Yours Until Death

by Gunnar Staalesen

Genres: Hard-Boiled

Synopsis

It was at their 'torture chamber', a hut in the pinewoods nearby, that Varg Veum, Private Investigator, first encountered the gang's pathetic but deadly ferocity. Eight-year-old Roar's bicycle had been stolen and not an adult in sight dared retrieve it. But a preliminary brush with such youthful violence was as nothing compared to what awaited Veum when he got to know Roar's blue-eyed, shy yet sensuous mother, Wenche Andresen, and her estranged husband, Jonas. Veum's attempts to break up Joker and his pack of young thugs by enlisting the help of the local youth club leader proved a dead end. But not so dead as the man who lay prone with a knife in his back on the floor of Andresen's flat. Yours Until Death is an unbearably tense novel of revenge and murder about marriage, childhood, bereavement and the destructive force of passion. First published in Norwegian in 1979, it was described by the critic Nils Nordberg as 'one of the finest, most serious, most ambitious books in post-war Norwegian crime writing'.

Release date: June 15, 2013

Publisher: Quercus Publishing

Print pages: 272

Sample

Maybe it was because he was the youngest client I’d ever had. Maybe it was because he reminded me of another little boy in another part of Bergen. Or maybe it was because I had nothing else to do. Anyway, I listened to him.

It was one of those days at the end of February when the wind shoves the temperature up from minus eight to plus twelve. Twenty-four hours of unexpected rain had washed away the snow which had been lying around for three or four weeks, making a paradise of the hills around the city and a complete hell of its centre. But that was over. A breath of spring lay over the city now, and people hurried through the streets with new energy in their bodies towards destinations they could only guess at.

The office seemed unusually deserted on a day like this. The square room with its big desk and a phone, with the nearly empty filing cabinets, was like a little isolated corner of the universe, a place where they stash forgotten souls. People whose names nobody remembers any more. I’d had one call all day – from an old lady who’d wanted me to find her poodle. I’d said I was allergic to dogs – especially poodles. She’d sniffed and hung up. That’s how I am. Don’t sell myself cheap.

It was almost three when I heard somebody outside the waiting-room door. I was half asleep in my chair and the sound made me start. I swung my legs to the floor, got up and opened the door between the two rooms. 

He stood in the exact middle of the floor, looking around curiously. He could have been about eight or nine. He was dressed in a worn-out blue ski jacket and jeans with patched knees. He wore a grey knitted cap, but when he saw me he yanked it off. His hair was long and straight and almost white. He had big blue eyes and a half-open anxious mouth which threatened to cry any minute.


‘Hello,’ I said.

He gulped and looked at me.

‘If you’re going to the dentist, it’s the office next door,’ I said.

He shook his head. ‘I want …’ he began, and nodded towards the door. In mirror-writing on the pebble-glass pane it said V. Veum, Private Investigator. He looked shyly at me. ‘Are you really a real detective?’

‘Maybe.’ I smiled at him. ‘Come in. Take a seat.’ We went into my office. I sat behind the desk and he settled himself in the other shabby chair. He looked around. I don’t know what he’d been expecting, but anyway he looked disappointed. It wasn’t the first time. Disappointing people is the only thing I’m really good at.

‘I found you in the phone book,’ he said. ‘Under Detective Bureaus.’ He pronounced the last word slowly and carefully, as if he’d invented it.

I looked at him. Thought: Thomas’ll be his age in a few years. And he’d also be able to find me in the phone book. If he wanted to.

‘And how can I help you?’ I said.

‘My bike,’ he said.

I nodded. ‘Your bike.’

I looked out of the window and across Vågen. The cars were bumper to bumper. It was stop-and-go all the way to that far-off land they call Åsane, east of the sun and west of the moon. Which you reach – if you’re lucky – just in time to turn around, line up, and drive back into the city early next morning.


I’d had a bike once. But that was before they’d given the city to cars and had baptised it with exhaust. The smog was like a hood over the harbour. Mount Fløien looked like a poisoned rat lying on its belly, trying to suck in a little sea air. ‘Your bike’s been stolen?’

He nodded.

‘But don’t you think the police …?’ I said.

‘Yes, but that would cause trouble.’

‘Trouble?’

‘Yes. It would.’ He nodded. It was as if his whole face were filled with something he wanted to say but couldn’t find words for.

Then suddenly he became a pragmatist. ‘Do you charge a lot? Are you expensive?’

‘I’m the most expensive and the cheapest,’ I said.

