by Anne Holt
“And the last one?” he asked almost inaudibly.
Johanne held her glasses up to the lamp and closed one eye. She squinted into the light through both lenses, several times. Then she slowly put the glasses back on. Shrugged her shoulders.
“You know what, I think I might actually try to get some sleep. It’s been—”
“Johanne,” Adam stopped her, then drank the rest of his coffee in one go.
The mug thumped down on the table.
A harsh light appeared on the ceiling. The beam wandered slowly from the kitchen to just above the door out to the south-facing balcony. The throb of an engine made the windowpanes vibrate.
“Garbagemen,” Adam said quickly. “So?”
If he hadn’t been so tired, he might have noticed that Johanne was holding her breath. If he had looked at her instead of going over to the window to check who was letting their engine idle in a residential area in the middle of the night, he might have noticed that her mouth was half open and her lips were pale. He would have seen that she was sitting tensely, with her eyes on the front door, then the children’s room.
But Adam was at the window, with his back to Johanne.
“Teenagers partying,” he said, peeved. “It’s only February. They don’t have their exams until May. They start earlier and earlier.”
He hesitated for a moment before going back to sit on the sofa opposite Johanne.
“The last one,” he insisted. “What happened in the last case?”
“He didn’t succeed. Warren included the example because—”
“Who did he try to murder, Johanne?”
She reached out for both cups and got up. He caught her as she passed.
“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “He didn’t succeed.”
The movement with which she broke free was unnecessarily harsh.
“Johanne,” he said, without following her. He heard the cups being put in the dishwasher. “You’re just being difficult now.”
“I’m sure.”
“Who did he try to kill?” Adam repeated.
He was surprised to hear the noise of the dishwasher. He pulled up his sleeve and looked at his watch. It was nearly half past one. Johanne was rummaging around in the drawers and cabinets.
“What are you doing?” he muttered as he went into the kitchen.
“Cleaning,” she replied tersely.
“Well,” he said and pointed at the clock, “I see that you’re getting used to living in a semidetached house.”
The cutlery drawer fell to the floor with a crash. Johanne bent down on her knees and tried to gather up the knives and forks, spoons and other gadgets.
“It was a family man,” she sobbed, “who was being investigated for insurance fraud in connection with a house fire. He . . . he set fire to the policeman’s home. The investigator’s home. While the whole family was sleeping.”
“Come here.”
He held her by the arms, firm and friendly, pulled her up. She resisted.
“No one is going to set this house on fire,” Adam said. “No one is ever going to set our house on fire.”
Twelve
For hundreds of years, people had walked the narrow streets between the low, crooked houses that clung together. Steps wound up narrow passages. Feet had trodden on the stone steps, in the same place, year after year, leaving behind a smoothly polished path that she crouched down to touch several times. The shiny hollows were cold against her fingers. She put her fingers in her mouth and felt the sting of salt on the tip of her tongue.
She leaned over the wall to the south. A grayish blue mist fused sea and sky. There was no horizon out there, no perspective, only an endlessness that made her dizzy. There was no wind, not even up here on the hilltop. A dank humidity swathed the medieval town of Eze. She was alone.
In summer this place must be unbearable. Even with shuttered windows and unwelcoming shop doors, closed for the winter, the signs of the summer season were obvious. Souvenir shops stood wall to wall, and on the few small squares that opened out in the heart of the town, she saw the scars from scraping chairs and countless cigarettes that had been stubbed out on the cobbles. As she walked by herself along the wall facing the sea, she imagined the sound of the summer hordes—chirruping Japanese and loud, red-cheeked Germans.
She was a veritable wanderer now. She had gradually discovered the old paths and found ways to avoid the main roads that were dangerous, with no sidewalks and a steady flow of roaring traffic.
