Pierced (20 page)

They remain opposite each other for a while. The man looks at Thorleif for a long time before he nods and walks further into the cathedral. Thorleif follows him. They sit down on a bench. The man waits until a group of Japanese tourists have moved on. Then he slips one hand into the inside pocket of his leather jacket and takes out a box. He opens it with care and shows it to Thorleif.

‘W-what’s that?’ Thorleif whispers, looking down at it. Reluctantly, he realises that he is intrigued.

‘This,’ the man says, reverently. ‘This is a piercing needle.’

‘Are you all right?’

Thorleif looks up at Guri Palme’s concerned face.

‘You’re as white as a sheet. Are you sure you’re okay to work?’

‘Oh, yes,’ Thorleif groans, and forces a smile. ‘I’ll be fine. But I think I might not start the editing today.’

‘Fine. It’s not going out until Saturday, anyway,’ Palme says sympathetically. ‘Are you really all right? You look terrible.’

‘I’ll be fine,’ he assures her.

Palme scrutinises him for several seconds before she puts her hand on his shoulder.

‘Good. It’s a big day today.’

They get into a white Peugeot 207 with TV2’s familiar ‘2’ and the letters ENG 12 on the right front wing and drive off. He is numb; it’s as if the body sitting in the car doesn’t belong to him. He can’t feel the seat underneath him.

He looks out of the window searching for something he can
focus
on and lose himself in, but he finds nothing. Only children in the park, people in cafés. Life passing by. He recognises the mood from this morning. Something is brewing. He starts to feel dizzy. The little box he was given is burning a hole in his inside pocket.

Thorleif hears the man’s voice inside his head:
There is no reason why you can’t go home from work today. You just have to do one small thing for us. If you do that you’ll be able to carry on with your life just as it was before. If you don’t, we’ll kill not only you but also your children.

Thorleif closes his eyes.

The car stops. The ground feels soft as he gets out. Ole Reinertsen, the other cameraman, opens the boot. Both of them pick up their cameras and recording equipment. Thorleif slings the lighting kit over his shoulder and soon feels his forehead flush with heat. The camera seems heavier than usual. The details around him lose substance and float past. He lets himself be guided through doors and finally into a room. He stares at the grey linoleum floor, feeling trapped by the white painted concrete walls.

‘Okay,’ Guri says. ‘We’ll probably need fifteen minutes to get ready. Or what do you think, Toffe?’

He nods. He hears a kind male voice reply that that’s fine and that he will be back. Thorleif is the last person to enter the room. He puts down his bags, his tripods and his camera. The room is small and narrow. A beech and glass table stands in the middle. The curtains have a pattern that looks like butterflies.

‘What do you think?’ Reinertsen asks him. ‘Two lights and a camera right behind Guri, roughly here?’

Reinertsen makes a square with his hands. Thorleif nods.

‘And I’ll be filming him as he enters.’

‘Mm.’

‘Could you pass me the tripod, please?’

Reinertsen points to the tripod. Thorleif does what he is asked. Behind him, Palme is marching up and down the floor with notes in her hands which she alternately looks at and away from. Thorleif’s work absorbs his attention for several minutes. He rigs the Panasonic 905 and finds a microphone and an XLR cable. Normally he would have said,
I just need to attach this to you
, and the interviewee would instantly forget that they were wearing a mike. But Thorleif doesn’t know if he will be able to say that today.

He tries to concentrate on the lighting. Three lights, perhaps a spot at the back to create an illusion of depth by contrasting objects. The light coming from behind is too sharp. He will have to close the curtains. Put a Dedolight in front, perhaps, with a Chimera attachment. It’ll be fine. The Chimera will disperse the light and soften it. If he dims the Dedolight, the colour will be warmer.

Rigging the lights distracts Thorleif and briefly makes him feel better. But in less than ten seconds the task facing him consumes him again.

Fifteen minutes later he is ready. He takes a deep breath, reaches inside his pocket, takes the box, opens it, turns away, places the needle in his left hand with the greatest of care, closes the box and puts it back.
Do everything
, he thinks.
You have to do everything.

