by Olivier Truc
Racagnal had cast an eye around the room. Ten or so customers were seated at tables, mostly drinking coffee. Three workers in fluorescent overalls were finishing their day with a beer at the bar. The schoolgirls were laughing out loud. The one with the bangs had taken out an exercise book. Several of them were doing their homework. Too risky here, he thought. Racagnal concentrated on his glass, his prospecting mission. It didn’t help. The girl’s childlike face rose before him. The little soft-skinned minx. Racagnal closed his eyes. Thought about his last trip to the Congo. Tried to stay calm. The Congo. The little girls in Kivu. There for the asking. Not even that—people had brought them to him. Things were more complicated here.
The trip to Alta was two days ago now. The police had left him in peace afterward. He had been able to focus on getting ready for the mission. He was staying at the Villmarkssenter, for years Kautokeino’s only hotel. It was plain and simple, with a well-meaning host whose Danish wife liked to play the haughty chatelaine, but who drank and smoked, though only outside on the terrace so as not to shock the guests. He had stayed there a long time ago, too.
Three more hotels had sprung up since the little airfield had been built, not long ago. The town’s sudden expansion was fueled by the mining companies’ growing interest in the region. Around Kautokeino and the interior of the Finnmark, mining companies were allowed to prospect only in the summer months—in theory—when the reindeer were hundreds of miles to the north, dispersed in their summer pastures along the coast. In winter, after the autumn migration, the reindeer were concentrated once again in the region between Kautokeino and Karasjok, feeding on lichen. The Sami did not allow any activity likely to disturb the animals or cause them to move into a neighboring herder’s territory. Rare exceptions were granted for nonintrusive prospecting, or activity that was limited to a very small area.
Racagnal had completed an application form, stating that he was carrying out a reconnaissance mission, mostly on foot, and very occasionally aboard a snowmobile within a clearly defined perimeter, sticking to a marked trail. Things had been simpler in Kivu on that score, too. But Racagnal knew that if you wanted to work here, you had to follow the rules. Within reason, of course.
* * *
Klemet returned to his seat while Nina took the call. He settled himself in front of his laptop and continued reading the reports of reindeer thefts. But the sight of Nina’s lips talking into her phone, the pretty outline of her sweater, set him thinking again.
Even now, after twenty-five years, he felt the same bitter regrets. So many wasted opportunities. And yet, as a young man, Klemet had been to the same parties as all the others, held in the same barns, or the same forest clearings. How many times had he hung around outside, or at the end of forest tracks, leaning nervously against his red, open-top Volvo P1800? He had installed a cassette deck on the dashboard. Roy Orbison’s “Pretty Woman.” But the girls never said yes—not to the quiet boy the others called Chubby, no matter how hard he tried to impress. Trouble was, if he stayed in the driver’s seat, the near-side window didn’t wind down completely, and he had to rest his elbow on top of it at an awkward angle, undermining any attempt to look cool and relaxed.
He had dreamed of owning a garage. He loved cars and engines. The purr of a finely tuned motor was a thing of wonder, approaching even the hypnotic beauty of one of Uncle Nils Ante’s joïks. On Midsummer Eve, the decorated poles were set up and he would watch, elbow in the air, from behind the wheel of his P1800. But girls like Nina were never for him. Klemet didn’t drink. He would lean against the hood of his Volvo, while the others enjoyed themselves. But he didn’t mind. At the end of the evening, the girls were happy to see him, when their beaux were dead drunk. Chubby was their reliable friend, a boy you could count on, the only one who stayed sober. Sometimes he would steal a kiss, never going too far; the girls knew he wouldn’t, or that if they objected he would know enough to stop. He was a reassuring presence. And even if he felt frustrated, he was content with his lot. The stolen kisses excited him for days afterward. When he joined the police, he had become more confident with women. It felt like confidence to him, at any rate. To others, his swaggering behavior masked the awkwardness beneath.
