The Leopard hh-8 Read online

  Kaja held his gaze. She had expected to panic. But it just didn’t come. Emotionally, she was like the stone in the terrain around them.

  ‘I don’t feel anything,’ she said.

  ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘The others were so frightened that they couldn’t even answer, could only babble. Charlotte Lolles was transfixed, as if in shock. Elias Skog couldn’t keep his language clean. My father cried. Is it mere chaos or is there some reflection? Do you feel sorrow? Remorse? Or relief that you don’t have to put up a fight any more? Look at Lene, for example. She’s given up and is going to her death like the meek lamb she is. How is it with you, Kaja? How much do you long to relinquish control?’

  Kaja could see there was genuine curiosity in his eyes.

  ‘Let me ask you instead how much you longed to gain control, Tony,’ she said, scouring her mouth for moisture. ‘When you killed one person after the other, under the guidance of an invisible person who turned out to be a boy whose tongue you had cut off. Can you tell me that?’

  Tony looked into the middle distance and slowly shook his head, as if answering another question.

  ‘I had no idea until reading on the Net that good old Skai had arrested someone from my village. Ole, no less. Who would have thought he had the guts?’

  ‘The hatred, don’t you mean?’

  Tony took a pistol from his pocket. Checked his watch.

  ‘Harry’s late.’

  ‘He’ll come.’

  Tony laughed. ‘But unfortunately for you minus a pulse. I liked Harry, by the way. Really. Fun to play with. I called him from Ustaoset – he had given me his number. Heard the voicemail say he would have no network coverage for a couple of days. That made me laugh. He was at the cabin in Havass, of course, the old sly boots.’ Tony rested the pistol in one palm while stroking the black steel with the other. ‘I could see it in him when we met at the police station. That he was like me.’

  ‘I doubt that.’

  ‘Oh yes, he is. A driven man. A junkie. A man who does what he must to have what he wants, who walks over dead bodies if need be. Isn’t that right?’

  Kaja didn’t answer.

  Tony checked his watch again. ‘I reckon we’ll have to start without him.’

  He’ll come, Kaja thought. I’ll have to play for time.

  ‘So you did a runner, did you?’ she said. ‘With your father’s passport and teeth?’

  Tony looked at her.

  She knew that he knew what she was doing. And also that he liked it. Telling her. How he had tricked them. They all did.

  ‘Do you know what, Kaja? I wish my father were here to see me now. Here, on the top of my mountain. To see me and understand me. Before I killed him. The way that Lene understands that she must die. The way I hope you understand too, Kaja.’

  She felt it now. The fear. More as a physical pain than a fit of panic that would cause her rational brain to implode. She saw clearly, heard clearly, reasoned clearly. Yes, clearer than ever before, she thought.

  ‘You started killing to hide that you had been unfaithful,’ she said, her voice hoarser now. ‘To safeguard the Galtung millions. But what about the millions you have tricked Lene out of here, are they enough to save your project?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Tony smiled, grasping the butt of the pistol. ‘We’ll have to see. Out.’

  ‘Is it worth it, Tony? Is this really worth all these lives?’

  Kaja gasped as the gun barrel was jabbed into her ribs. Tony’s voice hissed in her ear.

  ‘Look around you, Kaja. This is the cradle of humanity. See what a human life is worth. Some die and even more are born in one unending feverish race, round and round, and one life gives no more sense than any other. But the game makes sense. The passion, the fervour. The gambling addiction, as some idiots call it. It’s everything. It’s like Nyiragongo. It’s all-consuming, all-destroying, but it is a prerequisite of all life. No passion, no meaning, no boiling lava within and everything out here would be stone dead, frozen stiff. Passion, Kaja – have you got any? Or are you a dead volcano, a speck of human dust, summed up in three sentences in a funeral speech?’

  Kaja jerked away from the barrel, and Tony cackled with amusement.

  ‘Are you ready for the wedding, Kaja? Ready to thaw?’

