Chasing the Storm (6 page)

He thought about the screen, the spreadsheets. He’d be working on the damn exploration application right now, trying to get it done before five. He’d head back to Drammen, collapse into bed at nine, and the next morning it would all begin again, the commute past the gray girders, under the gray sky, then the numbers rolling up on his screen, the stacks of papers on his desk.
Savor this
, he thought.
Savor this moment. This is the real thing, finally. After twenty years of hell. The real thing
.

They had an hour in Zagreb before they had to be at the airport. Lena parked on a side street and led him to a central plaza. She held his elbow and leaned into him to guide him, her slender frame tapping against his. They walked down a wide path bordered with tulip beds. Colossal trees lined the path. On either side were buildings with frothy decorations and carven stone heads on the facades. They emerged onto a large square crisscrossed by tram tracks. In the center was a massive equestrian statue. Lena led him to a café opposite the statue. “That is the
ban Jelacic
sculpture,” she said. “It is a big … it has big meaning for Croatia. In communism, they hide it, some people who love their country. Then when the war is finished, they bring the sculpture. They are very proud people. You see how they have built their country? After the war, this city was nothing, but now … beautiful.”

“What’s Russia
really
like? I’ve only once briefly visited the Kola Peninsula and it wasn’t much to write home about, if you know what I mean.”

The tea and coffee arrived, with croissants. She waited to speak until the waiter left.

“Russia,” she said, more quietly. He loved the sound of the word from her mouth. “I grew up near to St. Petersburg. Also beautiful city. Big streets. Canals. In winter it is very beautiful.” She looked into the square. “But Russia is now the country of the fat men. They eat the beautiful. They want only money, money. For them, people, the people of Russia are like, are like sheeps, to use for money. And Russia for them is only a, how you say, something to take from. To destroy. My father was like this. But Russia is the country of Tolstoy, Chekhov, Tchaikovsky.” Her lips trembled slightly, but she sipped her tea, and when she turned to him, her blue eyes were dry. “Drink your coffee, Torgrim,” she said. “We must go to the airport, I think.”

April 9

Dmitri was leaning next to Ilya. Their hands were stained purple with beet juice, and the small galley was filled with the rich, earthy smell of beets. They worked as slowly as they could, extending this time away from the cramped room, slicing away the rinds, then chopping the beets into cubes. The dark juice ran onto the metal floor.

The commandos had been on the ship for five days. Things had entered a routine. The sailors were grouped four to a room, and mostly were forced to stay in, with the doors locked from the outside. Dmitri and Ilya were allowed to work in the galley. A commando loitered at the top of the steps, smoking. At first, Ilya, irrepressible, had tried to chat with Dmitri, but the guard had stomped down the stairs and shouted at them and banged Ilya on the head with the magazine of his gun. So they worked in silence. But today, as they were peeling the beets, another commando called to their guard, and he walked off. Ilya sidled next to Dmitri and murmured to him. He was in a room with the captain and Ludo, he said. He told Dmitri that the captain helped manage the boat, always under supervision. The captain had been forced to send a message to the owners that the ship had been hijacked. Then they had switched off the AIS. One of the commandos, according to the captain, was a superb seaman. They were zigzagging all over, so that even the captain had no idea where they were. The commandos used their own communication system, which they had brought with them – some sort of battery-run telephone. They spoke in a code that the captain did not think was Russian-based. Something was strange: eleven commandos had boarded the ship, but after the first day he’d only seen five. Dmitri thought about that.

“But there are eleven extra people on board,” he said. “I wash the dishes. I know.”

“But where are they?” Ilya said. “And another thing: Alexey and his short friend – did you know they have a room to themselves?”

“So are they with the hijackers?”

“They eat with us.”

“I don’t understand. Do you know where they’re taking us?”

“Well, the captain thinks it’s a hostage situation. They told the ship owners they want a ransom. He heard them.”

“Like Somalia.”

“Coming to the Baltic now. People are desperate, I guess.”

Dmitri looked down at his stained hands and shook his head. He thought about Ludo and his nose for funny business. Something was up, and Dmitri didn’t think that the hostage thing explained it away. The captain had known from the beginning, he was sure. And the gray brothers hadn’t seemed like hijackers. They were too solid, too professional, to risk their lives on a mission like this. He felt like a boy trying to fit a puzzle piece into the wrong slot. It almost fit, and he kept pressing, trying to force it, even though he knew it was just slightly off.

