by Jo Nesbo
‘Do you think this would be an appropriate time to review Norway’s diplomatic links with Austria, herr Brandhaug?’
He closed his eyes. They were fishing, as they were wont to do from time to time, but both he and they knew that they wouldn’t get a bite; he was too experienced. He could feel that he had been drinking; his head was light and his eyes danced on the back of his eyelids, but it was no problem.
‘That is a political judgment and it is not up to civil servants in the Foreign Office to decide,’ he said.
There was a pause. He liked her voice. She was blonde, he could sense it.
‘I wonder whether with your broad experience of foreign affairs you might predict what the Norwegian government will do?’
He knew what he ought to answer. It was very simple.
I don’t make predictions about that sort of thing.
No more, no less. You didn’t need to be in a job like his for very long before you had the feeling you had already answered all the questions in existence. Young journalists generally thought they were the first to ask him precisely the question they asked because they had spent half the night working it out. And they were all impressed when he seemed to pause for thought before answering a question he had probably answered a dozen times before.
I don’t make predictions about that sort of thing.
He was surprised he hadn’t said these words to her already, but there was something about her voice, something which made him feel like being a trifle more obliging. Your broad experience, she had said. He felt like asking her if it had been her idea to call him, Bernt Brandhaug, in particular.
‘As the most senior civil servant in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs I ensure that our usual diplomatic relations with Austria are maintained,’ he said. ‘That is clear – we are of course aware that other countries in the world are reacting to what is going on in Austria now. However, having diplomatic relations with a country does not mean that we like what is happening there.’
‘No, we do have diplomatic links with several military regimes,’ the voice answered at the other end. ‘So why do you think there are such violent reactions to precisely this government?’
‘I suppose it must be based on Austria’s recent history.’ He should have stopped there. He should have stopped. ‘The links with Nazism are there. After all, most historians agree that during the Second World War Austria was in reality an ally of Hitler’s Germany.’
‘Wasn’t Austria occupied, like Norway?’
It struck him that he had no idea what they learned at school about the Second World War nowadays. Very little apparently.
‘What did you say your name was?’ he asked. Perhaps he had drunk a bit too much. She told him her name.
‘Well, Natasja, let me help you a little before you start ringing anyone else. Have you heard of the Anschluss? It means that Austria wasn’t occupied in the normal understanding of the word. The Germans marched on Austria in March 1938. There was almost no resistance and that was how it stayed for the remainder of the war.’
‘Like Norway then?’
Brandhaug was shocked. She had said it in such an assured way, without a tinge of shame about her ignorance.
‘No,’ he said slowly, as if talking to a dull-witted child. ‘Not like in Norway. In Norway we defended ourselves and we had the Norwegian King and Norwegian government in London ready and waiting, making radio programmes and . . . giving encouragement to those back home.’
He could hear that his phraseology was slightly unfortunate and added, ‘In Norway the whole population stood shoulder to shoulder against the occupying forces. The few Norwegian traitors who donned Waffen SS uniforms and fought for the Germans were the scum of society that you have to accept exists in every country. But in Norway the power for good held up, the strong individuals who led the Resistance movement were the nucleus which paved the way for the democracy. These people were loyal to each other and in the final analysis that is what saved Norway. Democracy is its own reward. Scrub what I said about the King, Natasja.’
‘So you think that everyone who fought alongside the Nazis was scum?’
What was she really after? Brandhaug decided to bring the conversation to a close.
‘I simply mean to say that those who were traitors during the war should be happy they were let off lightly with imprisonment. I’ve been an ambassador in countries where each and every one of them would have been shot and I’m not so damned sure that wouldn’t have been right in Norway too. But back to the comment you wanted, Natasja. The Ministry for Foreign Affairs has no comment to make on the demonstration or on Austria’s new members of Parliament. I have guests here, so if you wouldn’t mind excusing me, Natasja . . .’
Natasja excused him and he put down the phone.
Back in the sitting room people were making moves to go. ‘Already?’ he said with a broad smile, but limited his objections to that. He was tired.
He accompanied his guests to the door. He applied particular pressure to the Chief Constable’s hand and said she should not hesitate to ask should there be anything he could do to help. It was all very well going through work channels but . . .
The last thing he thought about before falling asleep was Rakel. And her policeman he had removed from the scene. He fell asleep with a smile, but awoke with a splitting headache.
71
Fredrikstad to Halden. 9 May 2000.
THE TRAIN WAS BARELY HALF FULL AND HARRY HAD FOUND a seat by the window.
The girl in the seat directly behind him had taken out the earplugs from her Walkman and he could make out the vocalist but none of the instruments. The monitoring expert they had used in Sydney had explained to Harry that at low volumes the human ear amplifies the frequencies human voices use.
Harry thought there was something comforting about the fact that the last thing you heard before everything went quiet was the human voice.
Streaks of quivering raindrops fought their way across the carriage windows. Harry peered out at the flat, wet fields and the electric cables rising and falling between the posts alongside the track.
On the platform in Fredrikstad a Janizary band had been playing. The conductor on the train had explained to him that they were practising for Independence Day on 17 May.
