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wasn’t handsome. If anything, he was too skinny, too short, his face battered by tobacco and vodka. But those listening eyes.
    He remembered Marin sewing himself up in his hotel bathroom, the rich drops of blood against the porcelain. He remembered Marin sitting beside the bank of flowers, asking him, in his impeccable, delicately accented English, to pull his cigarettes from his breast pocket. And he remembered the woman’s face in the Orfeoplatz, her thin lips working. The sky had been blue in Hamburg.
    He noted the fresh graffiti in the well of the apartment as soon as he stepped through the door. The local gangs – immigrant kids and neo-Nazis mostly – had recently, after a lull, started up their wars again. The newspaper said that Fjell was a safe place to live these days, but Rygg couldn’t disagree more. The week before he’d left, he’d seen a skinny, shaven-headed boy stabbed to death in the parking lot. The attackers had just laughed at the boy’s pleas. He’d chased them, too – chasing seemed to be his thing these days – but they’d run off. What would he have done if he’d caught them, anyway? One on six, and they had knives, maybe even guns.
    He took the shabby elevator to the seventh floor. His apartment door was open, and he stood in front of it, cursing, his keys dangling from a finger. They’d pried it open, with a crowbar, perhaps, splintering the wood around the triple locks. Kicking the door savagely, so that splinters sprayed, he went in. They’d taken the television, but he didn’t really have much else to take. They’d cleaned him out the last two times.
    The place stank, and he wondered if there was another plumbing problem. But walking to the bathroom, he saw that one of them had taken a shit in the middle of the table. “ Jævla forpulte rasshøl! ” he shouted. “Fucking assholes!”
    He’d just gotten the shit cleaned up and was scrubbing the tabletop with steel wool, when the telephone rang. It was his ex-wife, and she started in instantly. Nora, their daughter, was moving into her own place with a friend, and she needed money for the down payment. He sat on the edge of the kitchen cabinet and held the receiver and looked down at it. He tried to break in: “Karin … Karin … Karin, listen … Karin …” Finally he shouted her name. She shut up. “Karin, I just got in. I just got in the door one minute ago from Hamburg, and I have to listen to this shit. You deal with her, okay? I’ll get you the money, but you deal with her. I need to sleep.” He unplugged the phone, then turned off his cell. He opened the fridge door, releasing a sweet stench of rot, and quickly shut it again. He shook his head. That’s right , he thought. Keep it closed. Keep the rot inside. Don’t let anyone know. He opened the liquor cupboard, but they’d cleaned that out as well. Too weary to curse any more, he fetched the bottle of duty-free aquavit from his suitcase, twisted off the cap, and tipped a gurgle down his throat. He loved the way the alcohol made him feel; warm and relaxed. Happy-go-lucky.
    April 15
    When he got to his office the next morning, one of the senior partners, a podgy old man with a nose that resembled a red potato, poked his head around the door and said, “The insurance papers for the White Angle FPSO, are they ready yet? Evagas and the yard are blaming each other for the oil leak, so make sure you get the figures right this time. We need to send the report over to the Evagas’ lawyers by Thursday.” No ‘Hi, how was your trip?’ No ‘Welcome back.’ Just straight into the bullshit again.
    “I finished that before I left,” he said.
    “Didn’t Frank tell you?”
    “Tell me what? I’ve been in Hamburg.”
    “Don’t you read your emails?”
    “Not on the plane.”
    “Oh, Lord. Okay, the Koreans got the report, sent it on to Paris, and the Evagas folk say it’s incomplete; they need something more thorough. Rigid rules, I know, but they won’t let