Free Europe @ 2.4 km/h by Ken Haley Page A

in a slow-motion cinematic shootout, have retired from a life of bank robbery to raise a family. Well, that’s their story — and they know where I live so I’m sticking with it. Passing strange, then, that we met outside a bank, eh?
    I’d come as quickly as my wheels would carry me from Trondheim Central Station, battling the clock all the way. The train drew in at 2.50 pm but first my luggage needed stowing. It must have been spot on 3.15 when I rolled up to the door of my chosen bank. I knew they all closed at three, but this one had been so friendly just the other day, waiving that discouraging 50 kroner (A$6) transaction fee — and it had an equally ‘friendly’ entrance ramp. Today the tellers glanced up but refused to let me in, citing the late hour. They pointed to the post office opposite, but its only entrance was above a forbidding flight of steps.
    So I waited, and waited, my annoyance increasing by the minute. It was then that Per and Tina pitched up. ‘Banks are real shits’ were Per’s first words to me. At that point, I couldn’t agree more. Then Per announced he that had an idea. ‘What, we should break in?’ I joked. No, he said with great earnestness, why didn’t I write a sign demanding entrance and pointing out that, as I’d told him, I had only 74 kroner (A$8) of the folding stuff in my possession?
    So I penned a heartfelt plea which Per translated into Norwegian and pressed against the windowpane. More than one teller looked up and read it — and looked down and continued tallying. 6
    Per and Tina, whose blue tattooed neck was quite riveting close up, now made the most generous of offers, ‘Why don’t you stay with us for the night?’ After a rapid self-consultation — Well, my locked bags are at the station, safe till tomorrow, so what have I got to lose? — I agreed.
    At his car, parked nearby, I was introduced to their rather sullen eight-year-old daughter, and ten minutes later, after a successful raid on Burger King, Per let me into the secret of his hostility towards Norway’s banks. My innocent query as to what he did for a living elicited the answer, ‘I am a gangster’. And then, amending himself to include his life partner, ‘ We are gangsters’.
    While I was pondering what exactly I had got myself into, Per gunned the engine and we roared north out of Trondheim, our destination — and this is the hardest part of the story to believe, but a world atlas will confirm it’s not made up — a town on the highway and rail line east to Sweden, 30 km from the coast, called Hell.
    These days my passport has a visa stamp from Hell — issued by a petrol station, it’s one of the only visas you can get in Western Europe these days — and there is even, appropriately enough, a chapter of the Coffin Cheaters’ motorbike gang on a hilltop outside the town.
    Per and Tina live in a country villa 6 km from Hell. Built in 1876, it is one of a row on the edge of a farmed field. Only upon entering the house did my doubts about their story vanish. There, in the parlour and again in the living room, were more clocks — some of them quite ornate pieces — than one dwelling could ever need. Clearly, they were a serious couple of ‘collectors’ and all I can say to anyone who doubts that their timepieces were ill-gotten gains is that if you’d spent 24 hours with Per and Tina you’d be as certain as I am that they were stolen goods.
    Per — who looked a dead ringer for Angry Andersen — told me he and Tina had both done prison time. She would go in and he would come out; he would go in and she would come out (I started to picture them as a pair of cuckoos) but now they had gone straight because, tattooed Tina told me, ‘we don’t want our daughter’s future to be affected’. Per said he now worked on an oil rig — four weeks on, four weeks off — while Tina was settling down to life as a rural housewife, not exactly living in Hell but only five minutes’ drive