The Jealousy Man and Other Stories

by Jo Nesbo

By this time I’m almost angry. Here I sit, exposing my most private and painful thoughts to him, fighting back the tears, and the officer just sits there completely expressionless. He might at the very least offer a nod of commiseration or pretend to be taking a note.

  ‘Until she met me Simone’s life was meaningless and directionless, she was on the skids. On the surface everything seemed fine – the looks, the money, the so-called friends – but there was no substance, no direction, you understand? I call it the terror of things. Because things can be lost, and the more things you have the more afraid you are of losing them. She was drowning in her own affluence, she couldn’t breathe. I came along and gave her space. Gave her air.’

  I stop. In front of me the officer’s face has started swimming.

  ‘Air. The opposite of cyanide, officer. Cyanide paralyses the cells in the respiratory organs, you can’t breathe and in a matter of seconds you choke to death. But I’m sure you know that?’

  That’s better. Talk about something else. I swallow, pull myself together and continue.

  ‘This architect, Henrik Bakke, I don’t know how she met him. She always said she met him after I moved out, and at first I believed her. But friends have told me how naive I was, pointing out that the guy moved in almost immediately. Before my side of the bed was even cold, as one of my friends put it. And yet, officer – and I know this may sound strange – it’s actually a sort of comfort to know that it was her feelings for someone else that ruined everything for us. That what Simone and I had wasn’t the kind of thing that just burns itself out of its own accord. That it took love to conquer love.’

  I cast a quick glance at the officer but look away when his eyes meet mine. I’m usually careful when it comes to talking about feelings, especially my own. But there’s something inside me now that has its own momentum and I can’t stop. Maybe don’t even want to stop.

  ‘I think I’m a normally jealous guy. Maybe Simone wasn’t a classic beauty, but she had an animal quality that made her beautiful in a dangerous way. She had a way of looking at you that could make you feel like the goldfish alone at home with the cat. But the men swarmed around her. Like crocodile birds around the mouth of the crocodile. She did something to their heads, she…well, you’ve seen her yourself. My black angel of death, I used to call her. I used to joke that she’d be the death of me, that one of her fanatical admirers would decide to do away with me. But deep down that didn’t frighten me as much as the thought that one day she’d fall for one of those insistent suitors of hers. Like I say, I’m a normally jealous man.’

  The officer has slumped deeper into the armchair. Not surprising really; so far I’ve said nothing of interest to the investigation. But he shows no sign of wanting to stop me either.

  ‘And yet I’ve never been jealous of Henrik Bakke. Isn’t that funny? At least not in the sense of hating him or having a grudge against him. I think the way I looked at it was that he was just another guy same as me, he loved Simone more than anything else on earth. I actually thought of him more as someone in the same boat as me than as a rival.’

  I fish around with my tongue in the corner of my mouth where a shred of coconut has got stuck and feel a momentary stab of discomfort. The officer’s silence is deafening.

  ‘OK. So that wasn’t exactly true. I was jealous of Henrik Bakke. At least the first time I met him. Let me explain. One day he called me at my office and asked if we could meet, he had some papers for me from Simone. I knew these must be the divorce papers, and even though it was, of course, unspeakable of her to use her new lover to deliver them I was curious to know who he was and so I agreed to a meeting at a restaurant. I presume he was just as curious about me.

  ‘Anyway, he turned out to be a really nice person – polite without being servile, intelligent but in a discreet way, and with a humorous appreciation of the comical aspect of our situation. We drank a couple of beers, and when he began after a while to talk about Simone it didn’t take long for me to realise that he was having exactly the same trouble with her as I had had. She was a cat. She came and went as she pleased, she was spoiled and moody, and loyalty was not her most outstanding quality. If I can put it like that. He complained of all the men friends she had and wondered why she couldn’t have female friends like other women. Talked about the nights she’d come home drunk after he’d gone to bed, and all the new and exciting people she’d met who she was so keen to tell him about. In a sort of aside he asked if I’d seen her since we’d split up and I’d moved out, and with a smile I had to tell him no. The smile was because I had realised that he was probably more jealous of me than I was of him. Isn’t that something of a paradox, officer?’

