Chasing the Storm

by Martin Molsted

  “Drugs?” Dmitri whispered the word.

  Ludo sucked the ember down to the filter, then flicked the butt up the stairwell. “I’ve been on drug runs,” he said. “Meth, heroin.” He shook his head slowly. “I’m just saying, keep your eyes open and your mouth shut on this one, okay?”

  Dmitri thought that was good advice. He dumped the dough into a pan, covered it, then grabbed a mop and started on the floor. Do your duty, he told himself. The captain said it would be good money this time. So do your duty, keep watching, and don’t start poking around with questions. Still, he liked the little tickle in his gut: there was something up, he was involved in something. Maybe this would turn into a story he could tell, when he was Ludo’s age.

  “There’s another thing,” Ludo said.

  “What’s that?”

  “Yuri’s mother.”

  “She’s sick, the captain said.”

  “No she’s not.”

  “How do you know?”

  “She’s dead. Yuri told me. She died two weeks ago.”

  April 4

  An hour before dawn, after six hours of sleep, Dmitri was getting breakfast set out when he heard two shouts and boots rattling up the stairs. He left the stack of plates on the table and went to see what was happening. There was more shouting, from the bridge, and he ran across the deck and looked along the railing.

  The captain was standing at the base of the bridge, with Jonas, the mate, and Ilya. With them were three men dressed all in black. They wore black balaclavas. One of them gestured, and Dmitri’s stomach made a sudden fist when he saw the weapon in the man’s grip. It was one of those chunky little machine guns, shaped like a fat T. Two more black-clad men swung across the railing, then two more. He looked over the side. Two black rubber boats with pointed prows bobbed beside the hull, the yellow light of the ship lamps glistening on their fat gunwales. On the side of the nearest boat, in fluorescent white capital letters, he read the word POLIS. More commandos scrambled up rope ladders like gigantic spiders. I didn’t do anything, he thought. I didn’t do anything. He turned to run back across the deck, but one of the commandos was already on him, shouting at him in English: “Turn around! Hands on the railing!”

  He did as he was told. The metal railing was yellow, newly painted, but he could feel the scabs of older paint beneath. He had no breath at all, and thought he was going to throw up. He licked his lips, trying to moisten his mouth, which had suddenly gone dry. Flakes of light skipped in the black water. There was a sudden rattle, like a length of chain released across metal. Oh my God, he thought. They’ve shot the captain. Barely turning his head, he swiveled his eyes sideways and saw the captain on his knees. Ilya and Jonas lay face-down on the deck.

  There was another rattle, and Dmitri saw with relief that the commando was shooting into the air. Then his arms were yanked behind him and bound at the wrist. He was prodded down into the rec room, joined in a minute by Ilya and Jonas. They were forced onto the floor, in a row. Ilya turned his head to look at him, and Dmitri saw that his forehead was slick with blood. Ilya’s eyes, which normally harbored a little joke, looked strangely dull, as though he were trying to remember something. Dmitri looked away. His heart was bumping his head on the pine wainscoting and he inched himself backward slightly. There were more footsteps on the stairs. Looking behind him, he saw the boots stumble in and thought, they’ve got the whole crew. A figure fell beside him, knocking his head against the wall, and Dmitri turned to see Wolfie subside into a fetal position. Blood bubbled out of his nose onto the carpet. I’ll have to clean that up, Dmitri thought, ridiculously. Then he closed his eyes.

  Chapter 3

  Drammen

  April 14

  Driving back along the highway to Drammen, passing the light bulb logo on the derelict factory – once a cornerstone industry of the city – Rygg felt, more strongly than he usually did, that he was entering a world bleached to black and white after a few days of color. The sky was a bank of gray, as if the smokestacks of the few remaining factories had poured it full. It had been gray when he left and he wondered if it would ever clear again. The girders of the silos were like black macramé against the gray sky, and the vast fields of containers beyond the bridge were monochrome bricks, scribbled over with graffiti. The drivers of the passing cars seemed two-dimensional behind their tinted glass, like old silver prints. Even his hand on the wheel looked gray.