Klemet remembered the day he had returned to Kautokeino after years away, sporting a police uniform. Remembered it like yesterday. He was still solidly built, but now he was fit, in good shape. People had looked at him differently, to his great satisfaction. The local women had given him more than kisses on the corner of the mouth, especially when he was out on patrol for days at a time, touring the farmsteads. No one dared call him Chubby. No one. Until Brattsen had showed up, and some kindly soul had told him about Klemet’s moniker from years gone by. No one but Brattsen ever dared use the nickname, but he caught people exchanging glances, sometimes, when Brattsen was winding him up. That hurt.
Nina ended her call, after talking in French for some time. Klemet’s reverie was interrupted.
“That was Paul. The Sami man who gave his father the drum worked as a guide for Paul-Émile Victor’s expedition. Paul saw the drum very often in his father’s study. He remembers there was a cross in the middle, and a straight line separating it into two sections. He doesn’t remember the other symbols, apart from the reindeer.”
“Nothing exceptional then.” Klemet sighed. “Most Sami drums have a cross in the middle. Usually, it symbolizes the sun. The reindeer are very common, too. And the dividing line. It separates the world of the living from the world of the dead. I think it does, anyway. That’s what Uncle Nils Ante always said, if I remember rightly. We won’t get far on that description.”
He ran his hand over the top of his head. A case like this was rare in the Reindeer Police. The theft of a priceless Sami drum, a murder, and practically no leads beyond the usual quarrels between the breeders. But there was always tension between breeders. Who stood to gain by Mattis’s death? He couldn’t say. His animals would be slaughtered by the Reindeer Administration, and they had been in poor shape, anyway. Who would take over his district? Could that provide a lead? He would check with the Administration. But he didn’t hold out much hope. The parceling out of territories was tightly controlled, too. There were strict administrative procedures to be followed.
“Paul says his father has kept a set of old papers from the expedition, in a trunk.”
Klemet thought further. Suddenly, he reached for his phone and called the Sheriff. Tor Jensen answered almost immediately. It was late.
“Tor, you need to send Nina to France to make inquiries. We won’t make any headway otherwise.”
Nina stared at her partner, wide-eyed. He hadn’t even bothered to ask her opinion. She couldn’t hear the Sheriff’s response, but this wouldn’t be an easy decision for a small station like theirs. Klemet ended the call, leaving her no time to object.
“The Sheriff’s OK with that. Apparently, Oslo is giving him such a hard time, he thinks he’ll have no trouble asking for an extended budget. Seems like a good idea to me. What do you think?”
“You might have asked me first.”
“Why, do you have a better plan? You need to go and take a look at those papers. We have nothing at all to go on at the moment. And tempers are rising. The Sheriff said there was a Progress Party demo in Alta on Tuesday. A demo against the Sami demo in Kautokeino.”
“You don’t have to treat me like a kid!” Nina was angry now.
Klemet fell silent. He felt a bizarre sense of gratification at the thought that Nina was taking a hit for all the times he had sat waiting at the end of the party, waiting while girls like her kissed all the other guys. It didn’t cross his mind that she hadn’t even been born at the time.
“Unless you’ve got a better idea.” But he looked obstinate.
“Your idea’s fine. But everyone treats me as if I’m invisible, somehow. You and your reindeer-breeder friends.”
“They’re not my friends.”
“Oh really? You seem to be on the same wa
velength, at any rate. Just tell me if you want me to make the coffee next time we interview a suspect. They have a special course for apprentice girl investigators at the police college, didn’t you know? It’s called ‘How to help your male colleagues solve cases that are too difficult for you to solve all by yourself.’ They teach us how to make nice coffee, and smile, and play the innocent in interviews so our colleagues’ questions look really clever. Get it?”
Klemet’s stubborn expression remained. He wanted to respond, but didn’t know how. And what was more annoying still, he would think of a rejoinder just at the wrong time, and far too late. Nina was an annoying kid, really. He was thirty years her senior. He’d done his time in all the stations in the region, not to mention Stockholm, and here she was, putting him in his place. Plus all that talk of coffee was making him thirsty. Wretched kid, he thought again.
