The Redbreast (16 page)

She only just managed to restrain herself from snatching the letter off Brockhard and ripping it to pieces.

‘Perhaps a young woman like you should be a little realistic and not develop too strong an attachment to a man who, in all probability, you will never see again. Incidentally, that shawl really suits you, Helena. Is it a family heirloom?’

‘I am surprised and happy to hear your considerate words, Doctor, but I can assure you they are completely redundant. I have no special feelings for this patient. Meals have to be served now, so if you would excuse me, Doctor . . .’

‘Helena, Helena . . .’ Brockhard shook his head and smiled. ‘Do you really believe I am blind? Do you think I can watch the pain this is causing you with a light heart? The close friendship between our families makes me feel there are bonds which tie us together, Helena. Otherwise I would not talk to you in this confidential manner. Please forgive me, but you must have noticed that I bear warm feelings of affection for you, and —’

‘Stop!’

‘What?’

Helena had closed the door behind her and now she raised her voice.

‘I’m a volunteer here, Brockhard. I’m not one of your nurses whom you can play with as you will. Give me that letter and say what you have to. Otherwise, I’ll be on my way immediately.’

‘My dear Helena,’ Brockhard wore an expression of concern, ‘don’t you understand that this is up to you?’

‘Up to me?’

‘A full bill of health is an extremely subjective thing. Especially with regard to a head injury of that kind.’

‘I see.’

‘I could provide him with a medical certificate for another three months, and who knows if there will be any Eastern Front in three months’ time?’

She looked at Brockhard, puzzled.

‘You’re a keen reader of the Bible, Helena. You know the story of King David, don’t you? Who desires Bathsheba even though she is married to one of his soldiers? So he orders his generals to send the husband to the front line so that he will be killed. Then King David can woo Bathsheba unhindered.’

‘What’s that got to do with this?’

‘Nothing. Nothing, Helena. I wouldn’t dream of sending your heart’s desire to the front if he was not fit enough. Or anyone else for that matter. That’s exactly what I mean. And since you know this patient’s state of health at least as well as I, I thought I might consult you before I make a final decision. If you consider him not to be fit enough, I ought perhaps to send a further medical certificate to the Wehrmacht.’

Slowly the nature of the situation began to sink in.

‘Or what, Helena?’

She could hardly believe her ears: he wanted to use Uriah to force his way into her bed. How long had he spent working this one out? Had he been waiting for weeks for just the right moment? And how did he actually want her? As a wife or a lover?

‘Well?’ Brockhard asked.

Her head was racing as she tried to find a way out of the labyrinth. But all the exits were closed. Naturally. Brockhard wasn’t a stupid man. As long as he had a certificate for Uriah, as a favour to her, she would have to obey his every whim. The posting would be deferred, but only when Uriah was gone would Brockhard cease to have any power over her. Power? Goodness, she hardly knew the Norwegian man. And she had no idea how he felt about her.

‘I . . .’ she began.

‘Yes?’

He had leaned forward in his eagerness. She wanted to continue, wanted to say what she knew she had to say to break free, but something stopped her. It took her a second to understand what it was. It was the lies. It was a lie that she wanted to be free, a lie that she didn’t know what Uriah felt for her, a lie that we always had to submit and to degrade ourselves to survive, it was all lies. She bit her lower lip as she felt it begin to tremble.

24
Bislett. New Year’s Eve 1999.

I
T WAS MIDDAY WHEN
H
ARRY
H
OLE GOT OFF THE TRAM AT
the Radisson SAS hotel in Holbergs gate and saw the low morning sun reflecting briefly on the residential block windows of the Rikshospital before disappearing back behind the clouds. He had been in his office for the last time. To clear up, to make sure he had collected everything, he had told himself. But the little that constituted his personal effects found enough room in the supermarket carrier bag he had taken from Kiwi the day before. Those who weren’t on duty were at home, preparing for the last party of the millennium. A paper streamer lay across the back of his chair as a reminder of yesterday’s little leaving party, under the direction of Ellen, of course. Bjarne Møller’s sober words of farewell hadn’t really been in keeping with her blue balloons and sponge cake decorated with candles, but the little speech had been nice enough anyway. Presumably the head of Crime Squad knew that Harry would never have forgiven him had he been verbose or sentimental. And Harry had to admit he had felt a tinge of pride when Møller congratulated him on being made an inspector and wished him luck in POT. Not even Tom Waaler’s sardonic smile and light shake of the head from the spectators’ ranks by the door at the back had destroyed the occasion.

The intention of the trip to the office had been to sit there one last time, in the creaking, broken office chair, in the room where he had spent almost seven years. Harry shivered. All this sentimentality, he wondered, wasn’t that another sign he was getting on?

Harry walked up Holbergs gate and turned left into Sofies gate. Most of the properties in this narrow street were workers’ flats dating back to the turn of the century and not in the best condition. But after the prices of flats had risen and young middle-class people who couldn’t afford to live in Majorstuen had moved in, the area had received something of a face-lift. Now there was only one property which had not had its façade done up recently: number 8, Harry’s. It didn’t bother Harry in the least.

He let himself in and opened the postbox in the hallway. An offer on pizzas and an envelope from Oslo City Treasurer which he immediately assumed contained a reminder to pay his parking fine from last month. He swore as he went up the stairs. He had bought a fifteen-year-old Ford Escort at a bargain price from an uncle whom, strictly speaking, he didn’t know. It was a bit rusty and the clutch was worn, it was true, but there was a neat sun roof. So far, however, there had been more parking fines and garage bills than hairs on your head. On top of that, the shit heap wouldn’t start, so he had to remember to park at the top of a hill to push-start it.

He unlocked his front door. It was a spartanly equipped two-room flat. Clean and tidy, no carpets on the polished wooden floor. The only decorations on the walls were a photograph of his mother and Sis, and a poster of
The Godfather
he had pinched from Symra cinema when he was sixteen. There were no plants, no candles or cute knick-knacks. He had once hung up a notice-board he had thought he might use for postcards, photographs or any words of wisdom he might come across. In other people’s homes he had seen boards like these. When he realised he never received postcards, and basically never took photos either, he cut out a quotation from Bjørneboe:

And this acceleration in the production of horsepower is again just one expression of acceleration in our understanding of the so-called laws of nature. This understanding = angst
.

With a single glance Harry established that there were no messages on the answerphone (another unnecessary investment), unbuttoned his shirt, put it in the dirty-washing basket and took a clean one from the tidy pile in the cupboard.

Harry left the answering machine on (perhaps someone would call from the Norwegian Gallup organisation), locked the door and left again.

Without a trace of sentimentality he bought the last papers of the millennium from Ali’s shop, then set off up Dovregata. In Waldemar Thranes gate people were hurrying home for the big night. Harry was shivering in his coat until he stepped into Schrøder’s and the moist warmth of humanity hit him in the face. It was fairly full, but he saw that his favourite table was about to become free and he steered towards it. The old man who had got up from the table put on his hat, gave Harry a quick once-over from under white bushy eyebrows, a taciturn nod, and left. The table was by the window and during the day it was one of the few in the dimly lit room to have enough light to read by. No sooner had he sat down than Maja was by his side.

‘Hi, Harry.’ She smacked the tablecloth with a grey duster. ‘Today’s special?’

‘If the cook’s sober.’

‘He is. Drink?’

‘Now we’re talking.’ He looked up. ‘What are you recommending today?’

‘Right.’ She placed one hand on her hip and proclaimed in a loud, clear voice, ‘Contrary to what people think, this city has in fact the purest drinking water in the country. And the least toxic pipes are to be found in the properties built around the turn of the century, such as this one.’

‘And who told you that, Maja?’

‘It was probably you, Harry.’ Her laughter was husky and heartfelt. ‘Being on the wagon suits you, by the way.’ She said this under her breath, made a note of his order and was off.

The other newspapers were full of the millennium, so Harry tackled
Dagsavisen
. On page six his eyes fell on a large photograph of a wooden road sign with a sun cross painted on.
Oslo 2,611 km
, it said on one arm,
Leningrad 5 km
on the other.

