The Redbreast (17 page)

‘Up against the wall with them!’ The Mohican smacked the palm of his hand down on the table, and a few faces turned towards him. Harry gestured with his hand to calm him down.

‘They’re just young men, Åsnes. Try and enjoy yourself now. It’s New Year’s Eve.’

‘Young men? What do you think we were? That didn’t stop the Germans. Kjell was nineteen. Oscar was twenty-two. Shoot them before it spreads, I say. It’s an illness; you have to catch it early on.’

He pointed a trembling forefinger at Harry.

‘One of them was sitting where you’re sitting now. They don’t bloody die out! You’re a policeman, you go out and catch them!’

‘How do you know I’m a policeman?’ Harry asked in surprise.

‘I read the newspapers. You shot someone in some country down south. That was good, but what about shooting a couple here too?’

‘You’re very talkative today, Åsnes.’

The Mohican clammed up and gave Harry a last surly glance before turning to the wall and studying the painting of Youngstorget. Harry, understanding that the conversation was over, waved to Maja for a cup of coffee and consulted his watch. A new millennium was just around the corner. Schrøder’s would close at four o’clock because of a ‘Private New Year’s Eve Party’, as the poster hanging on the entrance door said. Harry surveyed the familiar faces in the room. As far as he could see, all the guests had arrived.

25
Rudolf II Hospital, Vienna. 8 June 1944.

W
ARD
4
WAS FILLED WITH THE SOUNDS OF SLEEPING
. Tonight it was quieter than usual, no one moaning in pain or waking from a nightmare with a scream. Helena hadn’t heard an air-raid warning in Vienna either. If they didn’t bomb tonight, she hoped it would make everything easier. She had crept into the dormitory, stood at the foot of his bed and watched him. There, in the cone of light from his table lamp, he sat, so immersed in the book he was reading that he didn’t heed anything else. And she stood outside the glow, in the dark. With all the knowledge of the dark.

As he was about to turn the page he noticed her. He smiled and immediately put down his book.

‘Good evening, Helena. I didn’t think you were on duty tonight.’

She placed her forefinger over her lips and went closer.

‘What do you know about the night shifts?’ she whispered.

He smiled. ‘I don’t know anything about the others. I only know when you’re on duty.’

‘Is that right?’

‘Wednesday, Friday and Sunday, then Monday and Tuesday. Then Wednesday, Friday and Sunday again. Don’t be frightened, it’s a compliment. There’s not much else to use your brain on here. I also know when Hadler gets his enema.’

She laughed softly.

‘But you don’t know you’ve been declared fit for action, do you?’

He stared at her in surprise.

‘You’ve been posted to Hungary,’ she whispered. ‘To the 3rd Panzer Division.’

‘The Panzer Division? But that’s the Wehrmacht. They can’t enlist me. I’m a Norwegian.’

‘I know.’

‘And what am I supposed to be doing in Hungary? I —’

‘Shhh, you’ll wake the others. Uriah, I’ve read the orders. I’m afraid there’s not much we can do about it.’

‘But there has to be a mistake. It’s . . .’

He accidentally knocked the book onto the floor and it landed with a bang. Helena bent down and picked it up. On the cover, under the title
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
, there was a drawing of a boy in rags on a timber raft. Uriah was clearly angry.

‘This isn’t my war,’ he said through pursed lips. ‘I know that too,’ she whispered, putting the book in his bag under the chair.

‘What are you doing?’ he whispered.

‘You have to listen to me, Uriah. Time is short.’

‘Time?’

‘The duty nurse will be doing her rounds in half an hour. You have to have your mind made up before then.’

He pulled the shade of the lamp down to see her better in the dark. ‘What’s going on, Helena?’

She swallowed. ‘And why aren’t you wearing your uniform today?’ he asked.

This was what she had been dreading most. Not lying to her mother and saying she was going to her sister’s in Salzburg for a couple of days. Not persuading the forester’s son – who was now waiting in the road outside the gate – to drive her to the hospital. Not even saying goodbye to her possessions, the church and her secure life in the Viennese woods. But telling him everything: that she loved him and that she would willingly risk her life and future for him. Because she might be mistaken. Not about what he felt for her – of that she was certain – but about his character. Would he have the courage and the drive to do what she would suggest? At least he was clear it wasn’t his war they were fighting against the Red Army in the south.

