by Jo Nesbo
The head waiter cleared his throat. Helena realised that he had been unimpressed by Uriah’s rank of Vizekorporal and was perhaps puzzled by the strange foreign name in the book.
‘Your table is ready. Please follow me,’ he said with a strained smile, picking up two menus on his way. The restaurant was packed.
‘Here you are.’
Uriah smiled at Helena with resignation. They had been given an unlaid table beside the swing door into the kitchen.
‘Your waiter will be with you in a moment,’ the head waiter said and evaporated into thin air.
Helena looked around and began to chuckle. ‘Look,’ she said. ‘That was our original table.’
Uriah turned. Absolutely right: in front of the orchestra a waiter was already clearing a table set for two.
‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I think I might have put Major before my name when I phoned to book. I was relying on your radiance to outshine my lack of rank.’
She took his hand and at that moment the orchestra struck up a merry Hungarian Csardas.
‘They must be playing for us,’ he said. ‘Maybe they are.’ She lowered her eyes. ‘If not, it doesn’t matter. They’re playing gypsy music. It’s wonderful when it’s played by gypsies. Can you see any?’
He shook his head, his eyes intent on studying her face as if it were important he registered every feature, every crease of skin, every strand of hair.
‘They’ve all gone,’ she said. ‘Jews, too. Do you think the rumours are true?’
‘Which rumours?’
‘About the concentration camps.’
He shrugged.
‘There are all sorts of rumours during war. As for myself, I would feel quite safe in Hitler’s captivity.’
The orchestra began to play a song for three voices in a strange language. A couple of people in the audience sang along.
‘What’s that?’ Uriah asked.
‘A Verbunkos,’ Helena said. ‘A kind of soldiers’ song, just like the Norwegian one you sang on the train. Songs to recruit young Hungarian men to the Rákóczi war of independence. What are you laughing at?’
‘At all the unusual things you know. Can you understand what they are singing too?’
‘A little. Stop laughing,’ she sniggered. ‘Beatrice is Hungarian, and she used to sing to me. It’s all about forgotten heroes and ideals.’
‘Forgotten.’ He squeezed her hand. ‘As this war will be one day.’
A waiter had arrived unobtrusively at their table and coughed discreetly to signal his presence.
‘Meine Herrschaften, are you ready to order?’
‘I think so,’ Uriah said. ‘What would you recommend today?’
‘Hähnchen.’
‘Chicken. Sounds good. Could you choose a good wine for us? Helena?’
Helena’s eyes scanned the list.
‘Why are there no prices?’ she asked.
‘War, Fräulein. They vary from day to day.’
‘And what does Hähnchen cost?’
‘Fifty schillings.’
Out of the corner of her eye she saw Uriah blanch.
‘Goulash soup,’ she said. ‘We have already eaten today, and I hear that your Hungarian dishes are very good. Wouldn’t you like to try it too, Uriah? Two dinners in one day is not healthy.’
‘I . . . ,’ Uriah began.
‘And a light wine,’ Helena said.
‘Two goulash soups and a light wine?’ the waiter asked with a raised eyebrow.
‘I’m sure you understand what I mean,’ she gave him the menu and a beaming smile, ‘waiter.’
She and Uriah held each other’s gaze until the waiter had disappeared behind the kitchen door, then they began to giggle.
‘You’re crazy,’ he laughed.
‘Me? It wasn’t me who booked Zu den drei Husaren with less than fifty schillings in my pocket!’
He pulled out a handkerchief and leaned across the table. ‘Do you know what, Fräulein Lang?’ he said while drying her tears of laughter. ‘I love you. I really do.’
At that moment the air-raid siren sounded.
When Helena thought back to that evening she always had to ask herself how accurately she remembered it; whether the bombs fell as close as she recalled, whether everyone had turned round as they walked up the aisle in the Stephansdom. Even though their last night in Vienna remained veiled in unreality, on cold days it didn’t stop her warming her heart on the memory. And she could think about the same tiny moment that summer’s night and one day it would evoke laughter and the next tears, without her ever understanding why.
