by Jo Nesbo
'For self-defence,' Krohn interrupted and threw his arms up in despair. 'Your Honour, my client has already answered these questions.'
The judge rubbed his chin as he surveyed the counsel for the defence. Everyone knew that Johan Krohn Jr. was a defence constellation in the ascendancy-particularly Johan Krohn himself-and that was presumably what finally made the judge accede with some irritation: 'I agree with the defending counsel. Unless the prosecutor has anything new to add, may I suggest we move on?'
Groth opened his eyes so that a narrow white stripe could be seen above and beneath the iris. He inclined his head. With a fatigued movement, he raised a newspaper aloft.
'This is Dagbladet from 25 January. In an interview on page eight one of the accused's co-idealogues -'
'I object…' Krohn began.
Groth sighed. 'Let me change that to a man who expresses racist views.'
The judge nodded, but sent Krohn an admonitory glare at the same time. Groth continued.
'This man, commenting on the attack at Dennis Kebab, says we need more racists like Sverre Olsen to regain control of Norway. In the interview the word "racist" is used as a term of respect. Does the accused consider himself a "racist"?'
'Yes, I am a racist,' said Olsen before Krohn managed to interpose. 'In the sense that I use the word.'
'And what might that be?' Groth smiled.
Krohn clenched his fists under the table and looked up at the podium, at the two associate judges flanking the judge. These three would decide the fate of his client for the next few years, and his own status in the Tostrupkjeller bar for the next few months. Two ordinary citizens representing the people, representing common-sense justice. They used to call them 'lay judges', but perhaps they had realised that it was too reminiscent of 'play judges'. To the right of the judge was a young man wearing a cheap, sensible suit, who hardly dared raise his eyes. The young, slightly plump woman to the left seemed to be pretending to follow the proceedings, while extending her neck so that the incipient double chin could not be seen from the floor. Average Norwegians. What did they know about people like Sverre Olsen? What did they want to know?
Eight witnesses had seen Sverre Olsen go into the burger bar with a baseball bat under his arm and, after a brief exchange of expletives, hit the owner, Ho Dai-a forty-year-old Vietnamese, who came to Norway with the boat people in 1978-on the head. So hard that Ho Dai would never be able to walk again. When Olsen started to speak, Johan Krohn Jr. was already mentally shaping the appeal he would lodge with the High Court.
'Rac-ism,' Olsen read, having found the definition in his papers, 'is an eternal struggle against hereditary illness, degeneration and annihilation, as well as a dream of and a desire for a healthier society with a better quality of life. Racial mixture is a kind of bilateral genocide. In a world where there are plans to establish gene banks to preserve the smallest beetle, it is generally accepted that you can mix and destroy human races that have taken millennia to develop. In an article in the respected journal American Psychologist in 1972, fifty American and European scientists warned about the dangers of suppressing inheritance theory arguments.'
Olsen stopped, encompassed courtroom 17 in one sweeping glare and raised his right index finger. He had turned towards the prosecutor and Krohn could see the pale Sieg Heil tattoo on the shaven roll of fat between the back of his head and his neck-a mute shriek and a strangely grotesque contrast to the cool rhetoric of the court. In the ensuing silence Krohn could hear from the noise in the corridor that courtroom 18 had adjourned for lunch. Seconds passed. Krohn remembered something he had read about Adolf Hitler: that at mass rallies he would pause for effect for up to three minutes. When Olsen continued he beat the rhythm with his finger, as if to drum every word and sentence into the listeners' brains.
'Those of you who are trying to pretend that there is not a racial struggle going on here are either blind or traitors.'
He drank water from the glass the court usher had placed in front of him.
The prosecutor broke in: And in this racial struggle you and your supporters, of whom there are a number in this court today, are the only ones who have the right to attack?'
Boos from the skinheads in the public gallery.
'We don't attack, we defend ourselves,' Olsen said. 'It's the right and duty of every race.'