He got to his feet. Nina’s fit of temper had subsided. He noted with satisfaction that she was not opposed to his Paris idea. He offered to make her a coffee. She accepted. Case closed.
Nina spoke next. “Do you think the Sami nationalists could have stolen it?”
“Them, or the Progress Party. Everyone has an ax to grind when things flare up around here. You’ve got the local and national elections in less than a year, too.”
“What about Mattis and the reindeer thefts?”
“The most serious case he was involved in was ten years ago. Around the same time Johann Henrik was shot at. We had a succession of really hard winters, after really bad autumn weather, a bit like this year. Snowfall, and a melt, then another hard frost on top of that, so that you get a layer of ice. And then another melt, and so on, two or three times over, which is enough to build up the ice, so the reindeer can’t break through to the ground lichen. That throws everything off kilter. People get nervous. The reindeer can starve by the hundred, by the thousand. Ten years ago, one family in a very exposed district lost thousands of head of reindeer that way. They made up for it in part by rustling hundreds of reindeer from their neighbors’ herds. Mattis was involved. He wasn’t the ringleader, but he was accused of complicity in the crime. Spent a few months behind bars for his trouble.”
“But how could they steal the animals, if their ears were marked?”
“They recut the ears.”
“Recut?”
“Yes. They cut away the marked part of the ear, then incised what was left with their own mark.”
“Good grief.”
“Result—hundreds of reindeer with tiny ears. Some had been cut back so far they got infected. All the reindeer identified that way had to be slaughtered. Since then, even the size of the ears is strictly controlled. They can’t be too small.”
Nina was astounded. She found it hard to believe that any Sami would be prepared to go that far. Like most Nordic people, she knew nothing about their way of life. She had accepted the stereotypes without question, which came to the same thing.
“What about the other cases Mattis was involved in?”
“Bits and pieces. I’ve been wasting my time, I think. Mattis was a pitiful character. And I think most people around here saw him that way. A poor guy, down on his luck. Not a serious threat.”
“And people slice the ears off poor, unthreatening guys like him, here in lovely Lapland?”
Klemet said nothing. She was right. Something didn’t fit. People didn’t kill over a few stolen reindeer, either, especially not a small-time rustler like Mattis. There were worse culprits.
“Did Mattis live alone?”
“As far as I know. Aslak may know more about that. I don’t think he was ‘in a relationship.’ You saw his trailer. A professional bachelor pad.”
“But wives don’t live in the trailers, do they?”
“No. That’s not what I meant. The wilderness shelters are men’s territory. If a woman does go there, she probably isn’t the breeder’s wife, if you see what I mean. But the breeders mostly try to keep some semblance of order. Mattis had given up on that, too.”
“He made me feel very uncomfortable when I met him. He kept looking at my chest.”
Klemet fixed her firmly in the eye. An effort. “Really? Did he?”
“And he kept leering at me.”
Klemet took a sudden interest in the tips of his fingers. “Hmm. You shouldn’t let that bother you,” he said at last. “A man alone out on the tundra is bound to get excited at the sight of a pretty girl like you. It’s only normal.”
“No. It isn’t normal at all.”
Now Nina was the one with the stubborn expression. Klemet saw there was no point in insisting. And he had no idea where to look now. Fortunately for him, Nina picked up the thread of the discussion.
“So he had no family?”
“His mother died a long time ago. His father died more recently. If he had any brothers or sisters, they don’t live locally.”
“A very lonely man, in other words. A lonely, pathetic, penniless drunk, who had his ears sliced off for no apparent reason before being stabbed to death. All barely twenty-four hours after the theft of the drum. Notice anything strange?”
“Of course it’s strange!” Klemet felt angry and helpless. For the moment, they hadn’t a single clue: no murder weapon, no useful fingerprints, no motive.
“And the drum?”
