Thomas Enger - Pierced

‘I’m going to draw a car,’ he whispers. ‘A really fine car.’

Henning buys a baguette from Deli de Luca on his way home and eats it as he walks. The thought of what awaits him makes him speed up.

Heidi let him have the rest of the week off though she couldn’t refrain from sighing heavily when he refused to give her a reason. Instead she said, ‘Fine. You need it. You look dreadful.’

Henning said nothing.

Back in his flat he sits down on the sofa and takes out the mini cassettes with his initials on. He peels off the tape, scrunches it into a ball and throws it on the kitchen floor. None of the tapes are labelled with a date or year, and it’s impossible to see if some of them are more used than others.

Henning finds his old tape recorder in the driftwood cupboard, plugs in the power cable and inserts the first cassette. Soon he hears his own voice.

What did you think of Statoil’s handling of this matter?

The reply is provided by a female voice he can’t identify.

Statoil’s promises concerning my role and the company’s self-imposed obligations in respect of human rights were false and misleading. This individual case is symptomatic of a greater problem.

Henning fast-forwards. The woman’s voice follows him for twelve minutes and thirty-six seconds before another woman’s voice appears after a short break. Henning recognises the voice immediately.

The man was stabbed in the chest. He has been taken to Ulleval Hospital, but his condition is unknown. His attacker appears to be a woman and she is now in police custody.

The voice belongs to Assistant Commissioner Pia Nokleby and is professional and grave as it always is when he asks her for a quote or two on the record. Henning fast-forwards through a story about sexual abuse of schoolchildren before he works out that this tape must have been recorded at least one year before Jonas died. He finds a marker pen, puts a big black cross on that cassette and inserts the next.

It’s going to be a long night.

The feeling just before it happens is always the worst, when the body knows it needs to vomit but tries to fight the inevitable. And then it happens anyway, violently. Thorleif throws himself forwards while his stomach contracts and expels what little is left in his gut into the lavatory bowl. His intestines contort repeatedly, but nothing more comes out of his mouth.

He hacks a couple of times and lets the saliva drip but avoids looking down. The smell rising up towards him is enough. Tears press against his eyelids. Thorleif gets up, sniffs and flushes the lavatory. The sound of running water ricochets against the wall and inside his head where it jolts around, stirring up a chaotic mix of thoughts and emotions. His legs struggle to support his body. He staggers over to the sink and turns on the tap.

Thorleif recalls what he told Guri Palme yesterday. ‘I was sick this morning.’ It had been a white lie, but less than twenty-four hours later it proves to be true. Will he be able to go to work today?

He washes his face. He looks at the water dripping from his eyebrows and beard. You won’t be able to run over anyone. You’ll never be able to kill another human being. The very thought is enough to send him back to the lavatory bowl. He tries to ignore it, but there it is again, he recognises the revolting feeling, it’s only a matter of seconds now, and then it comes. He leans over the lavatory bowl, hugging the porcelain. The mere smell is enough to make him gag, but only saliva comes out. Saliva and mucus. He kneels down, spitting.

Soon he gets up again, splashes water on his face a second time, checks his watch: 5.30 a.m. He is due at work in four and a half hours.

He has to pull himself together.

*

Henning falls asleep around three o’clock in the morning and for once Jonas doesn’t haunt his dreams. Some hours later he is woken up by his mobile ringing, but when he answers it no one is there.

Henning drinks a mouthful of tepid Coke and opens the curtains. He goes to the kitchen and tips what is left of yesterday’s flask of coffee into a mug and puts it in the microwave. While he waits for the coffee to heat up, he looks at the cassettes on the kitchen table. Six of them are marked with big black crosses. The notepad next to them is filled with notes and names, but Henning’s pulse doesn’t quicken as he looks at them with fresh if still half-asleep eyes.

The microwave oven beeps. Henning takes out the mug and sips the hot liquid carefully. He sits down and puts on his headphones again. With slow and still sleepy motions he inserts the seventh cassette, presses play and listens. He hears his own voice. Boring questions. Bland answers. Have you any idea of the motive? Fast-forward, fast-forward, fast-forward. He drinks more coffee and presses play again. So what is your next move in this case? More fast-forwarding before he stops again. More play. He hears a man’s voice:… they might kill me.

Henning looks up. He rewinds to the start of the sentence and presses play for the umpteenth time. I’m risking my life meeting you. If they find me, they might kill me. Henning presses stop again.

He recognises the voice as belonging to Rasmus Bjelland and soon puts a face to a story. All it takes is a few internet searches to refresh his memory.

Bjelland was convicted of drugs smuggling in the early nineties. He was given a lengthy custodial sentence, Henning recalls, seven or eight years. When Bjelland was released, he started working as a carpenter without notable success. A limited company he set up, Bjelland, Bygg amp; Bolig, went bankrupt after trading for only eighteen months.

Like many other bankrupts at the time, Bjelland decided to try his luck in Brazil, more precisely in Natal — a pearl on the Atlantic coast and a city with 800,000 inhabitants. In the spring of 2006, Dagens N?ringsliv reported how the city was becoming a haven for Norwegian criminals. For years dirty money had been poured into various construction projects, later sold to Norwegians desperate for some sun and easily tempted by the favourable prices and generally low cost of living. They didn’t know that the million-krone construction projects were financed and controlled by criminal gangs who never filed a tax return in Norway. Even members of notorious gangs such as B-gjengen and Svenskeligaen invested in the Natal property market.

In 2004, Rasmus Bjelland married a Brazilian woman. She was responsible for attracting investors while Bjelland handled the construction side. Together they managed to build some smaller residential complexes which made them sufficient profits to reinvest. However, the people already running the show in Natal were perfectly happy with the existing set-up and resented the arrival of yet another property shark trying to get a share of their market.

On an autumn day in 2006, one of Bjelland’s business partners was found shot and killed outside the fishing village of Ponta Negra, an undeveloped area where Bjelland and his wife were planning their biggest project yet. Police concluded that the man, who was found with three bullet holes in his forehead and cash in his pocket, had been the victim of an armed robbery. Bjelland was terrified.

The story uncovered by Dagens N?ringsliv formed the basis of a huge Norwegian-Brazilian police operation. On 9 May 2007, 230 police officers in Natal carried out Operation Nemesis, the biggest raid the authorities in the province of Rio Grande do Norte had ever undertaken. They searched thirty-three flats and offices looking for documents to prove fraud and money laundering and confiscated items to a value of 300 million kroner. At the same time, in Oslo, eighty police officers carried out Operation Paradise and raided various locations associated with money laundering in Natal. While fourteen people were arrested in Natal, eleven were remanded in custody in Oslo. Seven people were later charged by Norway’s serious fraud office, Okokrim.