She appraised me for a moment, puzzled.
The shot jerked yellow-green. Vee’s eyes flicked back to the screen. The camera was in the air again, looking down. There were the two girls looking up at the helicopter, desperate now. And there, at the edge of the frame, a man in police uniform. Paul Andersen looked up, locked eyes with the camera. The helicopter continued to climb.
The girls disappeared inside the shower block. The door closed.
The short man unslung his rifle, walked toward the door of the building. From the other side of the screen his brother appeared, walking toward the door at the other end, his rifle held casually in his right hand.
For a sickening moment nothing happened. There was the red-roofed shower block, there was the yellowed grass, and there, at each end, stood the two men. Avatars, foreshortened, black-clothed, blond-haired, each with rifle in hand.
Were they hesitating? Were they gathering themselves? Don’t do this, I wanted to say. There is hope. But of course there was no hope, because that story was already written. And so the men entered the shower block at precisely the same time, and in that building out of sight of the camera they would kill nineteen children.
For two minutes the camera held where it was. It stared dispassionately down at the yellowed grass and the red-rusted roof, observed the length of the shower block and the broken concrete steps at each side. If you saw this shot on its own, you would never know. It was peaceful—boring, almost—while under that cheap rusted roof nineteen young people were executed at close range. Enemy combatants, the men had called them in their psychiatric interviews, tomorrow’s treacherous elite, and for that those children paid with their lives. The oldest of the children in the shower block was fifteen; the youngest thirteen.
“It’s weird what your brain does,” said Vee. “A part of me expects the tactical unit to arrive and save them. But we both read the report. We both know that doesn’t happen.”
The men emerged from the steps at the left of the shot. They turned and looked up at the camera. The helicopter rose rapidly and turned, headed out across the fjord, still looking down.
Halfway across the fjord it stopped. There, in the middle of the frame, facing right to left, was the red rubber boat, with its black-clad special forces team. Spray was pluming from the engine; the boat was barely moving.
I looked at Vee. “They’ve turned . . .”
“Yeah,” she said. “They’re heading back to the mainland.”
“Fuck,” I said.
“Yeah,” she said. “Fuck.”
As we watched, the two men at the front took oars and began to paddle.
“It’s sinking,” said Vee.
“Let’s put this on pause, Vee.”
Vee touched the screen, freezing the image of the red rubber boat, of the tactical unit pathetically paddling for the mainland. So this was what Bror had wanted me to know.
“They kept this out of evidence,” I said after a time.
“I know,” she said. “Do you think it’s a story?”
I didn’t have to answer. We both knew it was . . .
We watched the rest of the footage without speaking. The camera hovered above the island once more, quietly bearing witness, as the men entered buildings, as they left. If the helicopter approached too closely, the men would raise their weapons; the camera would move to a safer distance, then continue to watch the calm exteriors of the buildings while inside the children were cut down: seven dead here, five here, twelve here. Two shots every time, as we knew from the coroner’s report, while somewhere out of sight the tactical unit foundered in their too-small rubber boat.
The only sound now was Vee’s breathing. In, in and out. An everyday miracle, in the midst of all this death.
Suddenly she was there: the girl in the kingfisher dress. Above her a man on a ledge in a torn T-shirt. Both looked up at the same time. Hearing the helicopter, I guessed.
As I watched, the man threw himself from the ledge into the water and turned toward the shore. He was waving to the camera. You could see him shouting.
“Thank God,” said Vee very quietly. “That’s what he’s saying, right? Thank God. He thinks they’re going to drop a rope or something.”
The girl on-screen raised her hands to shade her eyes. She was smiling. You could feel the relief in her, even at this distance.
Vee leaned across and pressed pause. She picked up the iPad, stared at it very closely. Then she passed it to me.
“She thinks she’s being rescued.”
I looked up, nodded. Vee nodded back.
“Can you make this bigger, Vee?”
“You could. It won’t really help, though. There’s no extra detail.”
I handed the iPad to her. Vee pressed play.
Four more children on the steps now, waving upward. The girl who must be Licia at their head, in her kingfisher dress. The shot began to pull away as the helicopter moved upward. Why was it abandoning them?
Something in the girl changed. Every muscle in her seemed to slacken. She grasped the handrail at the edge of the steps. Strange how you could read the emotion, even at this distance: the realization that no one was coming to save her.
The world failed you, Licia, I thought.
Neither Vee nor I slept. I sat in the kitchen, making phone calls and drinking coffee; Vee sat with me, listening to every word.
Dan wanted TV pictures.
“Why?” I said. “You’re a radio station.”
“We’re that, and we’re whatever else we need to be.”
Elsa came through from the bedroom at six and I explained to her what I was going to do. I expected her to ask if I was crazy, but she listened, then asked if I needed help.
“No,” I said. “But thanks.”
The conversation about the Glock would have to wait.
The Assassin
Thirty
At eight I stood on the courtroom steps. The cameraman looked up from the viewfinder, nodded, and looked down. The record light glowed red.
Ready.
I heard Carly’s breath in my ear.
