The boy shook his head.
'A foreigner with a camel-hair coat perhaps?' Halvorsen asked as Harry slipped behind the reception desk and opened the guest register.
'The only foreigner we have here is one they brought from the soup bus,' the boy stuttered. 'But he didn't have a camel-hair coat. Just a suit jacket. Rikard Nilsen gave him a winter jacket from the storehouse.'
'Did he ring from here?' Harry called from behind the desk.
'He used the phone in the office behind you.'
'Time?'
'Approx half past eleven.'
'Matches the call to Zagreb,' Halvorsen murmured.
'Is he in?' Harry asked.
'Don't know. He took the key with him and I've been asleep.'
'Have you got a master key?'
The boy nodded, unhooked a key from the bunch he had attached to his belt and put it in Harry's outstretched hand.
'Room number?'
'Twenty-six. Up the stairs. At the end of the corridor.'
Harry had already set off. The uniformed policeman followed close behind with both hands on the machine gun.
'Stay in your room until this is over,' Halvorsen said to the boy as he pulled out his Smith & Wesson revolver, winked and patted him on the shoulder.
He unlocked the door and noted that reception was unmanned. Natural enough. As natural as a police car occupied by a policeman parked further up the street. After all, he had just discovered first-hand that this was a criminal area.
He trudged up the stairs, and as he rounded the corner of the corridor he heard a crackle he recognised from the bunkers in Vukovar – a walkie-talkie.
He glanced up. At the end of the corridor, by the door to his room, stood two men in plain clothes and one uniformed policeman holding a machine gun. Straight away he recognised one of the plain-clothes men with his hand on the door handle. The uniformed policeman raised the walkie-talkie and spoke quietly into it.
The other two were facing him. It was too late to retreat.
He nodded to them, stopped in front of room 22 and shook his head as if to show his despair at the increasing criminality in the neighbourhood while pretending to rummage through his pockets for his room key. From the corner of his eye he watched the policeman from the reception queue at Scandia Hotel push open the door to the room without a sound, closely followed by the other two.
As soon as they were out of sight he went back down the way he had come. Took the stairs in two strides. He had noted all the exits – as he always did – when he arrived in the white bus earlier in the evening. For an instant he wondered about the back door leading into the garden, but it was too obvious. Unless he was very much mistaken, they would have placed a policeman there. His best chance was the main entrance. He walked out and turned left, straight towards the police car. On that route there was only one of them. If he managed to slip past he could go down to the river and the darkness.
'Fuck, fuck, fuck!' Harry shouted, on finding the room empty.
'Perhaps he's gone out for a walk,' Halvorsen said.
They both turned to the driver. He hadn't said anything, but the walkie-talkie on his chest was speaking. 'It's the same guy I saw going in a moment ago. Now he's coming out again. He's coming towards me.'
Harry breathed in the air. There was a particular perfumed smell in the room which he vaguely recognised.
'That's him,' Harry said. 'He tricked us.'
'That's him,' the driver said into the microphone, running after Harry who was already out of the door.
'Fantastic. I've got him,' the radio crackled. 'Out.'
'No!' Harry shouted as they stormed down the corridor. 'Don't try to stop him. Wait for us!'
The driver repeated the order into the mike, but received a wordless hiss in response.
He saw the door of the police car open and a young uniformed officer step out under the street light with a gun.
'Halt!' shouted the man, standing with legs apart and the gun pointed at him. Inexperienced, he thought. There was almost fifty metres of darkened street between them, and unlike the young mugger under the bridge this policeman was not canny enough to wait until the victim's escape routes were cut off. For the second time that night he took out his Llama Minimax. And instead of making off he began to run straight towards the policeman.
'Halt!' repeated the police officer.
The distance had shrunk to thirty metres. Twenty metres.
He raised his gun and shot.
People tend to overestimate the chances of hitting another person at distances over ten metres. On the other hand, they often underestimate the psychological effect of the sound, of the explosion combined with the pinging of lead against something close by. When the bullet hit the car windscreen, which went white then collapsed, the same thing happened to the policeman. He went white and sank to his knees as his fingers tried to cling to the rather too heavy Jericho 941.
Harry and Halvorsen arrived in Heimdalsgata at the same time.