Lion's Mouth, The

by Holt, Anne

  However, she still knew which strings it was possible to pull.

  She looked at the time. The girls would be out for a few hours longer. Ruth-Dorthe Nordgarden fixed herself a cup of coffee, but it was too strong. She screwed her nose up at it and shuffled out to the kitchen again for some milk. The fridge smelled rank when she opened it; the girls were shirking their chores more than ever these days. She was irritated to see that the milk was out of date. She poked her nose into the opening, and decided to pour a generous amount into her cup all the same.

  As she sipped the muddy brown beverage, she let her eyes roam from the cell phone to the cordless one. It was difficult to believe that cell phones could not be eavesdropped; it seemed remarkable that with current technology it was possible to have a conversation and still be certain that no one else was listening. Cell phones appeared insecure: they crackled and crunched, and occasionally she had heard other voices on the line. Nevertheless, she decided to use the cell phone.

  “You wanted to talk to me,” she said listlessly once she was connected.

  She ought to wash the windows. The weak spring sunshine struggled to reach her desk, and dust particles danced in the pale light. She listened to the voice at the other end for some considerable time.

  “You’re talking about internal documents,” she said at last. “That’s very difficult of course. Not to say almost impossible.”

  That was not true. They both knew that. But Ruth-Dorthe Nordgarden wanted to be persuaded. She wanted to know what was in it for her.

  Five minutes later, she disconnected the call.

  She scribbled down a few words in the margin of her diary space for Monday. She would have to get hold of a repairman for the dishwasher as soon as possible. She would have to remember to ask the political adviser to arrange it.

  18.00, JACOB AALLS GATE 16

  “I am skeptical! I’m telling you, all the same, I am skeptical!”

  Birdie Grinde wrinkled her tanned forehead and puckered her lips. Nonetheless, Little Lettvik could discern a glimmer of curiosity in the old woman’s eyes.

  “After the dreadful things that newspaper of yours wrote about Ben, it’s no wonder I’m not exactly delighted to see you. On the other hand …”

  Birdie Grinde stepped back in the tiny hallway, indicating for Little Lettvik to follow.

  “… if I can contribute in any way to people realizing that Ben had nothing to do with this terrible story, then that would be really splendid, of course.”

  The woman, who had to be in her late seventies, was wearing a tight-fitting pair of denim jeans that in a fascinating way illustrated what happened to an ageing body. Her legs appeared frail and skinny, and her calves as thin as pipe cleaners. In the gap between the tight trouser legs and her platform sandals, Little Lettvik could make out patches of taut, shiny brown skin and dark liver spots. Birdie Grinde’s sweater, a loose-fitting pink angora, reached halfway down her posterior, below which Little could see that the ravages of time had removed all her buttock muscles.

  Ten years ago, Little Lettvik thought. Only ten years ago you would probably have got away with wearing such clothes.

  “You must sit down,” Birdie Grinde commanded, and Little Lettvik noticed the disagreeable, vengeful eyes beneath the old woman’s eyebrows, which formed two thin strands on her high forehead. “You’d probably appreciate a little snack, wouldn’t you?”

  When she returned from the kitchen, she was carrying a small plate of sandwiches in one hand and a stemmed cake stand in the other.

  “Myself, I’ve kept my slim figure, as you can see. Just a glass of port for me! So!”

  She poured herself such a generous amount that the reddish-brown liquid almost overflowed. Little Lettvik briefly nodded a “Yes, please”, and received half a glass.

  “You’re driving, I expect,” Birdie Grinde explained as she sat down. “Help yourself! Do tuck in!”

  She pushed the two plates toward the journalist.

  They looked good, and Little Lettvik was hungry. She was always hungry. Long ago she had read an article in a popular science magazine about hunger being a substitute for conscience. She had tried to forget that article. Picking up a sandwich filled with salmon and scrambled egg, she wondered whether this strange woman always had luxuries like this to hand, since she could not have been in the kitchen for longer than ten minutes.

