Headhunters

by Jo Nesbo

  ‘At the hospital Greve said I’d persuaded you to have an abortion because the baby had Down’s syndrome.’

  ‘Down’s?’ It was the first thing Diana had said for several minutes. ‘Where did he get that idea from? I didn’t say—’

  ‘I know. It was something I made up when I told Lotte about the abortion. She told me her parents had forced her to have an abortion when she was a teenager. So I made up the Down’s syndrome story because I thought she might see me in a better light.’

  ‘So she … she …’

  ‘Yes. She’s the only one who could have told Greve that.’

  I had waited. Let it sink in.

  Then I had told Diana what would happen now.

  She had stared at me in horror and shouted: ‘I can’t do it, Roger!’

  ‘Yes, you can,’ I had said. ‘You can and you will, my love.’ Said the new Roger Brown.

  ‘But … but …’

  ‘He was lying to you, Diana. He can’t give you a child. He’s sterile.’

  ‘Sterile?’

  ‘I’ll give you the child. I promise. Just do this for me.’

  She had refused. Cried. Begged. And then she had promised.

  When I went down to Lotte’s to become a murderer later that evening, I had instructed Diana and knew she would accomplish the mission. I could see her before me, receiving Greve when he came, the dazzling perfidious smile, the cognac already in the glass, passing it to him, toasting the victor, the future, the as yet unconceived child. Which she insisted should be conceived as soon as possible, tonight, now!

  I recoiled as Diana pinched one of my nipples. ‘What are you thinking about right now?’

  I pulled up the duvet. ‘The night Greve came here. Him lying with you where I am now.’

  ‘So what? You were lying with a dead body that night.’

  I had desisted from asking, but now I couldn’t restrain myself any longer. ‘Did you have sex?’

  She chuckled. ‘You did well to restrain yourself for so long, darling.’

  ‘Did you?’

  ‘Let me put it like this: the drops of Dormicum that were left in the rubber ball and that I squeezed into his welcome drink worked faster than I had imagined. I dolled myself up and when I came in here, he was already sleeping like a baby. The following day, however …’

  ‘I withdraw the question,’ I said with alacrity.

  Diana stroked my stomach with her hand and laughed again. ‘The next morning he was very much awake. Not because of me, but because of a phone call that had woken him up.’

  ‘My warning.’

  ‘Yes. At any rate he was dressed and off at once.’

  ‘Where was his gun?’

  ‘In his jacket pocket.’

  ‘Did he check the gun before he left?’

  ‘I don’t know. He wouldn’t have noticed the difference anyway, the weight was about the same. I just exchanged the top three cartridges in the magazine.’

  ‘Yes, but the blank cartridges I gave you have a red B on the end.’

  ‘If he’d checked he would probably have thought it stood for “back”.’

  The laughter of two people filled the bedroom. I enjoyed the sound. If all went well and the litmus test was positive, the room would soon be filled by the laughter of three people. And it would suppress the other sound, the echo I could still wake up to in the night. The bangs as Greve fired, the flash of the muzzle, the fraction of a second thinking that Diana had not switched the cartridges after all, that she had changed sides again. And then, the echo, the clink of empty cartridge cases landing on the parquet floor that was already covered with cartridges, live and blank, old and new, so many that the police would not be able to tell them apart regardless of whether they suspected that the video recording was a put-up job.

  ‘Were you frightened?’ she asked.

  ‘Frightened?’

  ‘Yes. You never told me how it felt. And you don’t appear in the pictures …’

  ‘Pic—’ I moved away to be able to see her face. ‘Do you mean to say you’ve been on the Net looking at the film?’

  She didn’t answer. And I thought there was still a lot I didn’t know about this woman. Perhaps there would be enough mysteries for a whole lifetime.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I was scared.’

  ‘What of? You knew his gun didn’t have any—’

  ‘Only the top three cartridges were blanks. I had to make sure he fired all of them so that the police wouldn’t find unused blanks in the magazine and see through the plan, didn’t I? But he could have fired some of the live bullets too. And he could have changed the magazine before coming. And he could also have brought along a sidekick I knew nothing about.’

