While my fellow passengers slept, I batted around fantasies of tripping him up and getting him to admit to having the missing skins, then waving Interpol agents in from the woods.
There was another image in my folder: an ultrasound. Only days before my flight departed, we’d learned that Marie-Josée was pregnant.
* * *
–
Somewhere over Greenland, my seatmate, an American woman in her forties with a hot pink pillow sausaged around her neck, turned to me with an eager smile and asked, “Do you live in Sweden?”
“No.” I stared at the in-flight map tracing a red line between Los Angeles and Oslo, searching for an appropriate response. “I live in L.A.”
She nodded her head and said, “I am so excited!”
* * *
–
The Norwegian countryside looked familiar to my midwestern eyes—barns painted tomato red, hay baled tidily before winter, Christmas-green forests of spruce spotted with faded-gold clusters of birch. I had pressured Long into letting me interview him at his home in the small village of Asker, some thirty minutes by train southwest of the capital down the Oslofjord. I didn’t want to confront him in a crowded café, and I had the outlandish hope that he might leave an incriminating piece of evidence in plain sight—a wing poking out from a box in the closet, or an iridescent glimmer under the couch.
It was late morning when the conductor announced our arrival at Bondivann, a secluded station tucked between a sliver of forest and a teardrop-shaped lake.
My phone buzzed with a text from my brother: “You’re in Jo Nesbø country . . . watch out!”
Long Nguyen greeted me with a broad, toothy smile and twinkling eyes. He had a bowl cut of tousled jet-black hair. Edwin had told me that Long, like all Norwegians, was “basically a millionaire” as a result of the country’s oil wealth, but as I shook his hand, I saw a modestly dressed student: Chuck Taylors, tattered jeans, a flannel shirt, and a thin winter coat. He was in his last year of graduate studies in landscape architecture, but apart from that, I knew very little about him.
As he led me through a forest path toward his home, we made nervous small talk about the weather, my hotel, and how expensive things were in Norway. I thought of my brother’s text and half expected Edwin to jump out from behind the pines. At last we emerged into a complex of four-story apartment buildings that looked like they had been built in the sixties. Thick paint the color of sockeye salmon coated the balconies.
As he fidgeted with his keys at the front door, I could hear a bird chirping with joy at the sound of his master’s return. His back turned to me, I dropped a pin on Google maps on my phone and sent it off to Marie-Josée, just in case.
I scanned the dimly lit apartment he shared with one of his sisters. Various unframed paintings and charcoal sketches of birds adorned the walls; vases and jars filled with peacock feathers were wedged into bookshelves; and neon-colored fish flitted about in a hundred-gallon aquarium.
Before my eyes could fully adjust, a bright flash of emerald exploded from another room and headed right at my face. A Green-Cheeked Conure flapped like a heat-seeking missile onto my shoulder, where it began shrieking in my ear.
“Meet Rin,” Long said with a laugh, as he went off to the kitchen to prepare tea.
As I stroked the parrot’s cheeks, it closed its eyes like a kitten and nuzzled against my finger. Rin and I wandered over to the bookshelf, where I found piles of manga on the lower shelves, beneath a carefully arranged collection of early-edition classics of the fly-tying genre. On top was a small bamboo picture frame with a photo of Long and Edwin in Japan.
I turned a corner and found myself directly in front of the painting of exotic birds I’d seen on his Facebook page, which had led me to link his identity to Goku’s. He’d said online that it had been a gift for Edwin, but he’d obviously changed his mind since then.
“I guess you’ll want to see my fly-tying desk,” a voice said from behind me.
My heart accelerated as I entered his bedroom, which wasn’t much larger than a closet. His bed was a narrow twin mattress without a frame. The rest of the cramped room was dominated by a large desk at which he tied his flies. I’d seen a number of workstations before, but never one this messy.
“How do you find what you need?” I asked.
