Read an Excerpt
1
“I am royalty, you bastard!”
It was forty-two degrees with a cold, gray drizzle rolling northeast over everything in its path. Apparently, the slowly dying Gulf Stream refused to do its job today of warming things up a bit in Oslo.
This, I thought peering out of a broken glass window at the monochromatic day, is what comes from saying “yes” to your girlfriend when you definitely meant “hell no.”
“Did you hear what I said, you wretched, filthy immigrant?”
The blue-blooded sovereign with the acne-scarred face and chest had inherited, through an arcane and vaunted royal system, more than several lifetimes of common folks’ dreams; money had no meaning to him. There was nothing to strive for, nothing to achieve since all struggles had been settled and accomplishments codified generations earlier. Sleepwalking through his privileged life had led him to seek out the dark, jagged edges and emulsified shadowed corners of the human experience. Places where he could finally—finally!—feel his heart race, his breath quicken. Places where he could achieve the only intimacy he sought: The intimacy of watching, feeling and smelling the essence of young girls dissipate into the air around him as he sodomized and strangled them to death.
I regretted not having a gun. Of all the unrepentantly evil people I’ve put down in my life as marine, cop and private citizen, the man behind me—tied to a rusting, wobbly metal chair—was tenth-level twisted, probably deserving of a bullet shortly after his birth. If I had acted upon my initial instincts, this monster’s scrawny neck would have been snapped forty minutes ago. But there were people counting on me to hold the line for the laws of this land.
A jar of Vicks Mentholated VapoRub would have come in handy, too; I desperately needed the stinging grease in my nostrils to mask the stench of the place.
“Hey, Black man!” the pasty prince shouted. “I’m talking to you!”
I really wished I had my Glock.
One shot, justifiable homicide and I’d still be a goddamn Scandinavian hero.
Probably put a statue of me in Christiania Torv square.
“My blood reigned from the time of King Harald Fairhair, when you people were eating bananas in trees!” His Majestic Mess railed. “How dare you treat me like a—a—I could squash you like a bug!”
He’d become increasingly agitated over the past fifteen minutes and frankly I was bored with him. Here I was in an abandoned warehouse on the grimy industrial outskirts of Oslo, Norway, babysitting an inbred, clearly psychopathic bastard son of obscure Norwegian royalty. A viscount or viceroy or some antiquated crap no one in the actual Norwegian royal family gave a thimble of blue-blood piss about. It was a bone-dampening spring morning and all I wanted was a hot shower, a hot cup of coffee in my hot shower and what passed for donuts from Brooklyn Bakverk on Storgata in Oslo’s Old Town.
“Are you listening to me, savage?!”
“No,” I said. I gave my watch another impatient glance. Six minutes and counting . . .
I’d used arts-and-crafts waxed Irish twine to tie him to the chair. Stronger than zip ties will ever be. Plus, the “White Riot” on January 6, 2021, in DC ruined the use of zip ties for guys like me around the world; any cop stops you with a pocketful of zip ties these days and it’s off to the pokey. Same cop stops you with a spool of waxed Irish twine? Must have picked it up for a kid’s bead bracelet project.
After knocking His Highness out with a quick right cross, securing him to the chair had been easy. The hardest part was being that close to him: he was pale and stank of sweat and decay, all barely masked by an exorbitantly expensive cologne. A scent the Oslo cops had discounted as speculation, not hard evidence.
Sometimes, speculation is all there is to go on.
Ask any seasoned police detective, theoretical physicist or priest.
I was trying very hard not to look at the sickness strapped to the chair; such a glance might lead me to either vomiting or cutting off his diseased balls.
Possibly both.
As expected, his threats soon morphed into bargaining: “I’m very wealthy and you’re—you’re Black! I’m an opportunity for you!” He offered money. Loads of it. His house in the South of France near Ile Sainte-Marguerite. A variety of dehumanizing sexual perversions at his physical expense.
Enough was enough.
I grabbed two liters of gas in a red metal can and unscrewed the cap. He had intended to use the gas to destroy his grotesque collection of evidence.
“What—what are you doing?” he asked as I splashed gasoline on his bare feet.
“A friend of mine,” I said, “—guy I knew in Afghanistan, Army Special Forces—”
“Stop it! What—why are you doing this?” He squirmed in the chair, trying to break free of the ties.
“Shh,” I said, holding up a gloved forefinger near his lips. He audibly gulped, his pronounced Adam’s apple bobbing. “Anyway, this guy—his Humvee hits an IED. Lit him up like Johnny Storm. You know. Fantastic Four? The Human Torch? Couple weeks later, I visit him in the hospital. Wrapped up like chicken shawarma.”
“Why—why are you telling me this?”
I shooshed him once again.
