by Thomas Enger
He knows that it is stupid and beyond all reason, but he can’t help it. He wants to know if she is with Gundersen, if her voice is happy or sad, if there is a hint of longing when she hears him speak. They haven’t spoken on the telephone since the day Jonas died. She called to ask him if he could pick up Jonas from nursery and look after him until the following morning, even though it was actually her week to have him. She wasn’t feeling very well. He replied: Yes, of course, don’t worry about it.
And he knows that it is not the fire itself, or that Jonas died, which is eating Nora. She will never forgive herself for falling ill that day and asking him to swap. If she hadn’t felt unwell, Jonas wouldn’t have been with Henning. And their son would still be alive.
He is convinced that whenever Nora feels a touch of flu or a twinge somewhere, she dismisses it as unimportant. She will be fine. I’m all right, I’m going to work. And every time, the same thought haunts her: Why didn’t I just pull myself together and pick him up? How ill was I really?
Thoughts like that can drive you mad. As for him, he thinks about the three generous brandies he drank after Jonas had gone to sleep that night. Perhaps he would have been able to save him if he had only had two? Or how about one? What if he had gone to bed earlier the night before, then he wouldn’t have been overtired and nodded off in front of the television before the fire started?
What if.
30
He lets it ring a long time. Perhaps her display tells her that it is him? Or she might have got a new mobile and not transferred the numbers from the old one? Or maybe she has quite simply deleted him? Or she is busy doing something? Like having a life.
He is surprised when she finally picks up. He could and probably should have hung up after the tenth ring, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. Her voice is awake when she says “Hi, Henning.” He replies:
“Hi, Nora.”
Christ, how it hurts to say her name out loud.
“How are you?” she says. “I heard what happened.”
“I’m good.”
“You must have been terrified?”
“More angry, really.”
That’s actually true. He isn’t trying to come across as some macho action hero. He did get angry, mainly because he didn’t want his life to end like that, in a crescendo, in the middle of something unresolved.
They fall silent. They used to be very good at silence, both of them, but now it is merely uncomfortable. She asks no follow-up questions. He starts a conversation before it gets too awkward. He imagines that she doesn’t want to seem overly concerned about his welfare, if Gundersen is in the room with her.
“Listen, I’m working on a story and I came across an article you wrote about a gang, Bad Boys Burning, about six months ago. Do you remember?”
A few seconds of silence follow.
“Yes. They had a bust up with another gang, if I remember rightly. Hemo Raiders, or someone like that.”
They sound like a nice, friendly bunch, he thinks.
“That’s right.”
“Four or five of them ended up in hospital. Stab wounds and broken bones.”
“Right again.”
“Why are you writing about them?”
He debates whether to tell her, but remembers that they work for rival newspapers and that trust is a closed chapter in their joint book of memories. Or partly closed, at any rate.
“I’m not writing about them. Or, at least, I don’t think so.”
“BBB is no joke, Henning.”
“I never joke.”
“No, I mean it. Some of those boys are psychopaths. They don’t give a crap about anyone. Do you think they’re behind the murder of Tariq Marhoni?”
Oh, Nora. She knows him far too well.
“I don’t know. It’s early days yet.”
“If you decide to go after them, Henning, be careful. Okay? They’re not nice people.”
“It’ll probably be all right,” he says, thinking how weird it is to discuss stories and sources with Nora again. Journalists inevitably end up talking shop. When you live together as well, it just becomes more shop. Until the whole thing topples.
He worked too much for a while. When he finally got home, Nora was so tired that she didn’t want to hear another word about newspapers. It all got to be too much. It was his fault, obviously. That, too. It is becoming the pattern of my life. I manage to destroy even the finest things, he thinks.
He thanks her for her help and hangs up. He stays on the sofa, staring at the telephone as though she is still down the other end. He presses the telephone against his ear again. Nothing but silence.