A shout from the benches, which Olsen caught and passed on with a smile: 'In fact, even among people from other races there is race-conscious National Socialism.'
Laughter and scattered applause from the gallery. The judge asked for silence before looking enquiringly at the prosecutor.
'That was all,' Groth said.
'Does the defence counsel have any more questions?' Krohn shook his head.
'Then I would like the first witness for the prosecution to be brought in.'
The prosecutor nodded to the usher, who opened the door at the back of the room. There was a scraping of chairs outside, the door opened wide and a large man strolled in. Krohn noted that the man was wearing a suit jacket which was slightly too small, black jeans and large Dr Martens boots. The close-shaven head and the slim athletic body suggested an age somewhere around the early thirties-although the bloodshot eyes with bags underneath and the pale complexion with thin capillaries bursting sporadically into small red deltas pointed more in the region of fifty.
'Police Officer Harry Hole?' the judge asked when the man had taken a seat in the witness box.
'Yes.'
'No home address given, I see?'
'Private.' Hole pointed with his thumb over his shoulder. 'They tried to break into my place.' More boos.
'Have you ever made an affirmation, Police Officer Hole? Taken the oath, in other words?'
'Yes.'
Krohn's head wobbled like the nodding dogs some motorists like to keep on their parcel shelf. He began feverishly to flick through the documents.
'You investigate murders for Crime Squad, don't you?' Groth said. 'Why were you given this case?'
'Because we wrongly assessed the case.'
'Oh?'
'We didn't think that Ho Dai would survive. You usually don't with a smashed skull and parts of the insides on the outside.'
Krohn saw the faces of the associate judges wince involuntarily. But it didn't matter now. He had found the document with their names. And there it was: the mistake.
3
Karl Johans Gate. 5 October 1999.
You're going to die, old chap.
The words were still ringing in the old man's ears when he walked down the steps to leave and stood still, blinded by the fierce autumn sun. As his pupils slowly shrank, he held on tight to the handrail and breathed in, slow and deep. He listened to the cacophony of cars, trams, the beeping sounds telling pedestrians they could cross. And voices-the excited, happy voices which hastened by to the accompaniment of the clatter of shoes. And music. Had he ever heard so much music? Nothing managed to drown the sound of the words though: You're going to die, old chap.
How many times had he stood here on the steps outside Dr Buer's surgery? Twice a year for forty years, that would make eighty times. Eighty normal days just like today, but never, not before today, had he noticed how much life there was in the streets, how much exhilaration, what voracious lust for life. It was October, but it felt like a day in May. The day peace broke out. Was he exaggerating? He could hear her voice, see her silhouette come running out of the sun, the outline of a face disappearing in a halo of white light.
You're going to die, old chap.
The whiteness took on colour and became Karl Johans gate. He arrived at the bottom step, stopped, looked to the right and then to the left as if he couldn't make up his mind which direction to take, and fell into a reverie. He gave a start as if someone had woken him and began to walk towards the Palace. His gait was hesitant, his eyes downcast and his gaunt figure stooped in the slightly oversized woollen coat. 'The cancer has spread,' Dr Buer had said.
'Right,' he had
answered, looking at the doctor and wondering if that was something they learned at medical school, to take off their glasses when serious issues had to be talked about, or if it was something shortsighted doctors did to avoid looking patients in the eye. Dr Konrad Buer had begun to resemble his father as his hairline receded, and the bags under his eyes gave him a little of his father's aura of concern.
'In a nutshell?' the old man had asked in the voice of someone he had not heard in more than fifty years. They had been the hollow, rough, guttural sounds of a man with mortal dread quivering in his vocal cords.
'Yes, there is in fact a question about -'
'Please, doctor. I've looked death in the eye before.'
He had raised his voice, chosen words which forced it to stay firm, the way he wanted Dr Buer to hear them. The way he himself wanted to hear them.
The doctor's gaze had flitted across the table top, across the worn parquet floor and out of the dirty window. It had taken refuge out there for a while before returning and meeting his own. His hands had found a cloth to clean his glasses again and again.
