Ю Несбё - The Jealousy Man and Other Stories

These details were still unknown to me as I sat that evening in one of Milan’s best restaurants looking into Judith Szabó’s blue eyes. What I knew for sure was that Anton was dead, and probably Luca Giualli too. That I had failed to do my job, and that it was now too late. I realised too that Judith Szabó had not been joking when she said I might be dead if I turned up late.

‘At that ball,’ I said, ‘I should never have let you go.’

‘No, you shouldn’t have. But you wanted to send a message to Greco, didn’t you?’

I ignored that. ‘You invited me here so I wouldn’t be at the castle when the boy came home. Why?’

‘At the ball I realised you were good. You would have smelled the fuse and possibly saved Luca Giualli.’

‘Was it Greco’s decision to get me out here tonight for this meal?’

‘Greco takes all the operational decisions.’

‘But?’

‘But this was my suggestion.’

‘Why? As you see, you’ve overestimated my ability to sniff out anything at all. When you invited me here, I thought—’ I stopped and pressed my thumb and index finger into my eyes.

‘Thought what?’ she said quietly.

I breathed out heavily. ‘That you were interested in me.’

‘I understand,’ she said, and laid her hand over mine. ‘But you aren’t mistaken. I am interested in you.’

I looked down at her hand. ‘Oh?’

‘The main reason I got you out of the way is because I didn’t want you to die too. You let me go the last time we met. You didn’t need to — I don’t even think it was something you planned. So it was my turn to show a little mercy.’

‘Showing mercy is not the same as being interested.’

‘But I’m telling you I am. I need a new client. I think I’ve just lost the one I had.’

She looked down without moving her hand from mine. With her other hand she lifted the serviette from her lap and held it out to me.

‘You’re crying,’ she explained.

That was how things started between me and Judith. With tears. Was that the way it was going to end too?

Six rings.

Seven.

Eight.

I was about to hang up.

‘Hey, lover boy. I was in the shower.’

As I breathed in hard I realised I had been holding my breath.

‘What’s up?’ she asked, worried, as though she’d read my silence.

‘I’m in a locked apartment with a mute boy—’

‘Gio.’ She said it before I’d finished my sentence.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I was afraid he’d traced you too.’

‘He can’t find me here, I’ve already told you that.’

‘Everybody can be found, Judith.’

‘Where are you?’

‘That’s not important, you can’t help me. I just wanted to hear that you’re OK.’

‘Lukas, tell me where—’

‘Now you know he’s trying to reach you by using me. Stay hidden. I...’

Not even now, in this situation, could I make myself say it.

Love.

That was a word reserved for Maria and Benjamin. Over the course of the year in which Judith and I had been together it had occurred to me that maybe one day I would be able to say it and mean it. But no matter how much Judith fascinated and interested me and in all sorts of ways made me happy, that was one door that seemed locked shut.

‘...am so fond of you, my darling.’

‘Lukas!’

I hung up.

Leaned against the wall.

Looked at my watch. It was working against me, that much I realised. But why had he given me all this time? Why run the risk of my calling up my allies and summoning them to come to my assistance, rescue me? Or perhaps even the police?

Because he knew I had no allies, or none willing to go up against someone like Gio Greco. As for the police, when was the last time they got involved in a stand-off between drivers, with or without an innocent boy as bait?

I beat the wall with the palm of my hand and the boy looked startled.

‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘I’m just trying to think.’

I put my hand to my forehead. Greco wasn’t crazy, not in the sense that he acted irrationally. It was just that with his particular personality disorders — a more precise diagnosis would probably be malign narcissism, which isn’t far away from psychopath — he operated with a rationale that was completely different from that of so-called normal people. If I was to predict his next move then I needed to understand him. We were revengers, both of us, but that was where the similarity ended. My crusade against the cartels was not just a form of spiritual cleansing, a way of muting my own pain; it was also principled: I wanted to tear down a world order in which the greediest and most unscrupulous profiteers had all the power. Greco didn’t want to torture me as a matter of principle, but for the brief, passing and sadistic pleasure it gave him. And in pursuit of that pleasure he was prepared to sacrifice the lives of innocent people. That was it. That had to be the reason why he didn’t just start the torture or the killing straight away; the pleasure would have been too brief. He wanted first to enjoy the knowledge that I knew what lay in store for me. This — my fear — was just his starter.

I went over my reasoning again.

There was something there that didn’t quite add up.

The direction in which I was thinking, that he just wanted to see me suffer — that was something he’d planted, it was exactly what he wanted me to think. It was too simple. He wanted something more. What does a narcissist want? He wants affirmation. He wants to know he’s best. Or, even more important, he wants everyone else to know he’s best. Naturally. He wants to show the whole business, the whole cartel world, that he’s better than me.

So far he’d managed to make me go along with everything he’d planned. I had run up the stairs to rescue the boy. I had managed to get us over to the other apartment. I had used the axe the way I was supposed to use it. I had...

I froze.

I had called Judith. He’d arranged it that way. He wanted me to call her. Why? Phone calls couldn’t be tracked and phones located the way people once could be. Silence.

I took the phone out again, tapped in her name. Pressed the phone to my ear. Silence.

The phone wasn’t ringing. I looked at the screen. The symbol showed not just a bad connection, it showed no connection at all. I crossed to the window, held the phone. Still no connection. We were in the middle of Milan, it wasn’t possible. Or, of course, it was possible. If someone installed a jamming apparatus in a room they could turn the jamming signal on and off at will.

I stared at the walls, trying to see where Greco might have hidden the box. On the ceiling, maybe? Was the box there to ensure I couldn’t call anyone once I had — predictably enough — called Judith? Greco probably thought that after all there just might be someone I could call who could possibly do something to upset his plans.

Accept. I had to accept that that possibility no longer existed. And I had to stop thinking about why it was he might possibly have wanted me to ring Judith, because there was nothing at all I could do about it. At least now she knew he was on the warpath, and I had to believe her when she said that she couldn’t be traced through the phone, and that he didn’t know where her apartment was, because not even I knew that.

I looked at my watch. And at the boy.

I had no doubt at all that Greco would use gas; he’d done so before. When the most brilliant inventor in the largest of the three electro-cartels took his vehicle in for repairs Greco had bribed a mechanic, entered the place by night and simply installed a gas pellet in the gearbox that would break open when the inventor put the gear lever into overdrive. The cartel’s security people had come for the car the following day, checked it for any explosive devices and then driven it through the heavily trafficked city streets to the house where he lived. It wasn’t until a few days later, when the inventor drove to his country home by Lake Como, that the car was out on a motorway and in due course he moved up into overdrive. The car went off the road close to one of the large bridges, rolled over and was crushed against the cobbles of a village square directly below. The death was recorded as a road accident. Not that insiders didn’t know gas was involved, for the death of everyone who is important for a company’s competitive success is always regarded as suspicious and involves an autopsy. But according to Judith the electro-cartel was anxious to play down the vulnerability of its security system as being bad for its reputation. The irony of it all was that within the drivers’ world I was the one given the credit for the attack, merely because on one occasion I had answered a query from another limo driver about how to eliminate this chemist who had an army to guard him and who rarely left his fortress home, and then only in a bulletproof car with his own personal driver and bodyguards for a skiing trip to the mountains at Bergamo. I suggested that one should track down the personal driver and hypnotise him without his knowing it, simply prime him with a trigger word which — when he heard or read it — would immediately put him into a trance. This type of hidden hypnosis leaves the person apparently exactly the same, and he feels exactly the same too. I suggested the trigger word should be a place name he would be bound to see along one of the fastest and most dangerous stretches of road between Milan and Bergamo.