“I’ll get to the point ’cause I know you’re just dying to get to the Ninth Circle of Hell.” Another splash of gas on his feet. “Yeah, so anyway, this guy? Second- and third-degree burns. Everywhere except his feet. Had those Michelangelo marble Roman-god feet. The rest of him? Beef jerky with bloodshot eyes. You know what he says to me? He says, ‘What happened? Everybody says I got burned.’ His doctor tells me somebody engulfed in flames goes from zero-to-insane in, like, a tenth of a second. Transcendental insanity. Like floating in space and watching a kid on earth zap ants with a magnifying glass.” I put the gas can down, reached into my pocket and pulled out a pack of matches I’d cribbed from a Chinese restaurant because of the nice logo. “On the other hand, when bits and pieces of the human body—like, say, feet—are set alight, the mind can’t make that leap to insanity. It doesn’t have that distance. No escaping the immediacy—the localized sensory proximity—of the pain.”
I lit a match and stood back.
“No! Please! God, no! Please!” He was weeping. Slobbering. Trying to shake the gasoline from his boney white feet. “Okay! Okay, I’m quiet! See? No talking!”
“You’re still talking.”
“Okay! Okay!”
He clamped his bloodless lips tightly together.
I blew out the match.
Walking back to the shattered remains of the window, I continued my impatient wait for the Oslo Police Rapid Response Team.
After a minute, a contingency of five white-and-lime-green Volkswagen Passats burst through the sheets of gray sleet, sliding to a halt in front of the abandoned warehouse. Tight on the rear of the last patrol car was a black Mercedes-Benz van, presumably carrying a Rapid Response Team armed to the teeth.
“I’ll never survive a trial! Or prison! Please! Kill me! Kill me now! I’ll pay you! I have money!”
“I already have money, you pus-bucket bastard. I’d still like to kill you, as a service to humanity. That might seem satisfying.”
A solidly-built dark-skinned Black man, middle-aged and dressed in a tailored police captain’s uniform, stood resolutely in front of one of the patrol cars. Through a bullhorn in Norwegian, he said the equivalent of, “Come out with your hands up!”
I did, instantly feeling the cold sleet glaze my face and hands.
“Jesus,” I said in English as I walked toward Captain Edus “Eddie” Gofu. “Eight minutes? Is that what you guys call ‘rapid response’?”
Captain Eddie lowered his bullhorn and gave the “go” for his Rapid Response team to breach the building.
“He is, of course, secured,” Captain Eddie said.
“Like a vulture in a barbed-wire cage.”
“Then that’s it,” he said quietly, his eyes hard and unblinking on the decrepit factory’s main entrance.
“That’s it for him,” I said. “It’s just beginning for the families and you guys.”
I’d come to know the Oslo Police Department captain through several years of back-and-forth from Mexicantown in southwest Detroit to Oslo to bask in the glow of the lady who held the key to my heart, Tatina Stadtmueller. Since her family’s immigration to Norway after her German doctor father’s untimely death, her mother had become well known in the upper echelons of Oslo society, hosting charitable events serving Oslo’s Somali, Nigerian and Syrian immigrant communities and sitting on a variety of corporate and nonprofit boards. Momma Stadtmueller, needless to say, was a force of nature.
I had been dragged to several of these black-tie charitable events by Tatina, including one honoring her late father’s service to Doctors Without Borders. She’d introduced me to Captain Eddie. He was an imposing man, wary of Americans and unshakably loyal to his adoptive Norway. That I was an ex-cop not by choice further fed his suspicion of me. But out of the immense respect he held for the Stadtmueller family he tolerated me.
I, on the other hand, couldn’t help but like the guy. Duty, service and sacrifice appeared to be inextricably woven into his DNA.
“Did you pull this kind of renegade nonsense in Detroit, Mr. Snow?” Captain Eddie said, turning his practiced stoic gaze to me. His chiseled face rarely hinted at much, but over the course of a month, I’d become attuned to variances in his highly disciplined demeanor. His micro-gestures. His voice and the set of his shoulders told me he was relieved. Not glad. Not happy. Relieved. “If, in fact, you did pull this kind of cowboy nonsense in Detroit, I can well understand why you are no longer on your city’s constabulary. Unless everybody there is a cowboy.”
“Just me ridin’ the high range, partner, doin’ what I can on the ponderosa.”
“I have absolutely no idea or interest in what that means,” he said.
I copped a seat on the hood of his Volkswagen cruiser.
A flex of his gloved left-hand fingers was a stern command for me to get my dimpled Blaxican ass off the hood of his car. He extracted a starched white handkerchief and repolished that area of the hood my bum briefly occupied.
One of his cops in black tactical gear approached Captain Eddie. The cop took off his helmet and balaclava and gave me serious side-eye. Captain Eddie nodded that the man could speak in front of me.
The two cops spoke in Norwegian. I assumed a situation report.
Then the cop slipped his balaclava and helmet back on and walked away.
“Wha’d he say?”
“In short,” Captain Eddie replied, “Sergeant Torgelson said it’s a goddam mess in there.”