Chapter 5

Yuri

April 26

Rygg walked along
Wendenstrasse, over the canal. He stopped, one hand on the railing, and looked down at the wavering reflections of the buildings in the dark green water. Leaning across the railing, he saw his shadowy reflection: suit, tie, briefcase – his daily uniform, which was now a disguise.

Walking again, he let the briefcase swing and forced his breaths into a rhythm. He knew he just had to act normal, but whatever he did it felt strange now that he was acting out his life.

He had checked into the Crillon-Hapsburg the afternoon before, and the impassive receptionist had murmured politely that he was pleased to give him the same room he’d had two weeks before. But it was not the same room, somehow. The view from the balcony was a set for the play he was in. He laid out his things – comb, razor, toothpaste – nudging them into forty-five degree angles, this way, that way. What would I do now? He walked to the Chilehaus bar, had a couple beers, chatted with the bartender. The beer helped, dulling his nerves. And a couple aquavits at the hotel bar made him feel like home. Allowed him to sleep.

But now he was following the script. The map was before his eyes. He turned right along Hammerbrookstrasse. Then left onto Albertstrasse. Then right again. He stopped at intervals, to tie his shoelace and glance casually backwards, looking for repetitions, for the same pair of shoes, the same car. He spent a minute in front of a shop, looking into the glass, watching the reflected cars, the passing shoes.
Always watch the shoes,
he’d once learned from a book on intelligence tactics.
They can put on a jacket, switch bags, put on wigs, spectacles, but the shoes will remain the same
. But nothing stood out.

As he was walking down Nagelsweg, he suddenly crossed the street and hailed one of the white, boxy Hamburg taxis. “Balduinstrasse,” he told the driver. He stayed low in the seat for a minute, watching the cars in the rear-view mirror. Four silver BMWs swept past the taxi. Four? And here was another one. He shook his head. You’re in Germany, he told himself. They’re all silver BMWs.

The driver stopped in front of the glassed windows of a bank and said, “Balduinstrasse.” Rygg handed over some cash and got out. He strode immediately into the bank and stood looking out the window. Shoes passed, cars passed. He saw three more silver BMWs, and shrugged. He’d just ignore those. He checked his watch. Working backward, he and Marin had figured out that he had twelve minutes. But when he checked the watch again, twenty-two seconds had gone by. The second hand seemed to be creeping suspiciously slowly, and he turned into the bank, checking his watch against the clock on the wall: enormous spokes pinned directly into the polished granite. No, it was right. Must be his nerves slowing the time.

He turned to the window again, and leaped backward, clutching the briefcase to his chest. A woman was standing on the other side of the glass, not a foot away, staring straight at him. She was pretty, in a charcoal-gray business suit, a handbag under her arm. Had he met her in the Hamburg office? Or in the hotel, perhaps? He didn’t recognize her face at all, and was beginning to shake his head, when she leaned closer and pulled down one of her lower eyelids. She plucked something invisible from the eye, then blinked a couple times and walked off. His heart was pounding. “Relax,” he muttered. When, at least an hour later, his watch finally indicated twelve minutes had passed, he walked out of the bank, and around the corner.

He walked for fifteen minutes, first heading west along Friedrichestrasse, then north to the Reeperbahn. Prostitutes leaned against posts advertising
Cats
and a George Michael concert, their hips angled this way and that. The
sündige Meile
, the Germans called it: the sinful mile. But somehow the German propriety and cleanliness divested the street of tainted ugliness, and made it all good fun. Backpacker couples strolled together along the pavement, and three crisply dressed businesswomen emerged from a café, laughing together.

Rygg passed the façade of the Condomerie, a hundred-euro bill pinned to the outsized condom in its window. If it fit you, the sign said, the money was yours. The condom was yellowing and dust had gathered on the scrolled rim. He passed the magazine racks, their banks of glossy covers displaying twisted bodies, in every possible permutation. For a while he stood with a small crowd, watching an oiled Thai girl wriggle in a window. Backtracking, he returned to one of the magazine racks and perused a series of photographs of an aristocratic brunette having her crotch shaved by her butler, peeking up over the edge of the rack every once in a while, looking for shoes.

