The Fifth Element

by Jorgen Brekke

  “Thanks for the wine. I’ll buy you another bottle the next time I go to the liquor store.”

  “Don’t bother. I’m going out traveling, and I always pick up some duty-free booze.”

  “Traveling? Where to?”

  Gjessing never stopped surprising him.

  “I to go London every year. To see QPR play. Are you familiar with British football teams?”

  “Sort of.”

  “Sort of? Young people today have no passion, but then you didn’t grow up playing the pools. For you, British football is all about brand names, like colas or Santa Claus.”

  “Do you really go all the way to England by yourself?”

  “I’ll keep doing that as long as I can stand on my own two feet. After my wife passed away, I was left with three things in my life: fishing, books, and QPR. And I’m not going to be doing much fishing anymore. Arthritis in my fingers. Soon I’ll only have my tall tales left from my life as a fisherman. When was the last time I was out in a boat? When could it have been? At least a year ago. I’m always thinking that I should go out one last time. But I’ve still got books and football. That may not sound like much. But it’s enough to fill my life for a few more years.”

  “When are you leaving?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  “What about the house?”

  “What about it?”

  “Who’s going to take care of the place?”

  “This house takes care of itself. Besides, you’re here. But it’d be nice if you’d take in the newspaper. I’ll be back on Saturday, February 19.”

  “Okay, I’ll do that.”

  Knut Andersen Stang gave the old man a casual, reassuring smile.

  But inside, he was in an uproar.

  * * *

  He lay in bed, staring up at the slanted ceiling where the lamp hook had been. A long crack in the ceiling tiles pointed to the spot where he was lying.

  He spent a lot of time in bed. It was the only piece of furniture in the place that was his own. He and his father had driven it over in a trailer from Oslo. He’d lasted a week on Gjessing’s creaking plank bed. What was that mattress filled with anyway? Hay? Gravel? The very first weekend after he’d moved away from home, he was back in Oslo. He couldn’t live without a decent mattress. He and his father had enjoyed the drive north. Stopping to swim in Sjoa. His father wore the same swimming trunks he’d had since Knut was a boy. Brown and orange, but by now the flower pattern was completely faded.

  Knut made the most of his bed, sleeping in it, eating in it—honey puffed wheat for breakfast and bacon for supper—dreaming, and going on Facebook, although not often. He spent less time on the Internet than most people. His father’s opinion had stuck with him. “The Web makes you restless,” he’d said. “And you’re restless enough as it is.” That’s why Knut didn’t even have a smartphone. He knew that not having one made him a freak, but he didn’t care. People liked him the way he was. But right now he was in trouble. He stared at the hole left by the hook on the ceiling. Some of the loose plaster drifted down from the hole. White powder filled the air.

  Of course he was out of coke. He’d gone into town and tried to get some, but no luck there either. He hadn’t dared contact anyone he knew because he didn’t want to talk about Jonas. Naturally people had been calling him, but he’d given only terse replies, saying that he was fine and he had no idea what had happened to his friend. What was he supposed to say? He could have tried telling them the truth, explaining that he wasn’t able to think clearly anymore. No. He couldn’t do that. He wasn’t like that. This state of shock had turned him into someone he didn’t recognize. Something Gjessing had said rang true: only really decisive events could alter a person’s innate temperament. Could that be what had happened? Had Jonas’s death fundamentally changed him? Was he a different person now?

  Instead of getting high, Knut had gotten drunk at a bar where he felt sure he wouldn’t be recognized. He’d gone home with a girl but couldn’t stand the sight of her in the glaring light of her kitchen. So he’d left before they made it to the bedroom. Back home, he threw up in the sink in the little bathroom down the hall.

  Now he was lying in bed, feeling sick to his stomach. He wasn’t thinking about anything specific. He was simply waiting, and listening.