The article beneath was credited to Even Juul, Professor of History. The subheading was concise:
The conditions for fascism seen in the light of increasing unemployment in Western Europe
.

Harry had seen Juul’s name in newspapers before; he was a kind of
éminence grise
as far as the occupation of Norway and the
Nasjonal Samling
were concerned. He leafed through the rest of the paper but didn’t find anything of interest. Then he flicked back to Juul’s article. It was a commentary on an earlier report about the strong position held by neo-Nazism in Sweden. Juul described how neo-Nazism, which had seen a dramatic decline in the years of the economic upturn in the nineties, was now coming back with renewed vigour. He also wrote that a hallmark of the new wave was its firm ideological base. While neo-Nazism in the eighties had mostly been about fashion and group identification, a uniform code of dress, shaven heads and archaic slogans such as ‘
Sieg Heil
’, the new wave was better organised. There was a financial support network and it was not based to the same degree on wealthy leaders and sponsors. In addition, Juul wrote, the new movement was not merely a reaction to factors in the current social situation, such as unemployment and immigration; it wanted to set up an alternative to social democracy. The catchword was re-armament – moral, military and racial. The decline of Christianity was used as an example of moral decay, as well as HIV and the increase in drug abuse. And the image of the enemy was also to some extent new: champions of the EU who broke down national and racial boundaries; NATO people who held out a hand to Russian and Slav
Untermenschen
; and the new Asian capital barons who had taken on the Jews’ role as world bankers.

Maja arrived with the lunch.

‘Dumplings?’ Harry asked, staring down at the grey lumps on a bed of Chinese cabbage sprinkled with thousand island dressing.

‘Schrøder style,’ Maja said.‘Leftovers from yesterday. Happy New Year.’ Harry held up the newspaper so that he could eat, and he had just taken the first bite of the cellulose dumpling when he heard a voice from behind the paper.

‘It’s dreadful, I say.’

Harry peeked beyond the newspaper. The Mohican was sitting at the neighbouring table, looking straight at him. Perhaps he had been sitting there the whole time, but Harry certainly hadn’t noticed him come in. Presumably they called him the Mohican because he was the last of his kind. He had been a seaman during the war, was torpedoed twice, and all his pals were long since dead. Maja had told Harry that. His long, unkempt beard hung into his beer glass and he sat there with his coat on, as he always did, summer and winter alike. His face, so gaunt that it showed the contours of his skull, had a network of veins like crimson lightning on a background of bleached white. The red, watery eyes stared at Harry from behind a layer of limp skin folds.

‘Dreadful!’

Harry had heard enough drunken babblings in his life not to take any particular notice of what regulars at Schrøder’s had to say, but this was different. In all the years he had been going there, these were the first comprehensible words he had heard the Mohican speak. Even after the night last winter, when Harry had found the Mohican sleeping against a house wall in Dovregata and had most probably saved the old boy from freezing to death, the Mohican had not even offered him so much as a nod on the occasions they met. And now it seemed that the Mohican had said his piece for the time being, as his lips were tightly pressed together and he was concentrating on his glass again. Harry looked around him before leaning over to the Mohican’s table.

‘Do you remember me, Konrad Åsnes?’

The old man grunted and stared into space without answering.

‘I found you asleep in a snowdrift in the street last year. The temperature was minus eighteen.’

The Mohican rolled his eyes.

‘There were no street lights, so I could easily have missed you. You could have croaked, Åsnes.’

The Mohican screwed up one red eye and gave Harry a furious look before raising his glass.

‘Yes, I’d like to thank you for that.’

He drank carefully. Then he slowly put his glass down on the table, placed it as if it were important that the glass should stand in a particular spot on the table.

‘Those gangsters should be shot,’ he said.

‘Really? Who?’

The Mohican directed a crooked finger towards Harry’s paper. Harry turned it over. The front page was emblazoned with a large photograph of a shaven-headed Swedish neo-Nazi.