Norwegian by Night

CHAPTER 5

It irritates Sheldon to no end that movie theatres in Oslo assign seating to its patrons.

‘You think we can’t sort it out for ourselves? We need supervision? Direction?’

He says this to the innocent girl behind the counter.

Her pimply face puckers. ‘Is it different where you’re from?’

‘Yes. First come, first serve. Survival of the fittest. Law of the jungle. Where competition breeds creativity, and out of conflict comes genius. In the Land of the Free, we sit where we like. We sit where we can.’

Sheldon snatches his ticket and mumbles. He mumbles at the price of hot dogs at the concession stand. He mumbles about the temperature of the popcorn, the distance between the restroom and the theatre, the steepness of the theatre’s seats, and the average height of the average Norwegian, which is well above average.

It is when he stops mumbling — for only the briefest moment as he catches his breath — that the murder rushes back in and finds purchase. It occupies the space.

He’s familiar with this problem on a larger scale. This is just an instance of it. History itself constantly threatens to take him over and leave him defenceless under its weight. It’s not dementia. It’s mortality.

The silence is the enemy. It breaches the wall of distraction, if you let it.

Jews know this. It’s why we keep talking at all cost. With what we’ve been through, if we stop for a second, we’re done for.

Turning to Paul, he says, ‘I don’t know anything about this movie, other than it’s over two hours long, at which point we’ll get you the world’s most expensive pizza at Pepe’s, and then we’re going to relax in style tonight at the Hotel Continental. It’s near the National Theatre. The Grand Hotel, I’m sure, is all booked. It’s the last place they’d think to find us, because it’s not the kind of place I tend to haunt. But, personally, I think we deserve a little calm tonight.’

And then the trailers end and the movie begins. It involves a spaceship on its way to the sun to save the world. The movie begins with wonder, but degrades into horror and death.

Sheldon closes his eyes.

President Jimmy Carter did not retain his position long enough to see the hostages come home from Iran in 1980. On the day of Ronald Reagan’s inauguration, the planes departed from Tehran with the Americans who had been held in captivity for four hundred and forty-four days. The cameras filmed Reagan take the oath of office in a light rain — his wife wore red under a grey sky.

But the drama was on the aeroplane where these people cried, and talked, and worried that it was all a lie and that they were merely being flown in circles in a further act of cruelty. What Sheldon understood, watching it all on TV, was that the grand sweep of American history was not in Reagan’s poised pronouncement, but in the lonely and pensive look on Jimmy Carter’s face as he stood, no longer president, on the tarmac. And beneath the grand sweep of history were the lives of people like him and Mabel and Bill Harmon, his colleague from the pawnshop down the block from his own place in New York.

Mabel read the newspaper in those days. She formed her opinions at the end of each article, and then allowed them to evaporate like so much water off a dead pond. She did not allow Sheldon to discuss politics in the house, and he had no desire to do so anyway. Saul had only been dead for six years by 1980 — which, as time works, was no time at all.

The city had become still for them, purposeless. It was a succession of yellow streaks of cabs going by. Black sheets of rain. A palette of greens from a farmer’s market. A red steak for dinner. Sleep again. The only movement came from the watches in Sheldon’s shop.

The watch-repair and antique store was in Gramercy, just off of Park Avenue South. It was inconspicuous, but locals knew it was there. Passers-by could easily miss the thickly barred iron door that opened into the small workshop in the front and the larger showroom in the back.

By the 1980s, Sheldon’s business was suffering from a Japanese invention called the ‘digital watch’. They had extremely few moving parts, kept remarkably accurate time, inexplicably excited people’s imaginations, and they were cheap. Worse yet, they were disposable. And so the Swiss-watch industry was in turmoil, and those who depended on it for their livelihoods were, too. No longer did men and women of every economic stratum come to Sheldon’s shop for a minor repair, or a service to oil the parts, or to put in a new gasket. Instead, only the old-timers were coming in. The quality of the watches improved steadily, as people replaced the cheap ones but fixed the good ones. There were fewer clients, the work was more complicated, and the pay did not improve. The decade grew silent and unremarkable.

Bill Harmon’s pawnshop was three doors down on the right. Bill was also in his fifties, was American of Irish decent, and had a shock of pure white hair over his ruddy face. He and Sheldon sent customers back and forth between them like they were ping pong balls.

‘Not for me. Try Bill’s shop. He buys power tools.’

‘No, no. You go to Donny’s with the fancy gold watch. I don’t know the first thing about these.’

‘This is a Nikon. What am I going to do with a Nikon? Go to Bill.’

‘Go to Donny.’

‘Go to Bill.’

