Phantom

12

I stood in skippergata watching the rain bucket down. The winter had never managed to get a grip, and there had been a lot of rain instead. Although it had not dampened demand. Oleg, Irene and I turned over more in one day than I had done in a whole week for Odin and Tutu. To the nearest round figure, I earned six thousand a day. I had counted all the Arsenal shirts in the centre. The old boy must have been making more than two million kroner a week, and that was a conservative calculation.

Every night, before we settled up with Andrey, Oleg and I carefully added up all the takings and made it tally with the goods. There was never as much as a krone missing. It wouldn’t have been worth it.

And I could trust Oleg one hundred per cent, I don’t think he had the imagination to think of stealing, or else he had not understood the concept. Or perhaps his head and his heart were too full of Irene. It was almost comical to see him wagging his tail when she was around. And how utterly blind she was to his adoration. Because Irene could see only one thing.

Me.

It neither bothered me nor pleased me, that was just how it was and always had been.

I knew her so well, knew exactly how I could make her little OMO-pure heart thump, her sweet mouth smile and — if that was what I wanted — her blue eyes fill with big tears. I could have let her go, opened the door and said there you are. But I’m a thief, and thieves don’t give away anything they think they might be able to convert into cash. Irene belonged to me, but two million a week belonged to the old boy.

It’s funny how six thousand a day develops legs when you take crystal meth like ice cubes in your drinks and wear clothes that are not bought from Cubus. That was why I was still dossing in the rehearsal room with Irene, who slept on a mattress behind the drums. But she was managing, didn’t touch so much as a spiked fag, ate veggie shit and had opened a fricking bank account. Oleg was living with his mother, so he must have been rolling in money. He had cleaned himself up, was doing some studying and had even begun to train at Valle Hovin.

While I was standing in Skippergata and thinking and doing mental arithmetic I saw a figure coming towards me in the pouring rain. Glasses misted up, thin hair plastered to his skull, wearing the type of all-weather jacket your fat, ugly girlfriend bought you both for Christmas. Well, either the girlfriend was ugly or she didn’t exist. I could see that from his gait. He limped. They’ve probably invented a word to camouflage it, but I call it a club foot, but then I say ‘spastic’ and ‘negro’ as well.

He stopped in front of me.

Now the thing is, I was no longer surprised at the kind of people who bought heroin, but this man definitely did not belong to the usual category of punter.

‘How much-?’

‘Three hundred and fifty for a quarter.’

‘-would you pay for a gram of heroin?’

‘Pay? We sell, fuckwit.’

‘I know. Just doing a bit of research.’

I looked at him. A journalist? A social worker? Or perhaps a politician? While I was working for Odin and Tutu a similar sort of bozo had come over and said he was on the council and some committee called RUNO, and asked me very politely whether I would go to a meeting about ‘Drugs and Youth’. They wanted to hear ‘voices from the street’. I turned up for a laugh and listened to them rabbit on about European Cities Against Drugs and a big international plan for a drug-free Europe. I was given a soft drink and a bun and laughed until I cried. But the person leading the meeting was this MILF, peroxide blonde, with features like a man, huge jugs and the voice of a sergeant major. For a moment I wondered whether she’d had more than her tits done. After the meeting she came over to me, said she was secretary to the Councillor for Social Services and that she would like to talk more about these things, could we meet at her place if I had ‘the opportunity’ one day. She was a MILF without the M, it turned out. Lived alone on a farm, wore tight riding breeches when she opened the door and wanted ‘it’ to take place in a stable. Didn’t bother me if she’d really had her dick done. They had tidied up nicely and installed a pair of milkers that bounced up a storm. But there’s something odd about screwing a woman who howls like a model aircraft two metres from sturdy, ruminating horses, which watch you with a semi-interested stare. Afterwards I had to pick straw from between my buttocks, and I asked her if she had a thousand kroner to lend me. We continued to meet until I started to earn six thousand a day, and between shags she had time to explain that a secretary did not sit writing letters for her councillor but dealt with practical politics. Even if she was a slave right now she was the person who made things happen. And when the right people understood that, it would be her turn to be a councillor. What I learned from her talk about the City Hall was that all politicians — high or low — wanted the same two things: power and sex. In that order. Whispering ‘cabinet minister’ in her ear at the same time as getting two fingers up could make her squirt all the way to the pigsty. I’m not kidding. And in the face of the guy in front of me I could read some of the same sick, intense longings.

‘Fuck off.’

‘Who’s your boss? I want to talk to him.’

