The Frozen Woman

by Jon Michelet

  ‘It was all the blood, as I said. And then there was the drunk who came as I was leaving.’

  ‘A drunk came to the house?’

  ‘Yes, as I was leaving there was a drunk standing in the doorway. I almost leapt out of my boots. The old man reeked of booze. Said he lived next door, asked me if I was a cop. “Are you the police, young man?” He said he’d rung the police some days before because he’d seen something very suspicious in Reidar’s house. Reidar is Bård’s uncle who couldn’t care less about the shack in Aspedammen because it’s falling to pieces and he lives in Lanzarote. The old man grumbled on about how the police never took him seriously when he saw mysterious goings-on and could prove the presence of drugs gangs and terrorists and so on. I told him I wasn’t a cop but Reidar’s nephew and it was my job to keep an eye on the house. Then I asked the old boy what suspicious things he’d seen.’

  ‘The suspense is killing me,’ Kykke says with a grin. But his expression is wary. The eye covered by the patch squints vigilantly into the sun.

  ‘He said he’d seen a couple of guys forcing a gypsy woman – that’s what he called her – out of a car and into the house. And then he heard screaming.’

  ‘I see,’ Kykke says. ‘Did the old boy give any details of the two men and the car they came in?’

  ‘No, and I didn’t ask. I told him the men he’d seen were friends of mine I’d sent to show the gypsy woman around. She was looking for somewhere to live, but she thought the house was too isolated and the rent much too expensive. She went all surly, made a scene, screamed and took off.’

  ‘And he bought that?’

  ‘He was rat-arsed and drooling. Tried to bum money off me. I freaked, made for my car and roared off to the sound of tinkling ice. Afterwards, when I’d calmed down and heard about the woman on the train, I put two and two together and reckoned the Kamikaze gang had been settling a score with a drug mule in the house. One who’d perhaps cheated them and had to pay the bitter price.’

  Kykke takes a sip from the beer can, a pinch of snus, spits majestically and praises Beach Boy for an excellent account. He asks why the lad thinks it was the Kamikaze renting the house and hears that it was Bård, Bård the Board, the skateboard freak, who had told him. Kykke says a lot of strange things go on in Aspedammen, as there is a motor circuit and everyone interested in cars knows the place, and it is close to Sweden. Pretty deserted. Great place for anyone who runs a little business over the border and needs somewhere to store goods.

  ‘You haven’t heard of or suspected anyone else who could be involved, apart from the Kamikaze?’ Kykke asks.

  ‘Nope,’ Beach Boy answers.

  ‘And the million-dollar question. Why did you think there was a connection between a woman killed in Aspedammen and the murder victim at Thygesen’s place in Oslo?’

  ‘When I went to Trøgstad there was a bit about the murdered woman in the papers and…’

  ‘Hang on,’ Kykke says. ‘Was there anyone in the slammer who knew you had something to do with the Seven Samurai?’

  ‘No, luckily, not at first,’ Beach Boy says with a wide grin. ‘I realised then how incredibly smart the rule of secret membership was. Because at Trøgstad there were two guys strutting about telling everyone they were Hells Angels and a third I was sure was a Kamikaze. There could have been all sorts of trouble if they’d known I was a Samurai. And then there were the poker-faced Albanians, who hate bikers, and the desert rats from Somalia, who don’t like our kind either.’

  ‘What did the other inmates make of you, lad?’

  ‘I was who I said I was. A petty thief from Hobøl who lived with his mother in Tistedalen.’

  ‘You said at first?’

  ‘Gradually I began to feel more comfortable. The two Hells Angels left right after I arrived, and the guy I thought was a Kamikaze was transferred to a prison in Mysen because he stabbed a guy with a fork in the dining room. And then I got a cell-mate from Frederikstad, nothing suspect about him, in for fiddling the dole, who dreamed about riding a big bike. He was a Harley fan. I tried to redeem him, told him about Kawasakis and the Seven Samurai, hinted that I knew a bit about the club.’

  ‘Fine,’ Kykke says. ‘What I’m getting at is: did you say anything to the warders or welfare officers, that sort of person?’

  ‘Not a peep. Are you out of your mind?’

