Seven Shoes

by Mark Davis

  “The birds behind these walls are not about to fly,” Lars said.

  Lars drove slowly after passing through the tall concrete walls of Halden Prison down a ribbon of road that rolled through thin, well-trimmed forest. A walkway bisected the forest, with park benches set at even distances along the way.

  Lars pumped the brake of his police Volvo to make way for a prisoner jogging across the road.

  “Bloody ridiculous,” Nasrin said from the backseat. “A perp’s paradise.”

  “With your talent for alliteration, Nasrin, you should find your calling as a headline writer for one of your country’s more lurid tabloids,” he said.

  The prison rolled into view, a sprawling two-story structure, modernist and concrete. There were no bars on any of the prison’s panoramic windows.

  They were going to see Karl Pedersen.

  As part of his deal, Karl had suffered no trial. He and his attorneys had agreed to a guilty plea with prosecutors in a matter of days, mostly gun and drug charges, in exchange for a short sentence he could begin serving immediately. The prosecutors were grateful. Lacking RICO statutes, they had precious little on Pedersen that would stick in court. The deal still had to be ratified by an appellate judge, who would not approve it unless Lars reported to him that Karl Pedersen had fully cooperated on the Preikestolen matter.

  Lars parked and led Elizabeth and Nasrin straight to security, where a guard took their cellphones. Each of them had to undergo a pat down from a blonde female guard who could have moonlighted as one of Wagner’s Valkyries. They had no guns to check. Lars generally did not carry a gun and he had asked Elizabeth to tell Nasrin not to bring her illicit weapon. Elizabeth found it interesting that he did not want to make the request to Nasrin directly, whether for deniability or because he did not like negotiating with Nasrin, she wasn’t sure.

  The Valkyrie led them through an outdoor basketball court surrounded by whitewashed walls. The walls were illustrated with enormous, modernist murals depicting men in striped prison uniforms trying to dribble and shoot while attached to balls-and-chains.

  “I read that these are gifts from some of the most famous street artists in Norway,” Lars said.

  “Do they bring in world-renowned chefs as well?” Nasrin asked.

  The guard unlocked a metal door and led them to a room with walls painted in soothing colors of forest-green and tans with framed watercolors depicting forests and fjords. Amid the mid-century modern furniture done in primary colors, Karl Pedersen sat waiting for them in a rented tuxedo with a blue shirt with ruffles. His black hair was slicked back, making him look like a movie vampire.

  “Elisabetta, mia cara, it is so good to see you again,” Karl said.

  “How has your stay been?” Lars asked. They had come to know each other through the interrogation and prosecution.

  “The food is borderline,” Karl said, giving Lars a sidewise look. “I am enjoying my daily runs and the weight room. The art class is very relaxing, although frankly, I am coming to terms with the fact that I am not particularly talented. And then there are the outside excursions. We had the first of our weekly summer swims in Oslo just yesterday. We’re told we will be doing some spectacular nature hikes in some of the nearby fjords.”

  “Why the tux?” Nasrin asked.

  “I am about to get married,” Karl said. “To Margita, one of our top girls.”

  “Your regular squeeze?” Nasrin asked.

  Karl shook his head.

  “She was Sven’s old lady, so I had to order them to split up.”

  “Why get married now?” Elizabeth asked.

  Pedersen seemed astonished by such an obviously stupid question.

  “I have to have someone to enjoy in the conjugal rooms, don’t I?” he said. “You’re more than welcome to attend our ceremony. It’s in a half-hour.”

  “No thanks,” Nasrin said. “I prefer to throw up in private.”

  Karl gave her a cat-with-a-canary smile, then turned serious.

  “I’ll say this for you, Nasrin, you keep your word,” he said. “Not many snuts do. That goes a long way in my book.”

  “The deal works only if you are forthcoming about everything to do with the site, everything Walleen knew or did,” Lars said. “Remember, you’re in prison on a conditional sentence. We can extend your stay by years with a single email.”

  “Tell me, Inspector, do they let you carry a flashlight on your belt, or would that be too militaristic?”

