The Kingdom Read online

  ‘What’s that there?’ I heard Kurt Olsen say.

  I turned, acted surprised at still finding him there. He nodded towards the metal grid in the floor where the water gushed down. At the bits that lay there without being washed away.

  ‘Huh?’ I said.

  The sheriff squatted down. ‘There’s blood coming out of them,’ he said. ‘This is flesh.’

  ‘Must be,’ I said.

  He glanced up at me. All that remained of his cigarette was the glowing tip.

  ‘Moose,’ I said. ‘Run over. Got caught in the front mesh. They come here to wash the mess away.’

  ‘I thought you just said it was a tractor, Roy.’

  ‘I guess it’s from a car last night,’ I said. ‘I can ask Egil, if there’s anything you want to...’ The sheriff jumped back as I directed the stream of water onto the lump of flesh so that it was pulled clear of the mesh and floated out across the cement floor.

  ‘...investigate.’ Kurt Olsen’s eyes flashed. He wiped off the thighs of his trousers, even though they were dry. I don’t know if he used the word deliberately, it was the same word he had used back then. Investigate. That of course this would have to be investigated. I didn’t dislike Kurt Olsen. He was an OK guy just doing his job. But I had very definitely disliked his investigating, and I doubt whether he’d have dragged these posters along with him if the name Opgard hadn’t been on them.

  * * *

  —

  When I got back to the station shop two teenage girls were standing there. One was Julie who had taken over behind the counter after Egil. The other girl, the customer, was standing with her back to me. Her head was bowed, she was waiting and gave no indication she was about to turn even though the door had opened. All the same I thought I recognised the Moe girl, the roofer’s daughter. Natalie. I saw her now and then with the boy racer gang outside. Where Julie was open, the bubbly type, as people say, there was something sensitive and at the same time something closed off about Natalie Moe’s expressionless face, as though she thought that any feelings she showed would be either mocked or ridiculed. That’s the age she was at. Although, surely she was at high school by now? Whatever, I had got the picture, picked up on the shame and had it confirmed when Julie greeted me at the same time as she nodded towards the shelf with the morning-after pills. Julie’s only seventeen, so she’s not allowed to sell tobacco and medicines.

  I stepped behind the counter, resolved to get the Moe girl’s embarrassment over as quickly as possible.

  ‘EllaOne?’ I asked and placed the little white box on the counter in front of her.

  ‘Uh?’ said Natalie Moe.

  ‘Your morning-after pill,’ said Julie mercilessly.

  I entered it on the till with my own card, so that it would look as though some presumably responsible adult person had made the purchase. The Moe girl left.

  ‘She’s having it off with Trond-Bertil,’ said Julie and snapped her bubblegum. ‘He’s over thirty, got a wife and kids.’

  ‘She’s young then,’ I said.

  ‘Young for what?’ Julie looked at me. It was strange, she wasn’t a big girl, but everything about her seemed big. The curly hair, the hands, the heavy breasts beneath the broad shoulders. The mouth almost vulgar. And the eyes. Those enormous blue peepers that looked me straight in the eye. ‘To be having it off with someone over thirty?’

  ‘Young to be making sensible decisions all the time,’ I said. ‘Maybe she’ll learn.’

  Julie snorted. ‘That’s not why it’s called a morning-after pill. And just because a girl is young doesn’t mean she doesn’t know what she wants.’

  ‘I’m sure you’re probably right about that.’

  ‘But when we put on an innocent face like that one there, then you men all think poor little girl. Just the way we want you to think.’ She laughed. ‘You’re so simple.’

  I slipped on a pair of plastic gloves and began to butter some baguettes. ‘Is there a secret society?’ I asked.

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘All you women, you think you know how other women think. Do you tell each other how it works, so that you’ve got like a complete internal overview? Because when it comes to other men, all I know is that I don’t know shit. That anything is possible. That at the most forty per cent of what I think I know about a man turns out to be right.’ I added the salami and the egg, delivered ready-sliced to the door. ‘And it’s us who are supposed to be simple. So all I can do is congratulate you on having one hundred per cent insight into the other half of the human race.’

  Julie didn’t answer. I saw her swallow. Must have been the lack of sleep last night that made me use heavy artillery like that against a teenage high-school dropout. The kind of girl who gets into all the wrong things too early and none of the right things. Although that could change. She had attitude, as Dad used to say, rebellious, but still, more in need of encouragement than resistance. Needing both of course, but mostly encouragement.

  ‘So you’re beginning to get the hang of how to change tyres,’ I said.

  Despite still being September, it had snowed on the cabins highest up the mountain. And even though we didn’t sell tyres or advertise a tyre-changing service we still got city folk coming in with their SUVs begging for help. Men as well as women. They simply don’t know how to carry out the most basic tasks. They’ll be dead before the end of the week the day a solar storm knocks out all the electrical equipment in the world.

  Julie smiled. She looked almost too happy. Changeable weather in there.

  ‘City folk think the roads are slippery now,’ Julie said. ‘Imagine when it gets really cold, minus twenty, thirty.’

  ‘Then the roads’ll be less slippery,’ I said.

  She looked quizzically at me.

