I had seen that look before. Not often, thank God, but you don’t forget what someone looks like the moment he is about to kill you.

When I saw his eyes, my hands were already at his chest. I slid them in, drove my fingers into his armpits and my thumbs into his chest, where the pecs run under the deltoids, pinching like I wanted to tear his armpits out. His face went gray with pain and I slammed my forehead into his nose. Then I threw him off and scrambled back. He was holding a knife, but his fingers had gone lax. I jerked it free and threw it down the alley.

A couple of tourists went scurrying by, looking carefully away. No one else was in sight.

I caught him in the armpits again and jerked him to his feet.  I threw him toward the back of the alley and followed him in.

He threw a looping right. I took it, knocked him down, then grabbed him again. There was a cross alley, just a ten foot square brick alcove, out of sight of the street. I threw him back into it.

He staggered up, and I slammed him back against the bricks. I put my forearm across his throat and said, “Where is she?”

“Who?” he sputtered.

“Susyn Davis. The one who hired you.”

“I don’t know, man!”

“I don’t know, man! With that God damned California accent. She brought you with her. Listen, you little bastard, you’d better talk quick or you’ll wish you were back in California.”

“I don’t know nothin’.”

“Not good enough!” I hit him in the ribs. Some broke. “You’d better talk quick or you’ll never live to get back to California.”

He spat in my face. I broke some more ribs. His eyes rolled back into his head and for a moment I thought I’d lost him. Then he swam back up to consciousness and I was still there, staring into his face like a vision of his own death. I said, “Where is she?”

“Murtle. Maidol. Something like that. I didn’t catch the name real good.”

“What were you supposed to do?”

He looked at me with his last ounce of defiance and said, “Kill you! She wants you dead.” Then his body turned to rubber.

I eased him down. He was badly hurt. Broken nose, broken ribs, internal damage. I had been well and truly pissed. I shook my head, and said, “It runs in the family.”

**********

Well and truly. Hemingway said those words first and often, and now every male author has to use them, in homage or in defiance. Well, here’s my version.

**********

Chapter Thirty-seven

A train for Bergen left the station at 1343. I made it by minutes.  A train had left at 0813, and another at 1131. Raven would have taken the first one. Susyn or Alan – or both – had probably been on the other.

I waited until the train was well on its way, then made my way to the toilet. Susyn’s henchman had had a gun stuffed inside his shirt, but he had never had time to get it out. I needed privacy to examine it. more tomorrow

Eric was there, opening up his instrument case. Raven was nowhere in sight.

When I walked up, he looked puzzled. He knew he should know me, but I was out of context. I said, “Where is Raven?”

Then he remembered. “You are – Gunn. What is your first name?”

“Ian.”

“Why is it you want to know?”

“I have been looking for her since the two of you took off. She is in danger. You ought to know that much. She certainly told you some of what happened.”

He nodded.

“I know some things now that she needs to know, in order to find safety. I need to talk to her.”

“You want her back?”

His accent gave him a kind of lisp. I had noticed in Paris how it added to his air of boyish innocence. It had irritated the hell out of me at the time. It still did.

“Of course, I want her back. Who wouldn’t? But that isn’t what this is about.”

“Isn’t it?”

That was a good question, but not a timely one.

“Let Raven decide who she goes with. She will anyway. What you or I want doesn’t have a damned thing to do with it.”

“This is true. Gud, is this true.”

He took up his fiddle and bow, struck a chord, and adjusted a tuning peg. I gave him time to decide. As long as he decided right. Otherwise, I was out of patience with this blonde, good looking – pasty boy. Daniel Cabral’s phrase was so right for the Erics of this world.

He lowered his instrument and said, “She left early this morning. She wanted to stop at Myrdal and ride the train down to see the fjord, then go on to Bergen for the night.”

“Without you?”

Eric looked at me with pain. “Without me,” he said, “and soon everything she does will be without me. I can see the preparation for her leaving every time I look in her eyes.”

I said, “I know the feeling.”

