by Jo Nesbo
I sprinted up the stairs, the toxic air scorching my lungs as I ran, counting each floor. When I stopped on the sixth there were two doors. I grabbed the handle of the one on the left. It was locked, and I heard the furious barking of a dog within. Then I realised the balcony was on the right side of the front of the building and tried the handle of the second door.
To my surprise it opened and smoke came billowing out. Behind the black wall I glimpsed flames. I pulled a piece of my woollen coat up over my face and went in. I couldn’t see much, but it seemed to be a small apartment. I headed in the direction the balcony had to be and banged into a sofa. I shouted, but there was no reply. Coughed and headed on. Flames licked from an open fridge door and on the floor in front of it lay the twisted and charred remains of something. A bedside lamp?
As I say, I don’t believe in coincidences, and this was an orchestrated replay, arranged for my benefit alone. Yet I still had to do what I knew I was expected to do – I could see no alternative.
A sudden gust of wind briefly wafted the smoke away from the balcony door and I saw the boy. He was wearing a dirty blazer with a badge on it, a stained, threadbare T-shirt and trousers to match. He stared at me with wide-open eyes. His hair was fair, just like Benjamin’s, but not as thick.
I took two quick steps forward and wrapped my arms around the boy, lifted him up and felt the small, warm fingers grab the skin at the back of my neck. I raced towards the front door, coughing smoke. Found it after feeling my way along the wall, tried to locate the handle. Couldn’t find it. I kicked at the door, put my shoulder to it, but it wouldn’t budge. Where the hell was the door handle?
I got my answer when I heard the hissing from the fridge, like the sound of air escaping from a punctured hosepipe. Gas streamed out, igniting the flames and illuminating the whole apartment.
The door had no handle. No keyhole, nothing. Directed by: Gio Greco.
Without letting go of the boy I ran back to the open balcony door. I leaned over the wrought-iron railings on the shallow balcony.
‘Breathe,’ I said to the boy, who was still staring at me with his wide-open brown eyes. He did as I instructed, but I knew that no matter how far out I held him, we would both soon die from carbon monoxide poisoning.
I looked down at the crowd in the street below, the faces staring up open-mouthed. Some were shouting, but I heard nothing, their words were drowned by the raging of the flames behind us. Just as I didn’t hear the sirens of the approaching fire engines. Because there were none.
The man who had opened the gate for me, he wasn’t just wearing the same suit as the others at the Café Morte; his face also had the same cold, closed expression, as dead as his victims.
I looked to my right. There was an ordinary balcony there, but it was too far away, there was no chance of reaching it. No balconies to the left, but there was a small ledge leading to the nearest window in the neighbouring apartment.
There was no time to lose. I held the boy a little bit away from me and looked into his brown eyes.
‘We’re going there, so you’re going to have to sit on my back and hold on tight. Understand?’
The boy didn’t answer, just nodded.
I swung him over onto my back and he held around my neck and wrapped his legs around my stomach. I stepped over the railing, holding fast to the rail as I placed one foot on the ledge. It was so narrow there was room for only a small part of one shoe, but fortunately they were my thick winter shoes, stiff enough to provide some support. I let go of the railing with one hand and pressed it against the wall.
People down below were screaming up at us, but I was hardly aware of them, or of the height. Not that I’m not afraid of heights, because I am. If we fell we would die, no question. But since the brain knew that the alternative to balancing on the ledge was burning alive it did not hesitate. And because balancing requires more concentration than the summoning of desperate powers, the brain temporarily closed down the fear side since that served no useful function in the current situation. In my experience, both as a psychologist and as a professional killer, we human beings are surprisingly rational in that respect.
With infinite care I let go of the railing. I was standing with my chest and cheek pressed in against the rough plaster and felt myself in balance. It was as though the boy realised he had to remain quite still on my back.
There was no longer any shouting from the street below; the only sound was that of the flames that were now outside on the balcony. In a sort of slow shuffle I started to move carefully to my right along the small but hopefully solid ledge. Solid it wasn’t. To my alarm I saw it disintegrating in gel-like pieces beneath my feet. It was as though the pressure from the shoes created a chemical reaction in the ledge, and I could see now that it was a slightly different colour to the rest of the facade. Since I was unable to stand in the same place for more than a few seconds before the ledge began disintegrating I kept moving. We were already so far from the French balcony that retreat had become impossible.
When I was close enough to the window in the neighbouring apartment I carefully loosened my Burberry scarf with my left hand while holding on with my right to the protruding windowsill. I had been given the scarf by Judith as a fortieth birthday present, along with a card on which she had written that she liked me a lot, a joke referring to the strongest word I ever used to express devotion to her. If I could manage to wrap the scarf around my hand I could break the windowpane, but one end of it was trapped between the boy’s arm and my neck.
The boy gave a start and moved as I jerked the scarf free, and I lost my balance. With my right hand gripping round the windowsill and only my right foot on the ledge I swung out helplessly from the facade like a barn door on hinges, almost fell, and then at the last moment managed to grab hold of the window ledge with my other hand.
I looked down and saw the Burberry scarf gently drifting down towards the ground. The height. The hollow feeling in my stomach. Got to keep it out. I raised my bare right fist and punched the windowpane with all my might, trying to tell myself that by hitting so hard I was reducing the risk of cuts. The glass shattered in a shower of shards and I felt the pain race up my arm. It wasn’t from the cut but because my fist had hit something hard. I grabbed hold of whatever this hard thing was, leaned to one side and saw that my punch had landed on a metal grid. It was hinged on both sides and locked in the centre with a large padlock. Who puts wrought-iron bars on a sixth-floor window?
The answer was obvious.
Through the bars I looked into a small, bare, dimly lit apartment. No furniture, only a large fire-axe hanging on the wall directly facing me, as though on exhibition. Or to put it another way, as though Greco wanted me to see it immediately.
Scrabbling, scraping sounds. A dark figure ran over the floor snarling and jumping. I felt the wet jaws and the teeth across my fingers holding round the bars. Then it dropped down to the floor and began howling furiously.
Instinctively I leaned backwards as the dog jumped up at me, and now I could feel the boy’s small hands slipping down my neck. He wouldn’t be able to hold on much longer. We had to get in there, quickly.
The dog – a Rottweiler – sat on the floor directly below the window, slathering from its open jaws with white, glistening teeth. It stood up on its hind legs and leaned them against the wall, but its snout kept butting up against the bars and it was unable to reach my fingers. As it stared at me with a cold, expressionless hatred I noticed something dangling from the collar around its thick neck. A key.
The dog gave up. Its forepaws slid down and it sat on the floor, barking up at me.
The boy tensed his legs and tried to ride higher up my back. He was whimpering softly. I stared at the key. At the fire-axe. And at the padlock.
Greco was willing to sacrifice a piece.
That’s what the great chess players do. Not to give the opponent an advant
age but to improve their own position on the board. At that exact moment I couldn’t see what his plan was, but I knew he had to have one. During a chess tournament in Nottingham in 1936 Emanuel Lasker, the German world chess champion, watched his opponent think for half an hour before finally offering him a major capture. The German declined the offer but went on to win the game. When he was asked afterwards why he hadn’t taken the piece he replied that when an opponent as good as his thinks about a move for half an hour before deciding that the sacrifice is worth the reward, then he certainly wasn’t going to respond by making the exact move his opponent had been expecting of him.
I thought about it. Ran through it. And made the move my opponent had been counting on.
I squeezed my left arm between the bars. It was so tight the sleeves of my jacket and shirt were pulled up exposing the naked, bloodied skin. My offer to the dog. Which responded silently and at lightning speed.
It twisted its lips and I could see the teeth sink into my underarm. The pain didn’t come until it clamped its jaws. I pushed my right arm through, but as my hand stretched for the key around its collar the dog pulled my left arm down towards the floor in an attempt to get away from my free hand.
It isn’t true that certain breeds are able to lock their jaws, but some bite harder than others. And some are more intelligent than others. Rottweilers bite harder and have a higher IQ than most. So high in fact that I chose a Rottweiler when I made a bet with two other psychology students that I could make an animal perform simple tasks – such as nodding several times, for example – under hypnosis. But the only thing I managed was to get it to sit quite still, and there was nothing new in the fact that a few simple techniques can get animals – everything from dogs and chickens to pigs and crocodiles – to lie motionless and apparently under deep trance. The hypnotist can only take partial credit for this catatonic state, which is due as much to the instinct to ‘play dead’ in situations in which flight is impossible. The aim is to arouse the predator’s reluctance to eat something that is already dead and possibly diseased. But it was obviously new enough for my two friends, who handed the money over and earned me an undeserved reputation as the great animal hypnotist. And at that stage of my life I couldn’t afford to turn down either one.
I forced my right hand in between the bars until I could reach down to the dog and let my hand rest lightly on the animal’s forehead. Moved it slowly and rhythmically back and forth while keeping up a stream of low talk. The dog looked up at me without releasing its jaws. I don’t know what it was feeling. A hypnotist is not, in virtue of his trade, any kind of sage. He’s just someone who’s learned certain techniques, an average chess player lacking in any particular insight who makes the opening gambits he has seen praised in some book. But obviously there are both good and bad hypnotists, and I was, after all, one of the good ones, perhaps even one of the best.
Even in humans, what hypnosis does is leapfrog over the slow cognitive processes, which is why it works so surprisingly quickly, quickly enough for a man waiting at a pedestrian crossing to be manipulated by simply looking into a traffic light for a few seconds and seeing there some previously implanted trigger.
I saw the dog’s eyelids half close and felt the jaws relax. Continuing to speak slowly and calmly I moved my right hand to the chain-collar, released the key and pulled it towards me. At that same moment I felt the boy’s grip loosen and his body start to slide down my back. I reached out behind me, grabbing across the little body and caught him by the lining of his trousers before he fell off. I held on to him but knew I wouldn’t be able to do so for long.
