Norwegian by Night Page 8

  ‘Norway.’

  ‘Whatever.’

  ‘You don’t sound quite like Bill.’

  ‘Who do you think I might be?’

  ‘I don’t like that question.’

  A little bell over the door said that a customer had entered the shop.

  ‘I think we should wrap this up.’

  ‘What happened this morning?’ asked Bill.

  ‘Which “this morning” are we talking about?’

  ‘The one with the little Balkan kid. Why did you hide in the closet? Why didn’t you save the woman?’

  ‘I’m eighty-two years old. What could I have done?’

  ‘I’m just saying.’

  ‘I made a choice. Whatever strength I had, I chose to use for the boy. Life is choice. I know how to make a choice.’

  ‘Now what?’

  ‘Every direction is up-river. Ask me when I get there.’

  A young usher wearing the name tag ‘Jonas’ is leaning over Sheldon with a kind expression. He says something in Norwegian.

  ‘What?’

  In English, Jonas then says, ‘I think you fell asleep. The movie is over, sir.’

  ‘Where’s the boy?’

  The lights are on and the credits have stopped.

  With some back pain, Sheldon walks across the red carpet and out to the lobby to find Paul holding another ice-cream cone — presumably a gift from the concessionaires.

  ‘I’ve been looking for you,’ says Sheldon.

  Paul does not smile when he sees Sheldon. He has not softened at all since they’ve met.

  Sheldon holds out his hand.

  Paul does not respond.

  So Sheldon calmly places his hand on the boy’s shoulder.

  ‘Let’s get out. Get you changed. You can’t keep wearing those trousers. I should have changed you out of them earlier. I wasn’t clear yet. I am now.’

  Petter taps Sigrid gently on the shoulder to take her attention away from the computer screen. ‘There is urine in the closet.’

  It is almost eight o’clock at night, and the sun is still high. The temperature is nearly thirty degrees in the office. They never installed air conditioning when the building was made. It was utterly unnecessary back them, but now global warming is killing them.

  Unlike some of the men in the office — buzzing now with energy — Sigrid has not unfastened the top button of her uniform. She is entitled to, and the office does not stand on formality; but, for reasons she cannot entirely explain to herself, she prefers not to.

  ‘Definitively new urine. It was still wet a few hours ago.’

  ‘You sure it wasn’t one of the cops?’ she asks sarcastically.

  ‘We’re testing it for DNA against the dead woman’s. It isn’t hers, because her own trousers were not wet. I wonder if it doesn’t belong to the missing boy.’

  ‘Hiding in the closet, hearing his mother murdered? It’s a terrible thought.’

  Petter says nothing.

  ‘How long to run the test?’

  ‘Normally? Six months.’

  ‘How about this particular time?’

  ‘By morning. I think Inga is going to stay late at the lab. She just broke up with her boyfriend. I think she likes being busy, and I broke six laws asking her to put this one in front.’

  ‘Doesn’t she have a dog?’

  ‘A cat.’

  ‘Victor?’

  ‘Caesar.’

  ‘Well. Good for us then.’

  ‘Are you going to the crime scene?’ Petter asks.

  ‘Aren’t you doing a good job?’

  Petter puckers his lips.

  ‘Yeah, eventually,’ Sigrid says. ‘I’m getting the woman’s name from the landlord, as well as her son’s and the man who probably did this. I figured I’d catch the bad guy first, and then worry about the rest later.’

  ‘We’re going to Pepe’s after for a pizza.’

  ‘After what?’ says Sigrid.

  ‘It’s a nice night. Have a drink.’

  ‘I’m not in the mood.’

  ‘I’ve never seen a woman murdered before,’ says Petter.

  Sigrid does not look away from the computer screen. She sternly says, ‘You still haven’t.’

  At the reception desk of the hotel, Sheldon checks in. ‘Name, please?’ asks the woman.

  In an accent that neither Sheldon nor the Swedish woman behind the desk can quite place, he says, ‘C. K. Dexter Haven.’

  ‘C. K. Dexter Haven,’ she repeats.

