What’s happened here?
You see dark patches on the tarmac. You touch them, hold your fingers to the light. Blood. You feel dizzy, you lean your back against the Range Rover, unaware that your son was standing in this very spot a quarter of an hour ago. Your eyes are shut so tightly that lights explode in your head. In your head you run through every detail of your conversation.
“The door’s open.”
“What?”
“The driver’s door is open.”
You blink, look at the door, and pull on the handle. The door swings open, the light inside goes on. You can see the driver’s seat is still wet.
He sat here.
You put your hand on the seat as if you could feel your son’s warmth. It was a quarter of an hour ago. No more than that. You get into the car and have the pleasant feeling of getting closer to your son that way. You close the door and take a deep breath. The rain is locked out. The light dims.
“I think they’ve deliberately left me the key to the Range Rover.”
Your hand seeks and finds the key. It’s in the ignition. You lean your head back, the rain drums on the roof. You’re sitting in a bloody Autobiography, hearing Marten’s voice like a distant radio station: Her name’s Taja and she’s not my girl. Every word echoes in your head: She inherited a beach hotel from her grandmother. With a view of a fjord. You still don’t get it. What’s the connection? Why would they steal your car of all cars, and then come back?
“They’re here again.”
None of it makes any sense. Marten would never have gone with them.
“I’ll call you right back.”
He said he’d call you right back. And why is his phone lying in the road? And what about the blood? You look at your fingertips. There’s no point sitting round here, just do something.
You search the car. There’s an empty candy wrapper on the backseat, some bits of paper on the floor, empty plastic bottles. You open the glove compartment. Sunglasses, five gas station receipts, a blunt pencil, nothing more than that.
You slam the glove compartment shut again and look at the instrument panel. It’s all high-tech. You turn the ignition. The CD player comes on, you turn the sound down. The navigation system lights up and tells you it’s another eight hours and eleven minutes to Ulvtannen. You tap on the display and see the route. It leads north.
“They’re heading further north.”
You start the car. Wherever your son has disappeared to, you’re setting off to bring him back. Because that’s what fathers do for their sons. They protect them.
He’s soaked through with rain and quivering, he’s bleeding from his mouth and every few seconds he gasps for air like there isn’t enough oxygen in the car. He’s older than you, bigger, one of those gangling types with shoulder-length hair that everyone likes. They write poems, listen to Damien Rice, and are adored by all the girls because they’re so understanding. You must weigh twice as much as he does. Muscles versus brain. You grab the back of his neck and shake him. He starts whimpering. Fine. Now he knows who’s in charge here. He stinks. The inside of the car fills with his smell and you remember the night three days ago when the gang roughed you up and Mirko ran away. You smelled just as bad when that happened, and even after a shower the stench didn’t leave you and clung to your hands.
You don’t want to think about Mirko, but your thoughts do what they want. You try to imagine one of the girls putting a gun to his head and then BOOM. The picture refuses to come into focus, as if it’s trying to deny reality, but you’ll find out what really happened. In detail. Which of the girls shot him, what she was thinking as she did so. And you will smell the same smell on her skin.
The doors open. Your father and Tanner get in. Your father slips in next to the boy. They’ve just been looking through the Range Rover and they’ve come back out empty-handed. Now their heavy breathing fills the interior of the car. Tanner opens the window a little to let the stench out. Leo starts the engine and turns on the heating. Your father asks the boy what his name is. The boy tells him.
“Okay, Marten, I’d like you to listen to me very closely now. I need to know how you’re involved with the girls.”
The boy tells you, stammering and nervous. How he thought the girls had problems with their car. How they had coffee together and then went off to the restroom and a moment later stole his father’s car. How he came running out.
“But they were gone.”
You nod. The story makes sense, it fits those sluts, but your father doesn’t like it. He has a very different question.
“And why did you get into the Range Rover?”
The boy says it was raining and the driver’s door had been open, so he’d thought he could get in.
“They left me the key.”
He shouldn’t have said that. It sounds so false that you want to knock his teeth out. Your father asks Tanner what he thinks. Tanner says it sounds ridiculous. Me too, you think, and say, “What if he’s just putting on a show and they’re all in it together?”
Back in Berlin, Tanner suggested that the girls had probably had help. The way it looks, Neil Exner wasn’t the only one supporting those bitches. You take the same line. Your father gives you a look of approval. It’s good that you’re adding your bit.
“Maybe his job was to get rid of the Range Rover,” you say.
The boy shrinks by nine inches. Your father asks him if he knows where the girls were going. The boy doesn’t react. His eyes are shut tight, he for sure wishes the day would start over again and he would wake up in his bed. You grab the back of his neck again. He recoils and whimpers. Snot flows from his nose, Tanner and Leo turn round for the first time. This is going on too long for them. Your father repeats the question.
“Where were they going?”
“To the north … I think … They … they wanted to get to a beach hotel … on a fjord …”
You’re impressed. It’s a mystery to you how your father could have known where the girls were going. You admire him so much it hurts.
“She inherited it,” the boy adds.
