The Fifth Element Read online

  “And what’s that?”

  “Defense attorney.”

  “High profile?” she said in English.

  “No.”

  “Okay. Maybe you’ve had a worse day than I’ve had. But I still doubt it. And I really don’t know whether my day is going to improve any by meeting a defense attorney. That’s a professional group that specializes in tearing apart the work I do.”

  “Ah. A prosecuting attorney with an accent?”

  “No, police detective. Or, at least I was, in a former life. It’s a long story.”

  “Where in the States are you from? Somewhere in the south?”

  “Virginia.”

  “Does this long story of yours include falling in love and moving to Norway?”

  “Why should I tell you about it?”

  “Because I’m a good listener. You police folks think that defense lawyers like me do nothing but talk. But most of my job involves listening. Anyone who can’t stand to listen to all the shit doesn’t belong in my job.”

  “It sounds to me like you’ve had enough of it yourself.”

  He looked at her and laughed.

  “I thought we were talking about you and your problems.”

  There was something about his laugh, something that provoked her, aroused her, made her scared.

  “So are you going to buy me a beer, or what?” she said.

  She’d switched to English by now. It made her relax, feel like a foreigner.

  “I like your eyes,” he said. “It’s like you’re looking inward. Gives you a melancholy air.”

  “I am melancholy.”

  “Really? Well, I guess I was right.” He laughed again. “I think you’re the kind of person who’s always evaluating yourself, never taking a break from your thoughts. Am I right?”

  “I was described in almost those exact words once before.”

  “Let’s hear it.”

  “It’s a story I’ve actually been trying to suppress. It says way too much about my profession and way too much about the sort of people I meet on the job.”

  “Don’t tell me you’re one of those officers who’s seen so much shit that you’ve lost all faith in people.”

  “When I was young, I was in rehab.”

  “Rehab? Maybe it’s not such a good idea for me to be buying you a drink.”

  “Are you going to let me tell my story or not?”

  “Sure. Go ahead.”

  “I was only nineteen. Had just graduated from high school. Was about to go to college and study literature. Instead my parents ended up taking me with them to Alaska for a whole year. I guess they wanted to get me away from Richmond and make sure I didn’t have a relapse. My father, who was a police officer and grew up in Alaska, got a temporary position as a sheriff in Barrow, the northernmost town in the States. On the North Slope, Iñupiat country. I was allowed to go along and help him with his work. He often gave me more responsibility than a teenager ought to have. I think it was his way of building my self-esteem. And I guess it worked. He always understood me better than my mother did.

  “One day I got permission to drive out of town to visit an Iñupiat family who lived on the coast. Every morning, all the children in that family were picked up in cars and driven to Barrow Elementary School. But the school reported that one of the pupils, a young boy, hadn’t shown up for a long time. The boy’s name was Adlartok. This was in early October and the middle of the whaling season, so school attendance fluctuated a lot more than at other times of the year. It wasn’t unusual for children to be absent from school. But this boy lived with his grandfather, and everyone knew that the old man didn’t go out whaling. And the boy had never before missed a single day of school. So when the teacher hadn’t seen him in almost two weeks, she phoned my father and asked him to go over there and see if the boy was okay. It seemed routine, so my father passed it on to me.

  “The little shack was built on stilts, which was customary up there. Not, as many people think, to keep the polar bears away at night but to make sure the heat inside the house didn’t melt the permafrost, because then the house would sink into the ground. That ramshackle house didn’t look like it had enough weight to sink into anything at all. I climbed up the ladder, which had a broken rung, and knocked on the sheet-metal wall next to the doorway. No answer. Three layers of walrus hide covered the door opening. Finally, I pushed them aside and went into the dark room. The grandfather was sitting at the hearth in the middle of the room. A cooking pot hung over the flames, and I could see meat boiling in the water. There was no electricity, which was unusual, even out there.

  “The old man looked up at me when I came in. I sat down next to him and explained that the sheriff had sent me. Then I asked if it would be all right if we had a chat.

  “‘You are welcome to chat,’ he replied in hesitant English.

  “I told him I’d come to see Adlartok.

  “He said, ‘Adlartok is in here,’ and he pointed to his chest.

  “Then he looked at me, and I looked into his eyes. They were gray, as if their original color had long ago faded into his bloodstream, and I saw nothing. People always say that the eyes are the windows to the soul. I’ve been a police officer long enough to know they’re actually the window shutters of the soul. But I’d never seen eyes like that before, or since. It was like I could see right through them, all the way through the man and the wall behind him, out into the gray, twilight landscape.

  “I got worried and asked him what he meant.

  “‘Don’t ask me what I mean,’ he said, and he stared at me for a long time with those squinting gray eyes of his. ‘We are alike and not alike, the two of us,’ he said. ‘We look inward. But I see a desolate landscape, while you see a stormy sea. You are trying to quiet a sea with questions. You will never succeed.’

  “When I got up, I thought what he’d said might be some pearl of wisdom. Had he told me something important? Something that might change me? I was nineteen, and I thought there was some truth that defined me. Something that others could see but I couldn’t. I also thought that old folks could see things more clearly than most people.