  Silence fell. Until she asked in a whisper: ‘So there was nothing else you were frightened of?’

  I knew she was thinking what I was thinking.

  ‘Yes, there was,’ I said, turning to her. ‘I was frightened of one more thing.’

  Her breathing on my face was fast and hot.

  ‘He might have killed you during the night,’ I said. ‘Greve didn’t have any plans to start a family with you, and you were a dangerous witness. I knew I was putting your life in danger when I asked you to be the decoy.’

  ‘I knew I was in danger the whole time, darling,’ she whispered. ‘That was why I gave him the welcome drink as soon as he came through the door. And didn’t wake him until you rang his phone. I knew he would be up and away after hearing the ghost’s voice. And besides, I had swapped the first three bullets in the gun, hadn’t I?’

  ‘True,’ I said. Diana, as I have said, is a woman with a relaxed relationship to prime numbers and logic.

  She caressed my stomach with her hand. ‘And another thing – I appreciate the fact that you knowingly and deliberately put my life in danger …’

  ‘Oh?’

  She ran her hand further down, over my penis. Held my balls in her hand. Weighed them, gently squeezed the two testicles. ‘Balance is of the essence,’ she said. ‘That applies to all good, harmonious relationships. Balance in guilt, balance in shame and pangs of conscience.’

  I chewed on that, tried to digest it, let my brain assimilate this somewhat weighty nugget of thought.

  ‘You mean …’ I began, gave up and started afresh. ‘You mean to say you put yourself in mortal danger for my sake … that that …’

  ‘… was an appropriate price to pay for what I had done to you, yes. The same as Galleri E was an appropriate price for you to pay for the abortion.’

  ‘And you’ve thought this for a long time?’

  ‘Of course. So have you.’

  ‘Correct,’ I said. ‘Penance …’

  ‘Penance, yes. It’s a very much underrated method of gaining peace of mind.’ She squeezed my testicles a bit harder and I tried to relax, to enjoy the pain. I inhaled her fragrance. It was wonderful, but would I ever wipe out the stench of human excrement? Would I ever hear anything that would drown the sound of Greve’s punctured lungs? Afterwards he had seemed to be staring at me with glazed, wronged eyes as I pressed Ove’s cold fingers against the stock and the trigger of the Uzi and the small black Rohrbaugh pistol with which I had shot Lotte. Would I ever be able to eat anything that could dull the taste of Ove’s dead flesh? I had bent over him there in bed sinking my canine teeth into his neck. Tightened my jaws until his skin was pierced and the corpse taste filled my mouth. There had been almost no blood, and when I had stifled my retching and wiped away the saliva, I had studied the result. It would probably pass as a dog bite to a detective looking for precisely that. Then I had crawled out of the open window behind the top of Ove’s bed to make sure I wasn’t recorded by the camera. Walked quickly into the forest; found paths, routes. Greeted walkers with a friendly gesture. The air, which became colder the higher I climbed, had kept me cool all the way to Grefsentoppen. There I had sat down and contemplated the autumn colours, which winter had already begun to suck from the forest beneath me, th
e town, the fjord and the light. The light that always presages the oncoming darkness.

  I could feel the blood surging into my dick, the shaft throbbing.

  ‘Come on,’ she whispered close to my ear.

  I took her. Systematically and completely, like a man who has a job to do. Who enjoys his work, but nonetheless sees it as a job. And he works until the siren goes off. The siren goes off and she places her hands with protective care over his ears, and the reins are slipped and he sprays her full of hot, life-giving seed, even though the place is already taken. And afterwards she sleeps, and he lies listening to her breathing, feeling the satisfaction of a job well done. Knowing things can never be the same as they were. But they could be similar. There could be a life ahead. He could look after her. He could love someone. And as if that alone were not overwhelming enough, he even sees a point to loving, a ‘because’, an echo of an argument used at a football match in London fog: ‘Because they need me.’

  EPILOGUE

  THE FIRST SNOW had come and gone again.