‘Every Tuesday, every year at this time,’ he said. ‘The band leader thinks that rehearsals are more realistic when they are surrounded by people.’
Harry had thrown a few clothes in a bag. The apartment in Klippan was supposed to be simple, but very well furnished. A television, a stereo, even some books.
‘Mein Kampf and that sort of thing,’ Meirik had said with a grin. He had not called Rakel. Even though he could have done with hearing her voice. A last human voice.
‘The next station is Halden,’ came the nasal crackle from the loudspeaker, interrupted by the strident, off-key tone of the train’s brakes.
Harry ran a finger across the window as he juggled the sentence in his head. A strident, off-key tone. An off-key strident tone. A tone which is strident . . .
A tone can’t be off-key, he thought. A tone isn’t off-key until it is set alongside other tones. Even Ellen, the most musical person he had known, needed a few moments, a few tones, to hear the music. Even she was unable to pinpoint a single moment and say with total certainty that it was off-key. It was wrong, it was a lie.
And yet this tone sang in his ear, high-pitched and gratingly offkey. He was going to Klippan to stake out a potential sender of a fax which as yet had provoked no more than a couple of newspaper headlines. He had combed the day’s newspapers and it was obvious that they had already forgotten the story about the threatening letters of which they had made so much a mere four days ago. Instead, Dagbladet wrote about the skier Lasse Kjus, who hated Norway, and Bernt Brandhaug, the Under Secretary of State at the Foreign Office, who, if quoted correctly, had said that traitors should be given the death sentence.
There was another tone that was off-key.
But perhaps because he wanted it to be. Rakel’s departure from the restaurant, the expression in her eyes, almost a declaration of love before she cut it short, leaving him in free fall and with a bill of eight hundred kroner that she had boasted she would pay. It didn’t make sense. Or did it? Rakel had been in Harry’s flat, seen him drinking, heard him talking tearfully about a dead colleague he had known for barely two years as if she was the only person he had ever had a close relationship with. Pathetic. Humans should be spared the sight of each other stripped bare. So why hadn’t she called it a day then and there? Why hadn’t she said to herself that this man was more trouble than she could handle?
As usual, he had escaped into his work when his private life became too much of a burden. It was typical of a certain type of man, he had read. That was probably why he had spent the weekend brewing conspiracy theories and scenarios which placed all the various elements – the Märklin rifle, Ellen’s murder, the murder of Hallgrim Dale – in one pot so that he could stir it up into one foul-smelling broth. That was pathetic too.
He ran an eye over the paper spread out over the collapsible table in front of him, focused on the photograph of the FO head. There was something familiar about that face.
He rubbed his chin with his hand. From experience he knew that the brain tended to make its own associations when an investigation was in a rut. And the investigation into the rifle was a closed chapter. Meirik had made that clear – he had called it a non-case. Meirik had wanted him to write reports about neo-Nazis and do undercover work among rootless youths in Sweden. Well, fuck him!
‘. . . the platform is on the right hand side.’
What if he simply got off the train? What was the worst that could happen? As long as the Foreign Office and POT were frightened that the shooting incident at the toll barrier last year would leak out, Meirik couldn’t give him the boot. And as far as Rakel was concerned . . . as far as Rakel was concerned, he didn’t know.
The train came to a halt with a final groan and the carriage fell quiet. Outside in the corridor, doors slammed. Harry remained in his seat. He could hear the song from the Walkman more clearly. It was one he had heard many times before; he just couldn’t remember where.
72
Nordberg and the Continental Hotel. 9 May 2000.
THE OLD MAN WAS CAUGHT COMPLETELY UNPREPARED; THE sudden stabbing pains took his breath away. He curled up on the ground where he lay and forced his fist into his mouth to stop himself screaming. He lay like that, trying to retain consciousness as waves of light and dark surged through him. Opening and closing his eyes. The sky rolled in over him. It was as if time were accelerating: the clouds sped across the sky, the stars shone through the blue. Day turned into night, into day, night, day, and back to night again. Then it was over and he could smell the aroma of wet earth beneath him and he knew he was alive.
He remained in the same position until he had got his breath back. The sweat had stuck his shirt to his body. Then he rolled over on to his stomach and looked down towards the house again.
It was a large black timber house. He had been lying there since the morning and he knew the wife was the only one home. Nevertheless, all the windows were lit on the ground and the first floor. He had seen her walking round to switch all the lights on as soon as there was a suspicion of dusk, from which he assumed that she was frightened of the dark.
He was frightened himself – not of the dark though, he had never been afraid of that. He was frightened of time accelerating. And the pain. It was a new experience and he hadn’t learned to control it yet. Nor did he know if he could. And the time? He did his best not to think about cells dividing and dividing and dividing.
A pale moon appeared in the sky. He checked his watch: 7.30. Soon it would be too dark and he would have to wait until the morning. In that case he would have to spend the whole of the night in the bivouac. He looked at the construction he had made. It consisted of two Y-shaped branches he had pushed into the earth leaving half a metre above the ground. Between these, in the fork of the branches, was a stripped branch from a pine tree. Then he had cut three long branches which he placed on the ground and rested against the pine branch. He had covered them with a thick layer of spruce twigs. Thus he had a kind of roof which would protect him from the rain, retain some warmth and camouflage his presence from walkers, should they unexpectedly stray from the path. It had taken him barely half an hour to make the windbreak.
