The Blue Place

thirteen

As they are heated, most molecules become less dense and expand so that the solid that barely fills half a cup will, as it melts to form a liquid, overflow that cup. If heated enough to vaporize, the gas will take up half a room. Water is different. For one thing—unlike, say, nitrogen—it has different names for all its states: water when liquid; steam when a vapour; ice when solid. And when water freezes, it doesn’t contract but expands. Against all reason, ice will float upon water. Ice has always fascinated us.

Climbers, when asked why they want to climb, say, Everest, reply: Because it’s there. A more true answer might be: Because it’s got ice on it. Ice is alluring, mysterious, alien. In the Western world, ice and science are regarded in the same light: cold and clear, ordered and deeply rational, apparently plain yet ultimately unknowable. I doubt that it’s a coincidence that the very first science fiction novel, Frankenstein, mixes both: the monster is brought forth in cosmic fire and marooned on ice. Ice cannot bring forth life but, used properly, it can preserve it. Think of all the food in our freezers. Think of all those kidneys and livers and hearts thrown in coolers and helicoptered out to save the lives of transplant patients. Anyone knows that if you happen to cut your finger off when peeling potatoes, you should keep the finger cool—but not frozen, because then water molecules inside the cells of skin and connective tissue and blood will begin to form tiny ice crystals that will expand and expand and eventually rupture the cell membrane, spilling protoplasm to the wind, destroying it. Those who believe in cryogenics are dreaming. They have seen too many rump steaks come out of the freezer as solid as hoary planks and yet two hours later sit luscious and red and mouthwatering on the countertop; but when something living is frozen, it dies. Only those organisms frozen before they are fully formed—gametes and embryos—can be brought back to life by thawing.

Ice is dangerous, but people keep climbing those mountains and walking the glaciers because, beyond all else, it is beautiful.

The sprekk lay open at my feet, exposing jewels unseen for thousands of years. I put my sweater back on, went down on my stomach, and squirmed to the edge. The Grand Canyon carved from ice. Inches from my nose, the top layer, sooty with hydrocarbons, gave way to one of dirty yellow, then one of heavy cream. These layers glistened, slick and icy, melted and refrozen several times by the spring sun. Below that, beyond the reach of both my arms and direct sunlight, the true colours began. The crevasse was over fifteen meters deep, and further down the light was milky and subtle, shaded and heightened in strange places by irregular outcroppings from the ice walls. Here, a bulge glittered blinding white, while the edge of the shadow it cast shimmered pale mauve, and the deeper shadow dusky indigo. Down, and down, and now the colours lost all hint of the organic and the crevasse became stern and ordered, a cathedral of ice. Striations of amethyst and aquamarine, deep, deep strata of pale emerald. My body heat and the slanting afternoon sun ricocheting down warmed the ice and lifted the biting, mineral scent of water that had fallen as snow eighteen thousand years ago, when mammoths still walked and breathed and scooped aside drifts with their tusks, millennia before human beings even set foot upon the land that would be Norway. That water would not be good to drink. Every year, there was always some stupid tourist who decided to drink from the lake or dip themself a handful of meltwater and came down with violent diarrhea, and mouth sores that lasted for ten days. But there was nothing wrong with smelling it, and for a while I lay lost in the scents and interplay of light and colour.

I had to get up when my thighs got so cold I could no longer feel them. Too long, I’d been lying down too long. Careless. My pants and sweater were damp, but they were made of wool and beneath that I wore silk, which, unlike cotton, dries fast and still traps heat while wet. Where the snow was level, I did some katas, slowly at first, then faster, and faster still, until the movements were mere lightning sketches of killing blows and someone watching from a distance would have thought there was a whirling dervish on the ice. When I stopped, I was warm, but I sat on my pack and poured myself a cup of hot, sweet coffee and ate some cheese and nuts. Staying safe was a matter of prevention.

I munched peacefully. The sun warmed my back and the sweater began to steam. It was about three o’clock. Julia would be in Oslo now, being very American with poor Edvard Borlaug. I got out my map. It was not a good idea to stay on the ice once the sun was slanting enough to send strange shadows stretching out from even small hillocks of snow. There was no longer time for the ice cave, but if I planned a careful route I could still spend a few minutes by the lake.

It was a fair hike north to the lake, but it was along the edge of the glacier, where in some places the moraine was almost nonexistent or so old that it had long since been invaded by moss and lichens, then grasses and the nodding heads of the rare pale Pasquale flower and the delicate cinnamon rose, by birch and aspen and pine and all that flew and hopped and crawled in and on them. The transition from white to full colour would have been impossibly abrupt but for the silvery trunks of birch and carpets of white-petalled mountain avons.