‘So Donny, take a look at this one,’ said Bill one day. He handed Sheldon a remarkably thin gold watch on an original leather band by Patek Philippe. ‘Guy says he bought it in Havana before they went red. Wanted to sell it to me. I sent him to you, but …’

‘I got in late.’

‘You got in late. So I bought it.’

Sheldon was wearing a leather apron and a white shirt, and had slid his reading glasses to the top of his head. He was looking a bit scruffy, and his blue eyes caught a glint of the afternoon. Not that Bill noticed. Bill had no sense for the dramatic, the fleeting, the ethereal. Nothing magical existed for Bill. Which was a pity, because as Sheldon saw it, Bill had one of the most magical shops in New York — aside from his own — and no one knew this better than his son had.

To Saul’s boyish delight, Bill’s pawnshop was the exact same size and shape as Sheldon’s. There was something about the identical shape that allowed Saul to feel proprietary over Bill’s shop, too. Bill, divorced and childless, welcomed this.

In his father’s shop, Saul had to walk down a few steps to enter through a single gated door. On the left was the repair centre. Sheldon had a big wooden desk there, and along the wall behind him were thousands — maybe millions — of tiny little shelves, each one smaller than a card catalogue at the library, with nothing but numbers on them. The light was good here, and Saul watched as people passed through, all of them nice to his father.

In Bill’s, there was a big display case so people could look in and see all the strange things he had for sale. At one time he had a Viking shield with fur on the front side. Another time he had Rock’em Sock’em Robots from Mattel, an antique pistol from the Wild West, a broken typewriter, a letter opener from France, a vase with fish for handles, and a mirror surrounded by gold leaves.

Bill did not wear a leather apron like Sheldon did, nor a watchmaker’s loupe, and so there was still something special back in his father’s. The apron was faded and folded, and clearly had been worn by knights as they fought dragons. Saul knew this, because Sheldon had told him. In fact, Sheldon had no special interest in looking like an old-world horlogeur, but he couldn’t deny that leather aprons were extraordinarily handy when he dropped tiny watch pieces. With the apron he could hear the pieces hit the leather, which let him know that, yes, he had dropped something. Also handy was how the tiny pieces could be easily collected from the folds. So while it actually belonged to a cobbler — not a watchmaker — it was both handy and had magical dragon-fighting qualities. Together, they made it easy to don and hard to remove.

When Bill walked in that morning, Sheldon had a thermos of coffee on the workbench and was carefully fitting a used balance spring into a new Ollech & Wajs diver’s watch.

‘Congratulations,’ said Sheldon. ‘Now you have a watch.’

‘What are you doing?’ asked Bill.

‘Something that’s been on my mind for a while.’

‘What?’

‘You wouldn’t understand.’

‘It’s complicated, right? Technical? I wouldn’t understand.’ Bill shook his head and whistled. ‘You Jews. You’re so clever. There’s nothing you’re not good at.’

Sheldon didn’t take the bait. ‘Staying out of trouble doesn’t seem to be our thing.’

‘So tell me what you’re doing, Einstein.’

Sheldon took off the eye loupe and placed it to the right of the work space. He pointed to the watch casing on the left.

‘That was Saul’s. They recovered it from his body. It came home with his personal effects.’

‘So you’re fixing it.’

‘No. I don’t want to fix it. I’m doing something else. Have you ever heard of elinvar?’

‘No.’

‘It’s a metal alloy that’s incredibly resistant to changes in temperature. The word is from the French elasticité invariable, which they shortened to elinvar. It’s used to make the balance spring on a mechanical watch like these two watches here.’

‘Valuable?’

‘No. It’s just iron, nickel, and chromium, but it makes a lot of stuff useful. The balance spring is a very delicate piece. It coils around and around and around. When you wind a watch, you’re coiling the balance spring. As it uncoils, the tension causes the watch parts to move and the whole thing to tick. The balance spring is the heart of the watch.

‘Thing is, there are only a few foundries actually producing the stuff. So most balance springs can be traced back to the same foundries. It’s like … the hearts all come from the same place. Like every watch has a soul, and is connected to every other one because they all came from the same home.

‘Saul’s watch was a modest Ollech & Wajs. Bought it from a magazine. Nothing you’d have ever heard of. Fancy people don’t own them. Working-class people do. Soldiers. And they get what they pay for. I like them. So I bought a new one recently, and I’m taking the balance spring from Saul’s old watch and I’m placing the old heart in the new one. This way, when I go about my day, and I check the time, and I make some decision or other, we’re connected. It makes me feel a little closer to him.’

‘That’s something, Donny.’

‘It’s what I’m doing, anyway.’

