Thomas Enger - Pierced

A statement, Thorleif thinks, alarmed, and feels his face become burning hot. He knows that he will never be able to give a false account of what happened. His voice will falter and his eyes become evasive. He is sure the police will grow suspicious and wonder why he is so nervous. They will want to question him further. In the end he will crack. And he knows what the consequences will be.

The man in the black leather jacket told him he could go home after killing Pulli and everything would carry on as normal. But how can it? He has taken the life of another human being. And what guarantee does he have that they really will leave him alone now that the job is done? Thorleif saw the man’s face, he knows that the man had accomplices to bring about Pulli’s death. Do they think that threatening Thorleif’s family is enough to make him keep his mouth shut for ever? What if the police see through him and the choice is taken away from him?

In the park below the police station Thorleif sees an Asian man wearing light summer clothes. The man is walking his dog. He reminds Thorleif of a guide he and a friend had when they were hiking in the Caucasus Mountains trying to find their way from Laza to Xinaliq in Azerbaijan. Thorleif closes his eyes and recalls how they hiked through a deep gorge between grassy mountains, waded in water up to their knees through fast-flowing rivers and were met by sheepdogs foaming at the mouths when they finally arrived early one afternoon. The shepherd who ran out from under a tarpaulin didn’t mind that they threw stones at his dogs to keep them at bay. The toothless man even invited them inside his shelter for a cup of tea before he started banging on a bucket and singing shepherd songs in Ketsh.

The village had only one telephone, Thorleif remembers. All the men came out of their huts to watch them communicate with the outside world. The village children followed them too, all eager to show them the brick house where they would be sleeping that night. The father of the house appeared with his oldest son, welcomed them warmly in Arabic and took them straight down to a pen where Thorleif picked out a lamb that was slaughtered a few seconds later.

Afterwards, they had a warm foot bath and a meal of sharp sheep’s cheese which they washed down with tea. Behind a curtain little girls sneaked a peek at the men’s world. At night the couple’s bed was made ready for them. Thorleif will never forget feeling like a royal traveller in the Middle Ages.

He opens his eyes again. There is so much he hasn’t done, so much he hasn’t seen. So many things he has yet to show his children.

Ole Reinertsen drives into TV2’s underground car park and parks the car. Thorleif is the last to get out.

‘You go on without me,’ he says as he slams the door shut. Palme turns to him.

‘Where are you going?’

‘I… I just need to get something from my car.’

She looks at him for a moment before she nods. Thorleif goes out the same way the car drove in, out into the daylight where the building across the road offers him a little shade. He thinks about Elisabeth and the children and of what he is about to do. And he has an epiphany. Sometimes it’s infinitely harder to live than to die.

Henning glares scornfully at the computer screen where the story about Pulli’s sudden death is making headlines. Fat white font against a black background. No photos. There are never any photos in the breaking-news section, only a small square in the top left-hand corner that says ‘breaking news’ in tiny red letters.

It feels as if the walls are trying to crush him into tiny pieces so he gets up and leaves the flat, moving quickly down the stairs once he has locked the door behind him.

The heat hits him as he steps outside. Three teenagers are sitting on a bench beneath a window in the courtyard, smoking. They look up at him as if he is insane, but Henning ignores them. He hurries past them out into the street and the dry summer dust. He walks past the old sail loft that gives the street its name and turns into Fosseveien. Cars drive by slowly. A grown man on a skateboard grins broadly as Henning moves out of his way.

He finds an empty spot on the grassy slope opposite Kuba Bru and watches the river Aker flow by lazily. Around him people are laughing, drinking beer, barbecuing or soaking up the sun.

They’re alive.

While the wrong people die.

Henning lies down and stares up at the sky. Tore Pulli is dead. He is gone. It’s weird, but it feels as if he has lost a friend. And when he thinks about it, perhaps he has.

Thorleif is reminded of Will Smith and the film Enemy of the State as he walks out into Karl Johansgate. Smith played a lawyer who was unaware that he had microphones and transmitters all over his body. Even his watch and shoes had been fitted with high-tech equipment which meant that Jon Voight’s team of rogue NSA agents knew absolutely everything that Smith did. The film’s tagline was ‘In God we trust. The rest we monitor.’

Thorleif doesn’t know how sophisticated the technology the man with the ponytail and his fellow thugs are using is, but they seem to know a great deal about him, and Thorleif can’t afford to take any chances. He glances over his shoulder before walking into the nearest budget clothes shop where he buys five pairs of socks, four pairs of underpants, a pair of long dark trousers, a pair of shorts, three white T-shirts, a thin cotton jumper and a denim jacket. Then he finds a shoe shop and buys a pair of trainers. He uses the lavatory at a Burger King restaurant to change and leaves all his old clothes behind.

Before going outside again, he waits in the restaurant for a few minutes and watches everyone around him, including the people in the street, until he feels confident that no one is waiting for him or keeping him under surveillance.

It takes him only seconds to cross the street and enter Arkaden Mall where he buys a black baseball cap. Afterwards he finds the nearest ATM and withdraws as much cash as he can first using his Visa card, then maxing out his previously untouched MasterCard.

Thorleif tries to suppress the urge to run when he exits on the other side of Arkaden. He walks briskly in the direction of Byporten Shopping Centre, enters through a revolving door and continues up two escalators while people rush around him. He passes a cafe, several clothes shops and makes eye contact with a pretty shop assistant at Handy Size before passing a supermarket, a bookshop and a kiosk. He has arrived at the forecourt of Oslo Central Station.

Leaving everything and everyone behind like this is pure madness, he thinks. But what choice does he have? If he stays, he will very likely be killed, probably today. If he is interviewed by the police, they will surely break him in the end and then his options are confessing to the murder and claiming responsibility for it or telling them everything. If he chooses to talk or if the police make him, the man with the ponytail will hurt Elisabeth and the children. In ways he can’t bear to think about.

The only sensible solution, Thorleif concludes, is to do what he is doing now. Get the hell out of Oslo. He wonders how long it will be before he is reported missing. Guri and Ole will wonder why he never returned to the office. They will try to call him on his mobile but will get no reply. They might ring Elisabeth to ask if he has come home though they will probably put that off for as long as they can. But it will be sometime tonight, Thorleif thinks. Before that, he needs to have found himself a place to hide. Until then his job is to make himself as invisible as possible.

Thorleif has reached the large departure boards at the station. An anthill of people is milling around. It is impossible to determine if any of them are watching him. He just has to hope that his diversion tactics have been successful.