“Do you have a computer with internet access here?” Sigrid asks Melinda.
“Are you joking?”
“Why you do keep asking me that?”
“Something about the way you talk.”
“No, I’m not joking.”
“There’s a laptop over there.”
Sigrid sits herself down on a comfy chair and starts poking around looking for inspiration that will lead to a plan that will lead to some time away from Melinda, who is starting to make her feel slightly guilty, because she seems like a genuinely good kid in need of a mentor, but the circumstances dictate that Sigrid needs to find Marcus without a chaperone. She does have an idea, if an imperfect one, about how to find Marcus in his wilderness fortress, and she wants to explore that possibility as far away from the sheriff and his people as possible—if only to give Marcus a real chance to explain himself and let the two of them work together to find a solution to the predicament.
“Target is really open until eleven at night?”
“Midnight on Saturdays. Not in Norway?”
“Not exactly.”
The shootout at the summer cabin last month began with the murder of a Serbian woman in the Oslo neighborhood of Tøyen. She had run to a neighboring apartment with her seven-year-old son for shelter, and it was provided by an eighty-two-year-old Jewish American—and Korean War vet—named Sheldon Horowitz. The woman didn’t make it, but the old man took it on himself to protect the boy by disappearing into the Norwegian landscape. For four days he evaded the city police, the district police, CCTV cameras, a helicopter, and the Balkan mafia. He didn’t speak Norwegian, he didn’t spend any money, and he left no evidence behind. After the fact, it took Sigrid’s team over two weeks to reconstruct his movements. They fielded calls from movie theaters, hotels, restaurants, and from tourists and motorists. She and her partner, Petter, had built out Sheldon’s time line until it made sense, and eventually a navy dive team was deployed to locate and photograph a tractor that had been parked creatively at the bottom of a lake.
Sigrid did not know Sheldon. Not beyond the moment they spent together on the grass, clutching each other, outside the summer cabin as he lay dying. She had, however, had the chance to explore his mind and personality—both of which were expansive. She is half the age of the man who did all that. She is unquestionably in better shape now than he had been—the jet lag notwithstanding. Unlike him, she speaks the local language, and her life isn’t at risk. Most important, Sigrid doesn’t have a traumatized child in tow as she searches for Marcus. There really is no good reason, she figures, that she shouldn’t be able to outperform the old man aside from three facts: She has to shake the police with whom she is now living; she was never trained by the U.S. Marines during a war to avoid the enemy as a scout-sniper; and she simply doesn’t have the audacity of Sheldon Horowitz.
The first is circumstantial, the second is beyond consideration, and the third . . . well . . . it invites an interesting question:
“What would Sheldon do?” Sigrid asks aloud.
“Huh?”
“I said, ‘What would Sheldon do?’” Sigrid repeats.
“Who’s Sheldon?” asks Melinda, not glancing away from a doctor show on TV.
“A man who always seemed to find a way.”
“Maybe we should hire him,” she says.
As Melinda watches House on television, Sigrid uses the laptop to find what she needs. Her plan is simple—ditch Melinda—but it seems to require an unusual recipe of information, including satellite imagery, some luck with line-of-sight considerations from Target’s parking lot, reasonable nighttime ambient temperatures, train timetables, and a prostitute. This all takes time to look up. In the meantime, she hears Dr. House yelling, “If her DNA was off by one percentage point, she’d be a dolphin!”
After ten minutes her plan has come together: She knows what to do, where to go, and how to get there. All she needs to do now is send a text message to Juliet, which she does.
Melinda laughs.
“Good show?” Sigrid asks.
“I think Hugh Laurie is sexy. Don’t you?”
A Sly One
When you asked me what time Target closes,” says Melinda from the driver’s seat of the patrol car, thirty minutes later, “it hadn’t occurred to me that you were actually wanting to come back here tonight.”
“Are you paid overtime for this?” Sigrid asks.
Melinda makes a thoughtful if sour face and says, “That’s a good question.”
“I’ll suggest it to Irv.”
According to the dashboard, the ambient temperature in the parking lot outside Target at 9:48 p.m. is 18 degrees Celsius, or 65 degrees Fahrenheit, which is about as warm as it gets in the daytime in Oslo. Behind Target is a fence that keeps children and hobos from wandering along the single operating railroad track that cuts across the county, far inland, parallel to the St. Lawrence.
Inside the superstore, staff wear beige trousers with the same pleats no one in Norway has worn since the Thompson Twins were ascendant. Their polo neck T-shirts are crimson red, and though it is night, and though the store is nearly empty, each cashier sports a smile of unnatural permanence. Above them, the store is lit with a checkerboard of rectangular lights through a dropped ceiling, shining down on a polished linoleum so clean it could warm the heart of a prison warden.
Sigrid watches a woman push a red cart holding two flatscreen TVs and a bag of school clothes.
Another heavy woman with thick ankles dotted with pimples is holding up what appears to Sigrid to be identical pairs of beige panties, each large enough to cradle a bowling ball. Through a pair of frameless reading glasses she is reading the fine print on the satin tags. She looks up at Sigrid to read her face as they pass each other.