  It was unpleasant to eat under the eagle eye of the woman on the settee. Her intense, brown eyes glanced up at her from the glass of port, and Little Lettvik gave up when she’d finished only half the sandwich.

  “How could you write such things?” Birdie Grinde resumed. “You already knew that the prosecution was a piece of nonsense!”

  “Arrest warrant,” Little Lettvik corrected. “It was an arrest warrant. And we also wrote that it had been rescinded. There was absolutely nothing in that article that wasn’t true.”

  Birdie Grinde seemed preoccupied. She stared uninhibitedly at Little Lettvik, but her thoughts seemed not to revolve around her son having been wrongfully singled out as a murderer only a few days earlier. Some vague new expression was carved out on her raddled face: a mixture of amusement and embarrassment.

  Little Lettvik found it disconcerting. “And of course it’s been forgotten now,” she continued. “Everybody forgets so quickly. I can reassure you on that point. But perhaps you could tell me something about your son’s …”

  Now the other woman’s gaze was unbearable. She continued to stare while carefully wiping her mouth with a linen napkin, over and over again.

  Little Lettvik shook her head gently. “Is there something wrong?”

  “You have some scrambled egg on your chin,” Birdie Grinde whispered, leaning across the coffee table. “Here!”

  She pointed to her own chin, and Little Lettvik made a lightning movement with the back of her hand. A yellow lump was pushed across her skin, and Little Lettvik resorted to the other hand for assistance.

  “You do have a napkin, you know,” Birdie Grinde said pointedly.

  “Thanks,” Little Lettvik mumbled, fumbling to remove the roll of fabric from a large engraved silver ring.

  “It’s gone now.” Birdie Grinde smiled in satisfaction. “What was it you wanted to ask me about?”

  Little Lettvik seldom let others get the better of her. She never paid any attention to her own appearance. She just did not care. There was very little at all she did bother about, and privately she was extremely pleased that she was not particularly fond of anyone: she was not even especially concerned about other people. Perhaps about him, however. No, not him either. Her business, her crusade, her major project, was the truth. Truth was an obsession, and she laughed derisively at all the pathetic attempts by other journalists to engage in philosophical debates about ethics and journalism. Twice, only twice in a long and illustrious career, had she committed to print something that had turned out not to be true. It had been difficult. Those incidents had plagued her for months afterward. Running the gauntlet of official retractions and compensation payments had been sheer hell.

  The truth could never be immoral. How you got hold of it, and what effect it had on other people, was entirely secondary. It made no difference whether she used lies and unscrupulous practices to get to the truth. The sole objective was to find out the truth. If every single word in an article she wrote was correct, then the article was legitimate.

  Her certainty about her own eternal search for the truth made her invincible. But just then, facing this witch of a woman – this tiny, conceited, ludicrous squirrel who sat playing with her whiskers on the opposite side of a massive mahogany coffee table – just then, Little Lettvik felt an unaccustomed touch of insecurity.

  She gave herself a shake and leaned back in the chair to try and reduce the size of her stomach. For the first time in ages she peered down in annoyance at her own breasts. They spilled over like a solid balcony in front of her; she had not actually noticed before that they rested on her thighs
when she was seated.

  “I simply wondered whether you could tell me a little about your son,” she said at last. “We would like to give our readers an accurate picture of him. He occupies an extremely prominent position, after all, and his life is of considerable public interest, wouldn’t you agree?”

  “Yes, very much so, that’s my view exactly!”

  Birdie Grinde laughed, a loud piercing ripple.

  “To tell the truth, I’m surprised the press hasn’t shown greater interest in him before. Do you know …”

  Birdie Grinde leaned forward again, as if to inspire familiarity.

  “… Ben was the first person in Norway to achieve both a medical degree and a doctorate in law? The very first. Look at this!”

  She rose from the settee and crossed to a bookcase, continuing her flow of chatter. Crouching down stiffly for a moment, she produced a ring binder.

  “Personally, I consider that the occasion received far too little attention.”

  She slapped the album down in front of the journalist.

