by Gard Sveen
37
She’d already been waiting for two hours. She wasn’t sure she could bear sitting in this common room much longer, watching junkies and drunks who wondered what the female cop was doing there and thinking they hadn’t come here to be brought in. It seemed as though Bjørn-Åge Flaten had just come to town to sleep, rather than to get more money. Though he’d surely had enough dope for today, he would eventually have to go out on the hunt and stockpile for the rest of the week. He would have to leave the shelter to take his next shot, and it couldn’t be long until then. Every single one of them was caught in a kind of Robinson Crusoe economy, which only lasted until the next fix and the two days that followed. Over it all rested the dream of the one big break that would save them from the muck.
Susanne drove the short way over to IKEA and had apple cake and coffee like any other housewife. There was not a white person to be seen among the staff. She’d seen most things in this job and lived for ten years in Grønland with the World Islamic Mission as her nearest neighbor, but she was unfamiliar with the sight of an IKEA employee wearing a hijab in the company colors. She told herself she was starting to get old. She’d grown up in a different country than the Norway that was now springing up under her feet.
She had her mouth full of cake and was thinking about the man she mustn’t think about when the phone rang.
“He’s awake. But he can’t take his shot here, so he’ll disappear just as soon as he intends to keep destroying his life. He should have gone to the hospital.”
“Then send him to a hospital for Pete’s sake,” she mumbled through the apple cake. “But not just yet. Don’t let him get away.”
As she ran out through the labyrinthine furniture store, she realized how stupid she was to have gone to IKEA out of sheer impatience. But she was back in the common room only a few minutes later.
About fifteen minutes later, a man came in who looked like the living dead. His face was drained of color and life, more disintegrated than wrinkled. And he was how old? Only eight years older than her. His clothes had obviously been stolen from a discount-store rack many years ago, and hung on him as they would on a scarecrow. His long hair looked freshly washed, but hung lifelessly over his sunken cheeks. He avoided her gaze as he collapsed in the chair in front of her. Judging by his breathing it sounded as if he might die right before her eyes. On one of his wrinkled hands was a simple prison tattoo.
He sat silently and motionless after she had introduced herself. Then something outside the window attracted his attention. She looked, but saw nothing of interest out there, just gray on gray and a long line of cars spewing out white exhaust.
“I’ve come here to—”
“Is it that case?” he interrupted. He pulled the sleeves of his sweater up and scratched his forearms. First left, then right.
Susanne had not expected him to be so well informed.
“Don’t you think I keep up with the news?” he said, smiling carefully. He was missing a few teeth.
Bjørn-Åge Flaten stood up laboriously from the chair. Out of his back pocket he pulled a few bills and coins, which he placed on the table. Then a packet of Red Mix. With his crooked fingers, he pulled off a Big Ben rolling paper, which he filled with tobacco. His breathing grew heavier.
Susanne thought that he could have been used as an extra in a movie. As a dying man.
“You said back then that you saw Kristiane at Skøyen.”
Flaten lit the hand-rolled cigarette. He started to cough, first lightly, then harder. She grew almost certain that he was going to die right before her eyes. When he was finally done, he concentrated on his breathing for a long time.
“I should be dead. The heroin makes it possible to live with the pain. Ironic, huh?”
She shook her head weakly. She was scared by the thought of what Flaten could have been today. Or, rather, it was the thought of his trajectory—from an upper-middle-class neighborhood in Bærum to a rooming house at Brobekk—that frightened her. It was the thought that she could end up here herself. The membrane of resistance that had prevented her from tipping over was so thin that she wasn’t sure it really existed.
The sight of Flaten was enough to deter her for months to come. The road to heroin was so short that you didn’t realize it until it was too late. She could have told Flaten about a girlfriend of hers who had everything she could want, but nonetheless sent the intern across town to buy her single-use syringes. Susanne was the only one who knew about it. Not even her husband knew. She lived her life with dignity, but couldn’t live without it. It was all a question of money, nothing else.
“What’s wrong with you?” she said.
“It doesn’t matter,” said Flaten. His eyes looked even older than the rest of his face.
“Did you see her? Kristiane?”
“Why does that matter now? The girl is dead.”
“I think it’s important, Bjørn-Åge.”
His eyes narrowed, and he smacked his lips a few times, as if he despised her for having said his name.
“I needed money.” He stared down at the cigarette, which had gone out.
“What do you mean?”
“I made it up. Isn’t that what you all accused me of back then?”
“Can’t you just tell me the truth?”
“What is truth?” was all he said. “Truth and lies are often two sides of the same thing.” His voice seemed frayed at the edges; there was a slight trembling with every word.
She had nothing to say. She felt a surge of disappointment, followed by a flatness she hoped he would not detect, a slight redness in her cheeks. She looked at the clock on the wall. It was too late to drive up to Ringvoll now. She would have to go back to the office and try to get hold of Kristiane’s old teacher, the one who lived in Spain. Anything was better than sitting here with an old drug addict who she had naïvely thought was telling the truth, whatever that was, back in 1988.
Flaten gasped for breath.
“I have to go into town,” he said.
She spent the rest of the day trying to track down Gunnar Austbø, mostly on the phone with a guy from Kripo, who did his best to help her find a contact in Spain.
The high point of the afternoon was the call from Bergmann. His voice had sounded odd, as if he’d seen a ghost in broad daylight.
“Someone lit a fire in her,” Bergmann had said.
“What did you say?”
“Someone lit a fire in her. That summer. In eighty-eight.”
His voice had been weak, as if the meeting with Anders Rask had sucked all the energy out of him. What is it with you? Susanne had wondered. But what Rask had said gave her hope that something may indeed have been overlooked back in 1988.
Now she was sitting in her office, staring blankly into the room.
She wasn’t thinking about Nico.
Or about Svein Finneland.
But about Bergmann.
“Someone lit a fire in her,” she said quietly.
God knows that could be dangerous.
But what was truth, and what was a lie?
Should they take Anders Rask’s words for truth?
When the clock reached four and Bergmann still hadn’t come back from Toten, she punched out, picked up her skates at home, and went to pick up Mathea at daycare. She could read all the papers in the world, but it wouldn’t help one bit.
A silly young girl, a temp who was in from time to time, had the late shift at the daycare. Susanne tried to put on a smile. The young girl obviously did not know whose mother she was.
“Mathea,” said Susanne, trying to be as indulgent as she could as she set the skate bag down on the floor.
“Yes . . .” The young girl’s gaze wandered over the group. Susanne suddenly wondered whether she even knew who Mathea was. What kind of mother was she really? Every day she gave up her most prized possession to people she didn’t know, whose names she didn’t even know. She felt a shudder in her temples, and her insides turned to ice. She j
ust knew that the young girl’s next words were going to be Mathea is dead, didn’t they call you?
The girl said something, but Susanne was unable to make out what. “She’s outside,” said a boy Mathea’s age. It took Susanne a few seconds to recognize him. Emil, a boy Mathea played with a lot. He had even come over once with his mother.
“So,” said the temp. “I—”
“See you tomorrow,” said Susanne, taking the bag of wet clothes down from Mathea’s cubby. She pretended not to see the drawings on the shelf and didn’t even feel guilty.
Mathea was lying upside down on the slide outside.
Susanne went all the way over to her daughter before she noticed her.
“Look, Mommy. I’m dead.”
Susanne closed her eyes.
She thought about saying, “Don’t say that,” but said nothing.
It was almost dark. The lights from the windows in the daycare didn’t quite reach her, and none of the streetlights along the walkway outside the fence were lit.
“Do they let you be out here alone?”
Mathea didn’t answer.
“Mathea?”
“I got permission.”
Susanne went over to the gate in the fence and felt it. It was locked with a sturdy snap lock and a padlock with a carabiner.
She heard slow steps approaching to her left.
A tall figure emerged from the darkness on the other side of the gate. The silhouette seemed to cover the whole walkway. Susanne tried to get a glimpse of the face, but the person had pulled the hood of his bubble jacket over his head, and his face was angled away from her.
Susanne observed the figure, who was now only a few steps from her.
He stopped, still half turned away from her.
She could suddenly hear his breathing, which was deep and heavy, as if he suffered from an illness.
She expected him to turn around at any moment.
“Mommy,” said Mathea behind her.
The man with the black bubble jacket motioned weakly with his right arm. Susanne thought that if he turned around, she would find herself face-to-face with Anders Rask.
She turned, grabbed Mathea, and practically dragged her back inside. She was tempted to turn around just to assure herself that the man hadn’t followed them back into the daycare. She could have sworn she heard the sound of the snap lock in the gate, the sound of steps following them.
Get a grip, she thought.
The image of Kristiane Thorstensen on the autopsy table flashed before her eyes. The organs, the hair, the cut from the pelvis up to the ribcage, the sawed-off sternum, the missing left breast.
What lunatic would think of going into a daycare center that was still open?
A man who’d spent years at Ringvoll, she thought. A man who had already killed six girls.
The bus felt comforting, heated and light, and Mathea’s hand was just so little and warm that Susanne quickly forgot the faceless man on the walkway behind the daycare.
They had Chinese food in Oslo City and looked at Christmas gifts in the big toy store, after which they walked over to the skating rink in Spikersuppa. Every time they passed a junkie under the Christmas wreaths, Susanne wished it was Bjørn-Åge Flaten. And that he would say, I lied to you earlier. I saw her, I saw Kristiane at Skøyen, and now I’ll tell you something no one else knows.
They skated until Mathea could no longer stay on her feet. In the taxi on their way home to Grønland, she was struck so brutally by a thought that she almost started to cry. The combination of the child by her side, the streets decorated for Christmas, and her overwhelming fatigue all made her think that if Mathea ever went over the precipice, there was nothing she would be able to do to rescue her. Flaten had once sat just like this, holding his mother’s hand after skating. Kristiane too. And then one day all that was forgotten, the cord was broken, they disappeared down into the depths, and their mothers never managed to fish them up again.
She took the mittens off Mathea, who blinked her eyes and hung her head. I’ll never let go, she thought. I’ll never let go of your hand.
