The Blue Place

nine

It was only a mile and a half from the Bristol to Vigeland Park but it was a sunny morning and our route along Bogstadsveien was lively with galleries and art shops. Julia seemed to find them amusing. Even so, we still had to cross traffic and tram tracks every few meters to look through yet another shop window: “If I’m going to design a sculpture park for a Norwegian corporation I have to get some idea of what Norwegians like.”

She looked at the displays, I scanned the crowd.

“A lot of Neo-Romanticism,” she said.

“You should look in museums, not these tourist traps.”

“That’s where you’re wrong. You need to look at both sides. I couldn’t learn about Americans’ taste for art, and that art’s history, by touring MoMA. To explain sixties pop art, for instance, I’d have to know about Disney World and Coney Island and network television as well as the formal canvases that hang on museum walls. That’s what helps me understand what will become valuable in a few years, what will be a good investment.” And then she was distracted by a collection of dolls dressed in bunad, bright red traditional costumes with tiny silver buckles and earrings. “They’re all different.”

“Each region has its own traditional dress.”

“Do people really wear them?”

“Sometimes. On national holidays.” I didn’t like standing here with people brushing by on both sides.

“Did you have one?”

“Yes.”

“Did you wear it?”

“When I was confirmed.” She wasn’t going to move along until I gave her what she wanted. “I was thirteen. I wore it once. Lutheran church though, no, I’m not particularly religious. It was and is more of a cultural event. I have no idea where the bunad is now.”

“Did you have long hair?” She fingered the doll’s braid.

“Yes.”

“And did you wear it in braids, with ribbons?” She was grinning.

It took us ninety minutes to reach the massive wrought-iron gates of Vigeland Park. Julia stood there for a while, just looking. “I’d like to look at this on my own for a while, I think.”

She was wearing a peach shirt; easy to keep track of in all the green. “An hour, then. Back here.”

The centrepiece of the park is the monolith. Standing before it, I understood why, when Vigeland was first working on these monuments, half of Oslo hated him. It is huge, made of whitish granite probably sixty-five feet tall, and depicts more than a hundred human figures twined and writhing about each other, some standing on and others clambering over their neighbours to reach the top. Not a very Norwegian sentiment. Around its base, on plinths on the steps leading up to it, are Vigeland’s vision of humanity teaching, playing, fighting, loving, eating and sleeping: a woman combing another’s hair; a man with children; a child having a tantrum. Massive figures, all naked, all gazing down at Norwegians with truth in their eyes.

I was still there when Julia climbed the steps. “I’ve just read in the museum that that piece of granite weighed two hundred and sixty tons and in 1926 took three months to transport to here from the harbour through the streets of Oslo.”

“Another reason for them to hate it.”

She gazed up at the figures, shading her eyes from the sun. “Hate it?”

“The primary tenet of Norwegian social life is something called the Jante Law: Don’t believe you are better than anyone else. We’re all equals.”

“I don’t see what’s so bad about egalitarianism.”

“You didn’t go to school here in the early seventies. They were ruthless: Don’t do better than anyone else. Coming here was such a relief to my eleven-year-old self. Vigeland may have been an egotistical monster, but at least he sometimes showed the truth.”

We studied it silently for a while. “The earlier work in the museum is quite different,” she said. “There’s one particular wall relief of emaciated figures. It’s disturbing, very powerful.”

“I like this better. You can see emaciated, tormented people anytime, in any city, especially the civilized ones.”

“Why do you suppose his work was so large?” she said to herself as we descended the steps slowly. She stopped before the woman washing another woman’s hair. “It’s intimate, almost sexual, and yet quite ordinary. I suppose that’s what he was trying to say: everything is ordinary.”

“He was saying everything in life is special. Every moment is a gift.”

She looked at me for a long, long time. Her eyes were sunlit, the colour of bluebells, and still shadowed very faintly with fatigue. She turned away. “We should get moving.”

We caught the number 2 tram back down Bogstadsveien.

The meeting with Edvard Borlaug of Olsen Glass was on the ninth floor of their new corporate building in the heart of the revitalized eastern side of Oslo. I briefed her on the way up.

“Don’t ask about his family. That will be seen as intrusive. He probably won’t indulge in small talk but will want to get right down to business. He will speak English, but may not always understand what you’re saying, though he’ll be too proud to admit it. I’ll do my best to step in when I think that’s happening.”

It was an austere office, good furniture but quite plain. Borlaug was younger than I had expected. Even though she had been warned, I think his briskness took Julia aback. He strode out from behind his desk, shook Julia’s hand firmly, and announced in basic English that he was a vice president of the corporation and fully empowered to make final decisions and that the corporation hoped to open the park next spring. I suspected he had been made vice president last week.

Julia introduced me as her “associate.” He stepped back behind his desk and gestured at the two chairs in front of it. I sat between Julia and the window, and turned my chair to have a view of the door.

Now it was Julia’s turn. She became grave and deliberate. “I don’t know if it’s possible to open the park by spring. A lesser project, perhaps, but if as you indicated in previous communications you want a lasting monument to the corporation’s importance and achievement, it may take longer.”

He seemed to relax: she was not some silly American out to make impossible promises. “How much longer?”

“I think we should leave estimates about time and money until later in the discussion. Right now, we need to know what ideas you have had about what you want.”

He pulled out a file folder. Opened it, closed it. Nervous behaviour, for a Norwegian.

Julia became even more steady and deliberate. “Why don’t we run over several possible avenues of approach and see if any of them seem appropriate?” He assumed the half smile people do when they don’t want anyone else to know they’ve missed something, especially when they think others might think they are too young for their job.

I cleared my throat. “Perhaps,” I said in Norwegian, “you will allow me to translate the more abstruse concepts.” He appreciated “abstruse.” No one would speak to him that way if they thought he was stupid. I repeated it in English. They both nodded. I translated.