When the air-raid siren sounded, all other sounds died. For a second the whole restaurant seemed to be frozen in time, then the first curses resounded beneath the gilt vaulted ceiling.
‘Hunde!’
‘Scheiße! It’s only eight o’clock.’
Uriah shook his head.
‘The English must be out of their minds,’ he said. ‘It’s not even dark yet.’
The waiters instantly busied themselves at the tables while the head waiter shouted curt orders to the diners.
‘Look,’ Helena said. ‘Soon this restaurant will be in ruins too and all they are interested in is getting customers to settle their bills before they run for cover.’
A man in a dark suit jumped up on to the podium where the orchestra was packing away its instruments.
‘Listen!’ he shouted. ‘All those who have settled their bills are requested to make their way immediately to the nearest shelter, to the underground near Weihburggasse 20. Please be quiet and listen! Turn right when you leave and then walk two hundred metres. Look for the men with red armbands. They’ll show you where to go. And stay calm. The planes won’t be here for a while yet.’
At that moment they heard the boom of the first bombs falling. The man on the podium tried to say something else, but the voices and screams drowned him out. He gave up, crossed himself, jumped down and made for the shelter.
There was a rush for the exit where a crowd of terrified people had already gathered. A woman was standing in the cloakroom screaming, ‘Mein Regenschirm! – my umbrella!’ But the cloakroom attendants were nowhere to be seen. More booms, closer this time. Helena looked over at the abandoned table next to them where two half-full glasses of wine rattled against each other as the whole room vibrated in a loud two-part harmony. A couple of young women with a merry walrus-like man in tow were on their way towards the exit. His shirt had ridden up and a beatific smile played around his lips.
Within minutes the restaurant was deserted and an eery silence fell over the place. All they could hear was low sobs from the cloakroom, where the woman had stopped shouting for her umbrella and had rested her forehead on the counter. Half-eaten meals and open bottles were left on the white tablecloths. Uriah was still holding Helena’s hand. A new boom made the chandeliers shake and the woman in the cloakroom came to and ran out screaming.
‘Alone at last,’ Uriah said.
The ground beneath them shook and a fine sprinkling of plaster from the gilt ceiling glittered in the air. Uriah stood up and held out his arm.
‘Our best table has just become free, Fräulein. If you wouldn’t mind . . .’
She took his arm, stood up and together they walked to the podium. She barely heard the whistling sound. The crash of the explosion that followed was deafening, the plaster from the walls turned into a sand-storm and the large windows giving on to Weihburggasse were blown in. The lights went out.
Uriah lit the candles in the candelabrum on the table, pulled the chair out for her, held up the folded napkin between thumb and first finger and flipped it open to lay it gently on her lap.
‘Hähnchen und Prädikatwein?’ he asked, discreetly brushing fragments of glass off the table, the dinner plates and her hair.
Perhaps it was the candles and the golden dust glittering in the air as dark fell outside, perhaps it was the cooling draught from the open windows giving them a breather from the hot
Pannonian summer, or perhaps it was simply her own heart, whose blood seemed to be raging through her veins in an attempt to experience these moments more intensely. But she could remember music, and that was not possible as the orchestra had packed up and fled. Was she dreaming it, this music? It was only many years later, before she was about to give birth to a daughter, that she realised what it must have been. Over the new cradle the father of her child had hung a mobile with coloured glass marbles, and one evening she had run her hand through the mobile and had immediately recognised the sound. And knew where it came from. It was the crystal chandelier in Zu den drei Husaren which had played for them. The clear, delicate wind chimes of the chandelier as it swung to the pounding of the ground, and Uriah marching in and out of the kitchen with Salzburger Nockerl and three bottles of Heuriger wine from the cellar, where he had also found one of the chefs sitting in the corner with a bottle. The chef didn’t move a muscle to prevent Uriah from taking provisions; on the contrary, he had inclined his head to show his approval when Uriah showed him which wine he had chosen.
