Until I Find You (85 page)

His blond, blue-eyed good looks had not endured. A man with delicate features had to be careful. Breivik’s face was slightly puffy; perhaps he drank. He gave Jack a virtual lecture on the subject of the cathedral’s new organ, which had been completed only a month before Jack’s arrival in Oslo—by a Finn living in Norway. (Jack couldn’t have cared less about the organ, or the Finn.)

With a grandiose gesture to the green-and-gold instrument, which positively shimmered, Breivik said: “We have the funeral of King Olav the Fifth to thank for this. January 1991—I’ll never forget it. The old Jørgensen was such a disgrace. The Prime Minister himself insisted that money be raised for a new organ.”

“I see,” Jack said.

Andreas Breivik had studied choral music in Stuttgart; he’d furthered his organ studies in London. (This hardly mattered to Jack, but he nodded politely; Breivik’s education, not to mention his mastery of English, meant a great deal to Breivik.)

“I’ve seen your films, of course—very entertaining! But you don’t seem to have followed in your father’s musical footsteps, so to speak.”

“No—no musical footsteps,” Jack said. “I took after my mother, it seems.”

“Are you tattooed?” Breivik asked.

“No. Are you?”

“Good Lord, no!” Andreas Breivik said. “Your dad was a talented musician, a generous teacher, an engaging man. But his tattoos were his own business. We didn’t discuss them. I never saw them.”

“Mr. Breivik, please tell me what happened. I don’t understand what
happened.
”

Jack remembered the cleaning woman in the church—how horrified she’d been to see him and his mom. He recalled what little he’d understood of his mom’s seduction of Andreas Breivik, and how Ingrid Moe had come to her for a tattoo—how Ingrid had wanted a broken heart and Alice had given the girl a whole one. But why had Alice insisted on talking to Ingrid Moe in the first place, and what information about Jack’s father could either Ingrid or Andreas possibly have given Jack’s mom? His dad hadn’t run away; Alice hadn’t been trying to find William. What was there about William that Alice didn’t already know?

Andreas Breivik was less pompous in relating
this
story; he wasn’t proud of it, nor was it an easy story for him to tell. But the pattern, which Jack had failed to grasp till now, was really rather simple.

Everywhere Jack and his mom went, after Copenhagen, they arrived
ahead
of his dad. Alice not only expected William to follow them—she knew how much William wanted to see his son—but Alice also knew ahead of time where William would be inclined to travel next. You didn’t just choose a church and an organ, Breivik told Jack; these appointments took time to arrange. There was always an experienced organist with whom a relatively
in
experienced organist wanted to study next, and the church where that mentor played had its own hierarchical way of choosing apprentices.

No organist wanted more than a few students, and only the most gifted students were chosen. With an organ, because of how many notes there were to play, sight reading was mandatory. Students with very narrow tastes, or those who disliked certain core composers, were generally discouraged; most younger students were irritating, because they liked to practice only loud or flashy music.

“You had to have a few irons in the fire,” Andreas Breivik said. He meant that you had to be making plans way ahead of yourself. Where was the
next
organist you wanted to study with? What church? Which organ? In this world, you were both an apprentice and a teacher; as an apprentice, you also needed to go where you’d have students. (Not too many, but enough to pay the rent.)

This was the way it worked: when William was still playing the organ at the Citadel Church in Denmark, he was already thinking about Sweden—about apprenticing himself to Torvald Torén, about playing the organ at the Hedvig Eleonora in Stockholm—and all the while he was in Stockholm, William was planning to come (eventually) to Oslo, where he could study with Rolf Karlsen and play the organ at the Domkirke.

What Alice did, starting in Copenhagen, was to find out which irons in the fire were the hottest—what city was the next in line for William. Jack and his mom would go there, and Alice would establish herself; she would set up shop and wait for William to arrive. Then, systematically, Alice would set out to destroy the relationships William valued most. First of all, those friends he might have made in the church—possibly even the organist who was his mentor. But Alice more often chose easier targets; in the case of Oslo, she chose William’s two best students, Andreas Breivik and Ingrid Moe.

