by Gard Sveen
As she unlocked the door, she remained quite certain that she’d done the right thing. She was reduced to being a damned pack mule, but a pack mule that had done the right thing.
In her left hand she held a bag that was crammed full of all the documents she’d been able to stuff into it. Over her other arm she had a thin garbage bag with all of Mathea’s wet clothes. In her right hand she had the takeout bag with their dinner. As she set it all down on the finished pine floor, some of the documents poured out. She glimpsed a few crime scene pictures, leaned down, and put them back in the bag again. She didn’t want to know what Mathea would think if she saw them.
She didn’t know what would be more productive right now: washing and drying her five-year-old’s clothes, or spending the evening searching for a needle in a haystack. She hadn’t even finished the job Bergmann had assigned her.
Instead of copying the rest of the material he wanted, she had gone up to the Brobekkveien shelter. It had been little more than pure impulse. She could have called, but she wanted to show up in person. For whatever reason, she thought that Bjørn-Åge Flaten would get paranoid and take off if he found out she was looking for him. Maybe she shouldn’t have called his mother. But she had to have something to shove in Bergmann’s face. She had to land a permanent job as an investigator; otherwise she would have no choice but to find something else to do.
“I’m so worn out,” said Mathea, almost falling over the threshold. The red cap was barely hanging onto the top of her head, making her look like she had just come from Santa’s elves’ workshop.
“Children don’t get worn out,” said Susanne. “Only grown-ups talk like that.”
“Then I guess I’m a grown-up,” said Mathea. She sat on her knees and clearly had no plans to move for a while. “Because I am worn out.”
She let Mathea sit right inside the front door, picked up the takeout bag off the floor, and placed the two Styrofoam containers of curried lamb from Punjab Tandoori on the kitchen counter. She poured herself a glass of red wine from the box on the counter and had already managed to drink half of it when she heard the sound of the TV from the living room.
The My Little Pony opening credits grew louder.
Damned little ponies, thought Susanne. Isn’t that the sort of thing you make sausages out of? Nice black sausage we could have on a slice of bread? For a moment she thought about going down to Grønland Square and buying a few sausage slices with as high a content of horse as possible and putting it in Mathea’s lunch sack tomorrow.
“Mommy!” she called from the living room, like a princess out of a fairy tale.
The kind that no one could silence. Susanne found herself counting the years until her daughter could move out. Fourteen, fifteen. Nineteen, that was the latest she would leave. If she hadn’t begged to be an exchange student before then.
Never, she thought. Over my dead body.
“Bath,” said Mathea without taking her eyes off the TV screen. “When you’re worn out, you should take a bath.”
Susanne walked over to the balcony door and opened it to observe the view. From her attic apartment on Mandalls Gate, she still had a view of the fjord, but it would soon be blocked by an impenetrable mass of futuristic apartment and office buildings. That fire that had devastated the Hollender block certainly came at an opportune time for people like her father—property investors, speculators, and vulture capitalists—she’d thought many a time. The fire had laid the groundwork for the building project that was playing out right before her eyes every day; it would take Oslo into the twenty-first century once and for all, transforming the city into something more like Dubai and Abu Dhabi than a capital in the sober-minded north. It was probably ultimately a good thing she wasn’t one to cling tightly to the past. Most things hadn’t been much better then. Nothing, when she thought about it. But the view—she would never get that back. The only consolation was that the cranes were adorned with strings of lights and a Christmas tree at the top. The light from the Christmas tree that perched above the post office swept by somewhere above her. It reminded her of Paris. She hadn’t been there for years, and now she had no man to go there with. You didn’t go to Paris without a man.
Svein, she thought and smiled.
In any event not the boy she’d brought home over the weekend.
She didn’t want to think about that. It had been so long since she’d cracked. Six months, right before she met Svein.
That was probably what had scared her into sleeping with him. She had truly thought she was done with all that. But you couldn’t fool yourself that easily. Part of her just wanted to go back, all the way down into the cellar, or all the way up in the sky, depending on how you looked at it.
She closed the balcony door.
“What did you and Daddy do over the weekend?”
No answer. Mathea braided the thick black hair she’d inherited from Nico and stared into the TV like something out of Poltergeist. And why did she really ask? She couldn’t recall the last time she’d actually gotten an answer.
What had she done herself?
Don’t think about that.
On the positive side, for once she hadn’t taken any shifts at Kripo, as she’d done ever since Nico moved out. She couldn’t bear any more of Monsen’s smutty talk. She had long since given up arguing with him. And given up getting irritated at the way he quite obviously undressed her with his eyes.
She turned on the faucet in the bathtub and observed herself in the mirror. She was used to being very attractive, but she was going downhill fast. The past year had taken a hard toll on her face. She was only thirty-two, but already it seemed as though her mother was forcing her way out in her features; she could clearly see the outlines of wrinkles. Botox, she thought. A shot in the forehead at New Year’s would save her from turning more and more into her mother. She would do whatever was necessary to avoid being like her, both inside and outside.
