by Jo Nesbo
“Haven’t a clue. Green, yellow and red. With a pentagram in the middle.”
“Ethiopia,” Harry said, letting go of the woman, who fell back into position. “This woman did not donate her body, but she has been donated, if I can put it like that. This is Sylvia Ottersen.”
Kai Robøle kept blinking as though hoping something would go away if he blinked enough times.
Harry placed a hand on his shoulder. “Get hold of someone who has access to the paperwork for the bodies and go through all of them. Now. I have to be on my way.”
“What’s going on?” Holm asked. “I honestly can’t get my head around this.”
“Try,” Harry said. “Forget everything you thought you knew and try.”
“Right, but what’s going on?”
“There are two answers to that,” Harry said. “One is that we’re closing in on the Snowman.”
“And the other?”
“I don’t know.”
33
WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 5, 1980
The Snowman
It was the day the snow came. At eleven o’clock in the morning, large flakes had appeared from a colorless sky and invaded the fields, gardens and lawns of Romerike like an armada from outer space.
Mathias was sitting alone in his mother’s Toyota Corolla in front of a house on Kolloveien. He had no idea what his mother was doing inside the house. She had said it wouldn’t take long. But it had already taken a long time. She had left the key in the ignition and the car radio was playing “Under Snø,” by the new girl group Dollie. He kicked open the car door and went out. Because of the snow an almost unnatural silence had settled over the houses. He bent down, picked up a handful of the sticky white stuff and cupped it into a snowball.
Today they had thrown snowballs at him in the school playground and called him “Mathias No-Nips,” his so-called classmates in 7A. He hated secondary school, hated being thirteen years old. It had begun after the first gym class, when they found out he didn’t have any nipples. According to the doctor, it could have been hereditary, and he had been tested for a number of illnesses. Mom had told him and Dad that her father, who died when Mom was small, didn’t have any nipples, either. But looking through one of his grandmother’s photo albums Mathias had found a picture of his grandfather during the mowing season in trousers and suspenders with a bare chest. And he definitely had nipples then.
Mathias packed the snowball harder between his hands. He wanted to throw it at someone. Hard. So hard that it hurt. But there was no one to launch it at. He could make someone to throw it at. He placed the packed snowball in the snow beside the garage. Started rolling it. The snow crystals hooked into one another. After he had done a circuit of the lawn, it already reached his stomach and had left a trail of brown grass. He continued to roll it. When he couldn’t push it any farther, he started a new one. It was big, too. He just managed to lift it up onto the first one. Then he made a head, climbed up and placed it on top. The snowman stood by one of the windows in the house. Sounds were coming out. He broke a couple of twigs off the apple tree and stuck them in the snowman’s sides. Dug up some gravel by the front steps, shinnied up again and made two eyes and a line of pebbles for a smile. Then he placed his thighs around the snowman’s head, and, sitting on the shoulders, looked through the window.
In the illuminated room stood a man with a bare chest thrusting his hips backward and forward with his eyes closed, as if he were dancing. From the bed in front of him protruded a pair of spread legs. Mathias couldn’t see, but he knew that it was Sara. That it was his mother. That they were fucking.
Mathias tightened his thighs around the snow head, felt the cold in his crotch. He was unable to breathe; a steel wire seemed to tauten around his throat.
Again and again the man’s hips banged against his mother. Mathias stared inside at the man’s chest as the cold numbness spread from his crotch to his stomach and up until it reached his head. The man was thrusting his willy inside her. As they did in the magazines. Soon the man would be spraying sperm inside his mother. And the man didn’t have any nipples.
Suddenly the man stopped. His eyes were open now. And they were looking at Mathias.
Mathias loosened his grip, slid down the back of the snowman, curled up and sat as quiet as a mouse, waiting. His mind was reeling. He was a smart boy, he’d always been told that. Strange, but with excellent mental faculties, the teachers had said. Thus all his thoughts were falling into place now, like pieces of a jigsaw he had been doing for a long time. But the picture that emerged was still incomprehensible, intolerable. It couldn’t be right. It had to be right.
