Norwegian by Night

CHAPTER 12

Sigrid has received so many calls since the murder made the newspapers that she has donned a headset with a microphone in order to get some work done. The calls, she has decided, have nothing to do with her job.

In Norway, the police operate under the authority of the district offices of both the Prosecuting Authority and the National Police Directorate, allowing people like Sigrid to get slapped on both sides of her face at the same time.

This one, for example, comes from the chief of police for her district. She takes it with her eyes closed, as one does a colonoscopy.

‘How’s it going?’

‘Fine, thank you.’

‘Need help?’

‘No. It happened yesterday. I think we’re doing fine.’

‘Pretty political, all this.’

‘Yes, I suppose it is.’

‘You have a suspect, right? This Serbian?’

‘Kosovar. And we suspect him, but we don’t have any direct evidence of his involvement. So I can’t charge him. And, for the moment, I also can’t find him.’

‘Muslim, right?’

‘Probably, but I don’t think religion is relevant to the case. Nationality may be. I’m not sure yet — it’s too soon to establish motive.’

‘Do you have any other suspects?’

Sigrid opens her eyes and looks around. Then she shuts them again. Something about being blind feels appropriate to the conversation.

‘There is someone we’re listing as a “person of concern”.’

‘What is that?’

‘It’s a new category I made up.’

‘Can you do that?’

‘I think so.’

‘Who is it?’

‘His name is Sheldon Horowitz.’

‘Albanian?’

‘Jewish.’

There is a very long pause on the other end of the phone.

A Very. Long. Pause.

The chief whispers. ‘Jewish?’

‘Jewish,’ Sigrid says, not whispering.

‘An Israeli spy? Mossad?’

‘No. Not Israeli. Jewish. He’s American. He’s an old Marine who may be suffering from dementia. Or sadness. Or something. He’s in his eighties.’

‘The Israelis are hiring old American Marines?’

‘This has nothing to do with Israel, and no.’

‘You said this has nothing to do with religion, but then said his name is Jewish.’

‘Yes, his name is Jewish.’

‘But you said religion doesn’t matter. But nationality does. So I said Israel.’

‘He’s not Israeli. He’s American. An American Marine.’

‘But … Jewish?’

‘And … Jewish.’

‘Why do Jews have Jewish names?’

Sigrid stares at the burnt-out light bulb.

‘Is this a trick question, chief?’

‘No, what I mean is … Norwegians don’t have Lutheran names; we have Norwegian names. And the French don’t have Catholic names; they have French names. And the Catholics don’t have Catholic names either, and the Muslims don’t have Muslim names. As far as I know. Though I suppose Mohammed is a Muslim name. So why do the Jews have Jewish names?’

‘Mohammed is a first name. Not a last name.’

‘That’s a very good point.’

‘If I had to take a guess …’ Sigrid says, wondering why she should guess, when surely someone else knows the answer to this, ‘I’d say … because the Jews were a tribe at least a thousand years before Norwegians, French, or Catholics ever existed. Maybe things were more combined back then. Like … with the Vikings. So if there were still Vikings, and they lived in different countries, they’d have Viking names. I guess.’

‘Do you think there were any Jewish Vikings?’ asks the chief.

‘I suspect that if there were Jewish Vikings it would have surfaced in conversation by now.’

‘Are the Palestinians involved?’

‘In what?’

‘The murder.’

Sigrid looks to the ceiling, eyes now open, for the hand of God to rescue her from this moment. She sees instead thin, old, cracked paint.

‘There are no Palestinians involved in this crime. There are no Israelis. There are no Arabs. None of it has anything to do with the Middle East. At all.’

‘But there are Jews.’

‘There is one single, solitary, old, probably confused, and definitely American, Jew. Who didn’t do anything wrong, may I add.’

‘Who concerns you.’

‘Who apparently concerns us all.’

‘The world is bigger than Oslo.’

‘I’ve seen the pictures, chief.’

‘So if you need help, you’ll ask.’

‘I have your number right here.’

‘Catch the bad guy, Sigrid.’

‘Yes, chief.’

Eventually — and Sigrid can’t say for sure when, because she’s lost track of time — the conversation ends.

