The Redeemer

by Jo Nesbo

  The real reason for her exile, however, was of course her boyfriend, Johannes. Johannes of the warm hands, Johannes of the gentle voice and the look that could read whatever she thought before she had got as far as thinking it. Johannes, the country clod, who was going nowhere. Everything changed after Johannes. She changed after Johannes.

  At Aron Schüster's private school she was freed from the nightmares, the guilt and the smell of fish, and learned all that young girls need to acquire a husband of their own or higher status. And with the inherited survival instinct that had enabled her to survive on the crag in Norway, she had slowly but surely buried the Ragnhild whose mind Johannes had read so well and become the Ragnhild who was going places, who did her own thing and would not be held back by anyone, least of all by upper-class French girls or spoilt Danish brats who sniggered in corners at the futile attempts of girls like Ragnhild to be anything but provincial or vulgar.

  Her little revenge was to seduce Herr Brehme, the young German teacher with whom they were all infatuated. The teachers lived in a building facing the pupils' block and she simply crossed the cobbled square and knocked on the door of his little room. She visited him four times. And four nights she click-clacked her way back across the cobble stones, her heels echoing off the walls of both buildings.

  Rumours started up, and she did little or nothing to stop them. When the news broke that Herr Brehme had resigned and hastily taken up a teaching post in Zurich, Ragnhild had beamed a smile of triumph to all the grief-stricken faces of the young girls in her class.

  After the final year of school in Switzerland, Ragnhild returned home. Home at last, she thought. But then Johannes's eyes were there again. In the silver fjord, in the shadows of the verdigris forest, behind the shiny black windows of the chapel or in the cars that flashed past, leaving a cloud of dust that made your teeth crunch and was bitter to the taste. When the letter from Chicago arrived, with the offer of a place to study business administration – four years for a BA, five for an MA – she went to Daddy to ask him to transfer the study funds without delay.

  It was a relief to go. A relief to be the new Ragnhild once again. She was looking forward to forgetting, but to do that she needed a project, a goal. In Chicago she found that goal. Mads Gilstrup.

  She anticipated that it would be simple. After all, she had the theoretical and practical grounding to seduce upper-class boys. And she was good-looking. Johannes and several others had said that. Above all, it was her eyes. She had been blessed with her mother's light blue irises surrounded by unusually white sclera, which science had proven attracted the opposite sex as it signalled robust health and hearty genes. For that reason Ragnhild was seldom seen wearing sunglasses. Unless she had planned the effect it created by taking them off at a particularly favourable moment.

  Some said she looked like Nicole Kidman. She understood what they meant. Beautiful in a stiff, severe way. Perhaps that was the reason. The severity. Because when she had tried to engineer some contact with Mads Gilstrup in the corridors or the campus canteen, he had behaved like a frightened wild horse, averted his eyes, tossed his fringe in the air and trotted off to a safe area.

  In the end she staked everything on one card.

  The evening before one of the many silly annual and, apparently, traditional parties, Ragnhild had given her room-mate money for a new pair of shoes and a hotel room in town and spent three hours in front of the mirror. For once she arrived early at the party. Because she knew Mads Gilstrup went to all parties early in order to pre-empt potential rivals.

  He stuttered and stammered, barely daring to look into her eyes – light blue irises and clear sclera notwithstanding – and even less down the plunging neckline she had arranged with such care. She had come to the conclusion – contrary to her previous opinion – that confidence did not necessarily come with money. Later she was to conclude that the reason for Mads's bad self-image lay at the door of his brilliant, demanding, weakness-hating father who was unable to grasp why he had not been granted a son more in his own mould.

  But she did not give up and dangled herself like bait in front of Mads Gilstrup. It was so obvious she was making herself accessible that she noticed the girls she called friends, and vice versa, were standing with their heads together in a huddle. When it came down to it, they were all herd animals. Then – after six American lagers and a growing suspicion that Mads Gilstrup was homosexual – the wild horse ventured out into open terrain and two lagers later they left the party.

  She let him mount her, but in her best friend's bed. After all, it had cost her an expensive pair of shoes. And when, three minutes later, Ragnhild wiped him off with her room-mate's home-made crocheted bedspread, she knew she had lassoed him. Harness and saddle would follow in good time.

  After their studies they travelled home as an engaged couple. Mads Gilstrup to administer his portion of the family fortune in the secure knowledge that he would never have to be tested in any rat race. His job consisted of finding the right advisers.

