The Son

28

Hugo Nestor loved Vermont. It was one of the few restaurant-bar-nightclub combinations that had actually succeeded in all three areas. The clientele was made up of the rich and beautiful, the not-beautiful but rich, the not-rich but beautiful, a cross section of celebrities, semi-successful financiers and people who worked nights in the entertainment and nightlife industry. Plus successful criminals. It was at Vermont in the nineties that the Tveita Gang and people involved in money laundering, bank and post office robberies had bought methuselahs of Dom Perignon, and because Norwegian strippers at the time had lacked a certain finesse, had better ones flown in from Copenhagen for a quick lap dance in their private dining room. They had used drinking straws to blow cocaine directly into the various orifices of the strippers, and eventually into their own, while the waiters brought them oysters, Perigord truffles and foie gras from geese that had been treated much as they were treating themselves. In short, Vermont was a place with style and tradition. A place where Hugo Nestor and his people could sit every night at their cordoned-off table and watch the world outside go to hell. A place where you could do business, where bankers and financiers could mix with criminals without the cops who frequented Vermont reading too much into it.

Consequently the request from the man who had sat down at their table wasn’t among the more unusual. He had come in, looked around and pushed his way through the crowds right over to them, but been stopped by Bo when he tried to straddle the red cordon that marked out their territory. After exchanging a few words, Bo had come over to Nestor and whispered into his ear: ‘He wants an Asian girl. He says it’s for a client who’ll pay whatever it costs.’

Nestor tilted his head and sipped his champagne. There was a saying of the Twin’s that he had made his own: Money can buy you champagne. ‘Does he look like a cop to you?’

‘No.’

‘Me neither. Get him a chair.’

The guy was wearing a suit that looked expensive, a freshly ironed shirt and a tie. He had pale eyebrows above a pair of prominent, exclusive spectacles. No, correct that, no eyebrows.

‘She has to be under twenty.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Nestor said. ‘Why are you here?’

‘My client is a friend of Iver Iversen.’

Hugo Nestor looked at him closely. He didn’t have any eyelashes, either. Perhaps he had alopecia universalis like Hugo’s brother — alleged brother — who didn’t have a single body hair. In which case the hair on the guy’s head had to be a wig.

‘My client is in shipping. He’ll pay you cash and in heroin that has come in by sea. You probably know better than I do what that means in terms of purity.’

Fewer stops. Fewer middlemen cutting the drugs.

‘Let me call Iversen,’ Nestor said.

The guy shook his head. ‘My client demands total discretion, neither Iversen nor anyone else must know. If Iversen is dumb enough to tell his close friends what he gets up to, then that’s his problem.’

And potentially ours, Nestor thought. Who was this guy? He didn’t look like an errand boy. A protege? A highly trusted family lawyer?

‘I understand, of course, that a direct approach from a man you don’t know requires extra assurances of a safe transaction. My client and I therefore suggest an advance to prove we’re serious. What do you say?’

‘I say 400,000,’ Nestor said. ‘It’s just a figure I plucked out of the air, I still don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘Of course not,’ the guy said. ‘We can do that.’

‘How soon?’

‘I’m thinking tonight.’

‘Tonight?’

‘I’m only in town until tomorrow morning, then I fly back to London. The money is in my suite at the Plaza.’

Nestor exchanged looks with Bo. Then he drained the tall champagne flute in one gulp.

‘I don’t understand a word you’re saying, mister. Unless you’re trying to tell me that you’re inviting us back for a drink in your suite.’

The guy flashed a smile. ‘That’s exactly what I’m saying.’

They searched the guy the moment they reached the car park. Bo held him while Nestor checked him for weapons and microphones. The guy let himself be frisked without resisting. He was clean.

Bo drove the limo to the Plaza and they walked from the multi-storey car park behind Spektrum to the towering glass prism that was the Plaza Hotel. They looked down at the city from the external lift and Nestor thought it was a metaphor — people down there grew smaller the higher he himself rose.

Bo took out his pistol as the guy opened the door to the suite. There was no obvious reason to expect an ambush; Nestor currently had no living enemies that he knew of. No unresolved disputes in the market and the police were free to arrest him if they wanted to, but they didn’t have anything on him. And yet he sensed an unease which he couldn’t quite pin down. He put it down to professional vigilance and decided not to drop his guard, something other people in the business could learn from. Nestor hadn’t got to where he was without good reason.

The suite was fine. Amazing view, he’d give them that. The guy had set out two briefcases on the coffee table. While Bo checked the other rooms, the guy went behind the bar and started mixing drinks.

‘Go ahead,’ he said, extending his hand towards the briefcases.

Nestor sat down at the coffee table and opened the lid of first one, then the other. There was more than 400,000 kroner. There had to be.