The lake, its surface brilliant with long, late afternoon sunshine, lay in a vast basin carved by the glacier ten thousand years ago. Nigardsbreen now lay at a tangent to the irregular circle of tarn, and its moraine formed the pebble and rock shore on which I stood. On the other side lay sedge and moss freckled with purple saxifrage and, behind that, woodland. Birds sang, an endless weave of bright trill and warble.

The lake itself was glacier melt, barely above freezing, and it was so still it seemed to be holding its breath, thick and green and mineral. I touched the surface with a fingertip, very gently, and the water dimpled but didn’t break, only heaved slightly, turning parts of the surface gold in the sun, part almost black in shadow. Grendel might have lived somewhere like this, deep and gelid and secret.

I sat on a rock and shut my eyes.

There is nothing like the smell of glacier and fjell in April and May, the fecund earth, rich and dark after a long winter, the warming, papery birch bark, and leaves unfurling new and tender in the depths of the wood. I lost myself, utterly relaxed, until the light began to fade and birdsong changed to evensong.

The birds stopped singing.

I opened my eyes and listened harder. Footsteps, crunching up along the glacier behind me and to my left, between me and the setting sun. I turned, preparing to give him or her my I’m just leaving smile, but there was no one there. My breath came fast. No rock, no trees I could use as cover. The footsteps stopped. My heart changed up a gear. He or she had to be on the glacier, but I couldn’t see anything.

I stood up and waved. “Hei!” Gave a big grin. Stood on tiptoes to stretch my muscles, flexed my hands, turned my face slightly so the fattening, setting sun didn’t blind me. In the heartbeat of silence took two steps toward the glacier—cut his line of sight.

A slide and scuffle of snow overhead.

“Hi there!” American voice, male. He came to the edge of the glacier and waved. Medium height, snow on his chest, gloved right hand, bare left. “Wait there, I’m coming down.” He stooped for something but I was already turning, already running the three steps to the lake, when I felt a punch on my back. I heard the phud of a suppressed rifle at the same instant I leapt out along the sunpath on the lake, and the water closed over my head. Blind, I stroked deep.

Ice water stops your breathing, sends your diaphragm into spasm, and convulses every muscle, but the choice was simple: remain hidden, or die. He would be scrambling down the glacier, rifle in hand, padding to the edge of the water, sights trained, ready. I spasmed downward to avoid thrashing at the surface. I’d been in the water five or six seconds, but could fight to hold my breath another two at most. Think! Sun. Setting sun: dazzled water. It might be enough. I let myself rise gently. A quick fin of my right hand sent me into a roll, and I broke the surface for a split second, like a floater, exposing only my shoulder and lower face, but long enough for one huge suck of air, blessed air, then back down. My eyes stung with the minerals and the cold, but I could see the cloud of blood, brown in the green water, trailing from my shoulder. The cold would soon stop the bleeding. He would think me dead. I dived, but slowly, gently, and stroked towards the shore. He had the gun, but I had the sun: he wouldn’t be able to see beneath the surface reflection, but I would see his shadow. Gloved right hand for the barrel, bare left for the trigger: he was left-handed. I felt along the lake bed until I found a smooth round stone that fit my palm.

The blood had made him careless. He was standing right at the edge of the water, one foot actually in it, rifle held only loosely to his left shoulder. I finned my way gently to his left, counted to three, and roared up out of the water, stone swinging—

—only it was more of a stumble than a roar, and the rock that should have slammed into his temple crunched into his left knee instead. He went down with a splash, face first. I was on my knees, heavy and useless with water. I swung the stone at his head, but slipped and thumped him between the shoulder blades. He thrashed and convulsed in the cold. I couldn’t summon any strength; it was as though someone had pulled the plug and everything had just drained away. I dropped the stone and shoved him, boatlike, out into the lake, only just retaining the wit to hang on to his rifle. He spasmed, swallowed water. I pulled out the clip and put it in my pants pocket, jacked out the round he had already chambered, then used the rifle as a crutch and heaved myself to my feet. I was so numb with cold I couldn’t tell where I’d been shot.

Think. Think fast. I swayed and closed my eyes, opened them again. He was definitely moving more slowly now. Very well, then. I tossed the rifle alongside my pack.

