“You owe me two hundred dollars,” Juliet now tells her. “Sixty for the helmet, plus tax, one hundred and twenty for the jacket, plus tax, and two hundred for doing your shopping in the middle of my shift. That’s what’s called the opportunity cost tax. That’s on top of the two hundred you gave me last time.”
“That’s a hundred and eighty I owe you.”
“Fuck you.”
“Here’s the two hundred,” Sigrid says, removing two crisp bills from her wallet. “I wasn’t sure you’d come.”
“It’s called ‘work for money,’ honey. It’s all the rage these days.”
“Still.”
“You want to tell me why I’m doing this?” Juliet asks.
“No,” says Sigrid.
“I don’t want to get in trouble.”
Sigrid is pressed for time and her internal clock is spinning, but even so, she’s certain that her confusion is legitimate. “You spend your time working as a prostitute but in the last twenty minutes all you’ve done is buy two items at a department store. What are you going to get in trouble for?”
“But I don’t know why, do I? I don’t know what you need them for. I don’t know where you’re going. I don’t know what your plan is, do I? And where’s the bike? Who the fuck needs a helmet without a motorcycle? I don’t see Evel Knievel waitin’ here in his jumpsuit to give you a ride.”
“Thanks for your help.”
“Where are you going next?”
“You can keep the change.”
“I want to know what your plan is.”
“OK.”
“I’m not your bitch.”
“Thanks again.”
Sigrid pulls the tag from the rocker-styled leather jacket and slips it on. It fits surprisingly well. She zips it up to where the collar flares before tearing open the square box, removing the helmet, and tossing the packaging into a dumpster.
The new items look regrettably unused and Sigrid is not unaware of this, but they will have to do; men in bars are not terribly good critical thinkers anyway.
With the sling bag taut to her shoulder, she glances back a final time to make sure Melinda hasn’t caught up to her before making her way into the open parking lot and toward the biker bar across the street fronted by a row of Harley-Davidsons.
“I hope you’re not going into that bar!” Juliet yells after her. “Those are One Percenters. You’re just fresh meat to those motherfuckers!” but Sigrid is out of earshot and en route to the Inferno.
“Dumb-ass foreign bitch,” Juliet mutters.
When Sigrid was three months into her first stint as a detective, she was asked if she wanted to get her hands dirty with some “real police work.” Hans Andersen was her captain and it was a rhetorical question, because her hunger was palpable.
Hans’s office smelled like black currant syrup. Most people drank coffee or tea, but Hans had a sweet tooth and hated caffeine. Oslo’s winters were no warmer for him, though, so he’d defrost by pouring boiling water into the saft and then pouring that into himself; the scent was in everything.
He called Sigrid in and explained the proposition.
“I’ve got two cases here. You get to choose. Both are undercover. The first is a Swedish motorcycle gang running cigarettes from Poland into Norway by land. There’s some reason to think they might also be filling up the empty trucks over here with stolen goods, including bicycles, motorcycles, and baby strollers and bringing them back to Poland.”
“Baby strollers?”
“Three hundred and forty-six baby strollers have been stolen across Oslo in the last ten months.”
“That’s despicable,” Sigrid said.
“So I’m thinking you want this one.”
“What’s the other choice?”
“Lithuanian diaper smugglers.”
“Again?”
“Lithuanian diaper smugglers.”
“I’m ready.”
“Apparently . . . and this is from a commissioned research study by the Norwegian Institute for International Affairs, or NUPI . . . diapers are much cheaper here than in Lithuania. I do wonder why we needed to commission a study for this rather than just call one of their supermarkets and ask . . .” Hans faded out for a moment. He often did that, hoping the insight would fade and leave his career unspoiled. When he returned he said, “And so the Lithuanians are buying our diapers cheap and smuggling them into Lithuania, where they sell them for a mark-up, which is still at below-market prices and they’re not paying the import duties.”
“It isn’t illegal to buy diapers in Norway. Why is this our problem?”
“It isn’t, but the Foreign Ministry has received a request for assistance from Vilnius and we’re meant to assist in an international sting operation because tax evasion hurts us all and usually we’re the ones with the higher taxes.”
“Lithuanian diaper smugglers,” Sigrid says.
“Sorry?”
“I wanted to say it once myself.”
“So . . . you prefer the bikers?”
“Yes, sir.”
Her assignment had been to pose as a corrupt customs official expecting a kickback from the bikers. In order to gain their trust she needed to talk about motorcycles with them at bars.
Sigrid had known nothing about motorcycles generally, and less than nothing about Harley-Davidsons specifically aside from their popularity with miscreant subcultures. In preparation for the assignment she was made to memorize their eclectic names (Glides, Softails, Sportsters), their shapes and engine displacements, years of manufacture, and distinctive repair issues. It nearly bored her to tears. But by the end she could talk a good game.
Her most unexpected observation in studying for her outlaw motorcycle gang exam was how all the clubs adopted American tropes about freedom, individuality, and rebellion and then demanded complete conformity to them. It was her first glimpse into the complex system that organized American culture—even when it was being exported to Scandinavia.
The cigarette runners in question were part of an antiquated club that had survived the Great Nordic Biker War of the mid-1990s, which left a dozen or so