“Every fly just takes twice as long,” he replied slowly, and I realized he was watching me scan his room. I suddenly felt like an intruder. I’d traveled thousands of miles after convincing this person, who was wary of me for obvious reasons, not only to let me into his inner sanctum but to allow recording equipment so that I could capture every uncomfortable moment of the conversation.
We decided to talk in the kitchen, where Rin’s refrigerator-size cage claimed a third of the room. With his bird on my shoulder, I found a seat at the table, which was cluttered with business cards of various fly-tiers and coils of silkworm gut. Another fish tank sat on the countertop, only this one was dank and nearly empty of water, sporous growth streaking up its sides like smoke. If Long was a millionaire, he certainly hadn’t let it affect his lifestyle.
Long poured some tea, set out a loaf of bread, some butter, and slices of brown caramel-flavored Norwegian cheese, and began to unfurl the story of his life.
* * *
–
He was the same age as Edwin, born in 1988 in Trondheim, the old Viking capital of Norway. His parents had fled Vietnam during the Boat People Crisis of the mid-1970s, reaching Norway after a protracted spell in Malaysia. Long was the third of four children. His dad worked long hours in restaurants and liked to fish for salmon in his downtime—his tackle box was filled with brightly colored lures.
Long began drawing birds when he was three. He was interested in little else, sketching what winged overhead and copying what he found in books. When he was six, his mom died of lung cancer. As the family gathered around her bedside in the final moments, Long didn’t understand what was happening. His father, nearly destroyed by the loss, withdrew into himself, spending less and less time with his children and succumbing to a gambling addiction. Social workers were soon dropping by the house to check on the children, taking them to doctors’ appointments and school functions.
When he was ten, Long and his brother were sent to live in what he called “the institution,” a home for boys in troubled circumstances. He still attended the same school, but because he never felt comfortable inviting classmates over, he didn’t develop deep friendships.
In his solitude, he began to tie flies, trying to replicate what he could remember of his dad’s tackle box. He found a magazine on salmon flies and immersed himself, tying as soon as he got back from school, sometimes missing dinner, huddled over the vise until it was time to sleep, tuning out the rest of the world. Sometimes a single fly would take months to finish: he’d get a third of the way through and realize the pattern required a feather he didn’t have or couldn’t afford. He took an after-school job in a local pet shop and began to save up so that he could buy the materials he needed.
One of his teachers, a kind woman named Greta, recognized that the precocious boy needed attention and affirmation. When she learned of his fly-tying talent, she and her husband, who had become like parents to Long and his siblings, took him on a special trip to Denmark, where he met Jens Pilgaard at his Fugl & Fjer Fluebinding feather shop. For the first time, Long saw full skins of Indian Crow, Blue Chatterer, and other exotic birds. Jens, who ensured that all his materials were legally sourced with CITES permits, took him under his wing, tutoring him in fly-tying techniques and gifting the occasional feather. Over the years, they grew close.
By his late teens, he was already one of Norway’s finest fly-tiers. He joined the ClassicFlyTying.com forum and collected admirers and friends throughout the globe. Adults asked him for tips on certain techniques and complimented the pictures of flies and paintings of birds he occasio
nally shared online.
But nothing made him as proud as when he caught the eye of the great Edwin Rist. Long had read about the American tier in magazines, marveled at his flies, and couldn’t believe that he was now trading messages with the “future of fly-tying” himself.
* * *
–
I tried to summon a hard edge, hoping not to be swayed by the obviously earnest and fractured soul pouring me tea in his modest kitchen, but Long was clearly not the person I’d imagined.
“What birds did he send you?” I blurted out.
“I had a couple skins he sent me,” he replied calmly. “I wanted to trade that painting, actually . . .” He trailed off.
“The skins of what?”
“He sent me some Cotinga, and I think he sent me one golden . . . what’s it called?” He searched for the word in English. “The Flame Bowerbird.”
“He didn’t want me to know about the truth behind the birds, that they were stolen,” he continued, as I rooted through my backpack for the folder of evidence.
“How many birds did he send in total?”
“I really can’t remember, but I think it was like three, maybe four.”
