossible to get it across to Norway, seeing as the Communists guarded the border with Norway, a NATO country, so carefully — and vice versa. But on Svalbard, where the border was only guarded by polar bears and temperatures of minus forty degrees, there wasn’t a problem.

Hoffmann’s contact on the Norwegian side sent the goods with the daily domestic flight to Tromsø, where they never checked so much as a single suitcase, even if everyone knew the miners were bringing in litre upon litre of cheap, tax-free spirits. It was as if even the authorities thought they deserved that much of a bonus. Obviously they were the ones who claimed in hindsight that it was naive to think that so much heroin could be brought in and shipped on to Oslo by plane, railway and road without anyone knowing about it. And that a few envelopes must have ended up in the hands of public officials.

But according to Hoffmann not a single krone was paid. It simply wasn’t necessary. The police had no idea what was going on. Not until an abandoned snow-scooter was found on the Norwegian side of the island, outside Longyearbyen.

The human remains left by the polar bears turned out to be Russian, and the petrol tank contained plastic bags holding a total of four kilos of pure heroin.

The operation was put on hold while the police and officials swarmed around the area like angry bees. A heroin panic broke out in Oslo. But greed is like meltwater: when one channel gets blocked it simply finds a new one. The Fisherman — who was many things, but first and foremost a businessman — put it like this: demand that isn’t being met demands to be met. He was a jovial, fat man with a walrus moustache who made you think of Santa Claus, until it suited him to slash you with a Stanley knife. He’d spent a few years smuggling Russian vodka that was shipped out on Soviet fishing boats, transferred to Norwegian fishing boats in the Barents Sea, then unloaded at an abandoned fishing station that the Fisherman not only ran, but owned, lock, stock and barrel. There the bottles were loaded into fish crates and driven down to the capital in fish vans. There was fish in them as well. In Oslo the bottles were stored in the cellar of the Fisherman’s shop, which was no fake front but a fishmonger’s that had been in the Fisherman’s family for three generations without ever being particularly profitable, but without going under either.

And when the Russians wondered if he could imagine swapping the vodka for heroin, the Fisherman did some calculations, looked at the legal penalties, looked at the risk of getting caught, then went for it. So, when Daniel Hoffmann started up his Svalbard trade again, he realised that he had competition. And he didn’t like that at all.

And that was where I came into the picture.

By that time — as I think I’ve already made clear — I had a more-or-less failed criminal career behind me. I’d done time for bank robbery, worked for and got fired by Hoffmann as an assistant pimp to Pine, and was on the lookout for something vaguely useful to do. Hoffmann contacted me again because he’d heard from reliable sources that I had fixed a smuggler who was found in the harbour at Halden with his head only partially intact. A very professional contract killing, Hoffmann declared. And seeing as I had no better reputation at my disposal, I didn’t deny it.

The first job was a man from Bergen who worked as a dealer for Hoffmann, but had stolen some of the goods, denied it, and had gone to work for the Fisherman instead. He was easy to track down: people from the west talk louder than other Norwegians, and his rolling Bergen r ’s ripped through the air down by the central station where he was dealing. I let him see my pistol, and that put an abrupt halt to those rolling r ’s. They say it’s easier to kill the second time, and I suppose that’s true. I took the guy down to the container port and shot him twice in the head to make it look like the Halden fix. Seeing as the police already had a suspect for the Halden case, they were on the wrong track from day one, and never came close to giving me any grief. And Hoffmann got confirmation of his conviction that I was fixer number one, and gave me another job.

This one was a young guy who’d called Hoffmann and said he’d rather deal for him than for the Fisherman. He wanted them to meet somewhere discreet so they could discuss the details without the Fisherman finding out. Said he couldn’t stand the stink of the fishmonger’s any more. He should probably have worked a bit harder on his cover story. Hoffmann got hold of me and said he thought the Fisherman had told the guy to fix him.

The following evening I was waiting for him at the top of the park at Sankt Hanshaugen. There’s a good view from up there. People say it was once used for sacrifices, and that it’s haunted. My mum told me printers used to boil ink there. All I know is that it’s where the city’s rubbish used to be burned. The forecast said it was going to be minus twelve degrees that evening, so I knew we’d be alone. At nine o’clock a man came walking up the long path to the tower. In spite of the cold his forehead was wet with sweat by the time he reached the top.

“You’re early,” I said.

“Who are you?” he asked, mopping his brow with his scarf. “And where’s Hoffmann?”

We both reached for our pistols at the same time, but I was faster. I hit him in the chest and in the arm just above the elbow. He dropped his gun and fell backwards. Lay there in the snow blinking up at me.

I put the pistol to his chest. “How much did he pay?”

“Tw... twenty thousand.”

“Do you think that’s enough for killing someone?”

He opened and closed his mouth.

“I’m going to kill you anyway, so there’s no need to come up with a smart answer.”

“We’ve got four kids and we live in a two-room flat,” he said.

“Hope he paid in advance,” I said, and fired.

He groaned, but lay there blinking. I stared at the two holes in the front of his jacket. Then I tore the buttons open.

He was wearing chain mail. Not a bulletproof vest, but fucking chain mail, the sort the Vikings used to wear. Well, they did in the illustrations of Snorri’s Sagas of the Kings that I read so many times as a boy that in the end the library refused to let me take it out any more. Iron. It was hardly surprising the climb up the hill had made him sweat.