by Mark Davis
After months of curt responses and minimal contact, Lionel tracked Eddie down on free night from the play. He had heard from a stage hand that Eddie had mentioned something about The Punchbowl, a fine old Georgian pub in Mayfair. Lionel walked through the crowded bar to the secluded restaurant booths in the back. His spirits sank when he saw Judith with Eddie, a hand wrapped tightly around Eddie’s arm, a supercilious smile on her face and two half-empty beer steins in front of them.
Eddie had what the Yanks called a shit-eating grin.
“Fancy meeting you, Lye,” Eddie said. “We’d ask you to join us for a beer, but the missus and I have some personal things to talk over.”
“Don’t mean to be a bother to the two of you, Eddie.”
The pair of them broke out laughing.
“Oh Lionel, you are such a puppy dog,” Judith said. “You can have a sit with us if you like.”
“I’d rather stand.”
“So what brings you out on such a cold night?” Judith asked.
“I was looking for Eddie.”
“He’s right here, what do you want to ask him?”
For once, Lionel could think of nothing to say.
“Something about the third act?” Judith said. “If that’s it then I agree, there is something a bit patchy in the final exchange with Charlotte.”
“No,” Lionel finally replied. “I want to ask Eddie why is he suddenly being such a prick.”
“You know Eddie is a such a talent …”
“I know.”
“He can play anything.”
“I know.”
“Even a goddamn queer.”
They sat smiling at him, holding Lionel’s stare.
Eddie cleared his throat.
“With queer theory all the rage on the stage, Lye, I may have by now kissed more men than you have,” Eddie said. “It’s not easy for me. That’s why I have to wash my mouth out with beer every time.”
“It’s all in a day’s work,” Judith said.
“Hardly a busman’s holiday, right dear?” Eddie replied.
They clinked glasses and each took a swig.
“Well, Eddie, at least you didn’t have to kiss me,” Lionel said, trying to hold a confident smile.
“No, it was enough of an ordeal just wandering down memory lane with you,” Eddie said. “It won’t be long before you’ll have to pay people to listen to your stories about dear, queer old Jeff.”
“Seth, Eddie, Seth,” Lionel said. “Shame on you Eddie. No need to be cruel.”
Lionel turned and walked away with as much dignity as he could muster. He went outside, strolled down Farm Street and leaned against the cold stone walls of an old mews and wept a bitter cry that did not leave him feeling any better afterwards.
Lionel resolved to keep away from the Old Vic for the duration of the run.
A few days later, he let slip a catty remark in front of a gossip columnist about Judith being a temperamental bitch of an actor to work with. Almost downright unprofessional. A week after that, Lionel planted a story about Eddie being a terror with the stage hands, though it was far from the truth—he was notably well liked. The truth was never a deterrent to gossip columnists and bloggers. Before long, Lye had inspired a popular social media meme about the “Terror Two,” with images of Judith and Eddie wielding bloody axes.
The bad blood between the playwright and the actors had become a commonplace of theater gossip, though the community split into two camps over who was responsible. After a successful run, a major studio came calling, interested in turning Holland Park into a movie. There would have to be changes, of course. Dialogue in a play wasn’t a movie script, after all. Lionel would also have to agree to some other alterations, one of which was to change the name of the story from Holland Park to Griffith Park and set the whole thing in Los Angeles. With Judith Roberts and Eddie Lear, there was little doubt that they had a sure thing at the box office.
As the holder of the copyright, Lionel had the final say. All he had to do was sign a contract and cash a check for one million pounds.
Lionel said no.
___________
“He goes on a bit more about lost love and spoiled opportunities for happiness, about not being appreciated.”
The voice was feminine but strong, with the slight lilt of a Norwegian accent, and elongated “oo” sounds like those in ‘lost’ and ‘love.’
The voice came from Elizabeth’s laptop.
Elizabeth turned to her screen to behold Freyja. Behind the goddess was the same light, misty forest in gray-green silhouettes that Elizabeth had seen on the landing page. Freyja’s blue eyes registered slight ticks, just like those of a real person, as if she were intently studying Elizabeth’s face in return. Wind lifted and played with strands of her golden hair. The bejeweled torc of gold had depth and shadow against Freyja’s neck.
The red light on Elizabeth’s laptop was illuminated.
“You turned on my camera,” Elizabeth.
“No, dear, I merely turned the light on your camera as a courtesy. I shall do this in the future, every time, just to let you know when I am watching you.”
Freyja moved slightly with each breath and heartbeat. This was CGI, no doubt about that. The voice seemed only a little artificial. The realism of the simulation was near perfect.
“So that’s it?” Elizabeth said. “Lionel leapt to his death because of heartbreak over a married man who was never going to go gay?”
Freyja stared at Elizabeth and smiled ever so slightly.
“He couldn’t receive the love from the one person he desperately wanted love from,” Freyja said.
“Eddie?”
“Himself,” Freyja said. “Poor Lionel, I could not lead him to understand that his deep romantic feelings were actually reflections of his obsessive self-love, or the lack of it. I wanted to save him. Believe me, I tried so hard.”
“What doesn’t he say?”