  She smelt the stench of sulphur. The driver had opened the door, watched Kaja with indifference, pointed a short-barrelled gun at her. Even here in the car, ten metres from the edge of the crater, she could feel the overwhelming heat. She didn’t move. The black man leaned in and grasped her arm. She let him pull her without offering any resistance, just made sure she was heavy enough for him to be off balance, so that when she suddenly bounded out he would be caught by surprise. The man was amazingly slight and probably a bit shorter than she was. She struck with her elbow. Knowing it was much more powerful than a fist. Knowing that the neck, the temple, the nose were good targets. The elbow hit something with a crunch, the man fell and dropped his weapon. Kaja lifted her foot. She had learned that the most effective way to neutralise a person on the ground was to trample on the thigh. The combination of a full-bodied stamp from the top and the pressure from the ground underneath will immediately cause such widespread bleeding to the thigh muscles that the person will be rendered incapable of pursuit. The alternative is to stamp on the chest and neck with potentially fatal consequences. She had her eyes fixed on the exposed neck when the moonlight fell on the man’s face. She hesitated for a fraction of a second. He couldn’t have been older than Even.

  Then she felt arms enclosing her from behind, her own arms forced into her sides and the air from her lungs expelled as she was lifted off the ground with her legs kicking helplessly. Tony’s voice close to her ear sounded cheerful. ‘Good, Kaja. Passion. You want to live. I’ll make sure his wages are docked, I promise you.’

  The boy on the ground in front of her got to his feet and grabbed his weapon. The indifference was gone now; a white fury shone in his eyes.

  Tony pressed her hands together behind her back and she felt thin plastic ties being tightened around her wrists.

  ‘So,’ said Tony. ‘May I ask you to be Lene’s maid of honour, froken Solness?’

  And now – at last – it came. The panic. It emptied her brain of all else, rendered everything blank, clean, cruel. Easy. She screamed.

  89

  The Wedding

  Kaja stood at the edge looking down. The scorching air rose, hit her face like a hot breeze. The poisonous smoke had already made her dizzy, but perhaps that was just the tremulous air blurring her vision, making the lava quiver, down there in the abyss where it shone with tinges of yellow and red. A strand of hair fell into her face, but her hands were bound behind her back with the plastic ties. She stood shoulder to shoulder with Lene Galtung who, Kaja assumed, must have been drugged from the way she stood staring in front of her like a sleepwalker. A white-clad, living corpse with only frost and wasteland within. A shop dummy dressed as a bride in the window of a ropery.

  Tony was right behind them. She felt his hand on the small of her back.

  ‘Do you take the man at your side and promise to love, honour and respect him for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness or in health…’ he whispered.

  This wasn’t out of cruelty, he had explained. It was just so practical. There wouldn’t be a trace left of them. Barely a question. People in the Congo go missing every day.

  ‘I hereby declare you married.’

  Kaja mumbled a prayer. She imagined it was a prayer. Until she heard the words: ‘… because it is impossible for me and the person I want to have to be together.’

  The words from Even’s farewell note.

  A car engine roared in a low gear with headlamps scanning the skies. The Range Rover appeared on the other side of the crater.

  ‘And there are the others,’ Tony said. ‘Wave goodbye, there’s good girls.’

  Harry didn’t know what sight would greet him when they turned onto th
e plateau by the crater. Kinzonzi had said that, apart from the girls, Mister Tony had only his chauffeur with him. But that he and Mister Tony were armed with automatic weapons.

  Before they reached the top Harry had offered Saul the chance to be dropped off, but he had declined. ‘I have no family left, Harry. Maybe it is true that you are on the side of the angels. Anyway, you paid for the whole day.’

  They skidded to a halt.

  The headlights pointed across the crater, to the clutch of three standing on the edge. Then they disappeared in a cloud, but Harry had seen them and already summed up the situation: one man with a short-barrelled gun behind the three of them. One parked Range Rover. And no time. Then the cloud wafted past and Harry saw that Tony and the other man were shielding their eyes as they watched the car, as though expecting something.

