Holy Terror

by Graham Masterton

  Magda stared at him. ‘You would trust me?’

  ‘No, I wouldn’t. But right now I need all the help I can get.’

  ‘You can trust me, I promise. After all, you find me attractive, don’t you?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You find me attractive. You wonder what I’m wearing beneath this long black skirt. Maybe I’m wearing nothing at all. Maybe some kind of underwear that you could never imagine, designed to arouse anyone who wears it. Black, with laces and chains.’

  ‘Magda—’

  ‘Look at me. Look at my eyes. Where are you going when you look at my eyes?’

  ‘I don’t know. Where am I going?’

  ‘You are going into my soul, that’s where you’re going. Deeper and deeper. It’s dark there. It’s totally silent. You can’t see anything and you can’t hear anything and you can’t feel anything. Nothing at all. You don’t even know which way is up and which way is down.

  ‘And you feel very happy now that I’m coming along with you. Very relaxed

  ‘And

  ‘You want to make love to me, but you don’t want to say it just yet. That’s a goodie to save for later.’

  Conor was aware of the chatter and the bustle all around him. He was aware that Magda was trying to hypnotize him. He felt strong, he felt controlled, but he knew that he couldn’t move until Magda told him to. Even Sidney’s trances hadn’t been as irresistible as this. He felt that if she had told him to stop breathing, he would have done that, too.

  ‘I’ll come with you,’ she said. ‘We can find Dennis Evelyn Branch and you can take your revenge on him for what he did to your friends; and I can take revenge on him for what he did to Ramon, and to me, too.

  ‘You’ll do that, won’t you? You’ll hunt him down; and when the moment comes, you won’t have any pity. When you get your chance, Conor O’Neil, you’ll kill him.’

  She paused for a moment, still holding his hand. Then she said, ‘You’re awake. You remember everything we said. You’re full of anger. You want to find Dennis Evelyn Branch and destroy him because of what he’s done to you.’

  Conor stared at her and said, ‘You hypnotized me. I was trying to resist you. You hypnotized me! How did you do that?’

  ‘It’s not so hard, with a little practice. Sometimes you can use a person’s resistance to hypnotize them more quickly. They’re so busy locking horns with you that they don’t realize you’ve crept up behind them and tied a firecracker onto their tail. Bang! from behind, their attention is distracted, and they’re yours.’

  ‘Oh, sure,’ Conor challenged her. ‘But who said I wanted to make love to you?’

  ‘You did,’ smiled Magda. ‘You’re a man, aren’t you? You’ve been saying it ever since we sat down. Not with words, but here.’ And she gently tapped her temples with her fingertips.

  Conor didn’t know what to make of her. Maybe she was telling him the truth. Maybe she was still working for Dennis Evelyn Branch. There was no doubt that she was a world-class hypnotist, and hypnotism was almost as good as firepower, as he had seen from Sidney’s performance at the Richmond Inn. In fact, sometimes it was better, because it left no fingerprints, no fibers, no gunpowder burns, no forensic evidence of any kind.

  You need her, he thought. He wasn’t entirely sure why. More than likely it was an idea which she had planted in his mind herself. But it seemed like common sense to take her to Norway. Maybe he needed her sophistication, and her ability to talk to anybody with ease. Maybe he needed her weirdness. More than anything else, maybe he needed her moral support. Emotionally, he was limping, at the moment. Lacey had left an empty space in his existence and maybe Magda Slanic had the strength to fill it.

  After a long moment of indecision, he said, ‘We’re leaving for Oslo tonight. Eleanor Bronsky and me. I’ll book an extra ticket for you – that’s always supposing you want to come. I don’t know what the risks are going to be and how long we’re going to be there, so pack plenty of clothes. Meet us here at five o’clock. If you’re not here, we’ll go without you. No waiting.’

  ‘I’ll be here, don’t you worry.’

  ‘Sir – have you finished with this table yet?’ the waiter wanted to know. ‘We’re really backed up here and we have a whole lot of people waiting to eat.’

  Conor stood up, and helped Magda up, too. He gave the waiter $10 and said, ‘I want to thank you. I hope you never realize what you’ve helped us to do here today.’

