Norwegian by Night

CHAPTER 19

Sigrid sits in the passenger seat of the speeding Volvo V60. The lights are flashing, and Petter’s face is grim. They have called Rhea and Lars. They have not received an answer.

The police radio is on, and the local law-enforcement has been notified. The Beredskapstroppen are coming from three different locations to converge on the summer house, and are well-armed and briefed. Sigrid has taken command of the operation, and everything is on hold until she gives the word for an assault.

‘We’re out on a limb here,’ Petter says after thirty minutes of silence on the highway.

‘I’m right. The old man is going to the house with the boy, and I’ll bet you a whisky that Enver and his clan are waiting to take the boy if they haven’t already.’

‘We really don’t know any of this.’

The nausea remains, but her focus has returned. Sigrid is angry, and the anger heals her. Petter is not wrong, but he isn’t right either.

‘The man and boy live in the same building,’ she says. ‘The box from the boy’s mother was under the man’s bed. She went in there with her son to hide. He hid them because he’s that kind of a man. He heard his neighbour at risk, and he stepped up to help. But something happened. Bardosh broke in, and Horowitz and the son hid in the closet. The boy urinated, and somehow they both got out. Bardosh and his gang learned this, one way or another, and they’ve been hunting for them. Horowitz has kept a step ahead of all of us. He probably thinks they don’t know about the summer house. And maybe they don’t. But maybe they do. After all, the movie buff was skulking around in the old man’s room. If they learned about the summer house, surely they’d send someone there to look around.

‘I can’t get Rhea and Lars on the phone. So I’m going to take a risk and assume they can’t pick it up. If I’m wrong, we scare them with a big entrance and I become the laughing stock of the police force for a few weeks. If I’m right, we’re showing up to a fight, well armed. Unless,’ she says, ‘the fight is already over.’

The speed limit on this stretch of road is eighty kilometres an hour, and Petter is driving at one hundred and thirty. They should be at the staging point in forty or fifty minutes if the traffic stays light.

She takes a key from around her neck, opens the glove box, and removes a Glock 17 9mm pistol. She releases the magazine and pulls it from the gun, which she places on her lap. Then she presses her fingers down hard on the bullets to check that the magazine is fully loaded. She puts it between her thighs and picks up the pistol. She pulls the slide all the way back until it clicks open, and then peers into the chamber to make sure it’s empty. She checks the magazine receiver for any debris or lint. Satisfied, she returns the magazine to the pistol. With a flick of her thumb on the release, the spring rams the slide forward, chambering the first round ‘American style’.

She engages the safety and then holsters the gun.

Petter looks at her, and she looks back.

She turns her head fully to him and says, ‘What?’

‘Nothing,’ says Petter.

The radio crackles. Sigrid can picture the operations room back at the police station, and imagines the computer-system display that tracks all the vehicles as they converge on the summer house.

It is a rushed mission, and she knew it, but the Beredskapstroppen are ready. Like her, they have already seen the satellite images of the approaches to the cabin, and have noted that there is only one road. They’ll have checked the angle of the sun against the available natural covers, to position snipers and assault teams. It is likely that the Kosovars are armed. There are a great many unregistered weapons across the country, and criminals are getting bolder in exploiting that weakness faster than the state can guard against it. They might also have found the two rifles registered to Lars Bjørnsson for hunting. Unless Lars got them first. Or Horowitz has. In which case, everyone is armed, and the situation is volatile.

Sigrid taps her fingers anxiously on her knees and checks their speed.

‘Can’t we go any faster?’

‘Yes, but we shouldn’t.’

She taps faster and looks out the window again.

River Rats. The old man’s letter was a quote from Huckleberry Finn, the American anti-slavery novel by Mark Twain, where Huck and the runaway slave Jim make their way down the Mississippi River, evading capture for wrongs they never committed. Sigrid had typed it in on the Internet, and it popped right up. Horowitz’s spelling of ‘sivilize’ with an ‘s’ and a ‘z’ made it a specifically American misspelling that was unique to the novel.

