Gone to the Wolves, page 29
Leslie let his eyes close. “I don’t understand the first thing about these batshit sons of bitches. Nothing you couldn’t get off the back of an LP.”
“You can tell me what’s bullshit,” Kip said, feeling himself start to panic. “You can tell me what’s true. You can keep me from making some stupid mistake.”
Leslie nodded. “Or we can take those letters straight to Interpol and tell them what we know.”
Kip could feel his face twitching. “We don’t know anything yet. You just said so yourself.”
“We’ve got a bag of teeth. A bag of teeth, Norvald. That’s physical evidence.”
“You’re contradicting yourself, do you realize that? You basically just told me the police are amateurs.”
“And what does that make us?”
“You’re scared,” Kip said. “That’s fine. I understand.”
“I’ll tell you something for free. If you’re not scared, boy, you’re fucked. Next time it’s your teeth in that mailbox.”
Kip held up a hand. “Let me just say what I think. Can I do that? These kids aren’t capable of—whatever it is we think is happening. Breaking into a gun shop, maybe. Even setting some buildings on fire. But not the rest. Not what happened to Kira.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I don’t think it’s them, Leslie. There’s somebody else.”
“Who?”
He hesitated. “The voice on that record. The one giving that speech—or sermon, or whatever it is—in the woods.”
Leslie chose not to dignify that with an answer. They sat glaring at each other now with their heads slightly bowed, their bent knees almost touching, like exhausted commuters on an evening train. Hampus grunted softly in the background, still reading Kerrang!, still paying them no attention whatsoever. Kip’s beanbag squeaked grotesquely as he eased his body forward.
“If you want to leave just tell me. I can go and change the ticket. But I’m staying till I find her.”
“You think that hillbilly bitch would do the same for me, Norvald? Or for anyone else on this planet, you included? I’m sitting here, watching you, shaking my head. That girl is either in an unmarked grave somewhere or she’s a goddamn Nazi.”
Kip waited until he was sure Leslie had nothing else to say.
“It doesn’t matter what Kira would do.”
“I’m shaking my head at this. Just sitting here literally shaking my head.”
“We loved each other,” Kip said quietly. “All of us. Not just me and Kira.”
“Keep me the fuck out of this equation.”
“I can’t do that, Leslie. I’m sorry.”
“She left you, Kip. She walked right out. She dumped you on your ass.”
“We don’t know that for sure.”
“Jesus Christ, man. She predicted it a hundred times. Before you even got together. She just knew.”
A humming started up somewhere—the far side of the wall, perhaps, or underneath the floor. Kip got to his feet.
“I tell you what I think.”
“Go ahead.”
“You don’t stop loving someone. Ever. It’s a permanent condition.”
“Kira didn’t see it that way.”
He was the one shaking his head now—some animal reflex. “You can want to be away from someone. You can want to be away from them forever. After Kira left I felt that way myself.”
“Then explain to me—”
“But loving someone is a fact. That’s how I see it. It’s a mutation to your basic way of thinking. And the way that I think—the way I understand the world—comes down to you and me and Kira. It’s that simple, Leslie. For better or for worse. That’s how it’s going to be until I die.”
The humming fell away. He’d never seen Leslie look so gray-faced and brittle, sunk down in that hideous purple beanbag like some lost king on a throne. So regretful and wise. So aghast at man’s folly. Leslie gazed down in perfect sadness at the notebook in his lap. Eventually he worked himself upright.
“We need to talk about Satan.”
Kip heard himself laugh. “Satan. Yes. Absolutely.”
“Go get something to write on.”
7
That afternoon the shop was full of people. Most of them looked like approximations of Aarseth—dyed-black hair in various stages of discoloration, combat boots and biker jackets, band shirts with cutoff sleeves and completely illegible logos—but some were so young that they still just looked like kids. They were drinking beer and striking disaffected poses, staring off into the middle distance, attempting to be invisible and conspicuous at once. It reminded Kip of Venice. He wondered how many of them had known Kira.
Discreetly he worked his way into the crowd. Smoke hung thick in the air and a riff shook the floor: a cascading bandsaw tritone he was sure he’d heard before. No one looked at him twice. No one was looking at anyone. People’s lips were moving and from this he judged that they were having conversations but he might as well have been watching closed-circuit TV. He was seeing a video of himself—grainy security footage—conducting highly sophisticated surveillance operations behind enemy lines. He was looking for Aarseth or hiding from Aarseth; it was hard to say which. He was casing the joint. He was trying to avoid being beaten to death with a bottle of lager.
At some point he found himself with his back against the counter and he ducked underneath it and rummaged through the cluttered plywood shelves below the register. Dozens of unopened utility statements. The little tin box where Aarseth kept his coins and scissors. A small stack of catalogs for sporting goods and a German guide to large-bore hunting rifles. A cheaply printed pamphlet, in Cyrillic, full of leering Jewish caricatures. A book in English detailing the Armenian genocide. A beginner’s guide to calisthenics. On the lowest shelf, next to three neatly rolled joints, a Polaroid of a head of long blond hair, gender unknown, streaked with clotted blood and chips of splintered bone.