Her mother had simply cut her off when Nico moved out. They hadn’t spoken since last February. Sometimes it was hard to believe. But Susanne Bech was not one to give in first; she never had been, and she never would be. “Imagine separating from a man like Nicolay” was the last thing her mother had said on the phone, hissing like a reptile. Susanne was the first to admit that she herself had used expressions that weren’t fit to print, but cutting your own daughter out of your life? Now it was her father, or sometimes Nicolay, who picked up Mathea if she wanted an overnight with her grandparents. Her only connection to her past was her father. He was a weak and aloof real estate investor, but nevertheless strong enough to defy her mother. He wasn’t a man who cut people off, at least not his own daughter.
The phone, thought Susanne. She really was a self-centered little girl, obsessed with how attractive she still was to men. How long had she been standing there looking at herself? The rushing sound of the faucet had eclipsed all other sound, even the idiotic ringtone on her phone.
“The phone, Mathea, have you seen Mommy’s phone?” She looked around in the hall, unable to locate the sound; maybe she really was as dumb as her mother made her out to be.
“One moment,” said Mathea, appearing by her side. She stood there in a shirt and green tights, her expression looking very grown-up as she held the phone up toward Susanne.
“It’s nice to have a little helper,” said the man on the other end.
“Who is this?” Susanne said more sharply than she intended. She hadn’t looked at the number on the display.
“Don’t you remember me from earlier today?”
Brobekkveien shelter. The man in reception. A middle-aged hippie—or outreach worker, as it was now called.
“Has he shown up? Flaten?”
“Bingo.”
“I’m coming over,” she said before she’d even given a thought to what she would do with Mathea.
“No, you’re not.”
Susanne said nothing.
“He’s in no shape for that.”
“I
n no shape?”
“If you come here now, he’s not going to respond to a thing you say. His lips will be sealed, do you understand? He’s sick, he really shouldn’t be here.”
“See about getting him admitted to a hospital.”
“I decide that, not you. Come over here at eight o’clock tomorrow morning. That’s going to be your best chance.”
Then he simply hung up, as if she was just anyone. Susanne exhaled deeply a few times, then she realized that the guy probably knew what he was doing. His questions earlier today had suggested as much. Is he a suspect, under indictment? She couldn’t even say that Flaten had status as a witness. The sixteen-year-old Kristiane case was not officially under investigation. Yet.
They ate in silence. Mathea browsed through an Architectural Digest magazine that Susanne had stuffed in her bag a few days ago. She didn’t even know why she had bought it. Maybe she just wanted to see gigantic bungalows in California in midwinter. Even if they reminded her of her mother. Most things reminded her of her mother. Winter, Christmas, her reflection, her breasts, her voice.
In the bathroom she could no longer contain herself. She could have gone into the living room to read case documents, but feared that something dreadful might happen if she was gone too long. That Mathea would slip in the tub and strike her head and drown without a sound. Then her mother would be right; then she really would be a bad mother, one who didn’t want the best for her child.
She retrieved the bag in the hall and sat down on the warm bathroom floor and started to read. Mathea wasn’t paying any attention to her. She was mostly preoccupied with looking at herself in the mirror while she bathed; the rubber ducks she’d kept from when she was younger would have to manage on their own.
She’s going to be just as vain as me.
Susanne started with Bjørn-Åge Flaten’s witness interview. She didn’t know how many times she’d read it, but seemed to think she might find something new every time. She made a note that she had to get hold of any old Dagbladet articles on him in the morning.
“Mommy, look now,” said Mathea.
Susanne glanced up. She could see a glimpse of the baby her daughter had once been in the little body. Her belly, small hands, and upper arms were still a little chubby. She fixed her gaze on her daughter’s chest, where Mathea had made tits of soap foam. Then she sank down into the tub, all the way under this time. She would often stay that way until Susanne couldn’t stand it and pulled her up again, half-blue in the face. It had become a game between them, a game Mathea always won.
Susanne took another folder out of the bag.
Oh no, she thought. Why did I bring this home with me?
It was a plastic folder filled with 10x15 photographs of Kristiane Thorstensen.
The fifteen-year-old girl lay with her arms out on the autopsy table, her thick curly hair fanned out around the blue-spotted face. She looked like a savior who came in peace.
Susanne held her hand over her mouth.
“My dear girl. There’s nothing left of you,” she whispered to herself. “I hope your mother didn’t see you like this.”
The other pictures in the folder simply disappeared in a blur of gray—she suddenly realized she’d been crying for a while now.
She crawled across the bathroom tiles with the folder in hand. In the bedroom she collapsed on the unmade double bed.
She sat up on the edge with her hands covering her face, then heard a sound in front of her.
“Don’t be sad,” said Mathea.
Susanne still sat motionless with her hands over her face. She cursed herself for having brought new life into the world at all. How could anyone possibly think life had any meaning at all? And Nico, that fucking piece of shit. Why couldn’t it just have worked out? She’d wanted it to work out—for the two of them to build a life together.
“Mommy?” Mathea started to cry. “I’m scared.”
Susanne got down on her knees and opened her arms. The little heart was pounding at double its normal speed. She was warm and cold at the same time.
