Ю Несбё - The Jealousy Man and Other Stories

I stared at the ceiling and the walls. Looked at my watch, at the second hand that jerked remorselessly onwards.

Tried to think clearly, to work out my next move, but it was impossible to know if my brain was functioning rationally, like the climber on Everest, knowing that the lack of oxygen at altitude enfeebles his powers of judgement and yet not being helped by that knowledge, confusion is confusion.

Sixty minutes. No. Fifty-nine.

I had to know.

I called her number, my heart pounding furiously as I waited.

One ring. Two.

Pick up. Pick up!

Three rings.

In another of Murakami’s games his opponent lost it all in the middlegame. Not because Olsen played badly, but because he was under pressure after falling into the Murakami Trap in the opening. The pleasant-mannered but always silent Olsen had used up valuable time in trying to work out his response and it left him struggling against the clock as well as Murakami’s strongly positioned and numerically superior major pieces. A frequently rehearsed argument revolves around the issue of whether Olsen sacrificed his queen, or Murakami took it. Most people, myself included, think it obvious that Olsen would not voluntarily have sacrificed her, and that all he achieved when Murakami took the piece was a postponement of the inevitable. In an ordinary game Olsen would have resigned and handed the victory to Murakami, but in lightning chess there’s always the chance your opponent will be stressed into making a catastrophic mistake. So Olsen chose to suffer on and allow himself to be cut up, piece by piece; all the while his one remaining black knight hopped about like a headless chicken. Playing that game over again, move by painful move, was like enduring a Greek tragedy. You know how it’s going to end; the object is only to find the most beautiful way of getting there, what the drivers call the scenic route.

I met Judith Szabó while she was still Gio Greco’s fixer and girlfriend. It was at a ball at the Sforzesco Palace that Luca Giualli, head of the Lombardy cartel, had purchased from the commune and turned into his own private fortress. In addition to hiring a small army to take care of the family’s security he had employed me to look for holes in the security routines and pick up signs of any imminent planned attacks.

I was standing by the piano in the atrium looking out across the crowds of the rich and the powerful in their tuxedos and ballgowns. I noticed her, even though she tried to carry herself just like any other guest. Not only because she was so strikingly beautiful in her bright red gown and long, raven-dark hair, but because she had been unable to resist approaching me like a professional.

‘You’re not doing your job especially well,’ was the first thing she said to me.

She was a couple of centimetres taller than my 175.

‘You must be Judith Szabó,’ I said.

‘See, that’s better. How did you work that out?’

‘I hear things. And you walk around like a queen and look around like a driver. Your name isn’t on the guest list, so how did you get in?’

‘I am on the guest list. As Anna Fogel, from the Tokyo cartel. There’s an invitation in the same name. It was just too easy to hack the system, and the check on my fake ID was embarrassingly feeble.’ She flashed a bank card at me.

I nodded. ‘And why wouldn’t I just sound the alarm now and have you cuffed?’

She smiled briefly before nodding in the direction of Luca Giualli, who stood conversing with the mayor of Milan, a man who had spoken enthusiastically of returning to the city-state model of Italy.

‘Because—’ said Judith Szabó, and I knew more or less what she was about to say — ‘to do so would reveal that you had allowed a potential assassin to get so near your employer that she — had she so wished — could have killed him.’

‘Then why are you here?’

‘To deliver a message. From you know who.’

‘The Greek. Broccoli head.’

She smiled thinly. ‘He just wants to find out whether you’re as good as they say you are.’

‘Better than him, you mean?’

Her smiled broadened. Her eyes were so lovely. Cold and blue. And I thought at the time, she has a psychopath’s pulse, her heart would beat slowly in a life-or-death situation. Later I would discover I was mistaken, that she was simply a consummate actress. And that the reason she was able to act the psychopath so well was that she was living with one.

‘And now at least we know you aren’t the best, Herr Meyer.’ She looked into my eyes as she brushed something from the lapel of my Brioni tuxedo, though I knew there was nothing there.

‘Excuse me, Herr Meyer, I’ve got someone waiting for me.’

She must have seen how I lifted my gaze above her shoulder and slowly shook my head, because she tensed, turned and looked up at one of the interior balconies in the atrium. It was too dark for her to see whether there was anyone in the darkness behind the open balcony door, but when she lowered her gaze she saw the red dot of a laser beam dancing across her gown.

‘How long has that been there?’ she asked.

‘Red on red,’ I said. ‘I doubt whether any of the guests have noticed it yet.’

‘And how long have you known that Anna Vogel doesn’t exist?’

‘Three days. I asked for every name on the list to be double-checked, and when Anna Vogel cropped up and there’s no one of that name in the Tokyo cartel it naturally made me curious about who you might be. And it looks as if my guess was right.’

That smile of hers was no longer quite so steady.

‘What happens now?’

‘Now you go back to the person waiting for you and tell him that he’s the one who’s been sent a message.’

Judith Szabó stood there, studying me. I knew what she was wondering about. Whether I had planned to let her go or had made my mind up on the spot.

Whatever, two weeks later I would have reason to regret that decision.

Fourth ring.

She always has a phone close by, always. Please, Judith.

Fifth ring.

Don’t be dead.

I called her two weeks after that meeting at the Sforzesco Palace.

‘Hello,’ was all she said.

I recognised her voice at once. Probably because I’d been thinking about her.

‘Hi,’ I said. ‘I’m calling because you rang this number. Can I ask how you got it?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘But you can ask if I’m free for dinner this evening.’

‘Are you?’

‘Yes. The table’s booked. Seven o’clock at Seta.’

‘That’s early. Will I survive?’

‘If you’re punctual.’

I smiled at what I took to be a joke.

But I was on time. And she was already seated at the table when I arrived. As before, I was struck by the austerity of her beauty. No sweetness, just healthy, symmetrical and properly proportioned. But then those eyes of hers. Those eyes...

‘You’re a widower,’ she said, once we had got a little shop talk out of the way without revealing any secrets.

‘What makes you think that?’

She nodded in the direction of my hand. ‘No driver wears a wedding ring. It tells you something about them. It makes them potentially vulnerable, knowing that there’s someone they love.’

‘Maybe I wear it as a distraction. Or maybe I’m divorced.’

‘Maybe. The pain in your eyes tells me something different.’

‘Maybe that’s from all the victims I have on my conscience.’

‘Is it?’

‘No.’

‘Well then?’

‘Tell me something about yourself first.’

‘What do you want to know?’

‘There’s probably quite a difference between what I want to know and what I’m permitted to know. Start anywhere you like.’