Take me to your leader? The guy was either nuts or plain stupid.

‘Piss off.’

The guy didn’t budge, stood there with a peculiar crease at the hip and pulled something from the pocket of his all-weather jacket. A plastic bag containing white powder — seemed like it could have been half a gram or so.

‘This is a sample. Take it to your boss. The price is eight hundred kroner a gram. Careful with the dosage, divide this into ten. I’ll be back the day after tomorrow, same time.’

The man passed me the bag, turned and limped down the street.

Normally I would have chucked the bag in the nearest bin. I couldn’t even sell the shit to make money for me; I had a reputation to tend to. But there was something about the gleam in the madman’s eye. As though he knew something. So, when the working day was over and we had settled up with Andrey, I went with Oleg and Irene to Heroin Park. There, we asked if anyone felt like being a test pilot. I had done this before with Tutu. If there were new goods in town you went to where the most desperate junkies hung out, the ones willing to test anything so long as it’s free, who don’t care if it kills them because death is round the corner anyway.

Four volunteered, but said they wanted an eighth of real heroin on top. I said that was not on offer and was left with three. I doled out the goods.

‘Not enough!’ shouted one of the junkies with the diction of a stroke patient. I told him to shut up if he wanted dessert.

Irene, Oleg and I sat watching as they searched for veins between encrusted blood and injected themselves with surprisingly effective movements.

‘Oh Jesus,’ one of them groaned.

‘Fffff…’ another howled.

Then it went still. Total silence. It was like sending a rocket into space and losing all contact. But I already knew, I could see the ecstasy in their eyes before they disappeared: Houston, we have no problem. When they landed back on earth it was dark. The trip had lasted for more than five hours, double the length of a normal heroin trip. The test panel were unanimous. They had never experienced anything with such a kick. They wanted more, the rest of the bag, now, please, and staggered towards us like the zombies in Thriller. We burst out laughing and ran away.

When we sat on my mattress in the rehearsal room half an hour later, I had a bit of thinking to do. A seasoned junkie typically uses a quarter of a gram of street heroin per shot while Oslo’s most hardened junkies had got as high as fricking virgins on a quarter of that! The guy had given me pure junk. But what was it? It looked and smelt like heroin, had the consistency of heroin, but to trip out for five hours on such a small dose? Whatever, I knew I was sitting on a gold mine. Eight hundred kroner per gram, which could be diluted three times and sold for fourteen hundred. Fifty grams a day. Thirty thousand straight in your pocket. In mine. In Oleg’s and Irene’s.

I raised the business proposition to them. Explained the figures.

They looked at each other. They didn’t seem to be as enthusiastic as I had expected.

‘But Dubai…’ Oleg said.

I lied and told them there was no danger so long as we didn’t trick the old boy. First, we would go and say we were stopping, that we had met Jesus or some such bollocks. Then wait a bit before starting up on our own in a small way.

They looked at each other again. And I suddenly realised there was something to it, something which I had not picked up on before.

‘It’s just that…’ Oleg said, his eyes struggling to find a focus on the wall. ‘Irene and I, we…’

‘You what?’

He squirmed like an impaled worm and in the end glanced at Irene for help.

‘Oleg and I have decided to live together,’ Irene said. ‘We’re saving up to put a deposit on a flat in Boler. We’d thought of working through till the summer and then…’

‘And then?’

‘Then we were going to finish school,’ Oleg said. ‘And then start studying.’

‘Law,’ Irene said. ‘Oleg’s got such good grades.’ She smiled the way she used to do when she thought she had said something stupid, but her usually pale cheeks were hot and red with pleasure.

They had been sneaking round and palling up behind my fricking back! How had I managed to miss that?

‘Law,’ I said, opening the bag which still contained more than a gram. ‘Isn’t that for people who want to make it to the top in the gendarmes?’

Neither of them answered.

I found the spoon I ate cornflakes with and wiped it on my thigh.

‘What are you doing?’ Oleg asked.

‘This has to be celebrated,’ I said, pouring the powder onto the spoon. ‘Besides, we have to test the product ourselves before we recommend it to the old boy.’

‘So it’s fine then?’ Irene exclaimed with relief in her voice. ‘We carry on as before?’

‘Of course, my dear.’ I put the lighter under the bowl of the spoon. ‘This is for you, Irene.’

‘Me? But I don’t think-’

‘For my sake, sis.’ I looked up at her and smiled. Smiled the smile she knew I knew she had no antidote for. ‘Boring getting high on your own, you know. Sort of lonely.’