  “I also understood that I wasn’t going to get anything more out of the old man. So I drove around to ask the neighbors about the boy. No one had seen him in a long time. Either him or his grandfather.

  “On my way back to town something suddenly occurred to me. The thought was monstrous, but I was sure I was right.” Here Felicia fell silent. “So what’s happening with that beer?” she asked.

  “Aren’t you going to finish the story?”

  “I don’t much care for the ending.”

  “You can’t just stop like that.”

  “The point was that the old man said the same thing you did. That I look inward. If I tell you the end of the story, you’ll find out how much I think your observation is worth. Wait here.”

  Felicia got up and went over to the bar. There she paid for a shot of scotch, which she downed instantly, and bought two beers, which she brought back to the table.

  “I thought I was the one buying,” he said.

  “You were too slow.” Felicia looked at him. She liked his face. He had coarse skin, and he needed a shave. A redeeming feature in a lawyer, she thought.

  “What I realized was that he hadn’t pointed to his chest, after all,” she said.

  “Where are we now?” he asked.

  “Back in Alaska. With the grandfather. When he pointed at himself and said his grandson was inside. He wasn’t pointing at his chest. He was pointing at his stomach.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “My father went out there later that day and confiscated the cooking pot with the boiled meat. Tests showed that it was equal parts whale meat and human flesh.”

  “My God!”

  “You were the one who wanted to hear the ending. That wise old man was totally psychotic. I had mistaken insanity for wisdom.”

  The lawyer sat there staring at her. Then he
raised his glass.

  “Here’s to your excellent insight into yourself,” he said.

  They both laughed.

  And that led to more toasts and more glasses of beer.

  8

  The day before it happened …

  That was how Felicia had ended up in this apartment, drinking a cup of coffee and looking out at the unfamiliar street.

  “I’m an alcoholic,” she said laconically. She spoke the words aloud, facing the window, as if someone could hear her down there on the deserted street.

  “I’m a two-timing alcoholic. Somebody who destroys things.”

  But what had she destroyed?

  I love him. I was never really mad at him. That wasn’t why I walked out. I just needed some distance. I think I was feeling like it was all too much—too much of us and him and his job.

  She stopped herself there.

  Why do I start all my sentences with the word I? she thought.

  Then she drank the rest of her coffee and left the apartment.

  Outside it was snowing, and the wind was so fierce that she decided to take a cab to Oslo Central Station. Besides, she might not be able to find her way there otherwise. For some strange reason, she took comfort in the fact that she had no idea where in the city she was. She didn’t know the names of the various neighborhoods or the parks or the streets. It was almost as if none of this had happened, as if she’d dreamed the whole thing.

  Even the express train to the airport had trouble staying on schedule. The weather was worse than the last time she’d gone out to the airport, and there was little hope that any flights would be leaving on time this morning.

  Felicia considered turning her phone back on to call Odd. She knew he must be worried about her. But she decided to wait.

  I need to see him. I actually need to see Odd again before I know what to say to him, and if I do decide to say something, I have to figure out how to say it.

  She wouldn’t know what had been destroyed and what was still whole until she looked into his eyes again.

  * * *

  “You’re not going to get to Trondheim today. We have passengers still waiting here from yesterday’s canceled flights. And they’ve already bought tickets, so they’ll have priority if we get any planes off the ground today. It’s even worse than before. A few planes departed yesterday, but I don’t know about today.”

  She got the same answer from Norwegian Air as she’d heard from SAS.

  The woman behind the service counter was already looking over Felicia’s shoulder to the next person in the line of grumbling passengers. The airline agent hid her stress behind an annoying professional indifference. Felicia had an urge to scream at the woman that she needed to go home, that she couldn’t wait. She was sweating and shaking. She felt like shit, in spite of the shower she’d taken that morning. But she realized there wasn’t a special line for people who needed to find out ASAP if they were loved. If they could still be loved.

  “You could try taking the train.”

  Felicia thanked the woman and took her suggestion.

  There were no seats available until the night train, which left at 11:45 P.M., and she’d have to sit up all night because the sleeping cars were booked. She bought herself a ticket. Then she went over to the Radisson Blu Plaza Hotel and got a room.

  It was still early in the day, and she knew she could sleep for hours. She asked for a wake-up call at eleven.

  Then she went to the room and crawled into bed. But she couldn’t sleep and decided to watch a movie instead on cable TV. Casablanca. She loved that film. But not today.

  * * *

  “It’s sheer chaos. The worst day I can ever remember,” said the Norwegian rail conductor as he walked along the platform to explain the situation to travelers.

  An announcement over the loudspeakers had just informed everyone that the night train to Trondheim had been canceled due to weather conditions. For the same reason, there would be no bus to replace the train on that particular stretch of track.

  “If I were you, I’d get a hotel room with a good selection of booze in the mini-bar. The forecast is for better weather in the morning, and sooner or later the traffic is bound to ease up. If you’re really desperate, I think there are still rental cars available, but I can’t promise decent driving conditions. If you want to wait for tomorrow’s trains, the NSB railroad will cover a night’s lodging, up to a certain limit. Please contact our information desk, which is in the airport arrivals hall.”

