Phantom

  Sergey Ivanov felt the tattoo itch between his shoulder blades.

  It was as though the skin were looking forward to the next installment.

  The man in the linen suit alighted from the airport express at Oslo Central Station. He guessed that it must have been a warm, sunny day in his old hometown, for the air was still gentle and embracing. He was carrying an almost comical little canvas suitcase and exited the station on the southern side with quick, supple strides. From the outside, Oslo’s heart—which some maintained the town did not have—beat with a restful pulse. Night rhythm. The few cars there were swirled around the circular Traffic Machine, were ejected, one by one, eastward to Stockholm and Trondheim, northward to other parts of town or westward to Drammen and Kristiansand. Both in size and shape the Traffic Machine resembled a brontosaurus, a dying giant that was soon to disappear, to be replaced by homes and businesses in Oslo’s splendid new quarter, with its splendid new construction, the Opera House. The man stopped and looked at the white iceberg situated between the Traffic Machine and the fjord. It had already won architectural prizes from all over the world; people came from far and wide to walk on the Italian marble roof that sloped right down into the sea. The light inside the building’s large windows was as strong as the moonlight falling on it.

  Christ, what an improvement, the man thought.

  It was not the future promises of a new urban development he saw, but the past. For this had been Oslo’s shooting gallery, its dopehead territory, where they had injected themselves and ridden their highs behind the barracks that partially hid them, the city’s lost children. A flimsy partition between them and their unknowing, well-meaning social-democratic parents. What an improvement, he thought. They were on a trip to hell in more beautiful surroundings.

  It was three years since he had last stood here. Everything was new. Everything was the same.

  They had ensconced themselves on a strip of grass between the station and the highway, much like the shoulder of a road. As doped-up now as then. Lying on their backs, eyes closed, as though the sun were too strong, huddled over, trying to find a vein that could still be used, or standing bent, with bowed junkie knees and knapsacks, unsure whether they were coming or going. Same faces. Not the same living dead when he used to walk here—they had died long ago, once and for all. But the same faces.

  On the road up to Tollbugata there were more of them. Since they had a connection with the reason for his return he tried to glean an impression. Tried to decide if there were more or fewer of them. Noted that they were dealing in Plata again. The little square of asphalt to the west of Jernbanetorget, which had been painted white, had been Oslo’s Taiwan, a free-trade area for drugs, established so that the authorities could keep a wary eye on what was happening and perhaps intercept young first-time buyers. But as business grew and Plata showed Oslo’s true face as one of Europe’s worst heroin spots, the place became a pure tourist attraction. The rising heroin trade and OD statistics had long been a source of shame for the capital, but nonetheless not such a visible stain as Plata. Newspapers and TV fed the rest of the country with images of stoned youths, zombies wandering the downtown in broad daylight. The politicians were blamed. When right-wingers were in power the left was in an uproar. “Not enough treatment centers.” “Prison sentences create users.” “The new class society creates gangs and drug trafficking in immigrant areas.” When the left was in power, the right was in an uproar. “Not enough police.” “Access for asylum-seekers too easy.” “Six out of seven prisoners are foreigners.”

  So, after being hounded from pillar to post, the Oslo City Council came to the inevitable decision: to save itself. To shovel the shit under the carpet. To close Plata.

  The man in the linen suit saw a youth in a red-and-white Arsenal shirt standing on some steps with four people shuffling their feet in front of him. The Arsenal player’s head was jerking left and right, like a chicken’s. The other four heads were motionless, staring only at the dealer, who was waiting until there were enough of them, a full cohort, maybe that was five, maybe six. Then he would accept payment for the orders and take them to where the dope was. Around the corner or inside a backyard, where his partner was waiting. It was a simple principle; the guy with the dope never had any contact with money and the guy with the money never had any contact with dope. That made it harder for the police to acquire solid evidence of drug-dealing against either of them. Nonetheless, the man in the linen suit was surprised, for what he saw was the old method used in the eighties and nineties. As the police gave up trying to catch pushers on the streets, sellers had dropped their elaborate routines and the assembly of a cohort and had started dealing directly as customers turned up—money in one hand, drugs in the other. Had the police started arresting street dealers again?

  A man in cycling gear pedaled past, helmet, orange goggles and heaving, brightly colored jersey. His thigh muscles bulged under the tight shorts, and the bike looked expensive. That must have been why he took it with him when he and the rest of the cohort followed the Arsenal player around the corner to the other side of the building. Everything was new. Everything was the same. But there were fewer of them, weren’t there?

  The prostitutes on the corner of Skippergata spoke to him in heavily accented English—Hey, baby! Wait a minute, handsome!—but he just shook his head. And it seemed as if the rumor of his chasteness, or possible pecuniary difficulties, spread faster than he could walk, because the girls farther up showed no interest in him. In his day, Oslo’s prostitutes had dressed in practical clothing, jeans and thick jackets. There hadn’t been many of them; it had been a seller’s market. But now the competition was fiercer, and there were short skirts, high heels and fishnet stockings. The African women seemed to be cold already. Wait until December, he thought.

