Headhunters (22 page)

The fingers on Sunded’s severed arm were still curled around the handle of his overnight case. His wristwatch was ticking. Ten sixteen. In a minute I would lose consciousness. In two I would be suffocated. Make up your mind, Greve.

And then he did.

I heard the lorry belch. The rpm sank. He had switched off the ignition; he was on his way here!

Or … had he put it into gear?

A low rumble. The crunch of gravel under the tyres bearing twenty-five tonnes. The rumble increased in volume. And increased. And became quieter. Disappeared into the countryside. Died away.

I closed my eyes and offered up my thanks. For not
being
burned, but only dying from a lack of oxygen. Because that is by no means the worst way to die. The brain closes down chambers one by one, you become dopey, you are numbed, stop thinking, and with that your problems cease to exist. In a way it is like taking a few stiff drinks. Yep, I thought, I can live with dying like that.

The idea of it almost made me laugh.

Me, who had spent my whole life trying to be my father’s opposite, would end my life as he had, in a wrecked car. And how different to him had I actually been? When I was too old for the bloody drunkard to hit me, I had begun to hit him. In the same way that he had hit Mum, without leaving any visible marks. As another example, when he had offered to teach me to drive, I had politely refused and informed him that I was not interested in having a driver’s licence. And I had got together with the ugly, pampered ambassador’s daughter Dad had driven to school every day, just so I could take her home for dinner and humiliate him. When I saw my mother in the kitchen crying between the main course and dessert, I had regretted that. I had applied to a college in London I had heard Dad say was a posh place for social parasites. But he hadn’t taken it as badly as I had hoped. He had even managed to put on a smile, seemed proud when I told him about it, the crafty bastard. So when later that autumn he had asked if he and my mother could travel from Norway to visit me on campus, I had said no, on the basis that I didn’t want my fellow students to discover that my father was not someone high up in the diplomatic corps but a plain chauffeur. That seemed to hit a tender spot. Not tender as in tenderness, of course, but sore.

I had rung my mother two weeks before the wedding to say that I was getting married to a girl I had met,
explained
that it would be a simple affair, just us and two witnesses. But my mother was welcome to come so long as she came without Dad. Mum had lost her temper and said that of course she wouldn’t come without him. Noble, loyal souls are often handicapped by loyalty to even the basest of individuals. Well, especially the base individuals.

Diana was going to meet my parents after the end of the semester that summer, but three weeks before we left London I had received news of the car accident. On the way home from their cabin, the policeman had said on the crackly telephone line. Evening, rain, the car had been going too fast. The old road had been temporarily re-routed, motorway extension. A new, perhaps somewhat illogical bend, but marked with danger signs. The newly laid tarmac absorbed light, naturally enough. A parked road-laying machine. I had interrupted the policeman and said they should breath-test my father. Just so that they could confirm what I already knew: that he had killed my mother.

That evening, alone in a pub in Barons Court, had been the first time I had tasted alcohol. And cried in public. The evening when I washed away my tears in the stinking urinals I saw my father’s limp, drunken face in the cracked mirror. And remembered that calm, attentive glow in his eyes when he had hit out at the chess pieces, hitting the queen which had whirled through the air – two and a half somersaults – before landing on the floor. Then he had hit me. Just the once, but he had raised his hand. Slapped me below the ear. And I had seen it then, in his eyes; what Mum called the Sickness. And it was a hideous, graceful and bloodthirsty monster that resided behind his eyes. But it was also him, my father, my own flesh and blood.

Blood.

Something which lay deep, that had lain under all the layers of denial for a long time, rose to the surface. A hazy memory of a thought that had gone through my head which would not let itself be held down any longer. It took a more concrete form. Became articulated through pain. Became the truth. The truth that hitherto I had managed to hold at arm’s length by lying to myself. For it wasn’t the fear of being supplanted by a child that made me not want to have children. It was the fear of the Sickness. The fear that I, the son, also had it. That it was there, behind my eyes. I had lied to everyone. I had told Lotte I didn’t want the child because it had a flaw, a syndrome, a chromosome irregularity. While the truth was that the irregularity was in me.

Everything was flowing now. My life had been a property left by the deceased, and now my brain had draped the furniture with dust sheets, closed the doors, prepared itself to switch off the current. My eyes dripped, ran and flooded, over my forehead, into my scalp. I was being suffocated by two human balloons. I thought about Lotte. And there, on the threshold, it dawned on me. I saw the light. I saw … Diana? What was the traitor doing here now? Balloons …

My free, dangling hand moved towards the overnight bag. My numb fingers loosened Sunded’s from the handle and opened it. Petrol was dripping off me into the bag as I rummaged around, pulled out a shirt, a pair of socks, underpants and a toilet bag. That was all. I opened the toilet bag with my free hand and emptied the contents on the roof. Toothpaste, an electric shaver, plasters, shampoo, a transparent plastic bag he must have used at airport security checks, Vaseline … there! A pair of scissors, the little pointed kind that bend upwards at the tip and which a number of people for some reason or another prefer to modern nail clippers.

My hand groped its way up one of the twins, over his gut, his chest, trying to find a zip or buttons. But I was losing sensation in my fingers and they would neither obey orders from nor send information to the brain. Then I grabbed the scissors and stuck the point in the belly of, well … let’s say it was Endride.

The nylon material gave with a liberating rip, slid back and revealed a bulging stomach packed into the light blue material of the police shirt. I snipped open the shirt and the flab covered in hairy, blue-white skin rolled forward. Now I had come to the part I dreaded most. But the thought of the possible reward – being able to live, to breathe – repressed all others, and I swung the scissors with maximum power, thrusting them into his stomach right above the navel. Retracted them. Nothing happened.

