The demonstrators closed ranks, their faces showing anxiety, irritation and sheer anger. The largest man in the group had moved to the front, seconded by one of the trusties and a couple of new arrivals who looked like students. Evy Berge shouldered her way to the front too.
I was following in her wake when Karin held me back. ‘Hang on, Varg, it might be…’
‘I’ve been out on a February evening before, love.’
‘Just wait and see what happens.’
‘OK.’
The big chap in the winter overcoat spoke with a surprisingly educated Bergen accent, as if he’d been conceived under a rhododendron bush in Kalfaret, the city’s poshest district. ‘May I ask if you have police authorisation for this demonstration?’
Evy Berge took a letter from her pocket and waved it under his nose. ‘Stamped and signed! See here!’
His eyes flashed with anger as he looked at her. ‘And how long were you lot planning on keeping us residents awake?’
‘Keeping us awake. Get him!’ piped up a voice from somewhere a good way back in the group, setting off a ripple of ironic laughter through the others.
‘We’ve got permission to carry on till midnight,’ said Evy Berge.
‘Why don’t you just go home and watch a porn film?’ called out one of the girls who claimed to give free blowjobs.
The man stood on his toes and looked over the heads of the people at the front. ‘Who said that?’
The girl stood on tiptoe herself. ‘Me.’
He glanced from her to her banner. ‘Is that an offer?’
‘Just come here, and I’ll bite it right off!’
He started to push his way towards the back. ‘Come here you little cuntlicker, I’ll show you…’
The man who looked like a hired bodyguard barred his way. ‘Let’s just take it easy, now.’
‘And what the fuck are you? A eunuch?’
‘An off-duty bailiff, if it’s all the same to you.’
The two men stood there glowering at each other. They were the same size and looked as though both knew a thing or two. I was itching to give somebody a piece of my mind too. Karin gripped my arm even more tightly.
The man with the blue knitted cap said: ‘Come on, Bernhard. You heard what the guy said. It’s not worth it. They’ll be off by midnight.’
I stood there listening. That voice…
I craned my neck to try and get a better look at his face, but there were too many heads in the way. I felt my scrotum shrinking, one of the last instinctive reactions we still have, and a sure sign of danger in the air. It surely couldn’t be…
‘OK then! Cocksucker!’ he hissed at the great bailiff. ‘You’ll be getting a free session for this, I suppose?’
The bailiff followed him out into the street, but Evy Berge set off hot on his heels and stopped him. ‘Don’t rise to the bait! We’ve made our point.’ She raised her yoke. ‘We’ll be back! Bet your bottom dollar on it!’
‘Leave my arse out of it!’ he shouted to them from the other side of the street.
The man in the lumber jacket didn’t even turn round but led the way, making for the corner leading to Holbergsalmenningen. I stood there peering at the way he walked. Once upon a time twenty years ago…
‘Oh, my God!’ I said to myself.
‘Hm,’ said Karin, pulling even closer. ‘Think we can go now?’
I glanced round. The group was already breaking up. ‘Looks as though the show’s over for tonight.’
Evy Berge came over to us. ‘Sometimes we’ve actually had to call the police ourselves. But tonight it went off OK, luckily. Quite a good demonstration, eh, Veum?’
I nodded. ‘Thanks a lot.’
‘Come on!’ said Karin. ‘I’m freezing…’
Later on, in bed at Fløenbakken, when she’d warmed up again, she lifted her head from my chest, looked deep into my eyes and said: ‘I can’t help thinking of Siren, when I – hear stuff like that.’
I put my arms more tightly round her and gave her a gentle squeeze.
‘I just can’t imagine what it must feel like to – do it for money…’
‘I can assure you that the girls who sell themselves like that don’t feel too good about it either. I’ve met plenty of them in all the years I’ve been doing this job.’
‘And so young…’
‘Boys too, unfortunately. But they’re still a minority. After all, there are fewer gays than heteros when all the chromosomes are finally totted up.’
‘But what drives them to it, Varg?’
‘Money, quite simply. Many of them to pay for a habit, but others just to buy the right clothes, for example, to keep up with the rest of their girlfriends. And the radical feminists who took part in the demonstration down there are wrong when they say that it’s all the men’s fault. Prostitution’s about power above all. You can afford to buy power over another person for a limited period of time. Even the feeblest man finds there’s someone who’s even punier than him. Why do you think so many of these girls are eventually raped and abused in their own milieu? Whores are pariahs, Karin; they always have been.’
‘And one of them was my sister. I’ve just never been able to get my head round it! We had the same mother and father, we came from the same background, had the same upbringing… What was it that made her end up like that, while I…?’
‘Who knows? Brothers and sisters are different, aren’t they? The genes are not equally divided. But, above all, I think it’s a matter of who you go around with, what your friends are like in the years when you’re finally staking out the course your life is going to follow. Siren was unlucky in that way, you know that better than I do, whereas you…’
She laid her head back on my chest and mumbled: ‘If only we’d known that it was going to turn out like this when we were small, would we have done things any different? Would we have been able to stop what happened? Would we, Varg?’
I couldn’t give her the right answer. Nobody could.
It was a restless night. When I eventually dropped off to sleep I drifted straight into a horrible dream. In a hotel room looking out onto doomsday I met the man in the lumber jacket again. Now he pulled off his knitted woollen cap and showed me his face. Only there was no face, just a bare skull, as though it was death itself that was on tour in the provinces and had at last found a grateful listener.
I woke bathed in sweat, unable to drop off to sleep again.
Twenty-eight
TUESDAY WAS A DAY with a calm clear sky, streaked with peach in the east. A pale moon with a little bite taken out of it hung suspended over Damsgårdsfjell Mountain and Lyderhorn.
We walked over the Kalfaret district to town, followed the pedestrian crowds through Marken and on Strandkaien, kissed a hurried goodbye, and Karin carried on down to the Population Register Department at Murhjørnet as I took the stairs up to the third floor, the papers under my arm and keys in hand.
During the previous day, the status of the ‘witness’ had changed to ‘suspect’ but anonymity was still maintained. However, according to the newspaper reports, the ‘suspect’ refused to accept that he was in any way linked to the death, apart from having met Torild Skagestøl ‘a few times.’ Yet one of the papers quoted a source confirming that the ‘suspect’ had been seen with Torild ‘and another girl’ on Thursday afternoon ‘at Jimmy’s, the amusement arcade-cum-snack bar in the centre of Bergen.’