  “I carry a weapon when I need to,” he said. “You should also know that the Norwegian prison system includes places less nice and closer to the Arctic Circle.”

  Karl Pedersen hunched in his seat and gave Lars a sullen look. In the hotel room, when he believed his life would soon be over, Karl had been expansive. Now, living in comfortable confinement, he appeared smaller, like a trapped animal ready to either roll on its back and present its stomach or burst into attack.

  Elizabeth looked down at Karl’s strong, fidgety hands and felt a momentary return of fear. She could feel the pressure of the bore of his pistol at her temple. Elizabeth had felt the onset of an attack last night and had taken a half a mil of benzodiazepine. She had taken another one this morning. It was clearly working, the feelings lurking at the edges of her mind, but not close to take hold of her.

  “Let’s get back on point,” Nasrin said. “We agreed that we have a common enemy …”

  “Right,” Karl said, eyes locked on Lars.

  “And we can help each other take down the person who got your people killed by the Russians and facilitated the suicides of seven British and American citizens.”

  “Right,” Karl said, turning his gaze on Nasrin.

  “So do you have anything?” she asked.

  Karl stood up and looked down, a reflex from years of stamping out cigarettes and grinding them with his feet. But there were no cigarettes allowed here. He motioned for them to follow him down a hallway, lined with more paintings. The Valkyrie followed.

  “So why is my donna Elizabetta with us today?” Karl asked Nasrin, nodding in the direction of Elizabeth as if she were an inanimate object.

  “She is here to evaluate you,” Lars answered instead. “To tell us if she thinks you’re telling the truth.”

  “When have I not told you the truth?” he asked.

  Karl came to an open door that led to a Spartan room with blond walls, a nightstand with a small lamp next to a single bed, a bureau and a small, flat-screen TV on the wall.

  “Catch any good soccer games here?” Nasrin asked.

  “Movies, mostly,” Karl said, rummaging around his desk to find a pen and a pad of paper. “I watch the games in the main hall with the other prisoners, livelier that way.”

  He picked up a slender pad full of notes.

  “What is this?” Lars asked.

  “It is my recollection of everything Walleen told me. Phrases, technical terms, words, all about this weird client.”

  “Walleen told us that he had told us everything,” Nasrin said.

  “He gave you enough to get you off his back.”

  “So who was the client?” Lars asked.

  “The one behind Freyja,” Karl said.

  “I know that, but who?”

  “Walleen never said.”

  “A man or woman?” Elizabeth asked. “Young or old? American or European?”

  “Never said,” Karl replied. “But he told me that this was the gateway.”

  sromonov@goaskalice.tor

  “That’s it?” Lars could sound intimidating when he wanted to. “I am putting you up in this studio for this?”

  “The password is ‘snowdenru83,’” Karl said.

  “Get ready to move,” Lars said. “Where we’re sending you, the only conjugal visits you’ll get will be with a polar bear.”

  Karl was nonplussed. He checked himself in the mirror and straightened out the lapel of his tuxedo.

&
nbsp; “This will lead you to Freyja,” he said. “You will be talking with her in a matter of days. And I will be enjoying Margita for the next few years. Of this I am certain.”

  The Valkyrie appeared at the door of Karl’s room and led them all out into the hall. She punched a code and two large metal doors opened, slow and silent.

  In the large social room beyond was a small, cheerless wedding party of surviving Hommelvik Hammers, looking uncomfortable in suits. In the center of the cluster of sullen men, Sven looked every bit as dour as the disapproving Lutheran pastor who stood next to him. Standing before them all was Margita in a white dress.

  Elizabeth recognized her as one of the wives she and Nasrin had seen in the middle of the crowd in the Fólkvangr social club. Margita was an attractive woman, tall, statuesque, with a pinched nose. She stood in the middle of the room clutching a bouquet of white tulips in plastic wrapping with the price tag still stuck on it.

  Margita smiled grimly at her new husband, ready to do her duty.

