Ю Несбё - The Jealousy Man and Other Stories

As I was growing up it always seemed to me that my father’s lightly adapted version of the Icarus myth was intended as an early warning to his oldest son. Hector was childless, and it was presumed that I would succeed him when the time came. Not until I was grown up did I learn that at around that time the firm had almost gone bankrupt as a result of Hector’s reckless gambling on the price of gold, that my grandfather had fired him, but for the sake of appearances allowed him to keep his title and office. In practice it was my father who ran the firm thereafter. I never found out whether the bedtime story he told me that evening referred to me or to Uncle Hector, but it must have made a deep impression on me because ever since I have had nightmares that involve falling and drowning. Actually, on some nights the dream seems like something warm and pleasant, a sleep in which everything painful ceases to exist. Who says you can’t dream of dying?

The plane shook and I heard gasps from the other passengers as we sank through so-called air pockets. For a moment or two I felt something like weightlessness. And that my hour had come. But it hadn’t, of course.

The Greek flag was blowing straight out from the flagpole by the little terminal building as we left the plane. As I passed the cockpit I heard the pilot say to the stewardess that the airport had just closed and that it was unlikely they would be able to return to Athens.

I followed the queue of passengers into the terminal building. A man wearing a blue police uniform stood with arms folded in front of the luggage belt and studied us. As I headed towards him he gave me a quizzical look and I nodded my confirmation.

‘George Kostopoulos,’ he said, holding out a large hand, the back of it covered with long black hairs. His grip was firm, but not exaggeratedly so, as is sometimes the case when provincial colleagues feel they’re in competition with the capital.

‘Thank you for coming at such short notice, Inspector Balli.’

‘Call me Nikos,’ I said.

‘Sorry I didn’t recognise you, but there aren’t many pictures of you, and I thought you were... er, older.’

I had inherited — probably from my mother’s side — the kind of looks that don’t age particularly with the years. My hair was grey and the curls gone, and I had maintained a fighting weight of seventy-five kilos, though nowadays less of it was muscle.

‘You don’t think fifty-nine is old enough?’

‘Well, goodness me yes, of course.’ He spoke in a voice that I was guessing was a little deeper than his natural register and smiled wryly beneath a moustache of the type men in Athens had shaved off some twenty years earlier. But the eyes were mild, and I knew I wouldn’t be getting any trouble from George Kostopoulus.

‘It’s just that I’ve been hearing about you ever since I was at the Police Academy, and that seems like a pretty long time ago to me. Any more baggage I can help you with?’

He glanced at the bag I was carrying. And yet I had the feeling he was asking about something more than what I was actually bringing with me in a physical sense. Not that I would have been able to answer him. I carry more with me on my travels than most men, but my baggage is the type that is carried alone.

‘Only hand baggage,’ I said.

‘We’ve got Franz Schmid, the brother of the missing man, at the station in Pothia,’ said George as we left the terminal building and crossed to a small, dust-coated Fiat with a stained windscreen. I guessed he had parked beneath some stone pines to keep out of the direct sunlight and instead got a dose of that sticky sap that in the end you have to scrap off with a knife. That’s the way it is. You raise your guard to protect your face and you leave your heart exposed. And vice versa.

‘I read the report on the plane,’ I said, putting my bag on the back seat. ‘Has he said anything else?’

‘No, he’s sticking to his story. His brother Julian left their room at six in the morning and never returned.’

‘It said Julian went for a swim?’

‘That’s what Franz says.’

‘But you don’t believe him?’

‘No.’

‘Surely drownings can’t be all that unusual on a holiday island like Kalymnos?’

‘No. And I would have believed Franz if it hadn’t been for the fact that he and Julian had a fight the previous evening, in the presence of witnesses.’

‘Yes, I noticed that.’

We turned down a narrow, pitted track with bare olive trees and small white stone houses on both sides of what must have been the main road.

‘They just closed the airport,’ I said. ‘I suppose that’s because of the wind.’

‘It happens all the time,’ said George. ‘That’s the trouble with having the airport on the highest point of an island.’

I could see what he meant. As soon as we got between the mountains the flags hung limply down from the flagpoles.

‘Fortunately my evening flight leaves from Kos,’ I said. The secretary in the Homicide Department had checked the travel itinerary before my boss had given me permission to make the trip. Even though we give priority to the very few cases involving foreign tourists, a condition of the permission was that I was to spend only one working day on it. Usually I was given free rein, but even the legendary Detective Inspector Balli was subject to budget cuts. And as my boss put it: this was a case with no body, no media interest and not even reasonable grounds to suspect a murder.

There were no return flights from Kalymnos in the evening, but there was one from the international airport on the island of Kos, a forty-minute ferry ride from Kalymnos, so he had grunted his assent, reminding me as he did so of the cutback on travel expenses and that I should avoid the overpriced tourist restaurants unless I wanted to pay out of my own pocket.

‘I’m afraid the boats to Kos won’t be going either in this weather,’ said George.

‘This weather? The sun is shining and there’s hardly a breath of wind, except up there.’

‘I know it seems unlikely from here, but there’s a stretch of open sea before you reach Kos and there have been a number of accidents in sunny weather just like this. We’ll book a hotel room for you. Maybe the wind will have eased off by tomorrow.’

For him to say the wind would ‘maybe’ ease off instead of the more typically overoptimistic ‘bound to have eased off’ suggested to me that the weather forecast didn’t favour either me or my boss. I thought disconsolately of the inadequate contents of my bag, and a little less disconsolately of my boss. Perhaps I might be able to get a little well-earned rest out here. I’m the type who has to be forced to take a holiday, even when I know I need one. Maybe being both childless and wifeless is what makes me so bad at holidays. They feel like a waste of time and serve only to reinforce what is an admittedly voluntary loneliness.

‘What’s that?’ I asked, pointing towards the other side of the car. Surrounded on all sides by steep inclines lay what looked like a village. But there were no signs of life. It looked like a model someone had carved from grey rock, a gathering of small houses like Lego blocks, with a wall enclosing the whole, all of it in the same monotonous grey.

‘That’s Palechora,’ said George. ‘Twelfth century. Byzantine. If the inhabitants of Kalymnos spotted hostile ships approaching they would flee up there and barricade themselves. People hid up there when the Italians invaded in 1912 and when the Allies bombed Kalymnos, when it was used as a German base during the Second World War.’

‘Obviously a must-see,’ I said, without adding that neither the houses nor the fortifications looked especially Byzantine.

‘Hm,’ said George. ‘Or actually no. It looks better from a distance. The last time it was repaired was by the Knights Hospitaller in the sixteenth century. It’s overgrown, there’s rubbish, goats, even the chapels are used as latrines. You could get up there if you could manage the stone steps, but there was a landslide and now the climb is even more strenuous. But if you’re really interested I could get a guide for you. I can promise you you’ll have the entire stone village all to yourself.’