The meeting lasted two and a half hours. Julia was very patient. She explained to Edvard Borlaug the various options: monumental outdoor parks, like Vigeland; indoor installations; traditional or interactive; representational or abstract.

A great deal depended, she said, upon their client base. “Who is it that you want to come and see the sculpture?”

“Everyone. All of Oslo.”

“Fine, very commendable. But let’s start from the beginning. We’ll need information on who uses your building—corporate clients, the general public, others?—and how they use it—which doors and so forth. Where would the most natural installation be? How would we funnel people there? How long would you like them to stay? We’ll need to know if the park is intended purely for enjoyment or whether its proposed function is more educational. For example, would you like to see schools bringing busloads of children to trample through the installation”—her prejudices were showing; I changed “trample” to “wander”—“or would they be under the feet of your corporate clients?”

I translated with half my mind, and used the rest to assess the room. The chairs were solid Norwegian pine; awkward as weapons, not strong enough for a shield. The desk, though, was probably a good inch of heart-of-pine, which would offer some protection from a small-calibre handgun.

He pulled pieces of paper from his folder: plans, columns of figures. Julia read them with approval. He started to warm up. After forty minutes he seemed quite enthusiastic. They started to talk about glass—how a vitreous sculpture might hold up under the extremes of the Oslo climate. They got into maintenance questions: long-term care of the individual items of the installation; short-term care, such as keeping the grass mowed—if they decided they wanted grass because they could, of course, go with gravel. With glass and granite sculpture a gravel surface would be very evocative of the ruggedness of the Norwegian landscape. If he wanted representation of Norwegian sculpture, then, naturally, he would want something from the abstract pioneer Haukeland. And what did he have in mind for children?

He became almost animated. Perhaps representations of figures from myth and legend—a bridge, complete with troll and billy goats Gruff; Sampo Lappelil, the little Lapp boy who defeated the king of the trolls, with his reindeer; The Woman Against the Stream. I obligingly gave Julia condensed versions of each tale. Edvard drew sketches. They were surprisingly strong-lined and clean.

“Edvard,” Julia said suddenly, looking at one, “where did the idea for this sculpture park come from?”

He blushed, and spoke in English. “The company made a big, a large profit last year. Which is good. But it was so large, it felt…it was felt we should not keep it all. We talked about giving it to a charity, but there are so many. And then we thought we could…” He pulled his thoughts together. “This part of the city is being built again. For a long time it was…”

“Desolate,” I supplied.

“Yes. Desolate and empty. We can help to make it better, to give the people something good. And it will help to make more money, too.”

He glanced at his watch and his face fell. “It’s five minutes past four o’clock.” He stood abruptly. “Thank you. Thank you. Perhaps we can meet again tomorrow?”

Julia looked surprised at his haste but she stood. “Certainly. The same time?”

“Earlier,” I suggested. “Perhaps the morning.”

“Yes,” he said. “Eleven o’clock?”

The corridor was crowded. There was a queue for the lift. We took the stairs. Unlike an American stairwell, it smelled fresh and well ventilated; often used.

“So what happened?” Julia asked on the way down. “It all seemed to be going so well then suddenly, phhtt, he wants to get rid of us.”

“Norwegians finish their workday at four sharp. He probably considered it very bad manners to have kept you past that time.”

“Ah. Did you see how he blushed when I asked whose idea the park was? He seems a bit young to be in charge.”

“He’ll live or die by this project. If it fails, his career fails.”

“Then we’d better make sure it doesn’t.”

We. How odd.

Outside, the streets were busy with home-bound office workers. “Would you like a walk before dinner?”

“Only if it’s an aimless American stroll. And only if we get a taxi back to the hotel first so I can change out of this corporate drag.”

When we got to the hotel, Julia suggested I wait in the lobby: It wouldn’t take her a minute. I read Dagbladet, a name that translated pragmatically to The Daily Newspaper. Julia came back down in jeans and the sunset-coloured sweater.

We wandered up Karl Johansgate, now almost deserted, to Slottsparken.

We walked under the trees. “In winter this is all white, and crisscrossed by ski trails.” Strangers are easy to see. “Tante Hjørdis bumped into King Haakon, literally bumped into him, over there near that statue.”

“No security people?”

“The royal family are very informal.”

“So how old is she?”

“In her seventies, I think. And she skis every day in winter.”

“You come from good genes. How about your mother—is she like you and Hjørdis?”

“And how is that?”

She looked me up and down slowly. “Tall. Strong. Hidden. But Hjørdis’s eyes are more blue. And she is less complicated, I think. Still very Norwegian. I don’t think you are.”

Under the tree shadow, I couldn’t read her face. “My mother’s eyes are more blue, also. She’s shorter than Hjørdis. About your height, but wider. She is…subtle.”

“You must have learned it from her.” We reached the statue, which was surrounded by an ironwork fence resembling bare winter branches. Before I could stop her, Julia climbed over it and strode to the bronze statue. “Camille Collett,” she read from the plaque. An early Norwegian writer. She beckoned me over. There was no English translation, but instead of asking me to tell her what it said, she touched my arm and said, “Aud, I want you to be less like your subtle mother and more Norwegian. I want you to tell me the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth—everything you know about Michael Honeycutt. Tell me what he’s up to, who those men might have been in his house. I need to know why Jim really died and if I’m…if they’re likely to come after me when we get back to Atlanta. I need to know.” She stood straight, unconsciously graceful, utterly serious.

“Let’s find somewhere to sit.”

The bar was only half a block from the Bristol. It had a Wurlitzer jukebox, a reasonable-looking menu, and table service. The music was loud, and the server had a sneer due more to a pierced upper lip than essential attitude.

“Ol,” I said, “and akevit.” The shots and beer chasers came swiftly. “Just bring us refills when you see our glasses empty.” I picked up the akevit. “Skal.” We drank it down.

