They chose not to assassinate her, he thought, out of breath. If there is such a thing as ‘they’. They chose not to kill her. Was that what they wanted? The purgatory? And if they wanted to create a confused vacuum, they…
He was running as fast as he could now, in his good shoes, a suit, and a coat that was a touch on the tight side. He stumbled here and there, but found his balance again and stormed on.
He wanted to get home. He ran and tried to think about something else. About summer, which was just around the corner; about the horse he was thinking about buying, though Johanne had refused to have any more pets other than the yellowy-brown slavering dog that Kristiane called Jack, King of America.
How were they going to use that vacuum?
XIV
It was nearly eleven o’clock. Johanne was too tired to get up from the sofa and too restless to sleep. She tried to relish the thought of not having the children tonight and tomorrow, but couldn’t do anything other than stare at the news, which was only serving up pointless repeats and regurgitated speculation. The only thing the authorities were clear about, nearly sixteen hours after the disappearance of the American president had been discovered, was that she had not reappeared. Representatives of official Norway were still reluctant to use the word ‘kidnapping’, but journalists showed no such restraint. One commentator after another expanded on the more-or-less ridiculous theories. The police just kept quiet. No one leading the investigation had been willing to give an interview since early afternoon.
‘I agree with them about that,’ Adam said and sat down beside her on the sofa. ‘There are limits as to how many times they can be forced to say exactly the same thing. Which generally has been nothing. Bastesen looked pretty sheepish the last couple of times.’
‘I hope they’re lying.’
‘Lying?’
She gave a faint smile and moved until she was more comfortable. ‘Yes, that they know more than they’re letting on. And I’m sure they do.’
‘I’m not so sure. I have seldom seen a grimmer-looking bunch of people than whose who were filmed on their way out from…’
Johanne zapped over to CNN.
Wolf Blitzer himself was in the studio, as he had been for the past fourteen hours. The programme, The Situation Room, had taken over the entire broadcasting network, and judging by the activity in the studio, they had no intention of ending soon. The anchorman was, as usual, immaculately dressed. Only his tie was a smidgen looser than earlier in the day. With expert ease, he switched from a correspondent in Washington DC over to New York, before politely interrupting the journalist to give the word to Christiane Amanpour. The world-famous journalist was on the slope in front of an illuminated Norwegian royal palace. She was wearing thin clothes, and she seemed to be shivering.
‘It’s impressive how quick they are,’ Adam mumbled. ‘They’re up and running within a few hours.’
‘I don’t see what the palace has got to do with the case.’ Johanne stifled a yawn. ‘But it’s a good report, I agree. Everything is getting slicker and quicker. Did you run? You’re sweating, my love.’
‘Picked up speed a bit towards the end. It was great. More like jogging.’
‘In a suit?’
He smiled disarmingly and kissed her. She plaited her fingers into his.
‘Strange, really…’ She stopped and stretched to get her wine glass. ‘Can you tell the difference?’
‘Between what?’
‘The Norwegian and the American programmes. The mood, I mean. The Americans seem to be efficient, quick, nearly… aggressive. Everything here is a bit more… restrained. People seem to be paralysed in a way. Almost passive. At least, the interviewees certainly do. It’s as if they’re frightened to say too much, and so what little they do say just sounds silly. It all feels a bit like a parody. Look at the Americans, they’re so much better at it.’
‘But then they’ve had more opportunities to practise,’ Adam said, trying to hide the irritation he always felt when confronted with Johanne’s ambiguous relationship with anything American.
On the one hand, she never wanted to talk about the period when she had studied in the US. The two of them had known each other for many years now. They were married; they had children and a mortgage together. They shared dreams and daily life. But there was still a substantial part of Johanne’s past that was secret, that she protected more vehemently than even the children. The night before their wedding, she had forced him to take an oath: that he would never, under any circumstances, ask her why she had suddenly broken off her psychology studies at the FBI’s academy in Quantico. He had sworn on his dead daughter’s grave. Both the formulation of the oath and the consequences of it made him feel unwell whenever the topic was raised, and Johanne was consumed by a rage that she never demonstrated otherwise.
But at the same time, Johanne’s fascination with everything American was bordering on manic. She read almost exclusively American literature and had a large collection of American low-budget films, which she bought over the Internet or got a friend of hers in Boston, whom he had never met and knew practically nothing about, to send. The shelves in her small office were full of reference books about American history, politics and society. He was never allowed to borrow any of them, and it really bothered him that she locked the door on the rare occasions that she went away on her own.
‘Not really,’ she said after a long silence.
‘What?’
‘You said that they’d had more opportunity to practise.’
‘I meant…’
‘They have never lost a president outside the country’s borders. American presidents have been killed by random madmen in their own country. Never abroad. And never as part of a conspiracy, for that matter. Did you know that?’
Something in her voice made him not answer. He knew her well enough to know that if he turned this into a dialogue, she would quickly change the subject. If she was left to carrying on talking without interruption, she did.
‘Four out of forty-four presidents have been assassinated,’ Johanne said thoughtfully, as if she was actually talking to herself. ‘Is that not nearly ten per cent?’
He tried to withstand the urge to interrupt.
‘Kennedy.’ She gave a faint smile and beat him to it. ‘Forget it. Lee Harvey Oswald was a strange man who may have planned it with another couple of weirdos. Possibly not. It was certainly no great conspiracy. Except for in the film.’
She reached out for the bottle of wine. It was too far away. Adam grabbed it and poured some into her glass. The TV was still on. Wolf Blitzer’s forehead now looked slightly damp, and when he handed over to a reporter in front of the White House, you could see the shadows under the anchorman’s eyes. No doubt they would be concealed with make-up after the adverts.
‘Lincoln, Garfield and McKinley,’ Johanne continued, without touching her glass. ‘They were all killed by lone fanatics. A confederate sympathiser, someone with mental-health problems and a mad anarchist, if I’m not wrong. Mad fellow countrymen. The same is true of all the many attempted assassinations. The guy who tried to kill Reagan wanted to make an impression on Jodie Foster, and the man who tried to bump off Theodore Roosevelt thought that he would get rid of the pain in his stomach if he killed the President. Only the two Puerto Ricans who…’
Christiane Amanpour was on the screen again. She had a warmer jacket on. The fur collar was perhaps intended to give a more Arctic mood. She was trying to keep it shut with one hand. This time she was standing outside the police headquarters in Grønland. Nothing new from there either. Johanne squinted at the screen. Adam turned down the volume with the remote control and asked: ‘What about the Puerto-’