Contrary to what Jack had believed for twenty-eight years, his dad
hadn’t
seduced Ingrid Moe. She was sixteen at the time, and engaged to be married to young Andreas Breivik. They’d been childhood sweethearts; they even played the same instruments, first the piano and then the organ. And William prized them as students—not only because they were talented and hardworking, but also because they were in love. (Having been in love with Karin Ringhof, William Burns had a high regard for young musicians in love.)

“Your father was more than a terrific organist and a great teacher,” Andreas Breivik told Jack. “In Oslo, the story of what had happened to him in Copenhagen preceded him. He was already a tragic figure.”

“So my mother seduced you?” Jack asked him.

His once delicate, now slightly puffy features hardened. “I had known only Ingrid,” Breivik said. “A young man who’s had only one girlfriend is vulnerable to an older woman—perhaps especially to a woman with a reputation. Your mother put it to me rather bluntly: she said—she was teasing me, of course—‘Andreas, you’re really just another kind of
virgin,
aren’t you?’ ”

“Where did you tattoo him?” Jack remembered asking his mom.

“Where he’ll never forget it,” she’d whispered to Jack, smiling at Andreas. (Possibly the sternum, Jack had imagined; that would explain why the young man had trembled at her touch.)

“Just keep it covered for a day,” Jack had said to Breivik, as the young organ student was leaving; it looked like it hurt him to walk. “It will feel like a sunburn,” Jack had told him. “Better put some moisturizer on it.”

But Andreas didn’t know anything. After the organ student had gone, Alice had sobbed, “If he’d known anything, he would have told me.”

She’d meant that Andreas Breivik didn’t know what irons William had in the fire; the boy had no idea where William was thinking of going next. But Ingrid Moe knew, and Alice wasted little time in letting Ingrid know that she’d slept with the girl’s fiancé. Ingrid had never felt so betrayed. Her speech impediment isolated her; she’d always been shy about meeting people. Ingrid couldn’t forgive Andreas for being unfaithful to her. It didn’t help that Alice wouldn’t leave the girl alone.

Jack remembered that Sunday when his mom took the shirt cardboard to church—how she’d stood in the center aisle at the end of the service, with the shirt cardboard saying
INGRID MOE
held to her chest. Jack had thought Rolf Karlsen must have been playing the organ that Sunday, because everyone said Karlsen was such a big deal and the organ sounded especially good.

But the organist that Sunday had been William Burns. It was the one time his father had played the organ for Jack, but—not unlike how the boy had met his dad in the restaurant at the Hotel Bristol—Jack didn’t know it, and neither did William.

“I’m sorry he hurt you,” Alice had said to Ingrid Moe, when the girl had come to the hotel for her broken-heart tattoo. But the
he
had been Andreas Breivik, who’d slept with Jack’s mother
—not,
as Jack had thought, his father, who had
never
slept with Ingrid Moe.

Jack remembered how Ingrid’s exquisite prettiness was marred by what an obvious strain it was for her to
speak.
Not that he’d understood her very well; for all these years, Jack had thought of her speech impediment as an agony connected with
kissing.
(When he’d imagined his father kissing the girl, Jack had felt ashamed.)

“I won’t do his name,” Alice had told Ingrid.

“I don’t want his name,” the girl had answered—clenching her teeth together when she talked, as if she were afraid or unable to show her tongue. She’d wanted just a heart, ripped in two.

Then Alice had given her a whole heart instead—a perfectly
un
broken one, as Jack recalled.

“You didn’t give me what I wanted!” Ingrid Moe had blurted out.

“I gave you what you
have,
a perfect heart—a small one,” Alice had told her.

“I’m not telling you anything,” the girl had said.

She’d told Jack instead—“Sibelius,” she’d said. Not the composer but the name of a music college in Helsinki, where William’s
next
best students would come from. (New students were part of what Andreas Breivik meant by irons in the fire.)

“Ingrid quit the organ,” Andreas told Jack. “She went back to the piano, without much success. I stayed with the organ. I kept growing, as you have to,” he said, with no small amount of pride. “Ingrid’s marriage didn’t have much success, either.”

Jack didn’t like him; Breivik seemed smug, even a little cruel. “What about
your
marriage?” Jack asked him. “Or didn’t you get married?”

Andreas shrugged. “I became an organist,” he said, as if that were all that mattered. “I’m grateful to your mother, if you really want to know. She saved me from getting married at a time when I was far too young to be married, anyway. I would have had a time-consuming personal life, when what I needed was to be completely focused on my music. As for Ingrid, in all likelihood, she would have chosen a personal life over a career—whether she married me or someone else. And I don’t think her personal life would have worked out any better, or differently, if she’d been married to me. With Ingrid, things just wouldn’t have worked out—they just
didn’t.
”

Like some other successful people Jack had known, Andreas Breivik had all the answers. The more Breivik said, the more Jack wanted to talk with Ingrid Moe. “There’s one other thing,” Jack said. “I remember a cleaning woman in the church—an older woman, well-spoken, imperious—”

“That’s impossible,” Breivik said. “Cleaning women aren’t well-spoken. Are you telling me this one spoke
English
?”

“Yes, she did,” Jack replied. “Her English was quite good.”

“She couldn’t have been a cleaning woman,” Andreas said with irritation. “I don’t suppose you remember her name.”

“She had a mop—she leaned on it, she pointed with it, she waved it around,” Jack went on. “Her name was Else-Marie Lothe.”

Breivik laughed scornfully. “That was Ingrid’s
mother
! I’ll say she was
imperious
! You got that right. But Else-Marie wasn’t
that
well-spoken; her English was only
okay.
”

“Her last name was Lothe. She had a mop,” Jack repeated.

“She was divorced from Ingrid’s father. She’d remarried,” Andreas said. “She had a
cane,
not a mop. She broke her ankle getting off the streetcar right in front of the cathedral. She caught her shoe in the trolley tracks. The ankle never healed properly—hence the cane.”

“She had dry hands, like a cleaning woman,” Jack mentioned lamely.

“She was a potter—the artistic type. Potters have dry hands,” Breivik said.

Needless to say, Else-Marie Lothe had hated Alice; she’d ended up hating Andreas Breivik, too. (Jack could easily see how that could happen.)

Jack asked Breivik for Ingrid Moe’s married name and her address.

“It’s so unnecessary for you to see her,” Andreas said. “You won’t find her any easier to understand this time.” But, after some complaining, Breivik gave Jack her name and address.

Under the circumstances, it turned out that Andreas Breivik knew more about Ingrid Moe than Jack would have thought. Her name was Ingrid Amundsen now. “After her divorce,” Breivik said, “she moved into a third-floor apartment on Theresesgate—on the left side of the street, looking north. You can walk from there to the center of Oslo in twenty-five minutes.” Breivik said this with the dispassion of a man who had
timed
the aforementioned walk, more than once. “The blue tram line goes by,” Andreas continued, as slowly as if he were waiting for the tram. “Since the new Rikshospitalet was built, there are three different lines passing. The noise might have bothered Ingrid to begin with, but she probably doesn’t hear it any longer.”

Ingrid Amundsen was a piano teacher; she gave private lessons in her apartment.

“Theresesgate is quite a nice street,” Andreas said, closing his eyes, as if he could walk the street in his sleep—of course he
had.
“Down at the south end, toward Bislett Stadium, which is only a five-minute walk from Ingrid’s, there are a few cafés, a decent bookstore—even an antiquarian bookstore—and the usual 7-Eleven. Closer to Ingrid, on her side of the street, is a large grocery store called Rimi. There’s a nice vegetable store next to the Stensgate tram stop, too. It’s run by immigrants—Turkish, I think. You can buy some imported specialties—marinated olives, some cheeses. It’s all very modest, but nice.” Breivik’s voice trailed away.

“You’ve never been
inside
her apartment?” Jack asked him.

Breivik shook his head sadly. “It’s an old building, four stories, built around 1875. It’s a bit shabby, I suppose. Knowing Ingrid, she probably would have kept the original wooden floors. She would have done some of the renovating herself. I’m sure her children would have helped her.”

“How old are her children?” Jack asked.

“The daughter is the older one,” Breivik told Jack. “She’s living with a guy she met in university, but they don’t have children. She lives in an area called Sofienberg. It’s a very popular and hip place for young people to live. The daughter can get on a tram in Trondheimsveien and be at her mother’s in about twenty minutes; by bicycle, it would take her ten or fifteen. I imagine, if she had children, she’d want to move out of central Oslo—maybe Holmlia, an affordable area, where there are still
almost
as many Norwegians as there are immigrants.”