Read Online The Fourth Man by K.O. Dahl - Free Book Online

warming up with a beer before catching the ferry to Denmark. The loudspeakers were playing the Hollies’ ‘He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother’ and a group of women dressed in track suits were singing along. Frølich studied himself in the mirror and felt like a Martian on Pluto. He drank his third and fourth beers while witnessing two old acquaintances of the police selling dope to some teenage girls. Frølich raised his glass. He was off duty for fuck’s sake. None of his business. But old acquaintances are as alert as wild mink. They immediately sensed Frølich’s passive state and were ready to misinterpret it. Frølich drank his beer and moved on, up Karl Johans gate. He paused at the intersection with Dronningensgate and the row of obscure bars. But then another old acquaintance limped out of the shadows by Kirkeristen: ‘Frankie, fancy a beer?’
    Frølich shook his head and walked back towards Jernbanetorget. Is it possible to sink any lower than being bought a beer by someone you have arrested countless times? He thought: the safest place to go on a bender seems to be further west. He caught the first tram, hung onto the strap as the tram swayed up Prinsens gate, got off at the lower end of Kontraskjæret, crossed to Fridtjof Nansens plass and decided to start on the corner and work his way along all the watering holes around the City Hall. It was a strenuous job. But he didn’t feel drunk; he just needed to keep emptying his bladder. A couple of hours later he wobbled into the lounge of the Hotel Continental. This was the place where original Munch paintings used to hang on the wall, where the male guests are the type of men who look forward to the weekend to try out their new golfing trousers and where the wallflowers are cultivated women with a nose for port wine. This was where an unshaven, furloughed cop could walk around incognito too, he thought, and fell over a sofa in the middle of the room. He ordered a whisky. After drinking another, knocking over a glass of beer and attempting to wipe up the mess with the table cloth from the neighbouring table, he was politely asked to leave. Things are improving, he thought. If I play my cards right now I will be taken to the drunk cells before the night is out. ‘I’m not drunk,’ he said to the girl who had been given the unenviable task. ‘I’m just suffering from a few synchronization problems.’ He stood up, impressed that he had managed to pronounce such a long, tricky word.
    He tottered out and almost collided with Emil Yttergjerde. Yttergjerde must have been in the middle of his own pub crawl because there was a red, almost purple, glow to his face and he had to hold onto the lamppost as they stood contemplating each other. Together, they staggered around the corner and into Universitetsgata. Several bars there. And he still had some money left.
    It was evening, maybe night, at any rate many hours later, when he and Yttergjerde were sitting at a table in Café Fiasco. No, he concluded, it had to be night. He was drinking his beer and struggling not to slide off his stool while concentrating on Yttergjerde’s mouth. The music was hammering away and he was shouting to be heard through the din.
    ‘She was from Argentina,’ Yttergjerde bellowed.
    Frølich put his half-litre down on the table, wishing Yttergjerde would shut up and stop his awful shouting.
    ‘But I didn’t find that out until later,’ Yttergjerde shouted.
    ‘What was that?’ Frølich shouted back.
    ‘The woman from Argentina. She was broke, you see, and I kept her going with cigarettes and some food. I was arseholed when I got into this bus, it was four in the morning and I was going to Milan. Anyway, I sat down in the bus and then she came and sat down beside me. She’d spent all her money on rented cars and expensive hotels in Paris and Rome. She needed somewhere to live because there were still two weeks to go before her return flight left from Paris to cross the