The second hand crept up to the mark. When he had fifteen seconds to go, he sauntered back out and entered the door across the street. The sign above the door read “Pleasure Hole” in plump pink letters, the
o
a heart. Inside, carpeted steps led downward, two stripes of pink neon along the ceiling lighting the way. At the bottom, he pushed open a heavy dark-wood door armored in brass knobs. The interior was musty, shadowed, and seemed entirely empty.

The door shut behind him with a loud clack. Four of the bulbs over the bar were burnt out. A half-empty glass stood on the zinc. There was an inept oil of intertwined Indian girls on one side of the bar, and a rectangular mirror painted over with the queen of hearts on the other. The tables were covered with what looked like dark red velvet.

“Do not turn around. I have a gun.” The voice was behind him, male, accented. “Raise your hands, please. Spread apart your legs.” He obeyed. Someone plucked the briefcase away. Then he felt hands on him, firm, squeezing into his armpits, groin, down along his ankles. “Okay. Turn.” He looked around. A man in a leather jacket, with a shaven head, angled the muzzle of a gun at his face. A tattered moustache concealed his mouth. “Who are you?” the man asked.

“Torgrim Rygg. I was sent by Marko. Marko Marin.”

“We will see. Over here, please.”

Rygg followed the man’s gesture to booths along one wall. They were lit by pink lamps recessed in the cornices of the low ceiling. The man allowed Rygg to sit first, then laid the briefcase on a bench and slid in across from him. For a long minute they sat, staring at each other.

“How did you say you were called?” the man asked, finally. He spoke with a faint lisp and broken English. By the pink light, Rygg saw that the moustache hid the scar of a mended harelip.

“Rygg. Torgrim Rygg.”

“And Marin sent you?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“It was dangerous for him here. He was shot.”

“I know this. And where is he now?”

“He told me not to say.”

“Good. That is good. And I do not want to know. Now first, do you have anything for me?”

“In the briefcase.”

The man pulled the briefcase onto the red velvet tablecloth. “Combination?” Rygg gave it to him. He popped open the lid.

“In the folder there, the green one,” Rygg said.

The man opened the folder.

“Under the papers you’ll find some clippings. Yes. Now look through. You’re looking for the iceberg. There. That one.”

The man lifted out the magazine page and laid it on the table. He shut the briefcase. Then he pulled a folded piece of paper from an inner pocket of his jacket. He spread it out, running his fingers along the creases to flatten the paper. Laying the other one beside it, he leaned over them, then crumpled both together and put them in his pocket.

“Good,” he said. “Very good. Now. My name is Yuri.”

“Yuri. Pleased to meet you.” Rygg extended his hand. Yuri’s grip was like being bound by wire, and his calluses were hard as plastic. His fingernails looked like flakes of flint.

“And now, do you have anything else for me?” He rubbed his forefinger and thumb together.

“Yes—” Rygg began, but Yuri stopped him with a hand flattened on the velvet.

“Good. I believe you. You are Scandinavian. I like Scandinavians. They are straight people. I was in Sweden five times. Stockholm, Gothenburg.”

“I’m Norwegian.”

“I was in Oslo once. Visited the Fram Museum. I like Nansen. He was a good man. Now, you wait. I have ordered some food. We can share.” He went to a door beside the bar and pushed it open and shouted. Then he came back.

“Okay, Mr. Rygg, we are doing a business, yes? I want money, you want story. Okay. But story will take a long time. So we have food, we have vodka, we are friends, yes?”

“Sounds good to me.” He was still jumpy and had no appetite at all.

The door banged open. From a haze of hanging pans and steam, a fat man bustled in with a tray.

“I order for you Hamburg specialties. You will like very much,” Yuri told him.

The fat man set down a bowl containing a thick beige stew in which nameless chunks surfaced and sank again. The man placed two glasses of vodka among the crockery, and cutlery wrapped in paper napkins. “
Guten appetit
!” he cried, and waddled back through the door.

“So what do we have here?” Rygg asked. He was frightened of the stew.

“Mm, mm, mm. I love to come to Hamburg just to eat,” Yuri told him. “To eat and to fuck Turkish woman with big ass.” He had already unwrapped his cutlery and tucked his paper napkin into his collar. He held his spoon in his fist like a child and jabbed at the dishes. “
Aalsuppe
. From a long fish, black.
Úgor
, it call in Russian. It swim like—” He waggled the spoon.

