The meanest Flood

clicked in his consciousness. First off the guy hadn’t shaved for days. It was way past designer stubble, the beginnings of a beard, except if you were growing a beard you had to trim it, shape it, or it looked like shit. The guy hadn’t shaped it at all so you had to think he didn’t care, that he didn’t have a razor or he was ate up on Alice or Aunt Nora.
    Second, he was wearing glasses. Thick plastic frames, looked too heavy for his head, as if they’d forced his chin into his chest. Sam didn’t wear glasses. Hell, he was a past master at refusing to see the things that were staring him in the face, but he didn’t need specs.
    And third, the body language was wrong. This guy had let the world get to him, you could see there’d been a significant moment in his life when he’d thrown in the towel and he was replaying it every moment that followed. He was a man in a constant act of surrender. That didn’t tally with Sam Turner. Sam was the guy who never gave up. Capitulation wasn’t part of his act. You could chop his arms and legs off and he’d come at you with his head.
    So everything was wrong. But Geordie smiled and went over to him. Sam kept his eyes down, didn’t crack his face for a second. The closer he got, the more Geordie could see there was Sam Turner, or at least a shadow of him, hidden deep in the folds of this derelict propping up the kiosk in Oslo’s Sentral Stasjon.
    ‘How you doing?’ Geordie asked.
    Sam adjusted his spectacles. He shook his head. ‘What’s with watching me trying to find you?’ Geordie said. ‘How long was I supposed to wait before you would’ve let on?’
    ‘I wanted to make sure you weren’t being followed,’ Sam said. ‘I don’t want Interpol scooping me up before I’ve sorted out what’s going on.’
    ‘OK, that I can accept. I thought you was testing me. Trying to improve my powers of observation.’
    ‘That, too,’ Sam said. ‘I wondered how many times you’d look at me before you saw who I was.’
    ‘That’s a crap thing to do, Sam. I wouldn’t do that to you.’
    ‘I didn’t plan on doing it, either. But once it started I got into the mood. It was like a game.’
    ‘Yeah, a game where you’re the only one knows the rules. I’m a stranger in a strange land and wondering if I’ve been dumped or landed in the wrong country and you’re playing silly buggers.’
    Sam took a step towards the exit and Geordie followed. Sam said, ‘I knew you’d see the funny side of it, accept it in the right spirit. Somebody else, a guy with no sense of humour, might have taken it completely wrong. I could have ended up with you giving me a row for it.’
    Geordie followed him out of the station to the side of the road. Everything was moving too fast. There was a huge bronze tiger prowling the cobblestone square outside the station. Size of a small elephant. And cold. You could feel the temperature; as you breathed in the air chilled your chest. Traffic zooming around, every last one of the cars and trucks on the wrong side of the road. He touched Sam’s shoulder. ‘We could go back in the station,’ he said. ‘I’ll get on the train and get off, try to do the whole thing over again but get it right.’
    ‘You mean, me get it right?’
    ‘No, both of us get it right.’
    ‘OK,’ Sam said. ‘I’m sorry. I’m under pressure.’ Geordie offered his hand. ‘I’m sorry, too,’ he said. ‘I’m under pressure as well.’
    Sam took his hand and shook it. He opened the door of the taxi that had stopped for them and whispered to Geordie before he got in, ‘Watch what you say while we’re driving. Norwegians understand English better than we do.’
    Sam asked the driver to take them to Storgata and Geordie kept mum and watched the city. New buildings, old buildings, some attempt at symmetry by successive generations of architects. The area around the station was the same as in any big city: cosmopolitan, busy with the usual sprinkling of dropouts and dopers, street-girls with hollow eyes wearing short skirts and lipstick among the shoppers and office-workers. Indians and Pakistanis and black Africans with stalls on the pavements and bluehaired ladies with kid-gloves, seemingly oblivious to change, laden with parcels from GlasMagasinet and Steen & Strom.
    Every other street there was a glance of the harbour with Stena, Fjord and Colour line ships tied at the quay waiting for their passengers to Copenhagen, Kiel and Gothenburg. Geordie had