Forty Days Without Shadow: An Arctic Thriller

by Olivier Truc

  “Here!”

  “Where’s ‘here’?”

  “In the garden!”

  Nina walked around the side of the house, picking her way carefully over the compacted snow and ice, until she saw a light glowing at the bottom of the garden. A light inside what could only be a Sami tent. The canvas flap lifted and Klemet’s silhouette appeared. Nina crossed the garden, then bent down to step inside. Klemet stood back, holding the flap. Nina straightened up and gazed around in amazement.

  Klemet had installed a lavvu—an authentic Sami tent—right there in his garden. In the middle, a blazing fire radiated heat on an open hearth, filling the top half of the tent with smoke. The ground was covered with reindeer skins, apart from the space in front of the entrance, which was carpeted with birch twigs.

  “Sit wherever you like,” Klemet invited her.

  “Where are you going to sit?”

  “On the other side of the fire from you, don’t worry,” he said. He wasn’t smiling.

  “I’m not worried.”

  Nina sat to the left of the fire and looked around once again. All around the circumference of the tent, between the reindeer skins and the canvas, stood a series of long, narrow wooden chests almost a foot wide. Some were covered with richly colored, silky cushions, adding a definite touch of refinement. Opposite the entrance, behind the hearth, stood a polished antique trunk, solid but not bulky, at the foot of a beautiful, elaborately carved cupboard, its corners reinforced with decorative copper fittings. Klemet had used string and strips of wood to hang reproductions of paintings and photographs celebrating the magnificence of the vidda: enchanting, magically lit landscapes, and abstracts in the colors of the earth, forest, and sky. Nina looked at the pictures, fascinated. Half obscured by the smoke, they seemed to hang in space, adding to their mystery.

  Looking higher, she followed the trails of smoke rising to the very top of the tent, which was open to the sky. The upper part of the roof space was hung with dozens of pairs of reindeer antlers, carefully interlocking and suspended thanks to an invisible but obviously ingenious system. Nina was impressed by the harmonious effect of the tightly knit barrage of antlers, glimpsed through the smoke. Like a mysterious filter catching at thoughts and dreams, keeping them inside. Everything had been chosen with taste to create a warm, welcoming atmosphere. Nothing she had seen of Klemet so far suggested this secret refuge. Nina was impressed and intimidated. The intimacy was almost too sudden. She felt the need to talk about something more banal, more practical.

  “I’ve booked my flight to France. I leave on Monday, late morning.”

  “Perfect,” said Klemet simply. He added nothing, conscious of the atmosphere he had created inside the lavvu. Conscious, too, that Nina needed time to get her bearings.

  “What’ll you have to drink?” he asked at length. “There’s some food, too, but no reindeer shanks, I promise.” He looked at her with a half smile.

  “Klemet, this is…extraordinary. This space. I’m really impressed. It’s like being transported to another world. It’s so…harmonious, cozy, magical. Unexpected, too. What an idea, to set up a lavvu in your garden.”

  “With or without alcohol?”

  Nina was still looking around. She had visited twenty or so trailers, huts, and breeders’ tents since her first days with the force, but she had seen nothing like this. “I’ll have a beer.”

  Klemet opened the antique chest and extracted two bottles of beer, from the Mack Brewery in Tromsø. He opened the cupboard door and took out two glasses, handing one to Nina with the opened beer bottle.

  “We need to find out everything about the drum, the prewar expedition, the Sami guide, and the other collectors, if possible,” he said. “Whatever Helmut says, we shouldn’t exclude the possibility that it has been stolen for some sort of illicit trade. We need to know for sure whether it’s one of the known drums or not. If the culprit’s local—Olaf, or anyone else—there must be a solid motive.”

  “Did you hear the radio news on NRK? They’re saying it could have been the Far Right, even the Laestadians. They say the Far Right want to prevent the Sami from reinforcing their identity with the drum, and the Laestadians want to protect the Sami from the temptations of the old religion.”

  “I heard. Those are motives, not proofs.”

  “Who are the Laestadians? I’ve never heard of them down south.”

  Klemet looked perfectly relaxed now. He raised his glass. “Skål.”

