Seven Shoes

by Mark Davis

  “Looks like St. Olaf might have done a little more converting in this area,” Nasrin said.

  “You could say the same anywhere in Europe now,” Elizabeth said.

  In between the dancers and the men talking, Elizabeth caught a glimpse of a man looking back at them, watchful, brown eyes like the falcon’s.

  Karl Pedersen.

  The song changed and they watched the dancing awhile longer. Nasrin spotted a clear table of rough-hewn wood and led Elizabeth over to it.

  “One of the dancers might be sitting here,” Elizabeth said. “This might piss someone off. Like Karl over there.”

  “Good,” Nasrin said. “We could stand a little attention. I am positively begging for trouble.”

  Elizabeth imagined Lars on the other end of the phone, plonking his head.

  Some dancers moved and Elizabeth saw Pedersen standing as immobile as one of the figures on the wall, eyes slitted and head arched back. After a moment of eye contact with Elizabeth, he spun around and disappeared behind the thicket of Hammers and their old ladies.

  “He looks as dangerous as his Q.E.,” Nasrin said. “Queen’s evidence.”

  “Do I want to know it all?” Elizabeth asked.

  “As his file says, suspected of this, linked to that,” Nasrin said. “Rape, murder, murder-for-hire, arson and lately, cybercrime. Except for a two-year stint for that rape, he’s been positively catlike in his ability to slink around the law.”

  They finished their beers. The music went back to something from ten years ago, and the dancers spun to a stop and began to gather around the bar. A woman of about thirty walked toward them.

  “Hello, may I join you? I am Sonya.”

  The accent was Eastern European, maybe Polish.

  Sonya pulled out a chair and sat down.

  “Are you enjoying yourselves?” she asked.

  “Not yet,” Nasrin said.

  Sonya had a dissipated beauty, high cheekbones and a pretty mouth, offset by a sallow complexion and an unhealthy-looking translucence about the corners of the eyes.

  “We won’t truly enjoy ourselves until we’ve talked to Karl,” Nasrin said.

  “Then go home unhappy,” Sonya said. “We know the stink of snut and we don’t want it in our house.”

  “What did she call us?” Elizabeth asked.

  “Here’s my warrant card,” Nasrin said, and flipped open a leather case to show her ornate badge and a holographic card with her picture.

  “You’ve got no jurisdiction here, snut,” Sonya said. “Go back to Scotland.”

  Nasrin laughed at her. Sonya’s eyes narrowed and she brought up a cigarette clipped in her nicotine-stained fingers, took a long drag and blew smoke at them as if she were laying down a curse.

  “It’s because I have no jurisdiction here that I think Karl will want to speak to us,” Nasrin said. “We just want information. I think the last thing you want is for us to come back here with the PST.”

  Sonya turned from Nasrin to inspect me.

  “And this one, she is from Scotland too?”

  “No,” Nasrin said. “She’s with the American FBI.”

  Elizabeth felt a clench in her gut.

  “If she is FBI, then I want to see her warrant card also.”

  “We don’t have warrant cards, we have badges,” Elizabeth said. “And by law, we are not allowed to take them outside of the U.S.”

  That seemed to satisfy Sonya.

  “So what do you want?”

  “You saw the Preikestolen suicides?”

  “How could I miss it? Fools.”

  “We want some background on it, how the Internet might have been used to bring these people together.”

  “And this has what to do with the Hammers?”

  Nasrin leaned in.

  “Ever hear of GCHQ? No? It’s a big silver building in the country in Gloucestershire they call the Doughnut, though personally I think it looks a bit more like a flying saucer that landed. Saucer or doughnut, when GCHQ turns its eyes and ears to Hommelvik it sees a digital spiderweb that laces out from near here to shady accounts in Cyprus, to Hezbollah and its sale of copycat pharma in South America and Russia, and—”

  “So someone’s bad,” Sonya said. “Look around if you like. There are no computers here. We don’t even have WiFi.”