  He advanced deeper into Kvadraturen, which had been Oslo’s first downtown, but now it was an asphalt-and-brick desert with administrative buildings and offices for 250,000 worker ants, who scuttled home at four or five o’clock, ceding the quarter to nocturnal rodents. When King Christian IV built the town in square blocks, according to Renaissance ideals of geometrical order, the population was kept in check by fire. Popular myth had it that down here every leap year’s night you could see people in flames running between houses, hear their screams, watch them burn and dissolve, but there would be a layer of ash left on the pavement, and if you managed to grab it before the wind blew it away, the house you occupied would never burn down. Because of the fire risk Christian IV built broad roads, by the standards of Oslo’s poor. Houses were erected in the un-Norwegian building material of brick.

  Along one of these brick walls the man in the linen suit passed the open door of a bar. A new violation of Guns N’ Roses’ “Welcome to the Jungle,” dance-produced reggae pissing on Marley and Rose, Slash and Stradlin, belted out to the smokers standing around outside. He stopped at an outstretched arm.

  “Gotta light?”

  A plump, top-heavy lady somewhere in her late thirties looked up at him. Her cigarette bounced provocatively up and down between her red lips.

  He raised an eyebrow and looked at her laughing girlfriend, who was standing behind her with a glowing cigarette. The top-heavy one noticed and then laughed as well, taking a step aside to regain her balance.

  “Don’t be so slow,” she said in the same Sørland accent as the Crown Princess. He had heard there was a prostitute in the covered market who got rich by looking like her, talking like her and dressing like her. And that the 5,000-kroner-an-hour fee included a plastic scepter that the customer was allowed to put to relatively free use.

  The woman’s hand rested on his arm as he made to move on. She leaned toward him and breathed red wine into his face.

  “You’re a good-looking guy. How about giving me … a light?”

  He turned the other side of his face to her. The bad side. The not-such-a-good-looking-guy side. Felt her flinch and slip as she saw the path left by the nail from his t
ime in the Congo. It stretched from mouth to ear like a badly sewn-up tear.

  He walked on as the music changed to Nirvana. “Come as You Are.” Original version.

  “Hash?”

  The voice came from a gateway, but he neither stopped nor turned.

  “Speed?”

  He had been clean for three years and had no intention of starting again.

  “Violin?”

  Least of all now.

  In front of him on the pavement a young man had stopped by two dealers; he was showing them something as he spoke. The youngster looked up as he approached, fixing two searching gray eyes on him. Policeman’s eyes, the man thought, lowered his head and crossed the street. It was perhaps a little paranoid; after all, it was unlikely such a young police officer would recognize him.

  There was the hotel. The rooming house. Leon.

  It was almost deserted in this part of the street. On the other side, under a lamp, he saw the dope seller astride the bike, with another cyclist, also wearing professional cycling gear. The dope seller was helping the other guy inject himself in the neck.

  The man in the linen suit shook his head and gazed up at the façade of the building before him.

  There was the same banner, gray with dirt, hanging below the third- and top-floor windows: FOUR HUNDRED KRONER A NIGHT! Everything was new. Everything was the same.

  THE RECEPTIONIST AT Hotel Leon was new. A kid, who greeted the man in the linen suit with an astonishingly polite smile and an amazing—for the Leon—lack of mistrust. He wished him a hearty “Welcome” without a tinge of irony in his voice and asked to see his passport. The man assumed he was often taken for a foreigner because of his tanned complexion and linen suit, and passed the receptionist his red Norwegian passport. It was worn and full of stamps. Too many for it to be called a good life.

  “Oh, yes,” the receptionist said, returning it. Placed a form on the counter and handed him a pen.

  “The marked sections are enough.”

  A checking-in form at the Leon? the man thought with surprise. Perhaps some things had changed after all. He took the pen and saw the receptionist staring at his hand, his middle finger. The one that had been his longest finger before it was cut off in a house on Holmenkollen Ridge. Now the first joint had been replaced with a grayish-blue titanium prosthesis. It wasn’t a lot of use, but it did provide balance for his adjacent fingers when he had to grip, and it was not in the way, since it was so short. The only disadvantage was the endless explanations when he had to go through security at airports.

  He filled in FIRST NAME and LAST NAME.

  DATE OF BIRTH.

  He knew he looked more like a man in his mid-forties now than had the damaged geriatric who left Norway three years ago. He had subjected himself to a strict regime of exercise, healthy food, plentiful sleep and—of course—absolutely no addictive substances. The aim of the regime had not been to look younger, but to avoid death. Besides, he liked it. In fact he had always like fixed routines, discipline, order. So why had his life been chaos instead, such self-destruction and a series of broken relationships between dark periods of intoxication? The blank boxes looked up at him questioningly. But they were too small for the answers they required.

  PERMANENT ADDRESS.

