The Redbreast

38

Focus Fitness Centre, Ila. 2 March 2000.

Harry was pedalling and sweating. The cardio-vascular room was equipped with eighteen hyper-modern ergometric exercise bikes, all occupied by 'urban', generally speaking, attractive people staring at the mute TV monitor hanging from the ceiling. Harry was watching Elisa in The Robinson Expedition mouthing that she couldn't stand Poppe. Harry knew. It was a repeat.

That don't impress me much! rang out from the loudspeakers.

No, well, there's a surprise, Harry thought, who liked neither the loud music nor the rasping sounds that could be heard coming from somewhere in his lungs. He could have worked out for nothing in the gym at Police HQ, but Ellen had persuaded him to join the Focus centre. He had gone along with that, but drew the line when she tried to get him to join an aerobics class. Moving in time to canned music with a troupe of people who all liked canned music while an instructor with a rictus smile encouraged greater exertion with such verbal wit as 'no pain, no gain' was for Harry an incomprehensible form of voluntary self-abasement. The way he saw it, the biggest advantage of Focus was that he could work out and watch The Robinson Expedition without having to be in the same room as Tom Waaler, who appeared to spend most of his free time in the police gym. Harry cast a quick glance around and confirmed that tonight, as usual, he was the oldest person there. Most people in the room were girls, with Walkmans plugged into their ears, sneaking a look in his direction at regular intervals. Not because they were looking at him, but because Norway's most popular stand-up comic sat next to him in a grey hoodie without a drop of sweat beneath his jaunty forelock. A message flashed up on Harry's speedometer console: You're training well.

But dressing badly, Harry thought, looking down at his limp, faded jogging bottoms, which he had to keep hitching up because of the mobile phone hanging on the waistband. And his tired Adidas trainers were neither new enough to be modern or old enough to be trendy again. The Joy Division T-shirt which had once held some kind of street cred just sent out the signal that he hadn't been following what was happening on the music scene for a number of years. But Harry didn't feel completely-completely-in the cold until his phone began to bleep and he noticed that seventeen reproachful pairs of eyes, including the stand-up comic's, were directed at him. He unhooked the tiny black devil's machine from his waistband.

'Hole.'

That don't impress me much\ again. 'It's Juul. Am I disturbing?’

‘No, it's just music'

'You're wheezing like a walrus. Ring me back when it's more convenient.'

'It's convenient now. I'm at the gym.'

Alright. I have good news. I've read your report from Johannesburg. Why didn't you say he'd been to Sennheim?'

'Uriah? Is that important? I wasn't even sure I had the name right. I looked for it on a map of Germany but I couldn't find any Sennheim.'

'The answer to your question is yes, it is important. If you've been in any doubt as to whether he fought at the front, you can be reassured now. It's one hundred per cent certain. Sennheim is a little place and the only Norwegians I've heard of who have been there went during the war. To the training camp before leaving for the Eastern Front. The reason you didn't find Sennheim on a map of Germany is because it isn't in Germany, but in French Alsace.’

‘Yes, but…'

'Alsace has alternated between being French and German throughout its history, that's why they speak German there. The fact that our man has been to Sennheim reduces the number of potential candidates drastically. You see, only men from the Nordland and Norge regiments received their training there. And even better -1 can give you the name of a person who was in Sennheim and would almost certainly be willing to help.'

'Really?'

A soldier from the Nordland regiment who fought at the front. He joined us in the Resistance as a volunteer in 1944.’

‘Wow.'

'He grew up on a remote farm with his parents and elder brothers, who were all fanatical NS people, and was forced to sign up for service at the front. He himself was never a convinced Nazi, and in 1943 he deserted near Leningrad. He was briefly in Russian captivity and fought alongside the Russians before managing to get back to Norway via Sweden.'

'Did you trust a soldier from the Eastern Front?'

Juul laughed. 'Absolutely.'

'Why are you laughing?'

'It's a long story'

'I've got plenty of time.'

'We ordered him to eliminate a member of his family'

Harry stopped pedalling. Juul cleared his throat.

'When we found him in Nordmarka, just north of Ullevalseter, at first we didn't believe his story. We thought he was an infiltrator and we were of a mind to shoot him. We had connections in the Oslo police archives, which meant that we could check his story, and it turned out in fact that he had been reported missing at the front. He was presumed to have deserted. His family background checked out and he had papers showing he was who he said he was. All of this could have been fabricated by the Germans, of course, so we decided to put him to the test.'

Pause.

'And?'

'We hid him in a hut, away from both us and the Germans. Someone suggested that we should order him to eliminate one of his brothers in the Nasjonal Samling. The main idea was to see how he would react. He didn't say a word when we gave him the orders, but the next day he was gone when we went down to his hut. We were sure he had backed out, but two days later he reappeared. He said he had been to the family farm in Gudbrandsdalen. A few days later we received reports from our people up there. One brother had been found in the cowshed, the other in the barn. The parents on the sitting-room floor.

'My God,' Harry said. 'The man must have been out of his mind.'

'Probably. We all were. It was war. Besides, we never talked about it, not then and not since. You shouldn't either…'

'Of course not. Where does he live?'

'Here in Oslo. Holmenkollen, I think.'

'And his name is?'

'Fauke. Sindre Fauke.'

'Great. I'll contact him. Thank you, herr Juul.'

On the TV screen, there was a very close close-up of Poppe sending a tearful greeting home. Harry secured the mobile phone in the waistband of his tracksuit bottoms, hitched them up and strode off to the weights room.

Shania Twain remained unimpressed.