Extrait
I
Amid the noises of the night in downtown Oslo—the regular drone of cars outside the window, the distant siren that rose and fell and the church bells that had begun to chime nearby—a rat went on the hunt for food. She ran her nose over the filthy linoleum on the kitchen floor. The pungent smell of gray cigarette ash. The sugary-sweet aroma of blood on a piece of cotton gauze. The bitter odor of beer on the inside of a bottle cap, Ringnes lager. Molecules of sulfur, saltpeter and carbon dioxide filtered up from an empty metal cartridge case designed for a nine-by-eighteen- millimeter lead bullet, also called a Makarov, after the gun to which the caliber was originally adapted. Smoke from a still-smoldering cigarette with a yellow filter and blackpaper, bearing the Russian imperial eagle. The tobacco was edible. And there: a stench of alcohol, leather, grease and asphalt. A shoe. She sniffed it. The obstacle lay on its side with its back to the wall blocking the entrance to the nest, and her eight newly born, blind, hairless babies were screaming ever louder for her milk. The mountain of flesh smelled of salt, sweat and blood. It was a human body. A living human being; her sensitive ears could detect the faint heartbeats between her babies’ hungry squeals.
The church bells were ringing in time with the human heart now. One beat, two. Three, four . . .
The rat bared her teeth.
July. Shit. It sucks to die in July. Is that really church bells I hear, or were there hallucinogens in the damn bullets? OK, so it stops here. And what difference does it make? Here or there. Now or later. But do I really deserve to die in July? With the birds singing, bottles clinking, laughter from down by the Akerselva and fricking summer merriment right outside the window? Do I deserve to be lying on the floor of an infected junkie pit with an extra hole in my body, as life rushes out of it along with flashbacks of everything that’s led me here? Is that me, is that everything, is that my life? I had plans, didn’t I? And now it’s no more than a bag of dust, a joke without a punchline, so short I could have told it before that insane bell stopped ringing. Shit! No one told me it would hurt so much to die. Are you there, Dad? Don’t go, not now. The joke goes like this: My name’s Gusto. I lived to the age of nineteen. You were a bad guy who screwed a bad woman and nine months later I popped out and got shipped to a foster family before I could say “Da-da.” I caused as much trouble as I could. They just wrapped the suffocating care blanket even tighter and asked me what I wanted. A fricking ice cream? They had no goddamn idea that people like you and me would end up shot, exterminated, that we spread contagion and decay and would multiply like rats if we got the chance. They have only themselves to blame. But they also want things. Everyone wants something. I was thirteen the first time I saw in my foster mother’s eyes what she wanted.
“You’re so handsome, Gusto,” she said. She had come into the bathroom—I had left the door open, and hadn’t turned on the shower so that the sound wouldn’t warn her. She stood there for exactly a second too long before going out. And I laughed, because now I knew. That’s my talent, Dad: I can see what people want. Do I take after you? After she left I looked at myself in the full-length mirror. She wasn’t the first to call me handsome. I had developed earlier than the other boys. Tall, tight, already broad-shouldered. Hair so black it gleamed. High cheekbones. Square chin. A big, greedy mouth, but with lips as full as a girl’s. Smooth, tanned skin. Brown, almost black eyes. “The brown rat,” one of the boys in the class called me. Didrik, think that was his name. He was going to be a concert pianist. I’d just turned fifteen, and he said it out loud in class. “That brown rat can’t even read right.”
I just laughed and, of course, I knew why he’d said it. Knew what he wanted. Kamilla. He was secretly in love with her; she was not so secretly in love with me. At a school dance I copped a feel to see what she had under her sweater. Which wasn’t much. I’d mentioned it to a couple of the boys and Didrik must have picked up on it, and decided to shut me out. Not that I gave a shit about being “in,” but bullying is bullying. So I went to Tutu in the motorcycle club, the bikers. I’d dealt some hash for them at school, and said that I needed some respect. Tutu said he’d take care of Didrik. Later Didrik wouldn’t explain to anyone how he got two fingers caught under the top hinge of the boys’ bathroom door, but he never called me a brown rat again. And—right—he never became a concert pianist, either. Shit, this hurts so much! No, I don’t need any consoling, Dad—I need a fix. One last shot and then I’ll leave this world without a peep, I swear. There goes the church bell again. Dad?