Julia breathed heavily through her nose, and her eyes watered. “Not unlike grappa.” She folded her hands together before her on the table. The formal effect was spoilt by her having to shout above the music. “I know you’ve told me what I paid to find out, but I would like the rest, with no evasions, no elisions, and no sugarcoating.”

“I don’t have all the pieces.”

“Then give me what you have.”

I sipped my beer, considering. “When you first asked for my help, you were adamant that the arson and Jim’s death had nothing to do with drugs. You were right in that Jim was just an innocent bystander, but you were wrong in that the case has everything to do with drugs. No, just listen. Honeycutt has been laundering money for the Tijuana cocaine cartel. Don’t confuse the Mexican cartels with those from Colombia. They don’t produce or process, all they do is ship or sometimes simply allow passage.”

I used the salt shaker to pour an outline of central and north America onto the formica. I put my thumb across Mexico. “The Mexicans, here, are middlemen: the Colombians can’t get their product to the western U.S. if the Mexicans don’t allow it.” I lifted my thumb. “The Tijuana cartel employs Federal Police, U.S. border inspectors, local police on both sides of the border, and San Diego and Los Angeles gang members. For U.S. drug enforcement, it used to just be a western and border states problem, but according to the DEA and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation the influence of both Tijuana and Sinaloa cartels has been marching steadily east.” I drew a salt arrow. “Atlanta passed quietly into the hands of the Tijuana people three years ago. And I mean quietly.”

The server brought us more akevit. I brushed away the map and sipped the icy liquor.

“These cartels have a lot of power and influence. They are almost immune from the law. They own the Mexican Federal Police, and they own the politicians, and the Mexican voters think that’s fine because the only people getting hurt are Americans—and the few Mexicans who don’t play ball. They are smarter, more attuned to the rest of the world, and higher up the business evolutionary tree than the Colombians.”

“What?”

The music was getting louder. “I said, they’re a leaner organization. There’s no Tijuana guy in Los Angeles or San Diego, just his consultants—gang members who act as enforcers and hit men without any of the usual benefits, like protection. The key to the success of these cartels is their relatively low profile: the bloodshed can be passed off as gang warfare; which means the bribes are easier for those in authority to stomach. Money moves to and fro smoothly. Only there’s a great deal of money, and unless the cartel’s bankers can clean it up sufficiently, the heads of the cartels can’t really use it.”

“Money laundering.”

“Precisely.” Behind Julia, someone was smoking hash. I wondered if there were Moroccan cartels. “Honeycutt is laundering tens of millions a year. Some of it must go through his bank, probably in shell accounts, but some gets cleaned up by buying artworks, selling them overseas, then banking the sale money quite legitimately.”

“Like the Friedrich. But that was a fake.”

“This is where it gets interesting. Honeycutt uses dirty money to buy one legitimate painting or sculpture—”

“Or Anglo-Saxon armring.”

“—sells it for clean money, and banks it openly. But then he sometimes also gets a copy, a fake, made, and sells that, too. This time, the money goes into his own personal account. I suspect he was using the money to pay off a blackmailer. When you spot the fake, he panics: tries to have you, your colleague and the evidence all go up in smoke. But the good news, the very good news, is that the cartel doesn’t know about it.” Just the blackmailer.

In the dim light, surrounded by swirls of sweet hash smoke, she was as clear as a cut-glass figurine. “Explain.”

“Honeycutt hired in someone used by the man who used to run the drug trade in the Southeast—not someone who the Tijuana cartel would employ. Besides, the cartels pay a lot of money for good, quiet, loyal service. They don’t want their employees or consultants drawing attention to themselves by silly stunts for personal gain.”

“So Honeycutt is terrified the cartel will find out….”

“And we can assume, for now at least, that they know nothing of you, or me.” And I would dearly like to keep it that way.

“Then if the cartel doesn’t already know…” She tapped her fingernail on the table while she thought. I couldn’t hear it. “Who planted cocaine in Jim’s garage?”

“I don’t know.”

“Could it have been Honeycutt?”

“I doubt it. He is strictly a money man. He probably wouldn’t have had access to the drugs. And that coke was worth a lot of money. He would rather have pocketed the proceeds.”

“Then who?”

“The blackmailer. Those three men at Honeycutt’s house were there to remove any evidence of a link between him and the blackmailer. They didn’t succeed. It might have been better for us if they had. I have no idea who the blackmailer is, or how much they know about you, or what they might do about that. The whole operation smells of calculation and organization and money.” Which, of course, made absolutely no sense: where would someone who was blackmailing for money get the cash to pay for several kilos of cocaine? Assuming that it was, in fact, the blackmailer who planted those bags.

“They’re going to come for me, aren’t they?” She could have been talking about a taxi pickup.

“I don’t know.”

“How would they do it?”

When I had been three months in the APD, my partner and I had pulled over two men on a routine traffic stop. Officer King had stepped up to the car and asked for some identification. They had backed up their car and run him down. I still remember the crunch the tires made going over his left arm. I shot out the perps’ rear tires, called in their license plate, and drove King to the Piedmont emergency room. He had sat there, perfectly composed, while the doctor and nurses clipped away his uniform, cleaned up torn flesh and muttered over X rays. When they told him they were going to have to operate, to put all the bones back inside the flesh and then screw on a steel plate, he had pursed his lips, nodded, and said curiously, “What size screws do you use?” Partly shock, partly genuine curiosity, partly a need to drown the reality of the whole in a flood of incremental and essentially useless details.

“There are as many different methods as there are killers.”

“I thought we agreed no evasions, no elisions, no sugarcoating.” She folded her hands again, a neat, tidy package between the empty glasses, beer rings, and salt.

“I would be guessing.”

“Then guess.” Her gaze was unwinking.

“Death is not something I like to play guessing games with.”

“I don’t consider obtaining information in order to stay alive a game.” Her voice was suddenly savage. “I feel as though I’m spinning in a greased barrel here, with nothing to hang on to!” She picked up her brimming glass of akevit, swallowed it down in one gulp, and slammed the empty glass down. “So help me out.”

