Was he getting the tattoo before the murder because, deep down, he was afraid? So afraid he was not sure he would be able to go through with it? That was why he had to have the tattoo now, to burn all the bridges behind him, remove all possibilities of a retreat so that he had to carry out the murder? No Siberian urka can live with a lie carved into his skin, that goes without saying. And he had been happy, he knew that he had been happy, so what were these thoughts, where did they come from?
He knew where they came from.
The dope seller. The boy with the Arsenal shirt.
He had started to appear in his dreams.
‘Yes, let’s begin,’ Sergey said.
17
‘THE DOCTOR RECKONS Oleg will be on his feet again within a few days,’ Rakel said. She was leaning against the fridge holding a cup of tea.
‘Then he’ll have to be moved to somewhere absolutely no one can get their hands on him,’ Harry said.
He was standing by her kitchen window and looking down on the town, where the cars of the afternoon rush hour were crawling like glow-worms along the main roads.
‘The police must have such places for witness protection,’ she said.
Rakel had not become hysterical. She had taken the news of the knife attack on Oleg with a kind of resigned composure. As though it was something she had been half expecting. At the same time Harry could see the indignation on her face. Her fight face.
‘He has to be in a prison, but I’ll talk to the public prosecutor about a move,’ Hans Christian Simonsen said. He had come as soon as Rakel had rung, and he sat at the kitchen table with circles of sweat under the arms of his shirt.
‘See if you can circumvent official channels,’ Harry said.
‘What do you mean?’ the solicitor asked.
‘The doors were unlocked, so at least one of the prison guards must have been in on this. As long as we’re in the dark about who was involved, we have to assume that everyone could have been.’
‘Aren’t you being a touch paranoid now?’
‘Paranoia saves lives,’ Harry said. ‘Can you fix that, Simonsen?’
‘I’ll see what I can do. What about where he is now?’
‘He’s in Ullevål Hospital, and I’ve made sure there are two officers I trust looking after him. One more thing: Oleg’s attacker is in hospital, but he will end up with restricted rights afterwards.’
‘No post or visitors?’ Simonsen asked.
‘Yep. Can you make sure we find out what he says in his statement to the police or his solicitor?’
‘That’s trickier.’ Simonsen scratched his head.
‘They probably won’t get a word out of him, but try anyway,’ Harry said, buttoning his coat.
‘Where are you going?’ Rakel asked, holding his arm.
‘To the source,’ Harry said.
It was eight o’clock in the evening, and the traffic in the capital of the country with the world’s shortest working day had eased long ago. The boy standing on the steps at the bottom of Tollbugata was wearing shirt number 23. Arshavin. He had his hoodie drawn over his head and wore a pair of oversized white Air Jordan trainers. The Girbaud jeans were ironed and so stiff they could almost stand up by themselves. Full gangsta gear, everything was copied down to the last detail from the latest Rick Ross video, and Harry assumed that when the trousers slipped down the right boxer shorts would be revealed, no scars from knives or bullets, but at least one violence-glorifying tattoo.
Harry walked over to him.
‘Violin, a quarter.’
The boy looked down at Harry without taking his hands from the pockets of his zip hoodie and nodded.
‘Well?’ Harry said.
‘You’ll have to wait, boraz.’ The boy spoke with a Pakistani accent which Harry presumed he dropped when he was eating his mother’s meatballs in their one hundred per cent Norwegian home.
‘I haven’t got time to wait for you to get a group together.’
‘Chillax, it’ll be quick.’
‘I’ll pay you a hundred more.’
The boy measured Harry with his eyes. And Harry knew roughly what he was thinking: an ugly businessman in a weird suit, regulated consumption, scared to death that colleagues and family will chance by. A man asking to be screwed.
‘Six hundred,’ the boy said.
Harry sighed and nodded.
‘Idra,’ the boy said and began to walk.
Harry presumed the word meant he had to follow.
They rounded the corner and went through an open gate into a backyard. The dope man was black, probably a North African, and he was leaning against a stack of wooden pallets. His head was bobbing up and down to the beat of the music from an iPod. One earplug hung down by his side.