'I know how you -'
'You know nothing, doctor.' The old man had heard himself utter a short, dry laugh. 'Don't take offence, Dr Buer, but I can guarantee you one thing: you know nothing.'
He had observed the doctor's discomfort and at the same time heard the tap dripping into the sink at the far end of the room. It was a new sound, and all of a sudden and incomprehensibly he seemed to have the hearing of a twenty-year-old.
Then Dr Buer had put his glasses back on, lifted a piece of paper as though the words he was going to say were written on it, cleared his throat and said: 'You're going to die, old chap.'
The old man would have preferred a little less familiarity.
He stopped by a gathering of people, where he heard a guitar being strummed and a voice singing a song that must have sounded old to everyone except him. He had heard it before, probably a quarter of a century ago, but to him it could have been yesterday. Everything was like that now-the further back in time it was, the closer and the clearer it seemed. He could remember things he hadn't thought of for years. Now he could close his eyes and see things projected on his retina that he had previously read about in his war diaries. 'You should have a year left, at any rate.'
One spring and one summer. He would be able to see every single yellowing leaf on the deciduous trees in Studenterlunden as if he were wearing new, stronger glasses. The same trees had stood there in 1945, or had they? They hadn't been very clear on that day, nothing had. The smiling faces, the furious faces, the shouts he barely heard, the car door being slammed shut and he might have had tears in his eyes because when he recalled the flags people were waving as they ran along the pavements, they were red and blurred. Their shouts: The Crown Prince is back!
He walked up the hill to the Palace where several people had collected to watch the changing of the guard. The echo of orders and the smack of rifle stock and boot heels reverberated against the pale yellow brick facade. There was the whirr of video cameras and he caught some German words. A young Japanese couple stood with their arms around each other, happily watching the show. He closed his eyes, tried to detect the smell of uniforms and gun oil. It was nonsense, of course; there was nothing here that smelled of his war.
He opened his eyes again. What did they know, these black-clad boy soldiers who were the social monarchy's parade-ground figures, performing symbolic actions they were too innocent to understand and too young to feel anything about. He thought about that day again, of the young Norwegians dressed as soldiers, or 'Swedish soldiers' as they had called them. In his eyes they had been tin soldiers; they hadn't known how to wear a uniform, even less how to treat a prisoner of war. They had been frightened and brutal; with cigarettes in their mouths and their uniform caps at a rakish slant, they had clung to their newly acquired weapons and tried to overcome their fear by smacking their rifle stocks into the prisoners' backs.
'Nazi swine,' they had said as they hit them, to receive instant forgiveness for their sins.
He breathed in and savoured the warm autumn day, but at that moment the pain came. He staggered backwards. Water in his lungs. In twelve months' time, maybe less, the inflammation and the pus would produce water, which would collect in his lungs. That was said to be the worst.
You're going to die, old chap.
Then came the cough. It was so violent that those standing closest to him moved away involuntarily.
4
Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Viktoria Terrasse.
5 October 1999.
The Under Secretary for Foreign Affairs, Bernt Brandhaug, strode down the corridor. He had left his office thirty seconds ago; in another forty-five he would be in the meeting room. He stretched his shoulders inside his jacket, felt that they more than filled it out, felt his back muscles strain against the material. Latissimus dorsi-the upper back muscles. He was sixty years old, but didn't look a day over fifty. Not that he was preoccupied with his appearance. He was well aware that he was an attractive man to look at, without needing to do very much more than the training that he loved anyway, as well as putting in a couple of sessions in the solarium in the winter and regularly plucking the grey hairs from what had become bushy eyebrows.
'Hi Lise!' he shouted as he passed the photocopier, and the young Foreign Office probationer jumped, managing only a wan smile before Brandhaug was round the next corner. Lise was a newly fledged lawyer and the daughter of a friend from university days. She had started only three weeks ago. And from that moment she had been aware that the Under Secretary, the highest civil servant in the building, knew who she was. Would he be able to have her? Probably. Not that it would happen. Necessarily.
