The Kingdom

by Jo Nesbo

  Laughter. Even some applause from the back of the hall. Everyone knew the story of the car sale, and right at that moment no one seems to have been thinking about what happened to that car later. A smiling Carl pointed to someone with a raised hand.

  A man stood up. Tall, as tall as Carl. I could see that it was only now Carl recognised him. Maybe he regretted inviting the guy to speak. Simon Nergard opened a mouth in which two teeth were noticeably whiter than the others. I could be wrong, but it seemed to me I could still hear a whistling from his nostrils when he spoke, from the bone that didn’t mend right.

  ‘Since this hotel is going to be on land you and your brother own...’ He took his time, let it hang for a moment.

  ‘Yes?’ said Carl in a loud, firm voice. Probably no one else besides me noticed it was a bit too loud and firm.

  ‘...it would be interesting to know how much you intend to ask for it.’

  ‘Ask for it?’ Carl scanned the gathering with his eyes. His head didn’t move. The place was silent again. It sounded undeniably – and it was probably not just me that thought it – as though Carl was playing for time. Simon at least had heard it, because when he spoke next there was almost a note of triumph in his voice.

  ‘Perhaps the Master of Business will understand better if I say what price,’ he said.

  Scattered laughter. An expectant silence. People had raised their heads, like animals at the watering hole that see the lion approaching, although still a safe distance away.

  Carl smiled. He bent over the documents in front of him and his shoulders shook as though he were laughing at a comradely kick in the shins from an old pal. Sorted his papers into a neat pile and seemed to be taking a break as he worked out how best to formulate his answer. I felt it, and from a quick look round realised that so did everyone else. That this was it. The moment of decision. I saw a straight back straighten further still two rows in front of me. Shannon. Looking up at the podium I saw Carl’s gaze fastened on me. I read something into it. An apology. He had lost. Screwed up. Screwed things up for the family. Both of us knew it. He wouldn’t be getting his hotel. And I wouldn’t be getting my service station.

  ‘We don’t want anything for it,’ said Carl. ‘Roy and I are donating the land.’

  At first I thought I had heard wrong, and I could see Simon thought the same. But then I heard the murmuring that spread through the hall, and realised that people had heard the same as me. Someone started to clap.

  ‘No, no,’ said Carl, holding up his hands. ‘We’ve still got a long way to go. What we need now is for enough people to sign a preliminary document of intention to join, so that when we apply to the council for permission they can see this is a serious project. Thank you!’

  The applause swelled. It grew and it grew. Soon everyone was clapping. Apart from Simon. And maybe Willumsen. And me.

  * * *

  —

  ‘I had to!’ said Carl. ‘It was the make-or-break moment. Couldn’t you tell?’

  He followed me half running back out to the car. I opened the car door and got behind the wheel. It was Carl who had suggested we drive to the meeting in my grey-and-white Volvo 240 rather than his flashing dollar sign of a car. I turned the ignition, put my foot down and slipped the clutch even before he’d closed the passenger door.

  ‘For fuck’s sake, Roy!’

  ‘For fuck’s sake what?’ I yelled and adjusted the mirror. Saw Årtun disappearing behind us. Saw Shannon’s silent, frightened face in the rear seat. ‘You promised! You said you’d tell them what the land cost if they asked, you prick.’

  ‘Oh, give me a break, Roy! You felt the mood as well. Don’t lie, I could see it on you. You know that if I had said well, yes, now that you ask, Simon, Roy and I are actually asking forty million for that lump of rock, that would have been end of story. And there’s no way you would have got the money for your station.’

  ‘You lied!’

  ‘I lied, yes. So you’ve still got the chance to get your own service station.’

  ‘What fucking chance?’ I put my foot down, felt the grunt of the tyres as they bit down into the gravel as I spun the wheel and we skidded out onto the main road. The tyres squealed before the rubber sucked down onto the asphalt and from the back seat came a little squeal too. ‘The one in ten years’ time when the hotel has started to give some returns?’ I spat as I floored the pedal. ‘The point is you lied, Carl! You lied and you gave them 320 acres of my...my land – for nothing!’

