Bob Oz pushed the empty cup to one side and buttoned up his coat. “I’ll be at your store at one thirty tomorrow, Mike. Maybe the guy will turn up after all.”
“Why should he, when he knows he’d be walking straight into an ambush?”
“I don’t know. There’s a certain kind of killer we call a moth.”
“A moth?”
“They seem attracted to the investigation into the murder they’ve committed. They turn up at the scene of the crime, or at the funeral. They make an effort to get close to the detectives involved. Frequent the bars where they hang out, close to the police station. They’re like moths that can’t help flying toward the flame, even though they know they might get their wings burned off.”
“You think Tomás might be like that?”
“I don’t know. I was talking to someone this morning who thinks that sometimes wewantto get caught. Maybe Tomás knows the game is almost up. Maybe deep down he just wants to get it over with.”
After Bob had gotten into his car and watched Mike’s station wagon head out onto East Lake Street and disappear toward the southwest, he pulled out his phone and made a call. Half expected to hear a pip and then the voicemail message telling him to stop calling her. Instead she picked up after just two rings.
“Hi, Bob.”
37
A Desolate Place, September 2022
The minister at the Mindekirken, Jon Erland, greets me in the lobby connecting the church to the offices. When I called him before my departure from Norway and told him about the book I was writing he said he hadn’t actually known my cousin, only my uncle, and that I should really try some other source. But once he became aware of my theological background, and I had hinted that it was memories of the Mindekirken when I was a child that had inspired me, he agreed to meet me anyway. Jon Erland looks to be in his seventies and speaks with the same Norwegian dialect as I do, not so surprising since the Norwegian Bible Belt is in the south of the country, like it is in the USA. But he uses words that became obsolete back home in Norway many years ago. He is professionally friendly and open—an American openness that seems to have worn off some of that traditional Scandinavian reserve. He shows me around. The Mindekirken is mostly still as I recallit. Large but austere, as Lutheran churches should be. As far as I can see the only thing that’s new is the air-conditioning. He suggests we talk in his office. On our way there we pass a Norwegian flag and photographs of the Norwegian king and queen, flatteringly young. Along with the gifts from earlier visitors from Norway it gives the church a strangely museum-like atmosphere, at once calming and a little disturbing. In his office Jon Erland tells me that he only met my relatives at church services, which are still held twice a day every Sunday, one in Norwegian at nine o’clock, which usually attracts a congregation of about forty or fifty, and the second in English at eleven o’clock, at which a congregation of between fifteen and twenty is about all they can expect. He tells me that my uncle is buried in the family grave at the Lakewood Cemetery, as I already knew.
“What do people say about my cousin, after what happened?” I ask.
“You mean his posthumous reputation, his legacy?”
“I mean, do people regard him as a hero?”
Jon Erland raises an eyebrow, clearly surprised. “Why? The whole thing ended in the most appalling tragedy. The best thing one could say about your cousin is that he was a poor, misguided soul.”
“That’s one way of looking at it—” I start to say.
“No!” says Jon Erland. “It is the truth. And as we all know, there is only one truth.”
I look at him. “Only one truth,” I echo. And in that same instant, remember why it was I could never have been a priest.
38
The Rage of Abandonment, October 2016
It was dark but the rain had stopped by the time Bob reached the house. He rang the bell. Heard the footsteps inside, recognized them as Alice’s, knew which slippers she was wearing, also that she would be wearing the white lamb’s-wool sweater she always wore when it was cold.
She opened the door. Smiled. And it seemed to him that she was still the same, beautiful Alice, with her hair tied up in a knot and stray honey-blond locks of hair tapping at the corners of her mouth, though the wrinkles around her eyes were now more pronounced.
“Come in,” she said.
“Thanks,” he said, and tried not to think how odd it was to be invited to enter his own house. “And thank you for seeing me.”
He removed his coat and hung it on one of the empty hooks.Tried not to wonder whether she might have removed one of Stan’s jackets from the same hook just before he rang the bell.
She led the way into the kitchen. He registered that she was back to her familiar Alice size, the curves had returned, there was a little more flesh on the bones, all of which suggested to him that she was doing well. Immediately following Frankie’s death she had lost weight dramatically, and then gained it so swiftly she became a sort of inflated version of herself. And then lost it again. It was as though she had gone through the whole repertoire of eating disorders familiar to her from her patients. Or maybe it was the pills.
They sat in their usual seats on opposite sides of the kitchen table. She laced her fingers around a large teacup. How many times had he seen her do that, warming her hands, with her shoulders slightly hunched? He noticed that the picture of Frankie on the refrigerator was still there. And next to it, one of Frankie, Bob and Alice together.
“Like something to drink?”
“Water,” he said and stood up. Took a glass from the cabinet above the sink, turned on the faucet and said, without turning around:
