Norwegian by Night (5 page)

Sheldon mutters under his breath. ‘Run, you fool. Get out, go to the police, and don't look back. He's going to kill you.'

And then the
bang
echoes from upstairs. Same as before. It is the door hitting the wall behind it.

Aloud, Sheldon says, ‘Run, you dummy. Why are you just standing there?'

On a hunch, Sheldon turns his head and looks out the front window. And there is the answer. A white Mercedes is parked outside. Inside, men in cheap leather jackets are smoking cigarettes, barring her escape.

And that seals it.

Quietly, slowly, but without hesitation, Sheldon opens the door.

What he sees is not what he expected.

The woman is clutching an ugly pink box just big enough to hold an adult pair of shoes. And she is not alone. Pressed against her belly is a small boy, maybe seven or eight years old. He is clearly terrified. He is dressed in little blue wellington boots with yellow Paddington Bears painted on the sides by hand. Tucked inside carefully are beige corduroy trousers. On top, he is wrapped in a green jacket of waxed cotton.

The footsteps from up above pound the floors. A voice hollers a name. Vera, maybe? Laura? Clara? Two syllables, anyway. Barked out. Coughed up.

Sheldon ushers them in with his finger pressed against his lips.

Vera looks up the stairs, then out the door. She does not look at Sheldon. She does not wonder about his intentions or give him a chance to reconsider by looking into his eyes for clarity. She pushes the silent boy in front of herself and into the flat.

Sheldon closes the door very, very quietly. The woman with her wide Slavic face looks at him in conspiratorial terror. They all squat down with their backs against the door, waiting for the monster to pass.

Again he raises his finger to his lips. ‘Shhh,' he says.

No need to look out the peephole now. He is no longer one of the people he abhorred. Sitting next to his neighbours, he wants to stand in the middle of a soccer field with a bull horn, surrounded by Europe's oldest generation and yell, ‘Was that so fucking hard?'

But outside he is silent. Disciplined. Calm. An old soldier.

‘When you sneak up on a man to kill him with a knife,' his staff sergeant explained sixty years ago, ‘don't stare at him. People know when you're staring at the backs of their heads. I don't know how, I don't know why. Just don't look at their heads. Look at the feet, approach, get the knife in. Head forward, not back. Never let him know you're there. If you want him dead, make him dead. Don't negotiate it with him. He's likely to disagree.'

Sheldon never had trouble with this end of things. Never pondered the imponderables, questioned his mission, doubted his function. Before he got lost and ended up on the HMAS
Bataan
, he was shaken awake one night by Mario de Luca. Mario was from San Francisco. His parents had emigrated from Tuscany with the intention of buying wine land north of San Francisco, but somehow his father never got out of the city, and Mario was drafted. Where Donny had intense blue eyes and sandy blond hair, Mario was dark like a Sicilian fisherman. And he talked like he'd been injected with some kind of truth serum.

‘Donny? Donny, you up?'

Donny didn't answer.

‘Donny. Donny, you up?'

This went on for minutes.

‘Donny. Donny, you up?'

‘It will not help my cause by answering you,' he'd said.

‘Donny, I don't get this invasion. I don't get this war. I don't know what we're supposed to do. What are we doing here?'

Donny was dressed in flannel pyjamas that were not government-issue. He replied, ‘You get out of the boat. You shoot Koreans. You get back in the boat. What confuses you?'

‘The middle part,' Mario explained. ‘Although, now that I think about it, the first part, too.'

‘What about the third part?'

‘No, that part is like crystal.'

‘So what about the first two?'

‘My motivation? What's my motivation?'

‘They'll be shooting at you.'

‘Then what's their motivation?'

‘You'll be shooting at them.'

‘What if I don't shoot at them?'

‘They'll still be shooting at you because other people will be shooting at them, and they won't differentiate. And you'll want them to stop, so you'll shoot back.'

‘What if I ask them not to?'

‘They're too far away, and they speak Korean.'

‘So I need to get closer and have a translator?'

‘Right. But you can't.'

‘Because they're shooting at me.'

‘That's the problem.'

‘But that's absurd!'

‘Yes, it is.'

‘It can't be true!'

‘Most things are both true and absurd.'

‘That's also absurd.'

‘And yet …?'

‘It may also be true. Jesus, Donny. I'm going to be up all night.'

Then Donny whispered, ‘If you don't go to bed, there will be no tomorrow. And it'll be all your fault.'

The monster's feet stop outside the door. What were stomping, pounding footfalls of a pursuer are now gentle shuffles. Whoever is chasing them is now spinning around, looking for them as though they might be hiding in a shadow or under a ray of light. Outside, a car door slams. Then another slams. There is fast talking in Serbian, or Albanian, or whatever it is. The conversation is easy to imagine.

‘Where did they go?'

‘I thought they were with you?'

‘They must have come out the front door.'

‘I didn't see anything.'

And then, because they are amateurs, because they are fools, they turn on each other and away from the task at hand.

‘That's because you were smoking and talking about that slut again.'

‘It was your job to bring them out. I'm just waiting.'

And so on.

One sound is all it would take to give them away. One squeal of glee from the hiding child who thinks it is all a game, or a whine because of his immobility. Or simply a cry of fear — something so human as a cry of fear.

Sheldon looks at him. The boy's back is against the door like his own, and his knees are up. He has wrapped his arms around them and is looking down at the floor in a gesture of defeat and isolation. Sheldon understands at once that he is assuming a familiar position. He will be silent. It has been a learned skill in his world of terror.