  ‘Not ten years, jughead. You’ll get your chance in a year at the most.’

  In our vocabulary jughead was not far off a term of endearment, and I realised he was asking for a truce.

  ‘Yes, one year and then what?’

  ‘And then the plots of land for the cabins come up for sale.’

  ‘Plots of land for the cabins?’ I punched the steering wheel. ‘Jesus Christ, forget the cabins, Carl! Haven’t you heard? The council has voted to stop any more cabin developments.’

  ‘They have?’

  ‘There’s no money for the council in cabins, only expenses.’

  ‘Is that right?’

  ‘Cabin owners pay taxes where they live, and when they’re only here for an average of six weekends a year they don’t leave enough money to cover what those fucking cabins cost the community. Water, sewage, collecting the rubbish, clearing the snow. Cabin owners fill up with petrol, they buy hamburgers from me, and that’s good for the station and a few of the other businesses, but for the council it’s a drop in the ocean.’

  ‘I really didn’t know that.’

  I glanced over at him. He grinned back at me, the prick. Of course he knew.

  ‘What we do with the council,’ said Carl, ‘is we sell them warm beds. As opposed to cold beds.’

  ‘Come again?’

  ‘Cabins are cold beds, empty nine weekends in ten. Hotels are warm beds. Filled every night all year round with people who spend money without costing the council anything. Warm beds are the wet dream of every local council, Roy. Never mind what the regulations say – they chuck planning permissions at you. That’s the way it is in Canada and that’s the way it is here. It isn’t the hotel that’s going to make the big bucks for you and me. It’s when we get permission to sell cabin plots. And we will, because we’ll offer the council a thirty–seventy deal.’

  ‘Thirty–seventy?’

  ‘We offer them thirty per cent warm beds in exchange for building permission for seventy per cent cold beds.’

  I eased off on the speed. ‘And you think they’ll go for it?’

  ‘Normally they’ll only accept a deal the other way round. With seventy per cent warm. But think of the council meeting next week where they’ll also be discussing the consequences of the rerouting of the main road and I present this project and we offer them a hotel that the entire village has voted for this evening. And they glance over at the spectators’ benches and there sits Abraham Lincoln and he’s nodding his head, this is good stuff.’

  Lincoln was the nickname Dad had given Jo Aas. And yes, I could see it. They would give Carl exactly what he was asking for.

  I glanced in the mirror. ‘What do you think?’

  ‘What do I think? I think you drive like a pig in heat.’

  Our eyes met and we began to laugh. Soon all three of us were laughing, me so hard that Carl had to put a hand on the wheel to steer for me. I took the wheel back again, changed down and turned along the gravel lane and the hairpin bends that led up to our farm.

  ‘Look,’ said Shannon.

  And we looked.

  A car with a blue flashing light in the middle of the road. We slowed down and the headlights picked out Kurt Olsen. He was lounging against the bonnet of his Land Rover with arms folded. I didn’t stop until my bumper almost touched his knees, but he didn’t move a muscle. He walked
up to the side of the car and I wound down the window.

  ‘Breathalyser test,’ he said and shone a torch beam straight into my face. ‘Get out of the car.’

  ‘Out?’ I asked, shading my face with one hand. ‘Can’t I just blow into the bag sitting here?’

  ‘Out,’ he said. Hard, calm and cold.

  I looked at Carl. He nodded twice. The first time to tell me to do what Olsen said, the second that, yes, he would hold the fort from here on in.

  I climbed out.

  ‘You see that?’ said Olsen and shone his torch on a more or less straight furrow in the gravel. I realised he had made it with the heel of his cowboy boot. ‘I want you to walk along that.’

  ‘You’re joking, right?’

  ‘No, I don’t make jokes, Roy Calvin Opgard. Start here. Go ahead.’

  I did as he said. Just to get it over with.

  ‘Uh-oh, careful, carefully now,’ said Olsen. ‘And again, slowly. Think of it as a line. Put your foot down on the line every time.’

