The Kingdom

by Jo Nesbo

  Again he paused, standing there in the semi-darkness beyond the podium. I just had to admire him. That last sentence was a bloody rhetorical masterpiece. In that one sentence he had done three things. One: appeared honest in admitting it was a setback but putting all the blame on the fire. Two: through a sort of inspired moralism preached solidarity, at the same time as handing responsibility for doing something about the situation onto everyone sitting in front of him. Three: appeared cautious, by stressing that a newly built hotel wasn’t a guaranteed solution but only a possibility, at the same time as he implied that it was unique, and therefore the only one.

  ‘But if we do this right, then we’ll do more than just get out of a bind,’ said Carl, still from the semi-darkness.

  I’m pretty sure that one of the reasons he arrived early was in order to arrange the lighting. Because when he once again moved forward into the light falling on the podium, the visual effect was as striking as his words. The man who had seemed so worn out and troubled when he entered the stage was suddenly transformed into a bullish demagogue.

  ‘We will make the village of Os blossom,’ he boomed. ‘And we will do it by building a hotel that is without compromises, that is without expensive tat like trolls and timber, because we believe that modern people, in search of an authentic experience, will find themselves entering the world of the Norwegian folk tale the moment they leave the city limits. The mountain is what they want, and that is without compromises too. So we’ll build a hotel that submits to the mountain, that fits in, that obeys the mountain’s own inexorable rules. Concrete is the material that comes closest to the mountain’s own conglomerate. We’ll build it like that not just because it’s cheaper, but because concrete is beautiful.’

  He looked out over the gathering as though challenging them, urging them to protest. But the silence was total.

  ‘Concrete, this concrete, our concrete,’ he almost sang in the chanting, hypnotising rhythm of a salvationist preacher, at the same time as he beat out the same rhythm with his forefinger on the laptop standing on the lectern, ‘is like us. It is simple, it can withstand the storms of autumn, of winter, defy avalanches, lightning and thunder, extreme weather, hurricanes and New Year rockets. In a word it is a material that, like us, survives. And because it is like us, my friends, that makes it beautiful!’

  This was obviously the cue for someone in charge of the projector, because at that moment music came pouring through the loudspeakers. And the hotel – the same hotel that I had seen on Shannon’s very first drawings – appeared on the illuminated screen. Green forests. Sunshine. A stream. Children playing, people strolling in summer clothing. And now the hotel didn’t look at all sterile but like a calm, firm canvas for the life that was drawn all around it, something permanent, like the mountain itself. It looked, quite simply, every bit as fantastic as Carl had described it.

  I could see he was holding his breath. Dammit, I was holding my breath too. And then the room erupted.

  Carl let the applause ring out, milking it. Stepped forward to the podium and silenced them with raised hands.

  ‘And since you clearly like it, how about a round of applause for the architect, Shannon Alleyne Opgard?’

  She emerged from the wings and into the spotlight, and once again the room erupted.

  She stopped after a few steps, smiled, waved to us, laughed happily, and remained there just long enough to show us that she appreciated the response but that she didn’t want to distract their attention from the village’s real hero.

  After she’d left, and the applause died down, Carl coughed and gripped the sides of the lectern with both hands.

  ‘Thank you, friends. Thank you. But this meeting is about more than the appearance of the hotel. It’s also about future plans, a timetable, finances, accounting and the election of representatives for the owners.’

  He had them in the palm of his hand now.

  He was going to tell them that work on the resurrection of the hotel would begin in two months, in April, take just fourteen months, and that the cost would rise by only about twenty per cent. And that they had made a new deal with the Swedish operator who would be running the hotel.

  Sixteen months.

  In sixteen months from now, Shannon and I would be out of here.

  Shannon sent a message she wouldn’t be coming to Notodden as arranged, that from now and until the recommencement of building work in April she, as leader of the project, had to give it her full and complete attention.

  I understood.

  I suffered.

  I counted the days.

  * * *

  *

  In the middle of March, with the rain beating down on Søm and the Varodd Bridge in the evening dark outside my window, the doorbell rang. And there she stood. Rain dripping from the red hair that lay plastered to her head. I blinked. It looked like streaks of rust or blood running across the white skin of her neck. She had a bag in her hand. And a mixture of despair and determination in her eyes.

  ‘Can I come in?’

  I stepped aside.

  I only found out the next day why she’d come.

  To tell me the news.

  And to ask me to kill again.

  62

  THE SUN HAD JUST RISEN, the earth was still wet with rain from the night before, and the birdsong deafening as Shannon and I walked arm in arm through the woods.

  ‘These are birds of passage,’ I said. ‘They come back earlier here in the south of the country.’

  ‘They sound happy,’ said Shannon, and laid her head against my arm. ‘They’ve probably been longing to come home. Who was which bird again?’

  ‘Dad was the mountain lark, Mum the wheatear. Uncle Bernard was the bunting. Carl is—’

  ‘Don’t tell me! The meadow pipit.’

  ‘Correct.’

