Ю Несбё - The Jealousy Man and Other Stories

The dead man appeared to be staring at a point in the ceiling above me, as though still waiting for the angels to come and take him away. Fly off with his soul.

Fly off.

I swallowed.

It had to be done.

I went back up to the bedroom and took out an old leather suitcase.

Then I went down to the cellar and fetched the saw.

From out in the corridor a voice shouts my name.

Something hard pounding on the door. Could be the butt of a gun.

The journey. I must remember the journey. Vienna. London. Madrid. Then a transport flight to Marrakesh and from there hitched a ride on a lorry.

The driver spoke a little Russian and wondered what I had in the suitcase that smelled so bad. I told him it was a human head, that I had opened the cranium up with an axe and left it out in the sun for three days to attract the flies. That flies had crawled into every orifice and laid eggs that had turned into larvae and were now eating up the brain. The driver laughed at my joke, but still wanted to know why.

‘So that he can get to heaven,’ I said.

‘So you’re religious?’

‘Not yet. First I need to see his ascent to heaven.’

After that the driver didn’t speak any more, but when he let me off at El Aaiún and I gave him the last of my roubles he leaned out of his window and said in a quick, low voice: ‘They’re on your trail, señor.’

‘Who is?’

‘I don’t know. I heard in Marrakesh.’ Then he put his lorry in gear and disappeared in a cloud of black diesel smoke.

I let myself into the flat and the stuffy air hit me like a wall. For months I had lived and worked here. I had suffered, hoped, rejoiced, wept, taken wrong turnings and still achieved the miracle. But most of all I had longed to be at home with Klara. I opened the windows and doors and dusted off the memory-shredder. Switched it on and breathed a sigh of relief: the batteries were still able to provide power. I took the wedding photo out of the bag, put it on the table next to the shredder, sat down, took a deep breath, concentrated. The desert wind moved the heavy rugs in front of the windows. Then I began at the beginning.

So that’s how it is. The snake bites its own tail and the circle is closed.

I shut my eyes. Everything’s inside now. Everything that must be wiped out, deleted, vanished. Including Klara. My darling, darling Klara. Forgive me.

As the door crashes open I press the large button on which it says DELETE. After that I remember noth—

I’m staring up at a large fan in the ceiling. It’s turning slowly, but I can’t move. I hear two sounds: a low humming, and a regular tapping sound. Two faces enter my field of vision. They’re wearing sand-coloured camouflage uniforms and pointing at me with machine guns. I have so many questions, and I know the answer to at least two of them. The humming I can’t identify, but the tapping is easy to recognise. It has to be the walking stick belonging to Daniel Egger, chairman of the board at Antoil Med, the company I work for.

‘Release him,’ says a voice. And sure enough, it’s Egger’s.

I’m able to move again, so I sit up. Look around. I’m sitting on the floor in a room in semi-darkness. Light leaks in between the hanging rugs. Where the hell are we?

Egger sits in a chair directly in front of me. He’s in uniform, like the others. It’s a little too new-looking to be his old colonel’s uniform from the days before he took over the family concern. The face is lightly sunburned. He leans his chin against the smooth, black top of the stick and directs his cold, intelligent gaze on me.

‘Where is the formula?’ he asks. His voice sounds hoarse. Maybe he has a cold.

‘Formula?’

‘For the medicine, idiot.’

He says it calmly, as though it’s my name. Idiot? Have I done something wrong?

‘But it’s in the reports I sent to Kopfer,’ I say.

‘What reports?’

‘What reports? The research reports on HADES1, they’re submitted every week and—’

‘Ankh!’ snarls Egger. ‘I’m talking about Ankh.’

I look at him, look at the armed men in the room. What’s going on?

‘Ankh?’ I repeat, as my brain searches for a place where this word might have hidden itself.

Egger looks at me expectantly. And then my brain finds the word in there, in the drawer in which it’s hidden.

A drawer from my childhood, when I read about Egypt. ‘You mean the hieroglyph for eternal life?’

Egger’s sunburned face glows even redder. He turns to the desk behind him. There’s a machine there, I don’t know what it is. It looks like one of those personal computers, from the days before the collapse of civilian technology. Egger picks up something next to the machine and holds it up in front of me.

‘If you don’t give me the formula we’ll find her and kill her.’

It’s a photograph in a wooden frame. I recognise myself, of course, but not the woman in the picture. We’re dressed like a bridal couple and I try to recall the occasion. Perhaps it was at a carnival, or some kind of practical joke. I really try, but the pretty, if ageing, face of the woman doesn’t excite any associations. And yet it seems as though Egger is serious about his threat. Can’t help wondering if maybe the man isn’t quite all there.

‘I’m really sorry, Herr Egger,’ I say. ‘But I’m afraid I have no idea what you’re talking about.’

It’s hard to interpret exactly what it is I see in his look. Rage? Hatred? Bewilderment? Fear? Like I said, it’s hard.

‘Boss,’ says a voice. I look towards the end of the room where a man is standing with a sergeant’s stripes on his chest. He points at a worn leather suitcase with his gun. ‘There’s a humming noise coming from this.’

I see that the other men start backing off towards the walls.

‘Brown!’ barks Egger. ‘See if that’s a bomb.’

‘Jawohl!’ A man steps forward. He’s holding a metallic object that resembles what people used to call a mobile phone. Runs it along the side of the suitcase. And now I recognise the suitcase. It’s the one I inherited from my brother Jürgen. Did I bring it here myself? And suddenly it dawns on me, why nothing dawns on me, why I have this feeling of staring at a jigsaw puzzle in which not just individual pieces are missing but the whole puzzle. Because that apparatus with a screen on the desk, doesn’t that look like the apparatus I once saw used on a patient suffering from trauma, a so-called memory-shredder? A machine that shreds certain parts of the memory, eliminating specific thematically connected memories but leaving the rest untouched? Have I used such a machine on myself? Egger was asking about a recipe. Have I removed a recipe from my memory? For a bomb? Is that a bomb inside the —?

‘The suitcase is clean,’ says the man with the metallic object.

‘Open it,’ says Egger.

The men around him press their backs against the walls. My heart beats faster.

‘We’ll all die if we don’t find the formula,’ hisses Egger. ‘Now!’

The sergeant steps forward, flips up both locks on the suitcase and looks to be taking a deep breath before he flips the lid open.

The humming is now deafening, and it is as though we are staring into a black storm, a night in motion. It takes a second for me to realise what this is. Then it rises up towards the ceiling in a single dense mass, there to break up into black sections that again divide into even smaller sections. Flies. Fat, heavy flies. And now that they’re all over the room, attention focuses on what is revealed inside the suitcase.

A human head.

The skull has been split open. Eyes, lips, cheeks, all the soft parts are gone, probably eaten up by at least one generation of larvae now matured into grown flies. But all the same, perhaps because of the bare and unusually egg-like shape of the head, it seems to me that I recognise the extremely intelligent researcher I once employed as my deputy and assistant, Bernard Johansson.