And if the drugs in the other briefcase were as pure as the guy had suggested, there was more than enough to buy a small village of Asian girls.

‘Do you mind if I turn on the TV?’ Nestor asked, picking up the remote control.

‘Be my guest,’ the guy said; he was busy mixing drinks, something he didn’t look comfortable doing, although at least he was slicing lemon for the three gin and tonics.

Nestor pressed the pay-TV button, flicked past the children and family movies to the porn channel and turned up the sound. He went over to the bar.

‘She is sixteen years old and will be delivered to the car park at Ingierstrand Lido at midnight tomorrow. You’ll pull up in the middle of the car park and stay in your car. One of my men will come over to you, get in the back and count the money. Then he’ll leave with the money and someone else will bring the girl. Understood?’

The guy nodded.

What Nestor didn’t mention, because it didn’t need saying, was that the girl wouldn’t be in the same car as the car that came to pick up the money. The money would have left the meeting place before the car with the girl arrived. Same principle as in a drug deal.

‘And the money. .?’

‘Another 400,000,’ Nestor said.

‘Fine.’

Bo entered from the bedroom and stopped to look at the screen. He appeared to enjoy it. Most people seemed to. Nestor only found porn useful because it offered a predictable and steady soundtrack of moaning that frustrated any possible bugging of the room.

‘Ingierstrand Lido tomorrow at midnight,’ Nestor repeated.

‘Let’s drink to it,’ the guy said, holding out two glasses.

‘Thanks, but I’m driving,’ Bo said.

‘Of course,’ the guy laughed and slapped his head. ‘Coke?’

Bo shrugged and the guy opened a can of Coke, poured it into a glass and cut another slice of lemon.

They toasted and sat down at the table. Nestor signalled to Bo who picked up the first bundle of banknotes from the briefcase and started counting out loud. He had brought a bag with him from the car into which he put the money. They never accepted the customer’s bags, they might contain sensors that could trace where the money was taken. It wasn’t until Nestor heard Bo miscount that he realised something was wrong. Only he didn’t know what. He looked around. Had the walls changed colour? He looked down at his empty glass. Looked at Bo’s empty glass. And the lawyer guy’s glass.

‘Why isn’t there any lemon in yours?’ Nestor asked. His voice sounded very far away. And the reply came from the same distant place.

‘Citrus fruit intolerance.’

Bo had stopped counting; his head was slumped over the money.

‘You’ve drugged us,’ Nestor said and reached for the knife in his leg sheath. He had time to register that he was patting the wrong leg before he saw the base of the lamp coming towards him. Then everything went black.

Hugo Nestor had always loved music. And he didn’t mean the kind of noise or childish series of notes which common people called music, but music for adults, thinking people. Richard Wagner. Chromatic scale. Twelve half-tones with frequency ratios based on the 12th root of 2. Clean, pure mathematics, harmony, German order. But the sound he was hearing now was the opposite of music. It was discordant, nothing related to anything else, it was chaos. When he had regained consciousness, he had realised he was in a car, in some sort of large bag. He had felt nauseous and dizzy; his hands and feet were tied together with something sharp that cut into his skin — plastic ties probably, he sometimes used them on the girls.

When the car had stopped, he had been lifted out and realised he must be inside a soft case with wheels. Half lying down, half standing upright, he had been pushed and dragged across a rugged terrain. He had heard whoever was pulling the suitcase pant and wheeze. Nestor had called out to him, made financial offers in return for his release, but had got no response.

The next sound he had heard was this unmusical, atonal hullabaloo which only rose in strength. And which he recognised the moment the suitcase was put down and he lay on his back, feeling the ground underneath him and knowing — because he had now worked out where he was — that the cold water seeping through the suitcase and then through his suit was marsh water. Dogs. The short, choppy barking of Argentine mastiffs.

What he didn’t know was what it was all about. Who the guy was and why this was happening to him. Was it a turf war? Was the guy who had abducted him the same guy who had killed Kalle? But why go about it this way?

The suitcase was unzipped and Nestor squinted, blinded by the light from the torch pointing straight at his face.

A hand grabbed his neck and pulled him to his feet.

Nestor opened his eyes and saw a pistol gleam dully in the light. The dogs’ barking had suddenly stopped.

‘Who was the mole?’ said the voice behind the torch.

‘What?’

‘Who was the mole? The police thought it was Ab Lofthus.’

Hugo Nestor narrowed his eyes against the light. ‘I don’t know. You might as well shoot me, I don’t know.’

‘Who does know?’

‘No one. None of us. Perhaps someone in the police.’

The torch was lowered and Nestor saw that it was the lawyer guy. He had taken off his glasses.

‘You need to be punished,’ he said. ‘Would you like to ease your conscience first?’