The water was just as cold when I waded back in, but I only had to go up to my thighs. He was barely conscious. It affects some people that way. I caught the neck of his jacket—some quilted cotton thing, sodden—and dragged him to the shore. Hauling him up was hard. I got him most of the way out and his eyelids started to flutter. I dropped him, found my stone, and hit him on the forehead, but not too hard. I wouldn’t need long. I dropped the stone back in the water, which rippled heavily, the murky brown cloud of my blood still clearly visible, and finished dragging him out onto dry ground. A quick search gave me his wallet, keys with Volvo logo on the fob, and sodden cigarettes and lighter. I flicked the lighter. Nothing. I held it up to the failing sun—half full of liquid—flicked again. Nothing. His driver’s license said John Turkel; so did the Blue Cross Card. Careless. No rental papers for the car. I pushed the keys into my pocket and everything else back in his.

My muscles were like lumps of wood stuck haphazardly onto cardboard bones. Nothing worked right. My fingers hung from my hands like thick, stupid bunches of bananas and I kept falling down because I couldn’t feel my feet. It took five tries to strip off my sweater, more for my pants and shoes, and then I half stumbled, half ran to the glacier, where I rolled in what snow I could find to absorb most of the excess water from my bare skin. Patches of bright red stained the snow here and there but it wasn’t too much. I stretched and flexed and staggered in circles until feeling returned to my torso, to thighs and wrist, and then I ran some more while I squeezed as much water as I could from the sweater and undershirt and pants. The trot back to my pack was reasonably steady but the shadows were so long I shied at pebbles, thinking they were boulders.

When I got to my pack, all I wanted to do was sit down, but I didn’t dare. I fished in it, standing, tilting it this way and that until the slippery plastic compresses slithered out into my clumsy hands. They were cold as eels, but two quick twists started the catalytic reaction and they began to warm. I held one compress against my chest with my right hand and tried to use my left to wrap the other tight inside my wet sweater and pants but my arm wouldn’t work properly, just flopped about. Try again. Slowly. I managed, one inch at a time. The bullet had hit something important. No time to think about that; there were more urgent things to deal with: getting my body temperature back up, warming the wool sweater and pants enough to put back on and trap what heat I could coax my body to produce.

In the gathering twilight the rocks near the lake looked like comfortable brown cows settling down for the night. I walked from one to another, found one that was still warm from the sun, and spread my undershirt out on it. An inch at a time.

I put the compress between my teeth and dragged my pack over to another rock, sat down, and dropped the compress across my thighs. I had to balance the plastic thermos cup on the turf to pour the hot, sweet coffee, and it wobbled precariously. I drank a whole cup, poured more, dug out some chocolate, chewed and swallowed, chewed again. My hands ached around the hot cup, the right just with cold, the left with more. Another ache bloomed high up on my back. Later.

More chocolate, the last of the coffee. Put it all away in the pack. Walk to gunman. Turkel, John Turkel.

Walking felt strange, as though someone had removed my arms and legs and then reattached them using odd connections. I squatted a few feet from the man, who was shaking convulsively with his eyes closed, and tossed a pebble at him. When he opened his eyes and saw my nakedness, his pupils dilated, then contracted.

“Talk,” I said in English.

He stared at me.

I didn’t have time for this. “I imagine your knee hurts, if you can feel it at all. You’ll need several hours’ surgery before you walk on that leg again. You are soaked through with freezing water and are in the first stages of hypothermia. Perhaps your thought processes are becoming cloudy. Let me make it clear: you will tell me everything about who sent you to kill me and why, or you will die out here.”

I watched him gather his pitiful resources—two quick breaths, flare of nostrils, tightening of muscles around his mouth—and when he lunged, I swayed to one side and hit his already bruised forehead with the meaty side of my fist. He went down like a punched-open inflatable doll.

This was taking too long. I rooted around a bit in the grass until I found another rock.

While he was still groaning, I smashed his other knee. He screamed. I waited until he had finished. “I’m in a hurry. Can you understand what I’m saying?”

A groan. I slapped his knee lightly. Another scream.

“John, answer me. Can you understand what I’m saying?”

“Yes. Yes.”

“Listen carefully. Both your knees are smashed. It’ll be dark in a few minutes. The only way you will survive tonight is with my help. I will only help you if you help me. Where is your car?”

His shaking had changed to long, rolling shudders and he didn’t seem to care about his car. I lifted my hand. “No! It’s…it’s…” He had to clench his jaw to stop his teeth from clacking together. “Miles, three maybe, valley.”

“In the Nigard Valley?” There was still enough light reflecting from the water to see his nod, or what seemed to be a nod amid all the jerking and shaking. “North or south?”

“North.”