Sigrid keeps tapping.

It was probably pity that motivated the hunters to drive Sheldon and Paul all the way to Glåmlia. It must have been out of their way, even if they had been heading north. The ride has taken more than an hour, and now that it has finally ended, Sheldon is staring straight at his biggest fear.

The Ford pick-up approaches a white Mercedes 190 E parked on the shoulder of the dirt road behind a yellow Toyota Corolla from the mid-1990s.

‘Stop the truck,’ Sheldon says to the driver.

The pick-up crunches to a halt behind the Mercedes. Only a metre away, the car looks like a sleeping white panther waiting for its tail to be pulled.

‘Is this the turn?’ asks the driver.

It is a good question. Sheldon looks down the road. He’s never been here before — he just knows the picture.

‘Do you see a white Mercedes?’ Sheldon asks the driver.

He is about 35 years old and has a dirty blond scruff on his tanned face. He’s a smoker and outdoorsman. He looks weathered, but not unkind. The question does not surprise him. Instead, he looks out the window and then back at Sheldon. He has become familiar with such questions from his own grandfather. He answers gently.

‘Yes, I do.’

Sheldon hasn’t seen a Korean in weeks. Not a single one in the shadows. And now the white car is here at his granddaughter’s summer retreat. After everything. After all that. They not only knew where to find him. They got here first.

I can’t be trusted. I have to give up the boy.

‘That’s more disappointing than I can explain,’ he says.

‘Is there anything I can do for you?’

Sheldon wonders the same thing. The driver looks weathered, but he does not look tough. His aged skin and calloused hands come from peacetime activities. Like taking off his gloves in the winter to get a better feel from the rifle. Like lying on packed snow with a flashlight between his teeth to find the hook to winch his friend’s car from a ditch. Like walking barefoot to the sauna. Like letting the rope slip too soon when coming about, and getting burned on the sea.

Walking up to the window of the truck, as though he’d been waiting for Sheldon to arrive, is his friend Bill.

Bill leans into the window.

‘What are you thinking about, Sheldon?’ asks Bill.

‘I’m thinking that from here on, I go alone.’

Sheldon gets out of the cab and holds the cool steel side of the truck for support as he walks to the back. Paul is sitting Indian-style on the floor, with Mads and Tormod on either side of him. There are two other men that Sheldon hasn’t properly met, sitting on their hunting gear.

‘Any of you have girlfriends?’ Sheldon asks.

One of the two men Sheldon doesn’t know raises his hand rather tentatively.

‘Well done. Have lots of sex. Now, what I want to say is this: you can’t come up to the house. I can’t tell you why. But it has to do with the white car. I need you boys to take young Paul here to the police station in the middle of town. And don’t stop for anything. Don’t stop for a drink. Don’t stop for a pee. Don’t stop if one of you falls overboard. Just bring him to the police and give them this.’ Sheldon hands the one without the girlfriend a piece of paper with the licence plate of the Mercedes, as well as his own driver’s licence from his wallet.

‘You tell them you saw this car. You tell them you saw me. You tell them this is the son of the woman who was murdered in Oslo.’

There is silence in the truck.

‘Are you all getting this? I can’t tell when your race is processing information and when it isn’t. It’s nothing but blank stares with you people. I need you to get this. Are you getting this or not?’

‘OK.’

This is said by the big one who failed to shoot the bunny.

‘OK what? Repeat it.’

He’ll go to the police with the boy and the licence-plate number and the old man’s driver’s licence, and say that he’s the son of the woman murdered in Oslo.

‘And tell them to get over here. And bring guns. Speaking of which, I need a rifle.’

No one moves or answers.

‘Rifles are the thunder sticks you all use to scare bunnies with. I need one. With a scope. An adjustable scope. My eyesight is off. And bullets. Don’t forget bullets.’

There remains no movement or speech.