  Only two hours after they had eaten dinner on the plane, the sky began to lighten outside the windows. Conor raised the blind and looked out over an endless continent of cloud. Not far away, another 747 was heading eastward, too, its lights flashing in the premature dawn. Beside him, Eleanor was asleep, wrapped in a blanket. Across the aisle, Magda was reading a book on mystical diets. She was wearing half-glasses, which made her look unexpectedly studious and vulnerable.

  An hour before they landed in Oslo, they were given plastic cartons of reconstituted orange juice and damp croissants with strawberry jelly.

  ‘You should have flown to Europe in the days of the Stratocruisers,’ Eleanor protested. ‘In those days you had a hot breakfast and the silverware was silverware, not plastic’

  ‘Sure,’ said Conor. ‘But how long did it take you?’

  ‘That didn’t matter. It was the style that mattered, not the speed. In those days you wouldn’t dream of traveling in anything but your very best clothes. Shelly Winters always used to travel in her mink. Now look at these people: jeans, sneakers, sweatshirts. Sometimes I wish I could have died before people started to dress like this.’

  They arrived at Gardermoen airport twenty minutes early. Outside, the sun was shining and the sky was immaculate blue, but when they left the aircraft they immediately felt the difference in temperature. It was a warm August morning: 60 degrees, expected to rise to 69 degrees by lunchtime. There was a smell of pinewood everywhere, and brine from the Oslofiord.

  As they drove into the city in the back of a Saab taxi, Conor felt as if he had arrived in a travel documentary, with neat houses and tiny yards and fir trees all around them. The highway skirted the Bestumkil, a wide inlet the color of dark blue marking ink, with tiny splashes of foam around the edges. Sailboats were already on the water, and water-skiers, too.

  ‘They’re out early,’ Conor remarked.

  The taxi driver nodded. ‘The summer is so short, we have to make the best of every hour.’

  He turned off before he reached the Oslotunnel, the underpass that carries the El8 underneath the harbor area and the old town, and took them past the Radhus, Oslo’s city hall, a huge russet building with two stolid square towers. Then he drove them through the busy, sunny streets to Kristian IV’s Gate, where Conor had booked them two suites at the Bristol.

  ‘This is extremely grand,’ said Eleanor, as the taxi driver helped them with their suitcases. They walked into the lobby, all polished marble and gleaming glass and gilding, with fresh flowers everywhere.

  ‘We won’t be staying here for long,’ said Conor. ‘Apart from the fact that it’s five hundred bucks a night, I want to try and find an apartment we can rent, someplace inconspicuous.’

  ‘That’s a pity,’ said Magda. ‘I could easily become accustomed to living in a place like this.’

  Their suites were just as luxurious. Thick blue carpets, enormous beds, velvet drapery, complimentary baskets of fruit waiting for them. Conor opened the french windows in his living room and stepped out onto the balcony. The sun was bright, the wind was cool. He could see past the Domkirke with its eighteenth-century clocktower, the oldest in Norway, all the way to Bjorvika, the eastern harbor.

  Magda and Eleanor went to their room to unpack; but it wasn’t long before Eleanor came back. She sat on the end of the bed eating a fig while Conor hung his shirts in the closet.

  ‘Do you think it was a good idea, bringing Magda with us?’

  ‘I don’t know. But my feeling is that she can help us.’

&nbs
p; ‘Do you really trust her?’

  ‘No, I don’t. But I think her self-interest coincides with ours, and I think that’s good enough.’

  They could hear the echoing shuffle of hundreds of feet as tourists walked along Kristian IV’s Gate below them; and the murmur of mass conversation. An occasional toot from the harbor, and the cries of seagulls. On the polished walnut bureau a vase of white lilies stood beneath a stem bearded portrait of Harald Harfagre, the first king of Norway. Next to it, Conor’s wallet, and a scattering of Norwegian loose change, kroner and öre.

  ‘Don’t allow yourself to become cynical,’ said Eleanor. ‘Cynicism can eat you away, like acid. I should know.’

  She pressed her hand against her chest and winced. ‘Angina?’ he asked her, and she nodded.

  ‘Did you bring your medication?’

  She nodded. ‘Enough for a week. But I’m going to need a fresh prescription.’

