'The cops?'
'Thought we had a deal. You were supposed to stay in the square, in Plata,' Harry said, looking past her at the vocalist.
'Huh,' said the woman standing straight in front of Harry. 'You're not in Narco. You're the guy on telly who killed-'
'Crime Squad.' Harry took her by the arm. 'Listen, you can get what you want in Plata. Don't force me to drag you in to the station.'
'Can not.' She tore her arm away.
Harry repented at once and held up both hands. 'Tell me you're not going to do any deals here and I can go. OK?'
She cocked her head. The thin, anaemic lips tightened a fraction. She seemed to see something amusing in the situation. 'Shall I tell you why I can't go to the square?'
Harry waited.
'Because my boy's down there.'
He felt his stomach churn.
'I don't want him to see me like this. Do you understand, cop?'
Harry looked into her defiant face as he tried to formulate a sentence.
'Happy Christmas,' he said, turning his back on her.
Harry dropped his cigarette into the packed, brown snow and walked off. He wanted this job off his back. He didn't see the people coming towards him, and, staring down at the blue ice as if they had a bad conscience, they didn't see him either, as if they, citizens of the world's most generous social democracy, were nonetheless ashamed. 'Because my boy's down there.'
In Fredensborgveien, beside Oslo Public Library, Harry stopped outside the number scrawled on the envelope he was carrying. He leaned back and looked up. The facade was grey and black and had recently been repainted. A tagger's wet dream. Christmas decorations were already hanging from some of the windows like silhouettes against the gentle, yellow light in what seemed like warm, secure homes. And perhaps they are indeed that, Harry forced himself to think. 'Forced' because you can't be in the police for twelve years without being infected by the contempt for humanity that comes with the territory. But he did fight against it; you had to give him that.
He found the name by the bell, closed his eyes and tried to find the right words. It didn't help. Her voice was still in the way.
'I don't want him to see me like this…'
Harry gave up. Is there a right way to formulate the impossible?
He pressed his thumb against the cold metal button, and somewhere inside the block it rang.
Captain Jon Karlsen took his finger off the button, put the heavy plastic bags down on the pavement and gazed up at the front of the block. The flats looked as if they had been under siege from light artillery. Big chunks of plaster had fallen off and the windows of a burnt-out flat on the first floor had been boarded up. At first he had walked right past Fredriksen's blue house; the cold seemed to have sucked all the colour out of the buildings and made all the house fronts in Hausmanns gate the same. It was only when he saw 'Vestbredden' – West Bank – scrawled on the wall of a squat that he realised he had walked too far. A crack in the glass of the front door was shaped like a V. V for victory.
Jon shivered in his windcheater and was glad the Salvation Army uniform underneath was made of pure, thick wool. When Jon had gone to be kitted out with his new uniform after Officer Training School, none of the regular sizes had fitted him, so he had been issued some material and sent to a tailor, who blew smoke into his face and said apropos of nothing that he rejected Jesus as his personal redeemer. However, the tailor did a good job and Jon thanked him warmly; he was not used to made-to-measure clothes. That was why he had a stoop, it was said. Those who saw him coming up Hausmanns gate that afternoon might well have thought he was bent over to keep out of the ice-cold December wind sweeping icicles and frozen litter along the pavements as the heavy traffic thundered by. But those who knew him said that Jon Karlsen stooped to take the edge off his height. And to reach down to those smaller than him. As he did now, to drop the twenty-kroner coin in the brown paper cup held by a filthy, trembling hand next to the doorway.
'How's it going?' Jon asked the human bundle sitting cross-legged on a piece of cardboard on the pavement in the swirling snow.
'I'm in the queue for methadone treatment,' the piteous person said in a halting, monotonous voice like an ill-rehearsed psalm, while staring at Jon's black uniformed knees.
'You should go down to our cafe in Urtegata,' Jon said. 'Warm up a bit and get some food and…'
The rest was drowned in the roar of the traffic as the lights behind them changed to green.
'No time,' the bundle replied. 'You wouldn't have a fifty note, would you?' Jon never ceased to be surprised by drug addicts' unwavering focus. He sighed and thrust a hundred-kroner note in the cup.
'See if you can find some warm clothes at Fretex. If not, we've got some new winter jackets at the Lighthouse. You'll freeze to death in that thin denim jacket.'
He was resigned to the fact that he was speaking to someone who already knew the gift would be used to buy dope, but so what? It was the same refrain, yet another of the irresolvable moral dilemmas that filled his days.
Jon pressed the bell once again. He saw his reflection in the dirty shop window beside the doorway. Thea said he was a big man. He wasn't big at all. He was small. A small soldier. But when he was finished the little soldier would sprint down Mollerveien, across the river Akerselva, where East Oslo and Grunerlokka started, over Sofienberg Park to Goteborggata 4, which the Army owned and rented out to its employees, unlock the door to entrance B, say hello to one of the other tenants he hoped would assume he was on his way to his flat on the third floor. However, he would take the lift to the fourth, go through the loft space to the A building, make sure the coast was clear, then head for Thea's door and tap out their prearranged signal. And she would open the door and her arms, into which he could creep and thawout.
Something was trembling.
At first he thought it was the ground, the city, the foundations. He put down the bag and delved into his pocket. His mobile phone was vibrating in his hand. The display showed Ragnhild's number. It was the third time today. He knew he could not put it off any longer; he would have to tell her. That he and Thea were getting engaged. When he had found the right words. He put the phone back in his pocket and avoided looking at his reflection. But he made up his mind. He would stop being a coward. He would be frank. Be a big soldier. For Thea in Goteborggata. For his father in Thailand. For the Lord above.
'Yes,' came the shout from the loudspeaker above the bells.
'Oh, hi. This is Jon.'
'Eh?'
'Jon from the Salvation Army.'
Jon waited.
'What do you want?' the voice crackled.
'I've got some food for you. I thought you might need-'
'Got any cigarettes?'
Jon swallowed and stamped his boots in the snow. 'No, I only had enough money for food this time.'
'Shit.'
It went quiet again.
'Hello?' Jon shouted.
'Yeah, yeah. I'm thinking.'
'If you want, I'll come back later.'
The mechanism buzzed and Jon quickly pushed open the door.
Inside the stairwell there were newspapers, empty bottles and frozen yellow pools of urine. Thanks to the cold weather Jon did not have to inhale the pervasive, bitter-sweet stench that filled the hallway on milder days.
He tried to walk without making much noise, but his footsteps reverberated on the stairs anyway. The woman standing in the doorway and waiting for him was ogling the bags. To avoid looking him in the eye, Jon thought. She had that same bloated, swollen face that came with many years of addiction, was overweight and wore a filthy white T-shirt under her dressing gown. A stale smell emanated from the door.
Jon stopped on the landing and put down the bags. 'Is your husband in, too?'