Norman Invasions (45 page)

“What is wrong?” I asked him.

“I am troubled,” he said.

“I have noted that you seemed so,” I acknowledged. “Why are you troubled?”

“It is nothing,” he said.

I then dismissed the matter, understanding it to be nothing.

Before our plane was to leave, some hours had been set aside for sightseeing, and shopping, mostly shopping, as most of the sights to be seen were shops. This arrangement demonstrated the sound thinking, and keen awareness of economics, which abounds amongst business communities in European municipalities.

Many rifles are available in Longyearbyen.

Shops are full of them.

And ammunition, and much of what you would want to have on hand, if you encounter polar bears. They do wander about, you know, but seldom on the main street, amongst the shops, at crowded hours, perhaps because of the rifles. Those who were once accustomed to do so, if we may believe the neo-Darwinists, may not have managed to replicate their genes. In any event, rifles are common amongst the natives in this area, and it is not unusual to see baby carriages and strollers about, packed with assortments of delightful Norwegian moppets and cherubs, being propelled by attentive fathers with rifles strapped to their backs. Too, Longyearbyen has the only bank in the world, as far as I know, in which fellows frequently enter with ski masks and rifles, and no one thinks twice about it. To enter unarmed and unmasked might, I suppose, instantly attract attention, and provoke suspicion.

“No,” I said. “There is something wrong. I am sure of it.”

I suspect that this remark was motivated by the unerring instinct of the natural-born investigative reporter. Otherwise it would be inexplicable.

“No,” he sobbed. “No!”

I was, of course, prepared to take his word for this. After all, who better than he to know if something was wrong?

Yet the investigative reporter in me remained unconvinced.

As our delightful lunch was concluded, I noted that he left a tip for the waitress. It was something like ten thousand Euros, which, even at the current exchange rates, seemed high for a tip, too, even allowing for beneficent intentions to reduce income inequality.

“You are overtipping,” I pointed out to him. “Thus you are attempting to assuage an acute guilt complex. Why do you feel guilty? What have you done?”

Tiger Mouse had pounced, almost as a reflex.

My own tipping, incidentally, leaves nothing in doubt as to my own moral stability and clear conscience.

He flung his head down to the table and began to sob wildly, uncontrollably.

It seemed I had touched a nerve. It is something investigative reporters are good at.

“Come away,” I said to him. “Come to the bar. We will find a booth. You must tell me all about it.” Many times I had pretended to be an off-duty bartender, to encourage informants to open up. This charade, in this instance, I was sure would be unnecessary.

Soon we were ensconced in the hotel bar, which, incidentally, I commend to you, if you are ever in Longyearbyen.

Our waiter was a large fellow, young and broad-shouldered, with a large mop of tastefully shaggy blond hair, rather of the sort favored by large, young, broad-shouldered Norwegian males who frequent discos. In an earlier century I speculated he might have broken the hearts of many a rural maid in the land of the Midnight Sun.

I ordered, using five of my forty-one words of Berlitz Norwegian.

He took our order, and withdrew, but, it seemed, not too far away.

I regarded the photographer, sympathetically, encouragingly.

Tears ran down his tastefully grizzled face. “Look!” he said, opening one of his trunks, which he had had at the table and subsequently had dragged behind him to the bar, to the dismay of the clerk on duty at the registration desk, apprehensive as to the effect of this transit on the polished hardwood floors.

As he had bade me I looked into the trunk, but briefly, as it was quickly shut. It was packed with a variety of currencies, of various nations, pounds, pesos, kroners, dinars, zarduks, shells, and such. I noted, amongst these, what appeared to be a large number of bills in U.S. currency, thousand-dollar bills.

We were silent as the waiter brought our order, and then withdrew, but, again, not too far away.

“Dare I ask how you came by these gains, presumably ill gotten?” I inquired.

“I think not ill gotten,” said my friend.

“Then why are you overtipping?” I asked.

He twitched, jerking about, his face and body writhing in what I supposed to be the expression of a contorted, semaphoric mass of subconscious conflict.