  Kykke slings his scarf, rolls a fag from Beach Boy’s pouch, lights up, asks about Thygesen and blows out a cloud that hangs in the still air.

  ‘One of the Hells Angels worked with me in the workshop where we reinforced the wooden crates,’ Beach Boy says. ‘He said the big guys in the Hells Angels had been to see Thygesen once to get advice about their magazine Scanbike. It was something to do with freedom of expression, and Thygesen was supposed to give legal support for a good fee. But it went pear-shaped and the Hells Angels were so angry they considered burning down his house. I wondered if the Kamikaze had used Thygesen as well and got so annoyed they dumped the dead woman in his garden, as an act of revenge, sort of.’

  ‘You’re a sharp thinker,’ Kykke says. ‘But is your memory as good? Can you remember me mentioning we’d also used some lawyer at The Middle of Nowhere?’

  ‘No, first I’ve heard of it.’

  ‘We, well, I, in my capacity as the mechanic in the Seven Samurai, hired a legal consultant at great expense to try to prevent the local council from expropriating the bunker and stopping us drinking and so on. All because of some damned environmental project the bloody Våler mayor wanted to push through. I lost because my legal bodger didn’t see the time limit for an appeal and so I couldn’t take out a civil action, and in the end I lost the chance to buy the farm and build a proper, authorised garage here. You didn’t hear about this? You didn’t tell anyone about it?’

  ‘No,’ Beach Boy says, staring at the ground.

  ‘Look me in the eyes, boy.’

  ‘I hadn’t heard about it, and if I had, I wouldn’t have told anyone, would I?’

  ‘That sounds logical,’ Kykke sighs. He gets up, walks over and points to the figure on the wall. ‘D’you remember who daubed this? It was a kid we took care of when he pedalled past on his mountain bike, a real little racer from Ringvoll with an alcoholic dad and a Valium-addicted mum. Good at drawing. A little Edvard Munch. Perhaps you can remember the lad in that foggy brain of yours? And why on that autumn day in 1993 he stopped drawing atomic rockets and started drawing Thygesen on a gallows? Because little pitchers have long ears, and the kid had heard how mad we were with the bum lawyer from Oslo West.’

  Beach Boy hides his face in his hands.

  ‘There’s no point lying through your teeth to me,’ Kykke says, sitting down heavily with a creak of the bench. ‘Was everything else you told me true or was that all lies too? Such as you being all alone in Aspedammen?’

  ‘Bård the Board was with me. He kept watch in the car we’d stolen.’

  ‘He never saw the blood or the bag?’

  ‘No,’ Beach Boy says, crossing his heart and drying his tears.

  ‘That’s the easy stuff over with,’ Kykke says. ‘Now we come to what really made Borken see red and Lips to look on the dark side. They almost went berserk when you called from the phone box in Trøgstad to say you were moving heaven and earth to get the photo of the murdered woman in the paper. They didn’t think it was possible and, to be honest, neither did I. But today I told them you’d actually pulled it off, your pièce de résistance. Do you think Borken went berserk? Give me the CD player on your belt.’

  Beach Boy unhitches the Walkman and passes it to Kykke. He takes out a little screwdriver from a side pocket in his leather trousers and unscrews the lid with quick, practised twists of his wrist. Removes the insides and examines them. Puts them back and replaces the lid.

  ‘What was the point of that?’ Beach Boy asks.

  ‘Loo
king for a police bug,’ Kykke answers calmly, and talks about the time he was part of a strike committee on a rig called the North Sea Star and the company bugged the cabins of the most militant gang leaders. That was when he had to learn how to look for hidden microphones.

  ‘You don’t bloody trust me at all, do you?’ Beach Boy shouts. ‘You have no reason to suspect that I’m a dirty, low-down spy.’

  ‘Kiss my arse,’ Kykke replies coldly.

  ‘So tell me what the point of taking my CD player was.’

  Beach Boy goes right up to Kykke and screams in his face, but Kykke stands with his hands in his pockets without responding.

  ‘You just stand there, calm as a stone,’ Beach Boy says.

  ‘My calm is of the type the old Greeks called stoic. Stoic calm,’ Kykke says. ‘Now listen. Someone may have planted an especially adapted CD player, with a mike and recording equipment, perhaps even a transmitter. What I did, I did for the safety of the club and for yours too. The world out there is hard. The cops are trying to crush every biker club in the country and they have the very latest bugging equipment. What have we got? Year before last’s old crap.’

