Death in Oslo (35 page)

More people laughed. Someone turned the music up even louder. Danny got up and gave a deep and exaggerated bow, holding his right arm over his stomach and making a gallant sweeping gesture with his left arm, the beer bottle still in his hand.

‘What d’you reckon, Abdallah? Is that what we’re like?’

But Abdallah was no longer there. He had slipped away unnoticed, between the giggling, drinking girls who eyed his body with curiosity and made him go home long before he had planned to.

That was back in 1979 and he had never forgotten it.

Danny had been absolutely right.

Abdallah was hungry. He never ate at night, as it was not good for the digestion. But now he felt that he would need something in his stomach if he was going to get any more sleep. He picked up a phone that was built into the bed frame. After two rings, he heard a sleepy voice on the other end. He gave his order in a quiet voice and then put the phone down.

He leant back again in the bed with his hands folded behind his neck.

Danny-boy: a long-haired, unkempt, sharp Stanford student who had seen reality so clearly that, without knowing it, he had given Abdallah a recipe that he would use more than quarter of a century later.

Abdallah al-Rahman knew all about military history. As he had had no choice but to take on responsibility for his father’s business empire very early on, the possibility of a military career was lost. He had always dreamt of being a soldier, particularly as a boy. For a period he had studied and read about all the old generals; the art of Chinese warfare, in particular, fascinated him. And the greatest strategist of them all was Sun Zi.

A beautifully bound copy of the 2,500-year-old book,
The Art of War
, always lay by his bed.

He picked it up now and leafed through the pages. He himself had commissioned a new Arabic translation, and the book he held in his hand was one of only three copies that he had had made. He owned them all.

It is best to keep the enemy’s state intact
, he read.
To crush it is the next best thing. For to win one hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the acme of skill. To subdue the enemy without fighting is the acme of skill.

He stroked the thick hand-made paper. Then he closed the book and laid it carefully back in its usual place.

Osama, his old childhood friend, only wanted destruction. Bin Laden believed that he had won on the 11th of September, but Abdallah knew better. The catastrophe on Manhattan was a massive defeat, but it did not destroy the US; it only changed the country.

For the worse.

Abdallah had bitter experience of that. Over two billion dollars of his assets had immediately been frozen in American banks. It had taken him several years and vast sums of money to free up most of the capital, but the effect of a complete, sustained stop in some of his most dynamic companies had been disastrous.

But he had pulled through. His business dynasty was complex. He had lots of legs to stand on. The losses in the US were to some extent offset by the rise in oil prices and successful investments elsewhere in the world

Abdallah was a patient man, and business was his greatest priority after his sons. The months went by. The American economy could not exclude Arab interests for ever. It wouldn’t survive. In the years immediately after 2001, he had to some extent extracted himself from the US market, but then a couple of years ago he had felt that the time was right to
invest again. And this time, the investment was bigger and bolder and more important than ever.

Helen Bentley was his chance. Even though he had never trusted a Western person before, he had seen a strength in her eyes, something different, a glimmer of integrity that he chose to trust. It looked like she was heading for a victory in November 2004 and she seemed to be rational. The fact that she was a woman never worried him. On the contrary, when he left his meeting with her, he felt a reluctant admiration for this strong, sharp woman.

She betrayed him only a week before the election, because she saw that it was necessary if she was going to win.

The art of war was to crush the enemy without fighting.

To fight the US in the traditional sense was futile. But Abdallah had realised that the Americans really only had one enemy: themselves.

If you deprive the average American of his car, shopping and TV, you take away his joy in life, he thought to himself, and turned off the TV screen. For a moment he saw a picture of Danny at Stanford again, with his crooked smile and a bottle of beer in his hand: an American with insight.

If you take the joys of life away from an American, he gets angry. And this anger starts at the grass roots, with the individual, with those who struggle to survive; the person who works fifty hours a week and still can’t afford to have dreams other than those that are fed to him from the TV screen.

With this thought, Abdallah closed his eyes.

