Ю Несбё - The Jealousy Man and Other Stories

‘My name’s Grace, I was in the same class as Amy,’ I said in a tearful voice. I’d got the names from Brad and the acting talent from a Columbian man and woman I never even knew. ‘This is my kid brother.’

‘What are you doing outside at night and how did you get in?’

‘We’ve been taking some food to my grandma, but now there’s a gang in the street down here and then I remembered Amy’s house. We climbed over the barbed wire. Look at Sergio.’

I pointed to the tears we had made in Dumbo’s shirt — although it should have been obvious he hadn’t a drop of Latin blood in his veins.

There was a pause. He was probably thinking. It wasn’t that unusual to transport food and other stuff between households under cover of darkness.

‘Just a moment,’ he said.

I listened. Footsteps on the stairs inside, sounded like an adult male.

The door opened. Slightly at first, then all the way.

‘Come in, I’m Will. Amy’s father.’

The man had blue eyes with laugh lines around them, a goatee beard and curly red hair that made him look younger than I guessed he was. Brad was probably right. The types that help people. He was barefoot but had pulled on a pair of worn jeans and a T-shirt with a name on it, probably the university where he was a student. I slipped inside so that I was behind him as he held the door open for Dumbo. Took out my gun and swung the barrel hard against the side of his head. Not to harm him or knock him out — because as tall as I am a kick from my heel to his head would have done the job — but to show him that the girl and the little guy were willing to use violence.

He shouted something and held his hand to the bleeding wound on his forehead. I pointed the gun at him.

‘Don’t harm my family,’ he said. ‘Take whatever you want, but don’t—’

‘If you do exactly as we say no one in the house will get hurt,’ I said. And thought I was telling the truth.

Blood ran from the wound in my forehead and down onto my T-shirt as they took me out to the garage and tied me to a chair, which they then tied to the lathe. The girl who said she was a classmate of Amy’s — and for all I knew she might have been — examined the diesel generator. It’s on wheels, but it weighs 150 kilos, so she was probably trying to figure out how she could take it with them.

My own thoughts were of what Heidi would do now. She’d been woken by the doorbell too and must have realised what had happened. Had she managed to get Amy and Sam to safety in the basement? To what we called the panic room, but which was actually a windowless cellar with stone walls, a solid door that could be locked from the inside, and enough food and water for a week. If the tall girl with the dark hair was as rational as she seemed then they would take just what they needed and could carry and get out of here. The boy with her hadn’t said a word, just obeyed the slightest sign from her, and he seemed too harmless to be the type to enjoy hurting people.

It was when I heard Heidi’s scream from another part of the house that I realised there were more of them.

‘You said—’ I began.

‘Shut up,’ said the girl, and hit me again with the pistol.

The boy looked up at her but she said nothing, just looked at me. It was a look that seemed apologetic.

And then a guy in a white ice-hockey helmet was standing in the garage doorway. The Justitia logo was painted on the front of the helmet.

‘He wants you to come in,’ he said. There was a repressed laughter in his voice.

Who was he ? The leader, presumably.

The kid and the girl disappeared and the guy stood in front of me. He was holding a Russian automatic weapon, the type suddenly everyone seems to have, said to be very reliable. A Kalashnikov. In some countries it’s part of the national flag, they see it as a symbol in the fight for freedom. But it just makes me shiver. That curved magazine, there’s something perverse about it.

‘I’ll pay you five thousand if you let me and my family go,’ I said.

‘Which I’ll spend where?’ asked the guy, laughing. ‘7-Eleven maybe?’

‘I can give you—’

‘You don’t need to give me anything, Gramps. I take what I want.’

He took down my old motorcycle helmet from a shelf. Took off the hockey helmet and tried it on. Raised and lowered the visor a couple of times. Seemed satisfied, took off the rucksack he was wearing on his back and pushed the helmet down into it.

I heard screams from inside the house again and couldn’t breathe. I was the idiot who had opened the door and let Leviathan in. I didn’t want to breathe, I wanted to die. But I couldn’t die, not now — they needed me. I had to free myself. I tugged on the plastic strips the girl had used to tie me to the chair, felt the skin break and the warm sticky blood running down into my palms.

Heidi screamed again, so loud that I could make out a word. Just the one word. ‘No.’ Like a desperate and hopeless protest against something she knew was going to happen.

The guy looked at me, put his hand around the barrel of the Kalashnikov and moved it up and down as though masturbating. He grinned at me.

And right there and then, I think, was where it started. When everything I had always thought would be me began to fall apart.

Me and Dumbo stood in the doorway and looked at the dining table. It was made of thick, rough brown planking. Sort of rustic style but you can bet it cost a fortune. Like the one Maria had shown me in some Country Living kind of magazine and said she wanted a table like that herself. But there was no way I could get that thing on the bike with me. My gaze moved on to the woman. She was lying tied up on the table. They must have found the rope somewhere and tied it round the tabletop and across her neck, chest and stomach. Her legs were tied to the legs of the table and her nightshirt pulled up above her stomach and down below her breasts.

In front of her I saw the back of a red leather jacket with the embroidered motif of a gaping dragon rearing up out of the sea. Ragnar’s jacket. He turned to us.

‘There you are.’

Below the smooth brown mane of hair that he would lose before he was thirty Ragnar had these predator’s eyes that glowed with something evil and dangerous, even when he smiled. Especially when he smiled. Maybe it wasn’t just by chance he referred to the city as ‘the savannah’ and kept a long metal chain with a hook attached to his bike that he used when he was busy ‘separating out the weakest animal in the herd’ as he liked to call it.

‘Really?’ I said.

‘Really,’ he said, and his smile widened. ‘Objections?’

I saw that he saw how I swallowed them down. That’s the price you pay for being in a gang. There are rules you must follow. Among other things. But what came next wasn’t in the rule book.

‘The hour has come, Dumbo,’ said Ragnar. ‘It’s your turn.’

‘Eh?’

‘Come on. It’s nothing to be afraid of.’

Dumbo looked up at me, wide-eyed.

‘He doesn’t have to,’ I said, and I could hear the tightness in my voice.

‘Yes, he does.’ Ragnar gave me that hostile, challenging look of his, the one that said he should have been Brad’s second-in-command, not me. He waited for me to protest so that he could play his ace, but I already knew what it was.

‘Brad’s orders,’ he finally added.

‘And where is Brad?’ I asked, looking round. Everyone, including Dumbo, was standing with their eyes riveted on the woman on the table. For the first time now I saw the little boy with the large round eyes in an armchair facing the table. He couldn’t have been more than three or four years old and he sat there looking at his mother.