“Over to Cal Curtis in Oslo, Norway. Cal—”
I didn’t wait for the question. “There’s something I’ve never understood about this little country: How could two armed men roam freely across an island near the nation’s capital for the best part of two hours, murdering young people at will, and not be stopped? If this were America or France, an armed unit would have been there in minutes. But last night a video came into my possession. And that video gives an answer, of sorts.”
Carly’s voice in my ear. “Cal, describe the footage that you have exclusively received.”
“It’s news video from a Polish helicopter pilot, from the day of the Garden Island massacre, and most of what it shows was never broadcast. This video is an important historical document, and records police failings that delayed the arrests of Paul and John Andersen.”
“Cal, how many of the ninety-one murder victims does this new information affect?”
“Roughly half. Plus my own daughter, who is not included in that figure of ninety-one dead. We already know that Police Chief Ephraim Tvist failed to act on information that identified the men responsible. We already know that a police cruiser was directly behind their car as they drove out to Garden Island, but did not have the information needed, because nobody had passed it on. What this video shows is that Mr. Tvist’s most highly trained men are badly equipped and underprepared. Because at 6:48 p.m., forty-five minutes after the first bullet was fired, at a time when we know that fifty-two of the victims were still alive, the police tactical weapons unit arrives at the slipway on the mainland. Yet it takes those same men sixty-three minutes to make the trip across the water to the island. And if you look at the footage—”
“Which is up on our website so that viewers can judge for themselves.”
“—you can clearly see that the rubber boat in which the tactical unit set off is inadequate for the job at hand. T
he boat is sinking under the weight of the men and their gear. The engine can barely move it. Halfway across the fjord they realize they’re not going to make it over, and the unit turns around and begins limping back toward the slipway on the mainland. It’s utterly pathetic.”
“And at this point, Cal, roughly fifty of the victims were still alive, including, of course, your own daughter.”
Licia.
“I used to wonder if it was a conspiracy that cost me my daughter. But now I see that it’s simple incompetence.”
A pause.
A moment of dead air.
“I . . . I mean, she was just . . .”
The cameraman looking up from the viewfinder.
The fear that grief might overwhelm me.
I swallowed the pain and stepped closer, stared straight down the lens. “I don’t know which is worse: the cowardice of the first two officers, who were unwilling to lay down their lives—for children, Carly, for our children—or the incompetence of the tactical unit, whose rubber boat nearly sank on the way to rescue those same children’s lives.”
Anger was coursing through my veins. I heard Carly’s breath in my ear. I felt the cameraman’s eyes on me as he tightened the shot. I turned away. I blinked the image of Licia’s face from my mind.
I turned to face the camera. The cameraman sent me a questioning look. I nodded. The cameraman nodded back. He put his eye to his viewfinder.
Ready.
“It’s the anniversary—a year to the day since the massacre on Garden Island. The police failed our children on that day, and a year later those same police are still failing our children. That this film was kept out of evidence is a national disgrace. They knew the truth. Tvist must be brought to account.”
Dan called me immediately. “Why were you ever a satirist? You were honestly never that good at it. This is clearly what you were born to do.”
“Thanks,” I said. “I think.”
“This was great work, brother. Sincere and relatable. You threw a bomb at the man, Cal. You threw a fucking bomb at him.
“A bomb?”
“Of course, you have to assume he’s going to throw a bomb right back. But that’s the job. Get ahead of these people, or they will screw you.”
I heard the call-waiting tone.
“Dan, I think Elsa’s calling.”
“Love you, brother. You’re a newsman, Cal. A fucking newsman.”
I selected Elsa’s call.
“Hey.”
“Hey.”
“So, I’m kind of dumbfounded.” The warmth and the love in Elsa’s voice. “And on the anniversary too. That was . . . yeah . . .”
I realized with a jolt that Elsa was crying. And God, at that moment, how I longed for the world as it once was.
“Cal? Would you please say something?”
Tears were smudging my vision. I wanted so badly to believe in my wife, and in her innocence.
“Sorry,” I said. “Yes.”
“Anyway, I called a few people. Because Midsummer’s Eve is our anniversary, and I won’t let it belong to those men. I’m going to buy gin and lemons and olives. And we can toast each other, and we can think about Licia. And then we will go out and meet our friends.”
I blinked the tears away. “Put the gin in the freezer, Elsa. Along with the shaker and a long spoon.”
People were sharing my report. As I entered the courtroom I could see on their phone screens the red roof and the yellowed grass of the shower block from the helicopter footage, even as the court discussed those same murders.
And there was Tvist smiling up at me, from the seat beside mine. I smiled as neutrally as I could. I sat down.
The short brother was speaking. Paul Andersen.
“Hun sa nei. Holdt armen foran ansiktet.”
She said no. She held her arm up in front of her face.
Tvist leaned across to me. “Did you notice?” he said. “The short one remembers each gunshot with absolute clarity. And the tall one simply watches his brother, and then he watches the family’s reaction. These are men who enjoy the details of suffering.”