  * * *

  Early in the morning the sounds started up. The oak door slowly opened, then shuffling footsteps, a suitcase set down on the floor for a short time as Gjessing paused in the entryway to put on his beige coat, hat, and wool scarf. Gjessing’s clothes had a certain flair—Knut had to give him that. He tried to picture the old man standing there, knotting his scarf, but ended up envisioning those small gray eyes of his, hovering all alone and weightless in the dimly lit hall.

  A few minutes later Gjessing picked up the suitcase and went out the door.

  Knut Andersen Stang—a dork and a coke addict, a drunk, seducer, and sanguine guy in a shitload of trouble—lay in bed listening to Gjessing close the front door and make his way down the stone stairs outside, moving cautiously on the wide slate steps, holding his cane in one hand and clutching the wrought-iron railing with the other. Old Gjessing probably wasn’t wearing cleats on his shoes, and no doubt he was worried about slipping on the thin layer of ice that covered the stairs in the morning. Frozen dew, shiny and nearly invisible, treacherous. Even Knut had slipped once in the winter on his own steps, which were narrower, but they were also made of slate.

  Gjessing stood outside for a long time. Silence descended. Maybe he was studying the view of the town. Knut wondered whether he should get up to see if the old man was still out there. Could he really have disappeared without another sound? Drifted away into the air? But Knut decided not to budge. He didn’t want to be seen in the window, peering out, as if he were up to something.

  Then he heard a car pull into the gravel driveway. Probably a taxi. So Gjessing was still there. He spoke to the cabdriver, then got in, the doors slammed, and the cab drove off.

  The last sound Knut heard was the creaking of the gravel as the taxi headed into Overlege Kindts Gate in the Upper Singsaker district of Trondheim. Gjessing, apparently a long-retired physician, had left. Setting off for a trip to England. A man well over eighty, maybe even ninety, was on his way to a football match in London.

  And Knut was alone in the house.

  Moving slowly, as always, he got out of bed. His stomach felt heavy, the same sensation he got when he ate a steak without chewing it properly. He exchanged his Hugo Boss underwear for Armani and got dressed. It felt like more work than usual.

  He went out to the hall and looked around. Hanging on Gjessing’s coat rack was a plaid smoking jacket. On the floor underneath were his slippers. Knut turned on the light and inspected the oak door leading to his landlord’s rooms. Suddenly he coughed, then strode over to the door and grabbed the brass handle. He gave it a tug, but the door was locked. That was no surprise. He tried to recall if he’d heard Gjessing turn a key in the lock, but he wasn’t sure. Probably Gjessing had locked the door as it closed. A soundless maneuver, with one hand on the door handle, the other turning the key. Then he’d slipped the key into his pocket. Automatic movements that even stiff, old fingers remembered.

  Knut felt a pang of guilt about what he was going to do, though he didn’t know why. Gjessing had said it himself. He had no plans for the money other than to surprise distant relatives that he seldom saw. If he found more than two hundred and fifty thousand-krone bills under the mattress, he planned to leave them there. Right now, it was a matter of survival. Going back to the life he’d been living. Maybe even giving up the dope. Who knew? That was an idea. A thought occurred to him. What about Jonas? Jonas was part of the life he’d been living. So that meant Knut really couldn’t go back. Not to his former life. That was gone for good. But no matter what, he had to get himself out of this situation, one way or another, and he had to do it alone. The thing was, he needed that money lying in there under the old mattress. He
needed it more than anybody else did. That money could do more for him than it ever could do for Gjessing.

  He went back to his room. Put on the down jacket, a pair of mittens his mother had knitted for him, and a Busnel knit cap. Then he went out into the freezing cold, exiting through his own door.

  The air was colder than a mug of whiskey. It hadn’t snowed. The storm everybody had been talking about in the media had passed south of Trondheim. It had also subsided a bit but was expected to return with even greater force over the weekend, and to this part of Norway as well. A few rays of sunlight penetrated the clouds like unexpected guests.

