Ю Несбё - The Jealousy Man and Other Stories

I don’t know whether Greco was ever told of my suggestion and that was what inspired him, or what he thought about me being given the credit for the attack. The point is, I would never have carried out such a mission; I never do jobs in which innocent people can die.

Again I looked at my watch. The problem wasn’t that time was moving too fast. It moved slowly, but I was thinking even slower.

I had to get the boy out of the apartment before the gas was released.

If I could get the people down in the street to tear down one of the shop blinds, might they possibly be able to use it as a jumping sheet?

I crossed to the window and looked down.

A man in police uniform stood down there. Apart from him the street was empty.

‘Hey!’ I suddenly shouted. ‘I need help!’

The uniformed man looked up. He neither responded nor moved. And although he was too far away for me to see his face clearly, I noticed that the big man’s head seemed to have been beaten down between his shoulders. The pedestrian precinct was closed at both ends of the block by security tape, presumably fake too, like the uniform. I closed my eyes and cursed inwardly. Big as he was, and wearing that uniform, he probably had little trouble telling people to move on. The drama moreover was at an end; the fire had been put out and the boy and I presumably rescued. I looked across to the other side of the street. Tried to estimate the distance in metres. The fake policeman crossed the street and disappeared through the gate directly below me.

I stepped back inside and studied the apartment again. With the same result. There was just us in here, the four walls, a fire-axe and the decapitated body of the dog. I walked round the walls, hitting them with my fist. Brick.

‘You know how to write?’ I asked.

The boy nodded.

I took the Montegrappa pen from my inside pocket and handed it to him.

‘What’s your name?’ I asked, pulling up the sleeve of my coat so that he could write on the cuff of my white shirt. But it was saturated with blood from the bite wound, and before I could pull up the other sleeve he had turned to the wall and was writing on the pale blue wallpaper.

‘ “Oscar, eight years old”,’ I read aloud. Then I said: ‘Hi, Oscar, my name is Lukas. And you know what, we’re going to have to get out of here.’

I’d worked it out already. It was about eighteen metres down to the street. Tying together the coat, the shirt and my trousers I would be able to lower Oscar four metres down. Using his own clothes would make that six metres. I could probably let Oscar go from a height of four metres without him getting seriously injured. But even for that I would need another eight metres. And where was I going to find that in an apartment that had been completely stripped?

I stared at the dog. We had not had much anatomy during our psychology studies, but one of the things I did notice — apart from the paper-thin bone between the eye socket and the brain — was that the human body contained eight metres of intestines. Or intestine. Because from the anal aperture to the throat is one long tube. How much weight could an intestine bear? I thought of my uncle in Munich who served sausages linked in their skins and how as a kid I used to try to pull them apart. In the end I always had to use a knife.

I picked up the axe.

‘Think you can help me, Oscar?’

The boy looked wide-eyed at me but nodded. I showed him how I wanted him to hold the dog’s body between his knees and hold the front paws out to the sides and back, so that the dog’s stomach lay open and distended in front of me.

‘Close your eyes,’ I said.

It’s remarkable how delicate we mammals are. All I had to do was draw the sharp edge of the axe up through the fur and the belly opened, and the guts tumbled out. So did the stench. I immediately began to pull the intestine out, concentrating on breathing through my mouth.

It was hard to see in all the blood and slime, but I located what looked to me like two ends and cut them off. Tied a knot in each end to seal off the openings. It didn’t look like eight metres, hardly even five. But the material seemed flexible, so maybe with a little weight on one end it would stretch to eight?

I took off my clothes and tied them together using a reef knot. It took a while, since it was a long time since I had practised the knots I learned from my father, in the days when I thought I was going to go in for competitive sailing, as he had done.

After several failed attempts I finally got it right, but when I tried to secure the intestine to the sleeve of the coat the two wouldn’t connect; the sleeve simply slipped out through the knot. I tried to think hard as I sat there on the floor in only my underwear, shivering in the cold draught coming from the window. It just didn’t work. I swore out loud and looked at my watch. It was now more than half an hour since Greco had begun his countdown.

I had another go, this time using a longer section of sleeve; but again the slippery, slimy gut just glided out through the knot. I threw the gut and the coat aside, lay back on the floor, pressed my stinking bloody hands to my face and felt the tears welling up.

He had me exactly where he wanted me.

A small hand lifted my own from my face.

I looked up and there was Oscar holding something up in the air. The gut and the coat sleeve. Knotted together. I took hold of it and pulled at the two ends, but they held fast. I stared in disbelief at the knot. And then I recognised it. It was a sheet bend. And I remembered what my father had said when I told him that Maria and I were going to get married. That with certain women the knot to use was a bowline, easy to tie and easy to untie. But getting married, the knot to use then was a sheet bend; the harder you pulled, the tighter it got.

‘Where did you learn...?’

Oscar saluted with two fingers held to his forehead.

‘Cubs?’

He nodded.

Just then the phone — which I had placed on the floor, along with my keys and wallet — began to vibrate. I picked it up. FaceTime again, and once again I had a full-strength signal.

I pressed Take Call and again Greco’s face filled the screen.

‘Hi, Lukas. She’s on her way. Look, she’s just parked outside.’

He held the phone up to a computer screen. I saw a street, obviously in a fashionable residential area, and the door of an Alfa Romeo opening. I felt as though someone had injected iced water into my chest. The woman who got out and crossed the road moved like a pro. And like a queen.

Greco spoke from behind the phone: ‘When you can’t find them, the thing you have to do is make them come to you.’

Judith was wearing the red coat she always wore when attending business meetings. When she was going to war, as she used to say. She removed it before the meeting started and wore beneath it a snowy white blouse. That symbolised a blank sheet of paper, she said. A willingness to compromise. And before she put her coat back on again she had always got a deal for her client. Always. It was so obvious when I thought about it now, the way you understand every genius chess move once it’s been shown to you.

Gio Greco had been Judith’s lover longer than me, he knew her better. He was also a better chess player than me. He knew I would call her when he said those words: ‘You and I are alone at least, now that she’s been taken from us both.’ And he knew what she’d do once she realised Greco had me in his power; go and see him and do what she was best at doing: negotiate a deal.

Greco’s grinning face filled the screen again: ‘You look like you realise what’s happening here, Lukas. The Queen is going to die. All is lost. Or is it?’ He lowered his voice dramatically, like a game-show host on one of those franchises spewed out by the Tokyo cartel. ‘Maybe you can save her after all. Yes, you know what: I’m going to give you one last chance to stop me. You can use your weapon. The great Lukas Meyer will hypnotise the terrible Gio Greco and save the day. Come on. You’ve got about fifteen seconds before she gets here.’ Greco opened his eyes wide as though to show how ready and responsive he was.