  “Skål,” said Nina.

  “They’re a Lutheran sect,” said Klemet. “My family were Laestadians.”

  Her eyes opened wide in unconcealed astonishment.

  “The name comes from a Swedish pastor who was part Sami, who went to great lengths to set the Sami back on the path of righteousness, because he thought they were too much under the influence of alcohol. That was a hundred and fifty years ago. There are still some congregations that follow his teaching. The real, hard-core traditionalists. Not my cup of tea at all. No TV, no alcohol, no curtains at the windows, all that. A lot of my family were practicing Laestadians. That’s why we fell out. I never could stand their bigotry.”

  “What did they do? Were they breeders?”

  Klemet took a slow sip of his beer. “No, like I said, my grandfather had been a breeder, but he had to give it up. He couldn’t carry on. People would find themselves ruined in the space of just a few years, which is what happened to my grandfather. He could have gone under when he lost the herd. But his Laestadian moral fiber kept him going. He went to work as a laborer for a local farmer. He lived on a farm beside a lake, on the other side of the mountain, two days’ walk from Kautokeino. When my father was a boy, he worked with other people’s reindeer, and sometimes in the fields, too. But my grandfather never drank. Nor my father. They were both very proud.”

  “You said you were Swedish.”

  “On my mother’s side,” he reminded her. “My father met her while he was doing seasonal work in Sweden. He lived part of the year with us in Sweden, and the rest of the time in Norway, depending on where he could find work. I grew up partly in Kiruna, in Sweden, where the iron-ore mine is. I was born there. I was fifteen when we came to live in Kautokeino.”

  Nina felt drowsy and comfortable, sipping her beer, stretched out on the reindeer skins, warm and slightly light-headed. She could tell Klemet was in a talkative mood, unusually.

  “Klemet, why did you set up this tent?”

  He gave an embarrassed laugh. “I like the atmosphere. It’s cozy, intimate.”

  “Would you have liked to be a reindeer breeder?”

  Preoccupied, he didn’t answer straightaway. “No. Not that I don’t think it’s interesting work. But I think you have to be born to it. I wanted to run a garage. I worked in one when I was a teenager here in Kautokeino. It was fun. There were all sorts of cars. We serviced them all. The ice cream van, the police cars, the ambulance. My favorite was the funeral hearse. Very classy. I drove them back after we’d finished. I loved doing that.”

  “Was that what you had always wanted to do?”

  “No.” He looked uncomfortable again. “This will sound idiotic. But what I always wanted to do was something no one did around here. No Sami has ever done it. But I wanted to be a whaler.”

  “A whaler…”

  “Yes. Daft, really, when you’re born so far inland, in Sápmi.”

  “My father was a whaler,” said Nina.

  Now it was Klemet’s turn to stare in surprise. He waited for Nina to go on, but she said nothing.

  “Well, well!” Klemet thought for a moment. He was about to ask Nina a question when he caught the dark look on her face.

  18

  Monday, January 17

  Sunrise: 10:07 a.m.; sunset: 12:52 p.m.

  2 hours 45 minutes of sunlight

  8:30 a.m., Kautokeino

  Karl Olsen walked into the municipal council offices in a thoroughly bad mood. He was naturally ill-tempered, but this was more than
his usual frame of mind. The mining affairs committee meeting was scheduled for late morning, and he hadn’t had time to read and prepare his files as he would have liked.

  As the Progress Party councillor, he represented something of a minority in Kautokeino. But the party’s 20 percent support rating at the national level earned him a degree of respect nonetheless. Some of the party’s opponents tried to brand it as a Far Right organization, but it was nothing like that at all. It was just that here, in Kautokeino, the Sami thought they could get their own way in everything, and it couldn’t be allowed to continue. He, Karl Olsen, would do everything in his power to make sure of that. Not for nothing had his family been farmers in the region from generation to generation. Yes, the Olsens were pioneers, among the first to conquer the Far North in the name of the Norwegian Crown. They’d been the first to clear the frozen waste, when all the Lapps did was run along behind their reindeer. The problem was that here, in the interior of Lapland, the Lapps were few enough in number, but they were still the majority. Down on the coast, it was different. Here, you had to accommodate them.