The Andersen brothers were looking directly at the father of a murdered girl, checking his response. The man sat rigid in the front row, listening to the brothers’ account.
I turned to look at Tvist. I could see the cleverness of the man. The way in which he used the truth—because he was right about the Andersens—to throw me off the scent. And Tvist smiled his smile, and gave nothing away.
I nodded and turned toward the Andersen brothers.
Paul Andersen continued speaking. I heard the word for angle, and the word for bullet.
Tvist leaned forward. “Is he really saying that? That his greatest worry was that the girl’s arm might deflect the round from its trajectory?”
“I guess he is.”
“This is an outrage, no?” Tvist leaned very close to me. “Even as they are watching this poor soul you can feel them seeking out the next family with their eyes. Because our laws say these men must have access to the media. And so they familiarize themselves with photographs from the newspapers.”
The father of the girl had turned his face from the men. Such quiet dignity in the face of their unrepentance.
“How does he do it?” whispered Tvist. “How does that poor man keep from screaming his hatred and his contempt for these men and what they have done to his family?”
I looked at Tvist. He was staring levelly at me, waiting for a reply. I stared levelly back.
“Right?” he said again.
“Right,” I said quietly.
“These brothers, though. They’re very caught up in the detail of what they have done. They are not planners. Wouldn’t you agree?”
“Maybe.”
“Then you do wonder what kind of logistical help they must have needed.”
“Isn’t it your job to answer that question?”
He laughed quietly to himself, folded his fingers together in front of his face as if thinking. He said, “Who is your source?”
I leaned in very close, whispered into his ear, “I’m not going to tell you.”
Tvist’s turn to whisper: “This is an issue of national security.”
I half laughed. “I genuinely don’t know the identity of my source.”
“But you have your suspicions? No?”
I looked about me. People were reacting to our whispered conversation. I turned to Tvist. “The internal meanderings of my brain are not the business of the police.”
“Very satirical.” He got up, brushed himself down, sniffed. “Have you thought about how you will bear it when the time comes for these men to talk about Alicia?”
He had spoken the words loudly and deliberately.
“No,” I said just as loudly. “I haven’t thought about that.”
People were turning toward us.
“Perhaps you should,” he said.
Some nagging voice told me that taking on Tvist was a mistake, that perhaps he was neither corrupt nor incompetent, that he was simply playing the long game. But a year had gone by and we were no closer to finding our daughter. I watched him go, doing nothing to disguise my anger.
When I turned toward the court I found Paul Andersen trying to lock his gaze onto mine.
That smile. As if the two of us shared some horrible secret.
Thirty-One
After twenty minutes I could bear no more of the men’s cruelty. I took the train home.
I stood outside the apartment building, looking in. No sign of movement. No trace of Elsa’s phone on my screen. Why had she switched it off? Was she out buying gin and olives at the mall? Perhaps the simplest explanation was the best.
On a terrace two floors up a woman was polishing shoes, stopping from time to time to examine the sheen. She noticed me watching, raised a hand in greeting. I waved back. Then I went down to the garage and drove out to Garden Island.
I had come to remember. I had half expected to be alone, but t
he road was filled with cars parked all the way down. I had to walk the last mile on foot.
One year.
People filed along the grass at the side of the road. Most were in their twenties. Many were younger. Some cried as they walked. Some spoke to each other in hushed words, as our shoes scuffed the path and our breathing filled the air around us. Some of us smiled private smiles, as if lost in thoughts of our loved ones. Many of us carried flowers. Had they, like me, simply felt the call?
At the slipway people were scattering their flowers onto the surface of the fjord: tulips and roses, chrysanthemums and lilies. The current today was strong. The flowers fanned out in a swath that reached halfway across the sound. I sat, my legs overhanging the water, watching as others paid their respects. Five hundred of us, maybe more.
Grief welled up in me. The tears seemed to come from nowhere, huge racking sobs from a place deep within.
My Licia.
My little girl.
I thought of the time on the mountain at Whistler, and of the moment when Licia returned, laughing, full of joy at surviving the snowstorm. I thought of the mirror in her bedroom, of her empty bed, of the dust that had settled over the fingerprint powder in the year since she had gone. . . .
I don’t know how long I sat there, at the edge of the slipway, hands pressed hard against my eyes. When I could cry no more I took off my clothes and folded them beside me.
I filled my lungs with air. I stepped toward the water’s edge. How long since I last felt the sun on my skin?
I stopped. I was naked. I looked about me, self-conscious, foolish and out of place. But no one was paying me any mind. I took another breath.
I jumped, piked in the air, straightened first my arms, then my legs. I felt the shock hit my torso as I dropped below the surface. I pulled myself downward—one stroke, then the next—into the chill peaty dark, tasting salt on my lips. After a time I sensed a darker shade of black. I slowed. My fingers found the branch of a tree. I gripped it gently.
I turned on my back, looked up. I could not see the surface, though I could sense light far above. I exhaled, watched as my breath gathered in a bubble that rose slowly away from me, contours disappearing into the gloom.
Love and Other Lies Page 23