The taxi stopped for a red light at Jernbanetorget, and she fixed her gaze on a group of junkies hanging out by the entrance to the subway. A young good-looking girl leaned toward an older man, a ghost; she recognized him from the old days. What made her come down here the first time?
That thought suddenly shed light on the meaning behind Rask’s words.
Someone had lit a fire in her.
Kristiane had fallen in love.
“Obviously,” Susanne mumbled to herself.
Fallen in love with someone she never should have fallen in love with.
And it had been the death of her.
38
The warmup was harder than usual. At least it felt that way. His lungs stung as if he’d smoked a whole pack of cigarettes that day. Bergmann acted like he was stretching and pressed himself up against the wall. The truth was that he was having trouble standing up. He tried to regain control of his breathing and get his pulse down to a reasonable level. Either he’d pushed himself too hard, or he hadn’t gotten enough sleep lately. This business with Anders Rask was getting to him more than he wanted to admit.
Maybe there was something wrong with him. Had his heart had enough before he’d even turned forty? Every time the doctor asked if he had illness in the family, he simply answered no. The truth, however, was that he didn’t know, on either his mother’s or his father’s side. He knew nothing about his mother’s birthplace in northern Norway, which she’d left when she was young. And where his father was concerned, he had nothing to go on. All it said in the census registry was “father unknown.” He tried not to give it that much thought, because he knew that “father unknown” generally meant one of two things: in the best case, it meant a one-night stand; in the worst, rape, incest, or code 6, that is, a violent psychopath one must avoid at all costs.
A man like myself, he thought. Those tendencies were usually inherited, he knew that too well from his own job.
But at least he’d left Hege alone after she moved out. That was still something, that he understood when the battle was lost.
“Are you okay?” said a voice behind him.
The assistant coach, Arne Drabløs, gave him a worried look. Bergmann briefly wondered what he was doing here. He’d initially gotten involved to help out his best friend a few years ago; now he had the whole team on his hands, without even having a daughter on it.
He dismissed the thought as quickly as it had come. This team and the coaching work were the closest he got to normalcy. Sometimes it was the only thread that connected him to other people, so that his life was not just made up of death and misery, misery he himself inflicted on others.
“Yes, just get them started for now.” He sank down on the bench without his pulse going down noticeably.
A fire, he thought, observing the girls.
Someone had lit a fire in her.
Maybe it was the thought that he would soon have to face Elisabeth Thorstensen again that was sucking the energy out of him. How had she managed to go on living? He’d tried to reach her twice on his way down from Toten. The first time, she’d hung up after he introduced himself; the second call went straight to voice mail. Something in her voice had frightened him. It seemed completely hollow, without the slightest spark of life.
“Hi, Tommy,” he heard to his left.
It was Sara coming out of the changing room—late, as always. She’d skipped warmup before almost every practice since last summer. He’d talked to her about it a couple of times, trying not to nag, but she’d fallen into some bad habits on the court. He imagined she was probably going to quit soon, which was too bad because they needed everyone they could get.
Only then did he become aware of two boys Sara’s age, perhaps a little older, sitting a few benches away from him. Sara went over to them and tousled one of the boys’ hair. They laughed at something or other. The boy stroked her bare brown
leg. The movements looked confident. He was clearly used to touching girls. Bergmann stood up, took out his whistle, and signaled that they should gather in the midcircle. He waved to Sara.
“Come on,” he said. The boy who had stroked her on the leg smiled in a way that only reinforced Bergmann’s initial impression of him. Gangster material. He was too young to have a tattoo on his neck, but had one anyway. And although any number of kids wore square diamonds in their ears like that, it only made Bergmann more sure of it. His cop gaze had never failed him. The boy reeked of trouble from a mile away, and he had Sara deep in his pocket.
Practice went better than it had in a long time, but Bergmann was more preoccupied by Sara’s apparent interest in the gangster boy than by the fact that his team was finally living up to its potential. Martine and Isabelle had gotten so good that unfortunately they made him think of Kristiane Thorstensen. For their own sake, he ought to move them to a stronger team, but he’d like to keep them until summer.
After practice he was struck by how different things were now from a year ago. Hadja no longer stopped by the way she used to, supposedly by accident, and these girls were now fourteen or fifteen, no longer just kids. While a few still stood with one foot in a kind of carefree childhood, Sara and a handful of the other girls looked as though their childhood was a thing of the past.
He stayed in the gym for half an hour afterward to watch the women’s team practice. He knew they needed a new coach next season, and had surprised himself by saying that he would think about it. There were days when he absolutely did not understand himself. He’d been considering quitting as the girls’ coach, and now he might instead find himself responsible for two teams. But he just couldn’t bear to see the semidesperate announcements in the local paper every time one of the teams lost a coach. Maybe it was absurd, but the words Will you be our coach? always made him sentimental. He’d even called around to some old friends he hadn’t seen in years to try to recruit them.
When he came out to the parking lot, he saw something he really didn’t want to see. He stood quietly in the darkness, the falling snow soaking into his hair and the shoulders of his workout jacket. A girl who was quite clearly Sara stood nearby, a cigarette burning faintly in her hand, making out with the boy with the tattoo on his neck.