Her new duffel coat was warm without being completely windproof. She had bought it in Nice along with three pairs of pants, four sweaters, a handful of skirts, and a suit that she wasn’t really sure she would dare to wear. When she came to France, just before Christmas, she only had two pairs of shoes with her. They were now in the trash can down on the street. Yesterday evening she had resolutely put them in a plastic bag and dropped them into the container, even though one pair was barely six months old. They were brown and solid. Sensible shoes, best suited for a middle-aged housewife.
The duffel coat was beige, and her Camper shoes were comfortable to walk in. The lady in the shop hadn’t so much as raised an eyebrow when she asked to try them on. A young boy sat beside her on one of the bright yellow ottomans and tried on the same shoes. When he caught her eye, he gave a friendly smile. Nodded in appreciation. She bought two pairs. They were very comfortable.
She walked.
Walking made it easier to think. It was during her long, slow walks along the sea, in the mountains and across the steep hillsides between Nice and Cap d’Ail, that she felt most acutely that her life had been injected with new vigor. Sometimes, often when she came home at night, she felt a tiredness in her muscles that was a wonderful reminder of her strength. She would take off her clothes and wander naked around the house, her reflection in the windows confirming the changes she was going through. She drank wine, but never too much. She enjoyed food, whether she made it herself or went to a restaurant where she was recognized, always recognized now, by polite waiters who pulled out her chair and remembered that she liked to have a glass of champagne before her meal.
Over the past few days, she had been filled with a sense of gratitude.
She had driven directly from Copenhagen, where she had left her car in an anonymous parking lot before taking the ferry to Oslo and back. Ferry passenger lists between Denmark and Norway were a joke. She traveled as Eva Hansen and stayed in her cabin. Both ways. Then after one night in a hotel, she managed to sit behind the wheel for thirty-five hours without ever really getting tired. She did feel a stiffness in her muscles and joints whenever she took a short break, small detours from the main road to fill the tank or to eat in a roadside café in a German village or along the Rhône. But she never felt the need for sleep.
She delivered the car back to the Moroccan waiter at the Café de la Paix. He was well rewarded for the hassle of renting the car in his name. He might not have entirely believed her explanation that she really needed a car but because she had a bad cold she wanted to avoid an unnecessary trip into Nice. But as he was going back to Morocco and a newly opened restaurant owned by his father, he accepted the money with a smile and no questions.
Then she walked home. As soon as her head hit the pillow, she fell into a dreamless slumber that lasted for eleven hours.
She had derived no pleasure from all those years of meticulous planning, gathering detailed information and doing painstaking research, other than that it was her work. It was necessary if she was to do the job she was paid for. She was good and had never been found out. No one could say that she made mistakes, was sloppy, or took shortcuts whenever she could.
Despite everything, she was grateful for those lifeless years.
They had given her knowledge and insight.
Even though the filing cabinet was in Norway, she could remember enough. The huge metal cabinet contained information about the people she had studied. Known and unknown. Famous people and celeb
rities, alongside the postman from Otta who always filled her mailbox with junk mail, despite the clear notice that it was not welcome. She registered people’s weaknesses and routines, observed their desires and needs, stowed their love lives, secrets, and movements in files, and stored it all in a huge gray metal cabinet.
She wasn’t sloppy. The secret of her trade was knowledge. Her memory never failed her.
All those living-dead years were not wasted. She was grateful for them now. She could assemble an AG-3 gun blindfolded and hotwire a car in thirty seconds. It would take her less than a week to get hold of a fake passport, and she had an overview of the Scandinavian heroin market that the police would envy. She knew people that no one else wanted to know; she knew them well—but none of them knew her.
It had gotten colder. An insidious wind blew down from the hills, dispersing the mist out at sea. The duffel coat was not protection enough, so she hurried down the mountain path. It was too cold to walk all the way back home. If the bus came when it was due, she would take it. If not, she could always treat herself to a taxi.
She had become more generous recently.