  “Only two little columns in Aftenposten,” she fretted, pointing with a red-varnished fingernail. “It was quite an occasion, I tell you. But …”

  She plumped down on her seat again.

  “… there was actually a longer article about Ben when he graduated from high school.”

  Birdie Grinde gestured with her hand to encourage Little Lettvik to leaf further back in the album.

  “It was only in the local Akershus Amtstidende, of course, but all the same.”

  Little Lettvik flicked through the pages. Suddenly she spotted the young Benjamin Grinde in a large, yellowed, dog-eared newspaper picture. He was smiling faintly, shyly, at the photographer, and despite his thick head of hair and eyes as blank as any eighteen-year-old’s, he was easily recognizable. The man had grown more handsome over the years, admittedly, but even in this old newspaper image she could see how good-looking he was: immature, vulnerable and engaging.

  “My goodness,” Little Lettvik muttered. “Did he get a distinction for his final grade?”

  “Distinction in every subject.” Birdie Grinde giggled delightedly. “At Oslo Cathedral School! The best in the city … Yes, I could almost say the best school in the country. At that time, anyway. Since then it has deteriorated, like so many other things.”

  Once again she pursed her mouth in disapproval.

  “Who’s this?”

  Little Lettvik placed the heavy ring binder in front of Benjamin Grinde’s mother. Producing a pair of half-moon glasses from a leather case on the table facing her, Birdie Grinde peered at the picture.

  “Oh that,” she shrieked. “That’s Birgitte of course! Poor Birgitte, look how lovely she was!”

  Birgitte Volter was standing with one arm around the eighteen-year-old Benjamin Grinde. The young man looked stiff as a board: his hands were dangling uncertainly in front of his thighs, and he was staring seriously at a point adjacent to the camera lens. Birgitte Volter, with mid-length hair, and wearing a full skirt and pumps, and glasses with cat-like frames, was laughing and holding a baby in her other arm. The infant was not lying comfortably; its head was hanging too far over the elbow. The caption written on the gray-black cardboard in white pen, neatly and legibly, was: “Little Liv’s first day in the sun”.

  “Look at this,” Birdie Grinde called eagerly, thumbing further through the album. “Here we are, all together on the beach! Birgitte Volter was a very close friend of our family, you understand. Her parents – brilliant people, they died several years ago, poor things – were our nearest neighbors. That was a lovely time.”

  She sighed, reclining on the settee with a smile, staring longingly out the window.

  “Such a lovely time,” she repeated softly, more to herself than to Little Lettvik.

  And Little Lettvik was not listening to her either.

  “Who is this?” she asked loudly, pointing to another photograph.

  Birdie Grinde did not respond. She continued to stare out the window, her face transformed. Something soft surrounded her eyes; her smile seemed to come from somewhere deep inside, from a place that had been locked away long ago.

  “Excuse me,” Little Lettvik called out. “Mrs. Grinde!”

  “Oh.” The old woman was startled. “I’m sorry. What was it you were asking?”

  “Who is this?”

  Little Lettvik did not want to draw attention to her own bitten nails, so instead tapped the photo of a baby with her knuckle. It was lying on its back on a terry towel, squinting unhappily at the sun, with its knees drawn up to its chest. Birgitte Volter was sitting on one side of the baby, still smiling flirtatiously. On the other side sat Benjamin Grinde, looking very solemn. Behind the child, crouching, handsome, broad-shouldered, smiling widely, and with his hand under the baby’s head, sat a man Little Lettvik recognized immediately. Roy Hansen.

  “Who’s the child?”

  Birdie Grinde looked at her in confusion.

  “The baby? That’s Liv, of course!”

  “Liv?”

  “Yes, Birgitte and Roy’s little daughter.”

  “Daughter? But they only have one child! A boy, isn’t it? Per.”

  “But my dear woman …”

  Birdie Grinde looked at her reproachfully.

  “… Per is only in his early twenties. This was taken in 65. Little Liv died, you see. A terrible tragedy, the whole business. She died just like …”

  She tried to snap her fingers.