Rubbing her eyes, Sigrid emerges from her office into the main room. This is not the morning she had in mind. She went to bed late last night, ate poorly, woke to find only decaffeinated instant coffee left in the cabinet above the refrigerator, and simply didn’t have the spiritual gumption to walk three blocks to stand in line for ten minutes at United Bakeries for a twenty-seven kroner cup of coffee that has been carefully engineered, in the last few years, to be served lukewarm because — according to the turtleneck-wearing elite barista — ‘it makes the coffee taste better’.

Try letting your customers tell you what tastes better.

Perhaps, though, it is the morning she deserves. Despite it being obvious to everyone connected to this case that the woman was killed by this Kosovar, there is no direct evidence at the moment, which is irritating. They have a shoe print on the front door, but no fingerprints. The woman was strangled with a cord, so there are no prints even to take off her body. The murder weapon is missing, and no one saw anything. Unless someone was in the closet, and saw something.

Sigrid takes a few steps further into the room, where she is generally ignored by her colleagues, who all seem remarkably busy and professional at the moment.

This is comforting, because she feels neither.

The hunt is on for the killer, of course, but Sigrid’s real concern is for the boy, and perhaps also for the old man. If the boy was in the closet, and the killer was his own father, he must be terrified beyond words. Ideally, she’d like to have him in custody and turned over to social services, but there is a niggling — though very unlikely — loophole at the moment. If there really is nothing connecting the boy’s father to the murder, what’s to stop him from walking in and demanding the boy?

There must be grounds for preventing it. It’s the morning, and there is insufficient caffeine in her veins, which is why she can’t think of the plug for the loophole. It still amazes her that her own father used to wake in the morning and take a shot of akevitt before going out to the barn to get on with the milking and other duties. He was never a heavy drinker, but times have changed. The Oslo intellectual types don’t go in for that sort of manly approach to facing the cold and dark of a northern morning. And surely they’re right. It’s unhealthy and old fashioned; we all need to take better care of ourselves now.

Or maybe we’ve become a nation of pussies.

‘You,’ she says to a young cop she’s never seen before.

‘Mats,’ he says, surprised she is speaking to him.

‘Go get me a cup of coffee.’

Admit it, though. Wouldn’t a shot of akevitt be better?

‘And everyone else, I need your attention. Gather round. Pull up a chair.’

It takes a minute for the room to wind down and for the office chairs to roll into position. When the circle has formed, Sigrid — sitting now, and still decaffeinated — addresses the troops.

‘Thank you all for working so hard. I know it was a long night. I see that we still don’t have any direct leads on the boy, the old man, or the suspect. So, to summarise, we have no CCTV footage of anything useful, no reports from other police stations or patrols, no leads from the flat itself that could point us in a direction, and no active theories about how everyone is slipping through our iron grip.’

They’re all now staring at their own shoes, which Sigrid reads to mean that her summary is accurate. There are seven of them. Seven droopy dwarfs. And she is Snow White, awake from her long sleep. And not a cup of coffee to be found. Just a room full of hairy midgets.

‘OK. So let’s think beyond our case. What has happened recently in Oslo that, by some creative act of imagination, we may be able to connect to the current problem?’

A woman in her twenties with blonde hair raises her hand.

‘You don’t actually need to raise your hand. We can just talk.’

‘Ah. A couple was arrested for swimming naked in the fountain in Frogner Park.’

‘Anyone else?’

‘No, just the two of them,’ the young officer added.

‘That’s not what I meant.’

Flipping through his notes, another cop raises his hand. Sigrid points to him.

‘A man stole a shopping cart from a Kiwi supermarket. His friend pushed him down Ullevålsveien. He was going forty kilometres an hour. The officer said he was issued with a speeding ticket.’

Sigrid does not look pleased.

‘Serious things happen in this city.’

‘Not yesterday,’ the officer adds, immediately wishing he hadn’t.

‘OK. I want anything else unusual brought to my attention. Anything at all. The way Petter does. Understood?’

They are quiet, and Sigrid nods.

A man in his forties speaks up. ‘It would have been easy for the suspect to leave in a friend’s car. We can’t track that.’

‘No,’ says Sigrid. ‘I’ve been thinking that, too. Does anyone know whether this Enver has a car registered in his own name?’

‘He doesn’t,’ says the same cop.

Petter speaks up. ‘A boat was stolen from the pier by Akershusstranda.’

‘What kind of boat?’

‘A little boat.’

