No sooner said than done. He set off round the corner and went into the Japanese restaurant. In the bar stood a Japanese bartender or chef, making sushi dishes which he then served, one after the other, to the guests who were sitting around the bar and eating their sushi off a wooden platter. Professor Andersen saw that there were a couple of seats available there, and sat down on one of them. He ordered his sushi and a bottle of lager. A waitress soon arrived with the wooden platter, chopsticks and the lager. ‘You ought to drink sake with it,’ said the man who was sitting beside him. Professor Andersen turned towards him and said, ‘Yes, I do believe you’re right.’ He beckoned to the waitress and asked her to change the lager to a small jar of sake. He then turned to his neighbour again, because he felt a strong urge to make it clear to him that it wasn’t his first time in a Japanese restaurant, and that he was therefore well aware that this small jar of sake was an excellent drink to have with sushi dishes, but now and then it so happened that he preferred lager, just as he had tonight, but when his neighbour had suggested sake, he actually wanted that instead. He hesitated a little, right enough, before he embarked on this explanation, because at first he wondered if it wasn’t sufficient that his neighbour had just heard him ordering ‘a small jar of sake’, which was the way it was served in this establishment, but as he didn’t dare to rely entirely on this being sufficient rectification, he turned to his neighbour all the same. He embarked on his explanation, and then he suddenly recognised the man next to him, and to his horror he became aware of finding himself sitting beside the man whom on Holy Night, as we call the evening before Christmas Day, he had seen murdering a young woman in an apartment on the other side of the street from his own apartment building.
He was sitting beside Henrik Nordstrøm. He was staring into the murderer’s face. He didn’t know what to do. But he had begun his explanation, and he couldn’t not complete it. He chose, however, to smile while he finished the explanation as to why he had chosen lager instead of sake, which he, as a rule, preferred when he was there. But when his neighbour, whom he familiarly called ‘you’, mentioned sake, he had such a great fancy for sake all the same, and therefore he called on the waitress at once and asked to change his lager to sake. ‘Yes, that was the right thing to do,’ said Henrik Nordstrøm. ‘It has to be sake, in my opinion.’ ‘Not always,’ said Professor Andersen, ‘sometimes I prefer lager.’ ‘Well, yes, sometimes we do prefer to have a lager with whatever we eat, no matter what is really best with it,’ said Henrik Nordstrøm. ‘When I think about it, I mainly drink lager with meals when I’m in the Far East.’ ‘So you are often in the Far East?’ asked Professor Andersen. ‘Not any longer,’ answered Henrik Nordstrøm. ‘Before, but not now. Later, but not now. Now I’m here,’ he said with a shrug.
Henrik Nordstrøm had the same kind of wooden platter in front of him, too. On it lay a couple of pieces of sushi, which he ate very elegantly using chopsticks. Shortly afterwards the Japanese bartender or chef handed the first piece of sushi over to Professor Andersen, along with horseradish and ginger. Professor Andersen began to eat. He dreaded it somewhat, as for one thing he was sitting beside the murderer and in this upsetting situation had to try to force down a bite of food, but also because he was a little uncertain about how he would master using chopsticks, which, after much practice, he could use more or less correctly, but he had never used them in such an upsetting and nerve-racking situation before. He concentrated intensely on this, and was relieved when his table companion didn’t make any comments which might indicate that he now had some reason to believe that Professor Andersen wasn’t really so familiar with Japanese restaurants after all, as he had just claimed. So Henrik Nordstrøm was still at large. He knew that anyway, for he could often observe him from the window of his apartment. Professor Andersen didn’t understand how he had been able to keep his crime concealed for so long. Didn’t the murdered woman, Mrs Nordstrøm, have any relatives or friends or workmates who missed her, or in some other way had become suspicious that something was not as it should be? He supposed Henrik Nordstrøm had managed to put them off with excuses, and with a story, which for the meantime was more or less credible and sufficiently reassuring for a relative or a workmate not to go to the sensational lengths of instigating a search for a woman whose husband had assured them of her good reasons for not coming to visit. But it was a dangerous gamble, and he was doomed in advance to lose. It was just a question of time. And that he knew, while he played this dangerous game. But so far nothing had happened, as yet no one missed Mrs Nordstrøm, or whatever her name was, to the extent that suspicion had been aroused and turned into manifest and vigilant uneasiness and anxiety, which demanded another answer. Now he was sitting here, in a Japanese restaurant in his own neighbourhood, and eating sushi in a sushi bar, along with Professor Andersen. They got talking and Henrik Nordstrøm talked willingly. For every piece of sushi that landed on Professor Andersen’s platter, he had a comment to make, because he had just eaten the same piece, hadn’t he, so he asked if his neighbour agreed with him that this bit was very good, in the circumstances, or whether he, too, hadn’t tasted better. And Professor Andersen passed comment. As a rule he agreed with Henrik Nordstrøm, but now and then he took care to have an independent opinion, and then he might say, ‘I’ve never tasted better scallops than this, at least not at this Japanese restaurant.’ When Professor Andersen disagreed in this way, Henrik Nordstrøm opened his eyes wide and said, peeved, ‘Well, that’s your opinion, I have mine.’ This way of opening his eyes wide and looking peeved, before dismissing it, wiping it out, was the most distinctive trait Professor Andersen could detect in Henrik Nordstrøm. Apart from his connection to the Far East, which he willingly made known, and willingly talked about. Small remarks about different places in the Far East, towns which Professor Andersen had never heard of, such as Siem Reap, M