The compress was cooling. My muscles began a light, internal tremble and the pain high up on my back grew, sending out shoots, twining like a liana down my left side, up my shoulder and down my arm. I backed away, looked around in the dark for a cow with a white coat. Found it. Lovely, lovely almost dry silk. “Tell me where you got the car.” Cautiously, I reached around my ribs with my right hand and touched my waist with my fingertips. Dried blood but whole skin. I worked my way up slowly, had to fight to silence a hiss when my fingers met the ragged furrow along my shoulder blade.

“Gothenburg,” the man said, and it took me a moment to remember what I’d asked him.

“Who told you to get the car in Sweden?” I felt along the bony top of my shoulder, nothing; around the back of the top of my arm. Ah. So the bullet had hit the bone at just the right angle and ploughed along skin and bone and along the top of my arm as I dived. Felt as though it had chipped the elbow. The nerves would be damaged, but perhaps not irreparably. Lucky. But I had lost blood, and the pain was going to get worse. “John, who told you to get the car in Sweden?” I plunked my left hand like a piece of meat on the cuff of one sleeve and used my right to wind the other sleeve over the first into a knot. I had to use my teeth to pull the knot tight. As soon as I dropped the improvised sling over my head I realized my mistake and took it off again.

“John?” No sound. No movement. He had passed out. I hurried.

My sweater was still damp but it was warm, and warmth was more important now than avoiding pain. I rested my left arm on my left thigh, spread the sweater over my right thigh, then threaded my left arm through the sleeve as though it were a stick, nothing to do with me. Pain is just a message. It was easy to get my right arm in the sleeve. I felt the wool dragging over the open furrow, sticking to clotting blood. Deep breath, just a message, pull sweater over head and down. Breathe. Just breathe. I didn’t even pause with the sling: over my head, pick up left arm, shove it through. Pants next; socks, boots; check car keys and clip in pocket, tuck compresses inside waistband. Good for another few minutes. Moonlight seeped from behind heavy cloud.

Back to John. His cheek felt cool and solid, like clay. I slapped it. He whimpered. I slapped him again. Faint glimmer as he opened his eyes.

“You’re not shivering anymore. You’ve entered the next stage of hypothermia. Unless you get warm very soon, John, you’ll die. I’m all that stands between you and death. Tell me what I need to know. Who sent you?”

“Man.” He looked surprised: talking was easier without the shivering. “Man in Atlanta.”

“Who?”

“Don’t know. Really don’t. Just sent us money, wired it to the bank.”

“Us? How many?”

“Three.”

Julia. I had to get to Oslo. But even if I could protect her there, what then? I needed information to stop this at the source. “How did you find me here?”

“Edvard Borlaug. Called him from Gothenburg. He said other woman, Julia? Julia.” The sound of her name in his mouth made my fingers stiffen with the need to punch through his eye to his brain. “Said that Julia was coming in. That you probably coming too, but not sure. So. I drove here. Asked at…at farm. They drove…Oslo. Kill her.”

Three. “What do they look like?”

“Ugly.” He thought that was funny and laughed, hoarse and high.

“Describe them. Tell me their names.” Hurting him would not help at this point.

“McCall’s tall. McCall’s tall.” He seemed quite taken with his little rhyme. Typical hypothermia confusion.

“How old?”

“Forty?”

“Tell me about the other one.”

“Ginger. Because of his hair. Don’t know his real name. Medium. Thin. Young.” Not the ones from Honeycutt’s house.

According to his license, John Turkel was thirty-two.

“Early twenties?”

“Younger.”

“Tell me again who sent you.”

“Don’t know. Man. From Atlanta.”

“How do you know he was from Atlanta?”

“I feel real bad.”

“How did you know?”

“Asked him…how know where to find you. He said. Call us from here, from where he was. Then he yelled…someone. In his office. ‘What’s time difference between Atlanta and Sweden.’ Something like that. Atlanta.”

“What did he say? What did he sound like?”

“Said: kill art bitch. Julia. Kill her. Kill you.”

“Did he want it to look like an accident?”

“Didn’t care. Just make them dead. That’s what he said. I feel real bad. Weird.”

“And that’s all? Do McCall and Ginger know where Julia is staying in Oslo?”

“Didn’t. Might now. Help me.” He tried to lift his hand but the hypothermia had him now and only a couple of fingers twitched. The air smelt like rain.

“Help me,” he said again.

I ran through events in my head: all my possessions, anything to link me to a body, were in my pack, and the bootprints would wash away in the rain. Just my prints on the rifle, then.

“I’ll need your jacket.”

It was sodden, and he couldn’t even move an arm to help me. In the end, I just tore off the collar and took that over to my pack. I had to grope around for the rifle. I wiped it free of prints and used the collar to carry it to the water. It made a thin, flat splash.

“What?” he said.