  ‘What sort of line?’ I asked as I set off again.

  ‘The type you suspend across a gulch. For example a ravine with rocks so loose that people who claim to know about such things write, in a report, that they advise against any investigation of the location. One false step along that line, Roy, and down you go.’

  I don’t know whether it was having to parade along like a fucking male model or the flickering light from his torch, but it had actually become extremely bloody difficult to keep my balance.

  ‘You know I don’t drink,’ I said. ‘So what is this?’

  ‘You don’t drink, no. It means your brother can drink for two. Which makes me think that you’re the one to watch out for. People who are always sober are hiding something, don’t you think? They’re afraid they’ll reveal their secrets if they get drunk. So they stay away from people, and parties.’

  ‘If you’re turning over stones, Olsen, turn over Moe the roofer. Have you done that yet?’

  ‘Put a sock in it, Roy. I know you’re trying to distract me.’ His voice was starting to lose its controlled calm.

  ‘You think trying to stop sexual abuse is a distraction? You think breathalysing teetotallers is a better use of your time?’

  ‘Oops, you stepped over the edge there,’ said Olsen.

  I looked down. ‘Fucking well didn’t.’

  ‘Look there, see?’ He shone the torch on a footprint outside the line. It was the print of a cowboy boot. ‘You better come with me.’

  ‘Fucking hell, Olsen, get out the fucking breathalyser!’

  ‘Someone buggered it up. Pressed the wrong keys and ruined it,’ he said. ‘You failed the balancing test and so that’s what we’re going to have to rely on. As you know, we have a comfortable cell at the sheriff’s office where you can wait until the doctor arrives to take a blood sample.’

  I gave him a look of such disbelieving astonishment that he pushed the torch up under his chin and shouted ‘Boo!’, and then gave a ghostly chuckle.

  ‘Careful with that light,’ I said. ‘Looks like you’ve had enough radiation to be going on with.’

  He didn’t seem particularly pissed off. Still laughing, he uncoupled the handcuffs from his belt.

  ‘Turn around, Roy.’

  PART THREE

  12

  I HEARD IT THROUGH THE stovepipe hole late one evening. I was sixteen years old, and had almost fallen asleep to the steady sound of conversation down there in the kitchen. Even though she didn’t have much to say, she was the one who did the talking. Dad said mostly yes and no, apart from the few occasions when he stopped her and told her clearly and concisely how things were, how things should be done, or not done as the case might be. This almost always happened without him raising his voice, but afterwards, as a rule, she kept quiet for a while. Before starting to talk calmly about something else, as though the subject of their previous conversation had never been raised. I know it sounds strange, but I never really got to know my mum. Maybe because I didn’t understand her, or because I wasn’t interested enough, or because she was so self-effacing next to Dad that she simply disappeared for me. Of course it’s strange that the person you’ve been most intimate with, who gave life to you, whom you spent every day with for eighteen years, can remain someone whose thoughts and feelings are a complete mystery to you. Was she happy? What were her dreams? Why was she able to talk with Dad, and a bit with Carl, but almost never with me? Did she have as little understanding of me as I did of her? On only one occasion did I catch a glimpse of what lay behind Mum in the kitchen, Mum in the cowshed, Mum who mended clothes and told us to do as our father said, and that was that evening at the Grand when Uncle Bernard turned fifty. After the meal in the rococo room the grown-ups jived to the music of a trio of fat men in white jackets, and while Carl was shown around the hotel I sat at the table and saw that Mum was watching the dancers with a look on her face I’d never seen before, dreamy and half smiling, her gaze slightly veiled. And for the first time in my life it struck me that my mother might be pretty, pretty, as she sat there humming in a red dress that matched the drink in front of her. I had never seen Mum drinking except on Christmas Eve, and then only the one glass of aquavit, and she had an unfamiliar warmth in her voice when she asked Dad if he wanted to dance. He shook his head, but smiled at her, maybe he saw the same thing as me. Then a man a bit younger than Dad came up and asked Mum for a dance. Dad sipped his beer, nodded and smiled at the man, as though he felt proud. I didn’t want to, but my gaze followed Mum out onto the dance floor. I just hoped it wasn’t going to be too embarrassing. I saw her saying a few words to the man, he nodded, and they began. First Mum danced quite close to him, then closer, then further away, she danced quick, then slow. She really could dance, and I had never had the faintest idea. But there was something else too. The way she looked at this stranger. The half-closed eyes and that fixed half-smile, like a cat playing with a mouse it intends to make a meal out of, only just not quite yet. Then I noticed Dad beside me getting restless. And suddenly it struck me that it wasn’t the man who was the stranger, it was her, the woman I called Mum.

  Then it was over and she sat down with us again. Later that evening, after Carl had fallen asleep beside me in the hotel room we shared, I heard voices in the corridor. I recognised Mum’s, it was unusually loud and piercing. I got up and opened the door just a fraction, enough to see across to the doorway of their room. Dad said something, Mum raised her hand and hit him. Dad touched his cheek and said something in a calm, low voice. She raised the other hand and struck him again. Then she grabbed the key from him, unlocked the door and disappeared into the room. Dad stayed where he was, hunched over slightly, rubbing his cheek and looking in the direction of the door where I was standing in the dark. He looked sad and lonely, almost, maybe like a kid that’s lost his teddy bear. I don’t know if he realised the door was ajar, all I know is that on that evening I got an insight into something to do with Mum and Dad. Something I didn’t quite understand. Something I wasn’t sure I wanted to know any more about. And next day, driving back home to Os, everything was just as it had always been. Mum talked to Dad, a quiet, even flow of everyday talk, with him saying yes, and sometimes no, or else having a coughing fit, at which she kept quiet for a while.

  The reason I listened with particular interest that evening all those years ago was that it was my dad who, after a long pause, began to speak. And it sounded like it was something he had been wondering how best to say. Also he kept his voice even lower than usual. Almost whispering. Now of course my parents knew we could hear them up through the stovepipe hole to our bedroom; what they didn’t realise was how well we could hear them. The hole was one thing, but it was the pipe itself that did the trick, amplifying the sound so much that it was like sitting down there between them. Carl and I had agreed there was no point in making them aware of this.

>   ‘Sigmund Olsen mentioned it today,’ he said.

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘He’s had what he referred to as a “warning report” from one of Carl’s teachers.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘She told him that on two occasions she’s seen blood on the back of Carl’s trousers, and when she asked Carl what had happened, he offered her what she called a “fairly unlikely explanation”.’

  ‘And that was?’ Mum had lowered her voice too by now.

  ‘Olsen wouldn’t give any details, he just wanted to pass on the message that the sheriff’s office wanted to talk to Carl. Apparently they have to inform the parents when they interrogate someone under sixteen.’

  I felt like a bucket of ice-cold water had been emptied over my head.

  ‘Olsen said we could be present if Carl wanted, and that Carl isn’t legally obliged to talk to them. Just so we know.’

  ‘What did you say?’ my mum whispered.

  ‘That of course my son wouldn’t refuse to talk to the police, but that I would like to talk to him first myself, and so it would be useful to know what kind of unlikely explanation Carl had given his teacher.’

  ‘And what did the sheriff say to that?’

  ‘He thought about it. Said he knows Carl of course because he’s in the same class as his own lad, what’s his name?’

  ‘Kurt.’

  ‘Kurt, yes. So he knows that Carl is an honest and upright lad, and he says that personally he believes Carl’s explanation. He says the teacher is straight out of teacher training college and nowadays they’re indoctrinated to be on the lookout for things like this, so that means they see it everywhere.’

  ‘But of course they do, for chrissakes. What did he say Carl told the teacher?’

  ‘Carl said he’d sat on the pile of planks behind the barn and sat right down on a nail that was sticking out.’

  I waited for Mum’s next question: Twice? It never came. Did she know? Had she guessed? I swallowed.