The Story of the Unpublished Novel
How a fictional friend invaded my life and forced me to tell his tale.
“I should probably fire you.”, the big boss said.
It was an early Oslo morning. I’d just arrived at the security office at the hotel. When he pulled in, the General Manager had come straight from the garage to confront me.
“But I can’t.”
Theoretically, of course, he could, but we both knew that he couldn’t.
First off, I had a key role in the most secretive planning operation in post-WWII Norway.
There was also the small matter of me not being responsible for what he wanted to fire me for. Norway has pretty strict rules that need to be met to justify job termination.
Earlier that morning, Iraq had invaded Kuwait and was using a hotel with our brand name as a base for their military leaders. As the Assistant Security Manager in a hotel four-and-a-half thousand kilometres away, it was unlikely I could be held responsible for the predicament our brand colleagues were in.
“Why don’t we have procedures for what to do when a foreign army takes over one of our hotels?”, the GM asked.
Our hotel was the chain’s flagship. The small chain didn’t have a Senior Security Executive at the corporate level. Hence, the security manager of our hotel oversaw safety and security for the 20+ hotels we had dotted around Scandinavia and the one we had in Kuwait. It was an unpaid addition to his responsibilities.
He hadn’t arrived at work yet, so the GM directed his fear-driven aggression toward me, the first person he saw when he emerged from the garage. I didn’t know how to answer him.
“Get busy!”, he said.
At 7:00 am August 2, 1990, I thought I was a happily married guy, working at a job I enjoyed, and living the life of a relatively successful immigrant. I was also carrying a country’s secrets around inside me. We were planning the funeral of a healthy King who enjoyed almost god-like reverence from his people.
At 7:10, the GM said he wanted to fire me.
By Christmas that year, I understood, that although I was a happily married man, I was living with a less-than-happy wife who felt I was keeping too many secrets from her. I promised to be a better communicator.
Work had been slightly stressful. Security in a 500-room, 5-star hotel is a challenge at the best of times. Throw in a bunch of covert planning meetings you have to find cover stories for while simultaneously trying to find ways to communicate with a team of hotel employees in a war-ravaged country isn’t easy.
Fortunately, my foreign colleagues ultimately joined an evacuation convoy from Kuwait via Saudi Arabia to Jordan.
My social communication skills on the home front were weak at the best of times so my New Year’s resolution for 1991 was “No more secrets”.
Like most New Year’s resolutions, it was broken within three weeks.
On January 16, 1991, Operation Desert Storm was launched and the “skies over Bagdad were illuminated” in the words of CNNs Bernard Shaw and Wolf Blitzer.
Shortly after we went to bed that evening, my phone rang.
“Get to the hotel, the King has died.”, the voice on the other end said.
“What?”, I asked, not because I didn’t believe the person who called but secret plans have secret launch codes and “the King died” wasn’t the right code to activate the royal funeral plan.
The person shouted the code and I said I was on my way. Before I left, I woke my then-wife, shared my secret with her and asked her to please bring me ten days’ worth of clothing to the hotel tomorrow.
When I returned home ten days later, she informed me that she no longer wished to be married to me.
We were an amicable if not amorous couple. We went to therapy. We separated and started divorce proceedings.
I moved into our spare room.
It was there that Ben Henriksen visited me while I slept. He had an incredible story.
When I woke up the next morning, I was compelled to write the story Ben told me. I started plugging away on our IBM PS/1. I spent every spare moment I had typing Ben’s story.
I kept the story and my writing a secret. I’d already broken my New Year’s resolution anyway.
My soon-to-be ex-wife found a new place to live, we sold our home at a huge loss, and, worst of all, she got the computer when we divvied up our stuff.
I moved into a small flat in a run-down old home an hour’s walk away from work. Since I was also paying a mortgage on a home I no longer lived in, money was tight and I’d rather spend money on beer than bus tickets.
A few weeks in, Ben joined me on my daily walks. He hadn’t finished his story. I enjoyed his company and I wanted to hear how the story ended. Not only that, I wanted to write it down and document it for him.
My ex-wife kindly copied the file onto a couple of 5 1/4” cardboard-covered floppy disks and I picked them up at her office.
“By the way, I deleted the file from the computer.”, she said.
Ben and I camped out in the security manager’s office every weekend to document the story. We didn’t share it with the security personnel. They behaved as if Ben was invisible and pretended not to care that their slightly eccentric assistant manager spent 10 - 12 hours per day in the office not doing anything in particular.