“If I were the mystery person who sent those men to Honeycutt’s house, I would kill you in Norway. Less chance of it being connected back to Atlanta. There again, no one knows you’re here, so that’s unlikely.”

“I gave Mrs. Miclasz the name of the hotel. But she promised not to mention it to anyone else.”

Promises were useless in the face of torture. “You might want to give her a call, just to make sure everything’s all right.”

Her hand tightened around the glass until the webbing between her thumb and index finger was quite white. “They wouldn’t!”

“Probably not. Just a precaution.” But I was still uneasy. Why? What had I missed?

“Go on.”

“Supposing he knew you were here, it would be child’s play to bring you down from a distance with some kind of scoped hunting rifle, and those would be easy to get hold of in Norway. You were a perfect, stationary target in the park.” I imagined her folding down in surprise, eyes wide, hot red blood splashed on bronze. “But it’s not hunting season, there’s no way to make such a shot look like an accident, and that’s what he’ll want this to look like. He might shoot you, but if he did it would be with a World War II relic, an old Lahti pistol maybe, and it would be set up to look like an accidental discharge while you were cleaning it.” No. A tourist wouldn’t be cleaning a gun. “That’s unlikely.” I sipped at my beer. So much depended on how much time he had, what kind of person he was. I had a sudden image of an iceberg: cold and unwinking, nine-tenths hidden. “If he thinks he can afford to wait to bring in professional talent, then it would be an elegant accident: a drowning in the harbour”—Julia, hauled blue and swollen from the cold fjord, winch chains dripping, onlookers gawking—“maybe electrocution in your hotel bath”—thrashing water, hum and sizzle, stink of sphincter letting go. “But if he was in a rush, then it would be local talent with less finesse. A mugging gone wrong might be the way to go. Have you ever seen a body that has been bludgeoned to death?” Her face was pale and set but I couldn’t stem the flood of words. “The body is remarkably resilient. Take skin, for example. It has to take a blow over a bone before it will split.” Those lovely cheekbones, gaping wide. “And you can live with a dozen broken bones, with the loss of a kidney or lung, pierced by one of those splintered ribs.” Hiss of air like a punctured tire. “The surest method would be a blow across the throat, then the larynx swells and death by asphyxiation follows in two or three minutes. Most likely they would just beat you around the head for a while. The skull, though, is designed to take punishment. If they hit the wrong places you’d be conscious for quite a while….”

She watched me, eyes soft as a doe’s, and I imagined a hand lashing out, a fist reddened by working on an offshore trawler, pulping her cheekbone, tearing open her cheek, ripping loose one of those eyes, and my throat tightened around the ugly words.

“…there’s always fire. The way Jim went. Only if it’s a fool doing the setting it will be in a place where it won’t be fumes that take you but the flame itself….”

My voice went on and on, harsh and brutal, and the pictures in my head flickered like a series of Technicolor slides: Julia, blackened like charbroiled steak, bits of clothing sticking to raw muscle; Julia, butchered like a goat; broken like a painted doll on the rocks…. I couldn’t stop talking, and I couldn’t stop the pictures. Those beautiful hands, folded so neatly before her on the table, would lash out but he would have her from behind in a garrotte. When she fell she might have five seconds’ strength left, which she would spill out scrabbling against the pavement, tearing out her nails.

“…or they could smother you in your bed. Is it real enough for you yet? Is it? Because this might be a foreign country for you but people still die here. They still leak blood.” Their bright eyes still fade. Her nostrils were wide and although her fingers were still folded, they were white around the knuckles.

“It’s real,” she said. The words were squeezed out, the way you squeeze air from a Ziploc bag before you seal it. I wondered if she might faint.

“Julia…”

She breathed for a moment. “If you were trying to scare me, you succeeded.”

“I wasn’t trying to—”

“Yes, you were.” She stood. “I’m going to call Annie. I can find my own way back to the hotel. It’s only half a block. Good night.” Her back was straight; she moved with enormous, fragile dignity.

Had I been trying to frighten her? Yes. Yes, because she had to see, she had to know, because she had to stay safe, had to, because someone—someone I didn’t know, someone I couldn’t see or hear or smell—was waiting back in America, and maybe their reach didn’t extend across the Atlantic and the North Sea to Norway, but maybe it did. I watched through the window as she entered the Bristol. “Another akevit over here!”

The corridor was quiet, the lights muted. The hotel hummed in shut-down, nighttime mode. There was a tray outside Julia’s room. I squatted down to look: the remains of a hamburger and fries. Upset enough to revert to familiar food, but not upset enough to lose her appetite. I touched the bun. Stone cold. Not surprising. It was two in the morning.

The door to my room seemed narrower than it had been. I clipped the doorjamb with my left shoulder as I went in. I did not turn the light on; there was enough illumination coming through the gauzy inner curtains to make out the tightly made, impersonal bed, the chaise longue, the connecting door. I stood for a while and listened. I was breathing heavily through my mouth. I shut it. Nothing.

I took off my jacket and threw it on the bed. Sat down. Stood up again. Still no sound from Julia’s room.

I eased the connecting door open. It was warm, much darker than my room. I closed the door behind me, listened. Nothing. I crept towards the bed. Still nothing. My heart began to pound like an asymmetric crank. There was a shape on the bed, very still.

My eyes were adjusting. I could make out her head, the spill of hair across her pillow. I reached out, held my hand, palm down, just above her face. Warm breath, steady and strong. I blinked hard. She slept on.

She knocked on the connecting door just before eight. “Aud, are you awake?”

“Come in.”

She was still in her robe, hair tucked behind her ears. She seemed surprised to find me still in mine, drinking coffee on the bed. She smiled tentatively. “That smells good.”

I picked up the phone, talked to room service.

“What did you say?”