  “Of course you wouldn’t, not exactly here at Sessrúmnir,” Nasrin said. “But we can see your assets seeded about the farms, the wharfs, the places you think we don’t know about, including those most nearby.”

  Sonya stared at them, put her cigarette down and threw her hands open in a gesture of mock surrender to an arrest.

  “And we do not care,” Nasrin said. “At least, I do not. But one of those spider threads links to a site that brought the suicides together. We want you to give up one small, sketchy customer. Do that, and I will never darken your door again.”

  Sonya sneered and gave a short laugh that was more like a snigger.

  “Snut, you will never leave us alone.”

  Sonya left.

  After waiting for fifteen minutes, Elizabeth went to the bar and got two more beers. She felt someone too close behind her and she turned.

  “I think you should leave when you finish those two.”

  It was the fat man who had sold them tickets. Elizabeth nodded.

  She took the beers back to the table and informed Nasrin that they had overstayed their welcome. They quaffed their beers to the halfway mark and took their leave.

  Once in the car, Nasrin pulled her phone from her purse and hit the speaker button.

  “Did you get that?” Nasrin asked.

  “Most of it,” Lars said, the connection making his voice several octaves higher. “At least enough to ask Agent Norris to indict Elizabeth for impersonating a federal officer. Not that I would care.”

  “So what is snut?” Elizabeth asked.

  “It means ‘snout,’ the idea being that police officers are always sniffing around like dogs,” Lars said. “Which I have always taken as an accurate description, if not exactly complimentary. I want you to come back to Oslo now. And I want to see the two of you in my office at 8 a.m.”

  Nasrin told Lars that the long call had left her phone without power, although she had already plugged it into the car charger.

  “Cheerio,” Nasrin said suddenly, and terminated the call.

  “So that went well,” Elizabeth said.

  “Didn’t it?”

  Nasrin started back for Trondheim. Soon they were coasting between a lonely stretch of shadowy forest on either side of the road.

  “So why didn’t Pedersen speak to us?” Elizabeth asked.

  “My guess is that was never in the cards,” Nasrin said, taking a particularly sharp turn with ease. “He would never expose himself to actual contact. He leaves that to flunkies like Sonya.”

  “Doesn’t this now mean the PST will show up with an army in a day or two?” Elizabeth said.

  “Perhaps Pedersen doesn’t care,” Nasrin said. “Perhaps he appreciates the fact that we have tipped him off, giving him time to clean up. Either way, it probably doesn’t matter.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I think after we meet with Lars, you and I will be on the first jet back home.”

  Nasrin glanced at the rearview mirror as the road straightened.

  “Trouble.”

  They gained speed.

  Elizabeth craned around to see a motorcyclist a good hundred yards behind them. He was large man whose bulk made his black Harley-Davidson appear absurdly small, like a trained bear on a tricycle. The motorcyclist’s long dirty blond hair whipped in the wind from underneath a black helmet that was also too small for him, almost sitting on the top of his head.

  “Be a dear and reach into my purse for me.”

  Elizabeth did as Nasrin asked.

  “Now kindly pull out my G43.”

  Elizabeth felt t
he cold polymer skin of a semiautomatic pistol. She carefully lifted it from Nasrin’s purse, lightly holding the grip to keep her fingertips as far away from the trigger as possible.

  “What is this?” she asked.

  “My Lady Glock, courtesy of a friend at the British Embassy. Don’t worry, the safety’s on. Now, please gently place it on top of my lap, barrel pointing toward the door.”

  Elizabeth again did as Nasrin asked.

  “Wouldn’t you get in big trouble if Lars knows you’re carrying?”

  “We’ll be in bigger trouble if Pedersen sent that chopperhead to kill us.”

  The gunning of an overpowered engine split the air and needled their eardrums. The sound became a guttural rip to make the distant mountains vibrate as the motorcycle shot forward like a black cannonball. The rider brought his front wheel right behind their back bumper.

  “I feel conspicuously outmatched in this little box,” Nasrin said.

  She whipped the Fiat onto the side of the road and quickly slowed to a stop.

