Blessed Are Those Who Thirst: A Hanne Wilhelmsen Novel (16 page)

“Is there anything special you’re interested in?”

The sweater-clad gentleman was obviously confused. Håverstad figured not many people bothered talking to him. He evidently wanted to talk. He would take whatever time it required.

“Well, yes and no,” E said in reply. “There’s such a lot now, out there.”

A newspaper cutting was jutting out from one of the cardboard boxes. Half the face of a female politician was smiling at him.

“Are you interested in politics?” He smiled, bending down to see what it was about.

E anticipated his move.

“Don’t touch,” he snarled, snapping the box closed right in front of his nose. “Don’t touch my things!”

“No, of course not, of course not!”

Finn Håverstad lifted his hands, palms upward, in a gesture of surrender, wondering at the same time whether he shouldn’t just leave.

“You can look at this,” E said suddenly, as though he had read his thoughts and realized he was actually hungry for company regardless.

He lifted up box number two from the front and held it out to his guest.

“Film reviews,” he explained.

That was what they were. Film reviews from newspapers, perfectly cut out and pasted onto A4 sheets. Underneath each review was the name of the newspaper and the date of the article, neatly inscribed with a fine, black felt-tip pen.

“Do you go to the cinema often?”

Håverstad was not especially interested in E’s habits, but this was at least an opening.

“The cinema? Me? Never. But they come on the television after a while, you see. It’s good to know something about them then.”

Of course. A reasonable explanation. This was absurd. He ought to leave.

“You can see this too.”

Now the man had become considerably more kindly disposed. He risked putting down the clipboard, even though he kept his face averted. The dentist was handed a second box. This one was heavier than the last. He looked around for somewhere to sit, but the floor was the only possibility. The clipboard was lying on the green chair, and the straight-backed chair beside the television did not invite a body such as his to sit.

He hunkered down and opened the box file. E knelt beside him, like an excited little child.

They were car registration numbers. In neat rows down the sheets of paper, divided into three columns. Each number was written down carefully below the previous one. It looked almost as though it had been typed out.

“Car numbers,” E elaborated unnecessarily. “I’ve been collecting them for fourteen years. The first sixteen pages are from here. The rest are from where I lived . . . before.”

Again he adopted that sorry, self-pitying expression, but it disappeared more quickly this time.

“Look at this.” He pointed. “None of the numbers are the same. It’s cheating, really. Just new numbers. Only numbers I can see from the window. Here . . .”

He pointed again.

“Here you see the date. Some days I collect around fifty numbers. Some days it’s just the same ones I’ve got from before. At the weekends and so on. There’s not much then, you see.”

The sweat was pouring from Håverstad. His heart was thumping like a fishing boat with engine trouble, and he sat right down on the actual floor to avoid the exertion of squatting.

“Have you by any chance”—he snorted—“have you by any chance some numbers from last weekend? From Saturday, May twenty-ninth?”

E pulled out a sheet and handed it to him. In the top left-hand corner was written
Saturday, May 29.
Thereafter followed seven car registrations. Only seven!

“Yes, well, it’s only cars that park here, you see,” E explained eagerly. “There’s no point in writing down the ones that just drive past.”

The dentist’s hands were shaking. He felt no pleasure at all at the discovery. Only a faint, slightly numb kind of satisfaction. Almost the same as when he had carried out a successful root canal treatment without causing the patient too much discomfort.

“Could I copy down these numbers, do you think?”

E hesitated for a second, then shrugged his shoulders and stood up.

“Okay.”

Half an hour later, Finn Håverstad was sitting at home faced by a list of seven car registration numbers and a telephone. Luckily, Kristine had gone to the summer cottage. He had plenty of time. Now all he had to do was find out which of these numbers corresponded to red cars. And who owned them. He called the operator and got the phone number of the vehicle registration center in Brønnøysund and five police stations in eastern Norway, and set to work.