Mathias listened to his own breathless gasps.
It was right. He just knew it. Everything fit. His mother’s coldness to his father. The conversations they thought he couldn’t hear; his father’s desperate threats and pleas for her to stay, not just for his sake but for Mathias’s sake. Good God, they had a child together, didn’t they? And his mother’s bitter laugh. Grandfather in the photo album and Mom’s lies. Of course, Mathias hadn’t believed it when Stian from his class had said that Mathias No-Nips’s mom had a lover living on the plateau—he said his aunt had told him. For Stian was just as stupid as the others and didn’t understand anything. Not even when, two days later, Stian found his cat hanging from the top of the school flagpole.
Dad didn’t know. Mathias could feel it in his whole body that Dad thought Mathias was … was his. And he must never know that he wasn’t. Never. It would kill him. Mathias would rather die himself. Yes, that was exactly what he wanted. He wanted to die, wanted to go, to go away from his mother and the school and Stian and … everything. He got up, kicked the snowman and ran to the car.
He would take her with him. She would die, too.
When his mother came out and he unlocked the door, almost forty minutes had passed since she had gone into the house.
“Is there anything wrong?” she asked.
“Yes,” Mathias said, moving on the backseat so that she could see him in the mirror. “I saw him.”
“What do you mean?” she said, putting the key in the ignition and turning.
“The snowman …”
“And what did the snowman look like?” The engine started with a roar and she let the clutch go with such a jerk that he almost dropped the car jack he was clinging to.
“Dad’s waiting for us,” she said. “We’ll have to get a move on.”
She switched on the radio. Just an announcer droning on about the American elections and Ronald Reagan. Nonetheless she turned up the volume. They drove over the crest of the hill, down toward the main road and the river. In the field ahead of them stiff yellow straw poked through the snow.
“We’re going to die,” Mathias said.
“What did you say?”
“We’re going to die.”
She turned down the voice on the radio. He steeled himself. Leaned forward between the seats and raised his arm.
“We’re going to die,” he whispered.
Then he struck.
The jack hit the back of her head with a crunch. And his mother didn’t seem to react, just sort of stiffened in her seat, so he hit her again. And again. The car jumped as her foot slid off the clutch pedal, but still no sound came from her. Perhaps the talking thing in her brain had been smashed, Mathias thought. At the fourth blow he could feel her head give; it seemed to have gone soft. The car rolled forward and picked up speed, but he knew she was no longer conscious. His mother’s Toyota Corolla crossed the main road and continued across the field on the other side. The snow slowed the car but not enough for it to stop. Then it hit the water and glided out into the broad black river. It tilted and was motionless for a moment before the current caught it and spun it around. The water seeped in through the doors and the bodywork, through the handles and at the side of the windows as they gently floated downstream. Mathias looked out the window, waved to a car on the main road, but the driver didn’t appear to have s
een him. The water was rising in the Toyota. And suddenly he heard his mother mumble something. He watched her, saw the deep gashes under her bloodstained hair at the back of her head. She was moving under the seat belt. The water was rising quickly now; it was already up to Mathias’s knees. He felt his panic mounting. He didn’t want to die. Not now, not like this. He smashed the jack into the side window. The glass shattered and the water poured in. He jumped up onto the seat and squeezed his way through the gap between the top of the window and the mass of water flooding in. One of his boots got snagged on the frame; he twisted his foot and felt the boot float away. Then he was free and began to swim ashore. He saw that a car had stopped on the main road and two people had got out and were on their way through the snow to the river.
Mathias was a good swimmer. He was good at a lot of things. So why didn’t they like him? A man waded out and dragged him ashore as he approached the riverbank. Mathias slumped into the snow. Not because he couldn’t stand but because instinctively he knew it was the smartest thing to do. He closed his eyes and heard an agitated voice by his ear ask whether there was anyone else in the car. If there was they might still be able to save them. Mathias slowly shook his head. The voice asked whether he was sure.