A nighttime news program is showing on twenty widescreen televisions. A distinguished man with a deep, calming voice is presenting a new NBC/Wall Street Journal poll putting Barack Obama three points ahead of John McCain in the presidential elections.
Sigrid’s plan to shake Melinda is subtle and simple, and was proven effective years ago against a woman who was also smart, driven, but inexperienced: herself. Nine years back, in 1999, Sigrid was working a city beat and had slowly followed a woman through the Glas Magasinet department store on Stortorvet in the city center across from the Oslo Domkirke. The woman—a drug addict—had grabbed a Michael Kors handbag and stuffed it with perfume, leather gloves, and wallets. Sigrid pursued her undramatically through the store with the intent of making eye contact, telling her to stop, defusing the situation, and taking her quietly into custody.
Sigrid reasoned that as a druggie with money issues—and possibly psychological ones—the woman was probably used to being followed around for one reason or other. And so when she started walking faster through the woman’s clothing section in the direction of the bathrooms, Sigrid radioed to her colleague, Lukas, and told him to meet her outside the small bathroom hallway on the third floor that had only one way in and therefore only one out.
“Stay here,” she’d told Lukas, who took position at the choke point of the hallway as Sigrid walked confidently down the hall and into the women’s restroom. After a thorough search, she found it completely empty: no open windows, stalls empty, no storage closets, no space under the sinks.
“Did she come out?” Sigrid asked Lukas when she emerged.
“No.”
“Changed her clothing?”
“No one came out.”
“She must not have gone in,” Sigrid concluded.
“Or she turned into a bird and flew out the third-story window,” Lukas said.
“I don’t like either option.”
“Let’s pretend it didn’t happen,” Lukas suggested.
“All evidence suggests that it didn’t,” said Sigrid.
She’d been stupid. She knew that. So had Lukas. But over the years she’d also come to appreciate how pervasive and deep our learning is, whether it is helpf
ul to our condition or not. Now she knows better. And she knows how to put that understanding to use.
Sigrid stands with her hands in her trousers, messenger bag over her shoulder, watching a Panasonic TV that has a sharper picture than the one next to it. Melinda arrives beside her—armed and in uniform—and places her hands inside her own pockets too. Obama’s lips are moving. The closed-captioned text says he’s talking about hope.
“You have a strange way of looking for your brother,” Melinda says, immobile.
“What do you think about this?” Sigrid asks, nodding toward the election polling.
“I think McCain’s gonna win.”
“Why?”
“Because Obama’s black.”
“The polls are all saying Obama’s going to win.”
“I think Fox News is right. I think that in the privacy of the voting booth, white people just won’t pull the lever for the black candidate. I wish things were different. But I’ve learned a lot recently about how things really are. And they aren’t good.”
“Who do you want to win?”
“I’m on the fence. I like the idea of more local government and less federal. McCain seems like a pretty regular guy while Obama seems like a fancy lawyer with all the right words. But McCain thinks everything’s just fine out there all by itself and all we need to do is leave things alone. I know that’s not true. Broken things don’t fix themselves. Obama gets that part. I guess I’m OK either way.”
“Tell me about what happened to Lydia’s nephew. Jeffrey.”
Melinda averts her eyes. “He was a little boy playing with his friends outside while his mom was doing the dishes. Two cops showed up like they were a SWAT team and blew him away. The grand jury decided it was a clean shooting because the cap gun looked real and the cops acted according to the rules.”
“Do you agree?”
“The police union, the commissioner, the departments—they’re all saying it was a good shooting.”
“That’s not what I asked,” Sigrid says.
“Irv said it happened in the next county and we’re to mind our own business and focus on Lydia.”
“That wasn’t my question either.”
“I think America’s screwed either way.”
“What does that mean?”
“If the grand jury had decided it was a bad shooting, it would mean we have a police force that can’t tell the difference between right and wrong. And if they call it a clean shooting, it means we have a whole country that can’t. But no one cares what I think.”
“Does the sheriff feel the same way you do?”
“Irv went to talk to Lydia’s parents. They’re Jeffrey’s grandparents too. They’ve been through hell. He went there to pay his respects and learn more about Lydia. He came back all quiet. And then he talked to the police commissioner. And then Reverend Fred Green. And after all that . . . all he wants to do is talk to Marcus. I guess the situation is pretty . . . well, you know.”
Sigrid checks her watch. It’s almost time.
“I have to go to the bathroom.”
“Again?”
“Traveling upsets my stomach.”
“All right.”
Sigrid moves briskly toward the bathroom.
“That bad?” she hears Melinda ask behind her.
Sigrid ducks through the aisles and around whirling carousels of marked-down shirts and skirts. She rounds a bend filled with humidifiers and dehumidifiers in equal numbers. She enters the hallway for the restrooms, checks her distance from Melinda—about twenty meters—and makes her move.