  ___________

  Lars’ phone trilled. He voice-activated the pick-up because, as an officer of the law, it would not only be illegal for him to hold a cellphone in one hand as he drove. In Norway, it would be a scandal.

  It was Harold Kober, federal police force.

  “Lars … where are you? I have some news to tell you.”

  “I am driving. You are on speaker with Nasrin Jones and Elizabeth Browne.”

  “It is bad news. You might want to pull over to receive it.”

  “I am fine.”

  “You truly might—”

  “Just tell me.”

  “Thor is dead.”

  “What?”

  Lars momentarily lost control of the Volvo, and steered into the center lane.

  “What?” he said, slowing down. “How?”

  ___________

  They left in a federal police plane, a Fokker turbo prop that jerked and bounced on bruised cloud tops over the North Sea. After decades of travel, Elizabeth still had not reconciled herself to severe turbulence. So she sat upright in her seat, eyes closed, concentrating on her calming breathing technique. Nasrin sat across from her, studying Elizabeth’s pretty face, reading her discomfort and deriving amusement from it. Agent Norris and Chuck Bowie had stretched out in the back to sleep. Lars looked out the window for the entire flight, lost in thought for the two hours it took to get to Tromso.

  The temperature fell a good thirty degrees when the flight attendant unsealed the door. Wind whipped across the tarmac as they descended the metal jetway down to the pavement and their police-escort Volvos. Dark, roiling clouds confirmed the wisdom of their packing umbrellas and rain coats. Mountains ringed the small cityscape, some rounded, some sharp and riven with ice.

  “Welcome to Tromso, Paris of the North,” Lars said glumly. “First time above the Arctic Circle, Elizabeth?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “We are going directly to the site.”

  Elizabeth started to ask if Thor’s body would still be there. Surely not, she hoped. It was one thing to see a stranger’s body in a morgue, quite something else to see someone you had just been working with, someone you liked.

  Elizabeth said nothing.

  They wended around the city and through a suburb of tidy wooden houses painted in vibrant reds, greens and yellows. They passed by a university of low brick with a broad, green campus, rode up a hill and parked in a gravel lot. A sign read:

  Arktisk alpin Botanisk hage

  “Artistic, alpine …?” Elizabeth asked.

  “Arctic, alpine botanical garden,” Lars replied.

  A police van was parked near the entrance. A young man and woman sat in the sunlight on fold out chairs, smoking and drinking coffee. They did not wear the clean suits of the forensic team at Walleen’s murder. At the sight of Lars and his uniform, they put down their cups, crushed out their cigarettes and stood at attention in their jeans and woolen shirts.

  Lars conversed awhile with them. One of the technicians, a young woman with sallow hair, made a right-this-way gesture. Her name was Marte and she was from the National Criminal Investigative Service.

  All around them was grassland and stone, with small ponds and gravel walkways.

  Before them was a small ridge covered in boulders, some sharp and some rounded. Some were ochre, others dark red or the color of sand. Running up the middle of the ridge was short staircase of flat stones of the same variegated colors.

  Marte led them up the stone steps. They all stopped for a moment at a rise. Dark clouds scudded fast toward the mountains, opening a patch of pale blue sky. Even in summer, the Arctic sunlight was as thin as weak tea. Elizabeth surveyed the low profile of the city, the mountains and fjordlands beyond.

  It suddenly seemed wrong to be taking in the view. The others had the same thought, turning as a group and following the steps down a ridge. In the grassland below were flowers—violet, pink and orange—in thick tufts.

  “I read the Gulf Stream keeps this place warmer than you’d expect,” Agent Norris said. He smiled and pointed out Rhododendrons and Aster. “Well, will you look at those.”

  “Let’s keep going,” Lars said.

  “Reminds me of my flowerbed back in Annenberg,” Norris said.

  “It is just up this way,” Marte said.

  Elizabeth wondered what the technician meant by “it” and shuddered.

  Up ahead was another ridge of boulders, with a similar set of flat stone steps leading up to the crest. A short line of yellow police tape had been wrapped around two poles at the entrance. The technician ripped it away.

