Death In Oslo

IX

Abdallah al-Rahman loved the newly born foal. She was jet black, just like her mother, and the lighter patch between her eyes gave him hope that she had inherited her father’s white blaze. Her legs were disproportionately long, as they are on a one-day-old foal. Her body was promising and her coat was already polished and shiny. She tottered backwards when he slowly entered the box with his hand outstretched. The mare whinnied aggressively, but he quickly calmed her with some soft words and a stroke on the muzzle.

Abdallah al-Rahman was happy. Everything was going according to plan. He still hadn’t had direct contact with anyone. It wasn’t necessary. As an adult, he had never done anything unnecessary. As human beings were only granted a limited amount of time on this earth, he believed it was important to keep the balance, to follow a strategy. He looked at his life in the same way that he looked at the fantastic carpets that adorned the floors of the three palaces he felt he needed at the moment.

A carpet weaver always had a plan. She didn’t start in one corner and then work willy-nilly until the carpet was finished. She knew where she was going, and it took time. Sometimes she was inspired and might include the most beautiful details, on impulse. The perfection of a hand-made carpet lay in its imperfection, in the tiny deviations from a preordained yet strict symmetry and order.

The most beautiful carpet of all was in his bedroom. His mother had knotted it, and it had taken her eight years to make it. Abdallah was thirteen when it was finished and she gave it to him as a present. No one had ever seen its like before. The golden hues changed according to the light, making it difficult to say what the colours actually were. No one had ever seen such close knots or felt such indescribably soft, thick silk.

The foal came up to him. She had pitch-black eyes, and she opened them wide as she tottered sideways, tossing her head to keep her balance. She snorted helplessly and pressed into her mother’s flank before trying once again to walk towards him.

Abdallah’s life was like a carpet, and when his brother died, he had decided what the pattern would be. He had made some small changes along the way, some minor adjustments, but never any more than his mother had done: a deeper, darker thread here and there, or another shade because it was beautiful and fitted in.

His brother was three years older than him and had been killed in Brooklyn on the 20th of August 1974. He had been on his way home from seeing an American girlfriend that his parents knew nothing about, and it was very late. When he was found by an elderly woman the next morning, his genitals were a bloody mess from all the punches and kicks. Their father flew immediately to the US and returned one month later, an old man.

The murder was never solved. The father’s powerful position in his home country and his indisputable authority, even in his meetings with the American authorities, had made no difference. After fourteen days, the chief investigator shrugged and looked away when he admitted that those responsible would never be caught. There were so many murders, so many young men who didn’t understand that they should avoid dangerous areas and stay indoors after midnight. He complained that there weren’t enough resources, and then closed the thin case file for good.

The father knew the man who much later became the first President Bush. The Arab had done him several favours, so now it was time to ask for one in return. But he wasn’t able to contact his influential friend. Richard Nixon had been forced from office some days earlier and Gerald Ford was the new president of the US. On the same evening that a young foreigner was kicked to death in a back street in Brooklyn, President Ford had announced that Nelson Rockefeller was to be appointed as America’s forty-first vice president. A deeply disappointed and hurt George Bush Senior had more important things to think about than a forgotten Arab acquaintance, and later that year escaped to China to lick his political wounds.

Abdallah grew up that autumn. He was only sixteen, and his father never really recovered. The old man managed to carry on the business. He had dependable people around him, and even though the oil industry went through a turbulent time at the start of the seventies, the family’s wealth grew steadily, but he was never the same again. With increasing frequency, he withdrew into religious meditation and hardly ate. He made no protest when Abdallah left his parents and six sisters to go to the West to get the schooling that his brother had been denied.

The people who ran the business were good, but gradually their numbers dwindled. Abdallah trusted them, but already by the time he was twenty he had a finger in most pies. He went home as often as he could. The summer he turned twenty-five, his father died of grief, ten years after losing his son.

Abdallah had seen it coming and had included it in the tapestry of his life, so that nothing would ever surprise him again. He was the head and sole owner of a conglomerate that no one had sufficient insight into to value. He was the only one who could estimate a reasonable figure, and he never told anyone what that was.