‘Do you see a connection?’

‘Well, I’ve been thinking about the line from Mr Horowitz’s note about ‘River Rats’, but he’s an old, frail man. How’s he going to steal a boat with a little boy?’

Sigrid nods. The connection and the rejection of it both make sense. But her father’s voice speaks to her and offers another view. She listens to this, and shares it with the others.

‘Another way to see it is that a former US Marine who fought in Korea sees himself on a last mission to protect a small boy who reminds him of his dead son. And this Marine, in a foreign environment, has successfully evaded every trap we have set for him in over thirty-six hours, and no one — including his immediate family — has any idea where he is. So let’s change our frame on this. What if we’re not tracking down a senile old man, but instead we’re up against a wily old fox with a noble cause? And what if we’re not simply inept — though we are — but in fact we’re competing, and he’s winning?’

They are quiet as they think about this. Then Petter says, ‘Why doesn’t he turn the boy into the police? He’d be safe with us.’

‘I don’t know. Maybe he doesn’t think so. Maybe he doesn’t trust us. Maybe he saw something that made him think otherwise. I can’t say. All I can hope is that if he’s able to evade us, he can also evade the suspect and his associates. Because I have a feeling that the father wants the son back.

‘Go find that boat,’ instructs Sigrid. ‘It can’t have gone far.’

At the Åpent Bakeri, across from the Oslo Literature House, Kadri talks with his mouth full of frosted cinnamon bun as a former KLA colleague and a young recruit strain to understand what he might be saying.

One lights a cigarette and squints his eyes so he can hear better.

Kadri swallows and says, ‘Are these delicious, or what?’

‘I’m not hungry,’ says the one with the cigarette.

Kadri takes another bite and says in Albanian, ‘Hungry has nothing to do with it.’

The second one says, ‘Kadri, what are we doing here?’

Kadri — though Enver has begged him not to — wears gold chains around his neck over a black shirt that looks as though it was found in a 1970s disco memorabilia shop. Kadri’s mobile phone is on the table next to the Marlboros, and he sips from a big bowl of café latte.

‘You don’t like café latte?’ he says to them.

They shake their heads.

‘Do they give you tummy troubles?’

They shake their heads again.

‘Look. We’re in Norway. You want everything to be like home? Go home. You want to be here, you take advantage of what they have here. Here they have café latte and cinnamon buns, pretty girls in fuzzy boots, and old American cars that come out in the summer. It’s not so bad, really.’

‘Kadri, we have things to do. Can we get on with it?’

‘Senka is dead.’

‘We know.’

‘The boy is missing.’

Burim, who slouches lower in his chair than Gjon, says, ‘We know this, too.’

‘Enver is looking for the boy. That means you’re going to look for the boy.’

Burim pulls on his cigarette. ‘I don’t know where the boy is.’

Kadri swallows the soft centre of the bun and says, ‘The centre is the best part, all sweet and sticky. You don’t know what you’re missing. Really. Look, shithead, if you knew where he was, I’d say, “Hey, shithead, where’s the boy?” And you’d say, “Oh. He’s right here in my pocket, with the lint and the chewing gum.” But you don’t know, and I know you don’t know, which is why I say you’re going to look for him.’

Burim scowls and then says, ‘If Enver is following the couple to get to the old man, and the old man is with the boy, what do we do? It sounds like it’s done.’

Kadri holds up a finger and says, ‘Because we may be wrong. Maybe the boy isn’t with the old man. Maybe the old man isn’t even connected to the people who own the flat. Maybe he is just some Norwegian pensioner who was standing on the street watching the car go by, and that’s who Enver saw. Maybe the old man isn’t going to meet up with the couple. Maybe Senka stashed the kid someplace else and then fooled us by running the other way. We don’t know. We are … ’ and he put his finger into his mouth, sucked on it, and then put it wet and glistening into the light breeze, ‘speculating’.

Gjon, who sips an espresso with a great deal of sugar, says, ‘If not the old man, who? Kid’s about seven years old. Can’t stay on his own. Maybe he’s with the police?’

Kadri wipes his finger with a napkin. ‘Maybe. Maybe not. If they put a missing-person announcement on the news, I’ll know there’s still hope.’

‘Then who?’

Kadri doesn’t look up. He just shrugs and casually says, ‘Maybe the Serbs.’

