Norwegian by Night

the hot tea and places it on the edge of the water glass. Holding the base with her other hand, she circles the ring until a low tone rises out like the mournful cry of a lost baby whale.

‘If I did that, I’d be in trouble,’ says Lars.

‘I’m sorry.’

‘How did you sleep?’ he asks.

‘I’d rather be at home.’

‘No you wouldn’t.’

‘How are we going to go back there? Knowing a woman was murdered in our apartment? How long can we live at a hotel?’

‘There are people with worse problems than us.’

‘That’s true. And it would be rude if they were here right now, but they aren’t, so let’s talk about us.’

Lars smiles and, for the first time since checking in, Rhea smiles, too.

‘You sound like your grandfather sometimes. Mostly when he isn’t around.’

‘He raised me.’

‘You’re worried about him?’

‘I’m too shocked to be worried.’

‘We don’t have to stay in the hotel. We’ll go to the summer house. We’ll stay there. I can get time off from work.’

‘I don’t have anything with me but a toothbrush.’

‘We have some things there. We can get what we need before we leave.’

‘Are we allowed to leave?’

‘I’ll call Sigrid Odegard and let her know where we’re going. Unless they want to pay the hotel bills.’

‘It’s in the paper this morning, you know. I saw a photo of the building on the front page.’

Lars is drinking black coffee and eating toast with an egg. He is wearing a white, short-sleeved dress shirt untucked over fashionable jeans and leather shoes.

‘How can you eat?’ she asks.

‘It’s breakfast.’

‘All this doesn’t invade you somehow? Disrupt everything? Hollow you?’

Lars puts down the coffee cup, and taps the table a few times. ‘I try not to think about it. I just try and think of what to do.’

‘Like a video game.’

‘That’s not fair or nice.’

‘You make it sound like a choice. Doesn’t it get into you? Actually terrify you? I’m terrified. My grandfather has all these hostile images in him. All this pent-up rage. I remember him, when I was little, looking at me with such love and tenderness and then, in a flash, becoming angry. Not at me. He never really got angry with me. Exasperated. He got exasperated all the time. He would throw up his hands and ask me what I was thinking. “What makes you think that’s a good idea?” he’d say.

‘It was the world itself he railed against. When I was older, he said that looking into my face showed him the infinite depth of humanity and all that is lost every time a person is taken from us. And it brings into focus the kinds of people who can look into a child’s face and harm them, and what the rest of us need to do about that.

‘And then he’d talk about the Holocaust. The Nazis shooting children in their heads in front of their parents to prove to themselves that they were above petty human kindness and were the supermen that Hitler said they were. Tying families together with piano strings along the Danube, and shooting only one so the others would drown. Gassing them. Throwing them into pits and covering them, still alive, with lime…’

‘Stop it,’ whispers Lars.

‘You want me to stop it?’ she says, slapping the table.

Sheldon wakes, and does not shave or bathe. Instead, he first walks to the door and finds the Aftenposten newspaper just outside. He can’t understand it, but he is looking for something specific, and he finds it.

The word for murder in Norwegian is mord. There is a picture of his building, a headline, and police tape across the entrance. There is a huddle of people standing around it. She is really dead. It is as if the reality of the experience is made doubly real by the world’s confirmation. Perhaps it’s just a function of the dementia that Mabel insisted he has.

You need proof.

Fine. Proof. I’ll find proof. Can I go now?

‘I didn’t even call the ambulance,’ he says to no one. ‘What kind of animal am I? How did I forget to do this? Could she have survived if I’d fought? If I’d have so much as called out?’

And then here is the boy. Who is peeing in the bathroom. Trying to aim over the rim and not make a mess. Who flushes and then turns on the tap. Who washes his little hands under the water like his mother taught him to do, and then turns it off as tightly as he can and then dries them on a fresh towel before coming out of the bathroom while trying to buckle his belt.

He learns that her name was Senka, not Vera. There is, as far as he can tell, no mention of a boy. If this is true, someone is being very careful about how this story is being told.

Sheldon showers, shaves, and dresses them both in the new clothes that the porter brought up. He looks under the bed, in the bathroom, the drawers, and in the folds of the bed and chairs, to be doubly sure that nothing in the room can identify them. He hasn’t skipped out on a bill since 1955, and there is a skill to it. He doesn’t want to get it wrong when the consequences are so unusually high.

When he finishes the departure preparations, he sits on the edge of the bed and just thinks. He thinks slowly and he concentrates.

If the police know about the dead woman, they know about the boy. And seeing as Sheldon didn’t come home last night, Rhea is probably losing her mind right about now.

It occurs to Sheldon that Rhea may have walked in on the dead woman. That she might have thought he’d been murdered as well. A day after the miscarriage.

This life? You want my views on this life?

He holds the paper and looks at the building. They will hunt for the killer and possibly for the boy as well. They will be looking for him, for one reason or another. And if the killer is after the boy, the police will be checking every plane, train, and bus to lock down the city.

‘It’s like in the Navy,’ he says aloud. ‘You control the choke points, like Gibraltar or the Bosporus or Panama or the Suez. Control that, and then you wait for the enemy to come to you. On your terms. It’s what they’ll do. It’s what I would do. The Norwegians might lack a certain assertiveness, but they’re no fools. They’ll wait for us all to fall into the trap.’

Sheldon looks over at Paul, who is watching a cartoon in Norwegian.

‘I know what you’re thinking — I should turn you in, drop you off. But what if they don’t suspect the monster? What if they hand you over to him? What if they think I’m a crazy old man and that my testimony isn’t worth spit? And I never saw his face anyway. I’ll bet Rhea already told them I’m cuckoo. So then what?

‘Look, I’m not turning you in until they catch him. OK? So how do we get out of here?’

Sheldon imagines the city as he knows it. He imagines it as a crystal in the midst of a wild emerald-green forest with flowing rivulets of blue. He pictures planes and trains and taxis and cars. He imagines the police and the monster sitting on either side of the crystal city peering into it. Looking for the old man and the little boy.

‘The river,’ he says at last, referring to the Oslo fjord.

Sheldon puts down the paper and rubs his face.

‘I don’t want to go on the river.’

At breakfast, Lars takes the napkin from his lap and places it on the table beside his plate. He sits back further in the chair. Rhea rests her chin on her open hands and slumps forward. They say nothing for a long while.

‘What would we have done today?’ Rhea finally says.

‘You mean, if all this wasn’t happening?’