The Mammoth Book Best International Crime Read online

  “So they caught him?”

  “With a little help from me. The idiot wore red Nikes, so on my way out to the airport I made an anonymous call, told the cops I’d seen a suspicious-looking guy in red sneakers coming out of such-and-such an address. I didn’t want to get involved, I said, but it was my civic responsibility to call it in – and they pulled up like five minutes later and hauled him in for questioning. Seemed a shame to leave all that beautiful money behind, so I brought most of it with me. You have any idea how weird cash feels when it’s frozen?”

  I rolled over and gave Ivo a deep soul kiss. His sigh of satisfaction had something almost animalistic to it.

  “I left a little behind for Marcel, but I wonder if he’ll ever get the chance to spend it …”

  Ivo sat up. “You want another drink, Aletta?”

  “White wine,” I said.

  He got out of bed and went off to the kitchen. He acted tough, but I could tell from the way he walked that he’d be as easy as Marcel.

  Yes, he’d do for a while.

  And it’d be nice to have a temp with money of his own for a change.

  Translation by Josh Pachter

  Serum

  Jo Nesbø

  Somewhere a bird screeched. A harsh, ugly sound. Or maybe it was some other animal. Ken didn’t know. He held the glass tube up towards the white sun, stuck the needle through the plastic seal, and drew up the plunger, so that the yellowish liquid was sucked into the syringe. A drop of sweat found its way between his bushy eyebrows, and he cursed under his breath when the salt burnt in his eye.

  The buzz of insects, which had always been deafening, now seemed to increase. He looked at his father, sitting with his back against a grey tree trunk. His skin seemed to become one with the bark. Splotches of light played over his face and khaki shirt, as if he were sitting under a disco ball in one of Ken’s favourite clubs in London. In fact, he sat beside a river in eastern Botswana, and stared up into the crown of the tree, where the sun was being filtered through the quivering leaves, of what Ken Abott did not know was an Acacia xanthophloea, a fever tree. Ken Abott didn’t know very much of anything about the burning hot, green and nightmarish world surrounding him. He knew only that he had very little time left to save the life of the person he valued most here on earth.

  Stan Abott had never made big plans for his son. He had seen far too many tragic examples of what the pressure of upper-class expectations did to the children. He didn’t need to look far from home. He didn’t even need to look as far as his boarding school friends who hadn’t become as successful as hoped. The ones who had emptied bottle after bottle, in order to dare to make the jump from their penthouse apartments in Kensington or Hampstead, five storeys down to the pavement. A pavement that was just as hard there as in Brixton and Tottenham. He didn’t even have to look as far as Archie, a nephew he had last seen tangled in blood-spotted sheets, and disposable syringes, in a hotel room in Amsterdam. Archie had already had the look of one who had been kissed on the mouth by the angel of death. He refused to return home and had carelessly pointed a revolver in Stan’s direction, but in such a way that Stan had understood Archie couldn’t have cared less where it had been pointed when he pulled the trigger.

  No, Stan did not need to look far. It was enough to look in the mirror.

  For nearly thirty years, he had been an unhappy publisher who issued books written by idiots, which were about idiots, and were purchased by idiots. There seemed to be enough idiots out there, too, for Stan had managed to triple what had already been a substantial family fortune, in the course of his career. This had pleased his wife, Emma, far more than it had himself. He could well remember the warm summer day in Cornwall when they had wed, but he had forgotten why. Perhaps she had just been at the right place at the right time and from the right type of family. It hadn’t been long before he had wondered what interested him least: the money, the books or his wife. He had brought up the topic of divorce, and three weeks later she had joyously announced to him that she was pregnant. Stan had felt a deep, internal pleasure that lasted for the next ten days. By the time he sat in the waiting room of St Mary’s Hospital, however, his unhappiness had returned. The child had been a boy. They had named him Ken after Stan’s father, handed him over to a nanny, sent him to boarding schools and then suddenly one day he had stood in his father’s office asking for a car.

  Stan had looked up in surprise and studied the young man in front of him. He had inherited his horse-like face and lipless mouth from his mother, but the rest was undeniably from his father. The long, narrow nose, with his father’s dense eyebrows above, formed a “T” in the middle of his face, and there were two bored, blue eyes on either side. They had taken for granted that his childhood blondness would eventually darken to his mother’s mousy grey, but that had not happened. Ken had already developed the droll, rather self-satirical sense of humour that makes the British seem so charming, and it had been dancing lustily in his eyes when he saw his father’s confusion.

  It occurred to Stan that even if he had meant to make ambitious plans for his son, he would never have managed it. How was it possible that his son had been able to grow up without him even noticing? Had he been too busy being unhappy, being the person he thought everyone around him expected him to be? And if this was the case, how could this persona not include being a father to his only son? It pained him. Or maybe not. He paused to take stock. Yes, he had to admit, it actually caused him a great deal of pain. He had lifted his hands in a powerless shrug.

  Whether or not Ken had foreseen his father’s bad conscience, is difficult to say, but in any case he had gotten the car.