The clip followed. I knelt by John Turkel and put the torn collar in his hand. I don’t think he even felt it.

“Please. Help me.” Barely a whisper.

I picked up my pack. “There isn’t time.”

The clouds parted and I stood up into a suddenly monochrome world: water sleek and black; sedge leached lithium grey; moonlight lying like pools of mercury on the upturned faces of graphite flowers. Nature, thinking there was no one to observe, was letting slide the greens and blues, the honey yellows, and showing her other face: flat, indifferent, anonymous.

Only trolls, fools and desperate people walk the fjell at night when all is shadow and deeper shadow. I knew that I could not walk down a mountain along a trail I didn’t know with muscles already cold and screaming with toxins and fatigue after the icewater of the lake, expecting my foot to twist on an unseen stone or skitter down scree, to any minute tumble into a gully or thump into a tree; knew I could not carefully place one foot in front of another for three or four miles with a hole punched in my back and a slow leak. So I ran.

Cloud closed over the moon and the rain came down, gentle and light, almost like mist. I ran like a deer, snuffing the scents lifted by the rain, veering away from the pine or wet stone that warned of danger and towards the safety of wet grass and opening flowers, relying on the tiny sound of a pebble rattling under my boot and tumbling away down to my left to warn me of a gully, ran like a deer that ignores a bullet through the shoulder because the wound is not the urgent thing, the urgent thing is the adrenalin stride, the run, covering the ground, the need to keep going, to never stop, to leap brooks and low-lying branches, to crash through brush, to weave through trees and skitter and fall on loose stone and get up without pausing, without thinking, without missing a beat. The branch whipping across the face, the slow hot leak of blood down the back and deeper tear of skin where the pack pulled open the wound, did not matter, because pain is just a message. I ignored it, washed it away with adrenalin and endorphins and the rhythm of breath and blood and bone.

Three miles, Turkel had said, but that was in daylight with map in hand, when you could plot the perfect diagonal. I was going to have to run farther; to get down into the valley, then run north. Five miles, perhaps. More. The rain came down harder, the underbrush thickened. My boots began to slide in mud. I shortened my stride a little and ran on.

Breath whistling in and out through nostrils and mouth, thigh muscles pumping—contract, relax, contract, relax—toes gripping inside boots and wearing raw against wet wool. Sweat running down my belly.

It was when each stride started coming shorter than the last and the pressure was on calves, not quadriceps, that I realized I had reached the floor of the valley and was starting up the other side. I turned left and ran north.

The valley trail under the trees was so dark I would have missed the place but for the suddenly alien scent of tires and good-quality leather getting wet. Then there it was, windshield streaming in the rain, both front windows open.

It was when I sat down on civilized leather, when I turned the key and the dark and the rain were outside, that the pain snapped like a gin trap on my back, biting down so hard it seemed to drive its teeth into my lungs and tear my breath apart. The headlights shining into the rain started to recede, as though I were on the back of a train heading into a long tunnel.

I slewed the Volvo to a stop outside the seter and stumbled in. It was two o’clock in the morning. The phone was on the table. I couldn’t remember the phone number of the Hotel Bristol. I called information. They could not understand me.

“Oslo,” I repeated. It sounded muddy and slurred. I shaped the next words carefully. “Hotel Bristol. Kristian VII’s gate.”

They gave me the number. It sounded like surf crashing in my ears.

“Again. Please. Give me the number again.”

“22 41 58 40.”

I had no pen, no paper. 22 41 48…no, 58. 22 58…I called again. The same woman. She gave me the number again. 22 41 58 40. I tapped it in carefully. It rang and rang and rang. Blood dripped down my back.

“Hotel Bristol.” Bright, young, male.

“I need to talk to one of your guests, Julia Lyons-Bennet.”

“Perhaps I could take a message.” His voice started to slide away. I breathed deep.

“No.” I had to hold on. Just another minute, another two. “I have to speak to her, now.”

“It is after two o’clock. In the morning.”

“I am not drunk. I am not in a different time zone. This is an emergency. Please put my call through.”

“After ten p.m. it is our policy that guests—”

“I wish to speak to the night manager.”

“Ma’am, the—”

“Get the night manager.”

He put me on hold. Pain pulsed like a candle under a glass sucking in oxygen and flaring, using up the oxygen and dying, sucking more and flaring; heating my nerve to a white-hot wire. I walked, very slowly, very upright, to the kitchen. Hold on. Hold on for just another minute, another two. I had to tuck the phone under my chin while I opened the cupboard and pulled out half a loaf of bread and a pot of sweet jam. I couldn’t cut the bread with just one hand, so I jammed it between my hip and the counter and tore off chunks, which I dipped straight into the jar. It tasted like dirt, but I chewed and swallowed, chewed and swallowed. Still on hold. The refrigerator yielded a wedge of yellow cheese wrapped in wax paper. My hearing came back in a tumble of discrete sounds: the prickles in each exhalation as it left my lungs, the creak of bone in my elbow as I shifted slightly, soft slap of white paper against cheese. The clarity of delirium. Just another minute, another two.