  ‘Switch off the engine,’ Harry said from the back seat, resting the Marklin on the front seat. ‘But leave the lights on.’

  Saul did as instructed.

  The man in camouflage knelt down with the gun to his shoulder and took aim.

  ‘Flash the lights a couple of times,’ Harry said, putting his eye to the sights. ‘They’re waiting for some signal or other.’

  Harry squeezed his left eye shut. Closed out half the world. Closed out the wan faces, the fact that Kaja was there, that Lene was there with bulging cheeks and shock-blackened eyes, that these seconds counted. Closed out the turquoise eyes examining him as he said the words: ‘I swear.’ Closed out the popping sound of a shot that told him they had sent the wrong signal, closed out the clunk as the bullet hit the car body, followed by another thud. Closed out everything that did not concern the light refraction on the windscreen, the light refraction in the quivering heat above the crater, the bullet’s probable deviation to the right, the same way the clouds of steam were drifting. He knew that now he was being sustained by one thing: adrenalin. Knew the effect of the natural stimulant would be short. It could wear off at any second. But as long as his heart was still supplying blood to the brain, it was the second he needed. For the brain is a fantastic computer. Tony Leike’s head was half hidden by Lene’s, but it was a little higher.

  Harry aimed at Kaja’s pointed teeth. Moved to the gleaming ball between Lene’s lips. Moved the sights up higher. No fine-tuning. Chance. Place your bets, last race.

  A cloud of steam was coming from the left.

  Soon they would be enshrouded in it, and as if he had been granted a second of visual clarity, Harry saw it: that when the cloud had passed no one would be standing there any longer. Harry pressed the trigger. Saw Kaja blink above the cross on the sights.

  I swear.

  He was doomed. At last.

  The inside of the car felt as if it would explode with the sound; his shoulder as if it would be knocked out of joint. There was a small, frostwhite perforation in the windscreen. The blood-red cloud covered everything on the other side of the crater. Harry took a deep, tremulous breath and waited.

  90

  Marlon Brando

  Harry was lying on his back, floating. floating away. Sinking into Lake Kivu while the blood, his and that of others, mingled with the lake’s, became one, disappeared in the universe’s great sleep, and the stars above him were extinguished in the cold, black water. Peace in the depths, silence, nothingness. Until he resurfaced in a bubble of methane gas, a night-blue corpse with Guinea worm-infected flesh that seethed and churned beneath the skin. And he had to get out of Lake Kivu to live. To wait.

  Harry opened his eyes. He could see the hotel balcony above him. He rolled onto his side and swam the few metres to the shore. Rose from the water.

  Soon dawn would break. Soon he would be sitting on the plane back to Oslo. Soon he would be in Gunnar Hagen’s office telling him it was over. That they were gone, gone for ever. That they had failed. So he, too, would try to be gone.

  Trembling, Harry wrapped himself in the large white towel and walked towards the stairs up to his hotel room.

  When the cloud passed, no one was standing by the edge of the crater.

  Harry’s sights had automatically sought the marksman. Found him and he had been on the point of firing. But discovered he was looking at the man’s back, heading for the car. Then the Range Rover had started up, passed them and gone.

  He had moved the sights back to where he had seen Kaja, Tony and Lene. Adjusted the optics. Seen the footprints. Three sets.

  Then he had thrown down the rifle, jumped out of the car and run around the crater with his revolver held in front of him. Had run and prayed. Skidded onto his knees beside them. Already knowing he had lost before he focused.

  Harry unlocked his hotel-room door. Went to the bathroom, removed the wet bandage around his head and applied a new one he had been given in reception. The temporary stitches held his cheek together; it was a different matter with his jaw. His bag was packed and ready by the bed. The clothes he would travel in hung over the chair. He took the cigarette pack out of his trouser pocket, went onto the balcony and sat down on one of the plastic chairs. The cold dulled the pain in his jaw and cheek. He looked out over the shimmering silver lake he would never see again as long as he lived.

