Ю Несбё - The Kingdom

We fetched our skis from the barn, fastened them on and set off. I realised that Carl had of course exaggerated; Shannon managed to stay on her feet most of the way, but she wasn’t good.

‘I think it’s the surfing I did as a child,’ she said, obviously pleased with herself. ‘It helps your balance, and—’ She squealed as one ski reared up in front of her and down she went on her arse in the fresh snow. Carl and I doubled over with laughter, and after a failed attempt to look offended Shannon had to start laughing too. As we helped her up I felt Carl’s hand on my back, felt it give my neck a little squeeze. And his blue gaze shone on me. He looked better than he had done at Christmas. A bit thinner, movements a little quicker, the whites of his eyes a little clearer, his diction clearer too.

‘Well?’ said Carl, leaning on his ski poles. ‘Can you see?’

All I saw was the same burnt-out ruins of the previous month.

‘Can’t you see it? The new hotel?’

‘No.’

Carl laughed. ‘Just wait. Fourteen months. I’ve spoken to my people, and we’re going to bloody well get it done in fourteen months. In a month’s time we’ll be cutting the ribbon down there for the start of the new building. And it’s going to be bigger than the first launch. Anna Falla has agreed to come and cut the ribbon.’

I nodded. Elected member of the Storting, leader of the Committee for Business and Industry. It was pretty big.

‘And afterwards, a party for the whole village at Årtun, just like the old days.’

‘Nothing can be just like the old days, Carl.’

‘Wait and see. I’m asking Rod to get the old band together for a reunion.’

‘You’re kidding!’ I laughed. Rod. That was way bigger than anyone the Storting could send.

Carl turned. ‘Shannon?’

She had struggled her way up the hill behind us. ‘It’s bakglatt . I kept slipping backwards,’ she said with a smile, panting. ‘Great Norwegian word. Easy to glide backwards, not so easy forwards.’

‘Want to show Uncle Roy how you’ve learned to ski downhill?’ Carl pointed to a sheltered slope. The fresh snow glistened like a carpet of diamonds.

Shannon made a face at him. ‘I’m not proposing to entertain you two.’

‘Just imagine you’re surfing at Surfer’s Point back home,’ he said teasingly.

She swung out at him with a ski pole and almost lost her balance again. Carl laughed.

‘You going to show her how to ski?’ Carl asked me.

‘No,’ I said, and closed my eyes, which were smarting, even though I was wearing sunglasses. ‘I don’t want to spoil.’

‘He means he doesn’t want to spoil the fresh snow,’ I heard Carl say to Shannon. ‘It used to drive Dad nuts. We’d come to some perfect downhill slope with untouched, powdery snow, and he’d ask Roy to go down first, because Roy’s the best of us on skis, and then Roy refuses. Says it’s so lovely and he doesn’t want to spoil it with ski tracks.’

‘I can understand that,’ said Shannon.

‘Not Dad,’ said Carl. ‘He said if you don’t spoil then you won’t get anywhere.’

We took off our skis, sat down on them and divided an orange into three.

‘Did you know that the orange tree came from Barbados?’ said Carl, squinting his eyes at me.

‘That’s the grapefruit tree,’ said Shannon. ‘And not even that is by any means certain. But then…’ She looked at me. ‘It’s all the things we don’t know that make history true.’

Once the orange had disappeared, Shannon said she was going to head back, so she wouldn’t have to worry about keeping us waiting.

Carl and I sat watching her until she disappeared over the rise.

Then Carl heaved a heavy sigh. ‘That bloody fire…’

‘Have they found out any more about how it happened?’

‘Only that someone started it, and that a rocket was put there so it would look like that was what started it. That Lithuanian…’

‘Latvian.’

‘…couldn’t even tell them the make of the car he’d seen, so they don’t exclude the possibility that he started it himself.’

‘Why would he do that?’

‘Pyromaniac. Or else someone paid him to do it. There are a few jealous souls in this village who hate that hotel, Roy.’

‘Hate us, you mean.’

‘That too.’

There was a distant howl. A dog. Someone claimed to have seen wolf tracks up here on the mountain. And even bear tracks. Not impossible, of course, only pretty unlikely. Almost nothing is impossible. It’s just a question of time, and then everything happens.

‘I believe him,’ I said.

‘The Lithuanian?’

‘Not even a pyromaniac would want to go on living on the same plot of land he’s scorched himself. And if he was paid to do it, why complicate it by saying he’d seen a car with a defective brake light heading down from the site? He could have said it was already on fire when he got there; or that he was asleep in the cabin, that he knew nothing about it. And let the police find out if it was the rocket or something else.’

‘Not everyone thinks as logically as you, Roy.’

I wedged in another snuff pellet. ‘Maybe not. Who hates you enough to burn down your hotel?’

‘Let’s see now. Kurt Olsen, because he’s still convinced we had something to do with his father’s death. Erik Nerell, after we humiliated him with those naked pictures we got him to send. Simon Nergard, because he… because he lives at Nergard, you beat him up, and he’s always hated us.’

‘What about Dan Krane?’

‘No. Him and Mari are part-owners of the hotel.’

‘In whose name?’

‘Mari’s.’

‘If I know Mari, they’ll have a separate ownership agreement in that house.’

‘Definitely. But then Dan would never do anything to harm Mari—’

‘No? Consider a man whose wife has been unfaithful to him, and you’re the man she did it with. Who’s been threatened, censored, humiliated by an enforcer because he wants to write something about the hotel that is critical, but true. Who’s lost his friends in high places and has to mingle with people like me on New Year’s Eve. That marriage was already on the rocks, and on New Year’s Eve he was planning to put the final nail in the coffin with a character assassination of her father in the leader column of his paper. Would a man like that never harm the cause of all his misery? If he could at the same time ruin you? At Stanley’s party I met a Dan Krane who’d gone to the wall.’

‘Gone to the wall?’

‘Do you know how scary it is to have your life threatened by someone who knows exactly the right buttons to push?’

‘Sort of,’ said Carl with a sidelong glance at me.

‘It eats away at your soul, as people say.’

‘Yeah,’ said Carl quietly.

‘And what happens then?’

‘In the end you just can’t face being scared any more.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘You don’t give a fuck, you’d rather die. Destroy yourself or destroy the other. Burn down, murder. Anything, not to go on being afraid. That’s what going to the wall means.’

‘Yes,’ said Carl. ‘That’s the wall. And it’s better on the other side of the wall, no matter what.’

We sat in silence. I heard rapid wingbeats above, a shadow crossed the snow. Grouse, maybe. I didn’t look up.

‘She seems happy,’ I said. ‘Shannon.’

‘Of course,’ said Carl. ‘She thinks she’s going to get her hotel, the way she drew it.’

‘Thinks?’

Carl nodded. He seemed to collapse imperceptibly and the smile, that bright smile, was gone.

‘I haven’t told her yet, but the news has somehow got out that the hotel wasn’t insured against fire. That it’s only Willumsen’s money that’s kept the project afloat until now. Dan Krane’s probably the source.’