“True Norwegian black metal,” a voice above him shouted.
He jerked back in surprise, expecting Aarseth—but in Aarseth’s place he saw a stocky girl with frizzled orange hair. She stared down at him coldly.
“I’ve heard this song before,” he said, if only to say something.
The girl didn’t answer.
“Do you know who it is?”
“Hva vil du?”
“This record. This album. You’ll have to speak English.”
“Burzum,” the girl said. She spoke the word slowly and with great precision, like a magic spell.
“I like it,” he told her. She seemed not to hear him.
“I like it,” he repeated. “Do you speak any English?”
She nodded.
“Do you know Øystein Aarseth? Euronymous? I’m trying to—”
Her bleary eyes went wide. “Your death is here.”
He’d been reading her lips—a skill he’d honed in half a decade’s worth of talk in crowded clubs—and it was possible, even likely, that he’d misunderstood. She might have been speaking Norwegian, or Swedish, or some secret language of her own invention.
“I’m not sure I heard that right. Who did you say is here?”
“Komme.” She leaned over the counter and caught the sleeve of his parka and guided him up. She was drunk but in no way flirtatious. She had an air about her of someone fulfilling an onerous duty. She watched him slip under the counter and took hold of him again and propelled him toward the back room of the shop.
The music went shrill as they moved through the crowd, working itself into hysterics, the high end inscribing itself across his inner ear like a tack across a blackboard. They passed through a doorway, then another, then a tattered velvet curtain. A cast-iron staircase came up out of nowhere. The girl went down into the dark and Kip went stumbling after. All his bluster had left him. He was following a drunken groupie down into some kind of crypt.
At the bottom of the stairs, in a room almost completely filled with crates and shipping boxes, she was waiting for him with three men in corpse paint holding gleaming silver knives. Even in that low light Kip knew one of them was Aarseth.
“Our American,” said Aarseth. He gave no sign of surprise. The men beside him scowled at Kip out of their blackened eye sockets, neither moving nor speaking, then went back to whatever they were doing with the knives. They held them loosely by the blade, hefting them in their open palms, less like killers than discriminating shoppers. Unreality broke over him again. He looked at these men with their faces crudely and childishly painted and thought of the Polaroid he’d seen upstairs and could draw no plausible connection between them. The girl gestured at him and hissed something softly into Aarseth’s ear. Aarseth ignored her. He had eyes only for Kip.
“Per Ivar’s friend Dusty.”
“You said to come back.”
“I said this.” Aarseth smiled. “And you did what I say.”
What light there was bled weakly through the gaps between the crates. Aarseth was dressed in the same clothes as the night before, as far as Kip could tell, with the addition of the corpse paint and enormous steel-tipped boots. Something hung from his wrist that Kip couldn’t make out—a dark wooden object, lopsided and heavy. The others had turned away now but the blades of the knives held the light. Blades as long as his forearm and perfectly straight. Eventually he saw that they were bayonets.
“You like weapons,” said Aarseth.
“I like music better.”
Aarseth was still smiling. “Of course! You are here for the music.”
“You said you’d have a record for me.”
“There are no record shops in America?”
“Not like this one.”
The answer clearly pleased him. “Yes,” he said. “Not like this one.”
The girl said something angrily in Norwegian and retreated up the staircase. Aarseth’s face remained unchanged. Kip focused on his breathing.
“What did she say?”
Aarseth was a long time answering. “She says you are a counterfeit.”
“I don’t get it. A counterfeit what?”
“An actor.” Aarseth made a curious clutching motion in the dark, as if trying to catch a nonexistent fly. “A liar.”
“She wanted to fuck me.”
“Of course. She is a whore.”
Aarseth leaned toward him now, observing his reaction. He was waiting for something. Some confirmation. Some tell.
“I don’t take it personally,” Kip found himself mumbling. “I’m probably the first American she’s ever seen up close.”
Aarseth shook his head comfortably. “You are not her first American.”
The words were out before he could check them. “I actually had a friend come through town—one year back, maybe less. I wonder if she ever showed up here.”
“A friend,” Aarseth repeated. “Like Per Ivar Lund.”
“Nothing like him.”
“Ah.” His eyes seemed to brighten. “Not weak.”
“A girl from America. From California.” Kip pushed the hair back from his forehead. “She had a scar here.”
“I see—an American girl.” His voice was unchanged but his expression had clouded. “And this is the reason you came.”
“You know why I came. You said you’d have a record—”
“The girl from Berlin?” Aarseth said languidly. “Magnus Haugan’s bitch?”
The air seized in Kip’s throat. It occurred to him then that Aarseth’s voice never varied, never betrayed the least emotion, no matter what he happened to be saying. If it was an act of some kind it was a consummate act. The fey psychopath. The object he held was a turned length of wood, like the leg of a table, with nails driven through its head to make a mace.
“This girl,” Kip got out finally. “She had that kind of scar?”
Aarseth touched a finger lightly to his own forehead. “Why should I say?”
“Cut the shit. Did you meet her or didn’t you?”