They won’t close ranks this time. They won’t direct their rage at the enemy, at someone out there,
someone who isn’t like us and who wants to hurt us
.

They will snap and fight upwards. They will turn against their own. They will turn their aggression on the people who are responsible for everything, for the system, for ensuring that things work, that cars can drive and that there are still dreams
to cling on to in their otherwise miserable existence.

But there is chaos at the top. The commander-in-chief is missing and her soldiers are running around like headless chickens, with no direction, in the vacuum that is created when a leader is neither alive nor dead but has just vanished.

A confusing blow to the head. Then a fatal blow to the body. Elementary and effective.

Abdallah looked up. The servant came in silently, carrying a tray. He put the fruit, cheese, bread and a large carafe of juice down by the bed. Then he disappeared again, giving a faint nod at the door. He had not said a word and Abdallah did not thank him.

Only one and a half days to go.

A
t first, when Helen Lardahl Bentley opened her eyes, she had no idea where she was.

She was lying in an uncomfortable position. Her right hand was squashed under her cheek and had gone to sleep. She sat up gingerly. Her body felt stiff and she tried to shake some life into her arm. She had to close her eyes to fight a sudden bout of dizziness, and then she remembered what had happened.

The dizziness passed. Her head still felt strange and light, but when she carefully stretched her arms and legs, she realised that she was not seriously injured. Even the wound on her temple felt better. She ran her fingertips over the bump and could feel that it was smaller than when she had fallen asleep.

Fallen asleep.

The last thing she remembered was that she had taken the woman in the wheelchair by the hand. She had promised . . .

Did I fall asleep on my feet? Did I faint?

It was only now that she realised she was still as dirty. The stench immediately became unbearable. Using her left hand as a support against the back of the sofa, she slowly levered herself up. She had to get washed.

‘Good morning, Madam President,’ a female voice said quietly from the doorway.

‘Good morning,’ Helen Bentley replied in surprise.

‘I was just out in the kitchen making some coffee.’

‘Have you . . . did you sit up all night?’

‘Yes.’ The woman in the wheelchair smiled. ‘Thought you
might have concussion, so I woke you up a couple of times during the night. You were pretty groggy. Would you like some?’

She held out a steaming cup.

Madam President waved it away with her free hand.

‘I want to shower,’ she said. ‘And if I’m not . . .’ She seemed confused for a moment, and ran her hand over her eyes. ‘If I’m not mistaken, you offered me some clean clothes.’

‘Of course. Can you manage by yourself, or should I wake Mary?’

‘Mary?’ mumbled the President. ‘That was the . . . housekeeper?’

‘Yes, that’s right. And my name is Hanne Wilhelmsen. You’ve probably forgotten. You can call me Hanne.’

‘Hannah,’ the President repeated.

‘Near enough.’

Helen Bentley took a few tentative steps. Her knees were shaking, but her legs held up. She looked askance at the other woman.

‘Where am I going?’

‘Follow me,’ was Hanne Wilhelmsen’s friendly reply as she rolled towards the door.

‘Have you . . .’

The President stopped and followed. The dawn light outside told her that it must still be very early. But she had already been there quite some time. Several hours at least. The woman in the wheelchair had obviously kept her promise. She hadn’t let anyone know. Helen Bentley could still do what she had to before raising the alarm. It was still possible to work the whole thing out, but to do that, no one must know she was still alive.

‘What’s the time?’ she asked as Hanne Wilhelmsen opened the bathroom door. ‘How long have I . . .’

She had to lean against the door frame for support.

‘Quarter past four,’ Hanne replied. ‘You’ve been asleep for about six hours. I’m sure that’s not enough.’

‘It’s a lot more than I usually get,’ the President said and managed a smile.

The bathroom was impressive. A double-width sunken bath dominated the room. It was almost a small pool. The President could make out something that looked like a radio and something that was definitely a small TV screen in the unusually spacious shower cabinet beside the bath. The floor was covered in oriental-patterned mosaics, and an enormous mirror with an elaborate gilded wooden frame hung above the two marble sinks.

