by Jon Michelet
Ryland reckoned he could safely file these infantile letters under ‘I’ for idiots, along with begging letters and enquiries about state money for the construction of castles in the air. But now events have begun to run away with him, on this, the first real day of summer. He is under pressure over the issue of the Norpaper merger, and then there is this private strain on top of everything else.
The boy who, in his own amateur way, has been trying to blackmail him has unbelievably, somehow or other, managed to get the police to publish an identikit drawing of the murdered woman. It is in Aftenposten and the tabloids, which Ryland doesn’t usually read. Only when Verdens Gang runs a new story in its continuing vendetta against him and the oil fund, only then does he bother to read VG.
Does he recognise the woman in the drawing? He has his doubts. He really isn’t sure. And if there is one thing he hates it is doubt.
On every occasion that offers itself he takes Natasha with him on his travels in Europe, on shorter or longer holidays. Travelling quells her restlessness, acts as a cure for her neuroses. She is never as happy as when she can sit in a pavement café in a city watching people walk by and confirming that most are well nourished, that the world is populated by living creatures who look as if they get enough food and not just Biafran and Ethiopian children and slum kids from Manila, Bucharest and Novosibirsk, the kind Natasha sees on TV.
When Natasha is all light and joy about being among the living, the sated millions, she is also unusually open, affectionate and chatty. She can speak a little in most major European languages and finds it easy to make contact with foreign women. Among them there is always one or more she feels sorry for and thinks they deserve a better, safer life in Norway.
The portrait the police have drawn could be one of these women. She is dark-haired and lean – or was, she is dead of course – and is reminiscent of the Natasha he met in Leningrad. Natasha before she imagined she was suffering from fibromyalgia and began to go to seed and put on weight.
The problem is that the woman – if he may formulate himself so brutally, and he can, in his mind – is the type there are thirteen to the dozen of in European capitals. She could have been a waitress in Rome with a dubious work permit in Italy, an immigrant street girl in Marseille selling flowers in the afternoon and her body in the evening, or a gypsy beggar in Prague.
If a woman like her tells Natasha she is being persecuted, Natasha will say she has to come to the safe haven that is Norway, and deftly, under the table, pass over his name and address so that she has a contact person in paradise. Many such women find it easy to say, in good faith, that they are being harassed or persecuted for the simple reason that they are. They have trouble with greedy employers, pimps, people smugglers and immigration bureaucracy.
This woman, badly drawn and stylised, reminds him vaguely of a hairdresser at Holywell Hotel in Athens. There was a minor drama in the salon because Natasha wasn’t happy with the haircut she had received and thought her hair had been cut too short, by an unprofessional person. Besides, she had asked for a perm with waves and had curls instead. The coiffeuse lifted her own hair to console Natasha and demonstrated that the customer could have very short hair because she didn’t have a deformed ear to hide.
The scene ended in a tearful reconciliation. He was so ill at ease that he retreated to a bar and knocked back a rare whiskey. On his return one of the other girls in the deserted basement salon was taking photos of Natasha and her new friend, the coiffeuse. From what he could gather the woman was Greek and not a persecuted refugee from Faroffistan or a prostitute from Moldova. That is how easy it is to make mistakes. He can speak just as little Greek as Natasha, a few words from a phrasebook. A woman who lives illegally in a country will try to seem even more normal and native than the country’s legal inhabitants. If, for example, she is a hairdresser during the day and forced into prostitution after the salon closes, she will try to hide the latter fact with all the means a woman has at her disposal.
He isn’t getting anywhere with thinking like this. He will have to go through Natasha’s chaotic collection of holiday snaps.
In one of the blackmail letters the writer mentioned nuclear warehouses in Våler. It appeared to be nonsense, completely contrary to official Norwegian policy on foreign bases. However, it seems there are some grounds to the claim. Aftenposten has just reviewed a new historical book which proves that nuclear warheads were built in Våler and at other batteries. How could someone so young know that?