  The officer opens his mouth but then he changes his mind and leaves his jaw hanging half open. It looks very silly. Actually I had decided not to say too much, but it’s funny how another person’s silence can affect you. To start with I experienced it as threatening, but I can see now that it isn’t what you might describe as a speaking silence. Not that the officer looks especially interested or attentive; what he exudes is more a sort of neutral nothingness. It’s an absence of speech, a vacant space that operates like a vacuum sucking up my own words.

  ‘We had another beer and a few good laughs as we swapped stories about some of her foibles. Such as how she always changed her mind after she ordered the food, so you had to get the waiter over and change the order. Or the way she always had to go to the toilet after she’d turned out the light and said ‘goodnight’. And of course the Saturday shopping expedition and what a catastrophe it was if you forgot to buy the Twists.

  ‘So I wasn’t all that surprised to meet Bakke again at the Kiwi store on Saturday morning a couple of weeks later. We both laughed when I looked in a very demonstrative way at the bag of Twists in his shopping trolley. And he asked about the divorce papers, he said Simone’s lawyer was waiting for them. I said I’d had a lot to do but that I would see to it next week. I was perhaps a little annoyed with him for bringing it up. I mean, what was the rush? He’d taken my place in her bed, surely that was enough to be going on with? It almost seemed as though he could hardly wait to get married to her. And her millions. So I asked him straight out if they were planning to get married. He looked bewildered, so I repeated my question. He smiled wanly and shook his head. And then I got the picture.’

  I straighten the liquorice wrapper between my fingers. ‘Lakris – lakrits – lakrids’ it says. Danish and Swedish as well as Norwegian. Easy to understand anyway. It’s good when neighbours speak almost the same language.

  ‘There was something in his eyes, a pain I recognised from my own reflection in the mirror back then. Bakke was on his way out. Simone was bored. It was just a question of time, and he knew it, already he could taste the bitter fruits of defeat. Have you investigated that, officer? Asked her girlfriends if she had any such plans? You ought to, because that could give him a motive, don’t you think? Crime passionnel, isn’t that what you call it?’

  Is that a smile I see curling the officer’s lips? He doesn’t respond. Of course not, he’s under an oath of silence as regards anything to do with the investigation. All the same, at the thought of Henrik Bakke being a suspect I can’t help but smile as well. I don’t even try to hide it. We smile.

  ‘Quite a paradox, isn’t it? I never did get round to sending in those divorce papers, so Simone and I were still man and wife when she died. That makes me the sole heir, officer. So if it really was Henrik Bakke who killed her, what that means is that the man who stole the love of my life from me has made me a millionaire. Me. How’s that for one of life’s little ironies?’

  My laughter echoes back at me from the flock wallpaper and the oak parquet flooring. I exaggerate it slightly, slap my thighs and put my head back. Then I see the officer’s eyes. Cold, like a shark’s. They nail me to the sofa. I stop instantly. Has he realised? I take another chocolate, a Daim, have already unwrapped it, but
then change my mind and take a Nougat Bali instead. I repack the Daim in its wrapper. Must think. No, no need to think. One look at the officer is enough.

  ‘The good thing about Twist is the wrapping,’ I say. ‘That you can change your mind. You can wrap it up again without anyone’s being able to see it’s been opened. Unlike most other things. Confessions, for example. Once a confession has been so to speak unwrapped then that’s it, it’s too late.’

  The officer nods his head. It’s more like a bow.

  ‘OK,’ I say. ‘No more games.’

  I say this as though I’ve just made up my mind here and now, but of course that’s not the case. For several minutes now I’ve just been waiting for the right moment. And the right moment is now.

  ‘You found those little bottles of cyanide solution in the cellar, didn’t you, officer?’ The chocolate melts on my tongue, and I can feel the hard centre against my soft palate. ‘One was missing. I took that with me when I was thrown out. Not really sure why. I was pretty far down, maybe I had some idea of doing away with myself. You make hydrocyanic acid from cyanide, but you probably know that?’

  My fingers sift through the chocolate bowl and find a banana cream but then put it straight back. Old habits.