Suddenly a splash of color appeared in the sky to the north. A person swayed rhythmically from side to side under an orange paraglider. Another paraglider appeared over the top of the hill, red and yellow with green writing that was impossible to read. A sudden turbulence made the fabric flap. The glider lost its lift and dropped some fifty or sixty yards before the pilot managed to regain control and slowly cut down into the valley below her.
She followed him with her eyes and laughed softly.
They thought they were challenging fate.
Extreme sports had always provoked her, primarily because she thought the people who participated in them were pathetic. Of course, not everyone had been granted an exciting life. Quite the contrary. Most of the world’s six billion people, the greater part of the inhabitants of Europe and probably all of the Norwegian population, lived uneventful lives. Their fight for survival consisted of getting enough food to live, taking care of their children, finding a better job, or having the newest car in the neighborhood. Human existence was and would always be a mere bagatelle. The fact that depraved, spoiled young people found it necessary to defy death by jumping and diving from sheer rock faces at great speed was an expression of Western decadence that she had always scorned.
Loathed.
They suffered from ennui because they believed they deserved something else, something better than what life in fact was to most: an insignificant period of time between life and death.
“They think they can escape from the meaninglessness of life,” she thought to herself. “By throwing themselves over the edge of Trollveggen with a parachute made from unreliable fabric. Or crossing one of the poles. Climbing an unclimbable mountain. They want to go higher, further, and to more daring lengths. They don’t notice the boredom that constantly shadows them, gray and sneering. They don’t see it until they’ve landed, before they’re safely at home. So they repeat the exercise, do something different, more dangerous, more daring, until they either understand that they can’t outwit life or meet their death attempting to prove the opposite.”
The paragliders were nearly down now; they were aiming to land on a slope with long rows of dwarf vines. She thought she could hear them laughing. Only imagination, obviously, as the wind was blowing in the wrong direction, and the bottom of the valley was far away. But she could see the two pilots slapping each other on the back and jumping up and down with excitement. Two women came running up the terraced slope. They waved happily.
She still was disgusted by the way they played arbitrarily with death.
The only thing they risked was their lives.
Dying was nothing more than a pleasant end to the boredom. And dying also enhanced your reputation, as obituaries were full of praise, not truth. If you died young, life had not yet aged you, made you ugly, fat, or skinny. A person who doesn’t live to be old leaves behind a tragic memento: a glamorized, redeeming story where what was boring becomes exciting and what was ugly becomes beautiful.
She thought about Vegard Krogh and bit her tongue.
She didn’t want to read about him anymore. The articles were all lies. Journalists and acquaintances, friends and family all contributed to the image that was drawn of Krogh, the artist. An uncompromising and upright champion of what was genuine and true. A colorful spirit, a fearless soldier in the service of that great and incorruptible force, culture.
She swore out loud and started to run down the road. The bus was just pulling out from the bus stop on the main road but stopped when the driver saw her. She paid and plopped down into an empty seat.
She would be going back to Norway for good soon.
She had to leave the house in Villefranche. The lease had been extended until March 1, but not longer. In just over a week she would be homeless, unless she went home.
She pictured her apartment, tastefully decorated and far too big for one person. Only the steel cabinet in the bedroom broke with the soft style she had copied from an interior decor magazine. She’d bought most of the stuff at IKEA but had also come across a couple of the more expensive items at sales.
She somehow didn’t fit into her apartment in Norway.
She seldom had guests and didn’t need the space. When she was at home, she generally sat in the messy study and therefore didn’t really get much pleasure from the fact that the rest of the apartment was so tasteful. In fact, she had never really felt at home there. It was more like living in a hotel. On her many trips to Europe, she had always stayed in rooms that felt more personal, warmer and more comfortable than her own living room.
She didn’t fit in in Norway at all. Norway was not for people like her. She felt suffocated by its grand egalitarian philosophy, excluded by the narrow-minded, exclusive elite. Norway was not big enough for someone like her; she was not recognized for what she was and had therefore chosen to protect herself with the cloak of anonymity. Aloof. Invisible. They didn’t want to see her. So she wouldn’t show herself to them.