Strange. There was a clear hole in his stomach, but nothing came out, nothing that I hoped would relieve the pressure on me. The balloon was still as airtight as before.

I stabbed again. Another hole. Another dry well.

Like a madman, I swung the scissors again. Squelch, squelch. Nothing. What the hell were these twins actually made of? Were they lard right through? Was the obesity epidemic going to kill me, too?

Another car passed, on the road above.

I tried to scream but had no air.

With the last of my strength I slammed the scissors into his gut, but this time I didn’t retract them, I simply didn’t have the energy. After a pause I began to move them. Stretched my thumb and first finger and brought them back. Cut my way inside. It was surprisingly easy. And then something happened. A stream of blood ran from the hole, down the stomach, disappeared under the clothes, reappeared on the bearded throat, ran
over
the chin, over the lips and vanished up one nostril. I continued to cut. Frenzied now. And discovered that humans in reality are fragile creatures, because the body opened, slid open the way I had seen happen when they carved up whales on TV. And this was with a tiny pair of nail scissors! I didn’t stop until the stomach had a gash running from the waist to the ribs. But the mass of blood and intestines I had expected would pour out was not forthcoming. And the strength in my arm died, I dropped the scissors and an old friend, tunnel vision, was back. Through the opening I could see the inside of the roof. There was a grey chessboard pattern. The broken chess pieces lay scattered around me. I gave up. Closed my eyes. It was wonderful to have given up. I felt gravity dragging me down to the centre of the earth, head first, like a baby on its way out of its mother’s incubator, I would be squeezed out, death was rebirth. I could even feel the labour pains now, the quivering pains massaging me. Then the white queen. Heard the sound and the amniotic fluid splashing onto the floor.

And the smell.

My God, the smell!

I was born, and my life started with a fall, a bang on the head and then total darkness.

Total darkness.

Darkness.

Oxygen?

Light.

I opened my eyes. I was lying on my back and above me I saw the back seat where the twins and I had been sitting clamped together. I must have been lying on the inside of the car roof, on the chessboard. And I was breathing. There was a stench of death, of human viscera. I peered around. It looked like a slaughterhouse, a sausage-making factory. But the strange thing was that
instead
of doing what my nature is predisposed to do – repressing, denying, fleeing – it seemed that my brain had expanded in order to take in the full range of sensual impressions. I decided to stay here. I breathed in the smell. I looked. I listened. Picked up the chess pieces from the floor. Put them into position on the board, one by one. Finally, I raised the chipped white queen. Studied her. Then I put her directly opposite the black king.

I SAT IN
the wreckage of the car gazing at the electric shaver. We have bizarre thoughts. The white queen was broken. She whom I had used to keep my father, my background, yes, the whole of my life in check. She who had said she loved me, and to whom I had vowed, even if it was a lie, that a part of me would always love her merely for saying that. She whom I had called my better half because I had really believed she was my Janus face: the good part. But I had been mistaken. And I hated her. No, not even that; Diana Strom-Eliassen no longer existed for me. Yet I was sitting in a wrecked car with four corpses around me, an electric shaver in hand and one single thought in my head:

Would Diana have loved me without my hair?

We have – as I said – bizarre thoughts. Then I dismissed the thought and pressed the
on
button. The shaver – which had belonged to Sunded, the man with the prophetic name that sounded like soon dead – vibrated in my hand.

I would change. I wanted to change. The old Roger no longer existed anyway. I set to work.

A quarter of an hour later I examined myself in the fragment that was left of the mirror. It was – as I had feared – not a pretty sight. My head looked like a peanut
with
the shell on, oblong with a slight kink in the middle. The shaven skull glistened, white and pale, above the more tanned skin of my face. But I was me: the new Roger Brown.

My hair lay between my legs. I swept it into the transparent plastic bag, which I then stuffed into the back pocket of Eskild Monsen’s uniform trousers. There I also found a wallet. Which contained some money and a credit card. And since I had no intention of allowing myself to be traced after using Kjikerud’s card, I decided to take the wallet with me. I had already found a lighter in the pocket of the black nylon jacket belonging to Pimples and once again I considered whether to set fire to the petrol-marinated wreck. It would delay the job of identifying the bodies and perhaps give me a day’s respite. On the other hand, the smoke would trigger the alarm before I had a chance to get out of the area, whereas without the smoke and with a bit of luck several hours could pass before anyone found the car. I eyed the meat-like surface where Pimples’ face had been and made my decision. I spent almost twenty minutes getting his trousers and jacket off and then dressing him in my green jogging outfit. And it is strange how quickly you get used to cutting people up. When I snipped the skin off both of his index fingers (I couldn’t remember whether fingerprints were taken from the left or the right hand) it was with the concentrated efficiency of a surgeon. Finally, I snipped at the thumb too so that the damage to his hands looked more random. I took two steps back from the wreck and studied the result. Blood, death, silence. Even the brown river beside the copse seemed frozen in mute immobility. It was worthy of a Morten Viskum installation. If I’d had a camera I would have taken a picture, sent it to Diana and suggested she hang it in the gallery. As an augury of what was to come. For what was it Greve
had
said? It’s the fear, not the pain, that makes you malleable.

I walked along the main road. Of course I ran the risk of being seen by Greve if he drove this way. But I was not concerned. First of all, he wouldn’t have recognised the bald-headed guy in a black nylon jacket with ELVERUM KO-DAW-YING CLUB on the back. Secondly, this person walked differently from the Roger Brown he had met; with a more erect back and at a slower pace. Thirdly, the GPS tracker would show in all its clarity that I was still in the wreck and hadn’t moved a metre. Obviously. After all, I was dead.

I passed a farm, but continued on my way. A car passed me, braked, wondering perhaps who I was, but accelerated again and disappeared into the sharp autumn light.