The Devil's Star

  ‘Just out of curiosity,’ Aune said, ‘what triggered it off? How did you know it was five?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I know a little about creative processes. What happened?’

  Harry smiled.

  ‘You tell me. Anyway, the last thing I saw before I went to sleep this morning was the clock on the bedside table showing three fives. Three women. Five.’

  ‘The brain is a wondrous instrument,’ Aune said.

  ‘I suppose so,’ Harry said. ‘According to a code-savvy friend of mine we have to find the answer to the question “why” before the code is fully cracked. And the answer is not five.’

  ‘So, why?’

  Harry yawned and stretched.

  ‘“Why” is your field, Ståle. I’ll just be happy if we catch him.’

  Aune smiled, looked at his watch, then got up.

  ‘You’re a very strange person, Harry.’

  He put on his tweed jacket.

  ‘I know you’ve been drinking a bit recently, but you look a little better. Are you over the worst this time?’

  Harry shook his head.

  ‘I’m just sober.’

  As Harry walked home the sky arced over him in all its splendour.

  A woman wearing sunglasses stood on the pavement below the neon sign over Niazi, the little grocery in the block next to where Harry lived. She had one hand on her hip; in her other hand she was holding one of Niazi’s anonymous white plastic bags. She smiled and pretended that she had been standing there waiting for him.

  It was Vibeke Knutsen.

  Harry knew that she was play-acting. It was a joke she wanted him to join in, so he slowed down and sent her the same smile in return. To show that he had been waiting to see her there. The odd thing was that he had been. He just hadn’t realised it until that moment.

  ‘Haven’t seen you at Underwater recently, precious,’ she said, lifting her sunglasses and peering out as if the sun still hung low over the rooftops.

  ‘I’ve been trying to keep my head above water,’ Harry said, taking out a packet of cigarettes.

  ‘Ooh, a play on words,’ she said, stretching.

  She wasn’t wearing anything exotic this evening – a blue summer dress with a plunging neckline. She filled it well and she knew it. He passed her the packet, and she took a cigarette, which she managed to place between her lips in a way that Harry could only characterise as indecent.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ he asked. ‘I thought you usually shopped at Kiwi?’

  ‘Closed. It’s almost midnight, Harry. I had to come down your way to find somewhere still open.’

  Her smile spread and her eyes narrowed, like those of a playful cat.

  ‘This is a dodgy area for a little girl on a Friday night,’ Harry said, lighting her cigarette. ‘You could’ve sent your man out if you needed a bit of shopping . . .’

  ‘Mixers,’ she said holding up her bag. ‘To mix drinks so that they aren’t too strong. And my betrothed is away. If it’s so dodgy here, you ought to rescue the girl and take her somewhere safe.’

  She nodded towards his block of flats.

  ‘I can make you a cup of coffee,’ he said.

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Nescafé. That’s all I have to offer.

  When Harry came into the sitting room carrying boiling water and a coffee glass, Vibeke Knutsen was sitting on the sofa with her legs drawn up underneath her and her shoes on the floor. Her milky white skin shone in the semidarkness. She lit another cigarette, her own this time. A foreign brand Harry had not seen before. No filter tip. In the flickering light from the match he could see that the dark red varnish on her toenails was chipped.

  ‘I don’t know that I can go on any longer,’ she said. ‘He’s changed. When he comes home he’s just restless and either paces up and down in the sitting room or goes out training. It feels as if he can’t wait to get away and travel again. I try to talk to him, but he cuts me short or else just looks at me in total incomprehension. We really do come from two different planets.’

  ‘It’s the combination of the distance between the planets and the mutual attraction that keeps them in orbit,’ Harry said, spooning out the freeze-dried coffee grains.

  ‘More playing with words?’ Vibeke plucked a strand of tobacco off the tip of her pink, wet tongue.

  Harry chuckled. ‘Something I read in a waiting room. I probably hoped it was true. For my own sake.’

