being he had three punters waiting. God knows what they were so frightened of. The cops had given up in this area, and if they hauled in pushers off the street it was only for appearances’ sake because some politician had been shooting his mouth off again.
A guy dressed as if he was going to confirmation passed the group and I saw him and Arsenal Shirt exchange barely perceptible nods. The guy stopped in front of me. Wearing a trench coat from Ferner Jacobsen, a suit from Ermengildo Zegna and a side parting from the Silver Boys. He was big.
‘Somebody wants to meet you.’ He spoke English with a sort of Russian growl.
I reckoned it would be the usual. He had seen my face, thought I was a rent boy and wanted a blow job or my teenage ass. And I had to confess that on days like today I did consider a change of profession; heated car seats and four times the hourly rate.
‘No thanks,’ I answered in English.
‘Right answer is Yes please,’ the guy said, grabbing my arm and lifting me rather than dragging me off to a black limousine, which at that moment pulled soundlessly up by the pavement. The rear door opened, and as resistance was useless I began to think about a proper price. Paid rape is better than unpaid, after all.
I was shoved onto the back seat, and the door was slammed with a soft, expensive click. Through the windows, which from the outside had seemed black and impenetrable, I saw that we were moving west. Behind the wheel sat a little guy with much too small a head for all the big things that should fit in it: a huge nose, a white, lipless shark-mouth and bulging eyes that looked as if they had been stuck on with crap glue. He too had a posh funeral suit and a parting like a choirboy’s. He looked at me in the rear-view mirror. ‘Sales good, eh?’
‘What sales, fuckwit?’
The little guy gave a friendly smile and nodded. In my mind, I had decided not to give them a bulk discount if they asked me, but now I could see in his eyes it wasn’t me they were after. There was something else, which for the moment I couldn’t interpret. The City Hall appeared and was gone. The American Embassy. The Palace Gardens. Further west. Kirkeveien. Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation. And then houses and rich men’s addresses.
We stopped in front of a large timber construction on a hill and the funeral directors escorted me to the gate. As we waded through the shingle to the oak door I had a look around. The property was as big as a football pitch with apple and pear trees, a bunker-like cement tower similar to the stores they have in desert countries, a double garage with iron bars that gave the impression it housed public emergency vehicles. A two- to three-metre-high fence enclosed the whole caboodle. I already had an inkling where we were going. Limousine, English with a growl, ‘Sales good?’, fortress sweet home.
In the lobby the bigger of the two suits frisked me, then he and the little one went to a corner where there was a small table with a red felt cloth and loads of old icons and crucifixes hanging all over the wall. They drew their shooters from their shoulder holsters, put them on the red felt and placed a cross on each pistol. Then a door to a lounge opened.
‘ Ataman,’ he said, pointing the way to me.
The old boy must have been at least as old as the leather armchair he was sitting in. I stared. Gnarled elderly fingers around a black cigarette.
There was a lively crackle coming from the enormous fireplace, and I made sure to position myself near enough for the heat to reach my back. The light from the flames flickered over his white silk shirt and old-man face. He put down the cigarette and raised his hand as though he expected me to kiss the large blue stone he wore on his ring finger.
‘Burmese sapphire,’ he said. ‘Six point six carat, four and a half thousand dollars per carat.’
He had an accent. It was not easy to hear, but it was there. Poland? Russia? Something to the east anyway.
‘How much?’ he said, resting his chin on the ring.
It took me a couple of seconds to understand what he meant.
‘Just under thirty thousand,’ I said.
‘How much under?’
I pondered. ‘Twenty-nine thousand seven hundred is pretty close.’
‘The exchange rate for the dollar is five eighty-three.’
‘Around a hundred and seventy thousand.’
The old boy nodded. ‘They said you were good.’ His old-man eyes shone bluer than the fricking Burmese sapphire.
‘They’ve got brains,’ I said.
‘I’ve watched you in action. You have a lot to learn, but I can see you’re smarter than the other imbeciles. You can see a customer and know what he’s willing to pay.’
I shrugged. I wondered what he was willing to pay.
‘But they also said you steal.’
‘Only when it’s worth my while.’
The old boy laughed. Well, since it was the first time I had met him, I thought it was a half-hearted coughing fit, like from lung cancer. There was a kind of gurgling noise deep in his throat, like the nice old chug-chug of a sailing boat. Then he fixed his cold, blue Jew-eyes on me and said in a tone that suggested he was telling me about Newton’s Second Law: ‘You should be able to manage the next calculation as well. If you steal from me I will kill you.’
The sweat was pouring down my back. I forced myself to meet his gaze. It was like staring into the fricking Antarctic. Nothing. Freezing cold wasteland. But I knew what he wanted. Number one: money.
‘The biker gang will let you sell ten grams on your own for every fifty grams you sell for them. Seventeen per cent. For me you sell only my stuff and you’re paid in cash. Fifteen per cent. You have your own street corner. There are three of you. Money man, dope man and scout. Seven per cent for the dope man, three per cent for the scout. You settle up with Andrey at midnight.’ He nodded towards the smaller choirboy.
Street corner. Scout. The fricking Wire.
‘Deal,’ I said. ‘Sling me the shirt.’
The old boy smiled, the sort of reptilian smile that serves to tell you roughly where in the hierarchy you are. ‘Andrey will sort it out.’
We continued to chat. He asked about my parents, friends, whether I had anywhere to live. I told him I lived with my foster-sister and lied no more than was necessary, for I had the feeling he already knew the answers. Only once was I out of my depth, when he asked why I spoke a kind of outdated Oslo East dialect when I had grown up in a well-educated family north of town, and I answered it was because of my father, the real one, he was from the East End of town. Fuck knows if that’s right, but it’s what I’ve always imagined, Dad, you walking around Oslo East, down on your luck, unemployed, hard up, a freezing flat, not a good place to bring up a kid. Or perhaps I talked the way I did to annoy Rolf and the posh neighbours’ kids. And then I discovered it gave me a kind of upper hand, a bit like a tattoo; people got scared, shied away, gave me a wide berth. While I was droning on about my life the old boy was studying my face and kept rapping the sapphire ring on the armrest, again and again, relentlessly, as if it were some kind of countdown. When there was a break in the questioning and the only sound was the rapping, I felt as if we were going to explode unless I broke the silence.
‘Cool shack,’ I said.
That sounded so blonde I blushed.
‘It was the head of the Gestapo’s residence in Norway from 1942 to 1945. Hellmuth Reinhard.’
‘S’pose the neighbours don’t bother you.’
‘I own the house next door as well. Reinhard’s lieutenant lived there. Or vice versa.’
‘Vice versa?’
‘Not everything here is so easy to grasp,’ the old boy said. Grinned his lizard smile. The Komodo dragon.
I knew I had to be careful, but could not resist. ‘There’s one thing I don’t understand. Odin pays me seventeen per cent, and that’s pretty much standard with the others as well. But you want a team of three people and you’re giving twenty-five per cent in total. Why?’
The old boy’s eyes stared intently at one side of my face. ‘Because three is safer than one, Gusto. My sellers’ risks are my risks. If you lose all the pawns it’s just a question of time before you’re checkmate, Gusto.’ He seemed to repeat my name to revel in the sound.