“They’re bringing more coffee, another cup, and breakfast. I asked them to hurry.” She hovered. “Please, sit. Or we can sit over by the window if you would be more comfortable.” I felt ridiculously formal. “Julia, I want to apologize. Last night—”

“No. I came to apologize to you. I asked.”

“There was no need for me to go into such detail.”

“No, it was me who—Oh, give me some of that coffee will you?” I handed her my cup. She took a sip, then a gulp, made to hand it back but I made a keep it motion. She finished off the coffee, despite the cream. “That was good. You know what frightened me more than the details? The way you talked about it. Your face was…I’ve never seen anything like it, except maybe some African sculpture. All implacable planes. Almost inhuman. And your voice, harsh as a broken engine. And I looked at you and thought: Oh, that’s what he’ll look like when he comes for me. I’ll just be a thing, a problem to be solved, and it doesn’t matter that I’ve eaten cod’s tongues, or that I really don’t much care for akevit, that I like roses even though they have too many thorns, and hot coffee in the morning. I felt inconsequential.”

Room service rapped on the door before I could say anything and I had to attend to the usual ceremony of pointing out a table—by the window—signing the chit, wishing him a good morning.

“Come and eat.” In the light by the window her hair was more sable than black, rich as a bear’s winter pelt. I wondered how it would look flung back in pleasure. We sat opposite each other at the tiny table and though they did not touch, I felt the heat of her bare leg on mine. We pulled off lids.

“Bacon!”

And eggs, and juice, and toast. “I thought you might like something familiar and comforting. It’s Danish bacon—more like Canadian than American. Less fatty.” I realized I was in danger of babbling and poured coffee for us both. We ate quietly.

“I called Annie. She’s fine.”

“Did you tell her to be careful?”

“I didn’t have to. As soon as she worked out I thought something might have happened to her, she pestered me with questions. I told her I’d explain everything when we got back. She said she’d be careful.”

“Good.”

We ate some more. “I was looking through the What To Do In Oslo pamphlets. The National Gallery sounds interesting. I thought we could go this morning. That is, I’d like to go, and I hope you’ll come with me. And maybe later we could get that dinner we should have had last night. Oh, unless Borlaug wants to take us out to celebrate the finalization of the park contract.”

“He won’t. In Norway one never mixes business and pleasure.” Dornan smiled at me from the back of my mind, and raised his eyebrows.

Early morning shoppers sipped coffee in the outdoor cafés of Kristian VII’s Gate. Along Universitetsgata, students in bright colours stood on the grass talking in groups of two and three. Everyone looked splendidly healthy. They had probably had more than three hours’ sleep.

We had to wait outside the gallery for it to open. Julia was restless. She was wearing another silk shirt, this time in deep blue. It pulled to and fro over her shoulders and breasts as she shifted her weight from heels to toes and her briefcase from one hand to the other. Her hair was in a fat braid, tied back with brown velvet that matched her pants, and hanging over her right shoulder. She looked at her watch. “How long will it take to get to Olsen Glass from here?”

“Fifteen minutes if we take the tram, but allow thirty.”

The doors opened. In the lobby, she checked her briefcase and looked at the signs. “So the question is, do we do a lightning tour of the whole place or concentrate on one area?” She nodded decisively. “We’ll just do the section on Norwegian painting. This way.”

We were the only ones in the Norwegian gallery. The first thing that caught her eye was one of J. C. Dahl’s huge paintings of fjord light and water. She stood before it and her restlessness dropped away. She became as still as the deep dark waters of the fjord. Her chest moved gently as she breathed, her eyes unfocused. I knew that if I put my hands on her shoulders, they would be soft and relaxed. This was a Julia I had not seen before: distant, analytical, expert. The minutes passed. Suddenly she cleared her throat and moved on, walking past the works of Tidemand and Gude with a quick glance and a nod, as though confirming a theory. She spent a little longer with a series of etchings depicting barn dances and summer village scenes. “Well, here are some people at last.” She leaned closer, then stepped back, looking from one to another. “I can understand that Dahl wouldn’t want to put people in his paintings—they would be dwarfed by the scenery—but these artists seem to think people do nothing but dance around and put flowers in their hair.”

She was not really talking to me.

“Now look at this,” she said, in front of a big abstract canvas of purples and greens. The nameplate read WEIDEMANN. “Even this is about nature.” I wondered how she could tell but I kept my doubts to myself.

More paintings.

“Full circle,” she said. “Neo-Romanticism. This painter may as well have been a Romantic who watched television.” We went back to the Dahl that had so interested her. “It reminds me of Hjørdis.”

Mountainside, cloaked in fir, falling straight into water as smooth and reflective as glass. You knew, looking at it, that it was a mile deep. Lush spring flowers, laughing sky. But changeable, and everywhere bones of rock. Good country in summer, but dangerous if approached without caution and, in winter, utterly isolated from the next valley by mountains suddenly cloaked in ice and mist. Troll country.

“I’m beginning to understand.” She reached out as if to touch the painting, then drew back. “So…untrammeled. Uncompromising. This is how you all like to see yourselves, isn’t it? The consensus of the national psyche: clear, uncomplicated, immovable as granite.” She looked at me with the same concentration she had directed at the painting. I felt her gaze on my bones, the cant of my eyebrows; weighing the line of jaw and length of neck; noting colour and shadow. “But these paintings don’t tell your story, do they, Aud? These paintings don’t have bad dreams.”

We stood there for an age, facing one another. A light above one of the paintings began to hum.

“These paintings show sunshine,” I said. “They show spring and summer, and when there is snow it glitters white and bright.” I held out my left hand. She gave me her right. It was cool; I held it carefully. Neither of us said anything as I led her from the room, down a corridor, through a door.

“This is the Munch Room.”

Self-portraits of Munch bleeding from gunshot wounds. Paintings of the sick and dying. And Skrik, with its sky swirling lower and lower, a long bridge whose planks aren’t quite clear because there’s not enough light to see, to make out anything clearly, but that doesn’t matter because the world is grey and you don’t care; wavy lines of nightmare; the face of one so utterly alone they scream to shake the world.

