Norwegian by Night

CHAPTER 21

Donny moves quietly, one small step at a time, further into the woods. His balance is not what it used to be, so it is harder to for him hold himself steady on one foot and to find the right placement for the other. He is still far enough from the road that he thinks it safe to remain upright, but he will crawl and become one with the ground as he gets closer.

He stops abruptly.

Just off the private road that leads to the mews and on to the house itself, he catches a glint of metal just off to the side in a gully. He is on level ground now, and instead of moving closer he moves farther back onto a small rise and sinks into a prone position.

Without making any wide movements, he takes the binoculars from his belt and brings them to his eyes. Out of habit, he does not use his trigger finger to adjust the focus, to avoid getting a splinter from the focus wheel.

Sheldon does not know much about motorcycles, but he can recognise the badge on the fuel tank well enough. It is the unmistakeable blue-and-white wheel of a BMW, and the bright-yellow fuel tank means it is Lars’s bike.

It has crashed in the gully facing towards the main road and away from the house, as though it were on the way to leaving the property.

He does not see any people near it. No one dead or injured. The wheels are not spinning. He cannot hear the engine knock or whine.

Whatever is going to happen has already started.

It is not the exertion that will kill him at eighty-two, but the simple adrenaline. His heart beats faster, and a thin layer of cold sweat has already formed on his forehead, threatening a chill, pneumonia, and death. The cool breeze that was a blessing only moments ago ushers in a future without him.

Sheldon keeps the binoculars to his eyes, and scans to his left. The forest and light blur until he catches the slightest glimpse of the colour red. It is a red that was once the colour of a sports car or a vibrant sunset. It is faded now, and pleasing. It makes the summer house both at one with, but always apart from, the sheltering wood.

He cannot see any windows from here. He cannot see the sauna. And that is where Moses and Aaron are hiding.

Convinced he is alone, he moves more quickly now. He knows that the human eye is most attuned to movement and only then registers colour. We are prey. We are not the hunters. We are designed as prey, and our senses control us like prey. His staff sergeant was clear on the matter.

When we see movement, our eyes dilate and we stare at it like idiots. Our adrenaline pulses through our hearts. We panic and prepare to flee, but we don’t flee. Why? Because we aren’t fast, and we don’t have any teeth worth mentioning, and we don’t have claws, and we can barely swim, and we can barely climb, and we aren’t half as clever as we think we are. We are food. But my job is to turn you from food into Marines! You cannot even imagine how hard my job is. I might as well turn lead to gold! I might as well turn my wife into Rita Hayworth! The only reason I am not involved in either of those useless but potentially gratifying pursuits is that the US Marine Corps is not paying me to pursue those other pursuits. They are paying me twelve cents a week to turn you from prey into predators! And do you know how the running, scared prey becomes the predator? Do you? I’ll tell you how! By stopping. And turning around. And deciding to kill. I will now teach you how to do that. You! Horowitz, what did I just say?

Sir! Eat or be eaten, sir!

He needs to cover ground and find the sauna, but not allow the enemy to spot him. He has done it before. But that was almost sixty years ago.

Eight-two years old. His eyes now let in only one-quarter of the light that a young man can see.

One fall, and his bones will break.

The high registers of sound are only a memory.

What can he even hear? Can he hear a leaf crackling under the heels of an enemy? A weapon being cocked? A bird taking flight, signalling that he is not alone?

He is no hunter now. He is a dreamer. A dying specimen. A useless man.

‘I’m dressed like a bush.’

‘Yes, you are, Donny. Wasn’t that the idea?’

‘Who am I fooling? Is it just myself?’

‘Are you sure you were a sniper? Not a file clerk, like you told Mabel?’

‘How would I know how to make the suit?’

‘You’re very smart, Sheldon. Maybe you figured it out.’

‘It’s more than that. There’s muscle memory here. I know how to step. I know how to look. These are memories that are a part of me. And it’s about more than that. It’s not just what I remember. It’s what I don’t remember.’

‘How so?’

‘I don’t remember filing anything.’

‘Either way, Sheldon, here you are. And what are you going to do about it? That’s the only persistent question in life.’

