Sohlberg and the Gift (27 page)

“Anyway. We have drinks. Smoke weed. Get naked and go out to the hot tub where we have more to drink. Then two of Cassandra’s friends drop by. These two gals get in the tub with us and before I know it they’re kissing and doing each other and they ask me to join in and I’m a sucker for that because I do. Of course I now realize it was all a set-up to get me hooked. And I’m loving it because I don’t mind having to go through three women that night before I get a taste of Janne.

“I would’ve taken care of Janne that night but Ludvik starts passing the crack pipe around and he’s like some butler passing around a tray of pills and lines of cocaine and before I know it I wake up in an upstairs bedroom with Cassandra and her two friends. I have no idea what day it is. I later figured out we had been there three days doing drugs and each other.”

From time to time Sohlberg sneaked a glance at the two psychiatrists while Patient # 1022 disgorged his story. Wide-eyed and breathing heavily through parted mouths the two psychiatrists appeared to be extremely interested in the prurient lifestyle of Patient # 1022. But they both avoided looking at each other.

What’s to be made of these two headshrinkers and their oddly modest behavior?

Since when are shrinks so modest?

Are the two having an affair? . . . Had an affair? . . . Would like to have an affair?

Patient #1022 continued:

“Well . . . by now . . . as you can imagine . . . I was hooked . . . no . . . I was obsessed . . . on getting up close and personal with Janne Eide. She was all that I could think about. The she-devil and the drug-devils. They had a hold of me . . . I stopped looking after my daughter . . . even when she needed me so badly after the death of her mother.

“If only I could go back and change that. But time only goes in one direction. Time’s a one-way street on which no u-turns are allowed. We can’t go back and start over again to undo the damage we’ve done to others. Regrets at best and disasters at worst are all we’re left with. We wreck and wreck and there’s no way to undo the damage as if it had never happened. That’s the heartbreaking truth. Ain’t it?”

Again Sohlberg felt like nodding in agreement with Patient # 1022. Not a day passed without the solemn detective regretting not having spent more time with his first wife. And even on that day at the insane asylum he was already filled with regrets at not spending more time with Emma—his second chance to prove that he could be a loving husband whose wife’s happiness was his main goal and not his job or career. The two psychiatrists also appeared downcast and their eyes filled with remorse.

“So . . . as you can see . . . Janne Eide had a hook through my heart. Sure I let her put it there. And she reeled me in. She told me her father was rich and that was why she and her hubby never spent any real amount of time in boring Norway since they had city homes in London and New York and Barcelona and Paris and Hong Kong and vacation homes in Greece and Spain and Mexico and Brazil and the British Virgin Islands. Her father had given up his Norwegian citizenship to become a citizen of Cyprus and he lived mostly in Switzerland to avoid Norway taxes. He paid almost no taxes at all on his investments.

“Well now. You can imagine how I started thinking of all sorts of way I could milk this cash cow to the max. But I didn’t have to come up with any scam since she started paying me a big fat weekly allowance in
cash
. Tax free baby!

“I hate admitting it . . . but she was basically paying me a lot of money to let her and her twisted Ludvik watch me do other women. They got a kick out of it. Think of it as foreplay by proxy. I didn’t mind since they got me all these stunning women or really slutty women who’d do anything and everything with me. In other words Janne and Ludvik played me like a cheap violin.

“After a few weeks they also started paying for my drugs and booze and clothes and before I knew it I was traveling all over the world to meet them for escapades with all these foreign babes. Janne and Ludvik took me south to Denmark where they bought me a legitimate Netherlands passport. One of her father’s Amsterdam lawyers paid a pretty penny for that gem. Now they ain’t dumb. Once I arrived at my destination the Eide lawyers would wait with goons at the airport and take my passport from me and not return it until I had another place to go to. Then I’d be escorted to the airport and shipped off to some other luxury Nirvana.”

“What,” said Sohlberg, “was the name on the passport?”

“Hans Muller.”

“Thank you. Keep on.”

“So off I’d go with my passport to Rio down in Brazil and to London and New York and Miami and Los Angeles and Dubai and Hong Kong and Nicosia in Cyprus and you name it and I had every single racial and ethnic babe. White. Black. Brown. Yellow. And everything in between.

“Can you imagine what I got in Brazil’s Rio de Jainero and in London?”

Sohlberg was tempted to but did not say, “Herpes.”

“I spent the whole year at different homes that Janne and Ludvik owned and I loved it. They rarely showed up to spend any time with me. By the way I never got to touch Janne. That really pissed me off. I soon saw that I was just a plaything for the idle rich . . . the trust fund babies . . . who are always moving on to their next toy. They bought me sports cars . . . and fancy clothes . . . and they threw buckets of money at me since I had a five hundred U.S. dollar a day coke habit. You’d think it be cheaper to buy cocaine in Rio on account of Brazil being next door to Bolivia and Peru and Columbia. . . .

“Anyway . . . after a while I found out a life of luxury ain’t all that it’s cracked up to be. It slowly got boring. Sex. Drugs. Booze. Clothes. Cars. Everything you’d ever want when and how you’d ever want it. No limits. Nothing to do but sit around and get whatever you wanted. Never giving. Just getting. I was losing my mind . . . I had no more energy . . . my health was shot. I felt that lonely coldness when death starts a-knocking on your door . . . I could literally feel the life draining out of me . . . drip . . . drip . . . drip.