  The conductor took off his cap to wipe his brow, which was sweaty in spite of the cold temperature out on the platform. Then he moved on to the next group of frustrated and worn-out travelers.

  Felicia stood there for a moment, staring after him. Then she made up her mind to rent a car.

  An hour later, a little past one in the morning, she was sitting in a four-wheel-drive Subaru with studded tires, heading away from Gardermoen Airport. Whirling snow danced past her. It was like having thousands of scratches on the glass of the windshield, in a constantly flickering pattern. On the radio the main news topic was the bad weather and all the delays. Everyone was being advised to travel only if necessary, and otherwise remain patient and calm.

  Nothing is more necessary than this trip, thought Felicia.

  Otherwise there was little news. A boy was reported missing from a shop in Oslo, where a man had been found dead. The police considered both the disappearance and the death to be suspicious.

  When she reached the E6, the light sculpture titled Kepler’s Star illuminated the snowdrift like an enormous catalyst for the storm.

  In fact, the road conditions weren’t that bad.

  Sure, a blizzard like this would be a disaster in Richmond, Virginia. Even a light snowfall paralyzed the whole city. There were hardly any snowplows, and no one even knew what studded tires were. Chaos would reign.

  In Norway things were totally different. Here it was actually possible to drive in a snowstorm. The plows were all at work, and on the main highways there was enough traffic to pack down the snow into a hard crust that was safe for driving.

  The biggest problem was really Felicia’s lack of experience in driving on icy surfaces. She’d driven a little during that long winter she’d spent in Barrow. But there the roads were straight, with few curves, and the distances were never far. It was a community of only three thousand inhabitants, surrounded by a huge expanse of ice. In the winter, when eternal night descended and the sky shifted from black to a leaden gray, she’d mostly gotten around by riding on the back of her father’s snowmobile. In Norway, on the other hand, driving in the winter was an everyday thing. That might be one of the most exotic things about this country—in Norway you had to take classes in how to drive on icy roads in order to get a driver’s license. Right now she wished she’d taken that class herself.

  She headed north on the E6. Overly cautious, she was probably driving a good fifteen miles an hour below the speed limit. She ended up with a long line of cars behind her, but she was patient, pulling over occasionally to let the other drivers pass.

  At a rest stop south of Hamar she got out to study a map that showed various routes to Trondheim. She’d driven this way a few times before with Odd.

  “I always drive through Østerdalen,” he’d told her the first time they headed south from Trondheim. “Not much to see along the way, but it’s a lot faster. The route through Gudbrandsdalen is for tourists.”

  “I’m a tourist,” she’d told him.

  That was after she’d been in Trondheim only a few weeks. They were going to the christening of Lars’s child. Back then, she was still on vacation from the Richmond Police Department. She hadn’t come up with the crazy idea of quitting and moving in with Odd in his run-down and drafty but charming apartment in this ice-cold land. She was just a tourist in love and nothing more.

  “You can be a tourist when we get to Oslo,” Odd had replied, which was unusually brusque for him.

  She learned lat
er that driving was one of the few things that could put him in a bad mood. The longer the trip, the grumpier he became, his ill temper escalating.

  Felicia promised herself she’d go through Gudbrandsdalen when she made the trip alone. But she wasn’t thinking of a day like today with this kind of weather, so late at night, and with such dark thoughts weighing on her mind.

  A kilometer farther along, she turned off the E6 and onto Highway 3 toward Elverum. She tried to find an open café in Elverum, but it was almost two thirty in the morning, and everything was closed. Luckily she still had plenty of gas. She probably wouldn’t need to fill up before she reached Trondheim. She headed out on the long, white stretch of road up through Østerdalen.

  * * *

  After Elverum, her car was the only one on the road. She was alone with the beam of her headlights, the frantic whirling of the snow, the humming of the heater, the lilt of the Norwegian language as people talked on the radio, and her thoughts about Odd, questions with no answers. The DJ, a woman with a sleepy voice, announced the last song of the night.

  “Three minutes and twenty-six seconds with my favorite brooding song,” she said. “Amazing, heavy, suggestive, depressing. That’s it for me tonight. This is Joy Division, with ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart.’ Have a nice, dark night.”

  Ian Curtis’s trembling, epileptic voice filled the car. Felicia imagined the snowflakes dancing in time to the music, whirling, flitting, stumbling, pieces of ash from a smoldering bonfire, scraps torn from the winter landscape. All of a sudden she began to cry. At first it was only one tear welling up in her eye, clinging like a drop of slush to her eyelashes for a moment. Then it rolled down her cheek.

  More tears.

  She gasped. Tried to take a deep breath and hold it in. But she couldn’t. Gasped again and again. Thought she might run out of oxygen, faint, and drive off the road, putting an end to all her misery. The idea didn’t scare her.

  How selfish can I be? she thought. How fucking selfish?

  Odd had been in the middle of a really big case. The kind that could leave permanent scars. The sort of case that no investigator wishes for.