The phone suddenly seemed to open out as the night manager punched the hold button to off and the myriad hums of a computerized office on standby filled the earpiece. He—and I could tell it was a he from the harmonics of his inhalation—drew breath, but I spoke first.

“My name is Aud Torvingen. To whom do I have the pleasure of speaking?”

“Rolf Lothbrok, the night manager.”

“Rolf, if you check your records you will find that Ms. Lyons-Bennet and I stayed with you two weeks ago. It is vitally important, urgent, that I speak to Ms. Lyons-Bennet now. Not later, or soon, but now.” The carbohydrates were metabolising now, hitting my bloodstream, and everything sparkled. Even my words seemed clear: cool, measured, precise. Rolf must have thought so, too.

“Very well, I’ll put your call through.”

A click. Purring electronic ring. Another. Again. On and on. Endless. The carbohydrates were cascading through my system. I disconnected, pressed the redial button.

“Put the manager back on,” I told the flustered young night clerk. “Rolf, she must have turned off the ringer. I want you to go knock on her door.”

“Ms. Torvingen, it is absolutely against our policy to disturb a guest.”

“This is an emergency.”

“Then may I suggest you call the police?”

He had reached the place where the officious become immovable, and the telephone was not a sharp enough tool. I switched tactics. “Rolf, this really is terribly urgent, but I think I know a way you can help me, if I may presume upon you for a favour.” Julia was safe in bed in a well-run hotel. I could be there before breakfast. “If you’re not too busy, perhaps I could persuade you to take down a note and slip it under her door where she will see it as soon as she wakes in the morning.” Where she would see it, bright and incongruous against the carpet if she got up to answer the knock of a strange man in the middle of the night. “Please, Rolf, could I ask you to do that?”

“I…well, perhaps I could do that.”

“Oh, thank you. The message is to read: ‘Very urgent, take all precautions, call Aud immediately, repeat, immediately.’” He scribbled industriously. I was very, very thirsty. I wanted to say more, but I knew the Rolfs of the world. Any mention of blood, of danger or bullets on the fjell would prompt an immediate withdrawal because it would mean I was a crazy woman: such things did not happen in Norway. “Please add…” What? Don’t talk to two men called Ginger and McCall who have been sent to kill you? “Please add my love. Please underline the words ‘very’ and ‘all.’”

“Very well.”

“And…Mr. Lothbrok”—make him feel big and clever and in charge—“you will see to that right away, won’t you? I just couldn’t sleep until I know she’s got the message. You’ll put it under her door?”

“As soon as I put the phone down, Ms. Torvingen.”

“Thank you, thank you very much.”

Then I suggest you call the police. Oslo police are typical Norwegians—everything one at a time, in the right order, by the book. They would show up at the hotel, ask a few questions, maybe wake Julia and talk to her. Julia would be safe—for tonight. The police would also show up here. They would surround me. They would want to know how I got shot. They would ask whose car it was. They would not let me talk to Julia. And when they stopped surrounding Julia because they thought I was crazy, I would be in a hospital cell, unable to protect her. No, not the police. Julia was safe for the night; Rolf and his staff were sticklers for protocol, wouldn’t tell anyone her room number; and she would see the note when she woke up in the morning.

I needed water, painkillers, heat, more food, in that order, but they would have to wait. I needed to think. A man from Atlanta had hired three Americans to kill Julia. It had to be Honeycutt, or his blackmailer. If it was Honeycutt, he had to be acting on his own; the cartel would have used their own people. Locals. But how had Honeycutt—or the blackmailer—known we were in Norway, and how had he known where to start looking? I should call Annie, but she would have questions and I had no answers. Nothing made sense.

Think about it later. What mattered now was Julia, and for that I would need help. Local help who were not too fussy about the law.

It was nearly three in the morning, an hour earlier in London. I picked up the phone again and called a number my mother had given me when I first left home, one I had never had to use. She answered on the third ring, alert. “Yes.”

“It’s Aud. I need your help.” I could almost see the lightening then sudden stilling of her face as she understood that it was her daughter, not World War III, but that I was in trouble. There was a click on the line.

“A tape,” she said, “so you don’t have to repeat anything.” Norwegian. I couldn’t remember the last time we had spoken our native tongue together.