  Nasrin turned to Elizabeth, eyes wide and bright.

  “Be ready in an instant to dart out that door and make for the woods,” she said.

  Elizabeth unlatched her door and undid her seatbelt.

  In one quick motion, Nasrin spun out her seat, planted her feet firmly a yard apart and aimed her gun at the motorcyclist with two hands.

  The loud, rasping rumble of the bike sputtered, coughed and died. The big man lifted one leg over the chopper and stood tall. He stretched his arms, displaying his broad shoulders and massive gut. The biker removed the black helmet from the top of his head. Elizabeth could now see that it was shaped like an old German army war helmet, a deliberate Nazi resonance that seemed to be the default fashion statement for outlaws everywhere. With insolent slowness, the man hung the helmet by a strap on one handle and shook out his hair. He ambled toward Nasrin, big boots grinding the pavement.

  “Close enough,” Nasrin said.

  Without a word, the man pulled a folded napkin from the front pocket of black leather pants and set the napkin down on the road. He placed a loose pebble on it, turned and walked back to his motorcycle. He gunned it and spun around to return to Sessrúmnir.

  Nasrin stuck her Glock into her waistband and bent over to lift the napkin. She unfolded it.

  “What does it say?” Elizabeth asked.

  Nasrin held it up. Elizabeth expected some cryptic message, but not actual numbers.

  63.36915526,10.89277578

  “A code?” She asked as Nasrin slipped back behind the wheel.

  “GPS coordinates,” Nasrin said, and slipped her gun back into her purse like a pack of mints.

  “Wonder where?”

  Nasrin keyed the numbers on her smartphone and read the screen.

  “Well, it appears we’ve just been invited to go to somewhere in the vicinity of Hell.”

  SIX

  The Radisson was a modernist take on a Hanseatic storehouse, with immense glass walls in its lobby that overlooked Trondheim’s oceanic fjord. Nasrin asked Elizabeth to meet her at nine for dinner in the hotel restaurant so they could go over the events of the day, plan their next steps and concoct a pitch to mollify Lars when they failed to show up in the morning.

  Elizabeth smiled and said good evening to Nasrin. She hoped it wasn’t a weak, sickly smile. Although Elizabeth did not want to repeat what had happened the last time they were in a hotel room together, she didn’t feel like being left alone, either.

  Elizabeth’s room, with its Scandinavian retro décor, was a large box, cool and empty. It felt strange to walk into a hotel room with no bags. She could stand to wear the same clothes another day in this cool climate. The greater problem was with what was roiling inside her. The room felt closed, like a tomb.

  Elizabeth pulled a bottle of water out of the minibar and fished a plastic container with a few pills out of her jeans pocket. She swallowed one, a half a milligram of benzodiazepine, with a sip of water.

  She pulled off her boots, stretched out on the bed and let it come.

  Elizabeth always appreciated what an observer watching her would see, as if she were outside herself, seeing her body tense, then ball up as she gave into a red-faced crying jag with gritted teeth, bobbing head, and spastic movements. Elizabeth struggled to let out the maximum amount of tears with the minimum amount of grunts and whines.

  The observer would not know, however, that on the inside Elizabeth was feeling far less than one would imagine, as if the powerful emotions being released by her body didn’t belong to her, just a fast-moving storm passing through.

  In this disassociated state, Elizabeth watched herself from the other side of the room, impassively, even contemptuously for the curled weakling crying in her bed.

  Her episodes always ended with feelings from which there was no disassociation and no escape. This stage was Elizabeth’s hell. She balled up even tighter, silent and wet-faced, trembling at the final arrival of her old familiar—dread like a physical thing that crept across the room until it wormed its way inside her and into the marrow of her bones. Since she was a teen, Elizabeth had always called this unwanted visitor the Edge, that thing that lurks in the periphery, a watchful predator waiting for her to get into the wrong situation and falter so it can return and prove to her that all her coping and her therapy and her tactics and her learning means nothing.

  The return of the Edge did not surprise Elizabeth. It always gave her warning.