“Mommy will always take care of you. Always.”
She managed to push away the image of Kristiane lying on a steel bench in the basement at Oslo University Hospital by chanting Bjørn-Åge Flaten’s name to herself.
She pressed her child to her as if she never planned to let her go, her sweater drenched by her hair.
28
He puttered around Lilleaker awhile, cursing himself for ever even having the idea of coming out here. Bergmann didn’t like this part of town; it was impersonal and cold, full of traffic, noise, and sleek office buildings. The patrol car he’d gotten a ride with to Oslo’s western boundary had long since disappeared. He peered at the point where he’d last seen its taillights, feeling like a foreigner, an intruder, in this chaotic landscape of old and new buildings bordering the Lysaker River.
The December darkness had fallen quickly on the way out here, and he could hardly read the signs that were supposed to show the way to the various buildings in the old factory area. At least it had stopped snowing, suddenly, as if someone up there was having some fun by turning the button for snow off and on.
He oriented himself by the illuminated company logos on the ends of the buildings, each name more empty and meaningless than the last. Once this area had been home to real factories and workshops where people actually produced things, back in the day when people actually needed things in this country. Now the newly renovated buildings and newly erected glass palaces alongside them appeared to contain little but office cubicles where the employees sat like slaves in front of computer screens all day—if they didn’t find themselves in endless meetings where they outdid each other in using the most complex words possible to package the moronically simple messages they were hired to sell.
Is this what we’re living on in this country? he wondered. Talk and empty words?
What would happen if there were a crisis, a real crisis, like the atomic winter? Who will save us then?
At last he found the building where Farberg’s company, MindWork, was housed. The lobby looked like a flood zone, the slush thick all the way over to the elevator. The second-floor office appeared deserted and abandoned, with only a handful of the company’s fifteen employees at their desks. The secretary in reception seemed more preoccupied with hanging Christmas ornaments on a plastic tree than with Bergmann’s appointment, and it took Farberg more than five minutes to come down and get him.
Not until he sank down into the visitor’s chair in Jon-Olav Farberg’s office did Bergmann understand that the man on the other side of the desk had been crying right before he came. His eyes looked red and raw, and his gaze was notably evasive. It appeared to require all his concentration to pour coffee into the cups.
Farberg was a head taller than Bergmann, but despite the fumbling introduction, he radiated a natural authority that made Bergmann feel like a schoolboy again.
Farberg looked down at his hands, letting the coffee cup sit untouched.
“Do you see I’ve been crying?” he said without looking at Bergmann.
He didn’t reply.
“It’s all a little too much, all this,” Farberg said in a low voice. “First the picture of myself in Dagbladet today. And now you sitting here in my office.”
“I understand that.”
“It all came back to me when I saw the picture of Marianne, Eva, and me,” he said. “Do you understand? For a moment you let yourself think it couldn’t possibly be true; then it all comes flooding back. I couldn’t believe it when they found her.”
Bergmann brought the cup to his lips. Farberg held his gaze, with a kind of sorrowful smile. Time had been kind to Farberg. He looked at least ten years younger than he was. His fashionable thick hair was becomingly bleached, his skin was lightly sun-kissed—perhaps from a week in the Mediterranean in the fall—and he looked fit under his coal-gray suit. Only the blue eyes appeared to belong to a man who was nearing sixty.
“You quit working at the school?”
“The summer after Kristiane was murdered. I just couldn’t take it anymore. Besides, I’d had enough of work in schools. I got a job in the HR department at the old phone company. It suited me well, and that’s the path I’ve been on ever since. I’ve been running the firm for almost ten years now. Can’t say I regret it. I have assignments from your people too, from just a few days ago actually, leadership coaching, you know . . .” Farberg let the sentence die away. He seemed to be studying Bergmann’s face, searching for something familiar. Bergmann knew what he was going to say. “I know you, don’t I? I’m sure I’ve seen you somewhere before.”
“Handball. Oppsal. Many years ago. I think you coached a younger team when I played on the junior team.”
Farberg shook his head.
“I’ll be damned. I knew I’d seen you before. But the name, no, I don’t remember it. You’re holding up well, I must say.”
You’re good at lying, thought Bergmann.
“You too.”
Farberg laughed quietly.
“Did you attend Vetlandsåsen?”
Bergmann shook his head.
“I’m from Tveita. The projects.”
“Exactly,” said Farberg. “The ramp, that is. The original gangsters. Everyone was scared of you guys.” He smiled to himself, not condescendingly, but in a friendly way. It’s true, thought Bergmann. He couldn’t even keep track of how many of his old friends had ended up on the skids or dead from overdoses. A few had been killed. He could just as easily have ended up on that side of the fence himself. Been dragged into the Tveita gang instead of getting involved in handball. Coincidence or predestination? He didn’t want to know the answer even if he could have found it out.
“You were Kristiane’s teacher?”
“Only in Norwegian and some substitute classes. Anders was, well, on sick leave a fair amount.”
“And her handball coach?” said Bergmann.