Then he placed his forty-odd schillings under the candelabrum, and they went out into the mild June evening. In Weihburggasse it was totally still, but the air was thick with the smell of smoke, dust and earth.
‘Let’s go for a walk,’ Uriah said.
Without either of them saying a word about where to go, they turned right, up Kärntner Straße, and were suddenly standing in front of a darkened, deserted Stephansplatz.
‘My God,’ Uriah said. The enormous cathedral before them filled the young night sky.
‘Stephansdom?’ he asked.
‘Yes.’ Helena leaned her head backwards and her eyes followed the Südturm, the green-black church spire, up, up towards the sky where the first stars had crept out.
The next thing Helena remembered they were standing inside the cathedral, surrounded by the white faces of the people who had sought refuge there, the sounds of crying children and organ music. They walked towards the altar, arm in arm, or had she only dreamed that? Had it really happened? Had he not suddenly taken her in his arms and said she would be his? Hadn’t she whispered, Ja, Ja, Ja, as the void in the church seized her words and flung them up to the vaulted ceiling, the dove and Christ on the cross, where the words were repeated and repeated until it had to be true? Whether it had happened or not, the words were truer than those she had carried with her since her conversation with André Brockhard.
‘I cannot go with you.’
They were said, but when and where?
She had told her mother the same afternoon, that she wasn’t leaving, although she didn’t give a reason. Her mother had tried to comfort her, but Helena couldn’t stand the sound of her sharp, self-righteous voice and had locked herself in her bedroom. Then Uriah had come, knocked on the door, and she had decided not to think any more, but to let herself fall without any fear, without imagining anything except an eternal abyss. Perhaps he had seen that immediately she opened the door. Perhaps the two of them standing in the doorway had made a tacit agreement to live the rest of their lives in the hours they had before the train left.
‘I cannot go with you.’
The name of André Brockhard had tasted like gall on her tongue, and she had spat it out. Together with the rest: the surety, the mother who was in danger of being thrown on to the street, the father who didn’t want a decent life to return to, Beatrice who had no other family. Yes, all that was said, but when? Had she told him everything in the cathedral? Or after they had run through the streets down to Filharmonikerstraße? Where the pavement was littered with bricks and shards of glass, and the yellow flames licked out of the windows in the old Konditorei, lighting their way to where they rushed into the opulent but now deserted blacked-out hotel reception, lit a match, arbitrarily took a key from the wall and sprinted up the stairs with carpeting so thick that they made no noise at all, ghosts who flitted along the corridors searching for Room 342. Then they were in each other’s arms, tearing off each other’s clothes as if they too were on fire, his breath burning against her skin; she scratched him till he bled and put her lips to the cuts afterwards. She repeated the words until it sounded like an incantation: ‘I cannot go with you.’
When the air-raid siren sounded, signalling that the bombing was over for this time, they were lying entwined in the bloody sheets, and she wept and wept.
Afterwards everything merged into a maelstrom of bodies, sleep and dreams. When they had been making love and when she had only dreamed that they were making love, she didn’t know. She had awoken in the middle of the night to the sound of rain, and knew instinctively that he was not by her side; she had gone to the window and stared down at the streets below being washed clean of the ash and soil. The water was already running over the edges of the pavement and an opened, ownerless umbrella sailed down the street towards the Danube. Then she had gone back to bed. When she awoke again it was light outside, the streets were dry and he was lying beside her, holding his breath. She looked at the clock on the bedside table. Two hours until the train left. She stroked his forehead.
‘Why aren’t you breathing?’ she whispered. ‘I’ve just woken up. You aren’t breathing, either.’
She snuggled up to him. He was naked, but hot and sweaty.
‘So we must be dead.’
‘Yes,’ he said.
‘You went somewhere.’
‘Yes.’
She could feel him trembling.
‘But you’re back now,’ she said.
Part Four
PURGATORY
35
Container Port, Bjørvika. 29 February 2000.