  And Olsen certainly knew how to accommodate people. He had mollified the other parties and secured himself a seat on two committees—agricultural affairs and mining affairs. He spent one day a week at the council offices as a rule, which was a lot, but he saw it as a duty—the best way to keep an eye on whatever schemes were being hatched. Olsen twisted from the waist to greet the receptionist—his neck was still stiff. He didn’t like her; he knew she voted Labor, but hers was a pivotal role. When the mayor’s secretary was away, she was often the one who kept day-to-day business running at the council offices.

  “How are you today, Ingrid, my dear?” Olsen affected a jovial, honeyed tone.

  “Fine. I’ve printed the agenda for the mining affairs committee. It’s in your pigeonhole, along with the guest list for the UN conference on indigenous peoples—the people coming to the mayor’s reception here.”

  “Wonderful! Many thanks, Ingrid, dear. In haste…”

  Olsen collected the agenda and guest list, together with a clutch of other envelopes and newspapers. Ramrod-straight, he directed his short, quick steps to the Progress Party office. As expected, there was no one in. His fellow PP councillor was an incompetent buffoon for whom Olsen felt nothing but scorn—a pretty face who preferred parading about on his snowmobile on market days. Pathetic. The guy ran a small IT shop and had joined the Progress Party only when he realized they had plans for a massive drop in taxation and a spending spree funded by the nation’s oil riches. He understood nothing about what really went on here, but Olsen needed him, so he put up with him.

  Karl Olsen thought over the recent events. There was a lot happening. Too much, in fact, but it got the police off their backsides, at any rate. He took the list of UN conference guests, balled it up without a glance, and tossed it into the wastepaper basket. His mind was on another gathering of far greater importance for him—the regional committee that would meet soon to attribute mining licenses in Lapland.

  Meanwhile, Kautokeino’s mining affairs committee was meeting later that morning. Olsen pondered the agenda as he leafed absently through the pages of the Finnmark Dagblad. There was a report about his party’s protest in Alta. This drum business was stirring up controversy. Down on the coast, people had had enough of Lapps dictating the law. Very good, thought Olsen. Very good. He turned the pages. A car crash on the Hammerfest road, a fishing boat in difficulty off the North Cape, a schoolgirl raped in Alta, a cigarette trafficker arrested in Kirkenes, approval at last for renovation work on the school in Tana Bru. He threw the newspaper in the trash.

  The handful of mining companies working in the region had brought plenty of development to Kautokeino, true enough—there was even a small airfield now. But that was nothing compared to what would happen after the latest round of permits. Dear God, no. That would be big, as Olsen knew only too well. He had got himself appointed to a seat on the town’s mining affairs committee precisely so that he could keep a close eye on things. His pretty-boy colleague could have the popular stuff, like the budget committee. Yes, the opportunities were huge, especially if you knew where to apply for the damned licenses in the first place.

  “Dear God, dear God, if only…,” Olsen swore bitterly.

  The blasted UN conference was just around the corner, and he still didn’t know exactly where to strike, which site he should apply to explore. He was staring at the agenda for the committee meeting when the phone rang.

  “Karl, there’s a gentleman in reception. He wants to see someone from the mining affairs committee.”

  “Well, tell him I’m busy,” muttered Olsen. “Tell him to come back this afternoon.”

  Olsen listened to a muffled exchange. The receptionist spoke into the receiver again.

  “He’s insisting, Karl. He’s French. A geologist. He says he’s submitted an application to prospect. He wants to know if it’s been accepted.”

  God almighty, thought Olsen. The character Brattsen had told him about. Quickly, he thought back over everything the deputy superintendent had mentioned at their latest rendezvous, two days previously, in a secluded spot behind the farm. A bit conspiratorial, all that, but it was his way of testing Rolf Brattsen’s will. If he could get the policeman to come to secret assignations in out-of-the-way places, he could get him to do a great deal more, too, he told himself. He had to keep the lad under his thumb. Brattsen had told him about the geologist. He might even be a suspect, who knew? After all, he had arrived in town just before the recent dramatic events. What was he after? It wouldn’t be too difficult to get him put away for a bit while things calmed down, until the wretched UN conference had passed and the tension had eased.