  ‘And I’m the dotterel. And you’re the ring ouzel.’

  I nodded.

  We had hardly spoken that night.

  ‘Can we talk about it tomorrow?’ Shannon had asked after I’d let her in and helped her out of her wet coat, firing off one question after another. ‘I need to sleep,’ she said, wrapping her arms around my waist and pressing her chin against my chest, and I felt how my shirt was soaked through. ‘But first I need you.’

  I had to get up early, we were expecting a big goods delivery at the station in the morning and I had to be on site. She hadn’t said anything about why she’d come over breakfast either, and I hadn’t asked. It was as though once I knew why, nothing would ever be the same again. So now we closed our eyes and enjoyed the brief space of time we had, the free fall before we hit the ground.

  I’d told her I had to stay at the station at least until lunch before I could get someone to cover for me, but that if she came to the station with me we could go for a walk after the delivery. She had nodded, we’d made the short drive and she had stayed waiting in the car while I checked and signed off for all the pallets.

  We walked north. Behind us lay the motorway, with its Saturn-rings system of entry and exit roads, ahead of us the woods which already, this early in March, had a touch of green to them. We discovered a path that led deep into the woods. I asked if Os was still deep in winter.

  ‘It’s still winter in Opgard,’ she said. ‘In the village they already had two fake springs.’

  I laughed and kissed her hair. We had reached a tall fence that barred any further progress and sat down on a large stone by the side of the path.

  ‘And the hotel?’ I asked with a glance at my watch. ‘How is that coming along?’

  ‘The official start-up will be in two weeks, as planned. So it’s going well. In a manner of speaking.’

  ‘OK,’ I said. ‘Tell me what isn’t going well.’

  She straightened her back. ‘That’s one of the things I’ve come to talk to you ab
out. An unforeseen problem came up. The engineers discovered a weakness in the ground, in the mountain itself.’

  ‘Discovered? But Carl knows the mountain is unstable, that’s the reason for the rockfalls in Huken, that’s why the highway tunnel wasn’t built ages ago.’ I could hear how irritated I sounded. Maybe it was at the thought that when she’d taken the trouble to drive all the way to Kristiansand, it wasn’t for my sake but because of her hotel.

  ‘Carl hasn’t said anything about the stability of the rock to anyone,’ she said. ‘Because, as you well know, he prefers to suppress anything he thinks might be a problem.’

  ‘And?’ I said impatiently.

  ‘It can be fixed, but that’ll need more money, and Carl said we don’t have it, and suggested we just keep quiet about it, that it would take at least twenty years before the building started looking a bit crooked. Of course, I wouldn’t accept that and I did some checking of the financial situation on my own, to see if there was room to borrow a bit more from the bank. They told me that for that they would require more security, and when I said I would talk to you and Carl to see if you were willing to offer the bank all the outlying land around Opgard as security, they told me...’ She stopped, swallowed before continuing. ‘...told me that according to the property register, Willumsen’s estate already had security in all the outlying land around Opgard. And on top of that, Carl Opgard was the sole registered owner after he bought you out in the autumn.’

  I stared at her. I had to cough to get my voice to work. ‘But that’s not correct. There must be some mistake.’

  ‘That’s what I said too. So they showed me a printout from the property register with both Carl’s and your signatures.’ She held her mobile phone up to me. And there it was. My signature. That’s to say, something that looked like my signature. Resembled it so closely that only one person could have done it, and that was the person who had learned to copy his brother’s handwriting for his essays at school.

  Something dawned on me. Something Carl had said to the enforcer while they were sitting in the kitchen. But Willumsen’s got security. And the enforcer’s response: Which he says ain’t worth much without a hotel. Willumsen, who normally took a man at his word, had not trusted Carl and demanded the land as security.

  ‘You know what Dad called that miserable little farm of ours?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The kingdom. Opgard is our kingdom, he always used to say. As though he was worried Carl and I wouldn’t take owning our own land seriously enough.’

  Shannon said nothing.

  I coughed. ‘Carl’s forged my signature. He knows I would have said no to using our land as security for a loan from Willumsen, so he transferred the property to himself behind my back.’

  ‘And now Carl owns all the land.’

  ‘On paper, yes. I’ll get it back.’

  ‘You think so? He’s had plenty of time to discreetly hand it back to you after Willumsen cancelled the debt. Why hasn’t he done so?’

  ‘He’s probably been too busy.’

  ‘Wake up, Roy. Or do I know your brother better than you do? As long as it’s his name on the property register, then he owns the land. We’re talking about someone who didn’t hesitate to swindle his partner and friends in Canada and then run off. When I was in Toronto in the summer I found out more about what happened that time. I talked to one of his partners who was also a friend of mine. He told me Carl threatened to kill him when he said he was going to warn the investors about the size of their losses on the project, so that it could be stopped before they lost even more.’

  ‘Carl knows what to say.’

  ‘He called round to see this friend of ours when he was at home on his own. Carl held a gun on him, Roy. Said he would kill him and his family if he didn’t keep his mouth shut.’