He calculated the risk of being seen from the road or by anyone in the nearby houses as negligible. It would have to be an unusually sharp-eyed person to make out the bivouac between the tree trunks in the dense spruce forest from a distance of almost three hundred metres. For safety’s sake he had covered nearly the whole of the opening with spruce twigs too and tied rags around the barrel of the rifle so that the low afternoon sun would not catch the steel.
He checked his watch again. Where the hell was he?
Bernt Brandhaug twirled the glass in his hand and checked his watch again. Where the hell was she?
They had arranged to meet at 7.30 and now it was getting on for 7.45. He downed the rest of his drink and poured himself another from the bottle of whisky room service had brought up: Jameson. The only good thing ever to come out of Ireland. He poured himself another. It had been one hell of a day. The headlines in Dagbladet had meant that the telephone never stopped ringing. He had received a fair amount of support, but in the end he had called the news editor at Dagbladet, an old friend from university, and made it clear that he had been misquoted. As a quid pro quo he had promised them inside information about the Foreign Minister’s major blunder at the European Finance Committee meeting. The editor had asked for some time to think. After half an hour he rang back. It seemed that this Natasja was new to the paper and she had admitted that she might have misunderstood Brandhaug. They wouldn’t issue a disclaimer, but they wouldn’t follow up the matter either. The damage limitation exercise had been successful.
Brandhaug took a large gulp, rolled the whisky around his mouth and tasted the rough yet smooth aroma deep down in the nasal channel. He looked around him. How many nights had he spent here? How many times had he woken up in the slightly too soft king-size bed with a bit of a headache after one drink too many? How many times had he asked the woman by his side – if she was still there – to take the lift to the breakfast lounge on the first floor and walk down the stairs to the reception, so that it looked as if she was coming from a breakfast meeting, and not from one of the bedrooms. Just to be on the safe side.
He poured himself another drink.
It would be different with Rakel. He wouldn’t send her down to the breakfast lounge.
There was a light knock at the door. He stood up, took a last look at the exclusive bedspread of yellow and gold, sensed a tiny rush of fear, which he instantly brushed aside, and covered the four strides to the door. He inspected himself in the hall mirror, slid his tongue across his white front teeth, moistened a finger and ran it along his eyebrows and opened the door.
She was leaning against the wall with her coat unbuttoned. She was wearing a red woollen dress underneath. He had asked her to wear something red. Her eyelids were heavy and she gave him a wry smirk. Brandhaug was surprised – he had never seen her looking like this before. She must have been drinking or taking some kind of pills – her eyes studied him apathetically and he hardly recognised her voice when she mumbled something incoherent about almost not finding the place. He took her arm but she wriggled free, so he guided her into the room with his hand against the small of her back. She slumped down on to the sofa.
‘A drink?’ he asked.
‘Yes, please,’ she said, her speech slurred. ‘Or would you rather I stripped off immediately?’
Brandhaug poured her a glass without answering. He knew what she was playing at. But if she thought she could ruin his pleasure by assuming the role of soiled goods, she was mistaken. Alright, he might have preferred it if she had chosen the role his c
onquests in the Foreign Department went for – the innocent girl falling for her boss’s irresistible charm and his self-assured masculine sensuality. But the most important thing was that she succumbed to his desires. He was too old to believe in humanity’s romantic motives. The only thing that separated them was what they were both after: power, career or custody of a son.
It had never bothered him that women were dazzled by his position as head. After all, he was too. He was Bernt Brandhaug, the Under Secretary of State at the Foreign Office. For Christ’s sake, he had spent all his life becoming the Under Secretary. If Rakel wanted to dope herself up and present herself as a whore, that didn’t change the facts.
‘I apologise, but I have to have you,’ he said, dropping two ice cubes in her drink. ‘When you get to know me, you’ll understand all this better. But let me give you a kind of first lesson anyhow, an idea of what makes me tick.’
He passed her the glass.
‘Some men crawl through life with their noses to the ground and are content with the scraps. The rest of us rise up on two legs, walk to the table and take our rightful places. We are in the minority because our lifestyle demands of us that occasionally we have to be brutal, and this brutality requires strength. We have to extricate ourselves from our social democratic, egalitarian upbringing. If it is a choice between that and crawling, I prefer to break with a short-sighted moralism which is not capable of placing individual actions in context. And it’s my belief that, deep down, you will come to respect me for that.’
She didn’t answer; she just knocked back the drink.
‘Hole didn’t pose any threat for you,’ she said. ‘He and I are only good friends.’
‘I think you’re lying,’ he said, reluctantly filling the glass she proffered.‘And I have to have you to myself. Don’t misunderstand me. When I made it a condition that you immediately broke all contact with Hole, it had less to do with jealousy and more to do with a principle of purity. Nevertheless, a few weeks in Sweden, or wherever it is Meirik sent him, will do him no harm.’
