strange feeling to see his own history in somebody else. He could glimpse traces of his own father in the boy. Traces of the father that he still regretted not killing. Maybe everything would have been different if he’d done that. Summoned up all the rage boiling inside of him and directed it at the one person who truly deserved it. Instead, his anger had seeped out in a totally different direction, without any purpose. And it was still there. He knew that. He just didn’t let it run riot as he had when he was younger. Now he was in control of his fury, and not the other way around. That was what he had to make his grandson understand. There was nothing wrong with his anger, but he needed to make sure that he was the one who decided when to let it loose. Anger was an arrow to be released in a controlled manner, not an axe to be swung wildly. Frans had tried that method and as a result he’d spent much of his life in prison, and his only son couldn’t bear to be in the same room with him. He had no one else. The men in the organization were not his friends. He’d never made the mistake of assuming that they were, or tried to make them friends. They were all too consumed with their own rage to establish that sort of a relationship with each other. They shared a goal. That was all.
He looked at Per and saw his father. But he also saw himself. And Kjell. He’d done his best to get to know his son during the brief family visits to the prison and those short periods when he was actually at home. But it was an endeavour doomed to failure. If he was honest with himself, Frans didn’t even know whether he really loved his son. Maybe he had once. Maybe his heart had once leapt when Rakel brought along their son to see him in prison. But he no longer remembered.
The strange thing was that as he sat there at the kitchen table with his grandson, the only love he could ever recall feeling was for Elsy. A love that was sixty years old, but it was still etched in his memory. Elsy and his grandson. They were the only people he’d ever felt any affection for. They had managed to elicit some sort of emotion from him. But it was dead now. His father had killed everything else. Frans hadn’t thought about it in a long time. About his father. Or all the rest. But recent events had made the past come alive for him. And now it was time to think about it again.
‘Kjell will be furious if he finds out that you came here.’ Carina stood in the doorway. She swayed a bit, but she was clean and dressed. Her hair was dripping wet, and she’d draped a towel over her shoulders so her shirt wouldn’t get wet.
‘I don’t care what Kjell thinks,’ said Frans drily. He got up to pour some coffee for Carina and himself.
‘This doesn’t look drinkable,’ she said as she sat down and stared at her cup, filled to the brim with the pitch- black brew.
‘Drink it,’ said Frans, opening cupboards and drawers.
‘What are you looking for?’ asked Carina, taking a sip and making a face. ‘Leave my cupboards alone!’
Frans didn’t reply as he pulled out one bottle after another and methodically poured the contents down the sink.
‘You have no right to interfere!’ she shouted at him. Per got up to leave.
‘Sit down,’ said Frans, pointing at his grandson. ‘We’re going to get to the bottom of this.’
Per obeyed at once, sinking back on to his chair.
An hour later, after all the booze had been dumped out, only the truth was left.
Kjell stared at his computer screen. Feelings of guilt had been gnawing at him ever since the police had come to see him yesterday. He knew he should go and see Per and Carina, but he just couldn’t bring himself to do it. He had no idea where to start. What scared him was the realization that he was starting to give up. He could fight external enemies. He could direct all his energy to combatting the power-mongers and neo-Nazis and wage battles with windmills, no matter how big they were. But when it came to his former family, when it came to Per and Carina, it was as if he had no strength left. It had been sapped by a guilty conscience.
He looked at the photo of Beata and the kids. Of course he loved Magda and Loke, and he wouldn’t want to live without them. But at the same time, it had all happened so fast, gone so wrong. He’d landed in a situation that had swept him away, and sometimes he still wondered if it had caused more harm than good. Maybe it was just the timing that had been unfortunate. Maybe he’d been going through some sort of midlife crisis, and Beata came along at just the wrong moment. At first he couldn’t believe it: an attractive young girl like her, interested in someone like him. But it had turned out to be true. And he hadn’t been able to resist sleeping with her, touching her firm, naked body, seeing the admiration in those eyes. It was nothing short of intoxicating. He couldn’t think clearly, couldn’t take a step back and make any sort of rational decision. Ironically enough, he’d just begun to show the first signs of coming to his senses when he’d lost all control of the situation. He had started to tire of the fact that she never offered any counter-arguments in their discussions, that she knew nothing about moon landings or the revolt in Hungary. He was even growing tired of the feeling of her smooth skin under his fingers.
He could still remember the moment when everything fell apart. It seemed like only yesterday, that she’d looked at him with those big blue eyes and told him that he was going to be a father, that now he would finally have to tell Carina, as he’d long promised to do.
It was at that moment he realized what a mistake he’d made. For a second he considered getting up and leaving her there in the cafe, going home to lie down on the sofa next to Carina to watch the news on TV while five-year-old Per slept soundly in his bed. But his male instinct told him that there was no going back. There were mistresses who wouldn’t dream of telling the wife, and there were mistresses who would delight in revealing every last detail of the affair. He had no doubt which category Beata fell into. She wouldn’t care who or what she crushed if he dared to crush her first. She would stomp on his life, destroy his very existence without looking back. And he would be left behind with the pieces.
And so he had chosen the coward’s way out. Terrified of ending up alone in some shitty bachelor’s flat, staring at the walls and wondering what to do with his life, he’d taken the only way remaining to him. Beata’s way. She had won. And he’d walked out on Carina and Per. Cast them aside like rubbish on the side of the road, even he could see that. In the process he had destroyed Carina. And he’d lost Per. That was the price that he’d paid for the touch of youthful skin under his fingertips.
Maybe he could have held on to Per if he’d been able to ignore the guilt that settled like a heavy stone on his chest every time he so much as thought about the two he’d left behind. But he wasn’t capable of doing that. He’d made sporadic attempts, played the authority figure, played the father on rare occasions, with miserable results.
Now his son was a stranger to him. And Kjell didn’t have the energy to try again. After a lifetime spent hating the father who had abandoned him and his mother in favour of a life in which they had no part, he had done the same thing to his own son. He had turned into his father, and that was the bitter truth.
He pounded his fist on the table, trying to replace the pain in his heart with a physical pain. It didn’t help. Then he opened the bottom desk drawer to look at the only thing that could distract his mind from this torture.
There had been a moment when he had considered handing the material to the police, but at the last second the professional journalist in him had put on the brakes. Erik hadn’t given him much. When he came up to Kjell’s office, he’d spent quite a while talking in circles, obviously uncertain how much he wanted to divulge. At one stage he’d seemed about to turn on his heel and leave without having revealed anything at all.
Kjell opened the folder. He wished he’d managed to ask Erik more questions, to get some pointers as to where he ought to look. All he had were a few newspaper articles that Erik had given him, without comment or explanation.
‘What do you expect me to do with this?’ Kjell had asked, throwing out his hands.
‘That’s your job,’ was Erik’s reply. ‘I know it might seem strange, but I can’t give you the whole answer. I don’t dare. So I’m giving you the tools – you can do the rest.’
And then he’d gone, leaving Kjell sitting at his desk with a folder containing three articles.
Kjell scratched his beard and opened the folder. He’d already read through the material several times, but other things kept coming up that had prevented him from giving his full attention to the task. If he were to be completely honest, he had also questioned the wisdom of devoting any time to it. The old man might just be senile. And if he was really in possession of material as explosive as he’d intimated why hadn’t he explained things better? But with Erik Frankel’s murder, he began to look at the folder in a different light. He was ready to give it his all now. And he knew exactly where to begin: with the common denominator in all three articles. A Norwegian resistance fighter by the name of Hans Olavsen.