Aarseth clapped his hands lightly and the men with the knives spun around as if they’d heard a shot. The iron railing dug into Kip’s shoulders as they crowded around him. Some new element was in play. Some form of brinksmanship. He was pushing his luck to its outermost limit. Aarseth lifted his weapon with a stately dignity and brought it down against the hollow of Kip’s chest.
“Your friend Lund,” he said softly. “Your friend who is dead.”
“I don’t care about Lund.”
Aarseth nodded. “How well did you know him, I wonder.”
“I keep telling you—”
“Lund was interested in Haugan’s bitch as well.”
“I don’t understand.”
Again he made his strange and sphinxlike gesture. “He had her and lost her. He was hoping to—recover her. Would this be the word?”
“Recover her from where?”
“Lund was thinking he could do this. Without grievance. Without harm.” Aarseth went quiet for a moment. “You say your friend was weak. You are mistaken. He died as a man.”
Kip took his tongue between his teeth and bit down hard to keep from answering. He was thinking of the only time he’d seen Lund, in that basement club in Kreuzberg: a stoop-shouldered man with a humorless face. Lund who had since burned to death in his car. One of the men stood behind him now, just out of his field of vision, close enough that Kip could smell his breath. It stank sweetly of lager. At some point Aarseth’s eyes had fallen closed.
“I answered to your question, Per Ivar’s friend Dusty. Now answer to mine.”
A hand closed on Kip’s collar. It felt almost gentle. He waited but Aarseth said nothing.
“What do you want to know?”
His dark eyes came open. “You meet the devil in the forest.”
“That’s not a question.”
“You meet the devil in the forest,” Aarseth repeated, his voice inflectionless as ever. “How do you greet him?”
The man to Aarseth’s left had started giggling. It was unsettling to watch someone in corpse paint doing that. The question was a riddle. A trap of some kind. Kip could feel himself faltering. He tried to remember what Leslie had taught him.
“There isn’t any devil in the forest.”
“What do you say?”
“I create my own good. I create my own evil.” He braced himself against the railing. “‘Satan’ is just a Christian word. It’s what they call free will.”
For a bright suspended instant no one spoke. The men stared at him. They were going to spit in his face. They were going to buy him a beer. They were going to take their bayonets and skin him like a lamb.
Finally Aarseth heaved a sigh. “I thought you were police.”
“No one’s perfect,” said Kip.
Someone called down from upstairs. Aarseth spoke calmly to the men and they wrapped the bayonets in oilcloth and packed them away in the nearest of the crates and screwed the top shut and went swiftly up the stairs in single file. He himself stayed as he was, neither moving nor blinking. He was waiting for something. He looked almost wistful.
“The Count,” he said at last. “The Count can tell.”
Kip wasn’t sure he’d heard correctly. “The Count of what?”
In place of a reply Aarseth gestured deeper into the cellar, past the boxes and crates, toward a passageway that Kip had failed to notice. Reflected light shone palely at its turning.
“All right, then,” Kip heard himself mutter.
“All right, then,” Aarseth echoed. He gave Kip two thumbs-up, flashing his teeth, then turned and started slowly up the staircase. At the sixth or seventh step he paused.
“I’ll tell you one thing else, Per Ivar’s friend.”
“What is it?”
“There is a devil in the forest. I have met him.”
8
The passage was long and damp and lined with chicken-wire cages locked with combination padlocks, the kind high school kids put on their lockers. Kip fully expected them to contain Japanese katanas or semiautomatic rifles or heaps of human bones but most were empty, and the few that weren’t were packed haphazardly with boxes of cassettes and piles of shirts and crates of shrink-wrapped vinyl. He made out the titles of records by Burzum and Darkthrone and Aarseth’s own band, Mayhem, and a scattering of other releases by Helvete’s tiny label. None of them were of interest to him now.
A few steps from the turning he hung back and listened. The music that had been so punishing upstairs was now a distant keening in a minor key. He wavered there, unsure what to do next, shifting from one foot to the other in the clammy dark. He seemed to have burned through his last reserves of both stupidity and courage. Things were moving too quickly. For the first time since he’d come downstairs he had a chance to think.
“Hvem er det?”
A man’s voice, thin but confident. Kip took a half step forward.
“Hvem her det nå? Øystein?”
“No,” he answered, willing himself to step around the corner.
He found himself on the threshold of a filthy room with walls of yellowed plaster. A cot, a high-backed armchair, a candelabrum in the corner. The words BLACK METAL crudely painted in block script above the armchair. In the middle of the room a crowbar and an open packing crate. Above the crate a handsome man with blond hair past his shoulders.
Before Kip had managed to make sense of what he was seeing the man was coming toward him with the crowbar in his hands.
“Hvem er du?”
“English, please. Do you speak English?”
The man stopped short and gave a low curse of surprise. But his English when he answered was ready and fluid—much better than Aarseth’s. He stood leaning on the crowbar like a dandy on a cane.
“If you’re looking for the toilet then you’ve missed it, I’m afraid.”
“Can I come in?”
“That depends.”
Kip held up his hands and took a tentative step forward. “Are you the Count?”
“Are you a cop?”
