Ю Несбё - The Jealousy Man and Other Stories

The barkeeper — busy filling a glass with brandy — must have overheard us, because he turned the newspaper towards him and studied it for a few moments.

‘The police have found an unidentified corpse at the municipal dump in San Sebastián. It was wrapped up in a rug.’

The barkeeper disappeared towards the other end of the bar, and I was left sitting there staring at the picture. It was obviously a very common type of rug because Peter had said that, when he paid the proprietor for it, it cost so little it wouldn’t have been worth trying to have it cleaned anyway.

When Peter returned he looked pale.

‘Stomach OK?’ I asked.

He nodded and smiled. He was holding his phone in his hand. During the night, going back and forth to the toilet in the corridor, I had heard the low voice coming from his room. Since he had not once during the course of our trip spoken to anyone back home I assumed the call was with her. Miriam. And I made up my mind to tell him so, after the bull run. Just in a casual sort of way: ‘Oh, by the way, I heard you talking last night. Who was it? Miriam?’ It might be enough to get Peter to start telling the whole story. Or at least relax a bit and talk the way he usually did, spontaneously and openly. Sure, he was friendly, the way he always was. But there was a watchfulness there now, a caution. I had put it down to guilty conscience combined with the effort required to make sure he didn’t reveal what had actually happened. But looking at Peter now I knew I wouldn’t be asking him about Miriam. Nor about anything else either.

Peter exhaled, long and heavy, the way an athlete does at the start of a race. ‘Shall we go?’

At eight precisely there came the distant boom of a cannon. That was the rocket being fired further down in the old town, the signal that the bulls had been released. Along with another fifty or so runners we were standing at a spot we had been told was well suited to first-timers. It was about halfway along the 800-metre route, and now it was a matter of keeping the nerves steady until we caught sight of the bulls, and not starting to run too early.

Two girls who had climbed up onto the barricade across the side street where we were standing started laughing down to us, showering us with sangria from two leather bottles and staining our white T-shirts red. I shouted: ‘Jake’s bar después’ — afterwards — which made them, and those standing around us, cheer loudly and blow kisses in our direction.

‘Concentrate now,’ said Peter quietly into my ear. ‘Listen.’ He looked serious. And now I heard it too. A low throbbing, like the sound of approaching thunder. Some of the runners around us, probably first-timer tourists like ourselves, were unable to control their nerves any longer and started to run. Then we caught sight of the first runners as they rounded the corner fifty metres away from where we were standing. And behind them came the bulls. The runners pressed themselves up against the walls of the houses to let the great beasts rage past them. Behind them some had fallen, others on top of them, and I saw a bull butting into the helpless pile, saw even at that distance how the white horns emerged red, and the blood spouted from the human pile, like the sangria from those leather bottles. I had been told that the bulls will attack anything lying down that moves. So if you fell, you were not to move, not even if you got trampled.

I saw two men in white start to run.

‘Now!’ I said and set off. I ran along the walls of the houses on the left side of the street. Peter was alongside me. I half turned and saw a huge beast with enormous horns which I realised, from the white patches, was only a cow, sent out with the bulls to calm them down and show them the way. But then directly behind the cow came something else altogether. A black colossus. I felt as though my heart had stopped beating, though probably the opposite was the case and it was beating faster than ever. Half a ton of muscle, horn, testosterone and fury. And it struck me that if I gave Peter a push now, just enough to make him lose his balance, he’d slip on the smooth cobblestones, and no matter how dead he tried to play, in a matter of moments he’d be the target for the killing machine behind us.

‘Here!’ I shouted, pointing to the barricade across the side street next to us, jumping for the wooden wall and grabbing the top. Peter did the same. Eager hands held us and pulled us up and over onto the other side and down among the singing spectators. A leather bottle of wine was pressed to my lips as though it were first aid. I saw the same thing happening to Peter and we laughed, gasping for breath, laughing and gasping for breath.

We returned to our rooms to rest and wash off the sticky sangria, adrenaline-stinking sweat and dust. When I met Peter in the corridor to use the shower after him he was wearing only a towel around his waist and had a small tattoo on his left pectoral, an M with a heart round it.

‘Hey!’ I said, pointing. ‘When...?’

‘In San Sebastián,’ was all he said.

‘So this is really serious?’

‘Yes.’

‘But shouldn’t you have a plaster on a fresh—’

‘I didn’t want it to look fresh,’ he said. ‘I asked the tattooist to make it look as though I’d always had it.’

And looking closer I could see he’d done a good job, and that the tattoo did actually look a little faded.

Peter wanted to catch up on a bit of sleep, but I said I was going out for some breakfast and to see if those girls had turned up at the bar. As I squeezed my way through the narrow streets I picked up the news that two people, a man and a woman, had been gored during the bull run and were fighting for their lives in the hospital.

On the way past Jake’s I heard a girl’s voice: ‘Hola, Mister Bull Runner!’

I shaded my eyes. And sure enough — there in the dim interior were the two girls from the barricade. I went in, ordered a baguette and a bottle of water and listened to their eager chattering in a mixture of Spanish and English. They were local, from a country village just outside Pamplona. The one who spoke the best English, a well-built blonde girl with kind, sparkling eyes, was studying in Barcelona. She said she always came back for San Fermín but that a lot of the people in Pamplona — including their parents — were really tired of all the tourists, the drunken parties and general disturbance, and usually left town and stayed away until it was all over.

‘During San Fermín the parties are even wilder in the villages,’ she said. ‘And the drink is much cheaper. Here the price for a beer is crazy when San Fermín. Come with us!’

‘Thank you, I have to be somewhere,’ I said. ‘But maybe tomorrow?’ I got the blonde’s phone number, ate the breakfast baguette and left.

At the railway station I had to wait an hour for my train, and I arrived in San Sebastián in the middle of the siesta, so most of the shops and places to eat were closed. I asked the taxi driver to take me to the police station.

He dropped me off by the river, in front of two modernist — or maybe I should say postmodernist — blocks that looked like slices of cake. Twenty minutes later I was sitting in the office of Imma Aluariz, a plain-clothes detective. She was older than me, in her mid-thirties maybe. Small, a bit stocky and with a severe face, and a pair of brown eyes that, it seemed to me, could turn soft if they saw something they liked. After listening to me for two minutes she called a number and at once a young man entered and explained that he was an interpreter. It took me a little by surprise, since Inspector Aluariz’s English had been good. But as this was a murder case they probably wanted to avoid any possibility of misunderstandings.