He looked confused, and I added quickly, ‘It depends entirely on what kind of work and who’s hiring. On what you want me to do and who you are. Tell me about it. Okay, so your bike’s been stolen. And you want to know who did it and where it is?’

‘No. I know who’s got it.’

‘Really? Who?’

‘Joker and his gang. They want my mum.’

‘Your mother?’ I didn’t understand.

He looked very serious. ‘Listen, what’s your name?’ I said.

‘Roar.’

‘What else?’

‘Roar Andresen.’


‘And how old are you?’

‘Eight and a half.’

‘And where do you live?’

He named one of the bedroom suburbs southwest of the city, a place I wasn’t very familiar with. I’d only seen it from a distance. It had sort of reminded me of a lunar landscape, if they have high-rises on the moon.

‘And your mother – does she know where you are?’

‘No. She hadn’t come home when I left. I found your address in the phone book, and I took the bus all by myself, and I got here without asking anybody.’

‘We should try calling your mum so she won’t worry about you. Do you have a phone?’

‘Yes. But she won’t be home yet.’

‘But she works somewhere, doesn’t she? Maybe we could call her there?’

‘No. She’s probably on her way home by now. And anyway I’d just as soon she didn’t know anything about … this.’

Suddenly he seemed grown up. He seemed so grown up I thought I could ask the question on the tip of my tongue. Kids know so much more these days.

‘And your father – where’s he?’

His eyes widened. The only reaction. ‘He … he doesn’t live with us any more. He moved out. Mum says he’s got somebody else, even though she’s got two kids of her own. Mum says my dad’s no good. That I ought to forget him.’


I could see Thomas and Beate, and I had to say something in a hurry. ‘Listen. I think I’d better drive you home, and then we’ll see if we can’t find your bike. You can tell me the rest in the car.’

I put on my overcoat and took a last look around. One more day was about to die without having left any special trace behind it.


‘Aren’t you going to take your pistol?’ he said.

I looked at him. ‘My pistol?’

‘Yes. Your pistol.’

‘I don’t have a pistol, Roar.’

‘You don’t? But I thought …’

‘That’s only in films. TV. Not in real life.’

‘Oh.’ Now he looked really disappointed.

We left. The minute I locked the door, the phone rang. For a second I wondered if I should answer it, but it was probably only somebody who wanted me to find his cat, and it would probably stop ringing just as I got to my desk. Anyway, I was allergic to cats. So I let it go.

This was the one week in the month when the lift worked, and on the way down I said, ‘This Joker, as you call him – who is he?’

He looked seriously at me and his voice shook. ‘He’s … I can’t.’

I didn’t ask any more until we were in the car.




It was turning cold again. The frost clawed at the milky sky. The morning’s champagne fizz was gone. Not much hope in the eyes of those we passed: dinner, or problems at work. Or waiting at home. Winter played an encore, both in the air and in people’s faces.

I’d left my car at a meter up on Tårnplass. It stood there looking innocent, even though it knew that the meter had long since run out.

My little client had been glancing up at me the whole time, just as any eight-year-old glances up at his father when they’re in town together. The thing was, I wasn’t his father and not much to glance up at. I’m a private investigator in his mid-thirties, no wife, no son, no good friends, no steady partner. I’d have been a credit to the National Association for the Advancement of Singles, but they’d never asked me to join.


Anyway I had a car. It had survived one more winter and was on its way to turning eighteen. But it still ran, even though it had minor problems starting. Especially in choppy weather. We got in and were under way after a few minutes of my hard-handed diplomacy. Roar seemed impressed by my soundless cursing.


I’ve always been good at that. I almost never curse in front of women and children. Maybe that’s why nobody likes me.

Suddenly we got stuck in traffic in the middle of Puddefjord Bridge. It was like being on top of a fading rainbow. To our right, Ask Island lay like a smear between the pale grey sky and the grey-black water. A thin veil of late afternoon light began to shimmer on the mountains.


To our left, at the very end of Viken, lay the skeleton of something which – if God and the shipping market willed it – would some day be a boat. A crane swung threateningly over the skeleton as if it were a prehistoric lizard just about to dine off a fallen dinosaur. It was one of those late winter afternoons with death in the air no matter where you looked.

‘Now tell me about your bicycle, and your mother, and about Joker and his gang,’ I said. ‘Tell me what I can do for you.’

I glanced at him and smiled. He tried to smile back, and I don’t know anything more heartbreaking than a little kid who tries to smile but can’t make it. This wasn’t going to be easy.

‘They took Petter’s bike last week.’ he said. ‘He doesn’t have a dad either.’

‘Oh?’