  Well, the flat on Sofies Gate had been sold right after he left three years ago, and the same with his parents’ house in Oppsal. In his present occupation an official address would have carried a certain inherent risk. So he wrote what he usually wrote when he checked in at other hotels: Chungking Mansions, Hong Kong. Which was no farther from the truth than anything else.

  OCCUPATION.

  Murder. He didn’t write that. This section hadn’t been marked.

  TELEPHONE NUMBER.

  He put a fictitious one. Cell phones could be traced, the conversations and where you had them.

  NEXT OF KIN’S TELEPHONE NUMBER.

  Next of kin? What husband would voluntarily give his wife’s number when he checked in at Hotel Leon? The place was the closest Oslo had to a public brothel, after all.

  The receptionist could evidently read his mind. “In case you should feel indisposed and we have to call someone.”

  He nodded. In case of a heart attack during the act.

  “You don’t need to write anything if you don’t—”

  “No,” he said, looking at the words. NEXT OF KIN. He had Sis. A sister with what she herself called “a touch of Down syndrome,” but who had always tackled life a great deal better than her elder brother. Apart from Sis, there was no one else. Absolutely no one. All the same, next of kin.

  He ticked CASH for mode of payment and signed and passed the form to the receptionist. Who skimmed through it. And then at last he saw it shine through: the mistrust.

  “Are you … are you Harry Hole?”

  Harry nodded. “Is that a problem?”

  The boy shook his head. Gulped.

  “Fine,” said Harry. “Do you have a key for me?”

  “Oh, sorry! Here. Three-oh-one.”

  Harry took it and noticed that the boy’s pupils had widened and his voice was constricted.

  “It … it’s my uncle,” the boy said. “He runs the hotel. Used to sit here before me. He’s told me about you.”

  “Only nice things, I trust,” Harry said, grabbing his canvas suitcase and heading for the stairs.

  “The elevator—”

  “Don’t like elevators,” Harry said without turning.

  The room was the same as before. Tatty, small and more or less clean. No, in fact, the curtains were new. Green. Stiff. Probably drip-dry. Which reminded him. He hung his suit in the bathroom and turned on the shower so the steam would remove the creases. The suit had cost him eight hundred Hong Kong dollars at Punjab House on Nathan Road, but in his job it was an essential investment; no one respected a man dressed in rags. He stood under the shower. The hot water made his skin tingle. Afterward he walked naked through the room to the window and opened it. Second floor. Backyard. Through an open window came the groans of simulated enthusiasm. He grasped the curtain pole and leaned out. Looked straight down onto an open garbage can and recognized the sweet smell of trash rising forth. He spat and heard it hit the paper in the can. But the rustling that followed was not of paper. There was a crack, and the stiff green curtains landed on the floor on either side of him. Shit! He pulled the thin pole out of the curtain hem. It was the old kind, with two bulbous pointed ends; it had broken before and someone had tried to stick it together with brown tape. Harry sat down on the bed and opened the drawer in the bedside table. A Bible with a light-blue synthetic leather cover and a sewing kit comprising black thread wound around a card with a needle stuck through. On mature reflection, Harry realized they might not be such a bad idea, after all. Afterward guests could sew back torn fly buttons and read about forgiveness of sins. He lay down on the bed and stared at the ceiling. Everything was new. Everything … He closed his eyes. On the flight he hadn’t slept a wink, and with or without jet lag, with or without curtains, he was going to have to sleep. And he began to dream the same dream he had had every night for the last three years: He was running down a corridor, fleeing a roaring avalanche that sucked out all the air, leaving him unable to breathe.

  It was just a question of keeping going and keeping his eyes closed for a little longer.

  He lost a grip on his thoughts; they were drifting away from him.

  Next of kin.

  Kin. Kith.

  Next of kin.

  That’s what he was. That’s why he was back.

  SERGEY WAS DRIVING on the E6 toward Oslo. Longing for the bed in his Furuset flat. Keeping under seventy-five, even though the highway was virtually empty so late at night. His cell phone rang. The conversation with Andrey was concise. He had spoken to his uncle, or the ataman—the leader—as Andrey called Uncle. After they had hung up Sergey could not restrain himself any longer. He put his foot down. Shrieked with delight. The man had arrived. Now, t
his evening. He was here! Sergey was not to do anything for the moment; the situation might resolve itself, Andrey had said. But he had to be even more prepared now, mentally and physically. Had to practice with the knife, sleep, be on his toes. If the necessary should become necessary.

  Tord Schultz barely heard the plane thundering overhead as he sat on the sofa breathing heavily. Perspiration lay in a thin layer on his naked upper body, and the echoes of iron on iron still hung between the bare sitting-room walls. Behind him were his weights and the mock-leather upholstered bench glistening with his sweat. From the TV screen Don Draper peered through his own cigarette smoke, sipping whiskey from a glass. Another plane roared over the rooftops. Mad Men. The sixties. U.S.A. Women wearing decent clothes. Decent drinks in decent glasses. Decent cigarettes without menthol and filters. The days when what didn’t kill you made you stronger. He had bought only the first season. Watched it again and again. He wasn’t sure he would like the next season.