Odd Numbers

by Anne Holt

  “What is it that’s wrong with you, then?”

  “Don’t know. A touch of one thing and the other, perhaps. I’ve definite problems with subtext—that was what it said in the report. Irony, for example. I like it best when people say what they actually mean. But at the same time, according to the psychologists, I have a good understanding of people, at least in theory. Maybe Tourette’s, but without the verbal tics? Don’t know. Maybe I’m just an extremely shy guy with an Adam’s apple that’s far too big.”

  She smiled. He smiled back. He liked that she had asked. Henrik wished that everyone would ask.

  “You’re fascinating, anyway,” Hanne said. “This is very good, Henrik. Go on.”

  “What if . . .”

  He put his left hand on the table and began to drum his fingers. His left foot followed the beat on the floor.

  “Let me have a try with one ‘what if,’ Hanne. Just one.”

  “Okay.”

  “What if what happened at the Maridal Lake that evening wasn’t merely a case of grievous bodily harm? What if, in addition, we’re dealing with a murder?”

  “If Karina was pushed into the water and drowned, then she’d have been found quickly. That river goes right through the whole of Oslo.”

  “But what if she was taken out? Fished out again and gotten rid of? What if—”

  He abruptly held himself in check. He had only been granted license for one “what if.”

  Hanne stared distractedly into thin air. From farther inside the apartment, Ida was calling on her. She failed to react. Sat completely still. Henrik tried with all his strength to do the same.

  “The Pakistanis,” she said at last. “We’ve no idea who they are.”

  “No.”

  “But maybe Abid Kahn does.”

  “The boy in 3B? The one who was in Rawalpindi when all this took place?”

  “Yes. Track him down. Speak to him as soon as possible. It’s a flimsy lead, but it’s the only one we’ve got. Now you have to go.”

  Henrik rose from his chair.

  “By the way, Gunnar’s a bit of a racist,” he said with a smile, stuffing his shirt more tidily into his trousers. “He thinks there are far too many Pakistanis here in Norway.”

  “He is not alone in that, unfortunately. He’s certainly not alone in that.”

  A young woman sat alone at a corner table, earplugs attached to a cell phone beside her plate. She was eating a salad at a leisurely pace. She did not look concerned at being the only one in the entire restaurant who lacked company.

  It was past ten o’clock at night. The place was crowded. Admittedly, evenings in the city had grown noticeably quieter in the past couple of days, but the vegetarian restaurant in Seilduksgata was now extremely popular, only two months after it had opened. Following a glowing report in the Dagens Næringsliv newspaper, there was now a three-week wait for a table. Nonetheless, hordes of people were lined up at the door in the hope that someone might have cancelled. Certain of these unannounced guests found space in the bar, but far from all, and there was sheer chaos in those quarters.

  But not for the red-haired woman in the corner.

  She had had a glass of white wine with her food following a recommendation from the waiter. A Spanish wine that she had accepted with some reluctance. She did not regret it. The food also lived up to her expectations, and the music in her ear was an improvement on what was booming out in the restaurant, mixing with the shrieks of impatient customers waiting on the other side of the restaurant.

  If there had not been so many present, she could well have been the decisive witness the police later never found. The other guests, in couples at tables, sometimes three, four, or more, were engrossed in one another’s company. The woman with the red hair had decided to become a writer, even though she was a student at the Oslo Business School. She liked to observe people. Create stories about people she saw.

  However, it was total chaos over there.

  A bag was pushed in under the bar counter in the course of the evening. Not a particularly large one, more of a travel bag really. Among the umbrellas and bags that guests at the bar had set down, it was barely noticeable.

  Until it exploded.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  If it had not been for Linus’s explosive reaction to the threat of contacting his mother, Billy T. would have done so without delay.

  Even though it was past ten o’clock on a Thursday night.

  She was probably awake anyway, since it was likely that very few Norwegians would manage to sleep in the wake of that evening’s latest terrorist attack. The most important thing now was, nonetheless, to keep hold of the boy. Keep him close and prevent him from moving off. Linus’s relatively regular visits to the apartment in Refstadsvingen at least gave Billy T. a certain control over him. An opportunity for contact.

  Moreover, it had to be admitted that the idea of speaking to Grete was the very last thing he wanted to do. He had turned his back and breathed a great sigh of relief once Linus’s eighteenth birthday was over and done with and he no longer needed to see her. At least not before a possible wedding. Such an event appeared extremely remote in Linus’s future plans.

  Billy T. was sitting in his own living room, watching TV.

  Six people were killed instantly when the bomb went off in the new, terribly trendy vegetarian restaurant Grønnere Gress in Seilduksgata in Grünerløkka. The number of wounded was formidable. The premises were razed to the ground, of course, but the material damage was not nearly as bad as at the NCIN office. The police at present refused to say anything about what kind of explosives had been used this time, but they had been placed in a case beneath a bar counter, and not mounted with almost mathematical precision on load-bearing beams at strategic points in a building.

  NRK had just broadcast direct from police headquarters—something that was a complete waste of time, as there was no further information to be gained from that quarter in the meantime. Police Chief Silje Sørensen had held a brief press conference just before midnight and announced that the next update would not be until nine o’clock the following morning.