What was he talking about? He sounded like a priest. Was this about that chaplain they had killed? But he was only a corrupt paedophile — surely no one would want to avenge him?

‘I’ve no regrets,’ Nestor said. ‘Just get it over with.’

He felt strangely calm. Perhaps it was a side effect of the drug. Or that he had thought it through enough times already, accepted that his life would probably end like this, with a bullet to the brain.

‘Not even for that girl you allowed to get mauled before you cut her throat? With this knife. .?’

Nestor blinked as the torchlight bounced off the curved blade. His own Arabic knife.

‘Don’t. .’

‘Where do you keep the girls, Nestor?’

The girls? Was that what he wanted, to take over the trafficking? Nestor tried to concentrate. But it was difficult, his brain was foggy.

‘Do you promise not to shoot me if I tell you?’ he asked, even though he realised that a yes would have about as much credibility as the German mark did in 1923.

‘Yes,’ the guy said.

So why did Nestor still believe him? Why did he believe the promise that he wouldn’t be shot from a guy who had done nothing but lie from the moment he appeared at Vermont? It had to be his crazy brain clinging to this last straw. Because there was nothing else, nothing but this foolish hope in a dog kennel in a forest at night: that the guy who had abducted him was telling the truth.

‘Enerhauggata 96.’

‘Thank you so much,’ the guy said and stuck the pistol into the waistband of his trousers.

Thank you so much?

The guy had taken out his mobile and was entering some information from a yellow Post-it note, a phone number, probably. The display lit up his face and it occurred to Nestor that he might be a priest after all. A priest who didn’t lie. A contradiction in terms, obviously, but he was convinced that such priests existed, who weren’t aware that they were lying. He carried on pressing keys. A text message. He sent it with a final push of the buttons. Then he slipped the mobile into his pocket and looked at Nestor.

‘You’ve done a good deed, Nestor, there is a chance they might be rescued now,’ he said. ‘I thought you would want to know that before you. .’

Before I what? Nestor gulped. The guy had promised not to kill him! Had. . Wait. He had promised not to shoot him. The light from the torch was now pointing straight at the padlock to the enclosure. The guy inserted a key into the lock. Nestor could hear the dogs now. Not barking, only a barely audible, but harmonised bass. A muted growl that came from the pits of their stomachs and rose in volume, tone and pitch, hushed and controlled like Wagner’s contrapuntal music. And no drugs could suppress his fear now. Fear that felt like being hosed down with icy water. If only the pressure could have washed him away, but this man was on the inside, inside him, hosing down the inside of his head and body. There was no escape. It was Hugo Nestor himself who was holding the hose.

Fidel Lae sat in the darkness, staring. He had stopped moving or making a sound. Only curled up in an attempt to keep warm and control his shaking. He recognised the two men’s voices. One was the man who had appeared out of nowhere and locked him up more than twenty-four hours ago. Fidel had barely eaten any of the dog food, only drunk the water. And shivered with cold. Even on a summer night the chill eats its way into your body, petrifies it, chases you around. He had screamed for help until his throat felt raw and he had no voice left, until blood and not saliva moistened his throat and the water he had drunk offered no relief, but stung and burned like alcohol. When he heard the car, he had tried screaming again, but started sobbing when his voice made no sound; it merely grated like a rusty engine.

Then he could tell from the dogs that someone was approaching. He had hoped. And prayed. And finally seen the silhouette against the summer-night sky, seen that he was back. The man who had floated over the moor yesterday was now bent double as he dragged something along. A suitcase. With a living human being inside. A man who stood with his hands tied behind his back and his feet pressed so close together that he clearly had problems keeping his balance when he was put in front of the gate to the enclosure where Fidel was.

Hugo Nestor.

They were only four metres from Fidel’s cage, and yet he couldn’t hear what they were talking about. The man unlocked the padlock and put his hand on Nestor’s head as if blessing him. He said something. Then he gave Nestor’s head a little push. The plump man in the suit screamed briefly, then he fell backwards and hit the gate, which opened inwards. The dogs stirred. The man quickly pushed Nestor’s feet inside and closed the gate. The dogs hesitated. Then Ghostbuster seemed to jerk and started moving. Fidel watched the white dogs as they pounced on Nestor. Their movements were so silent that he could clearly hear the chomping jaws, the sound of flesh being torn, the almost ecstatic growling and then Nestor’s scream. A single, quivering, strangely pure note that rose towards the light Nordic sky where Fidel could see insects dance. Then the note was suddenly cut short and Fidel saw something else rise, it looked like a swarm coming towards him and he felt the spray of tiny warm droplets and knew what it was because he had himself cut the artery of a still living elk on a hunting trip. Fidel wiped his face with the sleeve of his jacket and looked away. He saw that the man outside the cage had also turned away. Saw his shoulders shake. As if he was crying.