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the Hayundi yard do anything with the case before all the formalities are okayed. There’s not much I can do, sorry. Frank has the details. Talk to Frank.”
    Rygg just sat there staring at his desk. It was a foot thick in files already, and now he had to do the Evagas report over. He clicked open the computer. There were a hundred emails in his inbox, including eight in a row from Frank. The most recent was headed: ‘URGENT!!!’
    He worked methodically through the day. There was no way he could finish it by Thursday. It had taken him a week the first time through.
    After drinking five cups of coffee and gleaning not the slightest buzz, he checked the bag to make sure it was caffeinated. Late in the afternoon, he tried flirting with the new secretary, and she didn’t even seem angry, just looked at him the way you’d look at a pimply teenager. He went into the bathroom and peered at himself in the mirror, trying to see what she saw. What had happened to the trim athlete who used to get all the girls? He was big, and that helped, but his chest and stomach had started to slop forward, and his eyes were so tired. He needed to start running again. But there was no time, no time.
    The episode in Hamburg, starting with the woman’s face and ending with the club, coalesced in his mind, like a movie he’d seen a while ago. Plowing through the emails, he’d pause and close his eyes and think back. That was when he was alive. Then he’d open to the screen, the stacks of numbers, which would never end.
    He toiled through the night on the Evagas report, and finally tried to get to sleep at four in the morning, but sleep wouldn’t come. Lying there with his eyes closed, he saw the numbers scrolling like a horrible dream. They’re like a disease , he thought. Like a virus and I’m losing the fight .
    Finally, he got the insurance report finished four minutes before the deadline on Thursday, and went to tell Frank. Frank nodded without taking his eyes from the screen, and said, “The exploration application for northern Norway was due yesterday, Torgrim.”
    Going back to his desk, Rygg spent a few minutes browsing on Facebook, as some sort of reward. He found a law school acquaintance, who’d been the girlfriend of his buddy. Ingrid. He’d always sort of had the hots for her. She was divorced, living in Nordberg. He got her number from the online phonebook and called her up, right then, and they made a date for that night. Over lunch break, he bought himself a new shirt, got a haircut. And he even felt a little surge of something when she stepped out of the elevator of her building. She hadn’t let herself go like some of the others. He took her to an Italian place, Mama Rosa in Bygdøy. The restaurant was on the docks, among potted palm trees. He bought a bottle of Chateau Margaux , and made a little show of chewing it, testing its legs. In the light, across the table, he saw that her look was a clever artifice: she was thickly made up, with a stiff corona of hair that did not budge when she nodded, and scarlet, impeccable fingernails. Her smile seemed practiced in a mirror.
    She’d flunked out of law school and was now a hairdresser. She had two kids who still lived with her. Over the wine, they reminisced about college, then talked about their marriages. Hers had lasted a year longer than his. She talked about her battle with her landlordover a cupboard door, about her youngest son’s grades.
    He started telling her about the trip to Hamburg, and thought he was going to tell her about the shooting, but couldn’t. He didn’t want to sully that memory somehow, not with this plastic-haired woman. “I met a man there,” he told her, lamely. “Some Russian journalist. Interesting person.” They ate their desserts in silence.
    On the ferry back to Aker Brygge, they stood like statues, leaning on the railing, without saying a word. Rygg watched the smaller boats passing by. The seagulls screamed overhead, fighting for