Helen Bentley thought she remembered the woman saying that she was a retired policewoman. There certainly wasn’t much in this flat that had been bought on a policeman’s salary. Unless this was the only country in the world that paid its police what they were actually worth.

‘Make yourself at home,’ Hanne Wilhelmsen said. ‘There are towels in the cupboard over there. I’ll put some clothes outside the door, so you can get them when you’re ready. Just take the time you need.’

She rolled her chair out of the bathroom again and shut the door.

It took Madam President a while to get undressed. Her muscles were still tender and sore. For a moment she was unsure what to do with the soiled clothes, before she noticed that Hanne had put a folded bin liner by one of the sinks.

What a strange woman, thought the President. ‘But weren’t there two of them? Three, with the housekeeper.’

She was naked now. She stuffed the clothes into the bin liner and tied it carefully. What she really wanted was a bath, but a shower was probably more sensible, given how dirty she was.

The warm water poured from a showerhead that was about
the size of a dinner plate. Helen Bentley groaned, partly from pleasure and partly from the pain that coursed through her body as she leant her head back so the water would wash over her face.

There
was
another woman there last night. Helen Bentley remembered it clearly now. Someone who wanted to tell the police. The two women had spoken together in Norwegian, and she hadn’t been able to make out anything, other than a word that sounded like
police
. The woman in the wheelchair must have won the argument.

The shower was helping.

It was like purification in every sense. She turned the tap on full. The pressure increased noticeably. The jets of water felt like arrows massaging her skin. She gasped. Filled her mouth with water so she could hardly breathe, then spat it out, let everything run over her. She scrubbed herself thoroughly with a hemp glove that felt coarse and comforting on her hand. Her skin went red. Bright red from the hot water and flaming red from the hemp glove. Her cuts stung intensely when the water hit them.

She had stood exactly like this that late autumn evening in 1984, the evening she had never shared with anyone and that therefore no one must know about.

She had showered for nearly forty minutes when she got home. It was midnight. She remembered that clearly. She had scrubbed herself with a loofah until she bled, as if it were possible to scrape a visual impression off your skin. Make it vanish for ever. The hot water had run out, but she’d stayed in the freezing cascades until Christopher had come in and asked with some concern if she was going to get Billie ready for bed.

It had been raining outside. The rain had poured from the skies in deafening sheets that hammered on the tarmac, on the car, on the roofs and trees and the playground over the road from the house, where a swing swung backwards and forwards
on the gusts of wind, and a woman had been standing waiting.

She wanted Billie back.

Helen’s daughter had been born to another woman. But all the papers were in order.

She remembered screaming,
All the papers are in order
, and she remembered pulling her purse from her bag and waving it in front of the other woman’s pale, determined face:
How much do you want? How much do I need to pay you not to do this to me?

It wasn’t about the money, Billie’s biological mother said.

She knew that the papers were valid, she said, but they said nothing about Billie’s father. And he had come back now.

She said that with a slight smile, a vaguely triumphant expression, as if she had won a competition and couldn’t help boasting about it.

Father! Father! You never said anything about the father! You said you weren’t sure, and that in any case, the guy was gone, over the hills, an irresponsible slob, and you wouldn’t want Billie to be exposed to him. You said you wanted what was best for Billie, and that was for her to come and live with us, with Christopher and me, and that all the papers were in order. You even signed them! You signed, and Billie has her own room now, a room with pink wallpaper and a white crib with a mobile that she can reach out and touch, which makes her smile.

The father wanted to look after both of them, the woman said. She had to shout in the howling storm. He wanted to look after Billie and Billie’s real mother. Biological fathers had rights too. She was stupid not to have given his name when Billie was born, because then all this could have been avoided. She apologised. But that was the situation now. Her boyfriend was out of prison and had come back to her. Things had changed. Surely being a lawyer, Helen Bentley would understand that.