this city. One: The sort that goes on out here. Two: The sort that operates through contact ads in newspapers, magazines and Internet chat rooms. For example: Shapely blonde, 24, seeks well-to-do gentleman for morning meeting. Complete discretion required and guaranteed. They’re girls who live alone, have beautifully furnished flats and finance their studies or leisure activities by prostitution. These are the ones who appear in newspaper interviews where they claim they have a professional attitude towards what they do, that they do it of their own free will and have no scruples about it. They are, as they see themselves, the good Samaritans of other people’s love lives, and are going to retire early too.’
‘Perhaps they’re just that.’
‘And perhaps we live in a depraved society! A society in which everything is for sale, including love.’
‘We’re talking about what some people call the oldest profession in the world, aren’t we?’
‘Men are older, if you ask me, and a rotten bunch they are too!’
‘Yes, I suppose so, if you’re a fundamentalist as regards the story of creation.’
She overlooked this observation and continued with her list. ‘Three: Hotel prostitution. This is the hardest one to stamp out. Who can tell the difference between acquaintanceships that are really struck up on the dance floor or in a hotel bar and those that are just part of supply and demand? Who can really control what goes on in hotel rooms at night without resorting to closed circuit TV in every corner?’
‘No, that’s true.’
And lastly, four: What shall we call it? Institutionalised prostitution – the one that’s concealed behind other forms of economic activity. The much-discussed massage parlours, of which there are some examples here too. They change addresses about once every six months, but it’s the same people who run them, and the same people who’re behind them, putting up the money. I can give you the addresses of at least two regular brothels in town.’
‘But what about the pimps in all this? This is something the police could deal with.’
She looked at Karin as she replied. ‘I can guarantee that, in nearly all cases, men are behind it or at least are pulling the strings. The girls in this district all have their so-called protectors. And if they haven’t, they soon get one. If not, they’re hounded out. Simple as that.’ After a short pause she added: ‘The worst thing is that they almost all need it. Some of their clients are real swine, and in that case it can pay to have somebody nearby to call on for help.’
‘Oh my God!’ said Karin with feeling.
‘Some of the ones who operate from hotels also have their – backers. Sometimes just the owners of the hotels.’
I raised my hand. ‘Oh? Anyone who’s making a name for himself on that score just now?’
‘Remember the Week End Hotel?’
‘The one now called Pastel.’
‘It had been quite decent for a few years under the new owners. But last year the hotel was sold again, and now … Now it’s back to its old ways again. All that’s new is the name – and the bartender.’
‘The bartender?’
‘One of our taxi driver contacts tells us that a popular phone number at the moment is a direct line to the bar at the Pastel. You just have to remember to ask for Robert.’
‘Robert, I’ll remember that! You can count on it …’
Suddenly everything fell silent round us. Evy Berge looked up. She sniffed the air with her nostrils like an animal trying to catch the scent. ‘Talk of cockroaches, and they crawl out from under your boots! There’s just the sort I mean.’
I followed her eyes. Karin immediately took a few steps back, and I felt her hand grip my arm.
Two chaps came shuffling across the street. One of them had his hair in kiss curls I’d hardly seen since the fifties. The white shirt, the pale blue jeans and the black shoes protruding from beneath the long black wool overcoat placed him firmly in the same decade. He was heavy and powerfully built, not the type that spends the whole morning exercising at the fitness centre so he can beat the hell out of you: rather the type who lifts his belly up and drops it on your head, which is just as effective. The other seemed older in a way. He was smaller and walked more stiffly, with a slight limp as though he had once injured himself. His face was slightly podgy and he had a white goatee. His blue knitted cap was pulled well down, and the collar of his check lumber jacket turned up as though he didn’t really want to be seen.
The demonstrators closed ranks, their faces showing anxiety, irritation and sheer anger. The largest man in the group had moved to the front, seconded by one of the trusties and a couple of new arrivals who looked like students. Evy Berge shouldered her way to the front too.
I was following in her wake when Karin held me back. ‘Hang on, Varg, it might be …’
‘I’ve been out on a February evening before, love.’
‘Just wait and see what happens.’
‘OK.’
The big chap in the winter overcoat spoke with a surprisingly educated Bergen accent, as if he’d been conceived under a rhododendron bush in Kalfaret, the city’s poshest district. ‘May I ask if you have police authorisation for this demonstration?’
Evy Berge took a letter from her pocket and waved it under his nose. ‘Stamped and signed! See here!’
His eyes flashed with anger as he looked at her. ‘And how long were you lot planning on keeping us residents awake?’
‘Keeping us awake. Get him!’ piped up a voice from somewhere a good way back in the group, setting off a ripple of ironic laughter through the others.
‘We’ve got permission to carry on till midnight,’ said Evy Berge.
‘Why don’t you just go home and watch a porn film?’ called out one of the girls who claimed to give free blowjobs.
The man stood on his toes and looked over the heads of the people at the front. ‘Who said that?’
The girl stood on tiptoe herself. ‘Me.’
He glanced from her to her banner. ‘Is that an offer?’
‘Just come here, and I’ll bite it right off!’
