Snow soft as cotton danced beneath the street lamps. Up and down, aimlessly, carried by the devilish icy wind that came rushing from the great darkness of the Oslo fjord. Snow and wind swirled together, around and around in the darkness between the large warehouses on the harbor dock, all closed for the night. Until the wind grew tired of the dance and abandoned its partner by the wall. There, the dry, wind-beaten snow settled around the shoes of the man I had just shot in the chest and neck. Blood dripped onto the snow from the lower part of his shirt. I don’t know much about snow – I don’t know much about anything, to be honest – but I have read that the crystals formed when the snow is very cold are completely different from the thick flakes or the wet snow or the other kind, the crunchy one. And that the shape of the crystals and the dryness of the snow are why the hemoglobin in the blood retains its vivid red color.
Anyway, the blood behind the man’s body brought to mind a royal cloak, deep purple, with a white ermine trim, like in the pictures in that book of Norwegian folk tales my mother used to read to me. She liked kings and fairy tales. Maybe that’s why she gave me a royal name too. The Evening Post wrote that if this cold continued until New Year’s, 1977 would be the coldest year since the war and that we would remember it as the start of the new ice age that scientists had been predicting for some time. How should I know? All I knew was that the man standing in front of me would die any moment. It showed in the way his body trembled. He was one of the Fishermen’s men. I had nothing personal against him. That’s what I told him before he collapsed, leaving a large red smear on the wall.