“Sigrid?”
Melinda bends down and looks under the stall doors for feet.
“Sigrid, come on. Not funny. I’m being a good sport here. I don’t want to touch the bathroom the floor or crouch down or anything.”
Melinda opens each stall: every one is empty.
There is a small horizontal window on the far wall—big enough for a message in a bottle and little else—that’s encrusted with spider webs and bugs. There is no utility closet.
“Well, that’s impressive,” Melinda says to no one.
Using the radio on her belt she calls in as she exits the restroom and heads back to the main concourse.
“Cory?” she says to the microphone on her shoulder. “It’s Melinda. Tell Irv the Norwegian pulled a Houdini at Target.”
“Gave you the slip, Mel?”
“She’s a sly one.”
“I’ll tell Irv.”
“Roger that.”
Melinda climbs onto a green plastic lawn chair and then onto the round matching table, providing her with a commanding view of the store. There are a dozen shoppers. It is late. Several turn to look at her and Melinda gives them a casual wave. She looks toward the emergency exits in the back, but they aren’t open. No fire alarm has been activated and the theft sensors haven’t been tripped. Chief Inspector Sigrid Ødegård has made her move.
The One Percent
The megastore’s parking lot is lit by a grid of lamps that turn the asphalt into a glittering game of chess—one entering its endgame, Sigrid hopes, if her gambit proves successful. Without Melinda in tow, Sigrid jogs to the end of the building and turns the corner on her right, leading to the truck bays and dumpsters where the alley lights are switched off.
The passage smells of stale cigarettes, wet cardboard, and burnt clutch. Ahead, partly hidden from view, Sigrid sees Juliet McKenna standing in the same short purple skirt she wore earlier. She is leaning against the wall at the far end and in the shadows—a place most women would avoid yet she commands. As Sigrid approaches her it is clear she followed through with the arrangement; she’s holding a new black leather jacket with a price tag hanging from the inside lining, and a square box containing a motorcycle helmet marked down to a very reasonable $59.96 plus tax.
“You owe me two hundred dollars,” Juliet now tells her. “Sixty for the helmet, plus tax, one hundred and twenty for the jacket, plus tax, and two hundred for doing your shopping in the middle of my shift. That’s what’s called the opportunity cost tax. That’s on top of the two hundred you gave me last time.”
“That’s a hundred and eighty I owe you.”
“Fuck you.”
“Here’s the two hundred,” Sigrid says, removing two crisp bills from her wallet. “I wasn’t sure you’d come.”
“It’s called ‘work for money,’ honey. It’s all the rage these days.”
“Still.”
“You want to tell me why I’m doing this?” Juliet asks.
“No,” says Sigrid.
“I don’t want to get in trouble.”
Sigrid is pressed for time and her internal clock is spinning, but even so, she’s certain that her confusion is legitimate. “You spend your time working as a prostitute but in the last twenty minutes all you’ve done is buy two items at a department store. What are you going to get in trouble for?”
“But I don’t know why, do I? I don’t know what you need them for. I don’t know where you’re going. I don’t know what your plan is, do I? And where’s the bike? Who the fuck needs a helmet without a motorcycle? I don’t see Evel Knievel waitin’ here in his jumpsuit to give you a ride.”
“Thanks for your help.”
“Where are you going next?”
“You can keep the change.”
“I want to know what your plan is.”
“OK.”
“I’m not your bitch.”
“Thanks again.”
Sigrid pulls the tag from the rocker-styled leather jacket and slips it on. It fits surprisingly well. She zips it up to where the collar flares before tearing open the square box, removing the helmet, and tossing the packaging into a dumpster.
The new items look regrettably unused and Sigrid is not unaware of this, but they will have to do; men in bars are not terribly good critical thinkers anyway.
With the sling bag taut to her shoulder, she glances back a final time to make sure Melinda hasn’t caught up to her before making her way into the open parking lot and toward the biker bar across the street fronted by a row of Harley-Davidsons.