“What about the drum?”
“I don’t know. I’ve been trying to find a possible connection. Johann Henrik said Mattis was obsessed with drums.”
“True. I’ve been turning that over in my mind, too. But what connection? We don’t know anything about the drum yet. It was just an old drum. It was––”
He snapped his laptop shut and placed his hands on the lid. Nina waited for him to say something. He knew her intuition was right—there had to be a connection. He just didn’t want things to become even more complicated than they already were. He had joined the Reindeer Police for an easy life, after all. He had come back to Kautokeino because he’d had his fill of bad business. Investigations in tiny villages on the coast, ravaged by alcohol, prostitution, and trafficking. He’d had his fill of all that. Unaccompanied Saturday-night patrols, because budgets were tight. The feeling of dread every time you stepped outside the station. It had all contributed to a full-blown depression, a few years on medication. And he knew plenty of colleagues who had gone to the wall that way. How could Nina understand? He had no desire to talk about it. He had lost his nerve, spent months on sick leave. That was all there was to it. So yes, the Reindeer Police had meant peace and quiet, the open air, no bad business. None at all.
Klemet sighed heavily. He was about to say something, then didn’t. But he couldn’t afford to play the prima donna. The new directives from head office explicitly favored the promotion of women officers—there were quotas to fill, and targets to meet: 40 percent of the top jobs to be occupied by women. Given the almost complete absence of women cops in the Far North, Nina was all set for the fast track, if she didn’t make any mistakes.
“You may be right,” he said at last.
13
Friday, January 14
Sunrise: 10:31 a.m.; sunset: 12:26 p.m.
1 hour 55 minutes of sunlight
7:30 a.m., Central Sápmi
Reindeer Police Hut
Klemet woke early the following morning. Outside, all was darkness. The gusting wind buffeted the window, piling snow crystals against the pane. The stove had gone out. He shivered. His legs felt stiff and slightly numb in the warmth of his sleeping bag, but he didn’t stay lying down for long. He wriggled out of his bag, pulled on his reindeer-skin shoes, and stretched. Nina was still asleep on the opposite bunk, on the other side of the table. The first woman officer in the Reindeer Police. The brigade’s shelters weren’t designed to accommodate men and women together, but Nina hadn’t seemed to mind the lack of privacy when they turned in the night before. Just as well. Klemet wouldn’t have put up with any fussiness.
He stoked the stove with more wood and lit the
fire. The noise woke Nina up. She greeted her colleague, dressed quickly while Klemet made coffee in the kitchen, then stepped outside. Five minutes later she returned, freshly scrubbed with snow.
“It’s quite nice when you get used to it,” she said, her cheeks glowing red.
Klemet put the coffee and breakfast on the table. He had folded away his sleeping bag while she was outside.
“You can finish your wash and brush-up here, if you like,” he said, pointing to the pan of hot water on the stove. “I’ll be back in five minutes.”
He stood for a moment on the small porch at the front of the hut, facing into the icy wind, staring out into the darkness, as if searching for something. He unfastened his snowsuit and pulled his arms out from the sleeves. He made himself do this at the start of every new day, while darkness reigned over the tundra. He didn’t enjoy it, but he stuck to the ritual. He felt the cold grip his body, then took a deep breath and stepped out into the dark. He clapped his hands on his shoulders, then scooped the snow and scrubbed his face, torso, underarms, and neck, dried himself with a towel, and went back inside.
They sat and ate in silence.
“When will we go and see Aslak?” asked Nina.
“Soon.” Klemet chewed his bread, spread with creamed cod-roe paste. “Aslak’s one of a kind,” he said without looking at her. “He’s well respected in the region. Feared, too. But people fear him because he’s different. He hasn’t gone the way of everyone else—bought a house, a fleet of snowmobiles, four-by-four cars. He doesn’t work with helicopters. Some of them even hire Thai herders to watch the reindeer. None of that for Aslak. He’s—well, he keeps to the old ways.”