Who was the caller who was put through and said that a man by the name of Beach Boy was dead and demanded Gerhard Ryland’s total silence, unless he wished another murder to be committed?
The person who rang Gerhard Ryland and threatened to kill him was no kid on some crazy quest for a million kroner. This was an adult man, and he articulated what he had to say in brief, clear sentences: if Ryland didn’t keep his mouth shut about Beach Boy’s attempted blackmail, Ryland would be next on the list after the boy. The voice demanded no money, only silence. Before ringing off he warned Ryland in no uncertain terms that he was not to contact the police.
Ryland smokes Stalin cold and bites so hard that a piece of the mouthpiece breaks off.
Who could the caller have been? The man spoke normal Norwegian, Østland dialect, maybe an Østfolder. He expressed himself the way Ryland imagines a heavy would.
Could it have been one of Kingo’s men?
Kingo the arriviste, the prince of wood pellets, the son of the hymn-writer’s grandson, haunts Norway’s wood-processing industry. As far as the Norpaper merger is concerned, Kingo and SNOIF are on a collision course. Kingo has learned his business methods in the new capitalist Russia. Initially it seems highly unlikely that he should also haunt a murder case.
But you have to be open to all eventualities.
The anonymous caller’s warning about going to the police is the type of threat no sensible, rational person should heed of course.
If only you could be confident that there weren’t any leaks inside the police. If only it were as simple as picking up a phone, calling the police and presenting your case.
The problem is that there are leaks inside the police. The organisation leaked like a sieve to the newspaper houses in Akersgata during the massive Orderud case. A civil servant who wants to earn himself some easy money can tell the unscrupulous hacks at Verdens Gang that the tabloid’s arch-enemy, the MD of the oil fund, is involved in an unsolved murder case. VG is bound to throw all caution to the wind and just think of sex and sales. The name of a man VG doesn’t like, because he is an old fogey who sees it as his duty to prevent the destruction of Norwegian industry, is found on a murdered woman. Accordingly, this man, the enemy in journalistic logic, has had a sexual encounter with this woman and then killed her or got someone else to do so, to hide his trail of depravity.
Such patent nonsense won’t do long-term damage as it doesn’t have a scrap of truth in it. But it will do irreparable harm short-term. Kingo will be able to use the scandal for all it is worth to discredit an opponent in a situation where there is a lot at stake.
‘Shit sticks,’ Ryland says, spitting out a bit of the mouthpiece. He notices that he doesn’t spit it into the waste-paper basket but on to the carpet.
If he goes to the police and there is a leak, vital national interests could be compromised. If he doesn’t go to the police, he is behaving improperly and not doing his civic duty. The best policy is to go to the police, but the best policy can be the enemy of a good policy.
This is his dilemma. He has never been confronted by a dilemma that didn’t have a logical solution. Often the solution has been to take the middle path, to find a balance in the middle. The greatest threat he faces personally is death. Hmmm. He can live with that for the time being. It is only him. In the bigger picture – the one that concerns more important interests than his own skin – the worst that can happen is that he, an
d thus his cause, is attacked in the media as the result of a scandal. His mission, quite irrespective of what politicians might think, is to use oil funds in such a way that Kingo cannot merge with Borregaard, Peterson and the SBF paper plant.
Kingo makes it known that a merger of this kind between the three heavyweights in Østfold’s wood-processing industry would be beneficial to Norway and he would like a long-term ownership in the interests of the nation. In his argument he claims that Peterson was extremely close to selling up to the new Finnish conglomerate Nordic Paper Mills, abbreviated to Norpaper, and that Borregaard, after using the raw might of shareholders to liberate Sarpsborg from the Orkla concern, is open to foreign buy-outs if it stays on its own. The same applies to the SBF plant in Halden. This bluff has won over Norwegian authorities and the media. What they don’t know is that Kingo is pulling the wool over their eyes. He wants to increase his company’s total value through a merger and then sell on the whole caboodle to Canada. As he has kept the Canadian card close to his chest this secret plan cannot be documented.