  I had read on the Net that a purchase option and the display rights for The Calydonian Boar Hunt had been sold at an auction in Paris. The buyer was the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, which could now exhibit the painting – unless in the two-year option period an owner appeared from out of the blue and laid claim to the property – and could take up the option and acquire permanent possession. There were a few brief sentences about its origins and the discussions that had raged about whether it was a copy or an original by a different painter, since there were no sources proving that Rubens had ever painted any Calydonian boars. But the experts were now agreed that Rubens was the artist. There was nothing about how the picture had come to light, the fact that the Norwegian state was the vendor or any mention of price.

  Diana had realised that it would be difficult to run the gallery alone now that she was a mother-to-be, and had therefore – after consulting me – decided to bring in a partner who could take care of the more practical aspects, such as the financial management, so that she could concentrate more on art and artists. Our house had, furthermore, been put up for sale. We had agreed that a slightly smaller terrace house in a more rural setting would be a better place for a child to grow up. And I had already received a very high offer. It was from someone who had rung me the second he had seen the ad in the newspaper and asked for a viewing that very evening. I had recognised him as soon as I opened the door. Corneliani suit and geek-chic glasses.

  ‘Not one of Ole Bang’s very best perhaps,’ he commented after racing from room to room with me in tow. ‘But I’ll take it. How much do you want?’

  I mentioned the quote in the ad.

  ‘Plus a million,’ he said. ‘Deadline the day after tomorrow.’

  I said we would consider his offer and escorted him to the door. He passed me his business card. No title, just his name and a mobile phone number. The recruitment agency’s name was written in such small letters that to all practical intents and purposes it was unreadable.

  ‘Tell me,’ he said on the doorstep, ‘didn’t you use to be king of the heap?’ And before I could reply: ‘We’re thinking of expanding. We may ring you.’

  We. Small letters.

  I let the deadline pass without mentioning the offer to the estate agent or Diana. I didn’t hear anything from ‘we’, either.

  Since, on principle, I never start working before it is light, on this particular day I was – as on most other days – the last man to arrive in the car park outside Alfa. ‘The first shall be last.’ This is a privilege I have formulated myself and implemented, a privilege that can only be granted to the company’s best headhunter. The position also implies that no one can take your parking spot even though, on paper, it is subject to the same first-come-first-served rule as other company parking spaces.

  But on this day there was a car there nonetheless. An unfamiliar Passat, probably one of our customers who thought it would be fine to park there because of the Alfa sign hanging from the chain behind the space, a halfwit who did not have the capacity to read the large sign by the entrance directing them to VISITOR PARKING.

  All the same, I felt a little uncertainty. Could it be that someone in Alfa had come to the conclusion that I was no longer … I didn’t complete the thought.

  While I was casting around for another spot, annoyed, a man strode out of the office building heading in the vague direction of the Passat. He had a Passat-owner gait, I determined, and breathed a sigh of relief. For this was definitely not a rival for the spot but a client.

  I parked my car demonstratively in front of the Passat, waited and hoped. Perhaps it was a good start to the day after all, perhaps I could shout at an idiot. And, sure enough, the man tapped on my side window, and I looked into a coat at stomach height.

  I waited a couple of seconds before pressing the window button, and the glass slid down slowly – yet still a little faster than ideally I would have liked.

  ‘Listen—’ he began before being interrupted by my studied drawl.

  ‘Well, how can I help you today?’ Without deigning to cast him a glance, I prepared to deliver a refreshing sign-reading lecture.

  ‘Would you mind moving your car a bit? You’re b-ocking my way out.’

  ‘I think you’ll find that you are blocking my way in, my good—’

  At last the atmospheric noises reached my brain. I peered out of the window and up. My heart almost stopped beating.

  ‘Of course,’ I said. ‘Just a moment.’ I fumbled manically for the button to close the window. But my fine-motor-coordination skills seemed to have vanished.

  ‘Wait a sec,’ said Brede Sperre. ‘Haven’t we met before?’

  ‘I doubt it,’ I said, trying to produce a calm, relaxed bass voice.

  ‘Are you sure? I’m certain we’ve met.’

