‘An Old Fashioned, please.’
‘With whisky?’
‘Tequila. Jose Cuervo, Reserva de la Familia.’
‘You know it’ll take about 15 minutes?’
‘I know.’
The barman took out two glasses. Into one he poured the tequila. In the other, a heavy on-the-rocks glass, he put some sugar, which he dampened with a few drops of Angostura bitters. He crushed the mixture with a long, twisted steel mixing spoon. Then he added a minimal amount of tequila and an ice cube. He stirred it for a couple of minutes before fishing out a small piece of orange peel, which he singed, then put in the glass, stirring some more.
Into the bar came the man who had so often ended up in the ‘sundry’ column of Golden’s accounts. A number of the patrons glanced up. Everton manager Brian Fulton was a well-known face. Fulton wasn’t bothered by people looking and made a beeline for Golden.
Fulton was wearing a dark grey suit with a white, partially open shirt. He was still slim, even though it was a few years since he’d stopped playing.
‘For Christ’s sake, Golden. Who the fuck is this fucking Per what’s-his-fucking-name?’
Golden signalled to the barman and asked for a beer for his friend. The barman served up a bottle of Sapporo Black Label. Fulton brought it to his mouth and drank half the bottle in one go.
‘And what’s this fucking piece of Japanese shit?’ he said, before going on to drink the rest.
Golden ordered another one, and Fulton took a swig of the Japanese beer that clearly wasn’t so bad after all. Golden leant closer to Fulton.
‘Per Diesen is Norway’s best footballer,’he said. ‘He’ll fit in perfectly in the English league. Your team needs a playmaker, and Diesen will be a star for you. I’ve never let you down before.’
‘We do need midfielders, but there are loads of them out there,’ said Fulton, finishing his bottle and starting another. He was on auto-pilot now.
‘7 per cent,’ said Golden.
‘15.’
‘Are you mad? 8.’
‘I’m taking a big risk with this transfer. 12.’
‘There’s a good tradition called meeting each other halfway. Let’s say 10 per cent.’
Fulton downed his third beer in a single gulp, then put down the bottle, shook Golden by the hand and left the bar.
As if on cue, the barman put the Old Fashioned he’d finished mixing down on the bar. Golden closed his eyes and took a good sip. He controlled the two men from Everton he needed. Any other representatives would be like the damask rug in the Wimborne Room at The Ritz, unnecessary decoration.
He had a deal.
Pride
Steinar looked out the window and saw a man walking around on his property, a white van parked in the drive. Steinar went outside. The man was wearing a blue boiler suit, and he was scratching the part of his scalp not covered by his cap, which he wore backwards.
‘How does it look?’ asked Steinar.
‘Looks like there’s still a fair bit of activity, I’m afraid. Especially at the bottom of the house. It might be slugs eating the poison there, though.’
The man was from Rentokil. The company’s mission was to fight vermin, and Steinar thought that it’s name was almost perfect. Why hadn’t they gone all the way, though, changing the middle vowel and calling themselves Rent-a-kill? Together with some of his neighbours, Steinar had called in the company after last year’s neighbourhood barbecue was interrupted by a lethargic brown rat sauntering off with a Hungarian sausage.
Rats were unavoidable in a city like Oslo, in fact, they said there were twice as many rats as people there. But even though, statistically, Steinar should have to house two of them, neither he nor his neighbours were willing to accept that.
‘Well, at least there’ll be fewer slugs then,’ said Steinar, who had just as little sympathy for the Spanish slug as he had for Rattus norvegicus.
‘No, they just scoff the poison. They think it’s tasty; it doesn’t hurt them. They don’t have any blood in their bodies.’
‘They snack on rat poison?’
‘That’s what they do,’ said the Rentokil man, putting on a cheerful face and standing stock still. After a few moments, he spoke again. ‘Sorry, I was just thinking how cool it would be if my body had the same kind of tolerance for Coke and crisps. If none of it stuck. If it just passed straight through.’
He picked up a grey, metal box with yellow stickers on it and opened it with a special key. Inside was an empty, white plastic bowl.
‘You see how the bowl’s been practically licked clean? Typical slugs.’
He sprayed the bowl full of blue foam and locked the metal box with demonstrative thoroughness. The rat poison looked like toothpaste.
‘Humans can’t keep down enough of the stuff for it to be dangerous. It contains an emetic that rats don’t react to, but that makes us throw up. It’s an ingenious little product, this is, when you think about it,’ said the man, taking off his plastic gloves. ‘Turns out this is the last time I’ll be here. I’ve got a new route. It’s a shame, because there are so many nice people in this area.’
‘Do you like your job?’ asked Steinar.
‘Yeah, I get to be out and about lots, meet new people all the time. I love it.’
‘Good luck, then.’
Steinar thought the conversation was over, but there was something keeping the man here. He looked down, cleared his throat and said: ‘I’ve got a nephew.’
Steinar looked at the man, who gave no sign of continuing. Steinar knew where he was heading, but he still waited for him to go on.
‘He’s football mad. He practises the whole time. Well, he’s quite good at skiing too, but in the summer it’s nothing but football.’
‘Great.’