  By the time Ken had turned twenty the car was gone. He had lost it in a bet, with a fellow student, over who could drive back to campus the fastest from one of the boring pubs in Oxford. Now, it must be said that Kirk had had a Jaguar, but Ken had been convinced he had still had a chance.

  The following year he had lost his entire yearly stipend, from the education fund his father had set up for him, during a drunken night of poker with the heir to the Rolands’ fortune. He had had three jacks in his hand and thought he had had a chance.

  When he was twenty-four, he had, miraculously, obtained the right papers attesting to his knowledge of English literature and history, and had, without any trouble, gotten himself a job as a trainee in an English bank. The bank was of the old school, where the management understood the value of a man from Oxford, who knew his Keats and Wilde, and which anticipated that the ability to read accounts or evaluate the credit rating of a customer was something that someone with Ken’s background was born with, or could at least learn along the way.

  Ken landed in the stock market, where he became an undisputed success. He telephoned important investors every day keeping them updated on the market’s latest trends, took even more important investors out to dinner and to strip clubs, and the very most important investors he took down to his father’s country estate, where he got them drunk, and when the rare opportunity presented itself, screwed their wives.

  The bank’s management had considered moving Ken up the ladder and giving him a managerial position in the trading division, when it was discovered that he had incurred losses totaling just under fifteen million pounds, by trading in orange juice futures with the bank’s money, and without authorization. He had been called into the board room where he had explained that he had thought he had had a chance. Rather than being moved up, he had been removed – from the bank, the city, and the entire financial world.

  He had begun drinking, but had never really gotten the swing of it, so he had started going to the dog races, even though he never could stand dogs. It was from this point that his gambling had begun to take on enormous proportions. Not in actual money, because, in spite of his name, Ken was no longer able to obtain credit, and it would have been difficult for him to top his orange juice deal, anyway. His gambling had come to consume all of his time and energy. It had rapidly suck
ed him into a maelstrom of compulsive gambling where he had fallen weightless towards a black bottom. That is, it was a supposed bottom. In actuality, the fall had not yet ceased, so if one were an optimist, one might assume that that meant there was no bottom.

  Ken Abott financed his accelerating gambling addiction by going to the one person he knew who had not seemed to grasp what was happening: his father. His son had discovered something about Stan Abott, and that was that he had a wonderful ability to forget. Each time Ken had come knocking, his father had looked at him as though it were the very first time he had stood there asking for money, or maybe even the first time he had stood there at all.

  Ken pulled the syringe’s needle out of the plastic cover.

  “Do you remember how to do it?” His father’s voice was just a hoarse whisper now. Ken tried to smile. He had never been able to stand needles, otherwise he would probably not have stopped at cocaine, but continued on to the harder drugs. Right now he had no choice. It was a matter of life or death.

  “Try to find a vein?” he answered.

  His father shook his head.

  “Forget about veins. Just make the injection close to the bite. Small injections, three or four shots. And then one in the thigh, so that it’s closer to the heart than to the bite, understand?”

  “Are you sure that it was an Egyptian cobra, father? Can’t it have been a . . .?”

  “A what?”

  “I don’t know … a boomslang or something like that.”

  Stan Abott tried to laugh, but it just turned into coughing.

  “A boomslang is a little green devil that hangs around in the trees all day long, Ken. This one was black and slithered along the ground. And the boomslang has a haemotoxin poison, it would have caused bleeding from my mouth, ears and anus. Don’t you remember? We went all through this.”

  “I just want to make sure before I make the injection.”

  “Of course. I’m sorry.” He closed his eyes. “I just hope that you don’t think these weeks were a total waste of time.”

  Ken shook his head and meant it. Yes, he had hated each and every second of the four weeks he had been here. Hated the long, hot days he had trudged around the snake farm in his father’s footprints, and the grey-haired, Negro caretaker whose parents had, most likely in a moment of weird humour, decided to call Adolph. Their monotonous chant-like voices had gone in one ear and right out the other. They droned on about green and black mambas, poison fangs in the front and back of the mouth, about which ones could bite you even if you held them upside-down by the tail, and about which ones ate mice and which ate birds. He couldn’t give a damn about whether a cobra came from Egypt or Mozambique, he only knew that there were too many of them, and that his father must have been out of his mind when he bought this farm.

  In the evenings they had sat on the front veranda, his father and Adolph each with a pipe, while they listened to the animal noises all around them and Adolph told legends about them as they presented themselves. When the moon had come up and the hyenas cold laughter made Ken shiver, Adolph told about the Zulus who believed that snakes were the spirits of the dead and let them come into their homes. He told about the tribes in Zimbabwe that wouldn’t kill pythons, because it would cause long-lasting drought. When Ken had laughed over these superstitious beliefs, his father had told him about how in some rural areas in northern England people still practised an old snake ritual: if you saw an adder, you had to kill it right away, draw a ring around it, and then draw a cross within the ring. When that was done you had to read from psalm sixty-eight.

  Ken had looked at his father in shock when he stood up and yelled into the night-darkened jungle:

  “Let God arise, let his enemies be scattered:

  let them also that hate him flee before him.

