Ю Несбё - The Kingdom

‘The way you let everyone think they’ll get what they want?’

There was a chill in her voice that I had never heard before.

Carl wriggled in his chair. ‘Darling, this is a time for celebrating, not—’

Shannon stood up suddenly. Marched out.

‘What was all that about?’ I asked as the front door slammed.

Carl sighed. ‘It’s her hotel.’

‘Hers?’

‘She designed it.’

‘ She designed it? Not an architect?’

‘Shannon is an architect, Roy.’

‘She is?’

‘Best in Toronto if you ask me. But she has her own style and her own opinions, and unfortunately she’s a bit of a Howard Roark.’

‘A bit of a who?’

‘He’s an architect who blew his own work up because it wasn’t built exactly the way he drew it. Shannon’s going to make trouble about every little detail. If she’d been a bit more flexible she would have been not only the best but also the most in-demand architect in Toronto.’

‘Not that it matters all that fucking much but why the hell did you never say it was her who designed the hotel?’

Carl sighed. ‘The drawings are signed with the name of her firm. I figured that was enough. When the project leader allows his young, foreign wife to design the place then people are automatically going to suspect the project lacks professionality. Of course, everything’ll be fine once they see her track record, but my thinking was, we could do without all that fuss until the investors and the council were on board. Shannon agreed.’

‘OK, but why did neither of you tell me ?’

Carl opened his arms wide. ‘So you wouldn’t have to go round and tell lies as well. What I mean is, it’s not lies, the name of her company is there, but… well, you understand.’

‘Not so many loose ends? Fewer loose cannons?’

‘For fuck’s sake, Roy.’ He fixed me with his sorrowing, beautiful eyes. ‘I’m juggling a million balls in the air here. I’m just trying to keep the distractions to a minimum.’

I sucked my teeth. It’s something I must have started doing recently. Dad did it and it used to annoy me. ‘OK,’ I said.

‘Good.’

‘Speaking of balls in the air and distractions, I met Mari at the surgery the other day. She blushed when she saw me.’

‘Oh yeah?’

‘As if she was ashamed of something.’

‘Such as?’

‘I don’t know. But after all that stuff involving you and Grete and you going to the States, she tried to get her revenge on you.’

‘What did she do?’

I took a deep breath. ‘She came on to me.’

‘To you?’ Carl laughed uproariously. ‘And you complain about me not keeping the family informed?’

‘That’s what she wanted, for you to find out. And get hurt.’

Carl shook his head. Putting on a local accent he said: ‘Never underestimate a woman scorned. Did you go for it?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘When I saw that deep blush of shame it struck me that she’d never got her revenge, and that Mari Aas is not the type to forget, that that business is still inside her like some kind of encapsulated cyst. So I think you better watch out for her.’

‘You think she’s planning something?’

‘Or she’s already done it, something so extreme that she feels ashamed when she sees a member of our family.’

Carl rubbed his chin. ‘Like something for example that could affect our project?’

‘She might have arranged something that’s going to screw things up for you. I’m just saying.’

‘And you base this on the fact that you saw her blush as you happened to be passing by?’

‘I realise it sounds idiotic,’ I said. ‘But Mari isn’t the type to blush, we know that. She’s a self-assured lady and there’s almost nothing that embarrasses her. But she’s also a moralist. Remember that necklace you bought for her with money you nicked from Uncle Bernard?’

Carl nodded.

‘That’s what she looked like. As though she’d been party to something she knew was wrong, and it was too late to regret it.’

‘Got it,’ said Carl. ‘I’ll watch out for her.’

I went to bed early. Through the floor I could hear Carl and Shannon in the living room. Not the words, just the quarrelling. And then they fell silent. Footsteps on the stairs, the bedroom door closing. And then fucking.

I pressed the pillow over my ears and sang J. J. Cale’s ‘Don’t Go to Strangers’ inside my head.

THE SNOW HAD MELTED.

I stood at the kitchen window and looked out.

‘Where’s Carl?’ I asked.

‘Talking to the contractors,’ said Shannon, who was sitting on the worktop behind me reading the Os Daily . ‘They’re probably on site.’

‘Shouldn’t the architect be there too?’

She shrugged. ‘He wanted to handle it alone, he said.’

‘What does the paper say?’

‘That the council has opened the floodgates. That Os will turn into a holiday camp for rich city folk, and we’ll be the servants. That we would be better off building refugee camps for people who really need us.’

‘Jesus, is that Dan Krane saying that?’

‘It’s something sent in by a reader, but they’ve given it plenty of prominence and there’s a reference to it on the front page.’

‘What’s Krane’s editorial about?’

‘A story about a Pastor Armand. Revivalist meetings and miracle cures. That one week after he left Os with his collecting box full the people he cured were back in their wheelchairs again.’

I laughed and studied the sky above Ottertind, the mountain at the southern end of Lake Budal. It was full of contradictory signs and revealed little about the kind of weather we could expect. ‘So Krane doesn’t dare to criticise Carl directly,’ I said. ‘But he gives plenty of space to those who do.’

‘Well, anyway it doesn’t sound as if we have much to fear from that quarter,’ said Shannon.

‘Maybe not from there.’ I turned to her. ‘If you still think you can find out what Kurt Olsen’s looking for, I think now might be a good time.’

Fritt Fall was the type of bar that defines itself by the size of its market. Which in this case meant satisfying everyone’s demands. A long counter with stools for the thirsty beer drinkers, small round tables for the diners, a little dance floor with disco lights for people looking for action, a billiard table with holes in the cloth for the restless, and betting slips, coupons and a TV screen showing races for the hopeful. Who the black rooster that sometimes strutted between the tables was for I don’t know, but it didn’t bother anyone, no one bothered it, and it would neither take orders for beer nor respond when called by its name, Giovanni. But Giovanni would certainly be missed when he died and would – according to Erik Nerell – be dished up to the regulars as a slightly tough but agreeable coq au vin.

Shannon and I entered the bar at three o’clock. I saw no sign of Giovanni, just two men staring at the TV screen where horses with flowing manes were swarming round a gravel track. We sat at one of the window tables and as agreed I took out Shannon’s laptop, placed it on the table between us, stood up and walked to the bar from where Erik Nerell had been watching us since we came in, while pretending to read the Os Daily .

‘Two coffees,’ I said.

‘OK.’ He put a cup under the tap of a black Thermos and pressed the top.

‘What’s happening?’ I said.

He gave me a funny look. I nodded at his newspaper.

‘Oh, here,’ he said. ‘No. Well, actually…’ He changed the cups over. ‘No.’

Shannon had turned the laptop on by the time I returned with the coffees. I sat down beside her. The screensaver was a rather sombre-looking, rectangular and to my eyes quite ordinary-looking skyscraper which, she had explained to me, was a masterpiece, the IBM building in Chicago. She said it was designed by someone called Mies.