“Who inherited what?” your father asks.
“Taja, she inherited the hotel.”
Leo whistles through his teeth, and you have no idea why he does it. Your father looks out the window into the rain for a moment, before turning back to the boy.
“What kind of car are they driving?”
“An 807.”
“A what?” you all say at the same time.
“It’s a Peugeot,” says the boy. “A Peugeot 807.”
Leo turns round and wants to know what color the car is.
“Red.”
“Shit!”
Leo hammers twice on the steering wheel.
“Shit! Fucking shit!”
You don’t know what’s going on. Leo calms himself and says, “The car back there, the one at the exit that dazzled us, you know? Red. Shit, the car was red. I’m sure it was them.”
Tanner looks at his watch.
“They can’t be more than twenty minutes ahead of us. We’ll get them.”
Your father doesn’t react. In the semi-darkness of the car you see him wiping the rain from his face as if it had only just begun to bother him. He’s in no hurry, no one ever escapes him. He looks at you.
“Darian, show him your gun.”
You draw the Five-Seven from your jacket. When you took it from Neil Exner and felt the grip in your hand, you knew immediately that it was a beauty. A Herstal, top Belgian model, light and elegant. You know it from gun magazines, NATO stock. Your boys in Berlin will shit themselves when you show it to them. You know Neil Exner got it off the girls, and you wonder if it’s the same gun that killed Mirko.
The boy stares big-eyed at the Five-Seven, which is now on your knees. You feel him shaking beside you, it comes and goes in phases, you find it surprisingly arousing. If you’re discovering your homoerotic side right now, you really are in trouble.
Your father’s exp
laining the rules to the boy.
“Darian’s going to take care of you now, Marten, do you understand that?”
The boy doesn’t understand, but he nods.
“The risk that you work with these girls is simply too high for us.”
The boy stops nodding. Now he’s understood. You smile. Leo puts the car in gear, reverses a little way, and turns. You leave the restaurant and you’re back on Route 41. Twenty minutes pass, then the boy dares to break the silence.
“Please, let me go.”
No one reacts, it isn’t their problem anymore, it’s up to you now, so you bring your mouth close to the boy’s ear and whisper, “Say one more word, one single word, and I’ll blow you away. I don’t care whether you have anything to do with those bitches or not. I’m on your case now, and when I’m on your case you’re mine and mine alone till the end of your fucking days. You’re my responsibility, got that?”
The boy’s eyes are closed again, but he’s understood. Good. Nothing works without rules, you think. It would be interesting to hear what your thoughts would be if you knew what a big mistake you’ve just made. Because fear isn’t always fear. There’s also fear that awakes courage.
To understand you, we need a story from your life that you’re not proud of. Your father doesn’t know anything about it and your mother would probably have gone to the police if she’d known.
It’s your very private story.
Once upon a time there was a boy who didn’t defend himself. That boy was you. For years you kept your mouth shut. A psychologist would have established that you lacked the support of your father. A pal would have called you a pussy. Once upon a time there was another boy, who liked the fact that you kept your mouth shut and didn’t defend yourself. He slugged you whenever he felt like it. In school, after school. No one did anything. He stuck his tongue in your ear and called you a faggot. He ate your recess-time snacks, poured Coca-Cola into your schoolbag, and threw darts at you. Sometimes friends tried to help you, sometimes a teacher came or a passerby stopped and intervened. Their help made things worse. He stole your bicycle and sold it. He kicked your legs away on the street, your arm broke in two places when you fell, and your mother was surprised that you could be so clumsy.
In a book you read about the transmigration of souls and wondered what would happen if this boy was your archenemy in a previous life. Could it be that your fates were intertwined? Was he your scourge and you his victim? The idea that supernatural powers might be involved gave you courage. Anything was better than reality. Every spell has a counterspell.
The year you turned fourteen, your archenemy did something unexpected. He hit a different boy. That confused you. You thought you were his special, personal adversary. You wanted him to tell you why he’d done it. He didn’t understand what you were talking about, and smacked you. But you didn’t let go, you went running after him across the playground and followed him into the boys’ bathroom. He wanted to have a quick smoke in there, you needed an answer. He punched you in the stomach a few times and asked you if that was answer enough for you. You slid down the door. He asked you if that was what you’d wanted. He said you now belonged to him alone, forever and ever, and that from now on he’d just wait for you to have a girlfriend so that he could fuck her while you were forced to watch.
He was the same age as you, he was four inches shorter than you, it was going to be the last time he hit you.
When he leaned over you, you grabbed him by the shoulders. It looked as if you wanted to hug him. It took him by surprise. It was all you needed. You smacked your face against his. Again and again. You didn’t let go of him. He couldn’t find a grip, his sneakers slipped around on the tiles, he tried to push himself away from you, you didn’t give in, your nose broke, you didn’t yield an inch, and by the time you finally let him go he had lost his fighting spirit. He fell on top of you, and you lay there just like that.
Since that day you haven’t belonged to anybody, you’re your own man and you’ve found your counterspells—pride and violence. You never had to use them ever again, once was quite enough.