  He hadn’t slept well the night before, and now felt as though he’d been wrung out. His tongue was parched, and his eyelids scraped over grit. I’m an old gray dishcloth, he thought. They should just throw me out. And then tomorrow he’d be heading back along this same road, past the silos, listening to the newscaster prattle on.

  The traffic clotted on the bridge, then stopped. He closed his eyes and was back in the hotel lobby, and Lena was looking up from her handbag. The color of her eyes, that endless blue, like an antidote to this gray poison. He thought about the private room in the club, the bottles twinkling like a fairground attraction, the cozy pools of light through the glass, and Marin. What was it about Marin? He wasn’t handsome. If anything, he was too skinny, too short, his face battered by tobacco and vodka. But those listening eyes.

  He remembered Marin sewing himself up in his hotel bathroom, the rich drops of blood against the porcelain. He remembered Marin sitting beside the bank of flowers, asking him, in his impeccable, delicately accented English, to pull his cigarettes from his breast pocket. And he remembered the woman’s face in the Orfeoplatz, her thin lips working. The sky had been blue in Hamburg.

  He noted the fresh graffiti in the well of the apartment as soon as he stepped through the door. The local gangs – immigrant kids and neo-Nazis mostly – had recently, after a lull, started up their wars again. The newspaper said that Fjell was a safe place to live these days, but Rygg couldn’t disagree more. The week before he’d left, he’d seen a skinny, shaven-headed boy stabbed to death in the parking lot. The attackers had just laughed at the boy’s pleas. He’d chased them, too – chasing seemed to be his thing these days – but they’d run off. What would he have done if he’d caught them, anyway? One on six, and they had knives, maybe even guns.

  He took the shabby elevator to the seventh floor. His apartment door was open, and he stood in front of it, cursing, his keys dangling from a finger. They’d pried it open, with a crowbar, perhaps, splintering the wood around the triple locks. Kicking the door savagely, so that splinters sprayed, he went in. They’d taken the television, but he didn’t really have much else to take. They’d cleaned him out the last two times.

  The place stank, and he wondered if there was another plumbing problem. But walking to the bathroom, he saw that one of them had taken a shit in the middle of the table. “Jævla forpulte rasshøl!” he shouted. “Fucking assholes!”

  He’d just gotten the shit cleaned up and was scrubbing the tabletop with steel wool, when the telephone rang. It was his ex-wife, and she started in instantly. Nora, their daughter, was moving into her own place with a friend, and she needed money for the down payment. He sat on the edge of the kitchen cabinet and held the receiver and looked down at it. He tried to break in: “Karin … Karin … Karin, listen … Karin …” Finally he shouted her name. She shut up. “Karin, I just got in. I just got in the door one minute ago from Hamburg, and I have to listen to this shit. You deal with her, okay? I’ll get you the money, but you deal with her. I need to sleep.” He unplugged the phone, then turned off his cell. He opened the fridge door, releasing a sweet stench of rot, and quickly shut it again. He shook his head. That’s right, he thought. Keep it closed. Keep the rot inside. Don’t let anyone know. He opened the liquor cupboard, but they’d cleaned that out as well. Too weary to curse any more, he fetched the bottle of duty-free aquavit from his suitcase, twisted off the cap, and tipped a gurgle down his throat. He loved the way the alcohol made him feel; warm and relaxed. Happy-go-lucky.

  April 15

  When he got to his office
the next morning, one of the senior partners, a podgy old man with a nose that resembled a red potato, poked his head around the door and said, “The insurance papers for the White Angle FPSO, are they ready yet? Evagas and the yard are blaming each other for the oil leak, so make sure you get the figures right this time. We need to send the report over to the Evagas’ lawyers by Thursday.” No ‘Hi, how was your trip?’ No ‘Welcome back.’ Just straight into the bullshit again.

  “I finished that before I left,” he said.

  “Didn’t Frank tell you?”

  “Tell me what? I’ve been in Hamburg.”

  “Don’t you read your emails?”

  “Not on the plane.”

  “Oh, Lord. Okay, the Koreans got the report, sent it on to Paris, and the Evagas folk say it’s incomplete; they need something more thorough. Rigid rules, I know, but they won’t let the Hayundi yard do anything with the case before all the formalities are okayed. There’s not much I can do, sorry. Frank has the details. Talk to Frank.”

  Rygg just sat there staring at his desk. It was a foot thick in files already, and now he had to do the Evagas report over. He clicked open the computer. There were a hundred emails in his inbox, including eight in a row from Frank. The most recent was headed: ‘URGENT!!!’

  He worked methodically through the day. There was no way he could finish it by Thursday. It had taken him a week the first time through.

  After drinking five cups of coffee and gleaning not the slightest buzz, he checked the bag to make sure it was caffeinated. Late in the afternoon, he tried flirting with the new secretary, and she didn’t even seem angry, just looked at him the way you’d look at a pimply teenager. He went into the bathroom and peered at himself in the mirror, trying to see what she saw. What had happened to the trim athlete who used to get all the girls? He was big, and that helped, but his chest and stomach had started to slop forward, and his eyes were so tired. He needed to start running again. But there was no time, no time.

  The episode in Hamburg, starting with the woman’s face and ending with the club, coalesced in his mind, like a movie he’d seen a while ago. Plowing through the emails, he’d pause and close his eyes and think back. That was when he was alive. Then he’d open to the screen, the stacks of numbers, which would never end.

  He toiled through the night on the Evagas report, and finally tried to get to sleep at four in the morning, but sleep wouldn’t come. Lying there with his eyes closed, he saw the numbers scrolling like a horrible dream. They’re like a disease, he thought. Like a virus and I’m losing the fight.

  Finally, he got the insurance report finished four minutes before the deadline on Thursday, and went to tell Frank. Frank nodded without taking his eyes from the screen, and said, “The exploration application for northern Norway was due yesterday, Torgrim.”

  Going back to his desk, Rygg spent a few minutes browsing on Facebook, as some sort of reward. He found a law school acquaintance, who’d been the girlfriend of his buddy. Ingrid. He’d always sort of had the hots for her. She was divorced, living in Nordberg. He got her number from the online phonebook and called her up, right then, and they made a date for that night. Over lunch break, he bought himself a new shirt, got a haircut. And he even felt a little surge of something when she stepped out of the elevator of her building. She hadn’t let herself go like some of the others. He took her to an Italian place, Mama Rosa in Bygdøy. The restaurant was on the docks, among potted palm trees. He bought a bottle of Chateau Margaux, and made a little show of chewing it, testing its legs. In the light, across the table, he saw that her look was a clever artifice: she was thickly made up, with a stiff corona of hair that did not budge when she nodded, and scarlet, impeccable fingernails. Her smile seemed practiced in a mirror.

  She’d flunked out of law school and was now a hairdresser. She had two kids who still lived with her. Over the wine, they reminisced about college, then talked about their marriages. Hers had lasted a year longer than his. She talked about her battle with her landlord over a cupboard door, about her youngest son’s grades.

  He started telling her about the trip to Hamburg, and thought he was going to tell her about the shooting, but couldn’t. He didn’t want to sully that memory somehow, not with this plastic-haired woman. “I met a man there,” he told her, lamely. “Some Russian journalist. Interesting person.” They ate their desserts in silence.

  On the ferry back to Aker Brygge, they stood like statues, leaning on the railing, without saying a word. Rygg watched the smaller boats passing by. The seagulls screamed overhead, fighting for attention. Across the fjord a heap of white marble – the opera house – sparkled in the setting evening sun. He drove her back to her apartment, and she mentioned that her boys were with their father that weekend, but he didn’t even get out of the car. He let her peck his cheek, patted her hand, and said: “I’ll see you sometime, then.” And he drove off, disgusted with himself.