It was a stormy Saturday night and I was nearing the final pages when disaster struck.
I’d taken a break, gone to the staff canteen, and grabbed a luxurious dinner of lunchtime leftovers from a conference. Back in the office, I inserted the cardboard disk into the computer. The drive whirred and spun and the green cursor blinked as if it was expecting to deliver me to the place where I’d last left off. Then it sent me a message.
“A/: is not accessible”
I yelled a Norwegian profanity at the top of my lungs. Ben vanished into thin air before the security officer on duty rushed in.
He was a young man who mastered the art of writing daily activity and investigation reports to the point where they matched both the detailed descriptive style and the wit of a Mick Herron novel. He was a writer at heart.
I shared my secret with him. He felt my pain and bought me a beer when his shift ended.
I moved a few times before Ben reappeared and asked how my writing was coming along. He didn’t want me to give up, so I sent the half-dead disk to my brother in Canada. He worked in computers. Weeks later, the disk was back. 60% of the original text had been recovered.
“No worries.”, said Ben. “I remember the rest of it.”
By now, my talented colleague had shared my secret with the rest of the team and half of the employees in the hotel.
On my weekend writing sprees, colleagues bought me coffee. After work, they bought me beer in the pub and tried to get me to share the secrets of the story. When holidays approached, they paid me in brandy to write silly lyrics to tunes they could sing at Christmas parties. The support carried me to the finish line.
When I emerged from the basement office after typing “The End.”, the cheers could be heard all the way up to the lobby. It was Easter, 1992.
As a token of my gratitude, and because every writer wonders, and is scared to death about, what someone else thinks of their work, I printed a single copy.
I gave it to my best friend.
The second person who read the book was the security officer who had been there for me on the fateful night when the disk crashed. He read it cover to cover during a single night shift.
The book made the rounds from officer to officer in security, then through the front office and up to the reservations and accounting offices.
Although they were sworn to keep the script to themselves and not share it outside the confines of our 23-storey black-glass building, some of my newfound fans threatened to send it to a publisher unless I did.
To shut them up, I caved and sent it to Norway’s largest publisher.
The publisher rejected my masterpiece.
I was less than devastated.
Their rejection letter was very kind. They said it was “pretty not bad for a first attempt, with a story, a plot, and a main character that worked well”, but that it lacked a “literary quality” they felt was necessary if they were to consider it for publication.
The publishing house was kind enough to invite me to meet with an editor who had read Ben’s story and she returned the script to me by hand.
“Maybe you should try one of those publishers that print paperbacks for sale at gas stations.”, she said.
They just invited me to this meeting so they didn’t have to pay postage, I thought.
In the many months leading up to the King’s funeral, I had been busy planning logistics, spending night after night watching faxes tick into the temporary foreign office and military logistics centre that had been established in a secure zone of the hotel and keeping my secrets secret.
For his part, Ben had been seconded by security police, infiltrated a cell of radical people who wanted to create The Republic of Norway, and fallen in love.
On the day of the funeral, the most exciting episode at the hotel was that a head of state disappeared. It ended well when the government leader strolled into the lobby and said he couldn’t be bothered to wait in line for his limo and decided to walk back to the hotel.
For Ben, the day was different. He’d been betrayed, his heart was broken and he struggled to decide between running away or preventing an assassination.
When the rejection letter was received, Norway’s new King had been on the throne for 18 months and was becoming as well-liked as his father.
Norway was still a monarchy.
Was that ever in doubt? Not in the minds of Norwegians like the editor who said the story was “unlikely”, but Ben knows differently.
As for me, well, I spent the rest of the nineties paying off that mortgage for the home I didn’t live in, pretending to be Richard Branson by saying yes to everything the company wanted me to do and then figuring out how to do it, and travelling around the world after discovering how to travel business class for free.
I continued to go to the pub as often as possible and continued to pimp my poetry talents to anyone that needed lyrics to a song for their colleagues.
Ben left me in 1992.
30 years later, I discovered Substack.
Stay safe, Always Care
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In addition to writing stories like fictional Ben’s, I love to tell them.
As a multi-award-winning corporate leader in the fields of hospitality and global security, captivating keynotes, compelling coaching sessions, and edutaining, motivational workshops are all part of my repertoire.
Email me at paul@alwayscare.ca.
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