The traffic was slowly moving now. I automatically tailed the red brake-light ahead of me. He went on. ‘Joker and his gang they hang out – they have a hut up in the woods at the back of the high-rises.’

‘A hut?’

‘They didn’t build it. Somebody else did. But then Joker and them came and chased the others away. Nobody’ll go there now. Too scared to. But then …’

We were on the main road to Laksevåg. On the right, on the other side of Puddefjord, Nordnes looked like a dog’s paw lying in the water. ‘And then?’ I said.

‘We’d heard they’d done it before. That some of them took the big girls – grabbed them and took them up there to the hut and … did things with them. But that was girls, not mothers. But then they stole Petter’s bike, and when Petter’s mother went up there to get his bike, then … then she didn’t come back down.’


‘She didn’t come back down?’

‘No. We waited at least two hours – Petter and Hans and I. And Petter cried and said they’d killed his mother and his father’d gone to sea and hadn’t ever come back, and …’

‘But didn’t you go – couldn’t you get hold of a grown-up?’

‘Who? What grown-up? Petter doesn’t have a father. Hans doesn’t. I don’t. And the caretaker chases us away and so does Officer Hauge, and that stupid youth leader just tells us we should come and play Parchese.

‘And then his mother came down again. From the woods. And she had the bike. But somebody had torn her clothes – and she was dirty, and she was crying. Everybody saw her. And Joker and the others followed her and they laughed. And when they saw us they said – so everybody could hear – they said if she said anything to anybody they’d cut off … that something bad would happen to Petter.’

‘But what happened after that?’

‘Nothing. Nobody’ll do anything to Joker and them. One time when Joker was alone, a girl’s father caught him outside the supermarket and shoved him up against the wall and said he’d beat him until he couldn’t stand up if he didn’t lay off.’

‘And?’

‘One evening he came home late, and they stood outside the door and waited for him. The whole gang. They beat him up and it was two weeks before he was okay. Afterwards he moved. So there’s nobody who has the guts.’

‘So I’m supposed to have the guts?’ I glanced at him.

He looked hopefully up at me. ‘You’re a detective.’


I let that sink in for a while. A big strong detective with little little muscles and a big big mouth. We were past the first built-up area and the fifty-kilometre limit, but I didn’t especially speed up. I felt less and less that we were in a hurry.


‘And now,’ I said, ‘so now they’ve got your bike, and now you’re afraid … Your mother, have you told her what happened to Petter’s mother?’


‘No! I was too scared to.’

‘And you’re sure that it’s Joker and his gang who –’

‘I’m sure! Because there’s a fat little kid they call Tasse, and he found me when I got home from school, and he told me Joker’d borrowed my bike and I could have it back if I went up to the hut. And if I didn’t have the guts, I could send my mother, he said. And he laughed.’

I said, ‘How many in this gang?’

‘Eight or nine. Sometimes ten.’

‘Just boys?’

‘They have some girls – but not always, not when they …’

‘How old are they?’

‘Oh, they’re old. Sixteen, seventeen. And Joker’s a little older. Some people say he’s over twenty, but he’s probably nineteen.’

Nineteen: a psycho’s best age. Too old to be a kid and too young to be an adult. I knew the type. Tough as a boot one minute and crying like a baby the next because you’ve hurt his feelings. As predictable as a day at the end of February. You never know how he’ll react. I had a lot to look forward to.




We passed the big shopping centre they’d ironically called a market. Two schools stood on the hill: a big blush-pink secondary school and a primary school which clung like an overfed caterpillar to the crest of the ridge. Behind them, the four high-rises reared toward heaven.


‘We live in that one there,’ Roar said with the air of an astronomer identifying a star in the Big Dipper.

The entire area lay in the shadow of the Lyderhorn. The mountain looked steep, dark and depressing from here. TV antennas bristled on its summit. They sliced into the clouds’ bellies and guts of steel-blue sky leaked out.

I parked the car and we got out.

‘We live there,’ he said and pointed upwards.

I sighted along the pointing finger. ‘Where?’ I said.

‘On the ninth floor. That window with green and white curtains – that’s my room.’


‘That one.’ A window with green and white curtains on the ninth floor. He sounded like Robinson Crusoe.

‘We should say hello to your mother,’ I said.

He shook his head. ‘Not without my bike,’ he said. Firm about that.

‘Well.’ There was an uneasy feeling in my stomach. Gangs of seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds aren’t always your daintiest dancing partners. Especially if they think they’re tough and if you haven’t used your hands for much more than lifting a bottle of aquavit for the last couple of years. ‘Where’ll we find this hut?’


‘There.’ He pointed. ‘I’ll show you.’