“I hope you’re not going into that bar!” Juliet yells after her. “Those are One Percenters. You’re just fresh meat to those motherfuckers!” but Sigrid is out of earshot and en route to the Inferno.
“Dumb-ass foreign bitch,” Juliet mutters.
When Sigrid was three months into her first stint as a detective, she was asked if she wanted to get her hands dirty with some “real police work.” Hans Andersen was her captain and it was a rhetorical question, because her hunger was palpable.
Hans’s office smelled like black currant syrup. Most people drank coffee or tea, but Hans had a sweet tooth and hated caffeine. Oslo’s winters were no warmer for him, though, so he’d defrost by pouring boiling water into the saft and then pouring that into himself; the scent was in everything.
He called Sigrid in and explained the proposition.
“I’ve got two cases here. You get to choose. Both are undercover. The first is a Swedish motorcycle gang running cigarettes from Poland into Norway by land. There’s some reason to think they might also be filling up the empty trucks over here with stolen goods, including bicycles, motorcycles, and baby strollers and bringing them back to Poland.”
“Baby strollers?”
“Three hundred and forty-six baby strollers have been stolen across Oslo in the last ten months.”
“That’s despicable,” Sigrid said.
“So I’m thinking you want this one.”
“What’s the other choice?”
“Lithuanian diaper smugglers.”
“Again?”
“Lithuanian diaper smugglers.”
“I’m ready.”
“Apparently . . . and this is from a commissioned research study by the Norwegian Institute for International Affairs, or NUPI . . . diapers are much cheaper here than in Lithuania. I do wonder why we needed to commission a study for this rather than just call one of their supermarkets and ask . . .” Hans faded out for a moment. He often did that, hoping the insight would fade and leave his career unspoiled. When he returned he said, “And so the Lithuanians are buying our diapers cheap and smuggling them into Lithuania, where they sell them for a mark-up, which is still at below-market prices and they’re not paying the import duties.”
“It isn’t illegal to buy diapers in Norway. Why is this our problem?”
“It isn’t, but the Foreign Ministry has received a request for assistance from Vilnius and we’re meant to assist in an international sting operation because tax evasion hurts us all and usually we’re the ones with the higher taxes.”
“Lithuanian diaper smugglers,” Sigrid says.
“Sorry?”
“I wanted to say it once myself.”
“So . . . you prefer the bikers?”
“Yes, sir.”
Her assignment had been to pose as a corrupt customs official expecting a kickback from the bikers. In order to gain their trust she needed to talk about motorcycles with them at bars.
Sigrid had known nothing about motorcycles generally, and less than nothing about Harley-Davidsons specifically aside from their popularity with miscreant subcultures. In preparation for the assignment she was made to memorize their eclectic names (Glides, Softails, Sportsters), their shapes and engine displacements, years of manufacture, and distinctive repair issues. It nearly bored her to tears. But by the end she could talk a good game.
Her most unexpected observation in studying for her outlaw motorcycle gang exam was how all the cl
ubs adopted American tropes about freedom, individuality, and rebellion and then demanded complete conformity to them. It was her first glimpse into the complex system that organized American culture—even when it was being exported to Scandinavia.
The cigarette runners in question were part of an antiquated club that had survived the Great Nordic Biker War of the mid-1990s, which left a dozen or so dead, about a hundred wounded, and a whole bunch charged with attempted murder across Norway, Sweden, and Denmark. Her undercover work was part of a cross-border task force that wasn’t nearly as intense or risky as it had been for the senior officers, years ago, who’d infiltrated the ranks and helped set up new intelligence networks. But it was risky enough, especially for a first foray into undercover work.
Sigrid wraps her fingers around the skull-shaped door handle that will open the Gates of Hell to the Inferno. She does not hesitate so much as pause. Draped in leather and surrounded by beards and chrome, she feels as though she’s stepping backwards half a decade into that shithole in Västerås, Sweden, northwest of Stockholm, where she was to meet a Norwegian contact. The main difference here is that everyone is speaking English.
“Oh, Marcus,” she says to the skull.
