Ю Несбё - The Kingdom

Julie smiled. She looked almost too happy. Changeable weather in there.

‘City folk think the roads are slippery now,’ Julie said. ‘Imagine when it gets really cold, minus twenty, thirty.’

‘Then the roads’ll be less slippery,’ I said.

She looked quizzically at me.

‘Ice is slippier when it’s closer to melting point,’ I said. ‘Slippiest of all when it’s exactly seven degrees below. That’s the temperature they try to keep the ice in ice-hockey stadiums. What we slip on isn’t an invisible thin coating of water on account of the pressure and friction, the way people used to think, but gas that’s formed by loose molecules at those temperatures.’

‘How come you know all this stuff, Roy?’ She gave me a look of undeserved admiration.

That, of course, made me feel like one of those idiots I can’t stand myself, always showing off with random and superficial snippets of knowledge.

‘It’s the kind of stuff you can read in what we sell,’ I said, pointing to the magazine racks where Popular Science was stacked next to magazines about cars, boats, hunting and fishing, True Crime and – at the insistence of the head of sales – a couple of fashion magazines.

But Julie wasn’t going to let me down from my pedestal that easily.

‘Thirty’s not that old if you ask me. At least it’s better than twenty-year-olds who think they’re grown up just because they’ve passed their driving test.’

‘I’m over thirty, Julie.’

‘Are you? Then how old’s your brother?’

‘Thirty-five.’

‘He was in buying petrol yesterday,’ she said.

‘You weren’t working.’

‘I was here with some of my friends sitting in Knerten’s car. It was him said it was your brother. Know what my friends said? They said your brother was a DILF.’

I didn’t reply.

‘But you know what? If you ask me, you’re more of a DILF.’

I gave her a warning glare. She just grinned. Straightened up almost unnoticeably and drew her broad shoulders back. ‘DILF stands for—’

‘Thank you, but I think I know what it stands for. You gonna handle the Asko delivery?’

An Asko truck had pulled into the station. Soda water and sweets.

Julie looked at me with a deeply practised I’m-bored-to-death look. She blew a bubble gum balloon that burst. Tossed her head and marched out.

‘HERE?’ I ASKED IN DISBELIEF, looking across our outfields.

‘Here,’ said Carl.

Rocks with heather. Wind-blasted bare mountainside. Fantastic view of course, with blue mountain tops in all directions and the sun glinting on the water down there. But all the same. ‘You’re going to have to build a road up here. Water. Sewage. Electricity.’

‘Right.’ Carl laughed.

‘Carry out maintenance on something that’s on a… on a fucking mountain top. ’

‘It’s unique, right?’

‘And lovely,’ said Shannon. She was standing behind us with her arms folded, shivering in her black coat. ‘It’ll be lovely.’

I’d come home early from the station and of course the first thing I did was confront Carl about those posters.

‘Without saying a single fucking word to me?’ I said. ‘Have you any idea how many questions I’ve had today?’

‘How many? Did they seem positive?’ The keen way Carl asked made me understand he really didn’t care a damn about how I felt about being trampled over and ignored.

‘But for chrissakes,’ I said, ‘why didn’t you tell me this was what you were coming back for?’

‘Because I didn’t want you to hear just half the story, Roy.’ Carl laid an arm around my shoulder, gave me that warm damn smile. ‘Didn’t want you wandering about up here thinking up all kinds of objections. Because you’re a born sceptic, and you know it. So now let’s go and have dinner and I’ll tell you the whole story. OK?’

And yes, my mood improved slightly, if for no other reason than that for the first time since Mum and Dad there was a meal cooked and ready on the table when I came home from work. After we’d eaten our fill Carl had shown me the drawings for the hotel. It looked like an igloo on the moon. The only difference being that on this moon a couple of reindeer wandered by. Those reindeer and some moss were all the architect had provided of exterior staffage, apart from that it looked pretty sterile and modernist. The funny thing was that I liked it, but that was probably because I saw something that resembled a service station on Mars and not a hotel where people could relax and enjoy themselves. I mean, surely people want places like that to have a bit more warmth and class, a bit more of Norwegian national romance about them, rose-painted panels, turf roofs, like the palace of some fairy-tale king or whatever.

Then we’d walked the short kilometre from the house to the proposed building site, with the evening sun glowing in the heather and on the polished granite of the peaks.

‘See how it moulds itself into the landscape,’ said Carl as he drew in the air the hotel we had been looking at in the dining room. ‘The landscape and the function are what matter, not people’s expectations of what a mountain hotel should look like. This is a hotel that will change people’s ideas about architecture, not just hum along with them.’

‘OK then,’ I answered, no doubt sounding as sceptical as I thought there was every reason to be.

Carl explained the hotel would be 11,000 square metres and have two hundred rooms. It could be up and running within two years of the first shovel of dirt being shifted. Or the first explosive detonated – there wasn’t a lot of earth up here. Carl’s ‘pessimistic estimate’ was that it would cost four hundred million.

‘How do you propose to get hold of four hundred—’

‘The bank.’

‘Os Savings Bank?’

‘No, no.’ He laughed. ‘They’re too small for this. A city bank. DnB.’

‘And why would they loan you four hundred mil for this…?’ I didn’t actually say lunacy, but it was pretty obvious what I was thinking.

‘Because we’re not going to start a limited company. We’re going to start an SL.’

‘SL?’

‘A Shared Liability company. People in the village don’t have a lot of cash. What they do have are the farms and the land they live on. With an SL they don’t need to put up a single krone to come along for the ride. And everyone who’s in, the great and the small, has the same share and makes the same profit. They can all just sit back and let their property do the work for them. The bankers will be drooling at the mouth for the chance to finance this whole thing because they’ve never been offered better security than a whole bloody village!’

I scratched my head. ‘You mean, if the whole thing goes to hell, then—’

‘Then each investor is liable only for his own share. If there are a hundred of us, and the company goes bankrupt with a debt of a hundred thousand, then all you’re liable for, you and the rest of the investors, is a thousand kroner each. Even if some of the investors can’t manage the thousand, that’s not your problem, it’s the creditors’ problem.’

‘Jesus.’

‘Beautiful, isn’t it? So the more that are involved, the less the individual risk. But of course that also means the less they earn when this thing really takes off.’

It was a lot to take on board. A type of company where you don’t have to lay out a single krone and just rake it in, if everything goes according to plan. And if it all goes to hell, the only thing you’re liable for is your own share.

‘OK,’ I said, trying to figure out where the catch might be. ‘So why invite people to an investors’ meeting when they aren’t going to be investing anything?’