  Beach Boy has to concede this argument. He calms down and declares that if he were to spy for anyone it would have to be for the Russians. He could give them loads of information about the Nike battery in Våler.

  From a little leather bag attached to the front of the Kawasaki petrol tank Kykke takes a shiny silver Dictaphone. They sit down and he places the mini-recorder on the bench between himself and Beach Boy.

  ‘There’s something that mystifies a simple soul like myself,’ Kykke says wiping the sweat with a cloth he has taken from the bike. It is stained with motor oil. The stripes it leaves on his face are reminiscent of Indian war paint. ‘If you wanted to put the squeeze on a rich bastard why did you contact the police?’

  ‘I thought I’d kill two birds with one stone,’ Beach Boy answers.

  ‘How?’

  ‘First, I wrote a letter to Ryland, Gerhard Ryland the admin director of that oil fund, and said I’d found his name and address in an envelope in the bag of the woman who’d been killed. I wrote that our silence had a price, and it was a million kroner.’

  ‘What do you mean our silence? For Christ’s sake, surely you didn’t say anything about the Seven Samurai in the letter, did you?’

  ‘Not at all,’ Beach Boy answers quickly, running a hand through his yellow hair. ‘No, I just wrote that I represented a gang.’

  ‘Bloody hell, son,’ Kykke groans. ‘Now you’re lying again. We can’t have this. I’ll have to turn this little mike off. Borken said he wanted a recording of the conversation if things went seriously wrong.’

  ‘Don’t give a shit,’ Beach Boy says. ‘There are no skeletons in my cupboard. But you can’t expect me to remember everything perfectly. There are drugs that blow your mind if you mix them. Amphetamine plus four or five uppers, right?’

  ‘Does that mean you’re high now?’

  ‘Bit of a hangover from last night, although my head’s cleared after the Rohypnol. I didn’t know you were coming to pick me up at my mum’s this morning until you were at the door and frightened the living shit out of her.’

  Kykke switches on the Dictaphone. The light is red; the tape is running.

  And it runs for a good while.

  In the end, Kykke gets up, switches off the machine and says he has to go and wash, and cool down in the stream. He crosses the tarmac road, which feels soft under his boots, plods through the birch scrub and mounds of wood anemones in full leaf – they remind him of snowdrifts bordering the Filefjell road in June – finds a hole in the streamlet, where some yellow flowers are pushing through; he would like to know their name, he will have to find out in his next life, then he can become a botanist if he isn’t reincarnated as a bumble bee, that is. He takes off his eyepatch and sticks the whole of his head into the stream. The water is deliciously cool.

  This is freedom. Finding a stream by a country lane and cooling down.

  He waits for the surface of the water to become still. To reflect. He talks to his reflection: ‘He wasn’t a sight for the gods, except for Zeus, who set the Cyclops to work in Hephaistos’s smithy where they forged hammers.’

  Kykke breaks leafless twigs from a small tree which must have died in the summer drought. Places the twigs to form a lattice pattern over the hole. Sees his reflection again. This is how he will look behind prison bars.

  ‘You’re not a pleasant sight to behold from the normal view of beauty, but you’ll be even more unlovely behind bars.’

  A lack of beauty can be compensated for by cleverness.

  ‘But your cleverness wasn’t enough when you were going to create Hephaestus’s smithy in The Middle of Nowhere. Cleverness will be dealt a fatal blow in a prison. What will be left of you is a big, heavy, hollow man slowly wasting away.’

  Kykke dries himself with clumps of moss. Replaces the patch over his eye.

  He conjures up the two Hells Angels leaders who in the spring of 2001 were both sentenced to sixteen years’ imprisonment for smuggling 98.3 kilos of amphetamines. Three to four carrier bags of speed. Sixteen years!

  Sixteen tons. Sixteen ton-heavy years. The Belgian courier got fourteen. That is as long as it takes to become a teenager, and a teenager is almost an adult, a teenager has lived a little life.