  When he got back to his place, there was a plain envelope on the floor. Why hadn’t they put it in the mailbox? He opened it. Inside were two folded pieces of paper. One was an electronic ticket: Oslo to Prague to Zagreb. The other paper bore a message in black ballpoint. He recognized the cramped, slightly accented writing. “I need your help.” That was it – a single line in the middle of the page. No name, no date. But he recognized the tingling in his palms. He turned back to the ticket. It was in his name. April 20. But that was Monday. Monday afternoon. He laughed. Zagreb was in Croatia, wasn’t it? He opened the laptop, did a Google search, and tapped through images of tidy markets and folk dancers and massive, crusty loaves of bread. He couldn’t go. No way. It was too risky; he didn’t know anything about this man. He felt dizzy. Needed to lay down. Should he …? No … he couldn’t go. He had to go to work. But he knew he’d already decided. To hell with the exploration application and the filthy Drammen skies and skinheads shitting on his table and plastic-haired Ingrid. He was going to Zagreb.

  April 5

  Dmitri was in the galley again, peeling potatoes. His wrists still bore the corrugated imprints of the thin plastic straps the commandos had used to cuff them. The crew had spent most of the morning in the rec room, watched by two of the commandos. One of them said, in English, that they were Swedish police and were searching the ship for drugs. Ludo had complained that he was thirsty and got a boot in the teeth, and after that they all lay quietly. One of the commandos came through the room, patting their pockets, removing cell phones, matches, lighters, knives. After an hour, the captain was taken away. Another hour, and one of the commandos came down the stairs and called: “Dmitri?” He turned onto his back and raised his head cautiously. The commando came over. He cut the strap off his wrists with a knife and pulled Dmitri to his feet.

  Dmitri was taken to the galley and ordered to prepare a lunch. “But not too much food,” the commando told him. “We must save the food.”

  So Dmitri was peeling potatoes. Meat was boiling on one of the gigantic gas rings. He could see the boots of the commando at the top of the metal steps. So it was drugs, he thought. Ludo was wrong – it was drugs. The police must be taking them to Sweden. What were Swedish prisons like? he wondered. Did you automatically get a sentence if you were just on board? The captain must have known – maybe the captain could convince them that he’d known nothing about the cargo.

  The commando came down the steps and looked into the galley. “Not too many potatoes,” he said. “One for each person, enough.”

  Dmitri nodded. Then he asked, “How many are you?” His voice came out as a tremulous croak.

  “Eleven.” The commando went back up to the top of the steps. Quickly, Dmitri reached up to the spice shelf where he’d left his cell phone. He half buried the phone under potato peelings, on the far side of the pot of boiling meat. Stirring the meat with his left hand, heart pounding, he tapped out a message. His hand was shaking so badly that he had to grip his forefinger between thumb and middle finger to hit the buttons accurately. It seemed to
take forever. He kept glancing up at the boots, to make sure they were in the same place. 11 Swedish police on board, he wrote. He glanced at the boots again. Then he added: Drugs? He sent the message. Then he tossed the phone out the porthole.

  Chapter 4

  Croatia

  April 21

  The plane bobbed across the Alps while the waitress rushed out sandwiches and coffee, then started floating down, over forested hills. There were just a dozen passengers, but Rygg could make out five languages among the conversations. They breasted a hill, and the city was in a basin below them, brimming with orange tiled roofs and green copper steeples. Flowerbeds made Impressionist stripes and whorls of color in the evening sun.

  Zagreb airport was tiny: a couple rooms and a single baggage carousel. The guard didn’t open Rygg’s passport, just saw that it was Norwegian and nodded him through. Rygg had already spotted Lena. She waved at him through the glass, then came running up and gave him a big hug. “Anders!” she exclaimed, too loudly. “Is that all you have? Come!” She pulled him quickly out the door and into a waiting Renault. The engine was already running. Without bothering to put on a seatbelt, she slid the car into gear and pulled out past the line of taxis. She was wearing a blue dress the color of her eyes, that blue of other skies. And though her smile and embrace had been a pretense, he could still feel her thin arms around his neck, could taste the small perfume of the hair that had drifted against his face.

  “We are very happy you can come. You had a good flight?” she asked.

  “It was fine,” he said.

  “And it was no problem with your work?”

  “I told them it was an emergency.”

  “Good. They will not ask questions?”