He is reminded of a double murder in Bodø he covered some years ago. Before Nora went to bed, one of the first nights they were apart, he called her. They spoke for half an hour, longer possibly. When he heard her yawn, he told her to put the handset on her pillow but not hang up. He wanted to hear her sleep. He sat in his hotel room, listening to her breathing, which was rapid to begin with. Then deeper and deeper. Then he laid down, too. He doesn’t remember if he hung up. But he remembers how well he slept that night.
31
Zaheerullah Hassan Mintroza leans forward on the squeaky chair in his glass cage. He is counting money. Cash. It’s only ever cash in the car wash. He does have a till and it is plugged in, but he never uses it.
Nothing beats cash in hand.
He is very pleased with today’s takings so far: 12 passenger cars × 150 kroner each = 1,800 kroner. Plus 2 polishes @ 800 kroner. And 36 mini cabs × 100 kroner each. That makes 7,000 in total. Not bad. And it’s two hours till closing time.
Offering cabbies a discount was a good move.
He is about to go and greet a new customer, when two cars pull up behind the filthy Mercedes parked outside. Two police cars.
Damn, Hassan thinks. The officers, three in total, get out. Hassan goes to meet them. He has seen one of them before.
“Are you the owner of this car wash?” asks Detective Inspector Brogeland. He raises his voice to drown out the sound of the high-pressure hosing-down in progress inside the car wash. Hassan nods.
“Do you employ a man called Yasser Shah?”
Damn, Hassan thinks again.
“Yes.”
“Where is he? We would like to talk to him.”
“Why?” Hassan asks.
“Is he here?”
“No.”
“Do you know where he is?”
Hassan shakes his head.
“Isn’t he supposed to be at work today?”
“No.”
“Do you mind if we take a look inside the car wash?”
Hassan shrugs and remains outside while the officers enter the car wash. The filthy Mercedes drives off.
Hassan thinks about Yasser. Bloody amateur. Didn’t he tell him “no mistakes”?
Work inside stops. An Avensis minicab is nearly ready. The officers talk to the men, but Hassan can’t hear what they are saying. He sees Mohammed shakes his head. Omar, too.
The officers search every room, look around the glass cage, check in front of and behind the car wash. Brogeland says something to the other officers before he comes over to Hassan again.
“We need to talk to Yasser Shah urgently. If you do see him, you must tell him to contact me or the police as soon as possible.”
Brogeland hands him a card. Hassan accepts reluctantly, but he doesn’t look at it. In your dreams, pig.
“We know what you’re doing here, Hassan.”
Hassan tries not to show unease, but he can feel it in his cheeks. He waits for the threat which never comes and realizes that is because it has already been made.
Brogeland says nothing else. Hassan understands that the police will keep the car wash under surveillance from now on to get hold of Yasser Shah and to monitor his other activities.
He glares at Brogeland and the other officers as they get in their cars. Perhaps I ought to offer the police a discount, Hassan thinks as he
watches them drive off. Free car wash in return for their bodies at the bottom of Oslo Fjord.
He goes back in and gestures for the others to come over. They assemble inside the glass cage. Hassan doesn’t sit down. He looks at each of them in turn.
“They know Yasser did it,” he says.
“How can they?” Mohammed asks.
“Are you thick? Yasser told us there was a man there. He must have seen Yasser and identified him to the police. He can ruin everything for us.”
“Who? Yasser?”
Hassan sighs and shakes his head.
“The witness, you moron.”
Mohammed shrinks.
“I don’t care how you do it, but I want you to find him.”
Hassan looks at them, one by one.
“Find out everything you can from the papers, speak to people you know, in case one of them can name the witness. Yasser said the man’s face was scarred. Burn scars. That should make your job easier. If the police don’t find any evidence that Yasser was in the flat, that witness is the only person who can ruin it for him and for us. When you find the guy, then you let me know.”
“Why, what are you going to do?” one of the men asks. Hassan breathes deeply.
