Simon’s gambling addiction

Simon’s gambling addiction is more than a private compulsion: it becomes a force that connects emotional loss to debt, criminal compromise, and the betrayal of Ab Lofthus. In Else’s account to Kari, gambling shapes Simon’s relationship with Helene, contributes to the crisis that draws him into the Twin’s orbit, and remains bound to the self-loathing from which he spends the rest of his life trying to make amends.

Identity and Background

Else describes Simon as a man capable of seeing other people clearly, including their virtues and flaws, while struggling against his own demons. One of those demons was gambling addiction. His ability to perceive others did not give him control over his own compulsion: in Else’s recollection, the addiction repeatedly damages the life he is trying to build with Helene and later becomes part of a broader pattern of shame and self-punishment.

The addiction is presented through a retrospective conversation rather than through a single episode of gambling. Else shares what Simon told her with Kari, who already knows that he had been a gambling addict. Her account supplies the personal history behind that description: the financial instability, emotional consequences, and criminal choices that made the addiction consequential beyond Simon himself.

Debt and the Loss of Helene

Simon and Helene began seeing each other, but his gambling debt made their life together chaotic, and the relationship did not last long. Simon believed he was dragging Helene down. When Ab Lofthus came along, Helene left with Ab, and Simon was heartbroken. The loss sharpened the connection between his gambling and his sense that he was ruining the life of someone he loved.

Simon later learned that Helene was pregnant. In Else’s account, he responded by gambling recklessly, lost everything, and came close to an abyss. The sequence makes the addiction’s consequences cumulative: debt has already helped break the relationship, and the news of Helene’s pregnancy comes when Simon is in a state of acute emotional and financial collapse. Rather than restoring what he has lost, gambling intensifies the crisis and helps lead him toward a criminal solution.

The Bargain and Its Cost

With nothing left, Simon sought out the Twin and offered his soul. He knew who the Twin was and how to contact him, while the Twin did not know the identities of Simon and Ab Lofthus. Their information passed anonymously, first by telephone and letters and eventually through a computer. The account thus links Simon’s desperate private circumstances to a concealed criminal arrangement, while also showing that the relationship was structured around secrecy.

The bargain did not end with Simon. Once he had struck his deal, he went to Ab, who was deep in debt with Helene after the banking crisis sent interest rates sharply upward. Their immediate fear was homelessness, and they needed quick money. Simon offered Ab a place in the arrangement; Ab initially refused and threatened to report him to their boss. Simon then appealed to Ab’s fear that his son would suffer for his father’s pride and grow up poor. In Else’s telling, Simon later hated himself for having used Ab’s vulnerability to draw him into the same destructive bargain.

Else says that Simon believed he desired the shame, degradation, and self-loathing associated with what he had done, because they numbed other pain. He understood this as a form of mental self-harm. The gambling addiction therefore sits within a larger cycle: loss and debt lead to a criminal bargain, the bargain produces further guilt and harm to others, and shame becomes something Simon both suffers and, as he understood it, sought out.

Repentance and the Meaning of Self-Destruction

Else recalls that Simon regarded what he did to Ab as the worst part of his past. He had drawn his best friend into the bargain and, when the Twin wanted his mole to rise through the police force, the friendship became entangled with a struggle for position. Simon believed Ab was willing to kill him to secure that place. He contacted the Twin, claimed that Ab was a danger to them both, and killed Ab first. The account connects Simon’s initial financial desperation to a much larger betrayal, without reducing his responsibility for what followed to the addiction alone.

Simon eventually repented and stopped being the mole, though he could have continued. After Helene died, Else says, he had lost everything he believed there was to lose and no longer had anything to fear. He spent the rest of his life doing penance and making amends, relentlessly pursuing corrupt officers of the kind he had once been. That work left him lonely, but he considered loneliness deserved rather than an occasion for self-pity. Else remembers his description of self-loathing as the hatred a person feels on waking and looking in the mirror.

The addiction’s narrative significance lies in this movement from compulsion to consequence, not in a claim that repentance erases the damage. Simon’s gambling helps turn heartbreak into financial ruin and makes a criminal bargain appear to him as a way out; that bargain draws Ab into danger and precedes Simon’s betrayal of his closest friend. His later pursuit of corrupt officers is a sustained attempt to answer that history through action, while the loneliness and self-condemnation remain part of its cost.