  He trudged across the icy gravel toward the garage. He moved aside the shovel leaning against the garage door. The neighbor boy used the shovel to clear the driveway once a week. Otherwise it stood propped against the old door, holding it shut. Inside was the old, burgundy Mercedes that belonged to Guttorm Gjessing. Knut walked around the car to where the tools were kept at the back of the garage. He knew where to look. He had borrowed tools from Gjessing before. From the biggest drawer he took out a crowbar.

  * * *

  “No, no. Not in there!”

  A fat dog with shaggy fur and floppy ears came running into the yard. Knut was going back to the house and stopped midway, holding the crowbar in his hand, as if it were the metal tool that had brought him to an abrupt halt.

  The voice was coming from out on the street, beyond the winter-white hedge.

  “Aphrodite! Come here, Afro! Come to Mamma!”

  Then he caught sight of her.

  Her red hair hung over one shoulder, almost like a scarf. She wore a knitted cap with multicolored stripes, like a psychedelic snail with her hair sticking out. And she had freckles. Snowflakes fell from her gray coat with blue embroidery across the front. She had brushed against the snow-laden hedge on her way in. It was her. The girl he’d seen at the liquor store a couple of weeks ago. Before everything went to hell.

  “Oh, you’ll have to excuse my dog. She has no manners at all.”

  She laughed as if she really wasn’t the least bit sorry. Both of them looked at the dog, who was peeing near the corner of the garage.

  Knut laughed. It was one of those laughs he couldn’t control, a spontaneous sort of laughter. She laughed too, as if imitating him.

  “She doesn’t get her bad manners from me,” she said.

  “Let’s hope not.”

  He caught sight of the leash in her hand. She was also holding a book. Didn’t she have a book the last time he saw her?

  “Let me have that,” he said, pointing.

  He set the crowbar on the ground, feeling guilty. Did it look weird for him to be walking around with a crowbar on a cold day like this?

  As she raised her hand to give him the leash, he read what it said on the cover of her book: Campi clysteriorum by Symphorien Champier.

  “You read Latin?” he asked.

  “Only when I’m bored.” She gave him a teasing smile.

  Was she flirting with him?

  “Just kidding. It’s an English translation. They just kept the Latin title. Mostly I read detective novels, but sometimes I try something really old. This is a treatise from the Middle Ages. Pretty dry. Stuff for work. The original is archived in the library where I work. I brought it along so I could read it while I’m walking my dog.”

  “You read while you’re walking?”

  “I like to live dangerously.”

  “I read old books too,” he said. “Dostoyevsky, for example. Crimes and Punishments is my favorite book.”

  “You’ve never read even one sentence by Dostoyevsky in your whole life.” She laughed.

  He loved her laugh.

  “What makes you say that?”

  She’d seen right through him. Nobody had ever done that before. He liked it. He found it exciting.

  “I just know it’s true,” she said.

  “How can you know that?”

  “I could tell you, but then I’d just scare you off. I have a tendency to scare people. It’s a bad habit of mine.”

  “I’m not easily scared.”

  “If it really was your favorite book, you’d know that the title is Crime and Punishment, not crimes, plural. Are you going to help me catch my dog or not?”

  He held up the leash, staring at it foolishly.

  “Sure. Right,” he stammered.

  When he got close to the dog, it ran past him and straight over to the red-haired girl. She grabbed the dog’s collar, holding it carefully, lovingly.

  “Better bring the leash over here,” she said, laughing.

  He handed it to her.

  “So you named your dog Aphrodite?”

  “Mostly I just call her Afro.”

  “Both names suit her,” he said, grinning.

  He watched her fasten the leash to the dog’s collar. Then she said good-bye and went on her way.

  As she disappeared from sight, he noticed her stomach. She was thin, but under her coat he could see a slight bulge. Was she pregnant? He didn’t know why, but the thought made him even more excited. He leaned down and cautiously picked up the crowbar. It was so cold he could feel it through his mittens.

  * * *

  Back in his room Knut placed the crowbar on top of the electric heater. He knew it was irrational and crazy, but he wanted it to be warm to the touch. After eating a portion of honey puffed wheat with milk he put his hand on the crowbar and decided it was the proper temperature.