  ‘Esquire,’ he adds. Looking down, Sheldon then says, ‘And grandson. Paul. Paul Haven.’

  ‘May I have your passports, please?’

  Sheldon turns to Paul and says, ‘She wants our passports. The ones with our names on them.’

  He turns back to the receptionist. ‘Actually, my dear girl, there is bad news and good news there. The bad news is that we were robbed of our bags — passports included — not less than an hour ago when coming in on that fancy train you have from the airport. The experience was so traumatic that my boy actually wet himself. But I say this to you in confidence — I wouldn’t want to embarrass him, even at his age. But the good news is that my office faxed them over to you before we left, so luckily you have copies. And please, could you make me two more? I’ll need them for the police report tomorrow morning and for the embassy, so they can issue us new ones for the sad journey home.’

  There is a moment when nothing is said.

  As the slender, inviting, stylish woman opens her mouth to speak, C. K. Dexter Haven raises his hand and says, ‘But no need to do it now. Thank you for the offer. Our day has been so long, so tiring, that — given my age, I’m eighty-two — I think it’s best if we address the matter in the morning. What I would like to do, however, is give you cash for the room now so we can settle accounts. And then, I’d like one of your bellboys to go out to a local shop and buy my grandson some clothes. Socks, sneakers, trousers, underpants, a shirt, and a nice jacket for walking in the woods. Charge it to the room, and bring it up as soon as possible.’

  The woman is trying to speak. She makes the sorts of gestures one proffers when trying to contribute to a conversation. Some hand movements. An occasional open mouth. Eyes narrowing and widening, with the practised head-tilt being used for emphasis. But such subtleties are, against Sheldon, like whispering to an elephant. Sweet and pointless.

  ‘Mr Haven, I’m sorry that …’

  ‘Of course. So am I. And with the medication missing that I use to offset the side effects of my cancer, I’m so grateful to have been robbed in a country filled with such kind people. This is what they say in America. The Norwegians are the kindest people. If I make it home alive, I’ll confirm that message. And if I die before returning to my native land, the boy will do it for me.’

  It was a nice room.

  Sheldon found a station playing cartoons in Norwegian. Paul sat quietly on the bed with a bottle of Coke watching Tom chase Jerry. Sheldon sat next to him, doing the same.

  ‘I had an idea for a television commercial once,’ Sheldon says. ‘Picture this. First shot across the field of wheat and wild flowers, all in golden shades. The sound of insects buzzing away. You can feel the heat. The next, gentle ripples on a pond. A dreamlike patina on the water. Then, splash! A dog jumps in. The camera tracks him as he gently but single-mindedly swims from left to right. Then, coming into view on the right side, an empty Coke bottle floating in the pond. The dog — a golden retriever — takes the bottle in his snout, huffs and puffs as he turns back. He gets out, shakes, runs out onto a dock with the bottle where there is a boy lying on his back, lazing away under the clouds. The boy, without looking, picks up the bottle and tosses it back into the pond. Then, as the dog jumps back in, t
he words appear on the screen. ‘Coca-Cola. Summertime.

  ‘It eats you up! There’s nothing you can do! It reaches into your gut and plucks your piano string! But what do you do with an idea like that? Nothing. You send it in, they steal it. Meanwhile, I don’t have my own soft-drink company.’

  Paul says nothing. He has not uttered a word since they met. Has not so much as smiled.

  But a child does not know how to manage silence. About the need to keep comedy and tragedy as close to one another as humanly possible — as close as pathos and words will allow — to try to shut out the voices of the dead. He is only a little boy. He is enveloped in the silence of terror, where words fail and every utterance slips from reality like raindrops from a leaf. He is not old enough to distract himself with games, is not yet adept at finding solace from dialogue and drama. He is defenceless. His mother is dead. And this is why Sheldon will never leave him.

  ‘God made the world, said it was good,’ says Sheldon aloud. ‘Fine. But when did he re-appraise?’ he asks as Tom chases Jerry on the television.

