Ю Несбё - The Jealousy Man and Other Stories

The answer was obvious.

Through the bars I looked into a small, bare, dimly lit apartment. No furniture, only a large fire-axe hanging on the wall directly facing me, as though on exhibition. Or to put it another way, as though Greco wanted me to see it immediately.

Scrabbling, scraping sounds. A dark figure ran over the floor snarling and jumping. I felt the wet jaws and the teeth across my fingers holding round the bars. Then it dropped down to the floor and began howling furiously.

Instinctively I leaned backwards as the dog jumped up at me, and now I could feel the boy’s small hands slipping down my neck. He wouldn’t be able to hold on much longer. We had to get in there, quickly.

The dog — a Rottweiler — sat on the floor directly below the window, slathering from its open jaws with white, glistening teeth. It stood up on its hind legs and leaned them against the wall, but its snout kept butting up against the bars and it was unable to reach my fingers. As it stared at me with a cold, expressionless hatred I noticed something dangling from the collar around its thick neck. A key.

The dog gave up. Its forepaws slid down and it sat on the floor, barking up at me.

The boy tensed his legs and tried to ride higher up my back. He was whimpering softly. I stared at the key. At the fire-axe. And at the padlock.

Greco was willing to sacrifice a piece.

That’s what the great chess players do. Not to give the opponent an advantage but to improve their own position on the board. At that exact moment I couldn’t see what his plan was, but I knew he had to have one. During a chess tournament in Nottingham in 1936 Emanuel Lasker, the German world chess champion, watched his opponent think for half an hour before finally offering him a major capture. The German declined the offer but went on to win the game. When he was asked afterwards why he hadn’t taken the piece he replied that when an opponent as good as his thinks about a move for half an hour before deciding that the sacrifice is worth the reward, then he certainly wasn’t going to respond by making the exact move his opponent had been expecting of him.

I thought about it. Ran through it. And made the move my opponent had been counting on.

I squeezed my left arm between the bars. It was so tight the sleeves of my jacket and shirt were pulled up exposing the naked, bloodied skin. My offer to the dog. Which responded silently and at lightning speed.

It twisted its lips and I could see the teeth sink into my underarm. The pain didn’t come until it clamped its jaws. I pushed my right arm through, but as my hand stretched for the key around its collar the dog pulled my left arm down towards the floor in an attempt to get away from my free hand.

It isn’t true that certain breeds are able to lock their jaws, but some bite harder than others. And some are more intelligent than others. Rottweilers bite harder and have a higher IQ than most. So high in fact that I chose a Rottweiler when I made a bet with two other psychology students that I could make an animal perform simple tasks — such as nodding several times, for example — under hypnosis. But the only thing I managed was to get it to sit quite still, and there was nothing new in the fact that a few simple techniques can get animals — everything from dogs and chickens to pigs and crocodiles — to lie motionless and apparently under deep trance. The hypnotist can only take partial credit for this catatonic state, which is due as much to the instinct to ‘play dead’ in situations in which flight is impossible. The aim is to arouse the predator’s reluctance to eat something that is already dead and possibly diseased. But it was obviously new enough for my two friends, who handed the money over and earned me an undeserved reputation as the great animal hypnotist. And at that stage of my life I couldn’t afford to turn down either one.

I forced my right hand in between the bars until I could reach down to the dog and let my hand rest lightly on the animal’s forehead. Moved it slowly and rhythmically back and forth while keeping up a stream of low talk. The dog looked up at me without releasing its jaws. I don’t know what it was feeling. A hypnotist is not, in virtue of his trade, any kind of sage. He’s just someone who’s learned certain techniques, an average chess player lacking in any particular insight who makes the opening gambits he has seen praised in some book. But obviously there are both good and bad hypnotists, and I was, after all, one of the good ones, perhaps even one of the best.

Even in humans, what hypnosis does is leapfrog over the slow cognitive processes, which is why it works so surprisingly quickly, quickly enough for a man waiting at a pedestrian crossing to be manipulated by simply looking into a traffic light for a few seconds and seeing there some previously implanted trigger.

I saw the dog’s eyelids half close and felt the jaws relax. Continuing to speak slowly and calmly I moved my right hand to the chain-collar, released the key and pulled it towards me. At that same moment I felt the boy’s grip loosen and his body start to slide down my back. I reached out behind me, grabbing across the little body and caught him by the lining of his trousers before he fell off. I held on to him but knew I wouldn’t be able to do so for long.

I had managed to hold on to the key by pressing my thumb inside the key ring; now I had to work it out and get it in the padlock in the middle of the bars. It couldn’t be done with one hand. The bite was almost completely relaxed now and carefully I pulled my arm away, feeling at the same time how I was also pulling at the dog’s head. The teeth of a predator incline backwards, I reflected. It’s logical, so that they can hold on to their prey. So very carefully I pushed my arm a little further inwards before lifting it, and this time my hand came free. The blood ran down my forearm and into my palm so that I almost slipped off as I gripped round one of the bars with my little finger and ring finger.

‘Hold on tight for ten seconds,’ I said loudly. ‘Count out loud.’

The boy didn’t answer but renewed his grip around my neck.

I let go of him and using the other three fingers and my right hand I managed to get the key in the padlock and turn it. The hasp sprang up. I pushed one side of the grid open and turned so that that the boy could climb off me and get in through the window.

From the street below came the sounds of applause and bravos. I entered the apartment. The dog sat quite still, staring off into space, or perhaps deep into itself, who knows? I don’t read the professional journals any more, but I do recall a listing once of animals believed by researchers to experience an ‘I’, and that list didn’t include dogs.

The door was lined with a blank metal plate and like the door in the neighbouring apartment it had no handle. To make sure it was actually locked I gave it a little shove with my foot before lifting the fire-axe down from its two hooks on the wall. I tested its weight and studied the door.

Blood from my arm dripped onto the wooden floor below me with a deep, sighing sound. I heard another sound and turned to the window.

The boy was standing directly in front of the dog. He was stroking it!

I saw the muscles tense beneath the dog’s smooth dark fur, saw its ears prick up. The trance was over. I heard a low growling.

‘Get away!’ I shouted, but I knew it was too late. The boy managed a half-pace back before his face was splattered with blood. He sank to his knees, a look of shock in his eyes. The blade of the axe was wedged into the wooden floor directly in front of him, and between the blade and the boy lay the decapitated dog’s head with its twisted lips. The heart pumped two final spurts of blood from the mutilated body.