Ю Несбё - The Jealousy Man and Other Stories

‘I don’t feel any craving at all,’ she said as she buttoned her mink coat and looked at me.

I was sitting behind my desk and taking notes with the Montegrappa pen I had come across many years ago in an antiques shop. Patients like to see you making notes, it makes them feel a little less like something on a conveyor belt.

‘Tell me, Dr Meyer, is hypnosis difficult?’

‘It depends what you’re hypnotising,’ I said. ‘As film directors say, the hardest to work with are children and animals. And it’s easiest with a receptive and creative spirit like yours, signora.’

She laughed.

‘There are rumours that you once managed to hypnotise a dog, Dr Meyer. Is that true?’

‘Just rumours,’ I smiled. ‘And even if I had, I have a vow of confidentiality as regards all my patients.’

She laughed again. ‘But what power it gives you!’

‘I’m afraid I’m as powerless as anyone else,’ I said, searching through the desk drawer for an ink cartridge to replace the one in the pen, now empty. The leader of a local chess club I used to belong to once said to me that the reason I always lost was not that I didn’t know what I was doing, but that I sabotaged my own chances of winning through my bewildering weakness for the weak. He suspected that I would prefer to sacrifice a castle rather than a knight because I liked the knight better. Or because I thought of myself as a knight.

‘They’re pieces, Lukas,’ he said. ‘Pieces! The knight is the least valuable, and that is a fact, not preferences.’

‘Not in every position. The knight can get himself out of some pretty tight situations.’

‘Knights are slow and always arrive too late to save anyone, Lukas.’

I found the ink cartridge, a narrow metal sleeve the same length as the pen, and with a thin steel tip like a hypodermic syringe. I realised it would be my last one, that Montegrappa pens and cartridges were no longer produced. Like so many other uselessly beautiful quality products it had vanished beneath the merciless pressure of global competition.

I wrote slowly, reverently, careful not to waste my words. Fru Karlsson would start smoking again. And she’d tell all her friends that Dr Meyer was no good so I’d spared a rush from that quarter. She wouldn’t remember she’d had an abortion. If she ever did it would be because something had overridden the hypnosis. A special word, a mood, a dream, it could be anything. As in my case. At times I’ve thought I might like to obliterate Benjamin and Maria from my memory. At other times not. Anyway, it’s been a long time now since I had the ability to hypnotise myself. One learns too much about it. Like the conjuror no longer able to enjoy being fooled, even when one wants to be.

Once Fru Karlsson had gone I packed my beautiful black leather Calvino bag. I’d bought it because it had the same name as the anti-Fascist rebel Italo Calvino. And, of course, because I could afford it.

I knotted my Burberry scarf and walked into the reception area. Linda, who was the receptionist for me and the two other psychologists in our joint practice, looked up.

‘Have a nice day, Lukas,’ she said with an almost inaudible sigh and a scarcely noticeable glance at her watch which showed, as usual, that it was still only three. She used this Americanism not, primarily, to bless the remaining hours of daylight, or until I went to bed, but to point out the injustice in the fact that my working day was so much shorter than that of my two colleagues, and therefore hers. I think she believed — or thought she believed — that my not taking on more patients showed a lack of solidarity, but there was no way she could know that in recent years the psychology practice had become secondary and functioned more or less as a cover for my other, real job. Which was to kill people.

‘Have a nice day, Linda,’ I said as I strolled out into the lovely December sunshine.

I’ve never quite been able to make up my mind whether or not Milan is a beautiful city. It has been in the past, you only need to look at the pictures from back then, when Milan was a city in Italy, and not in Capitalia, as I call the stateless condition the world is in today. Of course, before the last of the physical world wars it had been almost supernaturally beautiful, but even after the bombs the city has preserved a discreet but distinct elegance in which the fashion houses in particular had influenced the style and taste, and vice versa. In the days before the sixteen giant business cartels assumed control of Europe, North America and Asia, factory emissions were subject to central authority regulations, which meant that even in Milan, with one of the worse air-pollution problems in Europe, one could still on a good day see all the way to the white peaks of the Dolomites. Now it lay over the city in a constant veil, and those who could not afford the overpriced air conditioners now in the hands of a monopoly lived lives that were short and sickly.

The cartel-run media tell us that people are richer than ever before and prove it by presenting us with statistics showing the real income per inhabitant. The reality is of course that the creators and directors of the cartels earn a thousand times more than the average worker. Eighty per cent of them are on temporary contracts with no chance to plan for the long term. They have to live in the ever-expanding slum that surrounds the city on all sides save in the north.

After Milan became the centre of European finance, with the Borsa Milano and the headquarters of seven of the cartels, the population exploded. The city was now not only the largest in Europe but also harboured the world’s third-largest slum. I’m no socialist, but you don’t need to be one to feel a longing for a time when incomes were lower but distributed more evenly, and there was a functioning state which did its best to help those who were struggling.

I passed the Duomo di Milano. In front of the imposing cathedral, queues of the tourists and the faithful extended into the large square of the Piazza Duomo. At the other end of the square I passed the tables of what those of us working in the business call Café Morte, Café Dead. The men sitting there — and they were exclusively men — had newspapers and phones in front of them while their eyes swept the square in search of possible employment. The market for contract killing had grown exponentially once the cartels and an unregulated open market took over, and those offering the service could principally be divided into two classes, a bit like prostitution. Café Morte was the outdoor market, for the street-walkers. Customers using the place could get a job done for a fee in the region of 10,000 euros. The quality was variable, as was the discretion offered; but in a society in which both the police and the authorities were drastically reduced and institutionally corrupt the risk of being caught was acceptably low. So the response of the family members or the employers of a target was quite commonly to arrange a contract killing. It meant that the business — like gun running or drug smuggling — was expanding.

The first cartel killings, in which personnel from rival cartels were killed in order to weaken their competitors, were carried out by taxi drivers, and it’s generally believed that that’s why we’re referred to as ‘drivers’. But you’ve got those who wait for their fares at a taxi rank like the Café Morte, and then you’ve got the limo drivers, the ones who work the indoor market, the luxury prostitutes, the ones you need to approach through a middleman called a ‘fixer’. Drivers like that have reputations and can cost as much as ten times what they charge at the Café Morte, but if you want to take out some well-protected employee from one of the cartels then these are the ones you need to hire. People like me.