  She was dead. The lead bullet with a diameter of one and a half centimetres had pierced her right eye, taking with it the right half of her head, taking Tony Leike’s large white front teeth through his skull, opening a crater at the back and spreading everything over an area of a hundred square metres of volcanic rock.

  Harry had spewed up. Spat green mucus on them and staggered backwards.

  He flipped two cigarettes out of the packet. Put them between his lips and felt them bobbing up and down against his chattering teeth. The plane left in four hours. He had arranged to go to the airport with Saul. Harry was so exhausted he could hardly keep his eyes open, yet neither could nor wanted to sleep. The ghosts were refused admission for the first night.

  ‘Marlon Brando,’ she said.

  ‘What?’ Harry replied, lighting the cigarettes and passing her one.

  ‘The macho actor whose name I couldn’t remember. He has the most feminine voice of them all. Woman’s mouth, too. Have you noticed, by the way, that he lisps? It’s not that audible, but it’s there, like a kind of overtone the ear doesn’t perceive as a sound, but the brain registers anyway.’

  ‘I know what you mean,’ Harry said, inhaling and observing her.

  She had been sprayed with blood, tissue, bone fragments and brain matter. It had taken a long time to cut the plastic ties binding her wrists; his fingers had simply not obeyed him. When she was finally free she had got to her feet, while he lay on all fours.

  And he had done nothing to stop her grabbing Tony’s jacket collar and belt, and rolling the body off the edge into the crater. Harry had not heard a sound, only the whisper of the wind. He had watched her looking down into the volcano until she turned to him.

  He nodded. She didn’t need to explain. That was how it had to be done.

  She had cast an enquiring glance at the body of Lene Galtung. But Harry had shaken his head. He had weighed up the practical versus the moral considerations. The diplomatic consequences versus a mother having a grave to visit. The truth versus a lie that might have made life more liveable. Then he had got to his feet. Lifted Lene Galtung, almost collapsing under the weight of the slight, young woman. Stood on the edge of the abyss, closed his eyes, felt the longing, swayed for a second. And then let her go. Opened his eyes and watched her descent. She was already a dot. Then it was swallowed by the smoke.

  ‘People go missing in the Congo every single day,’ Kaja had said on the drive back from the volcano with Saul, and Harry had sat on the back seat holding her.

  He knew it would be a short report. No traces. Vanished. They could be anywhere. And the answer to all the questions they would be asked would be this: people go missing in the Congo every single day. Even when she asked, the woman with the turquoise eyes. Because it would be simplest for them. No body, no in
ternal inquiry, which was routine when officers had fired a shot. No embarrassing international incident. No dropping of the case, at least not at an official level, but the continued search for Leike would just be for appearances’ sake. Lene Galtung would be reported missing. She hadn’t had a plane ticket and the immigration authorities in the Congo hadn’t registered her entry into the country. It was for the best, Hagen would say. For all parties. At any rate, those parties which counted.

  And the woman with the turquoise eyes would nod. Accept what she was told. But she might know anyway, if she listened to what he didn’t say. She could choose. Choose to hear him say her daughter was dead. That he had aimed between Lene’s eyes instead of what he assumed would be accurate, a bit further to the right. But he had wanted to be sure the bullet didn’t deviate so far to the right that he might shoot his colleague, the woman with whom he was working on this job. She could choose that or the lie that pushed sound waves up ahead, the ones that gave hope instead of a grave.

  They changed planes in Kampala.

  Sat in hard plastic chairs by the gate watching planes coming and going until Kaja fell asleep and her head slid down onto Harry’s shoulder.

  She was woken by something happening. She didn’t know what, but something had changed. The room temperature. The rhythm of Harry’s heartbeat. Or the lines in his drained, pale face. She saw his hand putting the phone back in his jacket pocket.

  ‘Who was it?’ she asked.

  ‘Rikshospital,’ Harry said, his eyes going absent to her, slipping past her, disappearing out of the panoramic windows, to the horizon of the concrete runway and the dazzling, light blue sky.