‘And this Oleg is the only other person you’ve spoken to?’ he asked.
‘Cross my heart.’
‘Have you got any weapons?’
‘An Odessa between us.’
‘Eh?’
‘The H&M version of a Stechkin.’
‘OK. It’s unlikely the detectives will give the number of kilos a thought if there are no signs of a break-in, but I suppose you’re scared Odin will come after you?’
‘No,’ I said, ‘I don’t give a shit about Odin. It’s my boss I’m scared of. I have no idea how, but I just know he knows to the gram how much heroin they have stored there.’
‘I want half,’ he said. ‘You and Boris can share the rest.’
‘Oleg.’
‘Be happy I’ve got a bad memory. And it works both ways. It’ll take me half a day to find you and nothing to destroy you.’ He lovingly rolled the ‘r’ in destroy.
It was Oleg who worked out how we should camouflage the robbery. It was so simple and obvious I don’t know why I hadn’t thought of it myself.
‘We swap what we pinch with potato flour. The police will report how many kilos they confiscate, not the purity of its content, right?’
The plan was, as I said, as brilliant as it was simple.
The same night that Odin and the old boy were having a birthday party at McDonald’s and discussing the price of violin in Drammen and Lillestrøm, Berntsen, Oleg and I were standing in the darkness outside the fence round the bikers’ clubhouse in Alnabru. Berntsen had taken control, and we were wearing nylon stockings, black jackets and gloves. In our rucksacks we had shooters, a drill, a screwdriver, a jemmy and six kilos’ worth of plastic bags packed with potato flour. Oleg and I had explained where Los Lobos had placed their surveillance cameras, but by climbing over the fence and running to the wall on the left we stayed in the blind spot the whole time. We knew that we could make as much noise as we wanted as the heavy traffic on the E6 below would drown everything, so Berntsen drilled through the wall while Oleg kept lookout and I hummed ‘Been Caught Stealing’, which was on the soundtrack of Stein’s GTA game, and he said it was by a band called Jane’s Addiction, and I remembered because it was a cool name, cooler than the songs actually. Oleg and I were in familiar territory and the layout of the clubhouse was simple: it consisted of one large lounge area. But as all the windows had been cleverly covered with wooden shutters the plan was to drill a peephole, then we would be sure the clubhouse was unoccupied before we entered. Berntsen had insisted on this, he had refused to believe that Odin would leave twenty kilos of heroin, with a street value of twenty-five million, unguarded. We knew Odin better, but gave in. Safety first.
‘There we are,’ Berntsen said, holding the drill, which died with a snarl.
I put my eye to the hole. Couldn’t see fuck. Either someone had switched off the light or else we hadn’t drilled right through. I turned to Berntsen who was wiping the drill. ‘What kind of bloody insulation is this?’ he said, holding up a finger. It looked like egg yolk and fricking hair.
We walked a couple of metres further down and bored a new hole. I peered through. And there was the good old clubhouse. With the same old leather chairs, the same bar and the same picture of Karen McDougal, Playmate of the Year, arranged over some customised motorbike. I never found out what gave them the biggest hard-on: women or bikes.
‘All clear,’ I said.
The back door was festooned with hinges and locks.
‘I thought you said there was one lock!’ Berntsen said.
‘So there was,’ I said. ‘Odin’s obviously developing a bit of paranoia.’
The plan had been to drill the lock off and screw it back on before leaving, so that there would be no signs of a break-in. That was still possible but not in the time we had calculated. We got down to work.
After twenty minutes Oleg checked his watch and said we had to hurry. We didn’t know exactly when the raid was due, only that it would happen at some point after the arrests, and the arrests would have to take place pretty quickly as Odin wouldn’t want to hang around when he realised the old boy wasn’t coming.
We spent half an hour cleaning up the crap, three times as much as calculated. We took out our shooters, pulled the stockings down over our faces and went in, Berntsen first. We had hardly got inside the door when he fell onto one knee and held the shooter in front of him with both hands like a member of the fricking SWAT team.
A guy was sitting on a chair by the west wall. Odin had left Tutu as a watchdog. In his lap he had a sawn-off shotgun. But the watchdog was sitting with his eyes closed, gob open and head against the wall. Rumours were circulating that Tutu stammered even when he snored, but he was sleeping as sweetly as a baby now.