  Billy T. felt sorry for Silje. She seemed completely exhausted and had aged ten years in the past few days. Once upon a time he had nearly got her into bed, one late evening during a seminar on the Kiel ferry. Despite having had too much to drink, she had drawn back when they reached the cabin door.

  They had both been glad of that the next day.

  She had, anyway: that was the impression he had gained.

  A classy lady, Silje. Smart. She couldn’t help it that her ship owner father had made her filthy rich in her twenties through an advance payment of her inheritance. She had completed a law degree in only three years while working part-time in the police force, so there was certainly nothing wrong with her competence either.

  Now NRK was damn well going to hold yet another debate, he saw, and he turned up the volume. In the past couple of hours, the network had already brought a series of experts into the studio, each one more serious and perplexed than the other. Politicians had been conspicuous by their absence; it seemed as if all the political parties had at least agreed to let the night go past before anyone politicized the increasingly tense situation. Probably not so stupid, Billy T. thought, even though both the Minister of Justice and the Prime Minister had continually been forced to endure scathing comments from the presenters concerning their uncompromising stance on making no statement as yet.

  One glance at his coffee cup made him feel queasy. He traipsed out to the kitchen to fetch a cold beer instead.

  “How is it possible?” he whispered when he returned to see the panel participants.

  Fredrik Grønning-Hansen was one of them. Fredrik Grønning-Hansen, a member of Parliament for the right-wing Progress Party, situated at such an extreme edge of the faction hostile to immigrants that he could have slid right into the Swedish Democrats. What on earth were NRK thinking of, resorting to such a loose cannon only hou
rs after terrorist attack number two had struck Norway less than three days after the first? It was unbelievable. He was a vinegary curmudgeon brimming with Islamophobia, in Billy T.’s opinion—a bastard who demanded leave to spread his shit without anyone being allowed to take him to task for his hogwash, without being accused of gagging him—and making him ill in the bargain. Typically he was the only national politician in Norway who had not yielded to the obvious general agreement to give both police and government the night to recover and collect their thoughts before anyone made pronouncements.

  “What a fucker!” Billy T. mumbled as he sat down again. “Damn NRK.”

  The state broadcaster had not stopped at Fredrik Grønning-Hansen. On the same side as the presenter, the Progress Party representative had Hilde Fossbakk to keep him company. She was head of the think tank Documented Humanity, where Kari Thue ran the website dochum.no.

  A dull and unfamiliar disquiet gave Billy T. such severe heartburn that he put down his beer.

  “It’s time that more drastic measures were adopted,” Fredrik Grønning-Hansen said shrilly. “That’s why I want to propose a motion in Parliament as soon as possible to give the police authority, in certain circumstances, to intern Muslims in this country.”

  The producer cut to a man on the presenter’s left who was staring openmouthed. Quite literally, with his eyes wide open and his mouth gaping, he gazed in disbelief from Grønning-Hansen to Hilde Fossbakk and back again. The camera lingered on the researcher from the Peace Research Institute even as Grønning-Hansen continued:

  “I, as well as many others, have warned against this. For a number of years. We have let our own country be undermined from the inside. Our culture is under siege as a consequence of a naiveté so astounding that it should be considered a crime. Our various governments over the last twenty years have permitted a silent invasion of troops under false colors. There is no such thing as a moderate Muslim. No one—”

  The camera was still dwelling on the researcher, who looked as though he had managed to pull himself together at last.

  “Internment? Are you saying, in deadly earnest, that you want to intern Norwegian Muslims? Are you aware of the historical implications of that suggestion? May I remind you of what the Americans did to their own citizens of Japanese extraction during World War II? It is one of the worst blemishes in U.S. history, and yet you’re sitting here and—”

  “Grønning-Hansen is talking about giving police the option,” Hilde Fossbakk broke in. “And it’s interesting that you should bring up World War II. The situation that has arisen in our country does in fact bear comparison to a war. We are at war! Against an ideology that entails rejecting everything this nation is built on, such as freedom of speech, gender equality, and other basic human rights.”

  The presenter raised his hands to interrupt her and touched his ear. While he listened, he continued to speak with expertise: “Now no one has actually assumed responsibility for last night’s terrorist attack as yet,” he said, pausing for a couple of seconds before his facial expression clearly changed.

  His tone of voice was softer as he continued slowly, with his eyes directed right at the camera.

  “Yes, in fact they have. We’ve just learned that the Prophet’s Ummah claims to be behind the explosion in Grünerløkka. So, not . . .”

  He let his hand drop as he glanced at the laptop in front of him.

  “I repeat: it’s not the Prophet’s True Ummah—the organization we first heard of last Tuesday—that is the focus now. In other words, we’re talking tonight about a far better-known organization, which has been under scrutiny from the Security Service and the media for some time.”

  The picture cut to a video showing a man in front of a neutral white wall. He was disguised using the customary scarf and otherwise dressed in loose-fitting clothes and a headdress that looked like a turban. In his hands, diagonally across his chest, he held an automatic weapon that Billy T. immediately recognized as the Russian AK-47.