The absence of anger was the only unexpected thing.

He had been exhausted by anger about six months after his brother’s death and fell ill. A stay in a convalescence home in Switzerland got him back on his feet, and the anger was replaced by a calculating calm that was much easier to live with. His rage had wormed its way into everything and eaten him up from inside, in the same way that grief had consumed his father, whereas calculating cynicism was something he could ration. Abdallah discovered the value of long-term planning and well-thought-out strategies, and he moved his mother’s present into his room so that he could study the carpet before falling asleep and on the rare occasion when he was woken at night by dreams of his brother.

The foal was one of the most beautiful things he had seen. Her muzzle was perfect, with unusually small vibrating nostrils. Her eyes were no longer so timid, and her eyelashes were like butterfly wings. She came right up to him as he sat on the bale of hay, waiting to win her trust.

‘Father!’

Abdallah turned around slowly. Over the top of the stable door he could see the fringe of his youngest son, who was trying to pull himself up with his hands so he could see the foal.

‘Just a minute,’ he said in a friendly voice. ‘I’m coming out.’

He very carefully stroked the foal. She arched her neck where he touched her and quivered. Abdallah smiled and put his hand on her tiny muzzle. She pulled back nervously. The man got up, walked slowly out of the stall and closed the door.

‘Father!’ the boy cried in delight. ‘We were going to watch a film today! You promised me!’

‘Wouldn’t you rather do some riding? In the ring, where it’s cooler?’

‘No! You said I could watch a film.’

Abdallah lifted the six-year-old up and carried him on one arm out through the massive stable doors. For want of legal cinemas in Saudi Arabia, Abdallah had made his own, with ten seats and a silver screen.

‘You promised me I could,’ the boy complained.

‘Later on. This evening is what I said.’

The boy’s hair smelt clean and tickled his nose. He smiled and kissed him before putting him down.

His youngest son was called Rashid, after his dead uncle. None of the four older boys would have suited the name. They all had the characteristics of their mother’s family. Then came the fifth son. The moment he was born, Abdallah saw his square chin with the tiny cleft in it. When the boy was two days old and had finally opened his eyes, he had a slight squint in his left eye. Abdullah laughed happily and named him Rashid.

Abdallah had never thought about avenging his brother’s death. Certainly not once the first surge of anger had died down and he had returned from Switzerland. He didn’t know who to take revenge on. The culprits were never caught and it would be impossible for an Arab boy to investigate a murder in the US on his own, no matter how much money he had. The policeman who closed the case was as much a victim of the system as he was himself, and it was hardly worth the time and effort to punish him.

The only real hatred that Abdallah al-Rahman allowed himself to nurture was for George Bush Senior. The man who became head of the CIA had owed his father a favour back then in 1974, and was obviously influential. He could have reopened the closed investigation with a simple telephone call. As it appeared that Rashid had been murdered by a gang of racist youths, surely it wouldn’t have been that difficult to solve the case – if only they had wanted to, and been given the permission to prioritise it.

But George Herbert Walker Bush was so preoccupied with the insult of not being offered the vice presidency that he didn’t have the time to answer the calls of a business contact he had chosen to forget.

As time passed, Abdallah understood that the most important lesson to learn from the circumstances surrounding his brother’s death was that favours did not always lead to favours in return. Unless you had something up your sleeve. Something that made it impossible to forget the debt, whether you wanted to or not. Abdallah had spent the last thirty years being generous without asking for anything in return, so now a lot of people owed him favours.

The time had never been right. Not until Helen Lardahl Bentley had given him final confirmation of his experience in life: never, never trust an American.

‘Can I watch an action film, Father? Can I watch-’

‘No. You know very well that they are not good for you.’

Abdallah ruffled his son’s hair. The boy looked up with a sulky pout, before slouching off with bowed head to find his brothers, who had arrived from Riyadh the night before, and were going to stay at home for the whole week.

Abdallah stood and watched his son until he disappeared round the corner of the huge stable building. Then he wandered towards the shady garden. He wanted to take a dip.