“I won’t do his name,” Alice had told Ingrid.
“I don’t want his name,” the girl had answered—clenching her teeth together when she talked, as if she were afraid or unable to show her tongue. She’d wanted just a heart, ripped in two.
Then Alice had given her a whole heart instead—a perfectly unbroken one, as Jack recalled.
“You didn’t give me what I wanted!” Ingrid Moe had blurted out.
“I gave you what you have, a perfect heart—a small one,” Alice had told her.
“I’m not telling you anything,” the girl had said.
She’d told Jack instead—“Sibelius,” she’d said. Not the composer but the name of a music college in Helsinki, where William’s next best students would come from. (New students were part of what Andreas Breivik meant by irons in the fire.)
“Ingrid quit the organ,” Andreas told Jack. “She went back to the piano, without much success. I stayed with the organ. I kept growing, as you have to,” he said, with no small amount of pride. “Ingrid’s marriage didn’t have much success, either.”
Jack didn’t like him; Breivik seemed smug, even a little cruel. “What about your marriage?” Jack asked him. “Or didn’t you get married?”
Andreas shrugged. “I became an organist,” he said, as if that were all that mattered. “I’m grateful to your mother, if you really want to know. She saved me from getting married at a time when I was far too young to be married, anyway. I would have had a time-consuming personal life, when what I needed was to be completely focused on my music. As for Ingrid, in all likelihood, she would have chosen a personal life over a career—whether she married me or someone else. And I don’t think her personal life would have worked out any better, or differently, if she’d been married to me. With Ingrid, things just wouldn’t have worked out—they just didn’t.”
Like some other successful people Jack had known, Andreas Breivik had all the answers. The more Breivik said, the more Jack wanted to talk with Ingrid Moe. “There’s one other thing,” Jack said. “I remember a cleaning woman in the church—an older woman, well-spoken, imperious—”
“That’s impossible,” Breivik said. “Cleaning women aren’t well-spoken. Are you telling me this one spoke English?”
“Yes, she did,” Jack replied. “Her English was quite good.”
“She couldn’t have been a cleaning woman,” Andreas said with irritation. “I don’t suppose you remember her name.”
“She had a mop—she leaned on it, she pointed with it, she waved it around,” Jack went on. “Her name was Else-Marie Lothe.”
Breivik laughed scornfully. “That was Ingrid’s mother! I’ll say she was imperious! You got that right. But Else-Marie wasn’t that well-spoken; her English was only okay.”
“Her last name was Lothe. She had a mop,” Jack repeated.
“She was divorced from Ingrid’s father. She’d remarried,” Andreas said. “She had a cane, not a mop. She broke her ankle getting off the streetcar right in front of the cathedral. She caught her shoe in the trolley tracks. The ankle never healed properly—hence the cane.”
“She had dry hands, like a cleaning woman,” Jack mentioned lamely.
“She was a potter—the artistic type. Potters have dry hands,” Breivik said.
Needless to say, Else-Marie Lothe had hated Alice; she’d ended up hating Andreas Breivik, too. (Jack could easily see how that could happen.)
Jack asked Breivik for Ingrid Moe’s married name and her address.
“It’s so unnecessary for you to see her,” Andreas said. “You won’t find her any easier to understand this time.” But, after some complaining, Breivik gave Jack her name and address.
Under the circumstances, it turned out that Andreas Breivik knew more about Ingrid Moe than Jack would have thought. Her name was Ingrid Amundsen now. “After her divorce,” Breivik said, “she moved into a third-floor apartment on Theresesgate—on the left side of the street, looking north. You can walk from there to the center of Oslo in twenty-five minutes.” Breivik said this with the dispassion of a man who had timed the aforementioned walk, more than once. “The blue tram line goes by,” Andreas continued, as slowly as if he were waiting for the tram. “Since the new Rikshospitalet was built, there are three different lines passing. The noise might have bothered Ingrid to begin with, but she probably doesn’t hear it any longer.”
Ingrid Amundsen was a piano teacher; she gave private lessons in her apartment.
“Theresesgate is quite a nice street,” Andreas said, closing his eyes, as if he could walk the street in his sleep—of course he had. “Down at the south end, toward Bislett Stadium, which is only a five-minute walk from Ingrid’s, there are a few cafés, a decent bookstore—even an antiquarian bookstore—and the usual 7-Eleven. Closer to Ingrid, on her side of the street, is a large grocery store called Rimi. There’s a nice vegetable store next to the Stensgate tram stop, too. It’s run by immigrants—Turkish, I think. You can buy some imported specialties—marinated olives, some cheeses. It’s all very modest, but nice.” Breivik’s voice trailed away.
“You’ve never been inside her apartment?” Jack asked him.
Breivik shook his head sadly. “It’s an old building, four stories, built around 1875. It’s a bit shabby, I suppose. Knowing Ingrid, she probably would have kept the original wooden floors. She would have done some of the renovating herself. I’m sure her children would have helped her.”
“How old are her children?” Jack asked.
“The daughter is the older one,” Breivik told Jack. “She’s living with a guy she met in university, but they don’t have children. She lives in an area called Sofienberg. It’s a very popular and hip place for young people to live. The daughter can get on a tram in Trondheimsveien and be at her mother’s in about twenty minutes; by bicycle, it would take her ten or fifteen. I imagine, if she had children, she’d want to move out of central Oslo—maybe Holmlia, an affordable area, where there are still almost as many Norwegians as there are immigrants.”
“And Ingrid has a son?” Jack asked.
“The boy is studying at the university in Bergen,” Andreas Breivik said. “He visits his mother only during vacations.”
Jack liked Breivik a little better after this conversation. Jack nearly told Andreas that he would come see him after he visited with Ingrid—and that he would describe the interior of her apartment to him so that the organist could imagine the interior part of Ingrid’s life as obsessively as he’d imagined the rest of it. But that would have been cruel. Andreas was probably unaware of what an investigation he’d made of his former girlfriend.
Ingrid Moe had been sixteen when Jack had covered the tattoo on her heart-side breast with a piece of gauze with Vaseline on it. He remembered that he’d had some difficulty getting the adhesive tape to stick to her skin, because she was still sweating from the pain.
“Have you done this before?” Ingrid had asked.
“Sure,” Jack had lied.
“No, you haven’t,” she’d said. “Not on a breast.”
When he’d held the gauze against her skin, Jack could feel the heat of her tattoo—her hot heart burning his hand through the bandage.