*   *   *

The violent shock had subsided, and a heavy, almost liberating sense of peace had settled in its place. When, after spending a few minutes pulling herself together, Kristine had left Central Station secure in the knowledge her rapist had disappeared down one of the platforms with his companion, she remained standing near the taxi line in front of the station, looking around at the city. For the first time in more than a week, she noticed the weather in surprise. She was too warmly dressed. Pulling her sweater over her head, she stuffed it into her shoulder bag. For a moment she regretted she hadn’t brought her rucksack, as it was heavy to carry this one across only one shoulder.

For once there was no queue for taxis. Everybody emerging from the station without too much luggage was doing the same as she was. Taken aback by the lovely heat after the air-conditioned passenger hall, they stretched out in the beautiful weather and decided to put their legs to use. A dark-skinned driver was standing leaning against the hood of his car, reading a foreign newspaper. She approached him, giving him her father’s address and asking how much it would cost to drive there. About a hundred kroner, the man thought. She gave him a hundred-kroner
note and her bag, making sure he understood the address precisely, and asked him just to leave the bag underneath the stairs.

“It’s a big white house with green edges,” she called through the open cab window, as he put the vehicle into gear.

A bare, hairy lower arm gave a friendly wave of reassurance from the window as the Mercedes set off.

Then she strolled toward the Homansbyen neighborhood.

She hated the man intensely. Since he had destroyed her that Saturday night an eternity of a week earlier, she had felt nothing other than powerlessness and sorrow. For hours she had wandered through the streets, overcome by a tumult of feelings she could not manage to sort out. Two days previously, she had stood in front of the railroad track above Majorstua station, right on the bend after the tunnel, invisible to everybody, even the driver of the train. She had stood there stiffly, listening to the approach of the train. Only a meter from the track. When the lead carriage suddenly came into sight around the bend, she hadn’t even heard the piercing whistle. She just stood there, mesmerized, not moving a muscle, without even contemplating throwing herself onto the railroad track. The train rushed past, and the flow of air was so powerful she had needed to take a step back to keep her balance. There was only a centimeter or two between her face and the set of coaches thundering by.

She was not the one who didn’t deserve to live. He was.

Now she had reached her own apartment. Hesitating for a moment at the entrance door, she let herself in.

The apartment looked just as before. It surprised her that it appeared so inviting, so comfortable. She ambled around, touching her possessions, stroking them and noticing that a light layer of dust had settled everywhere. In the dazzling light of the day outside, she saw the particles of dust dancing, as though in delight at seeing her again now that she had returned. She gingerly
opened the refrigerator. It smelled slightly rank, and she emptied out the perishable foodstuffs, already starting to turn moldy. A cheese, two tomatoes, and a cucumber that squished when she grasped it. She placed the garbage bag beside the front door so she would not forget it when she left.

The bedroom door was ajar. She nervously approached the passageway, where the door, which opened out toward her, shielded her view. After a second’s pause for thought, she strode resolutely into the room.

She wondered who had replaced the quilts on the bed. They were lying neatly folded with the pillows at the bottom of the mattress, beside the footboard. The bedcovers she had ripped off were gone. Of course, they would had been taken for analysis.

Almost against her will, her gaze was drawn to the two pine knobs adorning the top of each corner at the foot of the bed. Even from the door she could see the dark jagged indentations left by the steel wires that had been fastened there. They were not there now. There was nothing at all in the attractive little apartment to say what had happened there on Saturday, May 29. Except for herself.

Hesitantly, she sat on the bed. Then she leaped up, throwing the quilts on the floor and staring at the center of the mattress. But there was nothing there either other than what she recognized from before: a few familiar stains. She sat down again.

She hated that man with all her heart. A good liberating and all-consuming hatred ran like a rod of steel along her entire spine. She had not felt it until today. Seeing the man strolling about large as life, as though nothing had happened, as though her life were something trivial he had ruined by chance one Saturday night—it was a blessing. Now she had someone to hate.

