Two days later Torill passed on a phone message she had received at the reception desk. A Kaja Solness had said they could cancel her next appointment, that she wouldn’t be coming back, and that she’d found a solution to her problem.
44
Alexandra Sturdza was sitting at one of the window tables in the empty canteen at the Rikshospital. In front of her lay a cup of black coffee and another long day at work. She had worked until midnight the previous day, slept for five hours, and needed all the stimulants she could get.
The sun was on its way up. This city was like the sort of woman who could be dazzlingly beautiful in the right light, only to look so ordinary a moment later that she becomes utterly unremarkable, even ugly. But right now, at this early hour of the morning, before the average Norwegian got to work, Oslo was hers, like a secret lover she was sharing a stolen hour with. And it was a rendezvous with someone who was still unfamiliar and exciting.
The hills to the east lay in shadow, while those to the west were bathed in soft light. The buildings in the city centre down by the fjord were black silhouettes behind black silhouettes, like a cemetery at sunrise. Just a few glass buildings were lit up, like silver-coloured fish beneath the dark surface of the water. And the sea glinted between islands and skerries that would soon be green. How she longed for spring! They called March the first month of spring here, even if everyone knew it was still winter. Washed-out, cold, with isolated, sudden bursts of warm passion. April was at best a deceitful flirt. May was the first month you could rely on. May. Alexandra wanted a May. She knew that on the occasions when she had had a man like that, a warm, gentle man who gave her all she could ask for, even in suitable doses, she just became spoiled and demanding and ended up betraying him with June or, even worse, July, who was completely unreliable. How about a good, grown-up man like August next time, one with a bit of grey in his hair and a marriage and family behind him? Yes, she would have welcomed someone like that. So how come she had ended up falling in love with November? A gloomy, dark, rain-drenched man with prospects of getting even darker, who was either so quiet that you couldn’t even hear any birds, or felt like he was going to tear the roof off your house with his crazy, rumbling autumn gales. Sure, he rewarded you with sunny days of unexpected warmth that you valued all the more as a result, revealing a strangely beautiful, ruined, ravaged landscape where a few buildings were still standing. Solid and unshakeable, like the bedrock itself, which you knew would still be standing on the last day of the month, and where Alexandra—in the absence of anything better—had sought refuge from time to time. But something better would surely have to come along soon. She stretched and tried to yawn the tiredness out of her body. It must be spring soon. May.
“Miss Sturdza?”
She spun round in surprise. It wasn’t just the time of the encounter that was un-Norwegian, but the mode of address. And, sure enough, the man standing there wasn’t quite Norwegian. Or rather, he didn’tlookNorwegian. Not only did he have Asiatic features, but his outfit—suit, crisp white shirt and a tie with a tie clip—definitely wasn’t usual work attire for a Norwegian. Unless the Norwegian in question was one of those overconfident idiots with a job description ending in “agent” or “broker,” which was usually one of the first things they told you if you met them in a bar, where they tried to look like they’d just come from the office because they had to work so hard. That, at least, was the signal they hoped to give off. And when they “revealed” their job after discreetly maneuvering the conversation to a place where it wasn’t utterly ridiculous to mention it, they did so with feigned embarrassment, as if she had just uncovered some fucking crown prince in disguise.
“Sung-min Larsen,” the man said. “I’m a detective at Kripos. Can I sit down?”
Well. Alexandra studied him. Tall. He went to the gym. Not too much, everything in proportion, he was aware of the cosmetic value, but enjoyed the exercise itself. Like her. Brown eyes, of course. A little over thirty? No ring. Kripos. Yes, she’d heard a couple of the girls mention his name, that odd combination of Asian and Norwegian. Strange that she’d never met him before. At that moment the sun reached the canteen window of the Rikshospital, lit up Sung-min Larsen’s face and warmed one of Alexandra’s cheeks with surprising intensity.Miss Sturdza. Perhaps spring was coming early this year? Without putting her cup down she pushed a chair out with her foot.
“Be my guest.”
“Thanks.”
As he leaned forward to sit down, he instinctively put his hand over his tie, even though he was wearing a tie clip. There was something familiar about the clip, something that reminded her of her childhood. She remembered what it was. The bird-like logo of the Romanian airline, TAROM.
“Are you a pilot, Larsen?”
“My father was,” he said.
“My uncle was too,” she said. “He flew IAR-93 fighters.”
“Really? Produced in Romania.”
“You know the plane?”
“No, I just remember that they were the only Communist planes that weren’t made in the Soviet Union in the seventies.”
“Communist planes?”
Larsen gave a wry smile. “The sort my father was supposed to shoot down if they came too close.”
“The Cold War. So you dreamed of becoming a pilot yourself?”
He looked surprised. Something about him told her that didn’t happen very often.
“It’s fairly unusual to know about IAR-93s and wear a TAROM tie clip,” she added.
“I applied to the Air Force,” he admitted.
“But didn’t get in?”
“I would have got in,” he said with such natural confidence that she didn’t doubt it. “But my back was too long. I couldn’t fit in the cockpit of the fighters.”
“You could have flown other things. Transport planes, helicopters.”
“I suppose so,” he said.
Your father, she thought. He flew fighters. You couldn’t be happy being a lesser version of him, someone lower down on the uncomplicated pilots’ hierarchy than your father. Sooner something else altogether. So he was an alpha male. Someone who might not have got to where he was going, but was on the way. Like her.
“I’m investigating a murder…” he said, and she realised from his quick glance that the introduction was intended as a warning. “I’ve got some questions about a Harry Hole.”