I had managed to hold on to the key by pressing my thumb inside the key ring; now I had to work it out and get it in the padlock in the middle of the bars. It couldn’t be done with one hand. The bite was almost completely relaxed now and carefully I pulled my arm away, feeling at the same time how I was also pulling at the dog’s head. The teeth of a predator incline backwards, I reflected. It’s logical, so that they can hold on to their prey. So very carefully I pushed my arm a little further inwards before lifting it, and this time my hand came free. The blood ran down my forearm and into my palm so that I almost slipped off as I gripped round one of the bars with my little finger and ring finger.
‘Hold on tight for ten seconds,’ I said loudly. ‘Count out loud.’
The boy didn’t answer but renewed his grip around my neck.
I let go of him and using the other three fingers and my right hand I managed to get the key in the padlock and turn it. The hasp sprang up. I pushed one side of the grid open and turned so that that the boy could climb off me and get in through the window.
From the street below came the sounds of applause and bravos. I entered the apartment. The dog sat quite still, staring off into space, or perhaps deep into itself, who knows? I don’t read the professional journals any more, but I do recall a listing once of animals believed by researchers to experience an ‘I’, and that list didn’t include dogs.
The door was lined with a blank metal plate and like the door in the neighbouring apartment it had no handle. To make sure it was actually locked I gave it a little shove with my foot before lifting the fire-axe down from its two hooks on the wall. I tested its weight and studied the door.
Blood from my arm dripped onto the wooden floor below me with a deep, sighing sound. I heard another sound and turned to the window.
The boy was standing directly in front of the dog. He was stroking it!
I saw the muscles tense beneath the dog’s smooth dark fur, saw its ears prick up. The trance was over. I heard a low growling.
‘Get away!’ I shouted, but I knew it was too late. The boy managed a half-pace back before his face was splattered with blood. He sank to his knees, a look of shock in his eyes. The blade of the axe was wedged into the wooden floor directly in front of him, and between the blade and the boy lay the decapitated dog’s head with its twisted lips. The heart pumped two final spurts of blood from the mutilated body.
For a second or two I simply stood there. And only now did I realise that so far not a sound had come from the boy’s lips. I dropped to my knees, right in front of him. Took off my coat and wiped the blood from his face with it before placing a hand on his shoulder and making eye contact with him, then shaping my words with my hands:
You’re a mute, is that right?
He didn’t respond.
‘Are you a mute?’ I asked in a loud, clear voice.
The boy nodded.
‘I had a son who was a mute too,’ I said. ‘He used sign language, so I can understand that. Do you know sign language?’
The boy shook his head. Opened his mouth and pointed in towards the gap. Then he pointed to the axe blade.
‘Oh Jesus,’ I said.
The phone rang.
I took it from my jacket pocket. It was a FaceTime call, unknown number but I had a hunch who it was. I pressed the answer button and a face appeared on the screen. It looked like a Guy Fawkes mask, the mask once used by idealist revolutionaries the world over to protest against the powers that be, the nation state. With the thin moustache, the goatee beard and the unfailingly ironic smirk that contracted the eyes, Gio Greco looked a bit like a pig.
‘Congratulations,’ said Greco. ‘I see that the two of you have made it to the torture chamber.’
‘At least there’s no fire in here,’ I said.
‘Oh, when you see what I’ve got lined up for you’ll be wishing you’d died in the fire.’
‘Why are you doing this, Greco?’
‘Because the Abu Dhabi cartel are paying me two million. You should feel honoured, it’s a record price for a driver.’
I swallowed. Acquiring a reputation as a top driver carries its own risks, greater and smaller. Greater, because the price on your own head goes up; smaller, because other drivers won’t take a job where they know there’s a good ch
ance they’ll be the ones that end up in a grave. I’d been relying on that smaller risk to give me some protection.
‘I could actually have pushed the price even higher,’ said Greco. ‘If they’d been the ones who approached me.’
‘So you were the one who went to them?’
‘The job was my suggestion, yes. And I knew I could offer them a price they couldn’t refuse.’
The sweat was prickling all over my body, as though it thought that getting rid of liquid like this would improve my chances of survival.
‘But why…all this? You could have just shot me at the pedestrian crossing.’
‘Because we had the budget for something a little more extravagant than a bullet, something that would get us talked about in the business. Creating a reputation is, after all –’
‘Why?’ I had shouted, and saw the boy looking at me with frightened eyes. There was silence at the other end, but I could almost hear his contented smiling.
‘Why?’ I said again, struggling to keep my voice calm.
‘Surely you must know that. You’re a psychologist, and you’re fucking the Queen.’
‘Is it jealousy? Is it as simple as that?’
‘Oh, but jealousy isn’t simple, Lukas. See, after Judith left me I sank into a pretty deep depression. I ended up seeing a psychologist, and he told me that in addition to depression I was suffering from narcissism. I don’t know whether it makes sense to say someone suffers from having a well-founded self-image, but I told him anyway I’d come for some happiness pills, not to get a fucking diagnosis about completely different things.’
I said nothing, but what Greco told me was classic narcissism, where the narcissist refused to recognise the personality disorder or seek treatment for it, and that it was typically through depression that those of us in the health service got to meet the half per cent of the population the diagnosis applied to.