‘I’m going to find the rifles.’

‘Well, if that’s what’s going to happen, you should get on with it.’

The land dips into a long, shallow valley before rising up to the house. The earth is cooler here. It is moist beneath the leaves. It is easier to step on and find sure footing. The light is still strong, and the Nordic sun is high, casting only short shadows. He recognises the shallow valley as an alluvial rift created by a glacier or river aeons ago. It is helpful to know because it means the valley continues in two directions, and he can use that knowledge of the land to his benefit. It means the sauna will not be where floodwaters gather. It is not here or on the other side of the mews. It will be on higher ground. Drier ground. It will be up and behind the house.

I’ll take it wide and away.

A younger man might have taken an approach closer to the house, which he now approaches from the left and hundreds of metres into the wood. A younger man might have worried about Rhea with such intensity that he would have armed himself only with the short knife and used it as a weapon. But Sheldon is not a younger man. He cannot overpower anyone. From a seated position he can barely push the knife through the wall of the cotton canvas bag.

When we look into a forest to find the source of a sound, we look at the spaces in between. Between the trees where the light shines through. Between the branches to glimpse the blue sky, or the grey and silver linings of the heavens. Our eyes look for light, and search for something to carry us from the darkness of the wilderness.

And so Sheldon moves among the shadows. He clings to the base of trees. He lies flat for moments at a time where the ground is uneven, and he becomes the floor of the forest. He uses his knees and elbows to steady himself, because there is not enough strength in his chest any longer to keep his frail body above the earth for very long.

How much time has passed?

It’s been about an hour. Forty minutes for the Ghillie suit, and only twenty minutes on the move. Is that possible? It feels like much longer.

He would grow cold here if it were not so hot under the tarp. He should be wearing gloves. They always told him that. Leather is best. Drivers of race cars and horseback riders wear gloves to absorb the sweat and keep a grip on the reins. Metal workers and woodsmiths wear them. Gardeners and mountain climbers use them.

Such gentle hands, Mabel had once whispered to him.

Not any more. Now they are calloused and scarred. They are bloody and alone. They seldom even have each other for company anymore. They have grown indifferent to one another. There isn’t so much to clap for any longer.

Most of the men in his squad took to snipping off the index finger of their gloves and then sliding it back on unattached. It was possible to lose it this way and end up with one cold finger — which happened, but only rarely. Being gloved was important, and all the men knew it. It was the best way to keep their hands supple and warm. The raiders protected their hands the way that surgeons protect theirs. The way that violinists and pianists will not remove hot food from the oven.

They would remove the leather finger only at the last moment before the kill.

Sheldon looks back over the ground he’s covered. He is impressed with himself. The clothing does have a way of making the man. A soldier stands taller in his uniform. A doctor acts more authoritative in his white smock. The sniper creeps lower. Is sneakier. Gets closer.

The red house moves like the sun across the horizon. He has tracked it across this forested sky, and it is now coming to rest at his extreme right. It is larger than he expected. He has always imagined it as a single-room shack of coarse pinewood with a steep roof. A sort of outhouse or dog shed on a swept tundra that never thaws in the summer. A little photo on the refrigerator on his way to the iced coffee.

In actuality, it is rather larger than that. Sheldon reckons the house is a one-storey, with two bedrooms and an attic. Maybe one hundred and ten square metres. It is raised off the ground slightly, so there is a crawl space beneath the house. It is probably designed that way to keep it dry from the snow and run-off.

There are two steps leading up directly to the closed door. He is much too far away to see footprints, but there is no need to check. Lucifer’s tracks came back to the truck from the woods, but Mr Apple and Logger Boy left the scene only once.

There is nowhere else they could have gone. They are inside.

With the bike overturned, Sheldon can only hope that Rhea and Lars are there, too.

A little farther now and … is that it? He scans the spot with his binoculars. The edge is straight. Clearly man-made. It is a structure of some kind, about one hundred metres from the house. Sheldon creeps over huckleberry shrub and fallen birch. He avoids a dead badger, and is grateful there are no crows there to be startled and give away his location.