2
It was almost midnight at Gardermoen, Oslo’s principal airport, as Flight SK-459 from Bangkok taxied into its allocated spot by Gate 46. Captain Tord Schultz braked and brought the Airbus 340 to a complete halt; then he quickly switched off the fuel supply. The metallic whine from the jet engines sank through the frequencies to a good-natured growl before dying. Tord Schultz automatically noted the time, three minutes and forty seconds since touchdown, twelve minutes before the scheduled arrival. He and the first officer started the checklist for shutdown and parking, since the plane was to remain there overnight. With the goods. He flicked through the briefcase containing the log. September 2011. In Bangkok it was still the rainy season and had been steaming hot as usual, and he had longed for home and the first cool autumn evenings. Oslo in September. There was no better place on earth. He filled in the form for the remaining fuel. The fuel bill: He had had to find a way of accounting for it. After flights from Amsterdam or Madrid he had flown faster than was economically reasonable, burning off thousands of kroners’ worth of fuel to make it. In the end, his boss had called him on the carpet.
“To make what?” he had yelled. “You didn’t have any passengers with connecting flights!”
“The world’s most punctual airline,” Tord Schultz had mumbled, quoting the advertising slogan.
“The world’s most economically fucked-up airline! Is that the best explanation you can come up with?”
Tord Schultz had shrugged. After all, he couldn’t say the reason—that he had opened the fuel nozzles because there was something he himself had to make. The flight he had been put on, the one to Bergen, Trondheim or Stavanger. It was extremely important that
he did the trip and not one of the other pilots.
He was too old for them to do anything else to him but rant and rave. He had avoided making serious errors, the organization took care of him, and there were only a few years left before he reached the two fives, fifty-five, and would be retired, whatever happened. Tord Schultz sighed. A few years to fix things, to avert ending up as the world’s most economically fucked-up pilot.
He signed the log, got up and left the cockpit to flash his row of pearly-white pilot teeth at the passengers. The smile that would tell them that he was Mr. Confidence in person. Pilot: the professional title that had once made him something in other people’s eyes. He had seen it, how people, men and women, young and old, once the magic word
pilot had been enunciated, had looked at him and discovered not only the charisma, the nonchalance, the boyish charm, but also the captain’s dynamism and cold precision, the superior intellect and the courage of a man who defied physical laws and the innate fears of mere mortals. But that was a long time ago. Now they regarded him as the bus driver he was and asked him what the cheapest tickets to Las Palmas were, and why there was more leg room on Lufthansa.
To hell with them. To hell with them all.
Tord Schultz stood at the exit next to the flight attendants, straightened up and smiled, said, “Welcome back, miss,” in broad Texan, the way they had learned in flying school at Sheppard. Received a smile of acknowledgment. There had been a time when he could have arranged a meeting in the arrivals hall with such a smile. And indeed had. From Cape Town to Alta. Women. Many women. That had been the problem. And the solution. Women. Many women. New women. And now? His hairline was receding beneath the pilot’s cap, but the tailor-made uniform emphasized his tall, broad-shouldered physique. That was what he had blamed for not getting into fighter jets at flying school, and ending up as a cargo pilot on the Hercules, the workhorse of the sky. He had told them at home he had been a couple of inches too long in the spine, that the cockpits of F-5’s and F-16’s disqualified all but dwarfs. The truth was he hadn’t measured up to the competition. His body was all he had managed to maintain from those times, the only thing that hadn’t fallen apart, that hadn’t crumbled. Like his marriages. His family. Friends. How had it happened? Where had he been when it happened? Presumably in a hotel room in Cape Town or Alta, with cocaine up his nose to compensate for the potency-killing drinks at the bar, and his dick in not such a Welcome-Back-Miss to compensate for everything he was not and never would be.
Tord Schultz’s gaze fell on a man coming toward him down the aisle. He walked with his head bent, yet still he ...
--Ce texte fait référence à l'édition
CD
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Revue de presse
“Intricate, breakneck plotting makes for an addictive page-turner in
Phantom . . . Brings to mind Michael Connelly’s tortured LAPD detective Harry Bosch.”
—Los Angeles Times
“The Oslo depiction adds a contemporary heft to
Phantom that expands Nesbø’s reach . . . Suggests more than a few parallels to the great television series ‘The Wire’; perhaps it is one master’s nod to another.”
