Ю Несбё - Blood on Snow

I had — somewhat unnecessarily — explained that my flat wasn’t much to boast about, basically just a simple bachelor pad with a living room and an alcove for the bed. Clean and tidy, but no place for a woman like her. But it had one big advantage: no one knew where it was. To be more precise: no one — and by that I do literally mean no one — knew where I lived.

“Why not?” she asked, clasping the cup of coffee I’d given her.

She’d asked for tea, but I’d told her she’d have to wait till morning, and that I’d get some as soon as the shops opened. That I knew she liked tea in the morning. That I’d watched her drinking tea every morning for the past five days.

“It’s best if no one knows your address when you’re in my line of work,” I replied.

“But now I know.”

“Yes.”

We drank our coffee in silence.

“Does that mean you don’t have any friends or relations?” she asked.

“I have a mother.”

“Who doesn’t know...?”

“No.”

“And obviously she doesn’t know about your job either.”

“No.”

“What have you told her you do?”

“Fixer.”

“Odd jobs?”

I stared at Corina Hoffmann. Was she really interested, or just talking for the sake of it?

“Yes.”

“Right.” A shiver ran through her and she folded her arms over her chest. I’d turned the oven on full, but with the single-glazed windows and temperatures down at minus twenty for over a week, the cold had got the upper hand. I fiddled with my cup.

“What do you want to do, Olav?”

I got up from the kitchen chair. “See if I can find you a blanket.”

“I mean, what are we going to do?”

She was okay. You know someone’s okay if they can ignore things they can’t do anything about and move on. Wish I was like that.

“He’s going to come after me, Olav. After us. We can’t hide here for ever. And that’s how long he’ll go on looking. Believe me, I know him. He’d rather die than live with this shame.”

I didn’t ask the obvious question: So why did you take his son as your lover?

Instead I asked a less obvious one.

“Because of the shame? Not because he loves you?”

She shook her head. “It’s complicated.”

“We’ve got plenty of time,” I said. “And as you can see, I haven’t got a television.”

She laughed. I still hadn’t fetched that blanket. Or asked the question that for some reason I was desperate to ask: Did you love him? The son?

“Olav?”

“Yes?”

She lowered her voice. “Why are you doing this?”

I took a deep breath. I had prepared an answer to this question. Several answers, actually, in case I felt that the first one didn’t work. At least, I thought I had prepared some answers. But at that moment they all vanished.

“It’s wrong,” I said.

“What’s wrong?”

“What he’s doing. Trying to have his own wife killed.”

“And what would you have done if your wife was seeing another man in your own home?”

She had me there.

“I think you’ve got a good heart, Olav.”

“Good hearts come cheap these days.”

“No, that’s not true. Good hearts are unusual. And always in demand. You’re unusual, Olav.”

“I’m not sure that’s true.”

She yawned and stretched. Lithe as a pussycat. They have really flexible shoulders, so wherever they can get their heads in, they can also squeeze their whole body. Practical for hunting. Practical for flight.

“If you’ve got that blanket, I think I might get some sleep now,” she said. “There’s been a bit too much excitement today.”

“I’ll change the bed, then you can have that,” I said. “The sofa and I are old friends.”

“Really?” she smiled, winking one of her big blue eyes. “Does that mean I’m not the first person to spend the night here?”

“No, you are. But sometimes I fall asleep reading on the sofa.”

“What do you read?”

“Nothing special. Books.”

“Books?” She tilted her head to one side and smiled mischievously, as if she’d caught me out. “But I can see only one book here.”

“The library. Books take up space. Besides, I’m trying to cut down.”

She picked up the book that was on the table. “ Les Misérables? What’s this one about, then?”

“Lots of things.”

She raised an eyebrow.

“Mostly about a man who gets forgiveness for his sins,” I said. “He spends the rest of his life making up for his past by being a good man.”

“Hmm.” She weighed the book in her hands. “It feels a bit heavy. Is there any romance in it?”

“Yes.”

She put it down. “You didn’t say what we’re going to do, Olav.”

“What we have to do,” I said, “is fix Daniel Hoffmann before he fixes us.”

The sentence had sounded stupid when I formulated it inside my head. And just as stupid when I said it out loud.

I went to the hotel early the next morning. Both of the rooms that faced Hoffmann’s apartment were already taken. I went and stood outside in the morning darkness, hidden behind a parked van, and looked up at his living room. Waiting. Squeezing the pistol in my coat pocket. This was the time he normally left home to go to work. But of course things weren’t normal. The lights were on, but it was impossible to see if there was anyone up there. I presumed that Hoffmann realised I wouldn’t have taken off with Corina and now be holed up in a hotel in Copenhagen or Amsterdam, say. To begin with, that wasn’t my style, and anyway, I didn’t have the money, and Hoffmann knew that. I’d had to ask for an advance to cover my expenses for this job. He’d asked why I was so broke, seeing as he’d only just paid me for two jobs. I said something about bad habits.

If Hoffmann was assuming that I was still in the city, then he would also assume that I’d try to get him before he got me. We knew each other fairly well by now. But it’s one thing to think you know something about someone, and another to know for certain, and I’ve been wrong before. Maybe he was on his own up there. And if that was the case, I’d never get a better opportunity than when he emerged from the building. I’d just have to wait until the lock clicked shut behind him so he couldn’t get back inside, run across the street, two shots to the torso from five metres, then two in the head from close range.

That was a lot to hope for.

The door opened. It was him.

And Brynhildsen and Pine. Brynhildsen with the toupee that looked like it was made from dog hair and the pencil-thin moustache that looked like a croquet hoop. Pine in the caramel-brown leather jacket he wore all year round, summer and winter alike. With his little hat, the cigarette tucked behind his ear, and a mouth that just wouldn’t stop. Random words drifted across the street. “Fucking cold” and “that bastard.”

Hoffmann stopped inside the doorway while his two attack dogs went out onto the pavement and looked up and down the street with their hands deep in their jacket pockets.

Then they waved at Hoffmann and began to walk towards the car.

I hunched my shoulders and headed in the opposite direction. Fine. It was, as I said, a lot to hope for. And now at least I knew that he had worked out how I was thinking of solving this. With him dying rather than me.

Either way, it meant I had to go back to Plan A.

The reason I had started with Plan B was that there wasn’t a single thing I liked about Plan A.

I like watching films. Not as much as reading books, but a good film has something of the same function. It encourages you to look at things differently. But no film has managed to persuade me to take a different view of the advantages of being in the majority and being more heavily armed. In a fight between one man and several others, in which both parties are pretty much prepared and armed, the one who’s on his own will die. In a fight where one party has an automatic weapon, whoever has that weapon will win. This was the result of hard-won experience, and I wasn’t about to pretend it wasn’t true just so I wouldn’t have to go and see the Fisherman. It was true. And that’s why I went to see him.