she had not recognised him by sight. And she wouldn’t have, had he stood there in a bathrobe and slippers with his mug, because it is impossible for him to be here. To exist here, in this world, at this moment.
‘Papa?’
‘Rhea,’ he says.
Lars is not here, and Sheldon fears he must be dead.
The boy — physically unharmed — stands in the corner. He is, as ever, too traumatised to speak.
‘Papa!’ she yells.
Enver is going to leave with the boy now. And before he does, he is going to kill the old man.
Sheldon stumbles backwards a step as Enver advances. Sheldon drops the rifle and raises the knife for one last attack. He wants to plant the blade in Enver’s throat, but he lacks the strength. The arbitrary laws of time have taken away his last defences.
With valour, he lunges for Enver’s chest. But he misses.
Enver’s strike is hard and experienced. It cuts Sheldon down the left carotid artery in his throat and across the chest.
Sheldon’s right hand grasps his throat, and he staggers backwards into the kitchen and against the table.
The task done, Enver grabs the boy — who screams now — and takes him under his arm and out through the back door. The boy’s screams are deafening, and Enver shouts at him in Albanian to shut up. To quit the yelling. To knock it off or he’ll smack him. But the boy will not stop.
He does not stop when Enver drags him to the quad runner at the back of the house that is waiting to take them to Sweden.
He does not stop screaming when he catches a glimpse of a man in a black uniform holding a small black rifle.
And he does not stop screaming when he sees Lars Bjornsson emerge like a ghost from behind a mighty beech with a compound bow, and release a carbon-composite arrow directly into the heart of the monster.
Sheldon cannot be certain of what he sees or hears next any more.
Life — whatever this life may be — is draining from him. It may be that Rhea leapt to her feet and shoved the man that Sheldon failed to shoot into a window and somehow, as she did this, his chest exploded as though silent bullets had penetrated his thorax from outside the window.
It may be that she ran to him and held him up, pulling him to the front door, calling him, ‘Papa, Papa.’
It may be that together they fell, out the front door, their bodies tumbling down to the cool ground, his blood flowing to the earth.
It was certain, though, that the light around him was radiant and wonderful.
A woman appears. She is in uniform and has a kind face. A nurse, he presumes. He sees men in dark outfits scurrying around him. Perhaps they are hospital orderlies. This nurse is smiling at him. It is the warm and loving smile of someone with good news.
Sheldon reaches up his hand and touches Sigrid gently on the cheek.
‘My son. Is he OK? Is he well?’
‘Your boy is fine, Mr Horowitz. He is just fine.’
This book was written in 2008 in Geneva, Oslo, and Fornalutx. The ending came to me in the moments before my son, Julian, was born that April.
I am not sure how much of this book was written by me and how much was written by Sheldon himself. So I extend, here, my thanks to him for all his assistance. Which isn’t to say he was easy to work with…
I lifted the definitions of ‘snarf’ and ‘twerp’ from Kurt Vonnegut’s 1977 interview with
The lighthouse at Palmi-do at Inchon, Korea, was built in 1903. In 2006 it was made obsolete and replaced by a modern one. But the diminutive eight-metre tower still stands in the shadow of its big brother.
Unusually, this book was first published in Norway in 2011, in Norwegian, despite it having been written in English. The story has undergone additional revisions since then. I consider the English-language publication definitive.
In 2012, sixty-seven years after the end of World War II, the Norwegian government formally apologised to the Jewish population for its actions during the occupation.
My special thanks to Henry Rosenbloom and Lauren Wein for their editorial assistance.
Deepest thanks of all to my wife, Camilla, who makes everything possible and gives it meaning. And to my daughter, Clara, you are already an inspiration.
Derek B. Miller was born and raised in Boston, Massachusetts, and has lived abroad for over fifteen years in Israel, England, Hungary, Switzerland, and Norway. His interest in fiction began a few years after graduating from Sarah Lawrence College.
Currently, Derek is the director of The Policy Lab and a senior fellow with the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research. He has a PhD in international relations from the University of Geneva, and an MA in national security studies from Georgetown University, in cooperation with St Catherine’s College, University of Oxford. He lives in Oslo with his wife and children.
Copyright
Scribe Publications Pty Ltd
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First published by Scribe 2012
Copyright © Derek B. Miller 2012
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publishers of this book.
National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication data
Miller, Derek (Derek B.).
Norwegian by Night.
9781921942808 (e-book.)
Suspense fiction.
813.6