We walked around the next high-rise. On the hillside to the right some low-rises had been slung among the trees as if they’d been dropped from a great height and nobody’d bothered afterwards to see where they’d landed. There was a slope of junipers and pines behind the first building. Joker and the gang’s hut would be up that slope.


Roar stood at the corner of the last high-rise while he explained where I was to go.

‘Don’t you want to come along?’ I said.

He shook his head. Downcast.

I smiled at him. ‘No. I know how you feel.’ We’d had such a gang in the road I grew up in. Even if it hadn’t been so sophisticated. But then we didn’t live in such tall buildings either. ‘Better wait for me here. Is it up that path between those trees over there?’


He nodded twice. His eyes were huge. He looked really worried – not for his sake but for mine. It didn’t exactly increase my confidence.

I swung my hips like a sailor. It made me feel a little braver. As if this were nothing to a big strong man who’d been brushing his teeth all by himself for years now.


A woman walked by me. She was in her late thirties. Her face was as spare as the leftovers from a dried-fish dinner. To give herself some individuality, she’d pulled her hair into a ponytail. She looked almost like an Indian even though she was blonde. But that wasn’t a knocked-down teepee she was pulling – it was a shopping bag on wheels. She was very pale. She looked anxiously at me, but she had no reason to be afraid. I tried not to smile at her.


I walked between the trees. I’ve always liked pines. They’re phallic. Plump, round, voluptuous, and they stretch toward heaven. Not like pious spruces with their drooping branches and their sad, undertaker’s expressions.

The smell of pines has always meant summer to me. Late summer and you’re on the way up and through a mountain valley or a pass, up towards the heathery plateaus and the big open stretches and the arched pure late-summer sky with its dark blue strength, there where a long summer season has stored its vitamins against winter.

But it wasn’t late summer now. It was February and there was no reason to think of mountain plateaus or pines, or anything at all.


Suddenly I saw the hut, twenty metres further up the slope. It wasn’t a hut you could brag about. Somebody had dabbed green paint over pieces of lath, tar-paper and insulating scraps of sacks. High on the wall facing me was a little window covered with chicken wire. A shiny blue bicycle stood against the wail. I spotted a white face behind the chicken wire.

I came closer and heard voices inside the hut. And then they came tumbling out through one of the side walls and down to the front of the hut. They lined up in front of the bicycle. They were like a wall.

The Welcome Committee was in session.




They looked more nervous than tough. Six average, overgrown, teenage boys with the same old pimples, the same old downy chins, the same old fatuous sneers. A tall lanky kid at one end of the line tried rolling a cigarette, but he dropped half the tobacco on the ground, and when he finally got the cigarette in his mouth he just missed jamming it in his eye.

The kid in the middle was different. He was short and fat. Ruddy face, yellow-blond hair. The hangdog look in his eyes told me he was the gang’s court jester. All gangs have their fool, and God help anybody in another gang who tries anything with him. Consciously or not, the fool keeps the gang together. They’ve got to defend him. This must be the one Roar called Tasse.


You could see differences in hair colour, expression and size among the other four. Even so, they were amazingly alike. They all wore jeans. Some wore leather jackets, other ski jackets.

When the last one came out of the hut the picture changed abruptly. The others had rushed out like sheep. This one sauntered – as if he’d happened to pass by accidentally. Something deliberate and stagey about him warned me. Psycho.


I could see how they fawned on him. What thirty seconds earlier had been confirmation candidates who’d have meekly recited the Lord’s Prayer for me suddenly became a gang. Tight lips replaced the uneasy smiles. The anxious eyes hardened into pebbles. The tall one’s cigarette settled down in the corner of his mouth. Tasse displayed his stomach, rested his plump little hands on his hips.


He didn’t introduce himself. Wasn’t necessary. He seemed totally uninterested in the proceedings. There was something almost drowsy about him. But the narrow squinting eyes weren’t sleepy. They were bright and alert. A predator’s.

His dark hair was brushed back from a high white forehead. It gave him a priestly look. His nose was unusually narrow and thin, almost like a knife, and you had the feeling he could use it as a weapon. His mouth was a little like Elvis Presley’s. The upper lip curled, but the teeth were too decayed to smile on a record jacket.

He wore tight almost white jeans and a black leather jacket with a lot of shiny zippers. A spare taut body – not especially powerful. But I assumed he’d be very good with a knife. His type is.