‘So how’s that any different from taking a battery from one watch and sticking it in another?’

Sheldon rubbed his face. ‘And you wonder why you never get laid.’

‘I don’t know what you mean.’

‘You really don’t, do you …?’

‘How much for the new one?’

‘About thirty-five bucks or so. They used to be around seventeen.’

‘So look, guess how much I paid for the gold watch.’

‘How much?’

‘Oh, come on, Donny. Ask it like you mean it.’

Sheldon opened his hands a bit and asked in the same bored tone of voice, ‘How much?’

‘That’s more like it. Eight hundred.’

‘Eight hundred what? Dollars? Jesus, Bill. For a watch? You’ll never be able to sell that!’

‘I’m not gonna sell it. It’s an investment. I’m gonna buy a dozen of these things, stick ’em in a vault, and in twenty years when we sell these shops those watches will be worth thousands! We’ll retire. Get a place on Long Island. Fill it with Playboy bunnies, and drink champagne.’

The wooden desk chair creaked as Sheldon rocked on it.

Sheldon asked, ‘What are we going to do with Playboy bunnies when we’re in our seventies? Admire the way they carry drinks?’

‘You mark my words, Donny. By that time, with the way science is rushing on today, they’ll make a pill or give us a shot or something that’ll build a rocket in every old man’s trousers. We just landed on the moon ten years ago. That’s a young man’s dream. By the time those same scientists are our age, they’ll set their sights closer to home. They won’t want to go where no man has gone before. They’ll want to go where every man has gone before. And you know why? Because it’s nice there.’

‘What about our wives?’

‘Our wives … ’ said Bill, taking the question seriously, ‘I won’t be married and … by then … Mabel will be glad you’ve found a hobby.’

Sheldon leaned forward and opened his desk drawer. ‘You’re a visionary, Bill. I’ll grant you that. A horny, spendthrift visionary.’

Sheldon took out a small box and handed it to Bill.

‘What’s this?’ said Bill.

‘I want you to store these at your place. Just stick them someplace. Don’t sell them.’

‘What are they?’

‘Some medals they gave me, coming home from Korea.’

Bill took the box without opening it.

‘Why do I have to take them?’

‘I don’t want my wife to find them. Or Rhea. She’s getting bigger, and running around asking questions.’

‘You’re the one who taught her to speak.’

‘If I’d known the consequences …’

Bill looked around the antique shop. ‘You can’t hide them here? It’d be like hiding a tree in the forest.’

‘Do something useful.’

‘When do you want ’em back?’

‘Let’s see if I do.’

‘Is it really about the girls?’

‘In part. If you must know, I don’t want to be reminded that I let Saul see them. And as I’m doing this thing with the watches, I can’t handle them being so near me. Look, you don’t have to understand it. You just need to do it because I’m asking. How isn’t that enough?’

‘It’s enough.’

‘Good.’

Bill took the box and hovered as Sheldon worked. After a few minutes, Sheldon looked at him.

‘What’s with you today?’

‘I’m dead.’

‘What did you do now?’

‘I’m dead. Actually dead. Don’t you remember? It happened in November during the elections. Drunk driver. You took it hard. I guess you’re still taking it hard. I’m your first death since Saul. That’s why you’re doing the watch thing.’

‘I’m doing it because of my boy.’

‘Yes. But my death is why you’re doing it now.’

‘So this isn’t just a memory, then.’

‘Sure it is.’

‘Not this part. I mean, that just stands to reason. I can’t be remembering a conversation with a ghost. I have to be making this up.’

‘Well, no. I guess it’s not a memory per se. It’s more like a vision or something. Neither of us is here. You’re at the movies with the little foreign kid you picked up in Iceland.’

‘Norway.’

‘Whatever.’

‘You don’t sound quite like Bill.’

‘Who do you think I might be?’

‘I don’t like that question.’

A little bell over the door said that a customer had entered the shop.

‘I think we should wrap this up.’

‘What happened this morning?’ asked Bill.

‘Which “this morning” are we talking about?’

‘The one with the little Balkan kid. Why did you hide in the closet? Why didn’t you save the woman?’

‘I’m eighty-two years old. What could I have done?’

‘I’m just saying.’

‘I made a choice. Whatever strength I had, I chose to use for the boy. Life is choice. I know how to make a choice.’

‘Now what?’

‘Every direction is up-river. Ask me when I get there.’

A young usher wearing the name tag ‘Jonas’ is leaning over Sheldon with a kind expression. He says something in Norwegian.

‘What?’

In English, Jonas then says, ‘I think you fell asleep. The movie is over, sir.’

‘Where’s the boy?’

The lights are on and the credits have stopped.

With some back pain, Sheldon walks across the red carpet and out to the lobby to find Paul holding another ice-cream cone — presumably a gift from the concessionaires.

‘I’ve been looking for you,’ says Sheldon.

Paul does not smile when he sees Sheldon. He has not softened at all since they’ve met.

Sheldon holds out his hand.

Paul does not respond.

So Sheldon calmly places his hand on the boy’s shoulder.

‘Let’s get out. Get you changed. You can’t keep wearing those trousers. I should have changed you out of them earlier. I wasn’t clear yet. I am now.’

Petter taps Sigrid gently on the shoulder to take her attention away from the computer screen. ‘There is urine in the closet.’

It is almost eight o’clock at night, and the sun is still high. The temperature is nearly thirty degrees in the office. They never installed air conditioning when the building was made. It was utterly unnecessary back them, but now global warming is killing them.

Unlike some of the men in the office — buzzing now with energy — Sigrid has not unfastened the top button of her uniform. She is entitled to, and the office does not stand on formality; but, for reasons she cannot entirely explain to herself, she prefers not to.

‘Definitively new urine. It was still wet a few hours ago.’

‘You sure it wasn’t one of the cops?’ she asks sarcastically.

‘We’re testing it for DNA against the dead woman’s. It isn’t hers, because her own trousers were not wet. I wonder if it doesn’t belong to the missing boy.’

‘Hiding in the closet, hearing his mother murdered? It’s a terrible thought.’

Petter says nothing.

‘How long to run the test?’

‘Normally? Six months.’

‘How about this particular time?’

‘By morning. I think Inga is going to stay late at the lab. She just broke up with her boyfriend. I think she likes being busy, and I broke six laws asking her to put this one in front.’

‘Doesn’t she have a dog?’

‘A cat.’

‘Victor?’

‘Caesar.’

‘Well. Good for us then.’

‘Are you going to the crime scene?’ Petter asks.

‘Aren’t you doing a good job?’

Petter puckers his lips.

‘Yeah, eventually,’ Sigrid says. ‘I’m getting the woman’s name from the landlord, as well as her son’s and the man who probably did this. I figured I’d catch the bad guy first, and then worry about the rest later.’

‘We’re going to Pepe’s after for a pizza.’

‘After what?’ says Sigrid.

‘It’s a nice night. Have a drink.’

‘I’m not in the mood.’

‘I’ve never seen a woman murdered before,’ says Petter.

Sigrid does not look away from the computer screen. She sternly says, ‘You still haven’t.’

At the reception desk of the hotel, Sheldon checks in. ‘Name, please?’ asks the woman.

In an accent that neither Sheldon nor the Swedish woman behind the desk can quite place, he says, ‘C. K. Dexter Haven.’

‘C. K. Dexter Haven,’ she repeats.

‘Esquire,’ he adds. Looking down, Sheldon then says, ‘And grandson. Paul. Paul Haven.’

‘May I have your passports, please?’

Sheldon turns to Paul and says, ‘She wants our passports. The ones with our names on them.’

He turns back to the receptionist. ‘Actually, my dear girl, there is bad news and good news there. The bad news is that we were robbed of our bags — passports included — not less than an hour ago when coming in on that fancy train you have from the airport. The experience was so traumatic that my boy actually wet himself. But I say this to you in confidence — I wouldn’t want to embarrass him, even at his age. But the good news is that my office faxed them over to you before we left, so luckily you have copies. And please, could you make me two more? I’ll need them for the police report tomorrow morning and for the embassy, so they can issue us new ones for the sad journey home.’

There is a moment when nothing is said.

As the slender, inviting, stylish woman opens her mouth to speak, C. K. Dexter Haven raises his hand and says, ‘But no need to do it now. Thank you for the offer. Our day has been so long, so tiring, that — given my age, I’m eighty-two — I think it’s best if we address the matter in the morning. What I would like to do, however, is give you cash for the room now so we can settle accounts. And then, I’d like one of your bellboys to go out to a local shop and buy my grandson some clothes. Socks, sneakers, trousers, underpants, a shirt, and a nice jacket for walking in the woods. Charge it to the room, and bring it up as soon as possible.’

The woman is trying to speak. She makes the sorts of gestures one proffers when trying to contribute to a conversation. Some hand movements. An occasional open mouth. Eyes narrowing and widening, with the practised head-tilt being used for emphasis. But such subtleties are, against Sheldon, like whispering to an elephant. Sweet and pointless.