In silence, we watched his Rapid Response Team and evidence techs enter and exit the building. I imagine being a Nigerian immigrant who had risen to the rank of police captain in a Scandinavian country couldn’t have been easy for Captain Eddie; no time for slacking, joking, the usual high-jinks camaraderie of “brothers in blue.” He might have been tightly wound, but I could empathize.
One of his patrolmen emerged from the warehouse, wobbled a few feet, then vomited.
“Three bodies,” I said. “Female, probably between fourteen and seventeen. Most likely African—Somali and Nigerian immigrants—or Syrian refugees. Differing states of decomp, with, uh—let’s just say a fresh DNA contribution from the suspect on the least decomposed victim.”
“You—actually saw him—”
“Corpus interruptus.”
“Jesus Kristus, den allmektige,” Captain Eddie said under his breath.
The black-masked R2 Team brought out Prince Wacko, handcuffed, leg-manacled and smelling of gas: he was wearing a full-length Jacquard bee-and-grapevine-print silk robe and silk leopard-print boxer shorts. He was weeping, barely able to walk through the mud under his own power.
“I’d like it officially noted that I didn’t kick the silly shit out of the guy,” I said. “Even though he deserved to have the silly shit kicked out of him.”
“Such restraint,” Captain Eddie said as he watched his men dragging the demented blue blood to the Mercedes van.
“Civility, compassion, equanimity and fraternity only go so far with psychopaths,” I said. Then, drawing in a deep breath of cold, damp air, I said, “God help me if I’d had my Glock.”
“Strangely enough, Mr. Snow, most Norwegians feel fairly complete without a weapon,” Captain Eddie said with a definitive air of smugness. “I suppose you think we—I—owe you a debt of gratitude.”
“You owe me nothing,” I said. “You owe the families of the dead girls. You owe their communities.”
Captain Eddie turned to me. “There are conditions to your visa, Mr. Snow. Such as not providing illegal work services. Or obstructing official police business.”
Facing him and matching his steely mano a mano stare, I said, “I let you guys know my every move, and nobody seemed to mind much. As to the other, getting paid for my obviously superior detection skills, go ahead. Toss me out of Norway for taking payment in good homemade zilabiyah and akara.” I pressed my wrists together, offering them for handcuffs. “Go ahead. I can’t wait to read that headline.”
We stared at each other for a long time.
I liked Captain Eddie.
Thought he was a good man. A good cop.
But I was years done with taking anybody’s shit.
“You are a very strange man, Mr. Snow,” Captain Eddie finally said. “Then again, you are—”
“Yeah, I know. American.”
“My office, tomorrow morning,” he said. “Nine o’clock sharp. You will, of course, not speak of this matter to anyone. Even to your Ms. Stadtmueller and her mother, both of whom I hold in the highest regard. You do, and you won’t have to book a flight back to Detroit. I will launch you there with my left foot. I was a professional dedicated football striker in my youth. I believe my accuracy is still quite good.”
“Nine o’clock sharp, no press. Got it,” I said. “Closing this out is gonna make you a national hero. A Scandinavian hero.”
“Ugly way to become a hero,” he said.
“Hella ugly.”
Save for the medical examiner tech team and four uniforms, everybody went their separate way.
I squeezed into my college professor girlfriend’s MINI Cooper and left the scene.
I didn’t vomit until I got back to my apartment.
“It’s settled?”
“Mostly.”
I was on the phone with Tatina. She was in between teaching two graduate classes in cultural anthropology at the University of Oslo. I’d taken a long, hot shower (with a travel mug of East Indian Badnekhan coffee, black, from Kaffebrenneriet) in my fifth-floor Tjuvholmen Island apartment facing the water of the Inner Oslofjord. I was wearing a pair of brand-spanking-new gray U of O sweats, and a zippered hoodie bearing the bright red Universitas Osloensis logo. Tatina gifted me with the sweats, presumably at a discount since she was now a full professor at the school. I’m sure she wanted me to feel as at-home in Oslo as she felt in Mexicantown, Detroit. I also suspect she’d grown tired of seeing me in my threadbare, grass-stained Wayne State University Warriors sweats.
“Bad?” she said.
“Not at all good,” I said. “But we got the bastard.”
“You mean you got him,” she said. I could hear students in the background talking and laughing. “At least now the families and their communities can mourn properly.”
“Cold comfort,” I said. The smell of the young women’s corpses still ghosted my nostrils. “We bunking tonight?”
“Yeah, boy, howdy,” she said in her best cowpoke impression, instantly making me laugh. It was as bad as my best Humphrey Bogart. “I just need to check on Momma, the twins and Uncle Benni. Forty minutes, tops.”
“Everything okay?”
“Yes,” Tatina said brightly. “Momma would like for you to come to dinner Thursday. Six o’clock.”
“Jesus,” I said. “Am I in trouble?”
Tatina laughed. “When are you not, min kjærlighet?”