  The man was speaking Arabic. A simultaneous translation in Norwegian stuttered through the grotesque rhetoric for the two minutes it lasted.

  “Allahu akbar,” and then it was over.

  The footage had been released on YouTube.

  Someone came in.

  Billy T. switched off the television, jumped out of his armchair, and headed out to the hallway.

  “Linus.”

  “Hello.”

  “It’s late.”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you hungry?”

  “No.”

  His son took off his jacket and hung it up on the single hook beside the coat closet.

  “I’m going to bed,” he muttered.

  “Have you been at Arfan’s?”

  “That’s nothing to do with you.”

  “No. But you must listen to me right now, Linus. You simply must. For your own sake, if not for mine. Keep away from Arfan. Do you hear? Arfan is under—”

  He checked himself and tried to block the door into Linus’s room.

  “You really must stay away from Arfan. For a while.”

  “He’s not called Arfan anymore.”

  “What?”

  Linus shoved him away from the door. Billy T. offered no resistance, even though he wanted to.

  “He couldn’t be bothered converting after all,” Linus said as he entered his room.

  Fortunately he left the door open when he sat down on the bed and yanked off his sweater.

  “Do you know how fucking easy it is to convert to Islam?”

  He snorted.

  “It doesn’t take shit. If you’re going to become a Catholic or a Jew, for example, there’s a whole lot of stuff you have to go through. Studies and accreditation and all sorts of strange things. At least these folk take their religion seriously. To become a Muslim . . .”

  Now he was laughing.

  “. . . you can just come to a decision. It’s sort of between you and Allah, the whole business. Great if you can rattle off the Shahada, but nobody pokes their nose into any of it. Hey presto, you’re a Muslim! What a joke!”

  He stood up and took off his pants.

  “Keep away from Andreas,” Billy T. said quietly. “Please, Linus. For the foreseeable future.”

  “You don’t need to get worked up,” Linus said before wresting off his socks and lying down underneath the quilt. “Could you turn off the light?”

  “There’s been another terrorist attack.”

  “I know that. Heard it in town.”

  “Have you been in town?”

  “Turn off the light. People are stupid idiots anyway, taking it into their heads to go into a restaurant when those madmen have threatened further attacks. I wouldn’t have done that.”

  “Can you promise me that you’ll stay away from Arfan, or Andreas, or whatever he’s called, tomorrow?”

  Linus did not answer. He simply pulled the quilt over his head and turned to face the wall. Billy T. remained there for a moment, with his hand on the door handle, before sighing, flicking the light switch, and closing the door softly behind him.

  As he turned to return to the living room, he noticed Linus’s jacket. Something became detached from the sleeve and dropped onto the floor with slow, undulating movements. Billy T. bent down and picked it up.

  He saw that it was a feather.

  A pretty large gray feather, with a bluish glimmer when he held it up to the ceiling light.

  It looked as if it might be a pigeon feather.

  Once again the man from Sandefjord had released a pigeon.

  This one had lived with him for a few days, and he had in fact grown fond of it. The cooing was quite soothing to listen to. Since he had to keep it indoors because he would prefer that the neighbors did not see it, he had become used to the warm, deep sound from the pigeon’s throat at the approach of feeding time. The bird was tractable and used to handling as well.

  The place felt absolutely empty once it had gone, he noted, and sw
itched off the TV set.

  He felt a deep calm about everything that was in progress. Being able to contribute was the best thing that had ever happened to him. He now worked as a chemist in the research department at the Jotun paint company, but had lived in numerous places around the world before he had been parked in a small lab without much more to do than wait until he reached retirement age. Fortunately, that was not far off.

  He had traveled a long journey and met many people.

  He had had friends of all colors and nationalities. Capable people who had done their duty. They had not been particularly religious either, the people he had encountered in Dubai and South Korea, Australia, and Finland, for that matter. They were professionals. Agreeable professional people who took a shower when they needed one and took care of their families. Who worked hard and didn’t ask for any favors. Who didn’t end up with dozens of children and demand that other people’s taxes should support his offspring.

  It was the dregs who came to Norway.

  An impoverished rabble of Muslims who placed Islam higher than the Norwegian Constitution.

  He turned off the TV set, feeling content. Vigilant and alert. And content. It had been a sacrifice to be so alone all these years after his wife died, but it was worth it. He would have liked to see his sister more often, but Peder had decided a number of years ago that their contact should be considerably restricted. Contact and connections formed routines. They were never to leave behind routines or traces.

  Everything was going as it should.

  The plan was quite simply ingenious.

  “You don’t exactly need to be Einstein to appreciate that last night’s development makes the case a good deal worse,” Harald Jensen, head of the Security Service, said as he rubbed his rough hand over his face. “If it’s at all possible to become worse than it already was.”

  The Minister of Justice’s eyes narrowed.

  “So, in your judgment, it’s worse that the Prophet’s Ummah is involved than when this . . .” His breathing was labored and he shook his head gently before continuing: “ . . . sister organization, or whatever we’re to call it, assumed responsibility?”