And then the talking, the bickering, ends. The doors to the Mercedes open and close again, and the powerful engine starts. In a few moments, the car pulls off.

Sheldon sighs. He rubs his hands all over his face to stimulate some blood flow, and then forcefully massages his scalp. He has always imagined his brain like the liquid iron core of the earth — grey and heavy, constantly in motion, producing its own gravity, and carefully balanced on his neck's vertebrae like the earth is balanced on the backs of turtles in the cosmos.

Events like this tend to cause the iron flow to slow or even reverse, which can result in ice ages. A little massage usually takes care of the grey matter, though.

This time he is cold all over.

He looks up at his companions, who are still foetal on his floor. The woman looks more pasty, more podgy, than she was when viewed through the fisheye lens. The thin leather jacket is thinner. The trampy shirt is trampier. It all speaks to lower-class Balkan immigrant. He never saw the man outside the door. He could only imagine him being fat and sweating, wearing a Chinese-made Adidas tracksuit with white stripes down the arms and legs. His equally foul-breathed colleagues are probably in dark open shirts under poorly fitting, fake designer jackets, the texture of vinyl.

It is all so hopelessly predictable. Everything except the painted Paddington Bears on the boy's bright-blue wellingtons. These have been painted by someone with love and imagination. Sheldon is, at this moment, inexplicably prepared to credit them to the pasty hooker on his floor.

The car has moved off, so Sheldon says to the boy, ‘Those are nice boots.'

The boy looks up from the crook of his arm. He does not understand. Sheldon can't be sure if it's the comment itself that he doesn't understand, the timing of the comment, or else the language. There is no good reason, after all, to think he speaks English, except that everyone these days speaks English.

I mean, really. Why speak anything else? Stubbornness. That's why.

It also occurs to him that perhaps it is the soothing and encouraging male voice that is so rare and so unfamiliar. He lives in a world of violent men, like so many boys do. With this thought, he can't help but try again.

‘Nice bears,' says Sheldon, pointing at the bears and giving the thumbs up.

The boy looks down at the boots and turns one leg inward to get a look at the boots for himself. He does not know what Sheldon is saying, but he does know what he's talking about. He looks back at Sheldon without a smile, and then places his face back into the crook of his arm.

The woman stands up during Sheldon's gesture to the boy and is now talking. She is speaking quickly. The tone is grateful and seemingly apologetic, which seems to follow, given the circumstances. The words themselves are gibberish but, luckily, Sheldon speaks English, which is universally understood.

‘You're welcome. Yes. Yes — yes. Look, I'm old, so take my advice. Leave your husband. He's a Nazi.'

Her babbling continues. Even looking at her is exasperating. She has the accent of a Russian prostitute. The same nasal confidence. The same fluid slur of words. Not a single moment taken to collect her thoughts or search for a phrase. Only the educated stop to look for words — having enough to occasionally misplace them.

Sheldon labours to his feet and brushes off his trousers. He holds up his hands. ‘I don't understand. I don't understand. I'm not even sure I care. Just go to the police and get your boy a milkshake.'

She does not slow down.

‘Milkshake,' says Sheldon. ‘Police.'

Sheldon decides her name is Vera. Sheldon watches Vera gesture towards the boy and nod. She points and nods. She nods and points. She puts her hands together in a praying gesture. She crosses herself, which makes Sheldon lift his eyebrows for the first time.

‘In that case, why not just stay, have a cup of tea, and wait this out for an hour? Waiting is wise. He might come back. You don't want to go back to the apartment. Believe me.'

He thinks for a moment. There is a word they used in the Ukrainian part of Brooklyn. Yes. ‘
Chai.
' It is Russian for tea. He makes sipping sounds and says it again. To be absolutely certain he is communicating, he sticks out his pinkie finger and makes yummy slurping sounds.

‘Tea. Nazi. Milkshake. Police. Are we clear?'

Vera does not respond to Sheldon's pantomime. Exasperated, Sheldon throws up his hands. It is like persuading a plant to move.

As Vera keeps talking and the boy sits, Sheldon hears a rumbling — the familiar if distant sound of a German diesel engine pinging and ponging its way slowly around a nearby bend.

‘They're coming back. We have to leave. Now. They might not be as stupid as they absolutely seem to be. Come on. Come-come-come-come-come.' He gestures, and when the car stops and the door opens, he decides the time for niceties has ended.

With extraordinary effort, Sheldon bends down and lifts the boy up, cradling him under the bottom like a toddler. He is not strong enough to use a free arm to grab Vera's sleeve and pull her. He needs all his strength for the boy. He has nothing to move her but his power to convince. And he knows his power is limited.

‘
Puzhaltzda,'
he says.
Please.

It is the only real Russian he knows.

He moves with the boy to the three stairs that descend into his own apartment.

There is a bang at the door.

‘
Puzhaltzda,'
he says.

She talks more. She is explaining something crucial. He cannot make any sense of it, and then makes the kind of decision a soldier makes with simple, irreproachable logic.

‘I cannot understand you and I am not going to. A violent man is at the front door. I am therefore leaving through the back door. I am taking the boy. If you come with us, you will be better off. If not, I am removing you from the equation. So here we go.'

Sheldon steps down into his bedroom, past the bathroom, and past the closet on his right. Beyond the bookshelf there is a hanging Persian rug that covers the bicycle entrance, which Sheldon has known about for three weeks — not just this morning — but didn't want to admit finding on the day he moved into their apartment.

Say what you want, but there is a value to knowing the entrances and exits to places and problems.