Melinda stands watching Obama’s lips move as Sigrid turns the corner into the bathrooms. Melinda didn’t know Jeffrey Simmons’s shooter but she’d heard his name: Roy Carman. Jefferson County is pretty big, area-wise, but the cops tend to know each other and there’s a policy of trying to get people to know each other across the county lines. Barbecues, picnics, pickup softball . . . that sort of thing. Roy had attended high school two towns over, and had graduated from the police academy three years before Melinda. Rumors among Melinda’s colleagues at the office were that Roy had attention deficit disorder, was known for having a short temper, and liked to listen to right-wing talk radio, which he often quoted. He always banged on about personal responsibility, and law and order, and consequences for actions, and that sort of seesaw thinking that made the world tilt only one way and only so far.
When she listens to other cops talk, every argument about shooting Jeffrey sounds both reasonable and incomplete to her at the same time. Somehow, though, she can’t put her finger on the missing ingredient that explains what’s wrong with the actions except for the outcome.
Melinda was born in the small town of Harrisville, New York, which has a population of under 650 people. It was clean, gentle, and unassuming, but not the sort of place a young woman could fulfill her dreams or ambitions. It wasn’t a town that gave her a national perspective let alone a global one, and life wasn’t so much about trying to change history as it was pushing through the day-to-day and trying to hold the line on being a decent person while doing it. This involved fighting the small-time battles of family arguments, alcoholism, and unemployment, and pressing back against the atrophy of all things built by man—car transmissions, truck engines, roofing, potholes. The move to the sheriff’s office after the police academy was a godsend for her, and working for a boss like Irv, who not only had a college education but a master’s degree to boot in something involving Latin and Greek, well, that turned Melinda into a disciple. Still, for all that, it never much occurred to her that a local police shooting—even one caught on video camera—might actually be noticed by people living in foreign countries across the ocean.
Melinda watches Obama talk about the economy. She can’t hear him but she can see him and read along. She feels his confidence, and body language, and sense of purpose. He’s a man with somewhere to go and he wants America to give him the chance and come along. He could be holding a flute and skipping through a village.
In Jefferson County alone there had been almost two dozen police shootings that had left someone dead. Eighty percent of those dead were black despite fewer than ten percent of the population being black. Everyone knew something was off, but event by event, every shooting sounded right and reasonable. But how could that be?
A colleague had shown her the footage of the Rodney King beating. It was before her time. She wasn’t even ten years old when that happened so she didn’t remember it, but the folklore and his famous appeal still floated around the office, and eventually Melinda was pulled into it.
A nice guy she knew—who went by Wilky—tried to explain why King deserved every smack he got. He played the beating in slow motion the way the lawyers had done. At that speed, at that magnification, it all seemed right and reasonable. But when it was over and Wilky left her alone with the video, she played it over and over at full speed and it all felt wrong.
Wilky had made it sound like each cop had been left without a choice, and had a tough decision to make, blow by blow. But at full speed, she simply watched a guy getting the crap beaten out of him by people who were winding up for the nice strike—their batons bouncing off King’s pulverized muscles and joints.
Jeffrey’s death had really upset her. Jeffrey wasn’t a criminal. He wasn’t even an adult. And even people who are both aren’t supposed to be treated like that by law enforcement. Jeffrey was just a little boy playing make-believe with his friends. And then a man who was sworn to protect him showed up on his lawn and killed him. And after that, the grand jury decided not to even hold a trial to see if there’d been a mistake made, let alone negligence or manslaughter or worse.
It didn’t make sense, but she couldn’t figure out what part was out of balance. People talked about “institutionalized racism” on TV and seemed pretty passionate about it, but it didn’t make immediate sense to her; didn’t all that end after segregation? Now that the laws are the same, aren’t we all just responsib
le for our own actions? Melinda didn’t doubt that there were racists and bigots. But doesn’t it all come down to what they do, not what they think? The angry people on the news sure didn’t think so, and every time Melinda thought of bringing this up with one of the black cops, she’s lost her nerve. No one wants to looks stupid on purpose.
Now she had a Norwegian police chief looking at the same thing. Maybe Irv was onto something with that Bible stuff; maybe Sigrid could see the world through different eyes and understand something they couldn’t. Even if she couldn’t, though, it felt strange having a foreigner ask her about Jeffrey. It made her feel uneasy and ashamed. It also made Jeffrey’s death feel larger; like eyes from around the world were watching upstate New York through a one-way mirror and judging her and everyone she knew. Maybe it’s a good thing; maybe this is what they needed. Witnesses.
Obama has stopped talking and now there is an advertisement for dishwashing detergent. She’s had enough with this late-night shopping and bathroom-waiting and babysitting. Irv told her that Sigrid was probably going to try to give her the slip somehow, so her job was to keep an eye on her, but this was taking forever.
You had to sympathize with a woman who had the runs, though. Traveling can be tough on the belly.
Melinda glances over her shoulder to aisle seven. Without taking her eyes off the restroom hall for more than a moment or two, she grabs some Kaopectate, Pepto, and Imodium and heads toward the bathroom. She walks down the short hall and steps into the women’s room. There’s a line of four sinks on her right and four stalls to the left.
“Sigrid, I’ve got some stuff that might help.”
Nothing.
American by Day Page 10