July 13, 2007
Tour Blog: Car Theft in Oslo
Written by Girth McDürchstein on July 13, 2007 11:55 AM
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Splitcock Tour -- Europe & Japan '07
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After far too much time in the truck, we arrived in Oslo late Thursday night. I parked the truck and took the boys (plus Margo and Mikey) out for an early breakfast at Günter’s, a little diner in Majorstuen. It was a great meal with excellent service from a bleak-looking waitress. All told, we spent over two hours simply eating and chatting. Since Carl, Riffs, and Mikey had to ride in the back with all the instruments (and no access to the many boxes of Cheez-Its Margo and I kept in the cab), they were starving.
After we finished, I spent several important minutes giving the waitress lewd suggestions for alternate payment methods. She frowned at me and refused to respond, so I’m pretty sure she didn’t understand English. We paid the bill and dragged Riffs away from the mechanical-claw machine (I didn’t know they had those in the wasteland!).
Mikey was the first to notice the truck was gone. “What the fuck happened to the truck?” he asked helpfully.
“We’re parked on the other side,” I said confidently. On the other side of Günter’s is a train yard, not a parking lot. Embarrassed, we trudged back around to the front of the diner and I finally accepted it: the truck was gone. All our instruments, clothes, the special black silk tablecloths and sheets I bring on tour to spice up the motel rooms, the Cheez-Its—all gone!
I whipped out my cell phone and waited for it to find a signal. In the meantime, Margo ran over to the corner to use a pay phone. She got ahold of the police and spent 15 minutes trying to get in contact with an officer who could speak English reasonably well. She told him what had happened and where we were, and the officer arrived shortly before my cell phone registered one signal bar.
The officer stood about six and a half feet tall, a stocky and red-faced man with thinning blond hair. He asked about the incident, and we all gave detailed reports of what happened in the restaurant. Eventually he cut us off and snapped, “Tell me about the theft!”
I explained, “We went inside to eat, and when we came back out the truck was gone.”
“You saw nothing?”
“We were eating inside.”
The policeman chuckled and rubbed the stubble on his face. “This happens often at this eatery,” he said. “I believe the waitress is in on it, but nobody has proven a thing. No vehicles have ever been recovered, either, though once in awhile you find items in the used-goods shop.”
“Dammit!” I roared. “We need that shit. We got a gig…” I checked my watch. “Tonight!”
The police rolled his eyes, got back into his car, and left without making mention of filing a report. “What are we supposed to do?” I asked Margo.
“Quit whining,” she said. “I’ll handle this.”
She stomped into the diner, and when the door slammed the world felt a little more silent than usual. I couldn’t hear anything—buzzing lights, occasional car traffic, none of it. Except for a light whistle of wind.
We all four stood and just stared at the beacon of a diner on the wet street corner. After an unbearably long time, Carl asked, “Think they’re gettin’ it on?” I was about to smack him in the back of the head when glass shattered.
Have you ever had a real-life experience that felt as if it happened in slow-motion? When the waitress crashed through the side window of a diner and rolled onto the street like a rag doll, it felt like that. I heard Margo scream and leap through the glass hole after the waitress, slamming her head against the wet pavement.
We ran to the corner in time to hear the waitress shriek, “No!” as Margo prepared to strike another blow. She stopped long enough for the girl to whisper, “It’s…Njord.”
“What?” Margo demanded.
“He takes cars,” she said, then drifted out of consciousness.
“What the fuck does that mean?” Mikey wondered.
Ignoring him as usual, I snapped at Margo, “Wake her up.”
“I don’t have magical powers, Girth,” she groaned. “We just have to think…Wait!”
She leaped to her feet and ran to the phone booth 30 yards away. As she tore the Yellow Pages from its steel binder, I wondered (not for the first time) how she runs so easily in stiletto heels. When Margo returned, she handed the Yellow Pages on the street and said, “I’ll bet you $50 he’s in here.”
“Huh?”
“Look up…” She thought for a moment, then said, “Forbrytelse.”
“What the fuck is that?”
“You’ll see,” Margo said coyly. As I started to leaf through the Yellow Pages, Margo hunched over and said, “Hey Carl, you want to help me get her over to that dumpster…” She nodded her head toward an alley across the street.
Sure enough, I found it. This ad, right there in the Yellow Pages:
Margo told me later that Norway in general and Oslo in particular have such a high crime rate they’ve essentially deregulated the offenses that have no real impact on people, such as car theft, liquor-store robberies, and political riots.
I glanced down at my cell phone and found I’d lost my signal again. I went over to the booth and dialed the number in the ad.
“Brorer Njord,” said the voice on the other end, so utterly Scandinavian you could practically smell his oily hair and grimy flesh.
“Speak English?” I asked.
The voice sighed. “Sure thing, boss.”
“I, uh…I need some help with a car I want. How much you charge?”
“Depends on the vehicle. I think we need meet,” the man said in a menacing voice. I looked at the photo of the brothers in the ad and a shiver ran down my spine.
“‘Kay,” I said. “When?”
“Tonight,” the voice said. “Twenty-one. You know where?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“What?”
“Yes.”
“What?”
“I know where.”
“Good. See you when.”
As I hung up, Margo and Carl were returning from the dumpster. Meanwhile, Riffs had decided to lie down in the street exactly where the waitress had been while quietly muttering to himself.
“We got a hotel?” Carl asked.
“If we can walk there or take a bus,” I said. “Jason made the reservation weeks ago.”
We found a subway that took us to Grønland in central Oslo, where the Hotel Kukost was. We got checked into a giant suite that would fit all of us—thank God our reservation was still good, and thank the good people at the Hotel Kukost for letting us check in eight hours early—and just sat around, bored and depressed.
Around the time Riffs started jumping up and down on the bed, Carl asked, “What are we going to do about the gig?”
“We’re gonna have to cancel,” I said glumly.
“So what’ll we do instead? I mean—”
“Wait,” I told him. “That’s all we can do.”
Margo set down the pink squirrel she had ordered from the bar downstairs, licked her lips, and said, “Fuck that shit. You know what we gotta do? Plan. We gotta case those fuckers. We gotta be ready.”
So that’s what we agreed to do.
I would like to apologize on behalf of Abysmal Crucifix for the cancellation of our July 13th gig at Das Auge des Gotthaus. It was unavoidable.
Tomorrow: details on how the shit goes down.
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