  ‘Ice is slippier when it’s closer to melting point,’ I said. ‘Slippiest of all when it’s exactly seven degrees below. That’s the temperature they try to keep the ice in ice-hockey stadiums. What we slip on isn’t an invisible thin coating of water on account of the pressure and friction, the way people used to think, but gas that’s formed by loose molecules at those temperatures.’

  ‘How come you know all this stuff, Roy?’ She gave me a look of undeserved admiration.

  That, of course, made me feel like one of those idiots I can’t stand myself, always showing off with random and superficial snippets of knowledge.

  ‘It’s the kind of stuff you can read in what we sell,’ I said, pointing to the magazine racks where Popular Science was stacked next to magazines about cars, boats, hunting and fishing, True Crime and – at the insistence of the head of sales – a couple of fashion magazines.

  But Julie wasn’t going to let me down from my pedestal that easily.

  ‘Thirty’s not that old if you ask me. At least it’s better than twenty-year-olds who think they’re grown up just because they’ve passed their driving test.’

  ‘I’m over thirty, Julie.’

  ‘Are you? Then how old’s your brother?’

  ‘Thirty-five.’

  ‘He was in buying petrol yesterday,’ she said.

  ‘You weren’t working.’

  ‘I was here with some of my friends sitting in Knerten’s car. It was him said it was your brother. Know what my friends said? They said your brother was a DILF.’

  I didn’t reply.

  ‘But you know what? If you ask me, you’re more of a DILF.’

  I gave her a warning glare. She just grinned. Straightened up almost unnoticeably and drew her broad shoulders back. ‘DILF stands for—’

  ‘Thank you, but I think I know what it stands for. You gonna handle the Asko delivery?’

  An Asko truck had pulled into the station. Soda water and sweets.

  Julie looked at me with a deeply practised I’m-bored-to-death look. She blew a bubble gum balloon that
burst. Tossed her head and marched out.

  3

  ‘HERE?’ I ASKED IN DISBELIEF, looking across our outfields.

  ‘Here,’ said Carl.

  Rocks with heather. Wind-blasted bare mountainside. Fantastic view of course, with blue mountain tops in all directions and the sun glinting on the water down there. But all the same. ‘You’re going to have to build a road up here. Water. Sewage. Electricity.’

  ‘Right.’ Carl laughed.

  ‘Carry out maintenance on something that’s on a...on a fucking mountain top.’

  ‘It’s unique, right?’

  ‘And lovely,’ said Shannon. She was standing behind us with her arms folded, shivering in her black coat. ‘It’ll be lovely.’

  I’d come home early from the station and of course the first thing I did was confront Carl about those posters.

  ‘Without saying a single fucking word to me?’ I said. ‘Have you any idea how many questions I’ve had today?’

  ‘How many? Did they seem positive?’ The keen way Carl asked made me understand he really didn’t care a damn about how I felt about being trampled over and ignored.

  ‘But for chrissakes,’ I said, ‘why didn’t you tell me this was what you were coming back for?’

  ‘Because I didn’t want you to hear just half the story, Roy.’ Carl laid an arm around my shoulder, gave me that warm damn smile. ‘Didn’t want you wandering about up here thinking up all kinds of objections. Because you’re a born sceptic, and you know it. So now let’s go and have dinner and I’ll tell you the whole story. OK?’

  And yes, my mood improved slightly, if for no other reason than that for the first time since Mum and Dad there was a meal cooked and ready on the table when I came home from work. After we’d eaten our fill Carl had shown me the drawings for the hotel. It looked like an igloo on the moon. The only difference being that on this moon a couple of reindeer wandered by. Those reindeer and some moss were all the architect had provided of exterior staffage, apart from that it looked pretty sterile and modernist. The funny thing was that I liked it, but that was probably because I saw something that resembled a service station on Mars and not a hotel where people could relax and enjoy themselves. I mean, surely people want places like that to have a bit more warmth and class, a bit more of Norwegian national romance about them, rose-painted panels, turf roofs, like the palace of some fairy-tale king or whatever.

  Then we’d walked the short kilometre from the house to the proposed building site, with the evening sun glowing in the heather and on the polished granite of the peaks.

  ‘See how it moulds itself into the landscape,’ said Carl as he drew in the air the hotel we had been looking at in the dining room. ‘The landscape and the function are what matter, not people’s expectations of what a mountain hotel should look like. This is a hotel that will change people’s ideas about architecture, not just hum along with them.’

  ‘OK then,’ I answered, no doubt sounding as sceptical as I thought there was every reason to be.

  Carl explained the hotel would be 11,000 square metres and have two hundred rooms. It could be up and running within two years of the first shovel of dirt being shifted. Or the first explosive detonated – there wasn’t a lot of earth up here. Carl’s ‘pessimistic estimate’ was that it would cost four hundred million.

  ‘How do you propose to get hold of four hundred—’

  ‘The bank.’

  ‘Os Savings Bank?’

  ‘No, no.’ He laughed. ‘They’re too small for this. A city bank. DnB.’

  ‘And why would they loan you four hundred mil for this...?’ I didn’t actually say lunacy, but it was pretty obvious what I was thinking.

