* * *
'Baksheesh?' Harry screamed down the phone. 'What the hell is baksheesh?'
'Slush fund,' Řystein said. 'No one lifts a finger in this damned country without slush.'
'Fuck!' Harry kicked the table in front of the mirror. The telephone slid off the table and the receiver was tugged out of his hand.
'Hello? Are you there, Harry?' the phone on the floor crackled. Harry felt like leaving it where it was. Going away. Or putting on a Metallica record at full blast. One of the old ones.
'Don't go to pieces now, Harry!' the voice squeaked.
Harry bent down with a straight neck and picked up the receiver. 'Sorry, Řystein. How much did you say they wanted?'
'Twenty thousand Egyptian. Forty thousand Norwegian. Then I'll get the client served on a silver platter, they said.'
'They're screwing us, Řystein.'
'Of course they are. Do we want the client or not?'
'Money's on its way. Make sure you get a receipt, OK?'
Harry lay in bed staring at the ceiling as he waited for the triple dose of painkillers to kick in. The last thing he saw before tumbling into the darkness was a boy sitting up above, dangling his legs and looking down at him.
PART IV
26
D'Ajuda
FRED BAUGESTAD HAD A HANGOVER. HE WAS THIRTY-ONE years old, divorced and worked on Statfjord B oil rig as a roughneck. It was hard work and there was not a sniff of beer while he was on the job, but the money was great, there was a TV in your room, gourmet food and best of all: three weeks on, four weeks off. Some travelled home to their wives and gawped at the walls, some drove taxis or built houses so as not to go mad with boredom and some did what Fred did: went to a hot country and tried to drink themselves to death. Now and again, he wrote a postcard to Karmřy, his daughter, or 'the baby' as he still called her even though she was ten. Or was it eleven? Anyway, that was the only contact he still had with the Continental mainland, and that was enough. The last time he had spoken with his father, he had complained about Fred's mother being arrested for pinching biscuits from Rimi supermarket again. 'I pray for her,' his father had said and wondered if Fred had a Norwegian Bible with him where he was. 'The Book is as indispensable as breakfast, Dad,' Fred had answered. Which was true, as Fred never ate before lunch when he was in d'Ajuda. Unless you consider caipirinhas food. Which was a question of definition since he poured at least four spoonfuls of sugar in every cocktail. Fred Baugestad drank caipirinhas because they were genuinely bad. In Europe the drink had an undeservedly good reputation as it was made with rum or vodka instead of cachaça– the raw bitter Brazilian aguardente distilled from sugar cane, which made the drinking of caipirinhas the penitent act Fred claimed it was meant to be. Both Fred's grandfathers had been alcoholics, and with that kind of genetic make-up he thought it was best to err on the safe side and drink something which was so bad he could never become dependent on it.
Today he had dragged himself to Muhammed's at twelve and taken an espresso and brandy before slowly walking back in the quivering heat along the narrow pitted gravel track between the small, low, relatively white houses. The house he and Roger rented was one of the less white houses. The plaster was chipped, and inside, the grey untreated walls were so permeated by the damp wind blowing in off the Atlantic that you could taste the pungent wall smell by sticking out your tongue. But then, why would you do that, Fred mused. The house was good enough. Three bedrooms, two mattresses, one refrigerator and one stove. Plus a sofa and a tabletop on two Leca blocks in the room they defined as the sitting room since it had an almost square hole in the wall which they called a window. True enough, they should have cleaned up a bit more often–the kitchen was infested with yellow fire ants capable of a terrifying bite–but Fred didn't often go there after the refrigerator was moved to the sitting room. He was lying on the sofa planning his next move of the day when Roger came in.
'Where have you been?' Fred asked.
'At the chemist in Porto,' Roger said with a smile which went right the way round his broad, blotchy head. 'You won't fucking believe what they sell over the counter there. You can get things you can't even get a prescription for in Norway.' He emptied the contents of a plastic bag and began to read the labels aloud.
'Three milligrams of Benzodiazepine. Two milligrams of Flunitrazepam. Shit, we're practically talking Rohypnol!'
Fred didn't answer.
'Bad?' Roger effervesced. 'Haven't you had anything to eat yet?'
'Năo. Just a coffee at Muhammed's. By the way, there was some mysterious guy in there asking Muhammed about Lev.'