He could already hear the buzz of voices before he opened the door. He looked at his watch. Seventy-five seconds. Then he was inside, casting a fleeting glimpse around the room to confirm that all the authorities summoned were represented.
'Well, well, so you're Bjarne Moller?' he shouted with a broad smile as he offered his hand across the table to a tall thin man sitting beside Anne Storksen, the Chief Constable.
'You're the PAS, aren't you? I hear you're running the roller-coaster leg of the Holmenkollen relay?'
This was one of Brandhaug's tricks. Coming by a little piece of information about people he met for the first time. Something that wasn't in their CV. It made them insecure. Using the acronym PAS-the internal abbreviation for Politiavdelingssjef, the head of Crime Squad-particularly pleased him. Brandhaug sat down, winked at his old friend Kurt Meirik, the head of Politiets overv amp;kningstjeneste, or POT, the Security Service, and studied the others sitting round the table.
As yet, no one knew who would take charge of the meeting as the representatives were equally high ranking, theoretically at least, coming from the Prime Minister's Office, Oslo police district, Norwegian Security Service, Crime Squad and Brandhaug's own Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The Prime Minister's Office had called the meeting, but there was no doubt that Oslo police district, in the guise of Anne Storksen, and POT, in the shape of Kurt Meirik, wanted the operational responsibility when procedures were that far advanced. The Under Secretary of State from the Prime Minister's Office looked as if he envisaged taking charge.
Brandhaug closed his eyes and listened.
The nice-to-see-you conversations stopped, the buzz of voices slowly subsided and a table leg scraped on the floor. Not yet. There was the rustling of papers, the clicking of pens-at important meetings like these most heads of department had their personal note-takers with them in case at a later point they began to blame each other for things that had happened. Someone coughed, but it came from the wrong end of the room and apart from that it wasn't the kind of cough that preceded speaking. Sharp intake of breath. Someone spoke.
'Let's begin then,' Bernt Brandhaug said, opening his eyes.
Heads turned towards him. It was the same every time. A half-open mouth, the Under Secretary of Stat
e's; a wry smile from Anne Storksen showing that she understood what had taken place-but otherwise, blank faces looking at him without a hint of recognition that the battle was already over.
'Welcome to the first co-ordination meeting. Our task is to get four of the world's most important men in and out of Norway more or less in one piece.'
Polite chuckles from around the table.
'On Monday, 1 November, we will receive a visit from the PLO leader Yasser Arafat, the Israeli PM Ehud Barak, the Russian PM Vladimir Putin and, last but not least, the cherry on the cake: at 6.15 a.m., in exactly twenty-seven days' time, Air Force One, with the American President on board, will be landing at Gardemoen Airport, Oslo.'
Brandhaug's gaze moved from face to face down the table. It stopped at the new one, Bjarne Moller's.
'If it isn't foggy, that is,' he said, earning himself a laugh and noticing with satisfaction that Moller forgot his nervousness for a moment and laughed along with the others. Brandhaug responded with a smile, revealing his strong teeth which had become even whiter since his last cosmetic treatment at the dentist's.
'We still don't know exactly how many people are coming,' Brandhaug said. 'The President had an entourage of 2,000 in Australia and 1,700 in Copenhagen.'
Mumbles around the table.
'However, in my experience, a guesstimate of around 700 is probably more realistic.'
Brandhaug was quietly confident his 'guesstimate' would soon be confirmed as he had received a fax an hour before with a list of the 712 people coming.
'Some of you are probably wondering why the President needs so many people for a two-day summit meeting. The answer is simple. What we are talking about here is the good old-fashioned rhetoric of power. Seven hundred, if my assessment is correct, is precisely the number of people Kaiser Friedrich III had with him when he entered Rome in 1468 to show the Pope who the most powerful man in the world was.'
More laughter round the table. Brandhaug winked at Anne Storksen. He had found the reference in Aftenposten. He brought his two palms together.