HARRY PARKED BESIDE A WORKMEN’S HUT ON TOP OF THE only hill he could find in the flat quay area of Bjørvika. A sudden spell of mild weather had started to melt the snow, the snow was shining and it was simply a wonderful day. He walked between the containers piled up like gigantic Lego bricks in the sun, casting jagged shadows on the tarmac. The letters and symbols declared that they came from such distant climes as Taiwan, Buenos Aires and Cape Town. Harry stood on the edge of the quay, closed his eyes and imagined himself there as he sniffed in the mixture of sea water, sun-warmed tar and diesel. When he opened his eyes again, the ferry to Denmark slipped into his field of vision. It looked like a refrigerator. A fridge transporting the same people to and fro in a recreational shuttle service.
He knew it was too late to pick up on any leads from the meeting between Hochner and Uriah. It wasn’t even certain that this was the container port where they had met; it could equally as well have been Filipstad. Nevertheless, he had still had hopes that the place would be able to tell him something, give his imagination the necessary prod.
He kicked a tyre that was protruding over the edge of the quay. Perhaps he should buy a boat so that he could take Dad and Sis out to sea in the summer? Dad needed to get out. The man who had once been so sociable had become a loner since Mum died eight years ago. And though Sis didn’t get far under her own steam, you could often forget that she had Down’s syndrome.
A bird dived with glee between the containers. The blue tit can reach a speed of twenty-eight kilometres an hour. Ellen had told him that. A mallard can reach sixty-two kilometres an hour. They both managed equally well. No, Sis wasn’t a problem; he was more concerned about his father.
Harry tried to concentrate. Everything Hochner had said, he had written in his report, word for word, but now he focused on the man’s face to try and remember what he hadn’t said. What did Uriah look like? Hochner hadn’t managed to say a great deal, but when you have to describe someone you usually begin with the most striking features, whatever stands out. And the first thing Hochner had said about Uriah was that he had blue eyes. Unless Hochner thought having blue eyes was particularly unusual, it would suggest that Uriah did not have any visible handicap or walked or talked in a particular way. He spoke both German and English, and had been to somewhere in Germany called Sennheim. Harry followed the Denmark ferry, w
hich was making for Drøbak. Well-travelled. Had Uriah been to sea? he wondered. Harry had looked it up in an atlas, even a German one, but he hadn’t found anywhere called Sennheim. Hochner might have been making it up. Probably of no significance.
Hochner said that Uriah nurtured a hatred. So perhaps what he had guessed was right – that the person they were looking for had a personal motive. But what did he hate?
The sun disappeared behind the island of Hovedøya and there was an instant bite in the breeze off the Oslo fjord. Harry wrapped his coat tighter round him and walked back to his car. And the half a million? Had Uriah received it from a Mr Big or was this a solo job with his own funds?
He took out his mobile phone. A Nokia, a tiny thing, only two weeks old. He had fought against it for a long time, but in the end Ellen had persuaded him to buy one. He tapped in her number.
‘Hi, Ellen. Harry here. Are you alone? OK. I want you to concentrate. Yes, it’s a little game. Are you ready?’
They had played often enough before. The ‘game’ started with him giving her verbal cues. No background information, no clues as to where he was stuck, just scraps of information – of five words maximum – in any order. It had taken them time to work out the method. The most important rule was that there had to be at least five scraps of information, but no more than ten. Harry had got the idea when he bet Ellen a shift that she couldn’t remember the order of the cards in a pack after seeing them for two minutes, two seconds per card. He had lost three times before he gave in. Afterwards she had told him the method she used. She didn’t think of the cards as cards, but associated a person or action with every card and made up a story as they were turned over. Afterwards he had tried to use her association skills on the job. Sometimes the results were amazing.
‘Man, seventy,’ Harry said slowly. ‘Norwegian. Half a million kroner. Bitter. Blue eyes. Märklin rifle. Speaks German. Able-bodied. Arms smuggling at container port. Shooting practice in Skien. That’s it.’
He got into the car.
‘Nothing? Thought so. OK. Reckoned it was worth a try. Thanks, anyway. Take care.’