“What am I going to do? What the hell do you think?”
Henning finishes typing out the interview with Tariq and emails it to the news desk. He writes—in capital letters—that his name and photo must under no circumstances be displayed when the article is published. He has no intention of going underground, but neither does he want to advertise his whereabouts.
He looks at the clock. Damn! The off-license is closed. And he isn’t going to his mother’s without St. Hallvard. He decides to go for a walk instead. There might be a match practice that I can watch, he thinks, and unwind a little.
The sun over the Sail Loft Building hits his back as he gets outside. A table and two chairs have been put outside Mr. Tang’s Restaurant. A dog under the table closes its eyes. He thinks it is an Irish setter.
He loved dogs when he was little. And dogs loved him. His grandparents had a dog called Bianca. Bianca worshipped him. Even more so after he became allergic to her.
A yellow Opel Corsa zooms down Markvei, just as Henning is about to cross. Yellow cars always remind him of Jonas. Once, when he picked up his son from nursery, Jonas pointed out every single yellow car he saw on his way home. The game was to be the first person to spot them. They played it again the next day. And the day after. The whole summer, in fact. Not a day goes by without Henning looking for yellow cars. And every time, he hears his own voice cry out: Yellow car! And Jonas protests: I saw it first. It wasn’t proper yellow. Anyway, it doesn’t count, we hadn’t started yet.
Kids. They can turn anything into a game.
There is hardly an empty spot in the stands. Soccer players, parents, balls, buggies. He sits in his usual place, among the bitter nightshade. He watches them practice and he watches them play; he recognizes most of the children on the pitch. Boys huddle together. One of them holds a bag of potato chips in his hands. A blond boy wearing goalkeeper gloves tries to do a headstand. The coach’s voice sounds stern, he tells the boys to get ready, the game is about to begin.
The boys are wearing purple oversize Grüner soccer shirts. Jonas always looked good in those big shirts. White shorts and white socks. Henning closes his eyes and tries to imagine Jonas, two years older. Perhaps his hair would have been longer. He used to like it long. It might be possible to make out the features of an older boy, the beginnings of a young man. Perhaps he would have started looking at girls, but denied it vehemently.
Perhaps.
What if.
He opens his eyes. The potato chips have all been eaten. Sated, the boy tosses aside the packet and gulps down a mouthful of Coke.
32
That night he dreams about pistols. Huge pistols spewing bullets. The bullets are coming his way, but he wakes up every time, right before they hit him.
How he hates sleeping.
He can’t bear to be inside the flat, so at dawn the next morning, he goes up to Ekeberg Common. He rides on his Vespa, his rusty, pale blue Vespa, zooming through a city which has yet to wake up.
It was something he often used to do, return to the scenes of the murders he covered. It was his old mentor, Jarle Høgseth, who told him to do it. Get a feel for the surroundings, ideally at the time when the murder was committed. There might be information which hasn’t emerged from interviews, police reports, and witness statements. Jarle Høgseth was a smart man. Except when it came to smoking.
Henning parks next to the tarmac path which runs across the Common, right by Ekeberg School. The tent is still there, surrounded by police tape. It is just past six AM.
He looks around. A solitary horse is grazing near Ekeberg Farm. A woman, her blond hair in a ponytail, is out jogging. He sees a dog running around on the grass where the huge birches appear to have grown into one tree. The dog has a stick in its mouth.
He heads for the tent and tries to visualize what happened. Henriette Hagerup in the hole in the ground, knocked out by a stun gun. A man throwing heavy rocks at her, flogging her, chopping off her hand. Perhaps she didn’t start screaming until it was too late. No one saw or heard her.
She must have been killed in the middle of the night or very early in the morning. And she must have come here of her free will. No one could have carried an unconscious person across Ekeberg Common without being seen. Not even at night. There would still be traffic around. This makes him think she must have been meeting someone she knew. Could the filming have something to do with it?
His thoughts are interrupted by the dog jumping him. He just manages to raise his hands in defense as the dog tries to take a chunk out of his arm. He shakes and pushes the dog away. It doesn’t hurt him, but it growls. Its owner comes over.
“Sit!”
The man’s voice is firm. The dog scampers around Henning’s feet, before it returns to its master, reluctantly.
“I’m sorry,” the older man says. “He just wants to play. He’s very frisky, you see. Are you all right? He didn’t bite you?”
Henning doesn’t mind frisky, but he draws the line at attempted murder. He wants to shout at this bloody idiot of a dog owner who lets a lethal weapon run free in a public space. But he doesn’t. Because he remembers Assistant Commissioner Nøkleby saying at the press conference that:
The body was discovered by an older man out walking his dog. He called the police at six oh nine.
He checks his watch. It is almost ten past. He inhales deeply and looks at the dog owner.
“I’m fine,” he says, brushing off invisible dog’s hair. With Henning’s usual luck, some of them will have got stuck in his nostrils and he will have a fun couple of days of sneezing and wheezing to look forward to.
“Lively animal,” he says, forcing a smile.
“Yes, he’s a bundle of energy. His name is Kama Sutra.”
Henning stares at the man.
“Kama Sutra?”
The man nods proudly. Henning decides not to ask the obvious question.
“You’re out early?”
“We’re out early every day. I’m an early bird, always have been. Kama Sutra loves to start his day up here. And so do I. When it’s all quiet and the air is fresh.”
“Yes, I see what you mean,” Henning says, and looks around again.
“Thorbjørn Skagestad,” the man introduces himself before Henning has time to ask. He holds out his hand. Henning shakes it.
“Henning Juul.”
Skagestad wears a Norwegian army cap, though it is summer. The cap sits loosely on his head. His Wellies are army green, too. His combat trousers have pockets on the front, on the back, and on the legs and are reinforced with leather patches on the knees. His jacket matches the trousers, both in color and in style. Skagestad would look at home on the cover of Hunting and Fishing. His skin is lined and his teeth show his love of coffee and tobacco. Y
et he has an amiable face. It looks like it could break into a smile at any time.
“Are you a police officer?” he asks and throws the stick as far as he can. Kama Sutra shoots off. Henning sees its small paws dart across the soft grass.
“I’m a reporter. I work for the online newspaper 123news.”
“123news?”
“Yes.”
“What kind of name is that?”
Henning holds up his hands.
“Don’t ask me. I didn’t pick it.”
“But what are you doing out here at this hour? There’s no one around.”
“You’re here. It was you who found her, wasn’t it?”
Skagestad becomes defensive. Most people do when they realize they are about to be interviewed. Skagestad has no choice but to answer every single one of Henning’s questions. After all, his dog just attacked him, so Henning doesn’t feel bad in the slightest for imposing on Skagestad.
“I don’t want to get in the paper.”
“You won’t have to.”
Kama Sutra returns with the stick in its mouth. Skagestad takes one end and pulls as hard as he can. The dog growls again, no way will it let go and it doesn’t until Skagestad overpowers it. The dog pants, its tongue dangles out of the corner of its mouth. Kama Sutra sits down, its eyes filled with anticipation. Skagestad hurls the stick again.
“I’ve never seen anything like it.”
Henning can quite believe that.
“What has happened to this country?” Skagestad continues. “A stoning in Norway?”
He shakes his head.
“I bet it’s those bloody immigrants.”
Henning wants to say something, but stops himself. As Jarle Høgseth used to say: When people want to get something off their chest, then you let them talk. Let them talk themselves dry. Even if you don’t like what they are saying.
“There are far too many of them here.”
Skagestad shakes his head again.
“I’ve got nothing against helping people who’ve had a rough time where they came from, but if they’re going to live here, they should jolly well abide by Norwegian laws, respect our culture and our way of life, do things like we’ve always done them.”