  Then he carried it into the hall, where he stood and stared at the oak door.

  No, he thought. This is wrong. A burglar wouldn’t come in this way.

  There was no reason for any suspicion to fall on him. Gjessing was out of town, and burglaries occurred frequently on Overlege Kindts Gate. And the old geezer hadn’t installed a security alarm in his house. He’d asked his young lodger, who was often out, to keep an eye on things. With newspapers piling up on the front steps—Knut would forget about taking them inside, and that was merely an oversight, not a crime—and with all the lights off inside Gjessing’s house 24-7, it wouldn’t be at all strange for someone to try and break in. Nobody would suspect Knut, as long as he went about it the right way.

  He went back to his room and wiped off the crowbar with a T-shirt he found lying on the floor. Then he set it on the bed and lay down next to it. He tossed and turned for a long time. He could have used some stuff up his nose.

  Then he started thinking about her. At first it seemed coincidental that she would appear in his thoughts. He happened to think of what she’d said. That she scared people. But as soon as he began thinking about her, he couldn’t stop. She wasn’t especially pretty. And he found that annoying. But not ugly either. Definitely not ugly. She was slim, except for her stomach, and she had red hair and freckles. Not his type at all. So what was it about her?

  Aphrodite? Who would give a name like that to their dog? Was it really possible? But Afro was cool.

  He laughed out loud.

  It struck him how wrong this all was. He shouldn’t be thinking about such things right now. He had just lost his best friend. And he was in danger of losing his own life, or at least getting the shit beat out of him if his plan didn’t succeed. That was what he needed to focus on. But what was it about her? He was attracted to her, wasn’t he? Wanted to sleep with her? He wasn’t sure. Maybe it would be good. Maybe it would be better with her than with anyone else. Could she be the one? The one he didn’t want to get rid of the instant he woke up?

  But she was pregnant. She was with someone else. Maybe she was even married. What was he thinking about now? Those freckles of hers. He couldn’t get them out of his mind. They were red like Mars, seen with the naked eye from earth on a clear night when he walked home, semi-drunk, from a failed attempt to get laid. She was otherworldly.

  Finally, he fell asleep.

  * * *

  He woke up in a sweat several hours later, and she was still in his thoughts. He’d been dreaming about
the snow that had settled on her coat, and pictured himself brushing it off. Brushing and brushing until her whole coat crumbled away. Underneath she had on bright red panties and nothing else.

  It was not yet dark. He searched all his pockets but then realized he’d already done that several times earlier. No more white powder anywhere.

  Instead he went down to the basement, which could be reached from a door in the hallway. It wasn’t locked. There he had a storage space with a fridge inside. He found some beer—six bottles of Sol, Mexican piss—and a salami that his mother had brought him from Italy.

  He went back to his room to eat while he waited for darkness to fall. And finally it did. Just as it always does.

  He’d also brought upstairs from the basement some coveralls his father had left behind after helping him move in. That was so typical. His father had clothes for every occasion. Knut pulled on the coveralls over his jeans and shirt and buttoned them all the way up. He put on his Busnel cap, tugging it down over his forehead like a crook might do. Then he put on his gloves and grabbed the crowbar, which was lying on the bed.

  He went out through his own private entrance and hurried around the corner of the house, away from the street. On that side no one would be able to see him except for the neighbors who lived in the property at the back, but only if for some reason they should decide to shine a flashlight out their window. But there weren’t even any lights on in their house. They probably weren’t home. Knut was feeling confident.

  He paused to survey the old man’s house. There were four big windows on this side, and at least two of them led to Gjessing’s living room, while one was the kitchen window. But all of them were too high up for him to climb through from the ground. There were also a lot of basement windows, but he didn’t even consider using any of them. They would just give him access to the basement stairs and up to the oak door in the hall. And he’d already ruled that out as a possible entrance into Gjessing’s part of the house. So he decided to go back to the garage and get the stepladder. As he crossed the yard, he kept an eye on the road, but it remained deserted.