“This is how it is during mørketiden, the murky time, the lengthening nights of winter. The sky is so low you feel as though you could reach up and touch it, but even if you could, you couldn’t, because everything is so grey you can’t tell where the ground ends and the sky begins. There is wind, but it can’t get through the unreality, the knowledge that it will get darker and darker, day after day. You go to bed at night and pray that tomorrow the cloud will clear and the sun will shine, just for a little while, but you wake up and it’s dark, and it’s raining, and it’s only the first of December.”

Her hand stirred in mine, then she had my hand in both of hers, was lifting it to her cheek for a moment, letting it go. Neither of us said anything.

A sudden gaggle of noisy children clustered in the doorway while their teacher marshalled them into pairs. They held hands and giggled and pointed at the paintings. The Munch gallery was once again just a room in a museum.

“Ask them whether they would prefer an abstract or figurative sculpture park,” I said to Julia in an undertone. She huffed with quiet laughter. The teacher gave us an apologetic look as we left. We smiled at her with sympathy.

Outside, the students in their bright colours no longer seemed so gaudy, and I found my fatigue was gone.

The meeting with Borlaug went well but they were still mired in details at one o’clock. They agreed to a forty-five-minute break for lunch. We wandered down Dronningensgate. She stopped outside Café Tenerife. “Do you suppose it would be the act of an Ugly American to eat Spanish food in a Norwegian city?”

“Have you ever been to Spain?”

“No.”

“Then think of it as a two-for-one experience.”

We ordered a mountain of food.

“There’s still so much to be decided,” Julia said as she divided the tapas onto two plates, neat as a cat. We both ate ravenously. I was careful not to let my leg touch hers under the table.

“Do you need me this afternoon?”

She tilted her head, considered. “No. I think he’s past the shy stage. He’ll ask if he doesn’t understand.”

I walked her back to the building—she swung the briefcase, the way an adolescent, caught between girlhood and womanhood, might—and stopped outside the plate-glass entrance.

“I’ll return at four. Please wait in the lobby, even if you finish early. If you’re ready very early, call the hotel. I’ll check for messages.”

The concierge at the Bristol had bulging, oyster eyes and an encyclopedic knowledge of business in the city. I told him what I wanted and in ten minutes had a confirmation number for a four-wheel drive Audi and a cellular phone, to be delivered tomorrow at eleven-thirty. I tipped him and asked him to tell the front desk that I might be expecting messages but would be calling in for them from outside the hotel.

The harbour smelled of sunshine on cold water, the wet wood and diesel fume of boats, and the shrimp the crews cooked and sold from the deck in little white paper bags, heads and shells still intact. When the breeze changed direction it brought the scents of warm city stone, flowers bursting into bloom in the hills and the wildness of spring. I walked faster, drawing the heady mix deep into my lungs.

Two buskers with guitar and electric violin played some folk tune with fierce underpinnings, careless of the fact that no one seemed to be listening. I stood there awhile, letting the music prod at me and work its way under my skin. They nodded when I tossed some coins in the hat, and launched straight into an idiosyncratic reworking of Grieg.

Away from the harbour, the streets turned to neoclassical nineteenth century buildings and glass and steel towers built in the last two decades. Fire had done as much damage to Oslo over the years as Sherman did in Atlanta. I wandered, paying no particular attention, just absorbing the city through the soles of my shoes and the taste on my tongue.

I am used to being alone, used to autonomy, the freedom to stop when and where I want, be as I please. I could walk into a shop, like this one—chat earnestly to the girl behind the counter about a friend’s birthday, and which were the best chocolates she possessed, how much was that gorget; pay for them; ask for them to be wrapped—and the other customers would remain untouched by my presence, I by theirs. No one knew me; there was no one to compare my behaviour in the shop with my behaviour at other times. I could be fluid and responsible only to myself.

In my imagination, Julia snorted: Very Norwegian!

The image made me smile as I angled north and east. Half a mile or so from the Olsen Glass building the pavement was torn up and cordoned off. Below street level, a handful of people in cut-offs and work boots sweated away earnestly with pickaxes and shovels. They were young, and all cut from the same mould: plump tan muscles, fair hair, soft cheeks. Archaeology students. What looked like rotting foundations were partly exposed. One man was using a trowel to slice away clay, rasher by rasher, from what looked like a support post. He stretched, saw me watching, and nodded.

“What is it?” I called down.

“Remnants of the old city. Fifteenth century, we think.”

It would be good to jump down into the pit, roll up my sleeves and swing a pickaxe on a spring day.

“This was a large building—look at the size of this post—perhaps with some kind of ritual or civic function.”

He seemed hopeful rather than sure. Ritual or civic function. He made it sound so alien, but the men and women who had cut the trees, dug the post holes, woven the hangings, would have had the same concerns as us: hunger, love, irritation. It was probably something utterly prosaic: the fifteenth century equivalent of public toilets, or a tavern, or—given the unchanging nature of humanity—a combination. I could almost see a local burgher, drunk from celebrating the return of some trading ship and a handsome profit, staggering outside, twitching aside his velvet and pissing against the corner post.

The archaeology student went back to his task, nose just an inch away from the wood.

The western side of the Olsen Glass building looked like a slab of gold in the slanting sunlight. The entrance and lobby were on the south side. I was five minutes early. I stayed on the pavement.

When the lift doors opened and Julia stepped out, I watched her through the plate glass. It must have been warm in Borlaug’s office; the top buttons of her shirt were undone, the sleeves rolled above her elbow and her hair pulled up into a topknot. She looked alert and lithe, a dancer with a briefcase in the wrong building. When she turned her head this way and that I saw the movement of smooth muscle under her skin. I stepped inside the door. Her face lit, softly, like a candle.

“All settled?”