He was no longer simply an abstract monster difficult to attach a face to. Until now he hadn’t been a person, just a dimension, a phenomenon. Something that had swept into her life and
left it desolate, like a hurricane on the west coast or a cancerous tumor, something you could never guard against, something that visited itself on people only now and again, lamentable but completely unavoidable and out of all control.

It was no longer like that. He was a man. A person who had chosen to come. Who had chosen her life. He could have left her alone. He could have chosen not to do it, he could have decided on someone else. But she was the one he had taken. With eyes open, deliberately, on purpose.

The telephone was sitting there as usual, on a pine bedside table, beside an alarm clock and a crime novel. On a shelf just above floor height there was a phone book. She found the number rapidly and keyed in the eight digits. When she was finally connected to the place she sought, she spoke to a friendly woman.

“Hello, my name is . . . I’m Sunniva Kristoffersen,” she began. “I was at East Station, no, Central Station, I mean, today. A little problem cropped up, and I was helped really well by one of your staff. He was there at half past ten. Tall, good-looking guy, very broad shoulders, blond hair, thinning slightly. I’d really like to say thank you, but I forgot to ask his name. Have you any idea who it could be?”

The woman was able to do that quite spontaneously. She gave her a name and asked if she should take a message.

“No thanks,” Kristine Håverstad said quickly. “I was thinking of sending some flowers.”

*   *   *

A few years earlier, Finn Håverstad had been at a party where he had met a reporter from
Dagsrevyen,
a well-known figure, honored with the Narvesen Prize for his pursuit of a shipowner guilty of scams using guarantee funds from the state. The man had been pleasant, and the dentist found chatting with him interesting. Before that, he had a rather hazy impression that investigative
journalism consisted of secret meetings with suspect sources at odd times of the day and night. The hefty reporter had grinned when he had asked inquisitively if that were the case.

“The telephone! Ninety percent of my work comprises phone calls!”

Now he was beginning to understand that. It was amazing how much could be ascertained with the help of Bell’s ingenious invention. On the notepad in front of him he now had the names of six owners of cars parked in the short little street in Homansbyen on the night between May 29 and 30.

Four of them were women. That did not need to mean anything. A husband, son or, for that matter, car thief could have been using the vehicle. But in the meantime he laid these aside. There was only one car left. He dialed the number for Romerike police station and introduced himself.

“What do you think—I was at the receiving end of some major injustice,” he said indignantly to an unsympathetic policeman at the other end. “I’d parked my car beside the railroad station, and when I got back the paint work was dented and scratched. Luckily a young lady had made a note of the registration number. The scoundrel hadn’t left any kind of message, of course. Could you help me?”

Finally understanding the problem, the policeman jotted down the number, saying, “One moment, please,” and two minutes later was able to offer him the make of car as well as the name and address of the owner. Finn Håverstad thanked him effusively.

Now he had them all. First he had tried Brønnøysund, but it was totally impossible to get through there. Apparently the easiest method was the story about being bumped. He had phoned seven police stations, thus avoiding any suspicion. It would be extremely unlikely that seven different cars had bumped him.

The only hurdle was that the vehicle color evidently was not
listed in the police register. Moreover, it was probably necessary to double-check the addresses, as they could have changed since the cars were registered. To be on the safe side, he therefore phoned the National Population Register. That took an awfully long time.

But now everything was taken care of. At the Population Register he had obtained, on top of everything else, the dates of birth, something he hadn’t even thought about in advance.

So four of them were women. He put them aside for the moment. One of the men was born in 1926. Far too old. Of course he might have a son the right age, but he put him to one side as well. He was then left with two. Both lived in the Oslo area, one in Bærum and one at Lambertseter.

Not even then did he actually feel any joy. On the contrary. The gnawing and the terrible pain were there beneath his heart as they had been the entire time. His skin was numb; it was as if all the feelings in his whole body had gathered in the area of his stomach. He was dreadfully exhausted. He was existing on minimal sleep. The difference was that he now had something to work on. He would find somebody to hate.