At this, Burim and Gjon both moan and wiggle in their seats.

‘Look,’ says Kadri, licking his lips. ‘Senka was Serb. She has Serb friends. She doesn’t want the boy going to Kosovo with Enver. She knew he’d come to take him away. Kosovo is free now. A new state. A new beginning. Time to start afresh. Take the boy back where he belongs. Reap the spoils of all our labour. As soon as Norway recognised Kosovo in March, it was all over — the universe was conspiring against her. So maybe she hides the boy with the Serbs for protection. It makes sense, no? And maybe now is a good time to get that box back, no?’

‘Why not just ask Zezake? Put him on this?’

Kadri becomes very serious. ‘Because Zezake is a killing machine. He’s not Colombo. Are you even old enough to remember Colombo? Never mind. Point is, you use a knife for knife things. Now, we are reaching for a magnifying glass to play Sherlock. Not the same thing at all. No such thing as an all-purpose tool. This is what my father taught me.’

Burim and Gjon look at each other for support, for a way out, and then Burim says, ‘OK. It makes sense. But, what? I give a call to the Serbs? Hey, you seen the boy? Mind if he comes back with his father to Kosovo now that we won the war? Meanwhile, sorry about your sister.’

‘People know people,’ Kadri says. ‘Start asking around. Just be discreet, OK?’

Burim and Gjon both nod. Then Gjon says, ‘How?’

Kadri sighs and rubs his face. ‘Do I have to spell it out for you?’

‘I think so, yes.’

‘Romeo and Juliet. Find a boy and girl from different sides who are f*cking. Get the Serbian one to find out if the community is protecting the boy. In return, we don’t tell their parents. And their parents don’t kill them. Makes sense, no?’

Gjon, who is older than Burim and remembers the old country well, takes one of Kadri’s cigarettes and lights it. He leans back in his chair and takes a long drag. ‘What about me?’

Kadri digs deep into his back molar to find something. He takes his finger out and looks at it, disappointed. ‘I wouldn’t mind recovering the contents of the box.’

‘What’s in it?’ Gjon asks.

‘Things Senka collected from Kosovo. Things we don’t want remembered. It’s time to forgive and forget, you see. Not to wake sleeping beasts.’

Gjon says, ‘This could get out of hand very quickly. Like you said, people know people.’

Kadri nods. ‘There have been four hundred murders in Norway in the last ten years. That’s forty or fifty a year, in a country of over four-and-a-half million. Which isn’t high. The cops solved over 95 per cent of them very quickly. Over 80 per cent of them involve a man between thirty and forty years old killing a woman with a knife, and most of these people know each other. Enver strangled the girl. It’s already out of hand. And they’ll catch him if we don’t help him. What we need to do now is make sure it plays out nice and smooth. Get the boy back. Get them over the border. Take a private boat to Estonia. From there, it’s like sliding into a Ukrainian whore. If we can keep our noses out of any mess, we get to stay here,’ and Kadri smiles. ‘With the sticky buns. And the fuzzy boots.’

Burim puckers his lips and sucks on his front teeth. He says, ‘Why did Enver kill her?’

Kadri’s face goes very stern. He raises a finger, and his eyes are fierce. ‘Enver is a legend. He does what he wants. You don’t question him. You do what he says, and remember that it is because of men like him you have a country now to call your own. You stay here with the fuzzy boots if you want. Or you go to Kosovo. But you have a choice because of Enver.

‘Besides, I already explained how the times were conspiring against her. She failed to negotiate with them. She met her fate. It could happen to any of us.’

Then he sits back in his chair and opens his palms.

‘I want to clean the mess. And as much as I love him, I wouldn’t mind if Enver went away. You know the Norwegian police? They’re a bunch of pussies. They don’t carry guns, just like the English. But they stay after things for years and years, nagging and nagging. They’re like herpes. You think you’re rid of them, and then, when you’re a little stressed out, boom! There they are. In the end, they catch all the killers. They exhaust their prey into submission.

‘So, we need to stick together. We band of brothers! Huh? Right? In twenty-four hours, this is all over.’

Kadri reaches even farther back into his mouth. He gets most of his hand in there. He comes out with a piece of dental floss. He holds it up.

‘Because victory, victory is wonderful!’

Gjon nods, but Burim says nothing.