Sohlberg and the Gift (26 page)

“As always.”

“I spoke to all of his professors and discovered from one of them that our boy had hacked into the school’s computers and changed his grade in philosophy class from an
F
for excessive absences to an
A-plus
.”

“That’s our man to snoop on Thorsen. Very good.”

“Just how badly did the idiot Thorsen botch the Janne Eide case?”

“It’s a doozy.”

“As always with Thorsen.”

~ ~ ~

Sohlberg left his home at 9:15 A.M. and the BMW immediately followed his Volvo. He went east to the nearest drug store in the Nordstrad neighborhood near the Holtet tram station and bought bottles of cough syrup and aspirin at the Apotek One pharmacy on Kongsveien. Sohlberg shuffled as if he was ill and he made sure that the BMW driver saw the bottles in his hand when he left the store.

The detective then headed south on Ekerbergveien into a residential area near the Kastellet tram station where Cappelens vei branches off into six dead ends and other streets. Sohlberg pulled his disappearing act by whipping into one of the dead ends that he had found a few years ago after getting lost in the labyrinth of dead ends and narrow streets around the tram station.

With lightning speed and dead aim he backed into a blind spot—a narrow dogleg of a driveway—between two homes and their detached garage sheds. A low hedge of evergreen barberry shrubs and a steep downward slope at the end of the dogleg made the blind spot all the more effective. The hedge and the slope created an optical illusion that made anyone looking in from the street believe that no vehicle sat at the end of the driveway next to the home on the right.

Sohlberg waited patiently in his driveway lair for 45 minutes. He called Dr. Nansen and told her he’d be a little late. Cautious as ever he left his hideaway and then took plenty of circular routes and u-turns to make sure that no one followed him. The detective was confident that no one had planted a GPS tracking device on his car. Strong alarm systems and pick-proof Millennium locks protected his home and garage shed. He had also searched the car’s interior and even gotten under the car in the garage to look for devices after his wife left him that morning.

Jorfald and Nansen didn’t look particularly happy when they shook hands with Sohlberg in the lobby of the Dove Center.

“You’re fifteen minutes late,” said Dr. Jorfald. “
We’ve
been waiting here for you.” He had the petulant and
deeply
insulted posture that men of his caliber assume when they are made to wait for a table at a favorite restaurant.

“Sorry. I had to take care of a cockroach infestation.”

“Uugghh. . . .” said Dr. Bergitta Nansen. She twisted her face and still managed to look charming.

Jorfald hissed: “Shall
we
?”

They met Patient # 1022 at the same conference room with the same attendant hovering in the background. Sohlberg noted that the white-uniformed attendant turned on a switch in the wall which Sohlberg assumed was to start an audio recording or maybe even an audiovisual recording of the meeting for subsequent analysis by Jorfald and Nansen.

“I’m glad you’re back,” shouted the patient. “I started wondering if I had hallucinated yesterday’s meeting.”

“No,” said Dr. Jorfald. “This is reality Ludvik.”

“Excuse me . . . you mean Jakob Gansum.”

“
We
wish you would stop—” said Jorfald who was about to order the patient to stop referring to himself as Jakob Gansum. But Dr. Nansen quickly cut in and said:

“Yes . . . we wish you would stop and remind us of your real name. We’re so used to calling you Ludvik Helland.”

“Alright. I’ll forgive Doktor Jordy this time.”

“Now . . . Jakob,” said Dr. Nansen as she diplomatically took control of the meeting. “We’re going to talk today about the issues you mentioned to Chief Inspector Sohlberg when he was here yesterday on December the tenth.”

Sohlberg almost smiled at the predictability of the two doktors. Jorfald was determined to keep Gansum believing in the false reality of Ludvik Helland. Nansen on the other hand was obsessed with gathering material for her study of psychosis in the police and the criminal element.

“
We
,” said Jorfald, “want you to tell the Chief Inspector about your life before you came here.
We
think it’s important for you to talk about yourself. . . .”

Blinding sunlight poured into the conference room through the enormous window. Dr. Nansen raised her hand to shield her eyes. The incandescent reflection from the white field of snow required the attendant to lower a roll of dark mesh. The solar shade afforded immediate relief to everyone.

Jorfald droned on and on with an endless speech about the benefits of talk therapy. Sohlberg again noticed that Jorfald spoke with the grand imperial
we
used by popes and emperors.

Patient # 1022 interrupted the verbose psychiatrist:

“Alright. I get it Doktor Jordy. I heard your bit. Now let the cop hear me out.”

“That’s what
we
want you to do.”

“Yeah . . . sure you do. Now . . . let me make it perfectly clear to you Chief Inspector that I am not Ludvik Helland. My name is Jakob Gansum. I sent a letter to my daughter Astrid Isaksen. I asked her to contact you.”

“Why me?”

“I saw you on the news . . . on the television. Maybe it was N.R.K. Maybe it was in the newspaper. Or both. I don’t remember. You were asking the public to help with any information about the murder of the young man in Vigeland Park. That’s when I figured that you’d care about
me
if you cared enough to remember this dead guy
years
after he got killed.

“Anyway. . . . Before we go on I also want to make it perfectly clear that I’m no angel. I’ve done bad bad things. Done real ugly things. Done things I would’ve never done if I’d been in my right mind. But when you’re on drugs . . . you do disgusting things . . . you hang around disgusting people you wouldn’t have
ever
been caught with before you started doing drugs.

