Jo Nesbo - The Thirst

‘Now you’re scaring me, Mona! And what if they hear that you’ve got a pistol?’

‘I want them to hear that. Then they’ll know they can’t mess with me.’

Nora groaned in resignation. ‘But why do you have to do it alone, if it’s dangerous?’

‘Because that’s when it becomes newspaper legend, my dear Nora.’ Mona gave a big grin and raised her glass. ‘If this goes the way it should, I’ll pay for lunch next time. And championship or no championship, we’ll have champagne.’

‘Sorry I’m late,’ Harry said, closing the door to Tattoos & Piercings behind him.

‘We’re taking a look at what’s on offer,’ Anders Wyller smiled. He was standing behind a table, leafing through a catalogue with a bowlegged man in a Vålerenga Football Club cap, a black Hüsker Dü T-shirt and a beard that Harry was pretty sure had been there before the always synchronised hipsters stopped shaving.

‘Don’t let me disturb you,’ Harry said, stopping by the door.

‘As I was saying,’ the beard said, pointing at the catalogue, ‘those are only for decoration, you can’t put them in your mouth. And the teeth aren’t sharp either, apart from the canines.’

‘What about those?’

Harry looked round. There was no one else in the shop, and there would hardly have been room for anyone. Every square metre, not to mention cubic metre, had been used. The tattoo bench in the middle of the floor, T-shirts hanging from the ceiling. Racks of piercing jewellery and stands holding larger ornaments, skulls and chrome-covered metal models of comic-book characters. Any available wall space was covered with drawings and photographs of tattoos. In one of the photographs he recognised a Russian prison tattoo, a Makarov pistol, which told those in the know that its bearer had killed a police officer. And the indistinct lines could mean that it had been made the old way, using a guitar string fixed to a razor blade, the melted sole of a shoe and urine.

‘Are these all your tattoos?’ Harry wondered.

‘No, none of them,’ the man replied. ‘They’re from all over the place. Cool, aren’t they?’

‘We’re nearly done,’ Anders said.

‘Take all the time you n—’ Harry stopped abruptly.

‘Sorry I wasn’t able to help,’ the beard said to Wyller. ‘What you describe sounds more like the sort of the thing you’d find in a shop for sex fetishists.’

‘Thanks, we’ve already looked into that.’

‘Right. Well, just say if there’s anything else.’

‘There is.’

They both turned to the tall policeman who was pointing at a picture towards the top of the wall. ‘Where did you get hold of that?’

The other two went over to join him.

‘Ila Prison,’ the beard said. ‘It’s one of the tattoos left by Rico Herrem, an inmate who was also a tattooist. He died in Pattaya in Thailand soon after he got out two or three years ago. Anthrax.’

‘Have you ever given anyone that tattoo?’ Harry asked, feeling the screaming mouth in the demonic face draw his eyes to it.

‘Never. No one’s asked for it either. It’s not exactly the sort of thing anyone would want to go around with.’

‘No one?’

‘Not that I’ve seen. But now you mention it, there was a guy who worked here for a while who said he’d seen that tattoo. Cin , he called it. I only know that because cin and seytan are the only Turkish words I can still remember. Cin means demon.’

‘Did he say where he’d seen it?’

‘No, and he moved back to Turkey. But if it’s important I’ve probably got his phone number.’

Harry and Wyller waited until the man returned from the back room with a handwritten note.

‘I should warn you, he hardly speaks any English.’

‘How …?’

‘Sign language, my made-up Turkish and his kebab Norwegian. Which he’s probably forgotten. I’d recommend using a translator.’

‘Thanks again,’ Harry said. ‘And I’m afraid we’re going to have to take that drawing with us.’ He looked around for a chair to climb up on, only to see that Wyller had already put one in front of him.

Harry studied his smiling young colleague before climbing onto the chair.

‘What do we do now?’ Wyller asked when they were standing outside on Storgata and a tram rumbled past.

Harry put the drawing in the inside pocket of his jacket and looked up at the blue cross on the wall above them.

‘Now we go to a bar.’

He walked along the hospital corridor. Holding the bouquet of flowers up in front of him so that it covered part of his face. None of the people passing by, visitors or the ones in white, paid him any attention. His pulse was at its resting rate. When he was thirteen years old he fell off a ladder when he was trying to look at the neighbour’s wife, hit his head on the cement terrace and lost consciousness. When he came round his mother had her ear to his chest and he smelt her scent, a scent of lavender. She said she thought he was dead because she couldn’t hear his heart or find his pulse. It was hard to work out if that was relief or disappointment in her voice. But she had taken him to a young doctor, who only managed to find his pulse after a lot of effort, and said it was unusually low. That concussion often caused an increased heart rate. He was admitted and spent a week lying in a white bed, dreaming dazzlingly white dreams, like overexposed photographs, the way life after death is depicted in films. Angel-white. Nothing in a hospital prepares you for all the blackness that awaits.

The blackness that awaited the woman lying in the room whose number he had found out.

The blackness that awaited the policeman with that look in his eyes when he found out what had happened.

The blackness that awaits us all.

Harry looked at the bottles on the shelves in front of the mirror, and the way the golden liquid inside them glowed warmly in the reflected light. Rakel was asleep. She was asleep now. Forty-five per cent. Her chance of survival and the alcohol content of those bottles were roughly the same. Sleep. He could be there with her. He looked away. At Mehmet’s mouth instead, the lips that were forming incomprehensible words. Harry had read somewhere that Turkish grammar was regarded as the third most difficult in the world. The phone he was holding belonged to Harry.

‘ Sağ olun ,’ Mehmet said, and handed the phone back to Harry. ‘He says he saw the cin face on the chest of a man at a Turkish bathhouse in Sagene, the Cagaloglu Hamam. He says he saw him there a few times, and that the last time was probably less than a year ago, just before he went back to Turkey. He says the man usually wore his bathrobe, even in the sauna. The only time he saw him without it was inside the hararet .’

‘ Hara -what?’

‘The steam room. The door opened, clearing the steam for a second or two, and that’s when he caught a glimpse of him. He said you don’t forget a tattoo like that, that it was like seeing seytan himself trying to break free.’

‘And you asked him about any distinguishing features?’

‘Yes. He didn’t notice the scars under his chin that you mentioned, or anything else come to that.’

Harry nodded thoughtfully while Mehmet went to pour them more coffee.

‘Stake out the bathhouse?’ Wyller asked from the bar stool next to Harry’s.

Harry shook his head. ‘We have no idea when or if he’s going to show up, and if he does, we don’t even know what Valentin looks like these days. And he’s far too smart not to keep his tattoo covered.’

Mehmet came back and put their cups down on the counter in front of them.

‘Thanks for your help, Mehmet,’ Harry said. ‘It would probably have taken us at least a day to get hold of an authorised Turkish interpreter.’