‘OK, boys, what’s the matter?’

‘We can’t give you a rifle, sir.’

‘Why the hell not? You’ve got plenty.’

No one says anything.

‘You think I’m nuts.’

‘It’s just that it’s against the law, and we aren’t hunting anymore.’

‘Speak for yourself,’ says Sheldon.

Then, without asking, he unzips one of the hunter’s duffle bags and rummages through it.

He pulls out ammunition he can’t use and tosses it. He pulls out flashlights, whistles, a pair of shoe laces, and a woollen hat. He discards them all. He finds a pair of binoculars, and puts them in his satchel.

‘Um, sir …’

‘I need them more than you do. I’ll give them back if I’m not killed. OK?’

The man only nods. What else can he do? Perhaps if Sheldon were forty years younger and sane, he might have acted differently. But no other response was possible. They’d already cashed in their chips by saying no to the rifle.

‘Any of you fish?’ Sheldon asks.

The other hunter sitting next to him raises his hand. He is, however, reluctant. He is very fond of his fishing rod.

‘Give me the fishing line. And hurry up. Now, who’s got a knife?’

There is no response.

‘Each and every one of you weenies has a knife, and I know it. Now give me one.’

Tormod, his lower lip visibly extended, reaches so deeply into his pocket it looks as though he might extract an organ. He emerges with a small lock blade with brass bolsters and a clip blade. Sheldon takes it, feels its weight, and then opens it. He rubs his thumb across the edge, and then looks up at Tormod and frowns.

‘You should be ashamed of yourself for even owning this, let alone trying to pass it off on an old man. Now give me the real one. Come on, now.’

What arrives is a beautiful Hattori knife from Seki Japan with a mahogany handle, brass furniture, and a sharp AUS-8 fixed four-inch blade with full tang.

Sheldon nods. ‘That’s right,’ he says.

Standing in the soft earth, he finishes up by taking the largest green duffle bag and emptying its entire contents into the truck.

‘Oh, come on, man. Please? All we did was give you a ride.’

Sheldon takes the bag and a large fishing net he finds inside. He ignores their complaints.

‘I need a needle and thread. Who has a needle? You’re not leaving until I get one.’

With his newly acquired stash of items, which seem quite random to the hunters, Sheldon makes the men promise, one more time, that they will take Paul and the licence-plate number and his own ID to the police.

He looks at Paul, who is still sitting on the flatbed between Mads and Tormod.

Sheldon raises his hand to say goodbye.

Paul does not understand, and begins to cry.

Sheldon tries not to do the same.

Sheldon doesn’t have the heart to watch the truck drive off. If Paul is looking out the back window at him, if they can see each other grow smaller, and if Paul is crying, Sheldon will not be able to concentrate.

Not looking is no different, really, than not scratching. The consequences are the same, either way.

In a few moments, the sound of the diesel engine fades, and Sheldon is standing alone at the intersection where the main dirt road continues on and around the bend to the right, past the parked cars. The approach to the summer house is to his immediate right, and leads like a darkened medieval trail to the lair of a dragon.

‘What do we do now, Donny?’ asks Bill.

‘You’re still here?’

Bill shrugs. ‘I’m always here.’

‘That only condemns your inaction even more.’

‘The police are going to come eventually. Are you sure you want to go up there? I mean, really, what’s the point? You’re an old man. What can you possibly do?’

Sheldon sighs and does not argue the point. He knows it is true. He is hungry and weary. His head hurts. His arthritis is getting worse, and the only remedy he’s found that helps — raisins soaked in gin — isn’t available.

Sheldon leaves Bill standing at the intersection, and walks to the side of the road opposite the Mercedes and the Toyota. He crouches down and looks at the cars more intently.

‘What are you doing?’ Bill asks, more loudly this time.

‘Shut up, Bill.’

Sheldon crouches lower and — still unsatisfied with his view — finally succumbs to getting down on his hands and knees, hoping that eventually he’ll find a way to get back up.