Near him, a door is opened. He sees Palme’s face light up. She has put on her camera face. She smiles. Extends her hand. Thorleif struggles to stop his knees from knocking.
You’ll never be able to do it
, a voice inside him whispers.
You’ll fail. You’ll never succeed.

The room contracts. Thorleif presses his fingers together. His feet refuse to be still. The air grows clammy and difficult to inhale. Palme nods and smiles, she practically curtsies. ‘Thank you for coming. We’re delighted to start the
Dypdykk
series with this interview.’

A shadow appears in the doorway. Thorleif looks up. Dark, conspicuous tattoos. A woman’s face on a forearm.

He meets the eyes of the towering shadow. The man holds out his hand. Thorleif takes it, hears the man’s voice, deep and thundering.

‘Tore Pulli.’

Thorleif’s hand disappears inside the huge fist. He barely has enough strength to return the handshake. He looks up and says feebly, ‘Thorleif Brenden. N-nice to meet you.’

The fan on the windowsill whooshes noisily but still loses its battle with the quivering heat. The heat moistens Henning’s face as he leans over the kitchen table and scrolls through a Google search. Hundreds of articles about Rasmus Bjelland. More irrelevant hits than useful ones.

The vibrating of his mobile makes him turn his head. It’s Iver. Henning decides to ignore the call, but the mobile keeps twitching and buzzing. Finally, Henning hits the green answer button with irritation. A couple of seconds pass.

‘Hello?’

‘Mm.’

‘Is that you, Henning?’

‘Yes.’

‘Really . . . ? It doesn’t sound like you. Never mind . . . listen, have you heard the news?’

‘No?’

‘You won’t believe it. You know Tore Pulli? The ex-enforcer?’

Henning sits up in his seat. ‘Yes, what about him?’

‘He’s dead.’

The noise from the street disappears. The heat gives way to an icy blast. The space Henning is staring at narrows and contracts. His heart beats faster and faster until he swallows and inhales sharply. ‘W-what did you say?’

‘Tore Pulli is dead.’

Henning puts his elbow on the table and runs his hand across his face, letting it come to a rest on his forehead. His eyelids slide shut. He hears Iver say something, but the words refuse to sink in. All he can think about is Jonas. And his faint hope. That, too, has been extinguished.

‘Dead how?’

‘Jesus Christ, what kind of question is that?’

‘How did he die?’

‘I don’t have all the details yet. He appears to have just dropped dead, I believe, completely out of the blue. But you haven’t heard the worst. Or best, depending how you look at it. He died while he was being interviewed by TV2.’ The table moves in on him. ‘Unfortunately it wasn’t a live broadcast, otherwise we could have had a ball with it.’

Henning stares at the dents and scratches in the table top. The grain in the wood expands, it grows darker and deeper.

Who on earth will help him now?

‘When did it happen?’

‘About an hour ago. It’s completely—’

Henning plugs in the mobile’s headset and puts it down. He holds up his hands in front of his mouth and nose so they form a closed triangle.

‘Are you still there?’ Iver asks.

‘I’m here,’ Henning mumbles into his hands.

‘Are you coming in or what? I could do with some help here.’

‘No.’

‘But you’re supposed to be working today and—’

‘I’m taking a day’s leave.’

‘But I—’

Henning presses the red off button and buries his face in his hands.

Thorleif Brenden is shaking all over as the TV2 car drives slowly down the cobbled avenue leading away from Oslo Prison. Everything is out of focus.

Guri Palme in the front seat turns around to check on him.

‘How are you doing, Toffe?’

Her voice makes him jump.

‘F-fine,’ he replies.

‘Are you sure? You don’t look it.’

Thorleif doesn’t respond. He is trying to forget Tore Pulli’s eyes, but it’s impossible. They turned cold and still as if someone had covered them with a moist membrane. Saliva and mucus dribbled from his mouth and mixed with something white and foaming. His hands started to quiver, and the twitching spread to each body part like an infection. Then Pulli slumped on his side where he lay shaking for a few seconds before silence descended on him like a blanket.

‘We should expect to be called in to make a statement later today,’ Palme continues.