  ‘A couple of days after I met Bakke at the Kiwi store I bought a bag of Twists. At a chemist’s I bought a disposable syringe which I filled with cyanide when I got home. I then opened the bag of chocolates, took out the banana creams and carefully unwrapped them, injected the poison, wrapped them again and put them back in the bag. The rest was simplicity itself. The following Saturday I waited outside the Kiwi store until Bakke pulled up in Simone’s Porsche, slipped into the store in front of him with the bag of Twists under my coat, placed the bag at the front of the shelf with the Twists and from my position behind the shelving was able to see that he had picked the right bag.’

  The officer sits with head bowed. As though he’s the one confessing to murder by poison rather than me.

  ‘I read that when Henrik Bakke found her he thought at first she was asleep. Pity he wasn’t there when she died. He might have learned something. I mean, it must be fascinating to study a human being in transit between life and death, don’t you think?’

  The officer looks as though he might be preparing a response, a long and complex response that’s going to require a lot of thought. I continue.

  ‘I counted on you arresting Henrik Bakke as soon as you had the results of the autopsy. I presumed it would be an easy matter to work out that the cyanide came from the chocolates that Bakke had indisputably brought into the house.

  ‘But you didn’t, officer. You didn’t manage to connect the poison to the remains of chocolate you found in her stomach because the chocolate had already melted and dissolved. So I began to worry that Henrik Bakke might get away with it.’

  I drink what’s left of my coffee. The officer’s cup is still there, untouched.

  ‘But once a second body arrives on his slab I’m pretty sure the coroner is going to be able work it out, don’t you think? That the murder weapon was right there in front of you the whole time?’

  I point to the dish of chocolates and fix him with a smile. No response.

  ‘One last Twist before I raise the alarm, officer?’ In the ensuing silence I can hear the faint crackling of a banana cream wrapper as it slowly begins to unfold like a yellow-and-green rose on the coffee table in front of him. That beautiful coffee table.

  ODD

  odd was – seen from the auditorium – standing in the wings on the right-hand side.

  He tried to breathe normally.

  How many times had he stood like that, dreading the prospect of making his entrance in front of a crowd as he listened to the person who was going to interview him build him up, ratchet up the expectations? And this evening they would already be high, given that tickets to enter cost twenty-five pounds, more than the price of any of his slender books. With the possible exception of English first editions of his debut book, which could no longer be found in the second-hand bookshops and was selling for three hundred pounds on the net.

  Was that what made it so difficult to breathe? The fear that, as himself, the actual flesh-and-blood Odd Rimmen, he wouldn’t live up to the hype? Couldn’t live up to the hype. After all, they’d turned him into a kind of superman, a psychic intellectual who hadn’t just analysed the human condition but also predicted sociocultural trends and diagnosed the problems of modern man. Didn’t they understand that it was just writing?

  And yes, naturally, an author’s thought always had a subtext the author himself didn’t necessarily understand or see. That applied even to those authors whom he himself admired. Camus, Saramago – he suspected that even Sartre hadn’t fully plumbed his own depths, being more concerned with the external sex appeal of formulation.

  Face-to-face with the page’s – the computer’s – neutral surface and the option of retreat it offered, he could be Odd Rimmen, the man whom the reviewer in the Boston Globe had, with the greatest respect, dubbed Odd Dreamin’, a nickname that had stuck. But in person he was just Odd, a guy waiting to be exposed as a man of average intelligence with a slightly above average gift for language, and a distinctly below average control of his self-criticism and impulses. And he thought it was this latter – his lack of impulse control – that had led him to expose his emotional life so recklessly in front of thousands, indeed hundreds of thousands (not millions) of readers. Because even though the page/screen offered the option of retreat, the opportunity to regret and make changes, he never did so if he saw that it was good. His literary calling took precedence over his personal comfort. He could defy the weakness in his own character and move out of his comfort zone, as long as it all happened on the page, in his imagination, his dreams and his writing which, no matter what the theme or the degree of intimacy, was a comfort zone all its own, securely cut off from the life out there. He could write anything at all, and tell himself it was bound for the bottom drawer of his desk and would never be published. And then, once Sophie, his editor, had read it and massaged his writer’s ego to the point at which he believed her claim that it would be a literary crime to deprive readers of this, it was just a question of closing the eyes, trembling and drinking alone, and letting it all happen.