*          *          *

I was in a rush. It isn’t an excuse, just a fact. I knew that Cameron Davis wanted me dead, but he was half a world away. I knew Susyn was here in Europe and wanted Raven dead.

I forgot she wanted me dead, too.

I had left Eric to his music and started back toward the train station. So far I had seen about four blocks of Oslo and it looked like that would be all I would get to see. I didn’t want to miss the next train, so I was walking fast and thinking about running.

What I ran into was trouble.

It was neatly done. I was rushing, so he turned in front of me and it looked like my fault. We stumbled over each other and in the confusion he pushed my off shoulder and sent me down on my back in a narrow alley behind some trash cans. He came down on top of me. I automatically reached up to break his fall, embarrassed by my own clumsiness. Then I saw the look in his eyes. more tomorrow

There was nothing to do but wait. I settled in on a bench across from the Movenpick ice cream store and watched. So late in the season, most of the Americans had flown home. Some Germans, French, and British remained, but it was mostly a lean, blonde, fit stream of Nordic pedestrians that wandered by.

Ron stayed with me for half an hour, protecting his investment, but he eventually got bored and left. He said he would be back. I doubted it.

I moved with the sun as the hours passed. Just sitting and waiting was chilly, as well as tedious. The fountain in the middle of the grassy area had a quartet of bronze statues of innocent, playful, basically sexless children, getting ready to leap into the fountain for a swim. About eleven o’clock, some real ten year olds actually went wading, but they were Norwegians, and tougher than I was. Seven years in California had spoiled me.

Scores of brown-headed gulls came by to be fed. Young lovers, old men in conference about the world’s troubles, and even a trio of tough looking sailors, kept them happy.

Singly and in small groups the street musicians began gathering as noon approached. Apparently they knew something I didn’t, because about that time groups of overdressed, camera clicking tourists began to wander through. The effluvium of a cruise ship, perhaps? 

I didn’t talk to any of the musicians. There would be time for that if Raven or Eric did not show up. A very talented young flamenco guitarist set up and began to play. Half a dozen of his friends drank beer and talked quietly behind him. An occasional kroner fell into his guitar case, but he wasn’t making expenses.

Down the street, a nine year old kid was playing electric guitar very badly and singing in an untrained voice. He was using a thousand dollars worth of equipment and making a hundred dollars a day on charm and youth instead of talent. The flamenco player was breaking my heart with his music and starving.

A drunk came up and began strumming his beer bottle. He put his arm around the flamenco player; the guitarist cringed, probably singed by hundred horsepower breath. One of the guitar player’s friends tried to lead the drunk away. The drunk was obstinate. Another of the friends came to help and the two of them dragged the drunk off. He resisted, there was a scuffle, and the drunk ended up on the ground. He thrashed around like a beetle while the friends returned, shaking their heads. Then he began wailing. His plaintive voice drowned out the music, and the guitarists had to stop. I was glad he was speaking Norwegian; the sound was irritating enough without understanding the words. Eventually, he staggered to his feet and went off muttering.

The joys of performing.

I looked left and Eric was there, opening up his instrument case. Raven was nowhere in sight. more tomorrow

He was tall and rawboned, with a bushy blond beard, long hair, dressed in jeans and a U-2 tee shirt, with a relaxed and bemused expression that said “American.” He should have been fit and strong; you could tell by his bone structure that he had the genes for it. But he hadn’t done the work, so everything looked soft and toneless.

I walked up to him and said, “I’m Ian Gunn.”

He stuck out his hand and said he was Ron Anders. Of Norwegian ancestry, even though his folks lived in Kentucky now. He had come for the summer, and had taken up with a girl from his home state that played Appalachian dulcimer. That was why he was wandering around with musicians. He couldn’t play a note or carry a tune himself. That was how he had come across the flyer with Raven’s picture on it and why he had been keeping an eye out for her ever since. 

I listened with what patience I could muster. I was afraid that if I stopped his rambling, I might not get him talking again. I needn’t have worried about that.