The police would later ascribe the accident to the slippery road conditions and the drowned woman’s head injuries to the impact from driving off the road and hitting the water. In fact the car was barely damaged, but in the end it was the only plausible explanation. Just as shock was the only possible explanation for the boy’s answer when those first on the scene asked him several times whether there was anyone else in the car and he said at length: “No, only me. I’m alone.”
“No, only me,” Mathias repeated six years later. “I’m alone.”
“Thanks,” said the boy standing in front of him and putting down his tray on the cafeteria table that until then Mathias had had to himself. Outside, the rain was drumming its welcome march on the medical students in Bergen, a rhythmical march that would last until spring.
“You new to medicine as well?” the boy asked, and Mathias watched his knife cut the thick Wiener schnitzel.
He nodded.
“You’ve got an Østland accent,” the boy said. “Didn’t get into Oslo?”
“Didn’t want to go to Oslo,” Mathias said.
“Why not?”
“Don’t know anyone there.”
“Who do you know here, then?”
“No one.”
“I don’t know anyone here, either. What’s your name?”
“Mathias. Lund-Helgesen. And you?”
“Idar Vetlesen. Have you been up Ulriken Mountain?”
“No.”
But Mathias had been up Ulriken. And up Fløyen and Sandviksfjellet. He had been in the narrow alleyways, to Fisketorget, to Torgalmenningen—the main square, seen the penguins and the sea lions at the aquarium, drunk beer in Wesselstuen, listened to an overrated new band in Garage and seen SK Brann lose a football match at Brann Stadium. Mathias had found time to do all these things that you should do with student friends. Alone.
He did the circuit with Idar again and pretended it was the first time.
Mathias soon discovered that Idar was a social suckerfish, and by fastening onto him, Mathias found himself at the heart of all the action.
“Why did you choose to study medicine?” Idar asked Mathias at a party in an apartment belonging to a student with a traditional Bergensian name. It was the evening of the medical students’ annual autumn ball, and Idar had invited two nice Bergen girls in black dresses and with pinned-up hair, who were leaning forward to hear what the two of them were saying.
“To make the world a better place,” Mathias said, drinking up his lukewarm Hansa beer. “What about you?”
“To earn money, of course,” Idar said, winking at the girls.
One of them sat down beside Mathias.
“You’ve got a blood-donor badge,” she said. “What blood type are you?”
“B negative. And what do you do?”
“Let’s not talk about that. B negative? Isn’t that extremely rare?”
“Yes. How did you know?”
“I’m training as a nurse.”
“Oh,” Mathias said. “Which year?”
“Third.”
“Have you thought about what you’re going to speciali—”
“Let’s not talk about that,” she said and placed a hot little hand on his thigh.
She repeated the same sentence five hours later while lying naked beneath him in his bed.
“That’s never happened to me before,” he said.
She smiled up at him and stroked his cheek. “So there’s nothing wrong with me, then?”
“What?” he stammered. “No.”
She laughed. “I think you’re sweet. You’re nice and thoughtful. What happened to these, by the way?”
She pinched his chest.
Mathias felt something black descend. Something nasty and black and wonderful.
“I was born like that,” he said.
“Is it a disease?”
“It comes with Raynaud’s phenomenon and scleroderma.”
“What?”
“A hereditary disease causing connective tissue in the body to thicken.”
“Is it dangerous?” She carefully stroked his chest with her fingers.
Mathias smiled and sensed an incipient erection. “Raynaud’s phenomenon just means that your toes and fingers go cold and white. Scleroderma is worse …”
“Oh?”
“The thickened connective tissue makes the skin tighten. Everything is smoothed out and wrinkles disappear.”
“Isn’t that good?”