“I’m at the seter, on a cell phone.” I gave her the number. “I need the phone number of the Federal Police commander in Tijuana. A private number, or home number if possible. And the number of someone else, someone he might know, whom he could call to confirm my identity.”

She must have had a hundred questions but she asked only one. “How urgent?”

“It…Julia, a woman I love, it might mean her life.”

“I’ll call you back within an hour.”

Until she called, there was nothing more I could do. Now was the time for the water, painkillers, heat and food.

I took the old tin box that was the seter’s first-aid kit down from the bathroom shelf and ministered to myself with grim efficiency. Strip off damp pants. One syrette of morphine in the upper quadrant of right thigh. Pull on clean, dry pants. Drink water while that takes hold, fill kettle with water and put on to boil. Lay out compresses, antibiotic cream, peroxide, bandages. Think how I want to appear tomorrow in Oslo. Find clean dry knit silk tunic. Strip off damp, bloody sweater. Pick up peroxide.

It was messy, it hurt, I passed out twice. I ended up having to use a doubled-over pillowcase as well as the compresses: I could not afford to bleed in public tomorrow. I made instant coffee, very strong, and wished I had some soup that was not in cans. I ended up tearing chunks of ham from the bone with my teeth, and pulling the rest of the loaf to pieces. The morphine was laving my torn muscles like warm milk, swaddling my nerve sheaths in cotton wool. I could move my left hand well enough to steady a hot-water bottle, which I filled from the kettle in my right. It took four trips to assemble writing paper, ballpoint pen, coffee, hot water bottle and phone on the table in the living room.

The embassy in London would be a hornet’s nest, my mother rousting everyone out of bed, having them in turn rouse people in other embassies who owed her favours; tracking down the information I needed. I had seen her work before.

The pen was an old one, its clear octagonal plastic barrel chewed at the end, and when I put the tip to paper, it left a blot. I wrote the date, then paused. This must have been how Vortigern the High King felt when the last of the Roman legions withdrew, leaving fourth century Britain open to the prowling Saxon seawolves, and he had gambled, had picked a few from the pack and befriended them, gifted them with land along the south shore in return for a promise to defend the country from their hungry, landless cousins. Classic strategy, divide the enemy and hold the two opposing camps in perfect tension, only Vortigern had not known the sheer weight of numbers pressing up against the Saxon shore; the tension was unequal; his gamble had failed. The might of the Tijuana cartel and of Honeycutt were decidedly not equal, but when the cartel crushed Honeycutt and wanted to turn on me, this letter would be my Roman Legion in the hole.

I wrote steadily.

The phone rang. It was my mother. Fifty minutes. “The Tijuana Federal Police commander’s name is Luis Palma. I have his home number, his private work line, and the general office number. The name of the man in Tijuana who can confirm your identity is Hector Lorca, a television anchor. I have already called him, and he has agreed.” He must owe her a tremendous favour. Well, now so did I.

“Thank you.”

“Bring Julia to London to thank me.”

Four a.m. Still yesterday in Mexico, where Luis Palma would be sitting down to dinner with his family while outside the sky turned red.

I dialed. It didn’t have a chance to ring before it was picked up and a smooth male voice said, “Palma residence.”

“I wish to speak to Señor Palma.” My Spanish had been learned in England and Spain a long time ago. It was slow but, thanks to the few days’ practice with Beatriz, reasonably good. The European accent, too, would stand me in good stead.

“Señor Palma is a busy man and this is his family time. No doubt he would be delighted to speak to you tomorrow, from his office.” Unctuous as guacamole.

“Tonight I do not wish to discuss police business. Tonight I wish to impart some information about the cartel’s money launderer in Atlanta.”

“But that, of course, would be police business. However, as you have been kind enough to call with this information for Señor Palma, I will take a message.”

“No message. I need to talk to Señor Palma. Now. Tell him Michael Honeycutt is deceiving the cartel and stealing money.”

“If you will give me the details—”

“I will speak to Señor Palma only. Tell him my name is Aud Torvingen, that my mother is Else Torvingen, Norwegian ambassador to London. Tell him I am to be trusted, but that if he needs to check that I am to be trusted he may call Señor Hector Lorca at his home. Señor Lorca awaits his call. I will call back in twenty minutes.”

The knuckle bones were cast, the game with the bloody-handed Viking begun.

I wrote faster.

I covered three more pages with terse, blotched writing, then called again. The same smooth voice answered.

“Señor Palma will talk to you, Señorita Torvingen.”

“Thank you.”