She patted her briefcase. “Signed, sealed and delivered. The preliminaries, anyway. Ah,” she said, as we hit the pavement, “what a lovely afternoon! I want a bath, a drink, and dinner. Followed by another drink. I feel like celebrating. It’s the start of my vacation.”

We were sipping our coffee and contemplating a liqueur. Well-fed, well-bred conversation hummed round us lazily. Julia sighed and leaned back. Light poured over her face, dividing at her nose and spilling over her bare shoulders and arms. Her dress, of a heavy grey silk, gleamed like oiled chain mail, and the tiny hairs on her forearms could have been made of platinum.

“This is when I would kill for a panatella.” Her laugh was low and rich and adult; it fumed under my nose like a fine Armagnac. “No need to raise your eyebrows like that. I gave up smoking six years ago, but this is when I miss it most. And the smell of cigars is delicious.”

“But, like coffee, they never taste as good as they smell.”

“True.”

I lifted my jacket from the back of the next chair and took a flat box from the inside pocket. “Your native guide decided you ought to have a souvenir of Oslo.” I laid it on the heavy linen tablecloth in front of her.

She touched the velvet lightly. I imagined how it might feel against her fingertips. The moment stretched, then she opened the box. She said nothing. I couldn’t see her eyes. She tilted the open box this way and that so that light ran over the polished pewter. “Aud, it’s beautiful.”

“Then it should suit you.”

She lifted it out, draped its supple links over her forearm. It was as though someone had turned woodsmoke into metal and laid it against her skin—which suddenly seemed darker, more mysterious and infinitely alive. “It’s heavy.” She ran it up and down her arm, playing, enjoying the sensation.

“The maker assured me that it’s been designed for comfort as well as beauty. The swan’s neck is also meant to represent Oslo.” The lines were simple and dramatic, the swan more suggested than actual.

“I have to try it on.” She stood.

“The bathroom is that way.” I pointed behind me.

While I waited the waiter came and asked if there was anything else we wanted. I ordered brandy for me, more coffee for Julia, and the check. I waited some more. No other diners were missing. She was just admiring herself in the mirror.

The check and brandy came. I paid one and sipped at the other, let it hang a moment at the back of my tongue until it seemed I would swallow more fume than liquid, and then Julia was sliding back into her seat, the gorget lying around her throat: swan’s neck around swan’s neck. She was right, it was beautiful.

She leaned forward until I could almost have kissed her. Her eyes were brilliant. “You have to tell me why. No flip answers. Why did you buy me this?”

“I don’t know.” I had said I don’t know more times since I had met this woman than during the rest of my life put together. “I saw it in the shop. The sunlight caught it. I saw it and thought of you.” Thought of you in Borlaug’s office, the way your lip sometimes almost catches on your bottom incisor when you smile, how much I wanted to see you smile. “I thought of how it would look on you. I bought it.” She listened with an odd, patient expression on her face that I could not interpret. I had not given her what she wanted to hear. I did not know what that was.

She stood suddenly. “Finish your drink. I want to go dancing.”

We walked the long way round, south along Akershusstranda, the last glimmers of twilight on our faces. The sky was indigo and ink and the people walking laughed with a shiver of excitement: it was spring, and Friday night in the big city. Julia’s dress slid back and forth over her hips and her gorget gleamed. She seemed on the edge of something—restless, unsettled. As we neared the club, the bass thump thrust a hand in my belly and stirred. My heart accelerated.

There was a line. The flashing neon sign over the doorway caught on piercings and leather and smooth faces. The music was a wall of sound. Julia lifted her face to it, as though it were the sun. She smiled, then laughed aloud.

The line moved slowly. Julia hummed to herself, moved with the music. The air felt wild.

When we reached the head of the line, the man at the door held out his hand.

“How much?” I asked.

“Sixty krone. And ID.”

I reached for my wallet.

“What did he say?”

“He wants to see ID.” I found my driver’s license.

“What do you mean, he wants to see ID?” She turned to him, and suddenly all that restlessness was focused. “Oh, come on. Just how old do you think I am?”

He just held out his hand a bit more emphatically. I gave him my license. He scrutinized it carefully.

“Oh, that’s just great. How old do you think she is? Sixteen? And I suppose you think we’ve flown all the way to this country and faked ID just so we can get into this club!” Her voice was fierce.

“Julia, he’s just doing his job. This is an over-twenty-six club.”

“A what?” Now it was my turn under those unwinking eyes. I looked right back at her.

“You have to be over twenty-six. How is he to know you’re twenty-nine?”

“Indeed,” he said, with a formal little half bow, “you look much, much younger.”

I thought for a moment she would hit him. She restrained herself visibly. “That, I suppose, is meant as a compliment. I don’t take it as such. Here is my license. If you won’t let us in here, just say so. Now give me that back and either let us by or not.”

He gave back the license and she brushed past him. I paid and followed. The music was like a living stream, pulsing between bodies, collecting thickly in dark corners, vibrating bone so hard it might have been cartilage.

She was already at the bar. “I ordered you beer.” She tossed down the shot next to the two glasses of beer and lifted a finger to the bartender—a big woman, all fat and muscle and chipped front tooth—who brought her another. “That pompous bastard.” She drank half the second akevit. “God, I hate this stuff,” then finished it anyway. “Why do people do that with ID? They make me feel…It’s the way they look at you, as though you’re trying to cheat them somehow. Look, look at my face. Is this the face of a twenty-four-year-old? No. Of course it’s not. It’s all bullshit, this show me your ID crap. Do I look like the kind of person who would lie just to get into this lousy club? I hate being accused of being a liar, of trying to get something I don’t deserve. And as for that crap about, ‘Oh, you look so young, ma’am…’ Ha! Compliment my ass. Why do you suppose anyone would think it was a compliment to be told you look young and unmarked by experience, that is, naive and an easy mark? Well, I am not flattered. I’ve earned this face!”

