‘Not that I’ve noticed. As far as I know, we’ve only ever had one thing in common.’
What’s that?’
‘No one else wanted to be pals with us.’
They wound their way through the next bends in silence.
‘Apart from Tresko,’ Harry said.
Oystein snorted. ‘Who stank so much of toe-fart no one else could bear sitting next to him.’
‘Yes,’ Harry said. ‘We were good at that.’
‘We nailed that one,’ Oystein said. ‘But, Christ, how he stank.’
They laughed together. Gentle, light-hearted. Sad.
Oystein had parked the car on the brown grass with the doors open. Harry clambered up onto the top of the bunker and sat on the edge with his legs dangling. From the speakers inside the car doors Springsteen sang about blood brothers one stormy night and the vow that had to be kept.
Oystein passed Harry the bottle of Jim Beam. A lone siren from the town rose and fell until it lost power and died. The poison stung Harry’s throat and stomach, and he threw up. The second swig went better. The third was fine.
Max Weinberg sounded as if he was trying to destroy the drumhead.
‘It often strikes me how I ought to wish I had more regrets,’ Oystein said. ‘But I don’t give a shite. I think I just accepted from my first waking second that I was a bloody slob. What about you?’
Harry ruminated. ‘I have loads of regrets. But perhaps that’s because I carry around such high notions of myself. In fact, I imagine I could have chosen differently.’
‘But you bloody couldn’t.’
‘Not at that time. But next time, Oystein. Next time.’
‘Has it ever happened, Harry? Ever in the fucking history of mankind?’
‘Just because nothing has happened doesn’t mean that it can’t happen. I don’t know that this bottle is going to fall if I drop it. Fuck, which philosopher was it again? Hobbes? Hume? Heidegger? One of the headcases beginning with H.’
‘Answer me.’
Harry shrugged. ‘I think it’s possible to learn. The problem is that we learn so damned slowly, so that by the time you’ve realised, it’s too late. For example, someone you love might ask you for a favour, an act of love. Like helping him to die. Which you say no to because you haven’t learned, you haven’t had the insight. When you do finally see the light, it’s too late.’ Harry took another swig. ‘So instead you perform the act of love for someone else. Perhaps for someone you hate, even.’
Oystein accepted the bottle. ‘Got no idea what you’re chuntering on about, but it sounds fucked up.’
‘Not necessarily. It’s never too late for good actions, is it.’
‘It’s always too late, don’t you mean?’
‘No! I always thought we hate too much for it to be possible for us to obey other impulses. But my father had a different opinion. He said hatred and love are the same currency. Everything starts with love, hatred is the reverse side of the coin.’
‘Amen.’
‘But that must mean you can go the other way, from hatred to love. Hatred must be a good starting point for learning, for changing, for doing things differently next time.’
‘Now you’re so optimistic I’m considering puking, Harry.’
The organ came in the refrain, a whine, cutting through like a circular saw.
Oystein leaned his head to the side while flicking ash. And Harry was almost moved to tears. Simply because he saw the years that had become their lives, that had become them, in the way his friend flicked ash as he had always done, leaning to the side as if the cigarette were too heavy, his head angled as if he liked the world better from a slanted perspective, the ash on the floor of the smokers’ shed at school, down an empty beer bottle at a party they had gatecrashed, on the cold, rough concrete of a bunker.
‘Anyway, you’re beginning to get old, Harry.’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘When men start quoting their fathers, they’re old. The race has been run.’
And then Harry found it. The answer to her question about what he most wanted right now. He wanted an armoured heart.
Epilogue
Bluish-black clouds swept over Hong Kong’s highest point, Victoria Peak, but it had finally stopped raining after dripping constantly since the beginning of September. The sun poked through, and a huge rainbow formed a bridge between Kong Island and Kowloon. Harry closed his eyes and let the sun warm his face. The spell of good weather had come just in time for the horse-racing season due to open in Happy Valley later that evening.
Harry heard the buzz of Japanese voices approach and then pass the bench on which he was sitting. They were coming from the funicular railway, which since 1888 had attracted tourists and locals up here to the fresh air above the town. Harry opened his eyes again and flicked through the racing programme.
He had contacted Herman Kluit as soon as he’d arrived in Hong Kong. Kluit had offered Harry a job as a debt collector, that is, he had to trace people who were trying to flee from their debts. In this way, Kluit would not have to sell the debt with a substantial discount to the Triad, or think about the brutal recovery methods they employed.
It would have been stretching things to say Harry enjoyed the job, but it was well paid and simple. He didn’t have to recover the money, just locate the debtors. However, it turned out that his appearance – one metre ninety- two and a grinning scar from mouth to ear – was often enough for them to settle their accounts on the spot. And he very rarely had to resort to using a search engine on a server in Germany.
The trick, nevertheless, was to keep off dope and alcohol, which he had succeeded in doing thus far. There were two letters waiting for him in reception today. How they had found him he had no idea. Only that Kaja must have been involved. One letter bore the logo of Oslo Police District on the envelope, and Harry guessed Gunnar Hagen. With the other he didn’t need to guess, he immediately recognised Oleg’s upright and still childish handwriting. Harry had put both letters in his jacket pocket without taking a decision on when or indeed whether he would read them.
Harry folded the racing programme and put it down beside him on the bench. He peered across to the Chinese mainland where the yellow smog was becoming thicker by the year. But up here at the top of the mountain the air still felt almost fresh. He looked down on Happy Valley. On the cemeteries, west of the Wong Nai Chong road, where there were separate sections for Protestants, Catholics, Muslims and Hindus. He could see the racecourse where he knew jockeys and horses were already on the turf being tested before the evening’s races. Soon the spectators would be pouring in: those with hope, those without, the lucky and the unlucky. Those who went to have their dreams fulfilled and those who went purely to dream. The losers who took uncalculated risks and those who took calculated risks, but lost anyway. They had been here before, and they all came back, even the ghosts from the cemeteries down there, the several hundred who died in the great fire at Happy Valley Racecourse in 1918. For tonight it was definitely their turn to beat the odds, to conquer chance, to stuff their pockets full of crisp Hong Kong dollars, to get away with murder. In a couple of hours from now they would have entered the gates, read the racing programme, filled the coupons with the day’s doubles, quinellas, exactas, triples, superfectas, whatever their gambling god is called. They would have queued by the bookies’ hatches, holding their stakes at the ready. Most of them would have died a bit every time the tape was crossed, but redemption is only fifteen minutes away, when the staring gates open for the next race. Unless you’re a bridge jumper, of course, someone who risks all their assets on one horse in a race. But no one complains. Everyone knows the odds.
But you have those who know the odds, and then you have those who know the outcome. At a racecourse in