She pulls. The handle not only opens the door but pulls with it a cloud of gray tobacco smoke that rises as it hits the outside air and stings her eyes. The orifice to the Inferno looks less like an entrance than something you’d throw a virgin into to appease an angry god, but Sigrid presses through the sulfur and brimstone—helmet dangling from one arm—as some kind of death metal pounds a dark rhythm around her legs, threatening to pull her into shadow. The door closes behind her, leaving her inside a bar that smells of grease and unwashed, bearded men. Behind the bar, in a frame, is a black piece of cloth with a patch on it that says THE 1%.
Sigrid recalls that expression from reading the Norwegian newspaper. There it referenced the world’s richest people. Here it seems to mean something else.
The clubhouse is busy but not crammed. Everyone is dressed in a version of the same uniform, carefully calibrated to blend in rather than stand out. Confederate flags are more popular here than Sigrid might have expected this far north in the United States, but culture isn’t bound by location. A quarter of the bikers are women and none of them is young. With her own tired countenance, dirty hair, and glazed eyes Sigrid feels well-camouflaged aside from not showing as much cleavage as seems to be the norm, and weighing significantly less than most of the women. She leaves the jacket on so she doesn’t upstage the competition.
There is an empty barstool beside a woman wearing black chaps over jeans and a black tank-top—the ribbed neck cut off to show the tops of her breasts—that reads CHOPPER. Sigrid sits in it and turns to her:
“I need a ride,” she says.
The woman pulls from her beer, her eyes dulled by the future she can easily imagine. She glances at Sigrid, sees nothing interesting, and turns back to the television above the bar showing a sporting event.
“I don’t do women.”
“Someone stole my bike and I think a cop is following me,” Sigrid says. “I’ve got to disappear. I need a ride.”
“I don’t know you. What kind of accent is that?”
The wrinkles around CHOPPER’s eyes become mascara-black as she squints at Sigrid. There is a beer sud parked on her upper lip.
“Sweden,” Sigrid lies. “I’ll ask someone else.” Sigrid places her palms on the counter and has begun to shift her weight when the woman says, “Aryan, huh?”
Sigrid sits back down on the barstool.
“What’s in it for the rider?” CHOPPER asks her. “I might know a guy.”
“Money and gratitude.”
The woman makes a practiced and unflattering noise.
“I’m going south of Malone,” Sigrid says. “The cops are in the parking lot. I need to slip out now.”
“You might as well stay. This is the last place they’re going to look,” she says, ordering another beer and a shot.
“They know I’m around here someplace. Aside from Target it’s the most obvious place to look.”
“I didn’t say they don’t know where you are. I said it’s the last place they’re gonna come inside to look.”
A Depressing Spot
Sheriff Irving Wylie sits alone in his 1989 Jeep Wagoneer in the parking lot of Target, sipping from a safety mug filled with coffee and listening to a bluegrass band on NPR. He stares out the windshield into the darkness as the folks at Target start to close the shop up for the night.
Melinda opens the passenger-side door and slips into the beige leather seat beside him.
“Spot her?” Melinda asks, scanning the parking lot.
“Walked right out the front door,” says Irv, gesturing. “Jogged along there, and turned into that dark spot at the corner.”
“Cory pick her up on the back side?”
“She was in the alley for a bit and then he watched her cross the two hundred yards from the ally to the Inferno,” Irv says, turning down the music. “Cory says she’s in there right now.”
“Maybe we should call the coroner now, save some time,” says Melinda.
“I’m not so sure. Cory got a good view of her from his position and says she emerged wearing a black leather jacket and carrying a motorcycle helmet; two things she did not have when she slipped the surly bonds of the parking lot. A minute later, Juliet McKenna walks out of the same alley—here on my side—leans her boobs into a Honda Accord, and drives off with the guy.”
“Huh,” says Melinda.
“That’s what I said.”
“How does Sigrid know Juliet?”
“They met at Marcus’s place before she came over to us asking for help.”
“Hard to see them as friends. Not exactly the same type,” Melinda says.