“Perhaps I am undertipping,” he said. “Surely you are aware of the legitimacy of a graduated income tax. Why should a rich man not pay a thousand dollars for a cup of coffee, ten thousand dollars for a bottle of aspirin, a million dollars to see a movie?”

He had me there, so I was silent.

“I sold a photograph,” he said.

“That is legal, I suppose,” I said, “though it might depend on the nature of the photograph. Did it compromise the queen? Was it the photograph of a secret Norwegian naval base or something?”

“I sold the negative, as well,” he said.

I whistled softly. This was apparently serious business.

“I kept one print,” he whispered. “For my own protection.”

“I see,” I said. I recalled hearing earlier, when we had first arrived in Longyearbyen, in a remark seemingly casually dropped by a local travel guide, about a photographer who had been recently run down by a sled-dog team on the highway outside of town. Dog teams in Longyearbyen often draw wheeled sleds, which are more practical on cement surfaces than runners. Too, of course, out of town, on ice and snow, they draw ordinary sleds, vehicles of a sort more familiar to those who have attended movies about the far north. The natives of Longyearbyen tend to be fond of dogs. They are warm, loving, trustworthy, loyal, turn around three times before retiring, and bark at polar bears.

“May I see the retained print?” I asked.

“I would be pleased to show it to you,” he said. “In that way it would make it more difficult for them. They would have to kill both of us.”

“Maybe you could just tell me about it,” I said.

“You are willing to place your life in jeopardy?” he asked.

“I am an investigative reporter,” I said. I supposed I was as willing to place my life in jeopardy as much as your average investigative reporter. But, actually, that is not really too much. When it comes right down to it we would rather, however reluctantly, if a choice must be made, place the lives of others in jeopardy, our informants, and such.

“Look!” he cried, whipping out a glossy ten by fourteen photograph.

He had acted too quickly. I had just been preparing, upon reflection, to tell him that though I was an investigative reporter, a certain amount of caution and common sense must temper our inquiries—when it was too late, too late!

I stared, in horror, in disbelief, at the photograph.

“See?” inquired my friend.

“It cannot be what it seems to be,” I said.

“Note,” said my friend.

“I see, I see,” I said.

It was an enormous close up, obviously blown up, of the rump of a large polar bear, as it slipped into the water. It had been taken with one of those cameras to which I have previously alluded, one of those whose zoom lens might have detected a dropped lens cap in a lunar crater, and had then been enlarged, apparently several times.

“It is a zipper,” I said.

“Obviously,” he said.

As those with some expertise in zoology, particularly polar zoology, would instantly see, and, indeed, as those with no expertise whatsoever in zoology of any sort would instantly see, something was seriously awry.

Polar bears may shed in their summer months, but they certainly do not put on and remove coats, at least not like people, and certainly not with zippers.

Polar bears do not come with zippers.

“Perhaps,” said I, “it is not a zipper, but a wrinkle in the film, the result of a fault in the emulsion, a mistake in development of some sort.”

“It is a zipper,” he said.

“Clearly,” I agreed.

“What do you think it means?” he asked.

“Stop hovering,” I said to the waiter, who seemed, inadvertently, to have drifted by. He withdrew then, but not too far.

“Clearly there is a simple explanation for this,” I said to my friend. “In defiance of laws dedicated to preserving the purity of Arctic wastelands surely some recreant has cast an unwanted coat into the water, from which the zipper became detached, later to be snagged in the fur of that splendid animal.”

“Perhaps,” said the photographer, “but why then would a mysterious agent, acting on behalf it seems of some powerful group or force, purchase the other prints and negative?”

“As a novelty perhaps,” I said. “An eccentric collectible?”

“Perhaps,” he granted me.

“Not now,” I said to the waiter, using two more items from my Norwegian lexicon.

Soon thereafter I settled our small bar bill, from my expense account, courtesy of a major metropolitan newspaper whose unabashed liberal views and links to vast advertising revenues are unquestioned, at least by most.. Interestingly I settled the bill with a waitress, as the waiter with whom we had earlier dealt was nowhere in evidence, his shift doubtless having been completed. I did not object to his absence, for this lacuna obviated the necessity of leaving a tip. The waitress commented in Norwegian, but her remark did not lie within the compass of my lexicon.

