Free Sohlberg and the Gift by Jens Amundsen Page A

being followed. This time by a white Volvo. As before the driver dropped far behind as soon as Sohlberg slowed down. He got off the highway three times and waited until he was sure that no one was tailing him.
     
    “Uggh . . . here we go to lovely Østkanten,” muttered Sohlberg as he hurled down the snow-cleared E-6 and passed the Ring 3 Highway towards his destination in the East Side.
     
    As Sohlberg drove and looked out the car’s window he thought of how East Oslo had gone downhill.
     
    During my childhood the rough and poor Grønland and Tøyen neighborhoods had minimal crime. Ditto for the areas north along the Akerselva River to lower Grünerløkka and the poor suburbs east of the Akerselven.
     
    But now these neighborhoods are as dangerous as the Bronx in New York or South-Central Los Angeles in the USA.
     
    Sohlberg was not alone in remembering the 1970s of his childhood when Norway was safe and relatively crime-free. But that all changed for the worse when the political elites flooded Norway with Turkish and Pakistani immigrants. Like most Norwegians Sohlberg had seen first-hand the crime wave that followed the multi-cultural insanities of the elites.
     
    Insanity. That’s the perfect description.
     
    It got even worse when our leaders then tried to look like the world’s greatest bunch of humanitarians. Their refugee insanity brought us a swarm of criminals from Pakistan and Vietnam and Bosnia and Somalia.
     
    What a mess.
     
    Sohlberg sighed. He had no power at all to change such matters. Zero. He was just a small cog in the criminal justice wheel. But he at least could make a difference in the Janne Eide case. He was determined if not obsessed to do so. Even the powerless can do good for others when they choose to do so.
     
    With increasing angst Sohlberg dreaded his east-bound journey. He intensely disliked the far East Side of Oslo—the armpit of Oslo. He hated its urban sprawl and lack of character. He loathed the excess criminal population of East Europe that had encamped en masse to Østkanten thanks to the liberal immigration policies of the so-called tolerant elites of Norway. The drunk and the idle and the addicted had found a new host country to leach off ever since East European countries had ended the lavish cradle-to-grave welfare systems of communism. Oslo’s elites could now brag of having 300% the crime rate of New York City.
     
    Hideous big box buildings thrived as promiscuously as lice in the armpit of Oslo. So did row after row of 3- and 4-story pyramid-like complexes stacked with the traditional recessed terraces that allow Norwegians to get maximum exposure to the sun during the summer.
     
    The eastern reaches of Oslo depressed Sohlberg even more because the area was in transition . In other words East Oslo was in that irreversible downward spiral into crime and blight and poverty as ethnic Norwegians fled and East European and Third World immigrants moved in. Sohlberg had a hard time accepting Oslo’s white flight —once a symptom of dying American cities like Detroit. Sohlberg had an even harder time accepting that Islam was now the second largest religion in Norway. A large mosque dominated the Furuset neighborhood that Sohlberg drove past.
     
    During the last part of his trip Sohlberg began to think carefully about the questions that he would present to the grandparents. He had to be careful and subtle. Astrid Isaksen had warned him that her grandparents were still bitter in the extreme over their daughter’s death and that they hated her father for having abruptly abandoned her seven years ago “for another woman”.
     
    After exiting onto Karihaugveien he turned right into the narrow lanes of Edvard Munchs vei. Deep piles of snow covered the Ellingsrud neighborhood. The further he got away from the clean snow-plowed freeway the more dicey the roads became. Clumps of snow weighed down the pines on both sides of the road. Another right turn brought him into the