Ю Несбё - The Jealousy Man and Other Stories

She smiled, tasted the wine and nodded to the wine waiter who, without asking, had known who would be doing the tasting.

‘I’m from a well-to-do family. My every material need was met, but none of my emotional needs. The closest to that was my father, who abused me regularly from the age of eleven. What d’you think a psychologist would make of that and my ending up in this business?’

‘You tell me.’

‘I’ve got three university degrees, no children, I’ve lived in six countries and always earned more than my lovers and my ex-husband, and I was permanently bored. Until I started in this business. First as a client. Then as... a little more. Right now I’m Gio Greco’s girlfriend.’

‘Why not the other way round?’

‘What d’you mean?’

‘Why don’t you say Gio Greco is your boyfriend? You use the passive form.’

‘Isn’t that what strong men’s women usually do?’

‘You don’t strike me as someone who’s easy to dominate. Right now, you say: that makes it sound like a purely temporary arrangement.’

‘And you sound like a person preoccupied with semantics.’

‘The mouth overflows with what the heart is full of — isn’t that what they say?’

She raised her glass and we drank a toast.

‘Am I mistaken?’ I asked.

She shrugged. ‘Aren’t all relationships temporary arrangements? Some end when the love is gone, or the money, or the entertainment value. Others when there’s no life left. What happened in your case?’

I twirled the thick-bellied wine glass between my fingers. ‘The latter.’

‘Competitors’ drivers?’

I shook my head. ‘It was before I entered the business. She took her own life. Our son died in a fire the year before.’

‘Grief?’

‘And guilt.’

‘And was she? Guilty?’

I shook my head. ‘The guilty one was the maker of the Mickey Mouse lamp in the bedroom. It was made of a cheap and highly inflammable material in order to undercut the competition. The maker denied any guilt. He was one of the richest men in France.’

‘Was?’

‘He died in a fire.’

‘We aren’t by any chance talking about François Augvieux who burned to death on board his yacht in the harbour at Cannes?’

I didn’t answer.

‘So that was you. We always wondered who it was. There was no very obvious client. An impressive debut. Because it was your debut, wasn’t it?’

‘The world doesn’t need people who refuse to use their power to do something good.’

Again she put her head on one side, as though to study me from another angle. ‘Is that the reason you’re in this business? To kill unscrupulous profiteers and revenge your son and wife?’

It was my turn to shrug. ‘You’d have to ask a psychologist about that. But tell me, what would the Greek make of you and me sitting here and dining together this evening?’

‘What would ? What makes you think he doesn’t know?’

‘Does he?’

She smiled quickly. ‘He’s out on a job. And I’m on a job too. I’d like to have you in my stable.’

‘You make me sound like a racehorse.’

‘You got anything against that?’

‘Not the analogy. But I don’t need a fixer.’

‘Oh, but you do. You’re too easily outmanoeuvred without one. You need someone who’s got your back.’

‘The way I recall it, you were the one who got outmanoeuvred.’

‘I hope you don’t take this personally, Lukas, but you shouldn’t be here right now, you should be with your client.’

I could feel my pulse quicken.

‘Thanks, Judith, but Giualli’s safe enough in his fortress; and there are no traitors in our crew, I’ve made sure of that personally.’

Judith Szabó took something out of her Gucci bag and placed it on the tablecloth in front of me. It was a drawing or a print. It showed a cat running with something that looked like a lit explosive charge fastened to its body. In the background was a castle.

‘This is a 500-year-old illustration of an offensive tactic used by the Germans back in the sixteenth century. They would capture a cat or a dog that had found its way out through one of those little escape routes animals always find as a way out of the fortress or village they come from, then tie an explosive charge to it and drive it home. And hope the animal would get back up through its tunnel before the fuse burned down.’

I felt a prickling between my shoulder blades. I already had a pretty good idea of what was coming next. It was something I hadn’t — and should have — thought of.

‘Gio is...’ She seemed to be looking for the words. And as well as not being weak, Judith Szabó didn’t strike me as a person who had trouble finding her words. When finally she did, she spoke quietly, and I had to lean forward to hear.

‘I’ve got no problem with the method as such — it’s our job, after all, and we do what we have to do. But there are limits. At least, there are for some of us. Like when that boy who lives with his mother at Sforzesco, Anton...’

The name made me jump. Paolo Giualli and his wife, twenty years younger than him, were good people. Good, at least, considering how rich and powerful they were. They had three well-brought-up children who treated me with a distant courtesy which I reciprocated. Things were a little different with Anton, the five-year-old son of the cook, who lived in one of the service flats below stairs and was so like Benjamin I had to make a conscious effort to control my feelings for him. Judith Szabó stopped, maybe noticing that the name had a particular resonance for me. She coughed before continuing: ‘So Anton is going to be the cat,’ she said.

I was already halfway out of my seat.

‘It’s too late, Lukas. Sit down.’

I looked at her. Her voice was steady but I thought I could see tears in those blue eyes of hers. I knew nothing. Only that I was, once again, the knight.

Several days would pass before the testimony of witnesses and forensic examinations revealed what had happened. The Giualli children were accompanied by bodyguards wherever they went — at home, at school, at ballet, at karate, visiting triends — but the same thing didn’t apply to children of the staff. All employees were searched on arrival and departure — for treachery is, after all, a part of human nature. But the chances of their being kidnapped were regarded as remote, especially since all employees had signed a contract which clearly stated that, in any such eventuality, their employer was absolved of any responsibility.

When Anton returned home from school that afternoon, an hour later than usual, he was in a state of exhaustion and told his mother how he’d been stopped by a man on his way through the Sempione Park. The man had held a cloth against the boy’s face, everything went black and Anton said he had no idea how long he’d been out before waking up beneath one of the bushes in the park. His neck and throat were hurting, but apart from that he was feeling as well as could be expected. When asked to describe the man all Anton could remember was that, in spite of the heat of the day, he had been wearing an overcoat.

His mother had straight away spoken to Luca Giualli who at once rang the police and the doctor. The doctor had said the pains and the swelling around the neck could indicate that something — he declined to speculate on what it might be — had been forced down the boy’s throat. But he couldn’t say any more until he had taken a closer look.

According to the police report, four officers had been approaching the entrance to the fortress when the explosion occurred. The charge contained in the gelatine bag in the boy’s stomach would not have been powerful enough to kill Luca Giualli and his wife had they been in their part of the fortress and Anton in the service flat. But they were — as we said — good people, and they were not merely close by but actually in the same room, so that there was little left of any of them once the police and the fire brigade had made their way through the ruins.