Wolf Hour

6 Ghosts, September 2022

We’re back in downtown. I tell the taxi driver to wait for me and I get out. The city is awake by now and I hear the whistle blow as the subway train glides out of the station behind me. In front of me is a statue of Mayor Hubert Humphrey. Before he was mayor he was vice president, as well as a presidential candidate. During one of our trips to the USA, Dad brought us here and told us that the man up there on the plinth was half-Norwegian and that his mother, Ragnild Kristine Sannes, came from the same place in Norway as our family. She’d been one of twelve children and had fled from poverty in Norway to a country in which she would give birth to a child who would one day be just a few votes short of becoming the most powerful leader in the world. That’s what was so fantastic about this country, our father explained to us. That someone from a humble background — like the man who won that election, Richard Nixon — could end up at the very top. When we got back to Oslo, I bought a map of America and hung it over my bed, along with my posters of Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe. It was only later that I realised my father had been lying. In the first place, more or less all presidents except one during the previous hundred years were millionaires, and as for the American dream of social mobility, you had to work your way far down the list before you found my beloved USA, right behind Lithuania, South Korea and Portugal.

But strangely enough it was as though my father’s lies only served to further convince me that America is the home of the free and the brave. Because despite all the nice things you can say about my so-called home country of Norway, it’s fantastically boring. All you need to do is compare Oslo City Hall with the city hall behind the statue of Humphrey. The city hall in Oslo is just a couple of shoeboxes standing upright. Red brick, small windows, the place could be a factory. But Minneapolis City Hall, with its spires and its ornamentations and huge blocks of stone, radiates something exalted, like a cathedral, or a castle. Or like the Disneyland castle. The original intention was that these costly granite blocks, some weighing up to twenty tons, should be used only for the foundations and the rest be built of less expensive brick. But once the people of Minneapolis saw how mighty those granite blocks were they overruled the penny-pinching bureaucrats and made sure the whole building was made of granite. Which, of course, blew the budget to pieces. Which is the way to do it, if you ask me!

I have come here to get a closer look at this building because it is going to play an important part in my book. Inside, behind the granite blocks, you’ll find not just the mayor’s office, but courtrooms, police headquarters, even prison cells. And up on the sixth floor, the Homicide Department.

With the Ghost of City Hall.

It was in the Oslo public library that I came across a true-crime pamphlet about John Moshik, and the first and last public execution to take place at the city hall, back in 1898. Moshik was sentenced for killing a man for just fourteen dollars. But the means employed — hanging by the neck until dead — didn’t go according to plan. It took eight minutes for Moshik to die. Meaning just a minute less than the amount of time Derek Chauvin held his knee against George Floyd’s neck after Floyd had been arrested on suspicion of having paid for a pack of cigarettes with a counterfeit twenty-dollar bill. According to my contact in the MPD, Moshik’s ghost still walks the floor up there in the Homicide Department. But my business here is not Moshik’s ghost, or George Floyd’s either. The ghost I’m looking for was seen passing a CCTV camera six years ago, following a shooting in Jordan. And no one knew back then that this was only the beginning. I don’t know if this makes me a bad person, but the thought gives me a pleasurable shiver as I stand there studying the facade of the building. The black windows reveal nothing. My job is to fill in the blank spaces, give lines to the characters and life to the scenes.