Thorsen hid his shaking hands. He should have known that his boss was always watching his every move including his joining the golf range where the Minister happened to practice his golf swing. Thorsen had less than ten years to go before retirement and he could not afford to get demoted or even worse laterally transferred to Tromso up north or some other frozen wasteland halfway up to the North Pole like Spitsbergen in the Svalbard archipelago where one Politioverbetjent Police Superintendent committed suicide after being transferred there for the wrongful conviction of five innocent men.
At the club house Thorsen was directed to the private ferry terminal where Thorsen almost passed out when he realized that his boss had kept his round-trip ticket. Thorsen had almost no cash and as a non-member he had to pay 150 kroner or almost $ 30 U.S. dollars for the one-mile ferry trip to the Snaroya terminal on the mainland where he had left his car.
What would he do now that he had his marching orders?
He realized that he would have to move people around in his department and even worse bring in someone smart to get results.
“Never hire smart people to work for or around you,” his mother had told him. “They don’t take orders very well and they will always outshine you. Even worse they’ll get promoted and sooner or later take your job. No! No! No! Make sure that you always employ people as dumb or dumber than you. And my son you are not smart so you be very careful. Only hang around smart people as long as they help you.”
Thorsen smiled at the thought of his clever mother. She was absolutely right. As a puppet he too could play the part of the puppet master and start pulling strings and moving his own puppets around. He would rearrange the chess pieces so that he had a chance of success.
By the time the ferry got to the Snaroya terminal Thorsen knew exactly what he needed to do. First he would get flowers for his mother and go visit her in the afternoon and then he’d go have dinner with his good wife whom his mother had picked from the village. He remembered his mother always saying:
“Us simple country people are winners because we are survivors. Peasants are born to survive! Remember this Ivar and you will do well.”
“Daddy! Daddy! I want my Daddy!”
The man looked at Karl Haugen and said, “Not now Karl.”
“I want my Daddy!”
The man shook his head. Children never failed to amaze him.
“I’m going to take a nap as soon as we’re done,” she said.
“Good.”
“Are you going to take a nap?”
“I doubt it.” Harald Sohlberg dried the plates and silverware that his wife rinsed and handed him from the kitchen sink. “I’ll read for a while. . then maybe take a walk in the old neighborhood. I just can’t sleep in the afternoon. Not even after my fifteen mile run this morning.”
“If you don’t take a nap then that means that you are not going to have any sleep over a twenty-four hour period. Don’t forget. . we have a party with the Otterstads that doesn’t start until eight. They like to celebrate Saint Hans Aften. . St. John’s Eve. . until very very late.”
“I know. They don’t even light their bal. . bonfire by the beach. . until after midnight.”
“Then there’s all that food. You’ll get reflux if you eat late. . ”
“I promise I won’t eat so much that I feel like throwing up in bed.”
“You always say that and then you go ahead anyways and overeat like crazy. There’s going to be lots and lots of food. And that means lots of rommegrot. . sour cream porridge. They’ll probably be serving food until two or three in the morning. You know you always go crazy eating rommegrot. Remember when we went to my parents in Bergen after we met?. . You had almost four liters. . a gallon. . of my mother’s rommegrot.”
He could almost smell and taste the pudding of sour cream with melted butter and brown sugar and cinnamon. “Ja! I still remember that. But I rarely have it any more. . this will be my once-in-a-year feasting on my favorite food. Besides. . it’s been ages since we celebrated Sankthans. . Midsummer’s Eve. It’s been what?. . Maybe fifteen years since we spent a Sankthans in Norway?. . It’s been at least five years since we’ve been in Oslo during the summer for more than a few days.”
“True. I’m so happy we came back. Three weeks of summer vacation!”
“Don’t forget though. I must do a presentation at headquarters before we can leave. Then we’ll be off to see your folks and enjoy lovely Bergen once again.”
Fru Sohlberg handed him the last dish and noticed his eyes. “Won’t it feel strange going back to the Politidirektoratet. . the National Police Directorate?. . Are you nervous?”
“Yes and no,” he said fully aware that his wife could read his face and gestures like an open book. Not even the best lie detector and voice stress machine could surpass her skills at accurately and instantly detecting his real feelings and thoughts. Sometimes he wondered if she and not he should have been the Politiforstebetjent (Police Chief Inspector) in the family. He had no doubts that Fru Sohlberg would probably have solved more crimes than Herr Sohlberg given her special talents.
She turned and looked at him. “It must be strange if not difficult to have so many reminders of the past. . beginning with this house.”
“Ja,” he said. “A remembrance of things past.”
“Exactly. Like Proust. . the French author. . did you know that he wrote two million words in seven volumes based on a flood of memories that were unleashed by the smell and taste of the tea he used to drink and the little
Sohlberg nodded. “Ja. . This house brings back my childhood. . and so many memories. . even those as a young adult.”
During the past two days he had been embarrassed several times when she caught him lost in memories while he stared wistfully at different rooms of his old childhood home. He felt foolish at his sentimental longing for the good old days of his youth and yet he could not deny the powerful attraction that he had for the lovely waterfront home of glass-and-cedar where his parents and his brother had lived in as close to a perfect idyllic existence as possible thanks to his mother’s love and his father’s providing.
She read his face and said, “Well. . you can’t be blamed for feeling nostalgic over the great childhood you had here with your parents.”
“True,” said Sohlberg, “but it’s all in the past.”
“Yes. The good and the bad. . even the worst of the bad is now far behind you. . ”
“Ja. That’s true. Incredible how time has passed.”
She dried her hands on the towel that he held. She pulled him closer with the towel and kissed him gently on the lips. “Please take a nap if you can.”
Sohlberg smiled and watched her walk down the hallway and up the stairs. He drank the last of the sparkling mineral water of the third Farris bottle that he had consumed after returning from his early morning run. He then walked outside and past the towering pines down to the beach where his father had built a small guest cabin.
His father had built the cabin and used it as an office after his refurbished industrial machinery business took off in the early 1980s. Of course the cabin and the sailboat and the floating dock and other luxuries came only after many years of struggling and economizing. Sohlberg remembered many cold winters with little heat in the house and simple paper shades for curtains when they moved into the house during his last two years in high school. Norway’s oil boom greatly prospered his father’s business in the 1980s and Sohlberg sometimes wondered if he should have gone into business with his father.
“Me the businessman,” Sohlberg said to himself as he sat down before his father’s desk.
In less than an hour Sohlberg had carefully organized and added up the receipts and invoices that he needed to present to Interpol as soon as possible. He wanted to quickly get reimbursed for more than $ 12,932 U.S. dollars that he had spent on airlines and taxis and hotels and meals on his recent round of traveling to Norway from the USA. He decided that he would send the reimbursement request by fax later that night to Lyon France. But he had to make absolutely sure that he added and included every item correctly because he knew better than to submit a wrong reimbursement request to the accountants and bookkeepers at Interpol. The bean counters always made him and other Interpol advisers and field agents feel that they were somehow defrauding Interpol even when