—Boston Globe
“
Phantom will maintain Jo Nesbø’s unstoppable momentum.”
—The Independent (UK)
“Easily the most troubling and heartfelt of this excellent series,
Phantom is one of the finest suspense novels to come out of Scandinavia to date.”
—BookPage
“Nesbø’s true subject is the deterioration of the social fabric that has made Oslo such a civilized place.”
—New York Times Book Review
“A compulsive page-turner . . . [
Phantom] is expertly plotted and structured, with all the requisite twists and turns to keep the reader guessing. The latter half of the book is also relentlessly paced, reading at times like a Scandinavian police version of the Jason Bourne series.”
—The Independent on Sunday (UK)
“Far more than a procedural . . . Personal and topical and hip, as usual.”
—Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
“Nesbø has written a cunningly constructed thriller . . . running at Hollywood summer blockbuster speed.”
—Richmond Times-Dispatch
“Superb on every level . . . Nesbø begins with an emotionally gripping family drama but surrounds it with an elaborate, beautifully constructed plot involving [a] new drug and the ruthless man who rules its distribution. The subplots, plot twists (especially the last one), and the fully fleshed supporting characters—many of whom could drive their own novels—are all testament to Nesbø’s remarkable talent, but finally, it all comes back to Harry and the pain he endures in trying to carve out a separate peace from a world and a past that won’t let him go.”
—Booklist (starred)
“A first-class thriller . . . Contains several twists, some of which will make you gasp and at least one of which will make you cry . . .
Phantom is Nesbø’s finest novel, a novel for grown-ups, which triumphantly proves, as Harry says, that ‘humans are a perverted and damaged species and there is no cure, only relief.’”
—Evening Standard (UK)
“Deeply moving . . . This is Harry’s most personal case.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred)
“Norwegian crime fiction writer Nesbø is one of the best . . . Oslo’s gritty and violent drug world is brought to life through the characters. The fast-paced plots are twisted and riveting, and the two stories collide to reveal a shocking climax. Nesbø is on par with the original Scandinavian duo Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, authors of the Martin Beck series.”
—Library Journal
“The internationally popular detective series by the Norwegian author builds to a blockbuster climax [in
Phantom] . . . Those hooked by [
The Snowman] or earlier ones should make their way here as quickly as they can . . . Devastating for protagonist and reader alike.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred) “
Phantom is an astoundingly good novel. Nesbø has done it again.”
—Trouw (Netherlands)
“Another excellent example of why Nesbø has such a firm grasp on the Nordic crime crown . . . Nesbø’s portrait of venality and corruption is bleakly angry, his peek beneath Oslo’s gleaming façade disturbing; a fascination with addiction adds to his writing’s unsettling intensity. But he doesn’t let this overwhelm a tightly coiled plot.”
—Metro (UK)
“Once again Nesbø demonstrates that he is a crime writer of absolute world class . . . You will understand what I mean when you read
Phantom. And please do, this is a masterpiece of the genre. Jo Nesbø just gets better and better.”
—Västerbottens Folkblad (Sweden)
“Perhaps it was unrealistic to expect Nesbø to reach the dizzying heights of his two previous books,
The Snowman and
The Leopard. How wrong I was.
Phantom is arguably a much better book than any previous instalments. Nesbø wrings out the tension, by turns painful and delicious, with consummate skill. The surprises come like an avalanche as the end nears, engulfing everything in its path.”
—Daily Express (UK)
“Nesbø is one of the best suspense writers in the world and this novel fully confirms that claim . . . Suspenseful, moving, well written and impossible to put down . . . I just can’t recommend this enough.”
—Litteratursiden.dk (Denmark) “A brilliant thriller rife with exciting twists by one of the best Scandinavian crime authors.”
—Bücher (Germany) “Extremely thrilling!”
—Die Zeit (Germany)
“Harry’s most lethally gripping and personal journey to date.”
—The Mirror (UK)
“
Phantom must be the crime novel of the year. There is no one better or even equal to Jo Nesbø in Scandinavian crime fiction.”
—Weekendavisen (Denmark)
“Jo Nesbø is a master of his craft. His latest novel,
Phantom, is world-class crime writing.”
—Dagbladet (Norway)
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