The Redeemer(14)

The bus to the airport should have been here by now. He peered into the mist. The way he did that autumn, crouching beside Bobo and trying in vain to see something behind the white smoke. His job had been to run messages they didn't dare send over the radio link, as the Serbs were tuned to the frequency and didn't miss a thing. And as he was so small, he could run through the trenches at full speed without having to duck. He had told Bobo he wanted to kill tanks. Bobo had shaken his head. 'You're a messenger. These messages are important, sonny. I've got men to take care of the tanks.'

'But they're frightened. I'm not frightened.'

Bobo had raised an eyebrow. 'You're only a nipper.'

'If bullets find me here rather than out there, I don't get any older. And you said yourself that if we don't stop the tanks, they'll take the town.'

Bobo had given him a searching look.

'Let me think about it,' he said in the end. So they had sat in silence scanning the white screen without being able to distinguish between autumn mist and smoke from the ruins of the burning town. Then Bobo had cleared his throat: 'Last night I sent Franjo and Mirko to the gap in the embankment where the tanks come out. The mission was to hide and attach mines to the tanks as they rolled past. You know how they got on?'

He had nodded again. He had seen the bodies of Franjo and Mirko through the binoculars.

'If they'd been smaller, they might have been able to hide in the hollows in the ground,' Bobo said.

The boy had wiped away the snot from under his nose with a hand. 'How do I fix the mines to the tanks?'

At the crack of dawn on the following day he had wriggled back to his own lines, shaking with cold and covered in mud. Behind him, on the embankment, lay two destroyed Serbian tanks with smoke belching out of the open hatches. Bobo had dragged him down into the trench and shouted in triumph: 'To us a little redeemer is born!'

And that same day, when Bobo had dictated the message to be radioed to HQ in the town, he was given the code name that would follow him until the Serbs occupied and razed his home town to ashes, killing Bobo, massacring doctors and patients at the hospital, imprisoning and torturing any who offered resistance. It was a bitter paradox of a name. Given to him by the one person he had not been able to save. Mali spasitelj. The little redeemer.

A red bus appeared from the sea of mist.


The meeting room in the red zone on the sixth floor buzzed with low conversations and muted laughter as Harry approached and saw that he had timed his arrival well. Too late to mingle, eat cake and exchange the jokes and jibes with colleagues that men resort to when they have to say goodbye to someone they appreciate. On time for the presents and the speeches laden with too many pompous words men feel emboldened to use when they are in front of an audience and not in private.

Harry took stock of the crowd and found the three faces he could rely on to be friendly. His departing boss Bjarne Møller. Police Officer Halvorsen. And Beate Lønn, the young head of Krimteknisk, the forensics department. He did not make eye contact with anyone and no one tried with him. Harry was under no illusions about his popularity in Crime Squad. Møller had once said there was only one thing people disliked more than a sullen alcoholic, and that was a tall, sullen alcoholic. Harry stood one metre and ninety-two centimetres of sullen alcoholic, and the fact that he was a brilliant detective mildly mitigated in his favour, but no more than that. Everyone knew that had it not been for Bjarne Møller's protective wing, Harry would have been off the force years ago. And now that Møller was going, everyone also knew that top brass were just waiting for him to step out of line. Paradoxically, what was protecting him now was the same thing that stamped him as an eternal outsider: the fact that he had brought down one of their own. The Prince. Tom Waaler, an inspector in Crime Squad, one of the men behind the extensive gun-running operation in Oslo for the last eight years. Tom Waaler had ended his days in a pool of blood in the basement of a residential tower block in Kampen. In a brief ceremony in the canteen three weeks later the Chief Superintendent had, through clenched teeth, acknowledged Harry's contribution to cleaning up their own ranks. And Harry had thanked him.

'Thank you,' he had said, running his eyes across the assembled officers to check if anyone's met his. In fact, he had meant to restrict his speech to these two words, but the sight of averted faces and sardonic smiles had whipped up a sudden fury in him, and he had added: 'I suppose this will make it a bit more difficult for someone to give me the boot now. The press might believe that the person in question is doing it out of fear that I will be after him as well.'

And then they had looked at him. In disbelief. He had continued nevertheless.