  Shit, how could he have recognised the alleged third cousin of the Monsen brothers at the Pathology Unit? That version had been bald and dressed like a bumpkin. This one had luxuriant hair, an Ermenegildo Zegna suit and a freshly pressed Borelli shirt. But I knew I shouldn’t be too dismissive, put Sperre into defensive mode and set his brain whirring until he remembered. I took a deep breath. I was tired, more tired than I ought to have been today. This was a day when I had to deliver the goods. Show that I could live up to the reputation I had once enjoyed.

  ‘Who knows?’ I said. ‘To tell the truth there’s something familiar about you, too …’

  At first he seemed a little bewildered by this counteroffensive. Then he put on the boyish winsome smile that made Sperre so well suited to the visual media.

  ‘You’ve probably seen me on TV. I hear that all the time …’

  ‘Right, that’s probably where you’ve seen me too,’ I said.

  ‘Oh?’ he said, curious. ‘Which programme was that, then?’

  ‘Must have been your programme. Since you think we’ve met. Because the TV screen is not actually a window through which we can see each other, is it? On your side of the camera it’s more like … a mirror maybe?’

  Sperre looked slightly confused.

  ‘I’m joking,’ I said. ‘I’ll move. Have a great day.’

  I activated the car window and reversed. There were rumours going round that Sperre was screwing Odd G. Dybwad’s new wife. Rumours that he had screwed the old one, too. And – for that matter – that he was screwing Dybwad.

  As Sperre was driving out of the car park, he stopped before turning, so that for two seconds we were sitting in our cars windscreen to windscreen. I saw his eyes. He was looking at me as though he had just been tricked and only realised that now. I sent him a friendly nod. Then he accelerated and was off. And I looked in the rear-view mirror and whispered: ‘Hi there, Roger.’

  I entered Alfa and roared a deafening ‘Good morning, Oda!’ and then Ferdinand came rushing towards me.

  ‘Well?’ I said. ‘Have they come?’

  ‘Yes, they’re ready,’ Ferdinand said, tripping down t
he corridor after me. ‘By the way, there was a policeman here. Tall, blond and quite, erm … good-looking.’

  ‘What did he want?’

  ‘He wanted to know what Clas Greve had said about himself in the interviews he had attended here.’

  ‘He’s been dead a long time,’ I said. ‘Are they still investigating the case?’

  ‘Not the murder case. It’s about the Rubens picture. They can’t work out who he stole it from. No one’s come forward. Now they’re trying to trace who he’s been in contact with.’

  ‘Didn’t you read the paper today? Now they’ve started to doubt whether it’s an original Rubens again. Perhaps he didn’t steal it; he might have inherited it.’

  ‘Bizarre.’

  ‘What did you say to the policeman?’

  ‘I gave him our interview report, of course. That didn’t seem to interest him much. He said he would contact us again, if there was anything.’

  ‘And you’re hoping he will, I suppose?’

  Ferdinand gave his squeal of a laugh.

  ‘Anyway,’ I said, ‘you take care of that, Ferdy. I trust you.’

  I could see how he rose and sank, how the responsibility made him grow and the nickname made him shrink. Balance is everything.

  Then we were at the end of the corridor. I paused in front of the door and checked the knot of my tie. They were sitting inside, ready for the final interview. The rubber-stamping. For the candidate had already been selected, was already appointed, it was just the client who wasn’t aware of it yet, who thought they still had some say in the matter.

  ‘Then send the candidate in exactly two minutes from now,’ I said. ‘One hundred and twenty seconds.’

  Ferdinand nodded and studied his watch.

  ‘Just one tiny little thing,’ he said. ‘Her name’s Ida.’

  I opened the door and stepped inside.

  There was scraping of chairs as they stood up.

  ‘I apologise for the delay, gentlemen,’ I said, shaking the three hands held out to me. ‘But someone took my parking spot.’

  ‘Isn’t that wearing?’ the chairman of Pathfinder said, turning to his public relations manager who nodded in vigorous agreement. The shop steward representing the employees was there too, a guy in a red V-necked sweater with a cheap white shirt underneath, undoubtedly an engineer of the saddest variety.