Selling one’s soul to the Twin

Selling one’s soul to the Twin is the bargain that binds Simon Kefas and Ab Lofthus to a criminal enterprise and ultimately makes Simon betray his closest friend. What begins as a response to financial pressure becomes a contest for the one place the Twin will allow inside the police, leaving Simon to spend the rest of his life trying to make amends.

The bargain and its secrecy

Simon was among the few people who knew the Twin’s identity and how to contact him. The Twin, however, did not know who Simon and Ab were: information reached him through telephone calls or letters, and later by computer. The arrangement therefore depended on carefully maintained anonymity even as it drew police insiders into the Twin’s reach.

Simon made his own deal before recruiting Ab. He understood the bargain not merely as corruption for gain but as a form of self-punishment: he believed that shame, degradation, and self-loathing dulled other pain, and that embracing them was a kind of mental self-harm. The trade bought him a way into the criminal arrangement while deepening the damage he did to his own sense of self.

Ab is drawn in

The banking crisis and rising interest rates left Ab Lofthus and Helene deeply in debt. Quick money seemed to them the only way to avoid homelessness. Simon went to Ab after making his own agreement with the Twin and offered him a place in the same corrupt arrangement.

Ab initially refused and threatened to report Simon to their superior. Simon then used Ab’s concern for his son against him, arguing that the boy would bear the cost of his father’s pride and grow up poor. Ab gave way. Simon later said that watching his friend lose his principles was among the worst things he had done, though Ab’s involvement also made Simon feel less alone in the bargain.

The bargain turns into betrayal

The arrangement could not accommodate both men indefinitely. The Twin wanted his mole to rise through the police force, and Simon and Ab were competing for the same place. When Simon realized that Ab was willing to kill him to take it, he contacted the Twin and said Ab had discovered both their involvement and had to be eliminated urgently.

Simon described the two friends as being like identical twins, sharing the nightmare of trying to kill one another. He acted first: Simon killed Ab, his best friend. The bargain’s decisive cost was therefore not only Simon’s own corruption or Ab’s fall into it, but the destruction of the friendship that had connected them.

Remorse and atonement

Simon repented and stopped serving as the mole, though he could have continued. After Helene died, he felt he had lost everything he could lose and had nothing left to fear. He spent the remainder of his life doing penance and trying to make amends.

That atonement took an active form: Simon pursued corrupt officers without mercy, including people like the person he had once been. His campaign earned him few friends within the police and left him lonely. He did not regard that loneliness as an injustice, but as something he deserved; his self-condemnation persisted in the image of waking each morning and facing himself in the mirror.

Significance

The bargain converts economic vulnerability into leverage over personal loyalty. Ab’s debts make Simon’s offer consequential, and Simon’s appeal to Ab’s son turns the choice into a conflict between pride and family security. The Twin’s demand that only one mole rise through the police then transforms a shared secret into competition and, finally, murder.

For Simon, the phrase of selling his soul names a continuing moral injury rather than a single transaction. His later efforts to expose corruption do not undo what he did to Ab; they are the lifelong response to it. The concept thus joins the novel’s account of institutional corruption to the intimate cost of betrayal: Simon can leave the role of mole, but he cannot escape the memory of how he entered it and what he did to the person he brought with him.