Nemesis

'Just the name of your friend and the bank in Egypt where he wants to pick up the money.'

'You'll have them in an hour.' Harry got to his feet.

Raskol rubbed his wrists as if he had taken off handcuffs. 'I hope you don't think you understand me, Spiuni.' He said it in a low voice without looking up.

Harry came to a halt. 'What do you mean?'

'I'm a gypsy. My world can be an inverted world. Do you know what God is in Romany?'

'No.'

'Devel. Devil. Strange, isn't it? When you sell your soul, it's good to know who you're selling it to, Spiuni.'

***

Halvorsen thought Harry looked drained.

'Define "drained",' Harry said, leaning back in his office chair. 'Or, in fact, don't.'

When Halvorsen asked Harry how things were going and Harry asked him to define 'going', Halvorsen sighed and left the office to try his luck with Elmer.

Harry dialled the number he had received from Rakel, but again got the Russian voice he assumed was telling him he was generally barking up the wrong tree. So he rang Bjarne Mшller and tried to give his boss the impression he wasn't barking up the wrong tree. Mшller didn't sound convinced.

'I want good news, Harry. Not reports on how you've been spending your time.'

Beate came in to say she had watched the video ten more times and she no longer had any doubt that the Expeditor and Stine Grette knew each other. 'I think the last thing he tells her is that she is going to die. You can see it in her eyes. Defiant and frightened at the same time, just like in the war films where you see resistance fighters lined up ready to be shot.'

Pause.

'Hello?' She waved a hand in front of his eyes. 'You look drained.'

He rang Aune.

'Harry here. How do people react when they know they're going to be executed?'

Aune chuckled. 'They're focused,' he said. 'On time.'

'And frightened? Panic-stricken?'

'That depends. What sort of execution are we talking about?'

'A public execution. In a bank.'

'I see. I'll ring you back in two minutes.'

Harry studied his watch as he waited. It took 120 seconds.

'The process of dying, much like the process of being born, is a very intimate affair,' Aune said. 'The reason people in such situations instinctively have a desire to hide is not just because they feel physically vulnerable. Dying in the sight of others, as in a public execution, is a double punishment as it is an affront to the victim's modesty in the most brutal way conceivable. It was one of the reasons public executions were considered to have a more criminally preventative effect on the population than execution in the solitude of the cell. Some allowances were made, however, such as obliging the executioner to wear a mask. That wasn't, as many think, to conceal the executioner's identity-everyone knew it was the local butcher or rope-maker. The mask was out of consideration for the condemned man, so that he didn't feel a stranger was close to him at the moment of death.'

'Mm. The bank robber was also wearing a mask.'

'The use of masks is a whole field of psychological research. For example, the modern notion that wearing a mask deprives us of freedom can be turned on its head. Masks can depersonalise in a way which allows freedom. To what do you otherwise attribute the popularity of masked balls in Victorian times? Or the use of masks in sexual games? A bank robber, on the other hand, has more prosaic reasons for wearing a mask, of course.'

'Maybe.'

'Maybe?'

'I don't know,' Harry sighed.

'You seem…'

'Tired. See you.'

***

Harry's position on earth slowly moved away from the sun and the afternoons became dark earlier and earlier. The lemons outside Ali's shop shone like small yellow stars and a silent spray of fine rain fell as Harry walked up Sofies gate. The afternoon had been spent arranging the transfer of funds to El Tor. It hadn't been such a major job. He had chatted to Шystein, got his passport number plus the address of the bank beside the hotel where he was staying and phoned the information through to the prison inmates' newspaper the Returning Phantom, where Raskol was working on an article about Sun Tzu. Then it was simply a question of waiting.

Harry had arrived at the front door and was about to search for keys when he heard a padding of feet on the pavement behind him. He didn't turn.

Not until he heard the low growl.

In fact, he was not surprised. If you heat up a pressure cooker, you know that sooner or later something has to happen.

The dog's face was as black as the night and contrasted with the whiteness of the bared teeth. The feeble light from the lamp over the front door caught a trickle of saliva hanging off a large canine tooth and it sparkled.

'Sit!' said a familiar voice from the shadows beneath the garage entrance on the other side of the quiet, narrow street. The Rottweiler reluctantly lowered its broad, muscular hindquarters onto the wet tarmac, but its shiny brown eyes, the furthest thing from 'puppy-dog eyes' you could imagine, never left Harry.

The shadow from the cap fell across the approaching man's face.

'Good evening, Harry. Frightened of dogs?'

Harry looked down at the red jaws in front of him. A fragment of trivia floated to the surface. The Romans had used the Rottweiler's forefathers in the conquest of Europe. 'No, what do you want?'

'To make you an offer. An offer you…what's the phrase again?'

'That's fine, just make me the offer, Albu.'

'Truce.' Arne Albu flipped up the peak of his cap. He tried his boyish smile, but it didn't sit as well as the previous time. 'You keep away from me and I'll keep away from you.'

'Interesting. And what would you do to me, Albu?'

Albu nodded towards the Rottweiler, which was not sitting but on its haunches ready to pounce. 'I have my methods. And I'm not completely without resources.'

'Mm.' Harry patted his jacket pocket for cigarettes, but stopped when the growling became menacing. 'You look drained, Albu. Is all the running tiring you?'

Albu shook his head. 'It's not me who's running, Harry. It's you.'

'Oh? Vague threats against a police officer in a public place. I call that signs of fatigue. Why don't you want to play any more?'

'Play? Is that how you see it? A kind of ludo with human fate.'

Harry saw the anger in Arne Albu's eyes. Something else, too. His jaw was working and the blood vessels in the temples and forehead stood out. It was desperation.

'Do you realise what you've done?' he almost whispered, no longer making any attempt to smile. 'She's left me. She's…taken the children and gone. Because of a petty affair. Anna didn't mean a thing to me any more.'

Arne Albu stood close to Harry. 'Anna and I met when a friend of mine was showing me round his gallery and she happened to have a private viewing there. I bought two of her paintings, I don't really know why. I said they were for the office. Of course they were never hung up anywhere. When I went to fetch the pictures the next day, Anna and I fell into conversation and suddenly I had invited her to lunch. Then it was dinner. And two weeks later a weekend trip to Berlin. Things got out of hand. I was stuck and didn't even make an attempt to extricate myself. Not until Vigdis discovered what was going on and threatened to leave me.'

His voice had begun to tremble.

'I promised Vigdis it was just a one-off, an idiotic infatuation men of my age occasionally pursue when they meet a young woman. She reminds them what it had been like once. To be young, strong and independent. But you aren't any more. Independent, least of all. When you have children, you'll know…'

His voice gave way and he was breathing heavily. He buried his hands in his coat pockets and went on.