  ‘Don’t worry, I’ll find you a doctor. We could be here a long time. I don’t want anything happening to you.’

  Eleanor stood up and held out her arms and Conor hugged her. ‘What am I doing here?’ she asked him. ‘What are we all doing here?’

  A seagull perched on the balcony railing, and stayed there, crying, and turning its head, and crying again.

  ‘I guess we’re here to save some souls,’ said Conor.

  Chapter 25

  The following afternoon was even cooler, with a light southwesterly breeze blowing in from Oslofiord, and a watery sunshine that came and went, came and went, like the days passing in a dream.

  Conor had spent the morning calling up letting agencies; and they had two apartments to look at – one in Torshov, overlooking the park, and another on Helgesens Gate, in Grunerlokka. Both were only a few minutes away from Dennis Evelyn Branch’s address on Hammerfestgata. They had a koldtbord lunch at the Engebret Café on Bankplassen – a selection of dried, salted and smoked meats, as well as pickled herring and fiskeboller – fishballs in a béchamel sauce – and heaps of plain boiled potatoes sprinkled with dill.

  ‘I hope I’m going to be able to survive on this diet,’ said Eleanor.

  It’s very good for your health,’ Magda told her.

  ‘Unlike Dennis Evelyn Branch.’

  They took the subway out to Carl Berners Plass. The train was quiet and brightly lit and almost surrealistically clean. They were relentlessly stared at all the way by three unsmiling men with deepset eyes and troll-like beards and a young blond woman with round glasses and pigtails and sensible shoes. Conor had to admit that they probably made an unusual trio in a country like Norway. Magda, as usual, was dressed in black, with her hair swept up; and Eleanor was wearing Calvin Klein jeans and a stunningly expensive turquoise silk blouse from Yves St Laurent on Madison Avenue.

  Conor had opted for a blue check shirt and sand-colored cords. ‘You look as if you’re going off to cut down trees,’ Eleanor had commented.

  Hammerfestgata was a short street of gray, 1960s apartment blocks. Rows of lime trees lined the sidewalk, and a single man was walking a nondescript dog. As they approached number 17, the sun went in, giving them the feeling that they were walking into a black-and-white photograph.

  They reached the apartment building and pushed their way into the entrance hall. The floor was polished marble composite and the walls were painted beige. There was scarcely any smell, only a hint of vinegar and cigarette smoke. Conor went over to the row of mailboxes and looked at the name-cards.

  ‘Rustad, Jensen, Schei,’ said Eleanor. ‘It could be any one of these.’

  ‘Yes, but look. Here’s the name of the letting agency. Ole Wergeland, on Sars Gate. We can have a word with them.’

  They were about to leave when a middle-aged woman came struggling up to the front door with an armful of shopping. Conor opened the door for her and caught one of her bags.

  ‘Here. We don’t want pickled cucumbers all over the floor.’

  ‘Thank you,’ she said, in the clear, barely accented English that most Norwegians could speak. ‘I always try to carry too much.’

  As she went toward the elevator, Conor said, ‘Wait up a moment. Maybe you can help us. We’re looking for an American who lives here. White hair, white face, kind of thin.’

  The woman nodded. ‘Yes, there is one American, anyway. A man with white hair. He has different people coming and going. I can’t keep track. Once, a man with a beard. I see them sometimes and we say hello, but that’s all. I’ve never seen the woman.’

  ‘The woman? What woman?’

  ‘Just as I say, I’ve never seen her. But sometimes late at night I hear her talking.’

  ‘Must be a pretty loud talker.’

  ‘Well, I don’t like to put my nose into anybody else’s business. But, shouting.’

  ‘You don’t ever hear what she’s shouting about?’

  The woman shook her head, giving Conor the impression that even if she did know, she was too discreet to tell him.

  ‘What number apartment do they live in?’ he asked.

  She pointed to a mailbox with the name Udgaard on it. ‘That was the name of the old man who lived in the apartment before the American. They never changed his name. He collected butterflies. He died. It was very sad. Nobody came to the funeral.’

  ‘Thank you for that,’ said Conor.

  The woman looked wary. ‘There won’t be any trouble, will there?’