“Hardly,” says Irv. “What we’re learning about Chief Sigrid is that she plans ahead and plays everything close to the vest. When you called back Professor Williamson while Sigrid was sleeping . . . what did he say again?”
“Said they were talking about the Adirondacks and how much Marcus liked it out there.”
“And he specifically directed her to Saranac Lake?”
“Yeah. She’s definitely going to the ’Dacks, Sheriff. Can’t quite figure out how, though. She still in the bar, you said?”
“Yes. You can see the entrance with the binoculars.” Irv glances at Melinda and smiles. “You were supposed to let her get away, but you’re telling me she actually skipped you?”
“Went into the bathroom and disappeared like a ghost.”
“Which one?”
“By the bras and stuff.”
“You didn’t go in with her?”
“Waited at the end of the hall.”
Irv chuckles at her. “That old chestnut. You figure it out yet?”
“No.”
“Keep trying. Oh, look, there she is,” Irv says, jutting his chin toward the window and raising the binoculars. “Climbing onto that Roadking. You see her?”
“How can you tell it’s her?” Melinda asks, watching a woman in a black leather jacket and helmet settle into the pillion seat on the Harley.
“Three reasons. She walked out the door with the helmet on. No one does that. Next, none of these bikers use a full-face helmet. They all ride in shorties and open-face gear. She’s trying to cover her face and probably protect her head, too. And lastly . . . just look at her. That jacket and helmet are sparkling, they’re so new.”
“That’s some real Sherlock stuff, Sheriff.”
“The truth is, Melinda, she’s got a nice and upscale wiggle to her tush that has never been seen walking into or out of that place before. Don’t give me a look. It’s nothing the pope wouldn’t’a noticed.”
“Wouldn’t’a mentioned it, though.”
“That’s probably true,” Irv admits.
The biker who owns the Harley is talking with a fat man in a brown leather vest and fingerless gloves. S
igrid is sitting with her feet on the foot pegs, waiting for movement. It is probably her imagination, but Melinda can almost feel Sigrid’s anxiety about wanting to get on the road.
“Being so smart and everything,” Melinda says, “I’m surprised she didn’t see this coming. Us setting her up like this and everything.”
“Her mistake was underestimating us,” Irv says.
“Why do you think that happened?”
“It’s the cowboy boots, Melinda. No one has ever overestimated the intellect of a man in cowboy boots. That’s why I wear them. I always liked that Everyman edge Columbo had. You remember Columbo?”
“No.”
“Doesn’t matter. All right, they’re about to head off. Get out of here. I’ll see you after I catch up to her.”
Melinda opens the heavy door of the Wagoneer and slides to the asphalt. Before closing the door, she says, “She knows about Jeffrey Simmons. She’s been asking about him.”
“It was bound to come up. It doesn’t affect anything. We need to find Marcus. So does she.”
“You really think her brother did it? That apple would’ve had to have fallen pretty far from the family tree if she’s any indication. Given her upscale tush and all.”
“Marcus and Lydia were lovers during an emotional time. Anything could have happened. That’s the whole point of the investigation, Melinda. Now go home to bed. You did good tonight. Aside from . . . you know . . . losing her and everything.”
“Drive safe, Sheriff.”
She slams the door and walks back to her patrol car under the towering lamps of the parking lot.
Irv fastens his seatbelt and starts up the car, leaving the lights off. The rider is a mountain of a man in short sleeves wearing a Kaiser helmet with a spike on top. He pulls out of the parking lot, the Harley’s flatulent pipes filling the night with hostility.
“Damn bikers,” Irv says to himself.
He puts some field glasses to his eyes to get a better look at the make and model in case he has any trouble tailing them. It’s a custom job with leather panniers on the back and a sissy bar and Sigrid.
Irv puts the Wagoneer into gear, checks that he has a full tank, and urges its V8 after the Harley while keeping at a respectful distance. On his way out of the lot and onto the dark road, he turns up the radio. Gillian Welch and David Rawlings are playing “Revelator.” Their harmony is almost unnerving. It occurs to him that if he’d found even a measure of that with his ex-wife they’d still be married.
American by Day Page 11