  Ragnhild applied for and got a job with a trust manager, who had never heard of the mediocre university, but had heard of Chicago, and liked what he heard. And saw. He was not so brilliant, but he was demanding and found a soulmate in Ragnhild. Thus, after quite a short spell, she was removed from the intellectually somewhat over-demanding work as a share analyst and put behind a screen and telephone on one of the tables in the 'kitchen', as they called the traders' room. This was where Ragnhild Gilstrup (she had changed her name to Gilstrup as soon as they were engaged because it was 'more practical') came into her own. If it was not enough to advise brokerages' own and, one presumed, professional, investors to buy Opticum, she could purr, flirt, hiss, manipulate, lie and cry. Ragnhild Gilstrup could caress her way up a man's legs – and, if pushed, a woman's – in a way that shifted shares with far greater efficacy than any of her analyses had done. Her greatest quality, however, was her supreme understanding of the most important motivation of the equity market: greed.

  Then one day she became pregnant. And, to her surprise, she found herself considering an abortion. Until then she had really believed she wanted children, or one anyway. Eight months later she gave birth to Amalie. She was filled with such happiness that she repressed the memory of her thoughts of abortion. Two weeks later Amalie was taken to hospital with a high temperature. Ragnhild could see that the doctors were uneasy, but they couldn't tell her what was wrong with her child. One night Ragnhild had considered praying to God, but then dismissed the idea. The next night, at eleven o'clock, little Amalie died of pneumonia. Ragnhild locked herself indoors and cried for four successive days.

  'Cystic fibrosis,' the doctor had told her in private. 'It's genetic and means that either you or your husband is a carrier of the disease. Do you know if anyone has had it in your family or his? It may manifest itself in frequent asthma attacks or something similar.'

  'No,' Ragnhild had answered. 'And I assume you're aware of client confidentiality.'

  The period of grieving was managed with professional help. After a couple of months she was able to talk to people again. When summer came they went to Gilstrup's chalet on the west coast of Sweden and tried for another child. But one evening Mads found his wife crying in front of the bedroom mirror. She said this was her punishment because she had wanted an abortion. He comforted her, but when his tender caresses became bolder she pushed him away and said that would be the last time for a good while. Mads thought she meant having children and agreed right away. He was therefore disappointed, disconsolate, to find that she meant she wanted a break from the act itself. Mads Gilstrup had acquired a taste for mating and particularly appreciated the self-esteem he felt when giving her what he interpreted as small but distinct orgasms. Nevertheless, he accepted her explanation as the reactions to grieving and hormonal changes after childbirth. Ragnhild didn't think she could tell him that from her side the last two years had been a duty, or that the last remnants of pleasure she had been able to work up f
or him had disappeared in the delivery room when she had peered up into his stupid, gawping, terror-stricken face. And when he had cried with happiness and dropped the scissors just as he was supposed to cut the victory tape for all new fathers, she had felt like walloping him. Nor did she think she could tell him that, as far as the mating department was concerned, for the last year she and her less than brilliant boss had been meeting each other's demanding needs.

  Ragnhild was the only stockbroker in Oslo to have been offered a full partnership as she left for maternity leave. To everyone's surprise, however, she resigned. She had been offered another job. Managing Mads Gilstrup's family fortune.

  She explained to her boss on the farewell night that she thought it was time that brokers schmoozed with her, and not vice versa. She didn't breathe a word about the real reason: that, sad to say, Mads Gilstrup had been unable to manage the sole task he had been entrusted with, that of finding good advisers, and that the family fortune had shrunk at such an alarmingly rapid rate that Ragnhild and her father-in-law, Albert Gilstrup, had both intervened. That was the last time she met her boss. A few months later she heard he had taken sick leave after years of affliction with asthma.

  Ragnhild didn't like Mads's social circle and she noticed that Mads didn't, either. But they still went to the parties they were invited to, since the alternative – ending up outside the clique of people who meant or owned anything – was even worse. It was one thing to spend time with pompous, complacent men who deep in their hearts felt that their money gave them the right to be so; however, their wives, or the 'bitches', as Ragnhild labelled them in secret, were quite another. The chattering, shopaholic, health-freak housewives with tits that looked so genuine, not to mention the tan, although that was genuine, since they and their children had just returned from two weeks in St Tropez 'relaxing' away from au pairs and noisy workmen who never finished swimming pools and new kitchens. They talked with unfeigned concern about how bad the shopping had been in Europe over the last year, but otherwise their horizons didn't stretch further than skiing in Slemdal or swimming in Bogstad, both near Oslo, and at a pinch, Kragerø, in the south. Clothes, facelifts and exercise apparatuses were the wives' topics of conversation as that was the means to holding onto their rich, pompous husbands, which of course was their sole real mission here on earth.

  When Ragnhild thought like that she could surprise herself. Were they so different from her? Maybe the difference was that she had a job. Was that why she couldn't stand their smug faces at the morning restaurant in Vinderen when they complained about all the welfare abuse and tax evasion in what they, with a slight sneer, called 'society'? Or was there another reason? Because something had happened. A revolution. She had begun to care for someone other than herself. She hadn't felt that since Amalie. Or Johannes.