‘Mr Haven, I’m sorry that …’

‘Of course. So am I. And with the medication missing that I use to offset the side effects of my cancer, I’m so grateful to have been robbed in a country filled with such kind people. This is what they say in America. The Norwegians are the kindest people. If I make it home alive, I’ll confirm that message. And if I die before returning to my native land, the boy will do it for me.’

It was a nice room.

Sheldon found a station playing cartoons in Norwegian. Paul sat quietly on the bed with a bottle of Coke watching Tom chase Jerry. Sheldon sat next to him, doing the same.

‘I had an idea for a television commercial once,’ Sheldon says. ‘Picture this. First shot across the field of wheat and wild flowers, all in golden shades. The sound of insects buzzing away. You can feel the heat. The next, gentle ripples on a pond. A dreamlike patina on the water. Then, splash! A dog jumps in. The camera tracks him as he gently but single-mindedly swims from left to right. Then, coming into view on the right side, an empty Coke bottle floating in the pond. The dog — a golden retriever — takes the bottle in his snout, huffs and puffs as he turns back. He gets out, shakes, runs out onto a dock with the bottle where there is a boy lying on his back, lazing away under the clouds. The boy, without looking, picks up the bottle and tosses it back into the pond. Then, as the dog jumps back in, the words appear on the screen. ‘Coca-Cola. Summertime.

‘It eats you up! There’s nothing you can do! It reaches into your gut and plucks your piano string! But what do you do with an idea like that? Nothing. You send it in, they steal it. Meanwhile, I don’t have my own soft-drink company.’

Paul says nothing. He has not uttered a word since they met. Has not so much as smiled.

But a child does not know how to manage silence. About the need to keep comedy and tragedy as close to one another as humanly possible — as close as pathos and words will allow — to try to shut out the voices of the dead. He is only a little boy. He is enveloped in the silence of terror, where words fail and every utterance slips from reality like raindrops from a leaf. He is not old enough to distract himself with games, is not yet adept at finding solace from dialogue and drama. He is defenceless. His mother is dead. And this is why Sheldon will never leave him.

‘God made the world, said it was good,’ says Sheldon aloud. ‘Fine. But when did he re-appraise?’ he asks as Tom chases Jerry on the television.

‘OK, I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, well, he re-appraised before the Flood. Before Noah made the arky-arky made of hickory barky-barky. But that was a while ago. And it’s not like he went back to the drawing board. He just smudged it all out, except for the ark. I think we’re due for some reconsideration. Not necessarily the same juvenile response, like a kid crumpling up a bad drawing and pretending it never happened, leaving Noah with a question. The question was “Why me?” Unable to answer it, he hit the bottle. Personally, I’d like to see some growth in God. Some maturation. Some responsibility. Some admission of guilt. Some public testimony about his negligence. The trouble is, God is alone. No one to push back. Set him straight. No Mrs God. I’m not the first one to think this, I suspect.

‘Now, you might say, being as you are St Paul and therefore a theologian and a philosopher, and possibly the most interesting person in history, that it is impossible for God to make amends, because how does he know when he’s done wrong? After all, does being all-knowing include self-knowledge? As He is the source of everything, can he possibly deny His own actions and condemn them? Against what? What’s the yardstick other than himself?

‘So, I have an answer, and thanks for asking. The answer lies in the biblical story of masturbation. I wouldn’t mention this, not at your age, but seeing as you don’t speak English and you’ve been through worse today, it’ll cause little damage.

‘Onan. We remember him as the one who spilled his seed. The original jerk-off. But what happened there? Onan had a brother, and his brother and his wife couldn’t conceive. For whatever reason, God decides that the family needs a child, so — as was the custom in those days, when people seemed to be replaceable — God tells Onan to go into his brother’s tent and shtup his sister-in-law. But Onan finds this wrong. He goes into the tent, and — thinking God can’t see inside tents, and don’t even get me started on that one — proceeds to masturbate instead. Spills his seed, as it were. He comes out, tells God the deed is done, and walks off. God, being God, gets angry with Onan. The lesson we all derive from our Judaeo-Christian clerics is that masturbation is abhorred by God, and we’re to keep our hands off our willies. But my question is this. Where did Onan get the idea that instructions from God could possibly be immoral? That there was a morality, a code, that came from a place deeper in the human soul — from our uniqueness and our mortality — that already knew right from wrong with such clarity that it could deny the most powerful authority and navigate its own course?

‘And so the real question becomes, why couldn’t I instill some of that in my own son so he could have had the courage to stand up to me, deny me my own failings, and refuse to go to a futile war that killed him? So he could have outlived me. Why couldn’t I have given more of that … whatever that is … to my son?’

Then Sheldon looks at Paul, who is staring at the screen.

‘Now come here, and let’s get your wellingtons off.’