My photographer friend and I parted outside the hotel, each to while away a bit of time in the rifle and parka shops lining Longyearbyen's major thoroughfare, which is about two hundred yards long.

The plane would be boarding in something like a hour or so.

My friend and I went separately, as he was slowed by the necessity of dragging his trunk.

The photograph concerning which we have spoken here had been placed, carefully folded several times, in the left, inside pocket of his coat.

I am afraid that I did not devote the amount of attention they deserved to the parkas, rifles, bullets, compasses, boots, socks, knickknacks, and such, attractively displayed in Longyearbyen's several well-kept emporia. I was dissatisfied with the deft convenience and too obvious plausibility of my explanation of the polar bear's zipper. Another possibility nagged at the edge of my consciousness.

On the way back to the hotel, to gather my luggage and board the bus for the airport, I was distracted by a commotion on the street.

I thought there might be something to investigate here, and, as I was an investigator reporter, I investigated.

Moving politely to the front of a horrified crowd of tourists, intermingled with which were some blasé Norwegians, who seemed to see nothing out of the ordinary in the scene, I beheld, to my consternation, my photographer friend. He was lying beside his opened trunk, which had been forced open. The bunches of currency, however, lay within it unruffled. “He has been beaten senseless,” said a fellow, who was with our group. This was not quite true, as my friend was groaning, audibly. Perhaps he had been previously beaten senseless.

Fortunately our local guide was in the crowd.

“What happened?” I asked.

“Polar bear attack,” said the man.

“Here?”

“Yes,” he said. “It happens sometimes, particularly to photographers. You are not a photographer, are you?”

“No,” I assured him.

I bent to the body. I looked to the trunk. Not a dinar or shell was missing.

“Nothing is missing,” said the guide.

This is not unusual in polar bear attacks. Commonly not much is missing but half of the victim.

I should also note that neither the tourists nor the locals had touched the exposed riches in the open trunk, no more than the polar bear. Norwegians, as is well known, are an honest folk, even alarmingly so, and unusual people who take long trips to see polar bears, rather than visit a zoo, are very similar in this respect.

“No!” I cried. “Something is missing! A photograph! A photograph is gone!” And the reader has doubtless already surmised that the photograph in question was the very photograph which I had seen in the hotel bar earlier.

The Norwegians in the crowd laughed uneasily. The tourists laughed with less reservation.

“Why would a polar bear take a photograph?” asked the local guide.

“I intend to find out!” I announced.

The Norwegians looked at one another uneasily. The tourists exchanged glances, in a normal manner.

“There are tracks!” I cried, pointing to where an elderly municipal employee was busily sweeping.

I rushed about the municipal employee and hurried from the main street, which takes about four seconds, and found myself in Longyearbyen's wilderness. In a moment or two, guided by heavy paw prints, bloody on some rocks, and by an occasional broken twig, of which there are few in the area of Longyearbyen, and several dislodged pebbles, of which there are many in the area, I followed the trail, away from the city, across the highway, past a small lake filled with very cold water, past several “watch out for polar bears” signs, most of which merely showed the picture of a polar bear and an exclamation point, but that was enough to give one the general idea. The trail led upward, toward a small, dilapidated, apparently abandoned cabin, high on the side of a mountain.

It was to the door of this cabin that the trail led.

The bear had apparently entered the cabin. The cabin, I trusted, was abandoned. Otherwise I would have feared for any occupants.

In a fit of mad, blind investigative zeal, of a pitch and sort understood only by the true investigative reporter on a hot lead, or perhaps by a Viking Berserker, or a marine predator in a blood frenzy, or, say, a chemically enhanced homicidal psychotic, I plunged through the door and found myself face to face with a gigantic, standing polar bear. Moreover, this polar bear was holding a rifle, and it was pointing at my heart!