The bus rolled westward. The suspension was French and not good enough. She had to close her eyes so as not to feel sick.
To risk dying was no great feat. The danger they exposed themselves to, these mountaineers and air acrobats, solitary rowers in fragile boats crossing the Atlantic and motorcyclists performing death-defying stunts in front of audiences charged with the hope that something might go terribly wrong, was limited to the journey they each took, whether it lasted three seconds or eight weeks, one minute or maybe one year.
She was taking a gamble on life itself. The suspense of never landing, of never achieving her goal, made her unique. The risk increased each day, as she hoped it would and wanted it to. It was constantly there, intense and invigorating, the danger of being caught and exposed.
She leaned her forehead against the window. Evening was falling. The lights had been lit along the promenade below. A light rain darkened the asphalt.
There was nothing to indicate that they were getting closer. Despite the clues she had left, the obvious invitation in the pattern she had chosen, the police were still at a loss. It was so annoying and made her more determined to continue. Of course, the fact that the woman had just had a baby did upset the equation a bit. The timing was not optimal, she had already known that when she started, but there were limits to what she could control.
Maybe it would be a good thing to go home. To get closer.
Run a greater risk.
The bus stopped, and she got off. It was pouring rain now, and she ran all the way home. It was the evening of February 24.
Thirteen
Maybe there’s someone behind it all who’s manipulating the situation,” said Adam Stubo as he tucked into his chicken in yogurt sauce. “That’s her latest theory. I’m not too sure.”
He smiled with his mouth full of food.
“How do you mean?” asked Sigmund Berli. “That som
eone’s getting other people to do the killing, or what? Duping them?”
He broke off a piece of naan bread, held it between his thumb and finger, and peered at it suspiciously.
“Is this some kind of bread?”
“Naan,” Adam replied. “Try it. The theory isn’t that stupid. I mean, it’s pretty logical. In a way. If we accept that Mats Bohus actually killed Fiona Helle but none of the others, then it’s plausible that someone is behind it all. Pulling the strings. An overriding motive, as it were. But at the same time . . .”
Sigmund chewed and chewed. Didn’t manage to swallow.
“For Christ’s sake,” whispered Adam and leaned over the table. “Pull yourself together. There’ve been Indian restaurants in Norway for thirty years! You’re behaving as if it’s snake meat you’re eating. It’s bread, Sigmund. Just bread.”
“That guy over there’s not an Indian,” his colleague muttered and nodded in the direction of the waiter, a middle-aged man with a trimmed mustache and a kind smile. “He’s a Paki.”
The handle of Adam’s knife came crashing down onto the table.
“Cut it out,” he hissed. “I owe you a lot, Sigmund, but not enough to accept that kind of crap. I’ve told you a thousand times, keep that goddamn—”
“I meant Pakistani. Sorry. But he is a Pakistani. Not an Indian. And my stomach can’t cope with things that are too spicy.”
He made an exaggerated face as he clutched his belly dramatically.
“You ordered mild food,” Adam growled as he helped himself to more raita. “If you can’t eat this, you can’t eat sausage and mashed potatoes. Bon appétit.”
Sigmund put a tiny bit on his fork. Hesitated. Cautiously put it in his mouth. Chewed.
“I just can’t figure it out,” Adam said. “It’s somehow so . . . un-Norwegian. Un-European. That anyone would think of using some poor bastard as a pawn in a killing game.”
“Now it’s you who should cut it out,” retorted Sigmund. He swallowed and took some more. “Nothing is un-Norwegian anymore. In terms of crime, I mean. The situation is no better here than anywhere else. And it hasn’t been for years. It’s all these”—he stopped himself, thought about it, and continued—“Russians,” he ventured. “And those fucking bandits from the Balkans. Those boys know no shame, you know. You can see the evil in their eyes.”