Ю Несбё - Blood on Snow

From the phone box I could see up to my window on the fourth floor. And I could see Corina standing there, her head circled in light like some fucking halo. She was looking down at me. I waved. She waved back.

Then the coin fell with a metallic gulp.

“Chinese Pizza, how can I help you?”

“Hi, Lin, it’s Olav. One CP Special, takeaway.”

“No eat here, Mistel Olav?”

“Not today.”

“Fifteen minute.”

“Thanks. One more thing. Has anyone been in asking about me?”

“Ask about you? No.”

“Great. Is there anyone sitting there that you’ve seen me eating with before? Anyone with a funny thin moustache that looks like it has been drawn on? Or in a brown leather jacket with a cigarette tucked behind his ear?”

“Let’s see. Nooo...”

There were only about ten tables, so I believed him. Neither Brynhildsen nor Pine was waiting for me. They’d been there with me on more than one occasion, but presumably they didn’t know just how much of a regular I was. Good.

I shoved open the heavy metal door of the phone box and peered up at the window. She was still standing there.

It took a quarter of an hour to walk to Chinese Pizza. The pizza was waiting in a red cardboard box the size of a camping table. CP Special. The best in Oslo. I was looking forward to seeing Corina’s face when she tasted her first bite.

“See you latel, all-a-gatol,” Lin called as usual as I headed out of the door, which swung shut behind me before I had time to reply with the crocodile rhyme.

I hurried away along the pavement and swung round the corner. I was thinking about Corina. I must have been thinking about Corina very hard. At least that’s the only excuse I have for the fact that I didn’t see them, hear them, or even think the obvious thought: that if they had worked out that it was my regular haunt, then they’d also have worked out that it might have occurred to me that they might have worked it out, and that I therefore wouldn’t go anywhere near it without a degree of caution. So they weren’t waiting inside in the warmth and light, but outside in the frozen darkness of space, where I could have sworn that even molecules were having trouble moving.

I heard two steps crunch on the snow, but the bastard pizza slowed me down and I didn’t have time to draw my pistol before I felt cold hard metal pressing against my ear.

“Where is she?”

It was Brynhildsen. His pencil-thin moustache moved when he spoke. He had a young guy with him who looked more scared than dangerous, and who might as well have had a “trainee” badge on his jacket, but he still did a thorough job of searching me. I guessed Hoffmann had the sense to get the young lad to help Brynhildsen without arming him. Maybe he had a knife or something hidden away. Pistols were confirmation gifts.

“Hoffmann says you can live if we can have his wife,” Brynhildsen said.

That was a lie, but I’d have said the same thing myself. I considered my options. The street was empty of traffic and people. Apart from the wrong people. And it was so quiet that I could hear the spring in the trigger mechanism complain gently as it stretched.

“Fine,” Brynhildsen said. “We can find her without you, you know.”

He was right, he wasn’t bluffing.

“Okay,” I said. “I only took her to have something to bargain with. I had no idea the guy was a Hoffmann.”

“I don’t know anything about that. We just want the wife.”

“We’d better go and get her, then,” I said.

“We have to take the underground,” I explained. “Look, she thinks I’m protecting her. And I am. Unless I can use her in a deal like this. So I told her that if I wasn’t home in half an hour, something serious must have happened and she should take off. And it’ll take at least three-quarters of an hour by car to get to my flat through the Christmas traffic.”

Brynhildsen stared at me. “So call her and say you’re going to be a bit late.”

“I haven’t got a phone.”

“Really? So how come the pizza was waiting for you when you arrived, Johansen?”

I looked down at the big red cardboard box. Brynhildsen was no idiot. “Phone box.”

Brynhildsen ran his finger and thumb over either side of his moustache, as if he were trying to stretch the hairs. Then looked up and down the street. Presumably estimating the traffic. And wondering what Hoffmann would say if she got away.

“CP Special.” This from the young lad. He was grinning broadly as he nodded towards the box. “Best pizza in the city, eh?”

“Shut up,” Brynhildsen said, now finished with his moustache-stroking, having made up his mind.

“We’ll take the underground. And we’ll call Pine from your phone box and get him to pick us up out there.”

We walked the five minutes it took to get to the underground station by the National Theatre. Brynhildsen pulled the sleeve of his coat down to cover the pistol.

“You’ll have to get your own ticket, I’m not paying for it,” he said as we stood at the ticket booth.

“The one I got when I came in is valid for an hour,” I lied.

“That’s true,” Brynhildsen said with a grin.

I could always hope for a ticket inspection, and that they’d take me to some nice, safe police station.

The underground was as crowded as I had hoped. Weary commuters, gum-chewing teenagers, men and women wrapped up against the cold, with Christmas presents sticking out of plastic bags. So we had to stand. We positioned ourselves in the middle of the carriage, each of us with a hand on the shiny steel pole. The doors closed and the passengers’ breath began to build up on the windows again. The train pulled away.

“Hovseter. I wouldn’t have had you down as living out west, Johansen.”

“You shouldn’t believe everything you believe, Brynhildsen.”

“Really? You mean like the fact that I’d have thought you could get pizza out in Hovseter rather than having to come all the way into the city?”

“It’s a CP Special,” the young lad said respectfully, staring at the red box that was taking up a ridiculous amount of space in the overfull carriage. “You can’t get—”

“Shut up. So you like cold pizza, Johansen?”

“We reheat it.”

“ We? You and Hoffmann’s wife?” Brynhildsen laughed his one-snort laugh — it sounded like an axe falling. “You’re right, Johansen. We really shouldn’t believe everything we believe.”

No, I thought. You, for instance, shouldn’t believe that a guy like me would seriously believe that a man like Hoffmann was going to let him live. And, given that someone like me didn’t believe that, you shouldn’t believe that he wouldn’t take desperate measures to change the state of play. Brynhildsen’s eyebrows almost met at the top of his nose.

Obviously I couldn’t read what was going on in there, but I’d guess the plan was to shoot Corina and me in my flat. Then put the pistol in my hand and make it look like I’d shot her, then myself. A suitor driven mad by love, the old classic. A better option than dumping us in a lake in a valley just outside Oslo. Because if Corina just disappeared, her husband would automatically be the main suspect, and there wasn’t a lot about Hoffmann that would stand up to close scrutiny. Well, that’s what I’d have done if I was Brynhildsen. But Brynhildsen wasn’t me. Brynhildsen was a man with an inexperienced sidekick, a pistol hidden up one sleeve and the other hand loosely grasping a metal pole, but without the space to spread his legs far enough to keep his balance. That’s just the way it is when you’re a first-timer on this line. I counted down. I knew every jolt of the rails, every movement, every comma and full stop.