It would not be the first time Marco stole from someone lying prone on the ground, often the last dregs of the night’s drunks. This was easy enough, but here he was forced to wait until members of the hooting crowd that had gathered pulled the flailing mastodon away from his hapless victim. It gave Samuel a few seconds to get to his feet and stagger toward safety.
The tattooed roughneck bellowed that the little thief ought to be arrested and thrown in jail, but the onlookers showed mercy and Marco moved in and slipped his hand into Samuel’s jacket pocket as the kid pushed through the throng to get away. Even if he noticed anything, his instinct to flee would overrule all else.
All he wanted was to get away.
The big man was still ranting and raving, and Marco didn’t hang around to be thanked or accept a reward.
The contents of the locker at the Black Diamond were reward enough.
–
Back in his hideout at the House of Industry he emptied the shopping bags onto the concrete floor. For a moment he sat staring at the many items. They seemed so alive in the bleak surroundings, shades of color against the cold, gray concrete. He triumphantly removed the banknotes from the wallets without so much as glancing at credit cards or IDs. A quick count came to more than nine thousand kroner in five different currencies.
The sudden rush he felt sparked a brief outburst of laughter, an expression of relief that echoed gaily against the bare walls until his eyes once again settled on the pile of wallets, mobile phones, and watches in front of him.
Then all at once he became still inside. The dark concrete contours around him towered accusingly above his head. The many lit-up windows of the Palace Hotel and the countless diodes streaming Politiken’s news headlines on the facade across the square felt like reproachful eyes, like stabbing searchlights. Here lay the property of all these people. Leather wallets and purses, mobile phones with greasy finger marks that weren’t his, and no matter who in the first instance had stolen them, he knew at that moment he would be unable to capitalize on Romeo’s and Samuel’s thieving without becoming an accomplice.
It was an ugly feeling, as repulsive as dog mess on the sole of his shoe. At that moment he was a nobody. Just a simple lowdown thief like the rest of them, and though nine thousand kroner was a lot of money and would get him by for a long time, the day would inevitably come when it all ran out and he would have to become a thief again.
Who was he kidding?
Only then did he realize how impossible his life had become.
The hatred that had been latent within him from the first day Zola forced him to steal on the streets now flared up inside, kindling a thirst for vengeance that felt stronger than ever before.
He was a thief and would always be as long as the clan existed. Zola would still have his hooks in him wherever he went.
Marco clenched his fists and stared up at the concrete above his head as he imagined Stark’s corpse with its empty eye sockets, Tilde and her gentle voice, and the policeman called Carl who no doubt wanted to get in touch with him. All these shadows lingering above him and all the nasty ones lurking behind his back could vanish at once if he now did the right thing.
There was no longer any doubt. Zola and his clan had to be eliminated.
23
“I suppose the two of you were expecting to be received with a fanfare,” said Rose, skewering Assad in the gut with a rolled-up sheet of paper. “With Carl you never know what he’ll do, but I’d never have thought it of you, Assad. You knew perfectly well Malene was mine, and now here she is phoning me up while I’m at the ministry, telling me how you came barging in and put the screws on the two of them. What do you think you’re playing at?”
“That’s not quite how it happened, Rose,” Assad ventured, clearly poised to get the hell out with his prayer mat before her next sentence detonated.
Carl caught himself smirking, regardless of how unfair it was. “I’m the one you should be giving a tongue-lashing,” he pointed out. “Assad said we ought to have taken you with us, but it just didn’t turn out.”
Rose snorted. “What good’s a tongue-lashing ever done you, Carl Mørck? You’ve got skin thick as a rhinoceros.” She took hold of his hand and slapped her sheet of paper into his palm. “But if you can do without me there, you can do without me here, too, because that’s me, off. Then you can sit and have a think about what I’ve dug up in the meantime.”
“Ha, ha, that’s it, Rosie, you give ’em what for,” came a voice from the other end of the corridor.
Rose’s hands dropped to her sides as Gordon appeared. It was clear as day she didn’t need his assistance just now, but he carried on anyway.
“I’d say it borders on harassment when your superior doesn’t allow you to interview your own contact.”
A crease appeared on Rose’s brow. Not the kind that expressed perplexity, rather a line of demarcation, and woe betide any man who overstepped it.
“Stop, Gordon,” she snapped authoritatively, but the idiot was seemingly only capable of grasping a message in extremely small portions.
“But I suppose it’s typical of the older generation of criminal investigators,” he went on, undaunted. “A bit pubescently chauvinistic, the two of them, wouldn’t you agree?”
“Ooh, you’re a bunch of imbeciles, the lot of you!” Rose burst out, not waiting for their protests before disappearing into her office and slamming the door behind her. A bomb-proof postlude to her symphony of self-righteousness.
Carl turned to the culprit. “I’ve got broad shoulders, so this time I’m going to ignore that you’re audacious enough to call me pubescent and a male chauvinist, not to mention lumping me in with the older generation, but you don’t want to be talking to me like that again, do you hear me?”
The moron stared blankly at Carl. Was he brain-dead or just looking for trouble?
“I think perhaps you ought nod at this point, Gordon,” Assad suggested drily.
So he nodded, though barely perceptibly.
“Next, let me ask you to think back to yesterday. Didn’t you understand you were not only way out of line in someone else’s domain but also that we’d rather have a pack of ravenous hyenas on the loose than have you running around down here?”
Gordon didn’t answer. He probably had his own recollections of what had occurred, and they were undoubtedly rather more pleasant.
“OK, in that case I suggest that after Assad and I have knocked you about a bit, you get your ass upstairs to Lars Bjørn and tell him how unreasonable we are down here.”
Carl tapped a cigarette from his pack and lit up in one seamless movement. Seeing the kid abruptly shy away, his gormless mug momentarily obliterated by smoke, was almost enough to save the day.
Gordon was about to protest, until he saw Assad begin to roll up his shirtsleeves. Though he seemed to get the message and immediately retreated out the door like a cowed dog, he didn’t abstain from turning around at a safe distance farther up the corridor to hurl back a string of six-syllable words of Latin origin.
If that boy didn’t start toeing the line soon, it wouldn’t be long before he got hurt.
Carl unrolled the sheet of paper Rose had shoved at him. THE BAKA PROJECT it read at the top in ultra-bold thirty-point Times New Roman. In case anyone should fail to notice.
“Sit down and listen to what she’s written here, Assad, and put another expression on your face while you’re at it. Rose’ll come round, just you wait and see. She knows perfectly well we can’t all charge in like the Light Brigade every time we’re out interviewing people.”
“What is this Light Brigade, Carl?”
Carl jabbed a finger at the sheet in front of him. “Never you mind. It says here that Rose was encouraged to phone this civil servant in Yaoundé. That’s the capital of Cameroon, for your information.” He hadn’t known himself until two minutes ago.