SNO – which is what Ryland chooses to call the institution he heads, because Kjell Magne Bondevik’s abbreviation SNOIF sounds like the name of a third-division football team from the ex-Prime Minister’s home region – has to try to block the merger plan by buying up the minority in Borregaard and Peterson. As this won’t be enough, the Finns have to come in with a restricted equity interest. The difficulty with this is that whoever gives Finland, powered by the Nokia locomotive, an inch could end up losing much more. Peterson’s position is unclear and ambivalent. There is a sense that Peterson still wants to sell majority ownership to Norpaper. Then the national anti-merger argument will fail.
Kingo made a fortune importing cheap pulp from Russia, with its base in Arkhangelsk. Afterwards it was logs, big time. He has used all his power in the public arena and all his warped charm trying to thwart SNO investment in Østfold. In the background he has used the coarsest of threats. So far he hasn’t succeeded. A scandal is exactly what he needs, especially one which he himself hasn’t caused but which will fall like a luscious ripe peach into his diamond-studded millionaire’s lap.
There has to be a middle way. There has to be cover for his back.
Ryland dials the number of the only person he trusts in the Norwegian media, Ernst Filtvedt at Dagens Næringsliv, from his own mobile.
Filtvedt has been in the game since DN was the Sjøfartstidende. He is one of the few veterans who can still keep up in the hunt alongside distempered newspaper bloodhounds. And even though he has enough to leak he can also be very tight-lipped.
Filtvedt answers, as rusty as a ship ready for the scrapheap.
‘I’ve got something for you,’ Ryland says. ‘It’s very off-the-record.’
‘I’m very off the record myself. I’m at the Fridtjof in the middle of my third pint. Or it could be the fourth. If it’s any more of your Kingo-Kongo stuff it’s going to be bloody late before I cast off from here.’
‘Kingo-Kongo?’
‘Kingkong Kingo. I can’t listen to any more of your fantasies about Kingo. Give me one single bit of proof that the Canadians are the big, bad wolf and I’ll listen.’
‘This is about something quite different. It’s personal and serious.’
‘Jesus, I didn’t know that a paragon of virtue like you did personal.’
‘Can we meet where the ladies have the biggest…’
‘The biggest tits in town. I can be there in five minutes.’
*
‘Why do you use a chainsaw on those small bushes?’ Vanja Vaage asks. ‘Is it to show you use a sledgehammer to crack nuts?’
Vilhelm Thygesen stops the chainsaw that he has put on a rock in idle mode. He straightens his back and takes off his white protective gloves and opens the mesh visor of his helmet.
‘The chainsaw needs some exercise,’ he says, ‘and so do I. You don’t need a sauna when you’ve got a chainsaw. There’s no job that makes you sweat as much as using a chainsaw in full protective gear.’
‘You look trendy. The complete Alaska look.’
‘If I’d known you were coming I’d have taken off all the lumberjack stuff.’
Thygesen flicks off his heavy leather boots and strips off the black protective trousers without any further ado. He is wearing shorts underneath, jeans with the legs cut off. They match the drenched denim shirt. He grabs a towel hanging from the branch of a small pine he hasn’t mown down yet and wipes the sweat off his face and arms.
‘You don’t look bad yourself,’ he says. ‘Is that the full Riviera look?’
‘Latest fashion from Cubus.’
The latest fashion from Cubus, if Vaage is telling the truth, must be baggy khaki shorts which leave a lot to the imagination and a tight-fitting, turquoise top, which doesn’t.
Vaage asks if it isn’t dangerous to have a ponytail when you are working with a chainsaw. Couldn’t it get caught in the chain and cause the user to cut off his own head? No, Thygesen answers. Only idiots use a chainsaw behind their backs.
‘You damage small, innocent trees,’ she says.