He was aware of her hand groping southward. “The tightened skin begins to hinder facial expressions—you have fewer of them. It’s like your face is stiffening into a mask.”
The hot little hand closed around his dick.
“Your hands and, in time, your arms are bent and you can’t straighten them. In the end you’re left standing there, quite unable to move, as if you’re suffocated by your own skin.”
She whispered breathlessly: “Sounds like a gruesome death.”
“The best advice is to commit suicide before the pain drives you insane. Would you mind lying at the end of the bed? I’d like to stand and do it.”
“That’s why you study medicine, isn’t it?” she said. “To find out more. To find a way of living with it.”
“All I want,” he said, getting up and standing at the end of the bed with his erect penis swaying in the air, “is to find out when it’s time to die.”
The newly qualified Dr. Mathias Lund-Helgesen was a popular man in the Neurology Department of Bergen’s Haukeland University Hospital. Both colleagues and patients described him as a competent, thoughtful person and, not least, a good listener. The latter was a great help, as he often received patients with a variety of syndromes, generally inherited and often without much prospect of a cure, only some relief. And when on rare occasions patients were diagnosed with the dreadful condition of scleroderma they were always referred to the friendly young doctor who was beginning to consider specializing in immunology. It was early autumn when Laila Aasen and her husband came to him with their daughter. The daughter’s joints had stiffened and she was in pain; Mathias’s first thought was that it could be Bekhterev’s disease. Both Laila Aasen and her husband confirmed that there had been rheumatic illnesses on their side of the family, so Mathias took blood samples from them as well as from the daughter.
When the results came back Mathias was sitting at his desk and had to read them three times. And the same nasty and black and wonderful feeling surged to the surface again. The tests were negative. Both in the medical sense—Bekhterev’s disease could be eliminated as a cause of the afflictions—and in the more familiar sense, Herr Aasen could be eliminated as the girl’s father. And Mathias knew he didn’t know. But she knew; Laila Aasen knew. He had seen her face twit
ch when he asked for blood samples from all three of them. Was she still screwing the other man? What did he look like? Did he live in a detached house with a big front lawn? What secret flaws did he have? And how and when would the daughter find out that all her life she had been deceived by this lying whore?
Mathias looked down and realized he had knocked over his glass of water. A large wet stain was spreading across his crotch, and he felt the cold spread to his stomach and up toward his head.
He phoned Laila Aasen and informed her of the result. The medical result. She thanked him, audibly relieved, and they hung up. Mathias stared at the telephone for a long time. God, how he hated her. That night he lay unable to sleep on the narrow mattress in his apartment. He tried to read, but the letters danced in front of his eyes. He tried masturbating, which as a rule made him tired enough to sleep afterward, but he couldn’t concentrate. He stuck a needle in the big toe that had gone completely white again, just to see if he had any sensation. In the end he huddled up under the duvet and cried until daybreak painted the night sky gray.
Mathias was also responsible for more general neurological cases, and one of them was an officer from the Bergen Police Station. After the examination, the middle-aged policeman stood up and dressed. The combination of body odor and boozy breath was numbing.
“Well?” growled the policeman, as if Mathias were one of his subordinates.
“First stages of neuropathy,” Mathias replied. “The nerves under your feet are damaged. There is reduced sensation.”
“Do you think that’s why I’ve started walking like a goddamned drunk?”
“Are you a drunk, Rafto?”
The policeman stopped buttoning up his shirt and a flush rose up his neck, like mercury up a thermometer. “What did you say, you snot-nosed bastard?”
“As a rule too much alcohol is the cause of polyneuropathy. If you continue to drink, you risk permanent brain damage. Have you heard of Korsakoff, Rafto? You haven’t? Let’s hope you never do because if you hear his name it’s generally in connection with an extremely unpleasant syndrome named after him. When you look in the mirror and ask yourself if you’re a drunk, I don’t know what you answer, but I suggest that next time you ask an additional question: Do I want to die now or do I want some more time?”