“You think . . . I won’t and can’t go lower. But after your next high you’ve gone far far lower than what you thought was the bottom of the barrel. I got low. Real low. Most times I wanted to die. Heck . . . I’d rather be dead most days. And nights. I was dead. I was dying. It was suicide but in slow motion.

“The Old Devil had a hold of me. A grip like you’ve never felt. It’s a grip deep inside of you. Owns your mind and body and soul. You can feel him start squeezing your heart and soul and brain when he wants another drop of your life.

“Now . . . some of you may think there ain’t no Devil . . . then you ain’t been to a crack house. You ain’t been to a whorehouse. You ain’t done meth and stayed awake for a week. You ain’t put a gun in your mouth and wanted to shoot your brains out on the wall and be over and done with this thing called life but it’s really hell on earth with the drugs . . . the despair . . . each of them feeding off each other . . . and you caught in the middle . . . dying more each day.

“I got worse and worse after my woman died. Anne-Sophie Isaksen. Dead. Just like that. She’s young and then she’s dead. I thought we had time to do things right down the road . . . in the future.

“Doesn’t everyone think they’re gonna have more time? . . . Doesn’t everyone trick themselves into thinking that we’ll have more time? . . . And yet we all know for sure that death
always
shows up to return each of us to sender.

“We had a baby girl . . . my beautiful Astrid. I was a coward and wouldn’t marry Annie. I wanted to have fun and no freaking responsibilities. I thought we had time. Time to get myself right. Then out of the blue she got run over . . . like a dog . . . by an old man who couldn’t tell the accelerator from the brakes.

“Why was he driving?

“Why wasn’t he charged?

“No sir. No charges. Nothing. He was old and had money and his lawyer made sure that the prosecutor and judge were both crying a river about what a shame it was for an old man to go to prison for running over some nobody.

“You think the old man would’ve gotten off scot-free if my Anne-Sophie had been the Prime Minister’s daughter? . . . Or some famous movie star . . . or some model or singer?

“After my Annie died I started shooting and snorting and smoking and drinking and swallowing everything I could. It wasn’t enough. Don’t you understand?

“When your woman dies there’s a huge gaping bloody hole in your mind and body and soul and you go crazy thinking of the times when you loved her and had her body and there ain’t no more body of hers and you’re going crazy and you just want to do it with anyone all the time and you just don’t care.”

 Sohlberg almost nodded in agreement. Memories of his dead wife Karoline tried to force themselves into the cockpit of his brain to hijack his consciousness. Her laughter. Her favorite foods. Her sighs and moans in bed. The sickening
shisssh
of the rope going through the carabiner on her climbing harness. Her eyes wide and filled with love for him and acceptance of her fatal falling. Then his own subsequent descent into suicidal depression.

“I,” continued Patient # 1022, “was going nuts. Slipping and sliding into a nervous breakdown . . . or worse. Self-medication wasn’t helping. Just making the problem worse. So I started trolling online for women. The Internet opened up a whole new world for me. I was a slut. I slept with any woman anywhere anytime. Old. Young. Fat. Skinny. Married and pregnant or not. Divorced. Widowed. Healthy. Sick. Even terminal. The more I did it the more I needed it. Days with three or four women. Then more women at night. Running around like a demented bunny from their homes to motels to backseats of cars. Back alleys. Side streets. Basements. Rooftops. In parks and beaches.

“And then that wasn’t enough. I graduated to swinging couples. I’d take some crazy chick with me and we’d have foursomes. We’d meet couples at their homes or hotels. Or we’d go to swinging clubs where anything goes. One night I was bored waiting for a date to come spend the night with me. I clicked on this crazy website for wild swingers and there she was . . . Janne Eide.

“Oh Janne. Janne. Janne. What a naughty girl. She wanted a man to partner up for a threesome with her husband Ludvik Helland. She said he liked to watch her do it with another man before he did it with her. I decided to oblige him. And her. We met that night at a swinger nightclub called Babylonia . . . out east in the Alna borough . . . by the Alnabru railyard. It was great. You turn in your clothes and shoes at the door. It was dark. No windows. Sofas and chairs filled with people everywhere doing everything . . . even man on man and lots of lesbo action too.

“She’s there waiting for me and I recognize him and her from their Internet pictures and she does it first with her husband while I watch. Then this good-looking unbelievably-built chick appears out of nowhere and does me. I’ll never forget her name . . . Cassandra. I later figured out that Janne and her hubby must’ve paid her or recruited her at the club to work me over. She was a pro. I thought I was going to pass out. That’s how good she was.

“When Cassandra was done with me Janne said she was too tired but that she’d hook up later with me. She gave me her phone number and told me we would meet later at her home. But she never called. She was stringing me along. Dangling the bait. Driving me crazy.

“A couple of days passed and she calls me out of the blue. Tells me she’s at home and wants to see me that night. Gives me the address. I hightail it there and find Cassandra’s back in the picture. And I find that Janne and Ludvik are quite wealthy because I can’t believe their house. It’s a freaking palace of luxury. If I hadn’t been so hung up on getting lots of action that night I probably would’ve started casing the joint so I could come back and break in with some of my friends. I mean they had artwork and crystal and silver and gold pieces everywhere.