And now you’re sitting in a moving car with four strange men and your skull is about to burst and that muscleman next to you is waving a gun around, pressing his body against yours, not letting you breathe. The whole thing’s going too fast for you. A moment before you were on your way to the filling station to get ice cream for dessert, you were just flirting with a black-haired girl who knew almost all the bands you like. Until that moment your life had been an exciting sequence of great events. All of a sudden that collapsed and became this situation from which there seems to be no way out—you, crying; you, scared and summoning your voice and saying, “Please, let me go.”
It sounds as if there’s a dwarf sitting in your mouth and speaking on your behalf. You want to clear your throat, but the blood from your nose won’t stop flowing down your esophagus. You swallow and want to spit, but you don’t dare, you don’t dare to do anything, you’re just a pile of misery in a car racing through the night and planning to cross the whole of Norway in search of a beach hotel.
With me, shit, with me!
You know that isn’t okay. This isn’t okay, you want to say out loud, then muscleman leans over you and whispers in your ear as if he’d read your mind.
“Say one more word, one single word …”
Your brain registers the threat, your brain switches off and erects a mental barrier, but whatever your brain tries to do, the words filter through and your body pulls itself together. You’re twelve again and then thirteen and then fourteen, and all the threats echo in your head and make you close your eyes. Never again. When you open them again, the sound of the rain has gone. From one second to the next the car is quiet, the only sound comes from the rolling of the tires. Everyone looks upwards with surprise, as if the car roof alone were responsible for the silence. Everyone apart from you, because that’s the moment when you react. Your arms come up and you push muscleman against the window, his face hits the glass, there’s a smacking sound and you scream at him, you scream into his face and feel the clammy, shaven scalp beneath your fingers and have no idea what words are coming out of your mouth. You push and scream, and then the shots go off ONETWOTHREE and the car starts swerving and brakes hard, but you don’t care. The spell is your spell and you’re defending yourself, you want justice rather than enemies who are on your tail your whole life. Once was enough. Once was easily enough.
Never, ever again.
The car stops, you hear heavy breathing, you feel the wind blowing damp and warm into the car, and then you hear whimpering. Muscleman beside you has disappeared, the door is wide open.
Freedom.
You get out legs trembling, the car has stopped in the middle of the road, the headlights cut two breaches into the darkness, the tarmac steams and glistens like the skin of a reptile. You register everything, your senses are alert and receptive. The men in the car are moving. You hear groaning and cursing and you know you’ve got to get out of here, you’ve got to get away as fast as possible. Just do it.
Muscleman rams you from the side, you crash against the open door, bounce back, the air is pressed out of your lungs. You try to cling onto the door frame, the car door swings shut, you let go at the last moment, the door misses your fingers by a fraction of an inch. Muscleman grabs you by the back of the neck again, pulls you to him, and presses your head down as if you were a disobedient dog. You look at his running shoes, lift your foot, and stamp your heel down on his toes. He yells, he flinches, without letting go of you, then he slips on the wet tarmac. You both fall against the car and land in the road. You’re lying under him, his face is a raging moon, blood flows from his nose and drips down on you. You turn your head away, your knee comes up and slams into his balls. He bends double and slips off you. You start creeping under the car. Your plan is to come out the other side and then run, run faster than ever before. You’ve half disappeared under the car when he grabs your a
nkle. You kick out, kick against his fingers, lose a sneaker, kick with your other foot, he lets you go. You’re now right under the car, you slip through and come out on the other side where the man in the suit is waiting. He crouches down in front of you like someone who’s been waiting for a while, and is now looking at the animal that’s fallen into his trap. He has no gun, he doesn’t come any closer, he doesn’t need to touch you, he is the weapon.
“How could you?” you hear him say.
And then you give up. You put your arms over your head and give up. Enough is enough.
The first bullet hits the back of Leo’s head, a bloody crater glistens where his eye used to be. Leo leans against the driver’s door, his shattered face pressing against the window, his other eye wide open and staring into the road. One hand lies on the steering wheel, as if he still had everything under control. You see the scars around his knuckles, his other hand rests on his knee, palm up. You’ve never seen Leo so motionless. No nervous twitching, nothing anymore.
The second bullet left a clean hole in the windshield.
It was the third bullet that caught Tanner from the side. It smashed two of his ribs and tore a pinhead-sized piece out of his heart and shredded his right lung. Tanner’s head has dropped back, his breath rattles, and he stares at the roof of the car. His right hand grips the door handle, his finger bones shine white through the skin. The smell of urine hangs in the air like a spilled perfume.
You hear footsteps, your son comes running round the car, blood on his face, that damned gun in his hand. He sees you standing on the driver’s side, he sees the boy at your feet. You hit him, one blow on the left, one on the right, then you grab your son by the ear, pull him around the car, and point at Leo.
“You see that, you little fucker? You see that?”
Your son pants, your son nods. The gun falls out of his hand; you should never have let him keep it. All this happened just because he was taken by surprise.
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