  ‘OK, I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, well, he re-appraised before the Flood. Before Noah made the arky-arky made of hickory barky-barky. But that was a while ago. And it’s not like he went back to the drawing board. He just smudged it all out, except for the ark. I think we’re due for some reconsideration. Not necessarily the same juvenile response, like a kid crumpling up a bad drawing and pretending it never happened, leaving Noah with a question. The question was “Why me?” Unable to answer it, he hit the bottle. Personally, I’d like to see some growth in God. Some maturation. Some responsibility. Some admission of guilt. Some public testimony about his negligence. The trouble is, God is alone. No one to push back. Set him straight. No Mrs God. I’m not the first one to think this, I suspect.

  ‘Now, you might say, being as you are St Paul and therefore a theologian and a philosopher, and possibly the most interesting person in history, that it is impossible for God to make amends, because how does he know when he’s done wrong? After all, does being all-knowing include self-knowledge? As He is the source of everything, can he possibly deny His own actions and condemn them? Against what? What’s the yardstick other than himself?

  ‘So, I have an answer, and thanks for asking. The answer lies in the biblical story of masturbation. I wouldn’t mention this, not at your age, but seeing as you don’t speak English and you’ve been through worse today, it’ll cause little damage.

  ‘Onan. We remember him as the one who spilled his seed. The original jerk-off. But what happened there? Onan had a brother, and his brother and his wife couldn’t conceive. For whatever reason, God decides that the family needs a child, so — as was the custom in those days, when people seemed to be replaceable — God tells Onan to go into his brother’s tent and shtup his sister-in-law. But Onan finds this wrong. He goes into the tent, and — thinking God can’t see inside tents, and don’t even get me started on that one — proceeds to masturbate instead. Spills his seed, as it were. He comes out, tells God the deed is done, and walks off. God, being God, gets angry with Onan. The lesson we all derive from our Judaeo-Christian clerics is that masturbation is abhorred by God, and we’re to keep our hands off our willies. But my question is this. Where did Onan get the idea that instructions from God could possibly be immoral? That there was a morality, a code, that came from a place deeper in the human soul — from our uniqueness and our mortality — that already knew right from wrong with such clarity that it could deny the most powerful authority and navigate its own course?

  ‘And so the real question becomes, why couldn’t I instill some of that in my own son so he could have had the courage to stand up to me, deny me my own failings, and refuse to go to a futile war that killed him? So he could have outlived me. Why couldn’t I have given more of that … whatever that is … to my son?’

  Then Sheldon looks at Paul, who is staring at the screen.

  ‘Now come here, and let’s get your wellingtons off.’

  Chapter 6

  Rhea and Lars left the police station and then rode around the city for hours, looking for Sheldon. Their search was random at first. They rode through neighbourhoods close to the centre, and up and down the most popular roads. Karl Johan’s Gate. Kristian IV’s Gate. Wergelandsveien by the new Literature House. Up Hegdehaugsveien onto Bogstadveien, and then all around Majorstuen. Back to Frogner Park, down into Frogner, down to Vika, down to the port.

  Then they chose locations. There was a synagogue, but no sign of Sheldon. There was an all-day topless bar, but no sign of Sheldon. There were bookstores, but no sign of Sheldon.

  Lars suggested they stay overnight in town. Someplace nice. Someplace expensive. Perhaps the Grand Hotel? But the Grand Hotel had no rooms, so they stayed nearby at the Continental.

  Lars slept deeply. He was exhausted.

  Rhea stared into the ceiling, her life playing backwards and forwards.

  The breakfast in the Hotel Continental this morning is good, but Rhea is not hungry. She dips her finger into the hot tea and places it on the edge of the water glass. Holding the base with her other hand, she circles the ring until a low tone rises out like the mournful cry of a lost baby whale.

  ‘If I did that, I’d be in trouble,’ says Lars.

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘How did you sleep?’ he asks.

  ‘I’d rather be at home.’

  ‘No you wouldn’t.’

  ‘How are we going to go back there? Knowing a woman was murdered in our apartment? How long can we live at a hotel?’

