Sammy

Sammy is a caller who intrudes on Carl Mørck’s night with a drunken, oscillating demand to know what Ronny left in his will. The brief exchange establishes no wider biography, but it gives Sammy a distinct presence through his timing, slurred speech, interruptions, and abrupt shifts between suspicion and camaraderie. His call turns the will from an object Carl would rather not think about into a source of pressure that, by the end of the night, Carl cannot set aside.

Identity and Introduction

Sammy is introduced by voice. Carl recognizes him immediately and reacts with irritation, indicating that Sammy is already familiar to him, though the passage does not specify their relationship. Carl’s greeting makes plain that the call is unwelcome; Sammy’s response is to announce that it is him, then burp. The narration reads that bodily interruption as evidence that the party was neither just beginning nor over.

The exchange also establishes a difference between their immediate circumstances. Sammy asks someone nearby for the time and announces that it is ten, slurring his words; Carl replies that it is five where he is. The scene supplies no further explanation for the time difference, but it sharpens the sense that Sammy is calling at an inconvenient hour and is not attending closely to Carl’s situation.

The Calls About Ronny’s Will

Sammy’s first call quickly becomes an argument about Ronny’s will. He tells Carl that Ronny sent it to him and challenges Carl to admit that he has worked this out. His claim makes the will’s destination the central fact of the exchange: Sammy believes Carl has received it, but the scene does not establish what the will contains or whether Carl has read it.

The call is not private in any ordinary sense. While speaking to Carl, Sammy addresses someone in the background, asks them to wait, and tells them not to touch him because he is on the phone. The interruption, together with his burp and slurred speech, presents him as distracted and apparently drunk. Carl, by contrast, counts to ten before answering. He angrily rejects Sammy’s accusation and says that if he had the will, he would shove it down Sammy’s throat; then he ends the call.

Sammy calls again almost immediately. Rather than let Carl dismiss him, he warns him not to hang up and directly asks what Ronny wrote in the will, accusing Carl of pilfering everything. Carl responds to Sammy’s insult by threatening that it will cost him at least five days, adding that this is not the first time Sammy has called him that. The exchange suggests a recurring antagonistic familiarity, but it does not explain what the threatened five days refer to or establish the circumstances behind the earlier insult.

Accusation, Reconciliation, and Narrative Role

Sammy’s manner changes during the second call. After the accusation, he sighs and giggles, calls Carl by the name Diamond, and asks for a couple of minutes while still speaking to someone else. He then apologizes to Carl, describes the woman beside him as the reason for the interruption, and tells Carl that he is a great guy. The praise sits uneasily beside Sammy’s demand to know whether Carl is withholding Ronny’s will, and his assurance that they will work it out together does not resolve the accusation.

The call ends not with agreement but with Sammy turning back to the person beside him; the connection dies while he is still speaking. Carl is left to think about the will for the rest of the night. Sammy’s narrative importance in this scene lies in that consequence: he makes the will an immediate, personal problem for Carl, while leaving both the document’s contents and the future of their dispute unsettled. The passage offers no later outcome for Sammy, so his characterization remains concentrated in this single encounter: noisy, intrusive, suspicious, and capable of switching within moments from hostility to a professed alliance.