  ‘Do you know what the strangest part is? He doesn’t like me. And yet I know that he’ll never let me go.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘He needs me. I don’t know what for, exactly, but it’s like he’s lost something and that’s why he needs me. His parents . . .’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘He doesn’t have any contact with them. I’ve never met them. I don’t think they even know I exist. Not so long ago the telephone rang and there was a man asking after Anders. I immediately sensed it was his father. You can sort of hear it in the way that parents say the names of their children. In one way it’s something they’ve said so many times it’s the most natural thing in the world. But then in another way it’s so intimate that the word strips them bare to the skin so they say it quickly, almost with embarrassment. ‘Is Anders there?’ When I said that I would have to wake him first the voice suddenly started to babble away in a foreign language, or . . . not foreign exactly, but more like you and I would speak if we had to find words in a hurry. The way they speak at religious meetings in chapels when they’re well underway, sort of.’

  ‘Speaking in tongues?’

  ‘Yes, that’s probably what it’s called. Anders grew up with this stuff, though he never talks about it. I listened for a while. First of all, there was a fair sprinkling of words like “satan” and “sodom”. Then it got dirtier. “Cunt” and “whore” and things like that. So I put the phone down.’

  ‘What did Anders say to that?’

  ‘I never mentioned it to him.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I . . . it’s like a place I’ve never been allowed to enter. And I don’t want to go there, either.’

  Harry drank his coffee. Vibeke didn’t touch her own.

  ‘Don’t you get lonely sometimes, Harry?’

  His eyes rose to meet hers.

  ‘Sort of alone. Don’t you wish you were with someone?’

  ‘That’s two different things. You’re together with someone and you’re lonely.’

  She shivered as if a cold front was passing through the room.

  ‘Do you know what?’ she said. ‘I feel like a drink.’

  ‘Sorry, I’ve run out of that sort of thing.’

  She opened her handbag. ‘Can you fetch two glasses, precious?’

  ‘We’ll only need one.’

  ‘Well, OK.’

  She unscrewed the lid of her hip flask, tipped back her head and drank.

  ‘I’m not allowed to move at all,’ she said laughing. A shiny brown droplet ran down her chin.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Anders doesn’t like me to move. And I have to lie still, without moving. I mustn’t say a word or moan. I have to pretend that I’m asleep. He says that he loses the urge when I show passion.’

  ‘And?’

  She took another swig and screwed the lid back while looking at him.

  ‘It’s a nigh on impossible feat.’

  Her stare was so direct that Harry automatically breathed a little deeper, and to his irritation he could feel his erection beginning to throb against the inside of his trousers.

  She raised an eyebrow as if she could feel it too.

  ‘Come and sit on the sofa,’ she whispered.

  Her voice had become rough and husky. Harry saw the bulge in the thick blue artery in her white neck. It’s just a reflex action, Harry thought. A slavering Pavlovian dog that stands up when it hears the signal for food, a conditioned reaction, that’s all.

  ‘I don’t think I can,’ he sa
id.

  ‘Are you afraid of me?’

  ‘Yes,’ Harry said.

  A sad sweetness filled his lower abdomen, the silent lament of his sex.

  She laughed out loud, but stopped when she saw his eyes. She pouted and said in a pleading child’s voice: ‘But Harry, go on . . .’

  ‘I can’t. You’re so wonderful, but . . .’

  Her smile was intact but she blinked as if he had slapped her.

  ‘It’s not you I want,’ Harry said.

  Her eyes wavered. The corners of her mouth pulled as if she were going to laugh.

  ‘Hah,’ she said.

  It was meant ironically, it was supposed to have been an exaggerated theatrical exclamation. Instead it came out as a weary, resigned groan. The play was over, they had both forgotten their lines.

  ‘Sorry,’ Harry said.

  Her eyes filled with water.

  ‘Oh, Harry,’ she whispered.

  He wished she hadn’t said that, so he could have asked her to leave right away.

  ‘Whatever it is you want from me, I haven’t got it,’ he said. ‘She knows it. Now you know it, too.’