“Eel. Ål. It’s the same in Norwegian.”

“Yah, Aal.” He stabbed his spoon into the bowl. “The famous dish of Hamburg. When I am at home I dream of this.”

“Sounds delicious,” Rygg said. Luckily, Yuri was so absorbed in the
aalsuppe
that he only had to sample a couple spoonfuls. It actually wasn’t bad, with a dense, meaty flavor. He watched Yuri ladle the stew in under his moustache. He ate so fast and so intently that the meal was over before Rygg had taken five bites.

Yuri sat back and cleaned off his mustache with downward swipes of the napkin, then sucked at the ragged ends. He belched. “You like?” he asked.

“Fabulous,” Rygg told him.

Yuri picked up his vodka glass and motioned Rygg to do likewise. He banged them together and said: “
Prost
!” then drank half of it in a single swallow. He belched again. “Okay,” he said. “We begin.”

Over the next half hour, as Yuri drank vodka and told him his story, Rygg was bemused to remember Yuri’s initial suspicion and precautions. Now, he felt, he was Yuri’s pal for life. He wondered if all Russians were like this: once you’d eaten with them, and clashed your vodka glasses together, you were family.

On April second, Yuri told him, Captain Tamm of the
Alpensturm
, who Yuri had worked under for eight years, and who was like a father to him, had come to his house. He told Yuri that he was letting him go – Yuri was too lazy and liked his vodka too much to work on the ship any more. Yuri went crazy, shouting, grabbing at the captain – he demonstrated on Rygg’s shirt – but the captain just walked away.

For a day and a night Yuri moped, drinking and raging, but then he decided that he’d give it one last shot. He’d go see the captain and tell him that he needed another chance. He’d work for free for one trip, and if the captain still thought he was lazy, he’d quit, no problem.

He went to the captain’s house, but nobody was around, so he went down to the Kaliningrad docks. It was late in the evening, perhaps ten or eleven. Yuri was, by his own estimation, everybody’s best friend, and he just sauntered in with a wave to the guards. He walked down to the
Alpensturm
. The ship was dark. There was a car parked in the shadows beyond it. As he stepped toward the ship, two men got out of the car, one tall, one short and square. Yuri drew the figures in the air. They wore ordinary clothes, but didn’t seem like dock workers or even guards.

“They say what I want? I say I need Captain Tamm. They say to me to leave. I say fuck you, I need Captain Tamm. Then they show to me gun, they say to me to leave or they kill me. Okay. I leave.” Yuri lifted his hands in mock surrender. “These men, they no smile, I think they can kill me. But now I am very interested. What is happening with
Alpensturm
? Maybe on
Alpensturm
is now drugs, I think.”

Yuri headed out the closest gate. But then he turned right around and came in by the first gate again. He went to a ship berthed on the far side of the wharf, where he had a Filipino friend called Ocho. “I say ‘Ocho, take my clothes, I want to go swim.’ He is very surprise. I take off my clothes. I say ‘Ocho, give me Vaseline.’ You know Vaseline?”

Rygg nodded.

“I put Vaseline. I take my camera, always I have my camera. I buy here, in Hamburg. Three hundred Euro. It can go into water, it very small.”

Slipping into the frigid water, he swam to the
Alpensturm
, carrying the camera, and squirmed in through the galley porthole, which was always open. Inside it was “black as fuck” and he didn’t dare switch on a light. He heard snoring and peeked into the control room. By the light of the console, he saw Captain Tamm sleeping on a cot. “This is very strange. Why he sleep on
Alpensturm
? Why he not sleep in nice bed at home? Never before I see him sleep on
Alpensturm
.”

Yuri fetched the master keys from a secret hiding place that only he and the captain knew about, the whereabouts of which, for some reason, he refused to divulge to Rygg (and you will never guess!). He made his way to the hold, opened the metal doors with the keys, and felt his way inside. He was expecting drugs, in bags or concealed in tins. What he found were twelve long boxes. He measured them roughly with his feet. Each was around four meters long, one meter wide, and one meter high. Yuri fumbled around on the wall until he found a monkey wrench and jimmied one of the boxes open from the bottom – “Only five centimeter.” Reaching in, he could feel something hard: a firm, rounded surface. Demonstrating with his hands, Yuri showed how he slipped the camera in and took two pictures. Then he replaced the wrench and the keys and left, slipping out the porthole.