He started to push his way towards the back. ‘Come here you little cuntlicker, I’ll show you …’
The man who looked like a hired bodyguard barred his way. ‘Let’s just take it easy, now.’
‘And what the fuck are you? A eunuch?’
‘An off-duty bailiff, if it’s all the same to you.’
The two men stood there glowering at each other. They were the same size and looked as though both knew a thing or two. I was itching to give somebody a piece of my mind too. Karin gripped my arm even more tightly.
The man with the blue knitted cap said: ‘Come on, Bernhard. You heard what the guy said. It’s not worth it. They’ll be off by midnight.’
I stood there listening. That voice …
I craned my neck to try and get a better look at his face, but there were too many heads in the way. I felt my scrotum shrinking, one of the last instinctive reactions we still have, and a sure sign of danger in the air. It surely couldn’t be …
‘OK then! Cocksucker!’ he hissed at the great bailiff. ‘You’ll be getting a free session for this, I suppose?’
The bailiff followed him out into the street, but Evy Berge set off hot on his heels and stopped him. ‘Don’t rise to the bait! We’ve made our point.’ She raised her yoke. ‘We’ll be back! Bet your bottom dollar on it!’
‘Leave my arse out of it!’ he shouted to them from the other side of the street.
The man in the lumber jacket didn’t even turn round but led the way, making for the corner leading to Holbergsalmenningen. I stood there peering at the way he walked. Once upon a time twenty years ago …
‘Oh, my God!’ I said to myself.
‘Hm,’ said Karin, pulling even closer. ‘Think we can go now?’
I glanced round. The group was already breaking up. ‘Looks as though the show’s over for tonight.’
Evy Berge came over to us. ‘Sometimes we’v
e actually had to call the police ourselves. But tonight it went off OK, luckily. Quite a good demonstration, eh, Veum?’
I nodded. ‘Thanks a lot.’
‘Come on!’ said Karin. ‘I’m freezing …’
Later on, in bed at Fløenbakken, when she’d warmed up again, she lifted her head from my chest, looked deep into my eyes and said: ‘I can’t help thinking of Siren, when I – hear stuff like that.’
I put my arms more tightly round her and gave her a gentle squeeze.
‘I just can’t imagine what it must feel like to – do it for money …’
‘I can assure you that the girls who sell themselves like that don’t feel too good about it either. I’ve met plenty of them in all the years I’ve been doing this job.’
‘And so young …’
‘Boys too, unfortunately. But they’re still a minority. After all, there are fewer gays than heteros when all the chromosomes are finally totted up.’
‘But what drives them to it, Varg?’
‘Money, quite simply. Many of them to pay for a habit, but others just to buy the right clothes, for example, to keep up with the rest of their girlfriends. And the radical feminists who took part in the demonstration down there are wrong when they say that it’s all the men’s fault. Prostitution’s about power above all. You can afford to buy power over another person for a limited period of time. Even the feeblest man finds there’s someone who’s even punier than him. Why do you think so many of these girls are eventually raped and abused in their own milieu? Whores are pariahs, Karin; they always have been.’
‘And one of them was my sister. I’ve just never been able to get my head round it! We had the same mother and father, we came from the same background, had the same upbringing … What was it that made her end up like that, while I …?’
‘Who knows? Brothers and sisters are different, aren’t they? The genes are not equally divided. But, above all, I think it’s a matter of who you go around with, what your friends are like in the years when you’re finally staking out the course your life is going to follow. Siren was unlucky in that way, you know that better than I do, whereas you …’
She laid her head back on my chest and mumbled: ‘If only we’d known that it was going to turn out like this when we were small, would we have done things any different? Would we have been able to stop what happened? Would we, Varg?’
I couldn’t give her the right answer. Nobody could.
It was a restless night. When I eventually dropped off to sleep I drifted straight into a horrible dream. In a hotel room looking out onto doomsday I met the man in the lumber jacket again. Now he pulled off his knitted woollen cap and showed me his face. Only there was no face, just a bare skull, as though it was death itself that was on tour in the provinces and had at last found a grateful listener.
I woke bathed in sweat, unable to drop off to sleep again.
Twenty-eight
TUESDAY WAS A DAY with a calm clear sky, streaked with peach in the east. A pale moon with a little bite taken out of it hung suspended over Damsgårdsfjell Mountain and Lyderhorn.
We walked over the Kalfaret district to town, followed the pedestrian crowds through Marken and on Strandkaien, kissed a hurried goodbye, and Karin carried on down to the Population Register Department at Murhjørnet as I took the stairs up to the third floor, the papers under my arm and keys in hand.
During the previous day, the status of the ‘witness’ had changed to ‘suspect’ but anonymity was still maintained. However, according to the newspaper reports, the ‘suspect’ refused to accept that he was in any way linked to the death, apart from having met Torild Skagestøl ‘a few times.’ Yet one of the papers quoted a source confirming that the ‘suspect’ had been seen with Torild ‘and another girl’ on Thursday afternoon ‘at Jimmy’s, the amusement arcade-cum-snack bar in the centre of Bergen.’