“During those few moments when I was sober I started wondering if I was no different than a pig at the trough. Over and over I remembered an old saying of Annie’s parents. . . .

“
Pigs get fed. Hogs get slaughtered
.

“
And that’s when I started panicking . . . my coke and marijuana paranoid thoughts got me to thinking that maybe I was a hog being led to the slaughter by Janne and Ludvik. I also started having regrets about abandoning Astrid. She reminded me so much of her mother. Janne and Ludvik must’ve gotten suspicious about me and the drop in my drug-and-slut consumption because they told me they were bringing me back to Norway.

“I was glad. I had told them several times that I wanted to see my daughter Astrid. I wanted to at least die in my country and not in some far away pig pen. You see a pig pen is a pig pen especially when it’s a mansion. I guess that the old Viking blood in me just wanted to come back home . . . to my clan and my fjords and my snow and ice.

“I flew from Cyprus to Copenhagen and got driven by a chauffeur out to Gothenburg in Sweden where a lawyer friend of theirs told me his wife would be driving me into Oslo. I stayed with this guy at his house for a week . . . where he and his wife really got into some wild wife-swapping parties with me and three other couples. I finally came to Oslo with his wife and we stayed at their apartment here in Oslo where we did each other and lots of coke for two days and three nights. . . .

“What’s the name of the couple that you stayed with in Gothenberg?” asked Sohlberg.

“Falkanger. I don’t remember their first names anymore. I’m sure you can look up all the Falkanger lawyers who live in Gothenburg and own a stunning condo apartment in Oslo . . . right on the waterfront.”

“Where?” said Sohlberg in an offhanded manner so as not to attract attention to his intense interest in this promising bit of information.

“In the Aker Brygge . . . near the corner of Stranden and Fjordalléen. . . . There’s a real fancy restaurant there . . . called Jacob Aall . . . she took me there twice. The waiters seemed to know her well. . . . They called her Fru Falkanger. I can’t remember her first name but she had this huge butterfly tattoo on her butt. But Falkanger is her married surname.”

“Maybe not,” countered Sohlberg. “How do you know Falkanger was their real name?”

“I saw a University of Oslo law school diploma with his name in the study at their Gothenburg home. I know it sounds strange since they live in Sweden. But that’s what I saw.”

“Alright. I’ll look into it. What else happened after you arrived in Oslo?”

“The Falkanger woman and I got invited to go meet Janne and Ludvik at the nightclub . . . Babylonia . . . where I had first met Janne. She promised I would finally have her. The lawyer’s wife and I met Janne and Ludvik at the club and Janne told me to follow her and Ludvik through the back door to this old warehouse. I left the lawyer’s wife behind and went to the warehouse for my reward. That’s what she called it:

“
‘Your reward for being so good and passing all our tests.’

“As usual she and Ludvik wanted me to do other women in front of them before I could have her at their home. So I went for one last hurrah . . . one last shebang. When we finished at the warehouse we left in what I think was their car and we went to their home. By then I had several drinks and snorted lots of coke and taken some pills Janne had offered me. We got there and I had some weed and passed out.

“Next thing I remember is waking up in her bed . . . covered in blood . . . and the police all around me accusing me of killing her and microwaving her head after chopping it off along with her legs and arms. I threw up over and over. The cops forced me downstairs to the kitchen where I saw her head in the microwave and passed out again.”

An unnatural and uncomfortable silence filled the room. Brooding clouds brought a somber gray half-light that replaced the brilliant white light that had illuminated the room at the beginning of the astounding story of Patient # 1022.

“I think we need a break,” said Dr. Nansen. “I’ve got to go to the lady’s room. Shall we all meet back here in fifteen minutes?”

“Yes,” said Sohlberg and Dr. Jorfald at the same time.

The patient left with the attendant. Dr. Jorfald followed the two men but at the hallway the psychiatrist turned in the opposite direction. Sohlberg waited a few seconds and then left the room and followed in the direction of the patient. But when he reached the end of the hallway the patient and attendant had vanished. Two guards and a receptionist were the only inhabitants of the main lobby.

The receptionist asked: “Need help?”

“Yes,” said Sohlberg as he headed towards the east wing of the psychiatric ward. “I wanted to go to the restroom and get something to drink.”

“Not that way!” yelled one of the guards in a rather unfriendly and disrespectful tone.

Sohlberg kept walking at a fast pace in the direction of the east wing. “What?”

“Hey! You can’t go that way. Only patients and staff. Come back here.”

Sohlberg meekly turned around and smiled a wan little smile. He did not want to cause a scene. He now had a feel for the general layout of where the patients lived. And as he headed back to the west wing he intentionally walked right past the rear of the main desk. He noticed the almost endless row of closed circuit cameras which confirmed his suspicion that the entire building was thoroughly wired and heavily monitored. He stopped at the men’s restroom by the lobby to avoid running into Jorfald and then quickly walked back to the conference room.

Nansen and then Jorfald entered the room. A few seconds later so did the patient with the same attendant.

“Alright,” bellowed Jorfald. “Shall
we
press on? . . . Perhaps we’ll start with some questions from the Chief Inspector. We’ll ask some right after.”

“Thank you,” said Sohlberg. “But do you mind? . . . I’d like to have something to drink.”