He had gotten the flyer in Copenhagen, and that was three weeks ago, and he had not seen hide nor hair of Raven from that day until just two days ago when he had seen her here.

“Where? Where exactly did you see her?”

He would show me. But first, he wanted to be sure that he would get the reward. It was important to him. He tried to tell me why, but I couldn’t listen any longer. I gave him my card. I gave him Senator Cabral’s card. I wrote him an IOU that said if he showed me Raven, I would personally see to it that he got his money. He nodded over the paper, then had me sign it, even though it was in my handwriting. Then he folded it carefully and put it into his wallet and said, “Come along this way.”

He led me up Karl Johans Gate north from the train station through a fashionable pedestrians-only walkway. Within half a mile we came to a small park with a large triple fountain beneath columns of young, well kept trees. The grassy strip was a hundred feet wide and a block long, dotted with benches of concrete and steel.

Ron Anders gestured and said, “This is where I saw her. Two nights ago. She was with a guy who played violin.”

“A blonde guy? Well built? Good looking? Hardanger fiddle?”

“Yeah, that sounds like him,” Anders said, “but what kind of fiddle are you talking about?”

I shook my head. “And you call yourself a Norwegian. Was his violin decorated with ink drawings and did it have eight tuning pegs.”

“Man, I don’t know. Who notices things like that?”

Not Ron, certainly. 

It was only eight in the morning. There would not be many street musicians until later in the day, and the best of them might not come out until afternoon. I asked Ron where they were staying.

“I don’t know. I didn’t talk to them.”

No need to ask why. He hadn’t wanted Raven to call Marseilles herself and screw up his chance at the reward money. more tomorrow

Now their eyes were weary, glazed, and often drunken. They sat together in national groups; Americans, or British, or Germans seeking the familiarity of their own kind. No more reaching out to strangers. No more open acceptance. Somewhere along the line, each one had found his own personal disillusionment and nursed his own personal betrayal.

Innocence would not ride the trains again until June returned next year.

*          *          *

Since early May, when West German television had shown Hungarians beginning to remove the fence that lay between their country and Austria, East Germans, smarting from their own stolen election, had been going south on “vacation” and not returning. Now uncounted thousands of East Germans were refugees, scattered all over Hungary. The Honecker government wanted them sent back. Hungary demurred, but had no way to deal with such an influx.

I knew it was a major event, but I didn’t realize how important it would become. I decided if I didn’t find Raven in Innsbruck or Vienna, I would stop in at Budapest to see things for myself.

I never got that far. 

In Innsbruck, I called Will from the train station, while I watched the hikers in their Tyrollean hats and lederhosen waiting for the next train. They brought a smile. Their outfits were outrageous to American eyes, yet they were as genuine for the locals who wore them as Stetsons were in Texas.

“Ian,” Will said as he came to the phone, “they found her. Some tourist saw her in Oslo.”

*          *          *

I could fly out of Innsbruck, but connections were bad. I could take the train to Munich or Vienna to fly to Oslo, but that was get me there at two AM. It made more sense to get back on the next northbound express and take the train all the way.    

At three in the morning, I was awake watching them put the train on the ferry at Helsingor, and at four I was wide awake watching out the window as we rolled up the Swedish coast. A month ago it would have been daylight at this hour, but in mid-August the long days of summer were fading and the long, cold nights of winter were not far ahead.

The last hour coming into Oslo seemed to drag on forever as the train worked its way slowly through the dense sprawl of tracks. I was the first one off the train; swinging along the concrete apron, I could feel the tension jumping in my stomach. Even if Cameron Davis kept his agreement, Raven would not be safe until Susyn was called home.

I rode the slide ramp into Oslo’s Sentralstasjon, crowded with people arriving and departing for every part of Europe. Outside was an open square of cobblestone and marble, surrounded by nineteenth century buildings. Taxis were coming and going; busses waited across the street. In the center of the square was an ultramodern steel and glass clock tower, and beneath it was my contact. more tomorrow