“You don’t get the same clarity and focus as daylight, and it’s black and white. But as long as there’s no condensation on the lens or anything in the way, you should certainly be able to see your bear.”
The old man stamped on the floor in an attempt to attract Alf’s attention. The man in the car looked like he was taking a deep breath before ducking under again. His short, bristly hair was swaying, and his cheeks were puffed out. He hit both hands against the side window facing the camera, but the water inside the car leached the force from the blows. The old man had put his hands on the armrests and was trying to get up from his chair, but his muscles wouldn’t do what he told them to. He noticed that the middle finger on one of the man’s hands was a greyish colour. The man stopped banging and butted the glass with his head. It looked like he was giving up. Another branch snapped and the current tugged and strained to pull the car free, but the pine wasn’t ready to let go just yet. The old man stared at the anguished face pressed against the inside of the car window. Bulging blue eyes. A scar in a liver-coloured arc from one corner of his mouth up towards his ear. The old man had managed to get out of his chair and took two unsteady steps towards the shelves of cameras.
“Excuse me,” Alf said quietly to the customer. “What is it, Dad?”
The old man gesticulated at the screen behind him.
“Really?” Alf said dubiously, and hurried past the old man towards the screen. “Fish?”
The old man shook his head and turned back to the screen. The car. It was gone. And everything looked the same as before. The riverbed, the dead pine tree, the dress, the green light through the ice. As if nothing had happened. The old man stamped the floor again and pointed at the screen.
“Easy now, Dad,” Alf said, giving him a friendly pat on the shoulder. “It is very early for spawning, you know.” He went back to the customer and the wildlife cameras.
The old man looked at the two men standing with their backs to him, and felt despair and rage wash over him. How was he going to explain what he had just seen? His doctor had told him that when a stroke hits both the front and back parts of the left side of the brain, it wasn’t only your speech that was lost, but often the ability to communicate in general, even by writing or through gestures. He tottered back to the chair and sat down again. Looked at the river, which just went on flowing. Imperturbable. Undeterred. Unchanging. And after a couple of minutes he felt his heart start to beat more calmly again. Who knows, maybe it hadn’t actually happened after all? Maybe it had just been a glimpse of the next step towards the absolute darkness of old age. Or, in this case, its colourful world of hallucinations. He looked at the dress. For a moment, when he had thought it was lit up by car headlights, it had seemed to him as if Olivia was dancing in it. And behind the windshield, inside the illuminated car, he had glimpsed a face he had seen before. A face he remembered. And the only faces he still remembered were the ones he saw here, in the shop. And he had seen that man in here on two occasions. Those blue eyes, that liver-coloured scar. On both occasions he had bought a wildlife camera. The police had been in asking about him fairly recently. The old man could have told them he was a tall man. And that he had that look in his eyes. The look that said he knew the secret. The look that said he wasn’t a herbivore.
2
Svein Finne leaned over the woman and felt her forehead with one hand. It was wet with sweat. The eyes staring up at him were wide with pain. Or fear. Mostly fear, he guessed.
“Are you afraid of me?” he whispered.
She nodded and swallowed. He had always thought her beautiful. When he saw her walk to and from her home, when she was at the gym, when he was sitting on the metro just a few seats away from her, letting her see him. Just so she would know. But he had never seen her look more beautiful than she did right now, lying there helpless, so completely in his power.
“I promise it will be quick, darling,” he whispered.
She gulped. So frightened. He wondered if he should kiss her.
“A knife in the stomach,” he whispered. “Then it’s over.”
She screwed her eyes shut, and two glistening tears squeezed through her eyelashes.
Svein Finne laughed quietly. “You knew I’d come. You knew I couldn’t let you go. It was a promise, after all.”
He ran one finger through the mix of sweat and tears on her cheek. He could see one of her eyes through the big, gaping hole in his hand, in the eagle’s wing. The hole was the result of a bullet fired by a policeman, a young officer at the time. They had sentenced Svein Finne to twenty years in prison for eighteen charges of sexual assault, and he hadn’t denied the charges in and of themselves, just the description of them as “assault,” and the idea that those acts were something that a man like him should be punished for. But the judge and jury evidently believed that Norway’s laws were above nature’s. Fine, that was their opinion.
Her eye stared at him through the hole.
“Are you ready, darling?”
“Don’t call me that,” she whimpered. More pleading than commanding. “And stop talking about knives...”
Svein Finne sighed. Why were people so frightened of the knife? It was humanity’s first tool, they’d had two and a half million years to get used to it, yet some people still didn’t appreciate the beauty of what had made it possible for them to descend from the trees. Hunting, shelter, agriculture, food, defense. Just as much as the knife took life, it created it. You couldn’t have one without the other. Only those who appreciated that, and accepted the consequences of their humanity, their origins, could love the knife. Fear and love. Again, two sides of the same thing.
Svein Finne looked up. At the knives on the bench beside them, ready for use. Ready to be chosen. The choice of the right knife for the right job was important. These ones were good, purpose-made, top quality. Sure, they lacked what Svein Finne looked for in a knife. Personality. Spirit. Magic. Before that tall young policeman with the short, messy hair had ruined everything, Svein Finne had had a fine collection of twenty-six knives.
The finest of them had been Javanese. Long, thin, asymmetrical, like a curved snake with a handle. Sheer beauty, feminine. Possibly not the most effective to use, but it had the hypnotic qualities of both a snake and a beautiful woman, it made people do exactly what you told them. The most efficient knife in the collection, on the other hand, was a Rampuri, the favourite of the Indian mafia. It emanated a sort of chill, as if it were made of ice; it was so ugly that it was mesmerising. The karambit, which was shaped like a tiger’s claw, combined beauty and efficiency. But it was perhaps a little too calculated, like a whore wearing too much makeup and a dress that was too tight, too low-cut. Svein Finne had never liked it. He preferred them innocent. Virginal. And, ideally, simple. Like his favourite knife in the collection. A Finnish puukko knife. It had a worn, brown wooden handle, without any real relation to the blade, which was short with a groove, and the sharp edge curved up to form a point. He had bought the puukko in Turku, and two days later he had used it to clarify the situation to a plump eighteen-year-old girl who had been working all alone in a Neste petrol station on the outskirts of Helsinki. Even back then he had — as always when he felt a rush of sexual anticipation — started to stammer slightly. It wasn’t a sign that he wasn’t in control, but rather the opposite, it was just the dopamine. And confirmation that at the age of almost eighty his urges were undiminished. It had taken him precisely two and a half minutes from the moment he walked through the door — when he pinned her down on the counter, cut her trousers off, inseminated her, took out her ID card, noted Maalin’s name and address — until he was out again. Two and a half minutes. How many seconds had the actual insemination taken? Chimpanzees spent an average of eight seconds having intercourse, eight seconds in which both monkeys were defenseless in a world full of predators. A gorilla — who had fewer natural enemies — could stretch out the pleasure to a minute. But a disciplined man in enemy territory often had to sacrifice pleasure for the greater goaclass="underline" reproduction. So, just as a bank robbery should never take more than four minutes, an act of insemination in a public place should never take more than two and a half minutes. Evolution would prove him right, it was just a matter of time.