  ‘He panicked.’

  ‘And what do you think he’s doing now?’

  ‘Carl doesn’t steal from me, Shannon. I’m his brother.’ I felt her hand on my arm, wanted to pull it away, but didn’t. ‘And he doesn’t kill people,’ I said, and heard how my own voice was shaking. ‘Not like that. Not because of money.’

  ‘Maybe not,’ she said. ‘Not because of money.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘He won’t let me go. At least, not now.’

  ‘Not now? What’s different between now and then?’

  She looked me straight in the eye. There was a groan from the trees behind us. Then she put her arms around me.

  ‘I wish I’d never met Carl,’ she whispered in my ear. ‘But then I wouldn’t have met you either, so I don’t know. But we need a miracle. We need God to do something, Roy.’

  She rested her chin on my shoulder so that we were looking in different directions, her through the fence and into the dark forest, me towards the clearing and the motorway that led out, away, to other places.

  There was another groan, a shadow fell over us, and the chorus of birdsong stopped abruptly, as though a conductor had raised his baton.

  ‘Roy...’ whispered Shannon. She raised her chin from my shoulder.

  I looked at her, saw that she was staring upwards, with one eye wide open and one almost closed. I turned and saw four legs directly behind the fence. I followed the legs upwards. And upwards. And there at last was a body, and above it a neck. That continued upwards, parallel with the tree trunks.

  A wondrous thing to behold: a giraffe.

  Chomping away and looking down on us without interest. Eyelashes like Malcolm McDowell in A Clockwork Orange.

  ‘I forgot to tell you, this is a zoo,’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ said Shannon as the giraffe’s lips and tongue pulled at one of the thin, bare branches, making the sunlight flicker across her upturned face. ‘They forgot to tell us this is a zoo.’

  * * *

  —

  After our walk in the woods, Shannon and I headed back to the station.

  I said she could take the Volvo and that I would call her when I was finished so she could pick me up. I had accounts to go through, but I couldn’t concentrate. Carl had sold me out. Swindled me, stolen my birthright, sold it to the highest bidder. He’d allowed me to go ahead and become a killer, let me kill Willumsen to save his own skin. As usual. And still kept quiet about how he had betrayed me. Yes, he had betrayed me.

  I was so angry my whole body was trembling and would not fucking stop. Finally I had to go to the toilet and throw up. And afterwards I sat there whimpering and hoped no one heard me.

  What the fuck should I do?

  My eye fell on the poster in front of me. I’d pinned the same one up there as I had in the staff toilet at Os. DO WHAT HAS TO BE DONE. EVERYTHING DEPENDS ON YOU. DO IT NOW.

  I think I made my decision there and then. I’m pretty sure about that. But of course, it could have been later that evening. When I heard the other thing Shannon had come to Kristiansand to tell me.

  63

  I SAT IN SILENCE AT the kitchen table Shannon and I had carried into the living room.

  She’d been to the shopping centre and made cou cou, which she explained was the national dish of Barbados. It consisted of cornmeal, bananas, tomatoes, onions and peppers. Though she had to make do with cod instead of flying fish, she was pleased to have found okra and breadfruit.

  ‘Is anything wrong?’ asked Shannon.

  I shook my head. ‘It looks delicious.’

  ‘Finally food shops with a bit of choice,’ she said. ‘You’ve got the highest standard of living in the world, but you eat as though you were paupers.’

  ‘True,’ I said.

  ‘And I think the reason you all eat so quickly is that you aren’t used to food that actually tastes of something.’

  ‘True.’ I poured wine into our glasses from the bottle of white Pia Syse and head office had sent me two weeks ea
rlier, when it became clear that the station would take third place in the ranking list. Put the bottle down on the table but didn’t touch my glass.

  ‘You’re still thinking about Carl,’ she said.

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘You’re asking yourself how he could betray you like this?’

  I shook my head. ‘I’m asking myself how I could betray him like this.’

  She sighed. ‘You can’t decide who you fall for, Roy. You told me you mountain people fall in love with someone it makes practical sense to fall in love with, but now you see that isn’t true.’

  ‘Maybe not,’ I said. ‘But maybe it isn’t so completely random after all.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘Stanley told me about some French something-or-other who believes we desire the things other people desire. That we imitate.’

  ‘Mimetic desire,’ said Shannon. ‘René Girard.’

  ‘That was it.’

  ‘He believes it’s a romantic illusion that a person can follow their heart and their own inner desires, because beyond satisfying our most basic needs we don’t have any inner desires of our own. We desire what we see others around us desiring. Like dogs that are not interested in a toy bone suddenly have to have it when they see another dog wanting it.’

  I nodded. ‘And like when you feel a stronger desire to own your own service station once you know other people want to own it too.’

  ‘And architects have to land the job when they know they’re competing with the best.’

  ‘And the ugly, stupid brother who has to have the woman that belongs to the smart, handsome brother.’

  Shannon prodded at the food in front of her. ‘Are you saying your feelings for me are really about Carl?’