  The whole thing had started with a plan. Share values had continued to tumble thanks to Mads's unfortunate investments, and something drastic had to be done. It wasn't just a question of shifting assets to funds with a lower risk; debts had accumulated that had to be covered. In short, they needed to make a financial coup. Her father-in-law had launched the idea. And it really did smack of a coup, or to be more precise, a robbery. Not a robbery of a well-guarded bank but of old ladies. The lady in question was the Salvation Army. Ragnhild had gone through their property portfolio, which was nothing short of impressive. That is, the properties were not in very good condition, but their potential and location were excellent. Above all those in central Oslo, and especially those in Majorstuen. The accounts of the Salvation Army had demonstrated at least two things to her: they needed money and the properties were hugely undervalued. In all probability they were not aware of the assets they were sitting on; she very much doubted the decision-makers in the organisation were the sharpest knives in the drawer. In addition, it was perhaps the perfect time to buy as the property market had fallen at the same time as share prices, and other leading indicators had begun to point upwards again.

  One telephone call later she had arranged a meeting.

  It was a wonderful spring day as she drove up to the Salvation Army Headquarters.

  Commander David Eckhoff received her and within three seconds she had seen through the joviality. Behind it she saw a domineering leader of the herd, the kind she was so talented at manoeuvring and she thought to herself: this could go well. He led her into a meeting room with waffles, sensationally bad coffee and one older and two younger colleagues. The older one was the chief administrator, a lieutenant colonel who was on the point of retiring. The first of the two younger ones was Rikard Nilsen, a timid young man similar at first glance to Mads Gilstrup. But that recognition was nothing compared with the shock she received when greeting the other young man. He shook hands with a tentative smile and introduced himself as Jon Karlsen. It wasn't the tall, stooped figure, nor the open boyish face, nor the warm voice, but the eyes. He looked straight at her. Inside her. The way he had done. They were Johannes's eyes.

  For the first part of the meeting, while the chief administrator accounted for the turnover of the Norwegian Salvation Army, amounting to just under a billion kroner, of which a significant contribution was rental income from the 230 plots the Army owned, she sat in a trancelike state trying to stop herself staring at the young man. At his hair, at his hands resting on the table in total serenity. At his shoulders that didn't quite fill the black uniform, a uniform which Ragnhild had, from her childhood, associated with old men and women who, despite not believing in life before death, sang to three-chord songs with a smile. She must have thought – without really thinking – that the Salvation Army was for those who couldn't gain a foothold anywhere else, the simple ones, the lacklustre and the lackwits no one else wanted to play with but who knew that in the Army there was a community where even they could meet the requirements: singing second voice.

  When the chief administrator was finished, Ragnhild thanked him, opened the folder she had brought with her and passed a single A4 sheet over the table to the commander.

  'This is our offer,' she said. 'It will become clear which properties we're interested in.'

  'Thank you,' said the commander, studying the document.

  Ragnhild tried to read the expression on his face. But knew it didn't mean much. A pair of reading glasses lay untouched on the table in front of him.

  'Our specialist will have to do the calculations and make a recommendation,' the commander said with a smile, and passed the document on. To Jon Karlsen. Ragnhild noticed the twitch in Rikard Nilsen's face.

  She pushed a business card across the table to Jon Karlsen.

  'If anything is unclear, just give me a ring,' she said, and felt his eyes on her like a physical caress.

  'Thank you for talking to us, fru Gilstrup,' Commander Eckhoff said, clapping his hands. 'We promise to give you an answer in the course of . . . Jon?'

  'Not too long.'

  The commander gave a jovial smile. 'Not too long.'

  All four of them accompanied her to the lift. No one said anything while they waited.

  As the lift doors slid open she half leaned towards Jon and said in a low voice: 'Any time at all. Use my mobile number.'

  She had tried to catch his eye to feel it again, but had failed. On the way down in the lift, alone, Ragnhild Gilstrup had felt her blood pumping in sudden, painful bursts and she had started to tremble uncontrollably.

  Three days passed before he rang to say no. They had assessed the offer and concluded they didn't want to sell. Ragnhild had made an impassioned defence of the price and pointed out that the Salvation Army's position in the property market was vulnerable, the properties were not being run in a professional manner, that they were losing money with the low rents and that the Army should diversify their investments. Jon Karlsen listened without interrupting.

  'Thank you,' he said when she was finished, 'for examining the case with such thoroughness, fru Gilstrup. And, as an economist, I don't disagree with what you say. But—'r />
  'But what? The calculations are unambiguous . . .' She had heard the breathy excitement in her voice.

  'But there is a human dimension.'

  'Human?'

  'The tenants. Human beings. Old people who have lived there all their lives, retired Army soldiers, refugees, human beings who need security. They are my human dimension. You'll throw them out to do up the flats and rent or sell at a profit. The calculations are – as you yourself said – unambiguous. That's your all-consuming economic dimension and I accept it. Do you accept mine?'