‘I’m sorry to ask, but I’d really like to have your autograph. For my nephew, I mean.’
‘That’s no problem,’ said Steinar, looking at the man. Now, according to the usual custom with autographs, the man would normally produce something to write on and something to write with. After a brief pause, the man started patting down his pockets. He’d clearly left his pen in the van. He apologised and went to get a biro and a piece of copy paper that he used for his reports. He asked Steinar to write on the back.
‘Thank you so much. He’ll be happy with this,’ said the man, meticulously putting the top back on his biro. ‘So what are you doing these days anyway?’
Instinctively, Steinar was about to answer ‘I’m a footballer.’ He’d worked so hard at it for so many years, it was still part of his system in a way. But he looked at the Rentokil man and told him what he did.
‘I’m a lawyer.’
‘Blimey.’
Steinar gave a lop-sided smile. The man held up the little scrap of paper in the air.
‘Thanks. I’ll make sure the next technician gets all the information.’
Technician, thought Steinar. So that’s what they call themselves.
Ambitions
‘The post-mortem report isn’t ready yet. What I can give you is a short summary of the report from the first unit on the scene, but you can’t tell anybody where you got it,’ said Arnold Nesje, on the other end of the phone.
‘Of course not,’ said Benedikte.
As a sports journalist, Benedikte had some regular sources. She had a couple of players who could speak well for themselves, and whose clubs used them for everything from advertising jobs to entertainment programmes, as well as requests from journalists. She had a couple of coaches in clubs that were so uninteresting their boards had given them strict instructions not to hold anything back. She had directors of football who almost wept tears of joy when somebody called them, and fellow journalists with chronic verbal diarrhoea. For the Golden case, though, Benedikte needed to think beyond her normal sources, but it was a little harder to call Nesje than most other people, they’d had an on-off relationship for several years. Nesje was in the police, currently with the National Police
Immigration Service.
‘Golden’s neck was broken,’ he said. ‘It’s presumed that some kind of striking weapon was used, making several perforations in his neck, about a centimetre in depth. The impact killed him instantly. But there are also signs of a struggle before the fatal blow.’
Benedikte took a note of the information. A broken neck, a weapon, holes in his neck, a struggle. This was something brutal, but was it planned? Was it done in anger? Was hate behind it? Or was it money? Bearing in mind that a football agent was involved, it could be a combination of all these factors.
She had so many questions, but she knew that Nesje couldn’t answer them yet, nobody could. She looked back down at her notepad.
‘I need more help,’ she said.
‘What are you up to, anyway?’
‘I’m trying to investigate the killing of Arild Golden.’
‘I know that, but why?’
A couple of months previously, Benedikte had presented a story about a 29-year-old Norwegian sprinter who’d had to retire. She couldn’t get the story out of her head. It reminded her of the more senior colleagues she’d seen vanish from the TV screen. Colleagues who hadn’t managed to keep their positions after maternity leave. Colleagues who’d had to watch others being offered the job of presenting the Gullruten TV awards or Idrettsgallaen, the star-studded annual review of Norwegian sport. Her meeting with Steinar Brunsvik made her reflect on this too. He was younger than her when he stopped playing. If there was one thing sports personalities and female faces on commercial TV channels had in common, it was their early sell-by dates.
The Golden case was her big chance to be something more. Success depends to a large extent on luck, and journalists depend on other people’s achievements or failures. Where would Woodward and Bernstein have been without Nixon? Things like that didn’t happen in football. People in football barely knew who Nixon was, let alone Woodward or Bernstein. The biggest news stories would always deal with somebody getting mixed up with a prostitute, and that somebody would almost without exception be a player in the English Premier League. So for her as a sports journalist, a homicide at the epicentre of Norwegian football could only be described as one thing: a stroke of luck.
‘I want to go deeper,’ said Benedikte.
‘Give me the names and I’ll check them out.’
She was still young, but the experience of how easily life could change was burnt into her. How easily a life could be destroyed. It was so long ago, but those tough years still haunted her.
A Team Sport
Steinar needed to study something serious when he came back to Norway and ended up choosing law. Law was a marathon, a 50 km ski race, it was certainly nothing like the explosive nature of football.
The lecturers and his fellow students soon realised that Steinar wasn’t interested in talking football. The law faculty was well insulated from the Norwegian sports press, so Steinar was able to study in peace. Not long after his last exam, he started as a trainee in Tangen’s law firm.
One day Steinar assisted in an industrial dispute negotiation meeting. His company was representing a business carrying out massive changes to its employees’ contracts without really needing to, coming up against quite legitimate opposition from union representatives in the process.
The battle was ended by senior partner Edvin Tangen throwing the statute book on the table and saying: ‘Tell me where it says in here that employees on temporary contracts have the right to stay in their positions.’ The employees’ lawyer, who was terrified of Tangen – known for taking well over 3,000 kroner an hour – capitulated on the spot. At the same time, Steinar felt the appeal of working for the company vanish. He handed in his resignation the same day and rented a small office of his own at Sandaker, in the north of Oslo.