‘We should have had time to get to know each other better,’ she said, placing her hand over his. He grasped it and held it tight.

‘But we don’t have that luxury,’ she said, squeezing his hand. ‘There’s a train for Paris leaving in an hour. I’ve bought two tickets. My teacher lives there.’

‘Your teacher?’

‘It’s a long, complicated story, but he’ll receive us.’

‘What do you mean, receive us?’

‘We can stay with him. He lives alone. And, as far as I know, he doesn’t have a circle of friends. Have you got a passport?’

‘What? Yes . . .’

He seemed lost for words, as if he was wondering whether he had fallen asleep while reading the book about the boy in rags and all this was just a dream.

‘Yes, I’ve got a passport.’

‘Good. The trip takes two days. We’ve got seats and I’ve brought lots of food.’

He took a deep breath. ‘Why Paris?’

‘It’s a big city, a city you can disappear in. Listen, I’ve got some of my father’s clothes in the car – you can change into civvies there. His shoe size —’

‘No.’ He held up his hand and her low, intense stream of words stopped momentarily. She held her breath and concentrated on his pensive face.

‘No,’ he repeated in a whisper. ‘That’s silly.’

‘But . . .’ She seemed to have a block of ice in her stomach.

‘It’s better to travel in uniform,’ he said. ‘A young man in civvies will only arouse suspicion.’

She was so happy she could hardly get the words out and squeezed his hand even harder. Her heart sang with such joy that she had to tell it to be quiet.

‘And one more thing,’ he said, swinging his legs out of bed.

‘Yes?’

‘Do you love me?’

‘Yes.’

‘Good.’

He already had his jacket on.

26
POT, Police HQ. 21 February 2000.

H
ARRY CAST HIS EYES AROUND
. A
T
THE TIDY, WELL
-organised shelves of ring-binders neatly displayed in chronological order. At the walls where diplomas and distinctions from a career in smooth ascent hung. A black and white photograph of a younger, uniformed Kurt Meirik, with the rank of major, greeting King Olav hung behind the desk and caught the eye of everyone who came in. This was the picture Harry sat studying when the door opened behind him.

‘I apologise for keeping you waiting, Hole. Stay seated.’

It was Meirik. Harry hadn’t made a move to stand up. ‘Well,’ said Meirik, taking a seat behind his desk. ‘How has your first week with us been?’

Meirik sat upright in his chair and revealed a row of large yellow teeth, in a way which made you suspect he had overdone the smile training in his life.

‘Fairly dull,’ Harry said.

‘Heh, heh. It hasn’t been that bad, has it?’ Meirik seemed surprised.

‘Well, you’ve got better coffee than we have downstairs.’

‘Crime Squad have, you mean?’

‘Sorry,’ Harry said. ‘It takes time to get used to it. To “we” being POT now.’

‘Yes, we’ll just have to be a bit patient. That’s true for a number of things. Isn’t it, Hole, eh?’

Harry nodded assent. No point running at windmills. Not in the first month, anyway. As expected, he had been given an office at the end of a long corridor, which meant that he didn’t see more of the others working there than was absolutely necessary. His job consisted of reading reports from regional POT offices and quite simply evaluating whether they were case files which should be passed up higher into the system. Meirik’s instructions had been absolutely clear: unless it was rubbish, everything should be passed on. In other words, Harry’s job was to filter out the dross. Last week, three reports had come in. He had tried to read them slowly, but there were limits to how long he could drag it out. One of the reports was from Trondheim and dealt with the new electronic monitoring equipment no one knew how to operate, as their monitoring expert had left. Harry passed it on. The second one concerned a German businessman in Bergen whom they now declared ‘not suspicious’ because he had delivered the consignment of curtain rails he said he was there to deliver. Harry passed that one on. The third was from the Østland region, from the police station in Skien. They had received some complaints from chalet owners in Siljan who had heard shooting the previous weekend. Since they weren’t in the hunting season, an officer had gone up to investigate and had found empty cartridges of an unknown make in the woods. They had sent the cartridges to the forensics department within
Kripos
, the Norwegian CID, who had reported back that the ammunition was probably for a Märklin rifle, a very unusual weapon.