  But not with an interview onstage.

  Esther Abbot’s voice reached him like a far-off rumbling, a storm approaching across the stage. She was standing at a podium, with the armchairs they were to sit in ranged behind her. As though the creation of a setting that looked vaguely like a living room could make him feel more relaxed. An electric chair placed in a meadow full of flowers. Screw them.

  ‘He has given his readers a new vantage point from which to view ourselves, our own lives, the lives of those closest to us, the world about us,’ the voice said.

  He could just about make out the English words. He preferred to be interviewed in English rather than his native language, exaggerating his accent so that the audience would suppose his inability to formulate himself clearly was an obvious result of the fact that he had to speak in a foreign language, and not the fact that in every oral encounter, even when speaking his own language, he became a clown who stumbled his way through even the simplest sentences.

  ‘He is one of the most acute and uncompromising observers of our time, of our society, and ourselves as individuals.’

  What rubbish, Odd Rimmen thought, drying the palms of his hands against the thighs of his G-Star jeans. He was a writer who had achieved a commercial breakthrough entirely on the basis of his descriptions of sexual fantasies that balanced so delicately on the edge of what was acceptable that they were described as controversial and brave, but were not so on the edge that they really did shock and upset anyone, at the same time as it was all therapy for any feelings of shame readers might have experienced at having entertained the same fantasies as the author. As he p
resently realised, the rest of what he wrote rode on the back of these sex descriptions. And Odd Rimmen knew – as did his editor, even though they had never talked about it – that in the books that followed he had gone on to offer variations on these sexual fantasies, despite the fact that they were, thematically speaking, alien elements. They were like long, misplaced guitar solos, with no other relevance than that they were something the public expected, and even demanded of him. A provocation that had become so normal it ought to have occasioned a yawn rather than a gasp, a routine that almost made him throw up, but that he excused by telling himself it was the wheels the rest of the text needed, the element that could deliver his real message to a larger readership than he would otherwise have reached. But he had been mistaken. He had sold his soul, and as an artist he had been damaged by it. Well, then let there be an end to it.

  In the novel he was currently working on, and which he had not yet shown to his editor, he had weeded out everything that smacked of a commercial sell-out and cultivated only the poetic, the dreamlike vision, the real. The painful. No more compromises.

  Nevertheless, here he was, and in a few seconds he would be brought onstage to deafening applause from a packed Charles Dickens Theatre, an audience that even before he opened his mouth had made up its mind that it loved him, just as it loved his books, as though the two were one and the same thing, as though his writing and his lies had told them all they needed to know about him long ago.

  Worst of all was that he needed it. He actually needed their ill-founded admiration and unconditional love. He had become addicted to it, because what he saw in their eyes, the stolen goods he made away with, was like heroin. He knew that it was destroying him, corrupting him as an artist; and yet he had to have it.

  ‘…translated into forty languages, read all over the world, crossing cultural barriers…’

  Charles Dickens himself must have been the same kind of heroin addict. Not only had he published many of his novels chapter by chapter, and closely studied the public’s response before starting on the next one, he had also undertaken tours in which he read from his own books, and not with the shy distance to his own text of the intellectual author, the lovable diffidence of the humble man, but with a shameless passion that exposed not just his thespian ambitions and, as far as that went, his acting talent too, but also the avidity of his desire to seduce the masses, both high and low, regardless of their position and intellect. And had not that same Charles Dickens – the social reformer, the defender of the poor – been every bit as interested in money and social status as some of his own, less sympathetic characters? And yet it wasn’t this, as such, that Odd Rimmen objected to in Charles Dickens. It was that he had performed his art. Performed in the worst sense of the word. A combination of street trader and dancing bear, kept in chains by its owner so that it looks dangerous when, in reality, its testicles, claws and teeth have all been removed. Charles Dickens had given his public what it wanted, and what the public wanted at that particular point in time was social criticism.