He had to air out the office for two weeks, painting every square inch of the yellowed walls. He replaced the wall-to-wall carpet with light parquet flooring and bought a large, semi-circular desk. To finish with, he ordered business cards and a sign for the door, showing the name Sandaker Criminal Law. Even now, he was wary of revealing his name. Nonetheless, he was still asked fairly frequently: ‘But aren’t you…?’
Maybe a bit of extra PR wouldn’t go amiss, though. Steinar had taken on both criminal cases and civil cases; he had sufficient practice as a trainee lawyer and had taken the required exam. He could now dispense with the word ‘trainee’ in his title and rightfully call himself a lawyer, but he was still not getting enough cases. They weren’t covering the company’s running expenses.
The years spent studying law, his investments in his own company and life in general had eaten into the savings from his football career. If the current situation continued, Steinar would soon have to swallow his pride and beg Tangen to give him back his job. If nothing else, that would at least make the work Christmas party a bit more interesting than it was in his one-man firm.
The quiet days gave Steinar time to think, bringing back how much he missed football. He started to think of the man who’d ruined everything, Golden’s partner. Steinar had even given the man a name. He called him Vlad Vidić.
There was something intense about the man, something harsh, something bottled up that made Steinar think of the Balkans. Perhaps he’d unconsciously named him after Manchester United’s tough centre-back, Nemanja Vidić, a footballer he’d noticed even though he was trying to close himself off from the game.
Steinar checked that his phone wasn’t on silent. No missed calls. Then he sent a text message: ‘I’m on my way.’ Then he started thinking of Vidić again.
Nemanja was too sweet as a first name. When Steinar played football, he always used to focus on his opponents’ weak points. If a goalkeeper often let in low shots on the left, then Steinar would send the ball blazing towards that corner at the earliest opportunity. If a player was a little apprehensive when challenged, Steinar wouldn’t be adverse to tackling him over the touchline. And if he’d been up against Nemanja Vidić in a match, then he would’ve just thought about what a sweet, innocent name Nemanja was, merely to get the psychological upper hand.
Was that why he’d given Golden’s partner a more bloodthirsty first name or had the name Vlad Vidić come from somewhere else?
Steinar got up and watched the tram going past. There were two questions he couldn’t quite answer, nor get out of his mind. How had Vlad Vidić managed to stay anonymous all these years? And had Arild Golden himself had a hand in what happened to Steinar?
Soccer School
Benedikte sat in one of the large substitutes’ shelters next to the astroturf ground at Valle. Vålerenga’s training session was officially over, but some of the players had stayed on for a bit of extra practice.
Per Diesen fired the ball on target. From 20 yards he bent it up in the air, over an imaginary wall, past an imaginary keeper, in off the post and into the empty goalmouth. He put down another ball and sent it curving almost as high into the corner. Per Diesen was the best free kick taker in Norway.
Benedikte liked to see how carefully he prepared the ball. How he paced it out and how he exhaled before every shot. How high and hard he kicked the ball. Journalists don’t spend enough time studying what footballers actually do, she thought.
A short distance away, Marius Bjartmann was doing sit-ups. He’d taken off his T-shirt and was using it to lie on. The sweat glistened on his sculpted abs.
Kalid Jambo was still there too, running a series of 17–13 intervals. He shot along the length of the pitch, turned and went back a good distance in the 17 seconds he was running. Then he walked for 13 seconds to recover, throwing the odd remark over at the players fetching the balls.
Picking them up were Otto Cana and a couple of the other young lads. It was traditional in most football clubs to give that job to the youngest players. And it was also traditional in most football clubs for the youngest players to moan about it.
Bang, Diesen hit the crossbar, which rattled.
He shot off a
nother three free kicks, and Bjartmann finished his strength training. They left together, walking by the Vallhall Arena, the large sports hall next to the pitch, Kalid Jambo tagging along. After a couple of minutes’ vaguely focused searching, the young lads found the last ball, then they too headed off towards the arena, where the changing rooms were to be found.
The structure of the grey and blue arena, with its curved roof, was becoming worn. Pieces kept falling off. When this happened on the wall facing the car park it looked like a large, beached whale with tooth decay. That day, the team had probably done their training outdoors on the astroturf because their next league match was away at Aalesund’s Color Line Stadion, with its artificial pitch. But why, in winter, did Vålerenga’s first-team players prefer to train outdoors in the slush and freezing temperatures, and right next to one of the busiest roads in Norway, rather than inside the warm arena?
Vålerenga’s development coach, Andrei Sennikov, went over to Benedikte when they’d finished training, as agreed. The development coaches were responsible for the most talented young footballers, with the responsibility of nurturing them into first-team players. The idea was that they would take four to six players in each club under their wing, teach them about nutrition and training, and make sure they went to school and did their homework. A large part of the development coach’s day consisted of making home visits.
This social care dimension was important, but the development coaches had ever-expanding job descriptions. The less money the clubs had at their disposal, the more they tried to squeeze into these positions, Benedikte thought. Nothing changed for the managers. Goalkeeper coaches went on shooting straight instep drives at their apprentices at the start of training sessions, while the development coaches became increasingly worn out. Hardly anyone stayed in the role past the age of 50.
Exposed at the Back Page 3