  Part Four

  26

  Saturday. The Soul. The Day.

  As the sun streamed across Ekeberg Ridge on Saturday morning, with the promise of another record-breaking temperature, Otto Tangen was going over the mixing console for the last time.

  It was dark and cramped in the bus, and there was the smell of mouldy clothes that neither Otto’s Elvis Presley car fresheners nor his roll-up tobacco would ever succeed in dispersing. Sometimes he felt like he was sitting in a bunker in the trenches with the stench of death in his nostrils, but still isolated from what was going on immediately outside.

  The student building stood in the middle of a piece of land at the top of Kampen with a view down towards Tøyen. On each side of and almost parallel with the old four-storey red-brick building were two taller blocks of flats from the ’50s. The same paint and the same type of windows were used in the student building as in the blocks of flats, presumably in an attempt to give the area a unified look. However, the age difference could not be camouflaged; it still looked as if a waterspout had sucked up the student building and gently planted it down in the middle of a housing cooperative.

  Harry and Waaler agreed to locate the bus in the car park with all the other cars, directly in front of the student building, where reception was good and the bus was not too conspicuous. Passers-by who still might cast a cursory glance its way would assume that the rusty, blue Volvo bus with the isoprene-covered windows belonged to the rock band ‘Kindergarden Accident’, which was painted in black letters on the side with skulls as dots over the two ‘i’s.

  Otto dried his sweat and checked that all the cameras were working, that all the angles were covered and that everything that moved outside the building was picked up by at least one camera, so that they could follow the target from the moment he entered the hallway to the doorway of any one of the 80 student rooms in the eight corridors on the four floors.

  They had been assembling, lining up and screwing in cameras to the wall all night. Otto still had the metallic, bitter taste of dry mortar in his mouth and yellow wall plaster dusted the shoulders of his filthy denim jacket, like the scaly scurf of dandruff.

  Waaler had listened to reason in the end and realised that if they were to keep to the deadline, they would have to manage without sound. It wouldn’t affect the arrest in the slightest; the only thing was that they would lose material proof if the target were to say anything incriminating.

  They had not managed to put cameras in the lift, either. Using a cable-free camera, Otto couldn’t get a decent picture in the bus because the concrete shaft blocked the signals, and the problem with using cables was that, however they placed them, they were either visible or there was the chance that they would get entangled in the lift machinery. Waaler had given the OK on that since the target would be on his own in the lift anyway. The occupants of the house had been sworn to secrecy and had received strict instructions to lock their doors and stay inside their rooms from 4.00 till 6.00.

  Otto Tangen moved the mosaic of small pictures round on the three large data screens and increased the size of them until they formed a logical whole. On the screen to the left: the corridors running north, the fourth floor at the top and the ground floor at the bottom. On the middle screen: the entrance to the block, all the stair landings and the doors to the lift. On the screen to the right: the corridors running south.

  Otto clicked ‘Save’, put his hands behind his head and leaned backwards in his chair with a satisfied grunt. He could monitor the whole building. Of young students. If they had had more time, he might have set up a few cameras in some of the student rooms. Without any of the students knowing, of course. Tiny little fish-eye lenses placed where they would never be discovered. Along with Russian microphones. Randy young trainee nurses from Norway. He could have videoed them and sold the videos through his contacts. Screw that bastard Waaler. How the hell could he have known about Astrup and the barn in Asker! A suspicion of an idea fluttered through Otto’s brain and disappeared again. He had long suspected that Astrup was paying someone to spread a protective wing over his operation.

  Otto lit up a cigarette. The pictures were like stills; not a single movement in the yellow-painted corridors or on the stairs betrayed that this was a live transmission. Those students who were spending the summer in their rooms were probably still in bed sleeping. But if he waited for a couple of hours he might catch sight of the guy who was let in by the doll in room 303 at 2.00 in the morning. She had looked drunk. Drunk and ready. He had just looked ready. Otto thought about Aud-Rita. The first time he had met her for pre-drinks at Nils’s place everyone had had their fat paws out to shake hands, and when she put out her own little white hand to Otto and drawled ‘Aud-Rita’ it had sounded as though she was asking if he was pissed: Er’u drita.

