He could almost smell and taste the pudding of sour cream with melted butter and brown sugar and cinnamon. “Ja! I still remember that. But I rarely have it any more. . this will be my once-in-a-year feasting on my favorite food. Besides. . it’s been ages since we celebrated Sankthans. . Midsummer’s Eve. It’s been what?. . Maybe fifteen years since we spent a Sankthans in Norway?. . It’s been at least five years since we’ve been in Oslo during the summer for more than a few days.”
“True. I’m so happy we came back. Three weeks of summer vacation!”
“Don’t forget though. I must do a presentation at headquarters before we can leave. Then we’ll be off to see your folks and enjoy lovely Bergen once again.”
Fru Sohlberg handed him the last dish and noticed his eyes. “Won’t it feel strange going back to the Politidirektoratet. . the National Police Directorate?. . Are you nervous?”
“Yes and no,” he said fully aware that his wife could read his face and gestures like an open book. Not even the best lie detector and voice stress machine could surpass her skills at accurately and instantly detecting his real feelings and thoughts. Sometimes he wondered if she and not he should have been the Politiforstebetjent (Police Chief Inspector) in the family. He had no doubts that Fru Sohlberg would probably have solved more crimes than Herr Sohlberg given her special talents.
She turned and looked at him. “It must be strange if not difficult to have so many reminders of the past. . beginning with this house.”
“Ja,” he said. “A remembrance of things past.”
“Exactly. Like Proust. . the French author. . did you know that he wrote two million words in seven volumes based on a flood of memories that were unleashed by the smell and taste of the tea he used to drink and the little madeleine sponge cakes he used to eat as a child?”
Sohlberg nodded. “Ja. . This house brings back my childhood. . and so many memories. . even those as a young adult.”
During the past two days he had been embarrassed several times when she caught him lost in memories while he stared wistfully at different rooms of his old childhood home. He felt foolish at his sentimental longing for the good old days of his youth and yet he could not deny the powerful attraction that he had for the lovely waterfront home of glass-and-cedar where his parents and his brother had lived in as close to a perfect idyllic existence as possible thanks to his mother’s love and his father’s providing.
She read his face and said, “Well. . you can’t be blamed for feeling nostalgic over the great childhood you had here with your parents.”
“True,” said Sohlberg, “but it’s all in the past.”
“Yes. The good and the bad. . even the worst of the bad is now far behind you. . ”
“Ja. That’s true. Incredible how time has passed.”
She dried her hands on the towel that he held. She pulled him closer with the towel and kissed him gently on the lips. “Please take a nap if you can.”
Sohlberg smiled and watched her walk down the hallway and up the stairs. He drank the last of the sparkling mineral water of the third Farris bottle that he had consumed after returning from his early morning run. He then walked outside and past the towering pines down to the beach where his father had built a small guest cabin.
His father had built the cabin and used it as an office after his refurbished industrial machinery business took off in the early 1980s. Of course the cabin and the sailboat and the floating dock and other luxuries came only after many years of struggling and economizing. Sohlberg remembered many cold winters with little heat in the house and simple paper shades for curtains when they moved into the house during his last two years in high school. Norway’s oil boom greatly prospered his father’s business in the 1980s and Sohlberg sometimes wondered if he should have gone into business with his father.
“Me the businessman,” Sohlberg said to himself as he sat down before his father’s desk.
In less than an hour Sohlberg had carefully organized and added up the receipts and invoices that he needed to present to Interpol as soon as possible. He wanted to quickly get reimbursed for more than $ 12,932 U.S. dollars that he had spent on airlines and taxis and hotels and meals on his recent round of traveling to Norway from the USA. He decided that he would send the reimbursement request by fax later that night to Lyon France. But he had to make absolutely sure that he added and included every item correctly because he knew better than to submit a wrong reimbursement request to the accountants and bookkeepers at Interpol. The bean counters always made him and other Interpol advisers and field agents feel that they were somehow defrauding Interpol even when submitting the most accurate of expense reports.
Sohlberg had as ususal organized all the paperwork for the expense report on a day-by-day basis from the day that he and Fru Sohlberg had flown out of Seattle in the United States to the day that they arrived in Copenhagen Denmark for a four-day meeting of Interpol’s National Central Bureau (NCB) for the European Region. He still needed to add the paperwork for the airfare from Copenhagen to Oslo and the car rental at the airport.
Representatives from all 49 member nations of the Regional European NCB had attended the Copenhagen meeting to review and discuss links between major organized crime groups that smuggled drugs and humans from Asia into the western shores of Canada and the United States.
Sohlberg attended the Copenhagen meeting because he officially works full time as an Adviser at Interpol. During the past two years he had worked out of Seattle in the USA and directed a secret 12-country investigation into the smuggling of pure grade Number 4 heroin by criminal gangs based at Vancouver in British Columbia Canada and at Seattle in Washington State USA.
He placed the Interpol forms for reimbursement on the desk and was focusing on not making any errors when his cell phone buzzed angrily. Sohlberg frowned when he saw the incoming phone number on the little screen.
“Hei,” he said trying to sound as relaxed and casual as possible given the caller’s identity.
“Are you free to talk?”
“Ja.”
“Are you still on schedule to give a talk three days from now on heroin smuggling to all twenty-seven of our districts?”
“Ja. Why?”
“We need to meet. Come by my office after you finish your talk.”
The call from the Commissioner for the Oslo Police Regional District enraged Sohlberg. He hated Ivar Thorsen. Technically the man was his still his boss and that made Sohlberg hate him even more. On days like this Sohlberg felt that he would explode and have a heart attack or a stroke over the cruel fact that he was still subject to taking orders from an incompetent fool like Ivar Thorsen.
To think that they had once been close friends all the way from high school to law school!
Even as Sohlberg thought about their lost friendship from so long ago he remembered that he and other classmates could barely tolerate Ivar Thorsen after a couple of hours. Few could tolerate the man’s hypocritical fawning. Thorsen’s endless bootlicking disgusted all but the dumbest persons as grotesque and obvious attempts to ingratiate himself into a subservient but beneficial relationship. In other words Ivar Thorsen had inherited all of his mother’s pushy and cunning social designs and schemes but none of her charms which included the ample bosom and other intimate delicacies that she first shared with her employer’s son and then with the employer himself.
“Why?” shouted Sohlberg. “Why do we need to meet? What’s this about?”
“I’ll see you at noon sharp.”
Sohlberg immediately hanged up without waiting to hear more. “What a piece of garbage that Thorsen! Just what does he want from me?”
His former friend Ivar Thorsen was now the enemy and 100 % responsible in Sohlberg’s mind for pushing him out of Norway and into Lyon France for a job at Interpol. According to the press release at the time: