Phantom Read Free Page B

worker ants, who scuttled home at four or five o’clock, ceding the quarter to nocturnal rodents. When King Christian IV built the town in square blocks, according to Renaissance ideals of geometrical order, the population was kept in check by fire. Popular myth had it that down here every leap year’s night you could see people in flames running between houses, hear their screams, watch them burn and dissolve, but there would be a layer of ash left on the pavement, and if you managed to grab it before the wind blew it away, the house you occupied would never burn down. Because of the fire risk Christian IV built broad roads, by the standards of Oslo’s poor. Houses were erected in the un-Norwegian building material of brick.
    Along one of these brick walls the man in the linen suit passed the open door of a bar. A new violation of Guns N’ Roses’ “Welcome to the Jungle,” dance-produced reggae pissing on Marley and Rose, Slash and Stradlin, belted out to the smokers standing around outside. He stopped at an outstretched arm.
    “Gotta light?”
    A plump, top-heavy lady somewhere in her late thirties looked upat him. Her cigarette bounced provocatively up and down between her red lips.
    He raised an eyebrow and looked at her laughing girlfriend, who was standing behind her with a glowing cigarette. The top-heavy one noticed and then laughed as well, taking a step aside to regain her balance.
    “Don’t be so slow,” she said in the same Sørland accent as the Crown Princess. He had heard there was a prostitute in the covered market who got rich by looking like her, talking like her and dressing like her. And that the 5,000-kroner-an-hour fee included a plastic scepter that the customer was allowed to put to relatively free use.
    The woman’s hand rested on his arm as he made to move on. She leaned toward him and breathed red wine into his face.
    “You’re a good-looking guy. How about giving me … a light?”
    He turned the other side of his face to her. The bad side. The not-such-a-good-looking-guy side. Felt her flinch and slip as she saw the path left by the nail from his time in the Congo. It stretched from mouth to ear like a badly sewn-up tear.
    He walked on as the music changed to Nirvana. “Come as You Are.” Original version.
    “Hash?”
    The voice came from a gateway, but he neither stopped nor turned.
    “Speed?”
    He had been clean for three years and had no intention of starting again.
    “Violin?”
    Least of all now.
    In front of him on the pavement a young man had stopped by two dealers; he was showing them something as he spoke. The youngster looked up as he approached, fixing two searching gray eyes on him. Policeman’s eyes, the man thought, lowered his head and crossed the street. It was perhaps a little paranoid; after all, it was unlikely such a young police officer would recognize him.
    There was the hotel. The rooming house. Leon.
    It was almost deserted in this part of the street. On the other side, under a lamp, he saw the dope seller astride the bike, with another cyclist, also wearing professional cycling gear. The dope seller was helping the other guy inject himself in the neck.
    The man in the linen suit shook his head and gazed up at the façade of the building before him.
    There was the same banner, gray with dirt, hanging below thethird- and top-floor windows: FOUR HUNDRED KRONER A NIGHT! Everything was new. Everything was the same.
    T HE RECEPTIONIST AT Hotel Leon was new. A kid, who greeted the man in the linen suit with an astonishingly polite smile and an amazing—for the Leon—lack of mistrust. He wished him a hearty “Welcome” without a tinge of irony in his voice and asked to see his passport. The man assumed he was often taken for a foreigner because of his tanned complexion and linen suit, and passed the receptionist his red Norwegian passport. It was worn and full of stamps. Too many for it to be called a good life.
    “Oh, yes,” the receptionist said,