Phantom(123)

‘Say my name one more time,’ Harry whispered and felt himself forcing out the words, ‘and I’ll plaster your head against the wall with the wrong end of the gun.’

With quaking hands Nybakk unlocked the shackle on her foot while Irene stared into the distance, stiff and apathetic, as though none of this concerned her.

‘Irene,’ Harry said. ‘Irene!’

She seemed to wake up, and looked at him.

‘Get out of here,’ he said.

She pinched her eyes as if it cost her every ounce of concentration to interpret the sounds he had made, to convert the words into meaning. And actions. She walked past him and into the cellar passage with a slow, fixed somnambulist gait.

Nybakk had sat down on the mattress and pulled up his trouser leg. He was trying to attach the narrow shackle over his fat white calf.

‘I …’

‘Round your wrist,’ Harry said.

Nybakk obeyed, and Harry jerked the chain to check it was tight enough.

‘Take off the ring and give to me.’

‘Why? It’s just cheap tat—’

‘Because it’s not yours.’

Nybakk coaxed the ring off and passed it to Harry.

‘I know nothing,’ he said.

‘About what?’ Harry asked.

‘About what I know you’re going to ask. About Dubai. I’ve met him twice, but both times I was led there blindfolded, so I don’t know where I was. His two Russians came here and collected goods twice a week, but I never heard any names mentioned. Listen, if it’s money you want I’ve—’

‘Was that it?’

‘Was that what?’

‘Everything. Was it for money?’

Nybakk blinked a couple of times. Shrugged. Harry waited. And then a kind of weary smile flitted across Nybakk’s face. ‘What do you think, Harry?’

He motioned towards his foot.

Harry didn’t answer. Didn’t know if he wanted to hear. He might understand. That for two guys growing up in Oppsal, under the same conditions by and large, an apparent bagatelle of a congenital defect can make life dramatically different for one of them. A few bones out of line, turning the foot inwards. Pes equinovarus. Horse foot. Because the way someone with a club foot walks is redolent of a horse tiptoeing. A defect which gives you a slightly worse start in life, for which you find ways to compensate, or you don’t. Which means you have to compensate a bit more to become Mr Popular, the one they want: the boy who leads out the class team, the cool dude who has cool pals and the girl in the row by the window, the one whose smile makes your heart explode, even though the smile isn’t for you. Stig Nybakk had limped through life, unnoticed. So unnoticed Harry couldn’t remember him. And it had gone reasonably well. He’d got himself an education, worked hard, been made head of a department, had even begun to lead the class team himself. But the essential ingredient was missing. The girl from the row by the window. She was still smiling at the others.

Rich. He had to become rich.

Because money is like cosmetics, it conceals everything, it gets you everything, including those things which it is said are not for sale: respect, admiration, love. You just had to look around; beauty marries money every time. So now it was his turn, Stig Nybakk’s, Club Foot’s.

He had invented violin, and the world ought to be at his feet. So why didn’t she want him? Why did she turn away in barely concealed disgust even though she knew – knew – that he was already a rich man and would be richer with every week that passed. Was it because there was someone else she was thinking about, the one who had given her the foolish tawdry ring she wore on her finger? It was unjust, he had worked hard, tirelessly, to fulfil the criteria in order to be loved, and now she had to love him. So he had taken her. Snatched her from the row by the window. Shackled her here, so that she would never disappear again. And to complete the forced marriage he had taken her ring and put it on his own finger.

The cheap ring Irene had been given by Oleg, who in turn had stolen it from his mother, who in turn had been given it by Harry, who in turn had bought it at a street market, where in turn … it was like the Norwegian children’s song: ‘Take the Ring and Let It Wander’. Harry stroked the black nick in the ring’s gilt surface. He had been observant and yet blind.

Observant the first time he had met Stig Nybakk and said: ‘The ring. I used to have an identical one.’

And blind because he hadn’t reflected on what was identical.

The nick in the copper that had gone black.

It was only when he had seen Martine’s wedding ring and heard her say he was the only person in the world who would buy a tacky ring that he had linked Oleg with Nybakk.