  Two days back, Olsen had listened carefully to Brattsen’s news, narrowing his eyes, thinking hard, before turning sharply in his seat to face the policeman.

  “Can’t you see, lad? The man’s a blessing from heaven! Better than anything we could have hoped for. You can see that, can’t you?”

  Brattsen hadn’t seen at all.

  But he, Karl Olsen, had the grain of an idea. An idea that sprang from an obsession. Perhaps, at last, the time had come, he told himself, massaging the nape of his neck. But he couldn’t act alone. He had never trusted the local geologists. Too hand-in-glove with the authorities for his liking. The whole economic and industrial apparatus of the Far North had been infiltrated by the Labor Party, and that included the geologists, he was sure of that. Bureaucrats in the pockets of the powers that be, the whole lot of them. They wouldn’t know how to keep a secret. Their loyalty was never to the likes of him. And now here was a foreign geologist, heaven-sent.

  The receptionist was still waiting for an answer.

  “Ingrid, ask him to wait a moment.”

  Olsen hung up, then dialed Brattsen’s number. The policeman answered and Olsen got straight to the point. “Rolf, what else do you know about that Frenchman?”

  Olsen listened and his face broke into a broad smile. He grunted an acknowledgment from time to time. He was still listening carefully when he his gaze alighted on the Finnmark Dagblad in the wastepaper basket. He fished it out and smoothed it on the desk with his free hand, opening it at the relevant page—the local news in brief. Then he thanked Brattsen and ended the call. Olsen rubbed his hands, cut an item from the newspaper, and picked up the phone once again.

  “Ingrid, can you tell the gentleman I’m not free to see him before the committee meeting. We don’t want him trying to influence any outcomes, do we?”

  “I hadn’t thought of that, Karl, but you’re quite right, of course. That’s good thinking. If only we could say the same for some of our other councillors.”

  “Indeed, my dear, indeed. Well, must get on. No more calls until the meeting, understood?”

  Olsen hurried to his office window. The Frenchman was climbing back into his four-by-four. He looked angry and seemed in a hurry. He drove a large Volvo, an XC90. Olsen not
ed the direction he took as he drove off, waited a few minutes, then left the council offices by the back door.

  He soon caught up with the Frenchman. He waited until they were on an isolated stretch of road, then flashed his headlights twice. Up ahead, the geologist slowed and flashed his turn signal.

  Olsen pulled alongside. “You wanted to see someone from the mining affairs committee?” he asked, lowering his window. “Follow me.”

  They drove farther out of town, to the spot near the reindeer enclosure where the farmer had held his first rendezvous with Brattsen, just after the disappearance of the drum. Olsen leaned across and opened the passenger door, wincing in pain from his stiff neck. He unscrewed the thermos he had brought from home that morning. “Coffee?”

  Racagnal sat in silence. He didn’t seem particularly surprised to have been brought to this deserted spot by a complete stranger. The man was clearly no innocent, Olsen thought, used to underhanded business, dirty tricks. He would have to tread very carefully.

  Olsen shifted around in his seat and held out his hand with what he hoped was a benevolent smile. Racagnal stared at the cold rictus, unmoved.

  “Karl Olsen,” the councillor introduced himself. “Mining affairs committee. Slight problem back at the office, there, couldn’t see you right away, but it’s all taken care of. So, tell me…”

  Now it was Racagnal’s turn to take a closer look at the farmer. He turned to face him. “I don’t drink coffee, thanks,” he said, in French-accented Swedish. The Frenchman seemed to be assessing the situation, absently stroking the identity bracelet on his left wrist. “My company—the Société Française des Minerais—has lodged an application to prospect. I was promised a positive response today. I’ve jumped through all the hoops at the ministry, the Mining Administration, the regional council. I just need your council’s stamp. And I was told that wouldn’t be a problem.”

  “Really? Not a problem?” Olsen chuckled. “So we count for nothing at all, is that it?”