The story hewed suspiciously close to what Edwin had told me. It wouldn’t have been difficult for them to coordinate their story—but then again, they might have overlapped because they were both telling the truth.
I pulled out all the screenshots I’d taken of Goku’s activity and began to read the exact date and time of each post: “Flame Bowerbird, male, full skin,” “Indian Crow cape for sale,” “Purple-Breasted Cotinga skin for sale.” Long interjected to say that he’d never physically held those items—that he’d only been creating the posts on Edwin’s behalf, but I reminded him that Edwin already had an eBay account, a website, and knew how to make posts on the forum.
“Why on earth would he need your help?” I asked.
“It doesn’t make sense, I think,” he said in a chastened tone.
I battered him with questions about each sale, asking who bought what, but Long said he couldn’t remember anything, including whether it had been he or Edwin who received the money.
“You would remember, though, wouldn’t you?! I’m not trying to be an asshole, but you would remember. These things were thousands of dollars! Don’t you think you would remember?”
Rin, still perched on my shoulder, was getting agitated.
“I don’t think I sold things for thousands of dollars,” he said. “What I remember most is selling small amounts, like packages of feathers.”
“Did he send you those to then mail to buyers?”
“I don’t remember.”
Rin started shrieking so loudly, my ear began to ring. I was getting frustrated. Long’s reputation had been grievously tarnished by his association with Edwin. Jens, his erstwhile mentor, had shared with me the e-mail in which he cut ties with Long, whom he viewed as a son, over his involvement with the stolen birds. He’d been called everything from Edwin’s fence to the mastermind behind the heist. How could he have forgotten the details about the event in his life that had cost him so dearly?
“I spent four years trying to forget all this,” he said, sensing my mood. “You’re trying to bring it all to the surface. It’s really hard, though, because I’m trying for so long to just put this behind me. The details are quite unclear to myself because I’m trying to close this case.”
“Yeah, me too,” I muttered.
* * *
–
“Edwin told me that you were one of the first calls he made after he got arrested.” Searching for a different way in, I asked, “What did he say to you?”
“He told me everything. Then I realized everything I’ve been doing. . . . I thought I was helping a friend! Instead, I was really shooting my own leg. I thought I should be nice to Edwin, being very naïve. But it was like totally backstabbing a friend . . . the worst thing you can do. What he did was horrible.”
Long told me he mailed the few skins he had back to the Tring shortly thereafter. After realizing how his posts might be construed, he panicked and began to erase his digital tracks. “That’s why I deleted all the posts on the forum, because it seems like I’ve been behind the whole scenario,” he said, but now recognized that it only made his involvement more suspicious. He had a forlorn look. “That was totally idiotic.”
Bit by bit, over the subsequent hours of the interview, his memory yielded small confirmations: he remembered receiving money through PayPal, which he would then forward to Edwin. I asked if Edwin paid him for this service, and he admitted that he’d received some feathers as payment. Just as the community of fly-tiers engaged in bidding wars over exotic birds, he too fell under their spell: he wanted Blue Chatterer and Indian Crow feathers so badly that he hadn’t stopped to think clearly about how a student flautist had come to possess so many rare skins.
I read from the transcript of my conversation with Edwin, in which he blamed his arrest on Long, blaming him for talking indiscreetly about the birds he’d received. I hadn’t yet discovered that Edwin was mistaken—that it wasn’t Long who had blown his cover but rather the Dutchman Andy Boekholt, who had shown a suspicious bird to Irish. I glanced up to find a wounded look on Long’s face.
“What should I feel? I didn’t know this until now. He never mentioned that it was because of me that . . .” He trailed off. “I don’t feel bad,” he said, as though he were trying to convince himself. “I feel sorry for him. I don’t support his actions, but I support him as a friend.” He spun in circles, alternating between anger and hurt.
In his wounded state, I brought up the topic of the missing skins once again.
“Many people would probably think that I possessed those skins,” he said quietly.
“Why?”
“Because I was closely related to Edwin. . . . That would be a natural thing to assume.”