  It had been building up since the visit to the morgue. It showed itself after the encounter with the motorcyclist. Elizabeth’s hands had trembled in her lap as Nasrin calmly drove away, as if pulling a gun on a biker was as ordinary as pumping gas. While speeding along in the car, wind rushing through the open windows, Elizabeth caught sight of her nemesis in the corners of her eyes, welling up in the dark recesses of the forest like a rising tide of ink, lurking in the shadows that were satisfied with the knowledge that the sun would eventually set so the darkness could merge and cover everything.

  On the drive back to Trondheim, Elizabeth had studied Nasrin. The detective seemed to notice nothing off about her passenger. As Elizabeth had stared, she silently wished to be like Nasrin, to be able to face the world with simple, unexamined courage.

  It had been almost three months since the last episode. It had come just after Elizabeth’s failure to stop Jeremy from leaping from the 9th floor of a building in Washington, D.C. For the first time in years Elizabeth had to return to therapy and renew her prescription.

  She thought it was done, just a minor relapse brought on by fresh trauma. But now the Edge was back.

  And it was in the room with her.

  It advanced toward her stealthily, slithering like an ancient sea creature, a bilious horror, its skirt of black flesh undulating in a sickening and obscene motion.

  The Edge is both omen and the terrible thing the omen points to.

  She performed her breathing exercises, focusing on the hot breath on her nostrils and the expansion and recession of her diaphragm. Elizabeth felt clenched muscles unlock and begin to relax. She lay still, resting, imagining the drug dissolving, spreading in her bloodstream, slowing and cooling her hot brain, bringing peace.

  She opened her eyes. The room was clear.

  Elizabeth picked up her smartphone and rolled the contacts until she came to Dr. George Adler Abelman.

  She sent him a text.

  >Had a bit of a scare today. Turned out to be a trigger. Maybe we could Skype sometime?<

  The reply from gaableman@georgetown.edu came back immediately.

  >I can do better than that. I am in Oslo. Can we get together tomorrow? I am looking forward to seeing you again, my dear Elizabeth.<

  She replied.

  >Thank you, a Godsend for real.<

  Elizabeth didn’t have the strength to ask what her old faculty advisor, therapist and savior was doing in Norway. He was just close, a good
sign that comforted her like a warm blanket. She set an alarm so she could make dinner with Nasrin, an hour would be enough. The meds were now taking a firm hold. The tick of time slowed to thuds, and she fell into that state of numb grace that always guarantees peace.

  Elizabeth Browne was asleep.

  ___________

  After breakfast at the Radisson, Elizabeth and Nasrin took the little Fiat through Hommevik and past the turnoff to Sessrúmnir, while Elizabeth’s phone voiced directions to the GPS coordinates. They had decided over dinner to try to talk Lars into letting them pursue the thread a little further. He knew, as well as they did, that Karl Pedersen was too sophisticated to lure a British Scotland Yard Inspector and what he thought was an FBI agent to face a pointless death in the woods.

  “I told you to be in my office this morning,” Lars said sternly. But the new lead was tempting. After some arguing with Nasrin, he let them go, with the promise that Nasrin would again dial him and keep the line open. As before, he would station several armed units nearby in case of trouble.

  Along the ride, Elizabeth could not shake the feelings from last night. She didn’t need any more episodes, not on this trip. She thought of George, marveled at the coincidence of her mentor and therapist happening to be in Norway, and tried to balance her anxiety about the possibility of future episodes with her gratitude that he was here.

  Seeing George would keep the shadows away.

  “You have arrived at your destination.”

  Elizabeth’s phone had spoken with certainty, but there was nothing around but woods on both sides of the road. The town of Hell was two miles away. Nasrin eased the Fiat onto the side of the road. She retrieved the Glock from her purse, stepped out, double-checked the safety and slid the gun into a small holster on her right side.

  Getting out of the little car felt liberating. A slight wind rustled the forest, the hood of the Fiat snicked and the fan rumbled.

  “So this is what Hell looks like,” Nasrin said. “Just as I expected, it’s boring.”