Yes, there it is. That is the sauna he has imagined. A single room with a roof — large enough to seat half-a-dozen people and dry the firewood. A spoon inside to douse the rocks with cold water and build up steam. Where fair bodies simmer into a blistering rouge like a harlot’s cheeks after a firm roll.

Sheldon comes at the sauna from the back side, allowing it to eclipse the main house. He stands now for the first time, and feels the pain shoot up his back.

The door is on the far side facing the house, but there is a small window in the back that he can see inside if he stands fully erect.

It is dark inside, but not pitch black. There is also a round window on the door itself that lets in enough light to scout the contents of the room. There is a bench that runs around all sides except on the door itself, and on the left wall there is a second, higher bench. The seats are worn, and even though there is no fire he can smell the wood. It reminds him of being young and full of spunk. The feeling comes as an unwanted diversion. He tries immediately to repress it, but the memories that come from smells are the hardest to send away.

Is this the kind of place a man would store a weapon? Surely it is not. Ammunition is not likely to ignite at the reasonably low temperatures at which humans bake — otherwise the Middle East wouldn’t be armed. But it can warp delicate woods, and force metal to expand just enough to throw off the precision of a fine instrument.

So where is it?

Sheldon stands and looks through the window some more, but the idea doesn’t come to him.

‘How’s it going?’

‘Bill?’

‘Yeah.’

‘I can’t find the guns.’

‘Where have you looked?’

‘Well, I’ve looked through this window here.’

‘Sounds thorough. Might as well pack it in.’

‘All right, sunshine, what’s your bright idea?’

‘Actually, the idea is yours. If the sauna is too hot, then it can’t be in the sauna.’

‘So it’s outside the sauna.’

‘Well reasoned.’

It’s with the wood!

Sheldon walks left and peers around the corner. He can see the house, and is pretty sure the house cannot see him. But there, as Bill suggested, is a second, small shack. There is no window. It stands about two-and-a-half metres tall, and is less than two metres wide and a metre deep. More of a closet than a shack. In these parts, given that the property is not a farm, it could not be mistaken for anything other than a wood-and-toolshed. It is an utterly unremarkable place worth no one’s attention.

It is a good place to store a weapon, Sheldon figures. It might grow cold, but the damage to the gun is far less than the risk of robbery from the main house. There is always the risk of accident, too. This is why Sheldon never owned a gun once he got back from Korea, unless one counts the old pirate gun that Saul used to play with in the antique shop.

Bill, meanwhile, had a decommissioned musket, so when the two of them started going at it there was no getting any work done.

The door to the shed is secured with an old-fashioned Master Lock in a red-rubber encasement. It was always a popular lock. There used to be a commercial on television of someone shooting the lock. Then, with the bullet hole shown in close-up, someone would try it and, lo and behold, it was still locked. The company even ran a second ad, claiming that the trigger-happy doubters weren’t able to open it. Sheldon always suspected he’d be able to, but the opportunity never arose.

Under other circumstances, this would have been an excellent occasion — if only the rifle he needed to test the theory wasn’t behind the lock he planned to test it on.

None of which, right now, is a helpful line of thought.

What is useful is that, when he tries it, the lock is actually open. The inverted U of the lock has been set into place but not pinched closed. There is little point now in wondering why, though. He has to go in. He can only hope that no one has been here before him, and taken what he needs.

The door hinge is on the right, and so it swings towards the house. Sheldon steps into the shed and closes the door behind him. It is dark inside, and warm. It is so confined that, for the first time, he can smell himself. His body odour reeks, he is smeared with dirt and fungus, and he is streaked with the excrement of birds and worms. Every part of him blends with the earth and the soil — everything but his blue eyes that still take in the sharp rays of light from the cracks in the roof.

There is a rake, and three shovels of different sizes. There is a paintbrush that is stiff from neglect, and a coil of rope that was once dependable but has been too long near the petrol fumes and is now suspect. There are archery targets and fishing tackle. And there, above him, hanging just off the shelf because it is too deep for the shelf itself, is a leather case half the length of a rifle.