“This is Luis Palma.” His voice was smooth, too, but smooth like a Rolls-Royce, secure with power and money and the kind of arrogance that does not even have to display itself. “You have some information for me.”

“Information and a request for your help.”

“I am of course happy to help a young lady if it is in my power, but I am just a humble policeman in a poor country.”

“Of course, señor. You have no doubt heard of the Tijuana business cartel and their business of shipping the produce of certain people in Colombia. No doubt it is already common knowledge to you, as a policeman and well-informed citizen of the region, that a portion of the revenue from this business is administered in Atlanta. Some of the money is put to work immediately, investing in works of art which are bought and sold in this and other countries. The proceeds of these sales should of course find their way into the bank accounts of the Tijuana businessmen who brokered the product, and naturally the banker who oversees these deals should be a very prudent man. He is not. Quite by chance I have discovered that the Atlanta banker, Michael Honeycutt, is”—I didn’t know how to say playing both ends against the middle in my rather formal Spanish—“deceiving these businessmen. He is also drawing attention to himself and therefore the cartel through various illegal activities, including the forging of these works of art, so that he may pocket money for himself.”

“I am sure that these businessmen would like to hear proof of their colleague’s disloyalty.”

“I have proof. I know the names of the people who supplied the forged art to Honeycutt; I know about his accounts in the Seychelles. So does someone else. Señor Palma, I believe someone in Atlanta has discovered Honeycutt’s activities, including his work for the Tijuana businessmen, and is blackmailing him. Honeycutt has made many, many mistakes. Many innocents have become entangled in his web. Many innocents, including myself and a friend whose name is of no importance.”

“And you, of course, have spoken to no one about this.”

“No one. But I have taken the precaution of writing down all that I know and mailing it to my lawyer, to be opened in the case of my death or disappearance.”

“A very foresighted precaution.”

“Thank you. I am now, of course, worried that this banker in Atlanta, Michael Honeycutt, may succeed in his attempts to kill me and my friend, and that this information, this confidential information, may be loosed prematurely and damage the reputation and livelihood of this Tijuana business association. Today, one of the banker’s men came very close to succeeding, and there are two others in Oslo, just waiting for me. I thought perhaps that if these businessmen understood my predicament, they might be willing to put me in touch with some associates. They might offer some local assistance, and perhaps the temporary use of some of their office equipment.”

“A reasonable request. But I am not sure if the business association has an office in your area. Perhaps I could find out and telephone you in, say, one hour?”

“That is acceptable.”

“I will need your phone number.” I gave it to him. “In one hour, Miss Torvingen.”

By five-thirty in the morning I had finished my long letter. I put it in an envelope, which I sealed carefully, then wrote a note to my attorney, which I put, together with the sealed envelope, inside a second envelope, which I addressed to the law firm of Spirkett and Clowes in Atlanta. I had no idea how much international postage was, but ten domestic stamps should be plenty. One little envelope. It wasn’t enough insurance. I started another sheet of paper.

This time it went faster. When I’d finished, I addressed it to myself, in care of Dornan, at Borealis. For the first time in twelve hours I was not cold.

The cotton wool around my nerves was wearing thin and the milk that lapped my muscles evaporating. There were two syrettes of morphine left. It would have to wait.

Outside, the rain had stopped and the sun was coming up. I smeared mud on the Volvo’s license plates, just in case it had been stolen and reported to the police, and drove like an old woman to the post box three kilometers down the bumpy track. The first pickup was at seven-thirty. I slid the envelope addressed to my attorney through the slot, then drove another five kilometers to post the second.

The phone rang as I pulled up outside the seter.

“Miss Torvingen.” It was Guacamole Voice, the assistant. “Señor Palma has asked that I pass on the phone number of a business associate in Oslo who will be waiting for your call.” He gave it to me. It was another cellular number. “Señor Palma also asked me to tell you two things. First of all, that the banker of whom you spoke, Señor Honeycutt, was shot to death at a New York airport ten days ago.”

Honeycutt was shot ten days ago. Ten days ago.

“…association was of course most upset at the time, but given your information, they are not as upset as they had been. They do, however, wish they knew who had set such a thing in motion.”

Someone unknown to the cartel had killed Honeycutt. Honeycutt was dead. The man from Atlanta had killed Honeycutt. Honeycutt was not the man from Atlanta.

“…second item to convey is that despite the death, Señor Palma will honour his agreement. And, of course, should you discover who might have intended harm to Señor Honeycutt, Señor Palma would be most grateful for that information. He also hopes that given your diplomatic contacts, you might be persuaded to act as a goodwill ambassador in the future. Good evening, Miss Torvingen.”

A silky threat. You owe us. We will collect.