Harry had passed the report on, but not before taking a copy for himself.

‘Right, what I wanted to talk to you about was a poster that has come into our possession. Neo-Nazis are planning to kick up a fuss outside mosques in Oslo on 17 May. There is some movable Muslim feast which falls on the seventeenth this year, and a great many foreign parents are refusing to allow their children to take part in the children’s Independence Day parade because they want them to go to the mosque.’

‘Eid.’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘Eid. Their holy day. It’s the Muslims’ Christmas Eve.’

‘So you’re into this stuff ?’

‘No, but I was invited to a dinner by my neighbour last year. They’re Pakistani. They thought it was so sad for me to sit alone on Eid.’

‘Really? Hm.’ Meirik put on his Oberinspektor Derrick glasses. ‘I’ve got the poster here. They write that it is an insult to your host country to celebrate anything other than Norwegian Independence Day on 17 May. And they say that blacks are happy to claim benefits, but shirk every single Norwegian citizen’s obligation.’

‘To be obedient and shout “Hurrah” for Norway as the parade goes by,’ Harry said, pulling out his pack of cigarettes. He had noticed the ashtray on top of the bookcase and Meirik nodded in response to Harry’s enquiring glance. Harry lit up, drew the smoke deep into his lungs and tried to imagine the blood vessels in the lung wall greedily absorbing the nicotine. Life was becoming shorter and the thought that he would never stop smoking filled him with a strange satisfaction. Ignoring the warning on the cigarette packet might not be the most flamboyant act of rebellion a man could allow himself, but at least it was one he could afford.

‘See what you can find out,’ Meirik said. ‘Fine, but I warn you I have a short fuse where skinheads are concerned.’

‘Heh, heh.’ Meirik showed his large yellow teeth again and Harry realised what he reminded him of: a dressage horse.

‘Heh, heh.’

‘There was another thing,’ Harry said. ‘It’s about the report on the ammunition found in Siljan. It’s for a Märklin rifle.’

‘I have a vague recollection of hearing something about that, yes.’

‘I’ve been doing a bit of checking of my own.’

‘Oh?’

Harry picked up on the chill tone.

‘I checked the National Firearms Registry for last year. No Märklin rifles have been registered in Norway.’

‘That doesn’t surprise me. The list must already have been checked by people here after you passed on the report, Hole. Not your job, you know.’

‘Perhaps not. But I wanted to be sure that whoever was dealing with it followed up Interpol’s reports on arms smuggling.’

‘Interpol? Why should we do that?’

‘No one is importing these rifles into Norway, so this one has been smuggled in.’

Harry took a print-out from his breast pocket. ‘This is a copy of a list of consignments Interpol found during a raid on an illegal arms dealer in Johannesburg in November. Look here. A Märklin rifle. And there’s the destination, Oslo.’

‘Hm. Where did you get hold of this?’

‘The Interpol file on the Net. Available to anyone in POT. Anyone who can be bothered.’

‘Really?’ Meirik’s gaze settled on Harry for a moment before scrutinising the print-out more closely.

‘This is all very well, but arms smuggling is not our business, Hole. If you knew how many illegal weapons the police confiscate in the course of one year —’

‘Six hundred and eleven,’ Harry said.

‘Is that so?’

‘Last year. And that’s just the police authority in Oslo. Two out of three are taken off criminals, mainly small arms, pump guns and sawnoff shotguns. On average one gun is confiscated every day. In the nineties the number almost doubled.’

‘Fine, so you understand that we in POT cannot prioritise an unregistered rifle in Buskerud.’

Meirik was struggling to maintain his composure. Harry exhaled smoke through his mouth and studied it as it rose to the ceiling.

‘Siljan isn’t in Buskerud,’ he said.

Meirik’s jaw muscles were working hard.

‘Have you rung Customs & Excise, Hole?’

‘No.’

Meirik looked at his watch, a lumpen, inelegant steel job Harry guessed he had been given for long and faithful service.

‘Then I suggest you do. This is a case for them. Right now I have more pressing —’

‘Do you know what a Märklin rifle is, Meirik?’

Harry watched the POT boss’s eyebrows jump up and down and wondered if it was already too late. He could feel the swish of the windmills.

‘Not my business, either, by the way, Hole. You’d better take this up with . . .’