‘Sheldon, seriously …’

‘Shut up, Bill.’

Sheldon crawls slowly to the car and stops when he finds his first footprint. It looks like a sneaker, and has a strange symbol of a check mark above what appears to be a small apple. It is located in the centre of the shoe, and is helpfully distinct from the other footprints he finds.

The other, on the passenger side of the Toyota, is a workman’s boot with its typical diamond-cloved imprint and raised heel. Sheldon names him Logger Boy.

Apple and Logger Boy came from the Toyota, and clearly milled around for a while. The footprints are all around the vehicle and facing every direction. Maybe they were waiting for something. Both are too big to be a woman’s foot. Each looks a little too small to be Lars’s.

From the Mercedes’ driver’s side there is one clear set of footprints as well. They are unmistakably military. They have the ubiquitous rectangular tracks edging the front of the boot around five clovers and a thick, elevated heel in the back. They could be from almost any army, or they could have been easily bought at surplus shops. But Sheldon suspects they weren’t.

‘Sheldon, what are you doing?’

‘I’m learning. I’m an old dog on my hands and knees, and I may very well be nuts, but I’m learning.’ He rotates, slowly, to a sitting position in the middle of the road, and wipes his hands.

‘Three men: Mr Apple, Logger Boy, and Lucifer. Lucifer got here first. Got out of the car and walked into the woods. At some point, he came back and connected with the other two. Then they all went into the woods.’

‘How do you know they connected?’

‘Here.’ Sheldon points vaguely towards the rear of the Toyota. ‘Lucifer’s footprint is superimposed on Logger Boy’s. The form of his boot is clear, but the edge of Logger Boy’s is deformed. That means he stepped there afterwards.’

‘You came a long way with that boy to say goodbye so easily.’

‘It wasn’t easy. It was necessary. Now help me up.’

‘Can’t.’

‘Why not? You busy?’

‘You know why.’

‘Oh, I see.’

Before the big push to get back to his feet, Sheldon takes the knife from its sheath and proceeds to puncture the two tyres on his side of the car.

Sheldon then uses the door of the Mercedes to right himself. Once up, and on a whim, he tries the handle, but it’s locked. Inside, he sees old blue-vinyl seats and a gear shift with the numbers worn from overuse.

With care, he walks over to the Toyota and punctures its tyres, too.

No one’s going anywhere. This ends here.

When satisfied with his handiwork, he sheaths the knife and puts it back in the satchel. He walks back to the centre of the road and collects the other items he’d taken from the hunters, and slips into the woods like an old sniper.

The forest is dense here, and the ground is uneven. There are short mounds and small drops where glacial outcrops have been worn smooth by silent centuries of rain and wind. A blessed cool breeze that once started on the Siberian tundra rolls in low and crisply under the thick canopy of the poplars and majestic oaks.

Sheldon proceeds as silently as possible to a rocky enclave invisible to the two roads, and sets to work as quickly as his poor hands and eyes will allow.

He takes out the knife again and jabs it through the duffle bag near its bottom, and slits it open the way an experienced hand disembowels prey. He lays it open on the ground, with the bottom of the bag facing away from him. Laying the blade down, he takes the large fishing net and lays it over the duffle bag. Donny makes allowances for movement and stretch, and then cuts away the remaining net that hangs beyond the bag.

He inhales the cool breeze, and holds it in his lungs until the pain starts. Then he releases.

At New River, in 1950, he’d spent hours on the firing range. The firing point wasn’t covered by the sort of long lean-tos that shelter golfers as they pitch their shots deep into narrow fairways. At the Marine shooting range, the men fired from a small mound and lay in the dirt, or the dust or the mud or the grime, all depending on Mother Nature’s mood that day. When it was hot, they sweated and itched. When it was wet, they itched more. If they twitched or whined, they risked a rifle butt to the back of their helmets by the rifle master, who was utterly charmless.

Just breathe.

