Cockroaches(115)

He was out for a second. Mustn’t lose consciousness. The radio searched desperately for the station. The first thing he saw was a gold tooth glinting. Harry blinked. It wasn’t a gold tooth; it was the moon reflecting on the blade of a Sami knife. Then the hungry steel arced down toward him.

Harry would never know if he had acted instinctively or if there had been a mental process behind what he did. His left hand rose with fingers spread, straight toward the shiny steel. The knife breached his palm with consummate ease. When the knife was through to the handle, Harry pulled his hand away and kicked with his good leg. He hit his target somewhere in the black blood, Jens folded, groaned and fell sideways into the sand. Harry struggled to his knees. Jens had crawled into the fetal position and was holding both hands to his stomach. He was screaming. With laughter or pain, it was hard to say.

“Fuck, Harry. It hurts so much it’s just fantastic.” He gasped, grunted and laughed in turn.

Harry got to his feet. He looked at the knife protruding through both sides of his hand, unsure what the wisest course of action would be: pull it out or leave it in to stop the blood? He heard something shouted through a megaphone from the street below.

“Do you know what’s going to happen now, Harry?” Jens had closed his eyes.

“Not really.”

Jens paused to collect himself. “Let me explain then. This is going to be a big payday for a whole stack of policemen, lawyers and judges. You bastard, Harry, this is going to cost me.”

“What do you mean?”

“What do I mean? Are you playing the Norwegian Boy Scout again now? Everything can be bought. If you have money. I’ve got money. Besides …” He coughed. “There are a couple of politicians with vested interests in the building industry who do not want to see BERTS go down the pan.”

Harry shook his head. “Not this time, Jens. Not this time.”

Jens bared his teeth in a pained blend of a smile and a grimace. “Want to bet?”

Come on, Harry thought. Don’t do anything you’ll regret, Hole. He looked at his watch, a reflex action in his profession. Time of arrest for the report.

“There’s one thing I was wondering about, Jens. Inspector Crumley thought I was giving too much away when I asked you about Ellem Ltd. Perhaps I was. But you’ve known for a long time that I knew it was you, haven’t you?”

Jens tried to focus on Harry. “A while. That’s why I never understood why you worked so hard to release me from remand. Why, Harry?”

Harry felt dizzy and sat down on one of the toolboxes.

“Well, perhaps it hadn’t occurred to me yet that I knew it was you. Perhaps I wanted to see what card you were going to play next. Perhaps I just wanted to flush you out. I don’t know. What made you think I knew?”

“Someone said.”

“Impossible. I haven’t said a word about it until tonight.”

“Someone knew without you saying.”

“Runa?”

Jens’s cheek was trembling and he had white saliva at the corners of his mouth. “Do you know what, Harry? Runa had what some call intuition. I call it observational prowess. You have to learn to hide your thoughts better, Harry. Don’t open up to the enemy. It’s incredible what a woman is willing to tell you if you threaten to cut off what makes her a woman. You—”

“How did you threaten her?”

“Nipples. I threatened to cut off her nipples. What do you think about that, Harry?”

Harry had lifted his face to the sky and closed his eyes, as though expecting rain.

“Did I say something wrong, Harry?”

Harry felt hot air streaming through his nostrils.

“She was waiting for you, Harry.”

“Which hotel do you stay at when you’re in Oslo?” Harry whispered.

“Runa said you would come and save her, she said you knew who had kidnapped her. She cried like a baby and hit out with her prosthesis. It was quite funny. So—”

The sound of vibrating metal. Clang, clang, clang. They were on their way up the ladder. Harry looked at the knife still in his hand. No. He glanced around. Jens’s voice grated in his ear. A sweet tingle started somewhere down in his stomach, a light hiss in his head, like getting drunk on champagne. Don’t do it, Hole, hold on tight. But he could already feel the ecstasy of free fall. He let go.

The lock on the toolbox gave at the second kick. The pneumatic drill was a Wacker, light, probably no more than twenty kilos, and started at the first press of the button. Jens shut his mouth at once and his eyes widened as his brain gradually grasped what was going to happen.

“Harry, you can’t—”