  “For no reason at all. Absolutely awful. It affected everybody so dreadfully. Poor Mr. and Mrs. Volter, they quite simply went into a decline. I would put it as strongly as that. They were never the same again. Thank God Birgitte was so young. And Roy too, of course, although I’ve never really understood how Birgitte could have fallen for that man. Young folk, you know … Young folk manage to get back on their feet. And Ben, that good boy. He was shattered. Poor Ben. He’s so sensitive. His father was just the same. He was a photographer, you see, and actually had an artistic temperament. I always said that.”

  “And this was in 1965, you say?” Little Lettvik enquired, swallowing. “How old was the child?”

  “Only three months, poor soul. A beautiful little baby. Enchanting. She wasn’t exactly planned, if you understand what I mean …”

  Birdie Grinde winked slightly with her right eye.

  “… but she was a little ray of sunshine. And then she just died. Cot death. Isn’t that what they call it nowadays? We just called it a tragedy, we did. At that time we didn’t have so many fine words, you see.”

  Little Lettvik coughed violently: a hacking, husky cough that came from somewhere around her knees. Clutching her mouth with both hands, she gasped, “Could I have some water, please?”

  Birdie Grinde looked completely distracted as she scurried off to the kitchen.

  Little continued to cough, at the same time grabbing the album and letting it slide into the voluminous depths of the bag she always carried. During one final, fierce explosion, she pulled the zipper closed.

  “Here,” Birdie chirped, appearing beside her with water in a stemmed crystal glass. “Please drink it carefully! Do you smoke, Miss Lettvik? You really ought to stop!”

  Little Lettvik did not answer, but downed all the water.

  “Thanks,” she murmured. “Now I really must go.”

  “Already?”

  Birdie Grinde was unable to hide her disappointment.

  “But maybe you’ll come back again? Another time?”

  “Of course,” Little Lettvik assured her. “But I have to leave now.”

  She wondered fleetingly whether she should grab one of the tempting sandwiches on her way out. But then she pulled herself together.

  There were limits, after all.

  MONDAY, APRIL 14

  02.00, KVELDSAVISEN EDITORIAL OFFICE

  If Little Lettvik had possessed a tail, it would have been swishing contentedly from side to side. She was leaning over
a computer screen, studying the draft of that day’s front page. She was happiest of all with the picture: the wedding photograph of Birgitte Volter and Roy Hansen, taken by Benjamin Grinde’s father, the photographer Knut Grinde. Birgitte Volter had a little bump at the waist of her dress; ever so slightly too big to be considered up to date, two years after Marilyn Monroe’s death.

  “Where did you actually get hold of these pictures?” the editor mumbled.

  He did not expect a reply, and nor did he receive one. Little Lettvik simply smiled condescendingly as she asked for a printout.

  “Get it yourself,” the editor snapped.

  However, nothing could spoil Little Lettvik’s euphoric mood tonight. She trotted through to her own office, and clicked her way in to that day’s edition.

  CHILDHOOD FRIEND INVESTIGATES FAMILY TRAGEDY

  Previously unpublished photos of Prime Minister Birgitte Volter

  By Little Lettvik (Photo: private ownership)

  Today, Kveldsavisen is able to reveal previously unknown aspects of late Prime Minister Birgitte Volter’s life. These photographs from Volter’s youth have never previously been published.

  It has also never before come to light that, in 1965, Birgitte Volter and her husband lost their three-month-old daughter, Liv, in tragic circumstances. Birgitte Volter was only nineteen years old when the baby was born, but she still managed to graduate from high school. As is well known, Birgitte Volter did not go on to university, and two months after Liv’s death she began work as a secretary at the State Liquor Monopoly. She did not give birth to another child until 1975 – Per Volter, who is now at military training academy.

  The family has been extremely reticent about mentioning little Liv’s demise. Sources in contact with this newspaper, and who claim to be very close to the Volter family, say that they had no idea about this tragic event. The newspaper has not succeeded in obtaining a comment from Roy Hansen, Birgitte Volter’s widower.