photo of the three of us on his locker door in Valle Hovin. And do you know what, Rakel? He was smiling in that photo.’
Harry focused on the spruce trees. The little colour remaining was quickly sucked out of them, and now they stood like ranks of black uniformed silhouette-guardsmen. Then he heard her come over, felt her hand under his arm, her head against his shoulder, her hot cheek through his linen suit, and breathed in the perfume of her hair. ‘I don’t need any photograph to remember how happy we were, Harry.’
‘Mm.’
‘Perhaps he taught himself to lie. It happens to us all.’
Harry nodded. A gust of wind made him shiver. When was it he had taught himself to lie? Was it when Sis asked if their mother could see them from heaven? Had he learned so early? Was that why he found it so easy to lie when he pretended he didn’t know what Oleg had been doing? Oleg’s lost innocence was not that he had learned to lie, not that he had learned to inject heroin or steal his mother’s jewels. It was that he had learned, in a risk-free and effective way, how to sell drugs that consume the soul, cause the body to disintegrate and send the buyer into dependency’s cold, dripping hell. If Oleg was innocent of Gusto’s murder he would still be guilty. He had sent them by plane. To Dubai.
Fly Emirates.
Dubai is in the United Arab Emirates.
There are no Arabs, only pushers in Arsenal shirts selling violin. Shirts they had been given along with instructions on how to sell dope in the right way: one money man, one dope man. A conspicuous and yet run-of- the-mill shirt showing what they sold and to which organisation they belonged. Not one of the standard ephemeral gangs who were always brought down by their own greed, stupidity, torpor and foolhardiness, but an organisation that took no unnecessary risks, did not expose its backers and still seemed to have a monopoly on the junkies’ favourite new drug. And Oleg was one of them. Harry didn’t know a great deal about football, but he was pretty sure that Van Persie and Fabregas were Arsenal players. And absolutely sure that no Spurs supporter would have considered owning an Arsenal shirt if it hadn’t been for a special reason. Oleg had managed to teach him that much.
There was a good reason for Oleg talking to neither him nor the police. He was working for someone or something no one knew anything about. Someone or something that made everyone stay shtum. That was where Harry had to begin.
Rakel had started crying and buried her face in his neck. The tears warmed his skin as they ran down inside his shirt, over his chest, over his heart.
Darkness fell quickly.
Sergey was lying on his bed, staring at the ceiling.
The seconds passed, one by one.
This was the slowest part: the waiting. And he did not even know for sure if it was going to happen. If it was going to be necessary. He had slept badly. Dreamed badly. He had to know. So he had rung Andrey, asked if he could talk to Uncle. But Andrey had answered that ataman was not available. No more than that.
That was how it had always been with Uncle. And, for the majority of his life, Sergey had not even known that he existed. It was only after he — or his Armenian straw man — had appeared and created order that Sergey had begun to make enquiries. It was an eye-opener how little the others in the family knew about this relation. Sergey had established that Uncle had come from the west and married into the family in the 1950s. Some said he came from Lithuania, from a kulak family, the peasant landowning class that Stalin had actively deported, and that Uncle’s family had been sent to Siberia. Others said he was part of a small group of Jehovah’s Witnesses that had been transported to Siberia from Moldavia in 1951. An ageing aunt said that although Uncle had been a well-read, linguistically talented and courteous man he had adapted immediately to their simple lifestyle and had espoused ancient Siberian urka traditions as if they were his own. And that perhaps it was precisely his ability to adapt, along with his obvious business acumen, which soon enabled other urkas to accept him as a leader. Within a short time he was running one of the most profitable smuggling operations in the whole of southern Siberia. His enterprise in the eighties was so wide-ranging that in the end the authorities could no longer be bribed to turn a blind eye. When the police struck, while the Soviet Union was collapsing around them, it was with a raid so violent and so bloody, according to a neighbour who remembered Uncle, that it was more reminiscent of a blitzkrieg than the hand of the law. At first Uncle was reported killed. It was said he had been shot in the back and the police, fearing reprisals, had secretly disposed of the body in the River Lena. One of the officers had stolen his flick knife and had not been able to stop boasting about it. Nevertheless, a year later, Uncle gave a sign of life, and by then he was in France. He said he had gone into hiding, and the only thing he wanted to know was if his wife was pregnant or not. She was not, and with that no one in Tagil heard a word from him for several years. Not until Uncle’s wife died. Then he appeared for the funeral, Father said. He paid for everything, and a Russian Orthodox funeral does not come cheap. He also gave money to those of her relatives who needed a handout. Father was not among them, but it was him Uncle had gone to when he wanted a rundown on what family his wife had left in Tagil. And that was when his nephew, little Sergey, had been brought to his attention. The next morning Uncle was gone, as mysteriously and inexplicably as he had arrived. The years passed, Sergey became a teenager, an adult, and most people probably thought Uncle — whom they remembered as seeming old even when he went to Siberia — was long dead and buried. But then, when Sergey was arrested for smuggling hash, a man had made a sudden appearance, an Armenian who had presented himself as Uncle’s straw man, sorted out matters for Sergey and arranged Uncle’s invitation to Norway.
Sergey checked his watch. And confirmed that exactly twelve minutes had passed since he last checked. He closed his eyes and tried to visualise him. The policeman.
In fact, there was another detail about the story of his uncle’s alleged death. The officer who had stolen his knife had been found soon afterwards in the Taiga forest, what was left of him, that is — the rest had been eaten by a bear.
It was dark both outside and inside when the telephone rang.
It was Andrey.
10
Tord Schultz unlocked the door to his house, stared into the darkness and listened to the dense silence for a while. Sat down on the sofa without switching on the light and waited for the reassuring roar of the next plane.
They had let him go.
A man who introduced himself as an inspector had entered his cell, crouched in front of him and asked why the hell he had hidden flour in his trolley bag.
‘Flour?’
‘That’s what the Kripos lab say they’ve found.’
Tord Schultz had repeated the same thing he said when he was arrested, the emergency procedure, he didn’t know how the plastic bag had come into his possession or what it contained.
‘You’re lying,’ the inspector had said. ‘And we’re going to keep an eye on you.’
Then he had held the cell door open and nodded as a signal that he should leave.
Tord gave a start as a piercing ring filled the bare, darkened room. He got up and groped his way to the telephone on a wooden chair beside the training bench.
It was the operations manager. He told Tord that he had been taken off international flights for the foreseeable future and moved to domestic flights.
Tord asked why.
His boss said there had been a management meeting to discuss his situation.
‘You must appreciate we cannot have you on foreign flights with this suspicion hanging over you.’
‘So why don’t you ground me?’
‘Well.’
‘Well?’