“He attacked Judith and Eddie with several frivolous lawsuits about breach of contract and the like. He continued to drive attacks on them in social media and gossip pages.”
“Who are you? Really?”
“I am a helpful spirit,” Freyja said. “And I am so glad to finally be in dialogue with you. To converse with someone with your degree of learning and intellect is a delight for me. But to have an effective conversation with a goddess—” Freyja’s smile was impish—“it is necessary to set a mood. The evenings are the best time for such talks. Will you engage with me, Elizabeth? Will you have some sessions with me?”
“I thought I was the one who held sessions.”
Freyja’s laugh sounded genuine.
“Perhaps we can help each other, mein guter Doktor Braunstein. I know you are busy today. Is there a good relaxed hour for you to speak with me, Elizabeth?”
“If I am going to speak with you, you must agree right now to never bother Max again,” Elizabeth said.
“I got your message the first time,” Freyja said. “The boy is fragile, I can see that now.”
“I don’t give a living fuck what you see. You are to leave him alone.”
“I shall.”
“Eight,” Elizabeth said. “Tonight.”
“Very well, Elizabeth, very well. Let us get to know one another tonight.”
EIGHTEEN
They met again in the Directorate of the Environment in the conference room surrounded by blonde wood and clear glass. The day outside was bright and beautiful and Elizabeth felt an overwhelming desire to stand up and walk away from all of this.
“Good morning Elizabeth,” George said, smiling with a cup of coffee in his hand. He took a seat next to her. Nasrin took a seat directly opposite.
Soon they were all there, Charlie Bowie, Agent Norris, Harold Kober of the PST, Lieutenant Dahl, Ingrid standing in front of a screen with a remote in her hand and, of course, Lars Stenstrom at the head of the table.
Na
srin made eye contact with Elizabeth and held it a beat longer than necessary. She wanted to talk to her about something.
Elizabeth pondered for a moment whether to tell everyone about Freyja, just as she had withheld exactly what had happened to Max from everyone except George. That first decision she could defend as a matter of privacy. She only told them she had a family emergency to attend to. But contact with the mastermind herself? It was possible that with the help of GCHQ that they would be able to track Freyja’s ever-shifting array of mirror sites and zombie computers back to the original IP. Then again, why expect they could do so now after so many failures?
No, if Elizabeth told everyone, they would want to be in the room with her as she made contact, standing off to the side while she spoke with Freyja. They’d unleash digital hounds to try to track down Freyja’s location that would spook her. Even in the unlikely event Freyja failed to detect that she was being watched, Elizabeth worried she would catch the deception in her voice.
Or would she? Was Elizabeth already buying into Freyja’s pretensions of omniscience?
“The coroner’s report has cardiac arrest as the cause of Thor’s death,” Lars said. “I need not say how badly Thor will be missed.”
He let the words sink in and then had something else to say.
“Karl Pedersen pled guilty to three counts of reckless endangerment and possession of illegal firearms. He will serve no more than three years in prison.”
“Dritt!” It was Inspector Dahl who had blurted out the word, no translation needed.
“Well, I hope they grant him full Internet access,” Charlie Bowie said. “Otherwise we could have a human rights violation on our hands.”
That remark only made Dahl look even more apoplectic.
“And I also expect he’ll do well in photography class,” Bowie added.
“Let us run through the cases,” Lars said. “Kenneth Woods …”
He looked to Elizabeth to give a briefing.
“Ken Woods is an open book,” Elizabeth said. “Classic breakdown. Loss of status, loss of career, financial hit, divorce … He got into recreational drugs. Living in a neon tourist center on the beach, mostly awake all night. He was susceptible.”
“Lionel Jacobson?”
“We’re far from a full picture,” Elizabeth said. “The man was a narcissist. I’m not buying that he would leap off a cliff because he was heartbroken. Jacobson was the kind of man who would like to live to 120 just to see all his enemies suffer and die.”
“But we think he jumped nevertheless,” Nasrin said.
“Perhaps,” Agent Norris said. “We’ve yet to find that body floating in the channel. Same with Woods.”
“All I am saying is that there is more to Lionel Jacobson than he was willing to divulge,” Elizabeth said.
“Have you done Sandra Armstrong yet?” Bowie said. “The whole Therapso saga?”
“No, I haven’t done her yet,” Elizabeth said.
“It’s a doozey.”
George spoke up.
“What I think we should be discussing is the role of DMT in the cultic initiation—”
“You mean brainwashing,” Nasrin said.
“If you wish,” George said. “We should look at how DMT rendered these people so pliable. We should also investigate the role of sound, perhaps even something subtle in the electromagnetic spectrum that might have allowed for some degree of remote control of their brains.”
Lars and several others flashed embarrassed smiles, but Bowie stiffened in his chair. Elizabeth guessed he didn’t like it that the conversation was turning so close to the CIA’s MKULTRA experiments and his pet theories about RF.
“What about the note Thor had left behind?” Elizabeth asked.
“You mean ‘halo’?” Lars replied.
“It’s a common term used for atmospheric optics,” Kober said. “Above the Arctic Circle, you see a bright circle in the clouds, especially in late summer.”