They would run ten miles a day to tone their bodies and slow their metabolisms. They cut down on sugars and coffee. Anything to teach the heart not to beat. Slow, slow goes a metronome. Less air, less breath, less life. Anything to keep the sniper still, to keep the scout moving, observing, recording, returning.

This was fifty-eight years ago.

It is all clearer now than it was then. Rhea would say it is the vivid fabrications of an ageing mind. More likely, though, it is the clarity that comes from ageing — from the natural process of releasing the mind from imagined futures, and allowing the present and past to take their rightful place at the centre of our attention.

The past is palpable to Sheldon now, in the way the future is to the young. It is either a brief curse or a gift before oblivion.

Just breathe.

It was an especially rainy day once on the firing range, and Hank Bishop was on Sheldon’s left side trying to hit a two-hundred-metre target in a light fog.

Hank Bishop, bless him, was not very smart.

‘I can’t tell if I hit it,’ he’d say after each shot.

‘You didn’t,’ said Donny.

‘I can’t tell if I hit it,’ he said.

‘You didn’t,’ said Donny.

‘I can’t tell if I hit it,’ he said.

‘You didn’t,’ said Donny.

After more of this sort of conversation — of which Sheldon never tired — there was an unexplainable and miraculous event. Hank somehow reflected on his own actions, thus breaking the cycle and stimulating a question.

‘What makes you so sure I didn’t hit it, Donny?’

‘Because you’re shooting at my target, Hank. Yours is over there. Here — I’ll find it for you.’

In the increasingly heavy downpour, Donny silently unzipped his chest pocket and removed a single red-tipped bullet. He ejected the magazine and laid it down next to him. Then he cleared the chamber of the remaining round and slipped in the tracer bullet.

He took a shallow breath, let it out halfway, took aim, and squeezed the trigger.

The red phosphorous round ripped through the fog like a burning dove through an alpine tunnel, then slammed into Hank’s wooden target. It impacted almost dead centre, and the line of Marines started whooping and clapping, causing the rifle master to run down the line with his own rifle butt clanking on the helmets of every man in the squad.

Tracer bullets are not especially designed for penetration. So the burning round wedged itself into the wooden target, which immediately smouldered and hissed and caught fire from the inside out.

‘Horowitz, you numb nuts. What the hell do you think you’re doing?’

‘Wasn’t me, sir.’

‘It sure as shit wasn’t Bishop!’

‘All right, it was me. But Hank couldn’t hit his target, sir, and mine’s already good and dead!’

Sheldon is using these same hands now to sew. He works as quickly as his fingers allow. He threads the fishing line through the needle, and uses the butt of the knife as a thimble to push it through the duffle bag to sew the net onto it.

He is conscious of the time, but he forces his mind not to imagine what might be happening in the summer house.

It takes him more than thirty minutes of deep concentration. He is worried that the needle is too thin to withstand the constant abuse of the task. The duffle bag is made of thick cotton but, thankfully, it is loosely stitched and Sheldon is able to run the needle carefully between the coarse threads.

When he is finished, he looks at his handiwork. It’s reasonable, given how little he has had to work with. Now he needs to complete the Ghillie suit with brush and branches and tufts of earth from his surroundings. He surveys the forest again. He doesn’t want to use only material from his immediate surroundings, and instead wants the camouflage to blend with the widest array of life around him. He wants to become one with the forest — for his suit to be an actual, living part of the world around him.

When he is finished, he digs silently into the soft earth to where it is moist, takes up a small handful of dirt, and then rubs it over his face and the white backs of his hands. He smears it over his shoes and rubs it into the still-green sections of the duffle bag. When he is satisfied, he places the Ghillie suit over him, with his head in the curved section of the bag’s bottom. As a final touch, he punctures the suit to the left and right of his collarbone, and weaves the strap from the duffle bag through the holes. It now rides him like a squire’s cape. And, with this, he is ready.

‘Now what?’ asks Bill.

‘Precisely,’ says Sheldon.