  They climbed to the top. They were all a little out of breath.

  “He was in this place,” the young woman said.

  There was nothing to see. Elizabeth tried to imagine she could make out an imprint of Thor’s body in the gravel, but there was no pattern that she could make out in the pebbles.

  “He was found face down,” the technician said.

  “Lividity?” Nasrin asked.

  “Around his chest,” the technician said. “The EMTs had turned him over to find his shirt was already half off. Bruising about the ribs and nipples from blood pooling. My guess is that he had been deceased for several hours.”

  “Ligature?” Agent Norris asked.

  “No marks,” Marte said. “No wounds of any kind.”

  “What’s your prelim?” Nasrin asked.

  “Classic myocardial infarction,” Marte said. “Hands were frozen, like claws. He had been in obvious agony. Buttons along the middle of his shirt had been torn off as if he were trying to get to his chest.”

  Elizabeth shuddered.

  “Time of day?”

  “Mid-afternoon, there were many people who saw him running along the back street by the university,” Marte said. “He passed behind the garden’s ticket office and made his way over there …” she pointed to a muddy trail in a patch of grass between boulders.

  “Running?” Lars asked. “Up that steep slope? For what?”

  “It was some University of Tromso students who had seen him,” Marte said. “There were astonished to see such a … excuse me, fat man … running so hard. One of the students caught a picture of him on a smartphone.”

  Marte pulled her phone and produced a slighted blurred image of Thor taken at a cocked angle. Sweat pasted a mat of blonde hair onto Thor’s forehead. His shirt was untucked, wings flying as he ran. The silver clam of a laptop was tucked between an armpit and the grip of his left hand.

  “Any idea of what he was trying to catch?” Agent Norris asked.

  “More likely, he was running away from something,” Nasrin said.

  “There is one more unusual thing,” Marte said. “The laptop was not here when the medical technicians arrived.”

  “So a bystander stole it,” Agent Norris said. “Perhaps another visitor to the garden?”

  “No,” Marte said
. “This is Tromso. You could leave a laptop laying on a park bench in the middle of town and the only thing that would happen is that someone would take it to the police station.”

  ___________

  Three soft raps on the door.

  The bedside clock showed 12:30 am.

  Elizabeth resented being awakened. She wasn’t about to have a Sapphic dalliance or a sister-to-sister talk with Detective Inspector Jones. The almost endless days played with her sleep cycle, throwing her off, with fits of drowsiness in mid-afternoon. There was no escaping the near-constant days in Norway in late July. No matter how tightly one drew the curtains, random photons still managed to leak through, declaring that the middle of the night was day. And there would not be much sleep. They were to be in the lobby at 4:45 a.m. for the return to Oslo.

  Then Elizabeth remembered Pedersen and how close she came to being raped and murdered in an Oslo hotel room. He couldn’t be here, could he? No, he was in prison. Surely there was no danger. Not like that.

  Elizabeth looked through the peephole. Lars stood in the hallway wearing a T-shirt and blue jeans. He was motionless, a rind of stubble across his jaw. Elizabeth undid the chain and opened the door.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Forgive me,” Lars said. “But I think this is something that you will want to see. May I come into your room?”

  “Give me a minute.”

  Elizabeth slipped into her running shorts and T-shirt and let him in.

  “Let me show you,” Lars said. He crossed the room and pulled back the curtains that Elizabeth had kept tight to block the midnight sun of Tromso in late July.

  Night had finally arrived. The city was dark, no one bothering to turn on lights for an evening that would only last for about one hour.

  “Okay,” Elizabeth said. “What am I looking for?”

  “Come here,” Lars said, leaning onto the large windowpane. “Look.”

  In the dark sky Elizabeth saw a moving labyrinth, translucent, electric green drapes that crackled and shifted, snaked and danced. The shapes shimmered at the edges, swirled like fast moving clouds in the center. For all their color and beauty, the most spectacular thing about the Northern Lights was their obvious depth, tracing the immensity of space and exposing the smallness of man.