  The street value of one hundred kilos of amphetamines is more than half a billion kroner. Right, but if you buy shares worth half a billion in the Orkla Group, you are applauded at the shareholders’ meeting and not one bugger asks you where you got it from, whether for example you sliced it off your grandmother’s back in strips or laundered cocaine money or said you got the dough as a settlement for fish guts you sold to the Japs.

  Even if a biker is innocent he risks being convicted for something, as an accessory. The authorities have made up their minds. Now people who started riding bikes because they loved the freedom of the road are hauled in to rot in clink until they reach pensionable age and are chucked out and can continue living like rotten apples in a basket, in a hospice.

  ‘That won’t happen,’ Kykke mumbles, ploughing his way through the scrub forest like a bear, tearing up small trees by the roots, snapping them in half and throwing them into hell, if there is a hell for trees. ‘You never know, you’ll always walk alone, in the end.’

  The sun stings his neck, unless it is the bumble bee he will become that has stung him.

  ‘Hope that idiot of a boy has enough gumption to have cleared off.’

  But Beach Boy’s brain is on stand-by. He is sitting and smoking, cutting chunks off a piece of wood he has found, whittling away with his penknife.

  ‘Why do you look so bloody angry, like a pitbull?’ Beach Boy asks. ‘You’ll soon be frothing at the jaws.’

  Kykke wipes his mouth.

  ‘I thought I would get a bonus when I got out, I did,’ Beach Boy says. ‘The Hells Angels boast that they do. You said you had a sexy beast to show me? Were you teasing me or what?’

  ‘I never tease. You’ll see in two shakes. Do you know what Lips called you when he heard about all the commotion you’ve caused, about your great plan to make the club rich?’

  ‘A genius?’ Beach Boy answers.

  ‘Lips said you were a loose cannon.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘Give it some thought and you’ll work it out,’ Kykke says, unclipping the bunch of keys from his belt. ‘If you’d really managed to breach the ship below the waterline the cops would’ve surrounded your mother’s house when you came home, and they’d have been swarming round here. I have to say no real harm has been done. I don’t think Borken would agree with me, but I’m the one handling this. Borken isn’t here.’

  ‘Where is he?’ Beach Boy asks, glancing towards the road where an articulated lorry is s
truggling up the gentle bend in the direction of Hobøl.

  ‘Take it easy. Borken’s at home on the farm arguing with his family about inheritance rights and his golf project. He won’t turn up here to wring your neck.’

  Kykke asks Beach Boy if he is willing to make a deal, to drop his plan. If he is capable of buttoning his lip and shutting his gob, of denying everything when asked.

  ‘Christ, yes,’ Beach Boy answers and kicks the pile of wood-shavings by his feet.

  ‘Then let’s draw a veil over the whole business, shall we? And you get a bonus from me, and Lips. It isn’t one of the atomic rockets you always used to go on about, but it is almost,’ Kykke says. ‘Let’s have a look at Lips’s marvel.’

  He finds the key that fits the padlock on the door, opens it and pulls it to one side. Stale, oil-laden air hits them. The sunlight that tumbles in brings a gleam to the fire-engine red paint and nickel plate of a streamlined sports bike with a powerful exhaust pipe pointing upwards.

  ‘Ninja,’ Beach Boy whispers. ‘Jesus Christ. It’s a Ninja!’

  ‘I hope you won’t be disappointed to hear it’s a ZX-11,’ Kykke says.

  ‘Disappointed? Like hell I am!’ Beach Boy exclaims, goes over to the bike and strokes the side shield where it says ‘Ninja’ in letters that are almost as yellow as his hair, brushes some dust off the seat and grips the handlebars to get a feel. ‘I didn’t know Lips had bought himself such a beautiful hot rod.’

  ‘You know what a cheapskate Lips is. He saved himself a stack of money by not buying the biggest race bike, the ZX-12,’ Kykke says. ‘But this one’s not bad, is it?’

  ‘Not half bad,’ Beach Boy says. ‘Sure I can borrow it?’

  ‘You can have it for as long as Lips is in the States.’

  ‘Great! This is the Samurai spirit, lending me a vehicle like this. Can we roll it outside?’

  Before receiving an answer to his question Beach Boy starts trundling the bike on to the gravel. He straddles the machine. His face vies with the bodywork to beam brighter.