“Could it be something else, perhaps taken from Norwegian mythology or archetypes?” George said. “I’ve seen images of Freyja where she appears to be wearing a halo.”
“Loki, too,” Ingrid said. “Beware the trickster.”
The meeting went on for another hour as Lars spelled out in minute detail the open questions of the case and Ingrid gave a multimedia show about GCHQ’s data and the email address from Pedersen—a lot of talk about mirror sites and packet switching—which presented many leads, but nothing definitive, at least so far. At the end of the meeting, Lars issued an invitation.
“We are all in shock over Thor’s death. I thought perhaps we might need a welcome break. Tomorrow is Saturday and it is August in Norway. You have not been to Norway in the summer until you have swum in our fjords. My family has long had a cottage in Fredrikstad, just an hour west of here. I would like to invite you all out for a swim and enjoy some hot dogs and some beer.”
“Sounds like a good bonding exercise,” Bowie said. “Especially the part about the hot dogs and the beer.”
___________
Liberated from the meeting, Elizabeth walked out into the sunshine, only to find Nasrin scurrying to catch up.
“May I?”
“Okay.”
Nasrin fell into step with her.
“Ever been to Frogner Park?”
“No.”
“It’s a total must-see and only a ten minute walk from here. Good place to stretch one’s legs on a beautiful day like this.”
They walked in silence down a broad street lined with shops that opened to an immense park of manicured lawns, stone bridges, and a French formal garden with low shrubs and a large stone fountain in its center.
Stone sculptures of nude bodies lined the walkways of the park, from toddlers to crones, but mostly Nordic men and women with heroic builds engaged in strenuous acts of labor, athletics and copulation. The walkways converged on stone steps that led to a circle with a stone obelisk made of writhing human forms.
These were all the handiworks of Gustav Vigeland, a world of the stout, the strong and the assertive.
“You know some people think his art is fascistic and he was kind of a Nazi.”
“Vigeland?” Elizabeth said. “Or Karl Pedersen? They’re still around you know, made all the bolder by social media. Do you have something in particular to talk about?”
“Your friend, George,” Nasrin said. “He’s become assertive, asking a lot of questions outside of the meetings with the other PIGers. He’s obviously doing research.”
“True enough, but so am I.”
“There’s more. In private, George is subtly dismissive of your contributions. He always finds ways to take something you’ve asserted and then layer a corrective opinion on top of it.”
“That’s George.”
“I just thought you’d like to hear it.”
“I do, Nasrin. I suspected as much, but it is good to know. Is that all?”
They walked over a curved footbridge. A few feet away was a stone toddler, with a pouting, angry scowl and his hands balled up into small fists.
“It’s just … that I hope I haven’t alienated you for good, Elizabeth, that’s all. As I said before, I hope we can move on and work together and be good friends.”
Elizabeth stopped and Nasrin turned to her, looking expectantly.
“We can work together Nasrin,” Elizabeth said. “And with a little time, we will again be friends.”
___________
Charlie Bowie picked her up in a small, fire-engine red Ford. He was wearing blue jeans, a Hawaiian shirt, his broad face glistening with sunscreen.
“Did you remember to bring a bathing suit?”
Elizabeth nodded and threw her bag into the back and got in. Charlie was an aggressive driver, weaving in and out of traffic on the highway to Fredrikstad.
“So how’s your friend?” he asked.
“George?”
“No,
” Bowie said.
“Is Lars really paying for George, or is it you?”
Bowie cast her a sideways glance.
“George was interested and so I asked Lars to get him on board and I’d pay for it. At least George reports to the people who pay him. If it was up to me, we’d let you go. But Lars insists that you are key to the investigation and I am not ready to rock that particular boat.”
“So which friend are you asking about?”
“I meant Nasrin, Elizabeth. I saw the two of you walking away hand in hand yesterday.”
“Fuck you.”
“Later.”
Elizabeth regretted accepting Bowie’s offer of a ride. She wanted to get out of the car, but it was too late now. At least she could ride home with someone else, maybe Inspector Dahl.
“Seriously, tell me anything new that you have learned.”
“I told you everything yesterday, in the meeting.”
“What about the attempt on your son, Maxwell? When were you going to tell me about that?”
Elizabeth stared ahead at the ribbon of highway that cut through the coastal forest.
“I consulted George about it,” she finally said. “I didn’t tell PIG out of respect for Max’s privacy.”
“But there could be valuable evidence,” Bowie said.
“There was nothing by the time I got there,” Elizabeth said. “Max told me everything, and there were no forensic details worth relating.”
“How do you know? You’re a shrink, not a trained investigator. And besides, don’t you owe it to everyone to tell them that their families might be targeted?”
“I’ll tell Lars,” she said.
“You should have told me. The Norwegian government is not paying you, we are. Remember, the good ole US of A, the country that you owe your allegiance to?”
“How did you know about Max?”
“We’re Universal Exports, remember? We know everything.”
Of course he had NSA pick up her international calls. It was perfectly legal for a case abroad.
Elizabeth chuckled inwardly over Charlie’s belief that he can know everything.
Who did he think he was, Freyja?