Sheldon presses up on the case and tries to keep it from scraping as he pulls it off and down. It is heavier than it looks. Or perhaps he has grown weaker.

He wants to leave here immediately, but knows that a rifle without ammunition is useless to him. If he is caught here, he could be killed without a fight. It is too much of a risk, though, to leave and assemble the rifle, only to come back. It needs to be done here.

Trying not to knock anything over, he lays the case gently on the dusty floor, listening intently for any sound from outside. Still there is nothing. The case is old, and has a combination lock on the front with three digits that can be rotated by thumb. In the 1960s, a common code was 007 in honour of Sean Connery, and Sheldon tries it without success. The factory default on most cases is 000, and he tries this as well without success.

‘This could go on all day,’ says Bill.

‘Why’s it always Bill? Why not Mabel? Or Saul? Or Mario? Or someone I passed on a highway. Why do you come here dressed like the drunken Irish pawnbroker from next door?’

‘I thought he was dear to you.’

‘He was, and I miss him. Which is why I resent you dressing up like him. Over burning bushes, are you? Now you want to be Irish?’

‘It’s been a long time since we really spoke. I miss our conversations.’

‘I have no more to say to you than I did before. It’s you, if anyone, who has some explaining to do. So piss off, I’m busy.’

Sheldon silently turns the case around so the hinges face him. He wedges the knife blade under the first brass hinge. By inserting a small stone under the blade, he creates a fulcrum, and then he presses down hard on the hilt of the knife, successfully prying it off.

He repeats this on the second hinge, and they both come off without a fuss.

He checks his watch. More time has passed. That is all he’s prepared to admit.

Knowing it will creak slightly, he now lifts the case lid to expose the contents. To his surprise, there is only one rifle.

‘Which one are you? Moses or Aaron? The damaged one, or the brother who makes it to the Promised Land?’

Sheldon gently takes it from the case and feels its weight. It has been decades since he handled a rifle. He never intended to hold one again. But here, in the improvised Ghillie suit, on the floor of the dusty shack, he remembers who he once was, so long ago, with a confidence and clarity that has been missing for years.

The rifle is a Remington Model Seven with a 20-inch barrel that Donny wishes were a 22-inch, for added accuracy. Ammunition is supposed to be stored in a separate location, but Lars obviously trusted the hiding place and the lock box. There are five rounds of .308 Winchester, which look and feel familiar because they are about the same size as a NATO 7.62mm. They are the sort of rimless bottleneck round that he used to squeeze off — at a rate of 100 or 300 a day — back at New River.

The Remington, though, is a single-shot, bolt-action rifle. It is the sort of rifle that a father and son might own. Nothing fancy. Just a good, dense-wood deer hunter with a walnut stock and an old Bausch & Lomb scope.

Donny assembles the weapon, and then opens the bolt and slides it back. It is smooth and well oiled. With his finger, he checks the chamber to be sure it is empty, and then he slides in a round and presses forward — hard but quietly — on the bolt. He then locks it down into its groove.

With the safety on, he takes the remaining four rounds out of the box, and puts three of them in the breast pocket of his jacket under the suit. He places the final round above his right ear.

Sheldon checks the shed one last time to see whether he might be missing something — a clue, or the other rifle. There are paper targets and duck decoys, a pair of snow shoes and a set of skis, some odd strings dangling from a hook with brightly coloured ends, an empty tube of some kind that looks like it may have been used to carry architectural drawings, and two aged and worn-out tennis rackets probably used on days just like this to whack the ball around the mews.

He debates the merits of closing and replacing the box, and decides it is worth taking the few extra seconds involved. He is not used to working in a crisis situation like this. Not used to the pressures of a hostage situation. As a sniper, he worked alone or with a spotter. He was dropped off someplace, and then — usually in his own sweet time — made it to the objective and set up his position. He did not run around like a nervous cop wondering what to do like he had to do now.

Camouflaged and armed, Donny’s countenance changes. He stops sweating, and his back no longer feels pinched in the lumbar region. Even his hands feel looser.

And then the objective changes.

