Cockroaches(7)

Hole belched and Waaler leaned back.

“Another chance to do what?”

“To show what you can do,” the younger officer said with a boyish smile.

“I’ll show you what I can do.” Hole smiled, put the glass to his mouth and tipped his head back.

“Pack it in, Hole!” Waaler’s cheeks flushed as they watched Hole’s Adam’s apple rise and fall beneath his unshaven chin.

“Happy?” Hole asked, putting the empty glass down in front of him.

“Our job—”

“I couldn’t give a shit about your job.” Hole buttoned up his reefer jacket. “If Møller wants something he can ring me or wait until I’m at work tomorrow. Now I’m going home and I hope I won’t see your faces for the next twelve hours. Gentlemen …” Harry raised himself to his full 192 centimeters and lurched to the side.

“You arrogant prick,” Waaler said, rocking back in his chair. “You bloody loser. If only the reporters who wrote about you after Australia had known you haven’t got the balls—”

“The balls to do what, Waaler?” Hole was still smiling. “Lock up drunken sixteen-year-olds because they’ve got Mohicans?”

The younger officer glanced at Waaler. Rumors had been doing the rounds at Police College last year that some young punks had been hauled in for drinking beer in public places and beaten in the cells with oranges packed in wet towels.

“You’ve never understood esprit de corps, Hole,” Waaler said. “You just think about yourself. Everyone knows who was driving the car in Vinderen and why a good policeman smashed his skull against a fence post. Because you’re a drunk, Hole, and you drove while under the influence. You should be bloody glad the force swept the facts under the carpet. Had they not been concerned about the family and the force’s reputation—”

The younger officer accompanying Waaler was learning something new every day. This afternoon, for example, he learned it was very stupid to rock on a chair while insulting someone, because you are totally defenseless if the insulted party steps over and lands a straight right between the eyes. As customers often fell over at Schrøder’s there was no more than a couple of seconds’ silence before the buzz of conversation resumed.

He helped Waaler to his feet as he glimpsed the tails of Hole’s jacket disappearing through the door. “Wow, not bad after eight beers, eh?” he said, but shut up when he met Waaler’s gaze.


Harry’s legs strode out casually along the icy pavement of Dovregata. His knuckles didn’t hurt; it would be early tomorrow morning before either pain or regret came knocking.

He didn’t drink during working hours. Though he had done it before, and Dr. Aune contended that every new relapse started where the old one finished.

The white-haired, roly-poly Peter Ustinov clone had laughed so much his double chin shook as Harry explained to him that he was keeping away from his old foe Jim Beam and confining himself to beer. Because he didn’t like beer much.

“You’ve been in a mess, and the moment you open the bottle you’re there again. There’s no halfway house, Harry.”

Well. He was struggling home on two legs, generally managing to undress himself and getting himself to work the next day. It hadn’t always been like that. Harry called it a halfway house. He just needed a few knockout drops to sleep, that was all.

A woman said hello from under a black fur hat as she passed. Was it someone he knew? Last year lots of people had said hello, particularly after the interview on TV when Anne Grosvold had asked him how it felt to shoot a serial killer.

“Well, better than sitting here and answering questions like that one,” he had said with a crooked smile, and it had been the hit of the spring, the most repeated quote this side of one politician’s defense of an agricultural policy: “Sheep are nice animals.”

Harry inserted the key into the lock of his flat in Sofies gate. Why he had moved to Bislett escaped him. Perhaps it had been because his neighbors in Tøyen had started looking at him strangely and keeping their distance, which at first he had construed as showing respect.

Fine, the neighbors here left him in peace, though they would appear in the corridor to check everything was OK if, on rare occasions, he should slip on a step and roll back down to the nearest landing.

The backward rolls hadn’t started until October, after he had hit a brick wall over Sis’s case. Then the air had been knocked out of him and he had started dreaming again. And he knew only one way to keep the dreams at arm’s length.

He had tried to pull himself together, take Sis to the cabin in Rauland, but she had become very withdrawn since the assault, and she didn’t laugh as easily as before. So he had rung his father a couple of times, although the conversations hadn’t been very long, just long enough to indicate that his dad wanted to be left in peace.