I knew how his voice would sound: as tense as a steel wire and as gentle as a used razor blade. As soon as he opened his mouth, a ray of afternoon-yellow sun strayed under the pines and shone right in his face. The paper-pale skin turned as gold as an angel’s. The full lips were transformed – pouting, Raphaelite. Just an illusion. Like most things the sun shines on. ‘What do you want, old man?’ he said.


He didn’t have to hustle for his applause. They gave him a standing ovation. Ugly teenagers’ ugly laughter shattered the silence of the forest.

‘I’m looking for the kindergarten. Heard it was here.’ I lacked his charm. No one laughed.

His tongue explored the decaying stubs. ‘The old folks’ home’s down the hill. Maybe we should send for a wheelchair?’

More guffaws. That was the funniest thing they’d ever heard.

‘Why? Do you need one?’ I said. And added while I still had a little headway, ‘I came to pick up my bike.’


‘Your bike?’ He looked around as if he’d just discovered the others. ‘Any of you guys seen a bike?’

The clowns looked around, shook their heads. Tasse looked as if he’d explode with suppressed laughter. Joker said, ‘Send your auntie instead, grandad. Or one of the nurses. Then we’ll see.’

I thought they were really going to split their guts this time, and then I realised that I was going to make a speech. Whenever I’m scared I have to make a speech. I’m going to stand at death’s door and make a speech. I’m going to stand at the Pearly Gates and talk St Peter into a coma before he has a chance to send me to the Complaints Department on the first floor.


I began with the lanky kid. Looked him in the eye with what I hoped would remind him of all his childhood bogeyman experiences. We’ve all had them. The cigarette began wobbling in the corner of his mouth.


I said, ‘Maybe I don’t look so dangerous at first. Not when there are seven of you and you’re fifteen or twenty years younger. But a lion who’s spent years in the zoo doesn’t look dangerous either to an idiot who’s about to step into its cage.’

I moved to the next. He was nearly my height. He had a sweaty upper lip and a large inflamed pimple by his left nostril. ‘The Norwegian Alps looking poetic at sundown don’t impress me,’ I said. He blushed. I moved on.

This one already had a beautiful grey-black stubble. Thick black eyebrows. Clearly myopic. I waved my hand in front of his eyes and he didn’t know where to look.

‘Hello. Anybody home? Here I am. No. Here. Go home and get your glasses, pal. You look like a bug-eyed refugee from outer space.’


Joker was next. I skipped him. He didn’t like that. Tasse was on his right.

‘Hello, Porky Pig,’ I said. ‘You look as if you could use a bike.’ I waited a minute. ‘Exercise, Fatso. You’ll find “exercise” in the dictionary. If you can read.’

I took the last two together. ‘And who have we here? Abbott and Costello?’

I went back to the centre of the line and checked them over one by one. ‘You lot know who I am? I’m Veum. Heard of me? I’m in the phone book under M for Monster. I make the papers. Every time I beat somebody up. So I wouldn’t advise climbing into my cage. Or look at it this way. I play for the national team and you squirts are backwoods Little Leaguers. You’ve only got one thing going for you. I’m not crazy about creaming anything smaller than I am. But I’ve never been religious about it, so you’re welcome to try.’ I continued while I had a head start: ‘I came to get my bike. Any objections?’


I locked glances with Joker. You handle psychos the way you do bears. The best way to tame them is to look them right in the eye. ‘When we real men play poker, we never waste time with the Joker,’ I said.

And I walked by him, took the bicycle by the handlebars and swung it around.

Turning your back on a wrought-up psycho is one of the stupidest things you can do, but I had a spellbound public and not many choices. As I passed Joker on my way out of that charmed circle, I turned and held him with my gaze. ‘Better bring your boss a clean nappy, boys.’

I kept my head as still as if I had lumbago. Kept my eyes on Joker’s until I was too far away for him to jam a switchblade between my shoulders.


Not a sound behind me. Nobody laughed. Nobody ever laughs when he’s a witness to high treason. At any rate, not before the king’s left the throne room. I was conceited enough to think my performance would become myth. Some day when somebody recited the gang’s history beside a shining blue camp-fire in the future’s lonely desert.

On the way down I got on the bike. The Lone Ranger riding into the sunset. Trouble was, the real Lone Ranger was constantly busy rescuing people. And this Lone Ranger was me.





Roar was waiting where I’d left him. He gazed at me. Open admiration. I jumped off his bike and we wheeled it between us back to his building.

He said, ‘What did you do?’

I said, ‘I just went up there and took it.’ As if there’d been nothing to it.

She didn’t have to introduce herself. I knew. She came fluttering towards us like a terrified bird, her dark hair a cloud around her face. She wore blue corduroy trousers, a light white turtleneck, and a red . . .