  ‘Because we’re not going to start a limited company. We’re going to start an SL.’

  ‘SL?’

  ‘A Shared Liability company. People in the village don’t have a lot of cash. What they do have are the farms and the land they live on. With an SL they don’t need to put up a single krone to come along for the ride. And everyone who’s in, the great and the small, has the same share and makes the same profit. They can all just sit back and let their property do the work for them. The bankers will be drooling at the mouth for the chance to finance this whole thing because they’ve never been offered better security than a whole bloody village!’

  I scratched my head. ‘You mean, if the whole thing goes to hell, then—’

  ‘Then each investor is liable only for his own share. If there are a hundred of us, and the company goes bankrupt with a debt of a hundred thousand, then all you’re liable for, you and the rest of the investors, is a thousand kroner each. Even if some of the investors can’t manage the thousand, that’s not your problem, it’s the creditors’ problem.’

  ‘Jesus.’

  ‘Beautiful, isn’t it? So the more that are involved, the less the individual risk. But of course that also means the less they earn when this thing really takes off.’

  It was a lot to take on board. A type of company where you don’t have to lay out a single krone and just rake it in, if everything goes according to plan. And if it all goes to hell, the only thing you’re liable for is your own share.

  ‘OK,’ I said, trying to figure out where the catch might be. ‘So why invite people to an investors’ meeting when they aren’t going to be investing anything?’

  ‘Because “investor” sounds a lot more impressive than just “participant”. Don’t you think?’ Carl hooked his thumbs into his belt and put on a funny voice: ‘I ain’t just a farmer, I’m a hotel investor, don’t you know.’ He laughed loudly. ‘It’s pure psychology. When half the village has signed up the rest won’t be able to stand the thought of their neighbours buying themselves Audis and calling themselves hotel owners and not being a part of it themselves. Better to risk losing a few kroner, so long as your neighbour does the same.’

  I nodded slowly. He’d probably got the psychology about right there.

  ‘The project is solid. The tricky bit is to get the train rolling.’ Carl kicked at the ground beneath us. ‘Get the first few to commit, people who can show the others they think the project’s attractive enough to want to be a part of. If we manage that, then everyone will want to climb on board and then the thing will be rolling along under its own steam.’

  ‘OK. And how are you going to persuade the first to come on board?’

  ‘When I can’t even manage to convince my own brother, you mean?’ He smiled that fine, open smile with the slightly sad eyes. ‘One’ll do,’ said Carl before I could respond.

  ‘And that one is...?’

  ‘The bellwether. Aas.’

  Of course. The old council chairman. Mari’s father. He’d been calling meetings to order for more than twenty years, run this solidly Labour commune with a firm hand through good times and bad until one day he’d decided that was enough. Aas had to be over seventy by now and busied himself mostly at home on the farm, although now and then he would write something in the local newspaper, the Os Daily, and people read what he wrote. And even those who didn’t agree with Aas to begin with would start looking at things in a new light. Light shed through the old chairman’s way with words, his wisdom and his undeniable knack of always making the right decisions. People really did believe that the plans for a national highway bypassing the village would never have seen the light of day if Aas had still been chairman, that he would have explained to them how this would ruin everything, deprive the village of the extra income the through-traffic brought them, wipe an entire local community off the map and turn it into a deserted ghost town with just a few subsidised farmers close to retiring age still clinging on. And someone had suggested that Aas – and not the current chairman – lead a delegation to the capital to talk some sense into the transport minister.

  I spat. Which, for your information, is the opposite of the good
ole boy’s slow nodding of the head and means that you do not agree.

  ‘So you think Aas is just dying to risk his farm and his land on a spa hotel high up on top of the bare mountain? That he wants to put his fate in the hands of the guy who cheated on his daughter and then ran off abroad?’

  Carl shook his head. ‘You don’t get it. Aas liked me, Roy. I wasn’t just his future son-in-law, I was the son he never had.’

  ‘Everybody liked you, Carl. But when you screw her best friend...’

  Carl gave me a warning look and I lowered my voice and checked that Shannon – who was squatting in the heather and studying something – was out of earshot.

  ‘...then you slip a few places down the hit parade.’

  ‘Aas never knew about what happened between me and Grete,’ said Carl. ‘All he knows is that his daughter dumped me.’

  ‘Oh?’ I said in disbelief. And then a little less disbelieving once I thought about it. Mari – always very conscious of appearances – had naturally preferred the official version of her break-up with the village heart-throb, this being that she had dumped him, the unspoken assumption being that she was aiming higher than the mountain farm boy Opgard.

  ‘Straight after Mari broke up with me, I was summoned by Aas, and he told me how disappointed he was,’ said Carl. ‘He wondered if me and Mari couldn’t make up again somehow. Told me how him and his wife had been through some rough patches too, but they’d stuck it out now for over forty years. I said I would like that too, but right now I needed to get away for a while. He said he understood and gave me a few suggestions. My exam results at school were good, Mari had told him, and maybe he could arrange for a scholarship to a university in the States.’

  ‘Minnesota? Was that Aas?’

  ‘He had some contacts with the Norwegian–American Society there.’