  ‘There are people with worse problems than us.’

  ‘That’s true. And it would be rude if they were here right now, but they aren’t, so let’s talk about us.’

  Lars smiles and, for the first time since checking in, Rhea smiles, too.

  ‘You sound like your grandfather sometimes. Mostly when he isn’t around.’

  ‘He raised me.’

  ‘You’re worried about him?’

  ‘I’m too shocked to be worried.’

  ‘We don’t have to stay in the hotel. We’ll go to the summer house. We’ll stay there. I can get time off from work.’

  ‘I don’t have anything with me but a toothbrush.’

  ‘We have some things there. We can get what we need before we leave.’

  ‘Are we allowed to leave?’

  ‘I’ll call Sigrid Ødegård and let her know where we’re going. Unless they want to pay the hotel bills.’

  ‘It’s in the paper this morning, you know. I saw a photo of the building on the front page.’

  Lars is drinking black coffee and eating toast with an egg. He is wearing a white, short-sleeved dress shirt untucked over fashionable jeans and leather shoes.

  ‘How can you eat?’ she asks.

  ‘It’s breakfast.’

  ‘All this doesn’t invade you somehow? Disrupt everything? Hollow you?’

  Lars puts down the coffee cup, and taps the table a few times. ‘I try not to think about it. I just try and think of what to do.’

  ‘Like a video game.’

  ‘That’s not fair or nice.’

  ‘You make it sound like a choice. Doesn’t it get into you? Actually terrify you? I’m terrified. My grandfather has all these hostile images in him. All this pent-up rage. I remember him, when I was little, looking at me with such love and tenderness and then, in a flash, becoming angry. Not at me. He never really got angry with me. Exasperated. He got exasperated all the time. He would throw up his hands and ask me what I was thinking. “What makes you think that’s a good idea?” he’d say.

  ‘It was the world itself he railed against. When I was older, he said that looking into my face showed him the infinite depth of humanity and all that is lost every time a person is taken from us. And it bri
ngs into focus the kinds of people who can look into a child’s face and harm them, and what the rest of us need to do about that.

  ‘And then he’d talk about the Holocaust. The Nazis shooting children in their heads in front of their parents to prove to themselves that they were above petty human kindness and were the supermen that Hitler said they were. Tying families together with piano strings along the Danube, and shooting only one so the others would drown. Gassing them. Throwing them into pits and covering them, still alive, with lime …’

  ‘Stop it,’ whispers Lars.

  ‘You want me to stop it?’ she says, slapping the table.

  Sheldon wakes, and does not shave or bathe. Instead, he first walks to the door and finds the Aftenposten newspaper just outside. He can’t understand it, but he is looking for something specific, and he finds it.

  The word for murder in Norwegian is mord. There is a picture of his building, a headline, and police tape across the entrance. There is a huddle of people standing around it. She is really dead. It is as if the reality of the experience is made doubly real by the world’s confirmation. Perhaps it’s just a function of the dementia that Mabel insisted he has.

  You need proof.

  Fine. Proof. I’ll find proof. Can I go now?

  ‘I didn’t even call the ambulance,’ he says to no one. ‘What kind of animal am I? How did I forget to do this? Could she have survived if I’d fought? If I’d have so much as called out?’

  And then here is the boy. Who is peeing in the bathroom. Trying to aim over the rim and not make a mess. Who flushes and then turns on the tap. Who washes his little hands under the water like his mother taught him to do, and then turns it off as tightly as he can and then dries them on a fresh towel before coming out of the bathroom while trying to buckle his belt.

  He learns that her name was Senka, not Vera. There is, as far as he can tell, no mention of a boy. If this is true, someone is being very careful about how this story is being told.

  Sheldon showers, shaves, and dresses them both in the new clothes that the porter brought up. He looks under the bed, in the bathroom, the drawers, and in the folds of the bed and chairs, to be doubly sure that nothing in the room can identify them. He hasn’t skipped out on a bill since 1955, and there is a skill to it. He doesn’t want to get it wrong when the consequences are so unusually high.