The melted powder bubbled in the spoon. I didn’t have any cotton wool, so I considered whether to strain it through a broken-off cigarette filter. But it looked so clean. White, even consistency. So I let it cool for a couple of seconds before drawing it into the syringe.

‘Gusto-’ Oleg began to say.

‘We’d better be careful we don’t OD, there’s enough for three here. You’re invited as well, my friend. But perhaps you only feel like watching?’

I didn’t need to look up. I knew him too well. Pure of heart, blinded with love and clad in the armour suit of courage that had made him dive from fifteen-metre-high masts into Oslo fjord.

‘OK,’ he said and began to roll up his sleeve. ‘I’m in.’

The same armour suit that would take him down to the bottom and drown him like a rat.

I woke up to pounding on the door. My head felt as if a coal mine had been operating inside it, and I dreaded taking the plunge and opening one eye. The morning light seeped through the crack between the wooden boards nailed to the windows and frame. Irene was lying on her mattress, and I saw Oleg’s white Puma Speed Cat trainers sticking out between two amplifiers. I could hear whoever it was had started using their feet.

I got up and tottered towards the door trying to remember any messages about band practice or equipment that had to be collected. I opened a fraction and instinctively put my foot against the door. It didn’t help. The shove knocked me backwards into the room and I fell over the drums. One hell of a racket. After shifting the cymbal stands and the snare drum I looked up into the kisser of my dear foster-brother, Stein.

Delete dear.

He had grown bigger, but the Parachute Regiment haircut and the dark, hate-filled flinty eyes were the same. I saw him open his mouth and say something, but my ears were ringing with the sound of the cymbals. Automatically I put my hands in front of my face as he came for me. But he rushed past, stepped over the drum kit and went to Irene on the mattress. She gave a little scream as he grabbed an arm and dragged her to her feet.

He held her tight while stuffing a few possessions into her rucksack. She had stopped resisting by the time he pulled her to the door.

‘Stein…’ I started.

He stopped in the doorway and regarded me with a questioning expression, but I had nothing to add.

‘You’ve done enough damage to this family,’ he said.

He looked like fricking Bruce Lee as he swung his leg and kicked the iron door shut. The air quivered. Oleg stuck his head up above the amplifier and said something, but I was still deaf.

I stood with my back to the fireplace and felt the heat making my skin tingle. The flames and an antique bloody table lamp constituted the only light in the room. The old boy sat in the leather chair examining the man we had brought with us in the limousine from Skippergata. He was still wearing his all-weather jacket. Andrey stood behind the man untying the blindfold round his eyes.

‘Well,’ the old boy said. ‘So you supply this product which I have heard so much about.’

‘Yes,’ the man said, putting on his glasses and squinting round the room.

‘Where does it come from?’

‘I’m here to sell it, not to provide information about it.’

The old boy stroked his chin with thumb and finger. ‘In that case I’m not interested. Taking others’ stolen property always leads to dead bodies in this game. And dead bodies are trouble and bad for business.’

‘This is not stolen property.’

‘I venture to suggest I have a fairly good overview of supply channels, and this is not a product anyone has seen before. So I repeat: I will not buy anything until I have the assurance that this will not rebound on us.’

‘I’ve allowed myself to be brought here blindfolded because I understand the need for discretion. I hope you can show me the same sensitivity.’

The heat had made his glasses mist up, but he kept them on. Andrey and Peter had searched him in the car while I had searched his eyes, body language, voice, hands. All I found was loneliness. There was no fat, ugly girlfriend, only this man and his fantastic dope.

‘For all I know, you could be a policeman,’ the old boy said.

‘With this?’ the man said, pointing to his foot.

‘If you import goods, how come I haven’t heard of you before?’

‘Because I’m new. I don’t have a record and no one knows me, neither in the police nor in this business. I have a so-called respectable profession and have so far lived a normal life.’ He made a cautious grimace which I realised was supposed to be a smile. ‘An abnormally normal life, some might claim.’

‘Hm.’ The old boy stroked his chin repeatedly. Then he grabbed my hand and pulled me to his chair so that I was standing beside him and looking at the man.

‘Do you know what I think, Gusto? I think he makes this product himself. What do you think?’

I deliberated. ‘Maybe,’ I said.

