Blood Ties

1

Everybody has their weak spot.

Dad drummed that into me when he taught me to box. I was smaller than the other boys, but he showed me that even the most frightening opponents have a hole in their defense, some place that’s not covered, a mistake they’re doomed to repeat. He also taught me that it isn’t enough just to find that spot; in addition you have to have a heart that’s cold enough to exploit it without hesitation. And right there you had my weak spot. A heart that bled for people like me, that recognized all weakness as my own. But I learned, and my heart chilled. And now you could say my heart is an ice-cold, stone-dead volcano that had its last and final eruption eight years ago. And even then it was cold. Cold enough to make me a killer already back then.

That’s what was going through my head as I stood on the steps outside a house with a garage and an orchard tinged in fall colors in Kjelsås, in northern Oslo. That I’m a killer.

It was Saturday night, almost eight o’clock, and I’d just pressed my thumb against the bell on the front door. Directly beneath the bell was a heart-shaped ceramic shell that said “The Halden Family Live Here,” along with a smiley face.

I don’t know whether I was thinking about being a killer because I already had a guilty conscience, or to reassure myself that what I was about to do was something I was capable of doing. I’d done worse before.

My heart started beating faster as I heard the footsteps inside. Easy now. Just think fuck everything and get it over with.

The door opened.

“Yes, good evening, can I help you?”

The man was tall, a lot taller than my five feet eight. Slender, almost skinny. Gray hair, youngish face. Forty-one—I’d checked. I saw two snowsuits hanging on hooks behind him, with shoes for adults and kids strewn across the floor in typical organized chaos. According to the registration information I’d found online they’d owned the house for four years. I guessed Bent Halden’s wife wanted the place because they needed more room once number two was on the way—at least that was how I interpreted her Instagram account. And he’d always wanted something a bit higher up the hill because it was closer to running and skiing country. A Google search turned up his name as a participant in several local ski and orienteering events. But the last one was a few years back, so there was presumably less time now for that kind of thing than he’d planned. Partly because two kids are more than twice as much work as one, mostly because the company he’d started with a colleague named Jon Fuhr took up more—not less—of his time than before they became their own bosses. It’s just a guess, but I doubted I was too far off. Their company was called GeoData and they had been commissioned to examine the geology around Todde in connection with the tunnel being built to replace the road that ran straight though the middle of Os, as it had done as far back as people could remember, long before it was classified as an A-road in 1931.

I moistened my lips.

“Roy Opgard. Don’t know if you remember me?”

I tried to give him my friendly, maybe slightly anxious country-bumpkin-in-the-big-city face. Not my specialty. I’m guessing I looked like a Roy anyway. A bit dark, closed, reserved. Fortunately for me it seems to be a type Norwegians trust, probably because we think there’s some correlation between being shy and socially inept and honesty. Well, that’s the way I think too, so that’s okay.

Bent gave a long-drawn-out “Aaah” that was somewhere between a “Yes” and a “Not sure.”

“I fixed your car when you were working in Os,” I added.

Bent swished his finger through the air.

“Of course! And you made a really good job of it too.”

The skin in his forehead folded into several V-shaped rows. “Didn’t the money come through?”

“Oh yes, yes.” I tried a little laugh. “Sorry, I probably should have called you first, but that’s the way we do things out in the sticks, you know. Just turn up on your doorstep and ring the bell. But I’ve been in Poland, just got back, and since I was in town I remembered I had something of yours in my glove compartment. This.”

I held it up in front of him. And sure enough, I could see that Bent hadn’t the faintest idea what that shiny little metal object was.

“Found it after you got the car back. Must have just forgotten to put it back again. Of course, the car works without it, but much better with it. Where is the beast?”

“The car? Now? No, really, I’m sure I can fit it back myself. What is it, anyway?”

“Well, if you don’t know, how are you going to do that?”

Bent looked at me. Smiled and shook his head. “Good point.”

“I’ve been paid for a job that, for once, I haven’t done properly. It’ll only take five minutes. Where . . . ?”

“In the garage,” said Bent, stepping out of his slippers, lifting the keys to the Audi from a hook and pulling on a pair of sneakers. “Camilla! I’m just going down to the garage!”

From somewhere inside the house came the shouted reply: “Sigurd’s off to bed now.”

“If you get him ready then I’ll read to him!”

“You got kids?” Bent asked above the scraping noises as we walked the gravel path that led down to a large, white-painted garage. I wasn’t expecting the question and just shook my head and tried not to think that she would have been seven years old now. Not that I knew it would have been a girl, but I’d just grown more and more certain of it. I swallowed back a lump. It was a little smaller with every passing year, but it would never quite disappear completely.

“So you run that garage in Os?” His voice was friendly.

“No, closed down a long time ago. But I’m a certified car mechanic, so now and then I take on a repair job just for the fun of it. I run the gas station next to it.”

Bent held up his keys when we arrived at the garage and the door opened automatically. I could see it was the expensive type. Bent Halden would probably have chosen something different if he was buying today.

“Yes, now I remember the local guy who recommended you told me. You’re what’s-his-name’s brother, that . . .”

“Carl Opgard,” I said.

“Yes.” Bent laughed as we walked in. “The king of Os.”

I noticed he immediately realized how patronizing that sounded. As though Os was some shitty little town where Carl swaggers around like some pantomime king. King of the dunghill.

“I didn’t mean . . . I just gather that he owns most of the village.”

“He owns most of Os Spa. Open the car?”

“Yes, but doesn’t that make him king of Os?”

I slipped into the driver’s seat and Bent got into the passenger seat. I pulled out a screwdriver, flipped off the panel under the steering wheel and started turning the screwdriver. Bent watched, pretending to take an interest. “So what’s the news?” I said as I moved the leads. “From the preliminary reports I saw that your firm thinks the mountain at Todde looks okay?”

“That’s right.”

“I see. How sure are you?”

“Pretty sure.”

“Is that possible, when you can’t see inside the mountain?”

“Yes. Though, of course, there’s always an element of uncertainty when it comes to interpreting the seismic data.”

“And it’s your firm—or actually, in fact, you—who does the interpreting and then presents the conclusion, would that be right?”

“Well, yes, in a way. Along with my partner.”

“Jon Fuhr.”

“Jon, yes. We’re the head geologists.”

“You own sixty percent, he owns forty, so what happens if the two of you disagree?”

“Well, I must . . . you sure know a lot about us. How—”

“Oh, all you have to do is check the company registration records up at Brønnøysund. You know, just recently I was going to check the financial status of an American company that makes roller coasters. But it wasn’t that easy, and it struck me then how we take transparency for granted here in Norway. We’re such a trusting nation Americans would almost certainly say it bordered on the naive. But it’s precisely because we can see everything that we’re able to trust each other. It’s like it is out in the country towns and villages. Everybody knows everything about everybody in Os. Just about. It’s not that everybody likes everybody, but we just take it for granted that people are more or less telling the truth. The way the Highways and Parks Department trust that the conclusion you and Jon have come to is the truth.”

“Well, yes, we do have a good reputation.”

“But finances are a little tricky at the moment.” I looked up with an apologetic smile. “At least, according to Brønnøysund.”

Bent returned the smile a little stiffly. “Things came to a bit of a halt during the pandemic. What are you actually getting at here?”

I went back to concentrate on my work. “I’m wondering how sure you can be that it’s possible to bore this tunnel and stay within the budget that’s behind the decision to reroute the main road. On a scale of one to ten, for example.”

“We-ell,” said Bent. “Eight, perhaps. Nine if we say that it wouldn’t cost more than twice the amount.”

“Why not ten?”

He didn’t answer, just looked at me.

I held up the screwdriver. “What would it take to make you change your mind?”

“What do you . . . it’s Roy, isn’t it?”

I smiled. “I apologize, Bent. The questions are from a scientifically based technique of persuasion. The idea is to ask questions and let the other person convince himself that you are right. My brother gave me a book about it, it’s the way he works.”

“He persuades people?”

“Yes. Selling projects and things like that. He’s good at it.”

“So, you’re here to . . . sell me something?”

“Yes, I guess you could say that. But I’ll drop the sales pitch.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yes. And instead persuade you the good old-fashioned way. I’ll give you and your partner twelve million kroner if you say in your report to Highways and Parks that the tunnel can’t be built.”

Silence.

“Are you trying to bribe me?”

I nodded. “Yes. I know it doesn’t sound good but that’s probably the correct term.”

Bent stared in disbelief. “And what on earth makes you think that’ll work?”

“Because, in the first place, you’re using the present tense.”

“What?”

“If you were dismissing the idea completely you would have said ‘What makes you think that WOULD HAVE worked?’ They write about it in that book, that our choice of words reveals what we’re thinking, often before we ourselves even know we’re thinking it.”

Bent snorted. “And what else?”

“What?”

“You said ‘in the first place.’ ”

“Oh yeah!” I opened the glove compartment, took out the vehicle registration card and held it up. “I took a look at it while I was working on the car. Says here you don’t own the car. So it must be a company lease, right? Leasing’s a bad business practice right now, you know that?”

“So what?”

“There were three unpaid fines there too, all of them overdue. And that tells me just one thing. That you and your company have a cashflow problem, Bent.”

“So that makes you think I can be bribed? Listen, Roy, I’d rather let the company go under than do anything criminal.”

He’d raised his voice, but I doubted he was as morally indignant as he was pretending to be. I shook my head as though I was weighing things up. “Well, just how criminal is it, actually? No one knows exactly what’s inside that mountain. Could be water. Could be porous. Eight out of ten, that’s to say there is a twenty percent chance the provisional report is mistaken. Quite a lot, don’t you think? You just have to look at it from a slightly different angle, see if there are other ways of interpreting the data. Right?”

Bent didn’t reply.

“Sure, you can declare your company bankrupt, but not your family up there.” I nodded in the direction of the house. And saw from the flicker in his eyes that I’d found it. His weak spot. The family. Same as my weak spot. But I pushed aside anything you might call sympathy, I kept my heart cold.

“I checked the county registry,” I said. “This whole dump of yours is mortgaged to the hilt. So is your partner Jon’s house. Guess you had to go that extra mile when you started the company.”

Bent’s head didn’t move, but I could see he nodded assent with his eyes.

“And then along comes the pandemic.” I sighed. “Okay, the advantage is that it won’t be all that difficult to persuade Jon to go along with it.”

Bent’s eyes opened wide. “You’re crazy. Jon has—”

“—a previous conviction for fraud,” I interrupted. “And one for violence.”

Bent’s jaw froze open.

“Yes, the verdicts are in the public domain,” I explained. “Didn’t he tell you that? Sure, it was just a bit of loose change, when he was a student working in a bar, but he got six months conditional. So he’s got what it takes. That’s why I came to you, Bent. And you can take it up with him. Shouldn’t be that difficult really.”

Bent swallowed. His head dropped and he looked crestfallen. Resigned. But I recalled what Dad used to say, when he told Carl and me how they break wild horses in America. That the most dangerous moment was when the horse looked as though it had given up and was standing quite still. That was when you had to watch out, because that bronco had another buck coming.

“I could declare the company bankrupt and get work anywhere as a geologist the next morning,” Bent suddenly said in a sharp voice. “And get better money than I’m making today.”