A statement, Thorleif thinks, alarmed, and feels his face become burning hot. He knows that he will never be able to give a false account of what happened. His voice will falter and his eyes become evasive. He is sure the police will grow suspicious and wonder why he is so nervous. They will want to question him further. In the end he will crack. And he knows what the consequences will be.

The man in the black leather jacket told him he could go home after killing Pulli and everything would carry on as normal. But how can it? He has taken the life of another human being. And what guarantee does he have that they really will leave him alone now that the job is done? Thorleif saw the man’s face, he knows that the man had accomplices to bring about Pulli’s death. Do they think that threatening Thorleif’s family is enough to make him keep his mouth shut for ever? What if the police see through him and the choice is taken away from him?

In the park below the police station Thorleif sees an Asian man wearing light summer clothes. The man is walking his dog. He reminds Thorleif of a guide he and a friend had when they were hiking in the Caucasus Mountains trying to find their way from Laza to Xinaliq in Azerbaijan. Thorleif closes his eyes and recalls how they hiked through a deep gorge between grassy mountains, waded in water up to their knees through fast-flowing rivers and were met by sheepdogs foaming at the mouths when they finally arrived early one afternoon. The shepherd who ran out from under a tarpaulin didn’t mind that they threw stones at his dogs to keep them at bay. The toothless man even invited them inside his shelter for a cup of tea before he started banging on a bucket and singing shepherd songs in Ketsh.

The village had only one telephone, Thorleif remembers. All the men came out of their huts to watch them communicate with the outside world. The village children followed them too, all eager to show them the brick house where they would be sleeping that night. The father of the house appeared with his oldest son, welcomed them warmly in Arabic and took them straight down to a pen where Thorleif picked out a lamb that was slaughtered a few seconds later.

Afterwards, they had a warm foot bath and a meal of sharp sheep’s cheese which they washed down with tea. Behind a curtain little girls sneaked a peek at the men’s world. At night the couple’s bed was made ready for them. Thorleif will never forget feeling like a royal traveller in the Middle Ages.

He opens his eyes again. There is so much he hasn’t done, so much he hasn’t seen. So many things he has yet to show his children.

Ole Reinertsen drives into TV2’s underground car park and parks the car. Thorleif is the last to get out.

‘You go on without me,’ he says as he slams the door shut. Palme turns to him.

‘Where are you going?’

‘I . . . I just need to get something from my car.’

She looks at him for a moment before she nods. Thorleif goes out the same way the car drove in, out into the daylight where the building across the road offers him a little shade. He thinks about Elisabeth and the children and of what he is about to do. And he has an epiphany. Sometimes it’s infinitely harder to live than to die.

Henning glares scornfully at the computer screen where the story about Pulli’s sudden death is making headlines. Fat white font against a black background. No photos. There are never any photos in the breaking-news section, only a small square in the top left-hand corner that says ‘breaking news’ in tiny red letters.

It feels as if the walls are trying to crush him into tiny pieces so he gets up and leaves the flat, moving quickly down the stairs once he has locked the door behind him.

The heat hits him as he steps outside. Three teenagers are sitting on a bench beneath a window in the courtyard, smoking. They look up at him as if he is insane, but Henning ignores them. He hurries past them out into the street and the dry summer dust. He walks past the old sail loft that gives the street its name and turns into Fosseveien. Cars drive by slowly. A grown man on a skateboard grins broadly as Henning moves out of his way.

He finds an empty spot on the grassy slope opposite Kuba Bru and watches the river Aker flow by lazily. Around him people are laughing, drinking beer, barbecuing or soaking up the sun.

They’re alive.

While the wrong people die.

Henning lies down and stares up at the sky. Tore Pulli is dead. He is gone. It’s weird, but it feels as if he has lost a friend. And when he thinks about it, perhaps he has.

Thorleif is reminded of Will Smith and the film
Enemy of the State
as he walks out into Karl Johansgate. Smith played a lawyer who was unaware that he had microphones and transmitters all over his body. Even his watch and shoes had been fitted with high-tech equipment which meant that Jon Voight’s team of rogue NSA agents knew absolutely everything that Smith did. The film’s tagline was ‘In God we trust. The rest we monitor.’