I leafed back through my notes. Hadn’t Astrid Nikolaisen said the same when I talked to her? Yes, there it was … Torild and Åsa together with ‘some bloke or other’ … Helge Hagavik, the mysterious ‘suspect’?
I made three mental notes. I should have a word with Astrid Nikolaisen; I should have another word with Åsa and – if possible – I should have a word with Helge Hagavik.
It would take up most of today and go a long way towards helping me forget what day tomorrow was.
♦
The block Kenneth Persen lived in lay on the shady side of the street in the part of town that basks in the shadow of the towers of Vetlemanhattan on Nygårdstangen and is unlikely ever to see the light of day again.
His name was on one of the eight post boxes in the entrance hall downstairs, but as I climbed the stairs, there wasn’t a single name on a door anywhere, as if everybody who lived there was a member of Alcoholics Anonymous.
I went from floor to floor, pausing to listen for any sounds that might indicate someone was home, knocked on a few doors where I thought I could hear signs of life, but nobody answered.
Eventually, I realised I’d spent quite enough time on this aspect of the project and left.
In front of the City Station a handful of youths lolled against the concrete wall at the entrance to the pedestrian underpass, smoking, schoolbags thrown at their feet, and making not particularly positive remarks to passers-by.
I went into the waiting room and looked round. The smell of cooking oil and printing ink hung like a ring of self-loathing around the snack bar on one side and a national newsagent’s on the other. The garish posters in front of the shops on the first floor proclaimed that the January sales were still on, but the spark had long since gone out of them. I saw no sign of Astrid Nikolaisen anywhere, but in the space of just a few minutes, I observed two drug transactions with no particular attempt to conceal what went on.
I met Sigrun Søvik in the café on the first floor, as arranged.
She was sitting at one of the tables facing Lille Lungegård Lake, in sharp profile against the bright daylight outside. She was wearing the same outfit as last time: a red shirt, blue jeans and a grey knitted waistcoat. On the chair beside her she had hung a greyish-brown, slightly old-fashioned sheepskin jacket with a ‘No To Nuclear Power’ badge on one lapel.
I waved to her from a distance and fetched a cup of coffee from the counter before making my way over and taking a seat opposite her at the table.
I unwrapped two sugar lumps, popped one into my mouth and took a swig of the piping hot coffee.
Sigrun Søvik followed my movements with her eyes as though I was demonstrating first-class engineering skills, or else because she was overjoyed at being able to put off the evil hour.
I stole a quick look at her.
Her cheeks were surprisingly red, as if she’d had to rush to get here in time. Her eyes flitted to and fro, from my coffee to my face, without settling on either of them.
‘You had something to tell me,’ I said tentatively.
‘Yes, I did … Afterwards … it occurred to me … From what I said, you may have thought something had happened – between Mrs Furebø and Holger Skagestøl … when they paid us a visit at Radøy.’
I nodded slightly. ‘Erm, not necessarily.’
‘But I – I know that it wasn’t the case!’
‘Oh?’
She looked at me, alarmed. ‘Yes, I mean, I don’t know, but … Was there something between them, then?’
I had to tread carefully. ‘I’m not quite sure what you’re getting at …’
‘What I meant was … At any rate, I know why Torild and Åsa dropped out, that’s what I meant.’
‘And it had nothing to do with …’
‘No! And that’s why I thought … You don’t need to bother anybody with all that now, after the terrible thing that’s happened to Torild …’
‘I see …’ I nodded at her to go on. ‘Why did they drop out, though?’
‘I … I caught them in the act.’
‘Caught them in the act?’
She looked
out of the window towards the Electricity Board building, although it didn’t seem to cheer her up much. ‘You know, young people at that age, they’ve just – they’re in the process of discovering themselves … And that Friday evening, when everything was supposed to be quiet, I made my usual round of all the tents. I heard … sounds from Torild and Åsa’s tent … The light from a torch … I thought they must have been reading or – eating chocolate or … something like that. But when I unzipped the tent and put my head in …’
I waited.
‘They were – naked, and they …’ Her eyes swivelled round like a searchlight. ‘I’ve been involved in youth work for many years, I’m not all that easily shocked, but so young and already so depraved!’
‘In other words, they –’
‘Yes, I’m not going to say any more! Not about what they were doing!’
‘All right. But what did you do?’
‘I told them off, of course! Separated them and put them in separate tents for the rest of the time, but naturally I didn’t say anything to anyone – not to anybody, you understand, until now! I don’t want it to get out that something like that could happen when I was in charge! Do you understand?’
‘Yes, I do. But I can’t see what there is to make such a fuss about either. We were all young once –’
‘Not me!’
‘No?’
‘I mean I never did anything like that …’
‘No, I’m sure …’
She glanced at the clock. ‘I must be off now. I just wanted you to know that that was why they dropped out! Because they were embarrassed, of course! They couldn’t look me in the eye, either of them, for the remainder of that Whitsuntide camp.’
She stood up and put on her sheepskin jacket. She hesitated for a moment. ‘You won’t tell anybody, will you? Now that you’ve heard …’
I gave her a look of reassurance. ‘It probably … As you said yourself, they’ve more than enough to think about without bothering about youthful peccadilloes …’
The Writing on the Wall Page 15