  Magda smiled at her. ‘You don’t have to worry. All you have to do is think of what you bought today. Everything is fine. What are you cooking for supper?’

  ‘Klippfisk,’ she said.

  ‘That’s one of your favorites?’

  ‘Ja.’

  Magda stepped forward and touched the woman’s right temple. ‘You’re going to enjoy yourself tonight. You’re going to feel happy and relaxed, aren’t you? You’re going to cook a good meal and everybody is going to enjoy it.’

  ‘Ja.’

  ‘And

  ‘You’re going to forget that you met us. You’re going to forget that we asked you about the Americans. You’re going to feel peaceful and calm

  ‘And very, very content.’

  ‘Ja.’

  ‘I’m going to wake you up now,’ said Magda. ‘You won’t know who we are. You won’t remember what we said. You’ll simply get into the elevator and go up to your apartment and start cooking supper. You’ll wake up when I count to three. One, two, three.’

  The woman stared at them. She hesitated, readjusting her shopping bags. Then she retreated into the elevator and pressed the button. Conor watched her as the doors closed, and he had never seen a woman look so perplexed in her life. He had probably looked the same way, when Ramon had hypnotized him at Spurr’s.

  They left the building and walked along Langgata to Helgesens Gate. The sun brightened and faded, and then brightened again. Helgesens Gate was busy with traffic but the apartment block was only three years old, with a shiny entrance lobby, chrome-plated handrails on the stairs, and a tiled mural of an ocean liner surrounded by seagulls.

  A tiny woman with hugely magnifying eyeglasses and a haircut like a silver mushroom showed them around the apartment. It was big and airy and immaculately clean, with white leather couches and glass-topped tables.

  ‘The owner is a professor and his wife,’ the woman told them. ‘He is gone to Boston University in America. She is gone to Sudan, to look after the thin children.’

  ‘I like it,’ said Magda, swirling around in the middle of the living room. ‘It has good feng shut.’

  ‘It has a bidet, too,’ said the tiny woman, proudly.

  At the weekend, they moved out of the Bristol to Helgesens Gate. They missed the luxury, but they had already formed an unusual but comfortable ménage. Eleanor was still suspicious of Magda but Magda seemed to accept her suspicion quite calmly. Every morning she brought Eleanor a cup of coffee in bed and every evening she poured her a glass of ice-cold akvavit from the freezer compartment because she sai
d it was good for her heart.

  She began to talk a little about her childhood in Romania and how she had emigrated to the US. She had been taught simple hypnosis at the age of 13 by a friend of her father, an old man with no teeth who smelled of tobacco and liked to dandle her on his knee. He could remember Codreanu’s Iron Guard in 1938 and how they had strangled anybody who opposed them. He had learned hypnosis himself from a traveling circus performer who called himself the Great Cantemir; and he had used hypnosis to save himself when he was threatened with garrotting by drunken soldiers.

  ‘Hypnosis is a great power,’ she said. ‘A very great savior. When you don’t have hope, it can give you hope. When you have no way to turn, it can show you a path. There is no mystery. Hypnosis opens up your mind, that’s all, and shows you what strength you have; what bravery.’

  They kept watch on Dennis Evelyn Branch’s apartment block from a small café, the Baltazar, on the corner of Hammerfestgata and Trondheimsveien. Conor had bought a Norwegian mobile phone, so that they could keep in touch with each other during the long hours of their surveillance. On sunny days the café’s proprietor put white plastic seats out on the sidewalk, with red-and-white striped umbrellas. He didn’t seem to mind that Conor and Eleanor and Magda sat there all morning and most of the afternoon, drinking coffee and occasionally ordering polser hot dogs or flatbrod with salami and herring.

  Nobody resembling Dennis Evelyn Branch entered or left the apartment all weekend. Conor was beginning to think that they might be wasting their time in Oslo. After all, they had no guarantee that Dennis Evelyn Branch was here at all. But at 11:04 on Monday morning, a plain white Volvo panel van drew up outside the apartment building, and after a while two men came out of the front door. One of them was bearded, with a red T-shirt and jeans and a brown leather cap. The other wore a black sweater with a hood and black pants. Conor couldn’t see his face but his head seemed unusually big and he was sure that he glimpsed a wisp of white hair.