  Otto released a deep sigh.

  That bastard Waaler had been going over the course with people from Special Forces right up until midnight. Otto had caught the discussion between Waaler and the head of the soldiers outside his bus. Later in the day some soldiers from a special unit were to be deployed in threes in every corridor on each floor, 24 in all, dressed in black with balaclavas and carrying loaded MP5s, tear gas and gas masks. At a signal from the bus they would jump into action immediately the target knocked on a door or tried to enter one of the rooms. The thought made Otto tremble with excitement. He had seen them in action twice before and the guys were bloody unreal. There were bangs and flashes of light, just like at a heavy-rock concert, and on both occasions the targets were so numb with fear that the whole thing was over in seconds. Otto had been told that was the point of it, to frighten the wits out of the target so that he couldn’t raise the mental capacity to resist.

  Otto stubbed out his cigarette. The trap was set. It was just a question of waiting for the rat.

  The police were due to arrive at about 3.00. Waaler had banned any movement into and out of the bus before or after that time. It was going to be a long, hot day.

  Otto threw himself down on the mattress on the floor. He wondered what was going on in room 303 right now. He missed his own bed. He missed its movement. He missed Aud-Rita.

  At that same moment the entrance gate slammed behind Harry. He stood still to light his first cigarette of the day as he peered up at the sky where the morning mist lay, like a thin veil that the sun was in the process of burning through. He had slept. A deep, continuous, dreamless sleep. It hardly seemed possible.

  ‘That one gonna stink today, Harry! The weather forecast say it’s gonna be hottest day since 1907. Maybe.’

  It was Ali, who lived in the flat below Harry and owned Niazi. It didn’t matter how early Harry got up, Ali and his brother were always busy at work when he was leaving for the office. Ali had raised his broom and pointed to something on the pavement.

  Harry squinted
to see what it was Ali was pointing at. A dog turd. He hadn’t seen it when Vibeke was standing on exactly the same spot the previous evening. Someone had obviously been a little distracted when they took the dog for a walk this morning. Or last night.

  He looked at his watch. This was the day. In a few hours they would have an answer.

  Harry inhaled the smoke deep into his lungs and felt how the mixture of fresh air and nicotine perked up the system. For the first time in a very long time he could taste the tobacco. It even tasted good. And for a moment he had forgotten all the things he was going to lose: his job, Rakel and his soul.

  For this was the day.

  And it had started well.

  Once again, it hardly seemed possible.

  Harry could feel that she was happy when she heard his voice.

  ‘I’ve talked to Dad. He’s more than happy to look after Oleg. Sis will be there, too.’

  ‘Opening night?’ She said it with a cheery laugh in her voice. ‘At the National Theatre? Goodness me.’

  She was exaggerating – she liked to do that now and then – but Harry noticed that he was getting excited all the same.

  ‘What will you wear?’ she asked.

  ‘You haven’t said “yes” yet.’

  ‘It depends.’

  ‘A suit.’

  ‘Which one?’

  ‘Let me see . . . the one I bought in Hegdehaugsveien on May 17 the year before last. You know, the grey one with –’

  ‘That’s the only suit you’ve got.’

  ‘Then I’ll definitely wear that one.’

  She laughed. The soft laugh, as soft as her skin and kisses, but it was still her laugh he liked best. It was as simple as that.

  ‘I’ll come and pick you up at six,’ he said.

  ‘Fine. But Harry . . .’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Don’t think . . .’

  ‘I know. It’s just a play.’

  ‘Thanks, Harry.’

  ‘Oh, it’s my pleasure.’

  She laughed again. Once she had started he could get her to laugh at almost anything, as if they were in the same head looking out through the same eyes, and he could just point without saying anything in particular. He had to force himself to put the phone down.