  As smoke is driven away, so drive them away:

  as wax melteth before the fire, so let the wicked perish in the presence of God.”

  The bird screeched again. It sat in the top of the tree. It was white with a long beak and a red comb on its head, almost like a rooster.

  “Isn’t it strange how little you and I know about each other, Ken?”

  This made Ken jump. It was as though his father read his thoughts and spoke them aloud.

  His father sighed, “We never managed to get to know one another. I … was never there was I? It’s sad when fathers aren’t there.”The last sentence was left hanging in the air, demanding a response, but Ken didn’t answer.

  “Do you hate me, Ken?”

  The insects stopped their buzzing abruptly, as though they too were holding their breath a second.

  “No.” He held the syringe pointing upwards, pushing the plunger a little to get the air out, and a drop escaped down the needle. “Hate has nothing to do with it, father.”

  Stan Abott had woken up very early one morning, looked at his sleeping wife as if to remember who she was, gotten up and walked to the open window. He had looked at the trees in the park whose black branches were desperately splayed towards a winter-grey sky, and at the asphalt below. It glittered wetly in the light from the lampposts that seemed to be hunched against the wind.

  These were bad times, times requiring consolation. People wanted cheap lies and dreams, and since he sold the cheapest of them, his publishing firm was doing extremely well. An American company had made a bid to buy it.The publishing firm had been run by the family for three generations. Stan Abott had smiled. He had climbed up onto the window ledge, and a gust of wind had twisted the curtain around his foot, almost causing him to fall. By grasping the gutter, he had been able to, shakily, pull himself up to his full height.The rain coming from one side had struck his skin like needles of ice. He had opened his mouth. It had tasted like ashes. He had known it was time to take a huge leap. He then closed his eyes.

  When he had reopened his eyes, he divorced Emma. She now had the name of Ives, not her maiden name, but the name of the new husband, who had moved in where Stan had moved out, as the divorce settlement stipulated that she was to retain the house. The Americans had taken down the Abott sign above the entrance to the publishing firm. They had decided to use their own name, and Stan was fundamentally glad that his family name would no longer be blemished by association with the things that were produced there. Through a friend, he had purchased a snake farm in Tuli, in the eastern part of Botswana. He knew nothing about snake farms, except that they provided snakes to reptile parks and to laboratories that produced serums which saved the lives of people bitten by snakes, and that it was not a very lucrative business.

  Three weeks after he had opened his eyes, he had tried to squeeze them shut again, as well as he could. The sun had hung, like an oversized reading lamp, above the taxi area outside the international airport, in the not-so-international capital of Botswana. It was a smaller town which, according to his airline ticket, was called Gaborone. He had taken a taxi into it, and after a week of running through bureaucratic corridors, he was able to leave it, having obtained all the required licences, signatures, and stamps. He hadn’t been back there since. And as Gaborone had the country’s only international airport, it meant he had not been outside of Botswana.

  What business did he have anywhere else? As quickly and instinctively as he had come to hate Gaborone, he had fallen in love with Tuli. The farm consisted of three old, but well-kept concrete buildings, where the four people who worked there, lived with eight hundred, more or less, deadly poisonous snakes. The buildings stood on a plateau surrounded by buffalo bushes and mongonga trees on low tapering hillsides. The farm was seldom visited, except by elephants, who had gotten lost on their way to the river, jackals on the lookout for garbage and outdated shoes, or the weekly jeep that collected the snakes and snake venom, and brought provisions down the nearly impassable road. On a horizon of green hilltops, dead trees pointed their witch-fingers towards the sky, but aside from that there was nothing here reminiscent of London.

  When the dry season arrived, herds o
f impalas collected on the plains so they could be near the water, and they were accompanied by their faithful friends the baboons. Soon zebras and kudus also appeared. Lions hunted night and day, as it was party time for all the savannah’s hunters. In the short period of twilight each day, they could see the sun flame up in the west and then disappear, and later hear the lions’ deep roar throughout the night, while groups of moths collected like small snowstorms around the outdoor lights.

  There was only one time that he had had doubts about whether or not this was the place he belonged.There had been a hatching of naja nigricollis, or black-necked spitting cobra, and Stan had watched the young being eaten alive, one by one, by their own father, until they had managed to fish him out of the cage.Adolph had already told him that smaller snakes were a natural part of the cobras diet, but his own young? It had caused such a sense of disgust in him, such an aversion to the animal’s nature that it forced him to question whether he could stand to continue.Then one evening Adolph had shown him a dead tiger snake, bitten to death by its own young, and explained that the course of nature didn’t allow for family ties. It was eat or be eaten, everywhere. It was not evil, or immoral, to eat one’s own offspring, or parents. On the contrary, it was the fulfilment of nature’s course. It was what Africa was all about: survival, at any price. And after a while it had become instinctive for Stan Abott, a thing he had accepted and even come to admire as a part of the merciless order of things. It was the consistent logic that balanced all of nature and gave the animals and people here their justification for existence. As a result he slowly got back something he had been missing for so long: his fear of dying. Or more accurately stated: his fear of not living.