The gorget rose and fell as she breathed through her nose; the long muscles in her bare shoulders slid over each other as she reached for her beer.

“God, I hate this, too. Bartender, bring me a glass of chardonnay.”

She was fierce and wild as a hawk. I could imagine her wheeling between cliffs, sun glinting from her talons, harsh skree echoing down the canyon.

“So. You’re very quiet.”

She would lift those wings, thrust herself from the ledge to beat the hot air, rise and rise, and when her marigold eyes caught tiny movement down below she would stoop: crack of wind under the pinions, tiny rodent squeak of terror, snap of vertebrae, then the beat-beat-beat upward, hare hanging warm and limp from her talons. And suddenly I understood all those I don’t knows. Understood why I had come with her to Norway and taken her to visit Tante Hjørdis; why I had stood in that shop and bought the gorget; why I had shown her the Munch Room. I knew how the hawk’s mate felt when she returned with the hare and they ripped its flesh from its bones and swallowed the raw muscle and skin and stared into each other’s eyes. I understood why when she had asked Am I safe? I had said I’ll protect you, because I would protect her, from anyone, anything. The realization was shocking, like the taste of a copper penny in my mouth, like the taste of blood.

She laughed. “You have the oddest look on your face! Forget my pissing and moaning, ignore it. We’re here now. Drink some of your beer!”

The music was sinuous, insistent. She was moving with it again, swaying silver like a sleeping fish in its current.

“Dance with me,” I said, and held out my hand, and when she took it, it was not like before, not like the Munch Room; it was like closing a circuit and the current ran straight through my bones and began to heat my belly.

“Ah,” she said, and a flush bloomed under her cheekbones.

The floor was small and crowded with dancers, each their own private country as they moved belly to back, or wildly, like dervishes. Julia danced more with her body than her arms, more with her hips than breasts, and I could almost see the heat gathering below her navel, heat to match mine, like the molten core of a planet. This time we moved around a common centre of gravity that was suspended between us. It pulled us in, closer and closer, until the swell of her silver dress moved nine inches from mine, eight, seven.

“Aud,” she whispered, “Aud…”

I put my arm around her waist and swept her through the crowd. She stumbled once, legs uncoordinated and uncaring, all attention fixed on the heat gathering between my arm and her back, between the flats of my fingers where they curled over her hipbone and brushed her belly. I thrust two hundred kroner at the man at the door. “Taxi,” I said.

It appeared between one moment and the next and though the cab drove fast on empty roads, inside everything was still. We hardly breathed. My arm was still about her waist but neither of us moved as the heat built.

I must have paid him, must have ridden up in the elevator because suddenly we were in the familiar corridor and she was reaching for her doorknob and I was saying, “No, my room, it has to be my room,” and we were inside and I was locking the door.

She stood in the middle of the room and waited. I stopped two inches in front of her and reached out with my fingertips, fluttered them across her lips, down her throat where a great pulse beat, across the bare skin above her dress, and she began to moan, a deep rhythmic moan with a huff, until I stepped closer and my thigh pushed against her belly and she spread her feet wider and groaned into my mouth. Holding her to me with one hand behind her head, I used the other to slide down her zipper. When I stepped away an inch, the dress began to slip and she started to writhe. With the same hand, I unbuttoned my shirt and unzipped my trousers and now it was like trying to hold down a hurricane, and then she was straining against me and we were on the bed.

She was strong, lithe and fit and wild past civility. I stripped her naked and she literally tore the shirt from my back, and when I pushed her down and straddled her she had my pants yanked down to midthigh and her arms around my neck, and we were breast to breast and I could feel the muscles in her stomach flexing under mine. Her eyes were black as basalt. I ran my hands down her flank, bumping over ribs, curving over her hipbone, and then she was pushing herself up against me and the cords in her arms and shoulders stood out as she pulled me down against her, and we were moving over each other, sliding skin to skin, spinning a cocoon of wet trails, breathing each other’s breath, gazes locked, and the heat between us built, and she was muttering, “In me. In me.” And we moved harder and faster, and the heat built and built and now she was shouting and her arms were knotted behind my back and the heat was a blast furnace, red yellow white hot, and then it came roaring out over us, filling the world with hot air, hot metal, and flesh and bone dissolved to nothing in its path.

Julia lay on her back, smiling. I stroked her head, still tasting the shock of realization. It was just like that time when I was nine years old, and I had been playing in the autumn-wild gardens of Horley House, running and jumping for the sheer joy of being alive, and my mother had leaned from one of the big sash windows and called for me and I had run and run, full of joy and energy and vigour, leaping over rocks, over low gorse bushes, over the pile of deadwood and brambles that the gardeners had pulled together for a fire. I remember the smoky Yorkshire air, the heat of my cheeks in the rushing cool twilight, the way they burned as I finally skidded to a halt in the hall, eyes bright, and my mother looked at me, went white, and said, “What have you done to your leg?”

And I looked down and thought: Oh. My left leg was sheathed in red from the knee down, as though I were wearing a bright red sock. Then I could smell it: sharp and coppery. Blood. I twisted and peered at the back of my leg. One inch below the fold of my knee was a gaping cut.

“Lucky you didn’t hamstring yourself,” said the young, acne-riddled doctor at the hospital as he put in the final stitches.

I still have that four-inch scar today. I still wonder how it was that I got a wound like that—from the brambles, perhaps, or the nail in some old fencing—and not feel it, not feel the skin part, then the fat beneath it, and the plump, pink muscle beneath that.

Julia sighed and smiled some more. How had she managed to get inside me, slip between my ribs and rest against my heart, without me feeling it?

I stroked her up and down; so long and slim and fine. My stiletto. This is where the fear had come from, the unconscious knowledge that I was vulnerable. “I love you,” I said. Her smile broadened: she had known all along. I laughed, and it was my laugh, not one designed to cover anything. I laughed again at the sound. She laughed at my pleasure. The world is a strange and splendid place.