As he advances on the house from the shed, he sees two figures making their way up the mews towards the front door.

There is a tall one and a short one. The tall one is pulling or dragging the small one. They are more than one hundred and fifty metres away, through trees and bush.

How long has it been since he drank water? Could it be this morning? No, it was on the truck.

He stays low and hunched as he slips up the path towards the house.

It is a bad angle. A terrible angle. One of the worst possible angles. He is moving perpendicular to a possible target, giving it the longest time to detect his movement. They are converging on the same vortex. Sheldon is closer and may make the house sooner, but he will have no time to set up. He’ll be entirely exposed. And he has no idea who this is.

And then there descends a small gift. From the edges of Lapland comes a breeze, carrying with it with the scents of juniper and snow. The breeze rustles the trees surrounding Sheldon in a whirl of protective movement and hum.

At only fifty metres from the house, the ground cover begins to thin, and he knows this is it. He drops to his belly and slithers off the path to the left, where the ground has eroded a few inches because the earth is less densely packed here than the dirt on the footpath. He lies low and adjusts his Ghillie suit.

Checking the wind and the angle of the light, he takes his position.

Donny brings the rifle into play and checks his sight.

It would be good to have a spotter now. Hank never did cut it as a shooter, but they moved him off the rifle to the scope, and found him unexpectedly effective. Partly this was because he was well meaning and gullible and so did what he was told, but in part because — unlike Mario — he wasn’t smart enough to question what he was doing. He was good at finding the range and making helpful suggestions about where to set up the shot. And despite being a goofball, he was eerily silent when they were working.

But Hank is not here now, and Donny has to select the shot himself.

The tall one is an unremarkable man in a black-leather jacket carrying a lever-action rifle by its balance point just in front of the receiver.

And the small one is Paul.

Sheldon closes his eyes tightly. So tightly that the grid of cones and rods casts a mosaic against his retinas and resets his mind.

He blinks and then blinks again, to be sure. But, yes, the boy is still there.

Right.

So there is now a choice, and either choice is a failure. If he shoots the stranger with Paul he might, just might, be able to pull the boy into the thicket and hide him under the Ghillie suit long enough for the police to arrive. But if he does, he sacrifices his granddaughter and Lars to whoever is in the house. They will hear the shot. They will find the body. They will take their revenge.

Sheldon takes aim at Paul, and studies his face through the scope. He has been crying, and his face is red and puffy. The wellingtons are bright blue against the cool yellow of the mews’ summer grass. Paul no longer has his hat and horns. His Star of David is less like a comical act of defiance now, and more like a target or provocation. There is resistance in his steps and emotion on his face, where before there had been none. The boy has been pushed to his limit. And still he doesn’t know that his mother is dead.

Sheldon can only wonder what has happened to the hunters.

The shot is getting easier to take. They are walking towards him. Towards the house. Donny eases off the safety and places the crosshairs between the man’s eyes. There is no venom in his look. He is not speaking, and doesn’t appear at all frustrated over Paul’s resistance. He is much larger, and drags the boy where he wants to take him.

Donny lowers the sights to the centre of the man’s chest. It is an unfamiliar weapon. He does not know how the ammunition responds, how well the scope is aligned, and whether the barrel has been cleaned. The best he can do is shoot for the centre of mass and hope that his hands do not twitch, that the gun reacts, and that Paul will come when he is called.

Or, to be more precise, he hopes that Paul will come into the woods when a name that is not his is called out in a language he does not speak by a man holding a rifle and dressed like a bush.

This is not a good plan.

He breathes. He takes the air into his lungs deeply and lets it out slowly. Then he takes a second breath, more shallow than the first, and lets it out halfway. Without Hank, he checks the wind one last time. He measures the gait of his mark, and judges the distance to the target and the time it will take for the bullet to travel that distance so that the round can penetrate his heart at the correct moment of the step.

It has been fifty-eight years since Sheldon Horowitz has taken aim against an enemy.

With Sheldon balanced and in position, time is replaced by eternity.

In finding his form, he gains composure.

There is a moment of calm.

In that moment of calm, Donny pulls the trigger.