‘Innocent? It’s a mystery to me why these pines died over the winter. Now I’ve solved the death riddle and I feel like testing it out on others. You’re the first person to appear. So you tell me why.’
‘Exhaust fumes?’
‘Nonsense. Environmental nonsense.’
‘If I answer the greenhouse effect, is that environmental nonsense as well?’
Thygesen nods. He takes off his shirt and wipes down his lean, grey-haired chest. It is clear he has been outdoors a lot, but not uncovered. His body is pale, apart from a tanned wedge down from his neck and lower down on his chest where the spring sun sneaked in. He isn’t muscular and he has no six-pack. He is an ascetic, not an athlete. In an era of history notable for plentiful living which has given most western men a paunch, Thygesen hasn’t got one.
‘Fungus’, he says. ‘The wet autumn has led to fungal attacks on all small pines in Østland. Haven’t you noticed all the brown pines?’
‘No,’ Vaage answers. ‘Oh, I did see some on the road here. I thought it was caused by salt.’
‘We live in the so-called age of information. But neither TV nor the papers can be bothered to tell us why millions of pines in Norway have died in a veritable epidemic over the winter, and the danger of infection is still acute. I had to ring experts at the Agricultural High School in Ås to get a sensible answer to the riddle. The answer was the damn Lophodermium seditiosum. It attacks small trees from the ground and up to a height of around two metres, as you can see.’
Thygesen holds the top of a pine at his own height and shakes the brown needles off.
‘What’s really bad is that the fungus paves the way for other fungi which can attack big and small pines alike. Gremmeniella abietina. I cut down the small dry pines so that these fungi won’t spread to the whole clump of grown pines.’
He points to the clump of pines by the door and carries on talking in a dramatic voice. A large-scale fungal attack can, according to what he has been told, put paid to the most magnificent pines. If they survive it may have damaged the trees so badly that they can become a breeding ground for the feared pine shoot beetle, alias the bark beetle.
‘Then you’ve had it,’ Thygesen says. ‘Then the elm disease which ravaged Oslo in the 1980s is just small fry. We can wave goodbye to half of Nordmarken. And there’s not one bugger in Norwegian public services who cares.’
‘Interesting,’ Vaage says. ‘Actually it was another riddle that brought me here.’
‘Naturally,’ Thygesen says, rubbing his body energetically. ‘Just hear me out before we get to the point. When you’re as old as me, and I’m almost twice as old as you, you will probably also have given up trying to understand “the riddle that is yourself”. For most of us it is completely unsolva
ble. If you’re as bright as you appear you’ll also have given up trying to solve the riddle of the universe. You’ll concentrate on nature’s greater and smaller challenges. That’s healthy. It’s balm to the soul. Especially for lonely souls. By the way, do you originate from the Italian or Spanish pirates who drifted on to Nordland’s shores?’
‘Not as far as I know,’ Vaage answers. ‘My great-great-grandfather was a Sami from Tysfjord. That’s the most exotic element in our family. Why do you ask?’
‘Because you’re quite dark. A sort of Anna Hofstad type.’
‘Are you trying to flirt with me?’
‘Who knows what can get in the head of a recluse now the summer is upon us and women are throwing off their winter coats and circulating hormones.’
Vanja Vaage and Vilhelm Thygesen wander into the latter’s cool house, where he puts on a fleece jacket and she takes out a light cotton cardigan from the bag she is carrying. She slips into it to cover her bare shoulders, and her chest.
Thygesen puts on some coffee.
12
Gerhard Ryland takes the lift down from the sixth floor. It stops on the fourth and four men in Boss and Armani suits enter and fill the space. They know very well who Ryland is, but they don’t deign to say hello to one of the state’s money-moving lackeys. Because they are private money-movers, they represent the free movement of capital. They have set up the institution Ermine Funds, and when Ryland discovered what ermine was in Norwegian, hermelin, he dubbed the gang on the fourth floor ‘The Hermelins’, also the name of a Swedish noble family.