“Do you have them?”
“No.”
“How can you prove it?
“I can’t prove it.”
“Then the question becomes, where are they?”
“I don’t know.”
“But how is that possible?” I said in exasperation. “How do you not know?! You and Edwin.”
“I don’t know because only a tiny part was sold through me. . . . The rest, he was selling not through me.”
We sat in silence. The sun had set hours ago, and the groceries he’d purchased—pasta, a bottle of wine, vegetables, and ingredients for a Norwegian brown sauce—were all still in grocery bags. The last train back to Oslo was imminent.
Ten hours after I’d arrived, we shuffled down to the station, my head aching, my voice hoarse, and my stomach racked with hunger. As the train charged noisily into the station, he turned to me with a serious expression and said, “Look, I know the hand I played.” The doors slammed shut before I had a chance to follow up. I had no idea if I’d ever see him again.
On the way back to my hotel in Oslo, I mulled over what he’d said. If this was an admission of guilt, it wasn’t cathartic, either for him or for me. If it was a declaration of innocence, it wasn’t very convincing.
I made quick work of the hotel’s unfortunate minibar—cans of chili nuts, chocolate bars, and vinegar potato chips—chased the ensuing stomachache with Ambien, and went to sleep.
* * *
–
I was roused from my slumber by an early-morning phone call from the front desk informing me that a Mr. Long was waiting for me in the lobby. Bleary-eyed, I descended to find him perched on the arm of a sofa with a concerned look on his face.
As we headed out in search of caffeine, I realized how shaken he had been by the interview. He said he was thinking about giving up fly-tying but was worried that the friends he’d made through the hobby might not like him anymore. He kept asking me questions about how t
o live an ethical life, and whether it was possible to be both environmentally conscientious and a citizen in the modern world. Hadn’t I negated a lifetime’s worth of recycling simply by flying to Oslo? he asked. Hadn’t the animal that yielded the leather in my belt suffered? What about eating meat?
“Long, I’m not sure this is a question of animal welfare. . . . We’re talking about a felony heist of dead birds.”
He nodded gravely.
As we wandered around Oslo, I sensed he felt that now that the interview was behind us, we could just hang out, maybe even strike up a friendship.
Given our discussion of animals and skins, I couldn’t resist ducking into a storefront that had a decadent display of furs. Inside, a large taxidermy polar bear was frozen on its haunches in a menacing posture. A mounted baby seal stretched out on a nearby table. The manager, an elegant woman with ink-black hair, looked at the two of us skeptically: we didn’t appear as though we could afford what she was selling.
In the corner of the shop were eight shelves stacked with polar bear skins, ten in total. The smaller females were $25,000 each; the larger males started at $50,000. I stood in front of the largest skin, the bear’s jaw opened wide, teeth flared. As a rug, it would take up fifteen square feet. When I told the woman that I was an American, she scoffed and said there was no way I could bring a polar bear home now, thanks to Walter Palmer, the American dentist who had paid $54,000 for a guide in Zimbabwe to help him find a lion. When news broke that Cecil the Lion had been lured out of a sanctuary, shot, decapitated, and skinned, Palmer became the most hated dentist in the world. “You’ll never get it through customs,” she said, pronouncing customs with a sneer.
Back on the street, I was annoyed. Between Long’s question about the environmental impact of the flight I’d taken and the discussion of Palmer, there seemed to be endless ways to rationalize bad behavior. Palmer had blamed the guide for luring a protected beast into the sights of his bow. Edwin had said he stole from an institution and not a person, an institution that he had concluded was no longer participating in any meaningful scientific research. Long had said he simply trusted a friend, never questioning how a fellow student suddenly came into possession of such priceless skins; now he was wondering whether meat eaters inflicted greater ecological damage than fly-tiers. If any fly-tiers had doubts about whether the feathers and skins they had were from the Tring, they eased their consciences by deciding that the museum’s tally of missing skins was only a guess and an incorrect one at that.
The Feather Thief Page 21