‘You know, Gusto, you don’t exactly need to be an Einstein in chemistry. There are detailed recipes on the Net for how to turn opium into morphine and then to heroin. Let’s say you get hold of ten kilos of raw opium. Then you find yourself some boiling equipment, a fridge, a bit of methanol and a fan, and hey presto, you’ve got eight and a half kilos of heroin crystals. Dilute it and you have one point two kilos of street heroin.’

The man in the all-weather jacket coughed. ‘It requires a bit more than that.’

‘The question’, the old boy said, ‘is how you get hold of the opium.’

The man shook his head.

‘Aha,’ the old boy said, stroking the inside of my arm. ‘Not opiate. Opioid.’

The man didn’t answer.

‘Did you hear what he said, Gusto?’ The old boy pointed a finger at the club foot. ‘He makes totally synthetic dope. He doesn’t need any help from nature or Afghanistan, he applies simple chemistry and makes everything on the kitchen table. Total control and no risky smuggling. And it’s at least as powerful as heroin. We’ve got a clever guy among us, Gusto. That sort of enterprise commands respect.’

‘Respect,’ I mumbled.

‘How much can you produce?’

‘Two kilos a week maybe. It depends.’

‘I’ll take the lot,’ the old boy said.

‘The lot?’ The man’s voice was flat and contained no real surprise.

‘Yes, everything you produce. May I make you a business proposition, herr…?’

‘Ibsen.’

‘Ibsen?’

‘If you don’t mind.’

‘Not at all. He was also a great artist. I would like to propose a partnership, herr Ibsen. Vertical integration. We corner the market and set the price. Better margin for both of us. What do you say?’

Ibsen shook his head.

The old boy tilted his head with a smile on the lipless mouth. ‘Why not, herr Ibsen?’

I watched the little man straighten up; he seemed to grow in the baggy, all-year-round, world’s-most-boring-person jacket.

‘If I give you the monopoly, herr…’

The old boy pressed his fingertips together. ‘You can call me whatever you like, herr Ibsen.’

‘I don’t want to be dependent on a single buyer, herr Dubai. It’s too risky. And it means you can force prices down. On the other hand, I don’t want too many buyers, because then the risk that the police will trace me is greater. I came to you because you’re known to be invisible, but I want one more buyer. I have already been in contact with Los Lobos. I hope you can understand.’

The old boy laughed his chug-chug laugh. ‘Listen and learn, Gusto. Not only is he a pharmacist, he’s also a businessman. Good, herr Ibsen, let’s say that then.’

‘The price…’

‘I’ll pay what you asked. You’ll find this is a business in which you don’t waste time haggling, herr Ibsen. Life’s too short and death too close at hand. Shall we say the first delivery next Tuesday?’

On the way out the old boy acted as if he needed to support himself on me. His nails scratched the skin on my arm.

‘Have you thought about exporting, herr Ibsen? The checks on exporting drugs from Norway are non-existent, you know.’

Ibsen didn’t answer. But I saw it now. What he wanted. Saw it as he stood over his club foot with a pivoted hip. Saw it in the reflection from his sweaty, shiny forehead below the thinning hair. The condensation had gone from his glasses, and his eyes had the same gleam I had seen in Skippergata. Payback, Dad. He wanted some payback. Payback for all the things he hadn’t received: respect, love, admiration, acceptance, everything it is claimed you can’t buy. Although you can, of course. Isn’t that right, Dad? Life owes you stuff, but sometimes you have to be your own sodding debt collector. And if we have to burn in hell for it, heaven’s going to be sparsely populated. Isn’t that right, Dad?

Harry sat by the road looking out. Watched the planes taxiing in and taxiing out to the runway.

He would be in Shanghai within eighteen hours.

He liked Shanghai. Liked the food, liked walking down the Bund along the River Huangpu to Peace Hotel, liked going into the Old Jazz Bar and listening to the ancient jazz musicians creaking their way through standards, liked the thought that they had been sitting there and playing without an audible break since the revolution in ’49. Liked her. Liked what they had, and what they didn’t have, but ignored.

The ability to ignore. It was a wonderful quality, not something he was naturally blessed with, but which he had practised over the last three years. Not banging your head against the wall if you didn’t have to.

How unshakeable is your faith in your gospel actually? Aren’t you also a doubter?

He would be in Shanghai in eighteen hours.

Could be in Shanghai within eighteen hours.

Shit.

She answered on second ring.

‘What do you want?’

‘Don’t ring off again, OK?’

‘I’m here.’

‘Listen, how strong a hold have you got on that Nils Christian?’

‘Hans Christian.’

‘Is he besotted enough for you to persuade him to help me with a very dubious stunt?’